Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [106]
Finally, Heston issued a call to arms to the conservative heroes of the Free Congress Foundation, imploring, “Mainstream America is depending on you—counting on you—to draw your sword and fight for them.” And whom should these white knights fight against? Heston counted off the bad guys—“The fringe propaganda of the homosexual coalition, the feminists who preach that it’s a divine duty for women to hate men, blacks who raise a militant fist with one hand while they seek preference with the other, and all the New-Age apologists for juvenile crime, who see roving gangs as a means of youthful expression, sex as a means of adolescent merchandising, violence as a form of entertainment for impressionable minds, and gun bans as a means to lord-knows-what.”
And that’s persecution politics at its finest, an “appealing wondrous story” of an epic battle between the new oppressed class—straight white Christian gun-owning conservatives—and their new overlords—militant homosexuals, angry blacks, man-hating feminists, and Hollywood elites.
Refreshing the Tree of Liberty
Combining the NRA’s gun rights rhetoric with the right wing’s racial and religious persecution narratives, as Heston did, is like spanking a tiger with a chain saw. It joins the potent moral force of ethnic grievances with the stirring call to arms of militarists. Bearing arms to defend the Constitution from tyrants has its appeal, but bearing arms to defend one’s culture, creed, and race from malevolent enemies is one of those core human imperatives that can drive people insane with fury. And sure enough, the kind of rhetoric espoused by Heston has been driving people insane with fury.
Right-wing militias have been experimenting with volatile compounds of persecution and violence for decades. The first modern militias sprouted in the 1960s and 1970s from a fecund stew of racism, religious fanaticism, and antigovernment paranoia. For example, members of the Posse Comitatus, founded in 1969, believed that white Christian Americans are the Chosen People, anointed by God to fight a religious war against the Satan-backed Jews, blacks, communists, homosexuals, and race traitors who had seized control of the federal government.29
In the early 1990s, militia membership exploded, and a motley collection of white supremacists, gun rights militants, antitaxers, religious zealots, and new world order conspiracists coalesced into what became known as the Patriot movement. The Patriot groups acted out the stories that leaders like Wayne LaPierre had been spinning. They stockpiled weapons and practiced military drills to prepare for the defense of white Christian Americans from the jackbooted thugs, liberal despots, international Jews, militant blacks, immigrant gangs, and other assorted villains who threatened their survival.
Some militiamen, intoxicated by paranoia, went beyond preparation. In 1984, Gordon Kahl of the Posse Comitatus was killed in a shootout when police sought to arrest him for the murder of two U.S. Marshalls. In 1994, two members of the Minnesota Patriots Council were arrested for plotting to poison federal agents with the deadly toxin ricin. In 1995, militia sympathizers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols defended America from jackbooted thugs by blowing up a federal office building in Oklahoma City, killing 149 adults and 19 children. A few months later, the leader of the Oklahoma Constitutional Militia and two accomplices were arrested as they prepared explosives to bomb gay bars and abortion clinics. The following year, twelve members