116: The Oath Keepers and Stewart Rhodes, with Rob from The Right Podcast
Special guest Rob from The Right Podcast (@TheRightPodcast) returns to tell Jack all about Stewart Rhodes and The Oath Keepers - seen like a rash all over American fascist activity from Ferguson to January 6th - with special attention to their deep roots and influences in the Tea Party explosion of the Obama era, the John Birch Society tradition, the Ron Paul Revolution, the Bundy saga, Waco and Ruby Ridge, and the US far-right tradition generally. Content warnings. Show Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618 IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1 Episode Notes: The Right Podcast on YouTube The Right Podcast on audio Rob's Twitter
It was actually originally recorded on the 10th of September, so you should have had it before now.
Sorry about that, but I had some technical problems and I've had some health issues.
The main problem was that my side of the conversation didn't really come out, so I've actually had to re-record it.
sort of mock up my own side of the conversation.
It's an honest representation of what I said on the night, and I haven't bothered doing it with all the little interjections, the ahas and mm-hmms and the little laughs and so on, so you'll hear the quality of the original recording.
But I hope you enjoy this one now that you're finally going to get it.
This is I Don't Speak German.
I'm Jack Graham, he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he him, who spent years tracking the far right in their In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
Okay, and we're back with episode 116 of I Don't Speak German.
It's another Daniel-less episode, I'm afraid, but not to worry, he'll be back next time.
But we are very lucky that we have making up the shortfall for this episode our good friend and excellent former guest, Rob from The Right Podcast.
Welcome back, Rob.
How are you doing?
Hey, excellent Jack.
Thank you.
Great.
Well, the last episode you were on was very well received, which is good because I was very pleased with that.
And that was a kind of a just shooting the breeze, chucking ideas back and forth general chat.
But this time we're going to talk in a bit more focused way about the Oath Keepers, which you've been doing a lot of research on recently.
Yes, yes, and of course this is pertinent to everybody, with the January 6th hearings having closed and court dates being cemented by judges, so in September we should see some things happening in the news related to the Oath Keepers.
Yeah, and the Oath Keepers have been in the news a lot recently, what with the trial of Stuart Rhodes and a recent leak showing that they have lots of members in the police, the armed forces and even in government.
Yes.
Yes, that's true.
And without jumping too far ahead, there has been a series of efforts from the legal team of various members of the Oath Keepers to push back these dates or have things relocated, and those have ultimately run their course.
So you're correct.
Everything is going to proceed, and I can tell you that looking at the case, and we'll get to that later, the information is pretty damning.
They have communications going back and forth between Rhodes and other leaders within the Oath Keepers, and we'll read it and see exactly what they're talking about.
OK, well, we'll get to these things, but yeah, I first became aware of the Oath Keepers, I think, round about the time of the Ferguson protests, when they showed up on the streets of Ferguson claiming, at least some of the time, to be there to protect the protesters, which claim pretty soon became obviously not true.
Perhaps you could talk a little bit about their origins, and I think you want to talk specifically about some of their deeper origins in the Tea Party movement.
Ferguson is interesting, and we will get to that.
I think going back and revisiting some of this territory is important because, first of all, a lot of narratives from the right are going to try and break all this apart, make it confusing, and I think kind of make these guys look like You know, LARPing boomers, as I said, or something like that on the QAnon mind-melt level.
But they're not.
And even if they themselves are kind of a clown show, it's important to understand that they come from a line of ideologies that is coherent, that traces back decades.
The fact that they almost achieved something is frightening.
But, you know, Ferguson and other things we'll see along the way offer you foreshadowing.
And that type of hindsight, I think, is important to this analysis because At least I saw patterns that maybe didn't predict what was going to come, but there's certainly correlation at least, if not maybe causation to things that did occur later.
Maybe say with Kyle Rittenhouse, for instance, right?
And George Floyd protests.
So yes, I think going back to the beginning, we'll just start there.
So first, I think, who are, you know, maybe what are the Oath Keepers?
This is high school English class and we have to write a physician paper.
According to Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation, they describe them like this.
It's one of the largest and most prominent organizations of the militia and patriot movements with chapters across the United States.
And I liked that definition.
I looked at many, because it included the militia and patriot movements.
And those are both things that have existed, of course, and you know, on the right for decades, going back to the 80s and prior, but really proliferating in the 1990s.
And, you know, I like seeing those connections.
So, that's a good definition, right?
One of the most prominent of these.
And today, there's roughly, according to the Stanford Center again, 88 chapters nationwide.
So, it's going to be interesting to see what happens moving forward with Rhodes no longer in charge, as Rhodes was the creator and he's been the leader since the inception.
So, you know, we'll see what happens with this organization.
Currently, their website is down and a lot of references to the group have been scrubbed.
You know, I've looked at some, I've used some different tools to, in research, trying to look back at maybe references on different platforms and a lot of that stuff is gone.
So, yeah, it'll be interesting and telling to see what happens next with the group, at least.
Yeah, that does sound like a pretty good description, bringing both the word Patriot and the word Militia in, because the Oath Keepers seem to me like a fusion of two pretty distinct trends within the far right, the Militia movement and the, for want of a better term, Patriot movement, which to a huge extent now is Trumpism.
Exactly, exactly.
And I'm going to say we'll get to it, because I do feel like there's almost like a case to build that explains what you just said, but also ties to some historical concepts that cross over to things
That, you know, you and Daniel might discuss more often, you know, neo-Nazi white nationalist type groups, specifically in the 1990s, but also militia movement, patriot movement, people like, you know, Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, etc.
So, you know, with this group, it's interesting because, again, when you're talking about the Oath Keepers, at least up until now, there's the organization, of course, but you're really talking about the individual, right?
The individual Elmer Sort Rhodes, because he's the person that came up with it, he's the one that organized it, and he was the one that launched it.
And he did launch it in 2009.
And 2009 was an interesting point in history.
Barack Obama had just been elected president.
This is when, yes, the Tea Party was getting going.
And it's a decade roughly past some of those domestic terrorist events in the United States.
From figures that we just discussed, like McVeigh and Eric Rudolph, etc.
So, sometimes I think that these organizations look into things, and this was a flashpoint, I think, and an opportunity for something like this to occur.
And they formed in Lexington Common, Massachusetts.
And for, you know, history buffs that when you hear anything about that era, I was just in that area of the country, actually.
It's, you know, for the United States, probably the American Revolutionary War, War of Independence.
And that's why they were there.
So, you know, invoking this revolutionary kind of Tea Party aesthetic into the very inception of the group.
And I was digging around, I saw some articles from the era, one from the Boston Globe that described it as an event in Lexington that sought symbolically to liken their aims to those of the Revolutionary War.
And, you know, when I talk about, in hindsight, you know, 2020 and foreshadowing, I mean, this is ultimately where Rhodes and a, you know, small group of figures from this group were headed, right?
At the end, they were attempting an insurrection, essentially, and in their eyes, a revolutionary war.
So, from the very beginning to the very end, at least, of their tenure, you know, that was a theme that ran throughout.
And again, I do feel like this group in particular, but some other groups, I feel like sometimes they are looked at as, again, being harmless, being bumbling, you know, or silly.
And that was even present in some of the platform chats that I saw on various platforms, whether it was like 4chan or That they were kind of made fun of, but even still, in their clown show, this was the intent all along, and it was kind of out there for everybody to see, right?
And we just chose not to take it seriously, I suppose.
But in that opening speech, invoking a revolutionary war, The themes from the speakers included a looming second Revolutionary War.
They talked about things like globalism and globalism's threat to American sovereignty, the need to resist a tyrannical federal government.
So, I mean, just from the very beginning, what Rhodes was saying and people were speaking at the very inception of this group, you know, are these core right-wing conspiratorial tropes that can look forward into the future about kind of where we ended up at January 6th, but also, you know, into the past and some of these ideologies that existed prior to, say, 2009, roughly.
And again, I think it's important because, you know, another thing, too, is that for some reason, at least in the United States, right-wing figures tend to be, you know, pinned down as being a lone wolf, which is interesting when you have a pack of them and then they're lone wolves, plural, somehow.
But, you know, these people were more or less consistent ideologically, you know, dating back, as we mentioned, to, I mean, as far back as you want to go, but at least the 70s in the U.S., for sure.
So, you know, that was one of the eye-opening things that I saw when I was doing this research.
I was the Charlie Day person with the yarn on the wall saying, oh my gosh, I mean, they were telling you what they were wanting to do, and we let them do it.
I think along with this, like concurrently to this, is, you know, Stuart Rhodes and who he is just as an American and his kind of generation, you know, thinking back of like, okay, so what is the precedence to this?
In modern U.S.
history, you had the Reagan years of the Satanic Panic, a new Red Scare in which he and Thatcher both turned anti-communist rhetoric inward towards Labor and Democratic parties.
And while that's a bit out of scope, it's important because, you know, that is what informed the Patriot movements and the militia movements of the 1990s.
Of which, apparently, if we go to the definition given prior, the Oath Keepers are something of the inheritors of, or at least the largest of, these two movements.
So, there's a lot of precedence involved in this when we're talking about right-wing movements.
It wasn't something that just popped up out of nowhere, I suppose, in 2009.
The decade prior, or, you know, a little bit less, all of these things were, because a lot of that was based around the millennium, but were compounded by September 11th, and the introduction of Islamophobia, as well as an introduction to endless war, which created endless veterans, essentially, and a lot of people who became radicalized.
So the Oath Keepers had this context and a population of people to disseminate this information to and to garner support from.
Again, I think it's important to understand that these conspiracies and beliefs are not isolated.
And they weren't just roses.
They weren't created in a vacuum.
They're very much a part of the history, the modern history, of right-wing radicalism in the United States.
And the Oath Keepers are just a modern incarnation of that, I suppose.
Looking at the group, again, focusing on Rhodes, There's even some mystery around him.
You know, he has the eye patch.
He's a veteran as well.
Looking at the reality of where he came from, so he was born in 1966, which puts him in that generation kind of described before.
He did join the military, but he was discharged after a parachuting accident.
Military.com, surprisingly, had an article that went through his retirement paperwork describing him as essentially a normal soldier.
Nothing really stood out.
There's no great distinction.
The patch over his eye has nothing to do with his military service.
That was an injury that occurred in When he dropped a loaded handgun that shot him in the face by accident.
So, that was not due to his military service, which ended also in a parachuting accident, too.
Not to besmirch his service, but he did play off of that a lot when he was trying to recruit people.
And it was a little eye-opening to see an outlet like Military.com You know, describing his service in some black and white details that weren't all that great, I suppose.
He did go to college, and he's an intelligent fellow.
He went to college in Nevada.
In between his undergraduate and graduate work, he worked on the Ron Paul campaign, but he attended graduate school at Yale University.
Yes, we'll get to the Ron Paul.
Yeah, that's another thread I've encountered in my research as many times.
The Ron Paul revolution.
Sorry, go ahead.
No, no, no.
It's the same thing here, right?
It's those red flags popping up.
But yeah, he did attend Yale University.
I was just outside of Yale a few days ago and he was able to graduate.
So, you know, he's a smart fellow at least.
But yeah, the Ron Paul.
Let's talk about that because Even though, you know, the Ron Paul thing might not have anything to do specifically with Oath Keepers, it definitely gives you some insight into who Rhodes is.
So, now when you snickered, I'm guessing, and you can, you know, add on or go in another direction, when I think of Ron Paul, I think of the newsletters and some of the comments that were coming up.
You know, it's, I guess, not to give a history of Ron Paul, but so people who aren't aware of this.
Ron Paul ran as this kind of libertarian candidate, and he was trying to make a pitch, I think, as being, you know, almost like a third party alternative person, but with a whole bunch of just a grab bag of concepts and ideas.
And that worked for a while until some old newsletters were leaked, and they were just filled to the brim with conspiracies and racism, essentially.
And I think the biggest one was discussion around the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in which he said, essentially, that that was, you know,
Paraphrasing that the federal government had overstepped, that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 should not have occurred, that you can't coerce people or, you know, a line I think often used is legislate morality, and that all these bad things that, you know, everything from redlining to job discrimination, they would eventually go away, usually relying on the free market in one way or another.
People wouldn't want to go to You know, a business that wouldn't hire black men, say.
So, you know, that was, I think, roughly kind of the idea behind the Civil Rights Act, deeply rooted in a libertarian concept of the role of the federal government.
There are other comments, too, though, within these newsletters that were even more overt, you know, alluding to, for instance, the crime rates of black men specifically.
So, It was not good.
You know, coupled with this racism, there is also anti-Semitic memes that were being shared by Paul's Twitter account, and that created some waves as well.
One specifically I'm thinking of, it looks like someone just picked it right up off of a chan or 4chan of a Jewish person with the stereotypical, you know, hooked nose, a person of African-American descent punching Uncle Sam.
Yes, I remember that.
That was the one with a big red fist that was created by an assemblage of racist stereotypes.
Exactly.
And to just compound how horrible it was, the lettering around it, the text was, you know, cultural Marxism.
And I'm sure, you know, you're well aware of what that means, especially in German history and how that was used.
You know, so these were things that were just being, you know, discovered or openly shared and promoted by this campaign.
Coincidentally, thinking about Some of the say like that, that arguments about the Civil Rights Act, you know, that's the same.
It's very similar to things that, you know, for instance, Eric Rudolph talked about in his autobiography.
And for folks, I've said that name a few times, if you're not aware, he was a terrorist in the United States.
He bombed the Atlanta Olympic Games, he bombed abortion clinics, and he bombed a gay nightclub as well.
So, you know, I'm making these connections saying, okay, you know, this is where these people come from.
This is that ideological, you know, connection.
And Rudolf talked specifically about his childhood experiences in school, this idea of cultural Marxism taking over.
In an interview, and this was a great article, I think, if anyone's interested in Oath Keepers, you should look at this.
It was by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and they interviewed, essentially, Rhodes' family.
And one of his daughters, I'm going to kind of reference this kind of within context of other events throughout, but one of his daughters named Sequoia said that Rhodes at one point surrounded himself by people in the Liberty Movement, and the Liberty Movement was tied to this Ron Paul campaign essentially, and that within the Liberty Movement people were legitimately afraid of what Barack Obama was going to do if he was elected.
And without giving a history of that time era, I think, you know, Barack Obama was pinned as everything from the Antichrist to the Manchurian candidate, cultural Marxists, etc.
It's just the grab bag, right?
But, I mean, I think it's interesting because this would be a pivotal point in Rhodes' life, having just graduated college and moving into his graduate studies.
And it also just ties back again to this lineage of conspiracies.
And I think ultimately, because I might forget to mention this later, we were kind of talking back and forth earlier, in text at least, and it may be a side and not Really for this, but perhaps in the future.
There's an interesting editorial, I think, potential story out there of looking at who the Oath Keepers are in Rhodes as looking at someone, a man that just kind of falls apart.
And how these conspiracy theories and how radicalization just destroyed his life and his family's life and people around him that believed in him and supported him, too.
I think that maybe that's a subplot in all of this, the role of right-wing conspiracies and just what they do to people.
And of course, you know, that's been a topic lately with QAnon and COVID and etc.
But Yeah, that's been a recurring theme on I Don't Speak German as well, the way these people really do sabotage their own lives.
But please, go on.
Yeah, so I'll talk a little bit more about conspiracies, but then we'll get into it.
But the conspiracies are, you know, what led Other people in this time period to commit acts of violence, too.
You brought that up.
I put a pin in Jim Atkinson.
That's somebody who I discussed earlier, but that's another great example if folks want to go look at that.
And he's of this time era.
He specifically calls out these exact conspiracies about Barack Obama in his manifesto.
Also, I think, too, talking about foreshadowing as well, if we're talking about this era, One of the conspiracies was essentially the political slogan or platform that launched Donald Trump's political career, and that was the birther movement, of course.
People sometimes forget he ran for president prior to 2016, and his platform was of this conspiracy of birther conspiracy.
It's just all of that, again, just red flags and things along the way that end up manifesting later.
Something maybe that's more related to the Oath Keepers, you know, as opposed to the general zeitgeist of that era, is the Oath Keepers, I guess, you know, pledge, or I suppose that we could talk about.
But even before that, going way back to 2008, before the Oath Keepers existed, Rhodes had written an article for SWAT Magazine, and it was entitled Enemy at the Gates.
And I think that this is good because it directly informs what that pledge is going to say.
And that pledge, I think, is going to... there's going to be a lot of buzzwords, you know, in it.
But in this article back in 2008, he talked about this fictitious world in which Hillary Clinton was elected president.
He referred to her as her Hitler-y.
There was a national emergency declared by Hillary Clinton that was used as an excuse to seize firearms.
American patriots, as described by him, were placed in military detention.
And there's a leverage of powers by the federal government to allow Hillary Clinton to become a dictator.
And, you know, it's just so loaded when we talk about right-wing conspiracies.
But again, I think it gives you insight into the thinking of the leader of this organization and what he thought.
I kind of had two takeaways from that.
First, one of irony, because later, Rhodes would publicly declare on things like InfoWars that Donald Trump should impose the Insurrection Act.
Uh, post-George Floyd protests and to crush his political opponents, which is essentially, you know, the opposite of what he does, or fulfilling, I should say, what he described here as a nightmare.
But I also thought of the Turner Diaries and, you know, to me, thinking of the show, Yeah.
The federal government takes away your guns under the Cohen Act.
Of course, it has to be a Jewish name.
There's oppressive policies in the name of anti-racism.
Patriots are detained.
It ends in revolution.
Just swapping out some things, you know, maybe instead of overt racism, saying anti-racists who are actually fascists, you know.
But these things rang bells to me, like the Turner Diaries going way back, because again, I think it's important to see that it's not a new phenomenon, it's not lone wolves, it's not just ideas of one crazy, you know, silly old man.
That these are things that are embedded in right-wing extremist culture, at least in the United States, and they have a history to them.
These things will come up again in other forms as well.
So, thinking about the Turner Diaries, maybe specifically, and some other things that cross over into more white supremacist areas or neo-Nazi areas, We come to the Oath Keeper's Orders, and there's 10 of them.
I'm not going to read them all.
I was considering it, but there are some highlights, though.
And I think that looking at these highlights, you'll see that, yes, we've heard these before, and I don't speak German.
So the first one, we will not obey orders to disarm the American people.
That we won't detain American citizens as unlawful enemy combatants or subject them to a military tribunal.
That there will be no martial law or state of emergency used for usurpation of power.
That the idea of invading military or foreign soldiers to subjugate any state that asserts its sovereignty, and that's civil war, essentially.
Blockading American cities, turning them into what he calls giant concentration camps.
Again, foreign soldiers on US soil, To me, listening to these things, concentration camps, foreign soldiers on U.S.
soil, invade and subjugate states asserting sovereignty, yeah, you know, whatever crazy right-wing trope conspiracy going as far back as the 60s, wherever you want to go with it, you know, these are all things that you could pick apart, or you could use the Turner Diaries for an example, too, you know.
All of these have those flavors in it, and it's almost like When you read through this, and this was on their website formerly, it almost seems as if they aggregated them in a way into this, right?
It's almost like a hipster type thing where you just took all the good stuff from the prior generations and recreate something new.
