13
Epilogue

Oklahoma City and the Rise of the Militias

Earlier chapters have described a subculture steeped in exotic religious beliefs, deviant politics, and racial and ethnic stereotypes—a world whose beliefs and agenda seemed totally divorced from that inhabited by most Americans. Despite occasional news coverage of groups such as the Order, until recently few Americans were more than dimly aware of the radical right, the larger subculture in which Christian Identity is embedded. That changed with dramatic suddenness in the spring of 1995 with the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. Not since the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, Jr., in the 1960s had a domestic crisis evoked such a sense of national shock or elicited such saturation coverage by the media.

As the investigation of the bombing expanded through right-wing circles during April and May, a once-invisible milieu became the subject of countless news reports and daily conversations, revealing a world of apocalyptic fears, baroque plots, and paramilitary organizations. This chapter explores the bombing’s implications for, and possible connections with, Christian Identity, focusing on the radical right’s obsession with the destruction of the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, Texas, the spread of ideas about a New World Order conspiracy, the execution of Identity believer Richard Wayne Snell on the day the Oklahoma City bombing occurred, and the explosive growth of the militias.

Christian Identity, as we have seen, has had two basic organizational characteristics. The first is a capacity for rapid ideological and tactical mutation, which flows from its fragmented and decentralized structure. The second is Identity’s ability to blend with other elements of the radical right, from secular racists to neo-Nazis and Klan members. Developments in the 1990s have confirmed these predispositions, as Identity has become a leading force in building broad antigovern-ment coalitions. These alliances, which might once have operated in a clandestine netherworld, now increasingly seek to shed their stigma and function as open political forces.

The Bombing

On Wednesday, April 19, 1995, a bomb detonated in a truck parked near the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, destroying most of the building and killing 168 people, including 15 children. It was the most destructive terrorist attack ever committed on American soil. In keeping with prevailing stereotypes, initial suspicion fell on persons or groups from the Middle East, and a Jordanian-American was briefly held for questioning. By Friday, however, foreign connections had been rejected, as agents arrested Timothy McVeigh and, a short time later, McVeigh’s friend, Terry L. Nichols. Both were indicted on August 10. Suspicion also fell on several of their relatives and acquaintances and on an as-yet-unidentified individual (referred to by law-enforcement agencies as “John Doe #2”), but by the end of the year, only McVeigh and Nichols faced trial.¹

McVeigh and Nichols are alleged to have acted without the knowledge or sponsorship of any organization. However, the possibility of connections with other individuals on the radical right has been a recurring motif in the case. Early in 1996, for example, Stephen Jones, a lawyer for Timothy McVeigh, was reported to be investigating right-wing activists in Great Britain, on the theory that extremists in England, and possibly in Germany as well, had conspired with Americans to build the Oklahoma City bomb. At this writing, Jones’s theory remains unconfirmed. What is clear is that through the spring of 1995, investigators and journalists established a pattern of associations linking the suspects to radical right-wing organizations, activities, and literature. Michigan Militia literature was reportedly found on the farm of Terry Nichols and his brother James, both of whom were apparently ejected from a Michigan Militia meeting for “hyperbolic language.” McVeigh was seen at a militia meeting early in 1995. In 1993, McVeigh had tried to sell military equipment by placing ads in the Liberty Lobby newspaper, The Spotlight. Those who had known McVeigh in the army remembered his fondness for The Turner Diaries. While on one level McVeigh and Nichols emerge as loners operating outside any conventional organizational framework, on another level they appear to have moved continuously through a pervasive right-wing subculture, a world of paramilitary groups and gun shows, underground literature and videotapes, post office boxes and mail drops.²

Most Americans never knew that such a world existed. After McVeigh’s arrest on April 21, saturation media coverage of the radical right described a kind of alternative reality. Suddenly exposed to national notoriety were the previously invisible militias, a conspiratorial worldview built around fears of a sinister New World Order, and a literature in which more often than not the enemy was the U.S. government. At the same time, developments in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing cast new light on two earlier events, the siege at the Ruby Ridge, Idaho, cabin of Randy Weaver and his family in 1992 and the standoff at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, the following year (both discussed at the end of chapter 11). One thread connecting the events was the violence that can erupt between self-identified outsiders and the government. Another was the fact that outsiders on the right themselves saw a pattern in events. It was apparently no coincidence that both the fire at Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing took place on April 19.

Thus the hermetic right-wing subculture suddenly entered mainstream consciousness. It did so in the context of a collective national trauma, an event that unsettled conventional ideas about social and political order as much as did the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the assassinations of the 1960s. Inevitably, Christian Identity organizations and personalities were involved, for by 1995, Identity so pervaded the radical right that even though McVeigh and Nichols do not appear to have been believers, they moved through much the same world as did believers.

The “New World Order” Conspiracy

Central to the worldview of the militias and those in their orbit is belief in a “New World Order” (NWO) conspiracy. Although the phrase “New World Order” swept right-wing circles in the early 1990s, it predates that period by at least a decade. The same term, as a catch-phrase for “One World Government” under “the All Seeing Eye of Lucifer,” appeared in a 1981 publication of the Christian Identity commune, the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord (discussed in chapters 9 and 10). When George Bush talked about a “New World Order” at the time of the Gulf War, he meant only to suggest a newly revived system of collective security. Those on the right, however, saw such talk as confirmation of their worst fears: this child of “the establish- ment” was “going public” about the conspiracy’s secret plans for world domination. To many fundamentalists —preeminently Pat Robertson —the New World Order resonated with apocalyptic expectations of the Antichrist’s world dictatorship that will mark the Tribulation.³

The most common version of NWO theory contains the following elements. At the heart of the new order lies an unscrupulous secret organization of immensely wealthy men. They are often identified with the mysterious order of Illuminati, a demonic presence previously drawn from the cultic milieu by Christian Identity and some of its British-Israel precursors. The New World Order itself refers to the conspiracy’s plan for world domination, which it intends to implement through its control of the United Nations. According to NWO theorists, the conspiracy’s plans are already well advanced. Hundreds of thousands of foreign troops are allegedly stationed in the United States. New and sinister law-enforcement organizations, often believed to incorporate urban youth gangs, have been established. Gun owners and other “patriots” will soon face massive repression, including incarceration in a vast network of concentration camps being built by FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The symbol of these malevolent designs is the ubiquitous black helicopter, which is believed to be the conspiracy’s favored means of transport and surveillance.⁴

NWO conspiratorialists claim extraordinary certainty. Their literature is filled with names, dates, and places—the location of every concentration camp and the size and armament of every foreign military detachment. This is, as Richard Hofstadter noted in his famous essay on the “paranoid political style,” a genre of pseudo-scholarship in which “the very fantastic character of conclusions leads to heroic strivings for ‘evidence’ to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed.”

In its secular versions, NWO theory focuses on a cabal of the super-rich whose uncontrollable greed feeds a drive for world domination. In religious versions, the New World Order is the reign of Antichrist, fulfilling End-time prophecy. In both versions, the American constitutional system will be an early casualty, for the conspiracy must quickly dismantle republican government in order to exercise the control it seeks. Hence, as we shall see, NWO theory becomes a principal justification for paramilitary organization, necessary for repelling the invader in order to safeguard American institutions. This is in many respects a variation on Identity’s idea of the “Great Conspiracy,” save that in this version anti-Semitic themes have been suppressed —a mutation we will examine presently. Those who favor religious interpretations of the New World Order concentrate most of their attention on the enigmatic passage in Revelation 13 concerning “the mark of the beast”: “And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: and that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.” NWO speculation about the mark has extended in two directions: it is viewed both as a total means of surveillance and control, not merely as a means of regulating economic activity, and as a prophecy about the role microelectronics will play in the End-times. The latter has led to elaborate discussions of how microchips could be implanted under the skin, simultaneously fulfilling prophecy and giving the Antichrist conspiracy the means of exercising dictatorial control. One Michigan-based right-wing periodical claims that in the 1970s computer scientists began working on a microchip small enough to be implanted with a hypodermic needle in order to fulfill the requirements of Revelation 13.⁵

These concerns may well have had an impact on Timothy McVeigh. A few days after McVeigh’s arrest, Philip Morawski, an acquaintance of McVeigh and the Nichols brothers, told a reporter: “He [McVeigh] had this real sharp pain in his rear. He thought they had planted one of those chips that they have for identifying cattle, sheep or goats so the all-seeing eye of the government could keep an eye on him and know where he was.” This story soon took on a life of its own. By the time it reappeared in the Chicago Tribune three weeks later, the chip had been “injected.” Those on the radical right were quick to seize on the story. Linda Thompson, whose antigovernment videotapes about Waco will be discussed below, thought that the aim was to turn McVeigh into a “Manchurian Candidate,” a “brainwashed” or programmed assassin. Jack Oliphant, who had been associated with the paramilitary Arizona Patriots, told a reporter that “the government did plant that microchip in McVeigh’s butt. They can control behavior through that, you know.”⁶

All of these motifs —concentration camps, black helicopters, implanted microchips—are connected by the idea of forces that are at once immensely powerful and skilled in the arts of concealment and dissimulation —a hidden “they,” one step away from conquest of the United States, whether the purpose of their conquest is to enrich an evil plutocracy or to bring Satan’s triumph closer. It is scarcely surprising that some of those surrounded by these messages of menace and danger would try to strike first.

