TheAgitator.com
Gawker’s Jeff Neumann Libels Stewart Rhodes
Monday, June 27th, 2011In this post, Gawker’s Jeff Neumann calls Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes a “racist”, without any supporting evidence whatsoever. The poorly-reported Mother Jones article he links to makes a number of questionable allegations and implications against Rhodes and his organization, but even that article doesn’t imply that he’s racist.
I know that Gawker is more about smug and smart-ass than serious commentary, but there ought to be at least some concern about accuracy, no?
My interview with Rhodes here.
The putative racist Stewart Rhodes, and the presumably melanin-obsessed Oath Keepers, just conducted a rally in support of a Mexican-American Marine veteran who was murdered in his Tucson home by a SWAT team.
I haven’t seen or heard a syllable of outrage over the murder of Jose Guerena from the SPLC, David Neiwert, Jeff Neumann, or any of the other custodians of “tolerance” who routinely defame the Oath Keepers. In fact, I’ve never heard Morris Dees or the SPLC denounce the drug war and the myriad civil rights violations begotten by it. That is entirely understandable, I suppose, in light of the fact that Dees has made a lot of money as a “tolerance consultant” to police departments — and that those departments increasingly rely on WOD subsidies and “proceeds” as a revenue source.
Far too many lazy-minded people say “racist” when they mean “Jackass” or “swine”.
People aren’t being “lazy-minded” when they use the word racist. Aside from when the label is truly warranted, it’s a term that’s used to incite social opprobrium among the lazy-minded. It’s supposed to work the way “she has been shunned” works among the Amish — it’s a big scarlet letter or leper bell. People who use the word count on that kind of reaction from those who are in fact lazy-minded but who consider themselves righteous-minded.
“Jackass” and “swine” lacks the same effect.
The first I heard of Oath Keepers was in Mother Jones. The story followed two inserts about the unconstitutionality and injustice of asset forfeiture laws and Texas’ public intoxication laws. After reading the first two stories, I was really confused why they thought officers swearing to follow the constitution and due process was a bad thing .
I just don’t get the vitriol against Oath Keepers. I could understand arguing that it’s ineffective, but that’s not the argument that’s made.
I really think the anti-Oath Keepers attitudes on the part of those who seem to be leftists / statists is due to the fact that they worry that ‘their’ police force won’t obey them when ‘they’ give some order. The answer is “Don’t give any unconstitutional orders, like you’re not supposed to do anyway, and you don’t need to worry.”
Let’s just call his behavior what it is: libel. It’s that simple.
Oath Keepers will continue to draw this sort of attack because their cause so transparently opposes unlimited power of the state. For people who secretly believe that no practical limits on state power should exist (at least as long as their team is in power) but who don’t want to admit their authoritarianism, it’s easier to smear people like Rhodes with terms such as “racist” than to come up with a cogent argument for unlimited government.
Frankly, part of the result is that people will start to ignore the term “racist” as it becomes more clear that it’s just a smear word and not a word reflecting any credible racism in its target. It’s kinda too bad because actual racism is despicable, but, then again, so is using the word “racist” to smear someone…
He attended a local Tea Party function. And “a member” of Oath Keepers has something to do with Joe the Plumber.
I’m sure to Gawker and MoJo’s mush-brained readership, that evidence speaks for itself.
Any questioning of Hopey McChangeypants is evidence of racism.
The charge of racism has been thrown around so much by dishonest people it almost doesn’t mean anything anymore. Which real sucks for people who really are victimized by racism or racists. Legitimate accusations are dismissed far to often thanks to guys like this.
I wrote off Gawker back when they got their stupid asses banned from the Consumer Electronics Show. They’re on a lot of people’s shit list here in the Silicon Valley.
-jcr
What, you expected something better of an organization that runs smugness incarnate articles like Tea Party Morons Won’t Let Go of the Gold Standard, also by the same Jeff Neumann?
Of course he is a racist. We are all racists but it is just a technicality; if we were not racists we could not differentiate by race and any talk of race, even a statement of equality, would seem entirely nonsensical. It isn’t so much a question of accuacy as one of hyperbole and disingenuity.
