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The arrangements for my first meeting with John Trochmann, in November 1994, were an exquisite exercise in paranoia. On the phone beforehand he had insisted he meet me at the bridge over the Clark Fork River near the little town of Noxon, Montana, where he lived. I had been waiting outside my car at the appointed spot for about ten minutes when he came driving across in his car.

He got out and we shook hands and sized each other up, chatting about the cold air and the freezing river. Trochmann was a slight, skinny man with a bristling gray beard and sharp eyes, with a slightly nervous demeanor. It was cold and our breaths formed little clouds of mist around our heads. I took some photos of him, and then he told me to follow him in his car.

There was nothing ultrasecret about our meeting place—a little restaurant-tavern in Noxon’s main street business district, a comfy hewn-log joint of a type common in these parts of Montana. Over the course of the next couple of hours, over coffee and a few sandwiches, Trochmann frankly laid out his alternative universe and plied me with piles of evidence he claimed proved its existence. He was not unlikable, but his personality had a brittle quality that made him seem volatile, so I chose not to push him too hard that day with questions.

He seemed to have a lot of friends in town, including the restaurant’s owner, who was working that afternoon behind the bar. A TV mounted high on the wall at the bar’s end played news from CNN, which began running reports from Hurricane Gordon, which had slammed into Florida.

Trochmann and the bartender exchanged knowing looks. “Boy, that’s really late, isn’t it?” he said. The man nodded. I asked him what he meant. Was he suggesting that someone was manipulating the weather?

“Sure,” Trochmann said. “Naples, Florida, got hit at the same time Naples, Idaho [site of the Ruby Ridge standoff], did.”

Really? That wasn’t just an odd coincidence?

“Yeah, right,” he retorted. “And I have another bridge for sale for you.”

John Trochmann believed in a lot of things. He believed the federal government was capable of manipulating the weather, even causing hurricanes, through a secret radar installation up in the Arctic. He believed the feds were building hidden concentration camps intended to house gun owners and right-wing Americans like himself. He believed they intended to recruit Bloods and Crips street-gang members to round them up into black helicopters. And that’s a mere sampling.

Trochmann, more than any other person, was the primary well-spring and original source of many of the conspiracy theories that flourished in the 1990s. He gave people like Alex Jones not only their inspiration but the grist for their conspiracy mills. Trochmann’s Militia of Montana (MOM), based out of his home in Noxon, was not a real militia—it was a mail-order operation that specialized in disseminating material explaining to people not only how they could form their own “citizen militias,” but why they should do so (the New World Order). Trochmann himself—a follower of the white-supremacist religious movement Christian Identity—was prone to lifting ideas, claims, and “evidence” from his fellow Patriots, but he gave them such wide distribution that MOM became known as the go-to source for conspiratorial explanations of virtually every modern problem and event.

It was Trochmann who first distributed maps showing the location of FEMA “concentration camps” where Americans would be rounded up under the New World Order (NWO); who first suggested that the government was using radio transmitters and chemtrails to control the weather and people’s behavior; and who first claimed that the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was a secret government “false flag” operation designed to discredit the Patriot movement.

Trochmann had been living under the shadow of the law for many years as a result of a custody dispute over his then-teenage daughter Brandi. She had run away at age thirteen with her father from her mother’s custody in Minnesota in 1988, the same year that Trochmann had moved from there to Montana, following in the footsteps of his brother Dave, another Identity member who had arrived in the state four years earlier. The girl had been seen numerous times with him around Noxon; eventually the local sheriff issued an arrest warrant, and Trochmann spent some time in the county jail on custodial-interference charges, but his daughter never did return to Minnesota. Instead, she became a teen bride when she married another member of their Christian Identity church.

The Trochmann brothers wound up playing a key role in one of the Patriot movement’s seminal events. Both brothers attended Christian Identity gatherings at the Church of Jesus Christ–Christian in Hayden Lake, Idaho, better known to the outside world as the home compound of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations. At those gatherings they became friends with Randy and Vicki Weaver, a young couple who in 1984 had fled Iowa to make a home in the deep woods of the Idaho Panhandle, about two hours’ drive from Noxon. It was called Ruby Ridge.

