Blood and Politics (63 page)

The cause of the invasion was petty, a family dispute. A local judge had ruled against one of the Freemen’s kin in a divorce proceeding. Nothing the Freemen could do that day could change anything related to the divorce. Even so, the Freemen walked away satisfied that a true, lawful de jure court had met. “We have the law back in the county now,” the so-called presiding judge declared at the end of the pseudoceremony.
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“Supreme Court of Garfield County comitatus,” they called it.

The county’s actual law enforcement officers—a sheriff and two deputies—did not try to bar the intruders. Instead, they videotaped the event. The county attorney, a part-time employee working in his office a half block down the street, came rushing over to watch the common law court from the sidelines. After the event the courthouse clerk knew enough to ignore the bogus liens or writs the Freemen produced that day. Nevertheless, for that moment, in that place, the Freemen challenged local officials with their own authority. In time, such actions would constitute a virtual dual power.

The appearance of Freemen in Montana in 1994 testified to the persistence of ideologies with their roots in the Posse Comitatus and the mixture of Christian Identity theology and Dred Scott constitutionalism upon which the Posse had rested. It had been eleven years since Gordon Kahl shot two federal marshals in North Dakota and turned the Posse Comitatus from a tax protest and farm gate battle cry into a newspaper headline. One Freeman explicitly asserted this connection between common law courts in the 1990s and the Posse Comitatus of previous decades. “Our law of posse comitatus,” he wrote, “is derived from ‘Holy Scriptures.’”
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Here they distinguished between the rights of white Christian citizens and those of nonwhite, non-Christian residents. Accordingly, the former received their rights from God, while the latter supposedly derived citizenship from the Fourteenth Amendment. Thus the Freemen vowed allegiance to a white republic, much like those who had signed the Nehemiah Township charter in 1982.

The Freemen did not invent Christian Identity. Long before they crashed the door at the Garfield County courthouse, this theology had sanctified everything from family-style Bible camps to clandestine killing. While casting the heavens in a presumed racial order, it named a particular Satan who conspired against its Lord. And at every common law seminar, the Freemen studied Identity, spreading its message like worthless bank drafts. This crew adhered to the hard-edged so-called two seed version. In this fiction Jews personally incarnated Satan on earth. For white people to stay true to their Lord, they had to choose
between making covenants with the devil and establishing a common law “pursuant to the Word of Almighty God.” The Freemen wrote this Identity doctrine into their documents again and again, as if they were bar association attorneys citing case law in a pleading. One twenty-page paper on “Israel/Appointing Power” rambled on with a punctuation and capitalization style that only the initiated understood. Yet within a paragraph it restated the fundamentals of the Posse Comitatus doctrine:

How many of the People of Israel [Adam/white race] have rejected the words of Almighty God and rejected their “
faith
” [surety]
in Almighty God
, to worship man made laws; “
color or law
”, such as applying for a ‘social security card/number’; marriage licenses, drivers’ licenses, insurance, vehicle registration, welfare from the corporations, electrical inspections, permits to build your private home, income taxes, property taxes, inheritance taxes, etc., etc., etc.,

In essence, they argued much like the Posse Comitatus–influenced engineer at Cheney Lake in 1983 who claimed that a white person with a Social Security number could not attain the “status” of a (white) free man.
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Accordingly, inalienable rights belong only to “we the people,” the population mentioned in the Constitution’s Preamble. In this view, all others were like the slaves who gained their citizenship from the Fourteenth Amendment. Those people had lesser rights, devolved only from the government. By contrast, most legal scholars and historians trace an ever-expanding tradition of individual liberties from the Magna Carta to the U.S. Constitution and amendments, leading from the divine right of kings to representative democracy in a republican form of government. For the Freemen, however, this trajectory was about racial lineage, not developing institutions. The biblical tribes of Israel, the Anglo-Saxons of medieval England, and American white people all were hung from the same single genetic strain. By this account, the Book of Deuteronomy, the Magna Carta, and the Constitution are all God’s Law written only for God’s People.

