Audio By Carbonatix
part 2 of 2
Norm Resnick may relish his combative reputation, but when it comes right down to it, his Dr. Norm routine is often meek.
He usually cuts off callers rather than argue with them. Epperson’s conspiracy theory went “beyond my comfort level,” he says, and adds that one recent shortwave guest “stunk of racism and anti-Semitism–stunk of it. I tried to pin him down, but he was so elusive.” Actually, Resnick acknowledges, he doesn’t want guests on either of his shows with whom he violently disagrees.
“I don’t do both sides of the issue,” he explains. “Do I have guests on who I really disagree with? Yeah, and I’ll never schedule them again.”
Dr. Norm didn’t land on international shortwave because his opinions were fearless but because he sold a lot of gold and silver for Viking International Trading, a precious-metals dealer based in Scottsdale, Arizona, that targets patriots and gun-lovers and advertises on KHNC.
“I was selling a lot of coins for them,” says Resnick. “I was selling more coins for them than anybody in the country. And they got excited and they put me on shortwave. I couldn’t believe it.”
Dr. Norm’s ads for Viking are pretty much an extension of his show. After he and his guests warn patriots of imminent danger to their freedom, a prerecorded Dr. Norm comes on and says: “If you don’t believe what I’m saying, why don’t you go out there right now and invest your money in banks, IRAs, mutual funds or the stock market. And invest your money realizing full well that your hard-earned money is in the camp of the international bankers, and you’re actively supporting both your own financial destruction as well as promoting America’s move into the New World Order. You need to investigate precious metals. I’ve done my homework. Viking International is the respected leader in the precious-metals industry…Take the first step in regaining control of your financial life.”
Viking president Mike Callahan’s own show on WWCR, Protecting Your Wealth, uses the same tactic to make the same argument: Your paper money will be worthless once the New World Order destroys America, so if you’re going to survive to fight for your family’s freedom, you’d better hoard gold and silver.
Callahan, who declines to reveal his firm’s revenue or sales figures, calls this mixture of politics and salesmanship a “happy intersection.” Is the world listening? Although no rating service exists to measure shortwave audiences, he says, “One million in this country is high; one million worldwide is low.”
Every Tuesday afternoon at 5:30, gun-toting patriots and their families converge on a restaurant in LaSalle, a tiny town just south of Greeley on Highway 85, for a pizza-and-paranoia palaver. One-Minute Pizza is one of Dr. Norm’s advertisers, and these are his new friends–some of them, at least.
The entire restaurant is the meeting hall, and it’s a family affair: The children of the fifty or so patriots clamber around a plastic castle in the middle of the room while their pistol-packin’ parents discuss the issues of the day.
Emcee John Schlosser, the KHNC news director, starts telling the group what’s really going on in the United States. His associate on KHNC’s morning show, Scott Wheeler, is just back from Arkansas, where he apparently has been gathering information about President Clinton’s dirty laundry. Schlosser and Wheeler, among others at the loosely run, wisecrack-filled session, hawk videotapes and announce upcoming events. One patriot brings in an armload of The Spotlight for distribution; the newspaper is published by the stridently anti-Zionist Liberty Lobby. Others hawk Bearcat scanners that can be used to keep track of law officers’ whereabouts. (You never can tell when government agents will try to seize a citizen’s property.) And they sell a nice little shortwave radio for $55–so patriots can listen to Dr. Norm’s show on WWCR.
Schlosser, perhaps the only radio news director in the state who wears a gun on his hip, advises that “those interested in the militia should talk to me afterwards.” A guy stylishly attired in green camouflage announces a “survival seminar” and gives out his number, which begins with a 666 exchange. “I had nothing to do with the prefix on my phone number,” he says. Someone in the back dryly chips in, “Uh-huh.”
The tireless Janet Meisinger, who publishes a patriot newspaper in rural Adams County, strides to the front of the room, her weapon dangling in a nylon holster between her legs, and relates the latest episode in her war with bureaucrats. This week, she complains, she got a “folderol letter” back from the assessor’s office. Tris Harkless, frequently heard on Dr. Norm’s show and an expert in decoding the cultic symbolism imprinted on dollar bills, reads from data he’s compiled about former White House aide Vincent Foster’s death. (The patriots know it wasn’t a suicide.) Doug Campbell, head of the Colorado Taxpayers Party, appeals for help in his bid to run for secretary of state. The crowd murmurs its approval when Campbell urges people to rescind their marriage licenses because “marriage is an ordination of God, not the state.”
