Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
The “Identity Movement” originated in the post World War II McCarthy era when a handful of military officers joined the radical right and formed a loose coalition that declared war on “Z.O.G”, the Zionist Occupied Government. Their mission was to bring America back to the America of its founding fathers.
Decades later, that coalition would evolve into the Committee of the States. In 1984, representatives from twelve states assembled in Mariposa California to form a compact which called for the elimination of income taxes and the replacement of the Congress of the United States. The Compact was filed at the Mariposa County Recorder’s office where it lay, unnoticed, for two years. It was the first time in history that far right groups had united under one banner. To commemorate the occasion, silver coins (see cover) were privately minted in Sacramento and sold throughout the nation. Shortly afterward, Constructive Notices were sent out to the government officials informing them that anyone who interfered with the Committee would be indicted for treason and put to death by the Committee’s militia.
The Compact was signed on July 4, 1984 at the 100 acre ranch of Colonel William Potter Gales, a former staff officer of General Douglas MacArthur and director of guerrilla operations in the Philippines during World War II. Gale, identified as the founder of the Identity Movement by public media, had traveled the nation for twenty years preaching his doctrines on radio programs and training paramilitary organizations.
Unknown to the Committee of the States, a sleeping giant had awakened. Federal attorneys from California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Idaho and Alabama were already meeting in Seattle to form Operation Clean Sweep, a joint effort by the FBI, the IRS, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to arrest and convict targeted right-wing leaders. Colonel Gale and Committee members from Arizona and Nevada were subsequently swept up in a tide of arrests.
When investigative reporter Cheri Seymour was assigned to cover the October 23, 1986, arrest and trail of Colonel Gale, she embarked on a journey of discovery that would take her to the heart of the extreme right. She had not been briefed on Gale’s background and she reported just the circumstances of the arrest: dozens of FBI agents and federal marshalls, armed with shotguns and automatic weapons, swooped into Mariposa, a small town in California’s Sierra foothills, and arrested a frail, seventy-year-old Colonel for allegedly threatening the IRS.
Her unembellished news account led the reclusive “godfather of the far-right” to do something he had done only once before and vowed he would never do again: talk to the press. During the last year of his life, through his trial and conviction, Gale poured out his life story and the history of the Movement to Seymour. He introduced her to other right-wing leaders and gave her access to meetings, files, letters, mementos and documents.
Through Gale, Seymour uncovered the behind-the-scenes dynamics of the extreme-right underground and taped hundreds of hours of interviews with its members. For three years she amassed files of court documents, military records, press accounts and official reports from the IRS, the FBI and the state attorney general’s office. The resulting book, Committee of the States, is an unparalleled investigative report and oral history of one of the most organized and complex movements America has ever seen.
The Jacket photograph of a Committee of the States 1984 Articles of Confederation B221 is credited to: Stan Pierce, Mariposa Photographic Studio, Mariposa, California 95338.
"They were pretty well fixed up with weapons," recalls Howard "Slick" Alfred, the Henderson County sheriff at the time. "They had better weapons than we had. There was children in there. He was kind of hiding behind those kids. I didn't want another Waco kind of deal." And it's not as if Gray was a threat to the community, Alfred adds. "He's not hurting anybody over there."
The focus at Patriot meetings varies according to who’s talking, usually revolving around the keynote speaker. At Richard Mack meetings, the emphasis is on gun control and recruiting law-enforcement officers to the Patriot cause. Gene Schroder and Gary DeMott sessions revolve around ``constitutional law’’ and the ``common law’’ courts. And at MOM meetings and others like them, the emphasis is on confronting the New World Order by forming militias.
In all of them, though, the message remains essentially the same: The world is rotting at the seams. The American way of life, embodied in the Constitution, is threatened by forces conspiring to enslave the world. Only by forming an armed Patriotic resistance can their plans be thwarted.
By challenging the mainstream view -- that the world is essentially a safe place, that the nation is, in general, functional, even if it has problems -- the Patriots persuade their followers to place themselves outside the rest of society. Simultaneously, they offer a social structure of their own, drawn together by a Patriot sensibility that informs every aspect of the followers’ lives: legal, religious, even business behavior becomes an expression of their beliefs.
