2,408 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

In 1991, as the Cold War was ending, President George H. W. Bush proclaimed a New World Order, but failed to define what the term actually meant. It came to be seen as a negative by men such as Bo Gritz — i.e., those who were valorous, accomplished, white, and politically to the Right.

The New World Order

Gritz was not a simple “conspiracy theorist.” From his life experience and his reading, he understood the mindsets of those in powerful positions and understood the endpoint of their ideas. He realized that the various agencies within America’s national security bureaucracy were taking advantage of the end of the Cold War to expand. In 1991’s Called to Serve, Gritz deconstructs the views of then-Foreign Policy editor Charles William Maynes. Gritz warned that Maynes was advocating endless war for “democracy”:

. . . the “export of democracy” may well surpass anti-communism in the minds of foreign policy planners, and extreme means would be justified by them to achieve it: [Maynes claimed,] “Most Americans probably would be willing to defy international law and support the use of military force to spread the cause of democracy if the cost were low.”[1]

Gritz recognized that “democracies” abroad were often dictatorships, and that those dictators were often supported by the CIA or some other US government agency. Additionally, such “clandestine” operations were not kept secret from the enemy. Instead, the “secret” classification was used to keep the US media in line, suppress whistleblowers, and leave the American public in the dark. The costs of spreading “democracy” by force of arms can likewise climb upwards rapidly.

Gritz was especially concerned about the loss of American sovereignty to the United Nations. He wrote:

The New World Order isn’t new. John the Divine gives us a look at its origin in Revelation Chapter 12: “And there was war in Heaven . . . and the great dragon was cast out . . . into the Earth, and his angles . . . with him. And the dragon was wroth . . . and went to make war (against those) which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ. George [H. W.] Bush is simply the latest in a long line of clones to be dangled by the power elite before the masses as a pied piper promising world peace through a “New Order.”[2]

Like Ross Perot, Gritz opposed American involvement in the Persian Gulf War. He pointed out that the United States had supported Iraq up until the moment Kuwait was invaded in 1990. Gritz was certain that the war would upend the Middle East. He was also concerned about bar-code technology, which was then beginning to appear on driver’s licenses and such. He further pointed out that the cashless economy promised by electronic banking transactions could end up diminishing individual liberty.

Gritz’s premillennial eschatological views were not unusual in America in the late 1980s and early 1990s, nor were his concerns about bar codes and electronic banking transactions unfounded. Since the widespread adoption of cash transfer applications, debit cards, and so on, many dissidents — and especially whites, Christians, and those on the Right — have been de-banked. Bar codes and tracking technology have also allowed private companies and other agencies to gather data on private citizens.

Gritz attempted to bring various “conspiracy theorists” together with the aim of having them work together in 1988. These included people on both the Left and Right, as well as the Olympian Bob Richards. Little came from this, however, save publicity for Gritz. He attempted to run for Vice President on the Populist Party ticket that year as well but dropped out when he learned that David Duke would be his running mate, as he didn’t support Duke’s pro-white views. In 1992, Gritz ran for President himself for the Populist Party, but shortly before that he was involved in yet another historical event.

Ruby Ridge

In August 1991 there was an incident involving the family of Randy and Vicky Weaver that was destined to leave a lasting impression on the entire country. The Weavers were Iowans who, like many others, had been upended by deindustrialization. They were adherents of Christian fundamentalism and decided to move to a cabin in northern Idaho in order to live according to their beliefs in 1983. The mountaintop where they settled is called Ruby Ridge.

The Weaver family lived near the headquarters of Aryan Nations, which was led at the time by Reverend Richard Girnt Butler, an old-stock American with many ancestors from colonial-era Virginia. The FBI was looking to recruit an informant who would keep an eye on Aryan Nations. Randy Weaver was tricked into selling sawed-off shotguns, which are illegal, to an undercover agent from Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and was arrested. Law enforcement officials then attempted to cut a deal with Weaver, offering to drop the charges if he became the informant they wanted. Weaver refused to comply, leading to a chain of events that ended in US Marshals being ordered by a judge to arrest Weaver. When the Marshals approached the Weavers’ cabin on August 21, 1992, they unexpectedly encountered Weaver’s armed 14-year-old son, Sam, in the woods nearby and a firefight ensued which led to both Sam and a Marshal being killed.