Why Oklahoma City?

One of the most puzzling aspects of the April 19 bombing was its location. Why Oklahoma City? As many pointed out at the time, its very location magnified the horror, for if a relatively small and typical “heartland” city could experience such violence, where could one be safe? The bombing of the World Trade Center in Manhattan was less traumatic, not only because of the far lower loss of life, but because for many people New York was already perceived as a place of danger and sudden violence.

Many theories have developed to explain the choice of Oklahoma City: that it was chosen randomly, that it was close to Timothy McVeigh’s old army post(Fort Riley, Kansas), that it was near Waco. But in some of the conspiracy literature itself, Oklahoma City was not just another small metropolitan area. It was, rather, one of the nodal points in the New World Order plot.

In the 1970s, William Pabst, one of the early writers on alleged government concentration camps, singled out Oklahoma City. Pabst claimed there were only four such campsites (later writers would suggest over a hundred), but one of the four was said to be thirty miles from Oklahoma City. At the time, Pabst thought the camps would be run by the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, but by 1990, FEMA was the consensus candidate among NWO conspiratorialists. In the early 1990s, Oklahoma City was given even greater prominence by Mark Koernke, the University of Michigan custodial employee whose shortwave radio broadcasts and videotapes had large followings in militia circles. Koernke announced that all “patriots” detained west of the Mississippi would be processed in Oklahoma City. A similar idea appeared in Jim Keith’s 1994 book, Black Helicopters over America, one of the most widely read statements of NWO theory: “There are confirmed reports that… a huge FEMA prisoner transfer terminal is being constructed in Oklahoma City.” In 1995, the year of the bombing, the Michigan-based American Freedom Network added that Oklahoma City was the site of one of four enormous crematoria, able to incinerate three thousand corpses a day in a ten-story facility over whose entrance gates there is “the New World Order symbol, the all-seeing Satanic eye above a pyramid.”⁷

A plan to blow up the Oklahoma City federal building had apparently been discussed more than a decade before. The plot was allegedly revealed by James Ellison, the leader of the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord, in conversations with Steven N. Snyder, a prosecutor at the Fort Smith sedition trial (discussed in chapter 11). Snyder recalled that Ellison described a 1983 plot centered on the federal building. According to Snyder, Ellison de- scribed discussions that were said to have taken place in 1983 in Hayden Lake, Idaho, site of the Aryan Nations compound. Angered by news of Gordon Kahl’s death (see chapter 10), Ellison and a group of rightists met to plan a strike against the government. In Snyder’s recollections, Ellison attributed the choice of an Oklahoma City target to Richard Wayne Snell. Snell, whose life and Identity associations will be discussed in detail below, was executed for murder the day the Oklahoma City bombing occurred, April 19, 1995.

The 1983 plot apparently went no further than an examination of the building and the sketching out of placements for rocket launchers that could be used against it. As Snyder recalled twelve years later:

There is no evidence that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols had any direct contact with persons involved in the alleged 1983 plot or any knowledge of it. Nor is there clear evidence concerning Snell’s reasons for choosing Oklahoma City. Although his difficulties with the IRS may have been the principal reason, the independent appearance of Oklahoma City in later conspiracy theories suggests that it was emerging in right-wing thought as an important locus of the New World Order.⁸

The Bombing and Waco

The Oklahoma City bombing occurred on the second anniversary of the fire that destroyed the Branch Davidian compound, Mount Carmel, outside Waco, Texas. That the relationship between the two events was not coincidental is strongly suggested by two facts: first, Timothy McVeigh visited the ruins of Mount Carmel a few months after the fire and made no secret of his anger at the government; second, he allegedly rented the truck linked to the bombing with a forged driver’s license whose date of issue was.”4-19-93. “McVeigh’s fixation with Waco was, however, more than a personal idiosyncrasy. It was the reflection of a belief widespread in antigovernment circles that actions against the Branch Davidians were part of a larger plan directed at unpopular religious and political causes.⁹

On the face of it, the right’s appropriation of the Branch Davidians’ suffering as part of their own struggle appears implausible. The multiracial Davidians shared neither the religious beliefs of Christian Identity nor the political agenda of the radical right. Nonetheless, almost immediately after the end of the episode in April 1993, the radical right began to claim the Mount Carmel community as its own. In their eyes, the victims of the fire were martyrs to the same cause, their deaths indisputable evidence of the federal government’s ruthlessness.

While this was in part an opportunistic exploitation of the misery of others, it was also fed by the issue of gun control. The proximate cause of the original raid on the Branch Davidians by agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms was the community’s alleged violation of federal firearms laws. NWO conspiracy theory asserts that to seize power, the conspiracy must disarm the American population; hence, to believers, any vigorous enforcement of firearms regulations is prima facie evidence that the New World Order is on the march.

Months after the raid, The Spotlight, the most widely circulated right-wing periodical, continued to devote double-page spreads to Waco. And even after attacks on the government died out in right-wing print media, some on the right continued to champion the Branch Davidians’ cause through video-cassettes. The most influential of the Waco cassettes were two issued by the Indianapolis-based American Justice Federation, Waco: The Big Lie and Waco II: The Big Lie Continues. Among other charges, the tapes asserted that some ATF agents at Waco had actually been executed by the government, that tanks penetrating the compound were equipped with flamethrowers, and that survivors of the fire were shot as they tried to escape.¹⁰

The American Justice Federation is headed by attorney Linda Thompson, who had been at Mount Carmel during the standoff. On March 18, 1993, she sought unsuccessfully to enter the compound. On April 4, she asked “the ‘Unorganized Militia of the United States’ to come to Waco with their (legal) weapons to demonstrate and show support for Koresh.” Thompson claims to be “Acting Adjutant General” of the “Unorganized Militia.” She called for a militia march on Washington to take place on September 19, 1994, to seek repeal of the Fourteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Amendments, the Brady Law, and the North American Free Trade Agreement. When support for the march failed to materialize, she canceled it. Thompson’s attack on the government’s Waco policy blends into a broader New World Order conspirato-rialism. Her Waco II tape acknowledges the assistance of Mark Koernke, a major conspiracy theorist, and she claims that the Waco raid was related to “reported citings [sic] of UN tanks going into Portland, Oregon.”¹¹

It was scarcely surprising, therefore, that Thompson saw the Oklahoma City bombing in conspiratorial terms. The truck blast was a decoy “probably” arranged by the FBI to hide the real explosions. “We have a seismo-graphic report from the University of Oklahoma that shows there were two distinct blasts.” She noted on April 19 that FBI Special Agent Bob Ricks, who handled press briefings during Waco, was based in Oklahoma City. “My guess on this is it could be: (1) CIA, tired of waiting on the concerned citizens; (2) ADL/FBI in order to blame it on ‘Militia’” For Thompson and others, what happened in Waco and Oklahoma City were not isolated events; they were parts of a pattern in which nothing was as it seemed.¹²

So thoroughly did the radical right co-opt the Branch Davidians’ cause that one publication, Criminal Politics, insinuated that the Davidians were actually part of Christian Identity, contending that “they … believe that the Anglo-Saxons are the true Israelites.” One Davidian, the article claimed, “believes that the 10 ‘lost’ tribes of Israel in ancient times migrated over the Caucasus Mountains and into Europe, and the present day Jews are not true Israelites.” This clearly shows elements of the Khazar hypothesis, discussed in chapter 7. In fact, of course, it has nothing whatever to do with the actual Branch Davidians, who were free of anti-Semitism and considered the founding of the state of Israel to be the fulfillment of prophecy. It may, however, dimly reflect the fact that in the mid-1970s, the then-leader of the community, Ben Roden, ruled that the observance of biblical festivals, such as Passover, was required of the Branch Davidians —a practice that is also common in Christian Identity.¹³

Ironically, the most dramatic manifestation of right-wing concerns with the Waco episode was scheduled to occur on April 19, 1995—the day of the Oklahoma City bombing. Morning and afternoon ceremonies were scheduled to take place that day on the now-desolate site of the compound. The speakers announced for the morning remembrance ceremony and the afternoon memorial service were a mixed group. They included a former attorney general, Ramsey Clark, as well as lawyers, journalists, and academics, all critics of the government’s actions two years before. But mixed in among them were two other figures of a quite different sort: Ralph Turner, spokesperson for the North Texas Constitutional Militia, and James “Bo” Gritz, whose Christian Identity associations and leadership role on the radical right are noted in chapter 10. The militia placed a stone marker on the site, dedi- cated to “a church and its members… [who] came under attack by ATF and FBI agents.”¹⁴

