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Credit: Think Progress

[Photo via Judd Legum at ThinkProgress]

Seems there was a very good reason Tim Pawlenty decided not to show up for that pre-debate Tea Party rally in Greenville, S.C., last night: It was being run by some of the wingnuttiest, far-right elements in America:

According to [its] official program, the pre-debate “Freedom Rally” is sponsored by several extremist groups, including the Oath Keepers militia group and the radical anti-communist John Birch Society. You can see a picture of the program here.

And the speakers were straight out of casting central for rattle-eyed nutcases -- right along side GOP stalwarts like their new governor:

The rally also featured a cadre of high profile speakers, including Judge Roy Moore, the former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice who lost his job after refusing to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the state judicial building, and Nikki Haley, South Carolina's first female governor.

Yep, that would be the same Roy Moore who flirted with a presidential bid under the banner of the militia-friendly/far-right Constitution Party. And while the local press reported that Haley "fired up" the Tea Partiers while mostly sticking to "policy issues" in her speech, she couldn't help brushing up against the nutcases everywhere she turned:

She followed John Birch Society president John McManus, who equated neo-conservatives with socialists, and Greenville Republican activist Dan Herren, who urged the tea party to try to work within the GOP to make it more conservative.

On top of that, she spoke with that huge Oath Keepers banner right behind her. That's one of the rally's chief sponsors -- and it's one of the most bizarre, paranoid and extreme -- not to mention potentially dangerous -- of the Tea Party factions.

After all, let's recall the 10 points that Oath Keepers proclaim as their oath:

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To listen to right-wingers in the wake of the arrest the would-be Times Square bomber, Faisal Shazad, you'd think that every "liberal media" outlet on the planet had tried to pin the attempt on Tea Partiers. (The whining from Stuart Varney on Sean Hannity's show last night was especially high-pitched.)

I mean, where would anyone get the idea that right-wing Tea Partying extremists might potentially be involved in violent domestic terrorism?

Meanwhile, no one is reporting much on the arrest earlier this week by the FBI of Darren Huff, an Oath Keeper from Georgia who was upset by the arrest a few weeks ago of another "Patriot" believer who tried to conduct a "sovereign citizens" style arrest in Tennessee:

A Georgia man has been arrested in Tennessee--authorities say he headed to Madisonville, armed and prepared to take over the courthouse.

Darren Huff stands charged of traveling in interstate commerce with intent to incite a riot and transporting in commerce a firearm in furtherance of a civil disorder.

The FBI says Huff traveled to Tennessee armed with a pistol on his hip and an assault rifle in his truck, intent on carrying out citizen's arrests of 24 federal, state, and local officials, and on seeing that another man did not face trial for trying to do the same.

In the video above, you can see what happened on April 1: A Freeman-style "sovereign citizen" named Walter Francis Fitzpatrick -- after drafting "citizen's arrest warrants" for state, local, and federal officials -- had entered the Madison County Courthouse and attempted to make a citizen's arrest of Grand Jury Foreman Gary Pettway. (Fitzpatrick, as the WBIR story noted, "had previously tried to get the grand jury to indict President Barack Obama on charges of treason, with no success.") Instead, deputies wound up arresting Fitzpatrick, and he was charged with disorderly conduct, inciting to riot, disrupting a meeting, and resisting arrest.

This outraged Huff, a loud and proud member of the Oath Keepers who posted the video of Fitzpatrick's arrest with a rant demanding that his fellow Patriots leap into action to defend him. So on April 20, Huff headed to Madisonville with his big black pickup truck emblazoned with the "Oath Keepers" logo. In the back, he had ammo and several weapons, including a semiautomatic "assault" rifle.

Huff was pulled over in Sweetwater and detained, as you can see on the video, and later released on his recognizance. As the story explains:

The FBI interviewed a bank manager who said Huff told him on April 15 that Fitzpatrick had been falsely arrested, that Huff was in the Georgia militia, and that 8 or 9 other militia groups were headed to Madisonville on April 20 to "take over the city." The bank manager said Huff told him he'd see Huff's actions on the noon news.

