What It Means to Be an Oath Keeper - Part 1

What does it mean to be an Oath Keeper?

It means you keep your oath. That you honor - faithfully fulfill - your service oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, whether you are currently serving, retired, or a veteran.

You may have taken that oath when you served in the military, as a law enforcement officer, or as some other first responder (Fire, Search and Rescue, EMS, etc). And if you served in a local or state capacity, you also swore an oath to your state's Constitution (as required by that state Constitution).

Remember, the requirement that you take an oath to support and defend the Constitution comes from the Constitution itself, in Article VI, which mandates that all officers - executive, legislative, and judicial, and both at the federal and state level - must swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Our oath is not some mere tradition; it's a bedrock, constitutional, legal requirement, spelled out in the Supreme Law of the land. And note that it's not an oath to a person (in Nazi Germany, for example, the oath was to obey Hitler unconditionally), to a royal family (the oath in Commonwealth countries is to the Queen and her progeny), an office, or even to "protect and serve" the public. In America, our oath is to the Constitution. To protect and serve IT. Because our Constitution is what protects, serves, and preserves our life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, - the blessings of liberty - for We the People and our posterity.

That oath requirement applies to everyone in government office, from the President to all members of his cabinet, to the Attorney General and all lawyers in the DOJ, to every federal agent, every member of Congress, every federal judge, and every lawyer, period. And it applies to all their counterparts in the states, from the governor, to the state legislature, the state judges, the local mayor, the town council, the sheriff, the police chief, and every local cop. In other words, from the President of the United States down to your local dog-catcher, all must swear that oath.

I took an oath to defend the Constitution three times. First, when joining the Army in 1983 at age 18 to serve as a paratrooper in an airborne infantry, long range scout (LRS) reconnaissance unit (E. Co., 9th ID Scouts (Airborne), Ft. Lewis, WA).

I took the oath again right after graduating from Yale Law School in 2004, when I was sworn in as a law clerk for Arizona Supreme Court Justice Michael D. Ryan (during the 2004-2005 term), swearing to support the U.S. Constitution and the Arizona State Constitution.

I took it a third time in 2006 when I was sworn in as a lawyer in Polson, Montana, swearing again to support the U.S. Constitution but now also the Montana State Constitution. I only say that as an example.

Many of you reading this have had similar experiences, serving in multiple oath sworn capacities. Still, the oath I swore at age 18, when I entered the Army, is the one that matters the most to me, as I'm sure those of you who also served in the military can understand (sadly, only around 1% of the population). As the saying goes, when you take that oath, entering military service, you write out a blank check made payable to the American people, for an amount up to and including your life. You are stepping up to go in harm's way, for your country, and you are willing to give your life if that's what the mission requires. Once you take that step, there's no going back. Your life is changed forever.

Those who serve as law enforcement, firefighters, search and rescue, EMS, and other first responders also volunteer to go in harm’s way to serve their communities and our nation - "that others may live" and "to protect and serve." That's one reason why "Oath Keepers" the organization I founded in 2009 is also focused on such people, and not so much on politicians, judges, and lawyers, though they are also oath sworn. We focus on the men and women at the tip of the spear, the "sheepdogs" - those who understand what it means to put duty and the lives of others before their own safety. While others are running away from danger, they run toward it - toward the sound of gunfire, toward the burning building, toward the flood.

They have courage and honor, but do they know the Constitution?

Since I also served as a volunteer firefighter, I knew that Fire, EMS, and Search and Rescue personnel may also be given orders that violate the rights of the people and the experience during the Covid lockdowns, with totalitarian, Communist-Chinese style restrictions on daily life imposed at lightening speed, all in the name of medical necessity, shows the wisdom of including those personnel in our work.

Hence, Oath Keepers is an association of current serving, retired, and veteran military, police (federal, state, or local LEOs), firefighters, EMS, Search and Rescue, and other first responders, all committed to honoring the oath we swore while in service, by continuing to defend the Constitution, and of course, that also means defending the rights of the people the Constitution was created to preserve.

Hence, from day one our mission was defined simply as "to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic" Period. How do we/you defend the Constitution? We (and you) can, and should, defend the Constitution in multiple ways, as the Founders clearly intended. They didn't spell out a limited scope of how. In their wisdom, they left that wide open, but ground zero of that Article VI oath requirement is that those currently serving at every level (all branches, federal, state, and local) must refuse to follow unlawful orders and refuse to participate in unconstitutional actions (including legislation, but also executive and judicial branch actions), and all of us, whether currently serving or veterans/retired, must oppose the unconstitutional actions of others.

Oath Keepers is committed to bringing that critical oath to the forefront of the minds of everyone who took it - where it belongs. And that goes for both current serving and veterans since your oath doesn't expire until you do. While you're on this side of the grass, you're on the hook and honor-bound to keep your oath, "so help me God." Don't forget those final words. It is really a promise to the Almighty.

