In the Five Mile Road branch of Livonia, Michigan's, public library, they are waiting. The hall has been filled for at least half an hour -- a sea of farmers mixed with auto workers mixed with men dressed in camouflage. But they wait gladly, since they know why Mark Koernke is late. Newspapers all over the country covered his appearance yesterday in Palm Springs, California. Tonight's audience, which was here for him back when he was just a radio voice identifying himself as "Mark from Michigan," is proud of him.
Suddenly he appears, shadowed by a bodyguard with a cobra stenciled on his jacket. Koernke is a big man; he looks like the butcher's boy grown up. His voice is high and reedy, but it has come to represent the truth. He is introduced, and acknowledges the ensuing ovation. And then the darling of the militia movement gives his little half-smirk and begins: "Ladies and gentlemen, we just came back from Palm Springs, where the disinformation flowed like water, trust me."
Since the crowd knows him of old, Koernke does not run through his standard talk: the universal-conspiracy theory featuring the U.N.; the Rockefellers; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; Bill and Hillary Clinton and others. He dispenses with apocalyptic visions: the hundreds of thousands of foreign troops on American soil, waiting; Americans enslaved and implanted with microchips. Nor does he need to recapitulate the only hope: to create secret places and hoard guns, pistols as well as others; to take no offensive posture, but to train for war he sees as nearly inevitable; to somehow cause the Federal Government and its masters to show their hand prematurely.
Tonight he simply skips to the part he has come to relish: "Somebody asked me, 'What are you afraid of?' and you know out there that I have not been afraid for a long, long time. That's one thing you have to learn to throw away. We have the opportunity, even at the risk of death, of saving this nation ..." The crowd listens, rapt.
Livonia and Palm Springs took place in May. Last Thursday, Mark Koernke was in Washington, watching silently as several other militia leaders testified before the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on terrorism, technology and government information. The background role hardly accords with his stature. He is a "pre-eminent figure" in the militia movement's rise, "both a creature of it and someone who helped define it," according to Thomas Halpern, acting director of fact-finding for the Anti-Defamation League. Koernke first came to most Americans' attention when it was reported that he was wanted for questioning in connection with the Oklahoma City bombing. That turned out to be misleading. Stories that he had faxed an announcement of the bombing to a Congressman before it occurred, and that Timothy McVeigh once acted as his bodyguard, died on the vine; the fbi confirmed that he was not a suspect. In fact, say observers, Koernke's influence on the radical right, while less tangible, is more pervasive. The militia movement prides itself on being "unorganized," spontaneous and unburdened by a national structure. Yet it does have opinion leaders, and Koernke is one of the most vocal.