Thread by @BirdWendy2

“King Ryder” was the original name of a screenplay written in the 1980s. The author later changed the title to “Breakdown” in anticipation of its adaptation to film. The story:

In the early 1990s, the U.S. is under martial law. Media is controlled. Gasoline is rationed. Interstate travel requires special ID cards (difficult to acquire). Tax protestors are shot and people are disappeared, possibly into one of many concentration camps.

A growing underground resistance movement is led by the protagonist, King Ryder, who writes a book entitled "A Call to Arms," which inspires the formation of militias nationwide, culminating in an uprising against the gov and groups of armed white men attempting to take ‘back’ the country by force. It is illegal to possess King Ryder’s book.

The militia wages “an all-out assault” on the IRS, using a “fact-acting virus” to destroy their computers. Gov officials are hanged. Factions of the military join up with Ryder’s Militia and roam through the country, capturing certain high-value officials in exchange for the release of women and children in detention camps. The location of one particularly horrid camp, however, remains a mystery.

King Ryder is coordinating much of this from Kansas, “a militia stronghold and rumored home of Ryder,” despite the best efforts of “the gross feminoid, Dr. Livonia,” who conducts terroristic reprisals against the innocent. Ryder’s sidekick is Rick Pierce.

Frank Butler, the son of a high-ranking “new order” general, has read Ryder’s book and is deeply troubled by what he learns. Meanwhile, an attractive and naïve journalist, Celeste Roark, contacts Ryder, whom she’s been assigned to interview for a special, government-sanctioned broadcast.

Ryder, however, is preoccupied with locating the mysterious concentration camp, “but it remains a chimera” until Pierce develops “a clue!” which he then broadcasts along with an appeal for help to whoever is out there. Hearing the appeal, Butler provides Pierce with the camp’s location in Arizona, thereby redeeming himself for being born into the elite class.

The screenplay was written as a companion of sorts to a book by the same author, John Bruce Campbell, sometimes referred to as the “Father of the American Militia movement.” New American Man: A Call to Arms, published in 1988, is credited by insiders with inspiring the *early* 90s militia movement, and was widely read in those circles then.

It was the blueprint for forming the Coeur D'Alene, Idaho Militia and the Militia of Montana, among others.

Campbell, who died in Aug. 2023, was one of Louis Beam’s closest friends and wrote the Jubilee article cited by Belew that detailed some of Beam’s experiences during the Sedition Trials.

You may be reading this incredulously like, “I’ve read everything there is to know about this entire scene, and I’ve never heard of this book or this man.”While recognized by those there, Campbell’s significance in the early days of the 1990s militia movement is strikingly absent from most historical and journalistic accounts.

I really don’t have a definitive reason for why this is so, but I have a few guesses. Perhaps this is because Campbell did not seek or receive media attention and was not a spokesperson but more of a philosophical guru; his book was out of print and circulated only amongst insiders; most writing about the militia at the time focused on public facing ‘leaders’ and did not involve spending significant amounts of time behind the scenes; and/ or the militia movements concerted efforts to divorce themselves, at least within the public mind, from its racialist roots. IDK.

Campbell was a coordinator for the John Birch Society in Los Angeles in the 1960s until he discovered they were a “Zionist organization.” In 1967, while living in England, he began to read about politics and learned the U.S. was “responsible for communism everywhere since 1917,” which converted him into “a true enemy” of the U.S. government. Upon returning to the States, Campbell decided he was going to kill Henry Kissinger. Still, feeling he needed more experience to undertake such a mission, he went to Rhodesia and became a gun for hire.

And that’s where, in 1974, he met Lt. Col. Robert K. Brown, with whom he’d been corresponding but had not yet met. Brown ran Paladin Press, which put out interesting books on guns and various subversive topics.

Brown said he was doing freelance journalism for Esquire and Guns Magazines and asked to interview Campbell, who agreed, but under the condition that his name was not used. During their discussions, Brown mentioned that, while in the Special Forces in the late 50s, he ran guns to Castro for the CIA and, in the early 60s, engaged in assassination plots also at the behest of the CIA. This was too much for Campbell, who concluded that the only proper response to this information was to overthrow the U.S. government.

In the Summer of 1975, Campbell, under the alias “McNair,” was featured in a cover story entitled “American Mercenaries in Africa”, in the very first issue of Soldier of Fortune Magazine, which detailed some of his activities in Rhodesia.

Soon after, it became clear to Campbell that SOF was a CIA front. dn790000.ca.archive.org/0/items/soldie…

I spoke to Campbell in September 2014 while at the home of author and journalist Cheri Seymour.

When I asked Campbell how he came up with the name “Ryder” for his protagonist, he said

Asked how he came to conceive of and flesh out the philosophical outline of a ‘militia’, not yet a commonly used label at the time of his writing, Campbell started to explain

Wait, what?! Campbell elaborated on this slightly in discussions with others, explaining that although he fully intended to do some assassinating, he was arrested on weapons charges.

friend of his had been begging Campbell to include him in the planned assassinations, and so Campbell had taken him to a park to train him in the deadly arts, which led to the arrests of them both. At the time, he said, some media reports speculated that he was a hired assassin, but the truth of the matter was nobody had hired him.