FBI agents interviewed Huff at his home on April 19, and Huff said he would be traveling to Tennessee to help Fitzpatrick get the charges against him dropped. Huff told agents there would be no violence unless they were provoked into violence.

Still, he told agents he planned to travel with his Colt .45 handgun and AK-47 rifle.

Then, on April 20, officers in Madisonville reported numerous individuals in possession of openly displayed and concealed firearms, in the area around the courthouse.

FBI agents had observed Huff leaving his home around 6:15 that morning. Tennessee Highway Patrol troopers pulled him over in Sweetwater for traffic violations of traffic control device, registration law, and following too closely.

The troopers said Huff volunteered that he planned to travel to Madisonville to take over the courthouse, to arrest the people on Fitzpatrick's warrants--who he termed "domestic enemies of the United States engaged in treason"--and to turn those arrested over to state police to place in jail.

The troopers said Huff told them if they didn't have enough people on April 20 to do all they planned on that day, they'd be back in 1-2 weeks.

The troopers said Huff also told them he was ready to die for his rights and what he believed in, and that he would not consent to a search of his truck.

Then on April 21, Huff recorded a radio broadcast, talking about his traffic stop and saying he did have weapons and ammunition with him.

As a result, the FBI believes Huff had both the intent and means to carry out threats of violence.

The FBI arrested Huff in Tennessee; it appears Huff may have gone to Pettway's home on Saturday and effected his own "citizen's arrest," though details of the arrest are not clear. Huff is now out on bond.

Gee, where would anyone get the idea that white Tea Partiers might get indulge in an act of domestic terrorism?

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The Oath Keepers, I've explained, are not just your ordinary Tea Party support group -- they're a disturbing and potentially very dangerous organization, built around radicalizing members of the military, veterans, and police officers.

Now they're planning to protest in New Hampshire in defense of one of their associates -- a sometime Oath Keepers activist who, along with his fiance, claims the state came in to their hospital room and removed their newborn baby, all supposedly because he's an Oath Keeper:

The director of a self-described anti-totalitarian group is urging supporters to rally outside a New Hampshire courthouse this week in support of an Epsom couple whose newborn was taken last week by state social workers.

Johnathon Irish and Stephanie Taylor say their baby was seized because of Irish's association with the Oath Keepers. Court documents, however, charge Irish with a history of violence toward Taylor and her children.

Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, told his group's members yesterday that the rally, scheduled for Thursday outside the Rochester Family Division Court, would be "in support of the First Amendment-protected right of freedom of association."

... "The fact that the political association of the father with Oath Keepers, and his gun ownership, were even among the reasons given for the taking of this baby takes this case beyond the realm of your mundane family court matter and turns it into something that could affect the rights of us all, nationwide," Rhodes wrote on the Oath Keepers website yesterday.

What's really happened, as is so often the case with bizarre stories like this, is that this has been ginned up for the past couple of weeks by Alex Jones and his conspiracy-theory operation, which has been hitting the story constantly with its broadcasts and videos, and dozens of would-be "libertarians" have been jumping on the bandwagon. And so already there have been small clusters of protesters outside all of Irish's subsequent court hearings.

Hopefully, none of the kooks out protesting in defense of this child abuser will do what kooks often do, hurt other people (and themselves) by acting out violently. After all, we've already seen an Oath Keeper planning to take over a county courthouse. Crazier things have happened -- and with this bunch, are likely to.

The video above (compiled from couple of YouTube reports gives you a look at the couple in question as they're interviewed about the claims against them. The second half is a phone interview with Stephanie's ex-husband, who points to reports about Johnathon Irish being investigated for child abuse of Stephanie's two children.

Daniel Barrick of the Concord Monitor, who has been doing stellar work reporting this story, has more on that:

But according to an affidavit provided to Irish by the state Division for Children, Youth and Families, state officials took the child because of Irish's long record of violence and abuse. According to the affidavit, a judge determined that Irish abused Taylor's two other children. She is still married to the father of those children, though Taylor said yesterday that her husband has refused to accept her divorce petition for the past two years.