The Death of Richard Wayne Snell

The radical right has appropriated the Branch Davidian victims as its own. They are among its martyrs, the honored dead who must be avenged, if only because they had the same putative enemies, the federal government, the faceless NWO conspiracy, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and other assorted fronts for plots and cabals. But if the Branch Davidians are the most frequently honored of the martyrs, commemorated even on Timothy McVeigh’s forged driver’s license, they are by no means the only ones. Another also linked to April 19 is Richard Wayne Snell, whose execution for murder occurred on the day of the bombing. A London press report, attributed to McVeigh’s defense team, suggested that the bombing was in fact timed to coincide with Snell’s execution, although no confirmation of this has yet been offered. Snell’s attorneys sought a stay of execution as late as the day of the bombing, but Snell’s appearance at an April 10 clemency board hearing had made execution virtually inevitable, since he quoted Rudolph Hess and said he “probably” would shoot an Arkansas state trooper again if the circumstances of his original crime were repeated. Snell had been sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for the killing of Trooper Lewis Bryant, who was black, and sentenced to death for the murder of a pawnbroker, Bill Stump, whom he erroneously believed to be Jewish. According to his wife, Mary Snell, the conflict with Bryant began when Snell “reprimanded” Bryant for “harassment of white women.”¹⁵

Snell’s impending execution was well known in right-wing circles. Mary Snell secured the support of the Militia of Montana in a letter-writing campaign directed at Governor Jim Guy Tucker of Arkansas in advance of the clemency hearing. The militia’s newsletter, Taking Aim—which was reproduced on Snell’s own copying machine, donated to the militia by his wife — gave prominent coverage to the case as early as December 1994 under the headline, “AN AMERICAN PATRIOT TO BE EXECUTED BY THE BEAST.” In March 1995, Taking Aim reprinted a lengthy letter from Snell that tied his coming execution to a long series of Arkansas scandals allegedly connected with Bill Clinton, in which twenty-five victims were said to have met strange deaths. Indeed, he claimed to have evidence of twelve more such deaths. Snell was to die, according to the Militia of Montana, because he “was and still is heavily involved in exposing Clinton for his trail of blood to the White House.”¹⁶

Whether the accused Oklahoma City bombers timed the blast to coincide with Snell’s execution is not known at this time, but it is highly unlikely that anyone familiar with radical right-wing literature would have been unaware that the execution would take place sometime shortly after April 10, 1995. Even if revenge for Snell’s death was not a motive for the bombing, his execution is important for three reasons. First, the juxtaposition of his death with the bombing and the Waco anniversary strongly reinforces the significance of the date in right-wing circles. Second, Snell maintained a complex series of links among Christian Identity figures. Third, one of those Christian Identity connections may have drawn the attention of Timothy McVeigh in the weeks before the bombing.

Richard Wayne Snell was associated with three Christian Identity organizations, the first two of which figured prominently in preceding chapters: the Christian-Patriots Defense League, founded by John Harrell; the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord, led by James Ellison; and the Oklahoma-based Christian Identity communal settlement, Elohim City, led by Robert Millar. At various times, Snell also maintained ties with Gordon Kahl and Gordon “Jack” Mohr. Between November 1983 and June 1984—just as the Order was becoming active in the West—Snell, besides committing two murders, was involved in unsuccessful attempts to bomb a natural gas pipeline and an electricity transmission tower. In these activities, he was acting out the imagery of the war between “Aryan Israel” and its enemies that suffused Identity teaching.¹⁷

Snell was born in 1930, the son of a Church of the Nazarene preacher. He followed his father’s calling, but eventually he left organized religion, “disillusioned with what he saw in the church and became an avowed atheist.” After a period of increasing opposition to the IRS, he discovered Identity at a 1981 meeting of the Christian-Patriots Defense League. His Identity views remained unmellowed by his time on death row. “The Jew,” he wrote, “then and is endeavoring now to steal the birthright of true Israel. And it appears they have succeeded to the extent of stealing our wealth and our nation, and we have swallowed the lie of the Jew being ‘the chosen.’”¹⁸ Snell was still a member of the CPDL at the time of one of his trials, in October 1984. The “Minister of Defense” of the CPDL, Jack Mohr, a late convert to Identity, testified on Snell’s behalf: “I met him at a meeting of the Christian and Patriot Defense League … and we became quite well acquainted. We saw each other, I guess, on about a yearly basis, but corresponded back and forth and he also supported me off and on with contributions towards my work which is called ‘Crusade for Christ and Country’ which is a patriotic/Christian en- deavor.” At some point in the early 1980s, Snell also became a member of James Ellison’s Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord. Mary Snell testified that she herself was not an active member of CSA, but acknowledged that she had visited the group’s compound, Zarephath-Horeb, and received an award there.¹⁹

The fate of Gordon Kahl was closely intertwined with that of Snell. Kahl, it will be remembered, was the Posse Comitatus member who, after killing two federal marshals in North Dakota, was finally found and killed by law-enforcement authorities in Arkansas. Kahl’s death was a catalytic event for Snell, as it was for many on the radical right. Snell was apparently a courier aiding Kahl while the latter was in hiding in Arkansas, or so his wife’s testimony suggests:

Q: Is your husband a member of the Posse Comitatus?

A: No, sir.

Q: But he was a courier for Gordon Kahl, wasn’t he?

A: For the people who were involved with Gordon Kahl, I believe, rather than —

Q: For him personally? Okay.

A: As I understood.

Kahl’s death led Snell “to fear for his life because he felt he was in the same category as Gordon Kahl.” The feeling that Kahl’s fate awaited him too also appeared in conversations Snell had with Mohr and with another Christian Identity minister, Robert Millar. Yet Kahl’s death in June 1983 did not lead Snell to renounce violence; rather, it was the prelude to his own war. As he told Mohr, he believed he himself “would be dead in a few weeks.”²⁰

Movement Martyrology

Two alternative movement martyrologies have developed on the radical right. The first is linked to a date, April 19, and includes as signs of martyr status not only sacrificial deaths or suffering but also acts of resistance. The second is only partially linked to a date and remains fixed on acts of alleged martyrdom, regardless of when they occurred.

The date of April 19 became talismanic for the movement in large part because of the fire at the Branch Davidian compound, but there is evidence that a movement numerology, associating many events with the same date, did not begin until Snell’s execution date was set. As the Militia of Montana’s newsletter put it:

In other words, the linking of Snell’s execution with the Branch Davidian fire, treating April 19 as a sacred date, began before, not after, the Oklahoma City bombing. Subsequently, still other April 19 events were added. The Texas Militia seeks to associate the date with the battle of San Jacinto, April 21, 1836. Militia members and sympathizers are seeking formal recognition of April 19 as “Militia Day,” celebrating the Second Amendment. “Martyrs,” the Texas Militia believes, “will serve the Movement better than victors.”²¹

The alternative martyrology devotes less attention to a single date and more to personalities. This fixation on a line of heroic dead began in the mid-1980s with the deaths of Kahl and Robert Mathews. As a member of Aryan Nations rhapsodized about Mathews, “What greater Honor than to have been among the first to have died in the Final Battle.” Randy Weaver’s family entered the same line as a result of the death of his wife and son at Ruby Ridge in 1992. In response to Ruby Ridge, the Identity pastor Pete Peters convened a meeting of Identity and non-Identity movement figures in October 1992 at Estes Park, Colorado. In an “Open Letter to the Weaver Family,” the group sounded the notes of martyrdom: “Impelled by the spirit of our HEAVENLY FATHER, and hearing the cry of innocent blood shed in the land, WE, 160 Christian men assembled for three days of prayer and counsel…. We are determined to employ HIS strength and to work continually to insure that Vickie and Samuel’s mortal sacrifices were not in vain.” The Branch Davidians, according to this martyrology, fall into a line defined not by date but by person and cause: from Kahl, to Mathews, to the Weavers, to Waco.²²

Those who died in the Oklahoma City bombing cannot be readily incorporated in either martyrology, whether by concentrating on the date or the cause. Yet that has not prevented rightists from seeking to appropriate them for their cause, principally by insinuating that the government, not the defendants, bears responsibility for the blast. In conspiratorialism’s world of mirrors, where appearances mean nothing, such inversions are common- place. In the case of Oklahoma City, a bewildering variety of alternative explanations has emerged to either exculpate McVeigh and Nichols, reduce their bomb to a decoy, or make them tools of a government-sponsored conspiracy. Some versions of events claim that there were multiple blasts; others that McVeigh was a dupe (conspiratorialists frequently invoke the example of the Reichstag fire); and still others that McVeigh and Nichols were one of a much larger band of plotters who operated with government connivance. The consequences of these theories are threefold. First, by holding McVeigh and Nichols guiltless or making them little more than tools, conspiratorialists remove their right-wing associations as a factor in their alleged guilt. Indeed, so the right-wing argument goes, they were specially selected so that their associations would provide the pretext for suppression of “patriots.” Second, if a government conspiracy is responsible, then the Oklahoma City victims can be assimilated in the larger category of movement martyrs, co-opted in death like the Branch Davidians. Finally, the bombing-as-government-conspiracy explanation reinforces April 19 as a sacred date, when the forces of darkness again attacked the forces of light.²³

Timothy McVeigh and Christian Identity: A Connection?

