Blood and Politics (85 page)

However, the preparedness market became saturated long before the calendar was set to change, particularly in the Midwest, where expos had been a continual presence since the early 1980s and the total number of survivalists remained relatively limited. In 1999 one vendor candidly said he was still selling water purifiers in California, but sales in Kansas City had slowed to a halt.
¹⁹
As early as December 1998, a full year before any millennial disasters would supposedly hit,
The Spotlight
told its declining number of subscribers that “scaremongers” were pumping up public panic for private profit. “Don’t Be Fooled on Y2K,” the tabloid opined.
²⁰
After the doomsday date came and went without incident,
The Spotlight
took the opportunity to say, “Told you so.” The tabloid called to account one scaremeister popular among John Birch Society types, Gary North, for deciding that the calendar change might provoke the “biggest problem” in modern history. Another
Spotlight
target was Don McAlvaney, who had spent years speaking at preparedness expos that also featured Bo Gritz.
²¹

Nevertheless, Liberty Lobby could not itself resist the pull of the Y2K market. It published several special
American Family Preparedness
tabloid-size inserts for subscribers that were distributed free at these expos. The inserts featured a few print articles about buying guns and preparedness and lent the enterprise an authoritative look. The tabloid’s representatives sold “Liberty Library” book stock. And Liberty Lobby garnered additional advertising revenue by selling display ads to other outfits drilling the same landscape. By any measure,
The Spotlight
’s merchandising was opportunistic, not ideological.
²²

By contrast, Pete Peters opposed the Y2K salesmen as a matter of doctrinal certainty. The expos, he wrote, were, “in reality, patriots’ flea markets where Kosher Conservative speakers . . . scare . . . the audience who then go through the flea market to buy everything from gold and silver to generators and food storage.”
²³

Peters had kept much of his following throughout the 1990s despite a few setbacks, including the death from cancer of his wife, Cheri, and
a subsequent rift with his children when he remarried.
²⁴
In fact, Peters still represented a definable camp of Christian Identity preachers and their respective flocks. More significant, his critique of the Y2K scaremongers was thoroughly grounded in a specific Christian Identity eschatology. “We have been called to be more than survivors,” he argued to his flock. “We have been called to be overcomers and to wage spiritual battle against our enemies.”
²⁵
Peters’s refusal to fan the Y2K flame should have weighed more than the opportunism of a few visible cranks in any assessment of the millennial change.

It was Peters’s analysis that was the most important missing ingredient in the FBI’s
Project Megiddo
report. Further, an analysis of the Identity-specific theory of the End Times was absent from the predictions by those academics and other experts who guessed wrong about what would happen on January 1, 2000. Much like the distinction between one seed and two seed adherents inside the Christian Identity camp, on this piece of eschatological arcana rests an entire doctrinal superstructure.

Christian eschatology has to do with doctrines related to the End Times, the associated Second Coming of Christ, and the establishment of God’s Kingdom. Most Christian believers fall into three camps: amillennialism, postmillennialism, and premillennialism. In this case, “millennialism” refers to the period when Christians believe their Lord will rule the earth. The first group holds no particular set of ideas about when Christ will return to earth and how God’s Kingdom will be instituted. Premillennialists believe that Christ returns
prior
to the thousand-year kingdom, which is established through his agency (and his agency alone). Most Christian fundamentalists, those who believe in a literal interpretation of their Bible, are premillennialists.

