For all its seeming irrationalities–the baroquely elaborate plots, the vehement scapegoating of seemingly innocuous characters, the obsessive cataloguing of minutiae–the world of the conspiracy theorist is an eminently rational one. In this world nothing happens by chance; everything–from the outcome of presidential elections down to the hiring practices of the Texas School Book Depository–is carefully planned and masterfully executed. “How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster?” a famed political analyst once wondered. “It must be the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.”
After the Oklahoma bombing, I spent a good deal of time poking around the paranoid fringes of the Internet, digging up stray militia manifestos and instructions on how to make bombs, and listening in, as it were, on the discussions taking place in the more politically minded Usenet newsgroups. Everywhere I turned the discussion looked more or less the same: conspiracy theorizing and apocalyptic bluster dominated by those who blamed the U.S. government itself for the tragedy, arguing that the bombing was a kind of Reichstag fire orchestrated by the Clinton administration to make racist extremists look bad. One Usenet contributor suggested that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, expecting an attack, had used the day care center in the Oklahoma City federal building as a kind of “human shield” to protect them from terrorists; another even suggested that the BATF “had warnings about the bombing and collectively took the day off–yet failed to alert others in the building, particularly those in the day care center.”
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It seems a little silly to be surprised when would-be founding fathers don camouflage and join militias and start fretting about computer chips in their buttocks and the metal strips in $20 bills. These are wacky ideas, to be sure, but they’re no more wacky than the run-of-the-mill Kennedy assassination theories that have been floating around the edges of respectability for decades, involving everything from Oswald doubles and switched bodies to mysterious dart-shooting umbrellas.
This is bizarre, yes, but belief in the bizarre is as American as apple pie and tabloid television. Americans, for example, not only believe in UFOs, but, according to polls taken over the last 20 years (including a recent one conducted by Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University), about half of all Americans are convinced that the government is hiding the truth about alien visitors from the public. In a recent document posted on the Internet, Jon Roland of the Texas Militia Correspondence Committee outlines the conspiratorial designs of what he calls the “shadow government”–made up of financiers, government officials, and (in some undefinable way) space aliens. “UFOs and aliens seem to be involved,” he writes. “Perhaps only as a manufactured opportunity/threat, but more likely the people in charge of dealing with the matter are using a real situation to expand their power.”
Conspiracy is nothing new in American politics. Indeed one could almost say that America was founded in paranoia. In some respects the American Revolution was less an independence movement than a desperate attempt to defend the rights of colonists from the nefarious plotting of a royal cabal. It’s no wonder that contemporary militiamen look back with such fondness on the founding fathers; they share a similar worldview.
Now perhaps I’m being alarmist, but 100,000 seems to me rather a lot. Particularly when you start talking guns. In its heyday in the 30s, America’s much-dreaded Communist Party had fewer members than that; left groups today struggle along with memberships in the low hundreds. And the reds were then (and are today) armed only with pamphlets and their own big mouths; the militias pack both ideology and ammunition. If anything, the notoriety of the Oklahoma bombing has added to their appeal: according to the ADL, the militia movement has continued to grow since Oklahoma.
