Day of the Zealots

On a Grim April morning I stood in a bathroom of a Branson, Missouri hotel, surrounded by a quartet of white supremacists. I shared the sink with a "Christian patriot" named Don.

There was a picture of a blood-streaked baby in my mind as I wiped my hands with a paper towel. This particular snippet of CNN footage had been haunting me since I had seen it in the Atlanta airport 48 hours earlier. This was not the place to be having sympathetic thoughts about the Oklahoma City victims. I wadded up the spent towel and tossed it into the wastebasket and looked at Don.

This broad-faced Oklahoma farmer took us all in with his dead blue eyes and said, "They've been taking this country from us, piece by piece, for years."

A grin stripped Don's teeth as he peered malevolently at me over his Wal-Mart glasses.

"But we got a piece of it back in Oklahoma City."

We all laughed.

I was in a different country from the one I had left a few days before.

Here in this country, in the Ozark hills, faithful white kinsmen, patriots of the New Jerusalem, had gathered for three days of paranoia, hate, fear and wrath. Here in the tawdry mecca of bad white culture, sandwiched between the likes of Mickey Gilley and Roy Clark, some 600 adherents to the American jihad convened under an innocuous banner proclaiming the Second Annual Super Conference of the International Coalition of Covenant Congregations.

Here, in this congregation of "Christian" men, women and children, there were no tears for the mangled and dead of Oklahoma City, no prayers for lost babies and weeping mothers. No, we were here to renew our resolve to destroy the Antichrist, the Jew (the seed of Satan), to annihilate the homosexual, the abortionist, the race traitor, to drive the mongrels and mud people from the continent, to wipe out every trace of the tyrannical federal government and its FBI-BATF-IRS-EPA-FEMA police state that has conspired to bring us under the heel of the evil new world order.

I had traveled to this paranoid netherworld on April 19 because of the significance of the date. It was the second anniversary of the Waco inferno. It was the execution date for Richard Wayne Snell, a member of Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord, a group that thrived 50 miles south of here during the early Eighties.

Snell had murdered a Texarkana pawnbroker during a robbery intended to raise money for a race war, shot the man in the head because Snell thought he was Jewish. After attempting to blow up a natural gas pipeline, he went on the run and ended up killing a black Arkansas state trooper. The 64-year-old Oklahoman was executed 12 hours after the blast in Oklahoma City. Snell died unrepentant, with a promise that hell would follow in his wake.

Both Waco and Snell, along with the Randy Weaver-FBI incident, had been behind battle cries on a number of right-wing faxes, fliers and Internet postings for more than a year. As April 19 drew close, these warnings of righteous wrath reached a shrill note and then went quiet. A few of my temporary colleagues and I knew it was a good bet that some kind of action would take place on the 19th, but none of us was prepared for the horror that erupted in my old hometown.

•

I milled around the book tables at the back of Crystal Hall, a large auditorium apparently named for the trio of acrylic chandeliers hanging from the drop ceiling. On the tables were books and pamphlets that ranged from demolition manuals to organic diet guides. There were dominion theology volumes from Christian reconstructionists that called for an America governed by "God's law," political tracts from the John Birch Society, the Populist Party the Gun Owners of America and the National Association for the Advancement of White People, plus intricate maps of the new world order and its roots in the Sanhedrin, Illuminati, Vatican and Council on Foreign Relations.

There were outraged testimonies to fallen martyrs: Gordon Kahl, the anti-Semitic member of Posse Comitatus (an extreme antitax group) who was killed in 1983 after murdering two federal agents; Vicki and Sam Weaver, the wife and son of white supremacist Randy Weaver, who were killed in 1992 during a shoot-out at their Idaho stronghold; and, of course, David Koresh and the Waco Branch Davidians.

Officially, this was a gathering of Christian Identity, a movement that has its roots in a Victorian English curiosity called British Israelism, and there were hundreds of cassettes featuring Identity ministers, Identity music and Identity medical regimens.

