Rush, Newspeak and Fascism

[Parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, and X. See my explanatory note.]

XI: Dualist Receivers

So far, when talking about the "receivers" who compose the audience of the various "transmitters" of extremist memes into the mainstream, I've mainly focused on the mainstream Republicans who make up the mass of the conservative movement in America.

But as I've explained, these "transmissions" are two-way affairs, sending messages to both the mainstream and the extremists from whose worldview the memes are drawn: namely, that their formerly unacceptable beliefs are gaining acceptance. It essentially invites them to move into the mainstream without having to change their views.

And so for the past decade and more -- and particularly in the past three years -- mainstream conservatism has increasingly become home to a variety of right-wing extremists. Conservatives uniformly reject this reality, arguing that their party is not home to a bunch of wild-eyed lunatics; it's the home of tax-paying, churchgoing, job-holding, productive members of society.

One of the real problems with coming to grips with the right-wing extremists, in fact, is the public image that has grown up around them for the past half-century, but driven home in the militiaman stereotype of the 1990s: A half-educated, beer-swilling, Bible-thumping, child-beating, dentistry-challenged, gun-loving lunatic with both eyes rattling around in his head and a steady stream of hate foaming out of his mouth. Not to mention all those visions of black helicopters dancing in his head.

I have attended a lot of militia and Patriot meetings over the years, and this wasn't what I found at all. In my experience, the average militia member is a person who very much keeps all the appearances of being a mainstream player in society (as contrasted with, say, the skinheads and neo-Nazis, who more closely fit the description). Most of them are reasonably well educated. A large number of them are veterans. Most of the rest are agrarian or blue-collar workers with families. They all pay their taxes (unless they've been drawn in deeply by one of the tax-protest schemes) and vote and attend church.

The false stereotype is built on a sociological approach to these groups, called "centrist/extremist theory," developed in the 1950s that actually is now largely discredited among sociologists. This theory basically held that these "fringe" groups represented a constituency of largely uneducated classes who were grossly disenfranchised due to this fact, thus leading to their radicalism; their status also ensured that they would remain outside the realm of the mainstream. Well, subsequent data collected through the 1970s and 1980s began to demonstrate the weakness of this model; contrary to its prediction, surveys of "Christian Patriots" found that on average they were better educated than the population at large, and many of these groups' members actually prove to be highly educated and some of better-than-average means. Take, for instance, the saga of Carl Story and Vince Bertollini, who made millions in the Silicon Valley, moved to Sandpoint and promptly began underwriting the Aryan Nations and other Identity churches in the area. Of course, right now, Bertollini is on the lam and Story has moved away.

Sociology in the meantime has moved on to a broader consideration of the problem, often summarily described as "post-classical theory" and including such models as the "new social movements theory," all of which recognize that there can be considerable interaction between these groups and the mainstream, and that many of their followers are in fact as mainstream-based as can be. And this is borne out largely by what we've seen in terms of the Patriot movement's spread via mainstream channels.

It is important to note that it is erroneous to conclude that since there are often shared themes on the right that all right-wing groups work together. It is not fair to presume that all conservatives are on a slippery slope toward reaction, nor that all reactionaries are inevitably borne on a transmission belt toward fascism. Migrations do occur, but they occur in both directions, just as on the left.

At the same time, however, it is equally undeniable that these kinds of associations forever alter the nature of the political body in question. The Republicans' Southern Strategy, by aiming to draw white segregationists into the GOP fold, ineluctably transformed the party to the point that calling it the "party of Lincoln" now, particularly in the South, is liable to draw hoots. The associations work both ways, of course; extremists are just as likely to have their anger defused and their extremism tempered by their exposure to mainstream influences. But the overall gravitational pull rightward by the extremist elements has become increasingly disproportionate in recent years.

The problem is that Americans -- and the media particularly -- have a view of these so-called "fringe" elements as being on the outskirts of society, when in reality they have become wholly interwoven with the rest of this. Much of the blame belongs to "centrist/extremist theory," which gained such prominence in the media in the 1960s that it has never been displaced from the popular understanding of political extremism. C/E theory was an offshoot of the chief sociological model of the '40s and '50s, "Collective Behavior Theory," which stressed irrational dimensions of movements and often saw them as potentially dangerous, temporary aberrations in the otherwise smooth-flowing social system.

Let me recommend a resource for more on this point: Public Research Associates' page on "Studying the Right: A Scholarly Approach," which has a large amount of material on C/E Theory. Chip Berlet, the author, sums it up thus:

Under centrist/extremist theory, dissident movements of the left and right were portrayed as composed of outsiders -- politically marginal people who have no connection to the mainstream electoral system or nodes of government or corporate power. Their anxiety is heightened by fears that their economic or social status is slipping. Under great stress, these psychologically fragile people snap into a mode of irrational political hysteria, and as they embrace an increasingly paranoid style they make militant and unreasonable demands. Because they are unstable they can become dangerous and violent. Their extremism places them far outside the legitimate political process, which is located in the center where "pluralists" conduct democratic debates.

The solution prescribed by centrist/extremist theory is to marginalize the dissidents as radicals and dangerous extremists. Their demands need not be taken seriously. Law enforcement can then be relied upon to break up any criminal conspiracies by subversive radicals that threaten the social order.

You can read through the rest of the above piece to see why and how centrist/extremist theory has become discredited. But the coup de grace may have been delivered by a study that was important to my own work, James Aho's 1991 text, The Politics of Righteousness: Idaho Christian Patriotism. ("Christian Patriots" is what the movement called itself in the 1980s and then morphed into the more secular and simple "Patriot movement" by the early 1990s.) Aho, who conducted a complete study with a full statistical sample, found that while a number of Patriots indeed fit the profile predicted by centrist/extremist theory, the majority did not. He found that they were often well educated (their average education was above the average American's), held regular jobs (though they did experience a higher degree of occupational isolation), and appeared "normal" by most measures:

Idaho's patriots in general do not seem more socially alienated from their communities than cross-sections of Americans or Idahoans. ... Out of the seven alienation variables on which information was gathered, statistical support for the theory of mass politics [another term for C/E theory] is found for only one.

The false stereotypes -- beloved among folks on the left for their value in lampooning right-wingers, and equally cherished on the right by conservatives loath to admit the extremists' influence -- have obscured the extent to which right-wing extremists have woven themselves into the fabric of mainstream conservatism. It's an illusion that has especially manifested itself in rural America, where the extremists' actual numbers are hardly overwhelming, but the number of people who sympathize with them is. I would hate to have counted how many times I (and others who work the field) have heard neighbors, friends and relatives of Patriots say: "Well, I don't buy everything they say, but I think some of it might be true, and I certainly can understand why they'd feel that way" (or some variant thereon). In fact, it's rare when you can find a rural dweller out here who doesn't say something like that.

A deeper examination of the individual psychology of the kind of people who are drawn to extremist movements helps explain further how extremist believers intermingle with those in the larger mainstream. There have been many studies along these lines, but the one that seemed to most accurately describe the people I met in the Patriot movement could be found in the essay "Religious Totalism, Violence and Exemplary Dualism: Beyond the Extrinsic Model," by Dick Anthony and Thomas Robbins (both sociologists; Anthony is from Berkeley and Robbins from Yale).

In this analysis, the Patriot movement and its millennialist relatives are described as "exemplary dualist movements," a direct product of the current larger social malaise:

It has been a staple of recent American cultural analysis and criticism that the contemporary United States increasingly lacks a consensual and compelling social ethic and that in consequence, the 'covenant' uniting the American people has become, in Robert Bellah's words, an 'empty and broken shell.' One consequence of the lack of an integrative ethic, we have intimated above, is a diminished capacity of parents -- who are themselves wrestling with the fragmented selves that result from the lack of an integrated ethic -- to serve as persuasive role-models or identification figures for their children, and thereby to transmit a coherent set of values. In this context parents may tend to treat their children as 'self-objects' in the sense of evaluating them in terms of tangible, purely external criteria such as their apparent social-academic-vocational 'success' or competence. This pattern enhances the anxiety over the themes of success, competence and power on the part of children, who are more likely to develop a fragmented or polarized self composed of a grandiose, all-powerful or omnipotent self which is split off from a devalued, pathetic, failed self.

Social movements with distinctly dualistic worldviews provide psycho-ideological contexts which facilitate attempts to heal the split self by projecting negativity and devalued self-elements onto ideologically devalued contrast symbols. But there is another possible linkage between these kinds of movements and individuals with split selves in the throes of identity confusion. People with the whole range of personality disorders, which utilize splitting and projective identification, tend to have difficulties in establishing stable, intimate relationships. Splitting tends to produce volatile and unstable relationships as candidates for intimacy are alternately idealized and degraded. Thus, narcissists tend to have vocational, and more particularly, interpersonal difficulties as they obsessively focus upon status-reinforcing rewards in interpersonal relations. They have difficulty developing social bonds grounded in empathy and mutuality, and their structure of interpersonal relations tends to be unstable. Thus, individuals may be tempted to enter communal and quasi-communal social movements which combine a more structured setting for interpersonal relations with a dualistic interpersonal theme of 'triangulation' which embodies the motif of 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend.' Such movements create a sense of mutuality by focusing attention on specific contrast groups and their values, goals and lifestyles so that this shared repudiation seems to unite the participants and provide a meaningful 'boundary' to operationalize the identity of the group. Solidarity within the group and the convert's sense of dedication and sacrifice on behalf of group goals may enable him or her to repudiate the dissociated negative (bad, weak or failed) self and the related selfish and exploitative self which they may be aware that others might have perceived. These devalued selves can then be projected on to either scapegoats designated by the group or, more generally, non-believers whose values and behavior allegedly do not attain the exemplary purity and authenticity of that of devotees.