Rumors that Dave Trochmann might be involved in smuggling guns into the United States from Canada brought Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents sniffing around Ruby Ridge in 1990. It soon emerged that Weaver had sold a sawed-off shotgun—an illegal firearm—to an ATF informant. ATF agents put the squeeze on the wiry survivalist: either he would provide information about the Trochmanns’ activities or he would go to jail for selling an illegal weapon. Weaver walked away, telling them to go ahead and charge him.

And they did. In February 1991 Weaver was arrested in a roadside sting, taken to court in Coeur d’Alene, and charged. However, the judge released him on his own recognizance. Weaver then retreated to his remote cabin on Ruby Ridge and refused to come out for nearly an entire year, now facing federal warrants as a fugitive. Federal marshals began staking out the property, setting up surveillance equipment and trying to figure out the best way to arrest Weaver with a minimum of violence.

One day in August 1992 a team of six marshals went up to check the equipment. The Weavers’ dog, Striker, heard them and took off into the woods to find them. Randy, his teenage son Sammy, and Kevin Harris, a family friend, followed the dog down the trail and directly to the marshals’ hiding spot. Rather than let Striker reveal their position, the marshals shot the dog. Just then Sammy came into view and he witnessed the act. He began firing at the marshals, as did Kevin Harris. When the smoke from the exchange of gunfire cleared, both Sammy Weaver and Marshal William Degan lay dead.

So began one of the most infamous armed standoffs in law-enforcement history. It lasted ten days and also claimed the life of Vicki Weaver. She was shot by a sniper the day after Sammy and Degan were killed when she held the door open for her husband and Harris as they tried to escape an FBI barrage. She was holding a baby in her arms. Randy Weaver, his children, and Harris remained holed up in the cabin for another week. Then, on Day Six, Colonel James “Bo” Gritz, a former Green Beret and Vietnam vet, arrived at Ruby Ridge. Upon his arrival at the scene he announced his intention to negotiate an end to the standoff.

Gritz was a bluff, colorful camera hound who had made national headlines in the 1980s by leading a group of other Vietnam veterans back to Vietnam in an attempt to locate American prisoners of war who were rumored to be held secretly in deep jungle prisons by the Vietnamese government. It was basically a media stunt and was underwritten by the populist millionaire H. Ross Perot, among others (they found no missing POWs). It would later inspire the plot of Sylvester Stallone’s wildly popular film Rambo: First Blood Part II. More recently Gritz had become involved in organizing survivalist training sessions for would-be Patriots.

Four days after Gritz’s arrival, Weaver and his daughters surrendered. Both Harris and Weaver were put on trial on a total of ten charges, including murder and the original firearms charges, and both were acquitted on most charges by a jury in Boise a year later (Weaver was convicted on the lingering failure-to-appear charge). Despite the acquittal, their case lit a flame among the conspiracy-minded Patriots, and “Ruby Ridge” became an instant byword for “government overreaction and oppression.” That winter, a cluster of Patriot and Christian Identity movement leaders, including Trochmann, gathered in Estes Park, Colorado, and discussed their forthcoming strategy: encourage like-minded followers to form “citizen militias” that could spring into action to defend ordinary gun owners and other citizens against a dictatorial federal government.

Less than a year later, in February 1993, another armed standoff with a lethal outcome took place near Waco, Texas, at the compound of the Branch Davidian cult run by a charismatic preacher named David Koresh. The incident began with a botched ATF raid—they were looking for illegal weapons—that resulted in four federal officers dead and sixteen wounded and the deaths of six Branch Davidians. For fifty-one days the ATF tried to get the compound leaders to come out, but they refused. On April 19, 1993, FBI agents moved in to arrest the leaders, who instead immolated themselves and their followers—seventy-six people in all. Videos of the horror played endlessly on all the television networks. For the early dwellers in the Patriots’ alternative universe, the incident became compelling evidence that a totalitarian New World Order takeover of America was imminent.