But it does seem as if, you know, they were at least paying homage to these past, you know, militias and radical right-wing extremists, at least in the United States for sure.
Moving forward with that, and this is, you had discussed this earlier, their recruitment was advertised as being geared towards the military, veterans, law enforcement, but they would take anybody.
And it does appear as if most members weren't necessarily in those categories.
However, there have been leaks and there is one that was put out by distributed denial of secrets.
It's a non-profit journalist collective, and it leads to more than 38,000 names associated with Oath Keepers.
The ADL, Anti-Defamation League, has analyzed it, and I believe that this is an ongoing process because of the number of people here.
But so far, they found 81 elected officials just from that league, 373 law enforcement, 159 active duty military reserves and civilian contractors on the list.
Since then, there have been more as well.
But looking at that, there is one example, because when you throw numbers out there, it can be abstract, right?
So an example from that leak pointed to an Anaheim Police Department sergeant whose name was Michael Lynch.
And he wrote that he has, in quotes, a wide variety of law enforcement experience, including undercover operations, surveillance, and SWAT.
He's saying, I'm also a member of the executive board for my police labor association.
And so, something, right, right, yeah.
So, you know, looking at some of these, the insight, and the ADL has all this posted on their site, they have many quotes, there's another one from a military member, but you begin to see, because it's easy to diminish, math can do spectacular things, but when you look at who these individuals are, I think it does bring to light how significant it is.
There was another who has self-identified as a member of the Army, and he said, and these are his quotes, first and foremost, I believe the oath I took when I enlisted in the Army should always be held as a high standard.
The Constitution supersedes all law enforcement and even the President's.
I can shoot a weapon and I hit my target.
I can help when the federal government tries to enact martial law upon its citizens.
And so, these are the people that were involved in it, and these were the people that were, in one way or another, involved in events that occurred on January 6th that we'll get to.
Looking at some of the things that his children said, kind of related to this, in describing Rhodes, his daughter Sequoia stated that what Rhodes really wanted was collapse.
He wanted to be the king after this collapse, and he had his own little army, so it was always going to be that way, according to her.
Sedona, another of his daughters, said that he was always obsessing about societal collapse and the American Revolution.
She says you could tell that he wanted to be the next George Washington.
You know, there's a lot going on with that.
I mean, that gets into the realm of, you know, psychology and cult think, I think, too.
But it does at least, I think, provide insight into how serious, you know, these people were and kind of how they saw themselves and what it is that they were trying to achieve.
Yeah, and it's a version of a thing that's very old on the right.
I mean, we see it today in the Boogaloo Boys with their accelerationism and their Second Civil War stuff, and it goes back to, well it goes back much further than, but you know, it reminds me of Charles Manson and his idea of Helter Skelter, the coming race war, after which he would emerge as the new leader of the surviving white people.
That's, you know, I forgot about Manson.
You're right, exactly.
And, you know, you can take away from that statement, whatever you will, but I do think it's important for folks to understand, this is just...
Maybe, hopefully a small piece, but it is a piece of just American culture.
You know, it's been something that's generational, and the Oath Keepers were a manifestation of that, you know, and there will be more.
But understanding that, I think, helps anybody to understand who Rhodes was, or is, and what the Oath Keepers really were.
Especially, again, with what I'm suspecting will be a deluge of information coming out talking about how they were lone wolves or, you know, LARPing boomers or, you know, buffoons, etc.
No, they weren't, right?
They were just one iteration of something that's existed for decades.
Going back to that recruiting, you know, something else that's important too, I mean, it's eerie enough looking at the positions of somebody, I mean, someone being in a police union, you know, figures enough, but there are also early efforts that focused on Tea Party rallies, and that goes back to 2009 to 2010 era.
And, you know, with the Tea Party, people might not even know what the Tea Party was at this point, but I mean, I think it was a political manifestation of concepts that were previously held by the fringes of the right wing.
During the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s.
And that sometimes those figures were apolitical, at least if we're talking about electoralism.
To me, I went straight to Eric Rudolph, and he wrote that he lamented the GOP was not representing patriots like himself.
And that they were, in his words, allowing radical leftist socialists to take control without any serious pushback, so that he was forced, and this is how someone like he justifies it, he was forced to take matters into his own hands by committing acts of terrorism because he had no political representation within the Republican Party.
Well, I think the Tea Party is what began to pave the way for the legitimization of ideas and concepts held by people like Eric Rudolph that, of course, manifested later with MAGA and the election of Donald Trump.
But kind of before we get all of that, Rhodes shared a lot of beliefs himself that he carried over to the Oath Keepers with some of these older militia movement, patriot movement, you know, figures.
And looking back again at the interviews with his children, his children described what it was like growing up in this environment with Oath Keepers and prior.
And in the interview, they said, it didn't impinge on our lives, it deformed our lives.
Our lives happened in the breathing space left around Oath Keepers.
There was no independence from it whatsoever.
According to him, it was our brief moments of existence before the world ended.
Sequoia, again, one of his daughters, stated that, for my childhood and early middle school years, I did not think I had a future.
He told us that the world is going to end.
And, you know, that brought a lot of connections.
Of course, we have QAnon today, and MAGA, and, you know, it's kind of this cult thing, you know, that we mentioned earlier.
But, Another name that I thought of with this too that laid some precedence and was in a roundabout way a key figure to the radicalization of the militia movement was Randy Weaver in the United States, of course, the standoff with Ruby Ridge.
And without, you know, less so the historical events of that, but what he actually believed.
And of course, he held an anti-government apocalyptic belief system.
When you look and you research he and his family, I mean, you know, his wife was doing things like sending these apocalyptic letters to government officials, you know, talking about the world is going to end and revelations is going to occur and stuff unless things drastically changed.
But there was, I think, a key thing involved with that being the Christian identity movement.
Which is essentially an anti-Semitic sect of Christianity that claims that whites of Europe descended from the lost tribes of Israel, and that Jewish people are basically the satanic offspring of Eve and the serpents, going back to the Garden of Eden.
But I think you know kind of where I'm going with it.
To pull this all together, you know, we're talking, what's the thing that ties this bow?
Well, in the 90s, it was the New World Order.
In the aughts, it became globalists, right?
And you can talk, and then QAnon, et cetera.
But, you know, this is a key thing that runs through and straight, this idea of apocalyptic, you know, far-right Christianity.
But also, this cabal of people operating in dark rooms, and of course, who, when you get down to it, who is always leading this cabal of people, right?
It's always Jewish.
Yeah, it's always Jewish people.
So, again, for the purpose, I do think there's utility in having these discussions and understanding this to understand the Oath Keepers, right?
You know, if people are talking, like Stuart Rhodes, about New World Order and globalists, this is what they're talking about.
And it's not something that Alex Jones came up with.
This is something that's existed for a long time.
So this is what informed the Oath Keepers.
Rhodes's daughter Dakota, another daughter, described also kind of frequenting gun shows as well when they were children.
And it was a way for the family, she said, to socially network.
And you know, this Of course, in my mind, brings me right to Timothy McVeigh, because this is what he said on his trial.
And it's what he discussed as a key thing, you know, kind of early ages of the internet, maybe going back far enough, you know, pre-internet with zines and things.
But The idea that gun shows were a way for all these conspiracy theories, all these militia people to kind of get together and congregate and socially network.
And his daughter talked about that.
She talked about meeting people from Beau Greitz's Spike program.
And Beau Greitz was involved in the Ruby Ridge standoff.
He was someone that helped talk Randy Weaver down, actually.
And he was also involved in some fabulous things like the Christian Patriot Movement.
And he was a former candidate for the Populist Party, the one that David Duke also ran on.
So, you know, the connections are so close with he being Rhodes, you know, exposing his family to this is what these children grew up with, essentially.
And it's the remnants of that 1990s Patriot Movement.
There was one thing that I pulled out from Greitz that I thought was, again, telling.
So at these gun shows, Greitz would show up, and now I have quotes here about this thing, but it's almost like a performative act that he would do.
So he would say, I don't see a single person sitting here that won't get a chance in their lifetime to say no to this New World Order, this Antichrist.
And then he would burn a United Nations flag while citing Revelations 14.11, which says, and the smoke of their torment ascendeth up forever and ever.
I grabbed that from an article from the Kansas Reflector that was talking about Timothy McVeigh.
It was like a retrospective of Timothy McVeigh.
The New World Order, this idea of the globalists and looking at all these things that we talked about, when the right wing is talking about these international cabals and globalists, globalization, who are they always talking about?
And so this is, again, the soup of which the Oath Keepers kind of came out of, right?
Moving on with that, I said, you know, perhaps I'm making, I did question myself at a moment, am I making narratives that don't exist?
But I did find an article from the Southern Poverty Law Center that stated, oath keepers circulated similar conspiracies regarding globalists.
And I have here, if Daniel is on, but of course, you know, things that you and Daniel would understand, such as secret cabals of globalists, international organizations, United Nations attempting to usurp sovereignty of the American government and enslaved patriots.
And I'm sure that all sounds very familiar.
But I think lastly, to kind of maybe wrap this up is for the, I don't speak German audience, maybe specifically, I think if you go far enough back, to me, you get to the protocols of the elders of Zion, right? you get to the protocols of the elders of Zion, The secret plans of Jewish goal to rule and manipulate the economy, controlling the media, et cetera, et cetera.
And I think it's important to emphasize these beliefs to build that bridge, right, from right-wing extremists in the US dating back decades and pre-United States to what the Oath Keepers were doing.
Again, as a way to combat what I can only foresee coming as trying to paint these guys as anything but dangerous.
So, you know, with that, then we kind of get into the organization, because now we know what informed this organization, what's the ideology.
