While I have no way of knowing what John Trochmann truly believes, I could find no overtly racist or anti-Semitic statements in the publications or the videotapes distributed by the Militia of Montana. And militantly racist groups rarely hide their agendas, which are, after all, how they attract members.
The level of scholarship in the Klanwatch report is perhaps best demonstrated by the statement, "The foot soldiers in these groups are just the type of people that Klan and neo-Nazi leaders have recruited in recent years." For students of logic, this could be translated into the syllogism: "All Klansmen and neo-Nazis are white, own guns, and don't like the federal government. Therefore all whites who own guns and don't like the federal government should be feared as Klansmen or neo-Nazis."
Using innuendo, guilt by association, and stereotypes to tar people as racist, anti-Semitic, and potentially violent could be considered as much a hate act as the burning of crosses. Such indiscriminate accusations pin targets on people like the Tuttles by identifying them as objects to be attacked with impunity. This, in turn, creates the distrust that can result in disastrous confrontations between law enforcement officers and legally armed citizens. That's what happened at Waco. Another such disaster could have happened in Roundup, Montana in early March. That it didn't suggests that the militias are more peaceful and rational than their critics make out.
Gun-toting radicals busted in Montana," read the Spokane Spokesman-Review banner headline. Seven men had been arrested in Roundup on suspicion that they intended to kidnap and hang a judge or other public officials. The newspaper added that local officials were treating the case as though the suspects were high-risk terrorists. One of the men arrested was John Trochmann. The news story referred to the two civil rights watchdog reports and repeated their description of Trochmann and other officers of the Militia of Montana as men who had "long been involved in the white supremacist movement" and who promoted armed resistance to federal and state authorities.
Within 48 hours after the arrests, the leaders and most of the members of the citizen-militia groups knew about the arrests and wondered if they marked the beginning of a long-rumored roundup of militia leaders by federal law enforcement agencies. But it was the county sheriff, not the BATF or the FBI, who made the arrests in Roundup, a town about 500 miles away from Trochmann's home base in Noxon.
Trochmann, who actively monitors a number of anti-government groups, had gone as an observer with a group of Freemen to file papers at the Musselshell County Court House. The Freemen are tax resisters who oppose all government regulation of individual behavior, even the requirement that one carry a driver's license. After the court rejected the papers on legal grounds, a vocal but nonviolent altercation developed outside the courtroom. Sheriff's deputies arrested the five men and charged them with a basketful of felonies, including criminal endangerment, intimidation, and criminal syndicalism. Trochmann wasn't directly involved in the altercation but had been waiting outside in a parked car with one other person. Nevertheless, the sheriff arrested them both as part of the suspected conspiracy.
If the whole militia movement, or just the Militia of Montana, had been looking for an excuse to go to war, this would have been the opportunity. But no one mobilized and marched on Roundup. Instead, John Trochmann's nephew, Randy, made a public plea on a Spokane TV station and on the Internet, asking that all militia members stay home and send money to help pay for legal fees.
Simply put, the local law overreacted when a bunch of well-armed strangers rode into town. On March 29, Montana officials dropped all charges against five of the seven people, including John Trochmann, and the felony charges against the other two men. Eventually the Musselshell County authorities must prove to a jury that the two men still facing charges did commit misdemeanor weapon violations. They may also have to prove in civil court that there was reasonable cause for the arrest of the five already released.
That's the way that charges of crimes and government abuses are supposed to be settled in this country. The people I talked with would rather do it that way.
The events that followed the arrest of Timothy McVeigh suggest that the members of citizen-militia associations may have been fearful of the wrong institution. Their most dangerous enemy may not be the federal government but the national news media.
"When the FBI authorities were quoted, they were all very circumspect," says Bob Clarke. "The press very gladly lumped everybody together as a right-wing extremist, racist type of a cult. It's all the same to them. The media hasn't done a very good job of understanding this whole militia thing. There is a lot of misinformation coming off the airwaves."
There is indeed. After days of watching the media coverage on every one of the three major TV networks and reading through reams of news reports and critical editorial comment, I had neither heard nor read a single shred of court-admissible evidence that suggested that any unit of the militia movement was engaged in any conspiracy to overthrow the government or to commit any other crime in support of their political agenda.
Innuendo and scare quotes, largely taken out of context, dominated the reports. Even the advocates of conspiracy theories, such as Mark Koernke, never call for the overthrow of government in their material. While TV news people can play quotes out of context, anyone who watches hours of his militia videos knows that when a battle-ready Mark Koernke talks about defending one's sector, he's talking about a reaction force resisting an invasion, not the beginning of the revolution.
And some reports seemed deliberately misleading. ABC, for instance, showed a headline from The Resister, a publication of the self-proclaimed Special Forces Underground that is read by some militia members. It read: "Would You Shoot Fellow Americans?" ABC didn't tell viewers that the article is an exposé of a survey distributed by a Marine to his troops--not a call to arms.
One may not like the militia movement's political agenda, one may find its members' conspiracy theories troubling, and one may be offended by the idea that middle-class men and women are training with deadly weapons because of a fear that the government may someday attack them. But journalists have a responsibility to be accurate and careful, not merely entertaining and provocative. It is a responsibility they have too often shirked in reports on the militias.
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