In the dogged media pursuit of Timothy McVeigh’s past, only a single link has been found connecting him with Christian Identity, but it is an odd and tantalizing link, for it also connects him indirectly to Richard Wayne Snell. On April 5, 1995 —exactly two weeks before the bombing—Timothy McVeigh is reported to have made two telephone calls to Elohim City, a Christian Identity communal settlement in eastern Oklahoma, near the Arkansas border. The leader of Elohim City, Robert G. Millar, claimed neither to have known McVeigh nor to have spoken to him: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him. I don’t think he’s ever been in any of my audiences to the best of my knowledge. He may have gotten our telephone number from someone if he used our telephone number, and if he phoned, nobody here has any knowledge of ever talking to him.” The calls were apparently brief and made to a telephone in a common room. It is impossible to determine whom McVeigh called or why, although, according to one report, he was attempting to reach a German national he knew who was then living at the commune. Nonetheless, one may speculate that his call might have been prompted by the pending execution of Richard Wayne Snell, to whom Robert Millar was closely linked.²⁴

Millar’s ministry developed from a visionary experience he is reported to have had in 1948, in his native Canada. He founded the Bethel Christian Church and School in Maryland in the late 1950s, moved to Oklahoma in 1972, and claims congregations in Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland. By 1985, sixty people were living in the Elohim City community. A reporter who visited ten years later found slightly less than a hundred there. Millar has continued to teach Identity doctrine: “I believe that the inheritors of the promises of the 12 tribes of Israel are primarily the Celtic tribes, the Germanic people and the Scandinavian people, not inclusively, and not exclusively, but primarily.”²⁵

At some point in the late 1970s or early 1980s, Millar began an association with James Ellison of the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord. In time, he became Ellison’s “spiritual advisor.” In 1982, after Ellison had declared himself a descendant of King David, Millar performed an anointing ceremony at Zarephath-Horeb. During the standoff with federal law-enforcement agents at Zarephath-Horeb in 1985, Ellison asked to see Millar, who was flown to the compound by the FBI. Millar served as an intermediary in the negotiations that led to an end to the standoff, including Ellison’s surrender, much as Bo Gritz was to do in the Ruby Ridge affair seven years later. Ellison later served a sentence on weapons and racketeering charges. On May 19, 1995, after his release from prison, he married Millar’s granddaughter.²⁶

It is scarcely surprising that, given his close association with Ellison, Millar would also come to know Richard Wayne Snell. As he testified at Snell’s trial, Millar met Snell in 1981 at “a gathering in southern Missouri of Christians and concerned citizens” where Millar spoke. The conversation begun there was sufficiently intense to continue “for a number of days.” Subsequently, Snell visited “one of our communities,” although which community is not clear. Snell also accompanied Millar on some of his speaking engagements and stayed with one of Millar’s sons in Oklahoma. “We had extensive sharing on a general basis and on a theological basis,” Millar reported, “and although it wasn’t formalized it seemed that I sort of in a sense became his pastor.” Millar, in other words, came to perform the same function of spiritual adviser for Snell that he had for Ellison. Millar was a frequent visitor to Snell’s death row cell, was present for his execution, and escorted Snell’s body to Elohim City for burial on April 20.²⁷

The residents of Elohim City live reclusive lives at the end of a six-mile dirt road. Unlike the congregation of Pete Peters, for example, this is not an Identity group known for its aggressive outreach activities. Nor is Timothy McVeigh known to have had prior contacts with Millar or any of the corn- munity’s residents. As a local Methodist minister put it, “I guess they pretty much keep to themselves.” The community is also a substantial drive from Oklahoma City. It seems unlikely, therefore, that McVeigh phoned Elohim City for some casual reason. It is far more likely that he either wished to reach a specific individual (in which case the brevity of the calls suggests that he failed) or to acquire a specific piece of information, perhaps concerning the fate of Richard Wayne Snell.²⁸

The Turner Diaries

Much has been made of the role The Turner Diaries may have played in the planning of the Oklahoma City bombing. In the first place, those who knew McVeigh in the army have emphasized his attachment to the book, arguably the single most widely read work on the radical right. In addition to McVeigh’s fondness for the book, observers were struck after April 19 by the similarity between the Oklahoma City bombing and an episode that occurs early in Turner’s narrative. As the first major act of violence in the racist revolution, Turner’s organization is assigned the task of blowing up the FBI building in Washington. Unable to secure the desired supply of TNT or a comparable explosive, the plotters build a device that is “a little under 5,000 pounds, and nearly all of that is ammonium nitrate fertilizer,” which was, of course, one of the main components of the Oklahoma City bomb. The fertilizer, mixed with heating oil, is then packed into a stolen delivery truck that the plotters drive into the building’s freight entrance.²⁹

William Pierce, the book’s author, was immediately placed on the defensive when the parallel became widely publicized. When reporters reached Pierce at the National Alliance compound near Hillsboro, West Virginia, he scoffed at the idea that his novel might have been the model: “It’s just ridiculous. This is a fictional account I wrote 18 years ago. Why should there be any similarities between a fictional account in a novel with this bombing in Oklahoma City? It’s really, really grasping…. You can go to any newsstand or drug store, find a dozen adventure novels, spy novels in which there are bombings of some sort or other.” A week later, however, Pierce decided to make a more extended statement, aired on a shortwave radio program used by the radical right. Pierce’s statement is notable for both what it includes and what it omits.³⁰

The statement, “OKC Bombing and America’s Future,” is remarkable for its failure to make any mention of The Turner Diaries, even by way of exculpating its author in the manner of Pierce’s earlier interview. Pierce’s state- ment is nevertheless worth examining, because his opinions are influential in both Identity and non-Identity circles. Pierce linked Oklahoma City with Waco in two ways, arguing, first, that those who died at Waco were no less victims than those who died in Oklahoma City and, second, that what happened at Waco too was an act of terrorism: “They [the government] did it simply because the Davidians were different. Their religion was odd.” In Pierce’s view, the bombing was a “desperate and foolish” act. Attempting to walk a narrow line between commentary and incitement, Pierce continually distinguished “disorganized terrorism,” such as the bombing in Oklahoma City, from “planned, organized terrorism,” presumably of the kind described in The Turner Diaries. He predicted an increasing amount of the disorganized variety by “exasperated, fed-up Americans” angered by nonwhite immigration, corrupt politicians, Jewish media, multiculturalism, and other assorted ills. But, he concluded, “Such disorganized terrorism, motivated by anger rather than by a plan, will never bring down the government.” To accomplish this aim, Pierce prescribes, rather than the risky advocacy of planned terrorism, an informational campaign to “help … people understand who America’s real enemies are, by helping them understand the underlying causes of terrorism, and by encouraging them to stand together in a united front against government terrorism.”³¹

For obvious legal reasons, Pierce has chosen not to develop the logic of The Turner Diaries in a public forum, preferring instead to characterize it as a mere work of fiction on a par with airport paperbacks. Yet his reiterated contrast between disorganized and futile terrorism, on the one hand, and planned, potentially effective terrorism, on the other, is of a piece with the Diaries. If only, Pierce appears to be saying, there were a cadre of disciplined and totally committed individuals, people like Earl Turner and his colleagues, anything would be possible, even the overthrow of the government, with a racist “utopia” to follow. But curiously absent both from Pierce’s statement and from his novel is the organization most closely associated in the public mind with the Oklahoma City bombing—the militias.

The Rise of Militias

Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were, at most, hangers-on of the militia, drifting occasionally into meetings. Yet despite their lack of formal militia ties, public awareness of the militias was perhaps the most dramatic byproduct of the bombing. Militias are locally based private armed groups that possess a command structure, engage in military training or exercises, and claim to fulfill essential public functions: protection of the community against “tyranny,” assertion of the right to bear arms, and defense of the Constitution. In seeking to fit the militias into the larger picture of radical right-wing activity, two preliminary observations are essential. First, the groups now called militias did not emerge from a vacuum. They are, rather, the latest manifestation of a long-standing right-wing paramilitary tendency. Second, as potential instruments of violence, the militias and militialike organizations are in a relationship of constant tension with a competing organizational model. The military model, with its mobilized cohorts and chain of command, competes with what might be described as an atomistic or cellular model, in which the means of violence are held by single individuals or very small coteries, independent of one another rather than nested within a larger, more complex structure.

