Sharron Angle won yesterday’s primary to become Nevada’s Republican candidate for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s seat. She may have never advocated bartering for health care with chickens, as her opponent Sue Lowden did, but Angle already has some issues. Beyond embracing the Tea Party, she’s also reached out to the Oath Keepers, the fringe patriot group whose core membership of cops and soldiers are gearing up to resist the Obama administration’s anticipated slide toward outright tyranny.
Back in April, Angle told TPM‘s Evan McMorris-Santoro that she was a member of the Oath Keepers. This Monday, Angle’s husband Ted told TPM‘s McMorris-Santoro and Justin Elliott that “We support what the organization stands for” and that he and his wife “desire” to join it. Oath Keeper founder Steward Rhodes said that candidate Angle had paid a visit to the group’s Southern Nevada chapter last fall.
For the full scoop on the Oath Keepers and what they stand for, check out the in-depth investigation MoJo published about them this spring. In it, Justine Sharrock profiles Pvt. 1st Class Lee Pray, a young soldier who joined the group to prepare for the day when he might have to turn against his commander-in-chief to resist martial law and the mass detention of American citizens. Pray told Sharrock that he’d been recruiting buddies, running drills, and stashing weapons—just in case. Like all Oath Keepers, he’s sworn to disobey any orders he considers unconstiutional or illegal.
Angle’s not the group’s only high-profile ally. Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, and conspiracy guru Alex Jones have praised it, and last year it helped organize the National Liberty Unity Summit, a Tea Party-type confab that drew Georigia Republicans Rep. Phil Gingrey and Rep. Paul Broun. Since she’s not an active duty police officer or soldier, Angle can’t actually become a full-on Oath Keeper. But she already seems to have the rhetoric down. As she told the Reno Gazette-Journal last week, she’s noticed that ammo seems to be flying off the shelves at sporting goods stores: “That tells me the nation is arming. What are they arming for if it isn’t that they are so distrustful of their government? They’re afraid they’ll have to fight for their liberty in more Second Amendment kinds of ways?…If we don’t win at the ballot box, what will be the next step?”
