The United States of Paranoia (25 page)

In one of the more perceptive passages of “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Hofstadter highlighted the role of the alleged defector in spreading conspiracy tales. A “special significance,” he wrote, “attaches to the figure of the renegade from the enemy cause. The anti-Masonic movement seemed at times to be the creation of ex-Masons; it certainly attached the highest significance and gave the most unqualified credulity to their revelations. Anti-Catholicism used the runaway nun and the apostate priest, anti-Mormonism the ex-wife from the harem of polygamy; the avant-garde anti-Communist movements of our time use the ex-Communist.”
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Warnke and Todd carried on that tradition. One man who was especially interested in defectors’ stories was Jack Chick. In addition to endorsing Todd’s testimony, Chick became the preeminent platform for Alberto Rivera, a purported ex-Jesuit who blamed the Catholic order for everything from Jonestown to the Holocaust to the creation of Islam. Later Chick would promote the claims of Rebecca Brown, a former physician who claimed to have been a high priestess in a Satanic cult. It eventually emerged that Brown had lost her license to practice medicine, in part because she had been in the habit of diagnosing patients as demonically possessed and attempting to treat them with exorcisms.

Chick was also interested in Satan’s penetration of popular culture: His comics denounced rock (“heavy metal has turned millions into rock-a-holics. . . . They’ve become zombies”),
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the game Dungeons & Dragons (“
THE INTENSE OCCULT TRAINING THROUGH D&D PREPARED DEBBIE TO ACCEPT THE INVITATION TO ENTER A WITCHES’ COVEN
”),
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the sitcom
Bewitched
(“
that
show paved the way for all our occult and vampire programming viewed by
MILLIONS
today!”).
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And though his tracts weren’t exactly mainstream material, the ideas he expounded weren’t always confined to the country’s margins.

Take Pat Pulling, a mother who blamed Dungeons & Dragons for the 1982 suicide of her sixteen-year-old son. D&D, she decided, “uses demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex perversion, homosexuality, prostitution, satanic type rituals, gambling, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demon summoning, necromantics, divination and other teachings. There have been a number of deaths nationwide where games like Dungeons and Dragons were either the decisive factor in adolescent suicide and murder, or played a major factor in the violent behaviour of such tragedies.”
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She sued the game’s publisher, petitioned the government to regulate or ban D&D-related products, appeared on many popular TV shows, and distributed pamphlets to police departments around the country. (One of her suggested questions for cops interviewing gamers: “Has he read the Necronomicon or is he familiar with it?”)
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She also endorsed Jack Chick’s anti-D&D tract “Dark Dungeons.”

