The Joker in the Patriot Movement

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The Joker in the Patriot Movement

Postby American Dream » Sun Jun 15, 2014 7:58 am

The Joker in the Patriot Movement

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http://visupview.blogspot.com/2014/06/t ... ement.html


Now would seem an ideal time for reflection on the bizarre murders committed by Jerad and Amanda Miller this past Sunday in Las Vegas now that the pundits have had a full week to say their piece. Recluse has been eagerly monitoring the conspiratorial right's response to the murders since they unfolded this past Sunday and much of it was rather predictable. Alex Jones naturally detected a false flag operation at work. Raw Story noted:

"On his Monday radio show, Jones immediately called the shooting a “false flag” operation by the U.S. government.

"'Tens of millions of people are flooding here, hundreds of thousands a month, pouring over the borders, being given driver licenses in California to pull the lever to ban guns,' Jones warned. 'We are in the middle of a globalist revolution against this country right now. And my gut tells me that the cold-blood degenerate evil killing of two police officers and a citizen in Las Vegas yesterday is absolutely staged.'

"The conservative radio host said that his 'mind exploded with hundreds of data points' proving that the incident was staged when he first read about it on Sunday.

"Jones explained that conspirators were using Batman villain The Joker as a 'programming template for mind control' because Jerad Miller had dressed as comic book character while he was in Las Vegas.

"As evidence, the host began yelling that Aurora shooter James Holmes — who killed 12 people at a Batman movie in 2012 — had been part of a mind-control program called 'MK-ULTRA.'

“'[Sen. Majority Leader] Harry Reid comes out and says we’re going to do something about this, these are domestic terrorists at the Bundy ranch, everybody needs to be arrested,' Jones continued. 'I told you they’ve been building this behind the scenes, now they’re rolling it out.'

“'Would they stage this now? The answer is absolutely,' he insisted. 'If they would stage al Qaeda attacks, if they would do all of this, would they do this to get our guns and blame the Tea Party that’s sweeping in every runoff election and every primary right now? Defeating, in almost every case, 90 percent of Republican incumbents are going down! 1776 is happening, peacefully, through the system. They want to start a civil war with the police.'

"Jones speculated that the government had sent CIA 'cutouts' to the Pizza shop to kill the officers."


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The Joker meme is one of the most interesting aspects of this case and shall be dealt with in a moment. Before getting there though let us consider remarks made by Vigilante Citizen, a website that's held in shockingly high regard by many conspiracy theorists. Largely echoing Jones, VC stated:

"Was Jerad Miller a government agent used to infiltrate and discredit specific groups? Was he programmed to carry out the murders to then take his own life? Was he just a crazy guy with a gun? It’s difficult to say. It is however clear that the media spin on the Las Vegas shootings is perfectly in line with a top Agenda element of the elite : To discredit, demonize and lump together various groups that are not welcome in the U.S. anymore. Whether we look at Libertarians, constitutionalists, survivalists, or religious and pro-gun groups, they are all being targeted by the elite.

"While I won’t claim that every person involved in these groups is a kind, balanced, law-abiding citizen, it is clear that most of these groups exist because rights and freedoms are being chipped away in America. The main goal of many of these groups is to preserve the original spirit of the U.S. Constitution, which has been seriously violated in the past two decades. However, as the elite is transforming America into a NWO-friendly police-state, these groups are now perceived as a serious threat. More importantly, the elite needs the public to turn against them."


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Essentially Jones and VC are echoing many of the longstanding allegations made by the "Patriot movement", i.e. that their movement is the target of relentless persecution by Federal authorities and that even when followers of their ideology carry out horrendous crimes they should not be criticized because these individuals were government agents, mind controlled patsies and so forth.

By and large these claims are baseless, especially the latter. As I've documented before extensively here, the modern day Patriot movement was largely the creation of the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community. As that series and my one on the Oklahoma City bombing should have made abundantly clear to regular readers, government agents within the Patriot movement are not the exception, but the rule. The movement has been dominated by "former" high ranking military officers (many of them with backgrounds in intelligence) for decades. Major movement personalities long suspected of involvement in violent crimes (i.e. William Potter Gale, Frazier Glenn Miller, Louis Beam, etc) have inexplicably avoided any serious legal complications until they commit acts so blatant authorities can no longer suppress them (again, Miller).

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William Milton Cooper, one of the most revered figures in the movement
and a "former" Naval intelligence officer


The ties between the Patriot movement and the Pentagon/CIA first began to emerge at the onset of the movement, in the early 1960s, when members of the Minutemen were implicated in arming anti-Castro Cubans in the wake of the Bay of Pigs debacle.

"The record suggests that, even if the FBI would carry out raids at the Kennedys' request, Hoover's heart was not into making trouble for Lauchli and his Minutemen. Despite their involvement in illegal bomb-making and sabotage plots, Hoover did not see them as dangerous. In 1965 he told the California Senate committee that 'little real evidence existed that the Minutemen are anything more than essentially a paper organization with just enough followers over the country so that they can occasionally attract a headline.'

"Hoover's remarks are consistent with his career of treating mob financed anti-Communist operators as supportive of, rather than inimical to, his notion of proper law enforcement. In this he was not alone. Mob-backed intelligence operations, such as the New Orleans branch of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, served the purposes of all U.S. interests which hoped to reverse Castro's expropriation of their Cuban assets."

(Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Peter Dale Scott, pg. 89)


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a 1960s era Minutemen poster

Yes, these patriot groups have been implicated in the assassination of JFK, as I noted before here, here, and here. Nor was Hoover's view of these groups atypical of the FBI for decades to come.

"The basic radical-right complaint that it had been the target of COINTELPRO abuses was justified, even if the rhetoric used to denounce the government was steeped in bigotry and exaggerated claims. However, it is difficult to make the case that the Bureau's investigation of the Posse included illegal, COINTERLPRO-style methods. Little evidence exists to support the charge, either in the Bureau's own records, in news reports, or from other sources. Unlike its treatment of dissident groups under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI seemed to respect the constitutional rights of Posse members. Among other things, it closed investigations early – sometimes too early – as soon as it judged that the targeted individuals were engaged in constitutionally protected activity and were not planning any crimes. This was a far cry from the 'anything goes' mentality of the Hoover era. A more serious problems stemmed from the on-again, off-again investigative approach taken by local offices where agents – out of laziness, sympathy with right-wing groups, or concerns for career advancement – did not appear to take the Posse Comitatus very seriously. The memos from Director Kelly may have clamored for more substantial information from the field, but investigating right-wing hate groups was not a path to promotion in the Bureau – that came more readily to agents who distinguished themselves by working 'real' cases involving bank robbery, kidnapping, and murder. The consequences of this dynamic proved embarrassing two decades later when, in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, the Bureau had to scramble to get up to speed on right-wing hate groups because it had failed to devote sufficient resources to the problem much earlier."

(The Terrorist Next Door, Daniel Levitas, pgs. 137-138)


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COINTELPRO was an operation launched by the FBI in the 1960s against the counterculture as the Vietnam conflict began to rapidly lose support. For years Right Wing groups claimed they were subjected to similar tactics. The Posse Comitatus movement, which began to emerge in the early 1970s, is the basis for much of the modern day militia and sovereign citizen movements. It was founded by a "former" military intelligence officer named Colonel William Potter Gale. It succeeded the Minutemen as the chief militant "grassroots" Right Wing group in the nation and was taken no more seriously than Hoover took the Minutemen.


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the "Reverend" William Potter Gale

So yes, the claims of persecution by the conspiratorial right are largely frivolous. In point of fact, the Federal government has seemingly did everything in its power to avoid cracking down on the movement until the Oklahoma City bombing. Even then the movement was not dismantled, but simply pushed further underground. A decade later it managed a vigorous resurgence. What's more, it has seemingly more violent than ever. Let us briefly consider some of the violent crime linked to Patriot/white supremacist (I do not think its unfair to lump these two groups together as they and much of the other "grassroots" Right Wing movements are driven by a similar conspiratorial world view) ideology and groups in the past decade:

Jared Lee Loughner, the Tuscon shooter who murdered six people while trying to assassinate Democrat Gabrielle Giffords, was a major conspiracy buff and an Alex Jones fan

Serial killer Israel Keyes, who had been active since the late 1990s, was a Christian Identity follower with ties to Elohim City, the white supremacist compound long linked to the Oklahoma City bombing

As noted here before, Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza's mother was an uber gun enthusiastic and actively engaged in survivalist culture

The Wisconsin Sikh Temple shooting, which left six dead (seven counting the shooter), was committed by white supremacist Wade Michael Page

Tom Clements, the head of the Colorado Department of Corrections, was assassinated by a member of the white supremacist 211 Crew gang; the event was surrounded by bizarre circumstances, as I noted at the time

former White Patriot Party head and Klansman Frazier Glenn Miller was recently arrested for murdering three people during the Overland Park Jewish Community Center shooting; Miller was a "former" government informant who was instrumental in derailing the Federal government's Fort Smith Sedition Trail that would have put many of the heads of Patriot movement behind bars; he's also suspected of committing several murders in the 1980s

In March of 2014 a sovereign citizen was killed during a shootout with police in Ohio

the son of a sovereign citizen murdered two Alaska State Troopers in May of this year when they tried to arrest his father

Nearly 100 hate crime murders have been linked to Stormfront, the Internet's premier white supremacist website


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And now we have the killing spree of the Millers, in addition to a shooting in Georgia involving a sovereign citizen days before the Las Vegas shootings. Needless to say, this constitutes a lot of dead bodies. And these are just some of the major incidents and random shootings Recluse happened to save in his files. I suspect that the number of minor shootings linked to Patriot ideology and such like over the past ten years is quite significant but no one in a position of authority is trying especially hard to keep track of them all.

Are these indications of a broader conspiracy? Maybe, maybe not. As I noted during my initial examine of the Las Vegas incident, the modern day Patriot movement is displaying striking similarities to the Freecorps movement that emerged in Germany in the wake of the First World War and was instrumental in the rise of Nazism. Freecorps were paramilitary bands actively engaged in suppressing communists and occasionally attempting to overthrow the Weimer Republic. They, like the modern day Patriot movement, were driven by a conspiratorial world view revolving around the notion of world government being brought about by a cabal of Communists, Jews and Freemasons. So yes, this present wave of violence has some eerie parallels that likely are not mere coincidence.

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Freecorps men

But this researcher finds the notion that the bulk of these murders were committed by mind controlled patsies or even conscious government agents to be ridiculous. Americans are already buckling under the pressure of over three decades of neo-liberal economic policies that have left more than a few of us incredibly desperate if not outright destitute. Throw into this maelstrom the apocalyptic rhetoric and siege-like mentality that Alex Jones and his ilk specialize in and you have a perfect storm.

Thus, this researcher does not feel any hesitation in suggesting that memes being floated by Jones and such like are triggering these incidents of Patriot-related violence on some level. This is most obvious when considering the appearance of the Joker in the latest Las Vegas shooting. Predictably the conspiratorial right have attached much significance to Jerad Miller's apparent fondness for dressing up as the Joker. Probably the most noteworthy examination put forth has been by self-professed revisionist historian (and fascist sympathizer) Michael A. Hoffman II. On his blog Hoffman wrote:

"... The alleged killers in Las Vegas of two policemen at a restaurant, and a bystander at a shopping center, are being variously described as white supremacists, Constitutionalists etc. They may be all or none of those things, but they are most certainly demon-possessed individuals initiated into a devil cult by immersion in the soul-killing Hollywood movies and television and New York entertainment “culture” that permeates the US like the fumo di Satana.

"Examining the photos of the supposed killers of three people, we see the extent to which they have inculcated the Batman meme, which has been occult-saturated since the first, 1989 film in the series, and which reached its apogee with the most notorious and soulless entry ('The Dark Night') starring the late Heath Ledger, who died at age 28.

"On July 20, 2012 James Holmes, a PhD. candidate in the science of the brain (neurology), entered a theatre in Aurora, Colorado that was screening the most recent Batman movie, 'The Dark Knight Rises,' slaughtering 12 people. (The two 'Dark Night' movies have grossed more than $2 billion).

"The establishment media dubbed Holmes 'the Dark Knight shooter' and 'the Joker.' He appeared as a Joker in his first court appearance. His July 2012 massacre was embedded with occult significance (see Revisionist History newsletter no. 63, 'Predictive programming and ritual stagecraft: The Batman movie shooting synchronicities').

"Prior to the attack by Holmes, the name 'Aurora' (i.e. the goddess of the dawn), showed up in the movie trailer for the Dr. John Dee ('007') 'Skyfall' movie. The words 'Sandy Hook' appeared in 'The Dark Night Rises' Batman film prior to the school shootings at Sandy Hook.

"In the case at hand, we have Jerad and Amanda Miller, the putative Las Vegas cop killers leaving behind unmistakable links to the Joker of the Batman genre. No extensive investigation was needed to elicit this clue. It was online for all the world to see on 'Facebook.' The perps themselves revealed it in the Revelation of the Method, part of the pattern of self-revelation which the Cryptocracy permits and encourages in this time in which we live, the last stage of the age-old process of human alchemy, when Satan can walk openly among us and the American people don't give a hoot at any fundamental level of their waking consciousness..."


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the Millers

But while the symbolism of the Batman universe has always been fascinating and occultic, it has been changed radically in recent years thanks to the Christopher Nolan films. And this change has been in especially sinister. The great Christopher Knowles astutely noted this in the wake of the Aurora rampage. He wrote then:

"I do know that is just more bad news attached to a Christopher Nolan film. This is a guy who puts forward psychopaths as his protagonists (Following, Memento, The Prestige) and cast a guy previously best known as Bateman, the American Psycho as Batman. He also seems especially fascinated with mindfucking as we've seen in Inception and the first Batman film (how people led Inception slide is beyond me). I do know this is a guy who revels in fascist, brutalizing imagery and themes in his work.

"I do know that he deliberately created a brand new archetype with his Joker, the real protagonist of The Dark Knight. A figure of pure, wanton destruction- the killer that every Jugalo would love to be when they grow up. This was pure psychological manipulation of the worst kind, and has had terrible real world results.

"Of course no one wants to think about that because a lot of the same people who immerse themselves in Conspiratainment want to play their ultra-violent video games and watch their torture porn. And their Batman movies."


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But what Knowles does not note (at least not that I've found) is that this Joker-as-wanton-destruction archetype has been heavily reinforced in the real world by the "grassroots" Right Wing. Look no further than the Obama Jokers that sprang up in 2009. The Obama Joker image was originally designed by college student in Chicago, who posted it on his Flickr page during January of 2009. Initially it received little attention, but things suddenly changed. The LA Times reported:

"On Jan. 18, Alkhateeb uploaded the image to photo-sharing site Flickr (shown at right). Over the next two months, he amassed just a couple thousand hits, he said.

"Then the counter exploded after a still-anonymous rogue famously found his image, digitally removed the references to Time Magazine, captioned the picture with the word 'socialism' and hung printed copies around L.A., making headlines."


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Soon the image spread to several other cities and was adopted en mass by the Right. Likening Obama, whom the Right perceives as a dictator, to the Joker is something of curious choice, at least in the context of Nolan's Batman films. Batman himself would have been more apt. In The Dark Knight Harvey Dent favorably compares Batman to the Roman institution of dictatorship in which democracy was suspended while a military commander dealt with the "enemies were at the gate." By the end of the film Batman has effectively had to assume dictatorial powers (most notably in the form of NSA-like technological surveillance) to contain the anarchy unleashed by the Joker.

As a kind of archetype for chaos and anarchy Nolan's Joker is a much more apt symbol of the Patriot movement itself and their Red Dawn fever dreams. While no doubt an armed revolt against Obama's America may seem like a romantic idea to any number of Internet tough guys who frequent Infowars the interwar period in Germany tells a much different story. Freecorps gleefully turned their cities into full scale war zones and relished in assassination of various stripes. In theory this was done to contain the spread of communism after the Bolshevik Revolution but more often than not deteriorated into destruction for destruction's sake. This was a crucial part of the much mythologized "Freebooter spirit."

"The accepted authority of the Freebooter mentality suggests another reason why he and his comrades revolted against their class. He argues that since the very raison d'etre of the Free Corps was total destruction, the movement obviously could not draw its rationale from the Weltanschauung of the bourgeois-liberal world. Of necessity, therefore, that world must be destroyed. In a revealing essay von Salomon writes:

"'When we probe into the make-up of the [Free Corps fighter] we can find all the elements which ever played a role in German history except one: the burgerlich. And that is only natural because the peculiar experience of these men... had forged them into one single force of consuming destructiveness. Their purpose could only be accomplished by the emphatic renunciation of what they felt most strongly to be the falsification of true German substance. The spirit of the past centuries [i.e., of bourgeois-liberalism] had not been able to meet the uniquely severe test – that of the hardness of war. This is why the warrior, of necessity, despised the whole system which the spirit had created. The task required of him was not only to build up a new spirit... More than that. The task required... that all ballast, all sentimentalism, all other values must be ruthlessly cast aside so that this whole strength could be set free... Ecstasy and death, tumult and adventure, heroism and excess, cold deliberation and burning idealism, robbery and plundering, arson and murder – a mixture of every passion and demoniacal fury formed... the fighters who dominated the postwar period.'

"The memoirs left by the fighters of the Free Corps movement are a veritable hymn of hate directed against the Weimar Republic, which was the symbol and hence the target of the revolt against bourgeois society..."

(Vanguard of Nazism, Robert G.L. Waite, pg. 56)


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scenes from Munich following the overthrow of the Bavarian Soviet Republic

The trauma that the Freebooter spirit inflicted upon Germany during the 1918-1923 period was profound. Germany's economy improved somewhat after that, bringing a brief period of stability in the mid-1920s. But when things began to go sour by decade's end the siren song of Nazism began to work its spell on the German populace. Despite mythologizing the Freecorps movement to the hilt, the movement's stubborn sense of individuality and libertinism had no place in Nazi Germany and many key former Freecorps men, many of whom having joined the SA, were purged during the Night of Long Knives.

Effectively then the anarchist Freebooters were a crucial competent to the rise of Nazism and the authoritarianism it promoted. And it is quite likely that if the violence perpetuated by the Patriot movement continues to grow that something similar will occur in these United States.

Thus the Joker is quite apt for the Patriot movement, a notion I suspect Alex Jones is quite in agreement with. This blatant disinformation agent played a key role in the spread of the Obama Joker amongst the "grassroots" Right. Jones appeared in Joker makeup for a now notorious broadcast and even ran a poster contest on Infowars for the Obama Joker image. Amusingly, when one of Michael A. Hoffman's readers pointed out Jones' promotion of the Joker meme in the comment section of Hoffman's article on the Las Vegas shooting the revisionist historian was quick to insist that "It was Satanic arrogance, not Alex Jones, that dispatched this duo on their mission to play God in the name of saving the Republic."

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Hoffman

Of course, in the article itself Mr. Hoffman had no problem blaming "soul-killing Hollywood movies and television" and usual suspects such as abortion, homosexuality and demonic possession for the murders. Really, about anything seems fair game in Mr. Hoffman's mind except Alex Jones and the Pentagon/CIA-created Patriot movement. Nor is Mr. Hoffman alone in this double standard... far, far from it.

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Re: The Joker in the Patriot Movement

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Jun 15, 2014 12:51 pm

That was really good. A deconstruction of Jones and the Jokers that isn't coming from a blind anti-conspiracist perspective and doesn't hide the intel background.
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The operative part of divide and rule is 'divide.'

Postby Harvey » Sun Jun 15, 2014 8:51 pm

Oh crap, I feel a long and discursive ramble coming on...

Regarding Big Dumb Ideas such as the New World Order, a twentieth century invention as far as I know, hopefully somebody will educate me:

The first usage I'm aware of was uttered by a moustache in regard of the Turkish/Ottoman slaughter of more than one million Armenians. Among the observers to witness those events were a number of German industrialists who would later find themselves in key positions among the state apparatus of *Nazi Germany, where they would appropriate some of the techniques of mass killing, subterfuge and dehumanisation 'pioneered' in the killing fields of the former Ottoman empire. In English the acronym is startlingly self revelatory or unintentionally ironic, either way, it couldn't be more concise. NWO > OWN

* (Just as Paperclip transposes some of the subsequent players to America, rinse and repeat. Ideas may be infectious.)

Anyway, as the smallest tribe knows the efficacy and logic of trauma to impress cultural identity upon the initiate, first deraccinate, resetting the psyche, then impress a new and desired series of cultural co-ordinates through illustrative experiences, so do churches, the army, cults, terrorists and disaster capitalism. All of them seek to create new and directed identifications and associations, (of ideas, surrogate familial bonds etc) toward a series of purposeful ends. The complexity of this, at a civilisational level is simply too great to be consciously worked out in all it's details and ramifications, which leaves an unpalatable taste for the rugged individualist encountering these incredible workings of gestalt behaviour.

9/11 did for America what Iraq did, not just for Iraq, but the middle east as a whole. The psychic wound to Japan of Nagasaki and Hiroshima was inflicted at a civilisational level, in my view. A cultural immune response to a competing cultural model, to destroy the idea of the emperor and limit the last vestige of it's feudal system (the incarnation of a god-like being as head of state, akin to papal infallibility), not just Hirohito the man, but to remake Japan in America's image, a modern consumerist society. Japanese culture did in fact become notable as imitators, the traumatised nation imprinting upon it's perceived masters/conquerors. However, increasing consciousness of this process seems to be a partial antidote to it's effects.

Our cultural myths are the source code to a degree, as well as a symbolic description of what actually is. Alex Jones for example is just another myth maker seduced by the totality of his own experience, even though he, like a stopped clock, can occasionally tell the correct time.

I can't help but believe that in viewing civilisations as a complex series of inter-penetrating self aware organisms, not necessarily at the individual level, at multiple levels, we can create metaphors (and no more than that) which can help us understand ourselves and our communities more accurately and perhaps honestly. We can even test them, through imaginative, self administered reality checks or thought experiments and perhaps even arrive at limited predictions for the future.

The traumas of the relatively little known Armenian genocide then World War 1 unleashed inhibitions and reverberated throughout the twentieth century in increasingly destructive cycles, themselves rooted in earlier grievances and histories. (Also, curiously, the nearly as destructive but little remembered the 1918 flu pandemic. Can that be viewed as a planetary immune response to the human pathogen?)

Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as 9/11 may well become a similar template for the twenty first century, because their effect, though smaller in scale, has been amplified by modern media, affecting not just those who have experienced them most directly and potently, but everyone else. (The lingering thorn of Palestine, maintained by some Arab nations every bit as much as Israel and tacitly, America, is too valuable an emotional engine, but may need to be resolved for us all to move on.)

Back toward the thread topic, looking at these various movements as symptomatic of ideologically unopposed late capitalism, rather than the exclusive isolated orchestrations of narrowly defined groups may be a more fruitful approach, even if the latter is true, because we can begin to identify causes, rather than mere 'actors.' The mythic Pan-slavic aspirations of a continent creates Gavrilo Princip, or Dragutin Dimitrijevic, just as surely as the Austro-Hungarian empire. The focused vision of military industrialist America (including the repressed appetite for drugs, booze and sex via black market/mafia/cia/anti-communist interconnections) creates the martyred JFK and Oswald, a presidential piñata ritual.

The expressed aspirations of the neo-liberals via PNAC, their American Dream of profit as a sufficient reason, automobilophilia, cheap oil and 'full spectrum dominance,' these all create whoever controlled those planes on 9/11, just as surely as the collateral effects of the policies they entailed elsewhere in the world did. Post war US foreign policy dovetails with Israeli never againism, dovetails with post communist autocracy, dovetails with the economics of asset stripping poor nations dovetails with globalism and so on.

Incidentally, I detect some interesting and disturbing parallels between the tactics utilised in Ukraine and recent events in Iraq. Meanwhile the background hum of fear from the mass killings in the states is also interesting and no doubt relevant (Interesting as a phenomenon, I mean. It breaks my heart every time it happens, but I've developed so much scar tissue over the last few years.)

I suppose the litmus test will be when our civilisations spontaneously create more poets, artists and doctors than warriors. Right now, the organism is producing macrophages in plentiful supply. The only truly surprising thing about a culture so awash with weapons and disaffection as America is that these things don't occur more often.