Highway – Or orders which they decide, based on an reading of the constitution that completely clashes how it’s been interpreted for over a century…
Quite simply, they’re welcome to hold those views. They should not, however, be able to hold an non-elective office funded by the public and hold those views.
@11 – At least they TRY. There are plenty of sites which don’t, like Arse Technica.
#7 | freedomfan
I don’t think people call him racist because he “opposes unlimited power of the state” or that they believe in “unlimited government.” More likely it’s that they’re conflating his group with racist right wing paramilitary organizations, some of whom (like Stormfront) want to coopt his message for their own purposes. It doesn’t help that he’s chosen to live in small town haven for white supremacists, or that the name “Oath Keepers” is kinda crazy.
*Rather, that the name “Oath Keepers” is kinda creepy, not crazy.
Wrong Leon.
Theyr’e specifically required to refuse orders they believe are illegal. And they only take that “non-elective office funded by the public” upon public statement of an oath to support and defend that Constitution. Period. And that means the one that’s in writing in the Archives building. Not the imaginary version in some peoples’ heads.
And when an order they recieve conflicts with Constitutional limits, they’re supposed to oppose that order. And that’s true even if nobody else ever has. It’s also true if some other governmental office-holder somewhere says “Never mind the text. What it means is this other thing…” They’re still bound by oath to the Constitution itself.
Yeah, nothing says creepy like announcing your intention to keep your “oath of office” ;)
Yes, I’m sure the meaning of the phrase “Congress shall make no law” dramatically shifts over time.
Incidentally, you realize that you are arguing that the Nazi defense of “I vaz juzt vollowing orderz” was a valid defense, since you are arguing that people agents of the state should not use their discretion as to which orders that harm/interfere with people are lawful and which are not.
Personally, I would think that even if people think the Oath Keepers are going too far in refusing to act against the people on behalf of the government, one would cheer the fact that they are allowing their sense of morality to stay their hand. After all, wouldn’t it be awesome of pilots refused to take off on missions to bomb Libya since they felt the order was illegal? Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if police officers in WW II refused to round up U.S. citizens and send them to concentration camps?
I find this notion that people who object to tyrrany are required to get out of the way and vacate their positions for people who are willing to be agents of oppression kind of disheartening.
Gawker Media also owns Jezebel, which uses “sexist” as loosely and meaninglessly as Gawker uses “racist”. And don’t get me started on “homophobic”, which not only doesn’t mean what it’s used to mean* but is applied willy-nilly to those who oppose individual homosexuals in the same way “sexist” is used against those who oppose individual women and “racist” against those who oppose individual black people.
*(homo = “same”, phobos = “fear”, therefore homophobia =a morbid fear of sameness or monotony. Look it up in a good dictionary of psychology.
Randy, I’m not sure if you’ve spent much time on the Oath Keepers site, but crazy stuff gets put up in those forums without any check. If moderators fail to remove user-written articles that allege all Islamic people are terrorists or second-class citizens, they are permitting that behavior. Instead of creating dialog regarding unconstitutional actions, they resort to scapegoating a class of people based upon religion and skin color – it’s either Illegal Immigrants (from Mexico, not Asia), and/or Muslims that are the problem in Oath Keeper land. If I started blasting this website with anti-Semitic garbage, you would take it down on the basis that you do not endorse it (and further that you do not wish to promote it), so what does it say about the Oath Keepers who continually allow racist and Islamaphobic comments?
Rhodes is an interesting guy. He lost all credibility with me when he called an anti-war Veterans group “socialists” because a few members are socialists. More than a few Oath Keepers are racist, so using his own ability to judge a group by the sentiments of some members, Oath Keepers is an islamaphobic racist organization.
