What, Me Worry?
Posted on 06/19/2002 9:04:01 PM PDT by ppaul
Conspiracy theories are as American as apple pie, but rural places along the Canadian border have provided home base to a curiously high proportion of those obsessed with nefarious plots.
In her book "Lone Patriot: The Short Career of an American Militiaman," Paris-based New Yorker correspondent Jane Kramer has come home to chronicle the short, delusional life of the Washington State Militia that arose east of Bellingham during the mid-1990s.
Its leader, an unemployed ship painter-turned-commander-in-chief named John Pitner, convinced ragtag followers that an invading army had picked state Route 9 through rural Whatcom and Skagit counties as the New World Order's path to conquest.
Ultimately, Pitner couldn't get any respect. His wife left him. A female FBI agent busted him. And in last Sunday's review of "Lone Patriot," The Seattle Times kept spelling his name "Pinter."
State Route 9 winds in places. The state Department of Transportation has long plotted to widen and straighten it.
Now we know why. As commander of "Alpha One," the militia's flagship squad, Pitner saw a multiplicity of invaders coming down the narrow highway: United Nations troops, the U.S. Army, federal SWAT teams ... all under command of David Rockefeller, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.
Parts of "Lone Patriot" are a howl. The deputy director of Alpha One, a contractor named Fred Fisher, was once convicted of incest for molesting his stepdaughter. It didn't stop him from standing up at the Rome Grange to extol family values and outline U.N. plots to take children "from the moral authority of their parents."
"Beware parents!" he warned. "The U.N. wants your children for its world plantations."
Yet, it's unwise to fall down laughing. The Fibbers sure didn't. As one agent in the FBI Seattle bureau told Kramer: "It's a losers' club. This is where the danger lies."
Thanks to the information age, these losers were able to weave theories with like-minded folk across America and plot to stop the New World Order with their tracts.
Nowadays, with the Bush II presidency, conspiracy calls to this column come from the political left.
Usually it's an elderly lady who wants to know whether I've heard "intelligence reports" that Dubya knew about 9/11 and that it was all part of a plot to secure Central Asia and conquer Afghanistan so we can build an oil pipeline to the Persian Gulf.
Gatherings of such folk tend toward baby boomers with neatly trimmed beards. One recent audience, in St. Mark's Cathedral, nodded solemnly as the speaker decried distortions of the "corporate press," and "use of massive brutal power to subjugate the people of the world" by "George and his henchmen."
Afterward, a priest strummed a guitar, people bought the speaker's books, politically correct coffee was served, and everybody went home.
The wacko right is a lot scarier than the loony left.
Militias of the 1990s tended to be armed and frequently dangerous. One outfit, The Order, robbed banks and assassinated a Denver talk show host before its leader died in a Whidbey Island shootout.
They could be set off the rocker easily. A drug interdiction exercise, conducted by U.S. and Canadian border agencies in the remote Similkameen Valley, had the Chelan Militia ready to take to the hills.
Militias were the extreme end of a much larger "Patriot" movement: Kramer estimates it numbered 4 million fearful folk back in post-Waco America.
Unforgettable for this writer was an Okanogan gathering early in the Clinton years in which one fellow solemnly intoned: "1992 will go down as the last free election we will ever see in America."
Backwoods patriots were also ruthlessly manipulated by a right-wing rumor machine based far away in Washington, D.C. It conjured up fantasies of Bill Clinton's drug-running Arkansas airport, the "murder" of White House counsel Vincent Foster, and secret Clinton directives for putting U.S. soldiers under U.N. command.
Reading of John Pitner's rants, one is struck by how much of his material appeared -- carefully presented as conjecture -- on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal.
Whatcom County is wonderful: I grew up there. Its political life has spanned the spectrum from Concerned Christian Women, which predated the Moral Majority, to a Rainbow Coalition chapter that long outlived Jesse Jackson's campaigns.
But along with mountain and rural counties stretching east to Montana, it has harbored a share of folk who react to complications of a rapidly changing world by seeing "them" plotting to dominate "us."
Right-wing militias have receded of late, due to changed circumstances and a sharp starboard tack by the U.S. government.
