The United States of Paranoia

by Jesse Walker

  That vision was promoted by a collection of groups dedicated to tracking the radical Right, notably the Anti-Defamation League and Dees’s Southern Poverty Law Center. Their narrative dominated the media. “In news coverage, popular novels, episodes of Law and Order, and movies such as Arlington Road,” Churchill wrote, “the public became well acquainted with the archetypal militiaman, usually portrayed as warped by racial hatred, obsessed with bizarre conspiracy theories, and hungry for violent retribution.”5 In Searching for a Demon, a 2002 study of how the media portrayed the militias, the sociologist Steven Chermak summed up their image: They were “irrational terrorists—a dangerous, growing outsider threat that needed eradicating.”6

  The figures who promoted that image often traced the militia movement to a weekend meeting in 1992, when Peter J. Peters, an anti-Semitic preacher associated with the Christian Identity movement, organized a gathering of the far-right tribes in Estes Park, Colorado. About 160 people reportedly attended, including one, John Trochmann, who later played a significant role in the militia milieu. (Trochmann denies that he was there.) By that account, the militias were a direct sequel to the violent racist underground of the 1980s, represented by such groups as the Aryan Nations and the Order, a terrorist gang that robbed banks, counterfeited money, and murdered a Jewish talk-show host. For writers such as the Seattle-based journalist David Neiwert, the militias were “specifically geared toward mainstreaming some of the basic tenets of [the racist Right’s] worldview.”7 If the militias didn’t seem to express the same set of concerns as those predecessors, that was merely a mask.

  Churchill offered a more persuasive origin story. He agrees that the militias overlapped with the older, broader populist Right—the sorts of people who gathered around Bo Gritz’s presidential campaign—but he also distinguishes the militias from those precursors. The movement began to congeal not in 1992 but in the early months of 1994, as activists reacted to the lethal federal raid on the Branch Davidians. Rather than tracing the phenomenon back to groups such as the Order, Churchill used a series of case studies to explore the long American tradition of armed resistance to intrusive government.

  The militias of the 1990s, he argued, were reacting primarily to the rise of paramilitary police tactics. Their causes célèbres—the standoffs in Waco and Ruby Ridge—were only the most visible examples of what could go wrong when policemen regarded themselves as soldiers rather than peace officers. The militias formed and grew, Churchill wrote, as their members “came to the conclusion that the federalization and militarization of law enforcement had created a paramilitary culture of violence.”8 He backed up his interpretation with many quotes from militia figures, including denunciations of the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles and the rape of Abner Louima, a Haitian man whom New York police sodomized with a broomstick in 1997. Churchill also cited militia publications that covered botched paramilitary police raids. Ohio’s E Pluribus Unum once listed fifteen raids gone wrong, including three that had left civilians dead, under the headline “Just Who Are the Terrorists?”9

  Meanwhile, neither McVeigh nor his accomplice Terry Nichols turned out to be a member of a militia. After the Oklahoma City attack, a Michigan Militia spokesman said that his group’s closest contact with the bombers had come when James Nichols, Terry’s brother, showed up to speak during the open-forum portion of a meeting. As the spokesman told it, Nichols attempted to distribute some literature, urged those present to cut up their driver’s licenses, and was eventually asked to leave. (There are conflicting accounts as to whether McVeigh attended a Michigan Militia meeting, but even the witness who believes he was there states that he attended as a guest, not a member. And although some media outlets reported that McVeigh once served as a bodyguard to Michigan Militia leader Mark Koernke, that turned out to be a case of mistaken identity: The man in question was named McKay.)10

  In the years between Oklahoma City and 9/11, some would-be terrorists on the fringes of the militia milieu were nabbed for planning attacks. (By the most generous definition of militia, there were about a dozen plots.)11 Such events bolstered the narrative of 1995, but the details of the schemes reveal a much more complicated picture. Several of the plans originated with the government’s own infiltrators. Many of the “militias” involved were tiny operations run by hotheads who’d been expelled from more established militia groups. In at least three cases—a plan to assault a series of government and media targets in Michigan; a plot to bomb gay bars, abortion clinics, and antimilitia groups in Oklahoma; and a strange scheme to prevent a Chinese invasion by attacking Fort Hood, Texas—the conspirators were arrested after militia members themselves got wind of the plans and alerted the police.

