It appears that the Trump-Pence campaign—which never ceased operations after the 2016 election, and has been overseeing the ceaseless parade of Trump rallies around the nation that have occurred since his inauguration—has developed an official relationship with the far-right extremist group Oath Keepers to provide ad hoc “volunteer security” at these events heading into the 2020 election season.
Earlier this week, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes issued a call for volunteers to turn out in force for Thursday’s Trump rally in Minneapolis, ostensibly to protect rallygoers from violent “antifa” protesters. (As things turned out, there were anti-Trump protests and clashes with police, but none of them involved violence directed at rallygoers.)
An Oath Keeper working as “volunteer security” at a Trump-Pence event in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, last month.
Videos posted on Periscope showed Rhodes and other Oath Keepers working behind security lines and apparently serving as escorts, in some kind of semi-official capacity. That replicates what happened in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, on Sept. 16, when Oath Keepers similarly operated as “volunteer security” and were seen wearing official credentials behind security lines.
Rhodes and the Oath Keepers have been vociferous supporters of Trump, and were recently excited about the president’s reference to a “civil war” that might erupt if Democrats were to attempt to impeach him. Rhodes tweeted in response, “We ARE on the verge of a HOT civil war. Like in 1859. That’s where we are.”
It’s one thing to include ardent supporters as part of a campaign. It’s completely another, however, to empower an extremist organization aligned with the often-violent and always paranoid “Patriot”/militia movement, one with a history of being involved in armed standoffs with federal officers and attracting criminals and unstable characters to its ranks, particularly as part of a security operation for a presidential campaign.
The Oath Keepers constantly burnish their reputation by touting their credentials as veterans and former law enforcement officers, which is where the organization focuses its recruitment efforts. However, there’s no requirement of such backgrounds to join, and indeed many Oath Keepers, as the Anti-Defamation League observed in its report on the group, “do not have any current or former ties with military, police, or first responders.”
More to the point, not only are the Oath Keepers not any kind of authoritative law enforcement entity, but they are also a private army that has no accountability to anyone. If anyone is injured or harmed by any Oath Keepers at these events, their past history indicates that Rhodes and his group will simply disavow whatever member has been involved in the transgression, as they have in the past.
The Oath Keepers’ history—which is riddled with criminals, unstable hangers-on, support for white nationalists at their protests, and volatile situations involving armed standoffs with federal authorities—should be enough to permanently bar them from involvement in any kind of official political campaign.
From the very outset, the Oath Keepers brand has been associated with violent, threatening extremists. One of the first prominent members of the group was a man named Charles Dyer, whose online nom de plume was July4Patriot, and who represented the Oath Keepers at early tea party events in 2009, when he wasn’t producing ominous videos urging his fellow “Patriots” to prepare themselves for armed civil war and violent resistance to the newly elected Obama administration.
About a year later, Dyer was arrested for raping his daughter and eventually convicted. Police found a missile launcher in his personal armory. Stewart Rhodes and the Oath Keepers claimed he actually was never really a member and distanced themselves from Dyer as fast they could.
Rhodes has always attempted to present Oath Keepers as a mainstream organization, but the façade was thoroughly exposed in 2009 by Justine Sharrock at Mother Jones, whose in-depth report revealed a cadre of armed and angry extremists with paranoid ideas and unstable dispositions behind the claims of normalcy and civic-mindedness.
There are scores of patriot groups, but what makes Oath Keepers unique is that its core membership consists of men and women in uniform, including soldiers, police, and veterans. At regular ceremonies in every state, members reaffirm their official oaths of service, pledging to protect the Constitution—but then they go a step further, vowing to disobey "unconstitutional" orders from what they view as an increasingly tyrannical government.
The Oath Keepers played a prominent role in the 2014 Bundy ranch armed standoff in Nevada. A significant number of Oath Keepers responded to Cliven Bundy’s initial plea for support that April in his conflict with the Bureau of Land Management, and so the organization wound up playing a key role both in organizing the armed resistance to federal officers in mid-April, as well as in the nearly lethal mess into which the scene devolved later that month, in the weeks after the initial standoff.
That was when a paranoid rumor of an imminent drone strike on the encampment began circulating. The team that primarily circulated the drone-strike rumor—namely, Rhodes’ Oath Keepers—also began advising people to pull out, which sparked the wrath of militiamen.
Those militiamen voted to oust the Oath Keepers, and a couple even spoke of shooting Rhodes and his men in the back, which they deemed the proper battlefield treatment of “deserters.”
