THE NATION May 22, 1995
A visit with MOM
MONTANA'S MOTHER OF ALL MILITIAS
Marc Cooper
Noxon, Montana
Randy Trochmann, the 27-year-old co-founder and
one of the leaders of the Militia of Montana -- MOM
-- has a neat little theory about the Oklahoma
bombing, one that he's eagerly trying to I spoon-
feed me and every other member of the pack of
reporters from the BBC to Esquire who've trekked
into this densely forested northwest corner of
Montana. Namely, that the bloody destruction of
the Oklahoma City federal building was nothing but
Billary's version of the Reichstag fire.
"As soon as I heard about the bombing I said to
myself, 'Oh my God! Here it comes. We're gonna
get blamed.' We'd always said they were gonna look
for something to use to shut us down," Trochmann
says over ham and eggs at the Landmark Cafe in this
town of 350 people.
"You think the federal government bombed
itself?" I ask. Trochmann isn't about to fall for
such a blatant reporter's trick. After all, in the
previous forty-eight hours he and his MOM comrades
have been immersed in a crash course of advanced
media in the form of Q & A sessions with the best
the fourth estate has to offer. MOM is putting its
most humane face to the camera, while keeping its
other two cofounders -- Randy's gruff father,
David, and his even gnarlier uncle John, who has a
long association with neo-Nazi groups -- safely
bunkered away from the media's greedy reach.
In contrast, Randy's youth and folksy manner
are as disarming as his casual jeans and western
shirt. Likewise, in the booth next to us, another
MOM official, Bob Fletcher, sporting a blue blazer
and armed with nothing more deadly than a cellular
phone, is spinning like a top for a Swedish TV
crew.
Randy first gives a knowing smile to my point-
blank query and then delicately parries: "Hard to
say what happened. Have to wait to see what the
F.B.I. comes up with. But I will tell you this: If
it hadn't been for the bombing the headlines that
day would have read 'Bill and Hillary Clinton
Subpoenaed to Testify on Whitewater.' Instead,
that news got buried."
But with the hard ice of conspiracy theorizing
now cracked, poor Randy Trochmann can't help
himself. Like Dr. Strangelove's inability to
restrain his Nazi salute while working for the
Pentagon, Trochmann -- even now, on the best of
behavior -- dives head-first into that comfortable
pool of murky and sinister federal cabals. Isn't
it ironic, he says, that the bombing should come
just when Bill Clinton's anti-terrorism bill was
lagging in Congress? When new "gun grab" laws were
stalling? What about that former Secret Service
guy who Randy heard might have been in the building
at the time of the explosion? "Now you tell me,"
he says. "What business would a former Secret
Service agent have in that building?" What about
the Waco and Whitewater papers that again might
have been in that building? What about the reports
that there were two bombs, not one?
And then, of course, there's always the Jews.
Not by name, of course -- not with so many
reporters around. "I can't confirm this," Randy
continues, "but we do have some reports that the
A.D.L. had an office in that building and that the
people who work there were conveniently out at a
picnic that morning."
And with Tim McVeigh and the Nichols brothers
now in custody tied to the bombing and all three
tied in different degrees to the militia movement,
Trochmann anticipates my next question. "Militias
have nothing to do with the bombing. And even if
it turns out McVeigh is involved, then you're gonna
have to look seriously at his claim that the
government experimented on him, that they did put a
microchip in him or something like that."
Who knows? Given enough time to theorize,
Trochmann might find a way to link Mark Fuhrman and
the bloody glove to the Oklahoma bombing. This
scramble for cover is understandable. Because
after a solid year of phenomenal growth, the
nationwide militia movement -- despite declaring
the federal government its military enemy -- still
went either unnoticed by the press or was simply
shrugged off as an insignificant fringe phenomenon.
Now, the bombing has catapulted the likes of
Trochmann and his gun-toting citizen soldiers of
the hard right into the center of national
political debate.
Paranoia Strikes Deep
And this newfound scrutiny is particularly
uncomfortable for MOM, which is, in many ways, the
Mother of all Militias. Among the dozens of these
"unorganized" armed civilian groups that have
mushroomed in at least thirty-three states and
signed up maybe 20,000 active volunteers who
network by fax, phone, talk-radio and the Internet,
not only is MOM considered to be one of the most
radical but it also serves as the organizational
model nationwide. Indeed, many if not a majority
of the country's militias owe their existence in
part to the zealously aggressive proselytizing and
organizing campaign carried out by MOM since the
spring of 1994.
One hesitates to use the words Brain Center
when describing a movement that is fueled much more
by visceral fear and ignorance than by rational
ideology, but MOM, in that context, is undeniably a
national Nerve Center for the militias. Even the
much bigger and more infamous Michigan Militia,
says Trochmann, "really got started by us, directly
with our help." Further, the most notorious
byproduct of that outfit, Mark "From Michigan"
Koernke, who for a few days after the bombing was
reported wanted by the Feds, is a close associate
of MOM and played a key role in its organizing
campaign.
And my, how the MOM campaign and others like it
paid off. Pick just about any pocket of economic
and social distress -- Arizona and Montana
communities suffering from a decline in the mining
or timber industries, Michigan or New Hampshire
mill towns where heavy industry had fled to Mexico,
California edge cities where the cold war aerospace
subsidy has vanished -- and you will find thousands
of Americans who spent part of last year dressing
up in camouflage, undergoing automatic weapons
training and preparing for final battle with what
they consider to be an enemy federal government.
These groups are tinged with anti-Semitism and
racism-infused by the extreme right founders of the
movement -- but probably not much more so than any
suburban homeowners' club barbecue. Rank-and-file
concerns go way beyond racial or ethnic purity.
In their minds, militia members are fighting
for no less than the future of America itself.
More than religious or racial fundamentalists, they
claim to be constitutional literalists. And in an
age of globalization, in which ordinary people
rightfully suspect they may be mere slaves on a
worldwide plantation, the militias' message has
exercised a heady attraction. With no contending
voices able or willing to make themselves heard in
explaining the plight of scared white Americans,
the militias and the "patriot" groups have come up
with their own mythology: The cold war enemy,
Global Communism, has been supplanted by the
specter of Globalism itself. America is on the
verge of tyranny; the federal siege at Waco was
merely a dry run for nationwide martial law; the
United Nations, aided and abetted by the federal
government, is about to take over the United
States; the Feds will furnish the occupying Chinese
Army troops with Russian military equipment; soon
the government will confiscate all private
firearms; some forty-three concentration camps are
ready to house resistant libertarians; the
government has put secret markings on road signs to
facilitate the coming takeover by One World forces;
clandestine squadrons of black helicopters are
mapping all of America; Hong Kong police and Gurkha
troops are training in the Montana wilds "to take
guns away from Americans" by order of Bill Clinton;
and so on. All this is to usher in a New World
Order, itself a vast conspiracy of elite,
international bankers, including David Rockefeller,
in cahoots with Mikhail Gorbachev and even Newt
Gingrich. And of course, the 20 percent decline in
your real wages in as many years is somehow linked
to all of the above.
Now comes the bombing in Oklahoma. And as much
as the militias and their sideline defenders on
talk-radio, in certain state legislatures and even
in Congress would want to deny it, the April 19
slaughter of more than 140 men, women and children
is a defining moment of the contemporary right,
comparable to the 1970 Weather Underground
townhouse explosion for the left, only amplified
100-fold. The question now is, has the country's
rightward lurch extinguished itself in the Oklahoma
holocaust, or has it merely fragmented into a
thousand sparks destined to ignite a firestorm of
end-of-millennium madness?
It's the Story of a Bill Named Brady
The history and development of the militia
movement often generates disputes among
professional watchers of the right. Some put more
emphasis on the militia being merely a front group
for white supremacist leaders; other analysts see
it as more of an independent social movement. But
there are some basic facts that most analysts can
agree upon.
First and foremost, the militias are a movement
that for some time has been waiting to happen, born
in the backlashes against civil rights,
environmentalism, gay rights, the pro-choice
movement and gun control. On the other hand, the
idea of armed militias has also been floating
around for some time, but always held close in hand
by extremist groups -- from the K.K.K. to the
Birchite Minutemen to the White Citizens' Councils
to the jackbooted gangs of The Order and other neo-
Nazi sects. The explicitly racist and anti-Semitic
programs of these early militias acted as automatic
checks on their growth, as did a federal crackdown
on The Order in the mid-1980s [see Elinor Langer,
"The American Neo-Nazi Movement Today," July 16/23,
1990]. But in the past few years, against a
general background of economic uncertainty and
alienation from the political system, the militias
have made a radical turn toward the mainstream.
Two events galvanized the hard-right organizing
that would eventually spawn the militias. In 1992
federal agents found themselves in a standoff in
Ruby Ridge, Idaho, with avowed white separatist
Randy Weaver. In a confrontation that took one
agent's life, Weaver's unarmed wife and teenage son
were killed by government bullets.
For extreme-right activists, Weaver and his
family became immediate martyrs and icons of
resistance to federal tyranny. At a closed-door
meeting in the Rocky Mountains in October 1992 some
175 hard-right activists were brought together by
the explicitly racist Christian Identity minister
Pete Peters. Out of that confab grew a Weaver
support organization, the United Citizens for
Justice (UC.I.), led by former Texas Klan leader
Louis Beam and two Montanans, Chris Temple and
Randy Trochmann's uncle John, himself a participant
in Aryan Nations activities.