In my experience, this quite accurately describes the dynamic of how and why people are attracted to such hateful beliefs as those held by right-wing extremists, as well as their pale reflections -- filtered, as it were, through transmitters -- advocated by such receiver types as the Freepers. It also clearly describes the meeting-ground for extremist and mainstream in the black-and-white, Manichean dualism common to all kinds of worldviews; it has always been pronounced both among right-wing extremists and the theocratic right, but of late it has become a staple of mainstream conservatives as well.

Most of all, the suggestion that the movement’s primary converts will be essentially dysfunctional people is not much cause for optimism, either, for as they note at the end, this kind of susceptibility to authoritarianism obviously increases during such periods of social chaos as we have had since Sept. 11:

We do not necessarily view the members of exemplary dualist groups as mentally ill or deeply disturbed relative to average levels of developmental maturity in the general population. We do believe that such groups appeal to individuals with certain identity constructions and difficulties. Nevertheless some degree of splitting, projective identification and polarized identity may be 'normal' for most people in mainstream culture.

People with completely holistic selves with an integrated ethical orientation rather than split-off negative external conscience may be relatively unusual, particularly in periods when general meaning orientations in the culture as a whole have declined in coherence and plausibility. ... When mainstream cultural coherence declines, and anomie and identity confusion become more common, active seeking for exemplary dualist involvements is one possible solution to immediate psychic pain.

Indeed, as we will see, this could very well explain why the right is becoming increasingly intolerant of liberalism: It is the one remaining component of society that has so far failed to join up with the dualist worldview being promoted not merely by transmitters like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, but by the Bush administration itself.

More importantly, it makes clear that the chief driving force against liberalism in America is precisely in the chief meeting-ground of right-wing dualism: fundamentalist Christianity.

Next: Divine Transmissions

Real Christians

I'm way behind on this, but Kynn Bartlett at Shock & Awe had a long and thoughtful essay the other day:

More Stuff About Christians and Christianism

[Full disclosure: Kynn says some nice things about the "Rush" essay. But he carries the thinking to another level.]

Christianism is a theocratic form of Christianity which is anti-pluralistic, designed to impose conservative Christian beliefs on American society (and eventually the world) through the use of the political system (or sometimes outright force). Christianism is a domestic crusade designed to change the country from the inside into one in which (nominally) Christian beliefs are the guiding societal force.

This is the "culture wars" which we are engaged in. It is often presented as "secular vs. Christian," but that's patently false. The fundamentalists have managed to distort the public debate to the point that fundamentalist beliefs are identified in the media as "Christian" -- ignoring entirely the fact that there are large numbers of Christians who don't believe the same way as the conservatives.

I'm glad Kynn explores this issue, in depth, because it's one that animates me as well. I don't discuss the matter much in my analysis because it's clear, of course, that not everyone opposed to the fundamentalists is a Christian.

But the reality is that many of us are. And we are not only disgusted by what they do in the name of our faith, we are dedicated to stopping it.

Of course, as Kynn points out, we are not "real" Christians to these people. I for one am glad to let God decide that one, not some wattle-faced preacher.

You get what you ask for

Public Nuisance has a terrific post about the "Presidential Prayer Team," which is encouraging us Christians to pray that Bush will come up with a "biblical" solution to the heteros-only marriage conundrum:

Biblical Marriage

Here at the Nuisance, we believe prayer should be balanced by action. And, perhaps unlike certain others, we actually do read the Bible. So here, in support of the Prayer Team's admirable goals, is a proposed Constitutional Amendment codifying marriage entirely on biblical principles:

1 Marriage in the United States shall consist of a union between one man and one or more women. Marriage shall not impede a man's right to take concubines in addition to his wife or wives.

That's just the beginning. Funny and dead-on -- my kind of humor.

Dishonoring the memory

Margaret Kimberley over at The Black Commentator has a terrific takedown of Condoleeza Rice's bizarre comparison of the invasion of Iraq to 1960s civil-rights marches:

Condoleeza Rice and the Birmingham Bombing Victims

I don’t know anyone who protested against this war because they believed that Iraqis were not interested in democracy and freedom. I am certain that the Iraqi people wanted freedom in 1983 when the Reagan administration Middle East envoy, Donald Rumsfeld, met with our then friend Saddam Hussein. At that moment in history Iran was the bogeyman in the region and the United States government was all too pleased when Hussein invaded that nation. Rumsfeld was in Baghdad again in 1984 when the United Nations concluded that Iraq had used chemical weapons against Iranian military targets. No condemnation or protest was forthcoming from Mr. Rumsfeld or anyone else in the Reagan administration. In fact, American arms sales to the Iraqi regime increased. Saddam Hussein was an evil tyrant then, but because he was “our” evil tyrant we turned a blind eye when he started a war that resulted in the deaths of over one million Iraqis and Iranians.

Go read the rest.

A great American?

[Henry Ford receives the Grand Cross of the German Eagle in 1938 from two Nazi diplomats.]

John Hawkins over at Right Wing News has been polling bloggers for the best and worst figures of American history. I participated in the first poll of "Worst Figures in American History," but unfortunately couldn't find the time to send in a list for the "Best." John posted the results of that poll recently:

Left-Wing Bloggers Select The Greatest Figures Of The 20th Century

Most of the names selected seemed fairly reasonable, to tell the truth. (Indeed, there were several I wished I'd thought of when I was briefly trying to put a list together.)

But this one stopped me cold:

18) Henry Ford (3)

All right, I could easily see Ford appearing on a right-wing list. But why would anyone who calls himself a liberal name him?

Maybe they have simply bought the timeworn image of Ford as the clever industrialist who brought the automobile to the masses.

Maybe they simply have forgotten -- or were never aware of -- the rest of the Henry Ford story.

That would be the Henry Ford who in 1920 began publishing The International Jew -- one of the most infamous anti-Semitic screeds in history. This text first raised to national prominence the notorious Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion hoax -- and indeed may have been responsible for its subsequent wide distribution in Hitler's Germany as well.

Speaking of Hitler, here's what he had to say about the speculation in 1923 that Ford might run for president:

I wish I could send some of my shock troops to Chicago and other big American cities to help in the elections ... We look to Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing fascist movement in America ... We have just had his anti-Jewish articles translated and published. The book is being circulated in millions throughout Germany."

As the ADL notes:

Though Ford apologized for The International Jew and closed the Dearborn Independent, he later accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from Hitler's Nazi government in July, 1938.

This award, incidentally, is the highest honor Germany can offer to a non-German.

Ford also probably did more than any American to help build the Nazi war machine in the 1930s.

Whatever good Ford may have engendered through his clever industrialism was forever poisoned by his contributions to one of the worst nightmares in history.

Why would a liberal, exactly, put Henry Ford on any list of "great" Americans? For that matter, why would anyone?

Rush, Newspeak and Fascism

[Parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, and IX. See my explanatory note.]

X: Reaching the Receivers

I was driving around Billings, Montana, in the middle of a nasty blizzard in a cheap little rented car and trying to figure out what in the hell was going on when the Voice On Loan From God hit me.

There are, I suppose, things that you have to admire about Rush Limbaugh, and one of them is his voice. It is absolutely distinctive. I can hear it through a rolled-up car and know who the driver is listening to. But that afternoon in early March 1996 I heard him talk and it came as something of a revelation.

I actually have made a habit over the years of listening to Limbaugh because I want to know what he's saying. More to the point, I spend a lot of time driving around rural backcountry, and you have to know that Limbaugh is just about the only constant thing you can find on the radio out there. There's country music, but in the open range even it can be spotty reception-wise. Rush, however, is everywhere.

He is inescapable. He seems to be on at nearly all times of the day too. And sometimes the country music (especially the gawdawful crap they call 'new country') gets bad, and the tape collection gets old, and listening to Rush rumble away in that nice baritone is not all that bad to listen to, especially if I'm in the mood for the artistry of his awfulness. He makes me laugh, though not in ways he intends, I'm sure.

There wasn't anything new or remarkable about that day's broadcast. It just answered a question I had been trying to understand.

I was in Billings because a few days before, the FBI had arrested two leaders of the Montana Freemen at their compound near Jordan, Montana. I attended their initial hearings at the federal courthouse, drove up to Jordan for a day, then drove back to Billings for more courtroom action at the arraignments.

This was quite a bit of driving, especially with the ice and snow storm that had come through about a week before and was continuing to pile up. However, these had become familiar roads to me. I had been out this way only two months before, talking to people in Roundup and Jordan about the eruption of the Freemen on the local scene and trying to get a sense of what was happening to these rural societies.

Mostly I was trying to get a handle on the seething, venomous hatred of the government that was seeping out in the bile of movements like the Freemen, but was much, much more widespread. Almost literally anyone you talked to in rural America was bitter with their hatred of the "gummint" in nearly all of its forms, particularly the federal one. Certainly it had been on full display in the federal courtroom in Billings, where LeRoy Schweitzer and Dan Petersen had done their best to disrupt the hearings with their insistence that the entire proceedings against them were illegitimate.

I was no stranger to feelings of hatred of the government, for reasons I explained in In God's Country [short version: federal bureaucrats were responsible for the death of a great-aunt with whom I was close]. But this went beyond even that. It was blind, irrational, utterly visceral hatred that went beyond even the worst things I had heard from the mouths of Birchers when I was growing up. In fact, it reminded me of talk I had heard in only one other place previously: the Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake. The conspiracy theories, the pseudo-legal 'constitutionalism', as well as the barely concealed race-baiting and anti-Semitism were all present. The only thing missing was the usual accompaniment of Nazi worship and cross-burning.

