The Southern Poverty Law Center's 1997 Terror from the Right report describes a thwarted attempt to attack Ft. Hood and other military bases on July 4, 1997, by a group calling themselves the Third Continental Congress.  The SPLC report states that this group planned to invade and slaughter United Nations troops that they mistakenly believed were on these bases preparing for an assault on Americans. The belief that foreign troops are training in the United States in preparation to mount an attack on Christian patriots may sound outlandish to most, but it is not an unusual claim in New World Order Conspiracy media. And for many, Col. Jim Ammerman is the definitive expert on this subject.

Imminent Military Takeover of the U.S. Part II is a video of an over two hour speech given by Ammerman as part of The Prophecy Club tour in January 1997, and is widely quoted by New World Order conspiracy theorists.  This particular video was not necessarily the source of the beliefs behind the attempted attack on Ft. Hood, but is used here as an example to demonstrate that these ideas, although they sound extreme to most Americans, are not limited to militias and white supremacist groups.

In Imminent Military Takeover of the U.S. Part II, Ammerman describes a takeover of the United States by United Nations and foreign troops, which he claimed were gathering at military bases and national parks around the country.  Ammerman also claimed collusion of top government officials (President Clinton was in office at this time) with international Illuminati leaders in a conspiracy to take away United States sovereignty.

In the video Ammerman states that there are 400,000 to 1.3 million foreign troops waiting to attack U.S. citizens, that bases like Long Beach Naval Air Station and Holliman Air Force Base have been given to China and Germany, and that 28 national parks in the U.S. have been taken over by the United Nations.

Other quotes in this two hour video include the following:

"We have more foreign troops in the US than our own troops... so the takeover could take place at any time."
"We are coming to a showdown... we have traitors in high places."
"We won't have another national election."
"Jane Fonda should have been publicly executed not later than 1975... and right behind her should have been some guy named William Clinton."
 "There's a great spirit of the antichrist here today...it goes all the way to the Supreme Court."
"Hillary ...tells Bill what to do because she is higher up in the Illuminati than he is, and therefore he has to take orders."

Ammerman also states that 130 camps have been prepared by FEMA that he claims will house millions of dissident American patriots who are not "politically correct."  He continues with his own Americanized version of the Dolschtosslegende, or stab in the back theory; Ammerman served in Vietnam and claims that the war could not be won because American forces were ordered to refrain from bombing weapon stockpiles purchased by the Rothschilds and Rockefellers for the North Vietnamese.  

Ammerman also goes into great detail about the organizations and families that he believes are running this Illuminati conspiracy to destroy American Christian society.  He provides his audience with an outline of the ongoing conspiracy:

Lucifer in Heaven
May 1, 1776 Illuminati
July 4, 1776 Independence
Bilderbergers
Internal Revenue Service
Federal Reserve Board
WW I - League of Nations
1923 - Council of Foreign Relations
1933 - War Powers Act
1945 - United Nations
1973 - Trilateral Commission

And who are the major villains in this story?  Ammerman explains that eight families pull the strings through their control of central banks around the world.

"But here are the major stockholders of the Federal Reserve.  They own the Federal Reserve.  The Rothschilds with offices in London and Berlin, the Lazard brothers in Paris, Israel Seif of Italy, Kuhn Loeb Company of Germany, the Warburgs with offices in Hamburg and Amsterdam in the Netherlands and the last three are all interlocked - Lehman Brothers of New York, Goldman Sachs of New York, and Rockefeller of New York."

 (Note that the Rockefellers are included in Illuminati and other conspiracy theory as "crypto-Jews" and are sometimes described in this conspiracy as Jews corrupting the Protestant mainline churches from the inside.)

Ammerman's quote is, almost exactly word for word, the description of the anti-Semitic Federal Reserve conspiracy theory documented by the Anti-defamation League on the ADL website. However, ADL focuses on the conspiracy as being promoted by white supremacists and the Nation of Islam.  For John Hagee's version of this conspiracy theory see Bruce E. Wilson's video on Hagee's Federal Reserve conspiracy. For a debunking of this Federal Reserve conspiracy see this report from Public Eye, published by Political Research Associates.

Despite Ammerman's diatribes about Jewish bankers controlling the world, he apparently sees himself as a Christian Zionist and supporter of Israel.  According to Ammerman, "only two nations in all the earth have been raised up by the hand of God... Israel and the United States."

Ammerman is a former military chaplain whose Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches (CFCG) was approved in 1984 by the Department of Defense as an endorsing agency to place chaplains in the United States Military.  The CFCG website states that they are,

"Presently endorsing 270+ Military Chaplains/Chaplain Candidates and 180+ Civilian Chaplains/Seminarians."