Rhodes replied to their accusations in a video in which he teamed up with fellow Oath Keepers Steve Homan, Robert Casillas, and Brandon Rapolla (the latter of whom are also affiliated with Mike Vanderboegh’s so-called “III Percent” movement) to attack the “nutcases” that Rhodes claimed had assumed control of the militia camp at the Bundy ranch.
The situation slowly defused as more participants became disillusioned and left. However, their involvement was far from over: One of Rhodes’ longtime allies, a New Hampshire militiaman named Jerry DeLemus, who also happened to be the state chair of Veterans for Trump, was later arrested by the FBI for his role in the Bundy ranch standoff, then convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison.
We got a clear view of their version of accountability when Rhodes and his Oath Keepers organized “vigils” outside military recruiting stations around the country after right-wing media concocted the claim that the Obama administration was leaving such stations vulnerable to terrorist attack by insisting that recruiters be unarmed. At one of these vigils, a would-be “protector” mishandled his rifle and dropped it, discharging a round that narrowly missed bystanders.
Rhodes quickly waved off any responsibility, claiming that the man wasn’t a member: “Thankfully, not one of ours,” he said in an article posted to the group's website. “Good intentions on the part of volunteers are not enough, because we all know where the road paved with them leads,” the article mused.
They next made their presence felt in Oregon, at an attempt at recreating the Bundy ranch situation, this time at a mine near Grants Pass. The standoff fizzled, however, and the Oath Keepers wandered away from the scene in the two weeks after a rally outside federal offices. Many of its participants, however, were on the scene just a few months later in Burns, Oregon, when Cliven Bundy’s son Ammon organized the monthlong armed standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
The Oath Keepers were also present at some of the earliest far-right rallies on the West Coast in 2017, notably the ultraviolent riots in Berkeley, California, in April, as well as the large Patriot Prayer rally in Portland, Oregon, that followed the murder of two commuters on a MAX train by a far-right extremist. At the Berkeley event, Rhodes spoke to the crowd in front of an alt-right “Kekistan” banner, and he was followed on the dais by notorious white nationalist Brittany Pettibone.
Subsequently, Rhodes’ reputation among his far-right cohorts has waxed and waned, particularly as the Oath Keepers have increasingly backed out of participation in various events. They failed to appear, for instance, at a protest against Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters that they themselves had organized. At the most recent Proud Boys march in Portland on Aug. 17, Rhodes raised hackles by loudly announcing he was pulling Oath Keepers out of the event because of the likely presence of racist bigots among the Proud Boys and their allies, notably the American Guard.
“We do not, and cannot, knowingly associate with known or suspected white nationalists,” he claimed then; apparently his April 2017 Berkeley appearance fell into a different category.
Rhodes’ vision for the Oath Keepers appears to be to attempt to legitimize their paranoid vision not just by distancing them from overt racism, but also by becoming increasingly associated with the Trump campaign. After all, it has been in service as a kind of ad hoc security force to counter “antifa” ever since Trump’s inauguration in 2017.
The endpoint of this vision is for Oath Keepers to become an unofficial adjunct paramilitary force that could be deployed by President Trump at his own discretion—say, if he were to be impeached. Rhodes was explicit about this when he announced plans to provide a kind of specialized “Spartan” training program to prepare Oath Keepers for combat with “antifa” and whatever evil leftists might be lurking out there.
We’re going to have our most experienced law enforcement and military veterans, as well as firefighters, EMTs, Search and Rescue — guys that we’ve vetted that are qualified to teach, to go and train average Americans in how to organize their own neighborhood watch, their own security teams, their own event security, and walk them up the ladder in proficiency, so that they are available for the sheriff as a posse, under a Constitutional governor to be a state militia, or if it was called out by the President of the United States to serve as a militia of the United States to secure the schools, protect our borders, or whatever else he asks them to do to execute our laws, repel invasions, and to suppress insurrections, which we’re seeing from the left right now.
So we want to see a militia, basically, reestablished in this country and trained up. So we’re calling them training groups, we’re not calling them militia, because we believe that we want them to be a pool of people that can be utilized by the governor, by the sheriff, or by the president of the United States.
If Oath Keepers indeed have an official role as a “volunteer security” force at Trump-Pence campaign events, then Rhodes’ vision is now one step closer to realization.
Trump-Pence 2020 officials did not respond to Daily Kos queries for further information.
