The Ragged Edge Angry Patriots Inland Northwest Emerges As Home To A Growing Anti-Government Movement

Part 1

The Inland Northwest’s hostility toward Uncle Sam is as real as the growl in a Doberman’s throat.

Counties threaten to seize control of public lands. Armed posses vow to fight federal abuses of power.

A livid Colville plumber has goneso far as to pray for the president’s death - on the radio.

Frustration. Distrust. Fear. Fury.

A fierce anti-government movement is uniting growing factions of people who share a common, perceived enemy - an intrusive, corrupt and deaf Big Brother.

From the surly taxpayer to the weapons-hungry militia man, this uprising is as gentle as a bumper sticker and as menacing as a fertilizer bomb.

Look around.

In Eastern Washington, the number of home-schooled children has doubled in the past four years as parents reject government-driven curriculum.

In the Columbia Basin, the IRS watches a spreading tax revolt that includes a Grant County deputy assessor who openly refuses to pay her federal income tax.

In Western Montana, Noxon rebels turn their militia into a mail-order cottage industry, and county planners get death threats for trying to tell people what to do with their land.

Many in this broad movement call themselves “new patriots.” Their numbers are impossible to pinpoint. But they’re clearly shaping rural politics and penetrating the cities, too.

For more than a year, one group calling itself Concerned Citizens of Washington has met weekly in the basement of a county-owned building in the Spokane Valley. They watch militia videos and talk about government abuses.

The region’s tenor has shifted as dramatically as it has inside Congress, which in the past year went from the cordial leadership of Tom Foley to the sledgehammer guidance of Newt Gingrich.

Government-bashing is not just acceptable, it’s fashionable. A bipartisan national poll in July showed 76 percent of Americans don’t trust the feds anymore, an all-time high.

Distrust of the U.S. government has always run deep here, where about half the bounty of natural resources and Northern Rockies scenery belongs to the feds.

Now our region is a national rage center: the land of Randy Weaver, the home of constitutionalists, of Libertarians, John Birchers, Earth First!ers and Aryans, too.

The Inland Northwest even cradled the nation’s militia movement, which federal investigators suspect helped inspire the worst blast of homegrown terrorism in the country’s history - the April 19 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people.

Raw government hatred is so common it’s found in shopper tabloids sold in Coeur d’Alene minimarts. The June 29 issue of Reward! ran former Ku Klux Klan leader Louis Beam’s revolutionary manifesto about “leaderless resistance” next to an advertisement for massage therapy.

Some professors, human rights leaders and police warn the movement’s militant wing goes beyond constructive dissent, flirts with terrorism and threatens the republic.

Carl Raschke studied domestic threats and cults for his 1990 book “Painted Black,” and continues to monitor subversive groups. He says the nation’s anti-government refrain is loudest in rural Western states. “Wherever there are pine trees and mountains, you’re going to find it.”

But the University of Denver professor suspects the Inland Northwest is the most ferocious region because of its explosive cocktail of passionate rebel leaders, including neo-Nazis and other militants.

This region “is to the antigovernment movement what Syria is to the Islamic terrorist movement,” Raschke says.

Gary Morton looks around and sees the seeds of a regional rebellion that could tie up federal troops for months.

The head of Spokane’s Libertarian Party says the uprising reflects people’s sense that the federal government wants to control them, not listen to them.

“Many people out here feel no more connection with this government than Americans felt for King George in 1776,” Morton says. “These folk look at the folk back there in Washington, D.C., as an occupational army.”

Mainstream anger

No longer exiled to the fringe, the anti-government message resounds throughout an inland, tri-state area where independent Ross Perot fared almost as well as Bill Clinton in 1992.

This brew of disgruntled Americans includes populists, Christian fundamentalists, gun owners, home-schoolers, loggers, small-government advocates and others who share a growing sense of national rot.

The frustrations and fears are diverse: A trampled U.S. Constitution. Strangling regulations. A federal police state. Staggering national debt. A one-world economy. Deteriorating public schools.

