The United States of Paranoia (36 page)

But even when blacks had no use for the militiamen, they could be drawn to the conspiracy stories that some of those militiamen believed. Marc Lamont Hill, a professor of African-American studies at Columbia, has noted an effect the “cultural nationalist tradition within hip-hop and within black culture” had in the 1990s and afterward. “People were going to black book stores like Hakims in West Philly or Robbins downtown,” he told the
Philadelphia Weekly
, “and buying books like
Behold a Pale Horse
,” William Cooper’s UFO tract, which was also influential in the militia movement. “They were talking about the Illuminati and the Rothschilds and Bilderbergs,” Hill added.
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Professor Griff of the hip-hop group Public Enemy took to quoting Cooper. One MC/producer made “William Cooper” his stage name.

Tony Brown, the black host of the PBS show
Tony Brown’s Journal
, thought the patriot movement was a bunch of “armed-and-dangerous militias of disgruntled White supremacists.”
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But he also believed, like Anthony Hilder and Gary Allen, that the ruling class was trying to foment a race war. The militias, Brown wrote, were “America’s ‘Manchurian candidates,’ ” and although they “may not have been hypnotically programmed, they are nevertheless being psychologically prepared to kill Blacks, Browns, Yellows, Reds, Jews, and non-WASP White immigrants when the appropriate cue is given.”
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And who was going to give that cue? An “evil cabal of elitists and money lords that pulls the strings: the Illuminati Ruling Class Conspiracy.”
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One African-American militiaman—James Johnson of Columbus, Ohio—received a fair amount of public attention, if only because his prominent position in the movement made him hard to ignore. But he was treated as an aberration or, worse yet, a token. (One writer compared him to “the rare black nationalist who appears at a Klan meeting to endorse ‘separation of the races.’ ”)
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The press frequently treated the militia movement as a simple continuation of the 1980s racist underground. Yet the leaders of the older groups weren’t so quick to recognize the new crew as their children. “They are not for the preservation of the white race,” Aryan Nations chief Richard Butler complained to
New York Post
reporter Jonathan Karl. “They’re actually traitors to the white race; they seek to integrate with blacks, Jews, and others.”
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That’s not to say that members of the racist Right didn’t join militias, make an effort to recruit from the militias, or try to capitalize on the militias’ prominence. Some of them appended the word
militia
to their groups’ names in the 1990s, giving us organizations such as the tiny Oklahoma Constitutional Militia, led by an anti-Semite who’d been kicked out of the mainline militia movement. But even as bigots sometimes appeared in militia circles, so did blacks, Hispanics, and Jews. Churchill divided the movement into two distinct though sometimes overlapping tendencies: the constitutionalists and the millenarians. The former organized in public, emphasized gun rights and other civil liberties, and saw themselves as a deterrent to repression and abuse. The latter organized sometimes in secret cells, emphasized elaborate conspiracy theories, and saw themselves as survivors in the face of a coming apocalypse. The millenarians were more likely to tolerate racists, while groups in the constitutionalist wing sometimes went out of their way to pick political fights with white supremacists.

To understand just how oversimplified the story of militia racism was, look back to a nearly forgotten scandal that erupted the same year as the Oklahoma City bombing. For a decade and a half, it was discovered, federal, state, and local law enforcement officials had been attending an event in Tennessee called the Good O’ Boy Roundup. A Department of Justice investigation found “ample evidence of shocking racist, licentious, and puerile behavior” at the gathering, including a sign saying “No Niggers” and a self-appointed group that stopped drivers to announce that they were “checking cars for niggers.”
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What does this have to do with the militia movement? It was the Alabama-based Gadsden Militia that learned about the event, infiltrated it, and exposed it to the press, eventually triggering the official investigation. Faced with racist cops, those militiamen didn’t see allies in the belly of the beast; they saw another government abuse to be exposed.