As odd as it sounded in 1994, this particular reading of the Constitution was rooted in the United States’ founding moments. From the beginning of European settlement in North America, two different visions of citizenship, the political state and national identity, have contended for hegemony. One view sought a country without inherited privileges, envisioned a citizenry with unalienable rights and a government of all the people. According to a competing view, African slaves had no rights that a white man needed to respect. Neither did the Native Americans.
And while the political state granted citizenship rights to non-Christians and eventually to former slaves and their progeny, according to this second view, the real American nation and its cultural expressions remained Anglo-European (and Christian). The adherents of this second view are, in effect, if not always self-consciously, white nationalists. They may have tolerated a multiracial federal state, like Serbs in multinational Yugoslavia during the Tito era, but they never fully accepted it. Like ethnic nationalists seeking separation from a multiethnic Bosnia, the Freemen sought to establish themselves as an entity distinct from the multiracial United States.

This was the nasty white thread running through barrels of Freemen ink. It connected the phony court documents they filed on everything from family civil matters to computer-generated larcenous bank drafts. The United States is peopled by two nations, they argued, not one: “American nationals” (or organic sovereigns) versus “U.S. citizens.” The latter, they said, were unfortunate denizens of a corporation headquartered in Washington, D.C. This attack on the Fourteenth Amendment is the core of the Freemen ideology and the basis of their specious reasoning about the other issues on their minds, such as the Uniform Commercial Code. If the original white republic no longer existed according to congressional statute, then the Freemen denied the “lawfulness” of that legislation and the supporting constitutional amendments.

Over a several-year period, the Freemen established themselves inside Montana community life. In one instance a town’s mayor became a member. In another, authorities shied away from arresting Freemen for fear of provoking an armed conflict. And at moments they came dangerously close to their goal of establishing themselves as a dual power, with authority rivaling that of local and federal governments. Their Montana garrisons became the most important transfer points in a network whose strongest links stretched from the Northwest to the Midwest and south to Oklahoma and Texas. An estimated eight hundred camp followers attended their classes on convening common law courts and then used fake court writs to write fraudulent bank documents. Six men from Columbus, Ohio, for example, spent four days in Garfield County and then established a common law court back home. In another instance, a former state prison guard returned from a Freemen “school of learning” and set up courts in Kansas. One organizational descendant of the Freemen called itself the Republic of Texas and claimed to reestablish the original white republic there. A band from Oklahoma called itself United Sovereigns of America and joined in 1995 with the Colorado veterinarian Gene Schroder to convene, in Wichita, Kansas, a common law
convention of five hundred activists from across the country, further boosting the Freemen’s ideas and the common law court phenomenon.
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Another early admirer of the Freemen was a group with a similar ideological lineage, the Militia of Montana. According to this militia, the Freemen had discovered the essence of “our fore-fathers plan for self-government.” The militia newsletter repeated the Freemen’s core argument: a fundamental constitutional distinction existed between white Christians and others. “If you are a Fourteenth Amendment citizen then you have inalienable rights which can be liened. If you are a sovereign ‘Freemen’ then you have unalienable rights which cannot be liened.”
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Upon this mutually asserted citizenship, the common law court and militia movements combined to assert a white nationalism at odds with the federal government. Like the double helix at the heart of a DNA molecule, militias and common law courts would spin and thread through each other from Montana to Texas and from Oregon to Florida, with a single white chromosome at the root of a diversified complex of movement organs and tissues.

The Militia of Montana’s chief figure, John Trochmann, filed his own declaration of common law citizenship in 1992. Like the Freemen, he claimed a local court had no jurisdiction over him because he was an organic “sovereign”—that is, a free white Christian male whose rights trumped the Fourteenth Amendment.
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And in 1992 he declared himself to hold a Freemen-like “sovereign” status.

