Armed and Dangerous (The NRA, Militias
and White Supremacists are fostering a network of right wing
warriors)
Rolling Stone Magazine/November 2, 1995
By Leonard Zeskind
"The second amendment ain't about duck hunting," Larry
Pratt began. The crowd of 150 neo-Nazis and self-described
Christian patriots laughed. Looking like a slightly rumpled
accountant, Pratt, the executive director of the Washington, D.C.,
organization should be able to own the military assault weapon of
his choice - and form a militia to back up his rights. It was
October 1992, and the men - and they were all men - had traveled
thousands of miles from more than 14 states, sometimes sleeping in
their cars, to Estes Park, Colo., a resort town two hours from
Denver, at the eastern entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park.
Some of those who attended had already been to jail for their
cause, and others were prepared to go. Although many of the
participants had met before, this gathering was different. This
meeting marked the birth of the modern militia movement that would
tie well-armed radicals to gun advocates in a right-wing national
network. *Sparked by the siege of Randy Weaver's cabin in the
Idaho mountains two months earlier, the three-day strategy session
was organized by Pete Peters, a dark-haired man with close-set
eyes and a mustache who pastors to members of a fringe religious
group called Identity. Identity doctrine contends that Northern
Europeans are racial descendants of the biblical Hebrews; that our
government is in the hands of satanic Jews; and that black people
were created before Adam and are therefore less than human.
Identity believers have begun to stockpile weapons, food and
supplies in preparation for Armageddon, which they think will be a
race war in the United States. "The anti-Christ Jews [in the
media and government]…have a religious conviction that it is
wrong for us to own and possess weapons," Peters once wrote
in an Identity newsletter. * Weaver, an Identity adherent and
sometimes visitor to the white supremacist group Aryan nations,
had been wanted for failure to appear at trial on charges of
selling two sawed-off shotguns to a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms agent. When federal marshals tried to arrest Weaver, a
gunfight led to an 11-day siege that resulted in the death of
federal marshal William Degan, and Weaver's son Samual and wife,
Vicki, who was killed by an FBI sharpshooter's bullet. Their worst
suspicions of the government confirmed, the men who answered
Peter's call encamped at Estes Park's biggest meeting hall, the
YMCA, to figure out what to do next. * Outside the Y, a couple of
plainclothes police officers kept watch. Inside, Pratt stood at
the podium and peered out from behind his glasses. He confessed to
the crowd of gun lovers that he wasn't a particularly good shot or
an enthusiastic hunter. "I bought my first gun in 1968,
during the riots in Washington, D.C." that followed the
assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he said. At the time
all he could buy was a shotgun. "If they'd had that assault
rifle, so-called, for sale, and I'd seen that big old magazine
there at the time, that's exactly what I would have bought.
"I wasn't thinking about hunting," Pratt continued.
"I've very seldom ever gone hunting."
Guns were Pratt's focus, but they weren't the meeting's only
topic. The audience listened to speakers who mixed calls for
"Christian resistance" with warnings of concentration
camps for "patriots." The men gathered in committees
that issued reports with conclusions like, "Vigilante action
is scriptural." Richard Butler, the aging chief of Aryan
Nations, in Idaho's north woods, told the group, "I have to
confess to you, I am a bigot."
"I am a 100 percent bigot," he added for emphasis.
Others who spoke were unknown outside the meeting hall that
crisp fall weekend but would soon become important leaders of a
re-energized militia movement - like John Trochmann, who founded
the Montana Militia. In 1992, the bearded Montana was just a
disgruntled former hanger-on at the Aryan Nations. He has since
testified before a Senate committee and now draws reporters to the
tiny hamlet of Noxon, Mont., like a snake-oil salesman attracting
rheumatics to his wagon.
Peters warned the men coming to Estes Park: "I said, 'Now,
I want you to understand what can happen to you speaking in my
meetings. You know I'm labeled a white supremacist…I just
don't want people to come in unaware."
Louis Beam, a Texas Klansman before becoming a leader of Aryan
Nations was there, and so was his attorney, Kirk Lyons. Lyons
appealed to the men at Estes Park for money, based on their common
Identity beliefs: "We've got to make sure of this, gentlemen.
We have got to make sure that we, as Christian Israelites, are
represented" in regard to the Weaver case.