The affidavit also says that the police in Rochester report a "lengthy history of domestic violence" between Taylor and Irish, and that she accused him of choking and hitting her on more than one occasion. According to the document, Irish failed to complete a domestic violence course as ordered by the state, and that a hearing was held last month to terminate Taylor's parental rights over her two older children.

Taylor "has failed to recognize the impact of domestic violence in her life and the potential danger it poses to a newborn baby," the affidavit reads. "Mr. Irish has not acknowledged any responsibility to date and remains a significant safety risk to an infant in his care. . . . Without the intervention of the court, the infant will be at risk of harm."

All this is corroborated by an unlikely by probably authoritative source: Johnathon Irish's father, John Irish. Here's an interview Irish had on a self-described "Christian Patriot" radio show, "A Call to Action," hosted by Pastor Butch Paugh. It took place on Tuesday:

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It's an incredibly damning interview. John Irish describes his son as not just a child abuser but a wife abuser as well, a violent man with a vicious temper and an obsession with guns. Moreover, he is someone who lives off the government dole and yet belongs to one of the most noxious anti-government Patriot groups in the business. The key quote:

Irish: The reason they are concerned with Oath Keepers is that Johnathon has a fanatical attitude that Oath Keepers is an organization that is planning to overthrow the present government, and bring us back into strict accordance with the Constitution. And Johnathon's feeling on that is he needs to be acquiring weapons to be ready for that overthrow.

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Harry Reid has to be delighted with the outcome of the Republican primary in Nevada. After all, the onetime frontrunner, Sue Lowden, finally drowned in a sea of chicken feathers and psychotic denials.

In her stead, the winner was Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle. And as TPM's Justin Elliott and Evan McMorris-Santoro reported this morning, Angle is also a fan of the Oath Keepers:

Back in April, Angle told TPMDC she was a member of the Oath Keepers at a press gaggle in Washington. On Monday, we decided to call Angle's campaign to confirm her relationship to the group. Angle's husband, Ted, picked up the phone.

"We support what the organization stands for," he told us. "Sharron does."

Members of Oath Keepers -- whose motto is "Not on our watch!" -- subscribe to a 10-item declaration affirming that they will not, for example, force citizens into detention camps or invade a state "that asserts its sovereignty and declares the national government to be in violation of the compact by which that state entered the Union."

.... Angle's relationship with Oath Keepers hasn't been on the media radar, but she made a little-noticed attempt to woo the group's members at a speaking event last fall, Rhodes told TPMDC Monday.

Rhodes said the event with Angle was organized after she reached out to the Southern Nevada chapter of Oath Keepers. It was held in a clubhouse in Las Vegas. She spoke and "we asked her some pretty tough questions" -- about Hurricane Katrina, gun laws, and the Iraq War, says Rhodes.

"She's got a pretty good track record of being a pretty sincere Constitutionalist," Rhodes tells TPMDC, adding that Oath Keepers does not endorse candidates.

As Elliott and McMorris-Santoro point out, among the things the Oath Keepers believe is that high-ranking officials are secretly plotting to round up conservatives and place them in concentration camps.

But that's not all. C&L was one of the first news entities of any kind to report on the Oath Keepers, and we have a rundown on the things that they believe -- and by extension, beliefs that Angle apparently endorses:

Rhodes and Whittle are eager to portray the core of the Oath Keepers' creeds -- the "ten orders" they "will not obey" -- as involving merely ordinary rights that everyone naturally would stand up for, and in a way, that's true. But only deeply paranoid people would believe there is any reason to be concerned that these rights violations might be looming.

Here they are:

• 1. We will NOT obey any order 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.
• 4. We will NOT obey orders to impose martial law or a “state of emergency” on a state.
• 5. We will NOT obey orders to invade and subjugate any state that asserts its sovereignty.
• 6. We will NOT obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps.
• 7. We will NOT obey any order to force American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext.
• 8. We will NOT obey orders to assist or support the use of any foreign troops on U.S. soil against the American people to “keep the peace” or to “maintain control."
• 9. We will NOT obey any orders to confiscate the property of the American people, including food and other essential supplies.
• 10. We will NOT obey any orders which infringe on the right of the people to free speech, to peaceably assemble, and to petition their government for a redress of grievances.