Just a few months later, on April 19, 1993,
Attorney General Janet Reno directed the siege at
Waco against the Branch Davidian cult, culminating
in the death by bullets, gas and fire of seventy-
eight people, including a score of children in
whose supposed interest the government acted in the
first place.
Then the last element came into view: In
February 1994 the Brady Bill, which regulated
firearms sales, took effect; this was followed last
September by the assault weapons ban. "All of a
sudden the Trochmanns and their allies saw a bridge
magically open to the mainstream thanks to the gun
issue. The subthemes were, of course, Weaver, Waco
and a federal government out of control," says Ken
Toole, president of the Montana Human Rights
Network. "But with the Brady Bill it was like
someone poured jet fuel on the movement. Overnight
we saw all this militia stuff bleed right out of
the white supremacists who had been pushing the
idea for years and engulf entire communities."
By that time John Trochmann and his family had
broken with the U.C.J. and emerged publicly in
February 1994 as the Militia of Montana. The
explicitly racist claptrap of previous years was
now replaced with ominous warnings about impending
martial law and One World Socialism, all preceded
by the confiscation of your personal armory. In
the first part of 1994 MOM's founding cadre toured
Montana setting up a dozen or more meetings,
frequently drawing crowds of up to 800 people.
The fear of what Randy Trochmann calls a "gun
grab" is what brought the rank and file into the
tent. Once inside, the new recruits were
shellacked with coat after coat of conspiracy
theories and scapegoating programs that explained
the Big Picture. From the now well-publicized
white supremacist tract The Turner Diaries, to the
musty anti-Semitic libels detailing secret elites
of international bankers, to the new tales that
included black helicopters and bio-chip implants,
these theories all pointed in the direction of an
America about to be devoured by the New World
Order.
MOM itself became, in Toole's words, "the
largest, most prolific disseminator of support
materials in the country for people who wanted to
build militias." At one point it's estimated that
the Trochmanns were sending out as many as 200
militia start-up packages a week. The package
includes an "Information and Networking Manual:'
which confronts the reader with the choice of
either leaving "our fate in the hands of corrupted,
self-serving, foreign mercenaries ... and private
corporations in its employ, denying us the freedom
to keep and bare [sic] arms" or forming a militia.
"Join the Army and serve the UN or Join the Militia
and Serve America," the manual exhorts. "Your
Choice: Freedom or Slavery."
In Montana and throughout the country the
militias forged a new alliance between the old-line
white supremacist groups and the newer antitax
organizations, property rights organizations and
Wise Use anti-enviro activists [see David Helvarg,
page 722], Christian conservatives, antiabortion
militants, Perotista constitutionalists, gun-owner
associations and thousands of individual
representatives of that newly categorized political
species, the Angry White Male.
Last December, MOM conducted a second spasm of
intense organizing when it sponsored a weeklong
Montana tour by militia man Mark Koernke, who
enthralled standing-room audiences with his AK-47
rifle and a hangman's noose. A final meeting in
Noxon lasted ten hours and included discussions of
sniping techniques and ammo reloading.
MOM's efforts were successful. "They may claim
12,000 members, but they probably have only about
250 real active members," says Toole. "But their
base of soft support is large and very widespread."
Since early this year, Montana has been .the scene
of a number of nervous confrontations as local
officials clashed with militia members and
supporters who refuse to pay taxes, register their
cars, obey gun laws or recognize the jurisdiction
of courts they say are controlled by a treasonous
regime. "They do pose a serious law-enforcement
problem,' says Missoula County Attorney Dusty
Deschamps. "In this part of the country people
talk about gangs. In my opinion the most dangerous
gangs are these radical fundamentalist
constitutionalist types, because they drape the
American flag around themselves."
Militia activities are not always carried out
behind the backs of local law enforcement. A home
video of one recent militia organizing meeting in
Eureka, Montana, provided by the weekly Independent
of Missoula, shows a local sheriff not only
encouraging the group's formation but vowing not to
enforce the Brady Bill. "I would never register my
guns," the sheriff tells the group. "How could I
ask you to register yours?"
I Talk, Therefore I Aim
The growth of militias in this state can in
part be ascribed to the local psycho-geography and
economic hard times. Montana is conservative and
poor, and many of its citizens have always felt
"colonized" by remote centers of power; the state
suffered through a ten-year recession in the 1980s
and is now enduring the transition from mining and
timber economy to a low-wage vacation and service
economy.
But there's also something about our times,
when opinion has achieved moral equivalence with
knowledge, that has spawned paranoid and
apocalyptic movements throughout America. "The
conventional wisdom is that the country has
witnessed and survived previous waves of mass
dissatisfaction that eventually dissipates," says
Bill Chaloupka, political science professor at the
University of Montana. "But there's something new
about the way this sort of populism expresses
itself in the age of TV and talk-radio. There's
now an empowerment for individuals to convey their
own politics totally independent of a physical
community. Your new community becomes merely the
audience of Rush Limbaugh or other hate radio,
removed absolutely from rational interplay and
reality checks with real institutions."