The thing about government-bashing out West is that nearly anyone who has lived here for any length of time, particularly if they have deep family roots, has directly benefited from government programs that are in fact responsible for their very presence on this land. It's a decidedly mixed bag that has always created a love/hate relationship between the government and the ranchers and farmers who have been its main beneficiaries, and sometimes its victims.

In eastern Montana, for instance, this goes back to the homesteading programs of the post-1910 period sponsored by the federal government, in close cooperation (as it were) with the railroads. These were essentially scams which helped fill out millions of acres of empty space in the West but which more often than not proved financially disastrous for the homesteaders. [For a terrific account of this, read Jonathan Raban's Bad Land: An American Romance.]

The federal government builds our roads, pays for our schools, constructs our water-supply and irrigation systems and the dams that make them go. We're actually terribly dependent on the gummint, which chafes rather nastily against Westerners' own deeply mythologized self-reliance and independence.

The sheer venom that was emerging from the Patriot movement, however, was in another universe. Built around cockamamie theories and wild-eyed fire-breathing rhetoric, and unmoored from any real semblance of reality, it was so wildly out of left field that it was an incongruous thing to be taking root in a place like Montana where common sense was most often the real coin of the realm. It was a disturbing thing to see how many people with ordinary working-class, agricultural backgrounds -- people who before had always been normal contributors to society, sometimes, as in the case of a couple of at least one elderly Freeman, Emmett Clark, with a rock-solid reputation in the community -- were being drawn into the Patriot movement and embracing at least its rhetoric, if not its agenda.

How had this happened? What was encouraging people to make this leap? I was puzzling over this that day in Billings, tootling around in a front-wheel drive Chevy that actually handled the snow just fine, and listening to Rush on the radio.

On that day, I had decided to try listening to Rush as though I were someone like Dan Petersen or some other working-class stiff from Jordan -- not particularly educated, prone to a visceral kind of patriotism and similar politics, and insistent on my identity as an independent Westerner. Doing that, I got an answer, or at least part of one.

Limbaugh was holding forth that day on the subject of federal bureaucrats who he claimed were attempting to ignore the will of the people on matters relating to control of federal lands as well as the tax bureaucracy. At the apex of the rant, Limbaugh began speculating about the motives of these bureaucrats: they didn't care about "democracy"; they would probably just as soon dispose of it, and any kind of responsiveness to the public, altogether if given the opportunity; they would be happier in a dictatorship, which was what they were establishing anyway, Rush informed us.

Suddenly I had a very clear picture about how hatred of the government had reached such illogical and hysterical heights. Americans were being told, relentlessly and repeatedly, that not only was government a bad thing, it was inherently evil, indeed conspiring to take away their freedom and enslave them. The person telling them this was a mainstream conservative. He was giving them essentially the same message being spread by the Freemen and militias, but this time with the mantle of mainstream legitimacy. Rush was taking people up to the edge of Patriot beliefs and more or less introducing his listeners to them. And if they were people like those in Montana (or anywhere else the Patriot movement set up shop, which was largely every corner of the country), who already Patriots for neighbors, they would take the next step themselves.

Limbaugh's defenders, like Ann Coulter's, will no doubt defend this kind of talk as simple hyperbole intended to emphasize his point and inject some humor. That of is utterly disingenuous; why say something if at some level you don't mean it? Moreover, it overlooks the effect that it has on their audiences, who may not be as sophisticated or as inclined to distinguish the hyperbole from the supposedly reasonable discourse. Indeed, the bulk of Limbaughites I have met tend to take his every utterance as virtual Gospel.

Thus, Limbaugh might claim that he's merely being critical of government, but this rhetoric treads beyond such perfectly acceptable (in fact desirable) robust political speech, to the kind that argues for the overthrow and utter dismantling of the system. And that is, if anything, the dividing line between being a politically active citizen and being an extremist, right or left. Limbaugh blurs that line constantly.

It was this kind of irresponsible demagoguery to which President Clinton referred in his remarkable address in Minneapolis a few days after the Oklahoma City bombing:

In this country we cherish and guard the right of free speech. We know we love it when we put up with people saying things we absolutely deplore. And we must always be willing to defend their right to say things we deplore to the ultimate degree. But we hear so many loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other. They spread hate. They leave the impression that, by their very words, that violence is acceptable. You ought to see -- I'm sure you are now seeing the reports of some things that are regularly said over the airwaves in America today.

Well, people like that who want to share our freedoms must know that their bitter words can have consequences and that freedom has endured in this country for more than two centuries because it was coupled with an enormous sense of responsibility on the part of the American people.

If we are to have freedom to speak, freedom to assemble, and, yes, the freedom to bear arms, we must have responsibility as well. And to those of us who do not agree with the purveyors of hatred and division, with the promoters of paranoia, I remind you that we have freedom of speech, too, and we have responsibilities, too. And some of us have not discharged our responsibilities. It is time we all stood up and spoke against that kind of reckless speech and behavior.

If they insist on being irresponsible with our common liberties, then we must be all the more responsible with our liberties. When they talk of hatred, we must stand against them. When they talk of violence, we must stand against them. When they say things that are irresponsible, that may have egregious consequences, we must call them on it. The exercise of their freedom of speech makes our silence all the more unforgivable. So exercise yours, my fellow Americans. Our country, our future, our way of life is at stake.

Though Clinton certainly never identified Limbaugh as one of those "angry voices," almost immediately Limbaugh responded with cries of censorship and claims that Clinton was attempting to silence him. The protests have continued so steadily that the claim that Clinton blamed Limbaugh has become a stock theme about the supposed perfidy of liberals.

Indeed, Ann Coulter herself continued this meme in her book, nder: Liberal Lies About The American Right,92-93: "When impeached former president Bill Clinton identified Rush Limbaugh as the cause of the Oklahoma City bombing, he unleashed all the typical liberal curse words for conservatives. He blamed 'loud and angry voices' heard 'over the airwaves in America' that were making people 'paranoid' and spreading hate."

The, er, lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Of course, Clinton did not name anyone, even though the voices he probably had more in mind were those belong to the likes G. Gordon "Head Shots" Liddy and some of the more vicious Patriot types like Chuck Harder, who constantly hawked Patriot conspiracy theories outright, alongside a full dose of rhetoric about the violent resistance of federal agents. But in fact Clinton used very general terms probably because he recognized the reality as well, which was that characters like Limbaugh and his fellow movement arch-conservatives have been irresponsible as well -- perhaps not to the same degree, except for the fact that the reach of transmitters like Limbaugh is so massive.

And the bitter truth, for people like Limbaugh, is that Clinton was right: Words have consequences. When you carefully tailor memes and ideas that promote an essentially extremist worldview to fit a mainstream audience, you're spreading poison into the community that can have extremely violent consequences. Anyone who's read American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing has a pretty clear picture of how closely McVeigh's hatred of the government was fanned by both extremist and mainstream voices. And it was to all these voices which Clinton alluded.

Limbaugh's protests notwithstanding, it is not hard to see that while, of course, Limbaugh cannot be blamed directly for Oklahoma City, neither can he be wholly absolved. Whining does not relieve him from the responsibility for his words. Timothy McVeigh, and the wave of Patriot domestic terrorists who followed him, did not occur in a vacuum. They were creatures in a milieu in which Limbaugh and other ostensibly "mainstream" media, political and religious figures helped transmit and reinforce extremist ideas that, when nursed with a violent predisposition, became extremely volatile in real life.

These transmissions have a twofold effect, as I've mentioned earlier: They not only inject extremist ideas into the mainstream, but they brings the two sectors closer together.

Take two neighbors, Joe and Bill. Joe is a good taxpaying family man and a Republican precinct committeeman. Bill is a Patriot who attends Preparedness Expos and "common law court" meetings and has declared his "sovereign citizenship." Now, contrary to popular myths, most Patriots in fact are indistinguishable from any other average American -- they hold jobs, raise kids, carpool, attend church. And so in most respects, Joe and Bill get along fine, as most neighbors might, though Joe thinks Bill's ideas are kooky. Then he starts listening to Limbaugh, and after awhile, he begins to think that maybe his government-hating neighbor isn't so kooky after all.

Meanwhile, Bill listens to the same broadcasts and begins to believe that maybe mainstream Republicans are finally starting to "get it." The next time he and Bill talk over the fence, they find they have more to talk about. Pretty soon Joe is heading off with Bill to a Preparedness Expo, while Bill starts volunteering to work as a "poll watcher" for the Republicans in the next elections.

The result is that right-wing extremists wind up exerting a gravitational pull on mainstream conservatism -- and by extension, the whole political continuum -- that far exceeds their actual size or, for that matter, political viability. That the entire spectrum has shifted steadily rightward in the past 10 years and more could not be more self-evident. And at times, it has come with devastating results, as at Oklahoma City.

If nothing else, Oklahoma City should at least have been a signal to Limbaugh that it was time to tone down the rhetoric, to stop demonizing government employees and federal officials. That, as we have seen, has never occurred. Anti-government bile is still a constant of his radio rants, as anyone reading the transcripts at Web sites like Rush Transcript [http://rushtranscript.blogspot.com] can see for themselves. Certainly it was that day in Billings, which was nearly a year after Oklahoma City.

