Rocky Mountain Rendezvous (1992)

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Rocky Mountain Rendezvous
YMCA of the Rockies 29.jpg
YMCA of the Rockies, the venue of the Rendezvous
DateOctober 23–25, 1992 (1992-10-23 – 1992-10-25)
VenueEstes Park YMCA
Location Estes Park, Colorado
Also known as"Special Gathering of Christian Men"
Theme American militia movement, Patriot movement, Radical right politics
Cause Killing of Vicki and Samuel Weaver (Ruby Ridge)
Organised by Pete Peters, Scriptures for America Ministries
Participants150–175
OutcomeTransition of American right-wing terrorism to leaderless resistance

The Rocky Mountain Rendezvous was an October 1992 meeting in Estes Park, Colorado of 150 to 175 adherents and leaders of the American militia movement, Patriot movement and the radical right that developed the modern strategy for right-wing terrorism in the United States. [1] [2] The Rendezvous was organized by Christian Identity Pastor Pete Peters in response to the Ruby Ridge standoff two months prior. [3] [4] [5] Concerns included that the United States federal government was a police state engaged in systematic over taxation, wrongful imprisonment and murder of its citizens, described by the meeting as "genocide." [6] [7] [8] [9]

Contents

The meeting was critical in influencing the young American militia movement and sparking the transition in radical right and white supremacist violence in the United States towards leaderless resistance. [10] [11] [12]

Attendance

Peters described the meeting as a gathering of "Christian men." Attendees to the rendezvous hailed from numerous, even conflicting, far-right ideologies. Groups represented included Christian Identity, the American Coalition of Unregistered Churches, sovereign citizens, tax protestors, neo-Confederates, Posse Comitatus, the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations and National Alliance, and the Ku Klux Klan. [2] [13] Some attendees identified themselves as "100 percent bigot." [11]

Peters himself was a prolific anti-Semite, white supremacist, and homophobe, whose activism once sought to defeat lesbian and gay civil rights protections in nearby Fort Collins, Colorado. Other noteworthy participants included Richard G. Butler, founder of Aryan Nations, and Louis Beam, an Aryan Nations spokesman and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon. [10]

Proceedings

The Rendezvous lasted for three days. The proceedings were audio-recorded and compiled into a "Special Report" by Peters. [2] [14]

Events included meetings in multiple subject-matter committees. Proposals ranged from circulating petitions to holding unofficial citizen grand juries. [9] In particular, the "SWAT" ("Sacred Warfare Action Tactics") committee was responsible for hearing the essay on methods of leaderless violence presented by Beam. In Beam's explanation, "leaderless resistance" is an avenue where "a thousand different small phantom cells" could effectively overwhelm Federal forces in place of a vulnerable pyramidal hierarchy. [8] [15] [16] The essay was reproduced in whole in the meeting report. [10]

The attendees of the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous also drafted and sent an open letter to the family of Vicki and Samuel Weaver, the civilian casualties of Ruby Ridge, that acknowledged their "mortal sacrifices." [8]

Religious underpinnings

The Rendezvous placed a special emphasis on Christian theology. [11] In multiple references to the Bible, the SWAT committee identified that perpetrators of lone wolf attacks are actors under the command of Jesus Christ. [8] The introduction to the Special Report by Peters quoted Book of Numbers 35:33:

So you shall not pollute the land where you are; for blood defiles the land, and no atonement can be made for the land, for the blood that is shed on it, except by the blood of him who shed it.

Attendees feared that actors of the Antichrist would force open, violent conflict and identified the need for a Christian resistance and the creation of a "Christian civil body politic." [8] [9] [11] Militant violence was further justified as a necessary path to resist the conspiracy theories of a Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG) or New World Order. [11] [16]

Paradoxically, some attendees criticized the meeting's support for Randy Weaver, widower and father of Vicki and Samuel Weaver, for having "a poor reputation as a Christian man." This criticism was disregarded as irrelevant. [9]

Legacy

The Rocky Mountain Rendezvous was a "watershed" in right-wing extremism. [10] The Rendezvous placed leaderless resistance at the forefront of right-wing extremist strategy and provided a blueprint for future violent action—in part a brainchild of Beam. Leaderless resistance shifted violence away from the "robes of the KKK and the uniforms of the Aryan Nations." [1] [4] Thus, lone wolves and small, secret cells are relied on. [10]