One person who found Pulling persuasive was Tipper Gore, the wife of Senator Al Gore. Mrs. Gore had launched a crusade against indecent rock lyrics in 1985, and it didn’t take long before the targets of her campaign incorporated more than just music. In her 1987 book
Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society
, the spouse of the future vice president pitched herself as a moderate liberal who was adept with sociological evidence and concerned about feminist issues. Yet she included an entire chapter on the dangers of the occult, and one of the alleged occult dangers she discussed was D&D. “According to Mrs. Pat Pulling, founder of the organization Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons,” Gore wrote, “the game has been linked to nearly fifty teenage suicides and homicides.”
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As Todd reached the peak of his fame in 1978, his public statements grew more apocalyptic. On Friday the 13th of October, at a restaurant near Elkton, Maryland, he held what he said would be his final workshop. “I received a telephone call from John Todd that this would be his last meeting,” Tom Berry explained in an invitation to the session. “He was told by a former CIA agent that [word has] come down through the CIA to ‘not stop until John Todd is dead.’ Consequently, John has canceled all the bookings scheduled beyond October 13 and plans to go underground at that time.”
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By January, Todd was telling Darryl Hicks that the “riots have already started. You can’t stop it once it’s started, and it’s already started. In just a few days, John Todd will have vanished.”
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That same month, Todd’s wife Sheila sent his followers a communiqué from a ten-acre farm near Florence, Montana. “We get letters continually asking for us to defend ourselves against the many rumors going around,” she wrote. “Brothers and Sisters, we just cannot constantly defend ourselves. All we can say in defense is that if you will wait and watch things will come to pass as John has said they will.”
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Todd’s reputation was battered by the exposés and the failed predictions, but he still had some believers. When the
Journal Champion
attacked Todd, it received many letters criticizing its story.
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And when Todd gave a talk at a Holiday Inn near Chicago in 1979, the crowd wasn’t happy when a reporter from
Cornerstone
asked him some tough questions. While Todd grew more belligerent in his responses, finally screaming at his interrogator, one man in the audience yelled, “Use the whip!” As the reporter and four colleagues left the room, they heard people murmuring that they were “demons of rebellion.”
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As late as 1982, Todd was spotted speaking to a half-empty room at a Holiday Inn in Iowa. He wore a gun, and he kept glancing over his shoulder as he spoke. He had been brought in by a couple named Randy and Vicki Weaver, who had heard his tapes and been intrigued. But Vicki found herself turned off by Todd and by some of the people he attracted. “Watch out for him,” she told a friend, pointing to a man in the room. “He’s a neo-Nazi.”
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Meanwhile, Todd’s warnings had been taken to heart by the Zarephath-Horeb Community Church, a Christian community in the Ozarks that would eventually evolve into a paramilitary group called the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, or CSA. (The initials deliberately echoed another CSA, the Confederate States of America.) The group’s “propaganda minister,” Kerry Noble, heard his first Todd tape in 1978 and immediately shared it with his church’s elders. “With that first John Todd tape I was given, our group embraced everything Todd preached,” Noble later recalled. “He seemed to confirm all that we felt was wrong in this country, as well as what we believed would happen in the future.” Under Todd’s influence, the church began to arm itself: “[F]rom August 1978 to December 1979, we spent $52,000 on weapons, ammunition, and military equipment, and we began to train militarily.” They also “built our homes with defense in mind, strategically placing them against an attack from the outside. Many of the houses had bunkers built underneath. Those that didn’t usually had a foxhole bunker built nearby.”
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The church soon mixed Todd’s teachings with the ideas of other conspiracy theorists, many of them affiliated with Christian Identity, a racist movement that believed Anglo-Saxons rather than Jews are the real descendants of the ancient Israelites. The results could be seen in Noble’s brief book
Witchcraft and the Illuminati
. The chief difference between Todd’s tapes and Noble’s book was that Noble was antiblack, anti-Semitic, and obsessed with homosexuality. Todd denied that there was an international Jewish conspiracy, but Noble’s book cited
The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
, described Jews as “the most highly organized race of people on the face of the earth,” warned that they “control nearly every major organization in existence,” and called the Talmud “one of the most vile, anti-
Christian
, satanic books ever written.” The book also declared that “rebellious BLACKS” are among “the enemies of God” and accused many famous figures—including Mike Warnke—of being gay.
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The group’s fears grew increasingly apocalyptic. “It will get so bad that parents will eat their children,” church leader James Ellison predicted. “Death in the major cities will cause rampant diseases and plagues. Maggot-infested bodies will lie everywhere. Earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanoes, and other natural disasters will grow to gigantic proportions. Witches and satanic Jews will offer people up as sacrifices to their gods, openly and proudly; blacks will rape and kill white women and will torture and kill white men; homosexuals will sodomize whoever they can. Our new government will be a part of the one-world Zionist Communist government. All but the elect will have the mark of the Beast.”
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The CSA began to hatch plans for terrorist attacks, and Noble nearly bombed a gay church in Kansas City, discovering only at the last moment that he could not bring himself to do it. On April 19, 1985, the group found itself under siege by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. The four-day standoff ended after Noble, increasingly disillusioned with the church, helped negotiate a surrender.

You can take that as a lesson about the dark places where ideas like Todd’s can lead. But before you draw too neat a conclusion from the story, you should think about what happened to another two people who encountered John Todd and his worldview.

