Mr. Palian also showed the jury several clips from a virtual meeting on Nov. 9, 2020, during which Mr. Rhodes urged his members to “fight” on behalf of Mr. Trump. Mr. Rhodes went on during the meeting to make baseless claims about foreign interference in the election and said that he would welcome violence from leftist antifa activists because that would give Mr. Trump an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and call upon militias like his own to quell the chaos.
The messages released so far suggest that Mr. Rhodes’s obsessions, including antifa and election fraud, were not unlike those of dozens, even hundreds, of other Jan. 6 defendants. Like many others, he appeared to be consumed as well with the Revolutionary War, encouraging his followers in the days leading up to the Capitol attack to “build up armed local militia and minutemen companies.”
“We are now where the founders were in March, 1775,” he wrote on the Friends of Stone group chat on Nov. 8.
Mr. Rhodes also had a deep animus for Mr. Biden, describing him in the messages with epithets such as “illegitimate usurper” and “Chi com puppet.” That last description was a reference to yet another one of Mr. Rhodes’s fixations: the Chinese Communist Party.
He was not alone among the Oath Keepers in evincing fear and loathing of Mr. Biden. Ms. Watkins, too, seemed to believe that if Mr. Biden took power, it would be a cataclysmic event.
Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/04/us/politics/oath-keepers-rhodes-trial-texts.html
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