Militia critics nonetheless insisted that the movement was bigoted at its core. A representative text is the 1996 book
A Force upon the Plain
, written by the attorney Kenneth Stern. Stern essentially argued that when militia members weren’t racist themselves, they were duped by racists. When militia conspiracy theorists fretted over an international cabal led by Freemasons, the Illuminati, or the Trilateral Commission, Stern suggested, they were
really
imagining a cabal led by Jews. Such theories, he wrote, were “rooted in the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
” because the worldviews were structurally similar. “The militia movement today believes in the conspiracy theory of the
Protocols
,” Stern concluded, “even if some call it something else and never mention Jews.”
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The argument resembled Woody Allen’s syllogism “Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates.” And Stern’s history was as bad as his logic. The
Protocols
did not emerge until the late nineteenth century and was not widely popularized until 1903. As we’ve seen, anti-Masonic theories were common throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the English-speaking world’s first anti-Illuminati panic broke out in 1797.

An even odder argument held that the militias were a gateway drug. Stern attributed that idea to Ken Toole of the Montana Human Rights Network, who compared the movement to a funnel. People enter it for many reasons, he acknowledged. But as they’re sucked in, they begin to embrace conspiracy theories and revolutionary rhetoric. At the far end of the funnel are the hard-core bigots. Stern conceded that not all of the militiamen are at the funnel’s eye. But by virtue of being a part of the movement, he believed, they were heading there.

This theory would make sense only if white supremacy were the logical conclusion of opposing globalism, federal power, and paramilitary policing. But you’d expect the most extreme members of such a movement to embrace a radical
decentralism
, not racism. Perhaps anticipating this objection, Stern argued that decentralist rhetoric is itself racist.

“The ideas of ‘states’ rights’ and ‘county supremacy’ that fuel so much of the militia movement are covers for bigotry,” he asserted. “The former has always been used to shield local governments from criticism over discriminatory practices.”
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(Yes, he wrote “always.” When state officials object to federal raids on medical marijuana clubs, Stern presumably believes that they have a veiled racist agenda.) What’s more, “When a political movement rejects the idea of common American values and says, ‘Let me do it my own way,’ it usually means it wants to do things that are objectionable, and yearns to do them undisturbed and unnoticed.” Stern did note that ordinary arguments “about federal intrusiveness, silly regulations, mounds of red tape” need not be efforts “to remake America into a weak whole comprising fifty herculean states that can do as they wish.”
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But by using the phrase “it usually means,” he suggests that only a minority of decentralist arguments are innocuous. Combine this with Ken Toole’s funnel theory, and the implication is that any critic of centralized power, from a governor protesting unfunded mandates to an eco-conscious locavore, is potentially a part of the problem.

When you blur the boundaries of a scapegoated group, there’s a useful side benefit: You can discredit mainstream as well as radical political opponents. There was a turning point in the mid-nineties standoff between President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, and House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican—a moment when the White House was able to start setting the terms of the debate and the GOP went on the defensive. In most accounts, the shift came when the Republicans’ willingness to “shut down” the federal government backfired during the budget battle at the end of 1995. But the April bombing in Oklahoma City and the militia panic that followed were at least as important in shifting the grounds of the argument. They allowed Clinton’s supporters to play up the “extreme” antigovernment rhetoric coming from Gingrich’s supporters in the talk-radio Right and to link that to the “extremism” of McVeigh and the militias.

