COLUMN ONE : A Wave of Distrust in the West : A protest movement is rising among people who resent or fear the government. They are trying to stymie local councils with aggressive tactics that also have scared neighbors.

This is the dilemma facing officials in this former logging center just south of the Canadian border: How can you compromise with people who believe that you want to seize their land, take their guns and throw them into concentration camps?

It’s not easy, according to Steve Herbaly, Flathead County’s planning director.

Herbaly has found himself the target of accusations that he is a stalking-horse for a shadowy group of world leaders whose aim is to take over the United States, piece by piece.

“Some people literally tell me I slip off to Denver to be debriefed by federal officials laying the groundwork for a United Nations takeover of the United States,” he said, scoffing at the notion.

But the shrillness of growing opposition to any form of government regulation here has many officials and residents fearing for their safety. And civil debate on issues such as building codes and a new master plan for the county has come to a grinding halt.

Similar scenes are being repeated across the rural West in what some are calling the “politics of paranoia,” fed by growing numbers of mostly white people who feel economically disenfranchised and in desperate need of explanations--and villains to blame.

There is no way of knowing how many people embrace the conspiracy theories, although some experts who track extremist trends estimate there are at least a few hundred thousand.

And while this movement is growing, that does not mean it will survive critical public scrutiny or the checks and balances that exist in American society, said Laird Wilcox, founder of the Wilcox Collection on Contemporary Political Movements at the University of Kansas Library, one of the nation’s largest collections of American extremist literature.

For the moment, its fearsomely aggressive adherents are affecting the democratic process at the most basic levels in some communities. In some Montana counties, for example, officials are undergoing bomb-scare training and passing ordinances barring guns from public meetings. Some residents, fearing for their safety, have stopped attending such meetings altogether, allowing a vocal minority to dictate public policy.

Underlying the conspiracy anxiety is a distrust of government at every level, not just Washington. The GOP landslide in November has not diminished these attitudes reminiscent of McCarthyism in the 1950s, according to sociologists and organizations that track trends in rural America.

“What we are seeing is a right-wing counterculture starting to emerge; and these are not all kooks--they are people trying to deal with real problems ranging from shifting economies to changes in consumption,” Wilcox said.

“Once sensitized to the issue of control by outside forces, however, they begin to see it everywhere--this is the nature of paranoid thinking,” he added. “In this way, a zoning law in Kalispell can be seen as an example of regimentation.”

Unlike other fringe groups such as survivalists--who drop out of the system entirely--this is a movement of people who believe that the U.S. government is part of a conspiracy to create a new world order. They say their birthright is on the verge of being taken away and that federal officials signaled their malevolent intent by crossing a constitutional boundary in their mishandling of the 1993 tragedy in Waco, Tex., which ended in the deaths of more than 80 Branch Davidian cultists and four federal agents.

These beliefs are creating new alliances: Armed citizen militia groups are joining with anti-gun-control patriots, conservative religious groups and average working-class people who feel oppressed by government restrictions and abandoned by a national economy that is leaving manufacturing and extractive industries--such as mining--behind.

Bob Fletcher, spokesman for the Militia of Montana, a group gearing up for a showdown with the federal government, summed up the perceived threat: “It is a merger under way for years involving the United Nations and the wealthy elite of the world . . . all coming together to put us under a singular, one-world government--a giant dictatorship.”

Some might dismiss such pronouncements as ludicrous, but they are spreading.

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Harry Martin, whom some call the Thomas Paine of the patriot movement and who fears the nation is in danger of a takeover by the new world order, was recently elected to the Napa, Calif., City Council.

In Utah, an influential property rights group called the National Federal Lands Conference recently began to advocate the formation of citizen militias to safeguard private property from government seizure and to protect the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

The Eastern Arizona Courier in the small town of Safford--a weekly newspaper with a circulation of 8,000--recently started publishing John Birch Society columns as editorials for a growing number of ultraconservative residents.

In New Mexico’s Catron County, alarm spread one night in November: Some feared the U.N. invasion was underway after residents spotted men in military garb walking through the desert. The “invaders” turned out to be National Guardsmen assigned to help search for the body of a murder victim.

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All parties in this alliance shun the mass media, accusing major newspapers and TV networks of having liberal leanings and blaming them for what they see as a conspiracy of silence on key issues facing America.

They are turning onto a far-right lane of the exploding information highway, coming together via computer bulletin boards, faxes, videos and a network of emerging short-wave radio opinion-makers who, unlike Rush Limbaugh or G. Gordon Liddy, are not yet household names.

The new technology has made it possible for people in far-flung corners of the nation to disseminate their beliefs and, locally, to organize turnouts to pack meetings on issues ranging from school curriculum to zoning controls.