I took a seat among the congregation and looked carefully at the faithful gathered around me. They were mostly men, but there were families with beautiful babies and children, and two or three long-haired back-to-nature guys with beatific smiles, their wives glowing with peppermint-soap complexions. Plenty of militia types. Hard-faced ex-cons and military vets. Out-of-the-hills farm women from Appalachia and shopping-mall wives. The pastors in JC Penney and Western-styled suits with crisp white shirts and out-of-date neckties. It was fundamental white America besieged. All drawn together in a warped faith based on race, fundamentalism, conspiracy and heavy weaponry.

•

At the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, where I work, the Klanwatch Militia Task Force monitors the activities of the racist right within the new militia movement. In October 1994 Law Center co-founder Morris Dees wrote a letter to Attorney General Janet Reno warning of the increased involvement of white supremacists in the militias.

As far back as 1982 Klanwatch had obtained an injunction halting a Klan paramilitary force in Texas called the Texas Emergency Reserve, which had five compounds in that state. Headed by Louis Beam, then Grand Dragon of the Texas Ku Klux Klan, the outfit was training 2500 Klansmen and others in the arts of demolition, deployment, weapons and full-scale military operations.

Four years later Klansmen Glenn Miller and Stephen Miller (not related) formed the White Patriot Party in North Carolina. They managed to field at least a thousand white racists armed with semiautomatic assault weapons. Members of the party were later involved in the machine-gunning of a gay bookstore that left two people dead. They also attempted to hijack a TOW missile from a military convoy and use it to blow up the Southern Poverty Law Center. Dees later joined with the U.S. Attorney General in North Carolina in bringing down the Millers' terrorist army.

Many of these self-proclaimed patriots were spewing the same old anti-Semitic, antigovernment paranoia that has been around since the late Sixties. Many of them also had strong links to some of the most dangerous elements of the extremist right--the Klan, Aryan Nations, Posse Comitatus and, especially, Identity.

Identity's philosophy is based on several best-selling books of the mid-Victorian era, in which the densely woven theory of British Israelism contends that the true tribes of Israel are Anglo-Saxons. Anti-Semitism played no part in the theory's original manifestation. But in 1948 virulent racist Wesley Swift formed his Church of Jesus Christ Christian in southern California, where he was joined by two other anti-Semites, Bertrand Comparet and Colonel William Potter Gale. The trio joined the British Israel message with fundamentalist Christianity to form Christian Identity or Christian Israel.

According to Christian Identity's message, Adam was the first white man, the first true Israelite. Before Adam, God created people of color, "mud people," who were without souls. After Adam was given Eve, Eve coupled with Satan and delivered Cain--the seed of Satan--who in turn mated with the pre-Adamic "beasts" to form a mongrel tribe called the Edomites, otherwise known as Jews. The Edomites are the physical embodiment of evil in the world, and have been behind every catastrophe since they murdered Christ. They were behind the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, World Wars One and Two, Korea, Vietnam. Economic crises, income taxes, public schooling, the United Nations and the federal government all are part of a diabolical plan to enslave the world--the white Christian world.

In the beginning there were just a few hundred Identity adherents. Today there are tens of thousands, with many thousands more influenced by the group's message. The Reverend Norman Olson, leader of a Baptist congregation and commander of Michigan Militia, the best-publicized and largest militia in the country, is reportedly an Identity minister. Olson's militia has been linked to accused Oklahoma City bomber Tim McVeigh. (The militia denies McVeigh was ever a member.) Michigan Militia chief of staff Ray Southwell is a deacon in Olson's church. Both men resigned from militia positions on April 28, 1995, the day (continued on page 76) Zealots (continued from page 70) before their affiliations with the anti-Semitic religion were made public. For more than a year Olson and Southwell had loudly proclaimed that they had nothing to do with racists or white supremacy.

John Trochmann has been linked to the Aryan Nations and Identity movements. Along with his brother David and nephew Randy, Trochmann operates the Militia of Montana, which works in tandem with the Michigan Militia and Mark Koernke, the high-profile paramilitary advocate who became quite well known after the Oklahoma City bombing. The influence of these two groups was enormous in the formation of hundreds of militias across the nation. These two militias were crucial in establishing a nation-wide network of like-minded, well-armed fanatics.