Lyons wanted money for his organization, CAUSE. To the media he
described it as a constitutional-rights organization like the
American Civil Liberties Union. But to the initiated he spelled
out his white peoples' crusade a bit differently: "CAUSE
stands for Canada, Australia, United States, South Africa and
Europe, wherever the kindred people are found." Lyon knew his
movement needed a change of direction, and the Weaver incident was
its chance. "This is the fight of the decade," Lyons
told the gathering. "This is the crucible. This is the
turning poing."
Chris Temple, who is now a correspondent for an Identitiy
newspaper, Jubilee, and was an organizer for Bo Gritz's
failed 1992 presidential campaign on the far-right Populist Party
ticket, agreed that the diverse gathering had reached a crisis,
and he mapped out a new strategy.
"All of us in our groups…could not have done in the
next 20 years what the federal government did for our cause in 11
days in Naples, Idaho." Temple said. "What we need to do
is to not let this die and go away." Temple argued that white
supremacists should bury their differences with others on the far
right and build a unified single-issue movement to oppose the
federal government.
"We need to remember the Muslims' saying - that my enemy's
enemy is my friend," said Tample. "You know, we've got a
common goal…to restore and even establish Christian
government in this land." Temple wanted the groups to
undertake a strategic shift. The first stage would be to embark on
building a national network; the second, according to Identity
doctrine, would end with the creation of an al-white Christian
republic.
That approach meant men like Lyons would work side by side with
people who were not white supremacists, people who operated in the
mainstream but who shared the movement's agenda and many of its
beliefs. In particular it meant alliances with gun lobbyists like
Pratt. Pratt recognized "the importance of having an armed
militia able to organize quickly and effectively." But he
also understood the need to work within the mainstream. "I
think that all gun laws are unconstitutional," Pratt said,
"so we need leadership in the Congress to articulate our
position."
The change in strategy meant one thing: It signaled the
transformation of the gun lobby. Organizations like GOA or even
the National Rifle Association, which were devoted to the single
issue of firearms, would become the leading edge of a far right,
multi-issue assault on government institutions and democratic
rights. The gun lobby would be at the center of a web of
right-wing warriors.
To the Estes Park gathering, Pratt made it clear that he
considered the NRA a friend and an ally. Still, he criticized the
King Kong-size lobby, with its claim of 3 million members and a
$100 million budget, for timidity: "The NRA is an
organization that does a lot of good work. And I want to make sure
that I make the record clear….[But] for too long they tended
to perceive the whole issue of firearms freedom as one of
recreation, as one of the right to hunt."
Pratt noted that the NRA was beginning to pursue a broader and
more hard-line strategy and that new board members had been
elected who favored "a more aggressive approach." Change
was happening, he said, it just "hasn't happened
enough."
How fast and how far is a constant question for the NRA, one
that is complicated by the militia movement. The support of
right-wing radicals who share the organization's aims presents a
real dilemma for the NRA and its claim that the Second Amendment
guarantees every individual the right to bear arms. While the NRA
leadership is counting on a Republican majority in Congress,
combined with a Republican president in 1996, to eliminate any
meaningful gun control, the militias won't wait. They express
opposition to gun control by creating small, heavily armed
paramilitary units, not by becoming precinct workers. It is gun
disobedience, the far-right alternative to non-violent
disobedience practiced by the civil-rights movement 30 years ago.
The NRA's annual convention, held in Phoenix's cavernous
convention center last May, threw a spotlight on the tightrope the
NRA is walking. There, a new board of directors was announced.
Dave Edmundson, a 65-year-old retired engineer and sports-shooting
enthusiast from Texas who was a board member from 1986 to 1992,
supported a slate of "moderate" candidates to counteract
the "more aggressive approach" Pratt had applauded at
Estes Park. But only two of the 14 moderates won seats. One, Sen.
Larry Craig from Idaho was virtually assured election anyway,
since he was also supported by the so-called hard-liners on the
official nominating committee. The other moderate, Don Young, is a
congressman from Alaska.
After the election, Edmundson counted only five or six
moderates on the 76-member board. (NRA bylaws require members to
be paid for five consecutive years or to pay $500 for a lifetime
membership to be eligible to vote, accorfing to NRA spokesman Bill
Powers. The rule is supposed to prevent someone from signing up
members in order to stage a takeover, according to Powers.) Other
board members include Robert K. Brown, publisher of Soldier of
Fortune, a magazine for mercenaries; former Arizona state
senator Wayne Stump; filmaker John Milius, who directed Red
Dawn and Conan the barbarian; rocker Ted Nugent; and
conservative black activist Roy Innis, along with a scattering of
firearms-industry representatives and professional gun advocates.
