MARK KOERNKE

HE WAS A BOY WHO LIKED TO JUMP OUT OF THE WOODS AND SCARE PEOPLE, A NEIGHBOR REMEMBERS OF MARK KOERNKE. EVERY DAY, FAITHFULLY, HE'D PLAY ARMY. HE WOULD RUN THROUGH THE WOODS OF THE SEMI-RURAL MICHIGAN ISLAND THEY ALL LIVED ON, CARRYING GUNS MADE OF UNPAINTED WOOD. THE BOY CLAIMED TO HAVE A SECRET FORT GUARDED WIT

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Dominick Vincentini, co-director of a constitutionalist organization called Justice Pro-Se, was attracted to Koernke's apparent intelligence expertise, especially to his "information" that American skies were aswarm with "black helicopters," unmarked because they were not American aircraft at all but rather the vanguard of a new-world-order invasion force. Vincentini arranged for Koernke to speak at a local library and played up the black-helicopter angle. Such events usually drew up to 150 people. That night 400 attended, and Nancy claims that 1,000 more were turned away. Suddenly, speaking offers started to flow in from all over the country. Jon Coon, a Libertarian Michigan politician with a following in the Patriot movement, suggests that for some, the sheer universality of Koernke's theory was a draw. "[All his information] builds toward a broad general picture that there is a new-world-order conspiracy. Others are content to leave some things open to question, but he generally doesn't. When a point is raised from the audience, he always ties it in. Mark Koernke has the answers. That makes him different."

That and the timing of his first videotape. Koernke made America in Peril just as federal officers were moving in on David Koresh's compound at Waco, Texas. The ensuing tragedy was a key impulse of the militia movement, and Koernke surfed it expertly. The video presents him as calm and in control, sardonic rather than hysterical. To those who knew him back when, the fascination with military arcana is there, the mistrust of any law or rule, even an obscure (if negative) reference to Nazi Germany. It is a weird and personal tour de force that, one can't help thinking, was at least 20 years in the making.

In it, the new world order has already taken over much of the government. The federal alphabet-soup agencies are arms of the conspiracy, as are America's street gangs, which have been nurtured to further its aims. Exploiting carefully planted legal loopholes, this unholy alliance has waged a campaign of terror and disarmament on arms-bearing Patriots.

And that's just for starters. Reliable sources have detected 300,000 foreign troops on American soil, including a contingent of Nepalese Gurkhas in Montana, this doctrine holds. Soon they will attempt an outright takeover of America, dispersing countless Patriots to dozens of detention camps already built for the purpose by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. (fema's employees are the new world order's shadow government: "Only 59 to 63 out of 3,060 actually deal with storms, disasters, hurricanes and nuclear attack.") Once the nation is supine, it will be carved into large regions ruled through terror by new-world-order proconsuls. Microchips will be implanted in every newborn child, enabling the government to track each move by a new generation of citizens. Americans will live in slavery. Unless ...

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