Reading around

Atrios has a follow-up to the recent post here about those "frivolous" asbestos claims. Seems W.R. Grace's culpability in the asbestos poisoning of Libby, Montana, is even more egregious than previously surmised.

Charles Taylor has an excellent and highly informative review of Deborah Lipstadt's account of her trial by trial with David Irving.

Lambert at Corrente finds a Denver Post report with signs of the apparent spread of the extremist doctrine of "jury nullification." (For more on this concept, see my previous post, or see p. 297 of In God's Country.)

Oh yes. I also have a post up at American Street on political correctness after 9/11.

Ouch

Here, out of Oroville, California, is a story that brings new meaning to the phrase "self-martyrdom":

Oroville racist has himself nailed to cross

An Oroville man attempted to have himself nailed to a cross near the state Capitol to protest the war in Iraq, Sacramento police said.

He identified himself to capital authorities as Greg S. Tremaine, 43, but he is known in Butte County as Greg Withrow.

It's the second time Withrow, a white supremacist, has had himself nailed to a cross in Sacramento.

In the most recent case, he had hoped to be carried around the Capitol on Thursday while nailed to the cross, police spokeswoman Michelle Lazark said.

Paramedics persuaded Withrow to seek medical attention after his friend, a 41-year-old Oroville man, tapped a nail 20 times through his left hand and into a wooden cross, Lazark said.

It's not the first time Withrow has used the self-crucifixion stunt to get attention. He did it in 1987, but that time he claimed he was the victim of an attack:

In 1987, Withrow had been found nailed to a cross in Sacramento, after he had attempted to form a White Student union at a community college.

He went on the national talk show circuit afterward, claiming the attack was in retaliation for abandoning his white-power roots.

He also testified during legislative hearings that resulted in increased criminal penalties for certain hate crimes in California.

But in a lawsuit two years ago seeking to overturn the hate-statutes, Withrow asserted he set up the crucifixion to infiltrate the media and halls of government and increase flagging interest, particularly among white students, in white separatism.

Well, as they say, it takes all kinds ...

Incidentally, Withrow's opposition to the war in Iraq is likely based on positions similar to most white supremacists', that is, that this war is being waged on behalf of Jews generically and Israel specifically. More on that problem soon.

Hiding the wires

I was amused by the claims that George W. Bush wore a listening device under his jacket in the first two of his three debates with John Kerry, but recognized that, at the time, the evidence in the case was largely speculative. I was waiting to see if the press would do its job and investigate the matter thoroughly.

Turns out they did, according to a report from David Lindorff at Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. Problem is, they didn't tell the public what they had uncovered: that Bush almost certainly did, in fact, use such a device.

The suspicions were raised primarily in a series of Salon stories, many of them by Lindorff and featuring in the last installment the testimony of a NASA scientist who, it turns out, had also been talking to reporters from the New York Times:

At that point, Dr. Robert M. Nelson, a 30-year Jet Propulsion Laboratory veteran who works on photo imaging for NASA's various space probes and currently is part of a photo enhancement team for the Cassini Saturn space probe, entered the picture. Nelson recounts that after seeing the Salon story on the bulge, professional curiosity prompted him to apply his skills at photo enhancement to a digital image he took from a videotape of the first debate. He says that when he saw the results of his efforts, which clearly revealed a significant T-shaped object in the middle of Bush's back and a wire running up and over his shoulder, he realized it was an important story.

Eventually his discovery made its way to the attention of the Times. The story was ready to run in late October, but was reportedly killed because of its proximity to the election:

Times science writer William Broad, as well as reporters Andrew Revkin and John Schwartz, got to work on the story, according to Nelson, and produced a story that he says they assured him was scheduled to run the week of October 25. "It got pushed back because of the explosives story," he says, first to Wednesday, and then to Thursday, October 28. That would still have been five days ahead of Election Day.

