Blood and Politics (64 page)

One commentator argued that although Trochmann had attended three or four Aryan Nations meetings, this was “hardly a fair criterion for membership.” Further, he wrote that “racist ideas were conspicuously absent” from Trochmann’s public presentations. The point being, this person wrote, the role of racism in the militia should not be overemphasized.
¹⁴

The Aryan Nations staff at the Idaho compound took a completely different point of view and issued its own press release about Trochmann’s denials. “Why lie about the number of times here, especially when you came over several times for Bible Studies?” Aryan Nations asked of Trochmann. “John, you even helped us write out a set of rules for our code of conduct on the church grounds. For all the problems you claim you found at the Church . . . why did you immediately move skinheads to your place and then whine about the conduct? Maybe you’re just a first class whiner when things don’t suit you.”
¹⁵
To this charge from Aryan Nations, Trochmann was left, essentially, without a reply.

With or without Trochmann, the roots of this phenomenon lay in the white supremacist movement. Taking a look back, Daniel Levitas’s book
The Terrorist Next Door
described in minute detail the Posse-like ideological spine at the center of both the militia and its Siamese twin, the common law courts. Though the militias of the Clinton era were direct
descendants of the Gordon Kahl–era Posse Comitatus, these two movements were not identical, according to Levitas. Tax protest in the 1970s and the farm crisis of the 1980s had fueled the Posse. By the 1990s the farm movement had been recaptured by progressive farm organizations, and the few Posse farmers still active had no influence. Gun rights and national sovereignty, not grain prices and farm policy, filled the air like fertilizer and fuel oil waiting to explode.

Three events precipitated the rebirth of the militia movement: the FBI siege at Ruby Ridge in September 1992, the Waco inferno eight months later, and President Clinton’s 1993 signing of the gun control Brady Bill, which sent National Rifle Association members and the like into apoplexy.
¹⁶

Militiamen told themselves that their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms was being unconstitutionally abridged and that the Weaver family and Branch Davidians had been made targets by virtue of their religion. Militias were never simply a bunch of conspiracy mongers with guns, however. Rather, they asserted a particularized (white) nationalism, couched as opposition to the New World Order. It was upon this basis that the militia spread quickly across the country.

First in Idaho and Montana, next in Michigan and the Midwest, and then into the Confederate South and every other region, militiamen popped up like cardboard targets on a rapid-fire shooting range. The gunners outstripped the paper hangers from the common law courts. Dozens of local and regional militia leaders emerged and then faded, only to be replaced by new paramilitary enthusiasts. Bo Gritz’s presidential campaign promoted militias for the purposes of “preparedness” and “survival.” He talked constantly about “ballots in 1992 or bullets in 1996.” And he turned himself into one of the militia’s biggest megaphones.
¹⁷
In this environment, newsletters flourished like antiwar rags on college campuses in the 1960s. A half dozen periodical magazines and tabloids gained a national readership, although none rivaled
The Spotlight
for paid circulation. Militia groups built websites, used shortwave radio programming, and distributed videotapes. The militia became the most significant mass-style phenomenon of its kind since the 1960s, when white supremacist gunners had shot, burned, and bombed in defense of Jim Crow.

The word “militia” became an eponym, a proper noun changed into a common reference for so-called antigovernment radicals, much the way the term “Klan” had once referred only to a specific organizational subspecies but that with widespread use had become an uncapitalized reference to white racists in general. The actual militia membership became conflated with the much-larger numbers of preparedness buffs,
gun enthusiasts, and active sympathizers. The militia face became so familiar that even those who could not describe the difference between a .38-caliber revolver and a 9-millimeter pistol understood that guns had become once again a symbol of resistance, this time to a specter known as the New World Order. Thousands of articles by hundreds of journalists created a public record of militia activity. Unlike Aryan bandits such as The Order, which protected itself with a veil of clandestinity, these gun toters flashed themselves into the public’s eye as symbols of mass resistance. For the first time in ten years, white men carrying assault rifles allowed themselves to be photographed and videotaped. Television news programs found militias irresistible. Weekly and monthly magazines covered militias on one page and news about FBI wrongdoing at Waco and Weaver’s mountain on the next. Militia spokesmen often sounded as if they were indicting the government for hate crimes, and much of the public’s discourse accepted the militia’s self-description at face value. United States senators called militiamen to testify and accorded them the graciousness of a national platform.

