The sentencing today of Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes to 18 years in prison for seditious conspiracy for the Jan. 6 attack prompted me to dig into the TPM archives. We’ve been covering Rhodes and the Oath Keepers for a long time. But I couldn’t remember exactly how long. On closer look, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was from virtually the beginning of his emergence on the national stage. But rummaging through our past coverage also helped me to re-familiarize myself with the context in which Rhodes founded the Oath Keepers.

Rhodes incorporated the Oath Keepers in 2009 (gee, who became president that year?), and you can’t divorce its creation from the then-emerging Tea Party movement.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate do a deep dive into the rightward march of many state legislatures.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

Today is a great day to sign up for Morning Memo!

Here’s my quick take on the DeSantis-Musk campaign launch.

As you must know by now, the thing kicked up with a grandly humiliating tech glitch in which the whole “Twitter Space” crashed. After 20 minutes or so (I didn’t time it) they started a new one — now hosted on Musk’s crony David Sacks’s account as opposed to Musk’s — and that one mostly worked. Huge fail. And that will probably be the headline takeaway for most news organizations. Then DeSantis read a rushed and canned campaign announcement which was basically a mess. But once they got down to talking, DeSantis is fairly good at talking about the issues that matter to him.

The problem is the issues that matter to him. This is a way, way, WAY online-minded campaign. Extremely online, as the cool kids say. The whole conversation is geared to the keyboard warrior world of the far right.

The Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin today warning that there is a “heightened threat environment” for violent attacks in the U.S. as we head into the 2024 election cycle.

Department officials specifically warned that “perceptions of the 2024 general election cycle” and “legislative or judicial decisions pertaining to sociopolitical issues” could be mobilizing issues for those wishing to carry out acts of violence. It also specifically warns of the potential for attacks on “individuals or events associated with the LGBTQIA+ community.”