Among the first-time attendees is Donald C., a sweet-faced and soft-spoken old man from Greeley. Although he heard about these meetings on KHNC, he doesn’t much care for Dr. Norm and keeps up a running commentary on Jesus and sin with another first-timer sitting next to him. Donald C. nods approvingly when Schlosser tells the audience that “Sovereign God created we the people” and is trying to tell them something about their wicked ways. “Look at the earthquakes and floods,” Schlosser adds. Donald C. agrees, whispering to his neighbor, “God usually warns people when they’re in danger.”
But not everything about the evening’s activities sits well with Donald C. He’s offended by some of the speakers’ language. When candidate Campbell vows “to kick government in the butt,” Donald C. winces, shakes his head and mutters, “Honor all men.”
One problem with Dr. Norm, Donald C. says, is that he’s too harsh. But Dr. Norm has another problem: He doesn’t accept Jesus.
“I’m the Jews’ best friend,” Donald C. says with quiet conviction. “But they don’t read the Bible. Jews are enemies of God. God uses them as a punching bag.”
Donald C., an avid talk-show listener, recalls the case of a far better-known Jewish radio personality. “Alan Berg wasn’t tolerable,” he says. “He argued with everybody.”
His neighbor reminds Donald C. that Dr. Norm is certainly no liberal. The elderly man smiles and replies, “But he won’t read the Bible. He appears to be heading down the same road as Berg.”
Some of Norm Resnick’s fan mail is chilling. One is addressed to the “ADL Patriot Network,” an obvious sneer at the Anti-Defamation League and Resnick’s religion. In another, typed neatly on the letterhead of a right-wing paramilitary group in the Midwest, a “commander” writes: “All I hear on shortwave are calls to `save America.’ Why do you all attempt to save a cadaver? In the aftermath of Washington’s demise, we Aryans will erect a Republic for ourselves alone.”
Resnick says death threats by mail and phone have prompted him to pack a .45 wherever he goes. On the way to the sub shop, he pulls out a photo ID card from the Weld County sheriff that he proudly claims allows him to carry a concealed weapon.
But is Resnick really in danger? Or is he just so carried away with his radio-host persona and his gaggle of conspiracy theorists that he loves portraying himself as being at risk? “The answer to that question,” he says, “is I don’t know.”
One of Norm Resnick’s new set of colleagues is fellow electronic gunslinger Bob Enyart, Denver’s proudly homophobic Christian TV talk-show host. Enyart backs his bile with action: He played Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” on his show last year when a prominent gay Coloradan died of AIDS. For the past couple of months Enyart’s also been doing a daily radio show at KHNC, immediately following Dr. Norm.
“They asked me to come up, and I like what they’re doing here,” says Enyart. “It’s a small station, and it’s quite a drive for me, but I’m pretty excited about the kind of people that are in the audience. They have dreams of creating a network, and so there’s a possibility of being part of that.”
One afternoon this spring, when Dr. Norm has a few minutes of live air to kill before his own two-hour show ends, he sees Enyart walking around the studio and calls out to him.
Enyart, who plans to discuss the just-fresh execution of “homosexual and murderer” John Wayne Gacy on his show, enters the booth, takes off his own gun and lays it on the table, then sits down next to Dr. Norm. They’re like two little boys in a backyard fort. Resnick points out the reporter sitting nearby, and Enyart launches into a rap about Westword, which he says he likes but which “lacks wisdom.” He tells Dr. Norm and the KHNC audience that “being slammed by Westword is a really positive credential in our business.”
Dr. Norm, though, wants to talk about something else. He’s always looking for the “sizzle,” and he knows how to push Enyart’s button. “Bob,” he says, “I really do not object to homosexual behavior if I am left alone and my children are left alone and I’m not being inundated with it. But because I am, that’s why I object. You object on a more fundamental basis. You believe sodomy should be–“
“–recriminalized! Right!” interrupts Enyart. As usual, he has buggery on the brain. “Every one of our Founding Fathers believed sodomy was a crime. Sodomy has always been recognized to be an unnatural crime that leads to disease and death, and it will destroy the nation that endorses it. What happens when you bring your kids to a city park and then there’s two homos in the park and they start rolling around in the grass and then they start kissing? You want your boys to see that, Norm? Because that’s one of the most destructive things a young man could ever see. Norm, what some people do in private is everybody’s business.”
Eventually Dr. Norm breaks in and asks Enyart: “What do you think of the com-ment by the lady who called in when I said Ward was here from Westword and she said, `Hey, keep your gun close. You should shoot him’? Ward looks like a nice guy, doesn’t he?”
“Well, yeah,” Enyart replies, “but what did Jeffrey Dahmer look like?”