And, you know, it isn't as if this group was putting out, you know, deep ideological posts.
So, you kind of have to do that digging to get down and see where did Rhodes come from and where these ideas come from.
But I think, again, in hindsight, it was pretty clear this was not going to be just, you know, a group of people marching with, I don't know, you know, tri-corner revolutionary hats on, you know, talking about taxes.
And it goes back, when we talk about courts, you know, and so one year after the group was founded, it only took one year.
One of their members, Matthew Fairfield, was arrested for explosive charges, including storage of live napalm in his basement, which is fabulous.
And he lived in a residential area that he had a live napalm bomb in his possession.
Not a great neighbor.
Same year, Darren Huff attempted to take control of the Madisonville, Tennessee courthouse.
Under the use of citizen's arrest, he was armed with a pistol and a rifle.
Perhaps some foreshadowing there, because we're going to see groups, including the Oath Keepers, occupy territories in the future with the group.
Another great one, Charles Dreyer, very early on, he appeared in videos talking about the impending New World Order.
He was charged with possession of a stolen live grenade launcher and the rape of his daughter, who was a minor at the time.
So, you know, these are just the very first few years of the organization.
And of course, there are other lesser things, misdemeanors, but, you know, these are the ones that jumped out.
Again, in hindsight, they're telling you the types of people who are involved in this, and they're telling you what they believe, and, you know, none of it's good, right?
But this was, when I saw this again, it was, it had the same impact as looking at the comments of Rhodes' family and all these connections.
I was like, oh, I've heard this before.
This is what Tim McBay said.
This is what Eric Rudolph said.
One of their first actions, kind of outside of just trying to organize, occurred in Quartzsite, Arizona.
And the event itself wasn't, there wasn't really, it wasn't a big thing per se.
It was protests over a blogger named Jade Jones, and she was arrested for disorderly conduct in a town hall.
This was of that era in which, you know, the Tea Party was kind of in full swing and use of social media was being leveraged.
So, there was a video of this woman who was speaking at a town hall and essentially she wanted to put the mic down when people told her to.
So, she was kind of derailing the whole thing.
It, you know, to me, it reminded me of the Critical Race Theory Town Hall, you know, videos that were proliferating, I don't know, a year and a half ago, I guess now.
Yeah.
You know, they're just getting derailed by these folks, but also COVID things, too.
But, you know, more significant than this blogger and maybe some foresight about that was just Burgess, and I believe that's how you pronounce the name, but it was a Tea Party supporter and an Arizona state representative who was involved with all of this.
And a quote that I got from them was, you know, they have to call us domestic terrorists because we are the group that's going to stand up to their communist agenda.
So, You know, connecting the dots of this early Oathkeeper interaction with Tea Party, you know, members who are also government officials who legitimized extreme ideas from the 80s and 90s, I think you can see the road that's being paved to MAGA and events that occurred later.
But something else has stood out to you.
In all of this kind of small-town, you know, controversy was their mayor, so Quartzsite Mayor Ed Foster.
And in all of this, he claimed that because he came out in support of this blogger that he was getting railroaded, essentially.
And he made claims that he lost his recall election due to voter fraud.
And he was the individual who reached out to the Oath Keepers to ask them to come in and join these protests.
And this was in 2011.
So, you know, to me, I mean, I think it's fairly clear the comparisons to what happened with Donald Trump and the Oath Keepers later, but... Yeah, it's an incredible foreshadowing.
Isn't it?
Yeah, just the foreshadowing was amazing.
Another thing, so crossover at the Tea Party in 2012.
These are just some things, some notes, because there's much more, but the Asheville Tea Party invited local law enforcement to an Oath Keepers forum.
There's the widely spread image of Ted Cruz, of course, campaigning in front of the Oath Keepers flag.
The Tea Party Nation posted pro Oath Keeper content on our website in the same era.
So there was just a lot of co-bingling.
This is, I think, if you're looking at a retrospective, this is when the Oath Keepers gain some legitimization, as opposed to just being some weird sect that shows up in costumes at protests.
This is when they're making inroads with political movements and people in political office.
Which is important.
These are the pre-MAGA representatives, I guess you could say.
Ted Cruz, of course.
But something else before we get to Ferguson, because really, as you said, if Ferguson and the Clive Bundy protests over the Bureau of Land Man, those two events are what really launched the group into, I think, you know, a national stage in which people began to know who they are, as opposed to You know, a few sheriffs, say, in a county being invited to a speech or something.
But there was one other, you know, foreshadowing too.
In the same era, so 2012-13 or around there, there was an Oathkeeper supporter, Army Major General Albert Stubblebine, and he was spreading misinformation regarding the government's reaction to H1N1 or swine flu.
And he was doing this under the Oath Keepers brand, I suppose you could say.
But in talking about then President Obama's actions regarding swine flu, in quotes, he said, We either take this hill or we die on it.
He went on to state that Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia declared war on their own people.
Has the United States declared war on the American people today?
Sadly, tragically, it would appear so.
I do not wish to see the American population corralled, controlled, and killed.
H1N1 or swine flu has never been a serious illness.
And my gosh, if that is just not every anti-lockdown, you know, just reiterated over COVID.
Yeah, again, an almost exact foreshadowing of what was to come, yeah.
Right, right.
And there's more, unfortunately.
Isn't there always?
But, you know, my interpretation of what this group was, before really doing the work on it, I envisioned it kind of, as stated earlier, you know, LARPing older people.
Maybe they were veterans, maybe they weren't.
They want to pretend like they're in the military.
If they weren't, that kind of got themselves wrapped up into something bigger than what they really were.
And that was wrong.
You know, it was inaccurate.
Not only was there a lot of history, you know, in the extremist ideologies that these people pose, but as we're seeing, there's a lot of foreshadowing, too.
And, you know, you can only wonder, and, you know, it's not for me to do this now, but it is something to wonder about.
You know, how will this re-manifest?
You know, if this organization collapses because everybody is behind bars or because the group changes its image so that it can continue to exist, what's the next thing to come, right?
But different discussion, I guess.
The big moments, again, were Ferguson, and this is where we kind of started.
And I think it's excellent that you started with this, because I think for most people, this is when the Oath Keepers hit the scene.
This is when people began to understand who they were.
Well, Ferguson had a whole lot going on with it, but in short, there were protests surrounding Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old who was shot dead by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.
It's also kind of when Black Lives Matter began to hit the scene, too.
The protests, though, looking back at Ferguson, and there's a lot of personal things with this, too.
I was involved in education in an urban area at this time, so I recall a lot of these events.
They were, for the most part, peaceful.
You know, there was vandalism at night and the things that you would normally see, but in general, on the big picture, they were generally peaceful, at least in the daytime.
And I had hear about foreshadowing.
Unfortunately, there's a lot of comparisons to draw about.
What happened, you know, to Michael Brown in this event, but, you know, it's worth at least bringing up that, you know, this is going to happen again and again and again, but as mentioned earlier, you know, I think George Floyd protests would be the big one that we would look at.
And asking, you know, what did the Oath Keepers accomplish?
It's really hard to say, you know?
I looked at what they were doing at the time, and they were in Ferguson twice, but there was a Newsweek article from the era that interviewed some people who were in the Oath Keepers, and they claimed that one of their goals was to arm black protesters.
Now, I don't know if this was an initiative that was supported by the organization, because there's going to be some contradictory information about that later.
But in this one statement, too, you know, it's insightful, because you can see the disconnect, you know.
One Oathkeeper in his article said that African Americans in Ferguson told him that they felt if they carried the same weapons as he was carrying, that police would kill him.
And he didn't understand this, you know.
He said that this is your right.
The St.
Louis County Police eventually made their appearance in Ferguson.
They stated that they didn't want the Oath Keepers there, their presence was unnecessary and inflammatory, say what you will about the police.
But I kind of think that statement is accurate.
Oath Keepers were doing things like having kind of like vigilante patrols in neighborhoods.
They would be up on rooftops with weapons.
Local authorities did eventually intervene and disband them.
Oath keepers, and I think that this was a thing that kind of stood out to me, they were trying to justify this by saying that they're acting as security.
Right.
That they're acting as security for protesters and acting as security for local businesses, which is pretty much, I think, what Kyle Rittenhouse stated when he was on trial.
Right.
You know, again, not here to stand for police, but what the police did say was that their presence was unnecessary and inflammatory.
Yes.
You know, and foreshadowing.
I think, you know, that played out.
That's what happens when bad things happen and go sideways.
People get killed.
You know?
But I think kind of with them, the facts are just nobody wanted them there necessarily.
Nobody wanted them to come.
No one asked them to come, at least.
They weren't licensed to provide security in the States.
Some states in the U.S.
have things like guard cards.
You have to go through training, very basic things.
They didn't do that.
They were acting as vigilantes, essentially.
So they were acting outside of the law.
Foreshadowing, you know.
But also, too, Just such a grand disconnect with the population living there.
And, you know, in situations like that, things are complicated, and sometimes there might be people who welcome, you know, groups like this initially.
I personally remembered living in a city that was having some issues with crime, and guardian angels began patrolling the neighborhood.
Yes, yes.
Yeah, yeah.
And it was kind of the same flavor, maybe less militarized.
But, I mean, I can just tell you this.
The last person that you wanted to see talking to you or wave at you or interact with you were them.
They weren't helping, put it that way.
But, you know, just that disconnect of A white man dressed up as if he was in the military with some type of, you know, large, long, long-barreled gun or something saying, well, you can do this too.
And people say, no, we can't.
You know, that just struck me as well, you know.
The following year, and this is where things get a little funky.
The following year, Oath Keepers came back and they acted as security to InfoWars reporters who were going to Ferguson during the anniversary of all the events commemorating Michael Brown's death.
