The latest evidence reveals that the "Oath Keepers" only kept their "oaths" as long as incompetent Capitol police allowed them to; facing jail time, they've suddenly forgotten their "oaths"

 

The other day I observed on a digital billboard a public service advertisement reminding people that there is still a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the man caught on surveillance cameras planting pipe bombs near the DNC and RNC headquarters in Washington D.C. the evening before Congress was to reaffirm the 2020 presidential election results. It is believed that the bombs were meant to be a “distraction,” but they never detonated. The fact that the perpetrator has yet to be identified, and the reward still stands, indicates that there is still much discover in what was clearly coordinated pre-planning before the attack on the Capitol building, an attack that many on the right (not to mention Donald Trump) still try to characterize as just a stroll in the park, save for a troublemaker or two out for a few laughs. This of course was far from the reality.

For example, we are not only discovering the extent to which there was “planning” by far-right extremists to engage in violent action “if necessary,” but that Capitol Hill police were not only aware of this could happen, but purposely chose to at least initially limit their response in order to avoid any kind of confrontation—a strategy that may have prevented even more bloodshed, but also resulted in “optics” that made the riot look even worse. The assumption that Trump supporters were more “civilized” and “law-abiding” than left-wing protesters proved to be not only demonstrably false, but posed the greatest danger to constitutional democracy since the Civil War. The January 6 insurrection was more than a merely existential threat—it was happening in real time, and something no one should take for granted will not occur again so long as Trump and his disciples (like Kristi Noem) remain threats to constitutional order (let alone public health).

While Confederate and neo-Nazi flags in support of Trump roamed the Capitol building, with offices ransacked and $30 million dollars in damage by “patriotic” thugs, emails had been exchanged by members of the extremist group Oath Keepers, who claim to take an "oath" to "defend the Constitution" from "foreign and domestic" threats. These messages revealed that there were preparations made to organize a “quick reaction force” to counter any action taken against them. They may have believed that they would face BLM or Antifa counter-protesters, but those groups were not in fact present. But law enforcement was sparing in their use of weapons of any kind—although it might have been quite a different story if police were not facing nearly all-white, supposedly law-enforcement “friendly” rioters.

Prosecutors have discovered messages that indicate that members of the Oath Keepers were instructed to bring “full gear”—meaning “combat ready” outfits—and that weapons would be supplied as necessary at a “farm location,” which turned out to be a Comfort Inn in Arlington, VA. Video cameras showed several people identified as members of the group were seen making multiple trips to the room carrying what appeared to be various concealments for weapons. 

A dozen or more members of the Oath Keepers or person associated with them are expected to be charged in a conspiracy to recruit, organize and possibly direct an armed assault on the Capitol. One of those being charged, Jessica Watkins, was neck-deep in all of it, yet she now “disavows” the extremist group. Watkins, who organized a personal militia group in Ohio, preposterously claimed in court that “Given the result of everything on January 6 and everything that has come out, my fellow Oath Keepers have turned my stomach against it. Which is why I’m canceling my Oath Keeper Membership. I have no desire to continue with people who say things like that.”

Some are calling Watkins—who is transgender—a “naïve patriot,” which is something you wouldn’t usually call someone who served in the military in Afghanistan, or as a “civilian” recruited and trained her own private anti-government militia. If she believed all of Trump’s lies, that doesn’t make her “naïve”—that makes her at least a white nationalist who is afraid of actually going to jail, as most of her fellow partners in crime are. She wasn’t just a member of the Oath Keepers, but as a recruiter and “trainer” she was one of the organization’s ideologists; she now claims she was “lied” to—but she was an eager participant in spreading those lies. Watkins also claims that “she” can’t go to jail because her “gender identity” might would put her in harm’s way—something Watkins should have taken into consideration before believing that if Trump was “immune” from accountability for his crimes, then they all were.

Watkins didn’t stop there with the bullshit either: “I am sorry for any inconvenience I have caused the court. I am not a criminally minded person. I am humbled and I am humiliated that I am even here today.” What? Note that Watkins doesn’t say that she is “sorry” for the “inconvenience” she and her cohorts perpetrated on Congress and the peaceful transfer of power. This is the same person who boasted on social media about her participation in the storming of the Capitol and that it was a “historical event”—even asserting that Fox News was “wrong” to criticize their actions. Watkins, of course, wasn’t the only cowardly Oath Keeper charged in the insurrection whose “oath” melted like a snowball in hell when confronted with the reality that trying to overthrow the government wasn’t like recess in the playground, and then it was back to the classroom; it seems unfathomable that so-called adults need to be “schooled” on the basics of civics, yet here we are.

Meanwhile, Politico is reporting that Inspector General Michael Bolton has found a completely inept response to the insurrection by the Capitol police, particularly by its Civil Disturbance Unit, which was poorly trained with outdated tactics, and apparently little has been learned since the insurrection. The police failed to take the intelligence they received seriously, including the threat assessment that the “target” of the pro-Trump mob was not likely to be counterprotesters, but the Capitol building itself. Rather than prepare for the worst,  the danger was “minimized” in official memos, even claiming that there was no substantial evidence that the pro-Trump mob was likely to have a high concentration of far-right groups which were violence prone—thus the resulting lack of readiness and the lack of effective riot control equipment, including riot control grenade launchers, by “an order from leadership.”

It should be pointed out that while it is easy to engage in “whataboutism” here, as the right tends to do in relation to the BLM and Antifa protests last year. But we are talking strictly apples and oranges compared to what happened on January 6—and that is being “kind” to the insurrectionists. Most of property destruction that occurred from activities on the “left” was perpetrated by nihilistic “opportunists” and “black bloc” groups who had no real “agenda” other than to be destructive. The January 6 insurrectionists, regardless of whether they actually believed that they could overthrow the election results and turn this country into a de facto dictatorship with Trump as their Fuehrer, the fact that they had actually attempted to do so makes what they had done far more dangerous than all the protesting in 2020 combined, and its repercussions will not be fully dissipated until Trumpism is defeated once and for all.

Trump continues to make inflammatory speeches and give Fox News interviews claiming that the election was “stolen,” but voters may (we hope) tire of Trump unamusing vaudeville act almost as quickly as they discover that they prefer “normalcy” over a steady stream of obvious lies and empty nationalist bombast. If so, then we will know just how pathetic excuses for human beings those insurrectionists were, and that it was they, after all, who were the real domestic threats against the Constitution.