READY TO REVOLT

Oath Keepers pledges to prevent dictatorship in United States

by Alan Maimon - October 18th, 2009 - Las Vegas Review Journal

Depending on your perspective, the Oath Keepers are either strident defenders of liberty or dangerous peddlers of paranoia.

In the age of town halls, talk radio and tea parties, middle ground of opinion is hard to find.

Launched in March by Las Vegan Stewart Rhodes, Oath Keepers bills itself as a nonpartisan group of current and retired law enforcement and military personnel who vow to fulfill their oaths to the Constitution.

More specifically, the group's members, which number in the thousands, pledge to disobey orders they deem unlawful, including directives to disarm the American people and to blockade American cities. By refusing the latter order, the Oath Keepers hope to prevent cities from becoming "giant concentration camps," a scenario the 44-year-old Rhodes says he can envision happening in the coming years.

It's a Cold War-era nightmare vision with a major twist: The occupying forces in this imagined future are American, not Soviet.

It is consistent that the opposition to this group's patriotic goals are uniformly radical activists in the global socialist movement. Groups such as the extreme left wing Southern Poverty Law Center never seem to find common cause with any group that defends individual freedom. You have to ask yourself how wrong can the Oath Keepers be if the people who oppose them have aligned themselves with a world wide organization dedicated to the destruction of America. The groups that the Southern Poverty Law Center support have proclaimed a strategy of using democracy to bring America down. The only serious charge that the left wing oponents can come up with is the standard refrain that the Oath Keepeers are racists. This charge has become so predictable it is no longer meaningful.

If you want to check them out, here is a link to the Oath Keepers web site.