Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy,alt.politics.white-power
Subject: Paranoia as Patriotism: The Arizona Patriots

Archive/File: pub/orgs/american/adl/paranoia-as-patriotism/
              arizona-patriots
Last-Modified: 1995/08/22

                  The Arizona Patriots

The Arizona Patriots was an anti-Semitic group with an
emphasis on stockpiling weapons and baiting public officials.
(The group had disbanded by the end of the 1980's, but recent
reports indicate that the group may be reconstituting itself.)
The group first gained public notice by its efforts to clog
the Arizona court system with nuisance lawsuits in the 1980's.
This was a tactic also employed by the violence-prone Posse
Comitatus, whose adherence to the anti-Semitic "Identity"
doctrine and refusal to recognize any governmental authority
higher than the county level were shared by the Arizona
Patriots.

Ty Hardin, self-styled "freedom fighter" and former film and
TV actor, led the Arizona Patriots. After a mid-1970's dispute
with the IRS, Hardin ran a tax protest school called the
Common Law Institute, whose packet of materials included a
"Patriot Handbook" containing "tested cases and methods to
maintain good personal freedom." In 1983 and 1984, Hardin
edited _The Arizona Patriot_, a monthly journal that printed
diatribes against government officials, calls for "Christian
Patriots" to band together, and reprints of articles from such
anti-Semitic publications as _The Spotlight_ and _The National
Educator_, as well as from _Executive Intelligence Review_,
the magazine of the conspiracy-oriented Lyndon LaRouche
political cult. _The Arizona Patriot_ was published by Norman
Kuhman, signer of the 1984 "indictment" document issued by the
California-based Committee of the States.

In fact, mirroring the California-based Committee, the Arizona
Patriots issued a collective "indictment" in June 1984,
against all elected Arizona officials, threatening to conduct
a "grand jury inquest" unless those officials resigned within
30 days. The document was written in the name of the Committee
for the State of Arizona, Assembled.

During the same meeting at which the Patriots drew up its
"indictment," heavily armed members, clad in combat fatigues,
discussed plans to murder Arizona's then-Governor, Bruce
Babbitt, U.S. Superior Court Judge Paul Rosenblatt, and
members of the state's Department of Public Safety.

Following a two-year FBI undercover probe, Federal agents
raided a Patriot camp in 1986, and confiscated a homemade
blowgun, night-vision goggles, pamphlets depicting nuclear
war, gas masks, spent shell casings, numerous rocket
ammunition crates and publications of the Aryan Nations. The
investigation also uncovered a plot to finance a paramilitary
base by robbing an armored car in Nevada; Patriot surveillance
of the Phoenix ADL regional office as part of a bomb plan; and
plans for the group to bomb a Phoenix synagogue, and Ogden,
Utah IRS facility, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los
Angeles. FBI agents arrested eight members of the group, who
also had in their possession blueprints for three U.S. dams.

Of those arrested, three - Jack Oliphant, Monte Ross and
Daniel Arthur - were sentenced to four-year Federal prison
terms, three were sentenced to five years' probation, one was
released, and one remains a fugitive. Ty Hardin left Arizona,
and the group soon ceased to function.

In prison, Jack Oliphant wrote a 70-page manuscript titled "To
Alter or Abolish the Government" in which, according to _USA
Today_, he said that an "all-out, do or die, to the last man
civil war" is the only way patriots can "throw off one status
of citizenship while retaining the territory in which they
reside." Following his release, Oliphant returned to the
Kingman, Arizona area, where he sheltered neo-Nazi Skinhead
Jay Raspberry after an automobile-ramming incident for which
three counts of aggravated assault were later brought against
Raspberry. In a recent interview, Oliphant blamed a "Jew
judge" for his own conviction in the 1980s. (Anti-Defamation
League, 7-8)
                        Work Cited

Anti-Defamation League. [Special Report] Paranoia as Patriotism:
Far-Right Influences on the Militia Movement. 1995.

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