Oath Keepers
 |
|
| Motto | "Not on our watch!" |
|---|---|
| Formation | March 2009 |
| Founder | Stewart Rhodes |
|
Region
|
United States of America |
| Leader | Stewart Rhodes |
| Stewart Rhodes, Michele Imburgia, Rex H. McTyeire, Richard Mack, John D. Shirley, Steven C. Homan, Jim Ayala, Jay Stang | |
| Website | oathkeepers |
Oath Keepers is a far-right, anti-government American organization associated with the patriot movement and militia movement. It has also been described as extremist or radical by the Southern Poverty Law Center. It encourages members – some of whom are current and former U.S. military and law enforcement officers – not to obey orders which they believe would violate the United States Constitution. Oath Keepers had a controversial presence in Ferguson, Missouri during the 2014 and 2015protests and unrest in the city, when members armed with semi-automatic rifles patrolled streets and rooftops.
The organization claims a membership of 35,000 and describes itself as a non-partisan association of current and formerly serving military, police, and first responders, who pledge to fulfill the oath all military and police take to "defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic." Groups that monitor domestic terrorism and hate groups disagree with this description. Mark Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) describes the group as "heavily armed extremists with a conspiratorial and anti-government mindset looking for potential showdowns with the government". and they are listed in the ADL's section on domestic extremism & terrorism. The SPLC lists the group's founder as a known "extremist" and terms his announced plans to create localized militia units "frightening"; SPLC senior fellow Mark Potok describes the group as a whole as "really just an anti-government group who believe in a wild set of conspiracy theories." The group espouses a number of conspiracy and legal theories associated with the sovereign citizen movement and the white supremacist posse comitatus movement.
...
Wikipedia