Thread by @DavidNeiwert

Thread: A 12-year flashback to the first time I ever heard of the Oath Keepers. It happened in 2009 when I was monitoring ‘Patriot’ movement chatter and came across a YouTube video by this man: An ex-Marine named Charles Dyer. You can see why it caught my attention.

2) Dyer’s style was disturbing—combining a skull-mask imposed digitally and his fondness for ‘inspirational,’ anthemic music in the background—but his incendiary, violent rhetoric was especially worrisome. Watch this one to the end: ‘You’re damn right I’m a threat.’

3) This video and others I was seeing float around on the fringes of the suddenly burgeoning ‘Patriot’/militia far right made me concerned about their recruitment of military veterans. There were good reasons to be concerned.
crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/…

4) As it happened, I raised the alarm at @crooksandliars only a month or so before Homeland Security issued its ill-fate warning about precisely that problem—which set off months of hysterical hyperbole from Fox News and the far right alike.
crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/…

5) You may remember how that all turned out: The projection-fueled attack on DHS’s domestic-terrorism-monitoring section ended up gutting the section and sending the Obama administration into hunker-down/failure mode when it came to the radical right.
crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/…

6) Dyer, who went by the online nom de plume ‘July4Patriot,’ especially caught my attention when, the next time I encountered him in an online video, he was giving a speech at a July 4, 2009, Tea Party event in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.

7) This corroborated what I had been seeing elsewhere: The Tea Party, marketed on Fox News and CNN and everywhere else as a nominally mainstream movement, was rapidly becoming a massive conduit for a revival of the ‘90s Patriot movement.
crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/…

8) This trend became cemented over the following year, and eventually the Tea Party became wholly consumed by Patriot ideology, rhetoric, and agendas.
typeinvestigations.org/investigation/…

9) At the Broken Arrow event, Dyer had talked about the group he represented: the Oath Keepers. He also described the “ten orders we will not obey,” which mostly reflected paranoid fears of black helicopters and concentration camps common among ‘Patriots.’

10) In other videos, Dyer made his own affiliation with the Patriot movement explicit—and made it similarly clear that the Oath Keepers were part of that movement.

11) At the same time, Oath Keepers had become a fixture on the Tea Party scene, becoming sponsors of Tea Party gatherings and making their presence felt, and welcomed, among that movement. I considered them dangerous.
crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/…

12) Dyer also helped organize paramilitary training sessions, apparently in Oklahoma. Ironically, he voiced extreme agitation and paranoia about the DHS bulletin, which he claimed targeted veterans as domestic terrorists. (Fact check: It did not.)

13) Dyer’s rhetoric became increasingly violent, especially the talk about ‘a violent revolution.’

14) This was part of a larger trend we were seeing elsewhere across the country, including in the West and the South, of people forming militias and conducting paramilitary exercises—and wielding threatening seditionist rhetoric without restraint.
crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/…

15) The trend kept building. The numbers of militias hit an all-time high in 2012 at 1,360.
splcenter.org/fighting-hate/…

16) Charles Dyer’s speeches and activism, meanwhile, were being heavily promoted at the Oath Keepers website through 2009. Dyer shed his pseudonym as ‘July4Patriot’ and began using his real name.

17) However, Dyer’s career as a spokesman for the Oath Keepers ended abruptly and in ugly fashion. He was arrested in January 2010 and charged with raping his young daughter. Investigators found a grenade launcher in his home.
crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/…

18) Stewart Rhodes promptly disavowed him, claiming that Dyer had never been an actual dues-paying, card-signing member of the Oath Keepers, you see.
crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/…

19) At around the same time, Rhodes made an appearance on Chris Matthews’ MSNBC show and tried to defend his conspiracist agenda, which Matthews acutely diagnosed as being primarily about making people paranoid. No mention of Dyer was made.

20) Charles Dyer was eventually convicted, sentenced to 30 years, and remains in prison to this day.
splcenter.org/hatewatch/2012…

21) Fox News and particularly Bill O’Reilly were eager to indulge Rhodes’ claims that his group really weren’t a militia (even if they were functionaries of the same Patriot movement) and similarly eager to deny that militias had taken over the Tea Party.
crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/…

22) I think the above C&L post nailed it.

23) Of course, O’Reilly and his Fox cohorts were among the leading voices claiming that Obama’s DHS was trying to smear conservatives and the Tea Party with accusations of domestic terrorism.
crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/…

24) Mind you, this line of attack became broadly used by Republicans across the board to hammer into the narrative their denial that right-wing domestic terrorism posed any kind of real threat to Americans.
crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/…

24) And, well, here we are today, with three leading Oath Keepers currently under arrest, and more likely.
nytimes.com/2021/01/19/us/…

The final coda: Does it surprise anyone at all that we're still being fed the same sack of bullshit from Fox News?
dailykos.com/stories/2021/1…