Spotlight Casts Sobering Glare on U.S. Militias

For the ultraconservative paramilitary groups scattered across the country that have come to be known as the “militia movement,” this is the chill gray dawn of the morning after.

Following the April 19 Oklahoma City bombing and the discovery that the prime suspect had his roots in the dark conspiracy theories and violent rhetoric of the paramilitary right, members of the militia movement now find themselves on altered ground.

Gone is the protective cloak of obscurity. Gone is the ability to dwell in the safe and satisfying middle world between words and deeds--where militiamen could set their hearts racing with the language of guerrilla war and revolution but never face the terrible reality that their words implied.

Today, members of the militias are beginning to take a sober new look at themselves and their movement. So are their families, their neighbors and the nation as a whole.

Some militiamen--and all across the country, the membership is almost entirely male--are quitting in disgust. Some cling to their core beliefs but fervently reject the violent extremes. And some, who believe that the bombing was a plot to frame and discredit them, see the shattering of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building as yet more proof of the vile and perfidious nature of their foes--the federal government and, behind it, the international conspiracy to establish a new world order.

The bombing has also deepened divisions that already existed within the militia movements, feeding paranoia, sharpening rivalries and back-biting among leaders, sending some units deeper under cover.

Perhaps most far-reaching of all, the searing images of Oklahoma City have ended the easy tolerance by neighbors and local authorities that sheltered the militias in many parts of the country.

Here are dispatches from four regions where the movement had taken root, each illustrating a different facet of the situation as it exists today:

* From Kansas, where members of relatively new militia units talk about what drew them to the movement, what disturbs them about it now and what continues to attract them nonetheless.

* From Montana, where the anti-federal movement had taken its most dangerously confrontational form but where anti-militia feeling now surges instead.

* From rural Michigan, long a hotbed of militia intrigue, where accused Oklahoma City bomber Timothy J. McVeigh is believed to have nurtured his deadly vision.

* And from Pennsylvania, where the leader of the Keystone state militia quotes Thomas Jefferson and Alexis de Tocqueville and yearns for a simpler, better past.