December 09, 2021 03:37 PM UTC

Colorado's Leading Militia Group Keeps Getting Creepier

• 6 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

Last weekend, Colorado Newsline’s Chase Woodruff reported on remarks by Joe Oltmann, the founder of leading far-right conservative organizing group FEC United which includes among assets at its disposal the armed militia group known as the United American Defense Force (UADF). On Oltmann’s “Conservative Daily” podcast, Oltmann called out some 19 U.S. Senators by name along with Colorado Gov. Jared Polis to lead off “a line of executions of traitors through the United States of America,” carried out on “gallows all the way from Washington, D.C., to California.”

In FEC United’s newsletter that went out today, either Oltmann or somebody close to his heart wrote to members that “this is a time for orators and maybe soldiers.”

Some who should know are saying we are very close to war and/or man-made disasters. (Some businesses in downtown Denver probably feel they’ve been in a war zone for many months now.) Businesses have no role in a war except to hide, right? Wrong. This is not Hollywood. Do you have any idea how small a percentage of a military is actual combat troops? The most common military personnel are mechanics. An army, whether figurative (as we are now) or literal (could happen quickly), needs a whole lot of supplies. A high-tech army needs maintenance. [Pols emphasis]

So businesses are in an excellent position to support a patriot army. Some more than others, but you might be surprised – aerospace giant Northrop Grumman can trace its lineage back to a ball bearing company. It’s not a new concept…[w]hat do you have to offer? Food? Skills? Parts? You might be able to supply or house troops, send messages, provide digital connections. You might provide space, which in different situations might be needed for making personal connections, planning, storage, or even hiding. [Pols emphasis]

It’s a pro-active part of disaster preparedness, and disaster prep applies to businesses as well as families. Of course you should consider how the loss of electricity, Internet, or transportation could affect your business. But you should also consider the completely artificial type of disaster such as the loss of a license to operate your business. Could you shift immediately to some other sort of business? Could you rebuild your business in the parallel society?

What level of non-compliance will you go to at which point, and how will you handle official demands? How quickly could you move your operations to another location? What’s most important to take with you? Who can you trust, and how can you help each other? Can you plan out an alternate supply chain now, and do you have a way to practice it? Look for history books on what happened with businesses in the early days of the Soviet and Chinese communist revolutions, and the latter days of communism in Czechoslovakia and Poland…

Oltmann, as readers will recall, is under a tremendous amount of stress as the central figure in a defamation lawsuit filed by Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems employee Eric Coomer against numerous individuals in Donald Trump’s former campaign and legal team along with a number of conservative media outlets. The defendants in that lawsuit including Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani and One America News have all pointed back to Oltmann’s evidence-free assertion that Coomer was on a call with “Antifa” where he promised to steal the election as their own source. It is from this single dubious source, Joe Oltmann, that the entire mythology of Dominion’s involvement in the stealing of the 2020 election from Trump sprang, and if we were the ones holding the bag for a lie of such consequence we’d be feeling a bit twitchy too.

For Oltmann, it looks like the coping mechanism of choice for his legal trouble is prepping for civil war.

The problem for Colorado Republicans is that until Joe Oltmann went off the rails in the aftermath of the 2020 elections, he was broadly considered to be a capable and valued member of the team. FEC United has grown to wield considerable influence within the Colorado Republican Party–influence that helped, among other things, Kristi Burton Brown rise to her current position as party chairwoman. Confronted with Oltmann’s call for Gov. Polis and Senate “traitors” to be strung up on “gallows all the way from Washington, D.C., to California,” ex-GOP attorney general candidate George Brauchler refused to walk back his previous praise for Oltmann.

For years, the Colorado GOP was dominated by a far-right cabal masterminded by Dudley Brown of Rocky Mountain Gun Owners and fronted by the Neville family of politicians and operatives. FEC United has attracted a huge following in a fraction of the time–and if we’re to believe what they’re saying clearly, they’re planning for something much worse than recall elections.

It’s a threat that someone with authority needs to take seriously before something bad happens.