Word: freemen
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...strange week for the state of Montana, which may fear acquiring a reputation as the last refuge of scoundrels. In Jordan the authorities, wary of another Waco or Ruby Ridge, were gingerly handling the anarchist bunco artists who call themselves the Freemen...
...Apocalypse was postponed, of course, and since that dud of a Judgment Day, not much has changed in Montana. This spring the world is still about to end. On the Republican eastern prairie, the Freemen are holed up, surrounded by oddly tolerant G-men. In the more liberal western mountains, Ted Kaczynski, the suspected Unabomber, has been flushed from his trollish lair and jailed. For me, a resident of Montana's center (both geographically and politically), there's cosmic symmetry in this: right-wing nuts on one flank, suspected left-wing terrorist on the other. It's a state...
...Freemen drama confirms this point, but from another angle. Not content to live and let live in the peaceable Montana way, this band of alleged counterfeiters and tax cheats busied itself placing bounties on neighbors. No wonder the locals were set to raid the place before the FBI stepped in. In Montana, screwing the government is your affair, but no one likes a busybody...
Though the FBI has been worried that the scene at Justus could become a magnet for armed fringe groups, representatives of the self-proclaimed militias around the Western states have also been denouncing the Freemen as ordinary criminals. "Those people are crooks," says Bob Wright, who leads a militia unit in New Mexico. "This is not a militia issue...
...DAWSON arrived in the little town of Jordan, Montana, to cover the confrontation between the FBI and the Freemen only to find that news crews and law officers had taken all the hotel rooms. "So I flopped my sleeping bag in an old school bus in the barn on my cousin John Cooley's ranch," says Dawson, a native Montanan who has reported from the West for TIME for 15 years. He notes that the state has a "colorful and maybe not always noble history of vigilante movements." And although Dawson was surprised by "the accumulated anger and tunnel vision...