Through his center’s Klanwatch Project and, more recently, its Militia Task Force, Morris Dees has been tracking racist and far-Right paramilitary groups since 1980. He argues that groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Montana Freemen, and individuals like Oklahoma City bombing suspect Timothy McVeigh, are linked by a common hatred of the federal government and an adherence to Christian Identity philosophy. In his new book, “Gathering Storm: America’s Militia Threat,” he explains how hard-core neo-Nazis and other far-Right ideologues spread their belief that the government is preparing for a war against its own citizens.
Q: How big a concern is the militia movement?
A: Barring a major economic disaster, I don’t foresee it causing any overthrow of the United States government. But it’s going to do a lot of damage to innocent people.
There’s so much misinformation out there. The public has seen guys like John Trochmann (of the Militia of Montana) and Norman Olson (of the Northern Michigan Regional Militia) on television. These people have tried to get across the idea, first, that their groups are the main militia groups and, second, that they’re basically there to help law enforcement and to help little old ladies cross the street–that they’re just good, patriotic Americans.
These particular people are thought of as absolute buffoons by the real leaders of this movement. They’re harmless weekend warriors. Trochmann is a hustler of pamphlets on how to cause domestic terrorism.
The danger of those guys is that they attract a lot of people who will go off the deep end. Those are the people sitting around reading “The Turner Diaries” and stuff like that, and they’ve got all these pipe bombs.
Q: How do you keep up with these groups who are scattered around the country? Are they focused in any way?
A: They’re extremely unfocused. They range from the Freemen types–and there are 100 groups like the guys who were holed up in Montana–all the way to hard-core neo-Nazi, Aryan Nations types, to anti-tax groups, to militias, to secret cells.
We’ve identified about 800 small groups in the country. They’re tied together by their hatred for government and their Christian Identity philosophy, which holds that Jews are children of the devil, blacks are beasts of the field and Aryans are the true children of God. They believe our country is run by a Zionist, Jewish conspiracy that wants to make us into an evil one-world government.
All those people–the Klan, the Aryan Nations, the Freemen–accept that underlying thread, that America is being taken over and that the only way to save the country is to destroy this evil government.
If Timothy McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma City federal building, there was no world-wide conspiracy behind him. It was just five or six or seven people who got the same literature and attended the same meetings and decided it was time for them to take action.
Q: When did this current movement begin, and how?
A: The Christian Identity bunch has been around since the late 1970s and the farm crisis. But an important change took place after Ruby Ridge (the Idaho standoff in which federal agents killed Randall Weaver’s wife and son in 1992).
Until then this movement had been restricted to the white-supremacy, neo-Nazi hard core–which is a turnoff to people. But after the Randy Weaver thing happened, and then the Brady Bill passed and the assault-weapons ban passed, we saw these “citizen militia” groups cropping up. And after (the Branch Davidian tragedy at) Waco (in 1993), it really began to blossom.
Q: Is the radical, racist element of this movement really a “leaderless resistance,” as it is sometimes called?
A: There is no real head, but there are three principal leaders: William Pierce, who heads a neo-Nazi group called the National Alliance and who wrote “The Turner Diaries”; Louis Beam, the man who is the brains behind it all; and Pete Peters, the top Christian Identity minister in America. There are more than 100 people that we’ve profiled–including LeRoy Schweitzer, jailed spiritual leader of the Montana Freemen–but those three have given the movement its ideological underpinning and are providing the passion.
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Q: If Waco and Ruby Ridge were galvanizing factors, what effect do you think the peaceful end to the Freemen standoff at Jordan, Mont., will have on the movement?
A: It will defuse a lot of anger from the fence-sitters who might have been more inclined to join if it had ended in bloodshed. But it will have no effect on the core of the movement.
Q: What can be done to stop such radical groups from wreaking havoc?
A: Forty-four states have laws that outlaw these fellows. If the attorney generals got on the stick, they could put them all out of business. You cannot have a private army in America.
But I’ve written to all the state attorney generals, and a number of them have told me that we can’t interfere with these people’s free speech, which is totally a misconception. You don’t have to have AK-47s and pipe bombs to have free speech.
One thing you can do is make ammonium nitrate inert (so it can’t be used in bombs). But the fertilizer industry fought that.
Q: Is there a political nexus where the religious Right meets up with the radical elements of the so-called “patriot” movement?
A: Pat Buchanan speaks the mind of these people right down the line. He talks about gun control, abortion, taxes, crime, corrupt politicians. I don’t think Buchanan has any sympathy for militias’ illegal acts. But Larry Pratt, who was forced to resign as Buchanan’s co-campaign chairman, was at the (Colorado) meeting called by Beam and Peters to plan the far-Right’s response to Ruby Ridge. At that meeting he called for “armed citizen militias.”
Pat Robertson’s book that was a best-seller was called “The New World Order,” and that’s exactly what these crackpots, like Trochmann, are saying–that the United Nations is going to take us all over, and they’re worried about this one-world government, this new world order.
Pat Robertson would be offended if you tied him in with these people. His lawyers would be writing you a letter. But on the other hand, he lends enormous assistance in encouraging anti-government feelings and creating a sense of paranoia.
On a spectrum of so-called “patriots,” the more moderate end would be the concerned Christian coalitions. And on the other end you’ve got the tax protesters, who don’t believe the 16th Amendment is properly part of the Constitution, and the violent anti-abortionists that believe in justifiable homicide.
Q: Do you see a connection between this movement and the recent arson fires at more than 30 black churches in the South?
A: No. There might be people who consider themselves “patriots” who would burn a black church, but that’s not a goal of the movement.
Q: You’ve dedicated your life to combating hate groups, although it has forced you to travel with armed guards. What motivates you?
A: I’m a lawyer. I first got involved in 1979, when I defended a black man who had shot a Klansman in self-defense. That’s when I realized there was a tremendous rise in Klan activity, so I filed the first suit against a Klan group for the actions of its members.
One thing led to another, and you can’t just stop in the middle. You have to finish what you started.
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An edited transcript.