Casey Michel writes:

When [Stewart] Rhodes launched the Oath Keepers in 2009, he positioned the group as a disinterested platoon of law enforcement officers, military members, and other assorted volunteers looking simply to uphold their oaths to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Their fear was that an unscrupulous, overreaching president might order cops and service members to violate the rights of their own countrymen.

This had nothing to do with the fact that America had just elected its first Black president, Rhodes and his supporters insisted. Instead, they claimed, the Oath Keepers were a simple response to a nascent security state, a post-9/11 miasma of rights restrictions and militarized federal forces, no matter the occupant of the White House. “Too many conservatives relied on Bush’s character and didn’t pay attention,” Rhodes said in 2010. “Only now, with Obama, do they worry and see what has been done. Maybe you said, ‘I trusted Bush to only go after the terrorists.’ But what do you think can happen down the road when they say, ‘I think you are a threat to the nation?’”

The past four years, though, have demonstrated definitively that these Tea Party–era groups were part of a broader upswell of white revanchism, one that launched Trump to the presidency. Now, with a fellow traveler in the White House, the Oath Keepers and their ilk are little more than Blackshirts in the fascistic, authoritarian swell buoying Trump’s tenure: Once given to lofty defenses of “freedom from federal tyranny,” they are now openly interested in little more than maintaining an America where whites are first among equals. [Continue reading…]