by Jesse Walker
20. David Morrell, Rambo: First Blood Part II (Jove Books, 1985), 235. One of the POWs responds to the news about Reagan with the words “Holy fuck.” Rambo replies, “Yes, I said that many times.”
21. For a comparison of the POW/MIA films with certain westerns of the 1940s and ’50s—many of them conspiracy-themed—see Nick Redfern, “The Military Metaphor of Government in the Cold War Western,” April 16, 2009, nickredfern.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/the-military-metaphor-of-government-in-the-cold-war-western. Redfern linked Rambo to pictures whose anti-Washington attitude often reflected an authoritarian impulse, while I’m highlighting the picture’s ties to the more antiauthoritarian movies of the 1970s. I see this less as a disagreement with Redfern than as a sign of the complexities and contradictions of our shared subject.
22. Rambo III, directed by Peter MacDonald, screenplay by Sylvester Stallone and Sheldon Lettich, Carolco Pictures, 1988.
23. Sometimes the comparisons between Waco and Wounded Knee were direct and overt. For an example, see S. Leon Felkins, “The 110th Anniversary of the Wounded Knee Massacre: Some Chilling Modern Parallels,” December 28, 2000, lewrockwell.com/orig/felkins4.html.
24. On Posey’s career, see J. M. Berger, “Patriot Games,” Foreign Policy, April 18, 2012; R. M. Schneiderman, “My Life as a White Supremacist,” Newsweek, November 11, 2011.
25. Waco: The Rules of Engagement, directed by William Gazecki, written by William Gazecki, Dan Gifford, and Michael McNulty, New Yorker Films, 1997.
26. Andrea Chase, “Rambo,” n.d., killermoviereviews.com/main.php? nextlink=display&dId=959.
27. Gina Carbone, “ ‘Rambo’ Review: There Will Be Blood,” Seacoast Online, January 26, 2008.
28. David Morrell, “David Morrell FAQ,” n.d., at 66.241.209.129/faq.cfm.
29. Quoted in “Answering Questions Is as Easy as Breathing—Sly Answers Back! Day 1,” January 14, 2008, aintitcool.com/node/35279.
30. I wouldn’t have minded seeing some of the Afghan heroes of Rambo III return as villains in Rambo IV. But that might have pushed the franchise into areas that Stallone would rather leave alone.
31. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1973), 94. Or you may remember it from chapter 2.
32. If The Searchers is the most notable recent incarnation of the Indian captivity narrative, the most notable recent incarnation of the white-slavery captivity tale is a movie that The Searchers directly inspired: Taxi Driver, a 1976 film scripted by Paul Schrader and directed by Martin Scorsese. Robert De Niro’s version of the Wayne character is relentlessly unappealing—he is a murderer and a madman—but he becomes a folk hero after “rescuing” a prostitute in a bloody raid on a brothel.
De Niro’s character brushes against another archetype, the “lone nut” assassin, when he flirts with shooting a presidential candidate. A few years later, life imitated art when John Hinckley attempted to assassinate President Reagan. An obsessive fan of Taxi Driver, Hinckley hoped his act would impress the actress Jodie Foster, who played the prostitute in Scorsese’s movie.
33. Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, 95.
Chapter 11: The Demonic Cafeteria
1. Philip Sandifer, “Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 39 (Prime Suspect, Cracker),” September 12, 2012, philipsandifer.com/2012/09/pop-between-realities-home-in-time-for_12.html.
2. For a twenty-first-century account of black prisoners using the sovereign citizens’ legal arguments, see Kevin Carey, “Too Weird for The Wire,” The Washington Monthly, May–July 2008. Carey identified one conveyer belt by which these concepts reached black hands—the prison system—but that was hardly the only one. People affiliated with offshoots of the Moorish Science Temple had preached similar notions before the events at the core of Carey’s article occurred. And in the 1990s, when I was writing a lot about pirate radio, I met several black radicals who defended their right to operate unlicensed stations using arguments essentially identical to those of the sovereign citizen crowd.
3. Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (University of California Press, 2003), 11.
4. Robert Churchill, To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant’s Face: Libertarian Political Violence and the Origins of the Militia Movement (University of Michigan Press, 2009), 8.
5. Ibid.
6. Steven M. Chermak, Searching for a Demon: The Media Construction of the Militia Movement (Northeastern University Press, 2002), 235.