I asked board member T.J. Johnston, who was elected for the
third year in a row, whether any NRA board members are militiamen.
Johnston is a "commander" in the Orange County Corps, a
group of about 1,000 men who stockpile food, water, guns, and
medical supplies. (Johnston takes pains to point out it's not a
militiamen because that would be against California law.)
"There are members of the board who take whatever measures
necessary to defend themselves," Johnston answered. "If
it involves joining a militia…" His voice trailed off.
Is there room in the NRA for militia members, I wanted to know.
"There is a lot of space," Johnston replied.
Edmundson is a vocal critic of the NRA's present leadership, a
voice of dissent when others live by a code of silence. It is a
mistake, however, to conclude that there is any significant
opposition to the hard-liners who control the organization's
decision-making processes and have opposed even modest attempts to
legislate handguns or assault weapons. There are, of course, still
NRA members primarily interested in programs for hunters and
sports shooters. But the much-ballyhooed conflict within the NRA
between moderates and extremists in the leadership is almost
wholly a media-concocted story. The political culture in the NRA
has been so radicalized in recent years that bipartisan moderates
have been virtually eliminated. The division now is between
Republican Party hard-liners and a free-floating, militia-driven
constituency.
The ruling triumvirate of Wayne LaPierre, Tanya Metaksa and
Neal Knox, along with the no-compromise lobbyists, is no longer
the right-wing fringe - it's the Realpolitik center.
After the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, the
NRA came under intense public criticism for fueling the kind of
vicious anti-government sentiment that is believed to have been
linked to the explosion. So at the Phoenix meeting, the NRA
leadership made a particular effort to reverse any perception that
the organization was associated with the militia movement or
terrorism. The fact that Timothy McVeigh, the prime suspect in the
bombing, was once a member of the NRA was never mentioned,
although a resolution passed commemorating NRA members who died in
the explosion. Executive Director Wayne LaPierre publicly
apologized for his letter calling ATF agents "jack-booted
government thugs," a reference that prompted an outrage
resignation letter from former President George Bush. And with
reporters stacked around the edges of the crowded ausitorium in
Phoenix and television camera lights glaring, LaPierre uttered the
most widely reported words of the convention: "There is not,
nor has there ever been, any room at the NRA for anyone who
supports - or even fantasizes about - terrorism, sedition,
insurrection, treason, conspiracy or any other unlawful activity.
Period! End of story!"
That it wasn't really the end of the story became clear as the
convention progressed. For instance, Tanya Metaksa, the executive
director of the NRA's Institute for Legislative Action, gave the
ILA's Law Enforcement Officer of the Year Award to militia icon
Richard Mack, sheriff of Graham County, Ariz., Metaksa is the
architect of an NRA partnership with key Republicans such as
presidential front-runner Sen. Bob Dole and House Speaker Newt
Gringrich. Mack filed suit against the Brady Act, arguing that the
criminal checks required for the five-day waiting period on gun
buyers were an imposition on local cops that the feds had no right
to make. In June 1994 a U.S. District Court judge ruled in his
favor, although that decision was subsequently overturned. Five
other county sheriffs are pursuing similar lawsuits, with mixed
results. The cases will probably wind through the courts for
years.
Mack, who wears his uniform while speaking at rallies opposing
gun control, has co-written two books and organized a Graham
County militia to assist his 12 deputies. He is a handsome,
straightforward man with the firm belief that the Second Amendment
means "the founding fathers of this nation meant for
Congress, the president and all government authorities never
to infringe on the rights of the people to keep and bear
arms." Mack believes the First Amendment need to be
reinterpreted as well. "The court-imposed separation of
church and state is a folly, a myth, a lie," he says. For
him, America has departed from its God-centered Constitution and
is threatened by the new world order.
"Whether American citizens support the idea, damn the
concept or deny its existence, the new world order conspiracy had
been upon us for a long time," the NRA award winner has
written, repeating the paranoid scenarios that animate today's
militia movement. He believes that the militia is every
able-bodied male. His books sold fast from his booth in the
exhibition hall, and Mack was feted like a conquering hero.
