Barack Obama, Career Alternatives, Politics, Weirdness

Career Alternatives for Attorneys: Preventing Dictatorship?

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Meet Stewart Rhodes. He graduated in 2004 from Yale Law School, where his paper, “Solving the Puzzle of Enemy Combatant Status,” won a prize for the best paper on the Bill of Rights. Before entering the law, he served as a U.S. Army paratrooper.
What’s Rhodes up to now? Many military men turned lawyers troop off to large law firms, where the discipline and diligence cultivated in the armed forces help them succeed. Others join the JAG Corps or work for defense contractors.
But Rhodes, who was a non-traditional student at YLS, has taken a non-traditional career path since graduating.


From the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

Depending on your perspective, the Oath Keepers are either strident defenders of liberty or dangerous peddlers of paranoia. In the age of town halls, talk radio and tea parties, middle ground of opinion is hard to find.

Launched in March by Las Vegan Stewart Rhodes, Oath Keepers bills itself as a nonpartisan group of current and retired law enforcement and military personnel who vow to fulfill their oaths to the Constitution.

More specifically, the group’s members, which number in the thousands, pledge to disobey orders they deem unlawful, including directives to disarm the American people and to blockade American cities. By refusing the latter order, the Oath Keepers hope to prevent cities from becoming “giant concentration camps,” a scenario the 44-year-old Rhodes says he can envision happening in the coming years.

It’s a Cold War-era nightmare vision with a major twist: The occupying forces in this imagined future are American, not Soviet. “The whole point of Oath Keepers is to stop a dictatorship from ever happening here,” [said] Rhodes.

Dictatorship in the United States? American cities as “giant concentration camps”? Whatchoo talkin’ ’bout, Stewart?
Stewart and the Oath Keepers seek to prevent the imposition of martial law in America. As Rhodes told the LVRJ:

“The whole point of Oath Keepers is to stop a dictatorship from ever happening here. My focus is on the guys with the guns, because they can’t do it without them. We say if the American people decide it’s time for a revolution, we’ll fight with you.”

How worried are the Oath Keepers about the prospect of dictatorship?

The group’s Web site, www.oathkeepers.org, features videos and testimonials in which supporters compare President Barack Obama’s America to Adolf Hitler’s Germany. They also liken Obama to England’s King George III during the American Revolution.

One member, in a videotaped speech at an event in Washington, D.C., calls Obama “the domestic enemy the Constitution is talking about.”

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It seems that Stewart Rhodes isn’t a fan of Obama (or, for that matter, former President George W. Bush):

Rhodes, a former firearms instructor, said he easily could have started Oath Keepers during the Bush administration, but his focus during those years was first on getting his law degree and then volunteering on the 2008 presidential campaign of Texas Congressman Ron Paul, a libertarian Republican in whose office Rhodes worked during the 1990s.

What Rhodes terms “the rise of executive privilege” during the post-9/11 years of the Bush presidency will in his opinion only accelerate with Obama in office. What’s worse, he said, is that “gun-hating extremists” now control the White House.

Check out some components of the Oath Keepers’ oath, listed on their website:

1. We will NOT obey orders to disarm the American people.

2. We will NOT obey orders to conduct warrantless searches of the American people.

3. We will NOT obey orders to detain American citizens as “unlawful enemy combatants” or to subject them to military tribunal.

There’s something for everyone here. Second Amendment supporters would surely like #1, civil libertarians would fall for #2, and liberals would approve of #3.

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5. We will NOT obey orders to invade and subjugate any state that asserts its sovereignty….

7. We will NOT obey any order to force American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext.

Pacifists would support #5. As for #7, perhaps it’s a way of preventing a repeat of the detention camps for Japanese Americans.
You can read the complete oath, which has ten points, over here (or a more detailed, annotated version over here).
So, readers, what do you think of the Oath Keepers? Defenders of liberty, or a bunch of nuts?

Oath Keepers [official website]
Stewart Rhodes bio [OathKeepers.org]
READY TO REVOLT: Oath Keepers pledges to prevent dictatorship in United States [Las Vegas Review-Journal]

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