This is how people are drawn into the alternative universe of the Patriots, a world in which the same events occur as those that befall the rest of us, but all are seen through a different lens. Anything that makes it into a newspaper or the evening broadcast -- say, flooding in the Cascades, or the arrival of U.S. troops in Bosnia -- may be just another story for most of us, but to a Patriot, these widely disparate events all are connected to the conspiracy. Believers tend to organize in small local groups. They all have similar-sounding names -- Concerned Citizens for Constitutional Law, Alliance for America, and the like. They play host to the touring Patriots, the local leaders nervously introducing their admired guests. These groups operate out of the public limelight, on a low-level communications system: a combination of mailings, faxes and even Internet postings all advertise the meetings locally and regionally. Rarely does an announcement make the local mainstream press.
Most of the Patriots’ real recruiting takes place before the meetings, by word of mouth. It usually works like this:
John, a Patriot, tells Joe, a co-worker at his plant who’s going through a divorce, that he can find out ``what’s really going on’’ by attending a militia meeting. The Patriots, Joe is told, have answers to the moral decay that’s behind the way men get screwed in divorce cases.
Joe attends. He thinks the New World Order theories might be possible. He buys a video tape, maybe a book. It all starts to fit together. So this is why he hasn’t been able to get ahead in the world economically, he tells himself. He attends another meeting. Pretty soon he’s getting ``Taking Aim’’ in the mail.
Joe tells his neighbor Sam about the Patriots. Sam is dubious, but he’s been having a hell of a time paying his taxes, and Joe passes on what he knows about the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Reserve from the Patriot literature he’s read. Sam is intrigued. He reads some of Joe’s material. He goes to the next meeting with Joe. A month or two later, Sam starts drawing up papers to declare himself a ``sovereign citizen.’’
Sam goes to a picnic outing at his parents’ house. His older brother Jeff, an engineer at Boeing, asks Sam about the ``sovereign citizen’’ stuff. Sam explains. Jeff, too, is dubious, but he also happens to be a gun collector and sometime hunter, and he’s received mailings from the National Rifle Association that lead him to wonder if there isn’t something to this whole militia thing. When Sam starts talking about how the government is out of control, passing unconstitutional laws like the Brady Bill, Jeff tunes in. A month later, he, too, sits in on a Patriot town-hall meeting.
One by one it builds. Any of a number of vital issues -- land use, property rights, banking, economics, politics, gun control, abortion, education, welfare -- can serve as a drawing card. In many cases, they are deeply divisive, polarizing matters that the mainstream fails to adequately address.
Once recruits pass through any of these gateways into the Patriot universe, they are drawn further, inexorably. What once seemed like a screwed-up government has become monstrously, palpably evil. Then they learn about Patriot legal theories from people like the Freemen or from Schroder and DeMott:
* The Federal Reserve is bankrupt, a front for a phony system, run by private corporations, of printing money that really only helps keep rich bankers awash in cash.
* The Internal Revenue Service is illegal. Federal taxes actually are strictly voluntary.
* You can exempt yourself from paying federal taxes by filing a statement declaring yourself a ``sovereign citizen.’’ This ostensibly frees you from obligation to the United States -- which Patriots say is just an illegal corporation based in Washington, D.C. -- by nullifying your participation in the federal citizenship status established by the 14th Amendment.
* This distinction, arguing that only the 14th Amendment extends federal citizenship to minorities, forms the basis for the Patriots’ contention that only white male Christian property owners enjoy full citizenship under the ``organic Constitution.’’
* In fact, the only valid U.S. Constitution is this ``organic Constitution’’ -- that is, the main body of the Constitution and the first ten amendments, or the Bill of Rights. Patriots believe the remaining amendments either should be repealed or were approved illegally anyway. In any case, they would end the prohibition of slavery (13th Amendment); equal protection under the law (14th Amendment); prohibitions against racial or ethnic discrimination (15th Amendment); the income tax (16th Amendment); direct election of Senators (17th Amendment); the vote for women (19th Amendment); and a host of other constitutional protections passed since the time of the Founders.
* Establishing ``sovereign citizenship,’’ or ``Quiet Title’’ (which similarly declares a person a ``freeman’’), exempts a person from the rules of ``equity courts,’’ which means you don’t have to pay for licenses, building permits, or traffic citations, not to mention taxes.
* The only real courts with power are the ``common law’’ courts comprised of sovereign citizens, which have the power to issue rulings and liens against public officials they deem to have overstepped their bounds. If these officials fail to uphold the common-law courts, they can be found guilty of treason, and threatened with the appropriate penalty: hanging.
It is at this end of the Patriot universe that much of its deeper agenda is revealed. When Patriots talk about ``restoring the Constitution,’’ what they often have in mind is a campaign to roll back protections embodied in a wide range of amendments, as well as establishing a reading of the Second Amendment radically different from the one traditionally accepted by the U.S. court system.
It also is at this end of the universe that the charges of divisiveness and racism often leveled at the Patriots take on some weight. Plainly, the constitutional rollbacks would return the American system to a time when racial justice was not a considered concept. Not surprisingly, this is where the Patriots most closely resemble, and arguably are directly descended from, openly racist and anti-Semitic belief systems like those found in the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations, and the Posse Comitatus.
Most of these views are often dismissed by the mainstream legal profession as simple nonsense promoted by crackpots. And for the most part, the Patriots’ legal theories completely disintegrate when factually examined in the cold light of day. Nonetheless, the movement’s ranks continue to grow, and the mainstream courts, particularly in rural jurisdictions, now are faced with a sudden deluge of ``common law’’ documents that throw an already overburdened system into a tangle.
All the same, there is no law against being a crackpot. Otherwise, hundreds of Elvis sighters and UFO abductees would be rotting in prison cells alongside the Patriots, most of whom also are quite free to spread their conspiracy theories. The concern, rather, is what happens when the agenda of the Patriots, constructed out of an insular, paranoiac view of reality, tries to assert itself in the mainstream world. If their form of ``republic’’ comes to be, most of society’s current protections against racial injustice would vanish. Believers’ attempts to effect this agenda is certain to come into real conflict with mainstream Americans. Moreover, when Patriots begin to threaten public officials with hanging and other kinds of bodily harm, the potential for violence enters into the picture.
``What is going on in our society when somebody can come up with an idea like this, and a package of materials like this, and attract 200 people to a community meeting?’’ wonders Ken Toole, director of the Montana Human Rights Network. Toole has attended many of the sessions.
``To me, it's almost like a canary in a coal mine, and it's very indicative of how negative and hostile we've become about ourselves -- that somehow these people have managed to objectify the government at all levels, blame it for all kinds of things, and look for a way to kind of focus that anger.’’
josey wales wrote:First, how can a person that shares both a black and white parent be considered as 'passing for white'? They are, by definition, as much white as black. I suppose Spiro operates under the 'one drop' rule.
josey wales wrote:Secondly, Strauss is no conservative. He is a "neo-conservative". The broad brush that is generally applied to anyone that holds views outside the Left is no longer applicable. That fact has been brouhgt into sharp contrast during the reign of Bush II. That brush, I might add, is used here with regularity.
josey wales wrote:There is a growing movement of anti-war, pro-liberty 'conservatives' that have the establishment RNC very worried.
josey wales wrote:And finally, most of this navel gazing about "Right" and "Left" and Fascism is a smoke screen to divert attention away from the fact that the people at the top play both sides and are only interested in power and maintaining the 'system'. One only has to look as far as Obama to see that principle at work.
American Dream wrote:
A bumper crop of works on influential early 20th century American racists, fascists and eugenicists has been hitting the bookshelves in 2009. Two of the most interesting are on Madison Grant (1865-1937), perhaps the most important conservationist of his time and so pernicious a racist and anti-Semite that he helped inspire Hitler's policies, and Lawrence Dennis (1893-1977), the biggest defender of fascism in the 1930s, who was, surprisingly, a black man passing for white.
