Two Mass. politicians named in Oath Keepers’ membership lists

Updated Sept. 10 at 11:14 a.m.

A candidate looking to retake his post as a Barnstable County Commissioner and a Wilbraham Republican Town Committee member were included on the Oath Keepers’ membership database, a far-right paramilitary group that rioted at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 last year.

Republican candidate Ron Beaty of Barnstable and Committeeman David A. Sanders of Wilbraham were both included on an Oath Keeper membership list obtained by the nonprofit journalist collective Distributed Denial of Secrets. According to DDoSecrets, the list includes people who signed up and paid dues to the organization, which was then analyzed state by state by the antisemitism-focused civil rights watchdog group Anti-Defamation League.

Of the 38,000 people named on the lists are active members of the U.S. military, police, and sheriffs’ departments, first responders and elected officials. There are 550 who are in Massachusetts, though most have not been identified publicly. The ADL told GBH News that it is not revealing the names of individual law enforcement officers or members of the military “as this report is not meant to dox rank-and-file personnel.”

Beaty did not respond to multiple requests for comment. GBH News also contacted a New Hampshire state representative who has defended Beaty in the past and continues to, but he said he no longer speaks with mainstream media.

Calls and an email to Sanders in Wilbraham also went unanswered. Sanders told CommonWealth Magazine he believes he was included in the database after swearing an oath to protect the United States during a rally he attended in Washington, D.C., run by former Fox News host Glenn Beck’s 9-12 Project, affiliated with the conservative Tea Party movement. But Sanders did not disavow the Oath Keepers, telling reporter Shira Schoenberg, “As always, there’s good and bad in any group. Some people that go off the rails. I resent the people that try and portray me as a bad guy all the time.”

The Oath Keepers view themselves as defenders of the U.S. Constitution, but organizations that monitor right-wing extremists say the group is a dangerous militia. The Southern Poverty Law Center describes it as “one of the largest far-right antigovernment groups in the U.S. today” whose members “have participated in multiple armed standoffs against the government.”

The group is at the center of a Department of Justice investigation into the Jan. 6 attack, with leader Stewart Rhodes awaiting trial on a charge of seditious conspiracy for his role in the Capitol riots.

An ADL spokesman said its staff is in touch with each law enforcement agency impacted by the report and is working with them to help weed out “extremism within their ranks.” The ADL has noted a significant escalation in rhetoric and acts of intimidation against Jewish, Black, transgender, gay and Islamic residents of Massachusetts in recent years.

Beaty has had his own run-ins with law enforcement and has publicly courted controversy.

In the early 1990s, Beaty served time in a federal prison in Texas for threatening to kill President George H.W. Bush, Sen. Edward Kennedy and Mass. state Sen. Lois Pines, which he discussed in a 2014 interview with the Boston Globe.

But some voters overlooked Beaty’s controversial past and elected him as a commissioner in 2016, where he served for four years before being ousted.

In a lead-up to primary elections in 2020, the Cape Cod Chronicle asked its readers to vote out Beaty, citing a flurry of homophobic and misogynistic social media posts he had made. The Chronicle also cited a comment by Beaty about Black Lives Matter describing the movement as “a scumbag Marxist terror organization that instigates violent riots and looting.”

Cape Cod NAACP board member Morgan Peters told GBH News he is not surprised that Beaty’s name turned up on the Oath Keepers’ membership list.

“Beaty is somebody with a firm white supremacist agenda who has been trying to get into the politics of Cape Cod for quite some time, the Barnstable County political scene,” Peters said in an interview. “And the issue of him being an Oath Keeper is just sort of like confirmation of what he's already made known to the populace in terms of his point of view, his agenda and his political stance. So that he's a member of the Oath Keepers is really of no surprise. In fact, it would almost be expected.”

The only Republican on the primary ballot, Beaty advanced Tuesday to take back his job as a Barnstable County Commissioner. He will face incumbent Democrat Ronald Bergstrom in November.

Correction: This article was updated to reflect that multiple people are elected to the Barnstable County Commission.