Militia fever broke out in earnest late in the meeting when an
NRA member from Arizona offered a resolution from the floor,
supporting militia. Crying that the whole world was watching, the
NRA leadership sent in a triage team to prevent the fever's
spread. At the board meeting last February, officials anticipated
that militias might become an issue in the future. In fact,
February was the month when Metaksa had a secret dinner with the
leaders of the Michigan Militia - the same militia whose local
meetings Timothy McVeigh reportedly attended on several occasions.
Militia commander Ken Adams said on Nightline that he
complained about NRA President Tom Washington, who was arguing
that the NRA should not align itself with militias. He said
Metaksa agreed that Washington was " a problem to the
NRA." Metaksa declined to comment on the meeting, but
LaPierre responded that the militia asked for NRA money at a brief
meeting and was refused.
When the resolution supporting militias was offered, the
leadership was ready. Bill Davis, a board member from Atlanta,
immediately offered a prepared draft with on-the-one-hand,
on-the-other-hand wording as a substitute resolution. It said:
"The NRA does not approve or support any group activities
that properly belong to the national defense of the police.
"The NRA strongly supports the Constitution…which
guarantees the right of citizens to participate in militias for
proper, lawful and constitutional purposes.
"Although the NRA has not been involved on the formation
of any citizen militia units, neither has the NRA discouraged nor
would the NRA contemplate discouraging exercise of any
constitutional right."
After a half-hour of vigorous debate, the substitute resolution
won the vote.
Davis told me that until November 1994, the NRA didn't have any
real policy on the militia. It still doesn't appear to . The
substitute resolution was simply a compendium of resolutions
already on the NRA books, some apparently contradicting others.
The resulting parliamentary muddle is the result of the divide
that bedevils the NRA. The organization cannot afford to be seen
as a militia mouthpiece particularly when lobbying Congress. Yet
the NRA also cannot afford to spurn the militias, which are
attractive to a significant number of its most active members. For
instance, of the 1,245,000 members who were mailed ballots for the
last NRA election, in May, only 95,000 bothered to vote to elect
such board members as T.J. Johnston and Neal Knox. The 7.7 percent
participated rate was the lowest in memory.
The core of hard-line activists, as well as the gap between the
NRA's positions and national public opinion (which opposes
measures such as a repeal of the assault weapons ban), has caused
the NRA to increasingly rely on the muscle of its most fervent
supporters.
While the NRA is the biggest player in terms of money and
publicity, the gun lobby is in fact much broader, with tentacles
that reach not only up into Congress but also out to the margins
of American society that Identity believers and anti-government
conspiracy theorists inhabit. In that sense, Larry Pratt is
emblematic of today's gun lobby: He has one foot in the political
mainstream and the other in the fringe.
Just how Pratt is helpful to allies in the mainstream was
explained by T.J. Johnston. "I am a member of Gun Owners of
America," Johnston told me as he stood outside the Phoenix
convention center auditorium, handing out leaflets plugging his
re-election to the board. 'I support Larry Pratt. He leads the
edge. He's out there in front, fighting hard." Texas Rep.
Steve Stockman, who was received GOA political action committee
money and is himself a militia supporter, has also hailed GOA as
the "no committee" gun lobby.
The "NRA has to work very carefully to keep all the
coalitions together," said Johnston, explaining that anybody
who "supports a conservative voice" - and opposes gun
control, of course - is welcome. But the NRA "has to walk a
bit more carefully," he added. That's where GOA comes in.
"Larry Pratt is a very dedicated and aggressive
individual," Johnston said, " and he jumps in with both
feet… He can afford to be less pragmatic." Pratt,
Johnston continued, "may drag the NRA kicking and
screaming" along with him.
To Johnston, Pratt's organization is the cowcathcer at the
front of the NRA's political train.
Indeed, Pratt could stand as comfortably in the Capital Hill
offices of House Majority Leader Richard Armey (who sits on the
advisory board of a Pratt organization) and the presidential
campaign headquarters of Pat Buchanan (Pratt heads the group Gun
Owners for Buchanan) as he does in the Estes Park YMCA. In fact,
during the 1992 Estes Park meeting, Pratt asked the assembled to
keep Armey "in prayers" because if the then Texas
congressman were to become a Republican leader, "we [would]
have the possibility of having some issues fought." Armey,
who is now Gingrich's second in command, has "always been
willing to stand up and oppose the establishment…He is
willing to fight."
