Word: militia
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That web is further fortified by the information revolution, which enables people to disseminate their ideas widely, cheaply and often under the safe cloak of anonymity. Bomb recipes have been transmitted across computer bulletin boards. CB and shortwave radios enable militia members not only to communicate between themselves but also to monitor the communications of law-enforcement officials. In the gray split-level house that serves as the nerve center of the Michigan Militia there are 15 phone lines, four computers, multiple fax machines, a professional printing press and a full television-production facility...
...public-access or satellite TV. Or they can make and market their own videotapes-a propaganda tactic that insulates the patriot evangelists from any direct blame for the antigovernment acts they may inspire. The handful of celebrities on the patriot circuit-people like Koernke, attorney Linda Thompson and Militia of Montana founder John Trochmann-all have tapes in circulation that promote their theories about the plot to take over the world. In a two-hour video called America in Peril: A Call to Arms, Koernke, an Ann Arbor janitor who goes by the handle "Mark from Michigan," ominously reviews...
Other patriots are worried that their own agendas will be confused with the as-yet-unexplained agenda of the Oklahoma bomber. "If you get one crazy out there who doesn't have a brain, then everybody gets lumped in," complains Dean Compton, 33, who heads an armed militia in California's Sierra Nevada foothills. In dread of just such an event, he announced the formation of a group in March called the National Alliance of Christian Militia. Compton, who claims 85% of the militia movement is Christian, says the new alliance is an attempt to distinguish their efforts from...
Compton, who quit his job as a real estate agent in the lumber community of Shingletown to run armed-militia training camps, says all these preparations are for the sake of his children. "I decided I'd do everything in my power to make sure that when my son grows up, he'll have the same freedoms I had," he explains. His children, who range in age from 3 to 11, are schooled at home by Compton and his wife. Compton fled the San Francisco Bay Area 10 years ago to settle on a 48-hectare mountain ranch...
Increasingly these local-control activists are finding common cause with the militias. "Both have an antifederal outlook," says Dan Barry of the Environmental Working Group in Washington. "They run into each other because they have similar priorities." Indeed, their complaints are often indistinguishable. "We've been pushed so far by rules and regulations, the feds are in our pockets so deep, people are outraged," says Ronny Rardin, a commissioner in New Mexico's Otero County. The land-reform rebels have also been developing an appetite for militia-style conspiracy theories. "The New World Order will be running our lives through...