However, since the election of George W. Bush, Limbaugh's anti-government venom is largely reserved for liberal officials. In general, Limbaugh has now shifted his focus from demonizing the government to demonizing anything liberal. Of course, this sentiment has always been part of his schtick, but in recent months he has been stepping it up another notch. Not only are liberals to be opposed politically, they are in fact treasonous. This was explicit in his attacks on Sen. Tom Daschle, the leader of the Senate Democrats, and was a continuing theme as antiwar protests grew in volume and intensity, referring to dissenters as, among other things, "anti-American, anti-capitalist Marxists and Communists."

This is extremely dangerous talk, and not merely because it is divisive. It actually threatens to simultaneously harden the growing alliance between extremist and mainstream conservatives, and create a milieu in which violence against dissenters becomes acceptable. It is when we see this kind of coalescence that we are in real danger of seeing fascism blossom in America.

Of course, Clinton in fact made abundantly clear that day that the proper response is not to shut down those irresponsible voices, to try to silence them. That would be adopting their tactics, and put us on their moral plane.

Let Limbaugh and his cohorts have their say. And let the rest of us be there to counter his disinformation with facts, his false memes with a clear dose of reality.

But pretending that he's only an "entertainer" -- or for that matter that he really is wholly mainstream -- is no longer an option.

Next: Dualist Receivers

Bill O'Reilly: Put up or shut up

Joe Conason precisely characterizes the latest Bill O'Reilly column as a "self-pitying" whine-fest [that would gag a maggot, I must add; read only with a strong stomach].

I especially had to take note of a couple of lines:

Attempting to smear and destroy the reputations of those with whom you politically disagree is not satire.

No, it's not.

It's called the Arkansas Project.

Or it's called "Al Gore invented the Internet".

And it's called labeling your political opponents "traitors."

No, that's not satire. That's using your medium to carelessly malign people with whom you disagree politically.

That's selling falsehoods that benefit your own political agenda.

That's selling your journalistic soul in the service of spewing partisan propaganda.

And no matter how you cut it, Fox and Bill O'Reilly do it. In spades.

Of course, I also noticed this passage:

It makes me sick to see intellectually dishonest individuals hide behind the First Amendment to spread propaganda, libel and slander.

I trust that he keeps a barfbag handy while he's on the air, then.

The truth is this: If Al Franken committed libel, then make your case in court on that basis, Mr. O'Reilly -- not on risibly baseless harassment suits like the one you filed.

You see, Franken's book is not protected from a libel suit by the First Amendment. You can file such a suit at any time, Mr. O'Reilly.

But if you can't prove he libeled you, then you have no basis for claiming in public that he did.

Let's put it this way, Mr. O'Reilly: Your claim that Al Franken libeled you is false; in fact, every word he printed about you was perfectly accurate and factual in every respect. You know this -- indeed, you have yet to publish or broadcast any kind of factual refutation of Franken's account -- rather, you have only blustered and blithely claimed that Franken "libeled" you and that he "got it wrong," but you offer no facts in evidence of these claims. You know you'd lose any libel suit you brought on the matter of truthfulness alone (let alone the malicious-intent clause).

Bill O'Reilly is clearly a liar. He can feel free to sue me for saying that -- but the truth is, he would lose.

Rush, Newspeak and Fascism

[Parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII and VIII. See my explanatory note.]

IX: Media Transmitters

As seemingly psychotic cranks go, Ann Coulter has carved out a nice little career for herself as an obsessive hater of all things liberal, flavoring her television appearances with a frothing, twitchy dyspepsia that seems to infect everyone on the sound stage.

Along the way Coulter, like many of her media compatriots on the right, first developed a significant role in transmitting memes from the extremist Clinton-hating right into the mainstream of conservatism, and since then has expanded into other fields. During that process, she's been important in bringing the two sectors even closer together.

Of course, Coulter has built much of her reputation on being outrageous, as on the recent occasion when she penned a column about Muslims that concluded: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." Unsurprisingly, she has indulged in a litany of Clinton-hating memes that originated in the extremist right, ranging from equating him with Hitler, to hinting before Y2K that he intended to declare martial law, to indulging in later-disproven rumors that he had fathered an illegitimate black child.

The quintessential Coulter "transmission" remark, though, came after Sept. 11, in an interview with the New York Observer:

"My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building."

Most of the commentary about this remark focused on its seeming endorsement of terrorist violence, which her defenders, such as the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, dismissed airily as merely lacking in humor: "Why would anybody even pretend to believe that Ms. Coulter wishes any real harm to the New York Times or wishes to convert all Muslims forcibly to Christianity?" (Peculiarly, this piece ran on the same day as Coulter's Observer interview.)

This line of defense is nearly identical to that deployed by Rush Limbaugh when he tries to claim that he's merely an "entertainer" -- something along the lines of, "Why would you take them seriously in the first place?" Well, I don't know, you tell me: Why would anyone take them seriously? Just because they have audiences of millions who hang on their every word as Received Wisdom? Just because every major broadcast and cable-news network has presented them, and people like them, as serious thinkers whose words are worthy of the public's consideration?

More to the point, exactly which parts of Ann Coulter are we not supposed to take seriously? Just those parts when she writes like a banshee from hell? And how, exactly, are we supposed to discern those parts from the rest? Where does the 'fierce raillery' about which 'everybody laughs afterwards' end? And does that mean talking about blowing up hundreds of New Yorkers is supposed to be humorous?

In any event, there should have been no question that this remark was beyond the pale of acceptable public discourse, much more so than anything Trent Lott has ever said. Coulter should have become a pariah, at least on the public airwaves. Indeed, I should have expected not merely journalists to denounce her for this remark, but fellow conservatives as well. That this hasn't happened -- that in fact that conservatives have defended her avidly, and indeed she seems to be back on the air more than ever -- is significant in its own.

However, there are even more consequential subtexts here.

First, Coulter is clearly suggesting here that the only thing wrong with McVeigh's attack was his choice of targets. Coulter would have preferred the NYT Building; but she otherwise appears to be suggesting that bombing government employees (including a day care full of toddlers) was acceptable as well. I would argue that this aspect of her remark is even more egregious, and should earn her the permanent scorn of every decent American.

The important point that all of the postmortems about Coulter's remark missed, however, was the very context that was its foundation: Namely, a recognition that the extremist right of Timothy McVeigh was allied with, and indirectly doing the bidding of, ostensibly mainstream conservatives like herself.

In many ways, Coulter's remark is just an acknowledgement of the relationship. I'm certain it will gain her even more fans among the Patriot crowd. And that's how the ties grow stronger.

A number of analysts have noted over the years that violent right-wing extremists have often been viewed by mainstream conservatives as useful tools for enacting their own agenda. The history of this dates back as far as monarchists' attacks on liberal thinkers in the 16th and 17th centuries, and includes the American lynching phenomenon of 1870-1930, as well the McCarthyite/Bircher exploitation of the Communist threat and the opposition to desegregation and the civil-rights movement.

As I've been documenting, for the past six years or so this uneasy alliance is re-emerging, as ideological and political traffic between movement conservatives and right-wing extremists becomes increasingly common. Sometimes this happens almost accidentally, often in the meeting-ground of personal ambition and lurking agendas, as when David Horowitz published the views of white supremacist Jared Taylor at his Frontpage Webzine. Sometimes, as with Coulter, it is done with apparently full intent.

Her McVeigh remark really makes the relationship quite clear, depending of course on the extent to which mainstream conservatives view Coulter as one of them. Judging by their continuing silence about her obvious extremism, I'd have to assume that most of them are happy to claim her.

This kind of meshing of mainstream corporate interests with right-wing thuggery is in fact a hallmark of incipient fascism. A compliant media that portrays this kind of phenomenon as unremarkable is also important in its development.

And that is the role that media transmitters like Coulter play: Not only do they inject the extremist meme into mainstream conservatism, they also condition the mainstream to think of extremists in a generous and even collegial light. Simultaneously, they persuade extremists who might otherwise align themselves with marginal and powerless fringe groups to instead perceive that mainstream conservatives are capable of addressing their issues, thereby drawing them into the political ranks of mainstream conservatism.

For all her notoriety, Coulter is in some ways a minor player as a media transmitter. Let's look a little further at the various sectors of the media where transmitters operate:

A. Radio

While many of his critics would like to lump conservative radio-talk megastar Rush Limbaugh in with some of his contemporaries on the hard right, the Big Fat Idiot appears mostly to be a secular conservative who only occasionally treads into xenophobic or theocratic dogma. However, Limbaugh artfully presents ideas from the hard right for legitimate consideration by the mainstream, and thus plays a major role as a transmitter of ideas from other sectors -- especially in light of his considerable reach.

Limbaugh’s transmissions are clearest when he’s at his most shrill, decrying bureaucrats in Washington who "would just as soon do away with democracy" and similar hyperbole. "The second violent American revolution is just about--I got my fingers about a quarter of an inch apart -- is just about that far away," he told a Washington Post reporter, describing the sentiments behind the Patriot movement. "Because these people are sick and tired of a bunch of bureaucrats in Washington driving in to town and telling them what they can and can't do with their land." It’s a line that would have played well at a militia meeting.

At other times, Limbaugh has dabbled in wink-and-nudge racism: On his thankfully short-lived TV program, for instance, Limbaugh one night promised to show his audience footage of everyday life among welfare recipients. He then ran video of the antics of a variety of great apes -- mostly orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees -- hanging about zoos. The audience, of course, applauded and laughed.

