Militias Rely on Networks of Fiery Right

WASHINGTON —  Until last October, Morris Wilson was, in his own words, “a kept man.”

A floor-covering installation contractor in Topeka, Kan., he was filled with frustration and unfocused anger, a 56-year-old man no longer able to make his craft pay because of “taxes and regulations,” forced to endure the humiliation of relying on his wife’s small business to pay the bills.

“I’m one of the top experts in my field, and I can’t make any more than people flipping hamburgers at McDonald’s. I have to do jobs for my wife at her small business.”

Then, last October, he heard Mark Koernke.

Finally, everything seemed to make sense.

“I saw one of his videotapes and heard his radio show, and then I heard he was coming to Independence, Mo., to give a speech, and so I hooked up with the group there and invited him to speak in Topeka. We had about 200 come from all over, and he just seemed to have answers for people’s questions.”

Now, seven months later, Wilson is commander of the newly formed Kansas Unorganized Citizens Militia, Topeka Brigade, perhaps 100 strong.

“With his background in military intelligence, he has access to information that we don’t have,” Wilson says of his conversion to Koernke’s cause. “He explained about the black helicopters. What business do black helicopters have to be flying low over populated areas?”

In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, as the nation struggles to understand the worst act of domestic terrorism in its history, millions of Americans have gotten their first glimpse of the world of the right-wing militia movement. Militia leaders have denounced the bombing. But the chief suspect, Timothy J. McVeigh, was reported to have consorted with militia members and espoused similar views.

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The public utterances of ultraconservative militia leaders present almost a mirror image--a reverse print--of the world that mainstream Americans see around them: National leaders ostensibly controlling the affairs of state are seen as puppets of obscure external powers. Law enforcement agencies outwardly pledged to protect the public are scheming to enslave it. Where does this extraordinary view of reality come from? And how does it so effectively resist all attempts to change it?

The answer, in significant part, appears to be that the militia members inhabit something akin to an echo chamber. Steadfastly rejecting information from mainstream sources, they rely on a media network devoted to their own view.

Using the latest in communications technology to spread their message just below the radar screen of the mainstream media, militantly ultraconservative talk show hosts, fax mavens, computer jocks and militia leaders help define the militia Zeitgeist by bouncing news bulletins and apocalyptic rhetoric back and forth off the communications satellites and across the Internet.

Listen to Tom Valentine, a Florida talk show host who follows Koernke, a.k.a. “Mark from Michigan,” each night on shortwave radio. It is “laughable,” Valentine declares knowingly, “to say there is not a conspiracy to create a one-world government. They want the world in their image. All we see are their front men, but behind them are the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers. . . . “

Or Norm Resnik, a shortwave radio talk show host in rural Colorado: “The thinking is that the government plans to subjugate us to a spiritual, political and economic Babylon,” Resnik says. “There is great economic frustration out there among the militia. Something is disappearing--jobs.

“We are not as concerned about Waco and Ruby Ridge (the bloody federal raid on tax protester Randy Weaver) as we are about NAFTA, GATT, and the Mexican bailout.”

The loosely organized, yet expanding right-wing militia movement has spread deep into the American heartland. Old enemies of American ultra-rightists--blacks and Jews--have largely been supplanted by a new target: the federal government.

In the process, the militia has created its own history, its own mind-set and its own reality to cope with the world around it.

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Outside observers say that leaders of the present-day militia movement have few direct ties to older racist or anti-Semitic extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazis, and militia spokesmen insist that they are not white supremacists.

“This seems to be a new generation,” says Irwin Suall, director of special projects at the Anti-Defamation League, which monitors the militia. “These are not the same people we saw in the KKK or the John Birch Society.”

One of the few traditional groups that is openly allied to the militia is the Liberty Lobby, a Washington-based ultra-right organization that dates back to the red-scare days of the 1950s. Its newsletter, the Spotlight, is widely circulated among militia members.

But while the names and faces may be different from earlier hate groups, the paranoia is believable. There is just so much happening right in front of you, you don’t have to say wild things to catch people’s attention.