The end product: Any expression of even
momentary reason or factual argument is lost in the
round-the-clock cacophony of competing opinions.
In the wake of the Oklahoma bombing, for the first
time in American history, the central political and
moral debate in a time of national crisis is
carried on between the President and a talk-show
host.
"What's frightening about this current wave of
paranoid politics of resentment," says Chaloupka,
"is that so far the raw anger far surpasses any
gesture toward articulated and soothing reform.
Clinton tried to harness that impulse in 1992 but
so far his efforts have been insignificant."
Soldiers for Fortune?
As Randy Trochmann finishes his breakfast he
predicts a rosy future for the militias: As more
people become aware that "we are only a couple of
steps away from world government, when they hear
about the press release from the U.N. a few weeks
ago saying we will have world government by the
year 2000, when they realize that means no more
states' rights, no more mention of God and country,
no First and certainly no Second Amendment, we will
continue to grow."
"I talked to a guy in the Oregon militia today
who had a stand selling militia material at a gun
show this past weekend," Trochmann continues.
"People came up to him with tears in their eyes
saying they couldn't believe what Clinton was
saying about us. And our own phones haven't
stopped ringing with people calling to ask how they
can get involved."
Reality, of course, is more nuanced than a few
self-serving anecdotes. It's difficult to believe
that the advance of the militias into the
mainstream, humming along so smoothly this past
year, hasn't been interrupted by the Oklahoma City
bombing. A hard core of far-right activists may be
enthralled by the possibilities open to them to
live out otherwise ordinary lives within their own
novels of federal conspiracies and looming
repression. But those on the softer, outer edges
of the militia movement must be thinking twice
these days, maybe three times, about participating
in groups that -- thanks to TV -- have been
indelibly associated in the public mind with a
bombing that immolated scores of Americans; the
networks milked for every last rating point the
horrifying images of bleeding infants. Those
"bridges" to the mainstream that opened for the
hard right last year may have been blown up with
the federal building.
But there are also a lot of people now on the
other side of that bridge who have nowhere
respectable to go. The militia/"patriot" movement
may temporarily contract with the concussion of the
Oklahoma explosion, but a future expansion may have
deadly consequences, especially after the bombing
is neatly refolded into the hard right's folklore
of government conspiracy.
"The leaders of this movement are cagey folks,"
says Ken Toole. "They are more than willing to sit
back now and calmly wait for the next political
bridge to open. When it does they'll be scurrying
right back to the mainstream." And with the 1996
campaign moving to the front burner, with the
national political agenda laden with such explosive
issues as counter-terrorism legislation (read:
federal abuse of individual rights), welfare reform
(read: race-baiting) and immigration (read:
xenophobia), the opportunities for Randy Trochmann
and his friends will be plentiful. Further, the
intense media spotlight focused on the militias
this week has also given them their fifteen minutes
of fame and name recognition; for all I know, maybe
Randy Trochmann's phone has been ringing off the
hook. Certainly, as I watched Sam Donaldson on
Prime Time Live barely conceal his distaste at
having to interview janitor Mark Koernke (who
K.O.'d Donaldson on points), you'd have to wonder
how many other working-class men throughout the
country decided that very same moment that Sam (and
Diane and Cokie and George) were in fact all part
of an overpaid, arrogant governing elite.
Fifteen minutes after Trochmann leaves the
Landmark Cafe he returns, just as I am packing up
to go. In one hand he offers me as a gift two
camouflage hats that read "Militia -- Enough Is
Enough." In the other hand he grasps a tiny sheet
of yellow paper with scribbled notes. "I've got
two more tips you should look into about the
bombing;' he says, staring down at his notes and
ignoring a big-screen TV image of Bill Clinton
saying something about tolerance. "First, two days
before the explosion a military plane carrying an
Assistant Secretary of Defense blew up at 40,000
feet. It was carrying documents on board about a
coming bombing and was headed to Oklahoma City.
Second, that same week, right before the bombing,
Mikhail Gorbachev gave a speech in California
saying, 'We are now entering the New World Order.'
Check it out."
I got into my rental car and fingered the rim
of the militia hat. It prompted one small note of
optimism. Maybe the Trochmann clan, in the
American tradition, will not in the end let their
apocalyptic politics get in the way of profits.
Maybe they will decide it is more lucrative to live
off their mail-order cottage industry, supplying
the angry and alienated with the relatively
harmless paraphernalia of paranoia, rather than
pursue the mote dangerous and difficult work of
organizing a real insurrection. That's what I
hoped as I read the little tag inside the militia
hat that said "Made in China."
-----
Marc Cooper, a Nation contributing editor, is the
author of Roll Over, Che Guevara: Travels of a
Radical Reporter (Verso).