The FBI besieged the cabin, and a Hawaiian sniper shot and killed Vicki Weaver within as she was holding her 10-month-old daughter. Gritz believes that another FBI gunman shot Randy, who was unarmed at the time, as well as another young man who was living at the cabin, Kevin Harris. While wounded, they both survived. (The FBI claims that the same sniper fired at both the Weavers and Harris.) Concerned locals then descended upon the FBI’s encampment and protested.

Gritz became involved when local residents as well as an Idaho pastor asked him to help. To get the FBI’s attention, Gritz issued a “citizen’s arrest” notice against the FBI’s on-site commander, Gene Glenn. The FBI ignored the notice, but senior agents persuaded Gritz to work with the Bureau unofficially in order to talk Weaver into surrendering. Gritz successfully persuaded Weaver to leave the cabin; he was later acquitted of any criminal charges. Gritz also calmed the anti-FBI protestors, many of whom were skinheads, near their encampment.

Gritz writes that some Christian Identity ministers attempted to use him to propagate their own ideas during the siege, although he refused. Gritz also claimed that Reverend Butler was like “a 70-year old teenager making a statement of identity with a crooked cross rather than dying his hair green.”[3] While Gritz disavowed white advocacy, the press used a statement in which he used the words “identity” and “Christian” in the same sentence to claim that he was a Christian Identity sympathizer. (Randy Weaver likewise rejected the claim that he was a “white supremacist.”)

Gritz believed that Divine Providence aided him in ending the siege. He went on to testify at the Congressional hearings that were held regarding the siege, and some reforms were enacted as a result of them.

He ran for President in 1992 on a platform of protecting American sovereignty from international bodies such as the United Nations, reducing the national debt, and dissolving the Federal Reserve. He proposed paying off the national debt by having the US Treasury Department mint a trillion-dollar coin and send it to the Federal Reserve. His campaign was quixotic from the start, but he nevertheless managed to win 12% of the vote in Franklin County, Idaho.

In the late 1990s Gritz became involved in a real estate deal in Idaho which went badly, and his wife, Claudia, left him in 1998. As a result, Gritz attempted suicide. He recovered, however, and in September 1999 he married his fourth wife, Judy Gayle Kirsch. Judy was affiliated with the Church of Israel, a congregation that is in line with the Christian Identity movement. Gritz claims that he became interested in the Church of Israel because of its dedication to celebrating the various feasts described in the Old Testament.

Gritz and a Church of Israel pastor, Dan Gayman, had a falling out in 2000. Gritz’s account of the affair in his 2002 book, My Brother’s Keeper, is full of gossip about the differences between the Church of Israel’s leaders. It also contains the usual accusations of sexual misconduct that invariably appear in church fights.

Pastor Gayman was known to anti-white groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League prior to his association with Gritz. Gayman was a reluctant witness for the prosecution in the Fort Smith Sedition Trial of 1988 in which white advocates, some of whom had engaged in violence, were tried and then acquitted. Gayman was alleged to have taken money from Robert Matthews’ group, The Order, in 1984.

The Church of Israel

The Church of Israel is located in rural western Missouri. It is an offshoot of that branch of Mormonism which remained loyal to the son of the prophet Joseph Smith, Jr., and consequently didn’t go to Utah with the others. Today, the denomination is not Mormonism in the strictest sense, but has become a pro-white form of Protestantism.

The Church of Israel is notable in that it publishes well-written books describing its doctrine. They encourage circumcision for eight-day-old boys, but recognize that circumcision is not required as an act of Christian faith. The Church also uses the 1611 King James Bible and rejects all other translations. They reject sex outside of marriage and hold that Caucasians should only marry other Caucasians. To support this, they point to Genesis 3:15, which reads:

And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

In their view, the meaning of this passage is that white Caucasians live in a world where there is enmity between themselves and other races. They therefore oppose immigration as it currently exists. The Church also accepts the views of Francis Parker Yockey, Carleton S. Coon, Lothrop Stoddard, Madison Grant, and Earnest Sevier Cox.

