Thread: A 12-year flashback to the first time I ever heard of the Oath Keepers. It happened in 2009 when I was monitoring ‘Patriot’ movement chatter and came across a YouTube video by this man: An ex-Marine named Charles Dyer. You can see why it caught my attention.

2) Dyer’s style was disturbing—combining a skull-mask imposed digitally and his fondness for ‘inspirational,’ anthemic music in the background—but his incendiary, violent rhetoric was especially worrisome. Watch this one to the end: ‘You’re damn right I’m a threat.’

3) This video and others I was seeing float around on the fringes of the suddenly burgeoning ‘Patriot’/militia far right made me concerned about their recruitment of military veterans. There were good reasons to be

4) As it happened, I raised the alarm at @crooksandliars only a month or so before Homeland Security issued its ill-fate warning about precisely that problem—which set off months of hysterical hyperbole from Fox News and the far right

5) You may remember how that all turned out: The projection-fueled attack on DHS’s domestic-terrorism-monitoring section ended up gutting the section and sending the Obama administration into hunker-down/failure mode when it came to the radical