Pratt operates out of a modest suite in a three-story brown
brick building in the middle of Springfield, Va., office park. He
sits atop a complex of related organizations that in addition to
GOA includes two different tax-exempt educational charities,
several non-profit organizations and a political action committee,
the Gun Owners of America Political Victory Fund. The operation
spends more than $1 million a year, about 1 percent of the size of
the NRA's budget, and claims a membership of about 140,000, which
is less that 5 percent of the size of the NRA's. Recently the
federal government made it easier for one of the charities, the
Gun Owners Federal Campaign, a list of about 1,200 nonprofit
organizations to which the 2 million federal employees can
contribute through automatic deductions from their Foundation, to
collect contributions. This year it became part of the Combined
paychecks. The NRA's Firearms Civil Rights Legal Defense Fund is
on the list, as are groups such as Guiding Eyes for the Blind and
the Haitian Society for Mutual Aid. These organizations also
receive a portion of funds whose use is not specified by the
employee donor. In addition to lobbying, GOA also puts put videos.
Five days before the start of the 51 day siege near Waco, Texas
(and four months after the Estes Park meeting, David Koresh showed
one of GOA's videotapes to Robert Rodriguez, an ATF agent who had
infiltrated the Waco compound and was attending Branch Davidian
Bible sessions. The video "portrayed ATF as an evil agency
that threatened the liberty of U.S. citizens," according to a
Treasury Department report. Pratt has written more expansively on
those views, arguing in his 1990 book Armed People Victorious
that professional law enforcement should be replaced by militias.
"It is time that the United States," he wrote,
"return to reliance on an armed people." Pratt didn't
found GOA. H.L. Richardson, a former California state senator who
belonged to the conspiracy-minded John Birch Society three decades
ago, did. It was 1975, a time when according to Josh Sugarman's
book NRA: Money, Firepower and Fear, hard-lines were
worried that the NRA's leadership was forsaking politics for
conservation and sports shooting. Richardson, who now owns a
data-processing business, had been a member of the NRA's board.
Richardson is president of the tax-exempt Gun Owners
Foundation, chairman of GOA and chairman of Gun Owners of
California, a separate organization. His daughter works for the
California organization. Pratt, a former executive director of the
American Conservative Union and a one-term Virginia state
legislator, is executive vice president of the Gun Owners
Foundation as well as the executive director of GOA.
If NRA board members like T.J. Johnston and congressman like
Steve Stockman appreciate Pratt, so do radicals like Kirk Lyons.
Pratt ended up coming to Lyons' aid after the FBI's April 19,
1993, attack on the Branch Davidians complex, which ended in the
deaths of 80 adults and children and became one of the militias'
most powerful rallying points.
During the siege, hundreds of onlookers and reporters set up
shop just outside the police lines. Aryan Nations leader Luis Beam
was among them. When he attended an FBO press briefing, claiming
to represent a West Coast Identity tabloid, Beam was charged with
trespassing. Lyons got the charge dropped.
Lyons had become Beam's attorney after he was indicted, along
with nine others, in 1987 for seditious conspiracy. The charges
were based on the crimes of a group known as the Order, which had
attempted to finance a white revolution with armed robberies in
1983 and 1984. The Order had followed a battle plan drawn from a
neo-Nazi underground novel, The Turner Diaries, which was
sold through classified ads in racist tabloids and gun magazines
such as Soldier of Fortune, (Timothy McVeigh was a avid
reader of the book.) Beam was never implicated in any of the bank
robberies or murders - only charged with conspiracy to overthrow
the government. All the defendants were acquitted.
Lyons quit his position as a staff attorney in a
personal-injury law firm in Houston to help in his friend's
defense, and the case launched Lyons' career in the movement.
Since then he has been a regular at rallies and was the marshal at
a 1989 skinhead march in Pulaski, Tenn. On Sally Jesse Raphael
in March 1993, he called himself a white separatist, not a
supremacist, although it is a distinction without a difference.
According to Klanwatch and the Coalition for Human Dignity,
watchdog groups that monitor racists, there are about 25,000
hard-core white supremacists in the United States and another
150,000 active sympathizers who buy literature or attend meetings.
