When I first heard about the Oathkeepers, I thought they were just right-wing whackjobs obsessed with the paranoid fantasy that President Obama was a secret Stalinist, or a secret Muslim, or whatever else it is that right-wing whackjobs fantasize about.

The came the violent crackdown on Occupy, the revelation that the Department of Defense considers all forms of protest to be “low level terrorism,” and the military detention provisions in the NDAA, making it possible for the military to simply make people disappear.

All of a sudden, the Oathkeepers didn't seem quite so crazy after all. They started to seem like people who had seen what was coming before the rest of us did and had the courage to stand up and do something about it. They started to seem like patriots.

I doubt very much that most Oathkeepers would agree with me on most of my political opinions. I'm still under the impression that their political alignment is with the right, which is not surprising for a group of soldiers and law enforcement officers. I've heard them described as “gun nuts” in more than one place, which is why I'm writing about them in this blog rather than one of my other blogs.

But the Oathkeepers have sworn not to enforce any illegal or unconstitutional orders, such as the military detention of American citizens. If the worst case scenario becomes a reality, and our government decides to punish dissent by sending the military out to make dissenters disappear, then the Oathkeepers might be our only hope.