7. David Neiwert, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right (Paradigm Publishers, 2009), 35.
8. Churchill, To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant’s Face, 233.
9. Quoted ibid.
10. See Jonathan Karl, The Right to Bear Arms: The Rise of America’s New Militias (Harper Paperbacks, 1995), 91, 133.
11. The Southern Poverty Law Center—not a group given to minimizing militia violence—keeps a running tally of post–Oklahoma City right-wing terror plots (militia-related and otherwise) at splcenter.org/get-informed/publications/terror-from-the-right.
12. Quoted in Michael Kelly, “The Road to Paranoia,” The New Yorker, June 19, 1995.
13. Author’s interview with Bob Banner, May 1, 2012. All Banner quotes come from this interview unless otherwise noted.
14. I contacted Livergood to ask him to comment on Banner’s description of his group. After replying to my introductory e-mail, he did not answer the follow-up containing my questions. Subsequent attempts to elicit responses were equally unsuccessful.
15. “Introduction,” Critique 1, no. 1 (Autumn 1980). Banner wrote the editorial, though it appeared unsigned; it was reprinted several times in subsequent editions of the journal.
16. “Doubles?” Critique 1, no. 2 (Winter 1980–81).
17. Samuel Edward Konkin III, “Special Review: The Project, Part II,” New Libertarian 4, no. 17 (February–April 1987).
18. Tony Elias, “Interview with Mr. Martin,” Flatland Magazine 16 (February 1999). “Perot” is a reference to Ross Perot, a Texas billionaire who ran for president in 1992 and 1996.
19. Anson Kennedy, “PhenomiCon 1991: A Recipe for Weirdness,” January–February 1992, lysator.liu.se/skeptical/newsletters/Georgia_Skeptic/GS05-01.TXT.
20. The two PhenomiCons weren’t the only attempts to put on a conspiracy-themed convention. Notably, an annual gathering called Conspiracy Con has been held in Santa Clara, California, since 2001.
21. Author’s interview with Brian Redman, September 5, 2012.
22. “A couple of times he was right,” The Chicago Sun-Times reported when Skolnick died. “But the other theories Mr. Skolnick scattered with his shotgun style of crying corruption made him the Chicken Little of tipsters, a media pariah in Chicago.” Mark J. Konkol, “Conspiracy Theorist Helped Bring Down Ex-Gov,” The Chicago Sun-Times, May 23, 2006.
23. I drew those figures from “Branch Davidians Who Died at Mt. Carmel,” in Armageddon in Waco: Critical Perspectives on the Branch Davidian Conflict, ed. Stuart A. Wright (University of Chicago Press, 1995), 379–81.
24. I interviewed Bob Fletcher in 1995 for Jesse Walker, “The Populist Rainbow,” Chronicles, March 1996. All Fletcher quotes come from this interview unless otherwise noted.
25. I interviewed Afrika Islam in 1995 for “The Populist Rainbow.” All Islam quotes come from this interview.
26. Anthony J. Hilder, “Ordo Ab Chao,” on Amerika, cassette, Anthony Music Corporation, 1994.
27. I interviewed Anthony Hilder in 1995 for “The Populist Rainbow.” All Hilder quotes come from this interview unless otherwise noted.
28. I interviewed Michael Moor in 1995 for “The Populist Rainbow.” All Moor quotes come from this interview.
29. Quoted in Brian McManus, “The Illuminati: Conspiracy Theory or New World Order?” Philadelphia Weekly, December 1, 2010.
30. Tony Brown, Empower the People: Overthrowing the Conspiracy
That Is Stealing Your Money and Freedom (HarperCollins, 1998), 191.
31. Ibid., 186.
32. Ibid., xv. Brown’s version of the Illuminati story cites some of the same sources you see in conspiracy tracts of the right, from Edith Starr Miller to William Guy Carr.
33. Daniel Levitas, The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right (Thomas Dunne Books, 2002), 318.
34. Quoted in Karl, The Right to Bear Arms, 112. Butler added, “I think they are a government-sponsored movement, maybe the CIA.”
35. Department of Justice, “Good O’ Boy Roundup Report,” March 1996, justice.gov/oig/special/9603/exec.htm.
36. Kenneth S. Stern, A Force upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate (Simon & Schuster, 1996), 247.
37. Ibid., 246.
38. Ibid., 219.
39. Dick Morris, Behind the Oval Office: Getting Reelected Against All Odds, 2nd ed. (Renaissance Books, 1999), 418. Morris today is a fierce critic of the Democrats, including his former colleagues in the Clinton White House. So it’s worth noting that this book was written before he reinvented his public persona. It was generally friendly toward Bill Clinton and his administration, and its discussion of the “ricochet” plan did not treat it as a scandal. For a discussion of Morris’s subsequent evolution, which culminated with the man borrowing the rhetoric of the very militias he had once targeted, see Jesse Walker, “The Cynicism of Dick Morris,” January 18, 2013, reason.com/ archives/2013/01/18/the-cynicism-of-dick-morris.