With a bushy beard and wild eyes, Trochmann looked like the apparition of a nineteenth-century mountain man. In fact, he was a former Minnesota snowmobile salesman, a shrewd operator looking for his next main chance. Trochmann’s extended family had settled during the mid-1980s in Sanders County, Montana, a remote 2,749-square-mile mountainous expanse populated by fewer than nine thousand souls, 98.5 percent of whom were classified as white in the 1980 census. Only 45 percent were native Montanans.
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The mix of settlers included 1960s-style countercultural leftovers, as well as white supremacists gathering for a future Northwest Republic. The Trochmanns gained a small measure of local notoriety by distributing Christian Identity and so-called constitutionalist pamphlets.
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John Trochmann also attended several Aryan Nations conclaves at the Idaho campground, speaking at the 1990 session. There he met a fellow resettled midwesterner, Randy Weaver, and the two families became friends.
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When the FBI siege started on Weaver’s mountain, the Trochmanns joined the protest at the police barricades. After the siege, John attended Pete Peters’s stage-setting conference of “Christian men” in Estes Park, Colorado, though he did not speak from the dais or otherwise make a name for himself.
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After the meeting, however, Trochmann transformed himself from a pamphleteer in his own home region into a creative and energetic national leader. When Louis Beam and Chris Temple kick-started the United Citizens for Justice to press Weaver’s case with the public, Trochmann became a cochair alongside Temple. Despite the self-evident fact that Weaver was a white supremacist of the Christian Identity persuasion, the United Citizens had (successfully) pressed the case that the hapless ridge sitter was simply a harmless white “separatist.”

After Weaver’s exoneration at trial in July 1993, Trochmann might have returned to local obscurity. It had been Temple and Beam, after all, not Trochmann, who most clearly articulated a new post–Ruby Ridge two-stage strategy. Trochmann, however, became the new strategy’s more accomplished practitioner. Almost as if he were following instructions from Chris Temple’s Estes Park speech, Trochmann aimed at the federal government first. The racial “strangers” targeted by Aryan Nations could wait for a second stage. Trochmann’s bushy-bearded face became synonymous with the militia at small-town meetings, gun shows, and preparedness expos. At a Senate subcommittee hearing, he claimed his militia was simply the Montana version of a neighborhood watch. To reporters, he sold himself as an average American, angry with the federal government.

The Trochmann clan certainly handled its share of weapons and ammunition, but John Trochmann did his best podium pounding in public. In this sphere only a few others rivaled his notoriety and his gift for making nonsense sound as if it were God’s truth. During the first months of 1994, he crisscrossed Montana’s small towns and villages, holding open meetings in local schools and halls as if he were selling memberships in the Grange. These were not suit-and-tie affairs, with stuffy European atmospheres like those held behind closed doors by the Institute for Historical Review. Neither did they require long nights of travel out of state, like Liberty Lobby or Populist Party events. These were blue-collar and plaid shirt meets held in a familiar venue with speakers in the most American of tongues. Trochmann drew hundreds to long descriptions of various perceived threats: gun control and the federal government, of course, but also the United Nations and World Bank. Almost always, a foreign invasion was imminent. He could make long lists of individual facts, but his whole speech was always less than the sum of the
parts, a classic sign of what Richard Hofstadter called a “paranoid style” of politics. (As Hofstadter used it, the label was neither a clinical diagnosis nor an ideological statement, but a description of a certain type of political fashion.) The underlying message was defense of hearth and homeland from menacing forces emanating from a cabal of New World Order globalists. No true (white) American would want to surrender to the United Nations.

Trochmann’s Militia of Montana was the “mother of all militias,” as one reporter trenchantly wrote.
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The actual relationship of this founder of this militia to white supremacy and the Aryan Nations became a question of moment. Like others seeking more mainstream acceptance, including Randy Weaver, Sam Dickson, and David Duke, Trochmann always denied that he was a white supremacist. Asked about his Christian Identity beliefs, he claimed not to hold them. Asked about his speeches at Aryan Nations meetings, he would say he was just warning the campers of the dangers of race hatred. As militiamen spread across the media and gained a public hearing, the nature of Trochmann’s core beliefs—and by extension the militia’s founding ideology—became a point of public interest.