Now Ruby Ridge and Waco were on a lot of people’s lips, not just Patriots’ lips but also those of a number of mainstream conservative figures such as Rush Limbaugh, his many imitators on the airwaves, and eventually the pundits at the conservative cable TV network Fox News, when it launched in 1996. They mainly used the incidents to bash the Bill Clinton administration for its alleged incompetence, even though the Ruby Ridge incident had not occurred on his watch. Indeed, the Patriot movement was tapping into a deep vein of antigovernment sentiment that had been simmering among conservatives for many years, beginning in the years of the Reagan administration and its admonitions that the “government can’t solve problems, it is the problem.”

Antigovernment sentiment had started to reach a boil in the early nineties, thanks to the growing prominence of a phalanx of right-wing radio talk-show hosts who were transforming the nation’s broadcasting landscape. They were led by Rush Limbaugh, who had become the country’s most famous talk-show host.

“The second violent American revolution is just about—I got my fingers about a quarter of an inch apart—is just about that far away,” he said. “Because these people are sick and tired of a bunch of bureaucrats in Washington driving into town and telling them what they can and can’t do with their land.”

Limbaugh generally eschewed NWO-style conspiracy theories, but he was a virulent hater of Bill Clinton and his administration, and devoted endless hours to promoting the various drummed-up scandals and conspiracy theories about Clinton, including a “Clinton body count” of people connected with the Clintons who had died under murky circumstances and tales of Clinton running drugs while he was governor of Arkansas.

All of this was also readily absorbed into the Patriot universe, as proof of Clinton’s participation in the New World Order plot. Now, the agitation over the Ruby Ridge and Waco standoffs became a major lightning rod. Alex Jones later told reporter Alexander Zaitchik that he began his Austin, Texas, public-access television program devoted to New World Order conspiracies in 1993 as a result of his outrage over the Waco standoff.

By the mid-nineties the Patriot movement quickly became populated with a number of speakers who spread the word. John Trochmann, operating mainly in the Pacific Northwest, was one of them. Using an overhead projector he would blitz his audiences with a fast-moving blizzard of photos and news articles—military vehicles on railroad cars, blurry images of black helicopters, peculiar-looking fences and signage—that, thrown together with little explanation, reinforced the idea that there was a conspiracy to round up Americans and place them in concentration camps.

Similar speakers popped up around the country—in the Midwest, the Southwest, the South—spreading the word in similar fashion, one small gathering at a time. Some of the early Patriot movement leadership have faded into obscurity, while some—along with their political views—have had more enduring success in getting their messages out. In the latter category were Richard Mack, LeRoy Schweitzer, Jack McLamb, and Samuel Sherwood.

Richard Mack has proved to be one of the movement’s more durable figures. The sheriff of Graham County, Arizona, from 1988 to 1996, Mack gained notoriety for refusing to enforce the Brady gun-control law in his county because he is convinced that such laws are a facet of the NWO in action. A longtime member of the John Birch Society, Mack travels the nation giving seminars on how to resist the New World Order by resisting gun-control measures, and recommends forming militias as preparation for effective self-defense. He also proselytizes regarding the “constitutionalist” notion that the county sheriff is the supreme law of the land, superseding federal and state authorities. In 2009 Mack founded the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which became a major source of “constitutionalist” organizing in the following years and played a major role in the Bundy family’s standoffs with federal authorities in Nevada and Oregon in 2014 and 2016.

LeRoy Schweitzer, a former crop-dusting pilot who grew up near Bozeman, Montana, was an early proponent of “sovereign citizen” ideology that posited that ordinary Americans could declare themselves free of financial and other obligations to the federal government by filing certain documents with the county clerk. On the basis of this premise Schweitzer developed a scheme for getting rich. He held small seminars where he explained the material benefits of his system: how to create phony liens and file them against public or banking officials on spurious “constitutional” grounds, and then open bank accounts based on those liens and purchase expensive items with the checking account. This could work until bank officials figured out that such an account had nothing behind it. Schweitzer used his “system” to purchase a large cabin near Roundup, eastern Montana. That was where he began gathering a collection of likeminded “Freemen.”

Jack McLamb was a former Arizona policeman who had a long association with Bo Gritz and was involved with the Ruby Ridge incident. McLamb toured the country giving talks on why law enforcement officers should join the Patriot movement, activity that brought him national notoriety for his overt attempts to recruit law enforcement officers.

