legislature, and generally only attended rallies prepared by others. Sherwood espoused militias as a way to counter political trends he said were leading to an imminent “civil war.’’
Some of the less enduring, but in some cases more colorful of the earlier Patriot figures included Mark Koernke, Gary DeMott, and Gene Schroder. Koernke was a University of Michigan janitor who espoused theories essentially identical to John Trochmann’s and presented his ideas on speaking tours throughout the Midwest. His delivery, straight out of Rush Limbaugh’s book of mannerisms, was downright engaging, but as the nineties wore on, Koernke’s reputation became increasingly tarnished by failed predictions, and he eventually faded into obscurity.
Gary DeMott, of Boise, Idaho, was the president of the Idaho Sovereignty Association and the creator of a one-man “constitutionalist” show who toured the region tirelessly, spreading the gospel of “common law’’ courts. Demott asserted that the idea of a “common law” court, which originated with the old far-right Posse Comitatus movement, was the basis of the “sovereign citizen” form of government, and he told audiences, “We are the law enforcers.’’
Gene Schroder, based in Campo, Colorado, was another advocate of “common law” courts and toured the country explaining to people how to set up such courts. His United Sovereigns of America was a leading Patriot group that specialized in the pseudo-legal activity of these courts. Militias were a basic ingredient of Schroder’s model of a proper government, and of the solution for ending “unconstitutional’’ intrusions by the federal government.
Bo Gritz was one of the most prominent militia figures in the mainstream media, but he generally eschewed the speaking circuit. The gruff, charismatic ex–Green Beret preferred to concentrate on his traveling SPIKE (Specially Prepared Individuals for Key Events) paramilitary training sessions, in which he imparted his considerable knowledge of Special Forces techniques to average Patriots.
The Ruby Ridge and Waco chickens came home to roost two years to the day after the Waco tragedy, April 19, 1995. On that day a young Gulf War veteran named Timothy McVeigh drove a rental truck laden with fertilizer laced with diesel oil—a truck bomb—up to the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, walked away, and then watched from a couple of blocks away as the bomb detonated. The massive explosion ripped apart the building’s façade and took the lives of everyone near it, including 19 children in a day-care center. In total, 168 people lost their lives, and another 680 were injured in the blast.
Initially, media speculation focused on Islamic radical terrorists as the possible source of the terrorist attack. Three days later, however, McVeigh was arrested and charged with setting off the bomb. He eventually confessed, explaining both his ruthlessness and his motivations: “I didn’t define the rules of engagement in this conflict,” he told an interviewer. “The rules, if not written down, are defined by the aggressor … Women and kids were killed at Waco and Ruby Ridge. You put back in [the government’s] faces exactly what they’re giving out.”
I called John Trochmann the morning after the Oklahoma bombing to get his take on events. At the time, analysts were still largely ruminating about the possibility of some kind of terrorism from the Middle East, and law enforcement was still days away from arresting McVeigh. Trochmann, of course, had a completely different view: it was a New World Order plot to discredit the Patriot movement.
“It’s the track record of the federal government, the British government,’’ he told me. “In 1993 Waco burned. In 1992 they tried to raid Randy Weaver the first time. In ‘43, Warsaw burned. In 1775, Lexington burned. That’s when they tried to take our guns the first time.’’
This rant was stock MOM talk; Trochmann believed the conspiracy to confiscate Americans’ guns predated the Revolutionary War and included actions taken in the Warsaw Ghetto. But that wasn’t all.
“It is also the beginning day of the Satanic preparations for the grand climax, according to the Satanic calendar. And I got this from a witch, a former witch out of a coven in St. Cloud, Minnesota. Their preparation for the sacrifice is April nineteenth to twenty-sixth.
“The grand climax, which is what they’re preparing for, is the twenty-sixth through the thirty-first, in which they have oral, anal or vaginal sex with females ages one to twenty-five. They don’t take infants.’’
“What do you think happened yesterday?” I asked.
“Well, with the information that’s rolling in, it becomes very interesting. We’ve got a seismographic machine that’s recorded fifteen miles from the site: two separate blasts, eight seconds apart. One was the vehicle outside and one was the technical blast inside. High-tech blast, high, high, high-tech. We got a call at eleven thirty last night from Special Forces, being questioned, ‘Where were you?’ It continues today.”
Special Forces? This was the first I had heard suggesting that Patriots might be implicated. Was that what he meant?
“Oh, I think they’re going to try to use it. First off, they say that there’s three olive-skinned people from the Middle East that were doing it with the rig parked outside. Then we find out that that same morning NORAD was under Level 2 Alert, which is lockdown, nobody comes or goes. Then we find out the Kitty Hawk, the carrier fleet the Kitty Hawk, is heading into the Indian Ocean. And another carrier fleet, is heading into the eastern Mediterranean. What is all this connected to? We have two witnesses now that say there was a black helicopter hovering over that building earlier in the day, earlier in the morning. I think the most significant thing is the seismographic machine measuring two blasts, and it does not measure echoes, as the FBI is trying to defend. We full well believe that it’s an inside job to justify their future deeds here, to give them justification for coming after—whoever.’’
Per Trochmann, the blast was a false flag operation carried out by the NWO to justify neutralizing Patriots. That became the Patriot movement’s story, and they stuck to it. In short order, the dozens of conspiracy theorists around the country who had previously promoted New World Order tales quickly adopted it and began spreading it. It soon came out that McVeigh was a full-fledged far-right Patriot believer who had deeply embraced the New World Order narrative.
But Trochmann’s attempt at deflection—pinning the crime on the NWO instead of where it belonged, on its adversaries—did not work. McVeigh had hoped his murderous act in Oklahoma City would spark a Patriot uprising against the government, but it had largely the opposite effect, and instead turned out to be a powerful setback for the movement. Overnight, the image of militiamen such as McVeigh was transformed from bumbling armed men in the woods to menacing terrorists. Soon mainstream media reports were filled with accounts of the militias’ threatening behavior and rhetoric, as well as their conspiracy-driven worldview. It was not a flattering view.
In a widely covered speech, Clinton addressed the Oklahoma City bombing: “In this country we cherish and guard the right of free speech,” he said. “We know we love it when we put up with people saying things we absolutely deplore. And we must always be willing to defend their right to say things we deplore to the ultimate degree. But we hear so many loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible.”
The president was not calling for suppression of such speech, though: “If they insist on being irresponsible with our common liberties, then we must be all the more responsible with our liberties,” he continued. “When they talk of hatred, we must stand against them. When they talk of violence, we must stand against them.”
Right-wing talk-show hosts, led by Limbaugh, immediately protested that Clinton was trying to pin the cause of the bombing on them. In a full-page column Limbaugh wrote for the May 8 Newsweek, “Why I’m Not to Blame,” he stated: “Those who make excuses
