The Anger Rebellion: Anti-Government Mania on the March : Paramilitary: Bombing awakens a shocked nation to a fury in its midst. Experts warn that organized opposition has become part of mainstream America in 20th Century.

In the sagebrush canyon sheltering this town of 28 souls, don’t bother looking for armed militias to find rebellion in the air.

Peace-loving Americans are angry enough.

“If We Can’t Reform It, We Will Overthrow It!” warns a bumper sticker pasted to a window of the Clayton Mercantile, a general store and bar along the Salmon River.

Inside, three loaded rifles and a shotgun lean against a wall. They belong to the owners, Marilyn and Kirk Brower, who offer a visitor a milk crate to sit on and chat.

Who’s fed up with the federal government? Lots of folks, said Marilyn, 48. Her gripes soon grow as thick as the firs and pines in the national forests surrounding this central Idaho hamlet.

“They tell us we can’t log, we can’t mine, cattlemen can’t turn their cattle out. Yes, people are upset. People are angry, “ she said.

Upon hearing of the Oklahoma City bombing, Marilyn was not surprised.

“I was horrified,” she said. “But not surprised. That first day, when everybody was saying Middle Eastern terrorists, I said they better look a lot closer to home.”

*

In the month since a truck bomb tore up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 men, women and children, a shocked nation has awakened to a fury in its midst. The arrests of suspects Timothy J. McVeigh and Terry L. Nichols, who hold fierce antipathy toward the federal government, have exposed an undercurrent of right-wing extremists who walk and talk violence in the name of protecting freedom.

Experts estimate no more than 100,000 Americans, probably many fewer, belong to paramilitary groups, which wouldn’t even fill the Rose Bowl. But they warn that the same feeling of alienation that feeds such organized efforts has become part of mainstream American attitudes in the late 20th Century.

“Some of these people hold beliefs that are charitably regarded as paranoid,” said Chip Berlet, who analyzes anti-democratic movements for Political Research Associates in Cambridge, Mass. “But the concerns are real, and these people are just like your neighbor. They’re angry and frustrated.”

In the rubble of Oklahoma City, more questions than answers remain about where this anger will lead: Why would Americans wage war on America? What kind of anti-government fever lashes out and kills babies?

Could such insanity explode again? The violence of the radical Weather Underground did not stifle anti-war sentiment in the 1960s and 1970s. Why should outrage over the April 19 bombing shame away the disaffections of today?

Marilyn Brower, for example, was wooed by a militia group in Idaho. She found it too extreme for her tastes, but she is still angry.

“People are afraid of the government,” she said. “[Former Defense Secretary Robert] McNamara comes out 30 years later and says the Vietnam War was a tragic mistake. We know the Cold War was perpetuated by the industrial-military complex. The public knows the government has lied to us.”

Experts say her feelings are increasingly common.

“People feel terribly frustrated about the body politic,” said Seymour Martin Lipset, a political sociologist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. “They think the people in power aren’t interested in people like them.”

The reasons are diverse: Despite success on Wall Street, people are losing jobs. Homelessness persists.

Without communism to worry about, Washington is in upheaval over where to direct the federal government’s energy and taxpayers’ money. Statistics show less crime, but polls show Americans are more concerned about it. The welfare system doesn’t work. Sending U.S. troops to the Gulf War, Somalia and Haiti raises questions about the country’s role as global peacekeeper while it has woes at home.

Some anxious Americans find comfort voting--or not voting. Some, like Brower, simply let off steam. Pundits read anger in the 1994 Republican sweep. Ross Perot had his better idea. So did House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his “Contract With America.”

History reassures us, and yet frightens us, that this rhetoric of rebellion is as old as our flag.

“If you want to blame anything, you can blame the Bill of Rights,” Lipset said. “We killed the king.”

But for some who feel shut out of the system today, free speech seems a feeble defense against dark powers they believe are rallying against liberty. Particularly in remote and rural strongholds, there are gathering streams of Americans who are deeply afraid.

Afraid of what?

According to right-wing literature: Bar codes. The federal government and its agents. Gun confiscation. A United Nations plotting to become our world government. Jews. George Bush and his New World Order. Blacks. Republicans. Democrats. Bankers. Foreigners. Technology. The IRS. Incumbent politicians. Immigrants, legal or not. A complacent public. International meetings on the environment and population control.

Newsletters of the right weave a world view in which passage of the Brady Bill or the federal government’s fiery raid on the Branch Davidians at Waco--or even the Oklahoma City bombing--are not isolated events, but part of an international plot to enslave freedom-loving Americans.

A paranoid fringe looking for scapegoats is nothing new in America, either. But today’s technology gives fear and blame a broader reach, spread by fax and phone hot lines, by shortwave radio and the Internet.

This web of fear has found new life in the past year’s rapid rise of militias--small, ad hoc armies with names like the Gadsden Minutemen in Alabama or the Hillsborough Troop of Dragoons in New Hampshire.

Many such groups train in the woods with modern weapons. They cache food and ammunition against the impending U.N. invasion they foresee. They make veiled threats toward elected officials from the local sheriff to President Clinton.

Those who track extremists say that some militias share common roots with violently racist and anti-Semitic groups, but that there appears to be little central organization.

Few recruits start out mad at some abstract threat like the New World Order. For most, it begins much closer to home, one personal gripe at a time.

*

Forty people are crowded into a meeting room at the Pioneer Club tavern in Twin Falls, Idaho. An ice machine hums at the side of the room. Smoke and laughter drift in from the bar whenever the door is opened.

This is the monthly meeting of the local chapter of the U.S. Militia Assn., one of the nation’s largest militia groups, claiming 5,000 members in 11 states.

It is the chapter’s first meeting since the Oklahoma City bombing. A CNN film crew is here. So is the group’s national leader, Samuel Sherwood, who has driven two hours from his home in Blackfoot to be the evening’s featured speaker.

In the front row is Bill Trowbridge, 60, a grizzled and toothless blasting contractor who hasn’t filed an income tax return since 1977 and figures he owes the IRS $800,000. He’s here because “I don’t want no more rights of mine taken away.”

Fran Williams, 29, sits in a wheelchair to one side. Paralyzed in an all-terrain vehicle accident five years ago, she’s angry the federal government said she was entitled to disability benefits, then tried to take them away.

Bill Steward, a 51-year-old carpenter, rises from his chair in ire as he lists his complaints about the government, from nuclear waste stockpiled in Idaho to police who stop motorists merely because they are seen leaving a bar.

“I don’t need the federal government to tell me how to run my life--from seat belts to speeding--or how to raise my kid,” Steward says.

Hearty applause greets Sherwood, 45, a free-lance computer consultant who favors Army surplus garb and bills himself as the “reasonable militiaman.”

He is measured and moderate in news interviews, patiently explaining that his 18-month-old group doesn’t tramp around the hills with guns or plot against the government. It’s simply a political association, he says, seeking to preserve individual liberties, chief among them the right to own guns.

But tonight, the commanding six-footer shows a different side. Pacing and waving his arms in an evangelistic style that’s part Rush Limbaugh, part Pat Robertson, he rouses his audience to prepare for dire times ahead.

He expounds for more than an hour on taxes (too high), on a woman’s place (in the home), on homosexuality (“the dung of perversion”), and on a star called Wormwood (due, the Bible prophesies, to crash into Earth and kill one-third of all living things).

“Why are we here?” he intones. “We are here for the Unforeseen. We are here to prepare for those things which we do not know of, but have been warned about.”

Sherwood “was striking chords left and right,” said Scott Moody, 27, a cowhand here for his first militia meeting. He taps his jacket pocket. “I’ve got the membership application right here.”

*

Taking up arms against government is an American tradition.

A year before the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1788, the anti-tax Shay’s Rebellion enlisted debt-ridden farmers in Massachusetts. Armed protesters prevented debtor trials and died trying to take over a federal arsenal.

This century saw anarchist and anti-war bombings.

More recently, Robert Jay Mathews, a white supremacist, declared war on the United States and led a terror campaign that included armed robberies, church bombings and the murder of Denver radio host Alan Berg in 1984.

“If you go back to the early 1980s or late 1970s, you had groups and individuals, such as Louis Beam and his Texas Emergency Reserve, a 2,500-person, fully armed military operation practicing maneuvers in Texas,” said Morris Dees, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks and takes such groups to court.

Beam’s compatriots, Dees said, “would say they hate the government and sense a plot, primarily by Jews, to force the world into a one-world government.”

In recent years, some militias have shown similar violent ambitions.

Last year, federal agents in Virginia raided the home of a construction worker who started the paramilitary Blue Ridge Hunt Club. Besides illegal guns and silencers, investigators found documents advocating guerrilla warfare, assassination, and attacks on airports and bridges, all to fight gun control. The leader and a gun dealer member await sentencing after pleading guilty to federal weapons charges.

In February, two members of the anti-tax Minnesota Patriots Council were convicted on federal terrorism charges in a plot to use chemical poison against unnamed human targets.

Some 200 militia groups exist in at least 40 states, though they often comprise no more than a few buddies with a mailing list.

Many are armchair soldiers who subscribe to militia newsletters, such as USA Patriot magazine, and maybe attend a meeting or two. Fewer still join in weekend exercises.

Dees describes the militia movement as being a loose collection of five or six “generals” at the top, with a tier of 50 to 150 leaders below them, and maybe 5,000 to 10,000 hard-core followers--”people who consider themselves blood brothers, people you don’t know about until something happens.”

More worrisome than the size of militias, according to Dees and others, is the handful of leaders who stoke their members’ paranoia.

“The public side is to get on talk shows, publish material that’s not too violent, and then get people willing to take it one step further,” Dees said. “They take them right up to the edge, and give them a push.”

*

Fifteen miles from the Idaho state line is Noxon, Mont., 350 people in a corner of paradise. Ospreys nest along the gravelly river channel of the Clark Fork. Cattle kick up their heels in the valley’s spring-green pastures.

The peaceful setting cannot soothe the distress percolating in the Landmark Cafe. Noxon is headquarters for the Militia of Montana, less an armed camp than a clearinghouse for anti-government, paramilitary and survivalist books and videotapes.

Since the bombing, the group says its phone and fax machines have been busy almost constantly with requests for items like a $10 start-up kit containing a militia networking manual, pictures of Soviet tanks in the United States and samples of the militia newsletter, Taking Aim.

The four-man staff also sends out books on “defensive” military tactics, which in their view can include setting booby traps and shooting down helicopters.

Sample items from their catalogue: “Sniper Training and Employment” for $10; “Hand to Hand Fighting” for $7.

A book called “Blueprint for Survival,” offered for $20, contains this helpful hint about claymore mines: “Since the claymore has a massive back blast, great care has to be taken to position them in an area where they won’t injure you as well as your enemy.”

John Trochmann, who founded the militia in January, 1994, with his brother, David, and nephew, Randy, says such materials answer the concerns of government-fearing Americans.

Of course, it helps to cultivate those concerns, and that is a Militia of Montana specialty.

Bob Fletcher sits in the Landmark, his hand shaking as he digs into a Montana-size hamburger. A full-time militia staff researcher, Fletcher’s voice rises and falls in a hypnotic rhythm as he recites threats most Americans know nothing about:

The government has developed weather-tampering techniques to create drought and famine, so the New World Order can starve millions in America and control the rest. Tiny transponders implanted under the skin can track you worldwide, change your personality, or leave you sterile.

Two hours into his spiel, the most skeptical are spooked. If just half of this is true, Fletcher is questioned, then the invasion has already begun and the next logical step is to strike back--right?

Fletcher holds up both hands.

“You sound like a militant individual,” he said. “We must stand down from you. I don’t want to be responsible for initiating a civil war in America. You start it. I’ll follow you.”

Later, Trochmann laughs upon hearing about Fletcher’s conversation. A soft-spoken 51-year-old with an elegant white mustache and beard, a man who enjoys square-dancing with his wife, Trochmann is as mild-mannered as Fletcher is agitated.

“You’ve been Fletcherized,” he said. “He’s our prophet of doom--his one purpose is to Fletcherize people and get them to pay attention.”

Since the Oklahoma City bombing, Clinton and other government officials have urged measures to combat terrorism and blasted the poisonous rhetoric of talk radio.

Not addressed are uncertainties rattling a wider range of Americans, and scaring a few enough to launch their own private war. Some of the curious at militia meetings say nothing, but sit in the back row, nodding furiously and pounding their fists.

“I call it the rattlesnake stage,” Trochmann said. “They want to lash out at anything to try to right the wrongs they’ve discovered.”

But what about those who take a different message from Trochmann’s catalogue of bellicose books and videos?

That person “has interpreted it totally wrong,” Trochmann said earnestly. “He’s been watching too much violence on television.”