Blood and Politics (16 page)

At the time, one bankrupt farmer told the
Denver Post
, “We’re prepared right now for the outcome of the battle that’s being waged for this country by the Rockefeller cartel and the international Jew-Bolshevik cartel.”
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Mortal conflict rose on the immediate horizon. Paramilitary training sessions, combined with the drive toward confrontation with the so-called Zionist Occupied Government, ensured that it would begin sooner or later. And it began sooner, off the beaten track in a small town in North Dakota.

Gordon Wendell Kahl, an aircraft gunner during World War Two with two Purple Hearts, never forgot how to handle his weapons. He and his wife, Joan, raised six children, scraping out a living on their Heaton, North Dakota, farm, earning extra money working in Texas during the winter. He also believed the United States had been “conquered and occupied by the Jews” and that taxes were “tithes to the synagogue of Satan.”
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Because of these beliefs, he refused to pay taxes and was wanted for a misdemeanor probation violation related to an original tax conviction. Although he faced a relatively minor charge, he vowed not to be taken alive and always carried a gun.

On February 13, 1983, federal marshals followed Kahl to a meeting in Heaton, where he and other Posse Comitatus members were discussing forming their own township, much like the idea expressed in Idaho the summer before. The marshals lay in wait, hoping to make a surprise arrest on a federal fugitive warrant after the gathering. When Kahl, his twenty-three-year-old son, Yorie, and other family members and friends were stopped at a roadblock, a vicious firefight ensued. Two federal marshals were killed, and three other officers wounded. Yorie was also wounded.
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In a letter later sent to Aryan Nations explaining his version of the incident, Kahl argued the shoot-out had been part of a “struggle to the death between the people of the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Satan.” He also claimed to have killed the two marshals in self-defense. “My bullets appeared to be ricocheting off the windshield and door post” of the marshals’ car, he wrote. “I ran around toward the side of the vehicle, firing at the door as I went to keep him down until I got around far enough to get a clear shot at him.” When the shooting subsided, he
walked up to one of the wounded marshals and shot him twice, point-blank, in the head.
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In the aftermath, both Scott Faul, who was in the car at the time of the firefight, and son Yorie were convicted of assault and second-degree murder. But Gordon Kahl escaped into a network of friends and fellow believers who hid him from the authorities until the following June, when an FBI special agent found him living in a concrete-walled cabin outside Smithville, Arkansas, deep in the Ozark Mountains, not far from the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord camp on Bull Shoals Lake. Another shoot-out ensued. The local county sheriff was shot dead, and Kahl was killed, first shot in the head by a bullet from the sheriff’s gun and later burned up in a fire the FBI started that engulfed the cabin. The entire sequence of events involving Kahl was authoritatively recounted in the 1990 book
Bitter Harvest
, by James Corcoran, who followed Kahl’s trail to the end.

During the 1980s, white supremacists contested the circumstances of Kahl’s death. Several men in Arkansas launched a semipublic “investigation.” They claimed Kahl had been executed and the sheriff shot by one of his own men. (The government later charged two of the “investigators” with conspiracy to murder an FBI agent and a federal judge.) Joining the chorus, Liberty Lobby’s
Spotlight
claimed that Kahl, a principled patriot, tax protester, and brave family farmer, was killed while fighting government oppression.

There is a difference, however, between a farmer who is not financially able to make his loan payments and an activist ideologically determined not to pay his taxes. Gordon Kahl was the latter, not the former. His choices were cold-blooded and ideological. Although he was not a wealthy man, he was not a financially and emotionally squeezed bankrupt farmer. It wasn’t the local bank or any government agricultural lending agency that foreclosed on his North Dakota farm. It was the Internal Revenue Service, in payment of back taxes. Gordon Wendell Kahl had enjoyed the prerogatives of being a white man in America, and still he chose a struggle to the death.