Why is the anger so rampant?

People increasingly believe the government wants to micro-manage lives and livelihoods it doesn’t understand.

Now linked by the Internet, faxes, telephone trees and mailing lists, activists are banding together and fighting back.

Gun-rights champions combat new restrictions with their own agendas. Benewah County, Idaho, considered requiring a gun in every home this year. Riverside, in northcentral Washington, copied the idea and passed it.

Tax protesters are getting bolder, too. Seminars tell people how to “legally” avoid paying income and property taxes. Some people demand refunds on past taxes paid.

Even the education front is increasingly anti-government. During the past two years, 800 families from Colville to Missoula formed a group to protest “Outcome-based Education,” a federally approved curriculum they fear lowers test scores and weakens instruction.

Some parents see the program as a big-government, big-business ploy to mold robots for the 21st century workplace. “Why?” asks Joanne McCann, a retired Spokane elementary school principal. “Why don’t they want our kids to be independent thinkers?”

Elements of the anti-government movement appeal to something inside most of us.

A national poll in May found that 55 percent of Americans believe the government has grown so big it threatens freedoms.

The numbers run higher in the rural West, which is no longer as wild as many residents would like.

The past 40 years have brought increased government control and regulation, creating an expanding rule book people must follow.

Consider:

In 1950, the Federal Register had 12,000 pages of regulations. Today it has 90,000.

Washington state’s 130 agencies, boards and commissions crafted 880 new regulations last year. The U.S. government spat out another 4,886.

These new rules are rarely succinct.

The U.S. Constitution was written in 4,543 words. A new regulation controlling the sale of cabbage runs 27,000 words.

“A true bureaucracy, that’s what we’re living under today,” says Len McIrvin, a third-generation Eastern Washington rancher. “Unelected people are dictating how we live, and that’s wrong.”

Bureaucrats are irritated, too.

Steve Belzak points out that the city of Spokane’s building regulations were an inch thick in 1958, a half-foot tall in 1976 and now stand over 3 feet high.

“We used to help people do things,” says Belzak, an official at the Spokane city Building Department. “We used to be providers. Now, we’re just regulators.”

The old codes ensured safety, he says, by protecting against furnace fires and other hazards. Now energy codes also dictate the size of windows and the thickness of walls.

“We’re getting into social engineering here. We’ve taken choices away from individuals and given them to bureaucracies.”

Stanley Sloan is taking on bureaucrats with a bulldozer.

The Post Falls developer is bent on foiling plans for a new federal alcohol and drug center near property he owns in the Spokane Valley. When the feds asked to run a water line across 30 feet of it last summer, Sloan vowed to use his bulldozer against anyone who crossed his land.

The entire episode smacks of bureaucratic arrogance, he says, noting the project was built before the government secured water. “It blows my mind that they spent in excess of $4 million and they don’t have water. That’s your out-of-control government right there.”

The bureaucracy recoils

From the government’s perch, the Inland Northwest has been heating up since August 1992, when a hundred people rallied at a North Idaho roadblock to torment federal agents trying to apprehend scofflaw Randy Weaver.

President George Bush’s bodyguards were so worried about the region’s rage during that time, they helped persuade him to delay his campaign trip to Colville.

Bush’s spokesmen described it as a scheduling glitch. But a knowledgeable sheriff’s deputy says the Secret Service wanted to let the area cool down after the shootout that killed Weaver’s son, his wife and a deputy U.S. marshal.

Now it’s the Clinton White House that makes veins pop out on foreheads in this chunk of the country.

About 1,000 people crammed into Coeur d’Alene’s Lake City High School gymnasium in November last year to listen to Larry Nichols’ insights into President Bill Clinton’s character.

The former Arkansas state worker insisted the president was part of the “Dixie Mafia - the biggest crime syndicate in the history of this nation.” He claimed to possess 5,400 pages of documents proving Clinton’s hit men killed 40 people to silence them about his illicit acts.

The crowd roared, giving Nichols repeated standing ovations.

