The far right’s bullshitting heroes: Before there was Trump, there was Bo Gritz

One of the central figures of the 1990s Patriot/militia movement passed away last week, but his toxic legacy lives on in MAGA and Trump

David Neiwert, the Spyhop

It always seemed like James “Bo” Gritz wanted to go out like an action hero. After all, he was famous for supposedly having inspired a whole raft of action-hero archetypes. And then he made a career out of drawing media coverage by inserting himself into fraught situations—mostly armed standoffs with federal authorities, presenting himself as the intermediary who would save everyone. It was almost as if he had a death wish, which may have been why he shot himself once. But it always had the scent of bullshit about it.

“It’s a good day to die,” he declared at the outset of the 1982 commando raid, dubbed “Operation Lazarus,” that made him famous: a 14-day trek across the Mekong River to rescue American prisoners of war supposedly being held in the Laotian jungles. The action-movie bravado evaporated three days later when guerrillas ambushed the squad and killed two Laotians and captured an American. Gritz and Co. fled back to Vietnam.

In the end, Gritz however ended up going quietly and peacefully. The onetime presidential candidate passed away last week at the ripe old age of 87 at his ranch in southern Nevada, where he had spent the past 20 years or so.

Most of the obituaries have focused on Gritz’s exploits trying to find abandoned prisoners of war in Vietnam in the 1980s and how they inspired not just the Rambo character but a range of similar action-film archetypes, and a few mention his intervention at the scene of the 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff. None of them offer insight into his real legacy, the one that now rules our world: Gritz was in fact one of the central figures in the then-nascent “Patriot” militia movement of the 1990s. The “Patriots” became the “Tea Party.” And the Tea Party became MAGA. They still call each other “Patriots.”

Gritz in many ways presaged Trump: He ran for President, twice. His first running mate was David Duke. He unapologetically embraced antigovernment conspiracy theories and far-right politics. He spoke loudly and brashly and often verged on outright bigotry. Trump essentially grafted Gritz’s schtick onto his own billionaire persona. Yet journalists who spoke to him in recent years reported that Gritz loathed Trump as a phony—a matter he knew something about.

He made his first big splash on the national scene with “Operation Lazarus,” which was financed by H. Ross Perot. It seemed to matter little to the national media that the whole affair had been an embarrassing failure: the whole action-hero narrative—brash manly soldier brushes off fumbling government officials in order to rescue American POWs abandoned in the jungles of southeastern Asia, held in secret camps long after the war’s end—was always a hollow fever dream.

It also was Hollywood catnip. Gritz’s exploits captured the public fancy in a big way: The A-Team popped up on TV shortly thereafter, featuring a cigar-chomping George Peppard as a character closely modeled on Gritz—Col. “Hannibal” Smith, leader of a motley collection of mercenaries who performed daring deeds beyond official purview. A few years later, Sylvester Stallone likewise led a cinematic expedition in search of American soldiers in Rambo: First Blood Part 2, which in its heyday was the undisputed king of the box office and cemented Stallone’s rep as an action star. Chuck Norris chimed in with some cheap imitations. Eventually there were two more sequels.

Gritz is often cited as the inspiration for Rambo, even though the character as originally envisioned by novelist David Morrell—and depicted in its first iteration, First Blood—was not a rescue-mission warrior but a returned Vietnam veteran who has trouble fitting in back home; it was the sequel, which dipped into the headlines stirred up by Gritz, that sensationalized his exploits into a comic-book version. And if any character in that film resembled Gritz, it was Richard Crenna’s Colonel Trautman. Nonetheless, the Rambo connection stuck, which came in handy when Gritz wanted media attention.

However, unlike his better-scripted counterparts, Gritz’s rescue efforts came up empty-handed; not a single POW nor even one of the legendary camps was ever found. That failure was only another turn in the road, though. While rooting around in Southeast Asia, Gritz had some brushes with the region’s notorious drug kingpins in Burma — and came away convinced that American officials (particularly in the CIA) worked hand in glove with these criminals.