They emblazoned themselves with icons of colonial-era minutemen, dressed in camouflage fatigues, carried assault rifles, and often gave themselves military-style titles—Colonel This, Major That. Many militia groups were actually private armies of the type proscribed by laws in most states. If these cammie-coated ivories had been black-jacketed ebonies marching through the woods and firing armor-piercing cop-killing ammunition, the entire movement would not have lasted five minutes, much less five years. Yet not one state militia was ever prosecuted as a private army. Only after Timothy McVeigh and others known and unknown killed 168 men, women, and children with one bomb in Oklahoma City did the militia and the weapons-trafficking subculture surrounding it receive any special attention from law enforcement officials.

On the continuum between mainstream electioneering at one end and subcultural vanguardism at the other, the militia and common law court phenomena existed somewhere in between, at a point that might be called mass resistance. Unlike vote-seeking campaigners such as David Duke, the militia and the Freemen took up arms and repeatedly expressed their willingness to use them. But rather than dive deep into national socialist ideology and iconography, they expressed themselves in the most American of terms and used symbols such as the minutemen at Concord to identify their nationalist heritage. Much like civil disobedience activists of other movements past, they urged defiance of existing laws—regulations of gun ownership and private armies and use of
judicial proceedings and banking practices. They defined themselves as counterinstitutions to those that demarcated the political state: law enforcement agencies and the military as well as legal and financial authorities. And in places where they held some measure of communal power, either through sheer force of numbers or through intimidation of their foes, both the common law courts and militias existed as an embryonic (and revolutionary) dual power.

Whether or not militiamen and common law court activists believed the Holocaust happened, whether or not they used slur words to describe black people, whether or not they wanted to send nonwhite people and race traitors into the proverbial desert, the militia in the 1990s marched to the same drumbeat that other bands of white paramilitarists had heard before them.

Those who actually formed militias rested their rationale on a notion of state citizenship that fundamentally “predated” and opposed itself to the federal citizenship of the Fourteenth Amendment. Many militia groups consciously adopted the organic sovereign status, whereby only white Christians had natural inalienable citizenship rights. A few militia groups did not explicitly justify themselves by such Dred Scott reasoning. However, they did alternatively predicate themselves on a notion of states’ rights and state citizenship at odds with the Fourteenth Amendment, enforcement of which is the single most important
constitutional
roadblock to the restoration of a Jim Crow–style white republic. And citizenship status of course is a central element when delineating one nation or nation-state from another.

May 28, 1994.
At first glance it appears to be another quiet suit-and-tie meeting at the Atlanta airport Hilton Hotel. University professors, journalists, and religious leaders deliver academic-styled lectures in the most convivial of fashions. Instead of the fervid secrecy and thick European atmospherics attending gatherings on topics such as “Race and Civilization,” this conference, held under the auspices of a newsletter entitled
American Renaissance
, exhibits a relative openness. No loud white power rockers chant in locked arm unison. No skinhead tattoos. No swastika armbands or white robes. No Populist Party faction works the room, although a savvy, newly emergent group known as the Council of Conservative Citizens unmistakably holds the franchise on the sidelines. Neither Willis Carto nor William Pierce attends. Neither the Federal Reserve System nor the Holocaust is on this agenda. Nevertheless, Mark Weber and a small gaggle of Institute for Historical Review regulars dot the room. Ed Fields sits quietly. No one needs his flush-faced oratory here, but he is not the only cow pasture cross burner in the hotel. David Duke mills about the restaurant, a candidate without a campaign, telling whoever will listen of his plans to write a book. As the proceedings begin, however, the conveners close the door on Duke. He is not welcome. Instead, a small band of obviously Orthodox Jews, identifiably dressed in black suits, hats, and beards, enter the room alongside 150 others committed to white supremacy.
¹

