poll found that 60 percent of Trump’s supporters now also believed that global warming was a myth concocted by scientists.
In the countdown to the election, the propensity for conspiracism among Trump voters intensified. Encouraged by Trump’s frequent campaign trail charges that the election was rigged and his refusal, in the third and final presidential debate on October 19, to say he would accept the results of the election were he to lose, his supporters quickly embraced the conspiracy theories ginned up by Alex Jones and other Trump supporters. An August 2016 Public Policy Polling survey found that 69 percent of Trump voters believed that if Hillary Clinton won the election, it would be because it was “rigged,” whereas only 16 percent thought it would be because she got more votes than Trump.
The PPP poll had a peculiar finding related to the long-standing right-wing loathing of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, better known as ACORN, a group primarily committed to enrolling minority voters. It had been driven out of existence in 2010 by a right-wing scandal involving heavily edited videos. The poll asked: “Do you think ACORN will steal the election for Hillary Clinton, or not?” The pollsters found that “40 percent of Trump voters think that ACORN… will steal the election for Clinton. That shows the long staying power of GOP conspiracy theories.”
Indeed, this was not an overnight phenomenon. The dumpster Donald Trump’s campaign set on fire in the 2016 election had been slowly filling for many years.
Black Helicopters and Truck Bombs
The arrangements for my first meeting with John Trochmann, in November 1994, were an exquisite exercise in paranoia. On the phone beforehand he had insisted he meet me at the bridge over the Clark Fork River near the little town of Noxon, Montana, where he lived. I had been waiting outside my car at the appointed spot for about ten minutes when he came driving across in his car.
He got out and we shook hands and sized each other up, chatting about the cold air and the freezing river. Trochmann was a slight, skinny man with a bristling gray beard and sharp eyes, with a slightly nervous demeanor. It was cold and our breaths formed little clouds of mist around our heads. I took some photos of him, and then he told me to follow him in his car.
There was nothing ultrasecret about our meeting place—a little restaurant-tavern in Noxon’s main street business district, a comfy hewn-log joint of a type common in these parts of Montana. Over the course of the next couple of hours, over coffee and a few sandwiches, Trochmann frankly laid out his alternative universe and plied me with piles of evidence he claimed proved its existence. He was not unlikable, but his personality had a brittle quality that made him seem volatile, so I chose not to push him too hard that day with questions.
He seemed to have a lot of friends in town, including the restaurant’s owner, who was working that afternoon behind the bar. A TV mounted high on the wall at the bar’s end played news from CNN, which began running reports from Hurricane Gordon, which had slammed into Florida.
Trochmann and the bartender exchanged knowing looks. “Boy, that’s really late, isn’t it?” he said. The man nodded. I asked him what he meant. Was he suggesting that someone was manipulating the weather?
“Sure,” Trochmann said. “Naples, Florida, got hit at the same time Naples, Idaho [site of the Ruby Ridge standoff], did.”
Really? That wasn’t just an odd coincidence?
“Yeah, right,” he retorted. “And I have another bridge for sale for you.”
John Trochmann believed in a lot of things. He believed the federal government was capable of manipulating the weather, even causing hurricanes, through a secret radar installation up in the Arctic. He believed the feds were building hidden concentration camps intended to house gun owners and right-wing Americans like himself. He believed they intended to recruit Bloods and Crips street-gang members to round them up into black helicopters. And that’s a mere sampling.
Trochmann, more than any other person, was the primary well-spring and original source of many of the conspiracy theories that flourished in the 1990s. He gave people like Alex Jones not only their inspiration but the grist for their conspiracy mills. Trochmann’s Militia of Montana (MOM), based out of his home in Noxon, was not a real militia—it was a mail-order operation that specialized in disseminating material explaining to people not only how they could form their own “citizen militias,” but why they should do so (the New World Order). Trochmann himself—a follower of the white-supremacist religious movement Christian Identity—was prone to lifting ideas, claims, and “evidence” from his fellow Patriots, but he gave them such wide distribution that MOM became known as the go-to source for conspiratorial explanations of virtually every modern problem and event.
It was Trochmann who first distributed maps showing the location of FEMA “concentration camps” where Americans would be rounded up under the New World Order (NWO); who first suggested that the government was using radio transmitters and chemtrails to control the weather and people’s behavior; and who first claimed that the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was a secret government “false flag” operation designed to discredit the Patriot movement.
Trochmann had been living under the shadow of the law for many years as a result of a custody dispute over his then-teenage daughter Brandi. She had run away at age thirteen with her father from her mother’s custody in Minnesota in 1988, the same year that Trochmann had moved from there to Montana, following in the footsteps of his brother Dave, another Identity member who had arrived in the state four years earlier. The girl had been seen numerous times with him around Noxon; eventually the local sheriff issued an arrest warrant, and Trochmann spent some time in the county jail on custodial-interference charges, but his daughter never did return to Minnesota. Instead, she became a teen bride when she married another member of their Christian Identity church.
The Trochmann brothers wound up playing a key role in one of the Patriot movement’s seminal events. Both brothers attended Christian Identity gatherings at the Church of Jesus Christ–Christian in Hayden Lake, Idaho, better known to the outside world as the home compound of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations. At those gatherings they became friends with Randy and Vicki Weaver, a young couple who in 1984 had fled Iowa to make a home in the deep woods of the Idaho Panhandle, about two hours’ drive from Noxon. It was called Ruby Ridge.
Rumors that Dave Trochmann might be involved in smuggling guns into the United States from Canada brought Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents sniffing around Ruby Ridge in 1990. It soon emerged that Weaver had sold a sawed-off shotgun—an illegal firearm—to an ATF informant. ATF agents put the squeeze on the wiry survivalist: either he would provide information about the Trochmanns’ activities or he would go to jail for selling an illegal weapon. Weaver walked away, telling them to go ahead and charge him.
And they did. In February 1991 Weaver was arrested in a roadside sting, taken to court in Coeur d’Alene, and charged. However, the judge released him on his own recognizance. Weaver then retreated to his remote cabin on Ruby Ridge and refused to come out for nearly an entire year, now facing federal warrants as a fugitive. Federal marshals began staking out the property, setting up surveillance equipment and trying to figure out the best way to arrest Weaver with a minimum of violence.
One day in August 1992 a team of six marshals went up to check the equipment. The Weavers’ dog, Striker, heard them and took off into the woods to find them. Randy, his teenage son Sammy, and Kevin Harris, a family friend, followed the dog down the trail and directly to the marshals’ hiding spot. Rather than let Striker reveal
