On
Orcinus, David Neiwert explores connections between extreme right-wing Congressman Richard Pombo, the driving force behind this week's vote by the House of Representatives to gut key provisions of the Endangered Species Act,
and the extremist Patriot movement.
Since his election to Congress in 1994, Pombo has been on the leading edge of the right-wing assault on environmental law, and in the process has aligned himself with some of the right's most radical elements. Besides constantly attacking the ESA and "radical environmentalists," he has also been a leading proponent of "takings legislation," a strategy favored by some property-rights advocates that argues for compensation for landowners affected by environmental laws.
Elimination of environmental protections has long been an obsession of the Patriot and militia movements, thought by them to represent outrageous government interference in the rights of property owners. While you don't have far to go to tie Pombo to extremist elements, Neiwert focuses particularly "one of Pombo's closest associates", Chuck Cushman. He cites Paul DeArmond's Northwest Citizen site for a demonstration of Cushman's ties:
Chuck Cushman provided the rallying issue for the militia organizers when he toured northern Washington in early 1994 to organize opposition to the North Cascades Park proposal. The resulting furor over a mythical "UN invasion" has vastly exceeded the similar uproar around a hoax about "encephalitis carrying mosquitoes" at the Stone Lakes wildlife refuge in California. In both instances, Cushman has denied responsibility and attempted to distance himself.
Cushman has a history of using violent language and threatening tactics. In an interview on "60 Minutes", Cushman related how he encouraged things like video-taping environmentalists, disrupting meetings with noisy livestock or heavy equipment, and other methods of harassment and intimidation. Asked why he did such things, he compared his tactics to "Indians shooting flaming arrows over the wagon trains... to keep them awake at night."
At the Rome Grange, Cushman made over thirty references to violent acts in a half-hour speech. In every case, he associated the violence with his opponents. "They want to strangle you," was his most frequent remark. Cushman's set-speech emphasizes violent acts, theft, and arson. These themes repeat themselves over and over, creating the impression that these type of actions define the rules under which he and his supporters must operate.
... Cushman's selection of the North Cascades Park as an issue marked the beginning of a new phase in Wise Use activities in Washington State. The so-called "Park Conspiracy" was used as the main recruiting issue in Washington State by white supremacists and other anti-government extremists who have been forming paramilitary "militias." In October 1994, Skip Richards, Kathy Sutter and Shirley Hardy hosted a group of militia promoters, white supremacists, Constitutionalists and other conspiracy cranks at the Laurel Grange. Ostensibly, the meeting was to discuss the North Cascades Park, but the presentations focussed on conspiracy theories. The initial flyer for the meeting has a subhead that reads, "North Cascades International Ecosystem boundaries will be controlled by electronic fortifications and supervised by the CIA." (emphasis in original.)
Several of the speakers -- Ben Sams, Don Kehoe, David Montgomery, Robert Crittenden -- were later involved in sponsoring Bob Fletcher, Randy and David Trochmann of the Militia of Montana at a militia forum held in Maltby, Wash. on February 11, 1995. At Maltby, CLUE member Ben Hinkle spoke about the Citizens for Liberty's recruiting efforts that targeted Whatcom County police.
Neiwert also points out something I'd long forgotten: that Pombo's own 1996 book attacking environmentalism and espousing Patriot-style property rights was co-written by Joseph Farah, founder of online conspiracy site WorldNetDaily.com. From Neiwert's spectacular Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism series...
In the run-up to Y2K, for example, [WorldNetDaily's] major theme was the Patriot belief that Clinton intended to use the social chaos certain to proceed from the looming technological disaster as a pretext for declaring martial law and thereby establishing his dictatorship. Of course, one of the chief promoters of this theory was the zine's editor, Joseph Farah, who penned numerous columns on the subject.
Read the whole article over at Orcinus for more, including small-world ties between the 1994 meeting above and Ruby Ridge, and a demonstration that "like most figures on the far right, [Pombo's] own mythology is actually predicated on bullshit."