Ammerman is a long term leader among independent charismatic pastors and was a trustee with the International Charismatic Bible Ministries (ICBM), an organization started by Oral Roberts in 1986, which also included Ammerman's close friends, Kenneth Copeland and John Hagee.  The ICBM disbanded in 2007 as a result of the dramatic growth of other independent charismatic networking.  One of these is the International Coalition of Apostles (ICA) of the New Apostolic Reformation.

From it's inception in 2001 through 2007, Ammerman was also an Apostle in the ICA [link: see bottom of page for Jim Ammerman listing], headed by C. Peter Wagner, Convening Apostle of the New Apostolic Reformation.  Another member of this movement in the news recently is Lou Engle, a member of the Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders and head of "The Call." Lou Engle has been featured in recent Talk2action.org articles [1, 2] Ammerman is Vice President of the Board of Directors of the National Council for Bible Curriculum in Public Schools (Mr. and Mrs. Chuck Norris also serve on this Board of Directors and the Advisory Board is filled with Religious Right luminaries.) Ammerman also is a Commissioner and Director for Transworld Accrediting Commission International (TACI) which accredits evangelical schools, seminaries, colleges and universities.  

Americans United For Separation of Church and State reported in 1999 that Ammerman had been a part of an effort to get a chaplaincy program in public schools and that "Ammerman is affiliated with TV preacher Robertson, formerly serving as a visiting professor of institutional chaplaincy at Robertson's Regent University."  Pat Robertson is the author of the 1991 bestseller New World Order, a book that merges the end times prophecy with paranoid conspiracy theory.  Robertson's book reintroduced 1920s and 1930s conspiracy theories back into the mainstream in the guise of religious prophecy, and quoted and cited anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists past and present, such as Nesta Webster and Eustace Mullins.

Ammerman takes credit for giving John Hagee instructions from God (given to Ammerman while preaching at Hagee's Cornerstone Church) for Hagee to expand his television broadcast beyond San Antonio to a national and international audience.  It is not surprising that many of Hagee's paranoid conspiracy theories echo those of Ammerman.  In the Imminent Military Takeover of the U.S. II video Ammerman recounts a conversation that he had with Kenneth and Gloria Copeland over lunch, concerning the reason why the Copelands could not fly their private plane over national parks.  Ammerman claimed that it was to keep people from taking pictures of the foreign troops in these parks.

This biographical information is to emphasize that Ammerman does not fit the typical image of an anti-government conspiracy theorist. However, he is frequently referred to as one of its "most credible" proponents.  His long term military career and his prominence in charismatic evangelical organizations help to provide a veneer of respectability for these hateful and destructive narratives which are typically characterized by the mainstream press as being limited to the extremist right.

As pointed out in my last article, the New World Order conspiracy label does not apply to everyone who believes that there have been lies and cover-ups by government leaders.  The New World Order conspiracy storyline is a dualistic narrative of the war between good and evil, and is described in terms of demonic powers working together in an interconnected cabal with the intentional goal of the destruction of Christian society.  This narrative closely parallels that of the antichrist storyline of end times prophecy.  The recent decades of popular prophecy fiction has perhaps laid the foundations for further mainstreaming and widespread embrace of both religious and secular versions of New World Order conspiracy claims.
 [For more about the merging of end times prophecy with conspiracy theories, see this article, first in an ongoing series.]

A memorandum from the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, stamped September 25, 1997, tasked the Chairman of the Armed Forces Chaplains Board with a review of Ammerman's activities.  Partial transcripts from a radio interview and from the video Imminent Military Takeover of the U.S. II were in the memorandum which was signed by Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Normand G. Lezy.  The memorandum stated that Ammerman used his "Chaplaincy Full Gospel Churches chaplains as agents to collect and convey military intelligence information for Mr. Ammerman's political purposes."  It also stated that he encouraged military personal to affiliate with organization that are prohibited due to their "supremacist viewpoints" and that his video and interview have a "suggestion of a military overthrow of the United States government."

The memorandum on Ammerman included a partial transcript of audio cassette tapes from a Newswatch Magazine radio broadcast dated January 7, 1997.  The transcript states that "Ammerman is introduced as having `exclusive information' coming from his (170) military chaplains around the world.  The five pages of partial transcripts of the audio cassettes are listed in bullet point style in the memorandum and number seventeen is as follows,

"  This military term...is MOTE (Military Operations in Urban Terrain), that mean controlling our populace...of our cities... major training going on at Ft. Bliss...But not only there... I have a chaplain at the VA Center (Battle Creek, MI)...is what is called Ft. Mount Carson... Now it's training foreign troops... Going on at Ft. Hood... Ft. Bragg..."