So there is official security for InfoWars not serving the community of Ferguson or doing anything in between the two events.
But this caused conflict within the group.
And I think that this is insightful, too.
So again, this would be the year after the actual protest in Ferguson.
There was a member of the Oath Keepers named Sam Andrews, and he wanted to organize an open carry march with black residents to kind of really push this, you know.
You know, who knows?
Maybe there were some good motivations involved with that, despite maybe a lack of understanding.
But Rhodes and the National Board, whatever that's composed of, I don't know, but so there's National Board for Oath Keepers, squashed the idea and they stated concerns over optics.
And it's insightful, given all that we talked about previously, you know, the historical, the roots of these ideas and where they come from.
And now this concept of optics, and the optics would be Oath Keepers arming or walking with armed black residents of Ferguson, potentially in protest against law enforcement.
Well, you know, this discussion, they never had this discussion when they were at Clyde Bundy's ranch, for instance.
You know, they didn't have this discussion later.
We'll see when they're at, you know, a national refuge and occupying that with other Bundy relatives.
So, yeah, I think it's very clear what the optics are and what Rhodes and this national board thought might be an issue.
So, you know, that's a good segue because Ferguson was the big one.
But, you know, I think equally as significant and potentially more because it did manifest in violence eventually, was the Bundy family.
Now, you know, this goes back a long time.
This was a protest that was, I think, representative of some potentially, you know, legitimate grievances people in the Southwest and Western parts of the United States had against the Bureau of Land Management.
Long story short, essentially, families a long time ago were granted land permits from the government to graze cattle.
And the Bundy family specifically had been in conflict with the Bureau of Land Management going back to the 1990s.
So, there's a whole bunch of backstory to it.
But, you know, really, for this, you have to fast forward to 2014, which again is moving, we're moving forward in chronology here after Ferguson and the court site and these other things we talked about.
And, you know, the action really picks up when the Bureau of Land Management started taking punitive actions against the Bundy family and the Bundy Ranch.
So, essentially what happened was, after a series of legal disputes, this family just kept grazing their cattle in a place where they shouldn't have been doing that.
I mean, that's kind of the long story short.
There was an ongoing court case, but they just kept doing what they wanted to do.
And eventually, The Bureau of Land Management said, okay, well, we're going to start impounding your livestock.
And at this point, it had been going on for like a decade or so.
So, it's tempting to say BML, but that's Black Lives Matter.
So, the Bureau of Land Management started impounding livestock.
And this led to confrontations with the family.
Dave Bundy, Clyde's son, was arrested for refusing to disperse and resisting arrest.
Ammon, another one of his sons, was shot with a stun gun.
And it was at this point where the conflict was escalating that the Oath Keepers entered the picture, along with other militias from around the country.
You know, when I was reading this and I saw the conflict occurring with the family, again, it's in the zeitgeist, I think, of right-wing extremism in the modern U.S.
I'm going straight back to Ruby Ridge as well, you know.
Just watching the escalation.
And it does play a part in this.
The standoff grew extremely volatile.
And, you know, there's images that are all over the internet you can see of Oath Keepers and other militia members in sniper positions, you know, with their sights on Bureau of Land Management and police officials.
Again, Kyle Rittenhouse.
If just something goes sideways, people die, you know.
Fearing, I think, a bloodbath, kind of, you know, reminiscence of what happened at Ruby Ridge or another one, you know, Waco as well.
Waco, yes.
Which is exactly what I was thinking about.
Yeah, yeah.
And again, just making those connections.
I don't think it's just correlated, you know.
But the federal authorities ultimately backed it, they backed down, and they released the cattle.
And, you know, there's pros to that and there's cons to that.
You know, it might have been a good decision, as it was later revealed that supporters from the Bundy's ranks had set up a quote here, they were actually strategizing to put women in the front of their protests, so that if there was a shooting, that the news coverage would show women being shot as opposed to men.
So they were at that level of discussion, right?
And Rhodes, for his part, and the Oath Keepers hailed it as a significant watershed moment.
And it definitely validated, and I think emboldened Rhodes and the Oath Keepers.
They released a video, the Oath Keepers did, calling it the first time in our country's recent history that good Americans stood up and said, we're not going to let this happen on our watch.
Later, Rhodes would say on the Alex Jones Show, quote, just as Americans across the country stormed the Bundy Ranch to stand up for a rancher's family, we need to go to Washington with the same conviction.
And so, again, foreshadowing, this was years before January 6th, right?
And, you know, you can see maybe, I think with the empowerment that Rhodes felt and the validation of this, I think you can see him maybe becoming emboldened, as stated, but also going further and further down this rabbit hole of conspiracies and, you know, delusions.
Possibly believing that he can actually do these things that he's talking about, like Storm Washington, you know?
Yeah, so at the same time that his ideology is becoming more extreme and his conspiracy theories are becoming more entrenched, he's also feeling emboldened.
So I suppose this is all leading up to the culmination on January 6th.
Yeah, it's happening.
You know, it's really happening.
And there are some other events, too, because I think that the next big one, I think, is what we're going to see in Oregon, and potentially where things go off the rails.
But in between those big things we talked about, and I guess maybe the next big thing, there are some other things, too, that That may be validated.
So following up on the actions against the Bureau of Land Management, Oath Keepers went on to aid Richard Barclay and George Bax.
I might be pronouncing that last name wrong.
B-A-C-K-E-S.
But these were two individuals who were cited for unauthorized mining in Sugar Pine Mine in Oregon.
So Again, people kind of doing what they shouldn't be doing and then the government getting involved and it becoming a protest.
So roughly 700 people showed up at this protest kind of on the back of what happened at Bundy Ranch, including Oath Keepers and Three Percenters kind of at the forefront of it.
So what you would expect, you know, patrolling the area, being armed, there was a standoff that ended again with the Bureau of Land Management deciding that these two individuals would be permitted to resume mining while an associated court case was still ongoing.
And it wasn't something that lasted as long, it wasn't something that was as volatile as what happened at Bundy's Ranch, but again it's You know, it's everything that we just said, right?
It's another notch.
These conspiracies are becoming real, and he's becoming validated by them.
He's winning, in his mind.
In 2015, so now we're moving up chronologically, there is also the shooting of Marines and sailors in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Oathkeepers volunteered themselves for action.
Again, this is kind of their thing.
No one asked them to show up, but they did anyway.
This time they organized armed patrols at military recruiting centers.
For their part, the US Army Recruiting Command sent a letter to recruiters warning them to consider the armed civilians outside the recruiting centers as a security threat.
So, you know, maybe not a big incident, but again, just emboldened, you know, taking it upon themselves to do something.
But also, I think, If the U.S.
Army Recruiting Command is sending out letters, I would have to think that, at this point, other people within the U.S.
government is beginning to view these people as a legitimate security threat, as not just, you know, however you want to pose them, just people protesting in costumes, say.
But I think the culminating thing that really might have led to January 6th is the events that happened in Oregon at this wildlife refuge.
The background involved Dwight Hammond Jr.
and Steve Hammond.
They were being arrested and sentenced to five years in prison for arson.
They had set fire to federal land where they had been grazing their cattle and their lease had also been put into dispute.
So 100 acres of public land were destroyed by them.
FYI too, these individuals were granted clemency by Donald Trump when he was president, so that kind of ties that as well.
The Bundy family of Nevada joined with the Oath Keepers and other militias to, of course, illegally take over and occupy the headquarters of the Mahler National Wildlife Refuge near the city of Burns, Oregon.
And this became something of a combination of like a sit-in, occupation, But essentially this was a government building, you know, going back to 2010 when the very early Oathkeeper kind of attempted something similar with a town hall.
I think that this is escalation, you know, in which these people feel emboldened, not just to protest maybe actions on what they consider their land, but now actually going into, you know, government's territory, government buildings, and just taking them, right?
And I think, you know, there's a brazenness of it, but I think that there's also this Nihilistic, you know, or maybe what you could call escalation of saying, what are you going to do?
You know, because so far you haven't done anything, right?
And yeah, I mean January 6th.
But speaking of the incident, Rhodes said, these are his quotes, this is not an emergency situation unless you, speaking towards law enforcement, turn it into one.
These ranchers, cowboys and veterans, armed as Westerners tend to be, get over it.
There are no hostages.
There are no close by neighbors at risk.
There is nobody there except those who want to be.
And Yeah, you know, that's, I see that, the escalation points, you know?
I mean, and I'm sure that he understands the history, and I'm sure that he understands the interaction, and the political damage, right or wrong, and, you know, that's for a different episode, I would very much argue wrong, but the, I guess, truthisms that have seeped into American culture regarding what happened at Waco, per se, or Ruby Ridge, As being used as propaganda against any kind of movement by law enforcement or federal agents in these situations.
Sounds like a very dangerous combination of propaganda and brinksmanship, like he's almost daring the government to make the same mistake again, because actually Waco and Ruby Ridge were pretty damaging for the Clinton administration, the government at the time.
Yes, yes.
It was politically damaging in terms of just political speak, but also, and equally if not more important, it was something that could be used as propaganda and a radicalization tool.
You know, to get people who might not be going to gun shows and hanging out with, you know, Bo Greitz, who's talking about burning the UN flag and reciting revelations.
It's something to bring, you know, those people into a more radicalized position, right?
And also, it's great propaganda against anything that's, you know, left of center, too.
But Yeah, it plays into a lot of fears that a lot of people have.
Ideas about, you know, the federal government coming to take their guns and their ideas and their freedom of religion, etc, etc.
And yeah, it's relentlessly used, exploited as propaganda.
Of course.
Of course.
And it's a topic that I'm passionate about.
