Blood and Politics (84 page)

During this period, Blodgett said, he made a deal to purchase the Liberty Lobby mailing list for his own use and agreed to pay Liberty Lobby eighty-five thousand dollars. He still owed twenty-five thousand on the contract at the time Liberty Lobby filed bankruptcy, on May 13, 1998. Blodgett testified that he had paid the twenty-five thousand dollars on the Memorial Day weekend following, handing Carto 250 one-hundred-dollar bills in cash, while they both were in Phoenix attending a conference for Identity believers. Carto brought a special heavy-duty metal valise to carry off the funds.
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If paying twenty-five thousand dollars in cash did not look to Judge Teel like a Hollywood-style off-the-books drug deal, closer examination of Liberty Lobby’s monthly financials to the bankruptcy courts would easily determine if the sums had been properly reported. But before Blodgett was cross-examined by Liberty Lobby’s attorney, the court adjourned. The next session was scheduled for a month later.
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The hearing, particularly Blodgett’s testimony, apparently convinced Carto that his best path was to avoid the reporting that bankruptcy court required. Within the next month earnest negotiations with Mark Weber began, and an agreement was reached and ratified by Judge Teel. It required
that both parties refrain from further litigation, and it provided legion-IHR with several lump-sum payments and regular monthly payments. The total sum Liberty Lobby would ultimately have to pay would depend upon how much interest was accumulated, but the baseline figure negotiated stood at $1 million two hundred thousand plus additional $100,000 payments at six-month intervals. It was a sum less than half the original Farrel settlement, but enough for Weber’s crew to hire staff and reinvigorate the IHR. The first check to legion-IHR for $200,000 was paid that August. It looked as if six years of litigation between the two parties might finally be coming to an end. If the agreement was breached, however, the entirety of Judge Maino’s original judgment (plus interest) would once again be due.
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Predictably,
The Spotlight
told its readers that paying a settlement it had tried to avoid was actually a victory. The headline read: “Good News for Liberty Lobby; Bad News for Our Enemies.”
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For more than two decades,
The Spotlight
had been maintaining that down was really up: that Gordon Kahl was simply a tax-protesting farmer rather than a trigger-happy Aryan warrior; that David Duke was a controversial candidate rather than a white supremacist imbued with national socialist principles; and that men like Don Wassall and Mark Weber were the equivalent of Mossad agents rather than just factional opponents working in the same political movement. At that point, Liberty Lobby was sliding down a steep hill, heading for a crash. Declaring otherwise was a little bit like claiming the world was going to come to an end after December 31, 1999.

January 1, 2000. 23 Tebet 5760. The Year of the Dragon.
The sun’s surface burned at ten thousand degrees Fahrenheit. The moon rose in the east and settled in the west. The earth flew through the Lord’s heavens at 66,600 miles per hour. Volcanic activity steamed as usual. The oceans slept quietly. And most rivers (the Nile excepted) continued flowing toward the equator. On seven continents six billion people continued living as they had before. Most of them were ill fed, but hunger and poverty were chronic conditions and not particularly of the moment. In New York City, three million happy souls gathered in Times Square for a midnight celebration. In Washington, D.C., William Jefferson Clinton presided over a nation at peace and Alan Greenspan chaired the Federal Reserve Board. For the public, this was the turn of the millennial clock. The world did not end. Computers did not crash. The lights stayed on, and automatic teller machines spit out cash just like the day before.

Years of public worries had predicted a different change at the millennium. Power grids and banking systems, communications and transportation, local economies and world commerce, political stability and individual safety—all were thought vulnerable to the Y2K bug. Described almost as if it were a computer virus, this bug was supposedly a problem left over from decades before, when computer memory had been scarce. To save space, programmers wrote codes with dates represented in eight digits, not ten. December 31, 1999, became 12-31-99. But with one turn of a calendar page a potential danger emerged. At 01-01-00, January 1, 2000, could be mistaken for January 1, 1900. Things computer driven might come to a grinding halt. Planes would fall from the sky. Cities might succumb to rioting mobs looking for light, heat, and food. Civil society and civilization could disappear entirely.