I am still up-to-date with my Oath Keeper membership, but the group has gone more and more down hill. Rallying for the soldier in Arizona was a decent thing to do, but will that group recognize his death as an extension of the drug war? Of the war on terror and national security state that we live in? Will they read “Overkill”? No. They’ll blame the need for SWAT teams on illegal immigrants, fail to notice NATFA, and blame the violence in Mexico on the ATF. The group’s membership is by-in-large is racist. Rhodes is their leader. Are they training or having a dialog to confront the racism in their group, or are they quietly endorsing it?
@boomshanka: That’s my take on it as well. There are so many groups like that around and many of them are white supremacist groups, that espouse a very similar philosophy, that when one pops up that isn’t racist it takes actively looking into the group to realize they aren’t.
Pretty much everyone is guilty of it at one time or another. It isn’t that we’re evil, we’re just all kind of lazy. Except Gawker, and they combine lazy with suck.
this is why people assume (without actually confirming it) that they are racist:
1. They are a (mostly) right-wing pro-gun-rights organization. People assume that those people are bible-belt gun-toting militia racists.
2. The group (which is dedicated to not following orders from their superiors) started right after our first black chief executive took office.
@ #21, Fidelity said –
“Rallying for the soldier in Arizona was a decent thing to do, but will that group recognize his death as an extension of the drug war? Of the war on terror and national security state that we live in? Will they read “Overkill”? No. They’ll blame the need for SWAT teams on illegal immigrants, fail to notice NATFA, and blame the violence in Mexico on the ATF. The group’s membership is by-in-large is racist. Rhodes is their leader. Are they training or having a dialog to confront the racism in their group, or are they quietly endorsing it?”
-end quoted passage from Fidelity’s post at #21 -
Fidelity, you’ll be pleased to know that Oath Keepers is totally aware of the fact that in 1947 our country became a “National Security State”. I’ve even got Gore Vidal’s book in which he makes that observation. And I sit on the Board of Directors for Oath Keepers national. Regarding our muster and ceremony at Vanessa Guerena’s home this past Memorial Day, May 30, 2011, I invite you to view our 31 minute video,
http://oathkeepers.org/oath/2011/06/03/walking-a-mile-in-freedom%E2%80%99s-shoes-oath-keepers-muster-tucson-memorial-day-may-30-2011/
…and also Sheriff Mack’s video of his speech that afternoon where Oath Keepers mustered in Tucson at the Hotel Arizona, which I’ll link for you here, so you can enjoy seeing another Board member of Oath Keepers, Sheriff Mack himself, condemning the so-called “war on drugs” – see it here-
http://oathkeepers.org/oath/2011/06/03/walking-a-mile-in-freedom%E2%80%99s-shoes-oath-keepers-muster-tucson-memorial-day-may-30-2011/
There you will be able to see for yourself that Oath Keepers is totally against this farce called the “war on drugs”. We oppose any government’s claim to own a human body, and especially our present Federal government. When the government claims the right and power to regulate what a person puts into one’s body, that government is asserting ownership over that person and his/her body. That ain’t freedom, Bro – it’s slavery with soft gloves on, but in too many cases these days, the gloves aren’t so soft, as evidenced by SWAT’s killing of Jose Guerena on Cinco de Mayo, 2011. Oath Keepers opposes the War on Drugs as a fraud and farce.
Further info for you regarding your suggestion that Oath Keepers is a racist organization. Stewart Rhodes, our founder, is part Mexican, and one of our Board members is full Mexican (a retired Army soldier who runs our Oklahoma state chapter). Another active duty peace officer runs our Ohio state chapter and he is a white guy with a wonderful black woman for his wife (I’m jealous – she’s awesome!). Myself? I married a Jewish American Princess. So please remind readers here again just how damned racist you think Oath Keepers are, okay? ;)
We as Oath Keepers stand against this rampant use of SWAT in America today, and we’re calling this a component of a burgeoning police state, and we are opposed flat out to any use of SWAT for routine police work such as serving warrants. We oppose the war on drugs, we oppose the rampant use of SWAT, and we most certainly stand against the military-police state. That is why we’re educating our cops and soldiers, as well as our veterans and our firefighters, about the sacred obligation to that Constitution to which they all swore that Oath. We teach them that the Oath is to the Constitution, and that it is not sworn to the damned government which came out of that Constitution. Big difference. Think about that, eh? ;)
I have written numerous essays on NAFTA as well as CAFTA and the SPP etc. I read G. Edward Griffin’s “The Creature From Jekyll Island” eleven years ago and have studied many excellent source books on the criminality of the Federal Reserve, the endeavors to bring this nation into a one-world government using global economics for the NWO and its minions, but have not limited myself to just that approach. I’m a one-man force against the abuses of our shadow government, the secret government as Rep. Jack Brooks of Texas tried to uncover during the Iran-Contra-Mena scandal, and my personal dream is to defund the CIA and put intelligence gathering under civilian control inside the Pentagon/Dept. of Defense. I hate the CIA’s black-ops facet, while appreciating the loyal good Americans who do the “clean” work there – and believe me, there are some Oath Keepers on the upper floors at Langley.
