McVeigh’s Earplugs, and The Militia

It was the earplugs that really got to her.

Penny Cockerell and I sat near Boston, the cradle of the American Revolution. We talked about the self-described “patriot” Timothy McVeigh. It had always bothered her, Penny said, that McVeigh had earplugs in his pocket when the cops caught him about an hour after his truck bomb detonated outside the Murrah building in Oklahoma City.

He planned and executed a bombing that murdered 168 people and injured more than 500 others. He also protected his hearing.

I first met Penny in 2003 when I became a Dart Center Ochberg Fellow. I knew that she’d covered the Oklahoma City bombing for her hometown paper. She spoke some about how her newsroom and community wrestled with the challenge. It wasn’t until years later though, after I’d had the honor of working with her on the Dart Society board, that Penny finally opened up a little about McVeigh and his evil.

She’d written thousands of words about him across the better part of a decade. She’d interviewed his father, attended his trial and covered his execution.

For all his “patriot” posturing, McVeigh was a coward, Penny said. His bomb brought the silence of the grave to innocents, but he selfishly made certain that he had earplugs, so he’d still be able to hear bird song or listen to the voice of a loved one on the telephone.

McVeigh’s 1995 arrest drew sharp attention to the patriot movement, which was then active, and continues to survive in many parts of the country, including my community in the Pacific Northwest.

The “patriots” take that healthy, very American mistrust for government and ride it all the way to the end of a lonely gravel road where the guns are kept close and ears are always straining for the noise of approaching helicopter rotors. It is a movement based on fear.

For “patriots,” the government isn’t just out to tax you, or make you slow down on the freeway, or mandate where you can smoke, or decide what tests your kid must pass to get out of the third grade. Instead, governments that can’t reliably fix potholes or keep spending under budget are ascribed evil super powers.

They are said to be the secret agents of a decades-long conspiracy to usurp the Constitution and enslave freedom-loving people. Depending on the audience, that conspiracy is claimed to involve the British, the United Nations, international bankers, the authors of the federal tax code – even bureaucrats planning the placement and design of interstate highway signs, or tracking grizzly bears in the national parks.

Things can quickly get weird when one does journalism around these groups. Not long after McVeigh bombed the Murrah building, I was in my county auditor’s office, looking up documents filed by several people who were then “patriot” leaders in my community and advocating the formation of militias. The public records they’d filed asserted they were “sovereign” citizens, subject only to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Although they said the declarations were mainly about challenging the federal income tax, most of the paperwork contained language like this: “I am of the white race. My parents were of the white race. I am a white, natural born citizen …,” and so on. When I asked the authors what their race had to do with anything, they got angry. They said they weren’t racists, that I’d never understand, that I was too polluted by liberal jibber jabber.

These same people were convening community meetings where they suggested vast tracts of my county were about to be depopulated by government land-use planners. They said the aim was to create a playground for some shadowy international elite. The only way liberty would survive, some said, was if people began burying food and ammunition in their backyards, and started training for the day when it would all go to hell.

Some got together to practice small-unit military maneuvers. Others worked to establish their own system of “common law” courts, issuing roll-your-own legal writs and warrants. A few claimed to have formed their own county government, and picked as their sheriff a couch-surfing former FBI agent who told them they were right: the feds were out to place them in bondage.

Public life at times devolved. Men began showing up to intimidate school board members in one town, often dressing in camouflage and behaving like louts. At a 1994 county hearing, a man brandished a noose and said, “This is a message for you!” after an environmental activist spoke out in favor of limiting development near salmon-bearing streams. Another man reportedly grabbed the noose, waved it in the woman’s face, and told her, “We have a militia of 10,000, and if we can’t beat you at the ballot box we’ll beat you with a bullet.”

Troubling stuff, but not the whole picture. When I could get some of the “patriots” alone and was able to engage them in real conversations, there was a lot of common ground. Journalists develop well-founded distrust of government. We live by a code that honors truth and admire people who make hard choices because of principle.

While some in the patriot movement are mouth breathers, many have qualities that make them good neighbors and valued members of their community. My friend Dave Neiwert, who has done some of the most thoughtful journalism about the far right in this region,  probed that reality at length in his book, “In God’s Country, the Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest.”

It is critical to explore the paranoia, xenophobia and racism that underlie many “patriot” themes, but accurately portraying the people attracted to these ideas, and what makes them tick, takes time and respect for the truth, Niewert argues. In other words, it’s complicated.

Sometimes it takes years for the picture to come fully into focus.

In the mid-1990s I struck up something of a friendship with one local militia man. Matt had an off-kilter sense of humor and a public access television show. His Militia TV was a bit “Wayne’s World,” a bit “Red Dawn,” and funny in an I-shouldn’t-be-laughing-at-this way.

I wrote about what he was up to on the tube and we hit it off. Matt insisted he wasn’t planning armed revolt; he just liked his firearms, his freedoms and tweaking the government on TV. He was openly contemptuous of racists. He seemed to like them about as much as the “government thugs” he always insisted were coming for his guns.

Then one day the phone rang. Matt was freaking out. The feds had just arrested leaders of the Washington State Militia, the group he had joined. He figured he was next in the roundup. He wanted to tell a reporter – and anyone he believed was listening to his call – that he would go quietly; that there was no reason for violence.

Turns out his fears were misplaced. Unlike his militia compatriots, Matt didn’t wind up indicted for trafficking in fully automatic weapons, or getting himself tape recorded planning to kill police, or selling improvised explosive devices to federal agents. He was just a young guy with some unpopular ideas – and for the government he worried so much about, that posed absolutely no problem.

Matt broke with the militia and arranged to return to college. On his way out of town he dropped by the newsroom and gave me the Washington State Militia patch he’d cut off from his camouflage jacket. He was done. We corresponded for a time and then lost touch. When he resurfaced about five years ago, I felt sick. Matt was organizing Nazi rallies in communities around the Northwest. He described himself as the leader of a skinhead group. While there were reasons to doubt that claim, there was no mistaking the hate. I heard a recording of him at one rally. It was vile. The funny, talented guy I met in the mid-1990s was gone.

In the years since, I’ve written extensively about the Minutemen movement, or more particularly, about how an immigration-watch activist from my community, Shawna Forde, drifted into trouble down near the U.S.-Mexico border. In the desert, she participated in armed patrols very much like those exercises the militia folks were advocating around here just a few years ago. Forde now is accused of double murder and may face the death penalty for a home-invasion robbery that ended the lives of an Arivaca, Ariz., man and his 9-year-old daughter. Prosecutors allege the crimes were done to raise money for Forde’s group.

Much of the reporting about Forde’s case has centered on whether she represents the Minutemen. I imagine her trial in 2011 will put that question to rest.

As we mark the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, some in today’s patriot movement no doubt will think it unfair to link McVeigh and Matt to their worldview. Clearly, not everybody involved with militias thinks like these guys.

But the truth needs heard. In this, too, earplugs are for cowards.

Scott North, an assistant city editor at The Herald in Everett, Wash., is a 2003 fellow and president of the Dart Society.