Oath Keepers - Insiders Account
Oath Keepers - Insiders Account
Take a Tour Inside the Wild Contradictory World of the Oath Keepers and See How They Came To Worship The Thing They Feared Most - Federal Authoritarianism
Washington DC 12 July 2022 Midday
Today a revelatory insight into the Oath Keepers mindset has been published by the son of the OK leader Stewart Rhodes. Dakota Adams is a fascinating character with important insights into modern America’s deepest problems. He was brought up deep inside conspiracy land. Home schooled and thus denied exposure to ‘normies’, this is in part the story of how he broke free from the grip of the crazy thinking through sheer force of logic and access to information on line - usually it goes the other way.
Because the J6C will be getting into the direct links between Trump and right wing militias in under an hour, Civil War II offers a quick summary of the key points of Adams piece and a link to the original that is essential reading to understand how the militia’s that always feared black helicopters and the end of freedom came to cheer on exactly that when Trump was giving the orders. Its a stunning insight.
Quotes follow with occasional comments from CWII. The quotes were edited to fit Twitter word lengths
Early misgivings
I started to see uncomfortable parallels between the way Trump ran his cabinet and the toxic mismanagement style Stewart brought to the OK's board. Any similarity between my father and Trump was cause for concern
Trump’s ideological incoherence was confusing - saying mutually exclusive things that his followers would contort their belief systems into following. Adams gives examples of
people with Gadsden flag plates suddenly advocated for red flag laws and even confiscating all weapons from veterans on grounds of PTSD only to stay in step with Trump.
It made no sense to Adams but the people in his town did not seem to see the contradictions he was seeing.
I began to worry that there was nothing Trump could do that would shake their belief.
Unusually, it was a foreign policy failure that finally pushed Adams free of conspiracy land. Trumps betrayal of the Kurds was a turning point
Over the course of a single hour-long phone call with a foreign dictator, our president was convinced to completely abandon our most faithful regional allies in the Global War on Terror in one of the worst strategic decisions made by any president in modern history. The Kurds were added (again) to our long list of local allies betrayed in conflicts from Tripoli to Laos, and permanently set the reputation of the United States as an unreliable ally and fair-weather friend. I watched dumbfounded as a state that possibly intended genocide was given free reign to roll over the people who had done all the dying to destroy the caliphate our national failures helped create, just so that Trump could get an attaboy from an autocratic strongman.
He starts to see Putin’s hand above Trump pulling the strings
Or maybe not just an attaboy, the more I looked at the situation objectively the more I saw that in every aspect Putin gained enormously. This decision had done us no good in any respect, but had many advantages for the strategic goals of Russia. Standing in the family kitchen, I remember jokingly telling my mother that I was ready to re-think all of those Russiagate allegations. It didn't feel like a joke.
This was part of Trump’s genius. His opposite statements allowed him to message opposite groups. To followers he loved Putin the strongman. Mainstream national security people heard how hard he was on Russia due to State Dept imposed sanctions that he could not undo despite trying. So many were hoodwinked by this and almost no one saw the "flip-flopping +" or called him on it
Adams argues that for logical consistency reasons OKs should have supported BLM - but didn’t. This one is hard for outsiders to understand because militia’s are assumed to be fundamentally racist. Turns out they are. Adams articulates the tension between the “constitutional” widow dressing of militia’s rhetoric with the racist reality.
It follows logically that an anti-racist, anti-government movement would turn out for racial justice protests after egregious killings by agents of the state.
Logic does not matter much to the red neck army. What happened under Trump was the ultimate right wing fear come to life. Instead of fighting it they embraced it.
What happened instead was that the militias finally got to see the black helicopters and 'black bag' abduction squads they'd long predicted in action, vindicated at last, and they stood aside to cheer on the state.
Federal agents in plain clothes abducted protesters in unmarked rental vans without legal arrests ever being recorded, crowds were barricaded in place for mass arrests, citizens shot with less-than-lethal munitions on their own front porches, tanks rolling through neighborhoods flanked by police and soldiers in gas masks. It was a scene out of any and every paranoid antigovernment fantasy come to life, and the reaction was 'serves you right'. The use of state violence against protest movements in modern America moved toward normalization, the president threatened the deployment of US military forces to crush protests, and the anti-government freedom fighters applauded.
Militias embraced federal authoritarianism because it suited their other identity and power needs.
They turned up waving Trump flags and the star spangled banner, as if a protest against the unlawful killing of black people was inherently a protest against Trump and America itself. I thought about that image, the defensive reflex of the militia right to any attack on racism, for a long time.
Adams has a great contribution to make to deprogramming
I spent my entire youth practicing shouting down opposing views without ever really considering them, simply because I already knew I was right..The key, [to my change was] I had empathy for people who were different from me.
Here is the complete original
“Of course, Ron Paul would lose. In the ensuing panic and dissolution of the nascent Liberty Movement, my father would seize the time and place to found Oath Keepers and redirect the considerable grassroots energy that was now aimless and directionless.”
***Key point: The energy associated with societal unrest (whether organic or engineered) must be accommodated is some manner and is ripe for redirection and/or exploitation.
“In the midst of this, the Q handle would emerge with its now distinctive style of vague allusions and almost Socratic style of rhetorical questions. Q would go on to become a mass cultural phenomenon.”
***Interesting that this approach has just enough of a veneer of intelligence and awareness to give it credibility to those who want their fears confirmed. Straight up “The world is going to end, look out for space lasers” works for some but doesn’t do a good job of training it’s followers to stand up to scrutiny. The Q movement, and it’s Socratic questioning format, not only gave adherents the feeling that it was well-considered, but it also allowed for some evolution rather than rigidity. In other words, if you don’t prescribe all the answers but your goal is to create high numbers of believers, you let them answer those questions in whatever way is the most popular to the target masses.
“This, the forever wait by the Lock Her Up contingent of Trump voters, would become what I mark as the prototype of the eternal 'two more weeks' familiar to anyone who has studied QAnon.”
***Just like religious texts, there should be enough flexibility in the prophecy to allow it to never be fully disproven but instead to promise <fill in the blank> in such a way that the followers fully believe the resolution will eventually come. HOWEVER, there are both dangers and advantages in the “wait for it” approach to problem resolution. From football games to Christmas presents and restaurant meals to orgasms there is a human affinity for delayed resolution as long as the resolution actually manifests. Imagine, as a child, looking at all your tightly wrapped Christmas presents for weeks and then on Christmas day being told to return them without ever opening the package. How would you feel if you sat down in a fine restaurant, ordered your meal and then 15 minutes later were told that you would not receive it and to go away and check back some other time. This frustration from unresolved outcomes is a powerful force that can either perpetuate your movement or destroy it. The outcome depends on the fundamental attractiveness of your narrative and the ability of that narrative to withstand and successfully compartmentalize external assault. One of the greatest weaknesses of political narratives is their reliance on a change in leadership as the solution and are thusly tied to finite election cycles. I can predict the end of the world in 200 years and none of my audience will be around to test my prediction but if my grievances are all attributed to a certain political party or structure and when that party or structure changes nothing resolves, there’s some ‘splaining to do.
Bonus: Here is a modification to biblical text to address political Christianity:
Matthew 7:15 (2022 Anti-MAGA Version): “Beware of false PATRIOTS (née “prophets”) which come to you in sheep's
clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”