Limbaugh also sounds themes that often are taken whole from stories circulated first among the Patriot right: Clinton body counts, education conspiracies, phony medical and environmental tales. Perhaps this is most important role: As a font of outright misinformation. (Limbaugh has never, to my knowledge, issued a correction for any of his voluminous factual errors.)

Limbaugh likes to dress himself up in public as an "entertainer," but what he really is above all, as I've observed, is a propagandist. This is apparent from many aspects of his programs, ranging from his refusal to engage in any kind of open or honest debate to the endless spew of disinformation that flows into his microphone. The latter is perhaps the most telling, because this is the essence of Newspeak: to render the meanings of words empty by assaulting them with falsification.

Just as significant on the airwaves are the horde of Limbaugh imitators who appear willing to say anything outrageous in the hope of garnering higher ratings. Foremost among these is Michael Savage, the obnoxiously xenophobic hatemonger who recently was awarded a slot on MSNBC's Saturday lineup.

Savage is particularly gifted at presenting overtly racial appeals in soft wrapping, so that his listeners know what he means, even if he can't be pinned down for it later. But at times his appeal to racism is nearly naked. When he calls for the deportation of all immigrants, and the internment of Muslim-Americans, it isn't hard to discern a racial purpose to it all.

Perhaps just as disturbing about Savage is the eliminationist tone of much of his rhetoric, much of it aimed not at a racial or ethnic group but at liberals generally: "I say round them up and hang 'em high!" and "When I hear someone's in the civil rights business, I oil up my AR-15!" Here was a recent rant aimed at liberal critics:

"I'm more powerful than you are you little hateful nothings. You call yourself this for that and that for this. You say you represent groups, you represent nobody but the perverts that you hang around with and I'm warning you if you try to damage me any further with lies, be aware of something: that which you stoke shall come to burn you, the ashes of the fireplace will come and burn your own house down. Be very careful, you are living in incendiary times. You can't just throw things at people and walk away thinking that you had a little fun. I warn you; I'm gonna warn you again, if you harm me and I pray that no harm comes to you, but I can't guarantee that it won't."

The level of intolerance and the implied threat in remarks like these -- and they are common in his diatribes -- raise reminders of similar eliminationism that ran rampant in Germany in the 1930s.

Another Limbaugh-wannabee with a more modest reach is Chuck Harder, a Florida-based talk-show host whose topics range from United Nations takeovers to the coming Y2K Apocalypse -- as well as the full complement of Clinton scandals. In the past, Harder has broadcast daily updates from the Freemen standoff in Montana, and once featured renowned anti-Semite Eustace Mullins -- one of the radical right’s revered figures -- as an "expert" on the Federal Reserve.

B. Cable TV

Among transmitters of memes that originated in the far right, one entity stands in a class all its own: Fox News.

The cable-news behemoth touts itself as "fair and balanced," but no one has ever really figured out just who they think they're kidding. Probably the dittoheads who buy up Ann Coulter books.

Well, an open bias is one thing. But broadcasting far-right conspiracy theories is another. And that's what Fox has done on numerous occasions.

The most noteworthy of these -- though it received almost no attention at the time -- occurred Feb. 21, 2001, when Brit Hume interviewed a fellow named Bob Schulz of We the People Foundation. Schulz was propounding on television a tax scheme that is built upon a hash of groundless conspiracy theories which have their origins in the far-right Posse Comitatus and other extremist "tax protest" schemes. It was, in fact, remarkably similar to the Montana Freemen's theories as well.

Here's the transcript of Hume's interview [from the videotape excerpt provided at the time by Fox News]:

Brit Hume: ... Coming to the conclusion that there is no law on the books that actually requires them -- or most others for that matter -- to pay income taxes. Most astonishing, noted the Times, those companies were not only not being pursued by the IRS, but some of them have actually collected refunds on taxes previously paid but now they claim were never owed. So is there something to their argument? Bob Schulz thinks so. He's the leader of a small but vigorous movement that is seeking to convince Americans that the income tax is a massive fraud on the public. He joins me now from Albany, N.Y.

Well, this will come as quite astonishing news to a great many Americans, Mr. Schulz -- what's the basis of the claim?

Bob Schulz: There is a very substantial, credible body of evidence by as many as 87 researchers that has concluded that the 16th Amendment was fraudulently certified in 1913, and that in fact three-fourths of the states had not approved or ratified, properly ratified the 16th Amendment, the income-tax amendment.

Hume: And what have the courts ruled on that matter?

Schulz: The courts have not ruled on the fraudulent ratification of the 16th Amendment. Bill Benson, the individual, the professional who went around to the archives of all 48 states that were in existence in 1913, obtained 17,000 notarized and certified documents relating to the ratification process in that state, he put his report together and went to court with it, and the courts ruled it's a political question for Congress. He then took the issue to Congress, and Congress said it's an issue for the courts.

Hume: And so basically it stands because the folks who could have upset it have let it stand.

Schulz: Right.

Hume: Right. Now let me ask you about the tax code itself. Now, I know that you contend that within the tax code there is a definition of what is called taxable income, and that somehow, although it appears to apply to all income from all sources, it does not, because of what is called Section 861. Can you explain what Section 861 is?

Schulz: Yeah. There is no law, no statute, or regulation that requires most citizens to file a tax return -- most U.S. citizens to file a tax return or to pay the income tax. As an example, under Section 861 of the federal code of regulations, it says clearly that there's a list of income items, and unless the item of income comes from one of the sources which the code lists, then the code doesn't apply to the, um ...

Hume: -- To the taxpayer in question.

Schulz: Right. And so all of those sources are foreign sources. Unless you are a foreigner working here, or a U.S. citizen working or earning your money abroad, then the tax code does not apply to you. That's clear in the code.

Hume: Now, I work for Fox News Channel, which was -- is a division of a company that has its headquarters overseas. It is a domestic enterprise. And it is from that that I realize my income. Now if I were to take the position this year that I was owed a refund because the taxes that the company does withhold -- and I don't think I can convince them not to -- that I was owed a refund, and applied for that, would I get it?

Schulz: Um, heh, it might be difficult, because of the size of your corporation. Clearly, the federal government is nervous, Brit. A growing number of employers -- so far they're small employers -- have taken this position and have received refunds back for the money they're withheld from the paychecks of their employers. So far, no large company has taken this position.

This wasn't the only occasion when Fox interviewed Schulz. When he staged a "hunger strike" (there's no evidence he actually went without food) later that year, Fox's Hannity and Colmes interviewed him, and were only a little less credulous than Hume.

[Schulz, for those interested, gave up his "hunger strike" after the intervention of Republican Rep. Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland, who at first promised to give Schulz's group a briefing on tax laws with IRS officials, but even called that off when Schulz announced the meeting would be "putting the IRS on trial." Last anyone heard of Schulz, last November, he was threatening the federal government with a "final warning" to all branches of government to "obey the Constitution, or else." Um, OK, Bob.]

Then there's Bill O'Reilly, the former tabloid-TV-show host who now poses as a "journalist" as the chief talking head at Fox. O'Reilly in particular has a penchant for conspiracy theories.

O'Reilly, who especially prides himself at "no spin" broadcasts, bristles at such suggestions. So let's roll the tape, courtesy of the fine folks at WorldNetDaily, the Web site where O'Reilly's online column originally appeared, and with whom O'Reilly has had a long association. (Its own significant role as a transmitter is discussed below. WND has long been a clearinghouse for a number of other "New World Order" style conspiracy theories.)

This is from a piece dated March 21, 2001, titled "Oklahoma City blast linked to bin Laden":

A former investigative reporter for the NBC affiliate in Oklahoma City last night told Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly she has gathered massive evidence of a foreign conspiracy involving Saudi terrorist leader Osama bin Laden in the 1995 bombing of the federal building that killed 168 people.

This wasn't the only time O'Reilly touted this theory. From a story by NewsMax (another conspiracism-rich Web publication) later that year, titled "McVeigh's Trial Attorney Alleges FBI Blocked Conspiracy Probe":

During an interview Monday night on Fox News Channel's "The O'Reilly Factor," host Bill O'Reilly asked Jones whether he believed McVeigh had acted alone.

It is worth noting, however, that this time O'Reilly at least interviews the source of all these theories -- McVeigh's attorney, Stephen Jones.

It has remained an O'Reilly favorite. From a Fox transcript of May 8, 2002, "Are the OKC Bombing & 9/11 Linked?":

Last year, we interviewed investigative reporter [Jayna] Davis from Oklahoma, who believes there was a tie-in between the bombing in Oklahoma City and 9/11.

Joining us now from Washington is Larry Johnson, the former deputy director of the State Department's Office on Counter-terrorism under Presidents Bush and Clinton.

So you think there's some validity to this?

LARRY JOHNSON, FORMER STATE DEPARTMENT COUNTER-TERRORISM OFFICE DEPUTY DIRECTOR: I was skeptical at first, Bill. I took the evidence, I looked at it, and I started talking to some of the witnesses. Where there's smoke, there's fire. You've got several things going on here that have not been thoroughly looked at and need to be checked out.

O'Reilly's record extends well beyond his propensity for right-wing conspiracy theories. There have been such slips, for instance, as when he recently referred to Mexicans as "wetbacks."

O'Reilly also has been sounding an ominous theme that likewise is becoming popular on the Patriot right: That liberals who criticize Bush's war efforts are "traitors." His recent remarks were especially noteworthy:

Americans, and indeed our foreign allies who actively work against our military once the war is underway, will be considered enemies of the state by me.

Just fair warning to you, Barbra Streisand and others who see the world as you do. I don't want to demonize anyone, but anyone who hurts this country in a time like this, well, let's just say you will be spotlighted.