One of the hallmarks of premillennialism is the notion of dispensationalism, a specific ordering of events (including world events) by the Lord. A dispensation, then, is a specific period of time that begins with a revelation and ends with a divine judgment. The period before the Second Advent of Christ is considered a dispensation unto itself, a particular period of time that opens in prophecies and signs so that it can be known to the faithful. It ends with Christ’s judgment of all. On the exact nature of this last dispensation, known popularly as the period of the End Times, all premillennialists do not agree. But if any millennial-associated violence aimed at quickening the arrival of their Christ, it might have come from this theological camp. In any case, nothing happened.
²⁶

Postmillennialists, on the other hand, believe that the Kingdom of God will be brought about through human agency, essentially through the work of the church. After a thousand years of this kingdom, Christ
is supposed to return to earth, hence the name postmillennial. Christ’s return ends all time and begins the hereafter known as eternity. Liberal and mainstream Protestant denominations make up the greatest number of postmillennialists. But Christian Identity—with its emphasis on human action and a prolonged race war—falls within a postmillennial-like worldview.
²⁷
Simply put, Christian Identity adherents were not preparing for Y2K-specific End Times. And law enforcement officials and religious scholars who rang an alarm about end-of-the-century violence by Identity adherents proved manifestly mistaken.

While all this speculation about the meaning of the calendar change was going on, white nationalists were actually preparing for a different period of great transformation and tumult, what might be called a racial millennium. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the total population of the United States in 2000 was 281,421,906.
²⁸
Of that total population, 11 percent was counted as “foreign born.” Over 69 percent was considered “white, non-Hispanic.” Over 12 percent was counted as black. Another 12.5 percent (35,305,818) was counted as “Hispanic,” and 3.6 percent “Asian and Pacific Islander.” The numbers shifted significantly in predictions for the year 2050, when those children born during the year 2000 might be becoming grandparents. At that point, 13 percent of the population was expected to be foreign born. The number that most alarmed white nationalists, however, was the relationship of “white, non-Hispanics” to the total: 53 percent, a drop of almost twenty points from their majority status in the year 2000. The black population was expected to remain at around 13 percent of the total while those counted as “Asian and Pacific Islander” would double to almost 9 percent, and those counted as “Hispanic” were expected to take the largest jump, to 24 percent.

By the year 2070, the Census Bureau predicted, “white, non-Hispanics” would decline to 47 percent of the total. The change in the demographic character of the population was expected to happen faster in some states and cities than in others, of course. But the essential fact remained: in about the same number of years that elapsed between World War Two and the year 2000, white nationalists could expect to lose the powers and privileges of majority status. Thus those who conflated nation with race expected to lose what they regarded as the “genetic basis” for Western Civilization.

In the white nationalist mind, becoming a racial minority is only one step away from racial extinction. And fear of racial extinction has animated white supremacists since before the first antimiscegenation laws
were passed. When white supremacy reemerged as a distinctive movement in the 1970s, its leaders and publicists railed against any number of contemporary events and changes that they regarded as infringements upon “white rights.” At the same time, however, they remained animated by a fear that the white race would disappear. David Duke’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, for example, published a special recruitment tabloid under the banner headline of “A New Racial Minority,” featuring a picture of a pale-skinned infant. Future babies, Duke warned, would not be this color. In the early 1980s, Aryan Nations published a three-color map with boldly drawn arrows showing the waves of brown-skinned immigration it expected to swamp the white heartland. This fear for the racial future, posed as a concern for white children, became part of the movement’s core ritual observances. When Bob Mathews first organized his group of Order bandits, for example, they pledged their eternal fealty in a circle with a white baby in the middle. And Order member David Lane turned his famous “Fourteen Words” into a virtual religious mantra: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children.” Skinheads who joined the movement long after Lane had been imprisoned knew and repeated this slogan from California to Michigan and from Toronto to Stockholm. To hear this movement tell it, white people were an endangered species, akin to the white wolf.

After the transformation of white supremacy into white nationalism, a broader stratum of thinkers and activists began to consider the future of the American polity in specifically racial terms. Pat Buchanan’s focus changed from combating communism to worries about the possibility of assimilating “Zulus” to a final declaration that declining white birthrates (coupled with increased numbers of brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking immigrants and high “nonwhite” birthrates) signaled the end of Western Civilization itself. Even white power skinheads, not yet old enough to matriculate high school, claimed that fear for the future of their yet-to-be-born children motivated their desire to get drunk and knock some dark-skinned stranger on the head.

