Last call for Christian Identity

What if you were an endangered turtle

I’ve been party to holding staff after closing a truly uncomfortable number of times in my life.

One thing that must be understood about how Stewart conducts business, early in his Liberty movement days and all through the run of Oathkeepers, is that whatever you’re supposed to be doing is secondary to extracting Narcissistic Supply. That means the gabbing after a speaking event, political organization meeting, Constitution class, or rally must be prolonged as long as possible. The general chit chat extended until everyone who could make their escape has fled, through the forming of the dreaded Conversation Circle that could hold itself captive for hours out of good manners would migrate slowly out to the parking lot as frustrated employees cleaned tables and turned off lights around us. This became an in-joke, “Oh we’ve shut the place down again,” with no awareness of how not very funny it was to hold the employees hostage after closing to have the exact same conversation about the Gold Standard 3 nights a week.

One incident I mercifully do not remember was brought up by my sister not too long ago, a furious manager throwing our group the front door keys and telling us to lock up behind ourselves. The group took him up on that, and stayed for a good long while in a blissful lack of self awareness.

Some late talks were more memorable than others.

Picture now a dark and windswept Montana small town street, dirty crusty snow signaling the dead of winter and a typical greasy spoon diner with the Open sign most emphatically not on. The hour is late, the shop is closed, everyone involved should have long since trudged home to burrow under warm covers. Instead, over the shoulder of frustrated and depressed wait staff, we see a fidgety teenager held just as captive as the kitchen workers to three men in a booth discussing White Identity and the Bible.

The White Supremacist recruiters had spent several weeks worming their way close to Stewart, a tall and short pair of bearded old men in camouflage that I vaguely remember as a sort of racist Jasper and Horace. Stewart’s infatuation with his new buddies had intruded on my insular bookish life when we started shooting at a nearby range in subzero temperatures while they buddied up to fatherlord. I’ve never quite figured out if I hated shooting for its own sake as a youth and was simply in denial because it was supposed to be a Manly Virtue, or if doing anything with Stewart made it inherently miserable, but the company did not help.

A short winter’s day can drag on terribly if you spend the entire time cold and in a boring conversation, which summed up the honeymoon period of this bromance pretty well. Freeze in place listening to the same discussion on absolute nonsense that covered most of my social interaction from late childhood on, shoot, I would get sideways glances for doing something fundamental wrong or underperforming, I would soak in all possible heat while we drove their tiny shitty car up to the targets to swap them out, and then back out into the covered stand where my toes would instantly go numb again.

At the end of the day, Stewart would generally express some kind of disdain for shooting from wooden stands and covered benches instead of hand weaving a mat from native grass the way Spartans would. Shooting ranges were soft constructs of civilization, not adequate to a rugged barbarian like Stewart, who would spend 15 hours a day in a soft bed piled high with comforters, surrounded by psychological comfort tactical gear, and with fried chicken or steak on demand lest he develop a sad.

For my part, I was lucky if I didn’t do something dumb like get instructions confused when switching between multiple targets and shoot the wrong one. All the while the frigid chatting seemed especially superficial, extra survivalist generic, talking shop about military surplus winter boots and the end of the world, and slid off my skull with special ease. I might have been just especially done with it that month, but I might have also been picking up on the entire thing being a thin pretext.

Things got interesting when the blossoming broship advanced to getting coffee afterwards. Generally any militia world conversation in which the Bible spontaneously comes up is going nowhere good. It can happen fast, a guy flagging us down because the Ten Commandments magnetic sticker he’d given us had obviously fallen off of our family Suburban somewhere (No way a good Jesus family would do something like take it off) should be expected to rant about the Gay Agenda sweeping this nation while replacing it with one of his many spares. When the Bible is brought up circumspectly, almost cautiously, in a conversation that’s already about the Coming End and the New World Order in particular, it is an especially bad sign.

For the uninitiated, a very popular brand of white supremacist mythology in the United States is ‘Christian Identity’ or ‘C.I.’ for short, consisting of a very particular kind of brain damage that occurs when you stare so hard at the Begats section of the Bible that your neurons start to commit suicide and you come away with the belief that, properly decoded, the text reveals that northern European whites are the true children of Israel and the chosen people of God. This makes the actual Jews into deceptive interlopers and all others into at best unenlightened masses that white people are obligated to lead to salvation, from a position of paternalistic authority and Noblesse Oblige.

We’d already been in this dingy diner for a while when Bible Talk turned Race Realist and I realized that I would not be going home anytime soon. Stewart had an odd sort of Debate-Bro-ish reaction to coming into contact with racists, where most anti-racists would simply cut contact Stewart would stand his ground and argue the point to exhaustion. The exception was when the good name of Oathkeepers was publicly imperiled, which merited a swift veto of any event and excommunication of troublesome members.