This, from the same fellow who accused Clinton of malfeasance during the Bosnian campaign, and who undermined our position abroad by openly suggesting that Clinton's missile attacks on Al Qaeda were an attempt to 'wag the dog.'

These, of course, are mere samplings. If you happen to watch Fox News with any regularity, these far-right themes come popping out from all kinds of corners, usually uttered by spokesmen from transmitter political organizations such as those I identified in the last installment. (The popular Hannity and Colmes program is also a rife with this kind of rhetoric.) The result is a steady drip of extremist memes blending into the day's Republican talking points.

C. The Internet

Anyone who's followed the conservative movement's growth in the past five years is well familiar with the Free Republic, the ultra-conservative Web site that is in a class all its own in transmitting the extremist agenda into mainstream conservatism.

Free Republic (like the Patriot movement) avoids wading into racial or religious discussions, and presents itself as purely a "conservative" political forum, but it has become one of the chief breeding grounds for conspiracy theories on the right. During Bill Clinton's presidential tenure, many of these involved his alleged plans for overthrowing democracy and installing a "New World Order" dictatorship. Any number of extremist memes have over the years received extensive play at the site, including several post-9/11 threads blaming the entirety of that disaster on Clinton. In recent months, the site has gradually shifted its focus to a bellicose defense of President Bush's Iraq war plans, with an emphasis on intimidating liberal antiwar protesters.

The most significant part of the Web site's reach, though, is the kind of following it has created. Self-labeled "Freepers" have in recent years become increasingly organized manifestations of some of the extreme sentiments that circulate at the site, to the point of having serious real-world effects: Freepers played significant roles in several incidents involving thuggery and intimidation during the post-election Florida debacle, including disrupting an appearance by Jesse Jackson (in concert, as it happens, with white supremacists) and engaging in noisy, intimidating protests outside of Al Gore's vice-presidential residence.

Not quite as potent but certainly as vivid of transmitters of far-right memes are a couple of well-read Webzines: NewsMax and WorldNetDaily. Both have at various times been funded by right-wing guru Richard Mellon Scaife, who has on several occasions displayed his own predilection for extremist beliefs. Certainly these two Webzines reflect that. (Both magazines, incidentally, also carried breathless coverage of Bob Schulz's anti-tax campaign.)

WorldNetDaily in particular has been extremely conspiracy-prone over the years. In the run-up to Y2K, for example, its major theme was the Patriot belief that Clinton intended to use the social chaos certain to proceed from the looming technological disaster as a pretext for declaring martial law and thereby establishing his dictatorship. Of course, one of the chief promoters of this theory was the zine's editor, Joseph Farah, who penned numerous columns on the subject.

NewsMax has similarly been a major conduit of extremist anti-Clinton propaganda, especially since its reins were taken over by Christopher Ruddy, the Scaife-funded 'investigative reporter' who devoted years to proving Clinton had Vince Foster murdered (though of course he also pursued dozens of other Clinton conspiracy theories, all equally groundless). In recent months NewsMax has shifted its focus to attacks on Muslims and liberals as "traitors," while loudly defending President Bush's war plans.

D. The Press

The Wall Street Journal remains a well-respected paper within journalistic circles for its reporting staff, but the paper's editorial page has for the better part of a decade become one of the real scandals of newspapering, particularly its rampant unethical behavior in publishing material that is provably false and often little more than thinly disguised smears of various liberals, particularly Clinton during his tenure, and refusing at time to correct even gross errors of fact. Not surprisingly, many of these false memes were generated by right-wing extremists of various stripes and then given the mantle of respectability by the WSJ.

This propensity had manifested itself well before Clinton -- as when, for example, it championed the work of Charles Murray, co-author of the now-infamous The Bell Curve. As Lucy Williams explained it in her analysis of the way conservatives treated Murray:

By articulating a definition of poverty that associated it explicitly with illegitimacy, then associating illegitimacy with race, the Right made it acceptable to express blatantly racist concepts without shame. For example, when Charles Murray wrote The Bell Curve ten years after Losing Ground, he argued that welfare should be abolished, not simply because of the economic incentives it creates, but because it encourages "dysgenesis," the outbreeding of intelligent whites by genetically inferior African Americans, Hispanics, and poor whites.

Likewise, the WSJ indulged all kinds of extremist propaganda in its pursuit of Clinton. One of its chief sources was Floyd Brown, a longtime enemy of Bill from Arkansas days. Brown was responsible for the circulation of much of the early Whitewater dirt on Bill Clinton, mostly through Citizens United's top investigator, David Bossie (who later gained notoriety as the erstwhile chief investigator for Rep. Dan Burton's campaign-finance probe, and has in recent months been turning up as a pundit on Fox News).

Brown's credibility was already of questionable value; by 1998, this had become unmistakable. For instance, at Brown's Citizens United Web site -- in addition, naturally, to a bevy of Monica-related impeachment screeds -- you could find screaming exposes of the Clintons’ alleged involvement in the United Nations one-world-government plot. A streaming banner on the site shouted: "Secret United Nations Agenda Exposed In Explosive New Video!" (The video in question prominently featured an appearance by then-Sen. John Ashcroft.) A little further down, the site explains: "This timely new video reveals how the liberal regime of Bill Clinton is actively conspiring to aid and abet the United Nations in its drive for global supremacy." For those who follow the militia movement, these tales have more than a familiar ring.

Yet in 1994, members of the WSJ's editorial board sat down with Brown and examined his anti-Clinton information -- which in nature was not appreciably different from what he was flogging four years later -- and shortly thereafter, nearly half of the Journal's editorial page was devoted one day to reprinting materials obtained from Brown. Moreover, the WSJ continued to recycle the allegations from that material for much of the following six years.

The other major organ that transmits right-wing memes is the Moonie-owned newspaper The Washington Times, which suffers from a variety of ethical maladies. Most of these are related to spreading extremist memes about Bill Clinton, as well as championing various white-nationalist causes exuding from the neo-Confederate movement (two senior editors have long associations with the movement). But the conspiracy-mongering has continued well since Clinton left office, with a stream of recent pieces suggesting that Al Qaeda and not white supremacists were really behind the Oklahoma City bombing.

E. Pundits

These are the rich orphans of the media business -- some of them are former reporters, some are former political operatives, and some are just propagandists in the Limbaugh mold. Their ranks are filled with all kinds and shapes of transmitters, many of whom gladly resort to extremist memes because of their outrageousness quotient -- and if there's any way to make your reputation as a pundit, it's to say something that makes headlines. No publicity is bad publicity, as they say.

These range from ex-liberals like Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens, who gladly traded in several extremist memes about Clinton in the course of excreting their voluminous bile toward him, to barely concealed extremists like David Horowitz and Michael Savage. In between, it was never unusual to hear the late Barbara Olson repeat a Patriot legend, or even now for Peggy Noonan to indulge in plainly irresponsible speculation about Muslims.

The most notorious of them, though, is Ann Coulter, whose behavior continues to provide us with nearly perfect models of how transmitters work, and why they are so effective. Indeed, there seems to be no end in sight.

Next: Reaching the Receivers

Is MEChA racist?

Tacitus has a long post up questioning Cruz Bustamante's associations with Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, or MEChA, a Latino-rights organization that Tacitus contends is racist.

But the evidence that MEChA is racist, including that presented by Tacitus, is rather thin and problematic at best. In reality, it most resembles a typical college-campus ethnic-pride organization, with all the accompanying baggage of fiery rhetoric from its more radical contingents but largely a record of advocating for its rights entirely within the system and with an emphasis on multiculturalism, which is the antithesis of the racism practiced by most so-called "hate" groups.

First, let's try to make our terms clear: What, exactly, makes an organization racist? The Southern Poverty Law Center's definition of a "hate" group is probably the most clear and useful:

All hate groups have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.

It goes without saying, of course, that there are many, many racial/ethnic/identity-pride organizations, ranging from the Irish-American Cultural Institute to the Japanese American Citizens League, none of which are racist in any shape.

Many of these are devoted to not merely advocating for equal rights for their constituencies but (particularly with certain black-pride and gay-pride organizations) with arguing for a kind of nationalism, promoting the greater virtues of their particular identities and often fiercely denouncing the oppression they believe they continue to suffer. Again, there is nothing inherently racist in this.

These groups definitively become racist, however, when they tread over that line and begin attacking other ethnicities or identity groups. In the case of groups like neo-Nazis and the Klan, of course, this means serially denigrating non-whites and Jews in the lowest terms; it can also take such purportedly high-minded forms as the white-nationalist American Renaissance organization or the nakedly anti-Semitic and racist Nation of Islam. As mentioned previously, La Voz de Aztlan is clearly a racist hate group as well, and the SPLC identifies them as such.

But the connections between La Voz and MEChA, however, are tenuous at best. There are no MEChA links on the La Voz Web site, and the latter's use of the "Aztlan" concept is the same kind of cultural hijacking of legitimate ethnic-heritage symbolism that is common among white supremacists. It no more colors MEChA than does the neo-Nazi Stormfront's adoption of the Celtic Cross as a symbol impugn Celtic organizations (which is to say, not at all). The publishers of La Voz are ex-Mechistas, but again, that kind of "connection" is actually a very thin thread, particularly if they have no current associations with either national MEChA or any of its chapters.

Now let's look at the evidence Tacitus presents that MEChA is racist. Most of this is in the form of text he extracts from various Mechista writings, including the group's founding documents. Chief among the latter of these is El Plan de Santa Barbara:

The widespread use of the term Chicano today signals a rebirth of pride and confidence. Chicanismo simply embodies and ancient truth: that a person is never closer to his/her true self as when he/she is close to his/her community. Chicanismo draws its faith and strength from two main sources: from the just struggle of our people and from an objective analysis of our community's strategic needs....

