The United States of Paranoia (35 page)

We didn’t question the possibility that we were being duped. Our new beliefs were considered to be our own. We held onto them like cherished artifacts discovered in a cave of lost treasure. We wore them like clothes to distinguish us from our “enemies”: that multitude who did not believe the way we did. We didn’t see that we were becoming as attached to ideas and belief systems as those people we categorically lumped together on the
other
side. We didn’t see it because we didn’t want to. It was too easy and comfortable to align ourselves with ideas that were in opposition to the “established reality.”

Critique
, he hoped, would evoke “the spirit to think, reflect, create and act toward gaining a deeper understanding of the often invisible manipulating influences and of who, in fact, we are and who we are becoming.”
15

When Banner describes this period of his life today, he makes his younger self sound simultaneously skeptical and naive. On one hand, he was willing to interrogate not just the normal assumptions of American society but the assumptions of the most popular alternative social visions as well. At the same time, he was the sort of person willing to follow one of those trails into the arms of a group he came to consider a cult. Make that
two
groups that he came to consider cults: At the dawn of the nineties, feeling aimless again after a decade of publishing
Critique
, Banner joined Xanthyros, an intentional community in Vancouver led by a guru named Robert Augustus Masters.
Critique
was revamped as a New Age magazine called
Sacred Fire
, and Masters took it over, with Banner serving as little more than a typesetter until he left the community.

That mixture of skepticism and naiveté characterized
Critique
as well. “What I really found refreshing about
Critique
,” Jay Kinney recalled in 2012, “was that he was in some ways like a newborn with no taboos, would publish anything that challenged consensus reality. He even published Holocaust revisionist material, in what I would call a rather naïve fashion, but he was sincerely engaged with the notion of, ‘Well, what if what we know about that isn’t true?’ ” Some of the weirder material was included for novelty value or comic relief: Banner wasn’t being serious when, in the midst of a roundup of plausible or at least thinkable conspiracy news items, he threw in someone’s theory that “Carter looks like a zombified robot” because he “was killed in July of 78 and replaced with a ‘double.’ ”
16

Banner discovered a drawback to that approach when he manned a
Critique
table at an event near his home. “This guy shows up,” Banner told me, “and he’s so excited that he sees
Critique
. He loves my magazine. And he’s got mental problems.” The man rattled off references to drugs and aliens, to conspiracy theories and alternate realities; he sat on the ground leafing through back issues as he sang the publication’s praises. “And it’s the first time that I’m actually scared,” Banner recalled. “What the fuck am I doing if I’m attracting psychopaths or psychotic people or people who maybe really believe this shit I’m putting out? I’m doing it as an intellectual exercise to continually play with ideas and hold these ambiguities in my head. . . . Someone’s actually paying attention, and I need to be cautious.”

Banner was very different from Peter McAlpine, and
Critique
was very different from
Conspiracy Digest
. But the two men read and appreciated each other’s work, and they were recognizably a part of the same subculture, a world the libertarian activist Samuel Edward Konkin III, writing in 1987, dubbed “Conspiracy Fandom.”
17
By the time
Critique
was supplanted by
Sacred Fire
, new conspiracy fanzines were arriving to take its place, each with its own tone and flavor.
Steamshovel Press
launched in 1988.
The Excluded Middle
and
Paranoia
both followed in 1992.
Flatland
and the book catalog from which it emerged were a bit older, but they moved into the conspiracy culture only gradually. They came out of the Left, beginning as an adjunct to an anarchist printing collective in the mid-1980s.
Flatland
was still selling books on anarchism in the subsequent decade, but by then it also had a large stock of material on assassinations, mind control, UFOs, Wilhelm Reich, “suppressed science,” and the sovereign citizens movement. It even sold Bob Fletcher’s militia videos. The editor, Jim Martin, placed his operation firmly in fusionist territory when he called himself “an anarchist for Perot.”
18

Where there’s fandom, conventions frequently follow. In 1991 and 1992, you could attend PhenomiCon in Atlanta, a place where earnest UFO buffs such as William Cooper, the author of
Behold a Pale Horse
, could rub shoulders with ironists such as Robert Anton Wilson and the SubGenius crowd. A contingent from the Georgia Skeptics came the first year, eager to debate people with strange beliefs. One of the skeptics got more than he bargained for, according to the group’s newsletter, when he went to “a discussion on ‘Atomic Radio,’ billed as ‘the communications technology suppressed by the government since the late ’40s.’ ”
19
As the skeptic argued that the alleged technology violated the laws of physics, agents invaded the presentation and appeared to kill everyone present. The skeptic, it turned out, had wandered into a live-action role-playing game. No one at the session actually believed in “Atomic Radio” at all.
20

Fandoms tend to take root on the Internet, too. A discussion group called alt.conspiracy had already appeared on Usenet at the tail end of the eighties. As of 1993, you could subscribe to an e-mail newsletter called
Conspiracy for the Day
, run by Brian Redman of Champaign, Illinois. (The title parodied the “Thought for the Day” messages available from various online sources.) One of Redman’s
e-mails
might contain part of a
Science News
report about crop circles; another might feature an excerpt from a book about CIA brainwashing experiments; another might reprint an Abbie Hoffman critique of the drug war. It’s hard to generalize about how the newsletter’s recipients perceived what they were reading. I had friends who subscribed to it under the impression that it was at least partly tongue-in-cheek and who made a habit of forwarding the items that they found especially funny or strange. But though Redman didn’t accept every idea he printed—he wanted, he later said, to “leave it open so people could just decide for themselves”
21
—his interest in conspiracies was sincere.

Redman hadn’t paid much attention to world affairs until he hit his forties, when Waco got him interested in alternative news sources. After he had been putting out his daily e-mail for a while—he soon renamed it
Conspiracy Nation
—he got in touch with Sherman Skolnick, a Chicago-based conspiracy chaser who had been active since the sixties. In the days before mass access to the Internet, Skolnick had shared his ideas through a series of recorded messages that you could access by calling a phone number; now he became Redman’s mentor. Skolnick’s career had begun with a fairly well grounded argument that a couple of judges were corrupt, then had gradually descended into increasingly bizarre claims.
22
Eventually they became too bizarre for Redman, who went his own way after Skolnick started declaring, to give just one example, that sinister forces had deliberately steered Hurricane Katrina into New Orleans.

Skolnick came out of the radical Left but contributed to whatever publications would have him, including the Liberty Lobby’s paper
The
Spotlight
. Redman had started as a Democrat, but in the nineties his outlook became more libertarian. The sources used in
Conspiracy for the Day
and
Conspiracy Nation
spanned the spectrum from liberal muckrakers to followers of Lyndon LaRouche. That sort of range was not unusual in the 1990s conspiracy scene.

In that environment, it shouldn’t be surprising to see Anthony Hilder, who once had belonged to a group that sold “Support Your Local Police” bumper stickers, selling tapes at an event featuring Ice T and Body Count, musicians infamous for a song called “Cop Killer.”

Hilder and the concert’s organizers hailed from very different political traditions, but they shared some of the same conspiracy theories. That shouldn’t be surprising, since they shared some of the same fears. Both were wary of the government’s growing police powers. Both resented the abuses of civil liberties that have come with the war on drugs, and both accused government officials of being involved with the drug trade themselves. The firebombing of MOVE in Philadelphia and the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles aroused the same resentment among blacks that the Ruby Ridge standoff prompted among many whites. In much of the mass media, Americans angry about the Waco fires were classified with Klansmen. But nearly half the Branch Davidians killed at Mount Carmel were minorities—twenty-eight blacks, six Hispanics, and five Asians.
23
“As things get worse,” Bob Fletcher concluded, “blacks and whites will be thrown into the same trash pail.”
24

Two organizations played prominent roles at that black/white intersection: the Nation of Islam and the Universal Zulu Nation. The Nation of Islam dates back to the 1930s, but Zulu Nation was born in the early days of hip-hop. Afrika Bambaataa has been a DJ and community organizer in New York since the 1970s; along with Grandmaster Flash, Kool Herc, and others, he was one of the founding fathers of rap. He created Zulu Nation as an alternative to gangs, inviting young people to the Zulus’ world of rapping, break dancing, and graffiti instead. By the 1990s, the group included musicians, filmmakers, and others around the world, from France to Japan to Africa. One of the “primary functions of getting in,” according to Afrika Islam, was sharing theories about the New World Order.
25

In 1994, Islam’s friend Hilder appeared on
The Front Page
, a popular talk show on the black-oriented Los Angeles radio station KJLH. There Hilder mixed the conspiracy theories popular in the patriot movement with appeals aimed at a black community ruptured by unemployment and crime. One listener who tuned in that day was Rasul Al-Ikhlas, the host of
The Story of Soul
, a local public-access television program. Al-Ikhlas invited Hilder onto his show, and at his guest’s suggestion he had Fletcher come along as well.

Eager to reach still more of the black community, Hilder eventually tried his skills as a rapper, reciting apocalyptic verses over an electronic beat:

Masonic mind manipulation

Inciting riots, it’s crisis creation

Biochip implantation

Vaccinate your kid for U.N. identification
26

If you were hoping that Hilder’s tolerance would extend past the region of race and into sexual orientation, I’ll have to disappoint you: He also rhymes “Albert Pike” with “Janet Reno, dyke.”

News of the newcomers traveled via the Universal Zulu Nation network. (Hilder’s black girlfriend had the amusing experience of visiting a village in Belize only to be recognized by a native who had heard a tape of her speaking on the radio.) Islam introduced Hilder to Michael Moor, a reporter for the Nation of Islam’s newspaper
The Final Call
, and shortly afterward Moor appeared on Hilder’s radio show. There they argued that the powers that be are driving the United States toward a race war and that men and women of all ethnicities should work together to defuse the battle before it starts—the same story line that the John Birch Society preached in the 1960s, but now pitched to an audience that was more black than white. Other Muslims, such as Cedric X Welch of
The Final Call
, began to show an interest in the militia/patriot worldview.

Many readers, learning that elements of the Black Muslim and militia communities wanted to cooperate, will assume that the common ground was bigotry. Both groups, after all, have been plagued by accusations of anti-Semitism. There is indeed a lot of anti-Jewish sentiment in the Black Muslim community—Hilder had an unpleasant confrontation with the infamous Khalid Abdul Muhammad, whom he subsequently described as a “crazy” who wants to kill all whites, especially the Jewish ones—but it does not seem to have played a major role in the black-white crossover. “The blacks that are anti-Semitic won’t have anything to do with me,” Hilder noted at the time, “because they’re also antiwhite.”
27
That said, Cedric X Welch does have a history of anti-Semitic statements, and Hilder did share a microphone once with Steve Cokely, a black militant prone to citing
The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
and casually using the word “Jewboy.” The pairing didn’t work out: After the program, Cokely and his companions snubbed Hilder because of his race. (Hilder himself, though a Christian, is a former member of the Jewish Defense League.)

Even ignoring the problems posed by people like Cokely, this was an unstable alliance. Covering the story for a magazine article in 1995, I called Moor for an interview. I learned that he had cooled to the idea of black-white cooperation—and to other sorts of black-white interaction, too. “I don’t talk to the white media no more,” he told me gruffly. “Every time we talk to whitey, something happens.” The militias “seem sincere,” he continued, “but you have to wonder what their hidden agenda is, who’s pulling their strings.” There’s always the chance that “behind closed doors, we’re all still niggers to them. I’m not necessarily talking about Anthony [Hilder], but sometimes I don’t even know where he’s coming from.” After all, “They’re getting too much pub’ from the white media. . . . After they overthrow the overlords, maybe they’ll start lording it over people of color.”
28