Clinton’s Secret Service keeps an eye on the region’s radicals, including Mark Reynolds, who suggested a prayer for Clinton on his Feb. 26 radio broadcast on KCVL-AM, Colville’s lone radio station.

“Let his days be few, and let another take his office. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow,” said Reynolds, who is no longer on the air. “We need to maybe pray that for this wonderful president we have.”

The widespread antagonism has government officials tiptoeing around here like people trying not to upset hot-headed relatives.

The government has yet to challenge new ordinances by five Inland Northwest counties that demand control of federal lands within their borders.

Instead, federal foresters are told to not wear their uniforms in volatile zones, and urged not to argue with armed citizens.

A March 22 Forest Service directive advised foresters about potential clashes with local control advocates.

“If you are confronted, detained, or placed in custody by state or local authorities, while engaged in or on account of your duties, cooperate, do not resist.”

Jim Baca, former director of the U.S. Bureau of Lands Management, says his Western offices received bomb threats almost daily in 1993.

When someone actually hurled a bomb onto the roof of his Reno headquarters in October 1993, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt chose to do nothing about it, Baca complains.

“They blew off half the building. And then Babbitt and everyone wanted to keep a lid on it. He didn’t want to rock the boat.”

Government troops are getting cautious, too.

During a massive training exercise last April, Fairchild Air Force Base received calls from people threatening to fire at helicopters flying too close to their homes.

Instead of dismissing the callers, “Woodland Cougar” planners slapped a 3-mile-wide no-fly zone around a particularly angry rancher outside Springdale, Wash., and told helicopter pilots to look out for real gunfire.

In May, The Idaho Army National Guard asked the media to please inform Kootenai County residents that the tanks rolling along state Highway 53 were not part of a United Nations invasion.

Also this year, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms didn’t pursue allegations that a Spokane Valley resident with militia ties was making his own firearms.

Divorce papers filed in March accuse the man of owning two driver’s licenses with different names and addresses. His estranged wife claims he horded ammunition and designed and built weapons, including, possibly, pen guns.

Bob Harper, the ATF’s top agent in Spokane, says there wasn’t enough evidence to trigger an investigation. He says the case probably wouldn’t have been pursued even before the agency got in the public’s cross hairs.

But Harper admits the uproar is chilling. “I think we’re probably more sensitive about the types of cases we work, and the people we investigate.”

Instead of confronting antagonists, Congress appears bent on placating them with televised investigations into two lightning-rod events - the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, Texas, and the Weaver debacle.

Idaho Sen. Larry Craig says the Weaver hearings should help calm angry Americans by showing that the system works, that Congress will hold agencies accountable.

“I believe the hearings have been helpful in the sense of the average citizen out there saying, ‘You know, Congress did hear us.”’

The hearings didn’t satisfy everyone.

In October, suspected anti-government terrorists bombed a New York weather station and derailed an Amtrack train in Arizona.

In each case, they left notes professing their disgust with the government’s handling of Waco, Weaver or both.

Changing the face of politics

The public’s wrath not only scares bureaucrats and startles Congress, it’s also changing politics at the local level.

Increasingly, candidates see anti-government groups as voter blocks that cannot be ignored. Some candidates court their support.

In Idaho, Secretary of State Pete Cenarrusa, Lt. Gov. Butch Otter and Superintendent of Schools Anne Fox all spoke at leadership meetings for the U.S. Militia Association, based in Blackfoot.

The Idaho-based Northwest Liberty Network, a constitutionalist group formed last November, draws hundreds of people to some of its events. It lobbies legislators and also holds candidate forums.

While many politicians are listening to the rebel groups, no incumbent works the circuit better than Idaho’s U.S. Rep. Helen Chenoweth, the region’s new congressional celebrity.

The Militia of Montana is so enamored with her it sells videotapes of her speeches. Firearms fans and people incensed by environmental regulations see her as their champion, too.

When she arrived at the American Legion Hall in Bonner’s Ferry in October, the 100 people in the sleepy crowd sprang off their seats to applaud.