Much of popular culture seemed to stand at century’s end on an apocalyptic brink. To the cyberdoomsday scenario, add a particular set of Christian beliefs about the End of Time. In the mainstream media,
Newsweek
drew together several strands in a nine-page spread entitled: “Prophecy—Millennial Visions. What the Bible Says About the End of the World.”
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Large full-color outtakes of Renaissance-era paintings depicting apocalyptic and other biblical themes decorated the text. Survey data highlighted much of the story: “40% of U.S. adults believe the world will end as foretold: in a Battle of Armageddon between Jesus and the Antichrist . . . 19% of Americans . . . believe that the Antichrist is on earth now.” A similar number believed “Jesus will return to the earth during their lifetimes.”
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The perception of the world’s end, by either computer glitch or eschatological design, was said to be inspiring a range of survivalist and paramilitary activity, from Joe Doe Militiamen storing food and fuel to sects waiting with arms and ammunition for the hard times ahead. Some were sure to start shooting just to help events along, a bevy of so-called experts predicted.
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Not everyone cited by the magazine was convinced that white supremacists or Christian zealots were slouching toward Armageddon. J. Gordon Melton, an academic with a special interest in religion, added
Newsweek
’s caveat: “Yet among Christian communities, the coming millennium has inspired a surprisingly low count of doomsday survival cults.”
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Before nothing happened, a few voices asserted that nothing was going to happen.
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Other scholars, particularly those with an interest in millennial studies, as well as government agencies, acted as if they thought otherwise.
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To forestall any future problems, the U.S. Senate had established a Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem several years before Y2K computer concerns hit the media. In February 1996 the committee reported that some local and state governments might not make the necessary computer program upgrades to bridge the date change successfully. It also posited a possibility for “urban unrest” as a result. In 1999 the Federal Bureau of Investigation produced a report,
Project Megiddo
, named after a hill in northern Israel from which the term “Armageddon” was derived. One version of the report was solely for internal agency use. A second was made available to the public. It focused on the threat posed by those who believed the year 2000 marked the end of the world and who might use violence. The FBI specifically ruled outside its analytical parameters those “domestic terrorists” for whom the year 2000 was not a trigger. Despite a passing mention of a group called Black Hebrew Israelites, the report’s main target was the phenomenon it called “right-wing extremism.”
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Almost immediately critics assailed the FBI report. One liberal analyst warned that the report’s release had led to a “hysterical atmosphere,” increasing the likelihood that cops would overreact. “This is potentially disastrous,” he concluded.
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Most of the fire against the FBI’s report came from the conservative end of the spectrum, however. Phyllis Schlafly and Paul Weyrich complained that only the “right wing” was referenced in the report. Why wasn’t the “political left” targeted? they asked in a letter to Republican congressional leaders.
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Sam Francis, now ensconced in his role as Council of Conservative Citizens counselor, amplified the criticism in a syndicated column. Francis’s first concerns were political and cultural power, and he admitted that he had never gotten “excited about Y2K.” Nevertheless, he claimed that “an entire dissident political and religious subculture” had been “demonized” by the FBI.
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Compounding legitimate criticism of the FBI’s conclusion with a bit of anti-Semitic hysteria, commentators from Pete Peters to Willis Carto’s
Spotlight
issued a unanimous verdict: the FBI’s
Megiddo
report simply rewrote similarly scurrilous reports by those conspiratorial string pullers at the Anti-Defamation League. It smeared all “patriots,” they reported.
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In actuality, the FBI believed that the danger came from two directions. The first was from those who believed secular conspiracy theories about the New World Order. In these theories the Y2K computer problem would supposedly start a sequence of events leading to cataclysm and a United Nations–New World Order takeover of the United States. To thwart this imaginary occupation, guns and ammunition and all manner of survival gear were needed.
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The FBI did seem to miss the fact that this particular iteration differed little in form or substance from those conspiracy theories that had preceded it, including militia-style ramblings about black helicopters in the mid-1990s. In fact, it wasn’t the end of the world that worried these people, but a loss of (white) national hegemony. The second hypothetical threat allegedly came from those motivated by religious doctrine and the belief that the millennial change signaled the End Times or the Second Coming of Christ. Here the FBI directed most of its analysis at Christian Identity believers. Identity doctrine, the FBI stated correctly, regarded the battle of Armageddon, the final battle between good and evil, as a race war. As evidence, the report cited several high-profile racially motivated murders.
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As it happened, none of those crimes was actually committed with the calendar change in mind. The FBI’s
Project Megiddo
failed to understand the specific Identity conception of Armageddon, which is not linked to the Year 2000 or any other distinctive date. And in this mistake the FBI was not alone. A number of watchdog organizations misjudged
the response by Christian Identity adherents and other white nationalists to the calendar change.
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Certainly, a few Identity voices made a lot of noise, and one or two Aryan loudmouths, eager to grab headlines, made all sorts of threats they had no ability (or actual desire) to fulfill.
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But the most significant response to the impending calendar change came briefly in the late 1990s from survivalist marketers. The most creative sales effort belonged to Bo Gritz, who had changed directions after the November 1992 elections. He quickly abandoned the electioneering wing of the movement in favor of the commercial side of paramilitary “preparedness.” He began selling tickets to survivalist trainings as if they were ice cream on a hot afternoon in the city. At venues across the western states, he enlisted a shifting assortment of former military men, ex-cops, and con artists to teach “combat medicine,” lock picking, weapons handling, radio transmission, and other skills. Self-proclaimed patriots paid money to attend and then more money if they wanted to buy videotapes of the presentations. Gritz called these classes on breaking and entering SPIKE (Specially Prepared Individuals for Key Events) trainings. Here the key word was “individual” preparedness. No groups of men slogging in formation through the woods.
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Someone else would have to teach that. Much like Gritz’s seamless transition from presidential candidate to survivalist merchant, the trainings then had turned effortlessly in the mid-1990s into a commercial land venture he called Almost Heaven.

