Biker Oathkeeper
by digby
Lot’s of talk today about Ron Paul and Tea party candidate Alan West being exposed as a defender of a violent biker gang. It’s pretty creepy.
But consider this:
Does it surprise you that this fellow would be involved with violent bikers? Not me. After all, he was forced out of the service after being accused of torturing Iraqis. You can see why the teabaggers love him.
If you aren’t familiar with the Oath Keepers, read:
Oath Keepers and the Age of Treason. Glenn Beck loves them. Tea Partiers court them. Congressmen listen to them. Meet the fast-growing “patriot” group that’s recruiting soldiers to resist the Obama administration.
In Pray’s estimate, it might not be long (months, perhaps a year) before President Obama finds some pretext—a pandemic, a natural disaster, a terror attack—to impose martial law, ban interstate travel, and begin detaining citizens en masse. One of his fellow Oath Keepers, a former infantryman, advised me to prepare a “bug out” bag with 39 items including gas masks, ammo, and water purification tablets, so that I’d be ready to go “when the shit hits the fan.”
When it does, Pray and his buddies plan to go AWOL and make their way to their “fortified bunker”—the home of one comrade’s parents in rural Idaho—where they’ve stocked survival gear, generators, food, and weapons. If it becomes necessary, they say, they will turn those guns against their fellow soldiers.
Tea partiers like West are running for office proud of their membership in this group or openly sympathetic to it.
.