An indication of the seriousness with which the story was being pursued is provided by an email Schwartz sent to Nelson on October 26 -- one of a string of back-and-forth emails between Schwartz and Nelson. It read:

Hey there, Dr. Nelson—this story is shaping up very nicely, but my_editors have asked me to hold off for one day while they push through a few other stories that are ahead of us in line. I might be calling you again for more information, but I hope that you'll hold tight and not tell anyone else about this until we get a chance to get our story out there.

Please call me with any concerns that you might have about this, and thanks again for letting us tell your story.

But on October 28, the article was not in the paper. After learning from the reporters working on the story that their article had been killed the night before by senior editors, Nelson eventually sent his photographic evidence of presidential cheating to Salon magazine, which ran the photos as the magazine's lead item on October 29.

Lindorff's piece has the evidence to support its claims (namely, the reporters' e-mails), which stand in direct contradiction to the Times' initial claims that the story never existed. It also produces evidence from other sources that the story existed:

In fact, Schwartz, Revkin and Broad, using Nelson's photographic evidence as their starting point, had made a major effort to put together the story of presidential debate misconduct and deception. Among those called in the course of their reporting, in addition to Nelson, who says he received numerous calls and emails from the team, were Cornell physicist Kurt Gottfried, who was asked to vouch for Nelson's professional credentials; Bush/Cheney campaign chair Ken Mehlman (information about this call was provided by a journalist at the Times); and Jim Atkinson, an owner of a spyware and debugging company in Gloucester, Mass., called Granite Island Group.

"The Times reporters called me a number of times on this story," confirms Atkinson. "I was able to identify the object Nelson highlighted definitively as a magnetic cueing device that uses a wire yoke around the neck to communicate with a hidden earpiece -- the kind of thing that is used routinely now by music performers, actors, reporters -- and by politicians."

At first, the Times tried to slough off the FAIR report by claiming that the story had never existed:

Referring to a FAIR press release (11/5/04) about the spiked story, Village Voice press critic Jarrett Murphy wrote (11/16/04), "A Times reporter alleged to have worked on such a piece says FAIR was totally off base: The paper never pursued the story."

Murphy told Extra! that his source at the nation's self-proclaimed paper of record -- whom he would not identify -- told him the information about the bulge seen under Bush's jacket during the debates, provided by a senior astronomer and photo imaging specialist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, had been tossed onto the "nutpile," and was never researched further.

Now, it seems, the Time "reader advocate," Daniel Okrent, is admitting on the Times Web site that the story indeed existed, and indeed was spiked because of its proximity to the election:

I checked into Lindorff's assertion, and he's right. The story's life at the Times began with a tip from the NASA scientist, Robert Nelson, to reporter Bill Broad. Soon his colleagues on the science desk, John Schwartz and Andrew Revkin, took on the bulk of the reporting. Science editor Laura Chang presented the story at the daily news meeting but, like many other stories, it did not make the cut. According to executive editor Bill Keller, "In the end, nobody, including the scientist who brought it up, could take the story beyond speculation. In the crush of election-finale stories, it died a quiet, unlamented death."

Revkin, for one, wished it had run. Here's what he told me in an e-mail message:

I can appreciate the broader factors weighing on the paper's top editors, particularly that close to the election. But personally, I think that Nelson's assertions did rise above the level of garden-variety speculation, mainly because of who he is. Here was a veteran government scientist, whose decades-long career revolves around interpreting imagery like features of Mars, who decided to say very publicly that, without reservation, he was convinced there was something under a president's jacket when the White House said there was nothing. He essentially put his hard-won reputation utterly on the line (not to mention his job) in doing so and certainly with little prospect that he might gain something as a result -- except, as he put it, his preserved integrity.

Revkin also told me that before Nelson called Broad, he had approached other media outlets as well. None -- until Salon -- published anything on Nelson's analysis. "I'd certainly choose [Nelson's] opinion over that of a tailor," Revkin concluded, referring to news reports that cited the man who makes the president's suits. "Hard to believe that so many in the media chose the tailor, even in coverage after the election."

The truth of the matter is that killing a story that could affect the outcome of the election simply because it could affect the outcome of the election is an abandonment of one's duties as a journalist dedicated to publishing the truth and adequately informing the public. It would be one thing if the evidence was indeed speculative; but the evidence presented by Nelson and the Times' other sources, in fact, was well past speculation. It was, in fact, highly substantive.