A gentle-voiced maverick with meticulous magazine looks, Chenoweth mocked the government’s efforts to protect endangered animals, and charmed her audience with comments like: “I really think it’s true that once you hug a logger you never go back to trees.”

She peppered her speech with cracks about ballooning bureaucracies and “rattlesnake” politicians. She swung at appointed judges, noting, to applause, that she plans to push a bill that limits how long someone can serve as a federal judge. “They’re not accountable to anyone,” she explained.

The bold talk also surfaces in the statehouses, where proposals that probably would have been slapped aside a few years ago were routinely considered in 1995.

The Idaho Legislature created a $1 million defense fund to protect the state against any federal incursion of its rights.

Eastern Washington lawmakers tried to persuade their colleagues to let people pack guns on their hips, and to formally ask the U.S. government to minimize its involvement in the United Nations.

Montana lawmakers considered forcing homosexuals to register with the state, and requiring federal investigators to notify sheriffs before arresting county residents.

Montana state Sen. Steve Doherty says debate slid into an “atmosphere of hate” this year. Senators pander to vigilante bullies who want to destroy the establishment, not fix it, says the Great Falls lawmaker.

“The end result of this hatred of authority… can lead to increased paranoia and can legitimize some people who ought to be wearing aluminium foil in their ball caps so that the Martian ray beams don’t mess with their heads.”

In November, Washington voters rejected an initiative that would have forced governments to compensate people for financial losses inflicted by land-use regulations. But the proposal won strong support in rural Eastern Washington counties.

State House Speaker Mark Foreman, cast the “Takings Initiative” in the new patriots’ vernacular.

“It’s about time legislators started obeying the Constitution,” says the 1996 candidate for governor.

Modern-day pamphleteers

Much as Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” inspired Americans to break from British rule, the 208-year-old U.S. Constitution is held up by many as the reason to revolt today.

People throughout the region pull “Citizen Handbooks” from breast pockets to damn the establishment and prove the federal government has strayed from its road map.

The slim pamphlet holds the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and warnings from founding fathers, such as this one from George Washington:

“Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”

A prevailing distrust of government has always been part of the nation’s personality. And historians agree that public debate and scrutiny deter the abuses and excesses of power - if critics work within the political system.

Many strident constitutionalists refuse to recognize existing governments, courts or U.S. currency.

Near Jordan, Mont., self-styled Freemen created “Justus Township” and picked their own judge. In October, they seized $66,700 worth of ABC News camera gear at gunpoint.

Citing constitutional rights and archaic common law, angry patriots also baffle the courts, county treasurers and the IRS with defiant documents.

The Washington secretary of state reports a surge of petitions from people asking to relinquish their U.S. citizenship in exchange for becoming sovereign residents of the Republic of Washington.

From 1986 through 1992 there were 13 such filings. Since then, there have been 209.

Even more often, constitutionalists file bogus liens against judges, state troopers, bankers and lawyers, sometimes succeeding in temporarily tainting credit records.

Washington state felt so overwhelmed by the unusual documents it assigned assistant attorney general Jeff Even to study the legal logic behind them.

“My first reaction was that these people must be a bunch of morons,” Even says. “But when you take a look at it, that’s not at all true. It’s actually a very careful and meticulous theory.”

Still, Even doubts any judge would deem the documents valid.

Both Montana and Washington passed laws this year to better protect public officials from harassment and to free clerks from the obligation of filing most constitutionalist documents.

But they keep coming.

In August 1994, a man named J.D. Anderson filed an unusual notice with the Stevens County Superior Court. His papers warned county officials that if they processed an IRS lien against his property, they would be held personally responsible for “all expense, loss or otherwise mental or physical damage I might suffer.”

Three months later, Stevens County voters picked Anderson for one of their three commissioners.

Anderson refuses to publicly discuss his views with what he calls the “socialist, liberal media.”

But he had this to say in a brief conversation with a reporter last summer: “People better start listening to something besides what’s coming out of Washington,” D.C.

