Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [132]
“I know you don’t believe in what we’re doing,” he said, as he wiped the bottom of the stew dish with his white powdered biscuit, “but I think if you get to know us you will see that we don’t have horns or a tail. All we ask is that you honestly show what you see here and let the people in the theater decide for themselves.”
I told him that James Ridgeway was bringing two co-directors with him: a woman, Anne Bohlen, who had received an Oscar nomination for a short film about the Flint Sit-Down Strike, and Kevin Rafferty, who had made a number of documentaries. I told him that they do not editorialize in their movies, that they don’t use a narrator, that they just like to be flies on the wall and let the cameras roll. He liked all of that and gave his blessing for his gathering of hate groups to be featured in a movie.
Ridgeway, Bohlen, and Rafferty flew in the day before the convention so they could meet me and map out a plan. It was the first time I had ever been around a film crew or anything like this. I was all ears.
“OK,” said Kevin Rafferty, who was clearly the leader of the pack. “Mike, they trust you, so you stick by us. No need to say anything; we’ll direct the questions. Jim’s done all the research. Just hang nearby if we need you.”
“Sure,” I said, excited about being part of a film crew, whatever that meant. “Whatever you need.”
“I’ll be on the main camera, Robert will be second camera [Robert Stone, the acclaimed documentary director of Radio Bikini], and Anne [Bohlen] will do sound with Charlie and Mo [two film students]. We’re a pretty big crew, so we want to try to blend in and not get in their way.”
“Blending in” was not possible. When we arrived at Miles’s farm, greeting us were a few hundred solid American citizens bedecked in Nazi uniforms, spiffy sportswear emblazoned with various versions of the swastika, KKK outerwear, Aryan Nations buttons and badges, sashes that proclaimed white power and Christian superiority, and a whole lotta guys and gals who looked like they did not follow the cautionary guidelines from the National Institutes of Health regarding the downside of breeding within one’s family.
They viewed us with appropriate suspicion, yet nearly all were willing to be filmed. All, except Miles’s two co-gurus: Robert Butler, the head of the Aryan Nations in Hayden Lake, Idaho, and William Pierce, head of the National Alliance (the descendants of the American Nazi Party) and author of The Turner Diaries, a novel about America being overthrown by Jews, which leads to a race war in which all Jews and nonwhites are exterminated.8
Pierce and Butler were clearly smart enough to know we were up to no good, and they did not share Bob Miles’s attitude that they had nothing to hide. Miles was treated like the elder statesman of the event and, because this was his farm, all others deferred to his decisions, even if somewhat reluctantly. We were allowed to stay.
We began to spend time with some of the attendees. They were not shy with us.
“Who are you?” one man angrily asked, as he got right up into our collective face. “Where are you from? You working with the Feds?”
“We’re from New York,” Anne responded while doing her best to hide her nervousness.
“Figures—a bunch of Jews!” he grumbled. “I’m a violent anti-Sematic! I hate ’em all,” he said as he started to walk away.
“None of us are Jews,” Kevin said, trying to relax the man so he would keep talking. I picked up on his cue.
“I’m not from New York,” I offered. “I’m from right here.”
As I was not well-known at this time—and, truthfully, I looked a lot like most of them—the man turned around, sized me up, and continued on, speaking only to me.
“You don’t look like a race traitor. You are white and this is your country. It’s been taken from us by a bunch of race traitors. I will not rest until they are all removed.”
I kept the best straight race-traitor face that I could. There were six of us and two hundred of them. We had cameras, they had guns. Lots of them, I presumed. It was like we were