Patriot games.

• Author: Diamond, Sara
• Position: Freedom Rally of Patriot-movement groups

It was business as usual at the Fourth of July weekend Freedom Rally of Patriot-movement groups from Northern and Southern California. About 200 mostly middle-aged men and married couples spent two days at San Jose's Hyatt Hotel--swapping IRS war stories, alternative health tips, and some of the most virulent racist and anti-Semitic literature I've seen in more than a decade of monitoring the right.

Three years ago, I attended a nearly identical gathering sponsored by the same group, and there were a lot of familiar faces. The Free Enterprise Society, founded in 1979 to provide unofficial legal advice to tax dodgers of the far right, provides an annual forum for a loose network of racist preachers, conspiracy mongers, and militia men. They came from up and down the state and from as far away as Colorado, Montana, Oklahoma, and Missouri.

There was one African American in the crowd and at least one other Jew besides myself. My WASPish, bearded, ponytailed partner was among about a dozen long-haired guys. The Patriots dressed in a mix of cheap suits, shorts, and T-shirts. The shirts on one pair of burly Patriots had a modified Budweiser logo advertising JESUS CHRIST THE KING OF KINGS. Other shirts read: FIGHT CRIME--SHOOT BACK, FORGET THE ALAMO--REMEMBER WACO, and WILL WORK FOR FREEDOM. The women, few in number, were nondescript. One wore her American flag lapel pin upside down.

The price per couple at the door was forty-five "federal reserve notes" or f.r.n.'s. The Patriots hate the U.S. paper-money system, but until we return to gold and silver, they will accept the green stuff. Cash only, no questions asked, no name tags except for those worn by speakers and exhibitors. Unlike the Christian-right gatherings I frequently attend, the Patriot events are not places where one easily strikes up conversations with strangers. Scribbling too many notes, too fast, on a legal pad, I drew some uncomfortable glances from the tight-lipped and paranoid.

Two months after the Oklahoma City bombing threw a spotlight on the armed wing of the Patriot movement, the incident has not thinned the Patriots' ranks or toned down their rhetoric. If anything, these folks have added the arrest of Timothy McVeigh to their store of beefs against the government. Speakers and leafletters were united in their claim that the Feds bombed their own building to justify a crackdown on Patriots.

The mainstream media and the general public have only recently discovered the militia movement. But among those assembled at the Freedom Rally were people who have spent more than fifteen years organizing within earlier streams of the far right, particularly the violent Posse Comitatus tax resisters and the whitesupremacist Christian Identity churches.

These two overlapping networks grew out of the failed segregationist movement of the 1950s and 1960s. After the racist right's heyday during the 1968 George Wallace Presidential campaign, the movement floundered and split into innumerable sects. It never regained its massive influence at the ballot box. A remnant of the segregationist movement degenerated into small groups of gun-toting survivalists, including those who waged terror campaigns under the banner of the Aryan Nations in the 1980s.

Old Patriots don't die. They just change uniforms. Small groups with names like the Free Enterprise Society, the Freemen Educational Association, the National Commodity and...