Eventually, movement mythmaking transformed Kahl from a victim of government wrongdoing into a martyr for a new nationalism, struggling to be free. Like Joan of Arc for the French, he symbolized this white nation’s highest virtues. “He was the kind of people that have always built the quality of the nation,” lauded son Yorie from a jail cell, “every nation, every culture throughout history; the people that saw further, that cared more.”
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In the most immediate aftermath, the shoot-out in Arkansas electrified every sector of the movement. The rumor that Kahl had been unnecessarily
killed spread from his immediate circle of supporters to the Klan in Georgia and the Aryan Nations in Idaho. When it lapped up on the shores of Cheney Lake in Kansas, a picture formed of Christian patriot constitutionalism at the time and its ability to find a mass type of constituency alongside a cadre of killers.

August 20, 1983.
The hot wind whipped low across Cheney Lake State Park in south-central Kansas, about thirty-five miles west of Wichita. In the distance, pickup trucks and campers parked half hidden in a tree line. Advertised as the Gordon Kahl Memorial Arts and Crafts Festival, there were no arts or crafts. Fifty middle-aged tax protesters and Identity Christians, some from as far away as Tennessee, Louisiana, and Minnesota, stood in a small clump, surrounded by two thousand unpopulated acres. Several young women on a picnic blanket near a flatbed truck kept their small children occupied. Perched like waterbirds at the edge of a swamp, half a dozen farmers wearing AAM ball caps stood in silent testimony to the continuing influence of Posse Comitatus ideas among a stratum of farmer activists.
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The actual memorializing was done by a retired schoolteacher, Len Martin. Martin and Kahl had grown up together in North Dakota, and he described how they had been working together on creating a “township” the previous winter. He had been staying for a while at the Aryan Nations camp in Idaho and had set out from there to talk about Gordon Kahl.
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Apparently the enterprise had the blessing of the Aryan chief Richard Butler. “Since the name Gordon Kahl has caught the attention of the nation, it is important that we take this opportunity to awaken our Racial Nation,” Butler wrote in a letter to his supporters. “A speaking tour will be a catalyst for awakening the racially uninformed but tax-aware Aryan kinsmen as to the true nature of our Nation’s plight.”
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Len Martin took the Cheney Lake discussion in a different direction. In a nod to the men in ball caps, he argued that the township idea would stop farm foreclosures. As a second to Len Martin’s gesture, a bubblenosed
elderly farmer from Halstead, Kansas, Keith Shive, took the stand. Shive billed himself as the chief of the Farmers Liberation Army, the group that had participated in the Weskan paramilitary trainings the previous year. He spit out his complaints: Jews ran the banks, financed the Bolshevik Revolution, and committed an actual genocide against the white Christians of Russia—unlike the Jews’ phony Holocaust hoax. Now Christian farmers were losing their land to Jewish usury.
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After he was done speaking, Shive stepped into the knot around the platform, handing out leaflets and copies of
The Spotlight
. “Who are the real owners” of the Federal Reserve Banks? The flyers had the answer. “1. Rothschilds of London and Berlin 2. Lazared Brothers of Paris 3. Israel Mossesschif of Italy 4. Kuhn, Loeb & Company of Germany and New York 5. Warburg & Company of Hamburg, Germany 6. Lehman Brothers of New York 7. Goldman, Sachs of New York 8. Rockefeller Brothers of New York.”
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It was a constant refrain. Many farmers, in the midst of losing their farms and a failed federal farm policy, could recite the same mythic list of “international Jewish bankers” before they could tell you who their congressman was.

Two other speakers testified to their belief in Christian Identity. The first, a mild-mannered twenty-eight-year-old data processor for the Wichita school district in a white cowboy hat, T-shirt, and jeans, stepped onto the truck bed platform and explained that he was an “Identity Catholic” and approached the Lord with prayer through Mary.
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The second, a tough-talking army sergeant based at nearby Fort Riley (Timothy McVeigh’s base ten years later), added his story. He had been a John Birch Society member, he told the group, because he opposed communism. But the Birchers didn’t recognize that communism had been created by the Jews, he complained. So he quit in disgust. Only Christian Identity, he averred, taught the facts about communism, the Jews, and white people—who were the true people of Israel. To top it off, the sergeant offered his own services for anyone interested in paramilitary training.
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The combination of appeals to Christian Identity beliefs and opposition to the Federal Reserve System, told with an undertone of sympathy for the plight of distressed farmers and a sheen of anti-Semitic reasoning, typified dozens of Christian patriot meetings in the Midwest during the early 1980s. Plus, every rally had a resident expert on the Constitution. At Cheney Lake Milton Libby filled that role.

