“The guy with the gun in his hand. Is he going to shoot the old lady and the little kid?” Stewart Rhodes says he founded Oath Keepers to ensure that the answer would be no.

Oath Keepers reaches out to active duty military and law enforcement personnel with the message that they should and must refuse unlawful, unconstitutional orders, such as to shoot innocent children or throw ordinary Americans into concentration camps.

At this year’s New Hampshire Liberty Forum, Rhodes spoke about the parallel legal system now evolving in the United States as part of the so-called war on terror, and notes that under Bush administration policies which Obama is continuing and even expanding, ordinary Americans might be detained forever or even shot on sight if the government merely asserts, without ever having to prove, that such people had ever committed any crime.

The latest anti-terrorism legislation “makes no distinction between here and there, and citizen and non-citizen,” he said.

“The infrastructure is being put in place that is directly parallel to what’s been done in Stalinist Russia, in Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Communist China, you name it. The Star Chamber back in English history.”

The problem is not how many people are abused through such a system, Rhodes says, but the structure of the system itself.

“The Nazis had a two-tier legal track also. There was normal procedure for a criminal defendant, and then there was the track for the political criminals, enemies of the state. . . . We now have a two-track system in this country. So far, only two citizens have been taken down the railroad, in the box car, down that train track, but I am not going to wait until it’s 200 or 2,000 or 200,000. I’m going to oppose it right now.”

The New Hampshire Liberty Forum is an annual conference held by the Free State Project, a movement to bring 20,000 activists to New Hampshire to work toward reducing the size, scope and power of government and increasing individual liberty and responsibility. The project has signed over 10,000 participants, and over 800 have already moved. The Liberty Forum, and the project’s summer camping event, PorcFest, allow people undecided about the project to see the state firsthand and observe and participate in local activism.