The White House was well aware of what was going on. Eight days after the bombing, Clinton’s adviser Dick Morris presented the president with a proposal to take advantage of the blast. As Morris explained the thinking in his memoir, Republican leaders were “not themselves extremists,” so directly accusing them of radical sympathies would probably have backfired. But the president could “advocate executive and legislative measures to counter right-wing hate groups and limit their access to weapons of destruction,” Morris felt. “Reluctant to alienate part of their political base, the Republican leaders were certain to rise in opposition,” thus creating a link to the extremists themselves. The memo called that strategy the “ricochet” approach.
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If that sounds like the Red Scare and Brown Scare tactics of the past, it’s because it was consciously influenced by them. Morris’s memo explicitly cited McCarthyism as a precursor, noting that Republicans in 1952 had been able to use the “communism issue against Democrats” by pointing to the party’s “flirtation with extremists”— i.e., liberal defenses of Communist civil liberties. The document also described how the public’s fear of groups such as the John Birch Society and the Minutemen had been used against Goldwater in 1964 and how the fear of black rioters and student demonstrators had been used against Democrats in 1968. Clinton could do the same thing, Morris advised, if he would stress the “weird lifestyles, paranoia, and aberrant behavior” of right-wing groups; create a “President’s List” of dangerous organizations that must disclose their members and donors; and call for “preventative surveillance” of such extremists.
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Some of that scenario, though not all of it, would play out over the next year and a half. Clinton proposed an antiterror bill that included serious limits on civil liberties, and Republican leaders weathered a lot of criticism when they excised the most restrictive parts of the law. Even so, Morris felt that Clinton didn’t “emphasize the menace of right-wing extremism” to the extent that he had
suggested
.
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The president certainly didn’t go as far as Hollywood did. In the intensely paranoid film
Arlington Road
, an Enemy Within thriller from 1999, a suburban professor learns that his next-door neighbors are planning an attack on a federal building. The movie feels as though it had been only barely updated from the Red Scare films of the fifties, though its ending owes more to
The Parallax View
: The protagonist not only fails to prevent the attack but also becomes the patsy who’s blamed for it, and the real perps move on to commit their next outrage. In the world of
Arlington Road
, the normal-seeming family next door might be terrorists, the man accused of terrorism might be an antiterrorist hero, and the seemingly sedate districts where middle-class Americans live might be breeding destruction.

The militias received a different treatment on
The X-Files
, the science fiction series often identified as the most paranoid TV show of the 1990s. Actually, they received two different treatments. In “Unrequited” (1997), the show’s heroes—the maverick FBI agent Fox Mulder, who is quick to believe tales of extraterrestrials and conspiracies; and his partner Dana Scully, who is more skeptical—encounter a Bo Gritz–esque veteran who leads a paramilitary group called the Right Hand. He is initially presented as a potential villain, but by the end of the episode his claims about a POW/MIA cover-up have turned out to be true. “The Pine Bluff Variant” (1998) is closer to the narrative of 1995: A militia called the New Spartans is plotting to use biological weapons against Americans, and Mulder has to infiltrate the group to stop it. But the episode isn’t a simple Brown Scare story. We learn that the feds infiltrated and manipulated the militia long before Mulder arrived on the scene. The group’s bioweapons did not come, as we were initially told, from Russia; they came from a secret U.S. arsenal. And the New Spartans intended to spread the pathogen by spraying it onto a bank’s supply of money, thus transforming one of the United States’ central institutions—cash—into a tool of terror.

There are also signs that Mulder shares the militia’s concerns, even if he despises their methods. That’s how he landed in a position where he was able to join the group in the first place. “He spoke at a UFO conference in Boston,” an official explains, “where he apparently broadcast his feelings about the government and their conspiracies against the American people.” A militiaman saw him as a potential ally and reached out for his help.
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If any popular anxiety was afoot, be it conspiracist or more broadly paranoid, it was likely to turn up on
The X-Files
. (Sometimes the franchise managed to catch a fear
before
it entered the larger culture. Six months before 9/11, the debut episode of a short-lived spin-off,
The Lone Gunmen
, featured a plot to crash a jet into the World Trade Center.) The series found villains in the military, in corporate America, and in the skies. Its heroes encountered hackers and vampires, psychics and disgruntled postal workers, surveillance cameras and the country’s most pervasive species of shadow government: a neighborhood association and its Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions. Many episodes reflected a generalized dread about globalization and porous borders, reflecting the Enemy Outside’s newly diffuse status. “The central image of threat during the Cold War was a nuclear explosion—destruction that starts at a clear central point and spreads outward,” the critic Paul Cantor has observed. “The central image of threat in
The X-Files
is infection—a plague that may begin at any point on the globe and spread to any other.”
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