A few speakers set the event’s tone. Among them was Sam Dickson. Despite the presence of Jews at this particular event, the Atlanta area attorney was no stranger to the world of the politically
Judenfrei
. In the past he had operated a small Historical Review outfit in Georgia and had
attended at least one Institute for Historical Review conference in California. He had danced British führer John Tyndall across the Atlantic in 1991 and supported Pat Buchanan in 1992. Nevertheless, Dickson was as gracious as any southern gentleman could be and treated the Jewish speakers with deference and respect. Not even a euphemistic mention about “our traditional enemies” passed his lips. Instead, Dickson simply affirmed the theme of the meeting. “To me the whole idea of racial equality was preposterous from childhood,” he averred.
²
Over the course of the weekend it was stated and restated by others, with nuance and without: black people were mentally inferior, genetically prone to violent crime, and biologically unfit to live as social and political equals among whites.

Dickson’s unique contribution was a droll sarcastic wit. His target: white liberals. He turned the verbal tables by using psychologically loaded language to lampoon left-wing activism, the same lingo that liberals often used to describe the “paranoid” right wing. Ever since the
Brown v. Topeka Board of Education
decision, he said, the consensus view had been that racists were emotionally disturbed, perhaps best institutionalized for the benefit of society. The truth was the reverse. “Liberalism is a form of mental disorder,” he drawled. “It is a neurosis or a psychosis that has swept the world.” Among other emotional problems, liberals exhibited an unreasonable mania. They protested this cause and that, nonstop. “And they’re meeting constantly, and writing and printing and picketing. I mean these people have an abnormally elevated energy level,” Dickson chuckled. Worse, liberals were undaunted by failure. Look at public education, he said. Is there any evidence that “race mixing” has improved the lot of anyone? Of course not!
³

Sam Francis, the former Senate aide turned conservative think tank analyst cum
Washington Times
columnist, also stood at this podium. Francis displayed little of Dickson’s dramatic delivery, but he packed twice the analytical punch. Unlike Dickson, the Middle American philosopher-general had always eschewed dalliances with crass
anti-Semitica
, like that at the Institute for Historical Review. As Pat Buchanan marched through the primaries two years before, however, Francis had tried honing the inchoate revolt against Republican conservatism into an ever more tightly defined white nationalism. For the purposes of this meeting, he made two points.

First, American civilization was a white (biologically determined) racial civilization. “The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people,” he told the
Renaissance
audience. “Nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully
transmitted to a different people.” In Francis’s mind, those descended from African slaves, Chinese railroad workers, Mexican peasants, and Native Americans had few claims on American nationality. He added a caveat to the point: race alone could not explain “historical and social affairs,” but without “racial, biological and genetic explanations” nations could not exist. Second, Francis contended that while white people existed objectively, “whites do not exist subjectively because they do not think of themselves as whites.”
⁴
Ergo his task at hand was the development of white consciousness in explicitly racial terms.

During the entire post–World War Two, post-
Brown
era, similar ideas had animated white supremacists of every stripe, usually coupled with an explicitly anti-Semitic set of corollaries. Willis Carto had argued a link between race and civilization in his early pseudonymous article on Evotism. William Pierce had predicated a Leninist-style vanguard on Francis’s second point: white people’s lack of race consciousness rendered them incapable of saving themselves without National Alliance’s leadership. Unlike Pierce, however, Francis counted European Jews among the ranks of white people, and unlike Carto, Francis found anti-Semitic conspiracy theories an annoying distraction from real politics. As a consequence, Francis believed the presence of a few Jews did not necessarily detract from his white nationalist cause.