The founder of the Oath Keepers, Rhodes said he wants his right-wing gang to ‘repel invasions, to suppress insurrections, and to execute the laws of the union.’
When Rhodes says he wants to “execute the laws of the union,” you have to wonder if he means to kill the rule of law rather than carry it out. This guy was convicted and sentenced to 18 years in prison for seditious conspiracy in the January 6, 2021 violent attack on the U.S. Capitol. The New York Times reported that he “left a voluminous paper trail of his increasingly violent thoughts” after Trump lost the 2020 election and “said his organization might have to engage in civil war to defeat his perceived enemies: a supposed coalition of the Democrats, leftist protesters and the Chinese Communist Party.”
Trump commuted Rhodes’ sentence on his first day back in the White House.
Media Matters caught Rhodes’ announcement that his band of extremists is getting back together – and his hope they’ll be some kind of adjunct to the National Guard. “I'm relaunching the organization and rebuilding it,” Rhodes said on The Gateway Pundit’s podcast on November 9. “We're ready to serve, encourage [Trump] to do that, call us up as a militia,” and “order us all to come together in our counties under his command.”
Rhodes made it crystal clear he’s itching to engage in violence against both immigrants and the left. In fact he suggested there’s no daylight between the two: “We’re facing an ongoing invasion of this country, it has not stopped. We're facing an insurrection by the left. And we're also facing a direct blocking and resistance against enforcing federal law — federal immigration laws, attacking ICE agents, you know, trying to ram them and run them off the road, throwing bricks to their windows,” he said.
“And the militia is all of us. So, the National Guard is part of the militia, which is why it's completely lawful for him to use the National Guard as he has, and he should do more of that, I think, across the country,” Rhodes added.
Trump “could just say given the circumstances of an invasion, insurrection, and resistance against federal law being being enforced, I'm calling up the militia,” Rhodes continued. “ He can do that and I think he should do that. And so that's what I'll be advocating for from him.”