Have gun, will travel? More like “have own gun will go and put some powerful people in the ground” Campbell joked.

Others soon had the same aspirations

Campbell has said that while awaiting trial on the 1981 weapons charges, he had plenty of time, which, in part, he used to develop designs for an anti-landmine vehicle. He submitted a proposal to the Army R&D, but they rejected it. It appears he found other potential customers for his designs.

Waiting for his trial for the assassination fiasco also gave him time to research and write his book, through which he honed his philosophies.

And work on it he did, completing the first version in 1983, then writing its companion piece, King Ryder, and then revising both until finally, in 1988, he published the final version of the book.

Campbell felt that the now-nearly impossible-to-acquire book is unique, in part “because it's probably the only one I've ever heard of that calls for the assassination of traitors in this country, the U.S. government.” The last chapter calls for the selective assassination of traitors, mostly in the Council on Foreign Relations. People call it the Deep State these days… But anyway, that was the basis of the book. It was to punish treason.”

Still, despite his tireless work on the writing projects, JB Campbell continued to make time for trouble.

In the early 1990s, Cheri Seymour was collaborating on a cover story about the growing militia movement and spent a lot of time at the Militia of Montana headquarters in Noxon, Montana, which acted as a kind of hub for other previously established aligned groups and newly formed militias in the region and provided plenty of interview and observation opportunities.

Here she met both Bruce Campbell and the famed Louis Beam, who were working together to establish militia groups around the country.

Beam was connecting the most trusted of the groups into one centralized encrypted computer network as he’d already done for Aryan Nations, Militia of Montana, the Odessa, Texas, and Michigan militias, and dozens of others, including for Jubilee, a Christian Identity newspaper headquartered in Mariposa. CA.

As she did during the research of her seminal book, Committee of the States, Seymour employed an ethnographic approach, becoming an “embedded journalist” of sorts within these circles and would come to know and spent a great deal of time with Beam, Campbell, and other major players in ‘the movement,’ becoming a witness to events and participant in discussions, the significance of which would only become clear later, after the Oklahoma City bombing. I will elaborate on some of these startling events in future installments of this thread series.

For now, it should be noted that both Beam and Aryan Nations had been a major target of or subject of interest in several wide-reaching (some might say sprawling?) broadly defined multi-agency domestic terrorism investigations focused on the extreme right since at least the mid-1980s, including the widely reported PATCON. The name of PATCON's successor investigation/ infiltration operation(s), after its termination in 1993, is unknown to me, but that there was one, while speculative, seems probable. [Photo: Beam and Pastor of AN, Richard Butler]

Perhaps this was also on Beam’s mind when he gave a speech entitled “The Feds- And How They Affect Us…Or Don’t!”.

More than one person who knew him has told me that Louis Beam confided to them and a select few others that Dennis Mahon approached him about blowing up a federal building.

One of the people he confided this to was Bruce Campbell, who relayed it to me in a conversation I recorded in 2014.

In an email shortly before he died in 2023, he wrote that Beam “admitted that Dennis Mahon had approached him in '93 and said he wanted to blow up the Murrah Building […] He thought Mahon was unstable and [told me] he would never associate with him and [that he] suspected Mahon might be trying to frame him. He told Mahon he wasn't interested.”

There’s more to it than that, of course, which I’ll get into in upcoming threads. Before that can happen, though, I need to take a slight detour to address specific recent erroneous and irresponsible claims and false accusations made about Seymour, and easily avoidable factual errors about Campbell, which will be the subject of the following thread in this series. Afterwards, the rest of them will move the story forward, introduce new information, and contextualize until we are drowning in detail, where, as they say, the devil resides. But for now, let’s move on.

By 1993, Bruce Campbell had moved from his long-time residence in Carmel, California, to Noxon, Montana, to set up, train, and arm the newly formed Militia of Montana (MOM) led by the colorful John Trochmann.

One person told me, “I knew John Trochmann. He was a little weird, had some weird beliefs. He preached against drinking milk because he said it made your teeth big. My brother stayed at Trochmann's for a long time. They had a lot of guns. My brother was engaged to his step-daughter. After the marriage was called off, Trochmann invited my brother and me to his house, but we declined the invitation. We later found out that he intended to kill us.”

Trochmann had been a frequent visitor and Speaker at Aryan Nations. In fact, MOM and its members sprang from the streams of a few like-minded groups in the region.

Campbell himself was NOT an Aryan Nations member, and, at least according to him, didn’t even like setting foot in the place because of the rat infestation, but he WAS closely associated with those who attended regularly, including AN Ambassador at Large, Louis Beam. In fact, I have been told, those two were like brothers.

