Oathkeepers/Minutemen: The Same Old Seditious Conspiracy

When people hear about the "Minutemen" they may believe it is referencing the celebrated partisan militia formed during the American Revolutionary War, known for being ready at a minute’s notice, providing a highly mobile, rapidly deployed force that enabled the colonies to respond immediately to war threats by the British monarchy.

The more recent “Minuteman Project” refers to a self-described “citizens Neighborhood Watch on our border,” a group of private individuals who seek to extrajudicially monitor the United States-Mexico border’s flow of illegal immigrants.

Few people may recall the “Minutemen” (anti-Communist organization) formed in the United States in the early 1960s by founder and head of the group: Robert DePugh from Norborne, Missouri. They believed that Communism would soon take over the United States and they would need to be prepared to violently suppress persons and groups they deemed un-American.

Members of the Minutemen in San Diego went on to work for the Secret Army Organization, which the ACLU claimed had FBI support. The White House was alleged to have maintained its own liaison to the SAO, Donald Segretti (under President Nixon). Segretti was quoted by the ACLU as having told the SAO that anyone causing trouble at the 1972 Republican convention would be "gotten rid of," apparently in reference to the so-called "Liddy plan" as described by the United States Senate Watergate Committee. The plan was named for G. Gordon Liddy, former counsel of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, and entailed the kidnapping of protestors and sending them to Mexico.

Fewer people still may be aware of the “long suppressed European Best-Seller” book entitled “Farewell America: The Plot to Kill JFK,” only relatively recently allowed to be published in the U.S. in 2002. The book claims to include the results of an investigation instigated by JFK’S brother Robert Kennedy and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, later to become U.S. Senator of New York. The book was intended to be published to help boost the presidential campaign of Robert Kennedy. When Robert Kennedy was himself assassinated during his campaign, the plans to publish the book died with him and the material was handed to French Intelligence where it was ultimately published in French under the title “America Burns.”

While the book itself attempts to paint a broad-based conspiracy of right-wing entities against JFK (including theories that have long been debated ad nauseum), there is one very specific piece of information that seems to stand out towards the end, on page 322: “…the upper spheres of the CIA were certainly not informed of the preparations of the assassination. The activities of the CIA are highly compartmentalized. The team that operated at Dallas included specialists who had worked for the CIA’s DCA (Department of Covert Activity). Several of them belonged to the Minutemen, which was thus able to keep the upper hand in the situation.” In the footnotes, the book goes on to list the various activities of the Minutemen surrounding the assassination.