  Even the identification of the militias with the far Right isn’t entirely stable. The Left/Right crossovers that we saw bubbling beneath the paramilitary movies of the 1980s went even further in the following decade, as the fusion paranoia that Michael Kelly described found a receptive audience in much of the militia world. “We don’t want to hear about left and right, conservative and liberal, all these bullshit labels,” Militia of Montana activist Bob Fletcher told Kelly. “Let’s get back to the idea of good guys and bad guys, righteous governments—the honest, fair, proper, American government that all of us have been fooled into believing was being maintained.”12

  The fusionist style had continued to develop in the previous decade, with different figures putting their own stamps on the sensibility. When a new journal called Critique debuted in 1980, mixing articles about conspiracies and social control with essays on mysticism and the paranormal, it became clear just how eclectic the conspiracy subculture could be.

  Critique was created by Bob Banner, a young man who first stumbled into the conspiracy world at Santa Rosa Junior College in the mid-1970s. He was in his early twenties, and his life felt aimless: “I was drinking a quart of beer, fucking as many women as I could possibly find, and I was in a spiritual crisis, a psychological crisis.”13 Then he took a course in comparative religion from an instructor named Norman Livergood. When Banner found out that Livergood had a small center of his own—“it was like a secret society, it was like a mystery school”—he asked if he could join. They told him he had to get a haircut, shave his beard, buy a suit, and a find a full-time job. He did all of the above, and Livergood let him into the group: about a dozen people sharing a house and studying esoteric ideas.

  According to Banner, Livergood’s eclectic interests ranged from the mysticism of G. I. Gurdjieff to the political theories of Lyndon LaRouche, and he had a shelf full of publications from the Institute for Historical Review, an organization infamous for arguing that the Holocaust never happened. Banner adds that Livergood was intrigued by UFOs and by Wilhelm Reich’s ideas about sex. At one point, Banner told me, there was talk of “using our sexual attractiveness to other people to possibly bring them into the group.” Here Banner paused. “It sounds like I was in a cult. And yes, to a certain degree I was. We were a cult trying to figure out what the fuck we were.”14

  Livergood eventually kicked Banner out, but he left a mark on his former student. The first issue of Banner’s magazine included an editorial that seemed simultaneously to reflect Livergood’s social critique and to turn it against Livergood himself:

  During the 60s there were created “movements” which infiltrated American culture and politics. We were living in an emotionally strife era where racism, sexism, ageism, imperialism, corporatism, psychiatrism, patriotism and nuclear familyism were being attacked ruthlessly and irresponsibly. Movements were created overnight to destroy any new “disease” located in our cultural psyches. People who had the slightest degree of leadership capability amassed alien, atomized individuals to commit their time, rage, money and energy for purposes which these self-appointed leaders assumed to be meaningful.

  We didn’t question the possibility that we were being duped. Our new beliefs were considered to be our own. We held onto them like cherished artifacts di
scovered in a cave of lost treasure. We wore them like clothes to distinguish us from our “enemies”: that multitude who did not believe the way we did. We didn’t see that we were becoming as attached to ideas and belief systems as those people we categorically lumped together on the other side. We didn’t see it because we didn’t want to. It was too easy and comfortable to align ourselves with ideas that were in opposition to the “established reality.”

  Critique, he hoped, would evoke “the spirit to think, reflect, create and act toward gaining a deeper understanding of the often invisible manipulating influences and of who, in fact, we are and who we are becoming.”15

  When Banner describes this period of his life today, he makes his younger self sound simultaneously skeptical and naive. On one hand, he was willing to interrogate not just the normal assumptions of American society but the assumptions of the most popular alternative social visions as well. At the same time, he was the sort of person willing to follow one of those trails into the arms of a group he came to consider a cult. Make that two groups that he came to consider cults: At the dawn of the nineties, feeling aimless again after a decade of publishing Critique, Banner joined Xanthyros, an intentional community in Vancouver led by a guru named Robert Augustus Masters. Critique was revamped as a New Age magazine called Sacred Fire, and Masters took it over, with Banner serving as little more than a typesetter until he left the community.