•

I was sitting in the middle of some 600 of them when Pete Peters came bounding onto the stage to deliver an unscheduled prayer. Peters is one of the most influential figures on the racist right, an Identity minister from Laporte, Colorado who has reached hundreds of thousands of listeners and viewers through his Scriptures for America broadcasts. He is a close friend to Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler and former Klan Grand Dragon Louis Beam. A little-known meeting nearly three years ago may have set the stage for a campaign of domestic terrorism the likes of which has not been seen since Reconstruction. In October 1992 Pete Peters invited more than 160 "white Christian men" to Estes Park, Colorado for a three-day strategy session. During that weekend in the Rockies a network of militant antigovernment zealots was created. Alliances were formed from diverse factions--Identity, Posse Comitatus, the Klan, Aryan Nations, reconstructionist and other fundamentalist Christians, neo-Nazis, tax resisters, Second Amendment advocates and anti-abortion extremists.

Onstage now, Peters informed us that he had just gotten off the telephone with his folks in Colorado and that the federal government had linked the Oklahoma City bombing to white supremacists.

"Join me," Peters called in a nasal bray as he raised his arms to the ceiling. "Oh, Lord Yahweh, our creator, Yeshua, his son! Deliver us from the Antichrist enemies who plot against us! Strike them down! Thwart their satanic plots against your people! Smite them down, Lord. Keep us, your people Israel, safe from your enemy, the Antichrists who have done this thing and put it on us, your people! We pray, in Christ's name. Amen."

"Amen!" we echoed.

This frightening theme would be rapped out again and again as different "pastors" and "patriots" took the podium in the following sessions.

The most intriguing of these was Larry Pratt, executive director of both Gun Owners of America and the Committee to Protect the Family Foundation, an organization that raises funds for anti-abortion extremist Randall Terry. Pratt is a slight, bespectacled Presbyterian who travels between the Beltway and the extreme reaches of contemporary American fanaticism. The former Virginia legislator has been in constant contact with an array of extremist bodies for more than a decade, from racist meetings like the one in Branson to Peters' Estes Park strategy sessions to visits with militia officers in the Philippines and members of Guatemalan death squads.

"Maybe I should begin with a few remarks on what has happened," Pratt says. "I was in front of the FBI building in Washington just before noon. It was 11 o'clock, I guess, out in Oklahoma. There were a number of us there at a rally to commemorate what was done to those people at Waco by the FBI. And the media were all trying to make this connection between the Davidians and what happened in Oklahoma City. So I told them, 'Yeah, I do see a connection between what happened to the Davidians and what happened in Oklahoma City. And that was that whoever did that in Oklahoma City had sunk to the level of the FBI.' The government behaves as a beast. It did in Waco and we have somebody, whoever it might have been, whatever group it might have been, assuming they can't rely on the Lord to take vengeance."

Pratt's prepared theme was that Christians were ordered by God to take up assault rifles. It wasn't an issue of rights or governance. God simply said, "Get an assault rifle, or else."

"We have a lot of confusion in our land, and the bottom line is that it is a spiritual battle. This is not a political issue. This is something that comes first and foremost from the Scripture. What I see in scripture is not that we have a right to keep and bear arms, but that we have a responsibility to do so."

•

Fifteen years ago the Arkansas-based Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord, an Identity community of some 200 members, put out a statement regarding their Endtime Overcomers Survival School. "In this class we teach people the scriptural basis for war and a Christian army. Exodus 15:3 says 'I, the Lord, am a man of war: the Lord is my name.' God is a man of war, reaping vengeance on his enemies and the enemies of his elect. At CSA we try to teach that 'beans and bullets' are not enough--faith in Christ Jesus is mandatory in order to survive!"