Rant over. Peace.
Last edited by Harvey on Sun Jun 15, 2014 9:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Joker in the Patriot Movement

Postby ShinShinKid » Sun Jun 15, 2014 9:19 pm

When I was reading, I was immediately taken back to Will Smith's "Catcher in the Rye" speech in the movie "6 degrees of separation."
Good posts all around...commented for bumpage.
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Re: The Joker in the Patriot Movement

Postby alan ford » Sun Jun 15, 2014 11:01 pm

What would be interesting for me to understand is why the photo of a couple dressed as a Joker and the other character shows more often than any other photo , in other words what is the symbolism attached to the photo and what was the personal significance for a husband to dress like that.
Since I don't read the comics or watch the movies about Batman I don't have any reference from my experience to get the idea of a Joker - as I understand from reading web material the symbolism of the Joker in the Batman movie is that it somehow represents the anarchistic, Dionysian side of the man as opposed to the order, wanting the destruction of the order. If this is the case perhaps fascination with Joker comes from realizing the existing "order" of the society is not good, if this is the case probably would be better to "re-order" the society than destroying it.
Better to be a Fool than this kind of a Joker.
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Re: What are you listening to right now?

Postby IanEye » Sun Jun 15, 2014 11:19 pm

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Re: The Joker in the Patriot Movement

Postby American Dream » Mon Jun 16, 2014 8:42 am

http://www.projectcensored.org/disinfo- ... -war-mind/

Disinfo Wars: Alex Jones’ War on Your Mind

by Nolan Higdon

In 1833, William Miller predicted the second coming of Jesus Christ in the year 1843. Only after his fourth failed prediction, each of which saw hundreds of thousands of followers turn out, did his followers abandon him. By this time, Miller had already absconded with copious amounts of their money, spent on his publications and for ascension robes that were supposed to prepare them for Jesus Christ’s arrival.1 A profiteer relying on distortion and unfulfilled predictions, contemporary radio personality and activist Alex Jones operates in the same mode as Miller. Instead of ascension robes, Jones profits from the fear and uncertainty he relentlessly peddles via DVDs, publications, books, a TV show, a radio show, and websites.

Jones is recognized as a spearheading figure of anti-establishment reporting for many Google-searching-truth-seekers. Jones’s work includes an abundance of unfulfilled predictions that often rely on distorted and unproven claims. Despite his many predictions going unfulfilled, Jones and his claims increasingly appear in the corporate press as major media outlets rely on Internet sources for news content. As a result, the works of Alex Jones have broken into the so-called mainstream.2 This creates a serious problem for investigative journalists and scholars who focus on controversial subjects. Jones’ self-promotional, unfulfilled predictions and his speculative writings and reports can take away from other legitimate, fact-based researchers who investigate similar topics by shifting the focus from the relevant facts of the particular topic to his unverified and often sensational claims. The result is that those inclined to believe the so-called mainstream media disassociate themselves with some political movements and topics because Jones’ and his speculative reports become the face of said particular movements and topics. Jones’ ability and pattern of delegitimizing controversial, yet evidence-based contingents of so-called truth movements through radicalization and guilt by association, is eerily analogous to the blueprints of various US Government programs– most notably COINTELPRO from the 1960s and ‘70s. More recently, this has also been the case regarding establishment efforts to discredit the Occupy Wall St. Movement.3 This article will explore the work of Alex Jones’ and the effects he has had on others who research similar controversial subjects, and how research into those very subjects comes to be viewed in the public once Jones is perceived as a spokesperson or figurehead.


Who is Alex Jones and Why Does He Really Matter?


Alex Jones began broadcasting in Austin, Texas in 1996 on The Alex Jones Show and is now syndicated on over 140 radio stations.4 Jones often focuses on government and elite conspiracies during his radio show and through the postings on his websites Prison Planet and Infowars.5 The taglines for Infowars and Prison Planet are “because there is a war for your mind” and “truth will set you free,” respectively.6 Together his websites garner 11.5 million visitors each month with over 28 million page views, making InfoWars.com “the 390th most popular website in the United States.”7

Jones capitalized on the events of Waco, Texas and the Oklahoma City Bombing to launch his career. Jones claims his interest in abuses by government began with the 1993 siege in Waco, Texas when agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) killed seventy-six people—known as the Branch Davidians—for illegally stockpiling weapons.8 Like many researchers, Jones believed the victims were murdered unnecessarily.9 Later, when Timothy McVeigh was put on trial for the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people, Jones agreed with commenters who concluded that McVeigh was not responsible for the attack.10 Jones used his interpretation of both events to launch his public persona through protests, a radio show, and a drive to rebuild the lives of Davidians.11 In 2000 Jones attempted to capitalize on his “political activism” by launching a failed bid for the Republican Party nomination in the Texas state representative race.12

Much of Jones’ work focuses on a global conspiracy orchestrated by an elite cabal. In Jones’ usage, “elite” functions vaguely to include everyone from President Barack Obama to CNN personality Piers Morgan.13 Jeremy Stahl of Slate explained that Jones’ conspiracies typically contain a “hodgepodge of disparate banking, corporate, globalization, and military interests…working together to bring about a New World Order of centralized ‘globalist’ government.”14 In 2013, The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) which is a non-profit organization combating hate, intolerance, and discrimination, argued that Jones’ conspiracies focus on a “fiendish plot to control the world” by the elite.15 Jones echoed these claims explaining, “No one is safe, do you understand that? Pure evil is running wild everywhere at the highest levels.”16

Because Jones’ reporting is vast in focus and lacking in evidence, it can lead followers of the corporate (or mainstream) press to ignore the research done by others on similar controversial subjects. Jones’ claims range from those that may have factual evidence supporting them (which other researchers provide in far greater detail than Jones ever does) to the completely outlandish (i.e., factually unfounded). Freelance writer Dean Walker outlined the plethora of issues Jones covers: “Jones has accused the federal government of involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 attacks, said that the Branch Davidian cultists in Texas were purposely murdered by authorities, claimed that FEMA is secretly building concentration camps…”17 In 2010, Jones claimed that “The reason there are so many gay people now is because it’s a chemical warfare operation…I have the government documents where they said they’re going to encourage homosexuality with chemicals so people don’t have children.”18 In 2013, Jones claimed that a tornado in Oklahoma was not an act of nature, but a government made “weather weapon.”19

Various bloggers, reporters, and groups have criticized Jones for his conspiracies surrounding elites.20 RationalWiki.org, which offers criticism of the media, argued that Jones “never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like.”21 Tim Hjersted from the community-powered learning library Films For Action argued that Infowars “appeals to a certain niche conspiracy audience, but beyond this niche, it is not of much use for reaching people ‘beyond the choir.’”22 In his 2010 book Wingnuts, John Avlon of Newsweek and The Daily Beast argued that “wingnuts” are “the professional partisans and unhinged activists, the hard-core haters and the paranoid conspiracy theorists.”23 They are fueled by the “self-segregated echo chamber of talk radio, television news, and the Internet.”24Avlon identified Jones as a wingnut,25 because Jones’ distorted claims are documented on websites like Alex Jones Debunked—which deconstructs and exposes videos of Jones false and distorted reporting.26

For his book Among The Truthers: A Journey Through America’s Growing Conspiracist Underground, Canadian editor and columnist Jonathan Kay interviewed Jones. Kay explained that, “Talking to Jones is exhausting. He spits out every sentence as if he were calling the police to report a crime in progress…” and relies on unverified Internet sources to back up his claims.27 Jones oft makes claims that US actions amount to false flag events. A false flag is when the government performs an attack on its own people to shore up support for their policies and agenda. Kay summarized the views of Jones: there is no difference between the major parties, all governments use false flags, and President John F. Kennedy was murdered for trying to dismantle the Federal Reserve.28 Kay accused Jones of falsifying history in the case of Lusitania-which after being bombed by the Germans led to the US involvement in World War I-by calling it a false flag. Kay argued that Jones falsifies history to get present day followers to feel that contemporary events are like the false flags of the past.29 It is not that there are not demonstrable false flags in history, it’s that Jones does a shoddy job of proving it where other scholars have dedicated their careers to discussion on such matters, and as a result of Jones’ sloppy fear-mongering, their work gets dismissed by many in the public once it becomes associated with Jones (see endnote 29 for further relevant remarks on Kay’s work).


Alex Jones’ Unfulfilled Prophesies: “I Can Feel It in My Bones”


Jones broadcasts false flag predictions almost daily. His broadcasts before 2010 began with the imperial march theme from Star Wars with a voice that explains “Big Brother, mainstream media, government cover-ups. You want answers? Well so does he. He’s Alex Jones…on the GCN Radio Network. And now, live from Austin, Texas…Alex Jones.”30 On his February 4, 2009 show he explained that “No doubt in my mind they are planning to stage an inaugural bombing in the next six to seven months, just like 911….” with the goal of improving Obama’s approval ratings.31 A week later he said the government would use a “biological attack” to kill majority of the population to garner support for martial law.32 Two weeks later he said “I am telling you right now, I’m sure of it, they are going to stage terror attacks soon…it’s going to be full on federal worship on TV.”33 On April 2, 2009 he named Chicago, San Francisco, New York, Dallas, Cleveland, and or Denver as possible targets for a staged nuclear attack.34 In June 2009 he said “I would not be surprised if they stage some big terror attacks in the next sixty to ninety days….”35 In July 2009 he predicted multiple methods for a coming false flag including a nuclear attack, flu epidemic, world war, or “bankrupt everything by design.”36 None of these predictions proved to be true.

Instead of revisiting shortcomings of his previously unfulfilled predictions, Jones just invents new ones. On November 10, 2009, he said, “Now in the last three months I have been warning people that Obama’s controllers are going to be staging events.”37 This prediction ignored the prior failed predictions from February to September 2009, which claimed the same thing. However, instead of explaining why he ignored his previous failed predictions, Jones continued to make more predictions. On his February 16, 2010 show he noted that, “so they are gauging to stage an assassination on Obama to get his approval ratings up and I believe he is probably involved in it.”38 On March 29, 2010 he promised a “staged terror attacks in the next month.”39 None of these predictions proved true.

Similar to the unfilled prophecies regarding false flags, Jones replaces and ignores his unfulfilled economic predictions. In June 2008, he claimed the US dollar would drop by 90% in value by 2010.40 It did not, so in February 2010 he argued, “In the next sixteen months…they are going to bring in a new financial collapse, they are going to bring down at least 15 European nations.”41 That did not happen, either. On his February 9, 2009 show Jones supported his guest Lindsey Williams– the blog writing, ordained Baptist minister– who said, “9 to 12 months from now you are going to see a complete collapse of the US dollar.”42 When this did not happen, Jones continued to make further failed predictions. In May 2010, he said, “In the next two years they are going to devalue your currency by 50%.”43 In April of 2009, Jones claimed, “The government is going to take most everything you got.”44 In December 2010, he claimed that 60% of the pension funds are gone and they will all be gone “in a couple months.” He called anyone who did not believe him a “dumbass.”45 However, one might suggest it is Jones who looked like the “dumbass” because his prophecy again proved false.

Since he is not constrained by evidence, Jones goes beyond currency and false flag predictions, tying many conspiracy theories together—including those involving extraterrestrials. On his December 17, 2009 show he claimed that “whether aliens are real or not, the United Nations, another big Rothschild, the federal government, all these astronauts coming out, moonwalkers talking about flying saucers, they are getting people ready for extraterrestrial life to be announced, and I don’t know if it’s this month or five years from now…The mainstream media is legitimizing extraterrestrial life and is basically saying we are being visited and something is going on.”46 In fall of 2013, this remains yet another unfulfilled prediction from Jones.

The most celebrated of Jones’ predictions among his followers involved the events of 9/11. On September 11, 2001, it was reported that four US commercial airliners were hijacked and three crashed into buildings, killing almost three thousand people in New York City, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C.47 Weeks earlier on July 25, 2001 on his Infowars program, Jones asked listeners to “Call the White House and tell them we know the government is planning terrorism.” He said it will be someone like “bin Laden, who was a known CIA asset in the 80s, running the Mujahedeen War…is the boogeyman they need in this Orwellian phony system.”48 Despite using the phrase “like bin Laden” and not offering a date, Jones and his followers claim he predicted 9/11.49 Six weeks later Jones proclaimed, “I’ll tell you the bottom line…98 percent chance this was a government-orchestrated controlled bombing.” He also noted that it was part of an effort by elites to control the populace.50 Infowars still claims that “In July, 2001, Jones predicted the attacks of September 11, 2001…”51

However, all Jones did with his 9/11 prediction was exaggerate evidence of actual coming attacks and then without evidence claim that the government would be behind them. In 1999, former CIA consultant and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego Chalmers Johnson made the evidence-based case for an attack from Osama bin Laden on the US explaining that blowback– domestic foreign attacks resulting from US foreign policy– “was not yet at an end in the case of [Osama] bin Laden.”52 The government itself had numerous reports that bin Laden was determined to attack in the US in the year leading up to 9/11.53 There had been ongoing terrorist attacks against the US at the hands of bin Laden and others in the decade leading up to 9/11.54 Jones had access to most of this information and knew that the US had experienced attacks abroad by bin Laden such as the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Somalia and the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole.55 Then Jones claimed without evidence that the US government would be behind any future attack.

Jones similarly falsified evidence to support his predictions after the election of President Barack Obama. After Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Jones claimed that, following orders from Obama, the US government was constructing large prisons out of FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) camps for a massive crackdown against US citizens.56 Jones’s argument begins with a fact. FEMA was building emergency relief camps. Indeed, FEMA outlined the camps’ construction plans on its website.57 However, Jones went on to distort the camps’ purpose, arguing that they were intended for use as “rendition hubs” for some larger Obama conspiracy.58 Jones falsely employed the work of selected fact-based reports to fit his pre-determined conclusion of a global crackdown through FEMA. The Ashbury Park Press (APP) had been critical of conditions in one camp, noting that “it more closely resembles a prison camp” due to poor conditions.59 Infowars changed the language and narrative of the APP report in an article that explained the camp “more closely resembles a military concentration camp.”60 The phrase “concentration camp” is odd since a concentration camp does not allow people to come and go as they please. However, people were allowed to come and go from the Oceanport camp, as reported by the very APP article Infowars was citing.61

The foundations for Jones’ predictions are often self-admittedly not grounded in strong evidence. In January of 2009 he said a staged terror attack was coming because “I can feel it in my bones.”62 A week later he claimed that the body language of the federal government says a false flag is coming.63 He claimed an attack was coming in August 2009 because of Obama’s declining approval rating.64 His prediction of a government attack in March 2010 was based on CNN, FOX, CNBC, MSNBC, and HBO making anti-Tea Party documentaries.65 A week later he said a false flag was coming because “I can just feel it in my gut.”66 In 2009 he said “Look at how they bombed Madrid on 333, look at 777…they always do it on weird cryptic numbers because-not that we believe in it-it is them who believe in this weird Babylon mystery school.”67


Transmuting Collective Fears into Private Profits


Jones’ false reporting appears to be motivated by profit. On his December 31, 1999 radio show, Jones, with factless hyperbole, trumped up Y2K (the arrival of the year 2000) paranoia by predicting a global crackdown, but he argued that by listening to him you could “escape the globalist sneak attack plan.”68 He claimed that everyone should “gear up for clamping down on America.” He claimed that Russia, and soon the US, would be controlled by globalists through Y2K.69 He reported “Cash machines are failing in Britain,” “They are finding large amounts of explosives in France,” a war in Chechnya sees “hundreds of thousands dying,” the federal government “has set up a huge 50 million dollar command bunker hooked into all the FEMA boxes that can take over all the short wave broadcast and commercial AM and FM stations as well television broadcast stations,” “Police and military are on high alert running around looking for supposed boogiemen and terrorists under every rock,” “there are trains of military equipment moving into Austin,” “The airport will be used as a major, major facility for trouble makers or rioters here in Austin.”70 Jones’ reporting during Y2K, as evidenced here, was simply false.

Jones’ Y2K reporting buttressed fears among his audience, and in turn this benefited his advertisers. Jones claimed that an awful fate awaited the American people with the coming of Y2K. He claimed that nuclear plants had shutdown, a military takeover of the US was underway, and a brutal takeover of Russia had begun. The fear-mongering broadcast was only interrupted for commercial breaks to sell items needed to combat the false scenarios being reported. One commercial stated that “Time is getting shorter until Y2K, if you want to be sure your family and loved ones weather the potential Y2K storm of delays, shortages, or interruptions of services, then now is the time to stock up on emergency supplies at a Home Food Reserve.” Another commercial warned that a politically unstable Russia-which Jones had falsely been reporting on- would lead to a large ground war in the US and consumers should get supplies to protect themselves. Thus, Jones’ false reporting created a market for his advertisers.71 Businesses selling security related items continue to fund Jones’ program through advertisement as he fuels the fear that most certainly increases their profit.72

In the years following the Y2K broadcast Jones began to use his reporting for self-profit. He sold a DVD about his break-in to Bohemian Grove in Northern California. Jones snuck in during the annual retreat of highly influential attendees, which includes prominent businessmen and politicians. Jones videotaped the “Cremation of Care” ceremony that took place and presented it as part of some elite conspiracy only available through him on DVD. Former director of Project Censored, Sonoma State Sociology Professor, and an expert on what C. Wright Mills called the “power elite,” Dr. Peter Phillips had seen the ceremony while researching his dissertation (which was about the San Francisco Bohemian Club and events at the Bohemian Grove) and concluded that Jones egregiously misrepresented the ceremony. Phillips took issue with Jones for claiming that the ceremony was “some kind of cult human sacrifice” where the screaming voice of dying people were echoed through loud speakers.73 Phillips argued that Jones was pandering to online theories to sell his DVD, and that his claims were unfounded. In fact, Jones had been invited into the Grove with Phillips to observe, but chose to sneak in for a more theatrical and dramatic approach to set up his video.74 Nonetheless, Jones profited from the hype with the DVD Dark Secrets Inside Bohemian Grove—The Order of Death, released in 2001.75

Jones continued to profit from his sale of consumer goods at the expense of other researchers. Jones’ false flag 9/11 reporting led him to profit from a book and fourteen DVDs between 2001 and 2008.76 Jones sold six DVDs from 2008 through 2012 focusing on the coming Obama crackdown.77 Former employee of the Alex Jones Show and current radio host Jack Blood has criticized Jones for being profit driven and accused him of holding pre-determined conclusions that are unaltered by evidence. Blood was the former fill-in host for Jones on The Alex Jones Show. Blood explained that Jones charged high prices to advertise young filmmakers’ work and gave them about $.50 profit for each of their DVDs while he took a much larger portion for himself. Blood claimed that Jones sold self-autographed DVDs that were actually forged by his staff.78

Jones eventually expanded from radio into television and Hollywood. Jeff Bercovici, from Forbes wrote of Jones, “For a dude who believes virtually every powerful institution is a tool of an evil conspiracy, he’s surprisingly keen on Hollywood.” Jones is friends with Charlie Sheen of “Two and a Half Men” notoriety and director Richard Linklater, who featured him a in two of films, A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life.79 Jones is a consultant to Jesse Ventura’s TruTVshow, Conspiracy Theories.80 He is broadcast by GCN (Genesis Communications Network) an affiliate of ABC, making him a corporate media connected pundit.81 Bercovici argued that “Jones operates under this same corporate media for profit structure” as radio personalities Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. However, Jones attacks them both constantly because they are competitors “whom he accuses of stealing his theories and presenting them as [their] own….”82


The Echo Chamber of Establishment-Sanctioned Anti-Establishment Propaganda


Jones portrays himself and his work as standing outside of the mainstream, which is a crucial aspect of its popular appeal. University of California history professor Kathryn Olmstead argues that, once the size of US Government expanded during World War I and real government conspiracies were exposed, a culture of distrust in government flourished, leading to the peddling of more conspiracies.83 Similarly, senior lecturer in American Studies at the University of Manchester, Peter Knight, argues that Americans distrust the narratives provided by those in power—even when those narratives faithfully represent what really happened.84 Indeed, a 2012 Gallup Poll found that 60% of Americans do not trust television news—the highest figure yet recorded.85 Jones capitalizes on distrust and constructs narratives outside the mainstream despite lacking the evidence to prove his conclusions.86 Jonathan Kay argued that Jones’ behavior is dangerous because it divides American politics without evidence, making it nearly impossible for academics, journalists, and researchers to bridge the divide because of the systematic distrust.87

Despite his self-styled “outsider,” anti-establishment persona, Jones has become increasingly prominent in corporate media over the last decade. Jones was welcomed into the mainstream for his 9/11 claims. CNN’s Showbiz Tonight featured him on two episodes in March 2006 to discuss his views on 9/11.88 During his appearance Jones claimed credit for predicting 9/11. He said “Listen, for years Hollywood`s been on fire with people knowing the truth about 9/11. And I was the first to expose 9/11 on the day. In fact two months before I had intel that elements of the military industrial complex were going to carry out the attack.”89

As the corporate press increasingly relies on Internet sources for stories, Jones’ reports have become gradually more prominent. For instance, Matt Drudge, creator of the conservative website The Drudge Report, recently endorsed Jones via Twitter, calling 2013 the “Year of Alex Jones” and referring to Jones’ radio show as “one hell of a broadcast”90 Drudge has 32 million daily visitors and “often sets the news cycle” on television.91 In the first five months of 2013, fifty pieces of Jones’ work appeared on The Drudge Report, including one claiming that the US gave the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez cancer.92 The media watchdog group Media Matters observed that, “Drudge has been consistently linking to Jones’ site for years.” From April 2011 to April 2013, Drudge published 244 Infowars articles. The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), an investigative reporting nonprofit, found that Drudge and his Jones linked articles are used as a “reference for news material on Limbaugh’s, Sean Hannity’s, and Mark Levin’s radio shows…[and] a source of topics for [Michael] Savage’s rants…”93 Indeed, the work of Alex Jones seemingly has its own echo chamber.

The reliance of the corporate media on Jones’ links has led to politicians literally being informed on particular matters by Jones. On April 15, 2013, at the Boston Marathon, two pressure cooker bombs exploded killing 3 people and injuring 264.94 Within hours of the bombing Jones tweeted “this thing stinks to high heaven #falseflag.”95 Jones claimed that the FBI was behind the attack and that they possibly did it because of a drop in price of gold.96 Later The Inquisitor out of Shreveport-Bossier City, Louisiana reported that Jones concluded “the true intention [of the attack] is to expand the Transportation Security Administration’s reach to sporting events.”97InfoWars had a reporter in Boston at the press conferences asking for proof the bombing was not a “false flag.”98 New Hampshire state representative Stella Tremblay (R) wrote on Glenn Beck’s Facebook page that she endorsed Jones’ theory about the government’s involvement in the Boston Bombing. She wrote, “Are you that blind that you’re not willing to ask questions of your government?”99 If it is blindness Tremblay was concerned with, then perhaps she should have looked at whom she was citing, and sought what evidence Jones actually provided beyond speculation. Of course, people should ask questions of government and other societal institutions. But they should also question news and information sources and hold them to basic journalistic standards by demanding evidence be clearly shown for claims, and employ critical thinking skills, not jump to conclusions. Tremblay resigned from office for reasons relating to this issue in June of 2013.


