Right Turn
As Oregon’s conservatives grow angrier and bolder, pundits and militants are using the same red-hot rhetoric to call for revolution. But what will Oregon’s uprising look like?
By Randy Gragg
TUESDAY, 10 A.M. in the quiet lull following the geriatric early-bird stampede at Shari’s restaurant in Garden Home, a bouncy Mexican waitress is circling the hunched man at the counter like a gnat wearing an apron. Bzzzzzz. Coffee refill. Bzzzzzz. Water refill. Bzzzzzz. Ketchup. Chipper blasts of staccato Spanish choke the airspace behind her.
Sandwiched on his stool between the foreign chatter of the kitchen staff and a clearly disturbed man involved in a deep conversation with his scrambled eggs, 57-year-old ex-Marine William Krause leans heavily into the bar. He is a man apart. Not quite agitated. Not yet fed up. He’s just … tired. Tired of often feeling like the odd man out in the neighborhood he’s spent almost his entire life in.
As the banter from the waitress and the cooks swirls around him like vapor trails, Krause cements his elbow firmly between the syrup dispenser and a saucer of single-serve creamers and begins reeling off a calm, measured diatribe.
“I don’t think illegal aliens deserve health care,” he says, not exactly yelling, but also not bothering to lower his volume for the audience members, who may, themselves, be illegal aliens. “I don’t think they deserve to be here at all. They’re breaking the law. My adopted family were Jewish immigrants, and they had to go to Canada and then come here. They did it the right way.”
There is no white spittle of hate hanging off his rhetoric. Krause—white-haired, fit, and conversational—delivers his diatribe in an almost-sleepy drawl. As his story unspools over breakfast, it’s hard to argue that he hasn’t earned the right to his opinion. “I’m a patriot,” he says nonchalantly. He begins reciting a particularly valorous lineage. His father was killed fighting in Korea. His stepfather was stationed at Pearl Harbor during World War II, and his namesake uncle was a fighter pilot in that war. Krause himself served six years in the US Marines and another five as a machinist on a nuclear submarine. He also spent time as an explosives operator at the Army’s Umatilla Chemical Depot in Hermiston. When his service ended, he volunteered with the state police in the Columbia River Gorge, where he eventually discovered and named Metasequoia Creek. Then came a stint helping with disaster preparedness on the Portland Neighborhood Emergency Team, or NET. (Krause fears a devastating subduction earthquake is inevitable.) Six months ago, he signed up for yet another call of duty: membership in the Oregon State Defense Force, a volunteer squad that backs up the state’s National Guard during emergencies.
“I love my country,” he says. “And I love my state.”
But over the past few years, things have begun to unravel for Krause. A steelworker by trade, he was recently laid off from his job repairing pipe coating. State funding cuts put a stop to his work in the Gorge. He’s now only loosely involved with the NET team due to what he calls mismanagement. And then there is the perilous path he believes the country is on: A socialist in office. Defense being weakened overseas. An erosion of personal liberties. The country his father died for and that he himself has spent his adult life defending is slipping away.
So when a friend on one of Krause’s disaster-preparedness websites told him about a group called the Liberty Guard, a militia group based in Missouri, he signed on. A national “unorganized” (i.e., unofficial) militia, the Liberty Guard shares Krause’s distaste with the current shape of the nation. Plus, the group didn’t seem extreme in its views on race and religion, which was even more appealing to Krause. “There’s a lot of wackos out there, and I’ve dealt with some of them,” he says. “I told the LG I believed in a Creator and not one God, and they said they were cool with that.”
And unlike other groups Krause had been in contact with over the years, the Liberty Guard was doing more than just talking. It had a constitution. A liberty proclamation. A flag. It offered military training. More importantly, unlike militias that tend to clump together regionally, the guard’s membership stretches across the country.
“We believe in the Bill of Rights so much that we are forming defensive forces for secession, if that is what it takes,” says a Liberty Guard spokesman, who wishes to remain anonymous. “We see that we are living in the downfall of the current Republic.”
As the columns of freedom collapse around it, the Liberty Guard has taken the hard-line position to “defend ourselves to the last man, woman, and child.” Read one way, this is benign chest-beating. Read another way, it’s the beginning of a chilling endgame. Of course, it’s not like the group doesn’t have a sense of humor. “I got an e-mail from the Liberty Guard last weekend,” Krause says. “It was titled ‘Customer Service,’ and it had this operator sitting there, and somebody’s calling in and he’s telling them: ‘Press one for English. Press two if you need to learn English.’” Krause stifles his chuckle with another strip of bacon. Another slug of coffee. And a request to our waitress. “Excuse me,” he says in subdued tones. “Can I get some cha-pot -lay?” This last word he sounds out phonetically. “ Gracias.”