There's no other way of putting it: This is a gross dereliction of its Fourth Estate role as a public watchdog by the Times.

UPDATE: Following up on Times executive editor Bill Keller's explanation (someone in comments notes that he has remarked elsewhere to the effect that "lots of stories don't make the Times"), I thought it worth noting just which stories the Times deemed more newsworthy regarding its coverage of the campaign on Oct. 28, 2004:

A fluff piece on John Kerry and the Boston Red Sox

A scintillating piece on how well campaign-finance reform has worked

A thumbsucker on the political ramifications of the intelligence overhaul

Yeah, those were much more newsworthy than highly damning evidence that the president cheated during the debates.

The Final Solution

The latest poster boy for the religious right's never-ending persecution complex is a fellow named Michael Marcavage, who has been making headlines for his prosecution in Philadelphia for allegedly breaking the state's hate-crime law by protesting gay-pride events.

As the Post-Gazette story explains, the essence of the charge is that Marcavage and four cohorts broke a variety of laws, including bias-motivated intimidation (the hate crimes charge), in the process of organizing loud protests at OutFest, an event in which Philly gays are urged to come out of the closet, on Oct. 10 last year.

It's clear from the available videos that Marcavage was liable to be charged for refusing a police order to move, but the bias-crime charge seems potentially dubious to me; if prosecutors can produce evidence of actual threats or acts of intimidation, then the case may in fact be sound. (Prosecutors have issued a statement saying: "This case is about conduct, not content of speech.") Only a trial will be able to tell us for certain.

Marcavage operates an outfit called Repent America, which reportedly is closely connected to Donald Wildmon's American Family Association (one of the folks protesting SpongeBob Squarepants' participation in a tolerance campaign). The AFA, in fact, is providing Marcavage with free legal counsel, which may explain his apparent eagerness to be arrested (Marcavage says he's been in jail over a dozen times).

The "Philly Five" cause has also been picked up by other ostensibly mainstream-right outfits as Concerned Women for America, while Marcavage and his attorney have been busy making appearances on places like Fox News' "Hannity & Colmes" and "O'Reilly Factor," and "Hannity & Colmes," and MSNBC's "Abrams Report". Likewise, it is being trumpeted by outfits further toward the fringe like WorldNetDaily and Free Republic.

The Philadelphia City Paper just published an excellent story on Marcavage that covered most of the bases of the case. It also, rather strikingly, had this quote from Marcavage:

"According to the Scriptures, it's the government's job to enforce God's law and to uphold his law, and the Bible talks about how, I don't want to really get into this -- it'll make me sound like I'm crazy -- but it does talk about how [homosexuals] are to be put to death. The wages of sin is death. But I want to make [it] clear that I'm not advocating the [independent] killing of homosexuals. ... I'm saying that the government's duty is to uphold God's law. ... I know that's harsh, but we have all broken the law, God's law, and we need to be held accountable."

I don't think it's misreading these remarks to observe that Marcavage, while eschewing individual acts of murderous retribution, is calling for creating a system under which homosexuals can be put to death by the government simply for being homosexual.

And this is the young fresh face of the persecuted Christian right?

People who have dealt with the extremist right for many years have heard Marcavage's arguments before. They were made most famously by the leading figure in the white supremacist Christian Identity movement, the Rev. Pete Peters, who preaches sermons titled, "Intolerance of, Discrimination Against and the Death Penalty for Homosexuals is prescribed in the Bible," and likewise penned a pamphlet titled Death Penalty for Homosexuals is Prescribed in the Bible (a piece that was, incidentally, the source of his falling-out with Bo Gritz.) (You can see a copy of its cover here, along with a link to Chip Berlet's slide show on the subject of Identity.)