Ammerman continued as head of the endorsing agency and now, twelve years later, oversees one of the largest blocks of military chaplains. Ammerman has not toned down his rhetoric and his conspiracies are also being promoted by some of the chaplains under his endorsement, such as Maj. James Linzey.  See Talk2action.org article, with partial transcripts from several of of Linzey's 2005 radio show appearances here and another article on Linzey here.

Col. Jim Ammerman is just one example of the many New World Order conspiracy speakers for The Prophecy Club.  These videos are still being marketed on their website.  The site features a long list of previous tour speakers and their videos which include a curious mixture of Christian Zionists, Messianics and Hebrew Roots leaders, leading conspiracy theorists, well known anti-Semitic writers, and some who claim to be former Satanists and repentant Illuminati.  Despite the range of speakers, their New World Order conspiracy narratives are strikingly similar.

Speakers have included Texe Marrs, Fritz Springmeier, Jerome Corsi, Cliff Kincaid, Gen. Ben Partin, Gary Kah, Bree Keyton, Henry Gruver, Grant Jeffrey, Kitty Werthmann of Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, and Al Cuppett, retired Joint Chiefs of Staff Action Officer.

A PDF file of the Prophecy Club order form, with the current list of videos being marketed by The Prophecy Club can be downloaded from this link The videos of The Prophecy Club and other similar media are reemerging on the internet by the thousands since the election of President Obama.

The Prophecy Club's heyday was in the 1990s.  They state on The Prophecy Club website that they were at their peak, "heard on more than 80 radio stations, with programs being broadcast two to four times a day.  A daily television broadcast followed and reached an audience of 25 million people."

By 1996 The Prophecy Club was organizing speaking tours in major cities in which the speakers were recorded and rebroadcast on radio, and the videos marketed. Their featured speakers were then featured on other radio programs of various ministries and conspiracy broadcasts.

The Prophecy Club was founded and is led by Stan Johnson who is also the CEO of Prophetic Oil.  Both the late Hayseed Stephens, and his son Sha, used The Prophecy Club to promote the idea of a potential massive oil field in Israel.  See the Mother Jones 2008 article Let There Be Light Crude.

By the end of the 1990s, Stan Johnson, like numerous other independent charismatic leaders, was questioning the pre-Tribulation rapture of dispensational theology.  He embraced a theology that claims that born again Christians will still be present during the Tribulation. (This eschatology is still premillennial but is mid-Tribulation, post-Tribulation, or pre-wrath.)  Johnson then became Apostle Stan Johnson.

In plain English this means that these believers have altered an important part of an elaborate and well known narrative of the coming apocalyptic end of the world.  They do believe that born again Christians will not be spared this imminent conflagration, but will still be on earth during the Tribulation, or seven years of the reign of the anti-Christ.  They are therefore preparing themselves for the coming battle with the forces of the anti-Christ's one world government, as well as the apostate church of the end times.  In the context of The Prophecy Club speakers, the apostate church, or "whore of Babylon" of Revelation, is considered to be both the Roman Catholic Church (excluding charismatic Catholics) and Mainline Protestants.

This belief system allows for the possibility that we are currently in, or very close to, the Tribulation, and that believers must aggressively expand the body of the "true church" as well as prepare for literal physical battle against evil forces.  This has moved these end times believers closer to the narratives of groups such as Christian Identity whose believers relish the opportunity to battle their enemies during the end times.  Belief in a rapture that would take believers away before the events of the Tribulation is seen as "wimpy" and "escapist."

The media products of The Prophecy Club and others demonstrate the importance of the narrative in building fear and paranoia among their audiences.  Viewers are not being taught to hate just for the purpose of hatred alone.  They are being taught that this is a holy war, and they must prepare to fight for their very existence against a vast and powerful satanic movement - a cabal that is plotting their destruction and the end of life as they know it.  A holy war requires a demonic adversary.

In May of 1997, The Prophecy Club was served by the Johnson County, Kansas sheriff's office with an income withholding order in Case No. 96CV05915, Roeder vs. Roeder. This was the divorce of Scott Roeder and Lindsey Roeder.  Scott Roeder is the suspect charged with the murder of Dr. George Tiller.

[ed: this story is the second in a two-part series. Part one is Conspiracy as Prophecy. for more on Jim Ammerman, also see Defense Department-Certified Agency Newsletter Suggests Killing Democrats]