OUTCASTS DIGGING IN FOR THE APOCALYPSE

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The grisly mix of fertilizer and hatred that detonated in Oklahoma City last week appears to provide stark evidence of something many Americans have denied: the existence of paranoid, violent thinking within our borders. Just what are the tenets of this thinking? And did they figure in last year's election returns?

Like other political movements before it, the radical right in America today has its extremist component, which plainly was a force in the 1994 elections. For instance, George Nethercutt, the giant-slayer Congressman who knocked off former House Speaker Tom Foley in Washington State, drew strength from radio shows where callers talked about sightings of black helicopters and U.N. plans to set up a secret compound in the state. In neighboring Idaho, Helen Chenoweth upended an environmentalist Democratic incumbent in part by saying that the only endangered species was the "white Anglo-Saxon male."

These politicians and others drew on widespread mistrust and even hatred of government power in Western and rural areas. Their coalition included well-known elements of far-right thought: tax protesters; Christian home-schoolers; conspiracy theorists influenced by the John Birch Society's fear of one-world government; Second Amendment activists (mostly men) for whom guns are an important part of an independent way of life; self-reliant types who resent a Federal Government that seems to favor grizzly bears and wolves over humans on government land.

But this is common stuff in many parts of the country. It is several giant steps from this movement to the extremist-fringe thinking that seems to have bred the Oklahoma City bombing. That frame of mind appeals to a hard-bitten and alienated segment of society that has found a voice lately in millennial movements like the Christian Patriots and the state "militias," largely in the Middle West and West. The militias may be--as they strongly claim to be-composed largely of yeoman states'--righters energized over the threat to the Second Amendment. But they have also fostered viciously antigovernment thinking that if followed to its logical end leads in one direction: armed uprising.

Perhaps the most belligerent militia is the Militia of Montana, with headquarters in the Cabinet Mountains near Noxon. "This is probably where the war is going to begin, right here in Montana," a member who refused to be identified told the bbc last year. "We've got a lot more bullets than they do."

John Trochmann, the militia's cofounder, distributes literature that would terrify many people. It features photographs of Soviet jeeps said to be on American soil. Russian troops are going to arrive here as part of an international police force, contends Trochmann's newsletter, Taking Aim. Our own government, the literature asserts, is guilty of "treason," is secretly building concentration camps and is planning nine zones to replace the lower 48 states--a partition plan that the Militia of Montana asserts was spelled out in an illustration on the back of Kix cereal boxes last year. Martial law is inevitable. And Trochmann endorses the prediction that sometime in the next century, "America's white population will perish."