Blood and Politics (53 page)

By the time Populist leaders selected Gritz as their presidential candidate, he was already a known personality at Christian patriot meets and Identity retreats. He was a favorite of Pete Peters’s, and the Colorado preacher expedited publication of the memoir with a much-needed check. Gritz thanked Peters at a summer Bible camp in 1991. “I am telling you that He [God] has given us all that we need,” Gritz told a crowd of five hundred. “He’s given us the likes of Pete Peters. He’s given us the likes of the Christian Identity movement.” Although Gritz had not yet fully embraced the Identity theology, he had little problem adopting its rhetoric about Jews. At that same Bible camp he told an assembly: “The enemy you face today is a satanic overthrow of the United States of America, a nation under God, into USA Incorporated, with King George [Bush] as chairman of the board. And a Zionist group that would rule over us as long as Satan might be upon this earth. That is your enemy.”
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Despite these unambiguous, undeluded assertions of loyalty to white supremacist institutions and ideas, Gritz continued to walk and talk as if he did not comprehend the racist world around him. He claimed a
genuine support for Pete Peters on the one hand, while complaining about David Duke on the other. In a letter to Willis Carto, written in the middle of the factional dispute between Carto and Wassall over control of the Populist Party, Gritz complained that
The Spotlight
had ignored his looming presidential campaign, while still covering David Duke in a positive fashion.

You have yet to do a single article favorable to my campaign. David Duke is a loser. He has done more harm to the Populist Party and third party movement than Hitler would have. Why do you continue to ride a dead horse? Why support a young man who has never worn the uniform of the United States, but chosen to sport a nazi emblem that brave Americans (including my Dad) fighting [
sic
] against? Either you are an American in this fight against Bush’s new world order, or you are part of the problem. Decide which it is.
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Gritz’s campaign for president more often resembled a circus act on a circuit for paramilitary advocates than a genuine bid for the attention of ordinary white people. In fact, he seemed oblivious of the tension within the movement between mainstreamers and vanguardists, acting at times like both and neither.

During these earliest years of the 1990s, several factors had combined to shift the movement’s center of gravity. After the Fort Smith sedition verdicts in 1988, Richard Butler’s role inside the movement had declined. And Robert Miles’s withdrawal and subsequent death had left Aryan Nations bereft of its best strategist and long-term thinker. A law enforcement crackdown in Tulsa nabbed a band of skinheads, who were convicted on federal civil rights charges. Three Aryans were convicted for conspiring to blow up a gay nightclub in Seattle. Another was convicted of killing a black sailor in Jacksonville, Florida. Tom Metzger was sued in a Portland, Oregon, civil court by the Southern Poverty Law Center and judged to have incited his followers to kill an Ethiopian immigrant. The day before the trial started, three thousand local residents marched to protest bigoted violence; it was the largest outpouring of such public sentiment since the civil rights march in Forsyth County in 1987. Metzger’s trial and conviction, described in Elinor Langer’s book
A Hundred Little Hitlers,
only added weight to the shift toward the mainstreaming tendency.
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David Duke’s four-campaign transformation—from a marginal run as a Populist to Louisiana’s best-known Republican—added weight to the notion that Middle American money and votes waited for white supremacists willing to work for them. Pat Buchanan’s conversion from
a White House speechwriter into a white nationalist rabble-rouser demonstrated the promise of the growing split in conservative ranks. And Buchanan’s run through the Republican primaries, along with the insurgency represented by Ross Perot, revealed a great unhappiness with the two-party alternatives. Among this evidence of a change was the temporary growth of Thom Robb’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan into the largest national Klan faction, precisely because it now eschewed association with revolutionary violence. Robb had removed the “33/5” signature from his organizational propaganda after it had been attacked for years as a ubiquitous symbol advertising adherence to an “underground” Klan strategy. He also published a disclaimer in the
White Patriot
tabloid: the Knights were “not engaged in: 1) Seeking to overthrow the UNITED STATES [caps in original] government, 2) Harassing Negroes or other ‘Minorities,’ 3) Paramilitary camps, or 4) Paramilitary training.”
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He presented his Klan as a reasonable proponent of “white Christian revival” instead.