There is a War on Your Focus


Jones’ access to the mainstream media has resulted in the focus of controversial subjects moving from informed debate to Jones and his speculative, oft rant-like narratives. In 2013, the debate surrounding gun control erupted after the December 14, 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut where Adam Lanza killed twenty-six people.100 Jones was at the center of the debate in the corporate press fighting against gun control laws. Jones concluded that the government staged the shooting and that any gun control laws were an attempt by elites to control citizens.101

Jones supported a petition to the White House to deport CNN host Piers Morgan after Morgan supported gun control. By January 8, 2013, 106,000 US citizens signed a petition,102 that read in part: “British Citizen and CNN television host Piers Morgan is engaged in a hostile attack against the U.S. Constitution by targeting the Second Amendment…We demand that Mr. Morgan be deported immediately….”103 As in the Y2K scenario, Jones trumped up panic to support the NRA message arguing that “globalism and the megabanks that control the planet…they’ve taken everybody’s guns but the Swiss and the American people, and when they get our guns they can have world tyranny.”104 Jones’ advocacy of a petition to the US government may seem odd given his longstanding suspicion of that very same government. Though he has blamed the government for events from the Lusitania to 9/11, in this case he turned to that very same government to deport Morgan, whom he accused of supporting the government’s elite agenda.105

Jones appeared on Morgan’s CNN program where he reveled in his corporate media invitation and he shifted the focus from guns to himself. Jones spoke loudly and interrupted Morgan frequently and feverishly, refusing to answer questions and tossing insults at Morgan calling him a “hatchet man of the new world order.” In what can only be seen as a sensationalist tactic, Jones even challenged Morgan to a boxing match.106 This bizarre challenge from Jones came as Morgan dug for his guest to answer simple questions about the petition and the philosophy behind it. Jones sputtered off facts that could have made a counter-argument to gun legislation had they been organized and explained in a sensible and coherent manner. Instead, Jones went childish, spouting, “I can do a British accent as well” and proceeded to finish the interview imitating Morgan’s accent. Morgan later said of the Jones’ interview “It was startling, it was terrifying in parts, it was completely deluded. It was based on a premise of making Americans so fearful that they all rush out to buy even more guns…”107 Jones’ appearance earned him a profile in Forbes as he became the focus of the gun control story in numerous news outlets in January of 2013.108

In the hour following the interview, Jones went to the Internet in an attempt to establish his appearance on the show and especially his personal confrontation with Morgan as the predominant frame, thus distracting the audience from the more significant gun control debate. Jones then posted a 12-minute video online to make himself look like a hero who shook up the establishment at CNN in New York. For example, he compared himself to George Washington, who also came to New York against “fifteen to one odds.”109 Jones then spoke to the government in the camera “You may have domesticated people in New York City, but you do not have people in the heartland across this country…we are wise to you.”110 Then his voice grew more agitated, noting, “…you have not physically conquered us yet.”111 Then with an effort to boost ratings for the following day he closed with a cheerful voice, “Tomorrow, I should be back for the radio show…we are here in the middle of a mafia run syndicate….this could be the last video we put out.”112 His followers– just like in a 1960s TV episode of Batman– were encouraged to tune into the next episode of his show to find out what happened to Jones in New York.

Following the video and appearance the corporate press focused on Morgan and Jones’ feud rather than the gun control debate that had started it. On his show the following Tuesday, Jones said “I give myself about an ‘A’.” He claimed that “95% of people thought I just told it like it was, slammed him in the face” although he offered no proof for that number.113 He attempted to boost his ratings by confronting Morgan while Morgan broadcast his show live from a gun store in Texas.114 CNN directors ordered Jones and his cameraman outside, prompting Jones to respond, “You’re scared to have me back on.” Jones then proceeded to lead a protest outside the building.115 Jones claimed that Morgan was connected to the CIA and Obama.116 Morgan tweeted “Rather large protest growing outside…Feels slightly tyrannical, ironically.”117 Jones’ actions helped to shift the media’s focus from the gun control movement to his feud with Morgan.


The Jones Effect: Undermining Legitimate Research


The result of Jones making himself the focus of movements dealing with controversial subjects is comparable to the goals of government infiltration programs. For decades, the US government has planned to undermine activist groups through infiltration and disruption. For example, Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall documented how the FBI began its COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) to infiltrate and discredit political groups through radicalization and infiltration.118 Similarly, Tim Weiner documented how COINTELPRO, which began in 1956, was in fact the culmination of infiltration methods used by the FBI since 1908. Its original focus was to infiltrate the Communist Party of the US to “increase factionalism, cause disruption and win defections.”119 They employed tactics such as monitoring phone calls, conducting IRS audits, and falsifying documents.120 Through COINTELPRO the FBI later infiltrated civil rights and peace movements including Martin Luther King, Jr., the Black Panther Party, and anti-Vietnam War protests to note just a few.121 Contemporary government agencies continue to use the same infiltration programs and tactics against Occupy Wall St. and animal rights groups among others.122

Jones could be accused of “cognitive infiltration” in so-called truth movements by radicalizing people, inciting violence, and causing division, once he enters the topical picture.123 The events of 9/11 best illustrate how Jones’ bombastic behavior undermines legitimate evidence-based research movements. The 9/11 Truth Movement began after twelve relatives of 9/11 victims found the government’s official findings in The 9/11 Commission Report inadequate and misleading.124 The movement expanded to include many groups with various theories that collectively challenged the report’s validity.125 Over one hundred professors in the US have documented evidence-based problems with the government’s report.126 Many are involved in Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice who describe themselves as “a group of scholars and supporters endeavoring to address the unanswered questions of the September 11, 2001 attack through scientific research and public education.” 127 Their webpage analyzes the strengths and weaknesses concerning the evidence and lacking evidence of all 9/11 theories both official and alternative. They conclude that no theory provides a100% accurate understanding of what happened on 9/11.128

Jones’ involvement in the 9/11 Truth Movement has undermined legitimate 9/11 research as his claims regarding the topic (that the US government orchestrated the attacks) have been mostly speculative and unsubstantiated, and Jones is oft the source used when critics try to debunk the 9/11 Truth Movement. Jones’ reach via media catapults him into the public eye far more than other scholars that have been researching and meticulously documenting the events of 9/11 and the many factual problems associated with the government’s official reports. Jones became the mainstream face of the 9/11 Truth Movement, despite others in the very same movement who questioned Jones’ position and the evidence for it.129 Jones’ continuous radicalization eclipsed many in the 9/11 Truth Movement who disagreed with him. Jones has been known to physically take the spotlight from other protesters. In one case, he interrupted a protest with a bullhorn drowning out the people he claimed to support.130 Jake Blood explained that Jones does not allow for any diversion from his conclusions especially regarding 9/11.131 Those who did not agree with Jones, like Texas Republican gubernatorial candidate Debra Medina, were attacked by Jones and his followers. The result was Jones’ dismissal of those who disagree with him, unfortunately including actual evidence-based researchers.132

The corporate press has ignored most evidence-based researchers’ conclusions about 9/11 by falsely identifying anyone in the 9/11 Truth Movement with Jones and his unproven, sensationalist claims. Thus, following the 2013 Boston Bombing, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow argued that the 9/11 Commission Report and the Popular Mechanics volume titled “Debunking 9/11 Myths” refuted “9/11 truther” theories. She argued that contrary evidence had failed to dissuade advocates of continued 9/11 investigation because those beliefs are “too ideologically and, I think, emotionally satisfying to the people who espouse them.” She then attributed claims linking the Aurora, Colorado theatre shooting; the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut; and the Boston Marathon bombing as false flag operations to Alex Jones and his Internet radio show Infowars and Prison Planet website, thus making Jones the public face for all “conspiracy theories.”133 Reports like Maddow’s falsely associate the legitimate research of groups like Scholars for 9/11Truth & Justice with Jones’ factless speculation.134 This classic straw person fallacy makes for good propaganda against those who actually research and factually support their claims about controversial issues.

The ability of the corporate press to undermine the message of the 9/11 Truth Movement, one that questions official reports, by associating it with Jones results in part from tactics used by COINTELPRO and the CIA during the Cold War. Historically, the corporate media has lumped factual and speculative theories together under the set phrase of “conspiracy theory.”135 As scholar Lance deHaven-Smith has documented, the CIA coined the term “conspiracy theory” in the 1960s to undermine groups that challenged the government’s official narratives regarding controversial events. For example, the government designed “a global propaganda program to attack critics of the Warren Commission [The government’s account of the JFK assassination].”136 He argued that the CIA, through programs like Operation Mockingbird, had media outlets and journalists label those who challenged official historical narratives as “conspiracy theorists” which resulted in the media presenting all “conspiracies as discredited despite real conspiracies like Watergate existing.”137

The corporate media’s continuous claims that any questioning of the official 9/11 narrative put forth by the US government is tantamount to Jones’ speculative and unproven claims has led to self censorship. For 37 years, the student, faculty, and community-based Project Censored (PC) has reported on media censorship in the US. They release an annual book focused on censored news stories and news abuses by the corporate media. PC encountered its own censorship surrounding 9/11research when they reported on some of the unanswered questions surrounding the events of 9/11, in hopes of promoting further investigation. History professor and Project Censored director Mickey Huff explained, “We do not use speculative theory as a research method at PC. We think it is the role of the press to give factual information, ask tough questions, and find answers based on the known evidence, which is different than what Jones often does.”138

PC lost some financial and institutional support for its reports on the unanswered questions relating to 9/11 once Jones became the mainstream face of 9/11 research. Professor Robert Jensen and journalist Norman Solomon resigned from PC’s national judges board over PC’s 9/11 reporting. Several other people and organizations on the liberal/left end of the spectrum were increasingly divided over 9/11 issues. Even though PC has covered nearly a thousand stories and a wide array of topics since 1976, and is essentially an academic organization, they have been attacked as “9/11 conspiracy theorists” not only by more mainstream and/or corporate journalists, but also by media researchers, even though PC has covered only a few 9/11 related stories, and then, only after they were vetted.139

It seems that those who report on government propaganda in a throng of other incidences refuse to do the same with 9/11 in part because of involvement by people like Jones who make unfounded claims a centerpiece of any mention of the subject. But again, not all research and stories about 9/11 are equal. Some are actually supported by evidence, especially those looking into the many conflicts of interest and evidence suppression incidences associated with the 9/11 Commission and subsequent report.


Conclusion: The Truth is Out There, But it is Likely Not on Prison Planet


Alex Jones has built a minor media empire, and an increasingly prominent mainstream persona, on unfulfilled predictions and the distortion of evidence. Despite his failed predictions and hyperbolic claims, Jones continues to influence the corporate press.140 Whether he does it for personal profit, on behalf of a government program like COINTELPRO, or—as some critics have charged—in service of Startfor, a private intelligence company is ultimately of secondary importance.141 What matters most is that as a self-promoter with corporate media connections, Jones and his speculative reporting undermine the legitimate, evidence-based work of others who address the same controversial news stories. Dr. Peter Phillips argues that when Jones is involved in a movement the “defacto result is undermining legitimate research of government conspiracies, because Jones takes them to a radical extreme.”142 Mickey Huff argued that Jones fits the model of what the CIA and FBI wanted in the 1960s, if even unwittingly, which is creating someone who can “undermine legitimate researchers and political movements by fomenting distrust of those working in similar circles while sowing seeds of doubt in the public about alternative narratives to official accounts concerning controversial issues. Even if Jones is only out for himself, COINTELPRO couldn’t have created a better diversion from and disruptor for actual scholarly, factually supported research about state crimes against democracy and those who conduct it.”143

At least since William Miller and his Adventist divination, many people have posed as prophets—whether religious or secular—selling Americans prophecies that play on their most fundamental fears for private gain. Alex Jones is among the latest, and currently most influential, of these people. Those among the increasingly large audience who follow Jones and his claims should be alerted that, rather than warning of and protecting against the “war on your mind,” his broadcasts and publications are part and parcel of those battles. Like those before him, Jones profits on the American peoples’ fears; unlike Miller and others of his predecessors, he does so in an age of social media and corporate news, with the result being that his distorted perspective discredits genuine journalism and systemic research aimed at addressing the very fears that Jones perpetuates and by which he profits. The truth is out there, but it is based on facts and transparent sources, not faux elixirs and sensationalist claims peddled by a digital snake oil salesman who needs a war on your mind for his own financial well-being.


Special thanks go to Mickey Huff, Andy Lee Roth, and Peter Phillips for consultation, editing, and other assistance with this piece. Others declined to be interviewed for fear of retribution by Jones. I appreciate those who were willing to go on record candidly about Jones and his impact on social and political movements.

Nolan Higdon is a history instructor for multiple bay area colleges. He teaches US, California, Latin America, and critical thinking history courses. His academic work focuses on nation building through propaganda in the US and Latin America. Higdon began working as an intern for Project Censored in 2009 and currently operates as a faculty adviser and research fellow for the project. He has published entries and articles for Project Censored since 2011 Contact: NolanHigdonProjectCensored@gmail.com


Notes

1Richard L. Rogers, “Millennialism and American Culture: The Adventist Movement,”Comparative Social Research. January 13, 1991, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.researchgate.net/publication ... _1831-1851.

2 “In Defense of Alex Jones,” January 9, 2013. http://nothingtonpost.blogspot.com/2013 ... jones.html. Showbiz Tonight. Written by Robert Melstein. CNN. March 23-24, 2006. Piers Morgan Tonight. Hosted by Piers Morgan. CNN. January 07, 2013.

3 The terms “Truth Movement” or “truth movements” have been used in different contexts with varying connotations. On one hand, the term is embraced by those who are seeking the fact-based reality to explain historical and current events. On another, it is used pejoratively to cast such parties as paranoid, “conspiratorial,” delusional. In this article, I use the term in the former sense, with respect to those who seek understanding, not hype or ratings, and to those who are bound by evidence for their claims, not speculation. One of the main theses of this piece is that Alex Jones is one of the main reasons the term “truth movement” has become a pejorative one, ripe for dismissal and ridicule, which does a disservice to open discourse and poisons the potential for rational discussion of controversial issues.

4 “Alex Jones,” Infowars. accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.infowars.com/about-alex-jones. Lee Nichols, “Psst, It’s a Conspiracy: KJFK Gives Alex Jones the Boot Media Clips.” The Austin Chronicle, December 10, 1999, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/1999-12-10/75039/.

5 Alexander Zaitchik. “Meet Alex Jones, the Talk Radio Host Behind Charlie Sheen’s Crazy Rants,” Rolling Stone, March 2, 2011, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/ne ... a-20110302. Jeremy Stahl, “Where Did 9/11 Conspiracies Come From?” Slate, September 6, 2011, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... _from.html.

6 Infowars. http://www.infowars.com. Prison Plant. http://www.prisonplanet.com/

7 Alex Seitz-Wald, “Newtown truthers: Where conspiracy theories come from,” January 16, 2013, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.salon.com/2013/01/16/newtown ... _come_from. Free Speech Systems LLC: Web Media Kit. Infowars. accessed September 09, 2013, http://static.infowars.com/ads/mediakit_public.pdf

8 Justin Sturken And Mary Dore, “Remembering the Waco Siege,” February 28, 2007, accessed September 09, 2013, http://abcnews.go.com/US/Story?id=29089 ... W74xspXTQ4

9Jonathan Kay. Among The Truthers: A Journey Through America’s Growing Conspiracist Underground. (New York, New York: Harper Collins, 2011.), 16-19. Suggested Readings with similar claims: David B. Kopel and Paul H. Blackman. No More Wacos: What’s Wrong With Federal Law Enforcement and How to Fix It (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1997). James R. Lewis. From the Ashes: Making Sense of Waco (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman& Littlefield, 1994). Carol Moore. The Davidian Massacre: Disturbing Questions Abut Waco Which Must Be Answered. (Virginia: Gun Owners Foundation, 1995). Dick J. Reavis. The Ashes of Waco: An Investigation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995). Mike McNulty produced and wrote three films to document evidence contrary to the official report: The F.L.I.R Project (2001) ), Waco: A New Revelation (1999), and Waco: The Rules of Engagement (1997).

10“Victims of the Oklahoma City bombing,” USA Today, June 20, 2001, accessed September 09, 2013, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nat ... ictims.htm. An evidence based account of problems with the original government conclusions are documented in : A Noble Lie: Oklahoma City Bombing: Murrah Federal Building 1995. Directed by James Lane. Produced by Holland Vandennieuwenhof, Chris Emery, Wendy Painting. 2011. DVD. Matt Dineen, “From Baghdad to Terre Haute: Gulf War Veterans & the American Cycle of Violence,” Upside Down World, March 25, 2004, accessed September 09, 2013, http://upsidedownworld.org/Dineen.htm. “Killings As Collateral Damage: What the U.S. Military and Gulf War Vet Timothy Mcveigh Havein Common,” Democracy Now!, April 10, 2001, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.democracynow.org/2001/4/10/k ... e_what_the.

11 “Alex Jones,” Infowars. Kay, 16-19. Sharlene Shappart, “Alex Jones,” Wizards of Arizona, May 4, 2001, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.wizardsofaz.com/waco/waco5a.html.

12“Alex Jones,” Infowars.

13 Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones. “Why The Elite Would Lose a Civil War,” May 4, 2001, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.infowars.com/why-the-elite-w ... civil-war/

14 Jeremy Stahl, “Why Trutherism Lives On: The 9/11 conspiracy movement has faded, but the conspiracy theory will never die,” September 09, 2001, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... es_on.html.

15 Mark Potok, “The Year in Hate and Extremism Intelligence Report,” Southern Poverty Law Center, Spring 2013, accessed September 09, 2013,

http://www.splcenter.org/home/2013/spri ... -extremism

16Michael Shermer. “Conspiracy Contradictions,” The Work of Michael Shermer, September 2012, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.michaelshermer.com/2012/09/c ... adictions/

17 Dean Walker, “Alex Jones and Antigovernment “Patriot” Groups,” March 13, 2013, accessed September 09, 2013, http://deanwalker.wordpress.com/2013/03 ... iot-groups.

18Alex Seitz-Wald, “Alex Jones: Gay marriage truther?

The conspiracy theorist said the government is turning people gay through chemical warfare,” June 27, 2013, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.salon.com/2013/06/27/that_ti ... eople_gay/

19Jason Linkins, “You Just KNEW There Would Be ‘Tornado Truthers,’ Didn’t You?,” May 23, 2013, accessed September 09, 2013,

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb ... nt_top_art. While there are technologies that can impact weather patterns, Jones offered no actual proof such was the case in this instance. See http://www.projectcensored.org/9-govern ... ification/

20 Jeremy Stahl, “Why Trutherism Lives On,”

21 “Alex Jones,” Rational Wiki, September 9, 2013, accessed September 09, 2013, http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Alex_Jones

22 Tim Hjersted, “New World Order or Business as Usual? — An Open Letter to Supporters of Infowars and Alex Jones,” Films For Action. accessed September 17, 2013, http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/ ... alex_jones.

23 John Avlon. Wingnuts: How The Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America. (New York, New York, Beast Books, 2010.) 1-10

24 Avlon, 2

25 John Avlon, “‘Armed Mafia Are Stalking Us’—Conspiracy Peddler Alex Jones Melts Down,” The Daily Beast. Jan 8, 2013, accessed September 09, 2013,http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/08/armed-mafia-are-stalking-us-conspiracy-peddler-alex-jones-melts-down.html.

26 Alex Jones Debunked. accessed September 09, 2013, http://alexjonesdebunked.com/

27 Kay, 16-19

28 Kay, 2, 16-19

29 Kay, 113. Note that, although Kay’s book offers a useful firsthand account of interactions with Alex Jones, Kay’s work also identifies others who research the same subjects as Jones as members of what Kay calls a “post-rationalist, ideological movement.” Conclusions like Kays’ incorrectly associate fact-based research with Jones’ speculative commentary because they share a common topic despite their employing different degrees of evidence.

30 To hear the opening of his daily broadcast or entire shows: “Alex Jones Show Archive,” accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.infowars.com/listen-to-the-r ... w-archive/

31“The Alex Jones Show.” Narrated by Alex Jones. Infowars. February 4 2009 http://www.infowars.com/listen-to-the-r ... w-archive/

32Ibid., February 13, 2009

33Ibid., February 26, 2009

34Ibid., April 2, 2009

35Ibid., June 22, 2009

36Ibid., July 19, 2009

37Ibid., November 10, 2009

38Ibid., February 16, 2010

39Ibid., March 29, 2010

40Ibid., June 15, 2008

41Ibid., February 28, 2010

42Ibid., February 9, 2009. Pastor Lindsey Williams Blog, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.lindseywilliams.net/about/ HIS BLOG: http://lindseywilliams101.blogspot.com/

43“The Alex Jones Show.” May 23, 2010

44Ibid., April 14, 2009

45Ibid., December 15, 2010

46Ibid., December 17, 2009

47Inside 9/11 : Zero Hour. Written by Michael Eldridge and Lance Hori. National Geographic Channel, 2005. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States.

48 Stahl, “Where Did 9/11 Conspiracies Come From?”

49 Ibid., “9/11 Conspiracy: Alex Jones Predicts 9/11 In July 2001,” Conspiracy Theories and Illuminati, February 21, 2013, accessed September 09, 2013, http://conspiracytheoriesandilluminati. ... fo/?p=1069. “FLASHBACK: Alex Jones said 9/11 inside job on the day it happened,” Infowars, September 11, 2001, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.infowars.com/flashback-alex- ... t-happened.

50Stahl, “Where Did 9/11 Conspiracies Come From?,” “FLASHBACK: Alex Jones said 9/11 inside job on the day it happened,” Infowars.

51“Alex Jones,” Infowars.

52 Chalmers Johnson. Blowback: The Cost and Consequences of American Empire. (New York: New York, Henry Holt and Company LLC, 2000), 10

53 Kurt Eichenwald, “The Deafness Before the Storm” September 10, 2012,

accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/opini ... .html?_r=0

54 Brian Bennett, “Al Qaeda operative key to 1998 U.S. embassy bombings killed in Somalia,” Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2011, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.army.mil/terrorism/1999-1990/index.html

55 Bennett, “Al Qaeda operative key to 1998 U.S. embassy bombings killed in Somalia.” Kevin Ryan, “The USS Cole: Twelve years later, no justice or understanding,” Foreign Policy Journal, October 12, 2013, accessed September 09, 2013,

http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/201 ... rstanding/

56 “Bombshell – FEMA Camps Confirmed: Nightly News,” Infowars, January 26, 2012, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.infowars.com/bombshell-fema- ... htly-news/

57 “Disaster Recovery Centers,” FEMA, November 15, 2012, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.fema.gov/disaster-recovery-centers

58 “Bombshell – FEMA Camps Confirmed: Nightly News,”

59 Bill Bowman and Stephen Edelson, “Bitter cold inside a disaster shelter,” Ashbury park Press, November 10, 2012, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.app.com/viewart/20121109/NJN ... dy-shelter

60 Emphasis added. “FEMA’s Camp Freedom: Concentration Camp with Blackhawk Helicopters Flying Above,” Infowars, November 10, 2012, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.infowars.com/femas-camp-free ... ing-above/

61 Bowman and Edelson, “Bitter cold inside a disaster shelter,”

62“The Alex Jones Show.” January 27, 2009

63Ibid., Feb 10, 2009

64Ibid., August 2, 2009

65Ibid., March 3, 2010

66Ibid., March 10, 2009

67Ibid., April 15, 2009

68 “Infowars Store.” accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.infowarsshop.com/

69“The Alex Jones Show.” December 31, 1999.

70Ibid.

71Ibid.

72 Ibid. Many of the programs contain advertising by businesses in security related fields, about which Jones reports. Radio host William Cooper was the first person to expose Jones for his false Y2K reporting. “Bill Cooper exposes Alex Jones’ Scaremongering,” Eye on America Road Show, May 9, 2010, accessed September 09, 2013,http://eoars.avrnlive.com/welcome-to-eye-on-america-roadshow/2010/05/09/bill-cooper-exposes-aj-scaremongering/

73 “Infowars.Com Exclusive: Bohemian Grove,” Infowars.http://www.infowars.com/bg_story_template.html Personal Interview with Doctor Peter Phillips in Berkeley, CA on February 15, 2013.

74 Phillips Interview February 15, 2013.

75Dark Secrets Inside Bohemian Grove – The Order of Death. Directed by Alex Jones.2001. Color, NTSC, Widescreen.

76 “Alex Jones,” International Movie Database. accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1093953/

77 “Infowars Store.”

78 “Deadline Live,” hosted by Jake Blood. February 24 2010. accessed September 09, 2013, http://deadlinelive.info/2010/02/

79 Stahl, “Why Trutherism Lives On.” Jeff Bercovici, “Who Is Alex Jones, Anyway? Five Fun Factoids,” Forbes. January 9, 2013, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovi ... -factoids/

80 “UPDATE: “Police State” episode of hit Ventura show covering FEMA camps pulled from air,” Infowars. December 3, 2012, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.infowars.com/police-state-ep ... d-from-air.