Samuel Sherwood had been president of the United States Militia Association, based in Blackfoot, Idaho. Sherwood, also a devotee of Mormon “constitutionalist” W. Cleon Skousen and his brand of conspiracism, considered himself a mainstream political operative with influence in the 1990s Idaho legislature, and generally only attended rallies prepared by others. Sherwood espoused militias as a way to counter political trends he said were leading to an imminent “civil war.’’

Some of the less enduring, but in some cases more colorful of the earlier Patriot figures included Mark Koernke, Gary DeMott, and Gene Schroder. Koernke was a University of Michigan janitor who espoused theories essentially identical to John Trochmann’s and presented his ideas on speaking tours throughout the Midwest. His delivery, straight out of Rush Limbaugh’s book of mannerisms, was downright engaging, but as the nineties wore on, Koernke’s reputation became increasingly tarnished by failed predictions, and he eventually faded into obscurity.

Gary DeMott, of Boise, Idaho, was the president of the Idaho Sovereignty Association and the creator of a one-man “constitutionalist” show who toured the region tirelessly, spreading the gospel of “common law’’ courts. Demott asserted that the idea of a “common law” court, which originated with the old far-right Posse Comitatus movement, was the basis of the “sovereign citizen” form of government, and he told audiences, “We are the law enforcers.’’

Gene Schroder, based in Campo, Colorado, was another advocate of “common law” courts and toured the country explaining to people how to set up such courts. His United Sovereigns of America was a leading Patriot group that specialized in the pseudo-legal activity of these courts. Militias were a basic ingredient of Schroder’s model of a proper government, and of the solution for ending “unconstitutional’’ intrusions by the federal government.

Bo Gritz was one of the most prominent militia figures in the mainstream media, but he generally eschewed the speaking circuit. The gruff, charismatic ex–Green Beret preferred to concentrate on his traveling SPIKE (Specially Prepared Individuals for Key Events) paramilitary training sessions, in which he imparted his considerable knowledge of Special Forces techniques to average Patriots.

The Ruby Ridge and Waco chickens came home to roost two years to the day after the Waco tragedy, April 19, 1995. On that day a young Gulf War veteran named Timothy McVeigh drove a rental truck laden with fertilizer laced with diesel oil—a truck bomb—up to the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, walked away, and then watched from a couple of blocks away as the bomb detonated. The massive explosion ripped apart the building’s façade and took the lives of everyone near it, including 19 children in a day-care center. In total, 168 people lost their lives, and another 680 were injured in the blast.

Initially, media speculation focused on Islamic radical terrorists as the possible source of the terrorist attack. Three days later, however, McVeigh was arrested and charged with setting off the bomb. He eventually confessed, explaining both his ruthlessness and his motivations: “I didn’t define the rules of engagement in this conflict,” he told an interviewer. “The rules, if not written down, are defined by the aggressor … Women and kids were killed at Waco and Ruby Ridge. You put back in [the government’s] faces exactly what they’re giving out.”

I called John Trochmann the morning after the Oklahoma bombing to get his take on events. At the time, analysts were still largely ruminating about the possibility of some kind of terrorism from the Middle East, and law enforcement was still days away from arresting McVeigh. Trochmann, of course, had a completely different view: it was a New World Order plot to discredit the Patriot movement.

“It’s the track record of the federal government, the British government,’’ he told me. “In 1993 Waco burned. In 1992 they tried to raid Randy Weaver the first time. In ‘43, Warsaw burned. In 1775, Lexington burned. That’s when they tried to take our guns the first time.’’

This rant was stock MOM talk; Trochmann believed the conspiracy to confiscate Americans’ guns predated the Revolutionary War and included actions taken in the Warsaw Ghetto. But that wasn’t all.

“It is also the beginning day of the Satanic preparations for the grand climax, according to the Satanic calendar. And I got this from a witch, a former witch out of a coven in St. Cloud, Minnesota. Their preparation for the sacrifice is April nineteenth to twenty-sixth.

“The grand climax, which is what they’re preparing for, is the twenty-sixth through the thirty-first, in which they have oral, anal or vaginal sex with females ages one to twenty-five. They don’t take infants.’’