You may also recall Justine Sharrock's superb in-depth report on the Oath Keepers for Mother Jones:

Oath Keepers is officially nonpartisan, in part to make it easier for active-duty soldiers to participate, but its rightward bent is undeniable, and liberals are viewed with suspicion. At lunch, when I questioned my tablemates about the Obama-Hitler comparisons I'd heard at the conference, I got a step-by-step tutorial on how the president's socialized medicine agenda would beget a Nazi-style regime.

I learned that bringing guns to Tea Party protests was a reminder of our constitutional rights, was introduced to the notion that the founding fathers modeled their governing documents on the Bible, and debated whether being Muslim meant an inability to believe in and abide by—and thus be protected by—the Constitution. I was schooled on the treachery of the Federal Reserve and why America needs a gold standard, and at dinner one night, Nighta Davis, national organizer for the National 912 Project, explained how abortion-rights advocates are part of a eugenics program targeting Christians.

Even more potentially problematic for a would-be United States Senator is the Oath Keepers' view of the role of federal authorities -- which, it seems is taken straight from the Posse Comitatus, a white-supremacist anti-federal movement that dominated the extremist right in the 1980s:

The Oath Keepers are similar to the tea party crowd in that they often disagree what their movement represents. While bred from the libertarian spirit that courses through the West, the Oath Keepers don't have a formal structure beyond the vague principles outlined in the 10 orders.

They say the sheriff is at the top primarily because he is the highest elected law enforcement agent in the land, directly responsible to the voters, and argue the Tenth Amendment gives the voters all power not expressly given the federal government under the Constitution.

The movement has gained traction, including in dozen or more sheriff's races around the West from Orange County, Calif., to the northern border.

"It is time for the sworn protectors of liberty, the Sheriffs of these United States of America, to walk tall and stand up for our Constitution and Bill of Rights," proclaimed Larimer County, Colo., candidate Carl Bruning in his campaign literature.

Someone will have to ask Sharron Angle if she believes that her local sheriff has more real authority under the Constitution than a United States Senator.

Among other things.

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Bill O'Reilly was all worked up last night on his Fox News show, claiming that the "liberal media" are waving the bloody shirt again, using the violence and extremism and racism of a handful of joiners to smear an otherwise entirely innocent movement.

First, his Talking Points Memo segment was devoted to the notion that "the Tea Party as a whole is not responsible for the loons who may lurk among them."

Which is, you know, pretty much true. Unless, of course, the movement seems to attract a high percentage of loons, and especially if the movement itself employs loons as their speakers and representatives.

Which is the case with the Tea Parties.

This is pretty funny, really, coming from the guy -- as Matt Corley at ThinkProgress notes -- who only a couple of years ago was culling off comments at DailyKos to smear the entire liberal blogosphere as the equivalent of Nazis.

O'Reilly brought on Rev. Al Sharpton, who seems to have figured out how not to let O'Reilly make him into a punching bag, because he pretty effectively rebutted most of O'Reilly's points. Nonetheless, Monsieur Falafeloofah managed to assert that the "liberal media smear" of the Tea Parties by blaming them for their kooks is "unfair!"

This was followed by a segment with Mary Katherine Ham and Juan Williams. And Williams set off O'Reilly by pointing out that the Tea Parties are fundamentally a rebirth of the Patriot/militia movement of the 1990s:

WILLIAMS: You know, people who's have a lot of hateful attitudes towards President Bush and then somebody who is extremist on the fringe, yes. And if that was also to be then the case with the Tea Party, yes, that's too much and unfair. But, when you start to see militia groups start to associate with the Tea Party --

O'REILLY: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let me stop you there. I haven't seen militia groups associating with the Tea Party.