81 “Alex Jones is the phenomenon that just keeps growing,” General Communications Network, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.gcnlive.com/programs/alexJones. Victor Thorn & Lisa Guliani, “Genesis Communications Network (the Alex Jones network) is an ABC affiliate,” Free Republic, June 3, 2005, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1813351/posts

82 Jeff Bercovici, “Who Is Alex Jones, Anyway? Five Fun Factoids,”

83 Kathryn Olmsted. Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, 2011.)

84 Peter Knight. Conspiracy Culture: American Paranoia from the Kennedy Assassination to The X-files. (New York, New York: Routledge, 2001)

85 Lymari Morales, “U.S. Distrust in Media Hits New High: Fewer Americans closely following political news now than in previous election years,” Gallup Politics, September 21, 2012, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.gallup.com/poll/157589/distr ... -high.aspx

86 “Boston Marathon Explosions Conspiracy Theory: Alex Jones Calls Attack ‘False Flag’,”The Inquisitr, April 16, 2013, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.inquisitr.com/620716/boston- ... alse-flag/

87Kay, xix

88 Showbiz Tonight, March 23-24, 2006.

89 Ibid. “Transcript of Alex Jones Appearance on CNN’s Showbiz Tonight,” CNN, March 23-24, 2006, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/ma ... script.htm

90 Andrew Kirell, “Matt Drudge Tweets Kind Words For Alex Jones: ‘One Hell Of A Broadcast In Such Homogenized Media’,” Medialite, April 23, 2013, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.mediaite.com/online/matt-dru ... ized-media. David Ferguson, “Maddow slams right-wing mainstreaming of crackpots like Alex Jones,” Raw Story. April 25, 2013, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/04/25/m ... alex-jones.

91 “Drudge Report Up to Its Old Tricks with Condi,” Examiner, July 13, 2012, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.examiner.com/article/drudge- ... with-condi

92 “How Matt Drudge Serves As Alex Jones’ Web Traffic Pipeline, Medialite, April 26, 2013, accessed September 09, 2013, http://mediamatters.org/print/blog/2013 ... ffi/193780

93 “Matt Drudge,” Source Watch. accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Matt_Drudge

94 Deborah Kotz. “Injury toll from Marathon bombs reduced to 264,” The Boston Globe. April 24, 2013, accessed on September 9, 2013, http://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/he ... story.html.

95Alex Seitz-Wald, “Alex Jones: Boston explosion a government conspiracy ,” Salon. April 15, 2013, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.salon.com/2013/04/15/alex_jo ... alse_flag/

96Seitz-Wald, “Alex Jones: Boston explosion a government conspiracy ,”

97 “Boston Marathon Explosions Conspiracy Theory: Alex Jones Calls Attack ‘False Flag’,”

98David Weigel, “Tamerlan Tsarnaev Believed in Basically Every Conspiracy Theory,” Slate.April 23, 2013, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2013/ ... heory.html

99 Ferguson, “Maddow slams right-wing mainstreaming of crackpots like Alex Jones.”

100 Craig Brown and Jon Queally, “Slaughter in Connecticut: 20 Children, 6 Adults Dead in Kindergarten Massacre,”

Common Dreams, December 14, 2012, accessed September 09, 2013, https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/12/14-1

101 “Stooge Alex Jones Says Newtown, CT Sandy Hook School Shooting Was Staged,”Alex Jones Debunked, January 28, 2013, accessed September 09, 2013, http://alexjonesdebunked.com/2013/01/28 ... was-staged. “Special Report: Why People Think Sandy Hook is A Hoax,” January 27, 2013, accessed September 09, 2013,

http://www.infowars.com/why-people-thin ... is-a-hoax/

102 Eric Kelsey and Piya Sinha-Roy, “Thousands sign U.S. petition to deport Piers Morgan over gun comments,” Reuters, December 24, 2012, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/ ... M920121224

103Peter Grier, “Piers Morgan vs. Alex Jones on gun control: Who won wild debate?,”Christian Science Monitor, January 8, 2013, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Elections/ ... ild-debate

104 Ibid.

105 Ibid.

106 “Gun advocate Alex Jones, of petition to deport Piers Morgan, freaks out on CNN,”Toronto Sun. January 8, 2013, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.torontosun.com/2013/01/08/gu ... out-on-cnn

107 “Piers Morgan: Alex Jones ‘Terrifying,’ A Perfect ‘Advertisement For Gun Control’,” The Huffington Post, January 9, 2013, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/0 ... opular_art

108 Ibid., Bercovici, “Who Is Alex Jones, Anyway.” Grier, “Piers Morgan vs. Alex Jones on gun control.”

109 Ibid.

110 Ibid.

111 Ibid.

112 Ibid.

113 Jeff Bercovici, “Alex Jones Spins ‘Piers Morgan’ Appearance: ‘I Don’t Respect That Show’,” Forbes, January 8, 2013, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovi ... that-show/

114Paul Joseph Watson, “VIDEO: Alex Jones Confronts Piers Morgan At Gun Range,”Infowars, February 5, 2013, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.infowars.com/video-alex-jone ... gun-range/

115 Ibid.

116 Bercovici, “Alex Jones Spins ‘Piers Morgan’ Appearance.”

117 Watson, “VIDEO: Alex Jones Confronts Piers Morgan At Gun Range.”

118Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall. The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Domestic Dissent. (Boston: South End Press, 1990.)

119 Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI (New York: Random House, 2012), 195-196.

120 Ibid.

121 Ibid.,198, 235-236. Seth Rosenfeld. Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power.(New York, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.)

122 See, for example, David Ray Griffin, Cognitive Infiltration: An Obama Appointee’s Plan to Undermine The 9/11 Conspiracy Theory (Northhampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2011), ix-xii, 124.146.

123“Alex Jones is an Inside Job.”The Atlantean Conspiracy. accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.atlanteanconspiracy.com/2010 ... posed.html

124The Family Steering Committee For The 9/11 Independent Commission Report.accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.911independentcommission.org/members.html. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, Thomas H. Kean, and Lee Hamilton. 2004. The 9/11 Commission report: final report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. [Washington, D.C.]: National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States.

125 Alan Feuer, “500 Conspiracy Buffs Meet to Seek the Truth of 9/11,” New York Times, May 4, 2009, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/05/us/05conspiracy.html. “Citizens Petition New York Attorney General to Open 9-11 Inquiry,” Environment News Service, October 29, 2004, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/oct2004 ... -29-06.asp. Jefferson Siegel, “‘Pentagon Papers senator’ calls for new 9/11 probe,” The Villager, Volume 78 / Number 3, June 18 – 24, 2008, accessed September 09, 2013, http://thevillager.com/villager_268/pentagonpapers.html. Sonny Bunch. “The Truthers Are Out There,” The Weekly Standard, September 24, 2007, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/P ... 3zubvo.asp. Molé, Phil, “9/11 Conspiracy Theories: The 9/11 Truth Movement Perspective,” Skeptic12, June 6, 2009, accessed September 09, 2013.

126 “9/11 Commission Report Questioned by Over 100 Professors,” Want To Know, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.wanttoknow.info/070618professorsquestion911.

127 Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice, accessed September 09, 2013, http://stj911.org.

128 Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice.

129 Ibid. “FLASHBACK: Alex Jones said 9/11 inside job on the day it happened.”

130 Jones is documented via Youtube video interrupting a protest by using a bullhorn to drown out the very speakers he claims to support. “Alex Jones is an Inside Job.”

131“Deadline Live,” February 24 2010.

132 Ibid.

133 Ferguson, “Maddow slams right-wing mainstreaming of crackpots like Alex Jones,”

134 Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice,

135Thom Patterson, “Conspiracy theories, outrage swirl around TWA 800 plane crash,” June 20, 2013, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/20/us/twa-80 ... ary-debate. “MSNBC The Rachel Maddow Show: Crackpot Conspiracy Theories Enjoy Mainstreaming by Right,” 9/11 Blogger, April 26, 2013

accessed September 09, 2013, http://911blogger.com/news/2013-04-26/m ... ming-right.

136Lance deHaven-Smith. Conspiracy Theory in America. (Austin, Texas: Univ. of Texas, 2013). The Warren Commission refers to the US Federal Government approved group that wrote the official government report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

137 Ibid. Lance deHaven-Smith, “Conspiracy Denial in the U.S. Media,” Journal of 9/11 Studies, March 2013, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.journalof911studies.com/reso ... nSmith.pdf. See also, James F. Tracy, “Diffusing Conspiracy Panics,” Censored 2014: Fearless Speech in Fateful Times, ed. Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth (New York: Seven Stories, 2013) 271-86.

138 Personal Interview done with Mickey Huff.

139 C. D. Stelzer, “Over the line: Two judges quit Project Censored to protest 9/11 story,”Illinois Times, June 27,2007 accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.illinoistimes.com/Springfiel ... -line.html.

140John H. Richardson, “Alex Jones: Father Knows Best, Updated for the Apocalypse,”Esquire, August 2013, accessed September 09, 2013, http://www.esquire.com/features/alex-jo ... rview-0913 AND http://www.infowars.com/esquire-publish ... lex-jones/

141 On allegations of Jones’ connections to Stratfor, see, for example, “Is Alex Jones a STRATFOR Double Agent?” Truther, February 12, 2013, accessed Septermber 9, 2013, http://truthernews.wordpress.com/2012/0 ... ble-agent/.

Jones’ unremitting deflation of legitimate movements has not gone unnoticed and has put him at the center of an speculative Internet conspiracy. Bloggers argue that Jones works for a global intelligence company: Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor). Stratfor provides intelligence gathering for over 2,500 news outlets. Their goal is to “reduce risks and identify opportunities in every region of the globe.” The Stratfor conspiracy appears to have had some impact on Jones. On February 12, 2012, bloggers reported that Jones was a Stratfor double agent. Three days later, Jones abruptly canceled his nationwide speaking tour because “the collapse is so imminent,” although once again an “imminent collapse” predicted by Jones did not take place. Although the evidence connecting Jones to Stratfor is speculative at best, it is important because it raises questions about where Jones gets his money, information, and ties to celebrities and intelligence insiders. However, because it is speculative at this point, it was not included in this article.
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Re: The Joker in the Patriot Movement

Postby elfismiles » Mon Jun 16, 2014 9:32 am

Image

January 22, 2008 - Heath Ledger dies

July 14, 2008 - World premiere for The Dark Knight in New York City

July 27, 2008 - "... 20-year-old Spencer Taylor (above) of Three Rivers, Michigan, had been booked for investigation of larceny and malicious destruction of property. Mohney says officers who were dispatched on that early Sunday morning of July 27, 2008, to the theater to find employees restraining a man wearing a purple suit, a green wig and face paint in the style of Batman's nemesis in The Dark Knight."*

George W. Bush: Comic-Book Villain?
By Vanity Fair, 11:22 AM, July 29 2008
Image
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/ ... h-as-joker


September 1, 2008 - "... in Johannesburg, Morné Harmse, an 18-year-old pupil in his high school in South Africa allegedly killed a fellow student with a sword and then hacked up three others. Harmse wore a clown mask and carried other masks supposedly inspired by the group Slipknot. The key to our examination here is that the killer also spoke in a voice to mimic the Joker in The Dark Knight."*

October 31, 2008 (Halloween) - Palo Verde High School student 'accidentally' stabbed by fellow student ... "Classmates said that the student who accidentally stabbed his friend was dressed up like the Joker from the Batman movie The Dark Knight, and that dressing that way was not uncommon for him. He often goes by the nickname "Joker." ... "He dresses up like him a lot. He does his makeup like him a lot, and that's what he goes by," said sophomore Sara Everett, 15. ... "It was not a fight," he said. "It wasn't kids being knock-down, going after each other. It was horseplay that got out of control." ... Afterward, the students apparently made their way to the office and asked for help, he said. About an hour and a half later, officials tracked down the knife that was used in the incident, Sheard said."*

Image

January 2009 - "The Barack Obama "Joker" poster is a digitally manipulated image of United States President Barack Obama, designed by Firas Alkhateeb in January 2009, that has been adopted by some critics of the Obama administration and described as the "most infamous anti-Obama image".[1][2][3] The image portrays Obama as comic book supervillain, the Joker, based on the portrayal by Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight.[4] Alkhateeb has said the image was not intended to make a political statement.[5] He uploaded the image to the photo-sharing website Flickr, from where it was downloaded by an unknown individual who added the caption "socialism".[6][7]

Described by The Guardian as the "American right's first successful use of street art", since April 2009, the poster has been frequently used by anti-Obama protesters.[8][9][10]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_"Joker"_poster

January 23, 2009 - "The Dendermonde Joker (wearing a bulletproof vest, with a backpack, and makeup like The Joker) struck ... at a "Fairytale-land" or "Fabeltjesland" creche or daycare in Belgium. ... Although July 18, 2008 was the date of the first release of The Dark Knight, Warner Brothers re-released The Dark Knight in traditional theaters and IMAX theaters in the United States - as well as in other countries - on January 23, 2009. That date is exactly the same one as the Dendermonde Joker. The trend of Joker copycats is a recent phenomenon (see Joker Copycats: 2008-2112)."** ... and http://copycateffect.blogspot.com/2009/ ... joker.html

March, 2009 - NEW YORK magazine cover featuring Bernie Madoff as Joker
Image
http://herocomplex.latimes.com/uncatego ... mitates-c/
http://contentinacottage.blogspot.com/2 ... joker.html

March 8, 2009 - "A soldier dressed and wearing face-paint like Batman villain The Joker was shot and killed by police ... in the Shenandoah National Park after he pointed a loaded shotgun at them after a chase, an FBI affidavit says. The incident occurred near Front Royal, Virginia, according to the Associated Press. ... Army Spc. Christopher Lanum's girlfriend, Patsy Ann Marie Montowski, who was with him when he was shot, told FBI investigators that the soldier idolized the Joker, played in the most recent Batman film, The Dark Knight, by the late Heath Ledger."*

August 7 or 29, 2009 - Alex Jones launches Obama Joker Video Contest

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk1TGvQ2fPI PART ONE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qdh39mbC7nA PART TWO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCHJoh9ywlM PART THREE
http://www.infowars.com/the-obama-joker ... o-contest/
http://www.infowars.com/the-poster-revo ... w-contest/

August 8, 2009 - Alex Jones: The Joker Talks to Police About Obama

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnIWSI2tkDM

Have you seen me?
Post by marmot » 10 Aug 2009 16:29
Image
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=24785
...

WHAT'S MISSING HERE???

...

July 20, 2012 - Aurora, Colorado James Holmes Theater Shooting: "Midnight mass shooting during The Dark Knight Rises"**

July 20, 2012. Worcester, England, UK.
July 21, 2012. Aurora-Denver, Colorado.
July 22, 2012. Maine Turnpike, Maine.
July 22, 2012. Norwalk, California.
July 22, 2012. Sierra Vista, Arizona.
July 23, 2012. Waunakee, Wisconsin.
July 24, 2012. Woodward, Oklahoma.
July 24, 2012. Lexington, Kentucky.
July 25, 2012. Brooklyn, New York, New York.
July 26, 2012. Bronx, New York, New York.
July 26, 2012. Crofton, Maryland.
July 27, 2012. Pendleton, Indiana.
July 29, 2012. Kent, Ohio.
July 31, 2012. Miami Beach, Florida.
July 31, 2012. Eagan, Minnesota
August 3, 2012. Westlake, Ohio
August 4, 2012. Oak Creek, Wisconsin


Victor Hugo, The Joker, and Joker Copycats - Tuesday, February 26, 2013
http://copycateffect.blogspot.com/2013/ ... Joker.html


June 8, 2014 - Las Vegas, Jerad and Amanda Miller


* = Joker Copycats: 2008-2112 (Saturday, July 21, 2012) by Loren Coleman
http://copycateffect.blogspot.com/2009/ ... ycats.html

See also...

** = Aurora Copycat Effect: The Complete List by Loren Coleman (Sunday, July 29, 2012)
http://copycateffect.blogspot.com/2012/ ... ffect.html

EDITED MANY TIMES for organization and additions...
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Re: The Joker in the Patriot Movement

Postby American Dream » Mon Jun 16, 2014 10:57 pm

]http://www.e-flux.com/journal/politics-of-hate-in-the-usa-part-iii-posse-comitatus-grassroots-rebellion-and-secret-societies/

John Miller

Politics of Hate in the USA, Part III: Posse Comitatus, Grassroots Rebellion, and Secret Societies

The following text, which is the final of three installments, traces back to a conversation I had with Mike Kelley in 1994, “Too Young to be a Hippy, Too Old to be a Punk.”1 Christophe Tannert at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin had invited us to discuss underground political and aesthetic culture in the US for the first issue of Bethanien’s Be Magazin. One year later, I followed this up with a narrative account and analysis of the subject, “Burying the Underground.” Meanwhile, a series of sieges, armed standoffs, and bombings made Americans increasingly aware of a growing polarization between the US federal government and what was hardening into a grassroots militia movement: Ruby Ridge (1992), Waco (1993), Oklahoma City (1995) and Fort Davis, Texas (1997). I began to see this as a right-wing counterpart to militant leftism. In fact, the right seemed to be mirroring tactics that had previously belonged to the leftist underground. This led me to write a complementary essay, “Heil Hitler! Have a Nice Day!, the Politics of Hate in the USA” By 2001, the militia movement had run out of steam. When al-Qaeda terrorists staged the September 11 attacks, however, these so closely resembled events described in The Turner Diaries that I had initially suspected the radical right. Although unemployment and economic dislocation drove the militia movement, the Great Recession has not provoked a similar response. Instead of overturning—or seceding from—the federal government, the far right, now exemplified by the Tea Party, wants to work from within the political system by downsizing government and converting it to a states’ rights model. This shift is evident in the current Republican debates leading up to the next presidential election, where candidates have tried to turn “moderate” into a pejorative term.

John Miller

***

Posse Comitatus

The Jew run banks and federal loan agencies are working hand-in-hand foreclosing on thousands of farms right now in America. They are in essence, nationalizing farms for the jews [sic], as the farmer becomes a tenant slave on the land he once owned….The farmers must prepare to defend their families and land with their lives, or surrender it all.

—James Wickstrom,2 Christian Identity minister and radio talk show host



Of all the far right factions, the Posse Comitatus may be the largest. A true grassroots movement, it is also the most amorphous and the hardest to pin down. James Ridgeway compares its organizational flexibility with that pioneered by the SDS, yet it also takes the anti-Federalist logic of states’ rights to a topical extreme. “Posse Comitatus” literally means “power of the county” in Latin. The name refers to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 which forbids the use of US military and national guard forces as civilian police forces.3 Congress passed this legislation after the Civil War to prevent President Grant from using soldiers to guard ballot boxes against election fraud in southern states.4 The Posse Comitatus believes this law empowers a sheriff to call a posse into being or to disband it as necessary. A posse is simply “all the men that a sheriff may call to his assistance in the discharge of his official duty, as to quell a riot or to make an arrest.”5 The Posse Comitatus sees the law as a wellspring of radical decentralization, granting the sheriff ultimate authority. Accordingly, its members consider income tax, social security payments, drivers’ licenses and even license plates as violations of the Constitution. The Posse claims that, when necessary, it may usurp even the sheriff’s authority. According to a doctrine set forth by Christian Identity minister William Potter Gale, the Posse claims its authority comes straight from God.

Although the Posse Comitatus is freeform by definition, Lyman Tower Sargent traces its origin to the Citizens Law Enforcement and Research Committee, founded by former Silver Shirt and Identity Christian Henry L. Beach in 1969.6 With the spate of family farm foreclosures beginning in the late 1970s, ranks of the Posse expanded as farmers withheld taxes and fought to save their property. Amidst the greater period recession, high interest rates combined with a severe drop in demand for crops to touch off a farm crisis. After a major US-Soviet grain deal fell through, rising inflation forced underdeveloped countries to redirect their budgets from grain purchases to debt maintenance. In the US, the small farmer was left holding the bag. What made the crisis even worse was farmland itself sometimes dropped to a third of its previous value. A congressional report estimated that almost half the nation’s 2.2 million farmers would lose their farms by the end of the century.7 Unable to make ends meet, some turned to community activism, some to alcohol and spousal abuse, and others to anti-Semitism. Just as Nazis once blamed Jews for the dislocations of modernization, bankrupt small farmers wanted to pin their troubles on a Jewish banking conspiracy. Few, however, bothered noting that Jews own none of the big, international banks.

The idea of the family farm as a wellspring of American identity runs deep in the United States. It derives in part from Thomas Jefferson, who viewed big cities with distaste and envisioned the United States as a vast array of independent farms:

Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.

They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country, and wedded to its liberty and interests, by the most lasting bonds.
8

Jefferson’s philosophy reflected the political economy of the southern plantation system in which each plantation produced much or all of what it needed. (The autonomy of the plantation, of course, depended on slave labor.) Jefferson himself owned a Virginia plantation—though, ironically, a not very successful one. Unlike George Washington, he did not free his slaves after the Revolutionary War.9 Conversely, Washington was a land speculator in the trans-Appalachian region and therefore less aligned with small property interests. Jefferson vigorously championed small farming yet, by establishing a liberal political culture within a capitalist economy, his policies paved the way for America’s transition to industrial capitalism.

The small farmer’s aspirations for independent production and land ownership constitute as much an ideal of civic virtue as they do a means of livelihood. Even so, the supposed autonomy of the small farm has always been tenuous at best, subject to the vagaries of good and bad crops, variable interest rates and supply and demand. In other words, the autonomy of the small farmer was always a relative state—one rested on a precarious economic foundation. During bad times, small farmers have often resorted to wage labor to keep their farms intact. Nonetheless, their aspirations mark them as petit-bourgeois and have rarely shown solidarity with labor movements. Moreover, they resent federal farm subsidy programs—not only because policy makers attach them to big agricultural conglomerates, but also because they render the small farmer a dependent consumer instead of a virtuous producer.10 This tension is not new. Frontier farmers often found themselves at odds with a centralized government unwilling—or unable—to protect their interests. Rural vigilante justice and its attendant gun culture are legacies of that history. Taking the law into one’s own hands thus survives as a cherished rural tradition. And yet that civic independence has been frustrated in recent years. American farmers have been forced into the painful admission that the small farm has become inefficient and wasteful relative to conglomerate “agribusinesses.” Here, their sense of civic deprivation, plus very real material losses, goes back to a promise held out by homesteading: land ownership. James Corcoran has described its importance:

Land doesn’t only serve as a farmer’s collateral for operations loans, the ability to buy the seed, fertilizer and chemicals to plant his fields—land is a farmer’s identity. It is his connection to God; it is his religion, his nationality, his family’s heritage, and his legacy to his children. Land is a farmer’s way of life, and in the early 1980s he was losing it. Like the people he replaced on the land—the American Indian—the farmer became a modern exile, forced to migrate to strange cities and states in search of a new life.11

Driving people from the land is part of the process of long-range accumulation that Marx identified as a structural feature of capitalist development. The farmers’ resistance to dispossession does raise the radical question of who is entitled to land ownership. But claiming a holy right to the land—as do the Posse and Identity Christians—is a self-serving ideology; not only does it justify the farmer’s existence against abstract economic forces, it also represses the historical memory of how frontier farmers violently drove their predecessors, the Native Americans, off the very same soil. This manifest destiny of the small farmer simply transmutes the divine right of kings into the rural populist homestead. Even the ideal of independent production can, at times, undercut the small farmer’s sense of social responsibility. Thus, to consider small farming an inalienable and God-given way of life entails reactionary identifications with blood and soil.

Alarmed by an anti-Semitic flare up in the farm belt, in 1986 the Anti-Defamation League commissioned the Lois Harris organization to poll Iowa and Nebraska residents on these issues. Seventy-five percent of the respondents blamed “big international bankers” for farm problems, with 13 percent specifically blaming Jews. 27 percent agreed, “Farmers have always been exploited by international Jewish bankers.” Among people older than sixty-five, that number leapt to 45 percent.12 The growth of the Posse closely followed this trend.