Robb also promoted David Duke imitators, particularly those who presented themselves well on afternoon television talk shows, which were then pumping their ratings with appearances by racists and anti-Semites of various persuasions. In one instance in Colorado, Robb managed to convince a seasoned skinhead leader to put a dress shirt on over his swastika tattoo. The erstwhile skinhead talked rationally about running for office, whereas his immediate past practice had been to growl racist epithets and bash heads in mosh pits.
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The television appearances brought in a string of new recruits and money, which Robb turned to good effect by underwriting organizing drives in such new territories as Wisconsin and Iowa. He even claimed that the Knights were “beginning to meet with success in our effort of putting
sleepers
[italics in original] within the Republican and Democratic Party.” These were supposedly secret Klansmen who were also “prestigious” members of a community, such as businessmen or doctors, who would quietly join a party and work their way up to “positions of power and influence.”
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The “sleeper strategy” sounded good in spy novels, but it was an unproven claim in Robb’s case.
¹⁴

The one place where one of Robb’s top lieutenants did make a difference was in the Washington State Populist Party. There Kim Badynski and his wife, Debbi, transplants from Illinois to the Northwest Aryan Republic in 1987, openly organized meetings, made telephone calls, and otherwise did the day-to-day work of trying to build a viable third party apparatus. The Badynskis were not the only bed sheet and brown-shirt types leading the Washington State Populist Party. The state chair kept the Bo Gritz campaign moving with one hand, while distributing
Holocaust denial material and attending Aryan Nations camps with the other.
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Into this mélange of activity, Gritz tried to root his presidential campaign. He established his own America First Coalition, headquartered in Florida, to try to bridge some of the gap between Wassall’s Populist Party apparatus and other factions. It worked for a while. A. J. Barker, for example, was not then associated with Wassall but was named as Gritz’s campaign chair in North Carolina. Similarly, state chairs in Oregon, Maryland, and a half dozen other states were not Populists.
¹⁶
And to further create an illusion of movement unity behind his campaign, Gritz announced that appointments to his future cabinet would draw from a wide range of movement personalities.
¹⁷

Gritz never won
The Spotlight’s
endorsement, however, and his vote totals were only marginally better than those won by Populist Party candidates in 1984 and 1988. With ballot status in eighteen states, he received 107,002 votes, at a total cost of $371,648.
¹⁸
The Populist Party chief Don Wassall averred that Gritz “did a great job of getting his message out.”
¹⁹
In fact, most of the credit for the Populist Party’s showing in 1992 adhered to Gritz personally, as he did best in states, such as Utah, where Wassall’s party had little actual organization.

Gritz also fared better than Howard Phillips of the U.S. Taxpayers Party, another marginal third party candidate. Phillips’s résumé included long service at the centers of power. He had attended Harvard College and served as president of its student council. He had worked his way up Republican Party ranks until he became President Nixon’s director at the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1973. In 1974 he founded the Conservative Caucus, one of the most important addresses in the creation of the so-called New Right. And he hailed President Reagan’s election in 1980 as a victory for conservatives. As the Reagan administration and then the first Bush administration failed to fulfill Phillips’s political hopes, however, he turned farther to the right.
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The Taxpayers Party campaign rested heavily on its no-compromise opposition to all abortion rights, although the platform embraced the entire panoply of Christian nationalist issues. It could have attracted votes from Christian Coalition activists unhappy with the Reverend Pat Robertson’s support for President Bush, and it should have garnered some noticeable percentage of the 3 million voters who voted for Buchanan in the primaries. But it didn’t. Phillips received 43,398 votes—less than half that received by Gritz—and at a greater cost.
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All the evidence pointed to the Republican Party as a lasting, if unhappy and dysfunctional, home for the panoply of forces that groups such as the Taxpayers Party and Populist Party were trying to capture.
²²
One feature of Gritz’s presidential campaign endured, however, long after the vote counting was completed: an appeal for patriotism wrapped in a blanket of distrust for such established institutions as government and the media and guarded by a zealous paramilitary (white) nationalism.