“What do you think happened yesterday?” I asked.

“Well, with the information that’s rolling in, it becomes very interesting. We’ve got a seismographic machine that’s recorded fifteen miles from the site: two separate blasts, eight seconds apart. One was the vehicle outside and one was the technical blast inside. High-tech blast, high, high, high-tech. We got a call at eleven thirty last night from Special Forces, being questioned, ‘Where were you?’ It continues today.”

Special Forces? This was the first I had heard suggesting that Patriots might be implicated. Was that what he meant?

“Oh, I think they’re going to try to use it. First off, they say that there’s three olive-skinned people from the Middle East that were doing it with the rig parked outside. Then we find out that that same morning NORAD was under Level 2 Alert, which is lockdown, nobody comes or goes. Then we find out the Kitty Hawk, the carrier fleet the Kitty Hawk, is heading into the Indian Ocean. And another carrier fleet, is heading into the eastern Mediterranean. What is all this connected to? We have two witnesses now that say there was a black helicopter hovering over that building earlier in the day, earlier in the morning. I think the most significant thing is the seismographic machine measuring two blasts, and it does not measure echoes, as the FBI is trying to defend. We full well believe that it’s an inside job to justify their future deeds here, to give them justification for coming after—whoever.’’

Per Trochmann, the blast was a false flag operation carried out by the NWO to justify neutralizing Patriots. That became the Patriot movement’s story, and they stuck to it. In short order, the dozens of conspiracy theorists around the country who had previously promoted New World Order tales quickly adopted it and began spreading it. It soon came out that McVeigh was a full-fledged far-right Patriot believer who had deeply embraced the New World Order narrative.

But Trochmann’s attempt at deflection—pinning the crime on the NWO instead of where it belonged, on its adversaries—did not work. McVeigh had hoped his murderous act in Oklahoma City would spark a Patriot uprising against the government, but it had largely the opposite effect, and instead turned out to be a powerful setback for the movement. Overnight, the image of militiamen such as McVeigh was transformed from bumbling armed men in the woods to menacing terrorists. Soon mainstream media reports were filled with accounts of the militias’ threatening behavior and rhetoric, as well as their conspiracy-driven worldview. It was not a flattering view.

In a widely covered speech, Clinton addressed the Oklahoma City bombing: “In this country we cherish and guard the right of free speech,” he said. “We know we love it when we put up with people saying things we absolutely deplore. And we must always be willing to defend their right to say things we deplore to the ultimate degree. But we hear so many loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible.”

The president was not calling for suppression of such speech, though: “If they insist on being irresponsible with our common liberties, then we must be all the more responsible with our liberties,” he continued. “When they talk of hatred, we must stand against them. When they talk of violence, we must stand against them.”

Right-wing talk-show hosts, led by Limbaugh, immediately protested that Clinton was trying to pin the cause of the bombing on them. In a full-page column Limbaugh wrote for the May 8 Newsweek, “Why I’m Not to Blame,” he stated: “Those who make excuses for rioters and looters in Los Angeles now seek to blame people who played no role whatsoever in this tragedy.”

Now the Patriots’ chief talking point was that the president was trying to exploit the tragedy as a way of silencing his critics; eventually, the charge became an established part of conservative lore. Years later, in her 2002 bestseller, Slander: Liberal Lies about the American Right, the right-wing pundit Ann Coulter would assert: “When impeached former president Bill Clinton identified Rush Limbaugh as the cause of the Oklahoma City bombing, he unleashed all the typical liberal curse words for conservatives. He blamed ‘loud and angry voices’ heard ‘over the airwaves in America’ that were making people ‘paranoid’ and spreading hate.”

Limbaugh and his fellow conservatives deployed this line of argument to limit serious discussion of Clinton’s subsequent anti-terrorism legislation, which included a proposal that would allow law enforcement to track large fertilizer purchases. The legislation was largely defanged in Congress. Limbaugh and Co. also shut off exploration of a deeper underlying issue: the increasing migration of ideas and agendas that originated on the racist far right into mainstream conservatism and the dynamic whereby rational anger and discontent with the federal government was being transformed into an irrational, visceral, and paranoid hatred of it.