Four months after the meeting, the 1993 Waco siege at the Mount Carmel Center of the Branch Davidians fueled significant animosity against the United States federal government, and gave sympathy to the American militia movement espoused at the Rendezvous. [8] [12] The promotion of antigovernmental extremism and small-cell violence by the Rendezvous has been credited in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing committed by Timothy McVeigh less than three years after. [6] [17]

Since 2001 and the advent of the internet age, informal online communities and mass media have become the loci of radicalization for leaderless actors once fostered in extremist groups. [2] [18]

Related Research Articles

Christian Identity is an interpretation of Christianity which advocates the belief that only Celtic and Germanic peoples, such as the Anglo-Saxon, Nordic nations, or the Aryan race and kindred peoples, are the descendants of the ancient Israelites and are therefore God's "chosen people". It is a racial interpretation of Christianity and is not an organized religion, nor is it affiliated with specific Christian denominations. It emerged from British Israelism in the 1920s and developed during the 1940s–1970s. Today it is practiced by independent individuals, independent congregations, and some prison gangs.

The Zionist occupation government, Zionist occupational government or Zionist-occupied government (ZOG), sometimes also called the Jewish occupational government (JOG), is an antisemitic conspiracy theory claiming that Jews secretly control the governments of Western states. It is a contemporary variation on the centuries-old belief in an international Jewish conspiracy. According to believers, a secret Zionist organization actively controls international banks, and through them governments, to conspire against white, Christian, or Islamic interests.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">White Aryan Resistance</span> Neo-Nazi organization led by Tom Metzger

White Aryan Resistance (WAR) is a white supremacist and neo-Nazi organization in the United States which was founded and formerly led by former Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon Tom Metzger. It was based in Warsaw, Indiana, and it was also incorporated as a business. In 1993, the group expanded into Canada.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aryan Republican Army</span> White-nationalist bank-robbery gang

The Aryan Republican Army (ARA), also dubbed "The Midwest Bank bandits" by the FBI and law-enforcement, was a white nationalist terrorist gang which robbed 22 banks in the Midwest from 1994 to 1996. The bank robberies were spearheaded by Donna Langan. The gang, who had links to Neo-Nazism and white supremacism, were alleged to have conspired with convicted terrorist Timothy McVeigh in the months before the Oklahoma City bombing terrorist attack. Although it has never been proven, many theorists believe the ARA funneled robbery money to help fund the bombing as a direct response to the Waco and Ruby Ridge sieges.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christian Patriot movement</span> American Christian political movement

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Butler (white supremacist)</span> American white seperatist leader (1918–2004)

Richard Girnt Butler was an American engineer and neo-Nazi. After dedicating himself to the Christian Identity movement, a racist offshoot of British Israelism, Butler founded the National Socialist Aryan Nations and would become the "spiritual godfather" to the white separatist movement, in which he was a leading figure. He has been described as a "notorious racist".

Robert E. "Pastor Bob" Miles was a white supremacist theologist and Grand Dragon of the Michigan Ku Klux Klan from Michigan. In 1970, he founded the Mountain Church of Jesus Christ the Savior on his property in Cohoctah Township, becoming a major "dualist" religious leader, and allied himself with various groups that constituted the racist and anti-Semitic political-religious movement known as Christian Identity, including Aryan Nations. In 1977, Miles received a five-year sentence for the bombing and concurrent 4-year sentences for the tarring and feathering in 1971 of the deputy superintendent of Ann Arbor Public schools. In the early 1980s, Miles endorsed the Northwest Territorial Imperative.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Northwest Territorial Imperative</span> White separatist ethno-state project

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<i>Nazis, Communists, Klansmen, and Others on the Fringe</i> 1992 book by George and Wilcox

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Domestic terrorism in the United States</span> Incidents of American terrorism

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louis Beam</span> American white supremacist, conspiracy theorist and neo-fascist

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">American militia movement</span> Political movement of paramilitary groups in the US

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tom Metzger</span> American white supremacist and Neo-Nazi leader