When he returned stateside, Gritz tried to grab more headlines by revealing what he’d uncovered—but the public, long gorged on tales of CIA drug connections, paid little attention. However, Gritz soon enough found his audience: the conspiracy-mongers of the radical right, who reveled in fresh revelations of government perfidy at seemingly every chance. He fell in with Willis Carto’s antisemitic Populist Party, and shortly found himself the party’s vice presidential candidate in the 1988 elections. His running mate: David Duke. (Gritz later claimed he had been misled about the ticket and dropped out.)

Gritz parlayed that shot into the party’s outright presidential candidacy in 1992. But the Populists were a fringe party at best, and his campaign gained traction in only a few locales, mostly some pockets of ultra-right activity in rural states like Idaho. When a white supremacist named Randy Weaver got into an armed standoff with federal agents that August in the state’s Panhandle, it provided Gritz with his greatest opportunity ever. By negotiating an end to the Ruby Ridge siege after two days on the scene, Gritz once again attained pop-hero status.

At Ruby Ridge, though, Gritz reminded everyone that his heroism had a troubling shadow: As he left the scene and went out to talk to the crowd, he relayed a message from Weaver to the skinheads and neo-Nazis gathered nearby by offering them a stiff-armed Nazi salute.

That shadow never left Gritz. During his presidential campaign, he promoted the idea of average citizens forming “unorganized militias.” This concept became the centerpiece of the 1992 Christian Identity gathering in Estes Park, Colo., that is widely credited with giving birth to the militia movement. (Gritz himself did not attend. His long association with the gathering’s organizer, Identity pastor Pete Peters, had erupted earlier that year in a nasty feud sparked by Peters’ insistence that homosexuals should be put to death.) The next year, he again embarked on a speaking tour touting the militia concept but carrying it a step further: Gritz began offering his SPIKE (“Specially Prepared Individuals for Key Events”) training sessions, essentially providing a Special Forces background for any militiaman who wanted to learn.

And the rescues never abated either. He tried to negotiate an end to the 1996 Freemen standoff in Brusett, Mont., but gave up after a week in frustration. When a Connecticut housewife named Linda Wiegand approached him last year with a tale of her children being legally hijacked by a sexually (and satanically) abusive ex-husband, he leapt into action again. This time, though, he crossed the line: Gritz and his son, Jim, were arrested outside the school that the Wiegand boys attended — officers found pictures of the boys, their school schedules, two-way radios, some of the lock-picking tools Gritz sells for “defense against restrictive entry” and a modified switchblade — and charged both men with planning to kidnap the boys. Gritz was eventually acquitted in March 2000 by a Connecticut jury.

I interviewed Gritz by phone numerous times in the 1990s, and tried to meet with him in 1997 at Almost Heaven, the “covenant community” he tried to create on a plateau above the Clearwater River near Kamiah, Idaho, but he ducked out on me. I finally caught up with him at a survivalist “Preparedness Expo” in Puyallup, Washington, where he opened his speech by setting a paper United Nations flag afire.

The planning for Almost Heaven drew out his ideas as a military strategist. The community itself sat atop a narrow ridge running east and west. To the north is a dense, impenetrable wilderness with no roads. The only routes to the community come in from below. The place is easy to defend militarily, and it has the potential to be self-sufficient. All this to escape the floodwaters of social decay he sees washing over America.

“I see this tide certainly rising, and I think the high ground is in Idaho,” he told me. “What I’ve done is a very careful study. I did not make my choice of Idaho based on any single reason.” He rattled off the reasons for picking that particular spot: climate, soil, water availability, natural-disaster likelihood, and a tiny population in a conservative area.

“So when you look at it from literally every aspect, from political, social, from a natural phenomena point of view, climate, the physiology, the demography, of all places in America, every place from Florida to Maine to Washington to San Diego, California, the best place is Kamiah. That’s my conclusion, that’s why I’m out there.”

At the August 1998 Preparedness Expo, Gritz promoted his subsequent rescue attempt—trying to lure another white supremacist, bomber Eric Rudolph, out of the North Carolina woods—which turned, in familiar fashion, into a fiasco. He set out to organize an army of 100 searchers to convince Rudolph to turn himself in under Gritz’s watchful auspices (with the $1 million reward money being parlayed to Rudolph’s legal defense), but could only muster about 40 people or so.

