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Coloring the hostility is a large dose of the paranoia that has seeped into American political discourse over the past year, especially since the Oklahoma City bombing. These days it seems no conversation in Nye County can conclude without some reference to Waco and Ruby Ridge. "What these have done," says Carver, "is show how the oppressive bureaucrats think they can run over the tops of the American people." He thinks both incidents contributed to the presence of guns among the spectators the day he bulldozed the road. He is convinced federal agents are monitoring his travels. During a speech last month to 100 people in Park Rapids, Minnesota, part of a week-long speaking tour, Carver asked his audience, "Is there anyone from the Justice Department monitoring me? I know you are; don't be afraid to stand up."
So far, Carver has taken his message to audiences in 23 states. "Isn't it a shame that our people fear the government?" he asked the Park Rapids audience. He wore a white Western shirt and new Wrangler jeans that arced below a belly well accustomed to butter, eggs and beef. His head bore the usual stigmata of a ranching life: pale baby-smooth forehead over a raw, wind-scrubbed face. He eyed the crowd a moment, then answered his rhetorical question: "That's tyranny."
Carver's time on the podium was bracketed by apostles of the extreme. The speaker who preceded him announced that federal environmental laws and the international biodiversity treaty would force mass relocations in the Midwest--80% of Wisconsin's population would have to move. The speaker after Carver proudly disclosed that he was the cartoonist whose leaflet, stacked at the auditorium entrance, reprised a conspiracy theory about the Rockefellers' and Rothschilds' controlling the world. Carver left the room to avoid hearing his remarks.
Carver takes offense when critics try to link him to extremists, particularly white supremacists, and cites the fact that one branch of the Carver family helped rear George Washington Carver. "So black people are special to us," he says. He disavows fringe rhetoric but feels that as an elected official, he cannot discriminate against any audience just because its views are more extreme than his. Carver's policy: "If they pay for travel, if they give me a place to sleep, a hot dog to eat, I'll come. But I do not ally myself with any of them."
CARVER LIKES TO NOTE THAT HE WAS BORN on Friday the 13th, in October 1944, six years after his parents settled in the Big Smoky Valley. The family homestead became a small town, Carver Station--known locally as Carvers--but otherwise the valley looks the way it did a half-century ago. He now raises 100 head of cattle on about 860 acres of his own land--making him possibly the only rancher in the county movement without a direct financial stake in how federal land gets managed.