“It’s time to start killing the news media live on air,” opined one Oath Keeper on Parler last month, adding: “It’s time to start executing lefties openly and violently.” The same man, in a recent private chat, wrote: “Either we start fighting back or we lose forever. You bleed a little now or a lot later. … These people will not stop and openly claim as much. Either we kill them or they kill us.”
“We arnt left with no choice,” was one reply.
When The Hill tweeted out the headline, “Sen. Schumer: ‘No court is going to overturn this election—Joe Biden will be installed as president’,” a notorious Proud Boy from Oregon quote-tweeted it with the reply: “He forgot we have more guns than they do.”
Absolutely convinced that Donald Trump won the presidential election and that Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats are attempting to steal the victory, the same far-right extremists who flooded the streets of Washington, D.C., on Saturday to “Stop the Steal”—accompanied by their now-familiar violence and general thuggery—have been ratcheting up their already-hysterical rhetoric around the election, fueled by nonsensical conspiracism, to a fever-pitched open advocacy of lethal violence, targeting politicians and the media.
At the private chat room organized by the Oath Keepers at their website—whose contents were exposed in disturbing detail this week by the independent-journalism website Unicorn Riot—the pinned message atop the forum called for targeting political and media figures at their homes:
Let’s all take a step back for a moment and understand that the media relishes when one of us fights back. How about we all sit back and “peacefully” start visiting the homes of democratic politicians and media personalities so they can see how it feels when people with differing opinions disrupt their lives.
The comments became openly threatening. “Why hasn’t anyone talked about the Media,” asked a forum participant. “I think they have to be a main target of ours.”
“I agree,” added another. “It’s not freedom of speech when sedition is the goal and lies are the means. If we don’t take action we’ll all be going to the gulag.”
This was when the man—using the nom de plume "bonsaiisuperstar," but identified by activist/researcher Antifash Gordon as a Trump fan from Lebanon, Ohio, named Michael Wilson—chimed in with his conclusion, similar to his threatening Parler posts, that “either we kill them or they kill us.”
Unicorn Riot was able to infiltrate the forum, run by the Oath Keepers through Rocket.Chat, by simply entering as non-members. It was able to scrape chats between when the forum page was first created, in July 2020, through November 9.
The Oath Keepers have hardly been the only far-right extremists pushing violent rhetoric. The Oregon Proud Boy who threatened armed resistance to a Biden inauguration—Chandler Pappas of Astoria, who participated in numerous Proud Boys events in Oregon, and was accompanying Patriot Prayer member Aaron Danielson the night he was shot in Portland while engaged in a confrontation with an antifascist—also recently issued an ominous warning to state officials.
In a tweet in which Governor Kate Brown, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, and Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt were tagged, Chandler—who also participated in the Saturday mayhem in Washington, D.C.—posted:
You are not my master
You are not my leader
You are not untouchable
“Rhetoric within militia spaces I observe has been of high temperature for much of the summer, growing in intensity in and beyond the election. Fantasies of violence became more specific, discussion of lethal force more normalized, and the field of potential ‘targets’ continued to grow,” Hampton Stall of MilitiaWatch, which monitors armed far-right militias in the U.S., told Unicorn Riot.
The threatening hyperbole emanating from the Oath Keepers should be taken with a grain of salt. While founder Stewart Rhodes is fond of talking big—he was banned from Twitter for threatening “civil war” after Danielson’s shooting—he and his organization are widely regarded both within the “Patriot” far-right circles where he operates, and among outside observers, as being mostly full of hot air. Rhodes spouts a lot of pseudo-paramilitary talk and threatens a lot of action that never materializes.
Just before the election, Rhodes went on Alex Jones’ Infowars program and claimed that Oath Keepers would “have men already stationed outside DC as a nuclear option. In case they attempt to remove the President illegally, we will step in and stop it. We will be on the outside of D.C., armed, if the President calls us up.” No such armed militia monitors were ever reported lurking anywhere in the vicinity of the capital city.
However, Rhodes’ rhetoric reflects the broader sentiment within the “Patriot” militia movement regarding the election’s outcome. Moreover, it suggests a violent strain of resistance coming from the far right in the coming weeks and months, largely because its primary premise is that Biden and the Democrats are mere front men for a Communist takeover of the nation—Rhodes calls it a “wide open Communist insurrection—and that only by retaining Trump in the presidency can this existential threat to the nation be averted.