  That mixture of skepticism and naiveté characterized Critique as well. “What I really found refreshing about Critique,” Jay Kinney recalled in 2012, “was that he was in some ways like a newborn with no taboos, would publish anything that challenged consensus reality. He even published Holocaust revisionist material, in what I would call a rather naïve fashion, but he was sincerely engaged with the notion of, ‘Well, what if what we know about that isn’t true?’ ” Some of the weirder material was included for novelty value or comic relief: Banner wasn’t being serious when, in the midst of a roundup of plausible or at least thinkable conspiracy news items, he threw in someone’s theory that “Carter looks like a zombified robot” because he “was killed in July of 78 and replaced with a ‘double.’ ”16

  Banner discovered a drawback to that approach when he manned a Critique table at an event near his home. “This guy shows up,” Banner told me, “and he’s so excited that he sees Critique. He loves my magazine. And he’s got mental problems.” The man rattled off references to drugs and aliens, to conspiracy theories and alternate realities; he sat on the ground leafing through back issues as he sang the publication’s praises. “And it’s the first time that I’m actually scared,” Banner recalled. “What the fuck am I doing if I’m attracting psychopaths or psychotic people or people who maybe really believe this shit I’m putting out? I’m doing it as an intellectual exercise to continually play with ideas and hold these ambiguities in my head. . . . Someone’s actually paying attention, and I need to be cautious.”

  Banner was very different from Peter McAlpine, and Critique was very different from Conspiracy Digest. But the two men read and appreciated each other’s work, and they were recognizably a part of the same subculture, a world the libertarian activist Samuel Edward Konkin III, writing in 1987, dubbed “Conspiracy Fandom.”17 By the time Critique was supplanted by Sacred Fire, new conspiracy fanzines were arriving to take its place, each with its own tone and flavor. Steamshovel Press launched in 1988. The Excluded Middle and Paranoia both followed in 1992. Flatland and the book catalog from which it emerged were a bit older, but they moved into the conspiracy culture only gradually. They came out of the Left, beginning as an adjunct to an anarchist printing collective in the mid-1980s. Flatland was still selling books on anarchism in the subsequent decade, but by then it also had a large stock of material on assassinations, mind control, UFOs, Wilhelm Reich, “suppressed science,” and the sovereign citizens movement. It even sold Bob Fletcher’s militia videos. The editor, Jim Martin, placed his operation firmly in fusionist territory when he called himself “an anarchist for Perot.”18

  Where there’s fandom, conventions frequently follow. In 1991 and 1992, you could attend PhenomiCon in Atlanta, a place where earnest UFO buffs such as William Cooper, the author of Behold a Pale Horse, could rub shoulders with ironists such as Robert Anton Wilson and the SubGenius crowd. A contingent from the Georgia Skeptics came the first year, eager to debate people with strange beliefs. One of the skeptics got more than he bargained for, according to the group’s newsletter, when he went to “a discussion on ‘Atomic Radio,’ billed as ‘the communications technology suppressed by the government since the late ’40s.’ ”19 As the skeptic argued that the alleged technology violated the laws of physics, agents invaded the presentation and appeared to kill everyone present. The skeptic, it turned out, had wandered into a live-action role-playing game. No one at the session actually believed in “Atomic Radio” at all.20

  Fandoms tend to take root on the Internet, too. A discussion group called alt.conspiracy had already appeared on Usenet at the tail end of the eighties. As of 1993, you could subscribe to an e-mail newsletter called Conspiracy for the Day, run by Brian Redman of Champaign, Illinois. (The title parodied the “Thought for the Day” messages available from various online sources.) One of Redman’s e-mails might contain part of a Science News report about crop circles; another might feature an excerpt from a book about CIA brainwashing experiments; another might reprint an Abbie Hoffman critique of the drug war. It’s hard to generalize about how the newsletter’s recipients perceived what they were reading. I had friends who subscribed to it under the impression that it was at least partly tongue-in-cheek and who made a habit of forwarding the items that they found especially funny or strange. But though Redman didn’t accept every idea he printed—he wanted, he later said, to “leave it open so people could just decide for themselves”21—his interest in conspiracies was sincere.