With all of the, maybe accepting all of the nuance and all of the things that the government could have done better or differently, I do think at the end of the day, you know, decisions made by these people, whether they were clear decisions or they were down, you know, rabbit holes of cult thought or radicalization based in these same conspiracies that are found in like the Oathkeeper Pledge,
That they helped create, they manifested what it is that they feared happening.
And they made themselves martyrs in a way, you know.
It didn't need to go down like that, even with all the mistakes, you know, on the government side.
But we'll see here, the same thing happened, essentially.
And, you know, it's a great, I'm glad we had that side quest, because When we're looking at this iteration or this event in Oregon, where now they're escalating, occupying a government building, his daughter, Dakota, in that same, you know, going back to that excellent article from Southern Poverty Law Center, said that Rhodes hated this event, essentially.
He hated the thing because it was all about Ammon Bundy trying to be the messiah and trying to fix everything that was wrong in his life.
By starting a civil war, in her words.
And in her words, it's hilarious because that is basically what Stewart ended up, and that's Rhodes, ended up doing.
By January 6th, everything was falling apart for him.
He was afraid of going to prison, so he just decided to double down.
And, I mean, that's insight from his daughter, you know, and that's why earlier I said there, you know, could be a separate article or project viewing this as just like the deconstruction of a man, you know, through these conspiracy theories and through escalation, leading to maybe a self-fulfilling prophecy as well, you know.
But with this, you know, we'll get there.
But Ammon Bundy, along with Rhodes and other Oath Keepers, had dictated to the media and law enforcement what was going to happen, essentially.
You know, they kept saying that they had the support of locals, even though that's highly questionable.
They were given multiple outs, again, They were given multiple opportunities to just leave and they didn't.
One such deal fell through with the occupiers claiming that the FBI had no standing.
And so this was their excuse to continue this occupation.
So they said that the FBI agents would need to be deputized to negotiate going back to this constitutional sheriff idea that has been a part of the Oath Keepers since their inception, too.
It's a very problematic idea that has, you know, that there could be an episode on constitutional sheriff, but...
Yeah, it can be rooted in some pretty racist stuff as well, but that was their excuse of saying, you know, no, you're FBI, you don't have jurisdiction, essentially.
And on January 26th, now we're in 2016, again, it's like every year, it's moving up, escalating.
The occupation leaders were traveling.
They're going to participate in a meeting set up by local residents.
The highway that they're traveling on had been shut down due to the standoff.
And once the car was spotted by law enforcement, the group was forced to pull over.
And in that, in that There was an individual named Robert Finicum.
He exited his truck making motions to his jacket while yelling for police to shoot him, which they did.
Officers later found a loaded weapon in his pocket.
So that individual died from his wounds.
And Ryan Bundy, 43, sustained a minor gunshot wound.
But it was, again, Robert Lavoie.
Sometimes his middle name is included.
Finnegan was killed.
Others that were in the car were charged with felony conspiracy to impede federal officers.
So, you know, it just goes back to what we were discussing about this idea of escalation.
And now people are dying.
It really is like they're getting what they want, isn't it?
It is, isn't it?
And just like we kind of discussed earlier about historical figures manifesting what it is that they want, potentially to be martyrs, It does seem to be almost like an apocalyptic suicide mission in a way.
You know, there's so many different things as we saw in The Pledge, in that hoax, you know, just borrowing from so many things from, you know, these fringe right-wing, you know, maybe Christian sect ideas to more, you know, racist, anti-Semitic, globalist things.
It's just all there and it's kind of people living it out like an action adventure.
Yeah, the whole sovereign citizen, constitutional sheriff, posse comitatus, stew.
Of course.
Yeah, that's Ron Paul, you know, go back to that.
That's informing who, you know, Rhodes became as an adult and as a leader of this group, you know.
But this was 2015, 2016 or so.
And this is actually where events kind of died down a little bit for them, which was, you know, at first, just doing research, I found interesting, you know, saying to myself, well, what happened?
I did find something on Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, who have a timeline as well of some high level events.
They don't go into ideology and stuff like that, but high-level events.
And they designated this era between 2017 and 2020 as an ideological pivot for the group, is how they put it.
And the ideological pivot was necessary because there was a new president, right?
So, newly elected President Trump came into office.
And he promised to fight back against the deep state.
And so in some ways, Oath Keepers now found themselves aligning with the federal government in a way, or at least Donald Trump.
And this left them kind of anchorless.
They were seeking a new enemy.
And, you know, up to this point, the land management and the standoffs with feds had really been their success story, maybe more so than Ferguson, even.
But Yeah, now what?
So, Stuart Rhodes posted a call to action on the Oath Keeper's website titled, Operation Sabbath 2016.
And what was it to do?
Well, in quotes, help police ensure the free and fair election process is not stolen from the citizens of the United States of America.
So this is 2016.
Dog whistles, at least in my mind, such as watching out for quote-unquote busloads of voters being shipped in, were used.
Yeah.
So, you know, things like that were used to justify these kind of conspiracies around the idea that there could be election fraud in 2016.
That could subvert a Trump presidency.
And of course, the busloads of voters, that's just the old racist trope.
Yeah, Roy Moore used that story about people being bussed in over state lines as well.
Of course, of course.
Yeah, I mean, it's the same, you know, it's, it's that nuance.
It's that, you know, it's, I mean, not in this case, but it's the thing that allows you to say, be monetized on social media.
You say, you say globalists, you don't say Jewish person, you know, you say busloads of voters being shipped in, you don't say African Americans or what have, you know, But I think even though there were events and they were more low-level, maybe, than what had been occurring, you know, people getting shot in the side of the road, I think that they're key to the culmination, the crescendo of January 6th.
The way in which both keepers kind of pivoted to remain relevant was they had to find, you know, enemies.
And around and after the election of Trump, you had Antifa and other anti-fascist groups that were targeting Trump and Trump supporters, right?
And so in reaction, yeah, the patriots and militia movements, extremists, all started to rally around Antifa and sometimes Black Lives Matter as that common enemy.
And if that doesn't just play into, I mean, you know, that's the stuff that, mentioning earlier, you know, Eric Rudolph was talking about in the 90s.
I mean, this is just, you know, these far-left, you know, bad actors, the conspiracies go everywhere, you know, being funded by Soros and, you know, Hillary and stuff, but It's just old communists, right?
It's just that communist Red Scare thing.
John Birch rephrased for today.
Yeah.
It just, you know, it goes back into the same fears that people of someone of Rhodes' generation, you know, if you're into this and you got, you know, radicalized, it's the core principles of that.
And again, it's as if you see them being realized, you know, and now you're a key player in it.
So, along with the rise of fascist and far-right racist groups protesting and becoming more visible, there was also this debate that was kind of angling or trying to play off of free speech.
And that's kind of where the Oath Keepers got a foothold next, and they were present at Berkeley, California protests.
So, I'm sure people, listeners of this show, are probably aware of this, but the protests were against alt-right speakers, you know.
So, Milo, for instance, and a number of other people were invited to the University of California, Berkeley under the eyes of freedom of speech.
And, you know, free speech is also one of the things that's highlighted in the Oath Keeper's Pledge or what have you.
So it's a core principle.
At the event, 21 people were arrested, including some on the suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon, a According to Officer Brian White of the Berkeley Police Department, there were, and I remember when this occurred, but there were 11 people who were injured, at least six taken to a hospital for treatment, including a stabbing victim.
I remember the stabbing victim specifically.
In 2018, moving along again, getting closer to that pivotal event, Rhodes stated on InfoWars that Oath Keepers would start the Spartan Training Groups program to combat Antifa and serve as a national militia that could be called upon by President Trump if needed.
So here we see the plot or the narrative coming.
This is a little before or maybe at the same time where Rhodes is also floating the use of the Insurrection Act as well.
So it was during this time that Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer were taking front stage as well in clashes along the West Coast from San Francisco to Olympia to Portland, Oregon.
Yeah, you know, Oath Keepers found a use for themselves in these as well.
But by this point, Oath Keepers had done a 180 from their originally stated purpose.
You know, they were actively working to protect the Trump administration.
And it was around this time, too, I think that, you know, QAnon was really taking off, and there was certainly a lot of crossover in the broad range of Q or Q-adjacent conspiracies and the things that we talked about earlier.
And this created a narrative in which, you know, one could also position themselves as being contrarian for supporting Trump.
I think that that's the way that The Oath Keepers justified, you know, what it is that they were doing, that they were still part of this, you know, revolution against the deep state, even though they're supporting a sitting president.
Everything just went off steroids, as I'm sure that you know.
So, the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism found that oath keepers had shown a willingness and even enthusiasm to spread misinformation and conspiracy theories related to the virus and the disease.
A CTEC investigation of Oathkeeper-related social media accounts shows important figures, including Rhodes, proliferating among other dangerous rhetoric, QAnon-related language, false home remedies for COVID-19, and conspiracy theories about Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, etc.
And again, it goes right back.
You know, we mentioned at the start of the show, the Rompel newsletters.
There's loads of stuff in there about how AIDS is a conspiracy, and so on and so forth.
Swine flu?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's, again, I think it's just, the utility in understanding that is also the understanding that this is going to happen again, you know, and that this stuff is just, it's cyclical, it's repackaged, it looks a little bit different, and for whatever reason, at least in the United States, when these things re-manifest, they're never taken seriously.
You know, or if they are, they're lone wolves.
There's never a coherent ideology behind this that's been informing generations of people to commit acts of terrorism or violence.
And the mainstream is always ignore, ignore, or downplay, downplay, laugh, laugh, laugh.
And then when it explodes, the reaction is always, well, where did this come from?
What's happening?
Yes.
Yes.
And conversely, You know, it's the opposite with the left, isn't it?