In 1990, Lyons married Brenna Tate, the sister of Order member
David Tate, who murdered a Missouri highway patrolman who stopped
him during a dragnet for Order members. Tate and his sisters had
grown up in the shadow of the Aryan Nations compound, where their
father was second in command. Lyons was married at the compound
with Aryan nations chief Richard Butler officiating. Beam was his
best man. Beam was Lyons' first client at Waco. But the lawyer was
soon pressing four other lawsuits against government officials on
behalf of surviving Branch Davidian members (some of whom are,
ironically, black Jamaicans) or gun dealers accused of supplying
Koresh.
Actually, Lyons had asked the NRA in September 1994 for $50,000
to finance his work on the Waco cases, making a personal
presentation to its Firearms Civil Rights Legal Defense Fund,
which provides money to support gun-rights cases. So far he has
not received anything. His assistant David Holloway wrote in the
CAUSE newsletter that fund trustees told Lyons they wanted to
award the grant but that some were concerned about Lyons'
political pedigree.
At the NRA convention, I asked Sandra Froman, one of the Legal
Defense Fund's nine trustees, whether Lyons' ties to Aryan Nations
were a factor in the denial of the grant. "This is not a
factor for me," said Froman, a Harvard Law School graduate
with a small gold pistol charm hanging from her necklace. She
declined to explain any further.
When Pratt learned that the NRA had denied Lyons and CAUSE
money, he tried to fill the gap. Gun Owners made a contribution of
CAUSE. "Not %50,000 - but a lot of money for us," Pratt
told me. He anted up another $1,000 to pay for an arson
investigator to determine exactly what caused the incineration of
the Davidian compound. Pratt also said that friends of Lyons were
attempting to establish another corporation which wouldn't have
his name on it. This new corporation would then pursue a grant for
Waco-related lawsuits from the NRA. Pratt said that he wasn't sure
if the NRA would know the money would ultimately wind up in Lyons'
hands but that the third-party corporation would give them
"plausible deniability."
Without acknowledging the issue of deniability, Lyons himself
said that a colleague, an Atlanta attorney, is incorporating the
Waco Justice Foundation, in Delaware, to act as an umbrella
organization for all funds donated to Waco-related litigation.
Lyons told me, "I think the Waco Justice Foundation, of which
I would be a member by virtue of the fact that I'm pursuing Waco
litigation, will approach the NRA and ask for funding."
Blinding outrage over Waco has been a unifying force for those
on the radical right. On the day the Oklahoma City federal
building was bombed, Pratt was in Washington, D.C., for a
demonstration at the FBI building on the second anniversary of the
incineration of the Branch Davidian compound. Three days later
Pratt flew to Branson, Mo., where he once again met up with Pete
Peters and about 600 so-called Christian patriots for a unity
session. They were there to continue what they had started there
years earlier at Estes Park: building a working alliance between
Identity Christians and others who might be sympathetic to some of
their goals. Pratt told the group that there was a connection
between the Oklahoma bombing and the events in Waco. According to
Michael Reynolds of Klanwatch, who attended the meeting and later
described the event in an article he wrote for Playboy,
Pratt said: "The government behaves as a beast. It did in
Waco, and we have somebody, whoever it might have been, whatever
group it might have been, assuming they can't rely on the Lord to
take vengeance." The answer, Pratt counseled, was for
everyone to arm themselves - it was God's order.
Guns are not the only issue where Pratt's financial and
political support has been useful to the far right. His
involvement in the right's broad agenda shows just how deeply
unmeshed in a web of organizations that support right-wing causes-
from anti-immigration to abortion to Oliver North's failed Senate
candidacy. It also shows how often the paths of mainstream
political figures and far-right radicals cross.
Consider the Council for National Policy, of which Pratt is a
member. The organization, which functions as a policy committee
for the far-right, was founded in 1981 at the prompting of a
chairman of the John Birch Society, the late Georgia Congressman
Larry McDonald.
CNP soon received financial support from the Coors family, the
Colorado brewers, and guidance from Paul Weyrich, who has been
involved in nearly every ultraconservative cause since 1974.
Weyrich was one of the early strategists for the New Right and was
the first president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, which
now provides policy proposals to a generation of Gingrich
Republicans. Fourteen years ago, Weyrich wrote in Conservative
Digest: "We want to change the existing power structure.
