THE STORY OF THE “OATH KEEPERS” AND JANUARY 6^TH, PART I

 

       …Stewart Rhodes is the founder and leader of the 3000 member Oath Keepers

 

The Insurrection Act is left-over from the Civil War

 

It is interesting that just a few days after the 2020 election, Stewart Rhodes began talking about the Insurrection Act as critical to the country’s future.  Rhodes is the bombastic founder and leader of the extremist group, the Oath Keepers.

This obscure and rarely used Act would have allowed the then President Trump to declare a national emergency, so dire that the military, militias or both would be called out to keep him in the White House.

Now Stewart Rhodes is no regular military extremist.  He is a Yale Law School grad, that was a U.S. Army paratrooper and a Staffer to the former Republican Congressman, Ron Paul, father of the radical GOP congressman Rand Paul.

The 56 year old Elmer Stewart Rhodes III, founded the Oath Keepers in 2009. He and some friends decided they would form an organization around the perception of “imminent tyranny,” concerned about federal overreach and a series of unrecognized threats, like the government was planning to attack its own citizens. He recruited current and former military, police and first responders.

Rhodes, out of high school, joined the Army and became a paratrooper, but he was honorably discharged after he was injured during a night parachuting accident. 

He went to night school at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. His first job in politics was supervising interns for Ron Paul, the then Republican congressman from Texas.  Rhodes later went to Yale Law School, graduating in 2004 and clerking for Arizona Supreme Court Justice Michael Ryan.

Rhodes moved to Montana and relocated his law practice there, but took a “hard right turn away from politics,” and he launched the Oath Keepers.

He has said there were falsely about 40,000 Oath Keepers at its peak; but one extremism expert estimates the group’s membership today stands at about 3,000 nationally.  Before long, Rhodes was neglecting his law practice to work on the Oath Keepers. He was eventually disbarred in 2015.

He appeared on Nov. 9, 2020, as a guest on the Infowars program of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.  Rhodes had urged Trump to invoke the rare Act “to suppress the deep state” and he claimed the Oath Keepers already had men “stationed outside D.C. as a nuclear option.”

Invoking the Insurrection Act was an idea sparked in the conservative circles just last Spring as a means of subduing social justice protests and its related rioting.  That was a goal that the former president seemed to embrace when he called for state leaders to “dominate” their streets.  By the end of the year, it had become a rallying cry to cancel the results of a presidential election. Now, private and public discussions of the law stand as key evidence in the cases against the Oath Keepers.

Earlier this month, Rhodes was charged with seditious conspiracy and accused along with 10 members of his group of conspiring to use violence to try to stop Joe Biden’s certification as president.  Rhodes has denied wrongdoing, saying he never wanted or told his group to enter the U.S. Capitol, which there are videos of them doing just that.  (The Oath Keepers seldom make any move without the direction of their leader, Rhodes.)

Because he is considered such a threat to the U.S. government, he is remaining in jail without bail.  The federal indictment also says that Rhodes spent more than $15.500 on shotguns, AR15’s, gun mounts, scopes and magazines.

As he story goes, on Nov. 3, 2020, the Oath Keepers were already convinced that the election had been stolen from President Donald Trump.  Members of this far-right militia group were already making plans to march on the U.S. Capitol.

Court filings and public statements leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, show how important the idea of the Insurrection Act became to Rhodes and other extremists, including followers of the ever-changing QAnon extremist ideology, and to President Trump and people close to him.

“It is hard to put into words how mind-boggling this idea was, to use a statute designed to protect the country from insurrection to support an actual insurrection,” said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at the California State University at San Bernardino.

The act was last used in 1992 to quell days of protests and rioting in Los Angeles after four police officers accused of beating motorist Rodney King were found not guilty. The 1807 law was used at the request of the then governor to federalize the California National Guard units to quell the riots.

Indictments filed in the Jan. 6th investigation show Rhodes’s followers were drawn to Washington partly in the hope that Trump would invoke the law once more, transforming the Oath Keepers into a kind of shock troop militia to deal with the imagined rioters, government officials and anyone who tried to make Biden’s election victory a reality.

“If Trump activates the Insurrection Act, I’d hate to miss it,” Oath Keeper, Jessica Watkins of Ohio wrote a week before the Capitol attack.  Around the same time, Kelly Meggs, the head of the Florida chapter of Oath Keepers, allegedly predicted in a separate conversation that Trump would stay in power and “claim the Insurrection Act.”

That notion began gaining steam in late May 2020, when mass protests over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis prompted Trump and some of his supporters to suggest the military be called out to put an end to sporadic unrest.

The person referred to only as “Q” was the mysterious on-line persona whose pronouncements fed the QAnon extremist ideology.  He suggested that the president should invoke the law, adding cryptically, “call the ball,” an obscure piece of military aviation jargon used in the movie “Top Gun.”

End of Part I of: THE STORY OF THE “OATH KEEPERS” AND JANUARY 6^TH