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 concerned.
https://t.co/MYXKlguB9F
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 alike.
https://t.co/wsKvBMWse2
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 right.
https://t.co/T1Tlo0RDCr
6) Dyer, who went by the online nom de plume ‘July4Patriot,’ especially caught my attention when, the next time I encountered him in an online video, he was giving a speech at a July 4, 2009, Tea Party event in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.
7) This corroborated what I had been seeing elsewhere: The Tea Party, marketed on Fox News and CNN and everywhere else as a nominally mainstream movement, was rapidly becoming a massive conduit for a revival of the ‘90s Patriot movement.
https://t.co/sHEK11j0I3
8) This trend became cemented over the following year, and eventually the Tea Party became wholly consumed by Patriot ideology, rhetoric, and agendas.
https://t.co/Cg2zd6ZmTy
9) At the Broken Arrow event, Dyer had talked about the group he represented: the Oath Keepers. He also described the “ten orders we will not obey,” which mostly reflected paranoid fears of black helicopters and concentration camps common among ‘Patriots.’

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