In the buildup to Jan. 6, Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes ranted like a QAnon adherent about how Trump could stay in power by “exposing all the pedophiles.”
— at least adjacent to the unfounded conspiracy theory. QAnon holds that the government is infested with Satanic pedophile Democrats, and Q adherents have cast Trump as a hero who can expose the evildoers and vanquish their “deep state” power. While the Oath Keepers movement is also steeped in conspiratorial thinking, traditionally thehas been preoccupied with tyrannical gun-grabbers or warrant-less federal searches — not demonic, child-abusing politicians.
The Oath Keepers leader imagined the Trump-directed leaks building slowly. “All he’s got to do is go and declassify the first record of some pedophile who’s in the Congress, and then another one, and put the videos online and let the people watch them,” Rhodes said. “Everyone will see it. You can’t stop that. Once he discloses the first handful of pedophiles who are in office, then the avalanche can keep on coming.
Rhodes’ Q-inflected rhetoric may seem jarring, but Michael Jensen, lead investigator of the Domestic Radicalization Project at the University of Maryland, argues that the gruff, militant Oath Keepers and the extremely online adherents of QAnon had begun to cross pollinate by the 2020 election.
On the recorded web call, Rhodes argued that the repulsive evidence of elite corruption would also help shield the Oath Keepers from accountability. “You take away the authority, the perceived authority of the courts, to stop you,” he said. “You take away the perceived authority of Congress.”
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