The CSA also reported on a supposed world government plan for foreign troops to police the United States. Substitute "new world order" for "world government" and you have the same scenario that the militia movement has been promoting for the past two years.

•

"Folks, this tragedy in Oklahoma tells us that unless we know the savior, without knowing him, we won't have peace. This is the kingdom message."

David Barley, of America's Promise Ministry in Idaho, had the podium. His voice began evenly but soon took on the timbre of an angry terrier. "They say we are a bunch of white separatists. You bet we are!"

We responded with quite enthusiastic applause.

"They are out to do the same thing to us that they did in Oklahoma City. They don't talk about Waco."

Barley rolled his head around in disgust.

"Well, who were the evil cowards in Waco? Didn't they hide?"

Barley had us pitching anger back and forth. We bounced our butts on our chairs.

"Johnnie Reno, uh, Janet Reno. She's putting out hints about white supremacists and extremists and militia groups. 'They're up to something,' she says. You had better believe it! They are out to do the same thing. They first demonize you people, me, those people who love Jesus Christ, those people (continued on page 120) Zealots (continued from page 76) who love righteousness, those people who really care about this nation!

"Those people," says Barley, fiercely thrusting a finger eastward, "who want to violate God's law, do away with those biblical principles, they don't love this nation! We had Waco. ..."

The pastor lets that sink down on our shoulders like a heavy shadow of doom before continuing.

"People don't talk about that tragedy. They don't talk about the little children they murdered. They show pictures of these precious little children--and they were precious little children--who died in this accident. I didn't see any pictures of what happened in Waco!

"The media ask, Who are these evil cowards who were the perpetrators of this bomb? Who murdered these little children? Well, I have another question: Who are the evil cowards who hid themselves and murdered those little children in Waco, Texas? Didn't they hide themselves? Didn't they wear ski masks?"

Pastor Barley has a solution: We need a national old-covenant cleansing! We need a new heart! This is a time of reformation! What is the New Jerusalem? Who is the New Jerusalem? False teaching of the Scripture has put sin on this nation! And he commanded: and with a two-edged sword in their hand, render judgment on the heathen!"

I threw my hands together with the covenant people in a wash of applause for this appalling little bigot. My brain was reeling from the exploitation of mutilation, death and despair. I had just participated in. The rest of the country was still in shock, still grieving, but we here, the chosen patriots of the New Jerusalem, had no such feelings. We were the real victims. Us. Not those mangled toddlers and unlucky Social Security workers. No. They had it coming to them.

•

On the next day the rain fell and with it paranoia sprouted like mushrooms among us. For the militiamen, "Christian patriots" and Aryan Nations members, it was a well-justified fear that FBI agents might walk in at any time. For me, it was the fear I might be found out as the stranger among the Israelites, the traitor among patriots.

I knew I had nothing to fear so long as I was here in Branson among the thousands of hard-permed and polyestered tourists. But after I drove out of town, there were 10,000 holes in the Ozarks where my body could be dumped for all eternity.

We were treated to some Identity entertainment, which consisted of a husband and wife duo going at each other with electric piano and banjo, a gangly, crotch-pulling brother who wrenched through a few sacred tunes to Yahweh and finally a very strange ventriloquist act perpetrated by yet another member of the congregation.

This dismal spirit-raising endeavor was abruptly wiped away by the appearance of Earl Jones of the Christian Crusade for Truth, out of New Mexico. A shaved-pated ex-Marine colonel and close confidant to Louis Beam, Jones had laid down Beam's strategy for "leaderless resistance." Beam appropriated this guerrilla plan from a Cuban who had been involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Leaderless resistance, as Beam sees it, is a biblical system of warfare in which "freedom fighters" are trained, equipped, funded and then turned loose to do whatever may be necessary. It relieves the movement leadership from the actions of these cells, which are made up of from five to eight men. As Jones put it, it leaves the men "free to just do everything on their own, as just one man or several. They just do whatever comes on their hearts to do. It's called leaderless resistance," Jones continued. "But we know it as following the mandates given to us by our God."