This clampdown on rational discussion muddled the public’s understanding of the actual threat that the Patriot movement posed to democratic institutions, even as the movement kept producing a string of antigovernment radicals acting out violently.

In Roundup, Montana, following a series of confrontations with local law enforcement, LeRoy Schweitzer moved his cadre of Freemen out of their cabin, northward to a ranch a few miles outside the town of Jordan, owned by two fellow Freemen, Ralph and Emmett Clark. The Clark ranch was under foreclosure proceedings because the Clarks had refused to pay their taxes. At the ranch Schweitzer resumed his seminar sessions on “sovereign citizenship” and “common law courts,” even though he was wanted on a number of felony charges. People traveled from around the country to attend them. The Freemen also stepped up their “constitutional” actions against local law enforcement, threatening to hang a federal judge and the local prosecuting attorney. At this point the FBI stepped in.

On March 25, 1996, an FBI informant posing as an antenna installer convinced Schweitzer and one of his followers to check over the antenna installation a short distance from the cabin. The two Freemen soon found themselves surrounded by FBI agents and under arrest. FBI agents surrounded the Clark ranch and urged the Freemen remaining inside—about twenty people in all, including both Clark brothers and two children—to surrender. They refused, and another armed standoff had begun.

It lasted eighty-one days. The FBI—extremely sensitive to the criticism it had endured in the wake of Ruby Ridge and Waco—negotiated patiently with the Freemen. They enlisted the assistance of a number of third parties, even of some Patriot movement figures, Bo Gritz among them. They each negotiated for a few days, and then walked away in frustration, saying the Freemen were utterly unwilling to compromise, mendacious, and too paranoid to reason with.

The most successful negotiator turned out to be a moderate Republican legislator named Karl Ohs; his plainspoken style was the best bridge between the Freemen’s universe and the world waiting outside with guns. First he persuaded some of the people inside the ranch compound who were not facing arrest to come out of the house on their own. A few days later, on June 14, the remaining sixteen people came out. The Clarks and four others were slapped with federal charges, while eight others faced an array of other charges. Eventually, all of the participants were convicted, and some of those arrested on federal charges pled guilty and wound up serving a variety of sentences. Schweitzer received a twenty-two-year term and died in prison in September 2011.

The Freemen standoff demonstrated that the FBI had learned some lessons about dealing with Patriots and other similar groups. Those lessons would later be critical in its handling of the armed standoff on the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in early 2016. It also demonstrated that the Patriot true believers were willing to spend prison time as the price of their beliefs.

Shortly after the Freemen standoff ended, on July 27, 1996, someone in Atlanta, Georgia, left a backpack bomb at the Centennial Park, the main gathering spot for the 1996 Summer Olympic Games. When it detonated, it killed a spectator, Alice Hawthorne, and injured 111 people; one man died of a heart attack while rushing to the scene. Initial suspicion fell on a security guard at the scene, Richard Jewell, who had been the first to spot the backpack before it exploded and had begun clearing the area. After first being hailed as a hero, Jewell became the FBI’s prime suspect and was hounded by the media for weeks and even months afterward, until the investigating US attorney officially announced in October that Jewell had been exonerated. The investigation into the bombing remained officially open and unsolved, and the FBI admitted it had no other suspects.

On January 16, 1997, a bomb exploded outside an abortion clinic in the Atlanta suburb of Sandy Springs. An hour later, another bomb hidden nearby detonated, injuring seven. FBI investigators noticed the devices’ similarity to that used in Centennial Park.

Then, on February 21, a bomb containing nails went off in a back room of the Otherside Lounge, a lesbian bar in downtown Atlanta, which was packed with about 150 people, though only four women were injured. More chillingly, the bomber left a second backpack bomb outside in a walkway, clearly intended to go off as the crowd exited the building in a panic. Fortunately it did not detonate, and investigators found it and promptly defused it.

