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"The enemy has almost reached the point where he can touch the golden ring," Koernke intones in the video. "All their different schemes, plotting and conniving have come to a nexus, a point in time at which they have the opportunity to grab everything." The only hope, he declares, lies in inducing the conspirators to act prematurely, before their confederates in the Federal Government have managed to completely disarm the Patriots. "If we are lucky, we can get them to move too quickly." War on American soil is probably inevitable. "Did I say it was going to be a short war? Did I say it was going to be an inexpensive war?" Koernke asks. "Absolutely not." He ends with the slogan "Death to the new world order!"
Says Rick Strawcutter, a well-known right-wing Michigan cleric in whose church the video was filmed: "No one dreamed, and I certainly didn't think, that the tape was even going to go anywhere. There's been a lot of people that have said the very same thing for years ... But it just so happened that he kind of put it together from a perspective of someone who might know something, and the rest is history."
As the tape has become more popular, Koernke has been speaking continuously. He has allied himself at various times with movement firebrand Linda Thompson and the Militia of Montana, one of the most aggressive purveyors of the militia concept. Nine months ago, G. Michael Callahan, an Arizona coin and precious-metals dealer, began sponsoring The Intelligence Report five days a week on short-wave radio. Koernke has made two popular sequels to his video. And all that was before Oklahoma City.
It has, presumably, been a heady couple of months for Koernke. The man who as a teenager regretted not being able to get shot, and thus immortalized, has received death threats and at least once has posted armed guards at his house. He has faced off with Sam Donaldson. True, the attention can be a nuisance. Some viewers are intrigued by his 1993 tape inviting "experts" in various types of weaponry to join the militia-at-large Raider Company based in Dexter. Last September in the Michigan town of Fowlerville, three men claiming to be Koernke's "bodyguards" and "unorganized militia" members were arrested while transporting a .357 magnum revolver, three semiautomatic pistols, three loaded assault rifles (an AK-47, an M-1 and an M-14), three gas masks and assorted other military gear. Two of the three are currently in custody. Local authorities say no further inquiry has been made into their connections with Koernke.
But whatever Koernke's actions and associations back home, it is his role as a traveling salesman that seems to take most of his energy. Since April he has bobbed up in Livonia, Palm Springs and Orlando, Florida. At each venue he works the Oklahoma City bombing more snugly into his world view as "yet another foot stomp on the part of the new-world-order crowd to manipulate the population," softening it up for draconian new antiterrorism measures. At each venue, it seems, there are more reporters. At each Koernke touches a few more people.
From somewhere in Mark Koernke's dissatisfying past, a lone voice muses. Ramon Martinez remarks, "I looked at home, and I realized I've got a wedding picture with him in it. He stood up for me. I was the best man at his wedding. I was godfather for his daughter. I mean, I knew the guy. I thought I did, anyway."