  Redman hadn’t paid much attention to world affairs until he hit his forties, when Waco got him interested in alternative news sources. After he had been putting out his daily e-mail for a while—he soon renamed it Conspiracy Nation—he got in touch with Sherman Skolnick, a Chicago-based conspiracy chaser who had been active since the sixties. In the days before mass access to the Internet, Skolnick had shared his ideas through a series of recorded messages that you could access by calling a phone number; now he became Redman’s mentor. Skolnick’s career had begun with a fairly well grounded argument that a couple of judges were corrupt, then had gradually descended into increasingly bizarre claims.22 Eventually they became too bizarre for Redman, who went his own way after Skolnick started declaring, to give just one example, that sinister forces had deliberately steered Hurricane Katrina into New Orleans.

  Skolnick came out of the radical Left but contributed to whatever publications would have him, including the Liberty Lobby’s paper The Spotlight. Redman had started as a Democrat, but in the nineties his outlook became more libertarian. The sources used in Conspiracy for the Day and Conspiracy Nation spanned the spectrum from liberal muckrakers to followers of Lyndon LaRouche. That sort of range was not unusual in the 1990s conspiracy scene.

  In that environment, it shouldn’t be surprising to see Anthony Hilder, who once had belonged to a group that sold “Support Your Local Police” bumper stickers, selling tapes at an event featuring Ice T and Body Count, musicians infamous for a song called “Cop Killer.”

  Hilder and the concert’s organizers hailed from very different political traditions, but they shared some of the same conspiracy theories. That shouldn’t be surprising, since they shared some of the same fears. Both were wary of the government’s growing police powers. Both resented the abuses of civil liberties that have come with the war on drugs, and both accused government officials of being involved with the drug trade themselves. The firebombing of MOVE in Philadelphia and the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles aroused the same resentment among blacks that the Ruby Ridge standoff prompted among many whites. In much of the
mass media, Americans angry about the Waco fires were classified with Klansmen. But nearly half the Branch Davidians killed at Mount Carmel were minorities—twenty-eight blacks, six Hispanics, and five Asians.23 “As things get worse,” Bob Fletcher concluded, “blacks and whites will be thrown into the same trash pail.”24

  Two organizations played prominent roles at that black/white intersection: the Nation of Islam and the Universal Zulu Nation. The Nation of Islam dates back to the 1930s, but Zulu Nation was born in the early days of hip-hop. Afrika Bambaataa has been a DJ and community organizer in New York since the 1970s; along with Grandmaster Flash, Kool Herc, and others, he was one of the founding fathers of rap. He created Zulu Nation as an alternative to gangs, inviting young people to the Zulus’ world of rapping, break dancing, and graffiti instead. By the 1990s, the group included musicians, filmmakers, and others around the world, from France to Japan to Africa. One of the “primary functions of getting in,” according to Afrika Islam, was sharing theories about the New World Order.25

  In 1994, Islam’s friend Hilder appeared on The Front Page, a popular talk show on the black-oriented Los Angeles radio station KJLH. There Hilder mixed the conspiracy theories popular in the patriot movement with appeals aimed at a black community ruptured by unemployment and crime. One listener who tuned in that day was Rasul Al-Ikhlas, the host of The Story of Soul, a local public-access television program. Al-Ikhlas invited Hilder onto his show, and at his guest’s suggestion he had Fletcher come along as well.

  Eager to reach still more of the black community, Hilder eventually tried his skills as a rapper, reciting apocalyptic verses over an electronic beat:

  Masonic mind manipulation