Marcavage, perhaps not coincidentally, first made a splash on the extremist Patriot circuit back in 2001 when he was committed to a psychiatric ward for his protest of a controversial play being performed at Temple University that was a gay-themed take on the life of Christ. (Observe that the link from American Patriot Friends Network includes the following note: "Friends, This may be a preview of what happens to all Christians under the coming UN agenda. You must understand that everyone must be "tolerant" unless your views differ from the communist UN agenda which does not include God.")

This current campaign has been picked up not only by the Christian Reconstructionist Chalcedon Institute, but also by the far-right Army of God, which has been associated with abortion-clinic bombings and killings of abortion providers.

Sarah Posner at the Gadflyer has more on Marcavage.

All in all, the mainstream adoption of Marcavage's martyrdom campaign, like the SpongeBob brouhaha, can be considered both an example of the continuing spread of right-wing extremism into the mainstream, as well as evidence that, indeed, gays are the new Jews.

Book burners

In Norwood, Colorado, parents have apparently taken to gathering up and burning a book -- Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima -- that was assigned to freshmen as part of an English assignment and then confiscated by school officials after these parents protested:

It wasn't a band of angry students who destroyed about two dozen copies of "Bless Me, Ultima," a novel selected for a Norwood High School English class -- it was a group of parents. Norwood School Superintendent Bob Conder confiscated the books and released them to parents to be burned or otherwise purged.

Conder said that he removed the books based on complaints by parents, complaints that were made "mainly" about the language. The book, which is used in high school level curricula all over the country, contains profanity; it also deals with cultural and religious issues.

"Filthy language," said Conder of the profanity. "I'm not going to repeat the language. Our job is to protect kids from things that aren't good for kids."

According to a report from the American Library Association:

Conder said the books, about 2 dozen in total costing $6.99 each, were pulled from the classroom, and designated to be destroyed. The parents approached the superintendent and asked that they be able to burn the books instead of the school janitor destroying them.

The ALA report also describes the book being attacked:

Rudolfo Anaya, a professor emeritus of English at the University of New Mexico, wrote "Bless Me Ultima" in 1972. It explores the difficulty of reconciling conflicting cultural traditions. The main character, a young boy growing up in New Mexico during World War II, struggles with the complexities of his religion. He becomes increasingly frustrated by the failure of the Catholic Church to explain the most pressing questions about morality and human experience and is frustrated by his failure to find a forgiving god, and then finds an unlikely mentor in a local "healer" who comes to live with his family.

Many of the characters in the book are limited by their cultural prejudices and never learn to look beyond their own assumptions. Meanwhile the main character grows to understand that his experiences are lessons about life, and he knows that he must take life's lessons to heart, even when they are difficult, painful, or disappointing. Learning the importance of tolerance marks his growth, especially as he begins to realize that some religions may be better suited to some people than to others.

The same book was chosen by other Colorado communities, such as Fort Collins, Boulder, and most recently Grand Junction at Mesa State College as the book of choice to be read as a community. Anaya commented, "The book should be judged in its entirety. There is some strong language in strong situations, but there is no flippant use of profanity."

I think Anaya also has the situation sized up about right:

"Parents have the right to monitor what their children read, however they do not have the right to tell others what they can read. That is un-American, un-democratic and un-educational."

Yeah, well, who cares about democracy and education when our moral values are at stake?

Though it's true that previous cultures where book burnings were encouraged by officialdom didn't exactly work out so well on the moral values thing ...

It's all frivolity

The other night, when President Bush said this in the State of the Union address:

Justice is distorted, and our economy is held back, by irresponsible class actions and frivolous asbestos claims -- and I urge Congress to pass legal reforms this year.

... I wonder if he was thinking of cases like this:

The Halliburton Co. will pay $30 million to about 120 families of people who were exposed to deadly asbestos while working in shipyards, construction sites and industrial plants in the Pacific Northwest or serving on Navy ships that were serviced here.

The amount, announced yesterday in Seattle, is part of a recent $4.3 billion national settlement to wrap up the Houston-based oil-services giant's liabilities for people who are ailing, have died -- or will die in the coming years -- because of asbestos exposure.