As Kramer puts it: "Today, the country has a war on terror that is not homegrown, a born-again president, an attorney general more highly regarded on the Patriot Web sites than in The New York Times, and a House whip (Tom Delay) who sounds as if John Pitner drafts his stump speeches."
And, she adds, instead of a Wall Street conspiracy, we have "the conspiracy called al-Qaida that tried to destroy Wall Street on September 11, 2001."
Link to article HERE.
It wasn't the "wacky right" that let our intelligence and miitary readiness lapse that led to the 9/11 attack.
This guy Conelly, like his leftist counterparts, dismisses the threat of al-Qaeda as another figment of the "looney Right's" imagination.
With this sort of thinking being politically correct, we can count on more terrorism.
What, Me Worry?
He never did, nor ever will connect Waco, Ruby Ridge, or similar death dances to the Left.
He's the kind who would agree with Clinton that the OK City blast surely came from the militia movement.
He's a sack. Looks like a five pound bag full of 10 pounds of himself.
LOL
You nailed it, man!
She's right. The FBIers are a loser's club. Dangerous and incompetent as all hell.
By placing these references in his second sentence, Joel Connelly creates a self-activating barf alert for his screed.
Leave it to a grinning, empty-headed lib like Connelly to equate illusionary Canadian invasions with an actual Muslim terrorist attack on the American homeland that cost 3,000 innocent citizens their sacred lives.
Is this guy really playing with a full deck?
Joel,
I'm certainly a rightwinger but I don't share much with the militias.
While I'm sure you find the militias a hoot, let's consider who the terrorists have been since OKC.
The ones that burnt a ski resort to the ground in Vail, the ones that burnt a million dollar home on Long Island were all lefties. (Earth Liberation Front)
The ones who send razor blades to the primate labs, and the ones that destroy commercial animal husbandry businesses are all lefties. (Animal Liberation Front/PETA)
Who's laughing now?
We now know that lefties in the Forest Service planted Lynx fur to advance their agenda and Ms. Burton, who set the Haywood fire has yet to reveal her credentials, but lets take a guess that she's not a member of the militia.
TC Rider
To which Joel replied (ignoring my points and going off on a tangent):
How in the world can you peer into Ms. Burton's head and give her motives in starting that fire?
jc
To which I replied:
Joel,
You are seeing something in my email that's not there. I proscribed no motives to Ms. Burton, except that she's probably not a militia member. That may leave the implication she leans to the left, but that's almost a given after 8 years of Clintonism.
Her motives are becoming clearer all the time and we know it had little to do with 'burning a letter'.
My point is: You said, "The wacko right is a lot scarier than the loony left". Yet it's the loony left that's terrorizing America.
The militia movement was never a part of the main stream right wing in America and my understanding is they have little love for mainstream Republicans, including President G. W. Bush.
In fact, the militias are probably closer politically to the Anarchists that show up at anti-globalism rallys. Both so far in the extreme as to be passing each other in the halls of political extremism.
Yet, I never hear columnists like yourself refer to the ALF, ELF, Kazinski, the mailbox bomber and anarchists as extreme left wingers.
The mainstream lefties like PETA, Sierra Club, etc. never condemn ALF, ELF and the rest. In fact PETA gives legal support to ALF.
As you and others continue to try make the 'right' scary, you do a disservice to America. For homegrown terrorists, keep your eye on the left.
TC Rider
There are millions of patriots with guns. I am one of them.
I am old and fat and sick. I belong to no militia.
But somehow I know that when the day comes--if I am still alive--I will know it and act appropriately. And I belive that there are millions just like me, "minutemen" in the truest sense, who will not let America go down without a fight.
And it won't be a UN army marching under the command of David Rockefeller that starts it...I hope.
--Boris
He was even busted by a female FBI Agent? This guy thinks that the FBI saves their female agents for those occasions when they want to rub someone's face in the sand. And, when has a liberal rag ever worried about facts such as getting people's names right?
The mainstream lefties like PETA, Sierra Club, etc. never condemn ALF, ELF and the rest. In fact PETA gives legal support to ALF.
As you and others continue to try make the 'right' scary, you do a disservice to America.
For homegrown terrorists, keep your eye on the left.
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