A balding middle-aged engineer of medium stature and modest manner, Libby carried the requisite newspaper clippings and dog-eared court documents. A pint-size edition of the Constitution, issued by Liberty
Lobby, poked out of the front pocket of his western-style shirt. A wedding band appeared on the pinkie of his right hand. In short order he explained many of the central tenets of Posse Comitatus–style theory regarding the legal system.

While waving a pamphlet entitled
Where You Stand Depends on Where You Sit
, Libby claimed that success in the courts rested on “jurisdiction” and “status.” He advised everyone to repudiate his marriage license, driver’s license, Social Security card, and all other “contracts” with the state. Instead, Libby prescribed a life under “God’s law,” where all governed themselves as “natural individual persons.” Each individual “sovereign” made a citizenship contract to form a government, as the founders had done with the supposedly “organic” Constitution, the original document and Bill of Rights, but without any of the other amendments. (We the people, in order to form a more perfect union . . .) If such contracts could be made, he reasoned, they could also be broken. This was the principle known as asseveration.
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According to this doctrine, a “sovereign” was not just any individual born and residing in the United States. Instead, sovereigns were those originally mentioned in the Preamble to the Constitution in the phrase “We the people.” And as any high school student should know, at the time the Constitution was written, “We the people” meant “we the white people.” This (white) racial definition of citizenship had then been reaffirmed in the
Dred Scott
decision of 1857, which reads in part: “A free negro of the African race, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves, is not a ‘citizen’ within the meaning of the Constitution.”
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By repeating these arguments, the Posse Comitatus and its Christian patriot look-alikes stood on solid historical, if morally shaky, ground. Before the Civil War the United States had indeed been a “white Republic.”

After the Civil War, however, the Fourteenth Amendment had countermanded
Dred Scott
and guaranteed the rights of citizenship to the newly freed slaves and all others born in the United States. The racial definition of citizenship had changed. Like many unreconstructed Confederates and a host of other far-right propagandists, Christian patriots believed the Fourteenth Amendment had not been passed in a constitutional fashion. The southern states had been under military occupation at the time, they argued.
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Christian patriot ideologues took their argument a step beyond constitutional validity. The Fourteenth Amendment had created a special class of citizens, they argued. This special class received its rights from the government through an individual’s contract with the state. Sovereigns, on the other hand, those descended from the original (white) sovereigns,
still received their rights (and responsibilities) from God. By this logic, inconsistent as it might be, sovereigns could either join the compact or asseverate themselves from it.

In order to become a “free man,” Libby argued that day, it was necessary to assert your status as a “sovereign” as opposed to a “Fourteenth Amendment federal citizen.”
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A racial theory is deeply embedded in this concept of citizenship, which postulates rights and responsibilities for sovereign white Christian men different from that of Fourteenth Amendment citizens—that is, everyone else. Although it was expressed in constitutional language as fealty to the Founding Fathers, this was at bottom the same whites-only racial nation as William Pierce’s. (On this point, the principal difference between Christian patriots and Pierce: the former found their nationalism in an idealized past; the latter envisioned his state in the future.)

While Libby’s talk that day avoided any explicit mention of race when discussing citizenship status, there were others traveling on the Christian patriot circuit who did not pull anything back. One of those was Robert Wangrud, a peripatetic propagandist in the Northwest. He also distinguished between white “sovereigns,” whose rights devolved from God, and so-called Fourteenth Amendment citizens, meaning people of color and non-Christians. And he published in detail the constitutional and historical origins of his beliefs.
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