He noted the Waco and Weaver hearings indicate even Congress realizes Uncle Sam is out of control.

“Could it be,” Anderson asked, “that the nuts are right?”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 10 Color Photos; Graphic: Anger hot spots

MEMO: These 4 sidebars appeared with the story:

1. REBELLION HAS ROOTS IN EARLY AMERICA Flashback: A group of angry citizens from the western woods, most calling themselves militiamen, demand to be freed from onerous federal taxes and regulation. They take up arms against federal agents. The federals open fire on the armed men; one is killed, many are wounded. The year was 1794. It was the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania.

2. WHAT THE TERMS MEAN New World Order - A term used by President Bush in August 1990 before the gulf war, signaling an era of economic and military cooperation among nations. Some see the concept as one-world government and a threat to individual and national sovereignty. Constitutionalist - Someone who believes in a literal reading of the U.S. Constitution, often ignoring court rulings that interpret the document. New Patriots - A wide array of people who liken themselves to the founding fathers who drafted the U.S. Constitution and fought oppressive government. Common Law - A legal philosophy based upon unwritten laws and judicial precedent, rather than legislative rules. Militia - Groups of armed citizens who believe they must be organized and ready to defend the Constitution, individual liberties and state sovereignty. Members often call themselves patriots. united States of America - Some patriots, constitutionalists and states’ rights advocates deliberately lower-case “united” to emphasize the country is a republic made of individual states. Wise Use - A movement to repeal many environmental regulations and increase local control of public lands. Sovereign Citizen - The notion that people are free of any government control. It’s also referred to as “Sui Juris.” States’ rights - A political belief that says states retain all authority not specifically granted to the federal government by the U.S. Constitution.

Amendments Patriots frequently refer to four constitutional amendments to explain their beliefs. First Amendment - Guarantees freedom of religion, press, speech, assembly and petition. Second Amendment - Gives citizens the right to “keep and bear arms.” Advocates say this guarantee overrides any gun-control laws. Tenth Amendment - Powers not delegated to the federal government by the Constitution are reserved by the states or the people. This is the cornerstone of states’ rights arguments. Sixteenth Amendment - Gives Congress the power to collect taxes on income. Many people believe this amendment was not legally ratified by the states.

3. MONTANA INVASION GREATLY EXAGGERATED It was a shocking rumor. The crowd gathered below Ruby Ridge during the 1992 Randy Weaver standoff buzzed that 30,000 Chinese troops were holed up in Yaak, Mont. While Bo Gritz tried to talk Weaver into surrendering, Gritz associate Jerry Gillespie drove to Yaak to investigate the rumor. When he arrived and asked about the Chinese troops, he received blank looks. The only Asian invaders were a couple dozen Cambodian mushroom pickers. “All this paranoia,” Gillespie concludes. “A lot of it gets misguided.”

4. PEPTO PIG DISCOVERS A SIGN OF THE TIMES Dave Messersmith thought he had a quality roadside attraction with his Pepto Pig Second Hand Store on a lonely stretch of Washington highway between Colfax and Dusty. To catch customers, Messersmith bought a flashing arrow to complement the big pink pig he’d crafted out of an old fuel tank. But he soon discovered his sign violated state law after a sleepy fisherman reported he was so alarmed by the flashing light he almost drove off the road. State law demands that you can’t have anything flashing within a hundred feet of a main highway. “I do believe I’ve earned my right to make a living,” Messersmith says. “Why do they have to bother me? They got so many damn regulations now, you literally can’t pull out your toilet and put a new seal on it without getting a permit.” The former Vietnam sergeant wanted the second-hand store to subsidize his salvage yard at the same location. But he hasn’t been able to get a county business permit since the sign violation. Messersmith fought the ruling at the county level, but lost. “I think the government, in all forms, starting little like we got here, has gotten out of hand.”

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Jim Lynch Staff writer Additional reporting by staff writers Julie Sullivan, Bill Morlin and Craig Welch