It is the type of terrorism that we have seen in abortion clinic bombings, in assassinations of doctors and in the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City.

During the weekend in Branson we heard many Old Testament examples of this guerrilla tactic: References were repeatedly made to the stories of Phinehas, Gideon and Ehud--vigilantes of the Lord God.

"For our purposes," Jones asserted, trolling us with a flinty gaze, "we have to have leaderless resistance within the confines of our directives given to us in the word of God." In Identity that means death to the Jews, the sodomites, the baby killers, the race traitors, the socialists and any and all who would stand in the way of a white Christian republic. "Our backs are against the wall," said Colonel Jones.

Here in this upstairs room in Branson were just some of the thousands of white people who shared the same witness, and who were joined by the same bloody spirit. Some of them were not any more Identity than I was. It was acknowledged by Everitt Ramsey, the Identity minister who called this gathering, that this was a Covenant Congregation. This meant that like-minded "Christian patriots" were now bound together, regardless of whether or not they had "the Israel message."

Looking at Jones standing up there ramrod straight, fit and ready as a vintage combat pistol, I thought of Beam and his prophetic speech at Estes Park back in 1992.

"For the first time in the 22 years that I have been in the movement, we are all marching to the beat of the same drum," the menacing Texan had begun. "We are viewed by the government as the same: enemies of the state. When they come for you the federal government will not ask if you are a constitutionalist, a Baptist, Church of Christ, Identity, Covenant, Klansman, Nazi or home schooler. You are enemies of the state! If you believe in liberty, if you believe in justice, join with us. Pave the road to the new world order with the tyrants' blood, tyrants' bones. They shall know the broken heart!"

The engine that powered that yellow truck down Highway 77 into Oklahoma City was built by white supremacy. The fuel that powered that engine was Identity. No other group of Americans hates the federal government with as much purity, as much fervor and as much conviction as do those who have the Israel Message. It may not be that the terrorists responsible for the bombing were baptized Identity Christians. But their paranoia and homicidal will to action issued from more than 40 years of that peculiarly American sect's teachings and from tactics supplied by its followers, such as Beam, Jones, Peters and others.

I drove out of Branson in a cold, dismal rain and snaked down into Arkansas. I wasn't followed and I wasn't far from a safer country. Inside my head the little broken body floated, red and pink and yellow, like a wound. I pushed the Play button on my minicassette recorder to hear if my jerry-rigged "wire" system had worked during the conference. Out came the howling voice of W.N. Otwell, a pastor who runs a well-armed compound in the piney woods of east Texas.

"We talk about Patrick Henry, John Paul Jones and all these patriots and we don't do one stinking thing! We talk about the Constitution that was given to us in blood! And not one preacher did I meet in Waco, Texas! I was down there in Waco on the 19th, and I didn't know what was going to happen in Oklahoma City. But when it come time, the bottom fell out and it started raining. We had militia people there and we give a 21-gun salute. I had no idea they was going to blow up that building in Oklahoma City."

The little body was now outside my head, rocking back and forth just in front of the hood in the gray rain. I thought of my 16-month-old son as Otwell's rant continued:

"I just come back from there. Chief of police called me and said, 'I heard you were up in OKC.' I guess he thought I had something to do with it. About nine or nine-thirty we found out they had bombed that place. I saw all those amputations and broken bodies, but I'm still angry with them. I'll tell you something. They say, 'What about all those women and kids?' And I say: 'What about all those women and kids in Waco, Texas! You go look in the Old Testament. God did not mind killing a bunch of women and kids. God talks about slaughter! Don't leave one suckling! Don't leave no babies! Don't leave nothing! Kill them! Destroy them!' "

I hit the Stop button with my thumb. It was a long drive back to the Little Rock airport and a long way from there to the country I left on April 19. I kept my eyes on the broken body out there in the rain and wondered what Jesus might say.

Larry Pratt's prepared theme was that Christians were ordered by God to take up assault rifles.

After I drove out of town, there were 10,000 holes in the Ozarks where my body could be dumped.