WE are not conservative in the sense that conservative means
accepting the status quo." His latest project is a
closed-circuit satellite television station for conservatives
called National Empowerment Television. The station broadcasts
town-hall meetings, in which viewers can participate, in cities
throughout the country. The NRA and the Christian Coalition also
have contributed programming to the channel.
The CNP's aim is to set the future direction for the
conservative movement and for national policy. There are six
standing committees, including a committee on law and justice,
co-chaired by former Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese. Members
include Soldier of Fortune's Robert K. Brown, congressional
representatives Helen Chenowith, R-Idaho, the Stockman, both
militia sympathizers, and Armey, GOA chairman H.L. Richardson
co-chairs the CNP's committee on institutional reform with
right-wing fund-raiser Richard Viguerie.
While Pratt is simply a member of CNP, he is secretary of the
Council for Inter-American Security, another well-connected
outfit, the president of which was assistant director of the Peace
Corps under former President Richard Nixon. CIS supported Oliver
North's efforts to fund the Nicaraguan contras. North, who was
then a member of Reagan's National Security Council, congratulated
CIS for that support. North also received about $2,000 for his
unsuccessful Virginia senatorial campaign last year from GOA's
PAC.
Pratt has other pet conservative causes as well, such as
English First, one of the most radical organizations in the
right-wing's campaign against bilingual education and immigration.
English First, which Pratt, helped found, has been accused of
racism. It maintains a small political action committee that
raised $2,400 in 1994. It divided the money among North,
Maryland's Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (who also received PAC money from
GOA) and seven others. Arizona pol Wayne Stump (now on the NRA's
board of directors) served on its advisory board in 1985.
John Stoos, the former Western representative for English First
and the former executive director of the Gun Owners of California,
has also been an adviser to the California chapter of the powerful
Christian Coalition - which is headed by the Rev. Pat
Robertson, managed by the charismatic Ralph Reed and courted
by every major Republican politician, including the presidential
contenders. California Coalition state chair Sara DiVito Hardman
calls Stoos a "political friend." Stoos lost his job
with Gun Owners of California earlier this year after he gave a
talk in February at the Graduate Theological Union, in Berkeley,
Calif., representing himself as being from the Christian
Coalition. According to the Contra Costa Times, Stoos said,
"There is no such thing as a pluralistic society…You
can't say we are all going to agree or disagree." America, he
continued, should be founded upon the absolute principles of
biblical Christianity. Religious minorities would not belong but
would be tolerated. Stoos is now chief of staff for a California
state assemblyman, Republican Roberts Margett.
English First is actually a subsidiary of another Pratt entity,
the Family Foundation. Both are run from the same office suite in
Virginia that GOA calls home. Pratt founded the Family Foundation
as a Virginia nonprofit corporation in 1980 after he was already
GOA's executive director. By 1987, the Family Foundation had a
13-member advisory board of state and federal legislators,
including Armey. (Armey has been listed on GOA letterheads as an
advisory board member, but his office denies any official
association.)
That same year, in a fund-raising letter for the Family
Foundation, Pratt called for a quarantine for anyone with AIDS.
"Our judges coddle criminals instead of caring for the
victims of crime," he wrote. "They've chased God out of
our schools, defended abortions…and now they are trying to
infect us and kill us with strange and horrible diseases."
In 1990, Pratt used the foundation to pay bills for Randall
Terry's militant anti-abortion group, Operation Rescue. Terry
flouted a court injunction ordering Operation Rescue not to
interfere with women's health clinics in New York and was arrested
and fined $50,000. Terry refused to pay, and Operation Rescue's
bank accounts were seized. At that point, the Rev. Arthur F.
Tomlinson, an anti-abortion activist, approached Pratt on Terry's
behalf, according to the Washington Post.
Pratt responded. During the first six months of 1990, he sent
potential contributors three letters from the foundation, asking
for money to pay the debts and operating costs of Operation
Rescue. As Richard Viguerie has said, "The pro-life and
anit0control groups have no conflict with each other."
The foundation spent more than $146,000 on Operation Rescue's
debts that year. When a U.S. District Court judge ruled that the
foundation could also be held liable for Operation Rescue's fines,
since it was raising money and paying bills, Pratt stopped sending
letters, and Terry shut down his Operation Rescue office.