Jonathan Peter Spiro's biography of Grant, a very rich member of the American WASP elite, is eye opening. It is astonishing to realize how many major American figures of the early 1900s were so rabidly racist and anti-Semitic — and perfectly willing to use the power of the state to sterilize those they saw as lesser beings. Spiro's book is fundamental to understanding how profoundly our nation has been shaped by racist and anti-Semitic ideas.
Grant was a member of Theodore Roosevelt's Boone and Crockett Club, an exclusive organization focused originally on big game hunting, and later big game protection, that included a few hundred of the 26th president's closest friends. A celebrated fixture in New York's prestigious private clubs, Grant was also the founder of several important institutions, including the Bronx Zoo.
American Dream wrote:http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=1109
A Decade of Defiance
A 10-Year Standoff in Texas Raises Thorny Issues
By Larry Keller
Jonathan Gray performs sentry duty at his father's compound in Texas.
<snip>
No Regrets
In recent years, Gray and his family have lived in obscurity. It wasn't always so. In August 2000, Austin, Texas-based radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones told his audience he had received a tip that federal agents were preparing to attack Gray's compound in armored vehicles. Reporters from The New York Times, The Washington Post and other media outlets descended on tiny Trinidad for a confrontation that never came.
That same month, three armed men ventured into a neighboring pasture at dusk and destroyed a surveillance camera and video transmitter that authorities had placed in a horse trailer, before retreating to the Gray property. And later that year, Chuck Norris, martial artist, actor, right-wing Christian book author and fellow Texan, met with Gray at his ranch and offered to get him free legal representation in an attempt to end the standoff. "There's two people that family looks up to: Mel Gibson and Chuck," an intermediary said. But even Norris couldn't resolve the impasse.
The Gray Standoff on ABC 20/20 Part 1 of 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtkK9pWWOlQ
The Gray Standoff on ABC 20/20 Part 1 of 2 From: MikeHansonArchives | June 03, 2008 | 8,633 views I Mike Hanson, answered the comment line and worked in Alex Jones office for many years.
Mrs. Gray sent letters and called for several years trying get me to talk Alex into going to East Texas to do a story for his TV and radio show for the Grays personal problems relating to a custody battle over their grandkids.
Alex didn't want to do a story on a personal problem but the Grays persisted in calling.
Later the custody battle turned into a standoff situation as a result of John Gray being stopped in his vehicle and refusing to go to court. Mrs. Gray called my cell phone with this new information about the standoff.
Alex and I went to the Gray Ranch to talk to the Grays and ended up staying off and on for the next several weeks. Mrs. Gray personally asked me to tape and air their story.
I stayed up 24 hours in a row editing the video which played on Public Access TV the next night after getting the footage. The same footage that was released to 20/20 was shown on Access TV at Mrs. Grays request before it was shown on 20/20. So the video was already in the public domain.
If I had known the way the Grays would turn on Alex and I, even as far as pulling a gun on us, I would not have spent so much time trying to help them, and would instead have spent the time with my wife and young children.
When 20/20 showed up at the Gray ranch I witnessed John Gray agree to do a televised interview with 20/20 and allowing them to use his family's images on national television. What John Gray didn't like was the way 20/20 used his son-in-law to get the other side of the story. I think 20/20 and his son-in-law are what John Gray was upset about. The piece that 20/20 did was a fair piece in my opinion and John Gray didn't like it.
With the interest that Alex generated with his Access TV and radio show I personally saw a 16 foot long shed filled to the roof with canned foods, dry foods, ammunition and guns, that were donated by listeners as a direct result of Alex telling their story on the air. Also Alex offered to pay the Grays past due electric bill which had been cutoff due to non-payment of the bill. They declined Alex's offer.
As to the money, I received 300 dollars from Alex several months later, to help recoup expenses I incurred for hotel rooms, gas, tapes, food etc... Which was far less what I spent.