By now, police figured one person might be responsible for all of the bombing incidents, but it took awhile before they were certain. Nearly a year later, on January 29, 1998, a security officer named Robert Sanderson was killed at a Birmingham, Alabama, abortion clinic, when he began examining a backpack bomb left outside the building, hidden beneath a shrub. Emily Lyons, a nurse standing nearby, was badly injured. A witness spotted a man sitting in a gray Nissan pickup near the bombing scene and, watching him drive away afterward, wrote down the license plate number. Soon the FBI had its first real suspect: Eric Robert Rudolph.

The day after the bombing the FBI announced it was seeking him as a person of interest in the case. A week later, Rudolph’s gray Nissan pickup was found abandoned in the woods near Murphy, North Carolina, one of his childhood stomping grounds. Immediately, hundreds of law-enforcement officers descended on the woods, but Rudolph successfully eluded them. By May, he was on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List, with a $1 million reward on his head, where he stayed for the next five and a half years.

Rudolph was seen periodically by residents of the area around Murphy. Investigators began to suspect that some locals were harboring and assisting Rudolph. Finally, on May 31, 2003, he was captured by a rookie police officer in Murphy. Eventually he agreed to a plea bargain: life in prison with no chance of parole in exchange for a guilty plea. He then wrote an explicit confession detailing the bombings and his motivations for them.

Rudolph, thirty-nine at the time of his capture, was a religious fanatic who had been raised in rural North Carolina. When he was eighteen he had spent time with his mother in a Christian Identity community in rural Missouri and had converted to that belief system then, as his papers and writings indicate. He spent time in the Army in the 1980s but was discharged for marijuana use, and spent the next several years drifting around the South, gradually finding his calling as an anti-abortion and anti-gay zealot. He explained in a statement he issued after his arrest:

Because I believe that abortion is murder, I also believe that force is justified in an attempt to stop it. Because this government is committed to maintaining the policy of abortion, and protecting it, the agents of this government are the agents of mass murder, whether knowingly or unknowingly. And whether these agents of the government are armed or otherwise they are legitimate targets in the war to end this holocaust, especially those agents who carry arms in defense of this regime and the enforcement of its laws. This is the reason and the only reason for the targeting of so-called law enforcement personnel.

By the time Rudolph wrote his confession, the world had changed significantly. In 2003, when people thought of terrorists they no longer thought of people like Eric Rudolph.

Although not much of the Patriot movement’s New World Order conspiracism caught on with the general public, the Patriots kept working to mainstream their ideas, mainly by seizing on everyday news events and running them through the grist mill of their belief system.

Militia activity had dropped drastically. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported in 1999 that there were a total of 217 militia groups in the United States—just 25 percent of their 1996 number, 858.

But this didn’t seem to discourage relentless self-promoters such as Bo Gritz. Gritz had been attracted to all the media attention surrounding the hunt for Eric Rudolph, and in August 1998 he had shown up at the scene in North Carolina and announced that he intended to organize an army of 100 searchers to find Rudolph and convince him to turn himself in under Gritz’s auspices. Gritz planned to parlay the $1 million reward into Rudolph’s legal defense.

But the plan was a flop. First of all, Gritz could only muster about forty people. Then three of his searchers stumbled into some hornets and had to be treated at the hospital. The locals—already snickering about Gritz’s dreams of glory—dubbed the entourage Bo’s Hornet Hunters. After a week spent looking for Rudolph, Gritz packed his bags and returned home to Almost Heaven, the Idaho Patriot retreat community he had founded outside rural Kamiah.

Only two weeks before, Gritz had been brimming with his usual outgoing optimism as he addressed a big crowd at a Preparedness Expo in Puyallup, Washington, with Randy Weaver in the audience. The expo was devoted primarily to selling survivalist gear and supplies to attendees who had bought into the Patriot movement’s warnings about an impending mass social collapse. And in 1998, the focus of those fears was the Y2K Bug.

Computer scientists had realized that most of the world’s computers had operating systems with a dating method that used just the final two digits of any year to represent it. When the systems operating with twentieth-century dates expired on the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1999, those dates would suddenly reset to double zeroes, the same as 1900. Computer programmers had no idea how serious the consequences might be for the world’s computer systems, but to prevent potential havoc they began working on updates that would help the global computer network survive the glitch.

