Watching the government throw the book at the Oath Keepers, giving their leaders 18 years in prison, is essentially the SWAMP fighting back against those criticizing it. It’s a manipulation of the rule of law that benefits the acquisition of power itself and points to the root cause of the evil that has corrupted our government in extremely unhealthy ways. To see the Oath Keepers and all January 6^th prisoners harassed the way they have been is corruption that we have to deal with as a society. To see them prosecuted while leaders of Antifa continue free, waiting for their next assignment from the government to burn down a city block, is preposterous. But it’s also very revealing. We are better off knowing the forces opposing us, how deeply they are rooted in our government, and what their motivations are. And at least now we know. The people who protested on January 6^th were mad over election fraud, a process that removed the president they liked from office. I think it says many good things about our society; that it wasn’t worse than it was, and more people didn’t get hurt. At the time, it wasn’t so apparent the amount of election fraud that our intelligence agencies obviously supported to keep the power they had acquired from being drained away by an outsider like Trump. But once the lines in the sand were established, a much clearer picture of what the problems were that emerged, and this prosecution of the Oath Keepers displayed it without any doubt as to the level of evil we are dealing with embedded in our own taxpayer-funded government that has spun out of control with corruption. I wasn’t surprised, however, based on my own personal experiences. 

Along with the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys have been at the center of many of these Pro-Trump protests and have actually been confronting Antifa in the streets, meeting aggression with aggression. I told some of the story before, about how after Trump was removed from the White House through election fraud, early in November of 2020, I actually signed up for the Cincinnati chapter of the Proud Boys and started the vetting process. My concern was that Antifa would be emboldened by putting Biden in the White House, and we would have to fight these people in the streets. We had seen elements of BLM attempt to organize in Cincinnati, fanned on by area reporters wanting to see a fight in the streets of Northern Cincinnati where conservative politics has collected itself and to harass people in their comfortable homes. Given the kind of aggression we saw from these radical liberal groups, a fight was undoubtedly on the horizon with guns and busted heads as part of the violence that would surely follow. So I signed up officially to be part of that resistance, and I wanted people in the FBI to know that my name was on the list as one of the leaders. I wasn’t playing around; I was very serious about it. 

Over the following weeks, though, I lost interest because it was obvious that some hazing was going to happen, and I’m not a group consensus kind of guy. They used the word “brother” a lot, as they were a unified brotherhood, and that just wasn’t a fit for me. If there was going to be violence against government-sponsored insurgents looking to overthrow our American Constitution, then that was one thing. But I wasn’t looking for a military brotherhood, and we had a lot of conversations about uniforms and the right to wear the colors of the Proud Boys before anybody had been adequately vetted by the group. So I lost interest quickly in that kind of talk. I’m used to being completely in charge when I get into something, and I was not about to prove my allegiance through hazing rituals to a bunch of 30-somethings. And submit myself to some regimented command. I didn’t put up with that stuff when I went to college. Military life wasn’t for me because of those kinds of things. I would not ever submit to a drill sergeant and the regimented ranks of that kind of life. So officially belonging to the Proud Boys and falling into the ranks as an initiate wasn’t going to work for me. And that’s what they were all about. Yet I learned through that process that they were very concerned about FBI infiltration, which is why they did have a vetting process, which was obviously very much a concern. I went through all this before the Ray Epps situation on January 6^th. So they were fully aware that the government was trying to join their ranks with spies to manipulate everything behind the scenes. That’s when I knew the Proud Boy thing would not work for me, and I stepped away from the application process. There was too much trouble with officially joining anything; it was wasting my time, which I’m never in favor of. 

The best way to fight the SWAMP and its creatures is with unstructured volunteers, something a structured enemy cannot join and manipulate in a structured way. And that is what was attacked by the Oath Keepers, the ability to create a structured resistance to the evil intentions of a government that no longer reports to the people it is supposed to represent. Structured attacks are something they understand and control through processes. Unstructured attacks are where they are most vulnerable, and that’s why they hate President Trump so much because he is so unstructured. That lack of structure is actually where I am happiest, so I know how to handle things from that perspective. I thought that by joining the Proud Boys as a 50-something might send a message to the FBI to get on the right side of history. And that maybe it might avert a fight in the streets. But what became obvious was that it was too late for that. This is why there are prosecutions now where the book is being thrown at these Oath Keepers, J6s protesters, and Proud Boys who have suffered dramatically since those days of my application process. The bad guys control the structure of political society, so you never want to attack them where they are strongest. You want to attack where they are weakest, always. And in this case, it’s in their desire to rig the system in their favor and defend the ground they control, Washington D.C., the coastal media, and the courts. I met many well-intentioned people while I was joining the Proud Boys. But their vulnerability was in the structure as the FBI set up and controlled it. Instead of planning to defeat the globalists forces behind Antifa, most of the conversations were about trying to root out spies from the government sent to infiltrate their ranks and rot the whole effort from the inside. And that was only possible by controlling the structure itself. That wasn’t how America would be defended from these hostile forces. If you play that game, then the system is rigged to defend the SWAMP from scrutiny. And that’s precisely what has happened to the Oath Keepers. Their only hope is that President Trump will be re-elected and can give them a pardon, which is the plan. But before that can happen, the structure that the government uses to protect itself has to be eliminated. And that will not happen by attacking where they are well prepared. They must be hit where they aren’t, which is why I’m not a member of the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, or any organized group. And never will be.  

Rich Hoffman