ARGUMENT: EXTREMISMOath Keepers Leaders Were Found Guilty, but the Threat of Antigovernment Extremism Remains
With Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes convicted of seditious conspiracy, the group he founded is at a crossroads. Sam Jackson writes that the conviction is creating disarray in the group’s ranks, but that other so-called Patriot movements might benefit, and that the overall cause will remain strong.
The verdict is in. After weeks of evidence and three days of deliberation, a jury has found Stewart Rhodes guilty of seditious conspiracy in the first of several trials for members and affiliates of Oath Keepers involved in the Jan. 6 attack on Congress. Prosecutors didn’t get a clean sweep of all the charges for the five defendants in this case, but every defendant was found guilty of at least one felony charge.
Sam Jackson writes in Lawfare that
From the Oath Keepers’ founding, it has walked along the edge of violence. Since its first public event on April 19, 2009, the group has consistently asserted that the U.S. government has gone rogue, become increasingly tyrannical, violated the rights of Americans, and even been complicit with international actors seeking to destroy the country. As I’ve written in my book, the group’s leaders regularly urged those they considered to be patriotic Americans to prepare to fight back against the government—and to get their friends and neighbors involved in those preparations, even if that required a bit of misdirection, for example, by drawing parallels between the organization’s Community Preparedness Teams program and FEMA’s Community Emergency Response Teams program. At the same time, the group has engaged in “strategic ambiguity,” keeping much of the discussion of tyranny, violation of rights, and proper responses to tyrannical government abstract (and thus legal) and letting individuals fill in the blanks, deciding for themselves when their rights are being violated and whether violence is a justified response.
The group has also used historical analogies to think about violence. Oath Keepers frequently point to moments of conflict and crisis in U.S. history that (supposedly) illustrate government gone bad and the successful resistance to that government mounted by patriotic citizens. Primarily, this means talking about the American Revolution, the founders, and the “long train of abuses” that those founders argued justified a violent response to the British government. Oath Keepers leaders have said, time and again, that contemporary America faces the same kind of situation experienced by the residents of the British colonies of North America in the late 18th century, and that contemporary Americans can follow the model provided by those who fought against the British and won America’s independence in order to defeat America’s domestic enemies now. Cont.)
