Texas Officer Attacked As Member Of ‘Anti-Government Extremist Group’

A pair of groups that claim to monitor extremist groups in the United States have lined up a law enforcement officer near Dallas in their cross hairs. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Southern Poverty Law Centre claim Constable John Shirley is a member of an alleged anti-government group, the Oath Keepers. Constables are elected in Hood County Texas.

The ADL has described the “ideology of the Oath Keepers most closely resembles that of the militia movement, whose adherents believe that the United States is collaborating with a one-world tyrannical conspiracy called the New World Order to strip Americans of their rights—starting with their right to keep and bear arms.”

Meanwhile, the SPLC said the “entire organization is based on a set of baseless conspiracy theories about the federal government working to destroy the liberties of Americans.”

{"id":"Anti-Defamation League","type":"widget","widget":"video","ratio":"16by9"}

On one hand the SPLC claims the group espouses a number of conspiracy and legal theories associated with the sovereign citizen movement and the white supremacist posse comitatus movement. The claims are not verified.

Oath Keepers is controversial. It supports President Donald Trump and marched against police violence in Ferguson, MO. The group's founder Stewart Rhodes supported Edward Snowden's decision to leak the PRISM documents, Rhodes said in a Reason interview.

Constable Shirley wrote a commentary on a website in which he claims to have been a member of the Oath Keepers for more than a decade and to have held several offices within the organization.

“I’ve seen the multiple waves of attacks by the media and progressive NGOs (such as the SPLC),” he said on the website. “The Oath Keepers organization has been called right-wing, racist, anti-government, a militia, among many other hot-button epithets.

“Capitalizing on the base level of ignorance of too many of our citizens, these progressive organizations have done their best to turn “polite society” against the organization, by throwing around these ad hominem attacks without actually providing any evidence to support their assertions.”

The article is a fundraising and recruitment piece.

An Oath Keepers recruitment event Constable Shirley had planned was cancelled after management of the Harbour Lakes Golf Club in the town of Granbury, Texas, claimed it had been misled.

Roger Deeds, the sheriff of Hook County, said that from what he had been told the group was simply trying to “protect the constitution and protect Texas.”

Deeds said he is not a member of the group, but has doesn't have a problem with someone want to belong to the group. “I don’t think they’re anti-government. This guy is running for reelection so he’s bragged about being a member,” Deeds said in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

“I’ve read that they’re made up of people who are anti-government but I don’t think that’s correct,” he told The Independent. “I don’t think they’re anti-government."