The militias are the offspring of a tendency described in chapter 10 —“radical localism,” the belief that local governmental units, usually the county or township, are the most fundamental and legitimate units of government. Hence, they must take responsibility for their own defense. As David Bennett points out in his history of the American right, the militias, although creatures of the 1990s, have paramilitary antecedents that go back to armed anticommunist groups of the Cold War era, such as the Minutemen. The militias, however, focus not on invasion or foreign subversion, but on an enemy within, the government itself. In the post-Cold War era, with America’s most obvious external enemy defeated and in disintegration, a once-coherent world, with its clear and dramatic distinctions between good and evil, suddenly became much more complicated. Now, the world seems to be a muddled, confusing place, where—whether in Somalia, Haiti, or Bosnia — American national interests are often difficult to discern.³²

The theory of a New World Order reimposed a simple conflict between good and evil; but now evil lay within, in the form of a federal government bent on imposing tyranny upon its citizens. Where earlier examples of radical localism rested primarily upon constitutional theories that asserted the invalidity of larger governmental units, the militias add the belief, drawn from NWO theory, that localities are in imminent danger of attack from the national government. John Trochmann, head of the Militia of Montana, paints an apocalyptic picture:

The paramilitary groups that served as models for militias often had important Identity components. Among these was the Christian-Patriots Defense League, whose “Minister of Defense,” the Identity writer and evangelist Jack Mohr, was a comrade of Richard Wayne Snell, and the Posse Comitatus, the quintessential expression of radical localism, loose associations of armed county “posses.” Indeed, as we saw in chapter 10, a key figure in the posse movement was the Identity preacher William Potter Gale. In Gale’s thought, the Posse Comitatus often merged with the “Unorganized Militia.” At his trial on charges of tax resistance, Gale’s attorney described the Unorganized Militia as

The militias of the 1990s, therefore, constitute not so much a departure from as an extension of ideas that circulated widely in the Identity-radical right milieu in the two preceding decades.³⁴

The size of the militia movement is difficult to calculate with accuracy. The militia groups themselves have often made extravagant claims of their size. The Chemung Division of the Citizens Militia of Chemung County, New York, claims one thousand members; the Michigan Militia claims twelve thousand. Such figures cannot be tested, and no corroboration is provided. The best guess of those who monitor such groups is that there may be about fifteen thousand members nationally, divided into more than four hundred groups operating in all fifty states. Whatever their exact size, collectively the militias dwarf paramilitary organizations of earlier decades.³⁵

Militia Ideology

The militias claim to be organizations called into existence and legitimated by the Second Amendment, and whose function is to protect the American constitutional system from the prédations of the New World Order. The Michigan Militia, with which McVeigh and Nichols had at least passing contact, lists as its goals, besides providing military training, to “inform its members of local, national, and global events impelling [sic] the Constitution and impacting the direction of the country” and to “encourage its members to stand against tyranny, globalism, moral relativism, humanism, and the New World Order threatening to undermine our form of government and these United States of America.”³⁶

Like other conspiracy theories, NWO theory is a closed system. It resists falsification, because any fact or argument that might be advanced against it can be incorporated into the theory. Thus, allegedly contradictory evidence has been fabricated by the conspiracy, some opponents of the conspiracy may be dupes or confederates of the plotters, or the contradictory evidence is erroneous. Whichever option is chosen, the conspiracy theory itself is left intact. NWO theory is comparably nonfalsifiable. NWO forces, with their alleged wealth and political influence, are deemed to be in control of the media, academia, and many of the world’s governments. It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that so many people in militia circles were prepared to believe that McVeigh and Nichols either were not the bombers or had been set up to deflect attention from the “real” bombers, the NWO forces in the federal government who sought a pretext for suppressing “patriot” activity. The Spotlight claimed in August 1995 that the Pentagon, in collaboration with the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, had developed a plan to “decapitate” militias by seizing their leaders and instructors. In the process, a national emergency might be declared (a frequent component of NWO theory), along with the “virtual elimination” of the Second and Fourth Amendments.³⁷

Militias, consequently, exist in an atmosphere of continual fear of conspiracies and their agents. They are exemplars of what Richard Hofstadter three decades ago called “the paranoid political style.” While such individuals “tend to be overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression,” they see plots not as directed toward them personally, but as “directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects… millions of others.”³⁸

While militia ideology is often presented in secular terms, as a response to an Illuminatist-UN plot, there is also a significant religious dimension to its belief system. A 1994 militia field manual contains the usual constitutional arguments about gun ownership and popular sovereignty, but these are preceded by a theological chapter grounded in the Bible as “word-for-word the word of God.” On that basis, the field manual’s author asserts, “Jesus Christ was not a pacifist.” Furthermore, “since Jesus was not a pacifist, we cannot say that Christians renounced all armed conflict. And while force should be a last resort, it is sometimes necessary for self-defense and to resist tyranny…. [Jesus] gives authority to governments to maintain law and order, not to abuse citizens or to perpetrate evil.” When government officials engage in abuse or evil, they forfeit their authority, and they, not citizens who employ force against them, are the ones engaged in rebellion. The Michigan Militia calls the Bible “the greatest single guiding influence for all nations desiring to be free” and claims as one of its goals to “seek the protection, wisdom, and leadership of Almighty God as we submit to Him and to do His will in protecting the liberty and freedom He has given to all Americans.” As the Michigan Militia’s former leader, Norman Olson, put it: “Our God is not a wimp…. He’s the God of righteousness and wrath. Our way of looking at God and country is not passive Christianity.”³⁹

Given the militias’ conspiratorialism and religious undertone, it is not surprising that Christian Identity has been connected with them. E. Tom Stetson of Concerned Citizens of Idaho and Martin J. “Red” Beckman of Montana attended the 1992 Estes Park conference convened by Pete Peters. John Trochmann, co-founder of the Militia of Montana, spoke at the 1990 Aryan Nations Congress. Indeed, as we shall see, one consequence of the militia movement has been to provide Identity figures with new opportunities for recruitment and coalition-building. They can now present themselves not as religious sectarians but as pioneers in the struggle against the federal government.⁴⁰

The Roots of the Militias

As we have seen, the militias were in part modeled on older paramilitary organizations. But their sudden growth beginning around 1990 had different origins. Two factors seem particularly significant: the growth of antigovern-ment sentiment in the population at large and evidence of government misconduct at Ruby Ridge and Waco.

Surveys taken shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing reveal that although direct support for militias was low, a surprisingly large number of respondents held negative views of the government. A Washington Post-ABC News poll, taken between May 10 and 14—roughly three weeks after the bombing—found that only 2 percent of respondents said they strongly support militia groups, together with 11 percent who “support them somewhat.” While the tiny proportion of strong supporters is not surprising, the aggregate 13 percent expressing some degree of support signaled the existence of a larger pool of antigovernment sentiment, and indeed the existence of such a pool is clear in the findings of both the Washington Post-ABC survey and a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll, taken less than a week after the bombing.⁴¹

The latter survey asked respondents whether “the federal government has become so large and powerful it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.” Thirty-nine percent agreed with the statement, a finding that remained largely consistent across lines of gender, age, income, region, and political affiliation —although agreement was particularly strong among individuals who had not completed college, made less than $20,000 a year, and lived in rural areas. An almost identical question in the Washington Post-ABC News survey produced nearly the same results. Thirty-six percent of those surveyed claimed they feared the government as a threat to their “personal rights and freedoms.” Even though only 6 percent were willing to call the government an enemy, more than a third of respondents regarded it as a personal threat. Regardless of how this fear may have originated, it defines a sufficiently large mass of disaffected citizens to provide a significant reservoir for militia organizing.⁴²

If such free-floating antigovernment feeling has been one force driving the militias, a more specific goad to action can be found in government conduct at Ruby Ridge and Waco. Most Americans knew little about the incident at Ruby Ridge, which was not widely covered when it occurred in 1992, and the vast majority of Americans supported government actions taken against the Branch Davidians. However, there is persuasive circumstantial evidence that for the substantial minority who expressed fear of the government, the two incidents were taken as proof that their fears were well founded.

Rising hostility to the federal government was partially reflected in the extreme conservatism of newly elected members of the House of Representatives in 1994. In the period that followed the Oklahoma City bombing, this was manifested in renewed interest in government actions at Ruby Ridge and Waco, and both incidents were the subjects of well-publicized congressional hearings.

At the Ruby Ridge hearings in the fall of 1995, an FBI sharpshooter invoked the Fifth Amendment, while the bureau’s director, Louis J. Freeh, conceded that “at Ruby Ridge, the F.B.I, did not perform at the level which the American people expect or deserve from the F.B.I.” While public controversy centered on whether the Ruby Ridge deaths were the result of flawed rules of engagement, internal FBI investigations produced their own, less visible conflicts. The reports apparently dealt with both the events on the ground in Idaho in 1992 and the manner in which the subsequent internal investigation was conducted. Although neither report has been released, subsequent events suggest highly critical conclusions. Shortly before the beginning of Senate hearings, five FBI administrators were suspended, including a former deputy director. Their suspensions were based on the possibility that they had obstructed earlier investigations of the Weaver incident by destroying documents or providing false accounts. These cases have yet to be resolved. Four days after the suspensions were announced, the government agreed to pay $3.1 million to the Weaver family in settlement of a civil suit-tacit acknowledgment, perhaps, that an even larger judgment would have resulted if the case had gone to trial.⁴³

The impact of the Oklahoma City bombing on attitudes toward the Waco affair was more ambiguous, although here too a civil suit has been brought but remains pending. The high level of public support for government actions during the siege made it less likely that the Branch Davidians would be the recipients of belated sympathy. Nonetheless, government officials were compelled to restate their positions in widely covered congressional testimony. Little new information emerged, however, because the principals had already gone on record in earlier hearings, in internal Treasury and Justice Department inquiries (the reports of which had been made public), and in the criminal trials of surviving Davidians. Although the hearings were scheduled before the bombing, it is difficult to imagine that they would have been as widely noted in the absence of the bombing and the publicity it generated about the militia subculture. Clearly, those who convened and conducted the hearings did so knowing the symbolic importance Waco had assumed for the right generally and, by all accounts, for Timothy McVeigh personally; they knew as well that for a vocal right-wing constituency, whose perceptions had been shaped by Linda Thompson’s Waco videotapes and other antigov-ernment materials, the government’s conduct at Waco was a live and potent issue.⁴⁴

