Immediately following what I suspect to be a bungled false flag attempt, Andrews was approached by a county officer who told him that business owners had complained and wanted the defense group to leave. This was found to be a lie, and the officer admitted that his chief was being pressured by the feds to get Oath Keepers out of the area.
After failing on multiple occasions to run off Oath Keepers, the St. Louis County police chief is now attempting to use a statute requiring security personnel to be licensed by the state. The statute, however, clearly applies only to paid security personnel, not volunteers. So Oath Keepers is back again and refusing to comply with the order to disperse.
Other groups providing security, including a group of black volunteers defending a white-owned gas station out of respect for their former employer, have not been harassed by police.
Why are the state and federal governments so intent on getting rid of Oath Keeper volunteers whose only “crime” is to defend innocent people from harm? It’s probably because Oath Keepers is taking the concept of non-participation nationwide.
Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes states:
They want to create a false paradigm… They are presenting a false choice between lawlessness, looting, arson, assault, murder on the one side, unrestrained or a hyper-militarized police state on the other… They are failing to do the intelligent thing and protect businesses without trampling on rights.
All four businesses protected by Oath Keepers remain untouched by fire, including Natalie’s Cakes and More, a beauty supply store, a dentist’s office and a Chinese restaurant, even though all of them had been directly threatened at the beginning of the riots. Natalie’s Cakes and More had not only received threats of arson, but had also been damaged by looters before the arrival of Oath Keepers. Now, her business stands intact.
Natalies-Cakes-More-Oath-Keeper
My regular readers are well aware that I have been involved in the formation and training of my local Montana CPT. I believe it is one of the best models of the non-participation principle in action today, combining elements of security and defense, emergency medical training, engineering for vital resources (farming, water, construction, etc.), as well as communication — everything that a community needs to protect itself or rebuild in the wake of disaster. The Ferguson event proves beyond a doubt that the CPT concept is effective and necessary.
The governor of Missouri, the federal government and some elements of the local police were either unable to come to the aid of citizens of Ferguson or they were unwilling. It is my belief that many buildings in Ferguson were simply allowed to burn in order to help perpetuate tensions and provide another rationale in the minds of Americans for militarization of law enforcement. If the system cannot or will not protect you, then you and your community will have to provide security for yourselves.
By extension, if the citizenry suffers extreme levels of conflict with city-, state- or federal-run law enforcement organizations, then they should be providing for the safety of their own community. If the police and the people cannot get along, then remove the police from the picture entirely and create your own neighborhood watches and mutual aid groups. No city-paid police officer is going to care more about the safety of a neighborhood than the residents who live there and the businesses that survive there. And no violent criminal is going to be able to function for long in a neighborhood that is trained and armed to defend itself.
The best option, the only option when faced with a conundrum like Ferguson, is for residents to kick government out of the picture completely. Whatever problems might be encountered during such a transition would be a happy trade over the constant crisis wrought by political “mismanagement” or manipulation. In the end, corrupt government will never go away unless we stop handing our responsibilities over to them — and this includes security. We must stop trying to change the system by following the rules that perpetually benefit the system. If we are ever going to get rid of elitist control, we have to step outside the false paradigm and play our own game by our own rules.
You can learn more about Oath Keepers here.
http://oathkeepers.org–Brandon Smith
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Oath Keepers volunteers continue to guard Ferguson businesses and we have retained two patriotic St. Louis, Missouri lawyers from the firm of Hearne & Bendick to represent us in our defiance of, and legal challenge to, the St. Louis Police Chief’s unlawful order asserting that we cannot guard Ferguson residents and businesses against arsonists without a “security officer” permit.
Please help support that legal fight, and also help us provide legal defense if any of our volunteers are cited or arrested while engaged in civil disobedience against that unlawful order. Go here
https://www.formstack.com/forms/?750628-oJ9AeG1sgf where you can donate specifically to our legal defense fund. Any left over legal defense funds will be reserved to assist future litigation and legal defense.
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Fox News: Armed 'Oath Keepers' Threatened With Arrest for Guarding FergusonThis article was published at Fox News Insider on December 02, 2014, at this link:
http://insider.foxnews.com/2014/12/02/armed-oath-keepers-guard-ferguson-businesses-police-tell-them-stop Please go there and view the exclusive Fox News video of the interview with John Karriman of Missouri Oath Keepers.
Note from Stewart Rhodes, Founder and President of Oath Keepers:
As retired police officer and Missouri police academy instructor John Karriman said, we will not, and did not, stop protecting the buildings and people we had promised to protect. We were there the very next night after being told to stop, and we have been there every night since. And we will continue to be there until calm is restored and we are no longer needed. Refer to our attorney's letter to St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar :
http://www.scribd.com/doc/249001595/Letter-for-Oath-Keepers-to-Chief You may also read, and/or link to, this article at Oath Keepers' national website, where your comments are welcome. Here's that link --
http://oathkeepers.org/oath/2014/12/03/fox-news-insider-armed-oath-keepers-threatened-with-arrest-for-guarding-ferguson-shops/