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One of the things that happens major political parties and major media figures indulge in naked fearmongering is that -- surprise! -- a lot of people get fearful. Really fearful. Some of them become downright paranoid, and start believing in all kinds of looming conspiracies against them.

Which means you wind up with outfits like the Oath Keepers, who clearly are one of the major "Patriot" groups leading the recent surge in Patriot movement activity.

You can watch Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers' leader, at the recent CPAC conference being interviewed by the ever-friendly Bill Whittle and come away with the impression that, gosh, these are just folks who want to uphold the Constitution and apple pie. Paranoid, us?

As with all Patriot groups and their leaders, that's the schtick when the cameras are on. When the mask comes off, it becomes quite a different picture.

That's clear from reading Justine Sharrock's in-depth piece on the Oath Keepers for Mother Jones, a must-read. [Full disclosure: I am quoted in several places in this article.] As Sharrock makes clear, one of the more disturbing aspects of this group is that it has the effect of radicalizing the very people who are supposed to be upholding the law and protecting us from violent extremists:

There are scores of patriot groups, but what makes Oath Keepers unique is that its core membership consists of men and women in uniform, including soldiers, police, and veterans. At regular ceremonies in every state, members reaffirm their official oaths of service, pledging to protect the Constitution—but then they go a step further, vowing to disobey "unconstitutional" orders from what they view as an increasingly tyrannical government.

Moreover, recruiting from military and police veterans increases exponentially the lethal competence of these extremists. As we observed back in our first post on the Oath Keepers:

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Bill O'Reilly followed up his interview with Mark Potok about the Oath Keepers with a one-on-one interview with Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers' president and founder.

And give O'Reilly credit: He asked good questions and didn't let Rhodes get away with his usual justifications for their armed-to-the-teeth-and-paranoid worldview:

O'Reilly: OK, so full members in the Oath Keepers have to have a military or police background. Or firefighters. Now, I'm gonna read you something from your website. "We will not obey unconstitutional and thus illegal and immoral orders, such as orders to disarm the American people or place them under martial law."

Well, who's gonna try to disarm people and place them under martial law. I mean, why would that even be something you would be discussing?

Rhodes: Well, it happened as recently as Katrina. You probably have seen the videos there of the old lady being tackled in her kitchen, and disarmed of her revolver, and there was house-to-house searches for firearms. And you had the police chief declaring that no one would be allowed to have weapons, or he'd take all the guns. And he did.

So they disarmed Americans over some bad weather, as though the bad weather suspended the Second Amendment. So, that's the most recent example.

Sure, Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath were just "bad weather" -- such bad weather, in fact, that the levees around New Orleans broke, flooding 80 percent of the city and killing 1,464 people. Some 90 percent of the population of southeast Louisiana was evacuated. Describing this as mere "bad weather" is like describing the Haiti earthquake as "a little shaker."

This pretty much tells you all you need to know about the Oath Keepers and their grip on reality: They're unable to distinguish between "bad weather" and a devastating natural disaster and subsequent state of emergency.

O'Reilly, to his credit, pointed out that government has long been empowered to declare such emergencies in order to preserve lives and protect public safety in dire circumstances. It seems that for Rhodes and the Oath Keepers in general, no circumstances are ever dire enough to warrant such declarations.

What Rhodes didn't say, but which the Oath Keepers have made abundantly clear elsewhere, is that they believe President Obama is planning to declare a national state of emergency after the economy collapses, which they consider a sure thing.

Rhodes -- who is on the planning committee for the big Tea Party rally planned for September 11, an event his outfit is cosponsoring -- was at least forthcoming about his group's close relationship with the Tea Party movement:

Well, I've been to a lot of Tea Party events, we've spoken at quite a few of them, and I'm on the planning committee for the one on 9/11, this next September. So, the MarchOnDC.org. But, uh, we like the Tea Party movement a lot, we think it's great. It's a revitalization of our core Americanism and core constitutionalism.

In general, O'Reilly did reasonably well making clear that the Oath Keepers are a disturbing phenomenon, particularly in their emphasis on recruiting members of the military and police officers -- a fact which should ring some bells among the people who loudly denounced that DHS report for its observation that far-right extremists are working hard to recruit people with military and police backgrounds. (Ahem.)

