Prepared or preposterous?: Government the issue at 'Freedom Rally'
The "Freedom Rally" held in Kenai last week was no tea party.
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Bob Bird, a Nikiski High School history teacher, said he detested the notion that the event held at Kenai Central High School was a Tea Party event.
"We're not the Tea Party movement," Bird said, "I don't pay attention to exactly what the Tea Party is doing."
Spawned out of the popularity of a similar event held almost a year ago in Soldotna, Bird said a group called the Second Amendment/Constitutional Task Force organized this year's rally.
Nearly 150 people gathered outside the Renee C. Henderson Auditorium before the start of the meeting Thursday evening to bounce between information booths in the lobby.
The turnout wasn't quite up to last year's showing, when a standing room only crowd of more than 200 packed the Soldotna Sports Center conference rooms.
The make-up of this year's crowd straddled generations and socio-economic lines. Fatigues to jeans, business casual to living room casual, gray hair to still trying to grow facial hair, they all came.
While Bird said the event was not a Tea Party or affiliated with any other politically driven organization, the content of the two-hour meeting broached a number of subjects that have become intertwined as part of the right-wing grassroots movement that is sweeping across the Lower 48.
As has also been the case in rallies Outside, the event attracted the attention of at least some local politicians. Gubernatorial candidate Bill Walker planted a billboard sign in front of the school for the event.
Bird defends the loose organization of the group that incorporates a number of concerns.
"The idea is to remain decentralized and very loosely organized," he said. "If someone wants to go through the regular routes they can stay active in their parties or their movements."
That's typical of similar groups in the Lower 48, according to Mark Potok, director of The Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project in Alabama, and a leading expert on the radical right.
"I think what you're seeing are the same things that are happening all over the country, I don't think there's much unique about the situation (in Alaska)," he said.
Potok said Tea Party type events Outside attract doctors and lawyers to farmers and mechanics.
Changing demographics, the economy, the idea of an African-American in the White House, multi-million dollar bonuses for bank executives, bailouts for auto companies and growing budget deficits are just a few example of what's fueling the fire and angering some Americans, Potok said.
Wake up
Bird wears his exasperation on his sleeve, and he thinks others are starting to feel the same way.
"We've been asleep, that's the best answer I can come up with," he said, trying to explain why people are suddenly concerned and rallying. "People are starting to wake up, people are seeing that the scenarios are coming to pass."
Bird pointed to everything from health care legislation, closure of the Nikishka Beach, airport security and even some of the questions in the 2010 Census as examples of increased encroachment by the federal government.
"One unnamed party I was speaking with called it a target rich environment," Bird said. "There's so many things you can point out that are open violations of the constitution."
Fellow rally organizer and Nikiski resident Norm Olson largely agreed with Bird on the distraught feelings of Americans. Olson is head of the recently formed Alaska Citizens Militia. He ahd founded a militia in Michigan in the early 1990s but was ultimately thrown out of that organization.
"I think all of this is a groundswell of the frustration and growing anger that Americans feel about how they're being abused by a government that will not abide by the constitutional limits that were imposed by them," he said.
Both men also felt that the threats they perceive as activating people now have been growing for years, possibly centuries.
"I don't fault the American people. We are in, I guess, a condition of high distraction," Olson said. "We have a host of things we have to worry about, everything from increasing property taxes, we've got health care, mortgages, jobs.
"There's a thousand things we have to worry about, and the last thing we want to worry about is an economic collapse where it's every man for himself."
It is perhaps on that last note that Olson set the tone of Thursday's meeting apart.
Preparing for the worst
Olson described the current moment as consisting of three parts: The religious right, the constitutionalist party leaders and the minutemen -- the militia.
"In the constitutionalist you've got the overhead projector crew, the book sellers, public speakers, and they gain great wide crowds," he said.
He described himself as being part of the minutemen.
"The militia is very realistic, we're geared up with guns and our talk is strong and we're not going to take any nonsense," he said. "As things get increasingly worse people will get away from the political games."
Olson has in recent months become more outspoken about what he foresees as an economic apocalypse on the horizon. He knows his views are drawing criticism, but he won't back down.
"People call me a fear monger," he said. "I'm not a fear monger, I'm trying to tell people that there's a real danger out there."
Olson said his militia could be considered as a neighborhood-watch group for a coming disaster, and will serve to organize and prepare for it.
"What the militia wants to do is help people prepare for what is coming," he said. "They may call us crazy, they may call us Looney Tunes, but don't ever call us short sighted."
So far, Olson said recruiting for his militia has been slow.
"Were fighting misinformation and demonization that's pretty well entrenched against the concept of a militia," he said. "We're fighting the idea that the federal government is going to protect us and take care of us."
Olson said his group is not prone to violence.
He likes to think of his organization as a forum for those who are distraught. He specifically cited people like Joseph Stack, a Texas man who flew a plane into an Internal Revenue Service building in Austin last month; and Joseph Marchetti, a former Central Peninsula Hospital employee who shot two of his former bosses, one fatally, in 2008 in Soldotna. Olson believes his militia could have helped by showing individuals like those a way to vent that violence away from the public.
"A psychologist is going to sit down in a quiet room and talk to the person in soothing terms," he Olson said. "We don't do that, we get out there and tell it the way it really is. Sometimes venting that kind of anger, yelling at the heavens and firing off a hundred rounds and getting a bunch of guys feeling the same way you are, that's that way we did it the military. Having a wild night sometimes is the best thing in the world for us, and it's free."
Concern
"This is why I think Norm Olson is a dangerous man," counters Potok. "The reality is that Joseph Stack was animated by anti-government conspiracy theories, was certainly mentally ill. He engaged in an unbelievable murder suicide based on a fictional idea.
"If these are the people Norm Olson is gathering around him Alaskans should be uptight indeed."
Groups like Potok's are worried that the resurgence of militia movements will result in violent acts directed at the federal government or others.
"The danger is people like this decide, for instance, that federal law enforcement officials are enemy and end up in gun fight; or that (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) is building concentration camps," Potok said.
Olson was quoted in a 2002 article published in the Peninsula Clarion when he was considering moving to Nikiski from Michigan, that he had no intent of forming a militia in Alaska.
"That was then, and now is now," Olson explained. "When I got here I was fascinated by the stories and the legends and the romance of Alaska. I've come to find out the folks here had just as many fears and trepidations and unsettling feelings that the government is growing increasingly tyrannical and oppressive."
Potok said, however, that he's seen other leaders from the far-right come back to life after long periods of quiet through much of the last decade.
"I can't speak to Norm's personal motivations, but we're seeing it around the country," he said.
For Olson, this is a waiting game for what he sees as inevitable.
"You can just about predict that the militia is going to rise," he said.
Dante Petri can be reached at dante.petri@peninsulaclarion.com.