When three of his searchers stumbled into some hornets and had to be treated at the hospital, the locals — already snickering about Gritz’s self-aggrandizement — dubbed the entourage “Bo’s Hornet Hunters.” After a week looking for the former Army veteran, Gritz packed his bags and returned home—and the personal disaster awaiting him there.

Back home, his wife of 24 years, Claudia, served him with divorce papers. She had the papers waiting when he came home to Kamiah. She evidently had warned Gritz that she would leave him if he made the trip to North Carolina, and she’d meant it.

Ten days later, at a bend in the road not far from the Clearwater, an early-morning deer hunter happened upon a bleeding Gritz, lying by the side of a gravel road near his pickup. He had been shot once in the chest, but he was alive and breathing.

An ambulance whisked him to the nearby hospital in Orofino. The local sheriff told reporters the wound had been self-inflicted — and it was not life-threatening. Family members who lived at Gritz’s Patriot settlement (named “Almost Heaven”), 30 miles away, rushed to his side.

Gritz had spoken on his shortwave radio program about facing the shock of divorce. He told his listeners shortly after the papers were filed that he’d begun seeing a psychological counselor, who told him his compulsion to rescue others — from MIAs in Vietnam to Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge to the Freemen in Montana — was an expression of a subconscious effort to find and rescue his own father, who had died in combat in World War II. He said he planned to check himself in to a Nevada veterans hospital for psychotherapy, adding: “I am sick.”

Eventually, he gave up on Almost Heaven, and the community eventually crumbled under the weight of its radicalism. Gritz abandoned the Idaho plans, resettled in Nevada, and remarried – this time, to the daughter of a prominent white-supremacist Christian Identity preacher. Gritz became a full-fledged member of an Identity congregation.

Gritz retrospectively defended the Idaho plan. “The entire range of Americana showed up. All we did was increase the economy of Kamiah because we needed groceries and everything that community had to offer. At that point in time, the people up there were the kind you wanted to invite into your home for dinner,” Gritz told Spokesman-Review reporter Rebecca Boone.

Gritz blamed the eventual disharmony at Almost Heaven on the far-right characters he called the “knots”—hotheaded and bellicose radicals who weren’t going to wait around for the End Days.

“When you’re fishing and everything is running smooth, when you make a great cast, sure as hell when you reel in your line there’s a knot. These guys were a constant irritant,” said Gritz. “There were about six individuals who were looking for Armageddon, and if it didn’t come, they were going to cause it.”

His last big attempt to grab headlines occurred in 2005, when Gritz tried to interject himself into the media circus surrounding Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman whose husband attempted to mercifully end her days as a brain-dead patient but whose family attempted to intervene. Gritz showed up showing up and attempted to serve a phony “citizens arrest” on the judge and county officials involved in the case, then later held a protest vigil before heading back to Nevada.

Bo Gritz was the living, breathing embodiment of Umberto Eco’s warning: “In fascist society, everyone is educated to become a hero.” The arc of Gritz’s career traces the route of the American action hero into darkest authoritarianism, illustrating how the ethos it celebrates can lead to genuinely fascist outcomes. Some scholars, notably John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett, have explored how the 20^th century American “heroic monomyth” is, at its core, profoundly anti-democratic and anti-intellectual. Violent action is exalted above diplomacy and reason; indeed, the world portrayed in these films is always innately violent, which necessitates and thus justifies violence itself, both in self-defense and reciprocation. Indeed, the “aesthetic of violence” described by other scholars as part of the essence of fascism is the beating heart of the action-hero ideal.

To the extent that this worldview is acted out in real life, it has a pathological effect on both the individuals it infects and those affected by their behavior, including society at large. It often is expressed in a kind of ritual of reification and elimination, which Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann have described as occurring in a series of steps: naming the enemy, legitimizing him, mythologizing him, ingraining him, and finally dealing with him in a ritual of elimination. The western heroic ideal always necessitated an enemy; but through the lens of the modern action hero ethic – distorted by his distinctive qualities, including a heightened paranoia and anti-intellectualism – it becomes a model conduit for violent authoritarianism that plays out in the real world in the acts of men like Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph, men who see themselves as heroes out to purge society of diseased or decadent elements.