Commitment to the struggle for Chicano liberation is the operative definition of the ideology used here. Chicanismo involves a crucial distinction in political consciousness between a Mexican American (or Hispanic) and a Chicano mentality. The Mexican American or Hispanic is a person who lacks self-respect and pride in one's ethnic and cultural background. Thus, the Chicano acts with confidence and with a range of alternatives in the political world. He is capable of developing and effective ideology through action.

Mexican Americans (or Hispanics) must be viewed as potential Chicanos. Chicanismo is flexible enough to relate to the varying levels of consciousness within La Raza. Regional variations must always be kept in mind as well as the different levels of development, composition, maturity, achievement, and experience in political action. Cultural nationalism is a means of total Chicano liberation.

There are definite advantages to cultural nationalism, but no inherent limitations. A Chicano ideology, especially as it involves cultural nationalism, should be positively phrased in the form of propositions to the Movement. Chicanismo is a concept that integrates self-awareness with cultural identity, a necessary step in developing political consciousness. As such, it serves as a basis for political action, flexible enough to include the possibility of coalitions. The related concept of La Raza provides an internationalist scope of Chicanismo, and La Raza Cosmica furnishes a philosophical precedent.

Discomfiting and short-sighted as this may seem, there is in fact nothing inherently racist in this -- ethnic nationalism is not racism. It only becomes so when it attacks or maligns other races, and there is nothing in this text (or anywhere else in El Plan) that does so. Tacitus goes on to cite text from El Plan Spiritual de Aztlan that continues largely in this vein, though with more strident language decrying their "oppressors." There is, however, one disturbing sentence:

Brotherhood unites us, and love for our brothers makes us a people whose time has come and who struggles against the foreigner "gabacho" who exploits our riches and destroys our culture.

This is borderline racist, since "gabacho" has a clearly derogatory meaning, and it paints a picture of all white people as intending the destruction of Latino culture.

However, the bulk of these screeds are simply demanding a place at the table for Chicanos, albeit a powerful one -- like most such ethnic-nationalist worldviews, it sees itself in the leading role. Indeed, a careful reading of the rest of El Plan Spiritual reveals that it goes on to discuss its political role both as a majority and a minority, which indicates it sees itself working in a context of others, with no hint of eliminationism.

Tacitus' next excerpt is far more damning in that it is unequivocally racist:

According to Miguel Perez, mechista of Cal State Northridge, "The ultimate ideology is the liberation of Aztlan. [Communism would be closest]....Non-Chicanos would have to be expelled....opposition groups would have to be quashed because you have to keep the power."

It is one thing to advocate ethnic nationalism, even in strident terms; it is another thing altogether to advocate the removal of differing ethnicities and their political oppression. This is only a step removed from the viciousness of La Voz de Aztlan, frankly. Eliminationist rhetoric should be condemned in whatever form it appears.

However, the rantings of one person from a single chapter does not make an entire organization racist. The question is whether MEChA as a whole reflects these kinds of eliminationist views, or whether they are common among the ranks of Mechistas. And so far, I have uncovered no evidence that this is the case.

It is clear, in fact, that MEChA in fact is mostly a decentralized organization that encompasses fairly diverse worldviews and politics -- and moreover, the vast bulk of its activism stresses Chicano rights, but advocates them through cooperative action and working within the system (though obviously much of this is tinged with 1960s-style "revolutionary" fervor). It manifests itself mostly on college campuses, where chapters largely reflect the politics of the constituent students, and these range from the relatively moderate to the relatively radical. You can find MEChA chapters everywhere from Oregon to Yale, and a quick perusal of their Web sites reveals that these are largely benign groups that stress multiculturalism, not racism.

So far, it appears there is scant evidence throughout the rest of MEChA (including National MEChA) of much of Miguel Perez's racism, and it requires mostly a tendentious reading of the founding documents to find traces of racism there. It is important to remember that most true "hate" groups are positively obsessed not merely with the superiority of their identity but with attacking and maligning the Others.

Consider, for instance, the example of David Duke's National Organization for the Advancement of White People. As suggested by its name, its chief pose was not as a "hate" group but simply as an organization devoted to defending the rights of white people. But the NAAWP was unmistakably racist because it in fact devoted large portions, if not nearly the entirety, of its advocacy to attacking maligning blacks, Jews, homosexuals, "foreigners" and anyone else who was not white.

MEChA does not fit this kind of profile, even remotely. The tinges of racism it has acquired are not central to its philosophy, but are more a product of its ethnic nationalism, which by its nature can be problematic (just because it can be a breeding ground for racism) but is not in itself racist.

It is important to stress, however, that all of us are working from a limited set of data. I myself have only a handful of Mechista writings and position papers to work from, as does, I suspect, Tacitus. It may well be that a more thorough examination of Mechista writings and positions reveals widespread racism and eliminationism.

I contacted Mark Potok at the SPLC's Intelligence Report to inquire about their assessment of MEChA yesterday, and he replied that for the most part, MEChA has been viewed as a typical progressive multiculturalist campus organization. He indicates, however, that the recent concerns that have been raised about MEChA have sparked their interest, and that the SPLC is now in the process of doing a serious assessment of the matter. If they do so, it is probable that SPLC researchers will be working from a much broader database, which will likely include queries for clarification from national MEChA leadership.

Until we get a more thorough assessment, it is clear that it is best to reserve judgment about MEChA's racism, since the evidence for the charge is very thin and relies largely on "associations" that, so far at least, are tenuous at best and interpretations of rhetoric that lean tendentious.

Of course, one of the charges regularly leveled at "the left" generally (and the SPLC particularly) is that it applies the "racist" label too easily and readily -- after all, such charges can be personally and professionally damaging, and ultimately constitute a smear when they are not well-grounded. While I agree that this occurs with ridiculous regularity among the less thoughtful partisans of the left, particularly among various ethnic advocates, in reality such groups as the SPLC, like most mainstream liberals, are very circumspect and rely upon the weight of substantial evidence before naming an organization racist.

Such judiciousness would be fitting from the left's accusers as well.

[A note: It appears that the FrontPage Magazine article I cited in the previous post on Bustamante has now been edited to remove the reference to La Voz de Aztlan. In the original version, one of the paragraphs described La Voz's wretched anti-Semitism and concluded by asking why Bustamante did not denounce them. You can still find references to this at Alan Henderson's blog (which clearly connects Bustamante to La Voz) as well.]

Rush, Newspeak and Fascism

[Parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI and VII. See my explanatory note.]

VIII: Official Transmtters

The strange thing about watching Trent Lott's slow-motion toppling late last year was that the whole uproar was about something that was not particularly new or unknown about Lott.

Lott's lack of judgment, like that of many Republicans, is embodied in his dalliances with right-wing extremists, which had been well observed previously. In Lott's case, he had an open alliance with the Southern variant of extremism, embodied in the neo-Confederate movement, a band of Southern revivalists who unabashedly argue for modern-day secession by the former Confederate States: "The central idea that drives our organisation is the redemption of our independence as a nation," says the mission statement for the League of the South.

Of course, like most right-wing extremists, they also pathologically hated Bill Clinton: "Impeach Clintigula Now!" shouted a typical banner from a Neo-Confed site. As with their militia brethren elsewhere in the country, the hatred of the former president proved a potent recruiting tool, particularly for making inroads into mainstream conservatism.

Lott contributed a regular column to the neo-Confederate Citizen Informer magazine, usually pontificating on mainstream issues -- while being joined by other columnists who would rant about "Aracial Whites" and discuss the logistics of secession. The CofCC and other Neo-Confeds have a fondness for Mississippi's senior senator dating back to his efforts to rehabilitate the name and reputation of Jefferson Davis, and the senator in return has lent them both his ear and the air of legitimacy that his name as a columnist gives their magazine. He also told CofCC gatherings that they "stand for the right principles and the right philosophy."

When finally called out on this behavior, amid the counteraccusations that flew during the Clinton impeachment, Lott offered a startlingly misleading denial: "This group harbors views which Senator Lott firmly rejects. He has absolutely no involvement with them either now or in the future." Of course, the questions were about his past.

This all finally caught up with Lott after his now-infamous bout of nostalgia at Strom Thurmond's farewell banquet. But in addition to the collective amnesia that had let Lott slide through beforehand, the really curious thing about the way the Lott matter eventually played out was the compartmentalization of its resolution: All neat and tidy, with no ramifications for anyone else -- including, say, Attorney General John Ashcroft, who has had his own dalliances with neo-Confederates. It had the distinct flavor of a political hit by Team Rove, rather than signifying any sea change on the part of the GOP.

This no doubt serves the purposes of Republican strategists, who are hoping to remake the party's image so that it can finally shake the shadow of the Southern Strategy. But they have to do so carefully without upsetting their Southern base too deeply, and the Bush administration's later attacks on affirmative action, as well as its resurrection of such nominations as Charles Pickering's, may have gone a long way to mollify those voters.

In any case, these strategists are probably not really aiming to make significant inroads into the minority communities, particularly not with blacks. Instead, their obvious target in remaking their image is moderate white suburban voters, whose reluctance to vote Republican is often associated with the GOP's lily-white racial image. But the affirmative-action and other recent moves have made clear that the Bush team is primarily interested in empty symbolic gestures -- like Lott's fall -- to appeal to these voters.

