A Patriotic Trial

They assure they are not racists. But Obama’s election was exactly what triggered a drastic rise of militant groups’ activity in America.

Wearing a well-ironed shirt and lawyer glasses, 44 year old Stewart Rhodes doesn’t really look like a radical. His speech is filled with citations and quotes from court cases and historic documents. He’s a far cry from skinhead neo-Nazis and vociferous KKK who hold an annual “white pride parade” in Pulaski, TN.

Nevertheless, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) that monitors various manifestations of xenophobia in America claims that his organization, the Oath Keepers, “may be a particularly worrisome example of the Patriot revival.”

According to the SPLC, Patriots are the white radical organizations who like their guns and don’t like the federal government, which they think infringes upon their rights.

With a black president in the White House, hatred toward the federal government increased dramatically. According to the SPLC, in 2009 the number of patriotic groups in America went up from 149 to 512 and the number of militant organizations — like the Keepers — went up from 42 to 149. The authorities noticed this trend as far back as last spring. “Right-wing extremists have capitalized on the election of the first African American president, and are focusing their efforts to recruit new members and mobilize existing supporters,” reads a Homeland Security report.

Bullet Through Officer’s Head

It’s not quite clear if these people can be considered right-wing. For example, Rhodes and his organization, at least so they say, gravitate toward libertarianism — a movement that absolutizes personal freedoms. Apparent respectability allowed the Keepers to become heroes of the Tea Parties (conservative-libertarian demonstrations against Obama) and conservative talk shows habitués in just a year since their creation. They’ve participated in dozens of protests, organized hundreds of small local cells, and sold tons of booklets, bumper stickers and message T-shirts.

Rhodes’ ideology is rather simple: Any president tries to achieve unlimited power and enslave freedom-loving Americans. And since begging the congressmen is pointless, it’s necessary to appeal to law enforcement agencies to not follow criminal, according to the Keepers, orders. They say that they were sworn to the Constitution, not to the president. So if the president orders to send all American Patriots to concentration camps (which Patriots are seriously expecting to happen any minute) or take away their weapons, an honest military man or a policeman must refuse to do so.

Rhodes reminisces about one class in college when they discussed the orders the Nazi officers gave to the German soldiers. “I said without hesitation that if I received such an order, I would put a bullet through that officer’s head,” says the Keeper. The other students and the lecturer did not agree with him. “That’s exactly the kind of people Hitler was dreaming about,” affirms Rhodes.

He finds the writers of right-wing extremism reports outrageous: “They treat us like lab rats, they don’t care about the truth, and they think they know everything better than us. And what is it exactly that we did wrong?” According to him, virtually nothing — just gathered armed soldiers and policemen in Lexington Green (the location of the first Revolutionary War battle) and swore them to the Constitution. Thus, less than a year ago, on April 19, 2009, the organization was created.

Rhodes was inspired by Obama’s election. It was exactly then that the main Keeper felt that the country “was rolling towards the dictatorship.” According to him, only sensible people with guns are able to stop it from happening. A former paratrooper who got disabled after an unsuccessful parachute jump, Rhodes graduated from Yale with honors and then worked in Congress as Ron Paul’s staffer.

“In college, I wrote a paper on president’s extraordinary powers and it was marked as the best,” tells Rhodes. “And now for the same idea I am being called a terrorist, an extremist, or even worse, a racist.” He finds it outraging. After all, how can he be a racist if his mother was born in a family of Mexican immigrants?

Rhodes can’t get the president’s extraordinary powers out of his head. He has no doubts that concentration camps in America are only a matter of time. As soon as the terrorists blow up a dirty bomb (a shell with radioactive materials) in New York, the president will immediately put all the patriots behind bars. “During WWII we interned all the Japanese-Americans, didn’t we? And after Katrina didn’t the soldiers raid people’s homes and take away their weapons — clearly an anti-Constitutional act?”

He sees the Patriot Act enacted after 9/11 as a sign of the impending catastrophe. “Americans voluntarily gave up some of their rights because they were scared,” says Rhodes and warns that it’s only going to get worse. “Before it was the Japanese, then the Muslims, tomorrow it can be anyone of us.” He notes that Obama not only didn’t abolish the Act, but reenacted it.

In a year, Rhodes’ organization accepted up to 17,000 people, most of them active duty policemen and military. Their leader is sure that they are being hunted just like the Communists during McCarthyism.

At first, Rhodes tried to get through to the Republican Party, but he was disappointed: “The party is dying out, it’s mostly old men. They didn’t accept our ideas.” Then he and his brothers-in-arms began to hand out propaganda materials to the military appealing not to follow “criminal” orders.