40. Quoted in Morris, Behind the Oval Office, 419–23.
41. Ibid., 210. Interestingly, Morris felt that the bombing served as a turning point that allowed Clinton to formulate a “values agenda” around such issues as smoking and TV violence. If so, it’s an intriguing example of the transmutability of moral panics.
42. “The Pine Bluff Variant,” The X-Files, Fox, May 3, 1998.
43. Paul Cantor, Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 185.
44. “The Truth,” The X-Files, Fox, May 19, 2002.
45. Chung’s investigation of the alleged abduction resembles John Keel’s investigation of the Mothman, and he is identified as the author of a thriller called The Caligarian Candidate.
46. Ventura, who later served as governor of Minnesota, would still later write several books about conspiracies and host a cable TV show called Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura.
47. “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space,” The X-Files, Fox, April 12, 1996.
48. For an example, see Kenn Thomas, “Clinton Era Conspiracies! Was Gennifer Flowers on the Grassy Knoll? Probably Not, but Here Are Some Other Bizarre Theories for a New Political Age,” The Washington Post, January 16, 1994. Thomas, as it happens, was the editor of Steamshovel Press and a sincere believer in several nonmainstream conspiracy theories. It isn’t clear to what extent his ironic tone was the camouflage he adopted to write for the Post and to what extent it was imposed by editors who felt the style was the appropriate approach for discussing the subject.
49. Xandor Korzybski, letter to the editor, Mondo 2000 3 (Winter 1991).
50. R. U. Sirius, e-mail to the author, September 6, 2012, 5:19 P.M. Sirius would not reveal Korzybski’s identity, but he reported that the writer is “actually sort of a credible person in tech journalism circles, in his real life.”
51. R. U. Sirius, e-mail to the author, September 6, 2012, 6:15 P.M.
Chapter 12: Everything Is a Clue
1. “The Bottle Deposit,” Seinfeld, NBC, May 2, 1996. The scene that this line of dialogue comes from, in which George and Jerry ponder the possibility that a message is encoded in the song “Downtown,” is Exhibit A for my perhaps insane pet theory that Seinfeld, not The X-Files, was the most paranoid program of the 1990s.
2. For a useful overview of the 9/11 truth movement, see chapter 7 of Mark Fenster, Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture, 2nd ed. (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
3. Michael Barkun, Chasing Phantoms: Reality, Imagination, and Homeland Security Since 9/11 (University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 77. It’s too international a story to fit into this America-centric book—Moriarty comes from England, Mabuse from Germany, Fantômas from France—but there’s a fascinating study to be written on the history of the supervillain.
4. Author’s interview with Joel Best, October 26, 2001.
5. The anthrax attacks, in which envelopes containing anthrax spores were mailed to various politicians and media outlets, were almost certainly perpetrated by someone who didn’t have anything to do with 9/11. At the time, though, they were widely assumed to have been the brainchild of the same conspiracy. The White House reportedly pushed the FBI to prove that Al Qaeda was responsible for the anthrax mailings, but the Bureau didn’t buy the theory. See James Gordon Meek, “FBI Was Told to Blame Anthrax Scare on Al Qaeda by White House Officials,” Daily News (New York), August 2, 2008.
6. Quoted in “New Scare Diverts US Flight,” October 11, 2001, news .bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1592417.stm.
7. Gwen Shaffer, “Novel Security Measures,” Philadelphia City Paper, October 18–25, 2001.
8. Quoted in “Two Plead Not Guilty to Boston Hoax Charges,” February 2, 2007, web.archive.org/web/20070210181101/http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/02/01/boston.bombscare/index.html.
9. Richard Landes, Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (Oxford University Press, 2011), 14.
10. Some e-mails told readers to enter Q33NY, allegedly the flight or tail number of one of the planes that struck the World Trade Center. The results:
In that case, the e-mail was a hoax: Neither plane was associated with the code Q33NY.
11. Conspiracy thinking played a role in the president’s policies abroad as well as at home. Consider Bush’s description of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “axis of evil.” Since an axis is an alliance, his formulation suggested that Iran and Iraq—parties to one of the most bitter international rivalries of the day—were secretly aligned.
