Wrapped in the Flag (40 page)

My parents and their right-wing friends had been worrying about the Insiders and their New World Order for decades, but the words of President George H. W. Bush on September 11, 1990, created a new level of concern. In a television address announcing the deployment of troops into Kuwait to beat back the invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces, the president said, “The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times . . .
a new world order
[emphasis mine] can emerge: a new era—freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace.”
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According to my parents and the JBS, Bush’s speech signaled the beginning of the conspiracy’s final assault on the United States. For Mother and Dad and conspiracy fighters everywhere, the time had come to mobilize. War against the government was coming.

I was used to this New World Order stuff, but I was not prepared for the immensity of the rage when William Jefferson Clinton was sworn into office in January of 1993.

My mother became fixated on Clinton and his “Insider” credentials. She reminded me, many times, that he was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. Adding to the evidence against the president, Clinton had studied in Merry Olde Socialized England at Oxford University. And, most damning of all, Clinton was a Rhodes scholar.
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In addition to those strikes against him, Clinton was, according to the acting president of the JBS, a morally degenerate draft dodger who actively
courted the homosexual vote, smoked dope, and married Hillary Rodham, a revolutionary in her own right.
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When our new president said, “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America,” I heard a positive vision for my country.
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My mother heard a one-world socialist who would bring an end to America as we knew it and install a dictatorship controlled by the United Nations.

When the new president pushed for health-care reform, Mother was convinced that Clinton was moving quickly to reinvent the United States as a totalitarian state. “He’s a socialist,” she said. “He and that awful wife of his are pushing us to socialized medicine.”

One afternoon while I sipped tea with Mother, she was particularly agitated by an article in the latest John Birch Society bulletin. “Look at this,” she said. “Jack wrote it and he knows how serious the situation is.”

Mother’s friend “Jack” was John McManus, the president of the JBS. McManus had taken over in 1991, but he and my dad had known each other since 1966, when Jack joined the staff as a New England coordinator. One of the first decisions Jack made after becoming president was to move the national headquarters of the JBS from Belmont, Massachusetts, to Appleton, Wisconsin, the birthplace of Senator Joseph McCarthy. (As of 2012, McManus has been the JBS president for twenty-one years, making him the longest-serving executive of the society since Robert Welch.)
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McManus’s article, “It All Fits!,” traced the initiatives of the Clinton administration that were part of the plan to create a “new world order to replace the sovereignty of nations and the freedom of individuals.”
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Discussing everything from the mission in Somalia to the North American Free Trade Agreement, McManus built the case that Clinton was promoting a New World Order with every part of his agenda. If the JBS failed to get the message out, McManus guaranteed that the “looming new world order with all of its horrors will control the future.”
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“Clinton is the worst president ever,” Mother said.

“Maybe Clinton isn’t evil,” I suggested. “Maybe he’s just a Democrat.”

“Young lady, you ought to listen more closely to your mother,” she responded. “If you read more, instead of focusing on fun and games, you’d understand how serious this situation is. Let me remind you that you and your children are at risk.”

“You’ve been expecting this New World Order for thirty-six years,” I reminded her. “Why is this time any different?”

“You’re hopeless,” she said in disgust. “If you don’t understand the
conspiracy by now, you never will.”

The fear and anger on the right intensified when President Clinton pushed for the Brady Bill, the long-delayed legislation that increased the waiting period for handgun purchases and banned assault weapons.
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The Brady Bill became, without exaggeration, the Far Right’s call to arms. For the more intellectual right-wingers, like my mother, the weapons of choice were typewriters, pamphlets, and petitions. The more militant types took to the woods for combat training with their AK-47s and Glocks.
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Most of the guys who tromped through the mud in camouflage and practiced target shooting were weekend warriors. Among them, however, was a hard-core group of revolutionaries who studied sabotage and explosives with an eye toward fomenting a race war.
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Like true believers everywhere, these men had their own sacred text,
The Turner Diaries
.
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The book, published in 1978, was written by William Pierce under the name Andrew Macdonald. Pierce, an early member of the John Birch Society turned neo-Nazi, got the idea of using fiction to spread his white-supremacist ideas from his dear friend and mentor, Dr. Revilo Oliver.
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This grisly, violent, hate-filled story depicts America in 1991 as a police state where guns have been banned and government policies are enforced by roving bands of “Afros,” a derogatory term for African Americans. The main character, diarist Earl Turner, joins an underground movement that is planning and eventually executes terrorist attacks across the country in hopes of starting the “Great Revolution.” When Turner’s cell is ordered to blow up FBI headquarters, the conspirators build a homemade bomb using fertilizer, fuel oil, and a delivery truck. Turner records in great detail the “recipe” for the bomb and specific directions for assembling the device.
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The explosion is devastating, killing over seven hundred people and mangling many more. No pangs of conscience prick the perpetrators, however. One minute before the explosion, they contact the
Washington Post
with this message: “We are now settling the score with your pals in the politics police. Soon we’ll settle the score with you and all other traitors. White America shall live!”
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The book continues for another 150 pages describing the “Great Revolution” that purges the United States of all Jews and non-whites. One chapter details the “Day of the Rope,” when the revolution had purged Los Angeles of all Jews, non-whites, and Latinos and began systematic executions of those in the remaining population. In the book, tens of thousands of white women who “defiled their race by marrying or living with Blacks, with Jews, or with other non-white males” are hanged from “tens of thousands of lampposts, power poles, and trees.”
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The
Turner Diaries
might have remained underground, passed from extremist to extremist, if Trooper Charles Hanger hadn’t pulled over a yellow Mercury Marquis, without tags, on Interstate 35 a few miles from Perry, Oklahoma. It was 10:20 a.m. on April 19, 1995—ninety minutes after an explosion tore through the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building sixty miles away. Trooper Hanger had no idea that he’d just detained Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. In McVeigh’s car, investigators would find excerpts from
The Turner Diaries
.
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Sixty minutes before McVeigh was arrested, I stood in front of the television staring at the mangled shell of what had been, until 9:02 a.m., a federal office building. Minutes before the bomb blast, hundreds of people had come to this building to do what they did every day: go to work. Some had dropped off their babies at the second-floor day-care center before going upstairs to their offices. Others, everyday Oklahomans, had come to apply for Social Security benefits. Without warning, the building fell down on them.

