Oath Keepers head Stewart Rhodes has come out against the takeover of a federal building in Oregon not because he disagrees with the cause of the militia groups that are occupying the building, but because the people who they claim to be helping — ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond — don’t want them there and also because he thinks that the groups have put themselves at a strategic disadvantage in any potential clash with the government.
Rhodes expounded on his views in an interview with “The Common Sense Show,” a “Patriot” movement program, last week, saying that the Oregon standoff risked giving the federal government “what they would consider the eye candy of dead cops killed by gun owners,” which would then give them cover to take away everyone’s guns.
Rhodes and the show’s hosts, Dave Hodges and James White, spent quite a bit of time discussing the logistics of a civil war if the military and police officers were to turn on the federal government in retaliation for an overreach on guns. (Rhodes’ group is made up primarily of ex-military and law enforcement personnel.)
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.’”
“This is what I’m worried about, why I was upset about what was happening in Oregon,” he explained, “is that they’re potentially going to give them that gift. You might wind up with not just dead patriots out there but also dead highway patrolmen and sheriff’s deputies and federal agents. And so they’ll use that, you can bet, of course they will.”