In the next week or so Nate will be uploading the full version of "The Gray Standoff" video, produced by me and narrated by Alex Jones. Also the 20/20 video. It's easy to compare the two videos and why John Gray didn't like the 20/20 version. You can see that John Gray blamed his problems on everyone else without excepting his own responsibility. I find in my personal life that I have to accept responsibility for the mistakes I make. I see John Gray as making mistakes and blaming them them on others. Blaming his own misjudgments on Masons, Son-in-Law, courts, police, etc...
It was almost like John Gray wanted a confrontation with the police. Our goal was to remove a Waco scenario with more dead children. The Grays loved the attention they were getting from Alex's show but when the 20/20 piece aired with a different slant on the story then what Alex was talking about, they took it out on Alex.
I feel extremely hesitant to try and help anyone else in a standoff situation after the lessons learned from the Gray standoff. I felt like truth of what we tried to do has been twisted, mainly by John Gray himself and other So called Christian websites. Especially Alex has had his reputation tarnished by John Grays lies.
I know Alex and Alex has a good heart and tried to do the right thing in this situation.
God Bless
Mike Hanson
512-292-0070
The Gray Standoff on ABC 20/20 Part 2 of 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX78CRXdBlU
I Mike Hanson, answered the comment line and worked in Alex Jones office for many years.
Mrs. Gray sent letters and called for several years trying get me to talk Alex into going to East Texas to do a story for his TV and radio show for the Grays personal problems relating to a custody battle over their grandkids.
Alex didn't want to do a story on a personal problem but the Grays persisted in calling.
Later the custody battle turned into a standoff situation as a result of John Gray being stopped in his vehicle and refusing to go to court. Mrs. Gray called my cell phone with this new information about the standoff.
Alex and I went to the Gray Ranch to talk to the Grays and ended up staying off and on for the next several weeks. Mrs. Gray personally asked me to tape and air their story.
I stayed up 24 hours in a row editing the video which played on Public Access TV the next night after getting the footage. The same footage that was released to 20/20 was shown on Access TV at Mrs. Grays request before it was shown on 20/20. So the video was already in the public domain.
If I had known the way the Grays would turn on Alex and I, even as far as pulling a gun on us, I would not have spent so much time trying to help them, and would instead have spent the time with my wife and young children.
When 20/20 showed up at the Gray ranch I witnessed John Gray agree to do a televised interview with 20/20 and allowing them to use his family's images on national television. What John Gray didn't like was the way 20/20 used his son-in-law to get the other side of the story. I think 20/20 and his son-in-law are what John Gray was upset about. The piece that 20/20 did was a fair piece in my opinion and John Gray didn't like it.
With the interest that Alex generated with his Access TV and radio show I personally saw a 16 foot long shed filled to the roof with canned foods, dry foods, ammunition and guns, that were donated by listeners as a direct result of Alex telling their story on the air. Also Alex offered to pay the Grays past due electric bill which had been cutoff due to non-payment of the bill. They declined Alex's offer.
As to the money, I received 300 dollars from Alex several months later, to help recoup expenses I incurred for hotel rooms, gas, tapes, food etc... Which was far less what I spent.
In the next week or so Nate will be uploading the full version of "The Gray Standoff" video, produced by me and narrated by Alex Jones. Also the 20/20 video. It's easy to compare the two videos and why John Gray didn't like the 20/20 version. You can see that John Gray blamed his problems on everyone else without excepting his own responsibility. I find in my personal life that I have to accept responsibility for the mistakes I make. I see John Gray as making mistakes and blaming them them on others. Blaming his own misjudgments on Masons, Son-in-Law, courts, police, etc...
It was almost like John Gray wanted a confrontation with the police. Our goal was to remove a Waco scenario with more dead children. The Grays loved the attention they were getting from Alex's show but when the 20/20 piece aired with a different slant on the story then what Alex was talking about, they took it out on Alex.
I feel extremely hesitant to try and help anyone else in a standoff situation after the lessons learned from the Gray standoff. I felt like truth of what we tried to do has been twisted, mainly by John Gray himself and other So called Christian websites. Especially Alex has had his reputation tarnished by John Grays lies.
I know Alex and Alex has a good heart and tried to do the right thing in this situation.
God Bless
Mike Hanson
512-292-0070
http://www.mikehansonarchives.com
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