America’s Kids day-care center was destroyed, killing nineteen little ones. One firefighter, Chris Fields, wearing helmet number five, emerged from the building carrying the limp, blood-covered body of Baylee Almon. Little Baylee had turned one the day before.
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While rescue crews combed the wreckage for survivors, everyone wanted to know who had done this terrible thing. Almost immediately, an all-points bulletin was issued for “two men of Middle Eastern appearance with dark hair and beards.”
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The media brought out a parade of “experts” with a deep understanding of Islamic terrorism. One particularly popular fellow was Steven Emerson, the filmmaker who had produced the 1994 documentary
Terrorists Among Us: Jihad in America
for PBS. A few hours after the Oklahoma City bombing, Emerson confirmed on television that “federal law enforcement officials were investigating the possibility that Islamic groups were involved.”
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He went on to explain that the bomb that caused the explosion was “NOT the same type of bomb that has been traditionally used by other terrorist groups in the United States other than the Islamic ones.”

No one doubted Emerson. He had infiltrated meetings of radical Arab Americans, including one held several years before the bombing—also in Oklahoma City. He had intimate knowledge of the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel-Rahman, and of his terrorist friends who had bombed the World
Trade Center in New York City two years earlier. He knew a call for jihad when he heard it.
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I went to bed that night convinced that a gang of turbaned Islamic terrorists had opened another front in their war against America. Oddly enough, I found the conclusion comforting—we had an enemy “over there.” Our mighty military would eventually identify and capture the bad guys.

The next day, while the media prognostications continued, an FBI crew sifted through the rubble of the Murrah building looking for clues. Somehow, out of the mess that had been a building, one of the crew uncovered the rear axle of a truck with its identification number still visible. This clue led them to a body shop in Junction City, Kansas, where the Ryder truck had been rented. With the help of shop employees, a police sketch artist constructed the face of the man who rented that truck.
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Everyone expecting a dark-haired, dark-skinned, Semitic man with a beard had to be shocked when John Doe No. 1 turned out to be a young white man with a military crew cut and piercing eyes.
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At a local motel, the Dreamland, a desk clerk was able to put a name to that face. Timothy McVeigh had signed the register on April 14 and had checked out the morning of April 18—presumably to drive 270 miles south in time to destroy his target in Oklahoma City.
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The FBI traced its prime suspect to the Perry, Oklahoma, jail where McVeigh was awaiting a bond hearing on the charge of driving an unlicensed vehicle. Oklahoma authorities had discovered that the man had no criminal record and no outstanding warrants, but they were unable to determine if McVeigh owned the car he’d been driving or why he was carrying a loaded Glock in a shoulder holster. Nonetheless, he was going to be released after posting a $500 bond. Luckily, the presiding judge was running late that day. McVeigh was still locked up when the FBI called.
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Over the weekend, authorities continued to search for two other suspects in the bombing case, men they dubbed John Doe No. 2 and John Doe No. 3. No one knew exactly who these men were, but the clues indicated that they were part of a network of underground citizens’ militia groups that preached a schizophrenic kind of patriotism. These folks loathed the federal government, loved their own twisted interpretation of the Constitution, and embraced the idea of sovereign citizens—persons legally outside the reach of government rules, regulations, and taxes based on a “sovereign” declaration.
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