So we reach out to BOTH current serving and retired/veterans, reminding them of that oath. We call our strategy "Reach, Teach, and Inspire." We reach out to all of them, and we teach them more about the Constitution they swore to defend (how can you defend what you don't understand?), especially the Bill of Rights, which is the crown jewel of our Constitution and the high water mark of Western Civilization. We use historical examples of unlawful orders and people doing the right thing as well as doing the wrong thing. And we inspire them to follow the example of past oath-keeping heroes, as we also lead by our example.

A shining and inspiring example of an "oath keeper" in history is Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, Jr., who landed his helicopter gunships in Vietnam and personally put a stop to the Mÿ Lai Massacre, where U.S. troops followed illegal orders to shoot unarmed women and children. Thompson ordered his M60 door-gunners to fire on any troops who again fired on the women and children, and he drew his .45 pistol and escorted the survivors to safety on his helicopters.

Thompson stands in sharp contrast to "oath breaker" Lt. William L. Calley, Jr. who gave those illegal orders, later defending himself during his trial for war crimes by declaring he was 'just following orders" from superior officers. That defense didn't work for Lt. Calley any better than it worked for the Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials. He had an obligation to refuse to carry out unlawful orders, and he was found guilty of violating the laws of war.

Notice that Warrant Officer Thompson didn't just refuse to participate in the war crimes. He put a stop to them. Now, that is a man of honor.

To clarify, being a member of Oath Keepers DOES NOT mean you swear to fulfill some additional oath within the Oath Keepers organization, as some have erroneously claimed - usually our political enemies - as they willfully misconstruing our "Declaration of Ten Orders We Will Not Obey" as being some special Oath Keepers oath.

That Declaration is not itself an oath of any kind. It serves as a teaching tool, illustrating blatant examples of abuse of rights that oath-sworn Americans can look to for a frame of reference when given questionable orders during some emergency. When I wrote the Oath Keepers Declaration of Ten Orders We Will Not Obey in 2009 (yes, I was the sole author), I intended it as essentially a restatement of our Bill of Rights, ordered in the ranking of what I considered the most dangerous (the most likely to result in armed conflict here at home), with historical examples, including some egregious lessons learned since the Founding, such as the mass internment of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent during WWII; the Nazi use of cordoned off ghettos as defacto mass internment camps (the Warsaw Ghetto, for example); modern police-sate surveillance (i.e. the NSA mass surveillance exposed by Edward Snowden); use of military detention and military trials instead of jury trials for those accused of being terrorists (i.e. "enemy combatant" status, as was used by the Bush Admin. against U.S. citizens Jose Padilla and Yasir Hamdi); and the mass door-to-door gun confiscation during Katrina.

The Bill of Rights is itself an expression of the Founding Generation's experiences of oppression under King George (such as the dreaded "writs of assistance" warrantless searches; denial of local jury trial - being taken to England to be tried for "pretend offenses"; arrest for "libel" - merely criticizing the King, even if true; attempts to disarm the colonists, etc..), and each of the first ten Amendments, just as with many of the Articles in the main text of the Constitution, were meant to prevent such abuses from reoccurring. But there have been some horrific violations of human rights that have come with the 20th Century that I felt compelled to also reference.

Our detractors on the left, such as at Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), absurdly label the Declaration as a list of "baseless conspiracy theories." All I can do is shake my head at that. Everything in it is based on historical fact - things that have already happened, either here at home or abroad, and are still eminently possible if not probable, considering this nation's slide toward Communist Chinese style total surveillance, "social credit score" censorship and suppression of political opposition, the very troubling concentrations of power, and the bypassing of fundamental rights in the name of "national security" we saw post 9/11, starting with the PATRIOT Act, all the way to the experience of J-6 defendants being maliciously prosecuted in DC show trials as political "lawfare" against President Trump and MAGA (frankly, I need to update the list to include all that has happened since 2009).

The mass gun confiscation orders during Hurricane Katrina were a modern wake-up call of how fast violations of rights can happen, especially during an emergency, when unconstitutional orders are followed. Those orders were issued by the New Orleans Chief of Police at the behest of the Mayor of New Orleans. Under those orders, police officers brought from all over the nation to help ended up disarming peaceable, law-abiding, local residents just trying to defend themselves and their property from predatory looters, rapists, and robbers (who always crawl out of the woodwork after major hurricanes, taking advantage of the chaos).

There was the news footage of an old lady standing in her kitchen, with a small revolver in her hand, with the cylinder open (making it obvious that it was unloaded) talking to a California Highway Patrol officer who had come all the way from California to "help" her. One minute they are talking, with her explaining that she needs the gun to defend herself, and that she doesn't need to evacuate because her home is dry, and the next second, the CHP officer is violently tackling the old lady to the kitchen floor, wrestling the gun away from her. A court later ruled that those orders had been unconstitutional (you don't say?), but that didn't help the old lady, or the other citizens disarmed and left defenseless. Those orders should never have been followed to begin with.

Hence, Oath Keepers.

-Stewart Rhodes