LOS ANGELES TIMES: "Survivalists Certain: Chaos 'Still Coming' "

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This posting is dedicated to 'Blue Collar' who has shown a touching, wistful interest in these kinds of groups...:)

LOS ANGELES TIMES
Sunday, January 2, 2000

Survivalists Certain: Chaos 'Still Coming'

Refuge: To 350 families dug in in Idaho, Y2K was a blip, a straw man. The real dangers--one-world government, the antichrist--are ahead. And they're ready.

By KIM MURPHY, Times Staff Writer

DOVES OF THE VALLEY, Idaho--This is supposed to be the safest place in America.

Good water table. Tillable land. Lots of protein running wild in the hills. No nearby military installations. And the closest big city--if anybody would call Boise a big city--is 274 miles away.

Want to make it through the dawning of a new millennium, the Y2K bug, the end of the world? Go to the place created by the dynamic duo of survivalism, Bo Gritz and Jack McLamb. Their Idaho mountain redoubt was designed as a fortress against one-world government, urban crime, smog, traffic, zoning laws, the antichrist and errant computers.

But if you feel safer now that all appears well with the arrival of 2000, just wait.

"We got lots more coming at us," Leonard Michael said Saturday morning from his nuclear blast-proof underground retreat on the outskirts of Doves of the Valley. "What I've said is, it's going to be a slow thing--a little thing here, a little thing there. But it's still coming."

"I think it's real interesting the government has spent this much time to build this whole Y2K thing up, and then nothing happens," added Mike Cain, who has his own considerable cache of supplies. "I think Y2K was just a little incident. It has nothing to do with the whole New World Order scheme. It's still full steam ahead. It's inevitable."

The communities of Doves of the Valley and Almost Heaven in the hills above Kamiah, Idaho, bound by members' covenants, have drawn 350 families over the past five years--a few dozen of whom arrived recently in preparation for what they anticipated would be either the beginning of Armageddon or a fine New Year's Day in one heck of a beautiful place.

Kamiah retailers sold truckloads of five-gallon plastic buckets for storage of food and water, along with 300-gallon fuel and propane tanks and assorted generators, kerosene lamps, propane stoves and battery-powered refrigerators.

The local grocery store signed up families to buy bulk foods directly from the supplier. A man walked into the post office last week and bought $2,000 worth of money orders with a wad of cash. Another stockpiled supplies in a cave in the hills outside Almost Heaven.

Just about everybody here wants to get ready for the end of the world, David Hasz, the town marshal, said late last week as the serious hunkering-down was getting under way.

"One guy was telling me we were going to have to blow the bridges so the government couldn't get in. And I'm thinking, what's that going to do? They've got helicopters," Hasz said. "He even went so far as to say, 'If you lose power, how are you going to get water out of the river?' I refused to tell him my own technique. But between you and me, I've got buckets."

Pledge to Defend Neighbors' Rights

Gritz--the former Special Forces officer who claims to be the inspiration for Rambo--worked with McLamb in the mid-1990s to establish their covenant communities, where those wary of what was happening in the world around them could buy land at $3,000 an acre and put in whatever solar panels, generators, gas tanks or arsenals made them feel safe. Crops would be grown and bartered.

The "covenant" was simple: They had to agree to defend their neighbors' constitutional rights, however that need might evolve.

McLamb, who heads a group dedicated to reminding law enforcement and the military what the Constitution stands for, said he and Gritz saw the need for a refuge long before the Y2K issue, and that need hasn't gone away.

"Look at what's going on: We're losing our freedoms in America. We're going under the antichrist one-world system, without a doubt," McLamb said. "Bo decided that he and a group of officers and soldiers would try to find the safest place in America to live."

If it is not the safest place, it surely is one of the loveliest. Climbing on a narrow road out of the Clearwater Valley, the lodgepole pines are heavy with hoarfrost. The clouds blanketing the valley turn violet and pink with the early-setting sun. Deer poke out of the brush. Sloping fields of harvested alfalfa and vegetables cover the hillsides.

There are a few large, expensive frame houses on view lots, but the majority are small, home-built affairs: log cabins, single-wide mobile homes like the one McLamb lives in, a couple of underground houses, tiny cabins.

"About the most radical thing we did is, the cabin roof is red, the garage roof is white and the trailer roof is blue. Beyond that, there are no political statements here," said Joe Jakusz, a Union Pacific Railroad conductor from Nevada who was up in Doves of the Valley over the new year holiday for a honeymoon with his wife, a locomotive engineer.

As he spoke, a Chevron fuel truck was topping off a huge tank in his yard.

A few miles down the road, Cain and his wife were preparing for what he believes is the likelihood that the federal government will try to place the American public under an international, United Nations-led dictatorship. Last week, bets were that the Y2K computer bug was the government's attempt to spark enough public panic to justify the imposition of martial law.

So, too, Cain believes, were FBI predictions that right-wing groups like the one he adheres to--the Freemen--would mount terrorist attacks over the dawning of the new millennium.

"All the people they designated as domestic terrorists didn't in fact blow the world up," Cain said Saturday. "But it's not over yet. There's always been people down through the course of history who have wanted to take over the world. Generally, they tried to do it militarily and, in the long run, it's failed. It's interesting that in the 20th century, the general population has it in their heads that somehow there aren't those sorts of people around any more."

Last week, Cain and a roommate, Larry Rauquist, had an array of camouflage gear spread out on the living room floor. They had, they said vaguely, enough food and stores to last through any eventuality.

"Y2K was an artificially created situation, and now . . . those that created it are going to have to come up with some kind of activity to keep from looking like story-tellers and liars," Rauquist said.

"Anybody who won't go along with Slick Willie's program is called anti-government," Rauquist said, referring to President Clinton's policies. "How dare they call us anti-government, when we are the government?" he added, calling federal officials' "usurpation of authority" a criminal act.

"It smacks of treason," Cain interjected.

Michael--a former heavy-equipment operator from Las Vegas--has at least two years' worth of food stocked up inside 8 inches of reinforced concrete buried below 6 inches of dirt, all properly vented and equipped with switchable battery, generator and propane power systems. He has, he said, hard evidence that the government is preparing this year to take over most private property ownership in the United States and use it to pay off debts to international bankers.

'Have You Seen . . . the Things on TV?'

The Y2K computer bug, he said, wasn't the only scenario under which martial law could be declared. So he's not about to take down his stockpiles of canned spinach and beef stew, Log Cabin syrup, veterinary antibiotics, toilet paper, spare underwear and anthrax antidote.

"Have you seen all the things on TV lately about the terrorists and stuff? This is all mind control. So that when something happens, they can say, 'We told you,' " Michael said from his bunker last week. "We're going to a cashless society. You've heard about the smart card? It will have your Social Security number, your driver's license number, your banking number, everything. Everybody seems to think it's going to be an 18-digit number, probably the 9-digit Social Security number with your nine-digit zip code. Divided by 3, it comes down to be 6-6-6. For whatever that's worth."

Gritz didn't make it back to Almost Heaven for the millennium watch. After shooting himself in the chest a few months ago over the breakup of his third marriage, Gritz wed again and is now in Connecticut awaiting trial on charges that he helped a distraught mother kidnap her children from her ex-husband.

But he sent a word of warning to his followers, predicting that "out of the ashes of decimated fiat systems and economic chaos," the new year would bring "the rise of a 'MONEY MESSIAH,' who will offer a miraculous fix to a bleeding, begging world."

But there is refuge, Gritz says, and it's pretty cheap, and it's got a nice view. Electrical hookups--if you choose not to go off the grid--available. For the moment, anyway.

[ENDS]

-- John Whitley (jwhitley@inforamp.net), January 03, 2000

Answers

Good ole' Bo Gritz. Now there is a reliable source of good info, NOT! Shot himself in the chest over the breakup of his third marriage? Why he is just the person to get your guidence from.

-- Look (at@the.facts), January 03, 2000.

Hey, if you liked that, you'll like this, too...:)

Saturday, January 01, 2000

Party favours at militia's millennium: rifles, pine nuts
Deep in New Mexico

Toby Harnden
The Daily Telegraph

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - With the last hours of the 20th century slipping away, Cope Reynolds was taking no chances. Four hideaways in the Zuni mountains had been made ready and a year's provisions stored. He secured his ranch and waited for the darkness.

"It would take one major assault to breach this place," he said.

"We have no intention of letting anything happen to our loved ones or unit members. At the moment we are in a defensive posture. The only exception to that would be if our firearms were going to be confiscated. Then it is safe to assume we would go on the offensive."

As he spoke, Mr. Reynolds, one of four self-styled brigade commanders in the New Mexico Constitutional Regulated Militia, clutched a Chinese-made SKS -- "known as an assault rifle by the bed-wetting liberals" -- and a Remington 700.

Mr. Reynolds is one of thousands of militia members in 435 groups across America who spent much of 1999 preparing for the possible collapse of society and the formation of a New World Order.

The greatest threat, they believe, is not computer crashes or fuel shortages but President Clinton and the federal government.

They argue that Y2K could be used as a cover for a dark conspiracy to remove from American citizens their few remaining freedoms, including the right to bear arms. As they see it, the National Guard and the army would be used to seize firearms, and foreign troops would be called in to impose the sovereignty of the United Nations.

Jim "The Duke" Strode, "state commander of the New Mexico militia," said: "Bill Clinton is like a vulture sitting on a fence just waiting for his chance to declare martial law. He's seen himself all along as being a dictator and maybe world leader, leader of the UN. With all the panic that's been hyped up over the millennium, this could be his chance."

Mr. Reynolds, 43, a former soldier, and Mr. Strode, 60, who spent 23 years as a police officer, cite the second amendment to the American constitution, which describes a "well-regulated militia" as "being necessary to the security of a free state," as the basis for their activities.

They see themselves as patriots and model citizens. But the U.S. government views them as a threat.

Last month, two militia members in Sacramento, Calif., were arrested on suspicion of plotting to blow up two massive propane storage tanks. The FBI believed that their plan was to incite panic and force the authorities to declare martial law, thereby creating a public backlash against the federal authorities and prompting the overthrow of the government.

Mr. Strode said the arrests were trumped up and designed to persuade the public that all militia members were terrorists. "They're trying to turn American citizens against each other. What it's going to come down to is people will have a choice. They can stand in line waiting for the mark of the beast or they can fight."

He had taught himself to live off the land by eating pine nuts, insects, juniper berries and rattlesnakes. But he admitted: "It sure would be difficult for the kids so we've hidden packs of playing cards and bubble gum as well."

[ENDS]

-- John Whitley (jwhitley@inforamp.net), January 03, 2000.


The 'greatest threat' is they may leave their caves.

-- Look (at@the.facts), January 03, 2000.

Warning: There is a U.S. News and World Report reporter trolling around c.s.y2k who would like to write a similar "kooks and nuts" story--about anyone who answers his call!

-- cgbg jr (cgbgjr@webtv.net), January 03, 2000.

Wrong Whitley! Am just your typical small town soccer mom coping in this constitutional republic. Guess again. Keep up the great work posting relevant stories, spare us the drivel on the royals, please. Also see response to Militias "fingering and caressing" their gun triggers posted in your thread way below from the London Sunday Times. Again, consider the source: THE TIMES of London. This soccer mom has a friendly but not "intimate" relationship with Smith and Wesson. And that's a full size used van, not a mini honey. Better to haul my kids, dogs & preps.

-- blue collar (2ndshift@work.com), January 03, 2000.


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