What started out as an evening gathering of the Wind River Multiple Use Coalition late in March in Riverton, WY, was to erupt into a front-page airing of ageless conspiracy theories --- by a GOP legislator whose star within the state's robust multiple-use community has lately been very much on the rise.

Third-term WY State Rep. Carolyn Paseneaux --- a key oil-and-gas, ranching and private-property-rights advocate --- was later to profess no regrets for airing a controversial David Icke video and urging meeting-goers to duplicate and distribute it. (Icke is a New Age author whose work Cindy Silverman of the Denver B'nai B'rith office describes as consisting of "outrageous conspiracy tracts ... which include the belief that a self-appointed Global Elite controls the world.")

Stories in the Casper Star-Tribune were to make much of the video (deemed anti-Semitic, it turns out, by the Anti-Defamation League) and Paseneaux's oddly offhand reference to "the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Bilderburgers, the Trilateral Commission, and how our president plays into that."

But the other wise-use and U.N.-bashing salvos Paseneaux launched during the hour and 50 minute meeting were undeservingly lost in the shuffle. Taken together, they're a good picture of the present focus of the movement in the Cowboy State.

Multiple-Users Meet. The March 19 meeting of about 20 friends and neighbors was set in Riverton, a town of about 9,000 on the Wind River Reservation, once a thriving hub of the uranium business whose community leaders count, it sometimes seems, on that industry one day rising from beneath the waves, a nuclear Atlantis regained.

The orderly gathering treated Paseneaux like the favorite she is for her sponsorship of regulatory "takings" and wool subsidy checkoff bills, advocating a special $1 million bank account for suing over federal natural resource policy decisions, bashing the Nature Conservancy and decrying legislative efforts to introduce "one-man, one-vote" reform into rural school board elections.

Paseneaux criticized the Bureau of Land Management at length for failing to name county governments "cooperating agencies" in the writing of federal environmental analyses --- which BLM officials have contended is forbidden.

Paseneaux also warned multiple-users of impending but unspecified environmentalist attacks on the West's countless wooden utility poles, which are treated with creosote containing arsenic, chromium and other heavy metals.

"It's just another way to target what you are doing," she told an audience who promptly piped up with fond memories of using like-treated railroad ties in their flower gardens and fences, laughing aloud at the environmentalists' obviously foolish crusade.

The evening had grown late before Paseneaux delved into the Global Biodiversity Treaty, "stopped in Congress with only an hour to spare," she recalled breathlessly. The lawmaker said it entailed a Yellowstone-to-Yukon corridor and buffer zone which, in concert with the United Nations Wildlands Project, "will very much displace people" on the historic frontier.

"This is why they passed the Second Amendment," intoned one voice in the audience.

After that, Paseneaux showed the Icke video, which she had to cut off only partway through because it was time for the building crew to lock up for the night.

Icke had not yet had time to explore the Jewish banking conspiracy theories that B'nai B'rith claims to know him best for, although he did get into the alleged plans of the U.N. World Health Organization to force unnecessary vaccinations on people simply to enrich their partners in the world pharmaceutical trade.

But plans were already being made among the departing audience to have the video passed around and copied.

Later, in an interview with Star-Tribune Editor David Hipschman, the legislator said she was unfamiliar with Icke's long history as an expert on secret societies, UFOs, the Kennedy and John Lennon assassinations, and perhaps even more puzzlingly, sportscasting for the BBC.

Paseneaux has also declined, to date, an invitation from the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, who offered her a complimentary visit to their Museum of Tolerance.

Said the center's director, Rabbi Abraham Cooper: "She is literally playing with fire." ---