Typical Posse tactics include highly effective forms of “paper terrorism” such as tax resistance and filing nuisance liens and lawsuits, which tie up courts and make life miserable for Posse targets. When these fail, they sometimes turn to guns. In 1980, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) identified 17,222 individuals who, as a form of tax protest, either refused to file returns or filed and refused to pay what they owed. By 1983 that number jumped to 57,754 and subsequent efforts by a special IRS task force have hardly made a dent in this figure.13 In Wisconsin the aforementioned James Wickstrom, onetime candidate for governor and US Senate, openly espoused tax revolt and violence.14 Some groups, like Charles Shugarman’s Virginia Patriots Network, conduct special seminars in tax resistance, stating that wages are a special form of barter between employer and employee and, therefore, not subject to taxation.15 With a similar barter idea, Denver Posse member John Grandbouche initiated a system of warehouse banks where depositors could convert their money to gold or silver to avoid taxes. Grandbouche called his organization the National Commodities and Barter Association (NCBA). The Wall Street Journal reported that the NCBA laundered up to half a million dollars a day for as many as 20,000 depositors. Federal agents raided Grandbouche’s offices in 1985, recovering thousands of documents and an estimated $250,000 in gold bullion. A federal judge, however, ordered the return of this property.16 Other warehouse banks have turned out to be simply old-fashioned bilking schemes in which otherwise skeptical farmers have lost their life savings to con men. In June 1986, for example, authorities convicted Roderick Elliot in one such an embezzlement operation. Elliot was the publisher of the movement’s key tabloid, The Primrose and Cattleman’s Gazette (its name insinuating that Jewish bankers had led farmers “down the primrose path”).17 More recently, Roy Schwasinger’s organization, We The People, sold about 3,000 bogus “information kits” at $300 each to gullible farmers. These explained how to claim one’s portion of a supposed $600 trillion class action suit against the government brought by ranchers and farmers. In 1995 Schwasinger received a nine-year prison sentence for his part in the scam.18

In 1983 the death of the sixty-three-year-old tax resister Gordon Kahl created the Posse’s first martyr. Kahl was a decorated World War II veteran who kept his farm afloat by working winters in Texas as an auto mechanic. He joined the Posse in 1974, stopped paying taxes and appeared on television two years later urging others to follow suit. Going public landed him in Leavenworth prison for one year. Authorities then released him on probation with the proviso that he stay away from the Posse. Unrepentant, Kahl still refused to pay taxes and still urged others to do the same. Although he owed only a pittance, his very public defiance made him a thorn in the side of government officials. On February 13, 1983, federal marshals tracked Kahl, his son and some friends as they were leaving a Posse meeting in Medina, North Dakota. Kahl stopped at the marshals’ roadblock and a gunfight began. The marshals wounded his son. A crack shot, Kahl killed two marshals and wounded three others in retaliation.19 He went on the run for four months, then holed up in the Smithville, Arkansas “earth home” of his Posse friends, Leon and Norma Gintner. This dwelling was a survivalist bunker stockpiled with weapons and food. Federal agents and local Sheriff Gene Matthews surrounded the bunker on June 3. Outside, they captured Leonard Gintner. Shortly thereafter, Gintner’s wife came out to surrender. Neither would confirm whether Kahl was hiding inside. Matthews entered the bunker, hoping that, as sheriff, he could convince the fugitive to surrender peacefully. Kahl fatally wounded Matthews with one round from his Ruger Mini-14. Police experts believe that, in the exchange, Matthews killed Kahl as well. Unsure whether the fugitive was dead or alive, agents proceeded to spray the bunker with gunfire. The assault ended only after a commando detonated the bunker’s more than 100,000 rounds of ammunition with a grenade. Death left Kahl a longstanding hero in the movement.20 It also set the stage for a siege/shootout syndrome that would be tragically repeated as the struggle between right-wing dissidents and the federal government continued to escalate.

Other Posse figures include Arthur Kirk, who died in a 1984 firefight with a Nebraska SWAT team, and the eccentric Michael Ryan. Ryan presided over a polygamous, survivalist compound in Rulo, Nebraska where he forced his male followers to sodomize each other and a pet goat.21 Once considered a leader chosen by God, Ryan was convicted by jurors for torturing and killing two of his followers, twenty-seven-year-old James Thimm and five-year-old Luke Stice. For refusing to sodomize the goat, Ryan shoved greased rake handles up Thimm’s rectum, then literally skinned him alive. When police raided the Rulo compound, they discovered more than $250,000 in stolen farm equipment, an arsenal of full- and semiautomatic weapons and 150,000 rounds of ammunition.22 By anyone’s standards, Ryan was certifiably insane. His example illustrates the individual extremes that become available once the social contract is jettisoned. Conversely, Ryan’s case—among others—raises the question of how violence and irrationality become legitimized, both within extremist cults and within the mainstream.

Image


The Turner Diaries

The great danger of democracy, of course, is the same danger that exists with any other form of government; namely, that the wrong minority will be in the driver’s seat. That’s the problem we must overcome now—or perish as a race.

Before the advent of television, it wouldn’t have been feasible to run a truly progressive nation democratically; the process of control was too awkward. That’s why the United States drifted the way it did, subject to various pressure groups, until the worst of all possible groups elbowed the others aside and took over. These days the process of control is reasonably efficient, and if we ever manage to break the grip of the present media bosses we can look forward to the use of the same process to speed America along the upward path again.


—William L. Pierce 23

The Turner Diaries is an influential right-wing tract written by former physics professor William Pierce. Pierce published it, however, under the pseudonym Andrew MacDonald. Critics call the book the Mein Kampf of American neo-Nazism. Before starting his own National Alliance, Pierce had, in fact, been a member of George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party and the John Birch Society. Society president Robert Welch introduced Pierce to an apocalyptic story called The John Franklin Letters that Pierce used as a model for his own book.24 In the guise of a futuristic novel, The Turner Diaries is part propaganda, part primer for guerilla war and part juvenile blood lust. Its publisher Stuart Lyle described it as “an underground classic,” selling more than 185,000 copies outside bookstores before its above ground publication and distribution in 1978. Pierce himself gloats:

It offends almost everyone; Afro-Americans, feminists, gays and lesbians, liberals, communists, Mexicans, democrats, the FBI, egalitarians, and Jews. Especially Jews: for it portrays them as incarnations of everything that is evil and destructive.25

Former liberal William Gayley Simpson laid the ideological foundation for Pierce’s book in his own Which Way Western Man? After working as an integrationist, Simpson became obsessed with the idea that white Christians risked forfeiting their identity through policies of desegregation and affirmative action. These, moreover, he viewed as part of a sinister Jewish plot: a divide-and-conquer strategy of miscegenation that would leave only Jewish racial integrity intact. Consequently, he argued vehemently for eugenics, segregation and the deportation of Jews.26 Even so, Pierce sharply distinguishes between these beliefs and those of Christian Identity which he dismisses as a “lowbrow” theology incapable of attracting anyone but “hicks.”27

The narrative conceit of The Turner Diaries is the belated discovery of a unique record of “the Great Revolution,” the diaries of one Earl Turner, which historians have republished on the revolution’s one-hundredth anniversary. Pierce envisions this event in apocalyptic—rather than political—terms. The struggle occurs in 1999, at the outset of the millennium. Copying the French Revolution, Pierce even sets out a new dating system, with time divided BNE (Before the New Era, analogous to prehistoric time) and the years following it. Nevertheless, Pierce’s revolution is totalitarian, not democratic; the rights of man evaporate before a phantasm of racial purity. He also adds “editors’ notes” as additional commentary to Turner’s firsthand account. This “historicizes” the fantasy, a posture not dissimilar to Kruschev’s boast “History is on our side. We will live to see you buried.”

The plot begins when the federal government passes an anti-gun law called, suggestively enough, the Cohen Act. Blacks begin raping white women in great numbers (one of Pierce’s deep obsessions) and, as special deputies, round up all those who refuse to turn over their guns. Jews, of course, have masterminded this turn of events. Only one group stands ready to resist “the System,” a small network of underground cells called only “The Organization.” Earl Turner belongs to one such cell of four people operating in Washington, DC. Long before the Cohen Act, his group had buried a cache of guns in a remote Pennsylvania woods. Once they retrieve their weapons, they turn to robbery and murder simply to survive; as gun owners, they can neither work nor identify themselves in public. Meanwhile, Congress passes more stringent laws requiring all citizens to carry “internal passports” –used for all transactions from banking to medical care to purchasing gasoline. This pushes the Organization to more extreme measures, culminating in bombing a new supercomputer (for processing internal passports) housed in the FBI’s Washington headquarters. To carry this out, The Organization uses a truck filled with explosive chemical fertilizer. To finance its intensified level of operations, it starts counterfeiting as well. Trained as an engineer, Turner becomes responsible for bombs, communications and counterfeiting.

Soon, Turner’s superiors invite him to join “the Order,” an elite mystical cadre within the Organization. Its grey-hooded members reveal to him that white supremacy is divinely ordained and that Aryan terrorists are “the instruments of God.” As the struggle continues, the Organization’s leaders realize that only the System can win a war of attrition and accordingly step up their approach. In an all-or-nothing effort, they concentrate their entire force in Southern California and, through inside agents, trigger an insurrection within the armed forces stationed there. In the resulting chaos, the Organization manages to establish regional sovereignty, fending off the System by seizing nuclear warheads and threatening to use them. After setting up free zones in major American cities, it nukes Tel Aviv, saving a few remaining missiles for the Soviet Union. This, in effect, kills two birds with one stone, devastating communism and subverting the System’s control in America. The story ends with an inadvertent allusion to Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove”: Turner flying a suicide mission to the Pentagon with a nuclear warhead strapped to his crop-duster. The editorial notes confirm that, because of Turner’s noble sacrifice, the Aryan race successfully purges every other race from the face of the planet. Thus begins the New Era—a cartoon version of xenophobia with pointed consequences for the American political landscape of the 1990s.

Pierce’s hatred of other races is tautological. He accuses others of conspiracy and degradation, when he himself is the worst offender. The Turner Diaries depicts both Jews and African-Americans as stereotypes; Pierce even writes in dialect to further ridicule them. In lieu of social or historical analysis, Pierce invokes God to justify his beliefs. His stance toward the social movements of the 1960s and 70s is wholly reactive:

I remember a long string of Marxist acts of terror 20 years ago, during the Vietnam war. A number of government buildings were burned or dynamited, and several innocent bystanders were killed, but the press always portrayed such things as idealistic acts of “protest.”

There was a gang of armed, revolutionary Negroes who called themselves “Black Panthers.” Every time they had a shootout with the police, the press and TV people had their tearful interviews with the families of the Black gang members who got killed — not with the cops’ widows. And when a Negress who belonged to the Communist Party [a reference to Angela Davis] helped plan a courtroom shootout and even supplied the shotgun with which a judge was murdered, the press formed a cheering section at her trial and tried to make a folk hero out of her.28

“Women’s lib” was a form of mass psychosis which broke out during the last three decades of the Old Era. Women affected by it denied their femininity and insisted that they were “people,” not “women.” This aberration was promoted and encouraged by the System as a means of dividing our race against itself.29

…the knee-jerk liberals have forgotten all about their “radical chic” enthusiasm of a few years ago, now that we are the radicals.30


As a tactician, however, Pierce is coldly logical and utterly clearheaded. For starting a terrorist cell, he advises in the essay “A Program for Survival” (1984) published under his own name, a general three-phase program for Aryan supremacy comprised of:
1. cadre building;
2. community building;
3. community action;
4. make propaganda as militant as possible to attract only the most committed element;
5. operate on a “need to know” basis;
6. communicate either by meeting face-to-face or through short coded messages;
7. separate into “legal” and underground units (like Shin Féin and the I.R.A.);
8. “…[O]ne of the major purposes of political terror, always and everywhere, is to force the authorities to take reprisals and to become more repressive, thus alienating a portion of the population and generating sympathy for the terrorists.”
9. “…[T]he other purpose is to create unrest by destroying the population’s sense of security and their belief in the invincibility of the government.” 32

If the term “community action” sounds benign, however, The Turner Diaries shows just what Pierce means by that.

Pierce’s tactics and ideology would be adopted both by Robert Mathews’ group, The Order, and by Timothy McVeigh. Among other things, they anticipate baiting law enforcement officials to use excessive force and exploiting the overkill as movement propaganda.


Image
Bob Mathews founder of The Bruders Schweigen confronting an anti-racism protester.


The Bruders Schweigen

We just want to be a nameless, white underground.

—Robert Mathews33

Bob Mathews was a man with a mission. As an eleven-year-old boy in Phoenix, Arizona, he joined the John Birch Society. Later he became interested in Robert DePugh’s Minutemen. Mathews then started a group of his own called the Sons of Liberty. He also converted to the Mormon faith.34 Under the guidance of fellow Mormon Marvin Cooley, Mathews became a tax resister. In his 1973 W-4 tax form he claimed ten dependents as a single, unmarried man—by that reducing his tax burden to zero. This improbable claim quickly alerted IRS agents, who soon brought him to trial. There, Mathews had a rude awakening when only one of his militia friends agreed to vouch for him as a character witness. Shortly after this, a second friend killed himself, his wife and another couple in a bitter domestic dispute. Disillusioned, Mathews left Phoenix and resettled in Metaline Falls, Washington.35

After taking an apartment, the industrious Mathews soon managed to earn enough money to purchase and clear his own 60-acre plot of land. He found a wife and seemed to settle down. Eventually, his parents and two brothers, once estranged by his extremist views, moved up to Washington as well. Then, in 1978, after four years of relative calm, Mathews read William Galey Simpson’s Which Way Western Man? which left a deep impression. He learned about William Pierce’s National Alliance. By 1981 Mathews discovered William Butler’s Church of Jesus Christ Christian/Aryan Nations in nearby Hayden Lake. Although he had reservations about Butler, he nonetheless attended Aryan Nations events. Around this time, he conceived the “White American Bastion” by which Aryans would become the racially self-conscious political force of the Pacific Northwest. This idea echoed Butlers “10 percent solution,” except that Mathews felt numbers alone would be enough; he did not, at this time, envision the need for a separate government. To this end, he began advertising his “Bastion” plan in the Liberty Lobby’s magazine, The Spotlight. Ultimately, the ads did not pan out; after all his efforts, only one couple moved there. He increasingly resented the apparent docility of most whites and condescendingly called them “sheeple”—sheep people. He also read and absorbed the lessons of The Road Back, an instruction manual for running an underground terrorist group; Essays of a Klansman by Louis Beam, which laid out a point system of awards for Aryan Warriors; and The Turner Diaries. After this, Mathews established his leadership by confronting rowdy counter-demonstrators at Spokane, Aryan Nations rally. Before long he had assembled a small, but hard-core circle of friends and Aryan Nations members around him. He stressed that the time for talk was over. Now was the time for action. In a bizarre ceremony, each swore a loyalty oath before a six-month-old baby, pledging to secure the future propagation of the Aryan race. Before long, the group was planning armed robberies and counterfeiting schemes.36

On October 28, 1983, World Wide Video, Spokane’s only XXX-rated pornography store, became the group’s first target. After days of talks and building up their nerve, they netted a grand total of $369.10. If serious, they were going to have to play for bigger stakes. That Thanksgiving, unbeknownst to Richard Butler, Mathews’ friend Gary Yarbrough began printing their first counterfeit $50 bills on the Aryan Nations printing press. He had a hard time getting the color right, though. Police picked up Mathews’ right-hand-man Bruce Pierce (no relation to William Pierce) on December 3 when the group tried to pass the phony money. With Pierce in jail, on December 18 Mathews pulled a one-man bank heist in desperation. During his getaway, a dye-pack exploded in the loot bag, staining him and the cash red. He managed to clean most of the $25,952 with turpentine and bailed Pierce out of jail. The gang continued to rob banks and restaurants, but soon graduated to armored cars. They set up a system under which they would “tithe” most of the stolen money to other racist groups, setting aside part for their own operation and dividing the remainder as “salaries.” Several men quit their day jobs and began to think of themselves as revolutionaries. With their stolen money, they began to build up an arsenal.37

Meanwhile Pierce had, on his own initiative, ineffectually bombed a Boise synagogue. This breach of security enraged Mathews, but their troubles were just beginning. Aryan Nations member Walter West had begun to spout off in local bars about a new white guerilla group. West also had a reputation for beating his wife, Bonnie Sue, and Order member Tom Bentley had taken a romantic interest in her. Mathews directed Bentley and three others—James Dye, Randy Duey and Richard Kemp—to kill West. Sunday, May 27, 1984 Kemp and Duey brought the unsuspecting West to a remote logging road in the Kaniksu National Forest where Dye and Bentley waited hiding, having already dug a grave. Coming from behind, Kemp struck West’s skull with a three-pound sledgehammer. When this failed to kill him, Duey finished him off with his own Ruger Mini-14 automatic rifle. After that, Bentley moved in with Bonnie Sue; Mathews also began keeping a mistress of his own, Zillah Craig.38 West was neither black nor Jewish, but his murder marked a turning point. The Order had crossed over into lethal violence.

Outspoken radio talk show host Alan Berg specialized in agitating racist listeners. He could be rude, arrogant and insulting, but he was a man of conviction. With his program commanding more than 10 percent of the Denver audience, he nonetheless regarded his provocations as mostly show business. Not so Bob Mathews. He made Berg Number Three on his hit list—after Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Norman Lear, acclaimed television producer and liberal political activist.39 When Mathews stated that the time had come to “take out” Berg, opinion was split within the group. Some felt they were not yet ready, but Mathews refused to wait. His goal was to start a race war; if he were martyred in the struggle, the propaganda would be invaluable. When Mathews asked for volunteers, Bruce Pierce demanded to be the triggerman. Pierce pictured himself as “a true Aryan Warrior.” According to Louis Beam’s “point system,” one needed a full point to become this. Killing a Jew (i.e., Berg) was worth one-sixth of a point; killing the US President was worth one full point. At 9:20 p.m. Monday, June 18, 1984, Pierce gunned down Berg in his driveway as he was climbing out of his Volkswagen Beetle. David Lane and Mathews watched from a Plymouth parked nearby. Detectives quickly found .45 caliber shells from the 12 rounds that riddled the victim’s body. This was no ordinary slaying: the killer clearly wanted to “send a message” to the public. Based on the shells and slugs, investigators quickly identified the murder weapon as an Ingram MAC-10 machine pistol, a weapon of choice for right-wing gun buffs.40 Investigative Division Chief Don Mulnix therefore wasted no time in calling the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, the FBI and the BATF in on the case.41

Again desperate for cash, Mathews planned the Order’s next heist. Thanks to a disenchanted Brinks Company employee, he learned of a regularly scheduled truck—often loaded with millions of dollars—that took an especially vulnerable route north of Ukiah, California. Mathews put together a crew and thanks to careful planning by newly recruited Richard Scutari, pulled off the heist without a hitch. This time they netted $3,800,000. The only problem was that Mathews left behind a pistol registered to his follower Andrew Barnhill. Before long, federal investigators had tied the robbery to the Berg slaying. Their prime suspects belonged to the Order. Meanwhile, Mathews promptly tithed much of the take to his favorite charities: Richard Butler’s Aryan Nations, William Pierce’s National Alliance, Frazier Glenn Miller’s Carolina Knights of the KKK, Louis Beam, Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance, Bob Miles’ Mountain Kirk and Dan Gayman’s Church of Israel.42 With the FBI closing in, he set his sites on the next target: Morris Dees. His preliminary plan called for kidnapping and interrogating Dees, then flaying him alive.43 He also tried to contact the Syrian government to fund his war against the Jews.44 Finally, he gave his group a provisional name, taken from a book about Hitler’s Waffen SS: Bruders Schweigen, which refers to “the Silent Brotherhood.”45

On October 1, 1984, Tom Martinez went on trial at the US District Court in Philadelphia. Martinez was charged with helping pass the Order’s counterfeit bills. Shortly before the hearing, his attorney warned him that the FBI had already linked the Order to the Berg slaying and the Brinks heist. Martinez lost his nerve and turned state’s evidence.46 Based on his tips, the FBI stepped up its manhunt, nearly apprehending Mathews and key member Gary Yarbrough twice. Mathews found safe houses for the Order on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound. On October 23 Martinez led FBI agents to the Capri Motel in Portland where he was to meet Mathews and Yarbrough—ostensibly to discuss the Dees kidnaping. They caught Yarbrough, but Mathews got away, his right hand wounded.48

The Order regrouped on Whidbey Island. Knowing things were at an end, Mathews drafted a declaration of war on ZOG and an Aryan Declaration of Independence, which newspapers in every state were to receive. The Bruders Schweigen would no longer remain underground. The end, however, was nearer than Mathews could have ever known. On December 4, the FBI received an anonymous tip that Mathews and a dozen others had gone to Whidbey. Alan Whitaker, special agent-in-command at the Seattle FBI office, quickly assembled SWAT teams, a Hostage Rescue Team and reserve agents. By Friday, December 7, he deployed them around the Order’s three safe houses and evacuated nearby local residents. In the first house Randy Duey gave up without a fight. Next, counterfeiting expert Richard Merki surrendered with his wife Sharon and an older woman, Ida Bauman. Merki had taken care to burn as much evidence as possible before giving up. Meanwhile, in the third house Mathews refused to respond to negotiators. The FBI then brought in Duey and Merki who urged him to surrender. Mathews, however, demanded that Idaho, Washington and Montana be set aside as an Aryan homeland before he would talk. Meanwhile, his partner, Ian Stewart, gave up, but refused to confirm whether Mathews still had women or children inside with him. Next SWAT teams forced their way in, but Mathews sprayed them with machine-gun fire from above, shooting through the floorboards. They retreated. The following day the FBI brought a helicopter to hover above the house; Mathews sprayed it through the roof. At 6:30 p.m., the FBI command post issued orders to lob M-79 Starburst flares into the besieged building. Within twenty minutes the house went up in a firestorm. Sunday morning, investigators, sifting through the debris, found Mathews’ charred remains next to a blackened bathtub.48

The federal government’s case against the Order had become the government’s biggest since the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnaped Patty Hearst. In the wake of Mathews’ death, the group itself dissipated, but its influence did not. Seattle US District Attorney Gene Wilson put together a massive racketeering case against the remaining members, consisting of sixty-seven separate counts. On April 12, 1985, a federal grand jury indicted twenty-four members on racketeering and conspiracy. When the trial began that September, twelve pleaded guilty. Prosecutors convicted ten more that December 30. After police captured Richard Scutari in March 1986, he too pleaded guilty. In spring 1988, the government sued ten of the movement for sedition, including the leaders Richard Butler, Bob Miles and Lois Beam. This jury, however, acquitted everyone.49 After these events, William Pierce declared that America was not yet ready to embrace the revolution he had outlined in The Turner Diaries. He instead bought up enough American Telephone and Telegraph (ATT) stock to force a corporate phase-out of ATT’s affirmative action policy.50 Pierce’s renunciation of terrorism, however, was disingenuous, simply part of his strategy to separate the movement into underground and aboveground wings.

In the end, Robert Mathews succeeded in becoming the kind of martyr figure that Pierce deemed necessary for a popular revolution. Gordon Kahl had come first, but he was a lone individual. There had been other paramilitary groups too, like the Covenant, the Sword and Arm of the Lord (CSA) or Frazier Glenn Miller’s Confederate Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.51 Yet these functioned more like gangs of thugs, while Mathews’ Order quickly developed into, a model terrorist cell. Although Mathews had even drawn recruits from these other groups, he was the one who managed to take them from talk to action.

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Weaver family and Kevin Harris make the cover of a Spokane newspaper after winning the
wrongful death and civil rights lawsuit against the federal government for the Ruby Ridge shootout.


Ruby Ridge

In 1989 at an Aryan World Congress meeting, a biker identifying himself as Gus Magisono befriended former Green Beret Randy Weaver. Since his time in the military, Weaver had adopted Christian Identity beliefs and moved his family to an isolated cabin near Naples, Idaho. Overlooking Ruby Creek, the news media later came to call this place Ruby Ridge.