During his campaign stops Gritz typically unfurled a small black POW-MIA flag on the podium. He told war stories about searching for MIAs and urged the establishment of militias. Gun control was hitting the target on your first shot, he would say in repetition of a standard gun lobby one-liner. And after asking for members of the “unorganized militia” to raise their hands, he would say: “U.S. Code 10 and U.S. Code 32 designates who is in the unorganized militia . . . Now how many of you are between 18 and 64 here. Oh a lot more people just joined the unorganized militia. Good.”
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It was nonsense wrapped up in the Constitution.

The gun talk and militia mongering could have just been the usual movement braggadocio. Telling audiences that they were members of the militia did not turn them into camouflage artists carrying heavy assault weapons. That is, until the Randy Weaver incident on Ruby Ridge.

August 21, 1992.
There are moments when modest men and women—of goodwill and ill—change the course of events simply by obeying their most intensely held beliefs. So it was with Randall Claude Weaver, a forty-three-year-old unemployed outsider living high on a ridge in northern Idaho, who started a rockslide of events with an act of defiance based on an unambiguous fear. His name became an icon for the convergence of guns and religion on Pat Buchanan’s cultural battlefields. Congressional hearings and a television movie were to make this private man a public figure.
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Born January 3, 1948, into a stable, devoutly Presbyterian, smalltown Iowa family, Randy Weaver graduated from high school in 1966, joined the army and Special Forces (but never saw Vietnam), married his wife, Vicki, in 1971, and returned home to work and raise a family. During the same period that James Ellison was attracting spiritually dissolute baby boomers to the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord compound on the Missouri-Arkansas border, the more resolute Randy and Vicki Weaver found the same Christian Identity theology in their Fort Dodge hometown. Iowa, just starting to slide into the farm crisis of the early 1980s, was then being honeycombed by a host of Identity pamphleteers and Christian patriot salesmen. At the John Deere plant in Waterloo, where Randy worked, a representative of Aryan Nations declaimed loudly about the virtue of Butler’s Idaho enterprise and the vice of the Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG). Although there is no available evidence that this man directly influenced Randy Weaver, it is unlikely that the two did not know of each other. Whatever the case, after a period of Bible study and preparation, Randy and Vicki Weaver decided to move to the mountains and there await the final battle of Armageddon and the ultimate triumph of white Christian believers.
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In 1983, just as Bob Mathews was gathering his Order troops to create a white bastion in the Northwest, the Weaver family settled in Boundary County, in the narrow neck of northern Idaho, just sixty miles north of Butler’s campground, forty miles from the Canadian border, twenty miles from Washington State, and thirty miles from Montana. On a remote mountainous perch known as Ruby Ridge, Randy and Vicki constructed a roughshod cabin and outhouse, chopped firewood, raised chickens, and grew vegetables. Infant Elishiba was cradled like any other baby. Daughter Sara and son Sam played like other children, except that they also carried loaded weapons like sentries. Always short of cash, Randy worked periodically for local employers. The family both squabbled with neighbors and befriended a circle of settlers who believed as they did. As in many families in which the woman keeps the religious flame alive, it was Vicki more than Randy who imbued the family’s life with the Identity message. But Randy did his part for white supremacy. In 1986 he drove down to Aryan Nations and attended its annual conference; he did so again in 1989, this time with the whole family. He never signed an Aryan Nations membership card on the dotted line, but he often wore the organization’s belt buckle and sported a T-shirt emblazoned with “Just Say No to ZOG.” The exact nature of his beliefs later became subject to public dispute. But any reasonable account of the facts would have to conclude he considered himself a member of a theologically based movement defined by its belief in the Satanic nature of Jews and the secondary status of people of color—that is, white supremacy. He was neither a leader nor even a mid-rank activist, yet he would become an unlikely movement-wide symbol of government evil, an oversize role for an unassuming third-rank believer.
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