A several-hundred-acre land tract outside Kamiah, Idaho, it abutted the Nez Perce Reservation. Gritz promoted it as a safe haven, a so-called ark in a time of Noah, bound together by shared beliefs. This “covenant community” was actually structured like a smart real estate enterprise, with business trusts as the medium of control. The remote wooded and rolling central Idaho land attracted an assemblage of 160 souls, who built a variety of structures. One man created a hut of hay bales and plastic batting. Another pulled a double-wide trailer onto his lot. A third built a six-sided cabin in the woods. Each was lured by the promise of living off the grid.
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By moving in this direction, Gritz followed a course headed 180 degrees away from his days as a Populist Party candidate. Instead of pulling his constituents into the system, he was following them into dropping out. Instead of urging them to register and vote, he repeated various Christian common law notions, including the old Posse Comitatus distinction between organic sovereigns and federal citizens.
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Strategy always came in second or third for Gritz, however, behind patriotic profiteering. In this run-up to the millennial change he was joined by others making money on the preparedness expo circuit. The traveling
expo road shows that had drawn Louis Beam to Spokane in 1992 and Larry Pratt and Bo Gritz to Orlando after the Oklahoma City bombing had continued apace. Each year a supposed threat had been conceived a little differently. In 1997, for example, the main danger to national sovereignty came from the gun grabbers at the United Nations, but as at every expo, vendors sold water purifiers and dried foods as the cure. In 1998 the sales effort shifted to Y2K-specific preparedness. The gold and silver dealers therefore switched tack. Rather than warn of a gun grabber takeover, they told audiences to buy gold because the Y2K computer bug was going to shut down banks and banking systems.