“I understand that the administration wants to depict us as psychos running around the woods with weapons,” says Rhodes. In contrast to most of his followers, he himself doesn’t carry a gun. But the authorities have their reasons to worry. Rhodes has called the Secretary of State “Hitlery Clinton,” and on the organization’s website there is a video in which the former soldier calls Obama “a public enemy.”

Camouflaged Idiots

Ordinary Keepers are ready for even more. For example, 25 year old private L.P. from New York does precisely that, he says that he “runs around the woods with a machine gun.” Not by an order, but because he feels like it. He is sure that Obama will soon declare a state of emergency and pronounce all the otherwise-minded as traitors.

He and five other privates are seriously preparing for such a turn of events. They are developing strategies, training, and storing up for rainy days. L.P. admits that he’ll probably have to fight against the very army he serves for in case they try to disarm him. It won’t be easy — he knows all too well the tactics of his potential enemies.

L.P. holds sacred a popular belief among the ultra-right that Obama was born in Kenya and not in Hawaii and thus he can’t be the president of USA. He also believes that 9/11 was organized by the government to initiate the war in Iraq.

Rhodes refuses to have anything to do with this kind of followers. “The media are always interested in a couple of camouflaged idiots with machine guns,” he says. However, there is a video on the organization’s website in which L.P. openly talks about his views. Rhodes says that the purpose of that video is to show that “the situation has reached its boiling point.” According to him, he is almost a pacifist. “There are people who ask when we are going to storm Washington. And I say that a military coup is not much better than tyranny. But to refuse to follow criminal orders — that is effective.” But those who find the Keepers too soft have an alternative — a group that calls itself the Real Oath Keepers. “Those people are real neo-Nazis,” Rhodes says.

The Keepers — the common ones, not the “real” ones — were recently publicly embarrassed. At first, Rhodes’ followers actively supported an ex-Marine named Charles Dyer from California, who, with a semi-covered face, had been spreading propaganda on the Internet making statements such as: “… you’re damn right we’re a threat. We’re a threat to anyone that endangers our rights and the Constitution.” After leaving the Marines, Dyer was calling out to like-minded men to join him in one of the training camps in Oklahoma. However, in the beginning of the year he was arrested on a rape charge, and a grenade launcher that had been stolen from a military base was found in his house. All the references to him immediately vanished from the Keepers website.

This April promises to be rather heated: Obama’s opponents are planning major demonstrations for the tax filing deadline and also a gun owners’ demonstration — meaning almost all members of the organization.

Actually, Barack Obama has been so preoccupied with other issues during his presidency that he hasn’t even touched the sensitive topic of open weapon trade. However, during the first year of his administration, the sales of firearms went up from 12.7 to 14 million.

S., a 35 year old gun store owner from Reno, N.V., and an active member of the Oath Keepers, calls Obama “a present” for gun sellers. “My heart hurts for what’s happening to this country. It seems like we’re moving towards the Soviet Union or something,” he says. “They call us white psychos with guns, but in our organizations we have both Chinese psychos with guns and Jewish psychos with guns and Latino psychos with guns.”

He has developed his own apocalyptic scenario: Obama is assassinated, African Americans revolt in response, and the civil war starts. In his opinion, Americans are being repressed as we speak. “I’ll never forget how after Katrina soldiers arrested an 80 year old lady because she refused to give up her antique gun, which belonged to her husband or father,” he says. However, so far he hasn’t managed to get through even to his family. His wife, an immigrant from Ukraine, voted for Obama.

These last couple of months, the debate on guns has mostly been carried on in single states. Not so long ago, Obama had to sign a federal law that allowed carrying guns in national parks and in carry-on bins on trains. In Virginia, a law was signed that allows carrying concealed guns in bars and restaurants. At the same time, another law that limited weapon purchasing to one unit per month was abolished.

In Indiana, employers are required to allow their employees to keep guns in the cars parked on the office parking lot. Starbucks cafes recently became protest grounds for those who oppose the fire-arms ban since it allows the customer to openly carry guns inside. Groups of armed men would come in and buy coffee, thus demonstrating their Constitutional rights.

Some Americans are not so much scared by Obama as by a torrent of news about Islamist arrests in the USA. David B., a programmer from New York, didn’t even have a toy gun as a kid. The word “hunt” was considered to be a swear word in his family.

His views began to change after he witnessed the tragedy of 9/11. A year ago, when two Muslims planning new terrorist attacks were arrested in New York, he bought his first gun. And soon after that he became a shooting instructor himself, now owning seven units of fire-arms. He is proud of having introduced “dozens of people” to guns.