Topic: WorldNetDaily
An anonymously written Feb. 26 WorldNetDaily article states:
Enough is enough, says an armed U.S. Army veteran in Indiana who has decided to take student and teacher protection into his own hands after the horrifying Florida school shooting and threats of school violence rocked his own town.
Mark Cowan says he is keeping watch outside North Side High School in Fort Wayne with his AR-15 and a handgun – at least until added security is in place. Cown told WANE-TV 15 that he’s standing guard to protect students and defend them against anyone who might threaten their safety while they’re in school. He has been in contact with local police and the school resource officer.
“I [decided] to get my butt off the couch and come out here and keep an eye on these kids and teachers. They deserve it,” Cowan told the news station. “They all deserve a right to go home every night without fear of what’s going to happen during the day.”
In addition to being an Army veteran, Cowan is a member of Oath Keepers, an organization of former police officers, first responders and veterans.
Wait, what? Oath Keepers is "an organization of former police officers, first responders and veterans"? Not that we recall.
And not that the Southern Poverty Law Center recalls either:
The Oath Keepers, which claims tens of thousands of present and former law enforcement officials and military veterans as members, is one of the largest radical antigovernment groups in the U.S. today. While it claims only to be defending the Constitution, the entire organization is based on a set of baseless conspiracy theories about the federal government working to destroy the liberties of Americans.
[...]
The Oath Keepers was formed in 2009 by Yale Law School graduate and former U.S. Army paratrooper Stewart Rhodes in the direct aftermath of the election of the nation’s first black president. Today, it is one of the largest radical antigovernment organizations in the United States. By 2016, the group was claiming an improbable 30,000 members who were said to be mostly current and former military, law enforcement and emergency first responders.
The core idea of the Oath Keepers is that its members vow to forever support the oaths they took on joining law enforcement or the military to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” As a practical matter, what that means to the group is suggested most plainly by its list of the 10 “Orders We Will Not Obey” — a compendium of much-feared but entirely imaginary threats from the government, including forcing Americans into detention camps, imposing martial law, and disarming all civilians. Those supposed threats are all key to the central conspiracy theory of the antigovernment “Patriot” movement of which the Oath Keepers is a part. Basically, Patriots believe that the government will at any moment impose martial law, probably with the aid of foreign or United Nations troops; that all guns belonging to normal citizens will then be seized; that resisters will be thrown into concentration camps; and that, in the end, America will be forced into a one-world socialist government, “The New World Order.”
WND has previously whitewashed the Oath Keepers as "a group of veterans who provide security at pro-Trump rallies."