But we’re going to talk about how Campbell was not an Aryan Nations member, and how he was NOT an Aryan Nations regional leader with a completely different name, and how Cheri Seymour was NOT Richard Butler’s secretary in the next installment of this series. I freely admit that much in this case is confusing. Sometimes mind-boggling. That, however, is not.

Campbell told me that in the latter part of 1994, he was milling around MOM’s main office in Noxon when a man and a woman showed up. Trochmann, who appeared to know the man, introduced him as “Bob” and said Bob had a bunch of machine guns he wanted to sell. Campbell said he’d take them all.

Minutes later, though, apparently spooked by something, Trochmann indicated to Bob that it wasn’t a good idea to do a deal right now. Campbell said immediately after, Bob “took off like a big bird. I never saw him again.” Only later did he realize he’d met Spooky Roger Moore.

Moore, however, later said he visited MOM “on one occasion by accident” in the Summer of 1993, although this conflicts with an earlier statement he made in which he traveled across the country, visiting people he knew from the gun show circuit, looking for his so-called “stolen guns”- which would have to have been late fall 1994 at the earliest. Either way, if he went on purpose or somehow found himself there on accident, whenever it might have been, and however many times, there was probably a lot to talk about.

McVeigh made a trip to Montana to visit another heavily armed group in late summer / early fall 1994, but he never met Trochmann.

However, the defense team indicated there were some questions about the accuracy of that date. So that’s where we’re at with that. When asked why he visited, he said, “I was curious,” and that it was inconsequential.

And then, in March 1995, there was this:

That same month, March 1995, MOM made national headlines when a group of MOM members, including Trochmann and affiliated individuals, were arrested in Roundup, Montana; the result of a tip provided by a confidential informant to local law enforcement.

Of course, Trochmann himself would turn out to be an informant, something Campbell and others had figured out when Campbell discovered a letter at the M.O.M. headquarters written by Trochmann's lawyer to the state's Attorney General explaining that Trochmann worked with the FBI and should not be held in jail after an arrest of several members. Campbell provided a copy of that letter to Cheri Seymour, who detailed it in her memos from this time. And Trochmann himself would soon admit this to her on tape.

As if there wasn’t already enough going on in March 1995, a lengthy letter from Death Row inmate, and friend of Louis Beam, Richard Wayne Snell, was published in “The Seekers” and MOM’s newsletter published one by his wife.

Numerous people said they’d heard from MOM members that something big would go down on April 19. Included was the attorney for many of those arrested, John W. DeCamp,

attendees at MOM meetings,

Trochmann himself,

and more than a few federal prisoners who claimed to have heard about the plans of MOM and Aryan Nations members to conduct, among other things, bombings and assassinations, usually of government officials but also, according to one 302, a plot to murder “John Walsh, commentator of America’s Most Wanted as it is known amongst para-military groups, Snitch Incorporated.”

Militia members from Montana were seen visiting Elohim City prior to the OKC bombing, and calls were made from Elohim City to a Super 8 motel in Billings, Montana, on April 5, 1995.

As detailed in his book, John Bruce Campbell conceived of the Militia Movement as something that could not be stopped because there was nothing to stop it. No membership lists. Just a state of mind. That, he later said in interviews, is what made him so dangerous.

But the Oklahoma City Bombing caused the movement to die overnight because while the movement wasn’t criminally tried for the bombing, it was tried for it in the court of public opinion.

Several MOM members were questioned after the Oklahoma City bombing

Everybody dealt with it differently.

In February 2000, Campbell emailed Beam and said, “OKC destroyed what I started, and it took something horrible such as that to do it; such was the power of the idea.” Referring to a journalist he’d recently spoken with, Campbell said, “I have given him my reasons why I hate the government and why I called for its overthrow” but that he couldn’t get involved in trying again “until the OKC crime is solved” which would be his “crusade” because when the truth came out it would “destroy the FBI and ATF directly and the federal government’s legitimacy eventually.”

After the bombing, in the early 2000s, John Bruce Campbell, the Father of The Militia Movement, would focus for a while on reviving his anti-land mine vehicle, even making progress on building the prototype.

He says that Gen. Paul Kern, head of Army Materiel Command, fell in love with his idea, and a deal to make them had high-level backing and was in the works until, that is, it was killed from on high. The reason he says he was given for this unexpected and disappointing turn of events: his political and racist ideologies were a liability.

For a while, in the 2010s, Campbell was on the speaking circuit, giving lectures about the 2ndAmendment and his role in the Militia Movement; both issues that were undergoing a revival.

Campbell would continue to correspond with Cheri Seymour until he died in 2023, trying to make sense of the strange events surrounding the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing they’d both been privy to throughout the 1990s; events meticulously documented by Seymour to be fleshed out in subsequent installments of this series.

I was hoping to continue and get to the ‘unfortunate corrections to the record’ that must be made this evening, but it turns out creating insanely long threads takes much longer than I anticipated, this being just the first of many, and I desperately need to get some sleep.