Too bad he didn't have time to explore the matter of Charles Dyer, the onetime Oath Keepers figure arrested on charges of child rape, and the Oath Keepers's eagerness to disavow him -- in spite of the fact that Dyer had represented the Oath Keepers -- with Rhodes' blessing -- at a Tea Party on July 4 in Oklahoma. Dyer was also active in forming militias in Oklahoma.

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The right wing noise machine is gearing up to promote the Oath Keepers as much as possible. I think this is actually a very good thing. The more crazy that get up there the better. Bill O'Reilly will do his part by having them appear on The Factor too.

O'REILLY: Is there one group in America right now that you guys believe is dangerous, is growing fast, and that the folks should know about?

MARK POTOK (editor, Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report): Well, let me give an example. I'm not going to say this group is dangerous and, you know, these people are going to blow up federal buildings -- that's clearly not true -- but there is a new major group called the Oath Keepers. It was started, if I recall, in February of last year. This -- it has grown fairly explosively. It's well over a thousand members. What's interesting about the group is it's composed mainly of military and law enforcement personnel, officers of the law. The thing about the group is what they say is, you know, "What we're all about is simply pledging allegiance -- or re-pledging our oaths to defend the Constitution," which of course is well and fine. But the reality about the group is that what it's really about is the fear that martial law is about to be imposed, that Americans are about to be herded into concentration camps, that foreign troops are going to be put down on American soil. The Oath Keepers says specifically, we will not obey these orders, we will refuse orders to put Americans into concentration camps. Now, is that dangerous? It seems to me the danger is that these are men and women, in the case of police officers, who are given a real power over the rest of us, sometimes the power of life and death. They make very important decisions. And if these men and women are animated by the idea that, you know, foreign forces are about to come into this country and put us under martial law and throw us all into concentration camps, I think there is a certain danger associated with that.

O'REILLY: All right. Well, it's certainly not rational.

POTOK: They're operating on the basis on crazy theories that may cause one of them to draw a gun one day.

O'REILLY: All right. You know what I'm going to do, Mr. Potok? Because it's a very interesting topic. I'm going to invite somebody from the Oath Keepers to come on the Factor tomorrow and give forth their point of view. I think it's a fascinating topic, and we appreciate your time very much.

David Neiwert has some really great posts up on C&L about the Oath Keepers since we are one of the first blogs to expose this group and what they believe in.

Their values and some of their members are very scary indeed. And they are linked to the Beck's 9/12 Project as well.

Oath Keepers in coalition with John Birch Society, 9/12 Project branch. Oath Keepers is listed as a member of Friends for Liberty, a coalition that, according to its website, includes the right-wing John Birch Society, the Spokane, Washington, branch of the Glenn Beck-associated 9/12 Project, and Vaccination Liberation, a group that claims as part of its mission to "reveal the myth that vaccines are necessary, safe and effective."

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Gossip Boy -- which has been all over the case of onetime "Oath Keepers" figure Charles Dyer, arrested for the rape of a 7-year-old girl -- is reporting that the leader of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, is running away from Dyer as fast as he can.

Rhodes, as you can see in the video from his Oct. 21 appearance on MSNBC's Hardball, tries to project a straight-shooter image, even though the underlying beliefs of the Oath Keepers' "oath" is a swamp of bizarre conspiracies.

So now Rhodes has scrubbed any mention of Dyer from the Oath Keepers site, and is claiming to have had no association whatsoever with him:

“Charles Dyer never became an actual member of Oath Keepers. I met him when he attended our April 19, 2009 gathering at Lexington, and back then I considered him for a position as our liaison to the Marine Corps, but I decided against that when he made it clear he intended to train and help organize private militias across the country when he got out of the Marines. I considered such plans to be incompatible with the Oath Keepers mission and goals, and certainly incompatible with any leadership position within this org. He understood and agreed with my decision to not have him become officially involved with Oath Keepers. All of that was long before we even offered official memberships. So, he was never a member, and never in any leadership position.”

