Oath Keepers head Stewart Rhodes

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The rhetoric of the far right “Patriot” movement reveals a deeply disturbed and dangerous world view. Here’s Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes (recently disbarred from practicing law in Montana) on an extremist radio show called “The Common Sense Show,” fantasizing about civil war.

White asked Rhodes what percentage of the military he thought would turn on the government “when the call comes out from Obama, for example, to confiscate guns and maybe fire on American people.” Rhodes responded that the government is imposing gun restrictions in a more incremental manner now but that if the government’s move was “taking all guns,” then a great number of the military would turn against them and “our greatest danger at that point would be a military coup.”

Hodges had a follow-up question: “If Obama does make a full-out move and if a military coup is in the cards, do you think that Obama will resort to the use of UN troops, specifically the Russians and the Chinese, to subjugate Americans and put down any rebellion?”

Rhodes responded that Obama’s use of foreign troops to quash a rebellion would be “the greatest gift” he could give the “resistance” because then “it would just piss off every other American.”

This led White to ask if the government was inflating statistics on the number of police officers who are shot on duty in an attempt to “incite incidences between the police and the citizens” because the “powers that be” want to “throw them out in the front lines and have them chewed up first in their big plan.”

“Of course, that’s what they want,” Rhodes responded. “They would love to have what they would consider the eye candy of dead cops killed by gun owners. That would give them the great PR coup of being able to point to that and say, ‘See, this is why we have to have more gun control.’”