“That meeting was the spark for getting us going. Before Koernke came, we were just networking with a few people. But people were really interested in what he had to say, and from that point on we just decided to take action. Since I brought him to Topeka, it fell to me to take the lead, and that’s how I became commander.”

By day, Mark Koernke is a janitor at the Mary Markley dormitory at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

But at night, he becomes the charismatic “Mark from Michigan.” On shortwave radio, and on dozens of low-powered rural radio stations that pluck his show off the Telstar 2 satellite for free--listeners all across the United States are ushered into a hothouse world of government conspiracies and international cabals, of cover-ups and looming invasions.

There are, Koernke has warned, 15,000 Gurkha troops from India hiding in the Michigan hills, ready to pounce. National Guard units in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana are being merged, to better serve the United Nations. Secret markings have been placed on the backs of road signs, to guide the United Nations’ invading armies.

Who is responsible for these evil threats to American sovereignty? “The new world order gangsters,” he says.

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Koernke, a self-described former Army intelligence officer, urges militia members to go underground, to form small cells, to secretly stockpile weapons, and avoid the public displays of paramilitary uniforms and weekend outings in the woods. Koernke’s strategy has led to a fissure within the Michigan militia, where extremists have now broken off from the main organization.

“You shouldn’t get together with a bunch of people you don’t know,” agrees Kevin Shane, a former Michigan Militia Corps commander who says he subscribes to Koernke’s ideas. Shane was accused of participating in a plot to blow up Soviet military equipment being used by the Michigan National Guard in training exercises and has been ousted from the Michigan militia.

On his janitor’s wages, Koernke could hardly finance his new role as a voice of the militia movement. Instead, his patron is Mike Callahan, president of Viking International, a Scottsdale, Ariz., gold and silver dealer who offered Koernke his own show last year after hearing him as a caller to other shows.

Callahan doesn’t pay Koernke a salary. But he does send an estimated $35,000 a year to World Wide Christian Radio, a Nashville broker of shortwave air time, for Koernke’s nightly “intelligence report.” Koernke and his co-host, John Stadtmiller, don’t even need a studio or radio equipment; they just call in on a toll-free telephone line to Callahan’s Scottsdale offices, and he takes care of the rest.

In return, Koernke promotes the “hard assets” sold by Viking, telling listeners that hoarding gold and silver is the solution to a government plot to erode America’s economic strength by issuing “fake paper currency.”

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Indeed, he added on a recent show that the Oklahoma City bombing was nothing more than a government plot to “draw our attention away from the economic crisis imposed on us by top government officials. The United States is in a nose-dive with the peso as a boat anchor around our necks. You need hard currency for hard times. And Mike Callahan will come up with investments that suit your needs.”

(Late Friday, however, WWCR said it was indefinitely suspending broadcasts by the 37-year-old Koernke because of the flood of negative publicity he has garnered since the bombing.) Koernke has gained the most attention since the Oklahoma City disaster, yet he is hardly alone in preaching to the militia. Over the past year or two, nearly a dozen talk shows catering to the militia movement have sprung up on shortwave radio, while other spokesmen use computers and faxes instead.

Even in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, the militia movement has been able to keep the outside world’s version of reality at bay. Already, it has incorporated Oklahoma City into its mythology.

“I would say 80% of my listeners believe the bombing was orchestrated by the government,” says Resnik. “The University of Oklahoma seismograph recorded two distinct explosions. That was no fertilizer bomb.”

Indeed, there seems to be no way to dissuade the militia of its nightmares.

“I say to you fainthearted, if you love wealth more than liberty, if you love the quiet tranquillity of servitude more than the animating contest of freedom, then go home in peace, we ask neither your counsel nor your arms,” says Commander Norm Olson on a recent Michigan militia recruiting videotape. (Olson resigned his post under pressure Saturday after other militia leaders criticized him for blaming the Japanese government for the Oklahoma City bombing.)

“Bow down and lick the hands that feed you. May your chains rest lightly on your shoulders,” Olson said.

Times staff writer Judy Pasternak in Michigan and researchers Ann Rovin and John Beckham contributed to this story.