One little problem with this explanation, as Gossip Boy explains, is the evidence from our friends at Google cache:

Yep, that's the same Stewart Rhodes announcing that Dyer would be representing the Oath Keepers at the July 4 Tea Party in Broken Arrow.

Indeed, the reality is that Dyer has been a significant figure for the Oath Keepers all along. His first video, released in March, in fact put the Oath Keepers on the map Internet-wise by going viral.

As we noted, at least Dyer's friends at American Resistance are standing behind him. You can't blame Stewart Rhodes for wanting to cut and run, but he's not exactly helping his cause by being the opposite of forthcoming about it all.

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We first noticed Marine Sgt. Charles Dyer, aka "July4Patriot," back in March, when we ran one of the first reports on the "Oath Keepers" bloc of the Tea Party movement -- an organization devoted to recruiting military and police-force veterans into a Patriot-movement belief system predicated on a series of paranoid conspiracy theories, especially the notion that the federal government intends to begin rounding up citizens and putting them in concentration camps.

Dyer played a prominent role in connecting the Oath Keepers to the Tea Party movement, speaking at a July 4 Tea Party rally in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. And he's been involved in organizing militia "maneuvers" in Oklahoma.

Dyer cropped up again in the news -- this time in the police blotter for allegedly raping a 7-year-old girl:

An ex-military man has been arrested on charges of rape of a child and forcible sodomy.

Charles Alan Dyer, 29, of Marlow, was arrested Tuesday afternoon by Stephens County Sheriff’s deputies, said Sheriff Wayne McKinney. Dyer served in the United States Marines in Iraq.

Oh, and guess what police found when they searched his home:

During the search the sheriff’s deputies noted several firearms and a device believed to be a Colt M-203, 40-millimeter grenade launcher, a complaint filed in the United States District Court of Western Oklahoma by Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco Special Agent Brett Williams said.

As the story from KAUZ-TV notes, Dyer had a history of making bizarre claims in his videos -- as well as violent fears of being arrested.

“We come home and those bastards want to talk about how we’re domestic terrorists and a threat to this country. It makes me so angry,” said Charles Dyer, who has been accused of committing rape.

... More incriminating evidence against Dyer has surfaced in a YouTube video. The video shows Dyer, a former U.S. Marine, talking proudly about domestic terrorism. “Join the military?”, said Dyer. “Depends on what you want to do with it. Me? I'm going to use my training and become one of those domestic terrorists that you’re so afraid of from the DHS reports.”

... “I’m certainly not going to be hiding from my command anymore. I’m not hiding from ATF. Not hiding from FBI. Any organization. If they want to come get me I’m not going to be afraid,” Dyer said.

“Patriots, we are not overpowered. If we united under one banner and fight for our children’s liberity and the constitution, our resolve is invincible to any standing army,” Dyer said.

GossipBoy is reporting that the rape victim was a close family member. They also report that Dyer had been in touch with a fellow militiaman linked to explosives dealing, and that when bomb-sniffing dogs searched Dyer's home, they indicated explosives had been stored there recently.

Meanwhile, unsurprisingly, the folks at American Resistance Movement -- a group Dyer was also prominently involved in -- are claiming that Dyer was set up, and the girl who accused him was "programmed" to do so. Accordingly, they've set up a "Free July4Patriot" fund, with a little button on their front page so you can donate.

Also, Dyer's YouTube page remains active.

Every movement attracts its freaks. But the Patriot movement attracts an inordinate number of them -- and particularly people with a pedophilia problem. (I can list at least 10 different prominent figures in the Northwest's Patriot movement in the 1990s who had a history of being charged with abusing and abducting children.) Evidently, being a pedophile leads to resentment of the government -- probably for its desire to lock you away.

We'll reserve judgment on Dyer's guilt or innocence for after the trial. But let's just say that the predictable claims that he's been arrested as part of a government plot to silence him are not exactly compelling in this case.

[Thanks to Susie for her help with this post.]