The larger reality is that the Republican Party, and mainstream conservatism generally, has for some time now engaged in such dalliances with extremists across a broad range of issues, and in a number of different sectors and political blocs. Lott was merely the tip of the iceberg.

Lott, and politicians like him, play an important role for right-wing extremists. They are transmitters, figures who straddle both the mainstream and extremist sectors of the right. They help lend such segments as the neo-Confederates a veneer of legitimacy that they otherwise would utterly lack. And they help get their ideas, and ultimately their agendas, into the mainstream.

Let's examine the different kinds of transmitters:

Politicians and public officials

Lott was far from alone among Republicans in maintaining ties to neo-Confederates and other Southern racists. Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia, chief sponsor of a 1997 bill to impeach Clinton, also made appearances before the CofCC, and over the years has had open associations with the populist-right John Birch Society, as well as a striking penchant for placing the militias’ issues -- gun control, tearing down the United Nations, fighting "globalism" -- atop his list. Ex-Mississippi Gov. Kirk Fordice maintained open ties with the CofCC and other neo-Confederate factions. And Louisiana Gov. Mike Foster -- who was President Bush's campaign chair in that state -- maintained an interesting relationship with white supremacist David Duke: He liked to buy Duke's mailing lists. (He also tried to conceal his purchase of the lists and was caught and fined for it.)

The South, however, was only one of many staging grounds for ostensibly mainstream conservative politicians to commingle with right-wing extremists. In fact, it happened in every corner of the country. In New Hampshire, Republican Sen. Bob Smith made open alliances with the Patriot/militia-oriented Constitution Party (indeed, he nearly ran for president on the party's ticket). Former Rep. Helen Chenoweth of Idaho, who chaired a natural-resources subcommittee and was one of the first to join Barr as an impeachment co-sponsor, had long associations with her home district’s militiamen -- and you can still buy her anti-environmental video, "America in Crisis," from the Militia of Montana. Former Republican Rep. Steve Stockman of Texas likewise made open alliances with several Texas Patriot groups, and defended their agenda in Congress. Republican Rep. Ron Paul of Texas continues to peddle pseudo-Patriot "New World Order" conspiracy theories to his constituents.

Probably not surprisingly, nearly every single noteworthy transmitter in politics is a conservative Republican. The only exception was ex-Rep. James Traficant, an Ohio Democrat who was recently drummed out of Congress in the wake of his corruption convictions. Traficant trotted out a broad range of Patriot theories and agenda items during his career, but he was a near-total pariah in his own party. (Indeed, before his convictions, Republicans attempted to persuade him to change aisles.)

The spectrum of transmitters also includes a bevy of local and state officials who tread comfortably in multiple universes. Several state legislatures, notably Montana's, have had significant Patriot presences among their ranks, all of them ultraconservative Republicans. And then there was the GOP's 1996 nominee for governor in Washington state: Ellen Craswell, a religious conservative who argued for remaking America as a "Christian nation" and blamed a horrendous January 1993 storm in Seattle on God's wrath for the Clintons' inauguration, which had taken place that day. Craswell later left the GOP to play a prominent role in the pro-militia U.S. Taxpayers Party and its Washington offshoot, the American Heritage Party (both of which later morphed into the Constitution Party), but reportedly has since returned to the fold.

There are also political organizations that often transmit far-right memes in mainstream settings. The most notable of these is the Free Congress Foundation, run by right-wing guru Paul Weyrich, who was one of the architects of the Reagan Revolution, a founder of the Heritage Foundation, and reputedly someone who still enjoys considerable influence even in the current White House. Weyrich's far-right dalliances have been mounting lately, as the Southern Poverty Law Center recently detailed in a scathing report.

Other groups that transmit far-right memes into mainstream include Larry Pratt's Gun Owners of America, whose connections to the extremist right have been thoroughly documented; Gary Bauer's co-production with James Dobson, the Family Research Council, which spread numerous anti-homosexual memes that originated on the far right; the anti-affirmative action group Center for Individual Rights, which has its origins with the white-supremacist Pioneer Institute, but also has been the "driving force" in the campaign against the University of Michigan's AA program; so-called "Wise Use" groups, which spread anti-environmentalist conspiracy theories into the mainstream; and Operation Rescue (now called Rescue America), which openly consorted with a number of violent anti-abortion extremist groups, and sympathized with their calls for the murder of abortion providers. A complete list of such transmitter organizations, which would include advocacy groups across a broad range of issues, would make even more clear how these groups pick up ideas and themes from extremist organizations and repackage them as mainstream conservative talking points.


Religious figures

Among the leaders of America's religious right, Pat Robertson enjoys a uniquely powerful position, both as overseer of a large broadcasting and evangelical empire, but also as the first fundamentalist Christian leader in recent times to make a significant run for the presidency. He also has a pronounced history of transmitting far-right themes into the mainstream, most especially his frequent claims that America is a "Christian nation," and similar advocacy of installing a theocratic government.

His most notorious instance of trafficking extremist material came with the publication of his 1992 tome, The New World Order, which of course enjoyed a considerable audience on the extremist right. The book is literally riven with conspiracist allegations and references, including his invocation of the well-known Patriot belief that the Freemason conspiracy is "revealed in the great seal adopted at the founding of the United States."

Two articles -- one by Michael Lind and another by Jacob Heilbrunn -- in the New York Review of Books demonstrated conclusively that the bulk of the concepts in the book were clearly drawn directly from such notorious anti-Semitic works as Nesta Webster's Secret Societies and Subversive Movements and Eustace Mullins' Secrets of the Federal Reserve. What's truly remarkable about Robertson's tactic is that he soft-pedals these well-worn tropes in the cloak of references to "international bankers" and the like, much the same way the Patriot movement cloaks its own conspiracy theories.

Robertson's cohort in right-wing evangelizing, Jerry Falwell, likewise has a history of trotting out far-right themes, including the time he attempted to demonstrate that the Antichrist was a Jewish man currently alive. Falwell likewise was closely involved in promoting The Clinton Chronicles, which spread far-right conspiracy theories about the former president. Recently, of course, Falwell has again been in the news, first creating a national uproar by suggesting that gays, and lesbians and liberals in general were responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, then creating an international uproar by proclaiming that Mohammad, Islam's chief prophet, was a "terrorist."

Robertson and Falwell, however, are merely to the religious right what Limbaugh is to the army of imitators who fill the ranks of the rest of talk-radio land. The nation's fundamentalist pastors often play similar roles, repeating themes and ideas that originally circulated among extremists, but presenting them in mainstream contexts which lend them a sudden facade of legitimacy.

Perhaps the most significant sector of these fundamentalists are the Christian Reconstructionists, whose agenda is openly theocratic. Their stated purpose is to install a "Christian" government that draws its legal foundations from Scripture, not the Constitution. Their radical agenda, however, is endorsed by a broad array of conservative politicians, notably by the powerful Council for National Policy, which boasts a membership from across a range of mainstream conservatism, but which in fact was co-founded by R.J. Rushdoony, one of the leading lights of Reconstructionism.

This sector is gaining increasing significance as a meeting-ground for mainstream conservatism and right-wing extremism precisely because of the emphasis being placed on his own fundamentalist beliefs by President Bush. As I'll discuss later, the commingling of the two sectors is occurring at an increasing rate because of this, and it may wind up playing an important role in how the Bush camp responds to criticism of its policies -- particularly its war plans -- and potential threats to its hold on power.

Finally, there are the media transmitters. But they have earned a chapter unto themselves.

Next: Media Transmitters

The hate begins

Somewhat unsurprisingly, the debate over Mel Gibson's The Passion is bringing the haters out of the woodwork.

The Anti-Defamation League, which has been at the forefront in raising red flags about the anti-Semitic content of the film, reports that it is being flooded with hate mail and phone calls.

A sampling:

"You should be more concerned about the conduct of Jews in our government and financial markets … and stock scams promoted by Jews…" "The hypocracy [sic] going on by Jews in this nation such as your radical Marxist liberal people in government … and the entire diatribe [sic] that opposes our Christian faith and daily tries to undermine our Constitution. … "If a backlash comes it will be a result of that kind of conduct we see out of Jews … not a result of some historically based film …. Many people are just not going to be pushed around much longer."

"I find it sad that you would attempt to censor Gibson. Whether you like it or not, the Jews of the time were instrumental in Jesus' death. We don't need anymore revisionist history. Didn't the Holocaust teach you anything?"

"Shame on the ADL and its attempt at censorship! Where is the ADL when Holocaust films come out that cause feelings of hate toward Germans? … Stop trying to control world opinion and get over yourselves!"

[Note: I particularly enjoy the inherent irony of this argument, which I've been hearing increasingly on the right. It doesn't seem to occur to the writer that what Holocaust films inspire is hatred not of Germans (I happen to be of German descent) but of Nazis. Or is the writer unaware of the difference?]

"All anti-Semitism is the fault of Jews. If you would direct your people to quit being so dishonest, immoral, atheistic, and Marxist, this stigma would go away…. If you want people to quit their prejudice, then quit giving them reasons to be prejudiced. As long as you act like immoral heathens people will treat you the same way."

"Why are you so upset about Gibson's movie? What he portrays is the truth! Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus! … Maybe when Jesus returns as the Messiah, you won't try to do it again."

So much for all the skepticism that The Passion might inflame latent anti-Semitism.

Of course, if any of these same skeptics bothered to read La Voz de Aztlan (to which certain critics are attempting to link Cruz Bustamanate), they'd know that the debate over the movie is already serving as a significant pretext for spreading anti-Semitism.