Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [8]
The verbal abuse soon turned physical, and the SEALs were now on high alert. For security reasons, I will not go into too much detail here, partly on the advice of the agency and partly because I don’t want to give these criminals any more of the attention they were seeking:
In Nashville, a man with a knife leapt up on the stage and started coming toward me. The SEAL grabbed him from behind by his belt loop and collar and slung him off the front of the stage to the cement floor below. Someone had to mop up the blood after the SEALs took him away.
In Portland, a guy got on the outdoor stage and started coming at me with a blunt object that he apparently was going to use over my head. My assistant blocked him momentarily, and that gave the SEALs the jump they needed to grab him and take him away.
In Fort Lauderdale, a man in a nice suit saw me on the sidewalk and went crazy. He took the lid off his hot, scalding coffee and threw it at my face. The SEAL saw this happening but did not have the extra half-second needed to grab the guy, so he put his own face in front of mine and took the hit. The coffee burned his face so badly, we had to take him to the hospital (he had second-degree burns)—but not before the SEAL took the man face down to the pavement, placing his knee painfully in the man’s back, and putting him in cuffs.
In New York City, while I was holding a press conference outside one of the theaters showing Fahrenheit, a man walking by saw me, became inflamed, and pulled the only weapon he had on him out of his pocket—a very sharp and pointed #2 graphite pencil. As he lunged to stab me with it, the SEAL saw him and, in the last split second, put his hand up between me and the oncoming pencil. The pencil went right into the SEAL’s hand. You ever see a Navy SEAL get stabbed? The look on their face is the one we have when we discover we’re out of shampoo. The pencil stabber probably became a convert to the paperless society that day, once the SEAL was done with him and his sixteenth-century writing device.
In Denver, I appeared at a screening of my movie. Security found a man carrying a gun and had him removed. There were often guns found on people—always legal, of course, thanks to the new laws that let people carry handguns into public events.
More than once, some white guy just wanted to punch me. One time it was a group of skinheads. Another time it was a realtor. Each time, the SEALs stepped in and put their bodies between mine and the assailant’s. Most times we did not involve the police as we didn’t want it to become public, thinking that would only encourage copycats.
And then there was Lee James Headley. Sitting alone at his home in Ohio, Lee had big plans. The world, according to his diary, was a place dominated and being ruined by liberals. His comments read like the talking points of any given day’s episode of The Rush Limbaugh Show.
And so Lee made a list. It was a short list, but a list nonetheless of the people who had to go. The names on it were former attorney general Janet Reno, Senator Tom Harkin, Senator Tom Daschle, Rosie O’Donnell, and Sarah Brady. But at the top of the list was his number one target: “Michael Moore.” Beside my name he wrote, “MARKED” (as in “marked for death,” he would later explain).
Throughout the spring of 2004, Lee accumulated a huge amount of assault weapons, a cache of thousands of rounds of ammunition, and various bomb-making materials. He bought The Anarchist’s Cookbook and the race-war novel The Turner Diaries. His notebooks contained diagrams of rocket launchers and bombs, and he would write over and over: