OUTCASTS DIGGING IN FOR THE APOCALYPSE

By PHILIP WEISS

The grisly mix of fertilizer and hatred that detonated in Oklahoma City last week appears to provide stark evidence of something many Americans have denied: the existence of paranoid, violent thinking within our borders. Just what are the tenets of this thinking? And did they figure in last year's election returns?

Like other political movements before it, the radical right in America today has its extremist component, which plainly was a force in the 1994 elections. For instance, George Nethercutt, the giant-slayer Congressman who knocked off former House Speaker Tom Foley in Washington State, drew strength from radio shows where callers talked about sightings of black helicopters and U.N. plans to set up a secret compound in the state. In neighboring Idaho, Helen Chenoweth upended an environmentalist Democratic incumbent in part by saying that the only endangered species was the "white Anglo-Saxon male."

These politicians and others drew on widespread mistrust and even hatred of government power in Western and rural areas. Their coalition included well-known elements of far-right thought: tax protesters; Christian home-schoolers; conspiracy theorists influenced by the John Birch Society's fear of one-world government; Second Amendment activists (mostly men) for whom guns are an important part of an independent way of life; self-reliant types who resent a Federal Government that seems to favor grizzly bears and wolves over humans on government land.

But this is common stuff in many parts of the country. It is several giant steps from this movement to the extremist-fringe thinking that seems to have bred the Oklahoma City bombing. That frame of mind appeals to a hard-bitten and alienated segment of society that has found a voice lately in millennial movements like the Christian Patriots and the state "militias," largely in the Middle West and West. The militias may be--as they strongly claim to be-composed largely of yeoman states'--righters energized over the threat to the Second Amendment. But they have also fostered viciously antigovernment thinking that if followed to its logical end leads in one direction: armed uprising.

Perhaps the most belligerent militia is the Militia of Montana, with headquarters in the Cabinet Mountains near Noxon. "This is probably where the war is going to begin, right here in Montana," a member who refused to be identified told the bbc last year. "We've got a lot more bullets than they do."

John Trochmann, the militia's cofounder, distributes literature that would terrify many people. It features photographs of Soviet jeeps said to be on American soil. Russian troops are going to arrive here as part of an international police force, contends Trochmann's newsletter, Taking Aim. Our own government, the literature asserts, is guilty of "treason," is secretly building concentration camps and is planning nine zones to replace the lower 48 states--a partition plan that the Militia of Montana asserts was spelled out in an illustration on the back of Kix cereal boxes last year. Martial law is inevitable. And Trochmann endorses the prediction that sometime in the next century, "America's white population will perish."

His newsletter issues a call to action: "We must all become 'Political Dogs' getting in the trenches and fighting like we have never fought before. While at the same time preparing ourselves, our families ... [to] understand the times that we now live in. In other words, GET YOUR THREE B's [boots, beans and bullets] PUT AWAY."

Another strand in the alienated right is known as constitutionalism, a belief that the government has violated the Constitution. These arguments are generally not as aggressive as Trochmann's, but adherents all but renounce their citizenship. Stewart Balint is a handsome, blue-eyed construction worker in Priest River, Idaho, whose family lost its farm to bankers. He told me his studies of law had led him to the understanding that government powers are not legally derived. "I've gotten rid of all my contracts with government," he said. "Rescinded them. Social Security, birth certificate. Driving license, hunting license. I know the law, and it's not a losing battle for me."

Balint wears a belt buckle with an image of the Apache chief Cochise. He emulates the spirit of the Indians, disenfranchised on their ancestral territories. He seems to see himself and his friends as migrant workers in a wonderland visited by wealthy fly-fishing enthusiasts from the coasts. For some of these radicals the Endangered Species Act disguises a plan to create concentration camps for those who resist the new world order.

Lastly, there is a religious component to the hard-bitten right. Dan Fuller, a retired crop duster who last year joined a "Christian covenant community" in Idaho, glimpses signs of the "mark of the beast" from Revelations in government fiscal policy. He shares a widespread fear among Christian patriots that bodily implanted microchips will replace cash, ultimately spelling slavery for ordinary Americans. Vicki and Randall Weaver had visions of an apocalypse brought on by a Babylonian Federal Government, or ZOG (Zionist-Occupied Government). The apocalypse that came to their Idaho mountaintop in 1992--over flimsy gun charges against Randall--is one the Weavers surely helped bring on. But when an FBI sharpshooter killed Vicki Weaver as she held her baby in her arms, it gave the movement a martyr.

The Weavers apparently believed that after the great tribulation a remnant of the righteous would survive to work for a new kingdom over the resistance of the sheep people, or "sheeple." The Militia of Montana offers a similar vision: those who will rescue the Constitution are an underground army of men who have semiautomatics cached in barrels in the woods and who know you can catch catfish with Ivory soap as bait, men whom society now views as "outcast," "strange" or "erratic primitives" (in highlighted descriptions from clippings in Trochmann's mailings).

There aren't many adherents of these ideas. Experts suggest they number somewhere in the low tens of thousands. But with the right ingredients of paranoia and store-bought chemicals, it takes only a few to make the most bizarre world view come true for a blazing moment.

Philip Weiss, a journalist and novelist, has reported extensively on the radical right.