Regarding your suggestion that we’ll blame the Mexican border crime wave on the ATF – that is largely true – my article on the ATF’s Gunrunner and Project Fast and Furious was written with the direct assistance of David Codrea of the national Gun Rights Examiner operation and Mike Vanderboegh of Sipsey Street Irregulars. Those were the two guys who worked for months to get the story sent nationwide by CBS’s Sharyl Anderson, and they have the definitive timeline for the entire story. You can read my article on the ATF and Operation Gunrunner here -
http://oathkeepers.org/oath/2011/03/30/oath-keeping-at-the-atf/
Regarding your question about how do we handle racism in our ranks – we have just a few people (one full time and two part time) to monitor the national website and the national forums. I am one of those. Any time I see a “racist” post or comment under our articles at the national site, I simply delete them on sight. Oath Keepers does not tolerate racist talk, nor do we permit any comments which would suggest the initiation of violence or any criminal act. We are a non-violent organization structured along the lines of the philosophy of Martin Luther King and Gandhi.
On our front page you will see a link for our by-laws, which themselves will show our high moral standards. But I would like to ask you to consider that we do not preview or pre-approve/monitor comments which anyone in the public can post under our articles at our national site. Once posted, and when I or another moderator chance to see an offensive post/comment, we take care of it. We have revoked one membership because we discovered the man was associated with the Christian Identity movement, which we feel is thinly-veiled racism. As soon as we find one, we delete it.
But please remember that most folks commenting on our national site are not even members in Oath Keepers. Some, we do often suspect, may even be emissaries from the SPLC or ADL or DHS – anxious to post some trash so they can take a screen shot before I can delete it, and then use that to make their case that we’re racists or “extremists” or the latest fascinating name they’ve labeled us with, which is “anti-government”. It is funny, I know, but to the SPLC and ilk, if one is willing to actually honor one’s Oath to the Constitution, insist that the Federal government operate within its lawful limits as granted and enumerated in Article 1, Section 8, and stand down if given an unconstitutional order, that soldier or cop is suddenly an “anti-government” individual. The truth of that is that Oath Keepers is anti-crime-in-government. We in truth are America’s premiere support group for the Constitution and our outreach programs educate those men and women with the badges and guns why they should study the Constitution as written, and honor their Oath. We are for the most lawful and moral government just as it was created by this nation’s founders, and we are opposed to corruption in government and especially the corporate fascism presently in bed with the Federal government. We are pro-government, and we demand that our government be run honestly, with total transparency, and in keeping with its mandates as presented in the Constitution. For that, SPLC thinks we’re “anti-government”. Be your own judge – read about us yourself in our words, not in the words of someone who has no clue about who we are or what we stand for. http://www.oathkeepers.org/oath/
Lastly, I’ll offer you another longish link for your reading pleasure -
http://oathkeepers.org/oath/2011/05/16/an-empire-strikes-home-_-part-one/
Salute!
Elias Alias, Oath Keepers national board of directors, Montana Oath Keepers state chapter president
Ben, I was reading about the Oath Keepers while W was still prez, so your second point is incorrect.