Thomas Linton Metzger was an American white supremacist, neo-Nazi leader and Klansman. He founded White Aryan Resistance (WAR), a neo-Nazi organization, in 1983. He was a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s. Metzger voiced strong opposition to immigration to the United States, and was an advocate of the Third Position. He was incarcerated in Los Angeles County, California, and Toronto, Ontario, and was the subject of several lawsuits and government inquiries. He, his son, and WAR were fined a total of $12.5 million as a result of the murder of Mulugeta Seraw, 28, an Ethiopian student, by skinheads in Portland, Oregon, affiliated with WAR.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan</span> White supremacist and antisemitic hate group

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References

  1. 1 2 Perlmutter, Dawn (2001). "Skandalon 2001: The Religious Practices of Modern Satanists and Terrorists". Anthropoetics. 7 (2).
  2. 1 2 3 4 Hagen, Lisa (October 13, 2020). "The Original No Compromisers No Compromise". NPR.org (Podcast). Retrieved June 27, 2023.
  3. ↑ Potok, Mark. "Timeline: Land Use and the 'Patriots'". Southern Poverty Law Center. Retrieved 2022-12-28.
  4. 1 2 Atkins, Stephen (September 13, 2011). Encyclopedia of Right-Wing Extremism In Modern American History. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-Clio. p. 221. ISBN   978-1-59884-350-7 . Retrieved December 27, 2022.
  5. ↑ Simi, Pete George (1999-01-01). "Amerikan dreams: Dialogues with white supremacists". UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations. doi:10.25669/vfnh-zve7.
  6. 1 2 Newsweek Staff (2010-03-11). "The Roots of the Modern-Day Militia Movement". Newsweek. Retrieved 2022-12-28.
  7. ↑ Graefe, Alisha (December 2018). American Hatred: Wild West Myths, Color-Coded Rhetoric, and the Shaping of the Aryan Nations (Thesis). Boise State University. pp. 70–71.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Horgan, John; Braddock, Kurt (2012). Terrorism Studies: A Reader. New York City: Routledge. pp. 488–89. ISBN   978-0-415-45504-6.
  9. 1 2 3 4 Durham, Martin (2007-11-13). White Rage: The Extreme Right and American Politics. New York City: Routledge. p. 58. ISBN   978-1-134-23181-2.
  10. 1 2 3 4 5 "Peter J. "Pete" Peters". Anti-Defamation League . Archived from the original on June 28, 2008. Retrieved June 27, 2023.
  11. 1 2 3 4 5 Markham-Cameron, Julia (June 2019). "Firearm Stockpiling as a Symptom of the White Patriot Identity, or: How Whites Learned to Start Worrying and Love The Gun" (PDF). Social Justice & Equity Law Journal. 2 (2): 178–80.
  12. 1 2 Winter, Aaron (2010). "American Terror: From Oklahoma City to 9/11 and After". In Brecher, B.; Devenney, M.; Winter, A. (eds.). Discourses and Practices of Terrorism: Interrogating Terror (PDF). Oxford, England: Routledge.
  13. ↑ Conner, Chance. "The Oklahoma City Bombing Trial: The Denver Post Online". extras.denverpost.com. Retrieved 2022-12-28.
  14. ↑ Peters, Peter J. Special Report on the Meeting of Christian Men Held in Estes Park, Colorado October 23, 24, 25, 1992 Concerning the Killing of Vickie and Samuel Weaver by the United States Government (PDF). LaPorte, Colorado: Scriptures for America Ministries.
  15. ↑ Brister, Paul D. (September 2011). Ku Klux Rising: Toward an Understanding of American Right Wing Terrorist Campaigns (PDF) (Dissertation). Monterey, California: Naval Postgraduate School. p. 235.
  16. 1 2 Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas (July 2003). Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity. New York City: NYU Press. p. 26. ISBN   978-0-8147-3155-0.
  17. ↑ Dees, Morris; Cocoran, James (June 16, 1996). "The Nazilink with militias White racists play down their politics to recruit from the middle class". Baltimore Sun. Retrieved 2022-12-28.
  18. ↑ Spaaj, Hamm; Ramon, Mark S. (February 2015). Lone Wolf Terrorism in America: Using Knowledge of Radicalization Pathways to Forge Prevention Strategies (PDF). Retrieved December 28, 2022.
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