A few years ago, the WCOTC -- which had a foothold in Montana dating back to the mid-1980s -- attempted to move its operations out West, with one faction attempting to set up shop in Wyoming, while others tried to make a go of it in Montana. The Wyoming move evaporated, and now -- with Matt Hale, the group's Peoria leader, in prison for allegedly ordering a hit on a federal judge -- the Montana faction is on its last legs.
This was detailed in a recent two-part series by Allison Farrell of the Lee Newspapers' Montana bureau, the first of which, "Down to Two," describes how the WCOTC is now literally on the brink of extinction because its main source of funds -- the library of texts by its founder, Ben Klassen -- is now in the hands of civil-rights groups:
- But before he left, Carl used his key to the group's storage shed in Superior and took all of their remaining publications, some $41,000 worth of books written by the group's founder, and sold them to the Montana Human Rights Network for $300. The network monitors the radical right and other hate groups.
Carl said he wanted to hamstring the group's fund-raising ability. The books, which sell for $10 apiece, were the group's major source of income.
Carl also turned over boxes and boxes of the church's internal documents and e-mails that were stored in the shed. Page after page details the group's strained alliances, infighting and petty bickering.
The documents record Deardorff's brief contact with both the National Alliance and the Ku Klux Klan, and they highlight Hale's ego. The vast majority of the documents, however, paint a picture of paranoia and organizational chaos.
The extent of the group's decline -- already long apparent, as this backgrounder makes clear -- has finally reached the point where a movement that many thought was nearly extinguished back in 1992, when Klassen committed suicide, may finally disappear into the black hole from which it emerged. As the second part of Farrell's series explains, the lingering remnants are truly pathetic:
- "I think they were really overrated in terms of their size and danger,'' Balch said, adding that the rendezvous he attended was 'tiny.' ''
"Mostly, it was people hanging out and talking and eating really bad food, like Kentucky Fried Chicken and doughnuts,'' Balch said. "Nothing much went on.''
Still, this is a group that was well on its way to oblivion once before. Klassen -- who founded WCOTC in the 1970s, based in no small part on the fortune he made by inventing a kitchen applicance -- had been in declining health since the mid-1980s, and his designated successor in the early '90s was a Montana extremist named Rudy Stanko, who happened to be in prison at the time for selling rotten meat for consumption by schoolchildren (Stanko blamed his conviction on the ever-popular massive Jewish conspiracy to enslave the world). Stanko obtained much of Klassen's library, but then declined the WCOTC leadership when released from prison in 1991. Hale then stepped up to the seize the reins of the WCOTC after Klassen's 1993 suicide. Hale was largely responsible for its apparent revival in the late '90s.
As the story observes:
- "The World Church of the Creator very nearly collapsed once before in 1992 after its founder, Ben Klassen, committed suicide,'' said Mark Potok, editor of the Intelligence Report, a quarterly investigative magazine the Southern Poverty Law Center publishes on the American radical right. "Really what allowed the group to come back to life was the store of old Klassen books.''
The remnants of that library, as the recent stories explain, is now in the process of being transformed into a piece of art. As Farrell explains in a followup report, two Montana artists intend to make a kind of educational piece of artwork out of the material and put it on display for the public, sort of like encasing fossils in amber.
This, in turn, has those last surviving remnants of the species to voice their displeasure in the only way they know how: By issuing not-so-oblique threats:
- Another e-mail posted to the group's Web forum at www.creativityohio.com lists Holmes' home address and phone number, while another declares that Holmes' project "is one of many declarations of war against our religion.''
"We will remain legal in the face of corruption, but once all legal means are denied, a war will be unavoidable,'' the e-mail warns, in seeming contradiction to the group's Web pledge to seek merely legal redress.
The e-mail sent to Holmes calls him a "Jewish boot licker,'' and informs the Helena artist that "more (creators) will be in contact with you.''
It should be noted, of course, that a number of Montanans are already all too familiar with these kinds of threats, particularly the publication of home addresses and Web-based harassment (but then, so are some left-wing bloggers). It may be a cold comfort that WCOTC's remnants for the most appear to be so incompetent and impotent as to be incapable of doing anything other than blowing a lot of smoke.
Unfortunately, there is also the lingering example of Benjamin Smith, even now. A dying scorpion can still pack a nasty sting.
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