Published: March 2010
When the government takes my income and gives it to others, it creates a moral hazard. The recipients don’t see my sacrifice to provide for
their family, my support is taken for granted.
I will help them but what will they learn? Will they learn I was compassionate in their time of need? Will they understand I have been making
moral or financial decisions that allow me the choice of helping others?
Will they know I took from my family to support their family?
What will be their response? How can they thank me? Will they make changes in their life, so they can return my favor by supporting others in
need?
Do they expect me to be there next time?
I am tired of families on assistance with fancier cars, flat panel TVs and iPhones. I am angry that I support them and they have only a sense
of entitlement.
This must change.
Why dont you come down to Applegate conference center in Turner on March 13 for the Oregon 912 Project convention. You will see a different group of people. Everyday people just trying to survive this economic mess. I dare you to show up.
Blasengame, do you claim any neutrality? you said: “something like the successful Cash for Clunkers program”
Just curious, why do you call that program successful? what was successful about it?
Attempts to “understand” the Tea Party movement kind of crack me up. Attempts to demonize them as racists, hateful, and any other negative stereotype are just ignorant. Personally, I don’t think the Tea Party ideas break down well into signs, slogans, or talking points. But they are far from new ideas. Frédéric Bastiat pretty well laid it all out back in the 1800s:
“Men naturally rebel against the injustice of which they are victims. Thus, when plunder is organized by law for the profit of those who make the law, all the plundered classes try somehow to enter — by peaceful or revolutionary means — into the making of laws. According to their degree of enlightenment, these plundered classes may propose one of two entirely different purposes when they attempt to attain political power: Either they may wish to stop lawful plunder, or they may wish to share in it.”
-Frédéric Bastiat, The Law
Bastiat even clarifies how to identify “legal plunder”:
“But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.
Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals. If such a law — which may be an isolated case — is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system.
The person who profits from this law will complain bitterly, defending his acquired rights. He will claim that the state is obligated to protect and encourage his particular industry; that this procedure enriches the state because the protected industry is thus able to spend more and to pay higher wages to the poor workingmen.
Do not listen to this sophistry by vested interests. The acceptance of these arguments will build legal plunder into a whole system. In fact, this has already occurred. The present-day delusion is an attempt to enrich everyone at the expense of everyone else; to make plunder universal under the pretense of organizing it."
-Frédéric Bastiat, The Law
Clearly the moron who wrote this believes that without Glenn Beck, none of us would be able to form any opinion at all. After all, we can’t SEE with our own eyes what’s going on. Only after Beck and Fox news say something do Americans have enough vision, brains and motivation to know or care what’s happening? What an insult. What a completely self righteous condescending ass.
What I don’t understand is why everyone is so upset now? How come everything was hunky dory for the last eight years when Dubya was spending us into oblivion? Unrest only becomes newsworthy when a Democrat is in the White House?
Cutting edge journalism like this might explain why Portland Monthly is laying off staff and bleeding ad revenue.
Equating right-wing activism with militias is complete nonsense, and as old and tired a cliche as exists in American politics today. My opinions are tainted compared to the authors, because I have actually attended these events instead of depending on the drooling idiocy of tools like Charles Johnson, every Liberal’s favorite conservative. I’ve volunteered at at few events, and generally get around and talk to people. I haven’t seen anything like this energy and singularity of purpose since, oh, the Viet Nam war protests, also attended. Except I haven’t seen any TeaPartiers throwing flaming bags of human excrement at the Police, like the Yippie brats did in Chicago in 1968 (I was there, too). In fact, there are no police at the Teaparties because everyone behaves civilly.
Dbags like the author have to write this tripe because the simple truth, that joe sixpack is generally right of center and that peaceful, hard-working very plain, average Americans are pissed off enough at their “leaders” to get involved and work to turn the bums out, does not fit the progressive narrative.
Liberals have completely misdiagnosed the Teaparty syndrome, and are in for a rude shock come election day. I’ll be laughing my ass off at the so-called “intellectual” class coming up smelling like turds again.
Red, White & Blue can come in many shades.
Keep Portland Left!
Can’t we all just get along?