For the radical right, the renewed life breathed into these cases after April 19 had a double significance. On one level, it suggested a latent but tappable political force. If senators and representatives perceived these issues to be so significant that open hearings had to be held, then presumably the anti- government constituency was strong and important. As we shall see, this was one of a number of signs that the radical right’s sense of isolation from the political “mainstream” was breaking down and that a once-insular subculture was becoming linked to broader political tendencies. On another level, the seriousness with which charges of governmental misconduct at Ruby Ridge and Waco were taken at the highest legislative levels —indeed, the virtual admission of misconduct in the Weaver case—was taken by the right as validation of its own worldview. But, of course, this was not quite the case, for the radical right did not see the causes of misconduct as stupidity, ineptitude, or misjudgment. Instead, everything that was done was deemed to have been done intentionally, in fulfillment of a grand conspiratorial plan, the New World Order. Hence the lessons taken from Ruby Ridge and Waco might be quite different depending upon one’s perspective. Many not on the radical right who criticized government action in the harshest terms saw the outcomes at Waco and Ruby Ridge as institutional failures that could be addressed and solved. But NWO conspiratorialists criticized them as signs that a demonic plot was in progress to destroy American liberties.⁴⁵

“Leaderless Resistance”

Militias tread a fine line between radical localism and a hierarchical military model. They must maintain at least the semblance of a command structure, while simultaneously granting a significant measure of autonomy to local units. Placing too much emphasis on central control would destroy their claim that sovereignty resides in local communities. Completely sacrificing a command structure risks vitiating their claim to speak for the majority of Americans and makes a mockery of their claim to possess credible military force.

However, there is a significant number of people on the radical right who are profoundly suspicious of the military model —not for ideological reasons, but because they believe large, open organizations are too vulnerable to government penetration and suppression. Instead, they argue, violent opposition to the government and to racial traitors and inferiors must be undertaken by individuals or, at most, by very small groups without visible links to one another. The circumstances of the Oklahoma City bombing suggest that this view may have had more influence on McVeigh and Nichols, the alleged bombers, than the more widely publicized militia movement. The concept of individual and small unit violence has been most notably advanced in three works: William Pierce’s novel Hunter, Richard Kelly Hos- kins’s Vigilantes of Christendom, and Louis Beam’s influential essay, “Lead-erless Resistance.”

Although far less well known than The Turner Diaries, Hunter, published in 1989, presents an even more frightening scenario of America’s future. There, writing again under the pseudonym of Andrew MacDonald, Pierce presents the story of a single individual, Oscar Yeager, who undertakes a one-man war against Jews and nonwhites. Whereas “the Organization” in Turner resorted to open warfare, including the use of nuclear weapons, Yeager limits himself to bombings and assassinations. Hunter features yet another ammonium nitrate-fuel oil bomb packed in a delivery van. Yeager’s acts of violence achieve political impact through their coordination with the activities of a charismatic televangelist and a closet racist in the FBI. The message is clear: small-scale acts of violence can destabilize the government if the public’s racial consciousness is raised. Unlike The Turner Diaries, however, Hunter is openly contemptuous of Christian Identity. As one of Yeager’s associates puts it: “The reason they can’t recruit anyone but uneducated hicks is that their doctrine is crazy…. They have this completely nutty version of history, which no one who’s paid attention in his high school history class can believe.” (Curiously, Pierce’s anti-Identity diatribe has done nothing to diminish his influence in the movement.) Hunter placed Pierce in the forefront of those who reject organized, open armed struggle with the federal government in favor of difficult-to-trace acts of individual violence that might have a catalytic effect if the public mood is right. In retrospect, Hunter may be seen as one of the first systematic responses to the defeat of the Order (1985-86) and the Fort Smith sedition trial (1988). The federal government was too powerful; violence would work only outside a vulnerable organizational framework.⁴⁶

In 1990, a year after the publication of Hunter, Richard Kelly Hoskins published Vigilantes of Christendom. Hoskins, a Virginia-born racist in the mold of Lothrop Stoddard, believes that the “Nordic race” must struggle against the “Yellow Peril,” “the Khazar,” and “the hybrid Mexicans.” Vigilantes of Christendom purports to retell world history in terms of the exploits of “the Phineas Priesthood.” The name derives from an enigmatic reference in the 106th Psalm. The psalm, alluding to a plague that God sent against the rebellious Israelites in the wilderness, credits Phineas with “executing judgment” so that “the plague was stayed.” By extension, according to Hoskins, disease appears whenever “strangers seek … to force their way into Christian society,” bringing corruption and decay. Hoskins identifies a string of “Phineas Priests” through history who engage in acts of violent purification against “strangers” and “aliens.” They ranged from King Arthur and Robin Hood to the Klan and the SS.⁴⁷

When Hoskins reaches the contemporary period, his Christian Identity leanings become clear. He distinguishes between two types of Christians, “the Lawful and the Lawless. Those who believe and obey the Laws, Statutes, and Judgments, and those who don’t. Those who believe look to God as their governor. Those who don’t look for pronouncements from the ruling establishment for their cue as to what to believe…. The two are bitter opponents.” Lawful Christians “simply call themselves ‘Christian’ or ‘Christian Identity’ instead of Catholic, Baptist, Presbyterian, etc.” Hoskins points approvingly to Identity claims that biblical prophecies concerning Israel have been fulfilled by the history of Europeans. Hoskins never suggested that the “Phineas Priests” constituted a real organization, merely that God had commissioned individuals in different ages to use violence to preserve racial purity. Nonetheless, this metaphorical use of Phineas —a figure so obscure that many meanings could be read into him —might be understood by right-wing zealots to be a grant of divine authority for violent acts. Similarly, some law-enforcement personnel believed Hoskins might have been describing a previously unknown organization of right-wing assassins.⁴⁸

Pierce and Hoskins conjured up the same image almost simultaneously. In each image, single individuals or very small groups would engage in acts of violence engendered by a racist worldview. Pierce relied on an essentially secular conception of race as the moving force of history, while Hoskins sought to ground his tactical imperative in scriptural texts and the history of Christianity. What remained was to associate their atomistic style of violence with a strategic vision, a task that was to be accomplished by the Identity figure Louis Beam. Louis Beam, once a leader in the Texas Klan, became an Identity believer and was a defendant at the Fort Smith trial. His increasing involvement with Identity was reflected in his relocation from Texas to northern Idaho in 1993. His influential essay, “Leaderless Resistance,” was included in the report of Pete Peters’s 1992 Estes Park conference, following the shooting at Ruby Ridge.⁴⁹

Beam argued that antigovernment “resistance” organized along conventional hierarchical lines, with a command structure, was suicidal. Such an organization could too easily be penetrated and destroyed through infiltration and electronic surveillance. An alternative was the cellular model associated with Soviet communism, in which the destruction of a single cell left the rest of the organization intact. While Beam found this model attractive, he ultimately rejected it on the grounds that coordinated action by such cells required a degree of central direction and external resources that the movement could not afford. This led him, finally, to “leaderless resistance,” or “phantom cells.” These units, some as small as a single person, would have no central direction and no outside resources. “It becomes the responsibility of the individual to acquire the necessary skills and information.” Beam believed that central direction was unnecessary in any event, since “in any movement, all persons involved have the same general outlook, are acquainted with the same philosophy, and generally react to given situations in similar ways.” These uniform attitudes could be reinforced by alternative communications media, “allowing for a planned response that will take many variations.” From the government’s standpoint, Beam wrote, leaderless resistance would be an “intelligence nightmare.” While Beam’s essay carefully avoids any direct mention of violent acts, his use of the language of resistance, his emphasis on secrecy, and his invocation of the example of the Committees of Correspondence during the American Revolution make it clear that phantom cells are groups expected to engage in extralegal activity.⁵⁰

“Leaderless Resistance,” consequently, sought to provide a reasoned argument in favor of precisely the kind of individualized violence that had been described by William Pierce and Richard Kelly Hoskins. The attractions of such an approach were many: it promised security from government penetration; it evaded the embarrassing question of why the movement could not attract a mass following; and it implied that stealth and daring could accomplish what Robert Mathews and David Duke could not. By implication, however, leaderless resistance also stood in an ambiguous relationship to the militia movement. The militias sought to be large; they addressed the public directly; they claimed to be completely legal; and, despite the ideology of radical localism, they set great store by some kind of command structure. They had, in other words, all of the vulnerabilities Beam had associated with pyramidal organizations. If militias are the radical right’s public face, leaderless resistance by phantom cells is its hidden face. The uneasy coexistence of the two masks a certain dependence, for militias can become “feeder organizations” for leaderless resistance. Those who find militias too timid or constrained have somewhere else to go, an outlet for revolutionary millenar-ianism. One can speculate that the accused Oklahoma City bombers represented leaderless resistance as opposed to militia action, that Timothy McVeigh’s flirtation with the Michigan Militia drew him further into the movement, even as the militia’s relative restraint frustrated his urge for dramatic action —an urge that leaderless resistance encourages each individual to act upon.

Mainstreaming the Radical Right

As the radical right entered the 1990s, two new motifs became evident among some of its adherents: first, the claim that it was neither racist nor anti-Semitic and, second, the assertion that the extreme right, far from being radical, was in fact the carrier and guardian of mainstream American values.