This network reverberates with reports from people who swear they have seen Russian military equipment being carried on flatbed trucks along back roads and mysterious black helicopters buzzing their homes.

One Kalispell man said he was hiking in the woods recently when he was threatened by a group of gun-toting soldiers clad in white military garb and speaking a language he could not understand.

“I’m not saying it’s part of some global conspiracy,” said the man, who requested anonymity. “I’m just wondering why nobody is telling us what is really going on.”

Some of the fears are easily debunked. For example, some leaders of the movement insist that the crime bill signed by President Clinton last year includes a provision that would allow federal law enforcement agencies to hire Royal Hong Kong police. According to the conspiracy theorists, these foreign-born agents would have no qualms about shooting Americans during a future takeover attempt.

The provision in question was sponsored by Sen. William V. Roth Jr. (R-Del.) and never made it into the final bill. It was, in fact, only a proposal to hire Royal Hong Kong police to help fight the spread of Asian organized crime activity in the United States, a spokeswoman for Roth said.

That has not slowed the movement.

“A bloody civil war is brewing, and I’m serious,” said Tom Valentine, a short-wave radio talk show host in Florida who said his audience has grown from 9,000 people five years ago to about 200,000 this year. “It is happening because government has stopped listening to the people and become intrusive . . . and because the media is part of the conspiracy.”

Stacy Neary, 35, of Seattle, who has a language degree in Russian from the University of Arizona, agreed: “I love my country, but I fear my government.”

Neary, a homemaker and mother of two, said she is deeply troubled by videos she recently borrowed from a friend that suggest gas chambers and concentration camps for Americans are being built in the United States.

“The first time I heard these things I thought, ‘Oh God, who could believe this stuff?’ ” she said. “I’m still undecided, but it raises a lot of questions that demand further investigation.”

That kind of talk is loudest in regions where economies long reliant upon wood products, mining, agriculture and ranching are being replaced by tourism and low-paying service industries. In many of these communities, average-income residents are being displaced by well-heeled urbanites from both coasts who are paying top dollar for property and driving taxes and home values sky high.

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Amid the upheaval, planners are pushing for emergency land use restrictions to cope with unprecedented growth; school boards are trying to revamp regulations for suddenly crowded classrooms, and city officials are trying to diversify floundering economies. And in the process, they are running up against fierce, sometimes threatening, opposition from people with legitimate fears of losing their homes, livelihoods and traditional values.

In Helena, Mont., opposition to changes in school district operations and land use regulations is so strong that many supporters of such plans have stopped attending public meetings--or even writing letters to local newspapers--out of fear of harassment.

“We were recently advised by law enforcement authorities that it’s not wise to have our addresses listed in the phone book or to have personalized license plates on our cars,” said Mike Murray, a county commissioner in Montana’s Lewis and Clark County. “Sadly, people who want to be involved in government are being discouraged from participating, so we’re losing the best and brightest we’ve got.”

The same problems have hit hard in Kalispell, a fast-growing northern Rocky Mountain valley community near Flathead Lake, the West’s largest freshwater body.

“When the driving force for our analysis is whether an action will trigger an attack from the community, heck yes it’s affecting democracy,” Herbaly said. “I’ve had staff members ask me if they can stay home for a few days after certain planning board votes.”

Yet Flathead County, population 60,000, sorely needs input from citizens of every stripe to deal with its population explosion and the increasing numbers of longtime residents who are losing their livelihoods in a place where average annual family income is about $16,000.

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“We are trying to forge a policy for the future to safeguard components of life that make this place special--and it is heart-attack beautiful,” Herbaly said. “But we’re dealing with some folks who call us ‘utopian socialist planners’ and believe shooting the help is an option. And what I’m seeing now is an ominous silence from the general community about that.”

Herbaly blames much of the discontent here on a handful of right-wing agitators with a hidden agenda of opening the valley up for wall-to-wall development.

But John Stokes, a recent arrival from Washington state who has become a leader in the local movement to do away with all regulations over private property, said Herbaly misses the point.

“In the West, we don’t have $400,000 in a retirement fund or savings account, but we do have 40 acres of land,” he said. “The problem is that environmentalists, in their zeal to gain control, forgot about our constitutional rights and that, before they take private property away from us for public use, people deserve compensation.”

Stokes, who believes that local planners have been “acting like Marxists,” does not buy into global conspiracy theories. However, he conceded that many people here who share his concerns about over-burdensome regulations do.

“We’ve been like a 900-pound gorilla in a cage and they’ve been poking us with sticks for years,” he said. “Well, we found the keys and we’re outside and they’re wondering why the gorilla is mad at them.”