Less brutishly, the Council of Conservative Citizens talked about race, immigration, and the future, while its members marched to preserve monuments to the Confederate past. One monthly tabloid allied with this wing of the movement,
Middle American News
, used its back page to publish a large picture of a white baby with the headline “By the Time She Retires, Will the U.S. Be an Overcrowded Country?” Without using the words “white” or “race” the pictures and text conveyed a white racial story: “Because of immigration policies adopted by Congress, America’s population will grow from 281 million today to more than 500 million by 2050, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The millions
of newcomers are radically changing the U.S. into a multicultural society. Is this the future we want?”
²⁹

American Renaissance
too made the prospective future of the white race a key element of its program. Jared Taylor repeatedly claimed that racial diversity was a horror, “so obviously stupid that only very intelligent people could have thought it up.” Diversity and multiculturalism provoked wars among peoples, caused white people to move from their neighborhoods to the suburbs, and was about to turn North America into a “pesthole.” Only Europeans and Asians, he opined, could build successful societies. And if the present looked grim to Taylor, the future was certain to be worse. “What we are witnessing is one of the great tragedies in human history,” he claimed. “Powerful forces are in motion that, if left unchecked, will slowly push aside European man and European civilization on this continent. If we do nothing, the country we leave to our grandchildren will be a grim Third-World failure, in which whites will be a minority.”
³⁰

As a ray of white hope, Taylor believed that white people tended to lead segregated lives by natural instinct. Certainly he was right that housing segregation, for example, had not changed significantly since the passage of the open housing laws. In fact, there was evidence that growing numbers of young white people, the generation that would become the great-grandparents of the year 2050, were tending to regard “separate but equal” as a legitimate doctrine in the twenty-first century. A 1999 poll conducted by Zogby International found a definable drift away from integration and toward a “separate but equal” doctrine among younger people age eighteen to twenty-nine. Asked if “it’s OK if the races are basically separate from one another as long as everyone has equal opportunities,” 50.3 percent of survey respondents agreed.
³¹

The separate but equal doctrine had been described as inherently unequal by the Supreme Court in 1954. If this simple fact of life could be successfully ignored in 1999, less than fifty years later, the argument for racial partition would have greater salience, some Renaissancers believed. Others wanted to eviscerate the Fourteenth Amendment now. Survivalist tactics such as establishing so-called covenant communities and keeping stocks of food and rifles would not alter immigration and birthrates. All agreed that the coming permanent racial transformation of the United States posed a long-term danger to white nationalists, greater than any damage computer bugs could do by shutting down the banking system. For mainstreamers and vanguardists alike, the cultural war was not a war for control of a single culture. Rather, it was a war between cultures for dominance over a single piece of North American real estate. It was a battle for the future. And it often began with combat over the past.

January 8, 2000.
The new millennium began in South Carolina with a ceremonial remembrance of the past. After reading of the names of Confederate war dead, men dressed as Civil War reenactors, wearing gray uniforms and carrying muskets, marched ahead of a throng six thousand strong singing “Dixie” through the streets of Columbia, the state capital. Dwarfed by a sea of rebel battle flags, a shrunken ninety-three-year-old woman, said to be the last surviving widow of a Confederate veteran, was wheeled in her chair to the front. An oversize Confederate battle flag hung behind a speakers’ dais that included six state representatives and a state senator. All intended to protect the banner’s pride of place on the capitol’s flagstaff, where it had been flying beneath both the Stars and Stripes and South Carolina’s state flag since 1961. Vitriol flowed from the platform that day like undigested bile, much of it directed at the NAACP, which had been campaigning to remove the Confederate banner from its state-sanctioned position. One state senator called the NAACP the National Association of Retarded People. Another elected representative screamed, “If they keep trying to bring it down, they’re going to find out why they call it a battle flag.”
¹