The Church of Israel does not believe in Creationism or Darwinism, and rejects the idea that all of humanity is descended from Adam and Eve. They hold that only Caucasians are descended from the pair. The denomination further contends that the Anglo-Saxons, Celts, Scandinavians, and the Germanic and their kindred peoples are the descendants of Noah’s son Shem. The Church also doesn’t believe in spreading the message of Jesus Christ to non-whites.

Reverend Gayman preaches that America’s abandonment of Christian values has led to a nation in crisis. Debt is high, the economy is stagnant, and everywhere material affluence is declining. He writes:

The United States did not lose a single military engagement beginning with the War of Independence (1775-1781) through and including the end of World War II (1941-1945). However, beginning with the Korean War (1950-1953) and running all the way to the current war in Afghanistan, begun in the aftermath of 9/11 (2001) and still going, the United States has not sustained a clear military victory. All the blood and treasure appropriated by the United States in these wars, including tens of thousands of permanently cribbled soldiers and trillions of dollars spent, have accomplished little — and some people would say that they accomplished nothing, except to waste American blood and treasure.[4]

Gritz and the 1992 election in retrospect  

In his own telling, Gritz was and is not a white advocate. In the 1990s and early 2000s, he feuded with genuine white advocates and dismissed their claims, although he fully understood them. The claims that he was a white advocate came from groups such as the Anti-Defamation League. Perhaps this is because such organizations need to paint heroic figures such as Gritz as white advocates to keep their donations coming.

Gritz was a central part of Ronald Reagan’s “soldier of fortune” Right wing that was used by the administration to further their objectives, especially in Central America. The men who made up this group were uncomfortable with the social revolutions that had taken hold in the US during the 1960s, but they were unable to develop a feasible strategy to change the situation. Because of their military training and combat experience, they could have resorted to violence, but did not.

Gritz certainly believed in the causes of which he was a part, so one cannot say that he was fooled, but he was definitely used by senior politicians. Although the defection of “far Right” figures such as Gritz from the Republican Party helped to bring down George H. W. Bush in the 1992 election.

The focus of Gritz’s activism after the 1992 election is described in his book My Brother’s Keeper. He describes the sieges at Ruby Ridge and Waco in detail and tells the story of other men who were killed by overzealous federal agents. Gritz clearly identifies the problems in the US government in his book, but fails to identify their root: namely, the fact that since the advent of the 1964 Civil Rights act, Caucasians –and especially old-stock Americans — have become the villains in the eyes of law enforcement and the federal government. Additionally, once the Cold War ended the global system of alliances in which America was and is entangled means that the aspirations of ordinary Anglo-Saxon Americans for peace, prosperity, and neutrality are a threat to foreign lobbying groups and those politicians who are funded by them.

Gritz even predicted the disaster that the Iraq War would become in 2003:

Operation Iraqi Freedom is a cataclysmic mistake in my qualified opinion as an Army General Staff Officer and Special Forces Commander. Another blitz of Iraq only provides militant Muslims with the cause they want, to escalate the level of terrorism worldwide. The absolute worst thing America can do is to forcefully take down Saddam’s Islamic Iraqi government and replace it with a Western world military tribunal, a la 1945 Japan — exactly what George Bush has done![5]

Gritz never found any missing prisoners of war, and by the end of the 1990s, it was clear that there had never been any. The missing men, who in many cases were downed aircrews, were most likely swallowed up by the jungle after dying. So was Gritz a grifter? Definitely not. He believed in what he was doing.

Notes

[1] Bo Gritz, Called to Serve (Sandy Valley, Nev.: Lazarus Publishing, 1991), p. 556.

[2] Ibid., p. 491.

[3] Bo Gritz, My Brother’s Keeper (Sandy Valley, N. V.: Lazarus Publishing, 2003), p. 134.

[4] Dan Gayman, Finding the Ancient Paths (Schell City, Mo.: Watchman Outreach Ministries, 2023), p. 72.

[5] Bo Gritz, My Brother’s Keeper, p. 625.