The most notable was an armed standoff against the federal government at Bundy Ranch in Bunkerville, Nevada. The Oath Keepers engaged in a series of confrontations with the government during years of Barack Obama's presidency. Members pledge to “fulfill the oath all military and police take to ‘defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic,’” and to defend the Constitution, according to its website. Before long, Rhodes was neglecting his law practice to work on the Oath Keepers. Rhodes has said there were about 40,000 Oath Keepers at its peak one extremism expert estimates the group’s membership stands at about 3,000 nationally. He recruited current and former military, police and first responders. Rhodes moved to Montana and relocated his defense practice there but took a “hard right turn away from politics” the SPLC said, and launched the Oath Keepers. Rhodes later went to Yale Law School, graduating in 2004 and clerking for Arizona Supreme Court Justice Michael Ryan. His first job in politics was supervising interns for Ron Paul, who was then a Republican congressman from Texas. He went to night school at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. Rhodes, out of high school, joined the Army and became a paratrooper, but was honorably discharged after he was injured during a night parachuting accident, according to a biography on the Southern Poverty Law Center's website on extremism. 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 such as that the government was planning to attack its own citizens. Action was already planned.Įlmer Stewart Rhodes III, 56, founded the Oath Keepers in 2009. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore."īut for Rhodes and others, there was no need for Trump's words of encouragement. Many were animated by Trump's speech at a rally near the White House, just before the riot, where he said: “We fight like hell. Hundreds of people have been charged in the violent effort to stop the congressional certification of Biden's victory. 6, 2021, charged them with seditious conspiracy, a rarely-used Civil War-era statute reserved for only the most serious of political criminals.īut the documents also show how quickly Trump's most fervent and dangerous supporters mobilized to subvert the election results through force and violence, by any means necessary, even though there was no widespread election fraud and Trump's Cabinet and local election officials said the vote had been free and fair. The indictment last week of Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, and 10 other members or associates was stunning in part because federal prosecutors, after a year of investigating the insurrection of Jan. spirit.”įive days after the election, when The Associated Press and other news outlets declared Democrat Joe Biden the winner, the documents say Rhodes told Oath Keepers to “refuse to accept it and march en-masse on the nation's Capitol.” “We aren't getting through this without a civil war,” the group's leader, Stewart Rhodes, wrote fellow members, according to court documents.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |