Next Sunday will be the fourteenth anniversary of the worst act of domestic terrorism in US history. On April 19, 1995 Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring over 800. McVeigh, a former soldier, was connected with the radical right militias and soaked up many of his ideas from books, pamphlets and tracts that circulated in the militia movement:
Mr. McVeigh was an avid reader, his barrack mates recalled; he devoured Soldier of Fortune and Guns & Ammo magazines, the genre of paperback novels about survivors of apocalyptic war and lone commandos that are part of the post-Vietnam culture described by [sociologist James William] Gibson and, above all, "The Turner Diaries," a venomous novel by William L. Pierce, a former physics professor and official of the American Nazi Party. " 'The Turner Diaries' was Mr. McVeigh's bible," said a person closely involved in the case.
Mr. McVeigh's reading, which he pressed on his sister, Jennifer, among others, also included Spotlight, the newsletter of the anti-semitic Liberty Lobby, Patriot Report, a far-right Christian identity newsletter that would later declare the Oklahoma bombing a plot by "the real hate groups," namely the F.B.I. and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, to crack down on armed paramilitary groups, and a strange document titled "Operation Vampire Killer 2000."
Written by Jack McLamb, a former Phoenix police sergeant, it seeks to enlist police and military personnel against "the ongoing, elitist covert operation which has been installed in the American system with great stealth and cunning." It continues, "They, the globalists, have stated that the date of termination of the American way of life is the year 2000."
When the FBI searched the truck of McVeigh's sister Jennifer, they found the copy of Operation Vampire Killer he had sent her.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Operation Vampire Killer 2000 author Jack McLamb
embraced a panoply of conspiracy theories. He told a 1996 rally that government officials were smuggling drugs into the country in a bid to incite racial hatred.
In 1999, he asserted that Vice President Gore intended to reduce world population by 90% through some kind of end-of-the-millennium Y2K plot. He suggested that Communist-led Latinos planned to take over the Southwest.
Along with his friend, Green Beret-turned-Patriot James "Bo" Gritz, he sold plots of land in Idaho as the perfect place to survive the coming troubles.
But when the much ballyhooed "Y2K" collapse failed to materialize, McLamb began to peddle his ideas on the tax protest circuit, instructing students last fall that "Taxes are Voluntary!"
Described by the NYT as "incoherent and almost impossible to follow," Operation Vampire Killer 2000 purports to be the product of numerous law enforcement officials, or as they're repeatedly called, "our nation's protectors." It's ostensibly a recruitment tool for police officers to join the movement and resist the government. But Operation Vampire Killer 2000 lays out a sort of grand unifying theory of everything that is leading to the end of American liberty and the imposition of one world government.
In the beginning, in McLamb's telling there were the founding fathers. They created a land of liberty, in tune with the principles of the Bible. But starting somewhere in the 19th century, a threat arose, the threat of global government, or in the parlance of the early 90's, when the tract was produced, and borrowing from a phrase invoked by the administration of George HW Bush after the fall of communism, a New World Order (NWO).
"Clinton's, Bush's, and Perot's, plans for America are virtually identical," claims McLamb. "The Republicans and Democrats goals for America are virtually identical. They both are taking our nation into global government." The breadth and long-running conspiracy of the NWO is presented in a veritable word salad of quotes connected by little more than appearing on the same page. They go from James Garfield to David Rockefeller, the Rotschilds to newspapermen from the 1950's to—really, it's in there—a "French travel poster" that supposedly presages the impending New World Order.
The leaders of the NWO are described repeatedly as "vermin" or "parasites" or "bloodsuckers," invoking some of the same imagery used in 19th and 20th century anti-Semitism. The forces supposedly orchestrating the NWO are also described as elitists, putting Operation Vampire Killer 2000 in the same lineage as some of the more hateful American populism of the right, from Joe McCarthy to George Wallace to Richard Nixon to Pat Buchanan.
The theoretical groundwork for how the NOW would be imposed on freedom-loving Americans is described as Hegelian, but is also a sort of "shock doctrine":
The first step (thesis) is to create a problem. The second step (anti-thesis) is to generate opposition to the problem (fear, panic, hysteria). The third step (synthesis) is to offer the solution to the problem created in step one,--change which would have been impossible to impose on the people without the proper psychological conditioning achieved in stages one and two.
Psychology, psychiatry and humanistic education have some kind of role in laying the groundwork for the imposition of freedom-killing world government, but according to McLamb, a proximate cause, a shock, is necessary to put in motion the imposition of world government. Three possibilities are offered: a provoked and fake racial conflict—it was written shortly after the LA riots—a faked ecological crisis, or—shades of the X-Files—a faked crisis with UFO's, offered as a need to create a world government so as to effectively muster the earth's resistance to the predations of aliens.
Keys to the success of imposing the NWO on Americans are to take away their guns and to use the IRS to suck away their money. "Yes, the IRS is an essential part of the world order plan to divest Americans of their wealth, and make the people themselves pay for their own national destruction." Americans will be broke, and the NWO conspirators will use the uniformed police to take away the guns of all Americans.
This may sound fringe to some, but as former conservative Michael Lind showed back in 1995, conspiratorial ideas, especially in anti-Semitic form, were at the heart of the world view of major conservative and Republican figures such as Pat Buchanan and especially Pat Robertson. Other Republicans and conservative figures, including William F Buckley and Irving Kristol, not only made excuses for Robertson, but excoriated Lind for exposing Robertson's conspiratorial anti-Semitism.
Why did McLamb name his screed Operation Vampire Killer?
It is felt that this name reflects the actual program in which officers are involved, designed to stop or "kill off" the ongoing, elitist, covert operation which has been installed in the American system with great stealth and cunning. They, the globalists, have stated that the date of termination of the American way of life is the year 2000. Therefore it is fitting that our date to terminate, at the very least; their plan, is also the year 2000.
What can we do, what should we do? The Globalists' agenda is a diabolical program which, through patient gradualism, is slowly draining the moral, economic and political life blood from the United States and the hard working American people.
[…]
We in America, Officers and private citizens alike, are fortunate that at this moment in our history we can still LAWFULLY EXTERMINATE these parasitic Global Blood Suckers by placing numerous "STAKES" made of words, paper, pen, and hard work through their hardened hearts.
[…]
Very soon, if we do not stop these world government proponents, and install in places of leadership honorable men and women, all military, national guardsmen and officers of the law will be used as the "enforcement arm" to guarantee a full complement of "volunteers" for these imperialists' "peaceful" socialist global society.
Operation Vampire Killer 2000 is still floating about the fetid ponds of the radical right. Dave Weigel of the Washington Independent recently took photos at a gun show, including this one:
The radical right is still using tracts like Operation Vampire Killer 2000 to recruit, and it may help inspire future Timothy McVieghs to perpetrate their own acts of domestic terror.
But its not just Operation Vampire Killer 2000 itself that's still circulating within the radical right. It's the language, the metaphors, the messages that the government is planning on taking your guns and that the IRS is part of a global conspiracy to deprive Americans of their liberty that's still a staple of rightwing rhetoric and ideology. For example, Fox News' Glenn Beck:
Just like Pat Robertson brought anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in to the "mainstream" of the conservative movement and the Republican party, Glenn Beck is conveying the language and ideas of radical right conspiracy theories that helped inspire Timothy McVeigh and bringing them through basic cable in to the hearts and minds of viewers across the country. Does Beck realize that he's now channeling the inspirations of Timothy McVeigh? Maybe, maybe not. But to invoke an old conservative concept, ideas have consequences. And right now, Glenn Beck is peddling the rhetoric and ideas of the violent radical right that helped inspire the worst act of domestic terrorism in American history.
[h/t to David Waldman, keener/Mike Caulfield and others who made the Beck--Operation Vampire Killer 2000 connection]
