Armed Conspiracy Group will defend Republicans at Minneapolis Trump Rally

City Pages (MSP) ^ | 10-09-2019 | Peter Kotz

[tcrlaf]

No one’s expecting Donald Trump’s Thursday rally in Minneapolis to go seamlessly. Some 20,000 mostly out-of-towners will descend on the Target Center. An even larger crowd of locals will be frothing outside. It's a recipe that makes collisions inevitable.

So Republicans will be escorted to and from their cars. That duty will fall to Oath Keepers, a “patriot” group whose members fancy themselves as “guardians of the republic.” Or as the Southern Poverty Law Center calls them, “one of the largest radical anti-government groups in the U.S. today.”

They are not the kind of people you want entering your city. Especially since they tend to be heavily armed.

The group was launched in 2009 after—not coincidentally—we elected a black president. Its beliefs roughly mirrored the conspiracy theories of the day: that the black guy was preparing to invoke martial law. That he would take away your guns. That he would relegate patriots to detention camps.

A decade later, it appears Obama forgot to execute his plot, likely because he never entertained it in the first place. Yet the Oath Keepers carry on, raising “Citizen Preservation” militias to defend against “global elitists” and fight the imaginary forces arrayed against them.

Though a rainbow of people will be protesting—everyone from Veterans for Peace to Muslim civil rights groups to people organizing a knitting sit-in—the Oath Keepers have a new enemy: Antifa. Also known as “violent communists” and “America-hating leftists.”

[catnipman]

“I love the bad weather forecast”

indeed. Trump supporters are generally very hardy stock compared to their fair-weather fiend counterparts, but more importantly, drenching downpours make for terrible TV of “protests” and riots ...