That fall, when Weaver was almost broke, Magisono encouraged him to sell sawed-off shotguns to right-wing militants.52 After Weaver sold his first two, “Magisono,” a.k.a. Kenneth Fadeley, identified himself as a federal operative and threatened to turn him in unless he agreed to spy on Aryan Nations meetings. The FBI had promised Fadeley a reward if Weaver either complied or was arrested. In short, the US government had entrapped Randy Weaver.

Weaver, however, refused and warned Aryan Nations of the plan.53 In turn, the federal government indicted Weaver on firearms charges in December of 1990 and arrested him the following January. He posted a $10,000 bond and was released. The BATF set a court date for February 20 but sent Weaver a summons dated March 20. Six days before he thought he was supposed to appear in court, Assistant US Attorney Ron Howen issued a warrant for his arrest.54 March 20, however, came and went; Weaver ignored the summons and stayed holed up in his cabin.

August 21, 1992, six US marshals, part of a SWAT-like team called the Special Operations Group, surrounded the cabin on Weaver’s isolated twenty-acre property. They kept clear of the house itself for fear of being seen. One marshal threw pebbles near the cabin to distract Weaver’s dog. It started barking. Weaver, his fourteen-year-old son Sammy and a friend, Kevin Harris, grabbed their guns, thinking the retriever had found game. They followed him as he chased the marshals. Randy Weaver split from the others and, spotting a figure in camouflage gear, shouted a warning and ran back to the cabin. As the others began to follow, Marshal Art Roderick shot the dog. Sammy Weaver shot back. Then he continued running. After another burst of gunfire from the concealed marshals, Sammy Weaver fell to the ground dead, shot in the back. Harris returned fire. That exchange left veteran Marshall William Degan dead. It remains unproven exactly who shot whom in this exchange, but clearly Ron Howen had prematurely authorized use of excessive force to arrest Randy Weaver.55

The remaining five officers immediately contacted the US Marshals Service in Washington, DC, which in turn called in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The FBI mobilized its crack Hostage Rescue Team, headed by Richard Rogers. It brought in agents from around the country. By the day’s end, Idaho governor Cecil Andrus had called a state of emergency, by that authorizing the use of both the National Guard and state militias to capture Weaver. The next day, about four hundred military and police specialists had converged on Ruby Ridge with a helicopter, “humvees” (a military vehicle used in “Desert Storm”), armored transport and personnel carriers, and communications equipment. This force blockaded the Weaver’s property. Rogers had drawn up special “Rules of Engagement” for the operation, authorizing agents to shoot any adults carrying weapons on sight.56

About 6:00 p.m. that day, Weaver finally decided to venture out to reexamine his dead son, whom he had carried to a small shed near the cabin. Harris and Weaver’s daughter Sarah came with him. As he tried to enter the shed, a bullet ripped through the soft flesh under his arm. All three ran back to the cabin. Vicki, Weaver’s wife, held open the door, a baby in her arms. As they raced inside, a federal sharpshooter’s bullet passed through Vicki Weaver’s head, killing her instantly and severely wounding Harris.57 Fearing for their lives, Harris and the remaining Weavers refused to go outside for the next nine days. During this time Harris’s condition grew critical. By the barricades, a hundred local residents kept a vigil for those trapped inside and began to protest the paramilitary assault. Finally, Weaver agreed to surrender only after another former Green Beret, Bo Gritz, and a local Baptist minister, Chuck Sandelin, assured him that he and his family would go unharmed. 58

About one month later, Randy Trochmann, Chris Temple (publisher of a Christian Identity newspaper, The Jubilee) and several others who stood vigil during the siege formed a group called United Citizens for Justice. They proposed to expose government abuse of power and to form chapters in every state to protect fellow “patriots.” The organization, however, fell apart after only a few months.59 Another, more ominous organizing effort followed. This meeting, called “the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous,” took place on October 22 at Estes Park, Colorado. Besides Trochmann and Temple, Louis Beam, Richard Butler and other prominent members of the patriot movement attended.60 Their purpose was to mobilize the far right in the wake of Ruby Ridge. To do so, they decided to focus on anti-government sentiment and to downplay racism, which had been too divisive. As they re-prioritized Jews and blacks as “secondary” enemies, euphemisms replaced racist epithets in movement propaganda. In this, they took their cue from David Duke’s successful campaign for the Louisiana legislature. Identity pastor Pete Peters observed:

Men came together who in the past would normally not be caught together under the same roof, who greatly disagree with each other on many theological and philosophical points, whose teaching contradicts each other in many ways.61

All agreed that they must take extreme measures to check the tyranny of the federal government. Beam stated:

When they come for you, the federals will not ask if you are a Constitutionalist, a Baptist, Church of Christ, Identity covenant believer, Klansman, Nazi, home schooler, Freeman, New Testament believer, [or] fundamentalist….those who wear badges, black boots, and carry automatic weapons, and kick in doors already know all they need to know about you. You are the enemy of the state.62

They concluded that small, unorganized armies would be the most effective countermeasure. Thus, the contemporary militia movement was born. As Morris Dees notes, “At Estes Park, the movement changed from a disparate, fragmented group of pesky—and at times dangerous—gadflies to a serious armed political challenge to the state itself.”63

Ron Howen later tried to prosecute Weaver and Harris. The jury, however, in what The New York Times called “a strong rebuke of force during an armed siege,” acquitted the two of all the serious charges: murder, conspiracy and aiding and abetting. They found Weaver guilty only of failing to appear in court and violating the terms of his bail.64 The Weaver family and Kevin Harris later filed a wrongful death and civil rights lawsuit against the federal government. On August 16, 1995, Attorney General Janet Reno announced that the Justice Department had reached a $3.1 million settlement with the Weavers. Yet the government, as customary in such cases, admitted no wrongdoing.65 Under a government probe, however, E. Michael Kahoe, who supervised the siege for the FBI, admitted shredding documents detailing the shoot-to-kill orders.66 Clearly the FBI and the BATF, under the Clinton administration, had overstepped their authority to such an extent that extremist warnings of a nascent police state began to seem credible. Tactically, the encounter furnished the far right with invaluable propaganda. Even so, just as the Weaver case was being tried, the BATF blundered again—with even more horrible consequences.

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Second part of the video “Waco, the Big Lie” by Linda Thompson.

Waco

On April 19, 1993, the FBI and the BATF launched a concerted, paramilitary assault on a heavily armed and fortified compound in Waco, Texas. They used gas, tanks, and helicopters to incinerate and destroy a complex that belonged to the Branch Davidian religious group and had been under siege for 51 days. When the government ended the siege, they had killed Branch Davidian leader David Koresh and seventy-five of his followers. Of these, all but nineteen were women and children.67

Branch Davidians grew out of Victor Houteff’s Shepherd’s Rod Church in the 1960s. Shepherd’s Rod was a Seventh Day Adventist church; Adventists believe in the “Second Coming” of Jesus, which entails the fiery, apocalyptic destruction of the earth from which only true believers will be spared. After her husband and Branch Davidian founder, Ben Roden, died in 1978, Lois Roden became the new prophet, pronouncing that the Holy Spirit was female.68

David Koresh was born as Vernon Wayne Howell on August 17, 1959. He joined the Davidians in 1981, moving to the Mount Carmel Center. Howell became popular with the other Davidians and by 1984 began to emerge as the sect’s new spiritual leader. This led to a dispute with Lois Roden’s son George who ejected Howell from Mount Carmel. Many other Davidians followed him and set up a community on rental property in Palestine, Texas. In 1985 Howell visited Israel where he claimed to have a visitation from God who instructed him to study and to teach the prophecy of the Seven Seals from the Book of Revelations. During the same period, he also claims God told him to create a “House of David,” in which many wives would bear his children. His offspring would become the rulers of a new, purer world. Although the Davidians were apocalypticists, they were not racists like Christian Identity adherents; the congregation was racially and ethnically diverse.

After his mother’s death, George Roden challenged Howell’s leadership of the new group. He went so far as to dig up a coffin at Mount Vernon, daring Howell to raise the corpse inside from the dead. A gunfight resulted after Howell snuck onto the property to photograph the coffin. US District Judge Walter A. Smith sentenced Roden to six months in jail after Roden had threatened to infect him with herpes and AIDs. With Roden out of the way, Howell urged the country to put a lien on Mount Carmel for sixteen years of unpaid back taxes. By paying these off, Howell legally regained possession of Mount Carmel on March 22, 1988. In 1990 he changed his name to David Koresh, after the Old Testament King David and Cyrus, the Persian king who freed the Jews in Babylon.69

When Koresh declared in 1989 that God had commanded him to take the sect’s married women as his wives, follower Marc Breault became angry and left the group. In a 1990 affidavit he described Koresh as “power-hungry and abusive, bent on obtaining and exercising absolute power and authority over the group.” He took up the role of “a cult buster” and encouraged over a dozen Davidians to sign affidavits against Koresh. The charges included statutory rape, tax fraud, immigration violations, illegal weapons possession and child abuse. In 1991 Breault informed David Jewell that his young daughter Kiri would soon be eligible to become one of Koresh’s many wives. Jewell sued for custody in January 1992 and Jewell’s estranged wife surrendered the child voluntarily.70 In October of that year a Waco Herald-Tribune reporter contacted Assistant US. Attorney Bill Johnson about an exposé he was writing about Koresh, called “The Sinful Messiah.” It would detail the Davidian’s alleged child abuse and arms buildup.71

The BATF felt pressured to take action at Waco. On one hand, Jewell and the local media had raised charges of child abuse within the compound; on the other, due to charges of inefficiency, racism and sexism—not to mention the Ruby Ridge debacle, the BATF faced possible budget cuts and reorganization. Clear and decisive action at Waco might clear up both problems at once. Instead what resulted was a fifty-one-day siege that cost the lives of four BATF agents and that culminated in the death seventy-six Branch Davidians. As in the Ruby Ridge incident, the FBI failed to follow standard agency rules of engagement. Instead, after Davidians shot one marshal, agents received orders to shoot on sight. Reports suggest that although the Davidians were heavily armed, they would have complied with regularly served search warrants—as they indeed had done in the past. By beginning with a siege, the FBI and the BATF may have unnecessarily escalated the entire confrontation. FBI Director Louis J. Freeh later suspended Larry Potts and reprimanded dozens of other federal employees for the botched standoff at Ruby Ridge.72 Potts had overseen both Ruby Ridge and Waco. After this outcome, popular resentment ran deep. In a fund-raising letter, the otherwise mainstream NRA characterized BATF agents as “jack-booted government thugs” who wear “Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms.” That letter caused President George Bush to resign his NRA membership, stating, “Your broadside against federal agents deeply offends my own sense of decency and honor, and it offends my concept of service to my country.”73 In response to both Waco and Ruby Ridge, in October 1995 Janet Reno set forth new rules of engagement procedures for all federal law enforcement. These directives restrict the use of deadly force to a last resort and prohibit changes, even under extenuating circumstances.74

Right-wing propagandists were quick to exploit Waco—notably Linda Thompson. Calling herself “Assistant to the US Commanding General NATO” with a “Cosmic Top Secret/Atomal Security Clearance,” Thompson produced an inaccurate and misleading two-volume video set on the massacre called “Waco: the Big Lie.”75 Ironically, because of “race mixing” many of Thompson’s supporters would have otherwise targeted the Davidians themselves. White supremacist Timothy McVeigh nonetheless used Waco to justify the Oklahoma City bombing.

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U.S. Air Force personnel from alongside civilian firefighters to remove rubble
from the explosion site of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City.


Oklahoma City

On April 19, 1995, a truck bomb exploded at Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, killing 168 people and wounding about 500 others. As for loss of life and sheer destruction, this was by far the worst terrorist action in US history to date. Nineteen of the victims were children, most from the building’s day care center. In the wake of the World Trade Center bombing, the Clinton administration was quick to blame Arab terrorists, but then had to retract this accusation as it became clear the perpetrators were, after all, American. As in The Turner Diaries, the bomb consisted of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and fuel oil; the target was a building used by the FBI. One Aryan Nations group had already targeted the Murrah building in 1983. A key member of that group, in fact, was Richard Wayne Snell, executed in Arkansas on the very day of the 1995 bombing.76 Before his death, Snell warned, “Look over your shoulder, justice is coming!”77

Shortly after the bombing, a state trooper stopped a yellow Mercury sixty miles outside Oklahoma City to check a missing license plate. He arrested the driver after finding a Glock semiautomatic pistol and a five-inch hunting knife inside the car. The driver turned out to be Timothy McVeigh, a twenty-seven-year-old veteran who had received a Bronze Star in operation Desert Storm. With an identification number from a mangled axle found in the wreckage, investigators soon linked McVeigh to the bombing. They traced the axle to a Ryder truck from Elliott’s Body Shop in Junction City, Kansas. Shop owner Eldon Elliott identified McVeigh as the man who had rented the truck on April 17. The FBI found McVeigh’s fingerprints on fertilizer receipts as well. Other evidence suggested that the brothers James and Terry Nichols may have been involved as well. Once in police custody, McVeigh said little, conducting himself like a prisoner of war.78

The radical right, in fact, had earmarked April 19 as a symbolic date. The Militia of Montana (MOM) called for a “national militia day” to commemorate not only Snell’s execution but also the Waco tragedy.79 Telephone records show that McVeigh called William Pierce’s unlisted telephone number in West Virginia one week before the bombing.80

McVeigh went to trial on April 24, 1997 in Denver, Colorado. Michael and Lori Fortier, the prosecution’s chief witnesses, recounted how McVeigh had diagrammed his plan on their kitchen floor with soup cans six months before the bombing. On June 3 the jury found McVeigh guilty of conspiracy, two bombing charges and eight counts of murder for the federal agents killed in the blast. During the penalty phase of the trial, McVeigh’s defense team changed its tactics. Instead of insisting on McVeigh’s innocence, they stressed his outrage at the Waco massacre, as a justification for taking 168 lives. Morris Dees, however, disputes the far right’s putative “eye for an eye” logic:

The fact that lives were lost during both the Waco debacle and the Weaver incident does not make those tragedies morally equivalent to the Oklahoma City bombing as the militias have suggested. Viewing the Waco incident from the perspective of the government’s complicity, the deaths were by accident. Viewing the Oklahoma City disaster from the perspective of the bomber’s responsibility, the deaths were by design. And even if one were to buy the thoroughly discredited militia line that the government started the blaze that engulfed the Davidians, a crucial distinction would still remain. The FBI pleaded with Koresh and the Davidians to come out of their compound for fifty-one days. The Oklahoma City bombers struck without warning.81

McVeigh received the death penalty on June 13. He remained stoic as he heard the verdict and, leaving the courtroom, flashed the “victory sign” to his family. He was executed on June 11, 2001. Terry Nichols went to federal trial on September 29, 1997. Unlike McVeigh who received a sentence of life imprisonment after the jury deadlocked on the death penalty. For this reason, Nichols was tried again by the state of Oklahoma—which had declined to prosecute McVeigh—in 2004. That jury also balked during the death penalty phase and, for 161 counts of murder, Nichols received an equal number of consecutive life sentences without possibility of parole.

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Armed militia member portrayed as patrolling the U.S. border.

The Militia Movement

Before the Oklahoma City bombing, few Americans knew of the militia movement. Suddenly, Ted Koppel’s Nightline, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Time magazine all featured stories about it. For the first time, the mainstream public heard eccentric figures clad in camouflage gear warn of black helicopters, an invading strike force of Nepalese Gurkhas, secret tracking devices installed in their car ignitions, and the construction of massive crematoria in Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Kansas City and Oklahoma City. All of this was supposedly the work of a global secret government that had even orchestrated the Oklahoma City bombing as a pretext to crack down on Patriot groups. Richard Abanes assessed the movement shortly thereafter:

This loosely knit network of perhaps 5 to 12 million people may be one of the most diverse movements our nation has ever seen. Within its ranks are college students, the unemployed, farmers, manual laborers, professionals, law enforcement personnel and members of the military….Interesting, patriots have no single leader. The glue binding them together is a noxious compound of four ingredients: (1)an obsessive suspicion of the government; (2) belief in anti-government conspiracies; (3) a deep-seated hatred for government officials; and (4) a feeling that the United States Constitution…has been discarded by Washington bureaucrats.82

Reporters have described the militia trend as paranoid. It is largely an expression of middle-class rage—not of the broad middle class itself, only a tiny, disaffected extreme. Since the onset of the Reagan Revolution, .5 percent of the population has consolidated its hold over almost 40 percent of total national assets. With the gap between rich and poor turning into a gulf, the middle class has seen its incomes shrink and its prospects for a higher standard of living disappear. It is further enraged by economic agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the Mexican “bailout.” It views gun control and environmental restrictions as government “meddling” in their private affairs. Many militia members are “weekend warriors” who simply enjoy dressing up and marching around; others, of course, fully intend to use their weapons.83

Robert DePugh’s Minutemen, formed in the early 1960s, were the first contemporary, paramilitary group. Nonetheless, it was Ruby Ridge which gave birth to a national militia movement. During the standoff, sympathizers and local citizens had gathered outside the Weaver property to protest the government’s handling of the case. The resulting negotiations threw Bo Gritz into the limelight; after the Weaver incident, his Specially Prepared Individuals for Key Events (SPIKE) program took on a bigger role in training militia groups. Meanwhile, Louis Beam introduced the idea of leaderless resistance at the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous in Colorado. Beam argued that the patriot movement imitate “the communists”; it should discard traditional, military “pyramid structure” in favor of small, independent cells, impervious to infiltration by federal agents.84 Other protesters formed the United Citizens for Justice in October 1992 to protect citizens from “overzealous government.” That organization soon fizzled, but one member, Randy Trochmann, moved back to Noxon, Montana to form the Militia of Montana (MOM) with his father, Dave, and his uncle, John. The Trochmanns all have ties to Christian Identity. Unlike other militia groups, MOM concentrates on publishing training and propaganda material.85 Its titles include the M.O.D. Manual (a home guide to guerilla warfare), The Road Back (reclaiming America from the New World Order) and the instructional video Invasion and Betrayal (a survey of New World Order conspiracies). MOM members have had armed encounters with local police, but their primary significancy has been to spread the “militia gospel.”86

The Michigan Militia, founded by Norman Olson and Ray Southwell, is one of the movement’s best known. Six months after it was founded in 1994, brigades had sprung up in sixty-three of the state’s eighty-three counties. National attention focused on the Michigan Militia when investigators learned that suspects in the Oklahoma City bombing may have attended the group’s meetings. University of Michigan janitor Mark Koernke (“Mark from Michigan”) is the militia’s chief propagandist. He inveighs against the Federal Management Agency (FEMA) as a wing of the “shadow government” and has produced a two-hour video America in Peril: a Call to Arms that outlines the whole gamut of current conspiracy theories. In keeping with “need to know” tactics, most other militia groups prefer to operate in relative secrecy. Daniel Junas described how militia ideology differs from region to region in Covert Action Quarterly:

the militias vary in membership and ideology. In the East, they appear closer to the John Birch Society. In New Hampshire, for example, the 15-member Constitution Defense Militia reportedly embraces garden variety U.N. conspiracy fantasies and lobbies against gun control measures. In the Midwest, some militias have close ties to the Christian right, particularly the radical wing of the anti-abortion movement. In Wisconsin, Matthew Trewhella, leader of Missionaries to the Preborn, has organized paramilitary training sessions for his church members.87

Claiming that the New World Order controls 50 percent of the United States, US Representative Helen Chenoweth (Idaho) has lent official credence to such otherwise crackpot theories. In line with so-called Wise Use doctrine she also declared “spiritual war” on environmentalism and introduced a bill requiring all arms-bearing federal agents to obtain permission from local sheriffs before entering a state.88 Tactical anti-environmentalism began in Catron County, New Mexico with the Country Rule program. Here, attorney James Catron succeeded in passing an ordinance that declared that the country government supersedes federal law, including such questions as whether cattle may graze on federal lands. With this precedent, some 100 more western counties have followed suit.89

The biggest militia confrontation to date came in March 1996 when members of a group calling itself the Montana Freemen planned to kidnap and execute a judge and a second government official. Previous Freeman actions had included tax resistance, counterfeiting and impersonating government officials. FBI agents intercepted two members who were bringing a truckload of weapons from North Carolina to a compound they called “Justus Township” near Jordon, Montana. After this, sixteen other members, lead by Russell Dean Landers, holed up in this community for what would become an 81-day siege, the longest in American history. During that time, a total of 633 agents worked in twelve-hour shifts with sometimes as many as 150 agents surrounding the compound. After Ruby Ridge and Waco, FBI director Louis J. Freeh had decided to exercise extreme caution. Only after seventy-one days, did the FBI cut electrical power to the compound. Some criticized the agency for wasting time and money, but this approach paid off on June 13 when the FBI ended the armed standoff with no loss of life. Freeh declared, “The message that comes out very clear to everybody—if you break the law, the United States government will enforce the law. It will do it fairly but firmly.” Attorneys Kirk Lyons and David Holloway from the CAUSE Foundation in North Carolina will represent the Freemen in court. The CAUSE Foundation calls itself a civil rights organization for right-wing activists. Randy Trochmann declared that the trial would provide an ideal platform for militia propaganda.

Although the federal government made egregious mistakes at the Ruby Ridge and Waco sieges, these were exceptions. Nonetheless, the far right has aggressively exploited these events, turning its criminals into heroes. This might tempt Americans to forget that law enforcement officials have routinely risked and lost their lives to keep otherwise unregulated paramilitary groups in check. No one has turned the dead BATF or FBI agents into martyrs. Morris Dees notes that no other country in the world tolerates private armies that build bombs and train with assault weapons; local police seldom enforce state laws that forbid these armies.90 Moreover, he warns of a racist component in the tolerance extended to these groups:

It would be interesting to see the reaction of the state attorneys general if the militia groups operating today were all located near large metropolitan cities like Detroit and Philadelphia, and were comprised only of blacks. If law enforcement’s violent reaction to the Black Panthers of the 1960s is any example, I seriously doubt if black militia units training with assault weapons, distributing recipes for building bomb, and preaching hatred for the government would be tolerated.91

Any analysis of the constitutionality of the militia movement entails two questions: i) the right to bear arms and ii) the right to form private militias. While the constitutional right to bear arms is unclear and subject to debate, the Constitution expressly prohibits forming private militias. A militia may consist of the citizenry at large, just as the patriot movement claims. It fails to note, however, that only Congress can call up a militia, which, in turn, remains subject to government regulation:

Private citizens cannot simply band together, saying “Okay, we’re a militia. We’re here to protect our rights against what we believe is a tyrannical federal government.” The militias of today’s patriot movement are functioning outside constitutional boundaries. They are unconstitutional militias. The Constitution stipulates, “Congress shall have the power…To provide for calling forth the militia…To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia…reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of officers, and the authority of training the militia.92

Alarmed by the World Trade Center bombing of 1993, the Clinton administration tried to pass the Omnibus Counter-Terrorism Act of 1995. It intended this legislation to allow the FBI more leeway to collect information and to conduct surveillance without prior court authorization. The act did not pass. Appearing before the Senate, Morris Dees advised lawmakers simply to enforce existing laws; the FBI did not need such sweeping powers. Most important, Dees reminded his audience, although they should never accept misconduct by federal law enforcement agencies, they should never take effective law enforcement for granted. It forgets that even before Ruby Ridge the government had peacefully resolved dozens of standoffs. Since then, it acknowledged its mistakes and has taken steps to insure that they will not happen again.

Image
Tea Party in Washington D.C..