Dr. Norm laughs and brays, “How can I top that?”
He’ll try. When he returns to the studio two hours later for his shortwave show, Dr. Norm tells his local audience, his guest will be talking about “how the Clintons’ agenda very closely resembles what happened in Nazi Germany in the 1930s.”
Resnick has no problems lining up guests for his USA Patriot Network show, beamed live around the planet. His sales pitch? “I call ’em up and say, `I’m Norm Resnick, and I can give you a million listeners.'”
A few minutes before going on, Resnick calls this day’s guest, veterinarian Gene Schroeder from Campo, Colorado, to find out what to ask him. “I look for the bang, to hit from the opening sentence,” says Resnick.
Schroeder, who has a folksy twang but a no-nonsense delivery, winds up telling Dr. Norm’s shortwave audience right off the bat: “The thing you need to realize is that in this country we went under the War and Emergency Powers Act, which is a constitutional dictatorship, in 1933…and Hitler used the same powers in Germany. Once those powers are imposed, the government can do basically whatever it wants to do.”
While Schroeder is talking, Dr. Norm is skimming some scare propaganda from the McIlvany Intelligence Advisor, a newsletter published by Colorado conspiracy theorist Don McIlvany. Every so often, he breaks in and reads some of it aloud–without telling his audience that he’s using someone else’s words. Between interruptions, Schroeder continues: “It opened the way for Hitler to come in and do all the atrocities that were done in World War II. The important thing to realize is that those same powers are in place in this country today.”
For the next hour, Schroeder says basically the same thing fifty different ways. And the calls pour in–Henry from Virginia, Paul from Massachusetts, Jay from New Orleans.
Resnick takes off his headphones and says to his visitor: “From little Johnstown! Who would believe?!”
The shortwave signals from WWCR’s two transmitters (at 5810 and 7435 kilohertz) get stronger after dark. So as the sun sets across the United States, more and more people can pluck Dr. Norm from the ether. His disembodied callers seem to march across the country, east to west, their calls interspersed with sales pitches offering gold, silver, surveillance equipment and, of course, weapons.
“If you’re a gun owner who’s petrified about the onslaught of the new gun-control laws, you’d better do something about it right now,” warns Dr. Norm. “The gun grabbers have succeeded, and the large-capacity magazines will be drying up. Clearwater Trading Co. has a couple of thousand left…all at competitive prices…Uzis, Kalashnikovs…I wouldn’t write to them. Time is running out…”
Resnick whips off his headset, grins at his visitor and says, “There’s nobody else in Colorado doing this! Hardly anybody else in the country. But this is the opportunity people dream about, and I got it! Good shtick! Good shtick!” (He doesn’t use Yiddish on the air.)
As Schroeder speculates for the hundredth time about the chances of Americans “waking up” to the danger around them, the phone calls zip in faster and faster. The engineers in the control booth are holding up signs for Resnick listing the callers’ names and cities. “Here come the crazies,” he hoarsely whispers away from his mike. Then Dr. Norm puts his headset back on and says, “From Houston, Texas: Bubba, you’re on the air.”
“I know we’ve woke up a lot of people out here,” says Bubba from Houston, “but I hear a lot of talk and I think it’s time for some action…”
Dr. Norm, who’s moving at the speed of sound, interrupts to make a sales pitch: Schroeder’s booklet and a tape of the current show for $25.
“Amazing business!” he says off-air to his visitor. “I mean, I don’t know shit about this business. I don’t know shit from shit. I know how to lecture.”
And interrupt. Dr. Norm breaks into Schroeder’s reply to Bubba to say: “Gene, we’re in a battle for our Constitution. We’re in a battle for our way of life and yet there’s still a segment of the patriot community, maybe 20 percent, who blame the problems on Jews, on Hispanics and on blacks.”
Schroeder replies: “Norman, I think that’s the way of rulers: Divide and conquer, that as long as they can keep we the people fighting each other–“Resnick takes off his headset and says to his visitor: “I always say something like that every show. That’s my mission.”
Dr. Norm puts his headset back on and barges in on Schroeder to say that “these people do not realize that what they are doing is helping the destruction of America.”
As the hour winds up, Dr. Norm cuts off the last caller with a “God bless you,” repeats the names, addresses and phone numbers of his advertisers and himself, and then says in a flurry, “I sincerely appreciate your support. What we stand for here on the USA Patriot Network is the Judeo-Christian heritage, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. God bless you. God bless America. Good night.”
Norm Resnick takes off his headset for the last time. “If I get killed,” he tells his visitor, “write that he was an asshole, but he was consistent.”
end of part 2