Viewed through the Patriot movement’s prism, the Y2K bug soon became grist for a fresh round of apocalyptic fearmongering, as dozens of conspiracists rushed to predict that Western civilization would collapse on New Year’s Eve. Some of the believers in this new catastrophe were Christian evangelicals who for their own reasons already anticipated that the change of the millennium would bring about apocalyptical events foretold in the Book of Revelation. All of them traded books and videos describing the doom that was nearly upon them: trains derailing and crashing into each other, a black-helicopter-enabled New World Order takeover in the wake of the social collapse; proof that this was being planned in the form of ominous executive orders from President Bill Clinton; and eye-witness accounts of apocalyptic occurrences such as the appearance of the Four Horsemen.

Events such as the Preparedness Expo at the state fairgrounds in Puyallup were organized to help people prepare for Y2K and other dangers. Attendees could purchase a wide variety of food-storage systems; bulk foods such as beans, sugar, and flour; and security systems and surveillance equipment. One entrepreneur was selling a modern-day bomb-shelter system you could dig in your backyard.

Gritz’s talk to the attendees was a typical Bo performance: he urged his audience to help swell the ranks of his Rudolph expedition, and sounded biblical warnings about “the Beast” of evil government about to devour them. At one point he said, “This is a spiritual war, and very soon, you are gonna get a choice and you cannot sit on the fence.” He concluded the speech by setting fire to a paper United Nations flag.

Gritz knew then that he was in trouble, even as he evinced his usual bravado: “I have been blessed by Almighty God to fear nothing on this earth. I was put on this earth to be a warrior.” But he also explained to the crowd that “my wife is mad at me” about his plans for North Carolina.

When he returned from the failed Rudolph expedition to Idaho, he found that his wife of twenty-four years, Claudia, had packed her bags and departed. She soon filed divorce papers. A week later, Gritz pointed a gun at his chest and fired, but the wound was non-fatal and he eventually recovered. A year later, he married again, this time to the daughter of a longtime Christian Identity pastor. He abandoned his Almost Heaven project and moved to Nevada, where he became a full-fledged Christian Identity believer. Gritz now lives a quietly retired life in rural Nebraska.

Gritz’s stumble had little effect on the Patriot movement, whose frenzy about the Y2K Bug only intensified as New Year’s Eve approached. In addition to foodstuffs and bomb shelters, thousands of people were also purchasing guns, just in case. A number of right-wing websites with a conspiracist bent, such as the World Net Daily, ran stories warning that the Clinton administration intended to impose martial law to control the Y2K chaos.

No one could quite match Alex Jones, though, who on New Year’s Eve went on the air and warned that a Pennsylvania nuclear plant was being shut down because of Y2K (actually, it had experienced an insulator failure, a relatively common and minor issue). He claimed that the US military was rolling into Austin to quell rioters and troublemakers who were to be locked in the airport, FEMA was on the verge of taking over all AM and FM radio stations, and Russia was threatening nuclear war:

Cash machines are failing in Britain and now other European countries. They’re finding large amounts of explosives in France. Vladimir Putin, who is known as Vladimir the Ruthless, using all his profanity on national TV, you name it. We won’t read the profanity here but we’ve got it—this person is on an unbelievable power trip and resembles a demon. He is a creature of the IMF and the World Bank and International Communism. He is a former KGB head and this information is vital, ladies and gentleman.

We’re seeing the New World Order really come out in full force. More wars than have been in the past fifty years are going on right now.

But the Apocalypse stayed home. No one’s computers went down, the infrastructure remained intact, and the world proceeded on January 1, 2000, just as it had in the days and years before.

The failed prediction turned out to be a major embarrassment for the Patriot movement and its conspiracist cohort, who for the next couple of years, whenever they raised their heads in the media, were reminded of just how wrong they had been. The fiasco was especially damaging to their credibility among the hundreds of thousands of foot soldiers who had spent their hard-earned dollars on preparing for a mass social breakdown that then gave no whiff of actually occurring. And they were reminded of it every time they pondered what to do now with the stores of beans, rice, and canned goods they had tucked away in their safe shelters.

But then the terrorists of 9/11 struck, the political landscape shifted dramatically, and the Y2K fiasco was washed down the memory hole.