Most recently, the Family Foundation has allied itself with the
Christian Coalition and several Republican presidential candidates
to oppose Goals 2000, President Clinton's education initiative.
Congressmen, militia members, militant anti-abortion activists,
radical anti-immigration advocates, Christian Identity believers,
white separatists, gun lobbyists, the Christian Coalition,
high-powered right-wing fund raisers - they're all entangled in a
web of interlocking relationships. To a large degree, that's
precisely what the Estes Park attendees sought to create.
It was Friday night, six weeks after the Oklahoma City
explosion and the unity meeting in Branson. Three hundred people
in casual clothes and militia T-shirts sat in a large hall in a
convention center in Orlando, Fla., listening intently to speakers
describe how the bomb was part of a sinister government plot to
take away their weapons.
The audience members were among the more than 2,000 people who
paid $6 each day to attend the Preparedness Expo '95. It was
billed as a survivalist convention for those preparing for
disasters, natural and man-made, but it was more than that. It was
a place where America's gun advocates, militia members and
political extremists could meet.
Larry Pratt was at the podium. "Don't let Handgun Control
[Inc.} intimidate you by associating you with everything that they
don't like, whether it be the militia or just an angry white
man," he said. "After all, every time you read the
founders, they say something that makes them sound like they were
a bunch of militia types," because, Pratt continued,
"that's exactly what they were."
Bo Gritz soon got up and explained what was required for a
fertilizer bomb to destroy a nine-floor building and concluded
that some official sitting in the basement of a Washington office
was responsible for the blast. The Vietnam veteran spat out his
story as if giving final orders for a nighttime parachute drop
behind enemy lines. Each man in the audience was a brother in
arms, each one must be ready for the worst perfidy from the
so-called commander in chief, bivouacked safely away by the
Potomac.
Gritz then gave his definition of gun control: "Hitting
the target with every shot."
Next up was Mark Koernke from the Michigan Militia. Wearing a
dark business suit, Koernke said: "You must prepare
yourselves… For you are someday going to have to release
your husbands or your boyfriends or your brothers, and we may have
to face, yes, a terrible juggernaut, and some of us will not be
coming back."
The crowd loved it.
Speaking last on this panel of patriots was Nancy Lord, a
lawyer, a doctor, the Libertarian Party's 1992 vice presidential
candidate and a member of Jews for the Preservation of Firearm
Ownership - which received $4,590 from Pratt's Gun Owners in 1993.
She argued that the Jewish Holocaust was possible only because it
was preceeded by gun control.
In this exhibit hall, meanwhile, the Christian Patriots Network
was arguing that the Holocaust didn't happen. Its booth was a
ministore filled with books that claimed Hitler didn't do it as
well as some that claimed the Jews started World War II. Business
was brisk. Down the aisle was Florida's Seventh Regiment Militia.
According to regiment leader David Paine, "The state militia
is not subject to the state or the federal constitutions….[it]
is not a paramilitary organization; it is a 'military'
organization."
There were other, mixed in with the vitamin sellers and
pamphlet hawkers, who explained how to convert assets to silver
and gold, Florida's Rod and Gun Trader was pushing the
First U.S. Militia, from Key Largo, Fla. Carolyn Trochmann, the
wife of the Montana Militia founder, was selling books and videos.
Within earshot, the Second Amendment Militia from Binghamton,
N.Y., was selling T-shirts and dispensing advise on recruiting
women to the cause. Gritz and his wife, Claudia, sold a $65 knife
with a blade that automatically sprang out when removed from its
sheath. For another $60 you could buy eight hours of videotaped
paramilitary training including lock-piling lessons. Another booth
was filled with bomb manuals, and still others sold ammunition
boxes, camouflage clothing, and tubes for burying food or weapons.
For the occasional Floridian worried about hurricanes, several
speakers and exhibits specialized in food preservation and water
purity.
On Sunday afternoon, Gritz returned to the stage to plug Larry
Pratt. "Friends, its time to stop talking," Gritz said.
"and it's time to start walking. I'm a life member of the
NRA, but, friends, that ain't nothing. You get out there where
somebody's really doing something. I want you to go out there and
make sure you're part of the Gun Owners of America."
After the applause, everybody filed out of the room. About a
dozen guys stopped by Pratt's table to sign up.
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