Afterword

The Clinton Administration’s decision to limit deadly force significantly helped defuse the militia movement in the short term. The long-range impetus behind the militias waned for other reasons as well. The first, and most obvious, is that overturning the Federal government was never an achievable goal from the outset. However much ideological heat can be produced by stoking such fantasies could never drive a full-blown, right-wing revolution. Second, the logic of globalization, once so tempting for extremists to condemn as a conspiracy, has inexorably come to be accepted as part of twenty-first century social reality. Nonetheless, the extremist right continues to exert a disproportionately large ideological influence both domestically and internationally, though no longer in the form of an underground movement. The Tea Party represents the most recent expression of its disaffection, the roots of which can be traced back to the ongoing decimation of the middle class and the economic and social dislocation wrought be global capitalism. The progressive left has responded to these conditions as well, most notably through the Occupy Movement, which re-asserts the principle of communal public space and property against the logic of ongoing privatization. It is notable that how wealth is allocated is what fundamentally moves the populist right and left. Domestically, an ever-smaller elite lays claim to ever-more profits. Internationally, the distribution capital is beginning to include Third World economies rising out of the conditions of neo-colonialism. These are the underlying conditions of the Great Recession of the 2000s, which has so dramatically reduced the size and political clout of the middle class. The mandate, then, for the Tea Party has become to transform government, not overthrow it. It casts the proposed transformation as returning to the values of the founding fathers, even when such proposals blatantly contradict fundamental Constitutional principles. Embedded in the idea of such a return is the assumption that this will lead to a restoration of a once vibrant middle class. For example, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s recent assessment of John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech to Baptist ministers in Houston, a speech that reaffirmed Constitutional separation of church and state is one such “return.” Santorum said the Kennedy’s speech made him want to “throw up.” What is perhaps most alarming in this is, apart from its vehemence, that it signals a perceived feasibility of merging church and state. For the immediate future it seems that the battle over such issues will be waged by debate within the ranks of the Republican Party – and not with weapons from remote and isolated survivalist compounds.

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Re: The Joker in the Patriot Movement

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jun 17, 2014 11:21 am

William Cooper - The Alex Jones Deception - (1-4-2000)

Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Joker in the Patriot Movement

Postby American Dream » Wed Jun 18, 2014 12:11 am

http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2009/ ... y-for.html

Sunday, August 30, 2009

Of Tea-Parties and Patriots: Liberty for who?

Originally from the anarchist black cat forum

The following article was written and directed towards members of the "Liberty Movement," participants in the Tea Parties and Town Hall meeting protests. It was originally intended to be handed out at Colorado gun shows, where anarchists have done counter-recruitment against the Minutemen:

Of Tea-Parties and Patriots: Liberty for who?

As town hall meetings on health care become the targets for disruptive protest and a growing “pro-liberty” movement gains traction and headlines, a full analysis of the situations we are facing as white working class people and an analysis of the strategies of the new “pro-liberty” movement is necessary.
[Interesting propaganda]


I am authoring this piece as a white working class male that comes from a military family background, and identifies to some extent as being a libertarian. This description of myself is important as it helps color the perspective I am writing from, as any differences in my background, race, or socio-economic status would ultimately change the entire nature of this essay.


This piece is also mainly directed at white working class people that are active within this new movement. The reasons for this are many, as will become obvious as this piece progresses.


On race…


The Liberty Movement resembles the broader Libertarian Movement in a myriad of ways. One of these ways is in racial composition. To be plain and up front, the U.S. Right is mostly comprised of white people. These giant Tea Parties, our demonstrations and meetings are seas of white faces, with small sprinklings of nonwhite faces.


Whiteness is defined in many different ways by many different people. To many, Jews are not white. Up until the mid 1900’s, white skinned people of Irish and Italian descent were not considered white. Some folks still think this way.


I identify, for the benefit of this essay, a white person as any person with pale skin pigmentation that would commonly pass as white in this society. We don’t need to break this down any further. We know whether we’re white or not.


Most whites immediately become defensive when the word race is even brought up. We don’t want to admit we think in these terms. We don’t want to admit that race has anything to do with our lives or what’s going on in this country. We’d rather pretend it doesn’t exist and not talk about it.


We can act like Ostriches all we want. It doesn’t change that our movement is nearly completely white. Let’s admit that, understand that, and move on to understanding what that means for us.


On class…


When people bring up the term “class”, many white working people start to snicker. The calls of “leftist” or “socialist” or “pinko” come to the lips of many at the mere indication that someone may be conscious of class in America. Despite this tendency, especially within the ranks of poor and working whites, most white working people naturally view the world in terms of class, whether they’d admit it or not.


Our realities are shaped by where we stand socially, economically, and politically. The vast majority of whites, like people of all other races, live in precarious social, political, and economic realities. We live paycheck to paycheck. We live off over-extended credit. We live in debt. We don’t own much, if at all, in real estate. We live in stressful situations, where if one part of the chain breaks, we lose everything. Our very existence is one of insecurity and economic disaster.


Most people in the middle and upper classes of white society try to stifle this talk amongst us in the working or lower classes. Political, social, and church leaders try to erase the class line. But for those of us going home at night to trailers, slumlord owned apartments, or dilapidated houses, we tend to not forget the large suburban homes and mansions that these leaders sleep in.

Class exists. Just like race, we can’t make it go away by ignoring it. But why would we even want to ignore it? Our situation as working whites boils down directly to the idea of class.


Our class interests…


I start with the idea that most white working class people want similar things. We, as most people do, want security, freedom, prosperity, comfort, and safety. We don’t want to have to worry about where our next meal is coming from, how we’re going to be able to afford school supplies for our children, or whether or not we will fall victims to a “terrorist” attack. We don’t want to constantly fear losing our jobs or living the rest of our lives in precarious economic situations.


We now live in a country with a huge division between rich and poor. We live with a failed economy. We live in a nearly failed state. The government of the United States has systemically become a monstrous giant of bureaucrats and neo-tyrants. The whole government, every single politician, is part of this corrupt system.


Back home, in our communities, both rural and urban, we are losing our jobs. We are watching our sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, dying in deserts and mountains halfway across the world. Our police forces are growing larger, just as our prison populations. We, as working people, are losing everything.


But, there may still be hope for us. White working class people are starting to organize on a national level for what we believe are our interests as a class, as physically manifested with the wave of “Tea Parties” and protests against what many feel to be an impending socialist nightmare in Washington, D.C.


Thousands have mobilized in past months to send clear messages to the politicians in charge of this mess that we won’t take it anymore. And now, we’re mobilizing to shut down what many see as a socialist attempt to take away our health care options and build even more government power.


But what do these mobilizations really mean? And what have we gained by disruptively protesting these town hall meetings on health care reform? Are we gaining ground? Or are we merely paving the way for further future losses?


Liberty


Typically, political scientists have defined the concept of liberty as a political idea that identifies that a person has the right to act according to their own will and desires. This is how many Americans would like to think about liberty.


At Tea Parties, political meetings, and other gatherings, most white working people keep this image of liberty, of true freedom, deep in their hearts. It tends to motivate how we view the rest of the world and our relationship to it. We see liberty manifested here in the U.S., and the founders of this country dying to ensure it existed.


The other liberty…


Let’s be clear, however about the concept of liberty. We’ve all been duped, plainly and simply. On this land, the concept of liberty as defined in the previous context has never existed. In fact, we’ve had the wool pulled over our eyes so tightly, that we can’t even see how the word has changed meaning and been used against us.


Historically, because of the conditions in the United States, the concept of liberty in this country has taken on a much different connotation than the one previously stated. Liberty, in the United States, has become synonymous with the protection of rights to own property.


To many within the white working class, this doesn’t seem like a contradiction. Part of being able to determine our own wills and act in true freedom is being able to own property. We define freedom by the ability to own objects, to own land, to own cars, to own firearms. And we defend this right to own private property to the death.


However, the right to own property is the right that allows for the rich and elites to own everything that we produce. The right to property has become the legal and social basis for the rise in power of those that directly exploit us. Because it’s a protected right to own water resources, because it’s a protected right to own land that you will never live on or work on your own, because it’s a protected right to own a house and price gouge your tenants for rent, because it’s a protected right to own a business and pay your workers next to nothing, because we as white working people have helped protect these rights, we’ve laid the foundation for our own misery.


The concepts of freedom and private property, then, are at direct odds with each other. How can we be free when a corporation owns the rights to our water? How can we be free when a bank owns the land that our houses sit on? How can we be free when all of our food is owned by a field boss? How can freedom exist when a small minority own the very means of our survival?


We’ve become casualties of this way of thinking for centuries. The idea that property protection and liberty are one and the same has allowed for the rich, the political and economic elite, to swindle the rest of us.


In the name of freedom and liberty, we protect the right of 5% of the residents of this country to maintain ownership over 90% of the property and means of survival in this country. Modern liberty has become the freedom to starve, the freedom to lose our jobs without notice, and the freedom to have a bank take back its property from underneath us.


While the rich in this country pillage our paychecks, destroy our retirement funds, and take away our livelihoods, we gladly hand our resources to them. After all, liberty doesn’t exist without the protection of these rich people to own that property. They have the right to even own us, in fact.


By its very nature, the concept of private property has destroyed us and allowed the rich to ride all over us.


And it’s this thinking that has created and shaped our current “Liberty” Movement.


The Liberty Movement


The Liberty Movement, this new manifestation of centuries old U.S. patriotism, has spread across the country like a wild fire. Tea Parties, large mobilizations denouncing a rising “socialism” in this country, were held in cities across the U.S. in the Spring and early Summer.


New organizations on college campuses and within communities have sprung up to continue the organizing efforts. The main enemy is President Barack Obama. His policies resemble a socialist attack on the American way of life, and they must be stopped.


Led mostly by rich politically ambitious organizers these rallies have brought together thousands of mostly white working class participants to start to fight back against this onslaught from the left.

However, many contradictions appear within this framework. Thousands of white working people, people who rely on foodstamps, unemployment payments, and even welfare checks, fill the ranks at demonstrations calling for an end to social services. White working people, full of fear about socialism and an attack on “liberty” (in this case, an attack on the property rights of the rich) turn against their own interests and sell out their own needs to fight the new socialism.


The unpleasant reality for working class and poor people who have participated and still participate in this new movement, is that we’re being used by these rich leaders within the movement to protect their interests, not ours. But that’s nothing new.


A history of playing for the wrong team


The history of the white working class has been a history of being an exploited people. However, we’ve been an exploited people that further exploits other exploited people. While we’ve been living in tenements and slums for centuries, we’ve also been used by the rich to attack our neighbors, co-workers, and friends of different colors, religions, and nationalities.


Since the colonization of the Americas in the late 1400’s, white working people have been the footsoldiers of political and economic elites seeking to dominate and control land, resources, and wealth, all at our own expense.


We have enlisted in armies to slaughter indigenous peoples. We’ve been slave catchers to trap and enslave Africans. We’ve been police officers to terrorize communities of color. We’ve been prison guards to keep other working people locked up. We’ve been settlers, occupiers, colonizers, and conquerors. These roles have done very little to benefit us, on the whole. We’ve been used to benefit a small minority of politicians, bosses, and aristocrats.


The blunt reality is that for the last five hundred years on this continent, white working class people have been used by mostly white rich people to colonize for, kill for, work for, and then better the living standards of those same white rich people, all the while sacrificing our own needs, wants, aspirations, and even lives. It really is as simple as that. No one denies the history of what has happened at working people's expenses. Wars, poverty, homelessness, wage slavery... these are all ills created by someone, and perpetuated by us... the same workers who suffer these ills.


For some five centuries we've been used by the rich among our own race to promote their agenda and suffered because of it. Yet, somehow, we've still been convinced that it is in our interests to protect the rights of the rich to own as much property as they can, to protect the right of the rich to even exist, to protect these same rich people who would just as soon see us die for their benefit.


The heart of the matter is that for these five centuries, we've been too busy fighting the people who should naturally be our allies against these injustices. The rich whites have used our skin color against us, have used our human nature of fearing living beings different than us against us... they've used us against us. They've blinded us with these racialist ideas of "white supremacy" and "white pride" and "white nationalism" into fighting other working people of other races, while they sit on the sideline and laugh.


The New Liberty Movement plays directly into this situation, and turns us, as white working class people, against our natural interests as working class people, and against our natural allies. We’re still being used by rich whites to advance their causes, and lose everything that we desire and need.


Of socialism and healthcare


Let’s be plain. Obama is not a socialist. His reforms and the reforms of other politicians are not socialist. They’re not even radical. They’re truly reformist. And they’re truly state-capitalist.


Obama’s policies have not threatened the power structures of this country in anyway. The rich will stay rich. The poor will stay poor. Property will still be just as protected as it is now. Wars will still be waged on multiple continents. The systemic inequities that have created a mess for all working people will still exist.


But while these reforms, like public option healthcare, are not radical and do not fundamentally change any power relationships in this country, they still remain important bread and butter survival policies for poor and working people.


Just like people of all races and backgrounds, most white working and poor people have no healthcare. We’ve seen it disappear. We don’t have access to medical care when we need it. While national healthcare is not the answer to all of our problems, and shouldn’t be our ultimate end goal, it is a short term fix that we, as working class people, could probably use.


However, the red flag of socialism has been waved in front of our faces. We can’t see anything but the closet communist Obama taunting us and attacking our very way of life with these reforms.


And it’s this mentality that divides us from nonwhite working people even more. The vast majority of nonwhite working people are in support of this healthcare reform. They are in support of social service spending. They are in support of legislation that affects their survival as working class people.


We’re divided in a way that is fairly predictable. White working class people, people who have been bought off by the rich, would rather protect property rights that are used against us and our interests than work for healthcare and social services that we don’t like to admit that we utilize and need.


In our class based, capitalist society, white working class people protect property, while nonwhite working people struggle for social services necessary for survival. And thus, we as white working people play for the wrong team. And in the end, everyone besides the rich and the politicians ends up losing.


Let’s be honest. I don’t want the government to control healthcare. But I also don’t want to live in a property based society where I’m denied healthcare because I don’t make enough money. Until we get rid of that property based economic relationship, then I’ll gladly take social services from the state, just to level the playing field a bit between me and the rich boss that steals money from my paycheck, or the rich politician who guts money from our schools to fund occupations of other countries that benefit corporations he owns stock in.


Migrants and other scapegoats


Perhaps the most glaring example of how white working people are playing for the wrong team, and how the new Liberty Movement actively works against the liberty of all people, especially nonwhite people, is the role that the movement plays within the debate on immigration.


One of the attacks leveled at the government by the Liberty Movement is the government’s failure to secure the border. The white populist logic of the movement becomes quite clear at these times.


We have bought into the ridiculous notion that mostly brown skinned immigrants from Mexico or other countries are our enemy, that they are somehow stealing our jobs, that they somehow really threaten us. Let's get real. Who's really stealing our jobs?


Even with a generous estimate of the number of illegal immigrants working in the U.S. at 6 million (notice I said working, not living), this stands in stark contrast to the conservative estimate that nearly 50 million jobs will have been lost to outsourcing by 2015 since NAFTA came into affect in 1994. Well, let's ask ourselves, who's really stealing our jobs? Poor Mexicans? Or Rich White CEOs?


Leaders of the new Liberty Movement feed us ridiculous ideas of the "invading" brown hordes, and the rich whites that make up the upper echelons of organizations like the Minutemen and other similar groups salivate over our reactions. If we're busy fighting the Mexicans at the border, and busy trying to round up all the "illegals" then we're too busy to fight that real enemy, that one that keeps eluding us, the rich and political elite.


Most of us that keep falling for these lines initially might mean well. Heck, we only want to defend our families and our communities... but in reality, we're weakening them even more, by fighting our real potential allies and diverting our attention from the real enemy.


And why are all these brown skinned immigrants coming here in the first place? Why is there this sudden rush in the last thirteen years to get into this country? 80% of all illegal immigrants have entered since 1994. Why is that? What happened in 1994 that affected working people in Mexico just as it affected us? The passage of NAFTA, a free trade program that benefits nobody but the rich people on both sides of the border!


The new Liberty Movement defends the liberty of rich people to own property, while attacking the liberty of movement of brown working class people. The new Liberty Movement doesn’t protect liberty, it actively attacks it and defends a system that makes liberty for all people impossible.


We’re failing and being used


The new Liberty Movement is not a failure. It’s highly successful for accomplishing what the leaders of this movement want. If our interests as white working class people mirror those of other working people, the interests of the rich and political elite within our own movement mirror those of the rich and political elite within the government. The leaders of our own movement seek to keep the infighting amongst working people of all backgrounds and colors alive. Again, if we’re too busy fighting each other, then we can’t fight them.


We as white working class people are being used at these mobilizations. We’re fulfilling our old role of being foot soldiers for the political elite, for keeping other poor and working people in line. We’ve blinded ourselves again.


How else can we explain the willingness of hundreds of people without healthcare to actively work against legislation that would provide them with that healthcare?


And the worst part is, we don’t really gain anything from this situation. We’re failing ourselves. All of our work within the New Liberty movement, all of our energy, money, and talents are going to reinforce the same predatory economic, political, and social systems that keep us, as white working people, exploited and living in misery as well.


Our allegiances to these leaders, to people like Ron Paul, to people like Alex Jones, our acceptance of their white populist talk, our willingness to attack migrants, to disrupt attempts to provide healthcare to working class people, our willingness to cling to these ideas of the “other” liberty, the protection of property and not of people, are the biggest reasons that we are doomed to continue to live this way. We will continue to live paycheck to paycheck (at least those of us that have jobs) and in constant fear of eviction or foreclosure. We will continue to have to choose between new schoolbooks for our kids or dinner for the whole family. We will continue to see our retirement funds looted, our world destroyed, and our family members being killed in wars. And we will continue to not be able to do anything about it, unless we change our strategy and direction.


Moving forward


If we as white working people envision a world of safe, free, and economically secure communities, then we must act now. We have to start to identify our allegiances to that of our class, and not our race. We must create a revolutionary white identity that can actively work against all forms of domination that ensure that we will never enjoy true liberty.


Migrants and blacks are not our enemies. White rich people are not our friends. We must reverse this paradigm and start to work alongside movements of nonwhite working people against all predatory political, economic, and social systems. This means not just working against the state, but also working against capitalism. The state and capitalism are two faces of the same coin, a coin that must be thrown away.


We also must work actively against white supremacy in all its incarnations. Our future depends on this. If we as white working people want to enjoy freedom, then we must not be used by the rich to deny it to others and ourselves. The more we act as footsoldiers for the rich, the more we ensure that our freedom is also unattainable.


Historically, we as white working people have seen our allegiance become an allegiance to whiteness, to being white. We can relate to other white people, no matter how poor or rich. They're white like us, and that's something we can identify with, come to terms with. So of course, our natural enemies become nonwhite peoples.


The only problem with this idea is that we've had it wrong for centuries. We've been kept blind to the true nature of what is afoot here, as to what's really going on. Look around us. Who fills the trailer parks with us? Who works in the factories or fast food restaurants with us? Who is beside us working in the fields, picking produce that we'll never really be able to afford? Is it rich people, especially rich white people? Hell no, it isn't. It's brown people, black people, yellow people. It's people who have different shades of skin than us. They are the people that are in similar situations to us, living paycheck to paycheck, suffering like we do. So why then would we view them as our enemy?


Allegiances, traditionally, are made amongst people who have common interests. In an historical sense, white skinned working people have overwhelmingly believed that our interests are based on skin color. We have to work for the betterment of the race, for our culture, for our identity. The truth, however, could never be further away. Whose interests do these beliefs really serve? White workers? In some sense, the answer may be "yes". Working for the advancement of the white race at the cost of other races does buy us relative privileges and even some luxuries. In the end, however, we're still poor, we're still being used to make other people money. And those people aren't non-white working people.


We have a stake in creating a new social paradigm and movement that goes beyond the idea of liberty being a protection for property ownership. We have a direct interest in fighting white supremacy, the state, and capitalism. Our freedom is intimately woven into the freedom of all working people. Until we are free as a working class, we will never be free as individuals, no matter what skin color we are.


I don’t want to end on an abstract note. I want to end with a couple concrete steps that white working class people can take to work to build a movement for real liberty.


1) Actively work against groups like the Minutemen, the Klan, the Christian Identity Movement, and others that seek to divide us as working class people from other working class people based on their race, gender, sexuality, nationality or religion. These people are class traitors and ensure that we will never see freedom for ourselves or our families, as they keep us fighting other working class people and not the real enemy: the rich. Disrupt their attempts to organize and to recruit. Make it known they are not welcome at gun shows or other events where you are present. Not joining their organizations isn’t enough, we must actively stop them from organizing at all.

2) Actively work against leaders of the New Liberty movement that organize against nonwhite working class people. Alex Jones, Ron Paul, David Duke, and others are trying to ensure that we will turn on migrants and other people of color rather than turn on rich people, most of whom happen to be white.

3) Organize debtor’s unions and tenants unions in your neighborhood. We must come together with our neighbors to defend each other from foreclosures and evictions. Create networks of people in your neighborhood that can show up and help defend each other and prevent evictions.

4) Refuse to pay any debts you have and organize rent strikes. Don’t pay your hospital bills, your credit card bills, or any other debts you have. Don’t give these people that have been exploiting us any more of your money.

5) Support GI resistance to war and occupation. Many working class people are refusing orders to deploy, and resisting the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan in other ways. Lend them your support at couragetoresist.org

6) Don’t join the military, help prevent your family members from joining the military. This institution has robbed too many working people of their lives by convincing them it’s their patriotic duty. We must stop falling for this line, and fight for our class, not for the political elites.

7) Follow the examples of other working class people and occupy your workplace if threatened with layoffs or terminations. There have been occupations of workplaces in the U.S. and across other countries as the economic crisis has broadened. These reclamations of workplaces have ended with workers receiving back and severance pay, and sometimes even preventing their workplaces from closing

8 ) Organize with your neighbors to grow food for your communities. Don’t rely on the economic elites for your food any longer. Starting a personal garden is a good first step, but community gardens can provide more food for more people, and create important community ties and working relationships.

9) Be ready to actively defend your neighborhoods, workplaces, and communities from the police and state forces. Take whatever measures you deem necessary to do so.

10) Don’t get a job as a cop or prison guard. These jobs also reinforce racial divisions within our class, as well as create domestic armies to use against us when we do work toward our own power. Cops are not our friends. The police systemically exist to protect the rich and their property. Prison guards are not any better. Especially with the expansion of the war on drugs to include a war against Meth, many white working class people are finding themselves in prison and on the other side of the bars from their neighbors in guard’s uniforms.

11) Do anything you can to take back resources from the rich. We’ll keep this suggestion intentionally vague. The rich have all the food, all the money, all the wealth, and all the power. Let’s take it back. Any way we can.



Comments? Questions? Concerns? Hate mail? Wishes to collaborate?
johnbrown@riseup.net
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Re: The Joker in the Patriot Movement

Postby American Dream » Wed Jun 18, 2014 10:26 am

https://www.hate-speech.org/sovereign-c ... /view-all/

Militias and conspiracy culture

december 23, 2013

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David Brutsche, who identifies himself as a sovereign citizen, appears in court in Las Vegas, Nevada, on 23 Aug. 2013. Police say an undercover officer spent four months with Brutsche and Devon Campbell Newman, collecting evidence of a domestic terror operation.

IN DEPTH: Anti-government rage is primarily an American phenomenon, but a number of ideas and tropes from the US anti-government subculture have entered Europe over the last 10 years through the influence of conspiracy culture.

John Færseth

It is a sunny morning in Ithaca, a small university town in upstate New York that is the American residence of the Dalai Lama. The scene taking place in a parking area appears at first sight to be right out of a 1960s countercultural movie: A group of long-haired travellers in a mobile home have just been stopped by police for driving an unlicensed vehicle.

What separates the scene from “Easy Rider” is that none of the travellers possess a driver’s license. Their leader, a dreadlocked gentleman calling himself J. M. Sovereign: Godsent, argues that licenses are unconstitutional and a breach of “common law”. As soil-born “sovereign citizens”, they have a constitutional right to drive a non-commercial vessel or dwelling on all roads in all 50 states. A lady calling herself Sue Yo Ass, who claims to represent the “Sovereign Copwatch”, is filming the entire incident. According to Ms Ass, the policemen have no legal authority over the travellers. In fact, the policemen are required to pay her and her sovereign citizens a gold fee for every question asked and are in the process of running up a $15,000 bill.

J. M. Sovereign: Godsent is the author of the self-published book “Title 4 Flag Says You’re Schwag!” – a “handbook” for sovereign citizens. The outlandish moniker reflects his belief that the name on a birth certificate does not represent an actual person, but is a “strawman identity” that refers to his or her capacity for work and earning, used by the government as security to obtain loans from international bankers.