Militia groups have been particularly keen on presenting themselves as free of racist or anti-Semitic taints. This is especially true of two of the most highly publicized groups, the Michigan Militia and the Militia of Montana. The Michigan Militia, for example, advances as one of its goals “to insure that all citizens regardless of race, color, religion, sex, physical characteristics or national origin shall have the right and opportunity to due process of law.” In its literature, the militia claims to be

Non-Denominational (Not following any one particular tenet or religious group)

Non-Political (Not recognizing any one particular political candidate, group, or party)

Non-Racial (Not discriminating against any racial or ethnic group)

Despite such sentiments, militia members seem overwhelmingly to be white Christians.⁵¹

The Militia of Montana presents a more complex and ambiguous case, in part because one of its founders, John Trochmann, was associated in press reports with Aryan Nations. In 1994, Trochmann denied that he was a white supremacist: “I’m not a supremacist… No being is supreme except our creator. All ΓΙ? trying to do [with militia meetings] is to make people aware of the military takeover of our country and the erosion of our constitutional freedoms, especially the Second Amendment, the one amendment that guarantees all the rest.” He conceded that he had once spoken at the Aryan Nations compound, but claimed he “never had ties with them” and stated disapprovingly that he had noticed on his visit that they were “teaching their young men to disrespect women.”⁵²

Trochmann has not explicitly condemned anti-Semitism. Instead, in “answering allegations of … Anti-Semitism,” the Militia of Montana emphasizes the various activities of the Anti-Defamation League, which it claims does not represent American Jews. Trochmann and two associates appeared at Senate hearings on militias in June 1995. The militia’s attorney, John De Camp thought “they wanted John Trochmann because he is ‘dripping blood’ since he’s supposedly ‘anti-Semitic.” In an interview after the hearings, nei- ther De Camp, Trochmann, nor militia spokesman Bob Fletcher explicitly denied the charge. As De Camp put it, “they [the Senators] couldn’t document anything as far as their claims of anti-Semitism.” Again, the ADL surfaced as the Militia’s anathema. “We walked into an Anti-Defamation League-orchestrated set-up,” Trochmann claimed, “but it totally backfired on them…. When they started chopping us up as the lackeys for the ADL, we pulled the plug and let them have it.” Explicit anti-Semitism vanishes and in its place is a fixation on an ADL conspiracy.⁵³

The Militia of Montana claims the ADL had an office in the Oklahoma City federal building, implying that in some unspecified way this was related to the bombing. More sinister still, the ADL, along with Morris Dees, they assert, is an instrument “used in furthering the plan for world governance” that is, the New World Order. Since the Militia of Montana is part of “the patriot community” seeking to expose the plan for a “one-world-socialist-society,” those who attack it must be among the conspiracy’s allies. Hence organizations can forswear anti-Semitism while freely venting their hostilities on an organization intimately tied to the American Jewish community. There is no way of knowing whether this is a conscious employment of code words to evade public censure, but the militia’s audience clearly contains many people who are amply prepared to read “ADL” as “Jews.”⁵⁴

Militia organizations are not the only venues on the right in which such circumspection may be found. The 1992 Estes Park conference, led by Pastor Pete Peters, demonstrated similar care in avoiding any explicitly racist or anti-Semitic themes. Indeed, in discussing the Ruby Ridge incident, Peters implied that accusations of racism were part of a media-government conspiracy: “Not only has the media used the labeling terms of White Supremacist and White Separatist but it has used them with the term criminal.” But in summarizing the conferees’ “Other Thoughts and Dessenting [sic] Opinions,” the report included troubling language: “Some felt more emphasis needed to be placed on the command in Deut. 17:14–15 [that Israelites should not be ruled by foreigners] and that the destruction of white Christian people will continue until the stranger is removed from the position of being over His people.” This Identity language equates America with Israel, emphasizes the religious importance of racial purity, and denigrates “the stranger.” But who is “the stranger”? While the statement may refer to immigrants, a common theme in nativist writing, “stranger” is almost certainly a code word for “Jew.” It is employed in precisely that sense by Richard Kelly Hoskins in Vigilantes of Christendom, where strangers are “disease factories,” carriers of plague and bearers of “God’s curse.” To prevent contamination, “God’s cho- sen people always attempt to stamp out the lesser evil to avoid the greater one.”⁵⁵

As the radical right has expanded with the growth of the militias, it has become chary of utilizing the openly racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric customarily employed, as it were, “within the family.” Speaking now to broader audiences, including many attracted by nonracist, antigovernment appeals, discretion seems advisable, with euphemisms and code words substituting for the hard-edged rhetoric of an earlier period. At the same time, the right increasingly positions itself as an exemplar of core American values, arguing that even as these values are imperiled by the New World Order, they have found a stalwart and incorruptible guardian on the “patriot right.” This is in part a replay of earlier right-wing motifs, in which those on the political fringe sought legitimization by linkage with venerated American symbols. This was notably the case with the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. As we saw in chapter 2, the proto-Identity clergyman and Klan functionary Reuben Sawyer preached “a cleansed and purified Americanism” on the Klan’s behalf.

At the ideological level, the radical right seeks to make the same connection by portraying itself as the stronghold of “constitutionalists,” that is, those whose primary fidelity is to the values incorporated in the American foundational document. At the social level, the link is made through “bridging mechanisms,” that is, organizations that connect the core of the radical right to segments of American society considered more “mainstream” and non-stigmatizing.

Constitutionalism

Just as the radical right has embraced religious fundamentalism, so it has been associated with what might be called “legal fundamentalism.” Like its better-known religious counterpart, legal fundamentalism insists on the literal reading of authoritative legal texts and holds that the true meaning of those texts has been lost through distortions allegedly introduced by corrupt interpreters in the past. It is necessary, therefore, to recapture a submerged authentic tradition. Just as Christian Identity believes that Protestant clergy have corrupted the true meaning of Scripture, so on the legal level constitutionalists believe judges and lawyers have collectively perverted constitutional principles.

Some legal fundamentalists advance the idea of the “organic constitution,” the original constitutional text plus the Bill of Rights, on the theory that this alone was the product of the Founding Fathers. By implication, then, the remaining amendments, particularly the Civil War amendments (the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth) are not constitutionally valid. The remaining authoritative text is further subject to minute linguistic analysis. As Red Beckman, a participant in the Estes Park conference, explained: “We have a little stricter discipline in the use of words than you will see in most dictionaries.” A widely circulated militia handbook argues that the Sixteenth Amendment, which permitted the taxation of income, “WAS NOT ratified in the same language by three fourths of the United States as required … and is therefore invalid.”⁵⁶

The Constitution is intentionally severed from traditions of interpretation, with the goal of restoring its literal meaning. This has two consequences. The first is to effectively delegitimize the actions of courts and legislatures for those who seek the document’s “plain meaning” or the framers’ “original intent.” The second consequence is to raise the Constitution to a status of near-scriptural infallibility: “Apart from Original Intent, we break faith with those who founded this great nation. How do you like it when people interpret the Bible to suit their fancy instead of as God meant it? … Documents mean what their authors meante According to Reyond E. McFarland, an Iowa constitutionalist, the organic constitution “is not quite the Bible, but it is awfully close.” The connection between the Constitution and the Bible had been made earlier by William Potter Gale (see chapter 10), although Gale pushed divine inspiration back further to include the Articles of Confederation. The line of divine inspiration continued to the Constitution itself: “The Constitution was lifted from the Articles of Confederation, therefore the source of the Constitution is the Holy Bible.”⁵⁷

When constitutionalists have been prosecuted, as Gale was, they regard the government’s action as tyrannical and unconstitutional. In their eyes, it is they rather than the government that abides by the intent of the framers, and actions taken against them are construed as the misuse of power, cloaked in specious legal justifications. These tendencies, present at least since the 1970s, have intensified in the 1990s, with the rise of the militias, who trace their legitimacy to the Second Amendment and who claim, “Our purpose is solely to defend these [Bill of Rights] rights for ourselves and our neighbors.” In June 1995, John Trochmann and Bob Fletcher of the Militia of Montana appeared before a Senate subcommittee. In their prepared statement, they asserted that “the [militia] movement is made up of a cross section of ameri-cans from all walks of life, with one singular mandate which is public and overt: THE RETURN TO THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES, AND TO YOUR OATH TO DEFEND THAT CONSTITUTION.” By implication, then, those who oppose such activities either value the Constitution less or seek to subvert it.⁵⁸

A dramatic demonstration of these principles occurred in the spring of 1996 with the conflict between federal law-enforcement personnel and the group calling itself Freemen in Garfield County, Montana. The Freemen were an Identity group whose legal doctrines led them to claim virtually total freedom from the state’s authority. The ranch that served as their base — “Justus [sic] Township”—was declared to be a sovereign, self-governing unit beyond the government’s reach, empowered to convene its own grand juries and courts. The Freemen were an extreme example of what I referred to in chapter 10 as “radical localism,” and it is not surprising that their members faced legal charges —in this case, the use of fraudulent financial instruments.⁵⁹

