12/9/20
GRANBURY, Texas—In late August, the constable in a small county outside Fort Worth logged on to his Facebook account and called for the execution of a mayor nearly 2,000 miles away. “Ted Wheeler needs to be tried, convicted and executed posthaste,” John D. Shirley said on Aug. 31. “He has blood on his hands, and it’s time for justice.” What precipitated Shirley’s outburst against the Portland mayor was the shooting death on Aug. 29 of a member of a right-wing group called Patriot Prayer by an antifa activist. “If you doubt these lefties won’t put you and your family against a wall and pull the trigger, then you aren’t paying attention,” Shirley said on Oct. 10. “Their hatred for you is palpable. We dare never let them regain power again.” It might seem odd that an elected member of law enforcement would incite violence against another democratically elected official in one of the nation’s largest cities. But Shirley was also a sworn member of Oath Keepers, which in recent months has been warning of a civil war. Depending on whom you ask, Oath Keepers is either “the last line of defense against tyranny” or an extremist militia. They describe themselves as a nonpartisan association of tens of thousands of current and former military, police and first responders who pledge to defend the Constitution and refuse to obey orders they consider unconstitutional. The Southern Poverty Law Center on the other hand lists Oath Keepers as “one of the largest radical antigovernment groups in the U.S. today”.
“Our POTUS will not go down without a fight,” Oath Keepers said in a recent email blast. “He WILL NOT concede. This election was stolen from We The People. We will prevail but we need your help! Or we lose our democracy.” Shirley, who has described Hood County leaders as “RINOs & closet authoritarians,” doesn’t get along with the other officials and thinks the commissioners court is “out to get him.” In September, around the time Shirley’s Twitter account was suspended, Twitter also banned the accounts of Stewart Rhodes and Oath Keepers under its violent extremism policy. Oath Keepers had tweeted that there would be “open warfare against the Marxist insurrectionists by election night, no matter what you do” and that “Civil War is here, right now.” “We are the #DigitalConstitutionalMilitia. Our weapons of war are FB posts, Tweets, YouTube Videos, TikTok,” Shirley said back in November. “It’s up to US to do OUR part of this existential battle for the soul of #America. Patriots… You have your orders.”