The sovereign citizens movement is a growing subculture in the United States, and is rooted in the Posse Comitatus-movement of the 1970s and 80s, a movement founded by the bizarre preacher and ex-military William Potter Gale. Whether or not the hippie-ish Mr Godsent and Ms Ass are aware of it, the subculture shares many of its roots with the militia movement and white supremacist groups. All are manifestations of an American far-right scene characterized by anti-government conspiracy theories, usually paired with a related brand of scepticism towards the United Nations and other international organizations. The result is a paranoid view of the future involving economic collapse, strict gun laws and martial law, all seen as imminent. Racist ideologies, including anti-Semitism, sometimes infuse the brew.

Origins
Many of today’s manifestations of the extreme – and not so extreme – right have their roots in the upheavals of the 1950s and 60s, and in organizations like the John Birch Society (JBS). Founded in 1958 by Robert W. Welch Jr, a retired candy manufacturer, the JBS was named after John Birch, an American Baptist missionary and United States military intelligence officer shot by communist forces in China in August 1945 and regarded by the society as the first casualty of the Cold War. The JBS was dedicated to the fight against Communism, and opposed any form of recognition of the Soviet Union including summits with Soviet leaders. While the JBS originally had some mainstream respectability, its views often bordered on full paranoia, with the feminist and environmental movements seen as communist plots and even the Republican President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, accused of being a communist agent. Some John Birch Society publications even claimed that all forms of socialism from Marxism to social liberalism were the creations of the secret Illuminati society.

Persons affiliated with the JBS include author and conspiracy theorist Cleon Skousen, who would later become an important ideologist for parts of the Tea Party movement, and Robert DePugh, who would went on to form his own paramilitary organization, the Minutemen, after dismissing JBS members as “wimpish” letter-writers. Presidential candidate Ron Paul has denied having ever been a member, but he has declared the JBC an important influence on his thought and he was the main speaker at the JBS’s 50th Anniversary dinner in 2008.

William Potter Gale – Posse Commitatus, Christian Identity and White supremacy
William Potter Gale was a rather unsuccessful ex-militaryman who became politically radicalized in the 1950s. This led him to join DePugh’s Minutemen. His increasingly racist ideas led him to embrace Christian Identity, a racist interpretation of the Bible viewing North Europeans as descendants of the lost 10 tribes of Israel, and thus God’s chosen people, while seeing other races as “mud people”, mere animals created before Adam and Eve with no souls and therefore no possibility of salvation.

Jews hold a unique position in the Christian Identity worldview, and are either seen as descendants of the Khazars – a Turkic people who converted to Judaism in the early middle ages – and therefore impostors, or as literal spawn of Satan who mated with Eve in the Garden of Eden in the guise of the serpent. Ironically, Gale was himself almost entirely of Jewish descent, a fact he kept hidden his entire life.

Eventually Gale created his own movement, which he named Posse Comitatus. Posse Comitatus is a Latin term for “power of the county” and refers to the right of the local community to enforce laws. It usually implies absolute resistance to all forms of federal and state authorities, which are viewed as being in breach of both the original US constitution traditional Anglo-American Common Law. The only authority recognized is the local sheriff, who has been elected by his peers among the sovereign citizens. Some readers might interpret this as a radical brand of libertarianism. But for Gale and other early sovereign citizens, resistance to the federal government was deeply connected to their racism and anti-Semitism, and a reaction to the struggle for Civil Rights for African Americans. According to Gale, both the growth of federal power and the forced desegregation of the South were secretly directed by Jews and their communist dupes who controlled the government through the Federal Reserve, the American central bank. Jewish international bankers were also said to be behind the abandonment of the gold standard.

A majority of early sovereign citizens also believed that being white should be a prerequisite for citizenship, and that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which had guaranteed citizenship to African Americans and everyone else born on US soil, had been an illegal move to make everyone permanent subject to federal and state governments.

In the 1970s the Posse Comitatus movement merged with parts of the growing tax-resistance movement and started taking a violent turn. Internal Revenue Service officers, judges and policemen were “arrested”, beaten or taken before imaginary “citizens’ grand juries”. The agricultural crisis which rocked the Midwest in the late 1970s provided a dangerous recruiting ground for Posse agitators who visited fairs, attempted to take over farmers’ organizations and sent out newsletters to farmers in which Jews and international bankers were blamed for the hard times. Some even organized “Endtime Overcomer Survival Training Schools”, which taught the use of firearms, first aid and natural birth assistance in preparation for a coming societal collapse or for resisting the government. Many of these schools also gave instruction in Christian Identity theology.

The movement gained national attention in June 1983 when a North Dakota farmer named Gordon Kahl was killed in a shootout in Arkansas. Kahl, a 63-year-old World War II veteran, had been attracted by William Potter Gale’s radio broadcasts and started to travel around the Midwest spreading the Posse “gospel“ while condemning what he called the ZOG (Zionist Occupation Government), including politicians, courts and law-enforcement officials. Kahl also refused to support the government by paying his taxes, leading to a two-year prison sentence in 1977. Released on parole, he went on to become active in the “township” movement, an attempt to make towns secede from the United States.

Kahl’s organized activities came to an end when police attempted to arrest him for breach of probation in Medina, North Dakota, using a roadblock. In the ensuing shootout two policemen were killed and Kahl escaped. Hunted by FBI, he went into hiding at a Smithville, Arkansas, farm belonging to a sympathetic family. Kahl was eventually turned in by the family’s oldest daughter, who appeared to have been scared of him as well as attracted by $25,000 in reward money. Another arrest attempt, this time with of a small army of policemen, led to another shootout. Both Kahl and Lawrence County Sheriff Gene Matthews were killed.

Despite the “martyrdom” of Gordon Kahl, the sovereign citizens movement petered out in the late 1980s. It did, however, experience a massive rebirth in the late 2000s. It is difficult to gauge the number of adherents, but by one rough estimate there are more than 500,000 tax protestors in today’s United States, of whom 300,000 are either full-blown sovereign citizens or in the process of testing out various pseudo-legal techniques for resisting anything from speeding tickets to drug charges. Sovereign ideas also seem to be spreading among prisoners and among the unemployed, and among those who are in financial trouble because of the economic crisis.

Like their predecessors, today’s sovereign citizens repudiate the duties and responsibilities usually associated with citizenship. A central claim is that no citizen is obliged to pay federal taxes or possess a driver’s license, vehicle license plate or birth certificate. Some even claim that their doctrine is divinely inspired, and that paying taxes is a sin. Unlike the sovereign citizens of the 1970s and 1980s, many of today’s sovereigns seem to be unaware of the racist origin of their ideas – indeed, many sovereigns are African American.

A common claim is that the original legal system set up by the founding fathers was at some point replaced by “Admiralty law” or “the law of the sea”, changing the legal status of citizens to that of slaves. The time of this supposed changeover varies, but a common claim is that it occurred during the Civil War or with the subsequent passing of the 14th amendment. Another is that the change happened in 1933, when the United States abandoned the gold standard replaced money backed by gold with the “full faith and credit” of the government. To sovereign citizens, this government move was tantamount to pledging the future earnings of US subjects as collateral, which could then be sold to foreign investors. Some even believe that a secret account in the name of every US resident is set up at birth and contains between $600,000 and $20 million. Through a complex legal process known as “redemption”, it is possible both to emancipate oneself from admiralty law and gain possession of these funds.

Most sovereigns do not go further than filing an endless succession of dubious complaints – a process somewhat incorrectly known as “Paper Terrorism”. But in several instances, cornered sovereigns have lashed out in anger against what they deem an unlawful government. One example involves Jerry and Joe Kane, a father and son who travelled around the country conducting redemption workshops. After being pulled over by police in West Memphis, Arkansas, in May 2010, the Kanes resisted and Joe Kane shot and killed two police officers. Four months later, in Odessa, Texas, Victor White – a Vietnam veteran, tax resister and hermit – opened fire on an oil company worker and two sheriff’s deputies who had “illegally” entered his property.

Due to its roots in American anti-federalism and its heavy use of revolutionary war imagery, the sovereign citizens movement remained a US-based subculture until recently. It has eventually spread to Canada, where it has claimed to have more than 30,000 adherents, and to the UK and Europe. Proponents outside the US tend to call themselves “Freemen on the Land”. A tragicomic example was when Calgary retiree Camille Sokol discovered to her horror that her new tenant was a self-declared “Freeman on the land” who promptly declared her house an embassy and went on to fortify it, claiming that since he had “manumitted” himself from the government, Canadian law did no longer apply to him.

Even Norway has seen a somewhat bizarre case, with a former student of Princess Märtha’s New Age-style “Angel school” attempting to give up her Norwegian citizenship, claiming that her social security number was a straw identity used by the state to borrow money.

The militia movement
Early 1994 was a busy time for John Trochmann. Trochmann, a self-proclaimed “free white Christian man, Republic of Montana State Citizen” who asserted that he had never “knowingly been a citizen of the United States”, crisscrossed Montana speaking about of an upcoming invasion by United Nations troops in black helicopters. According to Trochmann, the American government had long abandoned the interest of the American people, rendering the individual states defenceless, and was now in the process of disarming the people in order to establish a sinister “New World Order”. He believed American soldiers were already being trained for “special operations” in which they would be arresting civilians. The only remedy was to establish a citizens’ militia, which according to Trochmann was a right guaranteed by the Constitution as a bulwark against a tyrannical government. Trochmann would himself set an example by establishing the Militia of Montana the same year.


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The last photograph of Vicki Weaver before she was killed by an FBI sniper 22 Aug. 1992 in the Ruby Ridge standoff. It was taken by US Marshall Service surveillance on the morning of 21 Aug. and was evidence at the subsequent trial.

Three incidents were crucial in the growth of the militia movement in the early 1990s. The first was the shootout at Ruby Ridge, in which the Weaver family attempted to hold off local and federal police in a remote cabin on top of Ruby Ridge, Idaho. Randy and Vicki Weaver were Christian Identity believers with a firm belief that the Biblical end-times were near at hand. Randy, a military veteran, got in trouble with the authorities when he attempted to sell two sawed-off shotguns to a government informant and subsequently refused both to appear in court and to become an informant. Randy, Vicki, their four children and a family friend withdrew to the cabin, leading to a full siege in which Vicki and their teenage son Sammy lost their lives. The trial of Randy Weaver attracted national attention among right-wing extremists and everyone else with a skeptical view of the government, especially because Weaver’s lawyer choose to downplay the white supremacist element and present the Weavers as “white separatists” who simply wanted to be left alone.

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The Mount Carmel Center in Waco, Texas, in flames on April 19, 1993. Photo: FBI.

The second incident was the death of 82 members of the Branch Davidian congregation on April 19, 1993. The charismatic David Koresh (born Vernon Howell) led an offshoot of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church based in a compound at Waco, Texas. The congregation aroused the interest of the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) when the bureau received reports of weapon deliverances to the sect’s compound. Like Randy Weaver, the Branch Davidians refused to cooperate, leading to a 51-day siege that ended in tragedy when FBI agents finally assaulted the compound. During the assault, the compound caught fire. Responsibility is still being debated. In any case, 76 persons lost their lives at Waco, including 17 children.

If Ruby Ridge helped launch the militia movement, Waco provided it with scores of martyrs, as the assault was perceived as an attack on both religious freedom and the constitutional right to bear arms. Even as the siege unfolded, it attracted national and international attention because cable news broadcasters provided continuous coverage of the events. Amongst the spectators and protestors drawn to the site were several well-known right-wing extremists as well as a young man named Alex Jones, who would eventually become a guru to many conspiracy theorists, and a recently discharged soldier called Timothy McVeigh.

The third event was the passage of federal gun-control legislation in 1993 and 1994, which established a five-day waiting period to purchase a handgun and limited the sale of various types of assault rifles. Both restrictions were both considered part of a “government conspiracy” to disarm the American people and ultimately to abolish the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

John Trochmann’s Militia of Montana was one of the first militia groups to organize as a response to the perceived threat. October 22, 1994, approximately 160 men from various right-wing organizations gathered for what was dubbed “The Rocky Mountain Rendezvous”. At the summit, various racist “revolutionaries” spoke of New World Order conspiracies, tax resistance, the need for armed militias and – more disturbingly – the possibility of “leaderless resistance” in order to overthrow the government and bring about a white Christian republic.

Militia membership peaked in the mid- 1990s, when it was claimed that more than 10,000 people were organized in militias and training in guerrilla warfare and survivalist techniques, and continued growing even after the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. A steep decline followed, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Reasons for the decline included systematic prosecution, aversion to the movement’s advocacy of violence, a new and highly conservative president and the fact that many militia leaders had been active proponents of the Y2K panic, stoking fears that that computers all over the world would fail to adjust to the change from 1999 to 2000 and cause a massive societal collapse.

Like the sovereign citizens movement, militia membership experienced a massive resurgence from 2008 on, after the election of Barack Obama. The resurgence was deeply connected to the belief that the new president would be a “gun grabber”, despite the fact that Obama never spoke about guns in his campaign speeches except when supporting the Second Amendment. A common rumor debated in militia Internet forums was that while Obama and the congressional Democrats knew it was impossible to outlaw guns, ammunition would be severely taxed. This rumour led to an increase in ammunition sales, which eventually made Wall-mart run out of bullets – a shortage that, according to author Will Bunch, sparked new rumours that the ammunition had been bought up by government agents. The same fear of imminent weapons regulations led the state of Montana to enact a law barring federal regulations on guns manufactured and sold in the state.

While estimates of today’s militia membership vary, the number of groups is usually set at above 300, far higher than at the previous peak in the 1990s. Most members tend to be white males between 20 and 55 years old. Unlike openly racist groups, militias tend to compare themselves to the patriots of the American Revolution, often using names and symbolism from the revolutionary war. Armed resistance against “illegitimate authority” is seen as a justifiable defence against an intrusive and tyrannical government. In the same manner, paramilitary training, stockpiling illegal weapons and similar activities are seen as necessary for self-defence and preservation. The Internet has proven an efficient recruiting and communication ground, with a multiple of forums, blogs and “blog talk radio stations” to spread and discuss relevant topics, including claims that Barack Obama will soon endorse drone strikes on American soil, and that a proposed national service corps is intended to function as Obama’s Hitlerjugend, helping in a coming mass arrest of American citizens. Like sovereign citizens, some have also resorted to imaginary courts to sentence what they deem illegal authorities, and have even ordered President Obama to appear before a “Citizens’ Grand Jury” for treason and fraud.

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FBI mugshot of Timothy McVeigh.


Domestic terrorism
In addition to those believing in the need to prepare for a coming suspension of civil liberties, there have for years been those who believe in preemptive action against the establishment.

Among those following the events at Waco was a 27-year old army veteran, Timothy McVeigh. McVeigh seems to have had trouble readjusting to civilian life, both in relation to holding a steady job and women. Instead he filled his time with conspiracy literature, including the writings and broadcastings of Milton William Cooper, a veteran from the UFO subculture who had mutated into a militia agitator speaking against an Illuminati-dominated “shadow government” preparing to set up a dictatorial “New World Order”. Indeed, McVeigh is said to have attempted to enter Area 51, a closed area in Nevada rumoured to be a testing ground for stolen or bartered alien technology, at some point before the event for which he is remembered.

On 19 April 1995, Timothy McVeigh struck back against a government he saw as tyrannical and traitorous by detonating a homemade bomb outside the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, destroying nine floors, killing 168 persons and wounding hundreds more.

The carnage caused by Timothy McVeigh is unique. On the other hand, there have been more than 100 lesser instances of right-wing violence or plans for such violence since 1995. The majority seem to have been inspired by antigovernment and/or militia ideology, closely followed by neo-Nazism or white supremacism. It should be noted, however, that many such ideologies overlap. For instance, it is difficult and probably not very constructive to try to determine whether Eric Rudolph – who detonated a bomb in an Atlanta park during the 1996 Summer Olympics and later bombed an abortion clinic and a gay bar – was motivated by Christian fundamentalism, radical anti-abortion or antigovernment ideology. What is known is that he claimed to be striking back against a federal government that had lost its mandate to govern by allowing the murder of unborn children. Nor are some border militias easy to categorize. They may see it as their duty to protect America from illegal Mexican and Central American immigration by terrorizing migrants, but they also share some rhetoric with the general militia movement and even sovereign citizen groups.

An instance of smaller-scale terrorism includes activity by the Republic of Texas, a radical separatist group that claims Texas is still an independent nation illegally occupied by the United States. In April 1997 the group took two hostages and demanded the release of a jailed ROT member. Another instance is the case of Andrew Joseph Stack III, a software consultant from Austin, Texas, with a longstanding income tax dispute with the IRS, who in February 2010 flew a single-engine aircraft into an office building housing an IRS office in Austin, killing one employee and injuring 13 more.

Given the rise in antigovernment and right-wing groups and the many instances of planned terror, there may be good reason to fear another large-scale incident, although today’s right wingers lack a Waco or Ruby Ridge to light the fuse.

Conspiracy culture
Many of the antigovernment ideas of the extreme right can also be found in the conspiracy culture that has developed since the late 1980s and which has exploded online since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. The extreme right is a main source of material for the conspiracists, although it also borrows from Christian apocalyptics and the UFO subculture, as seen in the development of Milton William Cooper from UFO theorist to full-blown “patriot” agitator. Conspiracy culture has evolved into a large media subculture that includes websites, books, radio shows and – not least – online TV and video broadcasted through YouTube.

In particular, conspiracy culture has adopted the extreme right’s scepticism towards the government and the belief that it has been taken over by sinister forces that use the government to further their own goals, typically a global dictatorship called the “New World Order”, often shortened NWO. The term NWO seems to be borrowed from Christian apocalypticism, which also infuses it with a sense of impending doom – indeed, the idea of a coming one-world dictatorship can be seen as a secularized form of Christian prophesies concerning the coming of the Antichrist before the Final Judgment. The role given to the United Nations and other international organizations by some conspiracy theorists and militia members also seems to be connected to the preeminent role of the UN in modern end-time speculation. The idea of a shadow government seems partly inspired by UFO culture, in which the shadow force is seen as having been set up to regulate contact between the official government and extraterrestrials, but has since got out of hand. The Illuminati order, which is sometimes said to control the move towards NWO, seems to be borrowed from publications of the John Birch Society, while the anti-Semitism that characterizes some strains of conspiracy culture is derived from older writings like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as well as the writings of William Potter Gale, Willis Carto and others.

A typical mark of conspiracy culture is a willingness to blame the government or banking elite of almost anything, including the orchestration of incidents like the Oklahoma City bombings, the 9/11 attacks and the Newtown shootings, in order to further their own goals. Radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, whose site is a hotbed of militia- and gun-related discussion, has blamed both Newtown and the Boston bombings on the Obama administration, describing them as pretexts to confiscate the weapons of American patriots.

While conspiracy culture has its roots in the political right, it has for years found its way over into parts of the left, where anti-Semitic ideas are repackaged as opposition to “Zionism” and “the Israel lobby”, and into New Age culture, creating a fusion culture described as “conspirituality” as represented by the Zeitgeist movies and the writings of David Icke.

The role of racism
The role played by racism in today’s anti-government culture is debatable. Some point to the presence of African-Americans in the sovereign citizens movement to prove that it has largely distanced itself from its racist past.

Others point to the fact that the militia resurgence has occurred under an African-American president, and should at least partially be seen as a response to changing demographics and rising non-white immigration, giving it a racist undertone similar to that of the 1990s, and possibly greater. The same racist undertone can be observed in the nativist sentiment that animates anti-immigrant border militias as well as fears that Barack Obama is not US-born and therefore not eligible for the presidency. And finally, as already stated, strong anti-Semitic undercurrents are present in both conspiracy culture and the hatred of “international bankers” so common among sovereign citizens, who tend to identify the bankers in charge of the Federal Reserve with the Rothschilds and other Jewish financiers.

Extremism and mainstream
At least some of the features uniting the American extreme right – including a paranoid view of government, anti-centralism and a belief in America as a chosen country whose system is continually under threat – can also be found in parts of the mainstream right, albeit in less passionate form.

Examples include commentator and Tea Party activist Glenn Beck – an outspoken admirer of Cleon Skousen – who has promoted right-wing conspiracy tropes like societal collapse, collapse of the dollar, the possibility of dictatorship and even the claim that dissidents are being put into FEMA camps, a theory he later dismissed. Some local militias are also close to the Tea Party movement, while Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul has appeared on Alex Jones’ online programme. Other examples are the never-ending rumour that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and the tendency of the right to cast itself as “real Americans” as opposed to minorities, “socialists”, immigrants and the political elites represented by “Washington”, a tradition dating back to both “producerist”, farmer-oriented populism and the John Birch Society. Indeed, as shown by Charles Postel, many of the tropes present in today’s Tea Party, including the identification of the country’s president as a socialist/collectivist “traitor”, were present in the JBS. With this in mind, it is fitting that congressman and Tea Party favourite Ron Paul was the main speaker at the society’s 50th anniversary celebration in 2008. There have also been some examples of Tea Party activists demonstrating in the company of pro-gun and Islamophobic groups connected to the militia movement. The Tea Party also shares a love of revolutionary war imagery with the antigovernment underground.

One of several places where the more radical elements of the mainstream overlap with moderate extremism is Oath Keepers, a nonprofit group founded in March 2009. Oath Keepers is based on the idea that it might eventually be necessary to resist the government by refusing to obey orders. It therefore attempts to recruit members of the police and military, and has attracted members from the fringe of the Tea Party as well as tax resisters and terrorist sympathizers. Among its endorsers: Glenn Beck.

The name “Oath Keepers” is derived from a theory that the primary duty of members of the military is to the Constitution, and that they should therefore be ready to resist an unconstitutional order. In reality, the oath of enlistment specifies that they shall obey the President. While less radical than militias, Oath Keepers is implicitly based on fears of the government will eventually find an excuse to declare martial law, confiscate guns and ammunition and arrest resisting patriots. Indeed, founder Stewart Rhodes has mentioned the “possibility” that black helicopters from the UN will eventually be entering the country to abolish American sovereignty.
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Re: The operative part of divide and rule is 'divide.'

Postby brainpanhandler » Wed Jun 18, 2014 11:49 am

Harvey » Sun Jun 15, 2014 7:51 pm wrote:(Interesting as a phenomenon, I mean. It breaks my heart every time it happens, but I've developed so much scar tissue over the last few years.)


Many things well said. For myself I wonder if it isn't so much scar tissue as numb apathy, though maybe that's the same thing. More disturbingly I can't help but wonder about my capacity for empathy anymore. I live with this nagging feeling that my conscience has been severely limited and constrained by the degenerate culture (American) I am immersed in even in spite of my efforts to retain/reclaim my humanity. but I feel childish even mentioning my existential struggles in light of the sorrow and misery the empire I am embedded within has perpetrated in my name and from which I benefit daily in a zero sum game. Perhaps I just feel so powerless that I have to intentionally numb myself, and no one else is really to blame but me, to the clear reality that I live extremely well directly because 10's of millions of 'others' live poorly, or not at all. I feel ashamed to even mention it, white, American, male that I am.

I suppose the litmus test will be when our civilisations spontaneously create more poets, artists and doctors than warriors.


Or as you suggest in the next sentence the macrophages are smart and target the most virulent strains first and leave the poets, artists and doctors alone.

Right now, the organism is producing macrophages in plentiful supply.


It seems as though the immune response is ramping up, but I think the infection is winning at the moment. (gasp! Are you equating humanity with a pathogen? Human hater - I hate you.)

The only truly surprising thing about a culture so awash with weapons and disaffection as America is that these things don't occur more often.


Indeed. One wonders if they do and we only hear about the ones with body counts unignorable or those that serve the propaganda interests of the ptb. In any event I am guessing that we are indeed witnessing a long predicted, perhaps self fulfilling, emerging pattern.

Rant over. Peace.


Thanks for the thought prompt.
"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." - Martin Luther King Jr.
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Re: The operative part of divide and rule is 'divide.'

Postby Harvey » Wed Jun 18, 2014 6:27 pm

I hate you.


Get in line, there's a waiting list. ; )
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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