Word: trochmann
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...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 the "evidence" of one-world conspiracy...
...says Potok, "there were a lot of angry letters in the extremist publications saying, 'You've made fools of us--we have a basement full of supplies and nothing to use them for.'" But if the militias are fading, some of their paranoid fervor lives on. Take John Trochmann, who still runs the Militia of Montana. "If they kill McVeigh, they'll be destroying more evidence that points to the government," he says. But fewer Americans are listening...
...John Trochmann, the militia's cofounder, distributes literature that would terrify many people. It features photographs of Soviet jeeps said to be on American soil. Russian troops are going to arrive here as part of an international police force, contends Trochmann's newsletter, Taking Aim. Our own government, the literature asserts, is guilty of "treason," is secretly building concentration camps and is planning nine zones to replace the lower 48 states--a partition plan that the Militia of Montana asserts was spelled out in an illustration on the back of Kix cereal boxes last year. Martial law is inevitable...
Another strand in the alienated right is known as constitutionalism, a belief that the government has violated the Constitution. These arguments are generally not as aggressive as Trochmann's, but adherents all but renounce their citizenship. Stewart Balint is a handsome, blue-eyed construction worker in Priest River, Idaho, whose family lost its farm to bankers. He told me his studies of law had led him to the understanding that government powers are not legally derived. "I've gotten rid of all my contracts with government," he said. "Rescinded them. Social Security, birth certificate. Driving license, hunting license. I know...
...will rescue the Constitution are an underground army of men who have semiautomatics cached in barrels in the woods and who know you can catch catfish with Ivory soap as bait, men whom society now views as "outcast," "strange" or "erratic primitives" (in highlighted descriptions from clippings in Trochmann's mailings...