At one time I interpreted this as a need to grandstand in any given situation, which it likely partially is, but I had also not fully thought through the fact that Stewart kept contact with Crazy Uncle Bobby when he married into racist royalty, in fact marrying the daughter of Roger Elvick, founder of a sovereign citizen scam combined with an offshoot of the Christian Identity Posse Comitatus movement (Whatever the hell a half Great Uncle’s father-in-law is to you is my relation to Elvick, yay). Over time, I’ve started to come around to the idea that Stewart has no deeper principles of any kind, including against racism, which meant it was an act and a facet of his persona that had to be practiced and reinforced. Because the performative anti-racist American Freedom Warrior bit was such a part of his core persona, the virtue signaling had to be executed even when I was the only audience.

God dangit Bobby

So, when the dialogue began to edge in ‘racial science’ directions, Stewart embraced the chance to performatively argue the point while time dragged on. If Stewart is one quarter Mexican, his favorite fun fact, then is one quarter of his body ignorant of God and the other three quarters enlightened? This would become a favorite line he would use in many arguments with C.I. folk at dinner tables, never once questioning that maybe incidentally running into friend-of-a-friend white nationalists so often indicated that he might be in the wrong crowd.

There are, of course, a few ways to handle a white nationalist telling you that whites are the true children of God:

Correct: “You’re wrong, Fuck Off,”

Correct (American): “My loyalty is to a set of laws that hold all men to be created equal, fuck off.”

Correct (Satanic): “Whites being the chosen of God doesn’t mean you are actually better, fuck off.”

Correct (Satanic)(American): “If God and the Constitution disagree on whether all people are equal, then God is wrong. Fuck off.”

Stewart chose Incorrect (Pedantic): “Let’s quibble over increasingly minor points of your braindead philosophy until the restaurant closes.”

So the light dwindled, the other customers left, the neon shut off, and the increasingly annoyed wait staff staring at three men in winter camo discussing real and fake Hebrews. At one point I asked one why, exactly, ‘race mixing’ was a bad thing. He turned to me, utterly disingenuous, and told me that “If you have a bunch of different species of turtle, all unique and beautiful, but they interbreed until they’re all the same, you just lost something important.”

Instead of telling him that I am not a turtle and, in fact, have an inalienable right to pursuit of happiness regardless of whether it means permanently losing pigment variety, I just nodded and got up to pace and daydream until the night was over. In point of fact, as a person it is within my basic rights to miscegenate as much as I damn well please, but arguing the point would have been useless.

I’d been sitting right there while this dude and his buddy tried to walk the conversation onto the Divine Right of White and he turned around to give a completely bullshit rehearsed answer as if I were a complete stranger to this conversation. I had triggered a sort of automated response constructed for getting racism across to teenagers, regardless of the context. This particular line is meant to be a bad faith run around ‘diversity’ language by saying that interracial marriage actually reduces diversity. Oh no.

It’s a tactic that badly misses the point, that people who make a huge point of celebrating diversity do it to push back against a cultural system that declared one human variety superior and any deviation from it a flaw. It’s a celebration of all people in a world hostile to equality and inclusiveness, not a declaration that human ethnic variety of pigment and features is a categorical good that must be preserved. Racists are generally too narrow minded to conceive of this, but weaselly enough to be disingenuous. In my case, an argument aimed at people who’d been exposed on a surface level to ‘celebrate diversity’ language without thinking deeper about it missed my Militia bubbled mind completely, but the sneakiness stuck with me.

That point would be hammered home a fair few times in my life: The guy who says that Southern Pride is about ‘heritage, not hate’ is waiting for a chance to say that maybe we need to think about whether all races are really compatible with a free society. The guy who just has questions about whether the Holocaust has been exaggerated to serve modern political ends thinks that the Jews are vampiric alien hybrids who faked the Holocaust to sully the name of Adolf Hitler, humanist superhero. People who start with ‘but what about preserving that beautiful human diversity?’ are really all about preserving the very easily diluted divine mandate of one variety. A somewhat reasonable sounding, moderate doubt of something phrased as ‘official dogma’ is usually an opening line to walk you gradually into insane bullshit.

The problem is that sometimes it works.

In our case, it only succeeded in wasting everyone’s time. We stayed for the arguing over Old Testament ethnic purity hours after everyone should have gone home, frustrated wait staff eyeing me while I paced restlessly up and down the booths while the circular talk spun on. Every time I wandered too close to the main entrance in my rounds, I dodged eye contact with the employees and hoped it was clear I was a prisoner in this situation too.

I did ultimately learn some useful lessons in the end, but perhaps not the ones anyone planned on. Hopefully some of the conversation was overheard, the waiter deserved at least a crazy story for his late night.

I can’t imagine that Stewart or the racists tipped well.