12. Meg Stalcup and Joshua Craze, “How We Train Our Cops to Fear Islam,” The Washington Monthly, March–April 2011. Sadly, Kharoba wasn’t the worst alleged expert giving talks on Islamic terrorism. On the Christian circuit, self-proclaimed defectors from jihadist conspiracies told tales worthy of John Todd. For some examples, see Jorg Luyken, “The Palestinian ‘Terrorist’ Turned Zionist,” The Jerusalem Post, March 20, 2008; Doug Howard, “Mixed Message,” Books & Culture, May–June 2010; Tim Murphy, “An Ex-Terrorist Walks into a Conservative Conference . . . ,” Mother Jones, September 15, 2012. For a report of such speakers addressing an air force audience, see Neil MacFarquhar, “Speakers at Academy Said to Make False Claims,” The New York Times, February 7, 2008.
13. “MIAC Strategic Report: The Modern Militia Movement,” Missouri Information Analysis Center, February 20, 2009, scribd.com/doc/13290698/The-Modern-Militia-MovementMissouri-MIAC-Strategic-Report-20Feb09.
14. “2009 Virginia Terrorism Threat Assessment,” Virginia Fusion Center, March 2009, rawstory.com/images/other/vafusioncenterterrorassessment.pdf.
15. North Central Texas Fusion System Prevention Awareness Bulletin, February 19, 2009.
16. “A Cautionary Note for Law Enforcement,” Pennsylvania Actionable Intelligence Briefing, November 13–15, 2009.
17. “Federal Support for and Involvement in State and Local Fusion Centers,” United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, October 3, 2012.
18. Kathleen Tierney, “The Red Pill,” June 11, 2006, understanding katrina.ssrc.org/Tierney.
19. When a subsequent storm, Sandy, hit New York in 2012, some pranksters deliberately fed the rumor mill by creating a Twitter hashtag called #SANDYLOOTCREW and posting lists and pictures of the goods they had allegedly stolen: a laptop, a TV, a shirt, even a cat. Sometimes they added inflammatory messages, such as “WE NOT STEALIN, WE TAKIN B
ACK FROM DA WHITE MAN.” Their hoax posts were repeated uncritically by the Drudge Report, the Daily Mail, and other outlets.
20. Lee Clarke and Caron Chess, “Elites and Panic: More to Fear Than Fear Itself,” Social Forces 87, no. 2 (December 2008). Clarke and Chess didn’t coin the term “elite panic”—they quoted a Kathleen Tierney article that used the phrase, and it is possible that other writers deployed it earlier as well. But Clarke and Chess gave the concept a more systematic treatment.
21. Sara Robinson, “Tragedy at the Holocaust Museum: Stand Up to Terror,” June 11, 2009, blog.ourfuture.org/20090610/tragedy-at-the-holocaust-museum-stand-up-to-terrorism.
22. Bonnie Erbe, “Round Up Hate-Promoters Now, Before Any More Holocaust Museum Attacks,” June 11, 2009, usnews.com/opinion/blogs/erbe/2009/06/11/round-up-hate-promoters-now-before-any-more-holocaust-museum-attacks.
23. Paul Krugman, “The Big Hate,” The New York Times, June 11, 2009.
24. Bob Herbert, “A Threat We Can’t Ignore,” The New York Times, June 19, 2009.
25. Frank Rich, “The Obama Haters’ Silent Enablers,” The New York Times, June 13, 2009.
26. “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,” U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of Intelligence and Analysis, April 7, 2009, fas.org/irp/eprint/rightwing.pdf.
27. The paper’s own author has had trouble explaining exactly what he meant. In his memoir, Johnson stressed that Homeland Security’s concern was with “violent antigovernment groups and potential terrorists,” adding that in hindsight his “definition of right-wing extremist should have incorporated the aspects of supporting, endorsing, and conducting criminal acts and violence.” But later in the book he related his long struggle with the department’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which tried to add precisely that sort of language to the report before it was released. Rather than recognizing in retrospect that the office had a point, Johnson became defensive. “Extremism should not be limited to those groups or individuals solely involved in criminal, illegal, or violent activity,” his book argued. “Extremism has a much broader definition, because it is the phase that precedes terrorism. Extremism involves ideologies that facilitate individuals and groups toward violence and terrorism.” Daryl Johnson, Right-Wing Resurgence: How a Domestic Terrorist Threat Is Being Ignored (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 9, 236–37. For a critique of Johnson’s book, see Jesse Walker, “Homeland Security Meets Office Politics,” October 30, 2012, reason.com/archives/2012/10/30/homeland-security-meets-office-politics.