Everything with the left are these, you know, if you support the slightest thing leftist center, you're all of a sudden part of something that, you know, might allude back to the 1960s.
And there's this clear, you know, ideology of the left, which is, you know, dated back forever, but not of the right for whatever reason.
But, you know, going back to those, as we were just discussing, I have in my notes here, going back to the initial Oathkeeper Orders regarding detention camps, foreign soldiers on U.S.
soil, all the surrounding context of anti-Semitism and New World Order conspiracies, the Turner Diaries, Yeah.
All of this stuff was QAnon.
And if the Oath Keepers pledge was an aggregation of these things, QAnon was just all this stuff on steroids.
And the Oath Keepers took advantage of it, for sure.
And it's a way in which... It was a tool and a wave that they could use.
And of course, with social media, all the marketing involved with that, and keywords and SEO.
It was a way that they could get their message out to people who normally wouldn't be interested in hearing their message.
So, you know, they gained some credibility with, you know, people in the suburbs, for instance.
And I can't tell you how many times, unfortunately, I've seen that with people in pickup trucks and, you know, note keepers, bumper sticker, 3% bumper sticker that Would otherwise have never have known if maybe COVID hadn't happened and people weren't glued to social media.
But yeah, that was a big messaging point for them.
And again, a way to validate them to an audience that normally wouldn't have been exposed to them in that way.
Also, I think, too, you know, in this moment of validation, this is kind of when Roger Stone enters the picture as well.
And Roger Stone was an advisor to then President Trump, and he began using Oath Keepers as personal security for himself.
And it was also, you know, kind of pre, but around the time of, you know, that big lie beginning to be unrolled, you know.
And people sometimes forget, I think, that the idea of the election being stolen was An idea that had been planted well before the actual election, going as far back as to removing sorting machines in post offices, for instance.
And as we saw in 2016, with the Oath Keepers participating in what they considered anti-fraud activities for Trump.
And Trump himself, of course, laying the groundwork for disputing the result if he lost in 2020, and even right back at the start of the first Trump election, 2016, saying, well, I would have won the popular vote too if there hadn't been so much voter fraud, so many dead people voting, etc.
He's always been doing this.
Yeah, yeah.
But in this time, Trump began pushing conspiracies kind of geared towards, I suppose, the 2020 election.
And as you had mentioned earlier, the mail-in ballots were a primary source of these conspiracies.
But Rhodes himself bought in, you know, 100%.
And so the Oath Keepers, as the organization, did as well.
According to Rhodes, his quotes, it's just amazing that Trump let the election be stolen right out from under him and to let our country be stolen like this.
So, you know, it is a theme that existed the whole time, but it's something that, I mean, it seems as if Rhodes, you know, truly believed in it, at least.
And it obviously informed, you know, what was going to come.
You had mentioned that great quote much earlier, but I had pulled something that was, it was just a retweet But it was something when Trump still had his Twitter in September of 2020, he retweeted, if the Democrats are successful in removing the president from office, which they will never be, it will cause a civil war, like fracture in this nation, from which our country will never heal.
And it was from Pastor Robert Jeffress at Fox News.
And just in my mind, and of course, so the president retweeted this, you know, and I was thinking courtside Mayor Ed Foster talking about election fraud back in the very beginning, you know, Tea Party rhetoric surrounding Obama, what you had mentioned, you know, going back to 2015 and 16 with Oath Keepers talking about fraud.
Again, if anything, you know, Rhodes has said it was amazing that Trump allowed the country to be stolen like this.
And I also think it's just amazing that collectively, we just allowed all this to happen.
You know, when I've listened in research focusing on January 6th specifically, a lot of the rhetoric is around Shock and surprise that maybe local officials didn't take more action looking at the chatter, you know, in the months leading up to January.
And that's true.
And that's valid as well.
But, you know, I also think maybe if you pull out from that and look at a macro view, I mean, this has been laid out for many, many years.
And it's just, again, it's amazing that it almost happened.
You know, it almost happened.
So, moving forward, let's see, I had some more things, but I think at this point we could jump to January 6th.
And the descriptions that I have are descriptions of what happened, taken from the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, United States of America, V, and then a series of individuals, but including Elmer Short-Road.
So, This is the verbiage lifted directly from the court filing of this.
And there was chatter, as you mentioned, leading up to the events, a lot of it.
It's somewhat difficult, you know, to look back now, as I had mentioned in the very beginning.
A lot of things associated with the Oath Keepers have been wiped out or scrubbed, etc.
But There's still so much here and it's just so damning.
I guess start with the counts, you know.
Seditious conspiracy.
That's the big one.
Conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding.
Obstruction of an official proceeding and aiding and abetting.
Conspiracy to prevent an officer from discharging any duties.
Destruction of government property and aiding and abetting civil disorder and aiding and abetting tampering with documents or proceedings and aiding and abetting.
And if you kind of work your way backwards, you know, some of these are things that they had done in the past and gotten away with.
Not sedition, but, you know, these ideas of feeling emboldened to, I don't know, obstruct an official proceeding, for instance.
Or the idea to prevent an officer from discharging any duties.
In various ways, they or people that they have been associated with had done this in the past and been successful.
The introduction of this court document states that, after Trump's loss, Elmer Stuart Rhodes conspired with his co-defendants to oppose, by force, the lawful transition of presidential power.
So, you know, that's the verbiage from the court documents.
And I would just, again, I've seen already too much of people attempting to either downplay Make Rose look like a clown show or say that this was an extreme minority.
And that's not what the court is saying.
At least not in this document.
Evidence includes coordinating travel to the events, bringing weapons to the events, building a cache of weapons on the outskirts of Washington D.C.
to be distributed among quick reaction force teams.
Movements were all organized and coordinated.
So they had a plan, and as we'll see, they partially executed their plan.
Beginning in November 2020, Rhodes was disseminating messages on an encrypted application to encourage co-conspirators to oppose by force the lawful transfer of presidential power.
So that's what everybody's been saying, right?
That this was an attempt to disrupt or, you know, stop the peaceful transition of power, the cornerstone of democracy.
And, you know, that's when everybody on the other side argues, no, these people were just protesting and, you know, they had the right to be there and Trump did not direct them.
Well, again, no, this is not what this is stating here.
So yeah, they were attempting to oppose by force the lawful transition of power.
Two days after the election, Rhodes sent a message stating, we aren't getting through this without a civil war.
So his words, right, we're having a civil war, basically.
He went on to say, we must we must now do what the people of Serbia did, which was interesting.
When Milosevic stole their election, he sent a video entitled, he being Rhodes, sent a video to this group entitled, Step-by-Step Procedure, How We Won When Milosevic Stole Our Election, which provided a detailed description of the upheaval, including the storming of their parliament and how they did that.
So this is the source material, right?
This is how we're going to do it.
Rhodes held a go-to meeting to outline plans to stop the lawful transfer of power, including preparations for the use of force.
From there, the co-conspirators sent out messages to recruits about military-style basic training.
Other messages contained information on reconnaissance in the D.C.
area and various trainings on unconventional warfare being offered.
In messages, Rhodes stated, it will be a bloody fight.
We are going to have to fight.
That can't be avoided.
And, you know, there's more, but the certitude of, I mean, to me, this is apocalyptic, you know, and it's going back to what we were talking about of That self-fulfilling prophecy of whatever it is, you know, whether it's some weird Christian identity movement, you know, martyr, and possibly how that impacted people like the Weavers or Waco, but up to this where you have the leader telling you what's going to happen, you know?
Yes.
It's almost, and his daughters, going back to what his daughters had stated, you know, he felt like he was going to go to jail and he was going all in on this.
I mean, it felt like a suicide mission, you know?
It's like the phenomenon that they talk about in cults, forcing the end, like Jonestown, for instance.
It is.
And, you know, I know that you have to be careful when making conspiracy, but I think at least there might be analogies that could be made for sure that are valid, you know?
So, I'll say, on a side note, last time that happened, it resulted in the Kill a Mountain.
And so, who knows?
But the evidence is, I mean, it's just damning.
It's saying what people are saying, and it's countering what others who are trying to dilute it are saying.
Getting to the nitty gritty of it, so around 2 p.m., a larger group forced entry into the Capitol, and Rhodes was among them.
So he was among the first group to get in.
Other people, Kelly Meigs, Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins, Joseph Packett, people that were with him in this operation, Followed him, and the way that they referred to this was, this was Stack Formation 1.
So this was an organized effort, there was strategy behind it, they had the name, so Stack 1 was the first formation to breach security and enter the capital.
After a melee with police officers, Stack One forced their entrance into the rotunda doors.
Once inside, Stack One then divided, and this was all practice beforehand, one group attempting to break law enforcement blockage of a hallway leading to the Senate chamber, and the other half headed to the House of Representatives searching for, specifically, Speaker Pelosi.
Later, Again, you know, highly organized.
A second group called Stack Two made their way up, composed of co-defendants.
They breached the Capitol, entered into a melee with law enforcement, who used chemical spray to try to deter them.
Jeremy Brown, an Oathkeeper member from Florida, drove explosives to a Virginia hotel in his recreational vehicle on January 6th.
A second member of the group, Thomas Caldwell, was later found in possession of a death list that included the names of Georgia election officials, according to the documents.
So, you know, recall that.
What happened with Trump and his attempts to kind of strong arm Georgia election officials to essentially just flip it for him so that he could get the electoral vote from that state.
Rhodes was unwilling to sit for a taped disposition during the January 6th committee investigation, but he was interviewed by the committee.
He largely invoked his Fifth Amendment rights.
In exchange, Rhodes demanded that he would speak freely if he would be given live airtime to do so.
And, you know, this was just never going to happen.
I think we all know what, you know, would have occurred with that.
