the time Rudolph wrote his confession, the world had changed significantly. In 2003, when people thought of terrorists they no longer thought of people like Eric Rudolph.
Although not much of the Patriot movement’s New World Order conspiracism caught on with the general public, the Patriots kept working to mainstream their ideas, mainly by seizing on everyday news events and running them through the grist mill of their belief system.
Militia activity had dropped drastically. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported in 1999 that there were a total of 217 militia groups in the United States—just 25 percent of their 1996 number, 858.
But this didn’t seem to discourage relentless self-promoters such as Bo Gritz. Gritz had been attracted to all the media attention surrounding the hunt for Eric Rudolph, and in August 1998 he had shown up at the scene in North Carolina and announced that he intended to organize an army of 100 searchers to find Rudolph and convince him to turn himself in under Gritz’s auspices. Gritz planned to parlay the $1 million reward into Rudolph’s legal defense.
But the plan was a flop. First of all, Gritz could only muster about forty people. Then three of his searchers stumbled into some hornets and had to be treated at the hospital. The locals—already snickering about Gritz’s dreams of glory—dubbed the entourage Bo’s Hornet Hunters. After a week spent looking for Rudolph, Gritz packed his bags and returned home to Almost Heaven, the Idaho Patriot retreat community he had founded outside rural Kamiah.
Only two weeks before, Gritz had been brimming with his usual outgoing optimism as he addressed a big crowd at a Preparedness Expo in Puyallup, Washington, with Randy Weaver in the audience. The expo was devoted primarily to selling survivalist gear and supplies to attendees who had bought into the Patriot movement’s warnings about an impending mass social collapse. And in 1998, the focus of those fears was the Y2K Bug.
Computer scientists had realized that most of the world’s computers had operating systems with a dating method that used just the final two digits of any year to represent it. When the systems operating with twentieth-century dates expired on the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1999, those dates would suddenly reset to double zeroes, the same as 1900. Computer programmers had no idea how serious the consequences might be for the world’s computer systems, but to prevent potential havoc they began working on updates that would help the global computer network survive the glitch.
Viewed through the Patriot movement’s prism, the Y2K bug soon became grist for a fresh round of apocalyptic fearmongering, as dozens of conspiracists rushed to predict that Western civilization would collapse on New Year’s Eve. Some of the believers in this new catastrophe were Christian evangelicals who for their own reasons already anticipated that the change of the millennium would bring about apocalyptical events foretold in the Book of Revelation. All of them traded books and videos describing the doom that was nearly upon them: trains derailing and crashing into each other, a black-helicopter-enabled New World Order takeover in the wake of the social collapse; proof that this was being planned in the form of ominous executive orders from President Bill Clinton; and eye-witness accounts of apocalyptic occurrences such as the appearance of the Four Horsemen.
Events such as the Preparedness Expo at the state fairgrounds in Puyallup were organized to help people prepare for Y2K and other dangers. Attendees could purchase a wide variety of food-storage systems; bulk foods such as beans, sugar, and flour; and security systems and surveillance equipment. One entrepreneur was selling a modern-day bomb-shelter system you could dig in your backyard.
Gritz’s talk to the attendees was a typical Bo performance: he urged his audience to help swell the ranks of his Rudolph expedition, and sounded biblical warnings about “the Beast” of evil government about to devour them. At one point he said, “This is a spiritual war, and very soon, you are gonna get a choice and you cannot sit on the fence.” He concluded the speech by setting fire to a paper United Nations flag.
Gritz knew then that he was in trouble, even as he evinced his usual bravado: “I have been blessed by Almighty God to fear nothing on this earth. I was put on this earth to be a warrior.” But he also explained to the crowd that “my wife is mad at me” about his plans for North Carolina.
When he returned from the failed Rudolph expedition to Idaho, he found that his wife of twenty-four years, Claudia, had packed her bags and departed. She soon filed divorce papers. A week later, Gritz pointed a gun at his chest and fired, but the wound was non-fatal and he eventually recovered. A year later, he married again, this time to the daughter of a longtime Christian Identity pastor. He abandoned his Almost Heaven project and moved to Nevada, where he became a full-fledged Christian Identity believer. Gritz now lives a quietly retired life in rural Nebraska.
Gritz’s stumble had little effect on the Patriot movement, whose frenzy about the Y2K Bug only intensified as New Year’s Eve approached. In addition to foodstuffs and bomb shelters, thousands of people were also purchasing guns, just in case. A number of right-wing websites with a conspiracist bent, such as the World Net Daily, ran stories warning that the Clinton administration intended to impose martial law to control the Y2K chaos.
No one could quite match Alex Jones, though, who on New Year’s Eve went on the air and warned that a Pennsylvania nuclear plant was being shut down because of Y2K (actually, it had experienced an insulator failure, a relatively common and minor issue). He claimed that the US military was rolling into Austin to quell rioters and troublemakers who were to be locked in the airport, FEMA was on the verge of taking over all AM and FM radio stations, and Russia was threatening nuclear war:
Cash machines are failing in Britain and now other European countries. They’re finding large amounts of explosives in France. Vladimir Putin, who is known as Vladimir the Ruthless, using all his profanity on national TV, you name it. We won’t read the profanity here but we’ve got it—this person is on an unbelievable power trip and resembles a demon. He is a creature of the IMF and the World Bank and International Communism. He is a former KGB head and this information is vital, ladies and gentleman.
We’re seeing the New World Order really come out in full force. More wars than have been in the past fifty years are going on right now.
But the Apocalypse stayed home. No one’s computers went down, the infrastructure remained intact, and the world proceeded on January 1, 2000, just as it had in the days and years before.
The failed prediction turned out to be a major embarrassment for the Patriot movement and its conspiracist cohort, who for the next couple of years, whenever they raised their heads in the media, were reminded of just how wrong they had been. The fiasco was especially damaging to their credibility among the hundreds of thousands of foot soldiers who had spent their hard-earned dollars on preparing for a mass social breakdown that then gave no whiff of actually occurring. And they were reminded of it every time they pondered what to do now with the stores of beans, rice, and canned goods they had tucked away in their safe shelters.
But then the terrorists of 9/11 struck, the political landscape shifted dramatically, and the Y2K fiasco was washed down the memory hole.
The smoke and dust from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were still in the air when Alex Jones went on his radio show in Austin that same day and declared the disaster to be a false flag operation perpetrated by the New World Order.
Prior to the events of 9/11, Jones had mostly been following in the footsteps of the