We like to think of action heroes as the equivalent of cultural cotton candy, fluffy entertainment whose meaning is no deeper than a tub of well-buttered popcorn. Yet heroes have always been a central feature of mythology, and myths, as Joseph Campbell explored in depth, provide the psychological framework for entire cultures, and American action heroes in the end are no different. However, the kind of meaning they impart to American culture is different in content and nature from traditional heroes, and some of those differences – particularly the crude indifference to ethics and reason – have profound consequences.

Indeed, Rambo is the archetype of the modern American action hero. The Rambo films are particularly striking for the seemingly self-contradictory nature of the character’s heroism: he was at once anti-authoritarian, but only because the authorities themselves had been corrupted from within. His heroic task was not merely to rescue his friends but redeem authority itself and restore it to its rightful state. His enemies were often those within the government itself.

The heroic task was no longer mere redemption by repelling alien forces from without, but had become complicated by the need to expel alien forces from within, ultimately confronting this corruption and eliminating its source. This deeply fascist narrative was always Bo Gritz’s appeal. And it has always been Donald Trump’s.

Gritz’s involvement with the far right was fitting because so many of its actors—both movement leaders and some of the horrifying monsters they have helped produce—see themselves as essentially heroic in the same iconoclastic fashion as Gritz and Rambo. They have named the Enemy—in the 1990s, it was the New World Order, which became the 1990s stand-in for everything from their own “out of control” government to a creeping “world government” to the secret Jewish conspiracy that has always been the far right’s great obsession; today in Trump’s America, it’s become a broader menu of immigrant criminals and evil Antifa Commies and woke libtards who want to destroy the nation, but still with Jews in charge of everything—and see themselves as acting on missions to eliminate him from existence.

They’re trying to save America in their minds, and they’re driven by a media-fueled desire—an obsession, really—to be seen as heroes. Their self-perceptions are often built around cinematic hero myths (which is why so many militiamen love to cosplay in Bradley Cooperesque American Sniper gear—body armor, comms devices, front gun slings). In addition to ordinary militia members, this is also what has always driven violent far-right terrorists, men like Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. McVeigh specifically cited Rambo and the Norris movies as giving him the model for his own idea of heroism. Interviews with rank-and-file members of extremist organizations – including, in the 21^st century, anti-immigration organizations like the Minutemen (whose organizational origins are very closely tied to the militia/Patriot movement anyway) – reveal that the action hero holds a similar role for them as well. Minuteman murderess Shawna Forde saw herself as being on a mission to save the country from the incoming immigrant hordes, and ended up gunning down a family in their home.

A German filmmaker, Andrea Luka Zimmerman, created an intriguing documentary about Gritz titled Erase and Forget that she assembled over a 10-year span and release in 2017. It’s a fascinating portrait that Zimmerman handles provocatively, delving deeper into how the American mythmaking machinery regularly spits out toxic characters like Gritz and Trump and their armies of authoritarian goons. Above everything else, Gritz fits a certain, well-known American archetype: the bullshitter. He’s charming the way all sociopaths are, and alike all sociopaths, he leaves a trail of personal casualties in his wake. The man had few, if any, real long-time friends. Most of all, he really is just deeply full of shit. These too are traits Trump shares with him. Zimmerman reveals all this to us gradually.

In the end, Erase and Forget is very effective at showing how the universe that Gritz inhabited is a dark and frightening place, and it really powerfully suggests how people can go down this rabbit hole into a belief system that has profound effects, and not just in their world but reverberates into the world around them. This has always been how conspiracist politics works—how it attracts the disempowered, and then in the end disenfranchises them wholly from the real world, from democracy, from their families and society at large. Gritz, in the end, was a great exemplar of that dynamic. It’s sad for him, but tragic when it infects a whole nation.