In places like rural Montana, the Tea Party is working hand-in-glove with Patriot movement radicals — including some with close ties to white supremacists and armed militias.
Maybe it’s the gun-making kits that are being raffled off as door prizes. Or maybe it’s the fact that nearly everyone inside this hall at the Ravalli County Fairground is packing heat. But most of all, it’s the copy of Mein Kampf sitting there on the book table, with its black-and-white swastika, sandwiched between a survivalist how-to book on food storage and a copy of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.
It is obvious: This is not your ordinary Tea Party gathering.
Mind you, they don’t explicitly call themselves Tea Partiers. Their official name is Celebrating Conservatism. But their mission statement is classic Tea Party — “to restore our country, counties, and cities back to the Republic and the Constitution of the United States” — and Celebrating Conservatism is listed as a member of the national Tea Party Patriots organization. Everyone in Hamilton, Montana — the whole of Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, for that matter — knows them as the Tea Party’s main presence in town. Once a month or so, the group holds a potluck dinner at the county fairgrounds that typically attracts a couple hundred people, which in a place like the Bitterroot is a sizeable presence.
This night — a September 14, 2010, potluck in the oversized metal shed that is the fairground’s main hall — is special because there is a high-profile guest: Larry Pratt, leader of Gun Owners of America.
Pratt, like a lot of Celebrating Conservatism’s speakers, has a long history with the far right. He is considered a godfather of the militia movement, a network of conspiracy-minded, armed paramilitary groups that exploded in the 1990s. Pratt addressed a pivotal three-day meeting of neo-Nazis and Christian Identity adherents in Estes Park, Colorado, in October 1992, convened in the wake of a shoot-out by federal agents in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, that had sent shock waves through the extreme right. That gathering is widely credited with birthing the movement’s strategy of organizing citizen militias as a form of “leaderless resistance” to a looming “New World Order.” Joining Pratt on the stage at Estes Park were Aryan Nations leaders Richard Butler and Louis Beam. (A few years later, Pratt became co-chair of Patrick Buchanan’s 1996 GOP presidential campaign, but was dismissed once these Neo-Nazi ties surfaced in the national press.)
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