Wow, I’ve just been via’d by Radley Balko.
Now I’m feeling terrible that my post was not as strong as it should have been. Definitely meant to disparages Gawker’s post, not Rhodes, and basically defend anybody nonviolent who wishes to be left alone and has been hastily lumped into one category by Gawker.
But if I feel like I have to explain it, I guess I didn’t do it right.
“And the racist guy who started Oath Keepers.”
Oh yeah, well Jeff Neumann is a fascist, pure and simple. He hates Oath Keepers, who advocate limited government. Fascists advocate state worship and hate things like constitutions. They would not like Oath Keepers very much. Thus, Jeff Neumann is a fascist. You hear that Jeff, you are a FASCIST.
See Jeff, that’s called making a spurious claim with little real evidence. If you do it, people might do it back to you, poopy head.
Lucy,
I did read your article and I found it to be just as you want it to come across. I appreciate that. Like Radley Balko, you were just fine and you did a good job with that piece. Thank you, Lucy.
Salute!
Elias
@ Elias Alias,
Thank you for the reply. I have not had any issues with the board members directly, and some of the moderators (and former moderators) have become friends.
I truly agree with you when you say, “We in truth are America’s premiere support group for the Constitution and our outreach programs educate those men and women with the badges and guns why they should study the Constitution as written, and honor their Oath.”
Regardless, that has not prevented many worthwhile conversations on Oath Keepers from quickly collapsing into a conversation about how Sharia Law is coming to destroy America, how Muslims are terrorists, or how Illegal Immigrants (from Mexico) deserve no rights what-so-ever. Certainly the most articulated arguments against this racism has come from board members and senior moderators, but that does not stop the majority of the community from spewing racist BS until the sun goes down, or sitting mute on the topic.
The predominate attitude of the Oath Keepers community falls on one side of the “left vs right” farce, bringing with it the television ignorance, predisposed arguments, and inability to reach consensus with more than half of this country who doesn’t care about “left vs right”. I acknowledge there have been steps taken to open the group up to alternative view points, but you know exactly what would happen if you opened a thread called “Sharia Law”, “Illegal Immigrants”, or “Muslims.” You know exactly the types of responses you would get. To pretend that the community is not plagued with racism is disingenuous. I’m not going to deny that I have seen threads and members who supported justice for all people regardless of skin tone and religion, but that’s not typically the case. If only the community was composed of people as wise as board members….but it’s not. You can write policies, just like our government can write laws, but that does not change the attitudes of our communities.
That community is predominately islamophobic, many in the community are also deeply xenophobic.
But still, I truly agree that it is the premier support group for the Constitution, I am still a member, and I do talk with LEO’s about the group, because there is none other.
@19 – You’re the one arguing that if someone can argue that his particular reading of the constitution makes it okay to torture kittens, he should get off. I’m arguing that living law is what is actually important, and torturing kittens ISN’T okay.
I strongly, strongly dislike codified constitutions, they cause far more issues than they even try and solve. The law SHOULD have reasonable discretion built in, as per the UK’s CPS “public interest” test, which excludes 95%+ of the crazy prosecutions you hear about in America! Writing down ironclad rules immediately does away with that.
I don’t care whether people follow written codes over their consciences or vice versa, so I don’t care about the legal positivist vs. originalist angle on the Oath Keepers. There’s an argument to be made that they’re traitors and an argument to be made that they’re patriots. In truth they’re fully both, but nothing is wrong with treason and nothing is admirable about patriotism, so it doesn’t matter.
I do care that what people do is morally justified. In most of the cases Oath Keepers say they’ll refuse to follow orders, they would not be justified in following them, making refusal the minimally decent thing to do. So props, or something.
(Note: No reason to doubt that there is any such thing as “morally justified”, and no doubt that we can reasonably grasp such things, or whatever, is cause to care whether people follow written codes over their consciences or vice versa. Amazing how many people think legal positivism follows somehow from moral skepticism/subjectivism/non-cognitivism.)
Elias Alias (I have heard of you!), thank you. I am glad you thought so.