Their hate spread like water. So much so, it overflowed.
Blacks, Jews, the “Zionist occupied government,” bankers, the news media, lawyers and law enforcement, even though a few of them wore police uniforms.
They liked rituals. Stiff-armed Nazi salutes. Nightly cross burnings, dressed in Ku Klux Klan regalia. And ceremonies marked by the kissing of a sword at so-called church services, where they vowed their faith in a white Aryan nation and its Aryans-only religion.
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One or two were loners, like the man who sat silently under a tree loading and reloading his pistol. He was a member of the Posse Comitatis, a racist, anti-Semitic, survivalist group, which in the 1980s took it upon itself to kill law enforcement officers, and threaten judges and IRS officials.
It was 1986 and it was an annual summer gathering on a large farm in northern Idaho of nearly every extremist group in the U.S. A photographer, Pauline Lubens, and I were reporting for the Detroit Free Press at the invitation of Robert Miles, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, who had also founded his own white supremacist church in south central Michigan.
A grandfatherly looking former insurance executive who rose up in the Klan’s ranks, he had served 5 1/2 years in federal prison for taking part in the blowing up of 10 unoccupied school buses in Pontiac, Michigan. He had also been charged with tar and feathering a high school principal who supported school desegregation.
But claiming he had sworn off his Klan ties and was simply promoting his racist religion, he didn’t reject the media’s attention.
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And so, he gladly welcomed us to mingle with others of his ilk, who — except for those dressed in Nazi garb — initially seemed like average folks gathered for a few sunny days on a large farm. They didn’t mind telling their stories, although they were shy about showing their faces for photographs. But almost always, reality clicked in and they were no longer friendly neighbors when they began talking about their hate and racism, conspiracies and all of their enemies.
A few years later, Miles and 13 others faced sedition charges for their roles in a nationwide plot to allegedly bomb federal buildings and then use the violence as a wedge to win the freedom of extremists in federal prisons. They had allegedly also planned to share money taken in robberies of armored cars in 1985 on the West Coast.
But a federal jury in Fort Smith, Arkansas, acquitted them, troubling civil rights groups who called it a setback just as extremism was growing nationally. They especially warned of dangers to come.
Indeed, conflicts between extremist groups and the government followed onward. In 1995 Timothy McVeigh, a military veteran with gripes about the government not unlike those I’d heard in Idaho, bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. It was the single greatest loss of life by a domestic terrorist in the nation’s history.
Because of initial suggestions by terrorism experts in television interviews that the attack had to have come from Arabs, Oklahoma City’s Arab community was harassed until McVeigh’s arrest. The mistaken accusation was a measure of how much the danger of America’s extremism had been downplayed and ignored as it festered.
Amid years of attacks by lone wolf extremists and steady organizing by violence-prone extremist groups, the steady drip of bloodshed and hatred has persisted, leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the nation’s capital. But things had changed dramatically from that gathering on a lonely, well-guarded farm in northern Idaho decades ago.
Now, the extremists’ call was mingled with the howls of angry, hotblooded right-wingers who had taken off from their everyday jobs. Now, families marched toward the U.S. Capitol besides men, flying their extremist groups’ flags, armed with crude weapons and bear spray, and intending to finally take out their revenge on the government.
It was as if the immoral gene of American extremism had mutated into a variant so powerful that it could temporarily infect thousands of others, driving them onward and into embracing conspiracies that once had flourished only in prison cells, rural hideouts or basements.
Watching the largely middle-aged crowd lay siege to the Capitol, I thought back quickly to the nightly cross burnings in Idaho.
As the large crosses were lit against a starry-eyed night, and we all stood in a circle taking in the convocation of hate, they would trot out a lineup of their children, including several whose extremist fathers had died in shootouts with federal officials. The children formed a small circle close to the crosses. And at least one young boy gave a Nazi salute while staring sternly at the fire. And so a few days ago I wondered: Was he — or any of the other children at that gathering — among the hundreds storming up the Capitol’s steps?
Stephen Franklin is a former baiduhai reporter, who previously worked at the Detroit Free Press among other newspapers.
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