Chuck Tanner, a research analyst for the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, agrees that Rhodes and the Oath Keepers are known for spouting a lot of hyperinflated talk. “Even if an organization is dominated by blowhards, however, it only takes one true believer to take their framework to heart and you can have a tragedy,” he warns.
“More to the point though, we have been concerned about the potential radicalizing effect on members of these movements across the transition from opposing COVID-19 restrictions, to responding to protests over police racism and violence, and now to the election being perceived as ‘stolen’ by ‘conspirators’,” Tanner told Daily Kos. “It's kind of a perfect storm for animating the ideologies that drive these groups. As the COVID-19 insurrection developed, wearing a mask to protect your neighbor was compared by some, ridiculously and offensively, to slavery and the Holocaust. But it became a symbol of unfolding tyranny from above.”
He continued: “During the protests over George Floyd's murder, Oath Keepers inserted itself into situations where violence could be a logical outcome to ‘protect’ against vilified Black Lives Matter and anti-fascist activists; they also defended Kyle Rittenhouse's actions. The election adds another potentially radicalizing element to all this—and it looks like the most violent language in the Unicorn Riot release comes in connection to the election.”
Unicorn Riot also obtained access to a November 13 group planning call by the Oath Keepers, and recorded it. Rhodes can be heard rambling at length about the coming weeks, saying: “[Trump] has a responsibility and duty to suppress that insurrection repel the invasion of the communist Chinese and all their allies…. I’m telling you straight up, guys, if he doesn’t drop the hammer on this communist insurrection, we are going to end up fighting a bloody civil war in this country to defeat them. Horrific. More of us are going to die.”
“I think regardless that’s going to happen,” a member offered.
“Well, sure,” Rhodes said. “But it’s better to fight it while he’s Commander-in-Chief. We’re not going to get out of this without a fight, that’s a friggin’ fact.”
Rhodes goes on at length:
I think being able to fix this through conventional politics, I'm on record already of saying president should pull the plug and drop the hammer. And what I mean by that would be pulling the plug that drains the swamp. You've got to, with his powers, you can do a mass declassification of CIA, FBI, NSA DNI old files of all the dirty secrets that they use control people. And that's exactly what the swamp water is.
So you drain that and pull the plug. And then he has to drop the hammer, which is the Insurrection Act. And you know, I understand. I'm a libertarian. I'm a constitutionalist. But he has the authority within the Constitution to suppress insurrections, and we're facing a wide-open Communist insurrection. In fact, it's a Chinese proxy attack, a military attack by Communist China, but using domestic Communist proxies—that's what this is. That's a combined force of domestic and foreign enemies. And the president has a narrow window to fix this, while he's commander in chief.
And we're gonna have a fight. We really can't get out of this without one. And the best way to do it is for him to step up as commander-in-chief and use the authority he has—it’s always been at his fingertips the entire time, whether he knows they're not.
… That's what he needs to do. And anything less than that, anything that’s sort of that, will not be enough to fix this, to defeat the Deep State without us having to fight a bloody, horrific civil war-slash-insurgency against us. So that's where we're at. And we need to realize that this story of the election is the tip of the iceberg of the corruption has been going on in our political system for decades. It's been horrific. But you can certainly count since the assassination of John F. Kennedy. And it's only gotten worse now they’re openly stealing elections.
So we got we can't let a fraudulent, fake poser Chinese puppet, Chinese agent—Obama, er, Biden—take office in January. So President Trump's got to stop it. And he needs to use his authority as commander in chief, and we need to support him in doing that, but you need to prepared for whatever may come, and it's gonna be a rocky month ahead or two months. …
… Call it what it is. It's an insurgency. But it's also an attack by a foreign enemy, the Communist Chinese using American proxies. And that's just reality.
As Tanner explains: “Groups like Oath Keepers have amped up for years that the ‘constitutional Republic’ is being threatened. In their far right nationalist conspiracy-think, and against basic facts, the election gets cast as it’s overthrown by an essentially satanic force.
“If you hold to a view like that, violence becomes a logical step. It's always hard to know when any individual, or small group, will move from online rhetoric to violence, but I am very concerned that the conditions for that leap are ripe. So, I think we have to take this kind of rhetoric seriously.”