The Oath Keepers: A Case Study

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Elmer Stewart Rhodes is a Yale Law School graduate, a former U.S. Army paratrooper, and a former staffer of Republican Congressman Ron Paul. Rhodes also believes that Hitler could have been stopped if German soldiers and police had refused to follow orders. This idea of dissociation from the mainstream government views was the catalyst Rhodes needed to create the Oath Keepers. The Oath Keepers is a radical anti-government organization -made up of current and former U.S. military and law enforcement officers- that encourages members not to obey laws that violate the United States Constitution. ”The Anti-Defamation League describes the group as "heavily armed extremists with a anti-government mindset looking for potential showdowns with the government". This is plausible due to the several Oath Keepers’ heavily armed protests to “defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” in the last several years. While this form of protest is truly spine-chilling, it’s an excellent form of unconventional political participation. So by …show more content…

While one may believe this just means voting, political participation includes actions like speaking out on social media and protests. Unconventional participation is defined as a behavior that challenges or defies government channels or the dominant culture. One more recent recent example of this is the Dakota access pipeline. In contrast to conventional participation which uses the channels of representative government, opposers to the pipeline begin protest and this soon led to a standoff between protesters and the Morton County Sheriff Department. Though this form of political participation is much more controversial it does has success in the past (i.e civil rights movement, the Vietnam War). Now let's look at how the Oath Keepers used this political participation in recent domestic

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