Increasingly attracted to far-right politics, Randy and Vicki Weaver moved from Iowa to the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, where they planned to live as self-sufficiently as possible. Then the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms entrapped Randy on a minor weapons violation and offered him a deal: The charge would be dismissed if he became an informant in the local white separatist movement. Instead Weaver moved his family to a cabin in the wilderness and failed to appear for his trial. It is possible that he deliberately decided to skip it, but he probably wouldn’t have shown up either way—he had been sent the wrong date.

When federal agents arrived on the scene, they shot the family dog. The Weavers’ son, Sam, not realizing what was going on, fired a shot in response and then fled, at which point an agent shot him in the back. Kevin Harris, a visiting friend, fired at the attacking cops, killing a U.S. marshal. The FBI’s snipers went on to wound both Randy and Harris, and one of the agents killed Vicki, firing a bullet into her head while she held her ten-month-old daughter.

The ensuing standoff lasted eleven days. After Weaver surrendered, he and Harris were found not guilty of murder. A subsequent internal report concluded that the FBI had violated the Weavers’ constitutional rights, though the man who killed Vicki Weaver never went to jail.

If the story of the CSA shows how a marginal group’s paranoia about the government can drive it to violence,
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the tale of the Weavers shows how the government’s paranoia about marginal groups can drive
it
to violence. The FBI looked at a family with fringe views and perceived a potential CSA, and as a result a woman, a boy, a dog, and one of the government’s own agents were killed.

The problem of Ruby Ridge was repeated a year later, when the ATF raided the Mount Carmel Center, home of the Branch Davidian sect, near Waco, Texas. The feds believed that the church was stockpiling weapons (and claimed, in a request for military support, that its members might have been manufacturing meth as well). It was an ill-conceived operation from the beginning: There was little evidence that the group’s weapons were illegal, there was no evidence at all of the drug lab, and in any event there were several less confrontational ways to arrest the sect’s leader. The situation went south when the Davidians shot at the raiders, killing four agents and starting a fifty-day standoff that ended with an FBI raid, a fire, and nearly all the Davidians dead.

While the feds confronted the Davidians, the media spread stories, some exaggerated and others simply false, of sexual depravity, weird rituals, and a plot against the outside world—the same sorts of fables that the medieval authorities told about Jews and heretics. The Davidians’ paranoia was no match for the paranoia of their enemies.

By that time the fear of Satanists had spread far beyond the evangelical world, mixing with three secular scares to create a new face for the Enemy Within.

The first of those scares was the country’s sudden obsession with missing children, an interest reflected in the new practice of printing lost kids’ faces on milk cartons. The fear began with some high-profile kidnappings and murders—the Atlanta child killings of 1979 to 1981, the 1979 disappearance of six-year-old Etan Patz, the 1981 abduction and decapitation of six-year-old Adam Walsh—and it was amplified by misleading statistics that often appeared in the media. An estimate of the number of missing children, for example, might include runaways, teens who returned home within twenty-four hours, and kids taken by parents in custodial disputes. The number of children abducted by strangers was much smaller. But the missing-children cases discussed in the news—and in the movies, and on TV shows, and in novels about child-grabbing conspiracies—highlighted the more rare and horrifying cases.
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The panic may have reached its most ridiculous moment on April 15, 1986, when police raided the home of the punk rock performer Jello Biafra, searching for evidence to support the obscenity charges that would soon hit Biafra’s band. One of his roommates had been collecting and posting pictures from milk cartons, and the decor alarmed an officer. “What are all those pictures of missing milk carton kids doing on your kitchen wall?” the cop asked the singer.
“Do you know where they are?”
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The second scare was a surge in charges of child molestation. Aware that such crimes had frequently been swept under the rug in the past, many advocates were loath to disbelieve any allegations that came their way, even if they contained obvious fantasies and even if they did not emerge until after the kids had undergone lengthy sessions with sketchy therapists. While that impulse was found in parts of the feminist movement, another source of the fear had a more antifeminist cast. For many people, day care centers represented women’s willingness to abandon their children. With that mind-set, they found it easy to believe that terrible abuses were taking place behind day care center doors.