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The ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’: Former Oath Keeper testifies [1]
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Date: 2022-07-12
During Tuesday’s public Jan. 6 committee hearing, former high-ranking Oath Keeper Jason Van Tatenhove testified to his experience with the extremist group. Headed by Elmer Rhodes, the Oath Keepers got their hooks into Tatenhove back when he was working as a freelance independent “journalist,” and met the group as he covered other extremist federal land occupiers, the Cliven Bundy clan.
The Oath Keepers have been tied to Donald Trump’s campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 election as a sort of satellite mercenary group, willing to do some military work on the cheap if needed, and to hopefully take advantage of the riots being created by Trump-world rhetoric. Tatenhove was brought out to testify to the true nature of the Oath Keepers, their use of misinformation to organize and incite, and the underpinnings of militia violence and authoritarianism that Rhodes relied on.
Tatenhove became the Oath Keeper’s spokesman and media propagandist shortly after he began working with them in 2014. He told the Denver Post that “I had these grand intentions that I was going to write my break-out novel, but what wound up happening is I just became a propagandist for them. I failed that internal mission pretty fantastically.” Tatenhove worked for the group for a year-and-a-half between 2015 and 2016—and during that time he watched the group become more and more extreme.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/12/2109960/-The-straw-that-broke-the-camel-s-back-Former-Oath-Keeper-testifies
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