So, you know, it was a way of him stalling, but it's also a way of him kind of justifying pleading the Fifth over and over again, saying, well, we could meet in the middle and we could do this live.
You know, I don't trust you to represent my words in a good faith manner.
Which, you know, maybe he really believes that, but it sounds kind of like a way to get around answering questions, too.
So far, three members of the Oath Keepers have pled guilty to seditious conspiracy, being William Todd Williamson, Brian Ulrich, and Joshua James.
In his guilty plea, Wilson, a military and law enforcement veteran, admitted that he agreed with others to take part in a plan to use force to prevent, hinder, and delay the execution of the laws of the United States governing the transfer of presidential power.
He and others use encrypted and private communications, equip themselves with a variety of weapons, combat and tactical gear, and were prepared to answer a call to take up arms.
Others, including Rhodes, have obviously pled not guilty to this point.
So with this research, I suppose, kind of wrapped up two weeks ago.
I've been away on travel last week, but since then, some things have occurred too.
The United States District Court for Columbia, and in this court case of the nine defendants, including Rhodes, is on track to begin this month after a federal judge turned down a request by nearly all the defendants put off the court showdown until next year, September 26 being the date for opening jury selection.
There's a lot that you could debrief on with this, but, you know, we'll see what happens with the organization, you know, with these individuals, of course.
But for me, you know, personally, kind of delving into this a bit, and there's so much more, of course, but those themes that we talked about in the beginning, you know, and just the idea of hammering home how, even if these people were maybe individually buffoonish in their own right, but
How close they came to doing something, whatever that might be, and how dangerous and equipped they truly were.
And I guess also how they were not, you know, a part of something that formed in Ferguson or that got catapulted by QAnon, but how, I mean, talking about the elders of Zion, you know, how these beliefs are repackaged and sold, you know, for decades, at least in U.S.
history, you know, that direct connection to the 1990s.
And I just can't help but see that connection and the validity that those fringe ideas have gained to the point now of, you know, Rhodes going to jail, potentially, but that if he is in jail, people in the Republican Party still campaigning and using imagery and slogans steeped in these conspiracies that are essentially now accepted as mainstream.
And what is that going to be moving forward?
That's a different episode, I suppose.
But yeah, a lot to chew on.
So that's where I'm at with the Oath Keepers, and there's just so much more.
So maybe to start wrapping up, what would you say were your main takeaways from this?
How would you synthesize it down?
I mean, there's obviously many, but I think if you really had to distill it down, I think it just really is how dangerous conspiracy theories are, you know?
How dangerous, specifically to American culture, specifically in our time, that right-wing conspiracies are.
And that, you know, there's a lot that we could talk about with right-wing extremism But that at the end of the day, just how ruinous this is to people's lives and people who are just uninvolved or that are involved not due to their free will, such as, you know, Rhodes' children and the impact that they had, or victims of people who commit violence, you know, in the 90s since.
But Because there will be something.
There's always something.
And it's big money.
And so I suppose, to me, for people listening and looking forward, for themselves and their mental health, but also their family too, and people that they know and care about, Whatever the next thing is, maybe it's the next incarnation of a disease or something that Joe Biden does, some policy, you know, but there will be something and all these themes are going to be repackaged.
And there's power in knowing where they come from and how they've been used, because you can't debate them, you know, and conspiracies are inherently, they're not logical, you know, and they're made to not be debated, but there's power in understanding what they are, Where they come from and how they're used, and to be able to present that to somebody to say, you're being conned and here's why.
And I think that, maybe not initially, but in the long term, that might get through to some people.
One of the things that scholars of fascism talk about a lot is its syncretic properties, its ability to... Well, it's a scavenger ideology, that famous phrase.
And its ability to hoover up all the bits and pieces that it needs.
And I think we see that very clearly with QAnon, which has been called a meta-conspiracy.
You know, it's kind of an umbrella conspiracy.
It can contain all the other ones inside it.
You just used the word repackage, and it seems to me that that's at least as important a part of how this works.
The ability not to, you know, add new stuff, but to repackage the old stuff.
To rebrand it and retransmit it in a way that makes sense in the modern context.
And I think maybe, in a more dire level, potentially, but connected to everything that you just said, and everything I said earlier, is that I highlighted maybe a new disease or a policy of Joe Biden, but everything that we've talked about is now mainstream for the Republican Party.
And speaking on the United States, I'm aware of UK politics too, but it's going to be hugely important the next six years, eight years, to see what happens with this.
You know, the Oath Keepers are a part of it, and Trump is a part of it, but this has been something that's existed for a long time, and now it's been validated and institutionalized in a way.
Again, going back to those prison letters from Eric Rudolph saying, I had to blow up these women's clinics and the Olympics because I had no representation.
Well, I mean, now he does.
You know, he does have representation.
And what the heck does that mean?
And is it a passing thing, or is it a thing that's going to stay with us?
Because, you know, more so, or in a different way, not more so, but in a different way, While all these conspiracies and things being repackaged can impact people that you care about, it's also going to manifest in, well we've already seen it, but in politics.
And that means legislation and laws.
And that's a scary thing.
Yeah, and it really is true now that the United States has as one of its two main parties a fascist party, or perhaps if we go with President Biden, a semi-fascist party.
What it looks like to me is that the classic pattern of the fascist takeover of the capitalist state is that in a period of crisis, the fascist movement strong arms itself into a position where it's a major player.
And the mainstream right conservative rulership of the state
Parliamentary state kind of adopts fascism or takes it on board because it feels that it needs to both to kind of neutralize it and contain it and maybe to use it against their enemies thinking they can control it little do they know but that that process doesn't seem to have worked so far anyway in terms of the American state as a whole but it's almost like a cameo version of that process has has taken place inside the Republican Party so you now have the Republican Party like a
Just in this sense, anyway, like a mini-state that's been captured by a fascist movement.
And so you now have effectively a MAGA party.
And I'm not doing that thing that centrist pundits do, you know, where they say, you know, yearning for the old good Republican Party where it was full of sensible good men like Ronald Reagan.
I'm not doing that.
But yeah, there is a qualitative difference, I think.
And so yeah, America now has a kind of a fascist or fascist-captured party vying for state power.
And yeah, what's going to happen next?
Liberal pundits aside, I know exactly what you're talking about, but Liz Cheney was a victim of this.
Right or wrong, you know, it's going to be interesting to see if that is something that takes hold and these, whether they're Trump people or maybe in the future DeSantis people or whomever, whoever's next to kind of take this up, to see internally how the Republican Party goes.
But I see the Tea Party as being just so fundamental to this process because they were the ones, they started RINO, they started Republicans In Name Only, they were the ones that said get incumbents out, and they were the ones that validated all of the conspiracy, they were the ones that invited people like the Oath Keepers in, you know?
And it's just that transitional piece from people like Timothy McVeigh or Eric that did these things on their own or in militias, the Montana Freeman and things like that in the 90s to gaining institutional power and political representation.
And so, it's, again, it's been a long It's almost like the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
It's been a long process of steps that, in hindsight, seem very clear and maybe culminating in an event like January 6th, in which people never thought would happen.
Or, for that instance, the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
But we're going to need to watch how the Republican Party handles this because, as you know, fascists don't always play by the rules.
Everything up to this point has been geared towards what they're doing with general elections against Democrats, but this could be turned inward as well.
Trump and Trumpism, it seems, may be starting to be on the decline.
Maybe that's optimistic, but the process continues though.
And it does seem like the Republican Party is pretty committed to attempting to, not to sound melodramatic about it, attempting to steal elections.
I mean, it's pretty clear that through redistricting and voter suppression and controlled electors and things like that, they are planning everything they can to take elections, take election wins that they don't actually get.
And meanwhile, of course, we have on the ground these potential shock troops, which is another essential part of the fascist pattern.
And I don't know if and when it comes, the shock troops might not be specifically the Oath Keepers, but it'll be something like them, something that's grown out of them or parallel to them.
So we have a situation where you have a fascist-captured party, which is apparently intent upon, as I say, taking election wins it's not entitled to, with a whole potential host of shock troops on the ground to use to enforce their will, as indeed they tried to do on January 6th.
That's pretty much exactly what they tried to do on January the 6th.
I mean, in a way, it's a certainty, but I think the question is, in what way does it manifest and what power does it have, you know?
I mean, there's... With these conspiracies and these concepts, while we can talk about, you know, Elders of Zion, for instance, and these things that date back ages, but there's a discussion that needs to be had about the inherent conspiracies involved in Modern American culture and how Americans perceive themselves in the United States and their identity and the role of the United States in the world.
And, you know, that's a reckoning that's been unfolding for a while, but it's Something that I believe is just inherited, that's always going to be there on some level.
It's just whether or not it's a group of 10 people, you know, on the corner with a megaphone, or whether it's people entering a government building.
Okay, well I think that'll do.
Thank you so much, Rob, for that incredibly detailed and interesting breakdown of the Oath Keepers.
That's brilliant.
So, where can people find you if they want to track down your work, which I strongly advise them so to do?
Yeah, so on Twitter, at The Right Podcast.
And of course, YouTube is where I mainly live, that's where my videos live.
The same, you can look up the channel, The Right Podcast, or link out from my Twitter.
OK, well thanks again, and thanks for listening everybody.
I will be back soon with Daniel, hopefully.
And yeah, tune in for that.
Cheers then, bye!
That was I Don't Speak German.
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If you want to contact me, I'm at underscore Jack underscore Graham underscore, Daniel is at Daniel E Harper, and the show's Twitter is at IDSGPod.
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I Don't Speak German is hosted at idonspeakgerman.libsyn.com, and we're also on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, and we show up in all podcast apps.
This show is associated with Eruditorum Press, where you can find more details about it.