The Freemen’s Identity views were explicated in a “Common Law Memorandum” filed with a local court by Rodney Skurdal in 1994. Skurdal, who was in charge of Freemen security, joined the group in the fall of 1995. The memorandum begins with a lengthy presentation of Identity beliefs, including two-seed theology, and then goes on to draw legal implications. Not only are members of “the white race” Israelites, but.”’America,’ i.e., ‘United States of America,’ is the New Land of’milk and honey’, the new ‘Zion,’ as contained in the Bible, … in which Israel will never move from, [sic] and the Land which Almighty God promised Israel.” If whites are Israel, living on land promised by God, then the only law applicable to them is that of the Bible, along with whatever nonbiblical norms are judged to derive from Scripture. The Freemen discovered this fundamental, divinely enjoined law in the “organic constitution” and in a vision of common law drawn from an idiosyncratic reading of English legal history in the Middle Ages, conjuring up an imagined utopia of free Anglo-Saxon yeoman.⁶⁰

An important corollary of this argument is that regulations that fall outside the biblical-common law corpus do not bind members of the white race, and obedience to such norms is a form of idolatry. The Skurdal memorandum considers as acts of “worshipping Baal” even seemingly innocent legal requirements, such as applying for a driver’s license, marriage license, or building permit; securing a Social Security card; or paying income, property, or inheritance tax. “Once you have applied for these benefits, via your ‘application forms’ … from your ’new gods/ you have voluntary [sic] become their new ‘slaves,’ to ‘tax’ at their will, for you are no longer ‘Free,’ i.e., a ‘freeman.’ “By this reasoning, conforming to the law is no longer merely a violation of a fundamentalist reading of the Constitution; it is the most profound kind of sin.⁶¹

The Freemen manifest a number of ideas described in earlier chapters. They resemble the armed radical localism of the Posse Comitatus. Their “sovereign township” harks back to an earlier separatist declaration, the Ne-hemiah Township Charter. Their fusion of law and the Bible has roots in the writings of Howard Rand and his followers. Together, these elements form a volatile mix that made conflict with authority virtually inevitable.

Having learned some of the bitter lessons of Waco, the FBI approached the Freemen in a radically different manner. Agents remained as inconspicuous as possible, the operation was directed by specialists in crisis management, and the authorities carefully avoided the appearance of a military operation. The FBI avoided self-imposed deadlines and relied instead upon patience and the passage of time in the hope of slowly eroding the Freemen’s resistance. The wisdom of this strategy was borne out when, on June 13, 1996—the eighty-first day of the standoff—the sixteen Freemen still in the compound surrendered to federal authorities.

Bridging Mechanisms

The increasing association of the radical right with core American values suggests its fundamental repositioning within American politics and society. As recently as the late 1980s, the radical right was an isolated, insular subculture, detached from and shunned by the larger society, if indeed the latter was even aware of its existence. It was blocked from access to major communications media, where notice of it was taken only intermittently when it was associated with actual or threatened violence. Its boundaries were maintained by a combination of distaste for a world it regarded as corrupt and by the world’s rejection. The subculture’s cohesion was maintained by an intricate alternative communications system made up of books, periodicals, mailorder services, electronic bulletin boards, shortwave broadcasts, video and audio tapes, gun shows, and the like.

But the chasm that once separated the radical right from less stigmatized forms of association and expression has narrowed appreciably in the last five years. It has become linked to the mainstream of American politics and culture by a series of bridging mechanisms. First, some on the radical right have deliberately sought to repackage themselves in order to deflect opposition and attract larger audiences. Second, ideas incubated on the radical right have found partial acceptance in some mainstream venues, particularly some of those associated with evangelical Protestantism and the New Age. Third, the militia movement provides a way station for the disaffected between the outermost fringe of acceptable political discourse and the core of the radical right.

Emblematic of this mainstreaming is the case of Larry Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners of America. Pratt was a featured speaker at the 1992 Estes Park conference attended by important Christian Identity and militia figures, as well a contributor to the Identity periodical Jubilee. In 1996, Pratt served as one of four co-chairs of Pat Buchanan’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. In February 1996, Pratt’s earlier associations became public knowledge, and, although he denied any racist sentiment, he was compelled to step down from his campaign post. Two conclusions seem clear. First, Pratt would have continued to serve had his sharing of a platform with Louis Beam and Identity’s Richard Butler not become public knowledge. It is perhaps not coincidental that the information about him was released shortly after Buchanan’s strong showing early in the campaign, as he was increasingly employing anti-New World Order rhetoric. Second, since Pratt’s supportive view of militias was scarcely a secret, it seems reasonable to suppose that his appointment to the top echelon of a national campaign was made after a calculation that the stigma attaching to his views and activities was less important than his ability to mobilize a valued constituency.⁶²

The “repackaging” of the radical right is tied to the rhetoric discussed earlier in this chapter: the New World Order theories that seek to explain America’s problems by attributing them to a conspiratorial threat. In a society where conspiracy theories have always flourished, NWO conspiracy theories appear different largely in degree. These tales of plots and cabals coexist with the constitutionalism described earlier. Indeed, the two are often combined: the threat posed by the New World Order requires extraordinary efforts if the Constitution is to survive. Whether for opportunistic reasons or out of conviction, this rhetorical style is largely free of the strident anti-Semitism and racism that previously was so conspicuous a part of ultra-right discourse. Such themes, however, often remain just below the surface in variants that link the conspiracy to Jewish bankers or see world government designs in affirmative action proposals.

In part because these conspiracy theories are often devoid of the most objectionable racist language, they have found places outside the radical right subculture itself. They have been transplanted to some evangelical Protestant and New Age circles. Among evangelical Protestants, for example, New World Order ideas, with elaborate discussions of the Illuminates role, appear in the ministry and publications of Texe Marrs, whose works may be found in religious bookstores to which conspiratorial literature would ordinarily not gain access. A weaker but still fully recognizable version of NWO theory also appears in Pat Robertson’s 1991 volume, The New World Order. Although Robertson has disclaimed any anti-Semitic intentions, his tale of Illuminatist plots is drawn in large part from the anti-Semitic writings of Nesta Webster and Eustace Mullins. The appearance of such material in religious writings is not entirely surprising, however, since fears of world government have been linked by millenarians to the rise of Antichrist in the End-times.⁶³

More surprising, though, is the fact that some of the same ideas appear in New Age publications, which themselves are reviled by fundamentalists as manifestations of paganism and Satanism. Yet some New Age publications have found conspiracy theories attractive for their own reasons, as examples of what might be called stigmatized knowledge —ideas rejected or ignored by such institutions as universities, the scientific community, and the mass media. Just as these institutions have generally rejected UFOs, herbal medicine, and the story of Atlantis, so they have turned their backs on conspiratorial theories of history. Indeed, to some in the New Age movement such theories are doubly attractive, for they are not only themselves examples of stigmatized knowledge; they can also be used to explain why other ideas have been shunned. As with conspiratorial religious literature, New Age conspiratorialism is rarely subject to informal censorship and gains access to mainstream distribution outlets.⁶⁴

Finally, the militias themselves are a bridging mechanism, with their public face and patriotic rhetoric. Yet even when they themselves eschew racial appeals, they are part of the subculture’s communications system and facilitate contacts by their members with groups and ideas that are far more extreme. They are less fronts than they are transition points on individual journeys from conventional politics to political extremism. Rather than shift abruptly from “normal” to “abnormal” politics, one can move by stages.

What are the consequences of these bridging mechanisms? Will they transform formerly isolated coteries into socially acceptable mass movements? Or will they dilute extremist doctrines in order to build greater pubic acceptance? When a formerly small and insular group aspires to be a major social movement, it often faces a trade-off between doctrinal purity and a mass membership. It can rarely have both. This poses a special dilemma for Christian Identity, whose idiosyncratic belief system seems particularly ill suited to mass organization. Identity can cloak its beliefs, seeking instead to establish a leadership position in a broader coalition of antigovernment forces, somewhat as Pete Peters did at the Estes Park conference. Alternatively, it can retain and nurture a unique message, in the hope that an enlarged recruiting pool will find it attractive. Which of these courses it will take, and what impact bridging mechanisms will have, are questions that, unfortunately, can be answered only after the fact.

The experiences of the last five years, culminating in the bombing in Oklahoma City, have confirmed and strengthened the conclusions drawn in the original edition of this book. The analysis of Christian Identity suggested that it had, throughout its brief history, been a movement peculiarly susceptible to rapid doctrinal mutations. That may be said as well for the larger right-wing milieu in which it is enfolded. Precisely because it is a fragmented world, with leaders who often compete, organizations that rapidly form and split, and a disinclination to accept a comprehensive structure of coordination, its development is subject to sudden swings. In this respect, the growth of militias is merely the latest in a long series of examples. In the absence of a charismatic figure capable of welding its disparate elements together, the radical right, including Identity, may be expected to undergo future changes, only some of which can be anticipated.

What is most striking about the Oklahoma City bombing’s implications for Identity and the radical right, therefore, is its irony: the circumstantial ties between the bombing and the radical right should have definitively delegit-imized the radical right. But instead of reinforcing its pariah status, the bombing helped move it toward the mainstream, supplying it with the kind of media access it never previously enjoyed and attributing to it a power about which it had only fantasized. Such media access, in a time of rising antigovernment sentiment, has opened new recruiting possibilities, while the attribution of power has made the fringe right an increasingly attractive prize for some mainstream politicians to covet.