Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 06:55 pm
If you go to the Oath Keepers website, you’ll see that Brandon Smith writes that a Hillary Clinton win means civil war:
[I]f Hillary Clinton is chosen by the establishment to take Obama’s place, the result would probably be outright civil war in the U.S. The level of hatred among conservatives for that woman is so stratospheric I cannot see any other outcome. It might not happen immediately, but a solid bet would be conflagration within her first term.
Right. Hillary Clinton, as of 2015 the “most admired woman for record 20th time,” according to Gallup. The woman even Republicans are saying they will vote for if Trump gets the nomination. That’s how must conservatives hate her.
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Racial fantasies also surface in the prediction that a Trump win means “at the very least” nationwide Ferguson-type riots “with the social justice cultists running wild with their goofy slogans and molotov cocktails.” According to Smith, black people protesting the murder of their of young black men “are a paper tiger however, and are only a threat if they manage to convince a majority of the ethnic American population to follow their lead.
A threat? To what, precisely?
We have an answer to that: their fantasy America. This is the group, remember, that said it would “protect” Kim Davis from arrest by US Marshals last year, apparently on the premise that “there is no crime if you have Christ.”
It is obvious that what is speaking to us here is not only the Fox News Reality Bubble but some wishful thinking, because just last week Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes told Alex Jones that,
Oath Keepers’ “civil defense units†will “fight in the street†against “the jihadists and the cartels and the gangs and these radical Black Lives Matter people and the black anarchists, the black flag anarchists; they are all just force multipliers and proxies, just as we saw during the Cold War with communism.â€
You no doubt remember too when heavily-armed Oath Keepers roamed the Ferguson streets while unarmed Black Lives Matter protesters were ordered to disperse.
So the enemy of the Oath Keepers, which laughingly claims to be “a non-partisan association,” is the many-headed hydra of jihadists, cartels, gangs, and Black Lives Matter people. Pretty much anyone who isn’t white, not to put too fine a point upon it.
And it is interesting that Rhodes doesn’t seem to be troubled by his fellow conservatives waving Confederate or Nazi flags while pretending to be Americans, but he sure doesn’t want to see “leftists” disrespecting Old Glory, telling Jones:
“You’re going to get stomped. That’s what’s going to happen to them. I know a lot of veterans, the first time they see some radical leftist trampling on a flag or burning a flag, they’re going to kick their ass. I know you can say it’s free speech, but the veteran doesn’t care about that. In his mind, it’s not free speech, that’s not protected speech, it’s incitement to violence so he’s going to go ahead and use it.â€
“When someone gets in your face and wants to use violence, like that one commissar who was screaming and screeching for ‘muscle,’ ‘Bring some muscle over here, I need muscle,’ people like that, we have no sympathy for, so when she gets what’s coming to her and those like her, well that’s just the way it goes. When someone does defend themselves and they get stomped, of course they’ll screech and call them ‘racist’ and ‘fascist’ and ‘brownshirts’ but they brought it on themselves so I just have no sympathy for them.â€
Now post-apocalyptic literature is very popular – stories like Hunger Games, Divergent, and others sell very well. But Oath Keepers doesn’t want the literature – they thirst for the real thing. They relish the idea of complete systems collapse, as you can see from Brandon Smith’s article:
In the event of stolen conventions, election fraud or rioting, the election itself could very well be postponed. Congress does have the authority to pass a law postponing federal elections due to emergencies or “extenuating circumstancesâ€, and, they also have the ability to transfer that authority to the executive branch.
Keep in mind, this could also take place in the event of a national crisis outside of the election process. An economic collapse, large scale terrorist attacks, or general social breakdown could result in a postponed election. Though this is an incredibly unlikely scenario, with the way 2016 has been going I would not rule anything out. Also take note that such a scenario would result in a prolonged Obama White House…
They have their guns and they have their gear and they have their survival stashes and by God they want to use them. Jim Bakker isn’t selling those food buckets just to line his pockets (OK, maybe he is). Bakker too, by the way, says you need to buy his food because “there’s criminals coming in, there’s terrorists coming in, there’s drugs coming that’s killing America’s kids!â€
Bakker doesn’t mind Mexicans “who are picking the crops” and he points out that ethnically speaking, “they are great bricklayers,” and damned if he can understand why people are attacking him for saying it.
People like Bakker and Stewart Rhodes have a lot of imaginary enemies, and not all of them are black or Mexican or Muslim. You might remember when he said of John McCain that “he should be hung by the neck until dead,” and compared him to Adolf Hitler in defending that appalling comment, saying McCain “is every bit as nuts as Adolf Hitler was.”
Because it’s not nuts saying you want to lynch a congressman. If we’re going to talk about Hitler, let’s talk about manufacturing crises. Hitler was good at that too, Stewart Rhodes.
This is the inevitable result of making a list of people you hate and then coming up with reasons why it’s okay for you to hate them, and that is all the Oath Keepers have done. They’re not defending the Constitution; they are defending their bigotry by saying anyone who disagrees with their appalling views must by definition not really be an American, even though they can’t point to anything in the Founding documents or letters of the Founding Fathers to support those views. As David Barton proves, you can just invent this stuff and conservatives will gobble it up because it justifies their preconceptions.
In the final analysis, the Oath Keepers are an armed group whose existence is predicated upon conspiracy theories about threats to an America and “our Judeo Christian way of life” that does not and has never existed. Not to mention the non-existent threats, like the alleged “communist infiltration” of the Ferguson protests.
For Stewart Rhodes, it is still the 1950s and the Cold War never ended; it just got new enemies to go along with the old.
Rhodes cloaks it all in an aura of sanctity but as the SPLC points out, “almost since the beginning, the Oath Keepers struggled to explain away the extremism in their ranks.” It is obvious, given these most recent wishful fantasies, that he has failed.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