... Halliburton inherited a flood of asbestos and silica claims when it acquired Dresser Industries Inc. in 1998, during Dick Cheney's tenure at the helm of Halliburton before he became vice president. Most of the claims had been filed against Harbison-Walker Refractories Co., a Pittsburgh-based subsidiary of Dresser.

"Halliburton is pleased to have the matter of asbestos and silica litigation fully and finally resolved," company spokeswoman Beverly Scippa said yesterday. "The settlement will provide a permanent resolution to a difficult and complicated problem."

Nah. I'm sure instead he was thinking of "frivolous" cases like this one in Montana:

Asbestos from a now-closed vermiculite mine on a mountain near Libby has killed 192 people and left at least 375 with fatal diseases. Doctors say the people of Libby will keep dying for decades.

This was the case, you'll recall, that put W.R. Grace out of business:

Saying it can't handle the flood of asbestos personal-injury lawsuits, W.R. Grace & Co. has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Because of the filing, taxpayers may get stuck with millions of dollars for cleaning up sites contaminated by the 150-year-old company.

... "This doesn't come as a surprise. We've known that Grace was going to use the legal system to get out of its responsibility to the hundreds of people their actions have sickened or killed in Libby," says Gayla Benefield, whose parents both died from exposure to asbestos contaminating the ore at Grace's nearby vermiculite mine.

"There are hundreds of people in Libby who are relying on Grace's promise to pay their medical bills for treatment of the diseases caused by the asbestos and they have no idea what (the bankruptcy) will mean to their future," Benefield said.

Yep, those lawsuits sound pretty damned frivolous to me.

Creepy

I'm glad I'm not the only one who found this downright creepy: the White House assigning "handlers" to accompany journalists at the Inaugural events in Washington -- not to watch what they ask, but to keep an eye on their contacts:

Consider that the escorts weren't there to provide security; all of us had already been through two checkpoints and one metal detector. They weren't there to keep me away from, Heaven forbid, a Democrat or a protester; those folks were kept safely behind rings of fences and concrete barriers. Nor were the escorts there to admonish me for asking a rude question of the partying faithful, or to protect the paying customers from the prying media.

Their real purpose only occurred to me after I had gone home for the night, when I remembered a brief conversation with a woman I was interviewing. During the middle of our otherwise innocuous encounter, she suddenly noticed the presence of my minder. She stopped for a moment, glanced past me, then resumed talking.

No, the minders weren't there to monitor me. They were there to let the guests, my sources on inaugural night, know that any complaint, any unguarded statement, any off-the-reservation political observation, might be noted. But maybe someday they'll be monitoring something more important than an inaugural ball, and the source could be you.

I'm not sure which this reminds me more of: the Soviets or the Nazis. Either way, the totalitarian nature of this kind of intimidation should be self-evident.

[Via Pacific Views, via Tom Tomorrow.]

Asymmetry and terror

CNN's Henry Schuster has an interesting piece about "lone wolves" -- a topic that, as regular readers (or those familiar with In God's Country) know, is a subject near and dear to my heart.

It touches on cases I've also discussed here previously, notably William Krar, the would-be cyanide bomber, as well as the anthrax killer:

Ask Potok and the folks at the SPLC and they will tell you they believe the anthrax killer is a lone wolf -- and probably not an Islamic terrorist, despite the letters that were sent in late 2001 containing the anthrax, which seemed to signal this was an al Qaeda-style attack. Potok and company base this belief in part on how the killer has gone quiet since the flurry of letters in late 2001 -- and that there have been no claims by international terror groups.

You might be noticing the pattern by now. Lone wolves are typically Americans with an extremist agenda, usually anti-government. They are certainly not the only domestic terrorists (we'll deal with the animal rights and eco-terrorists at a later date), but they are scary nonetheless.

It's not that they are merely scary: it's that they are more effective than they're often given credit for. Think, for instance, of how for nearly a month the anthrax story was the lead on all the newscasts, because it was perceived as an act of terrorism of a piece with 9/11.

And the truth is, it was, though not in the way most people think. The anthrax killer almost certainly was not an Al Qaeda or Iraqi terrorist, but was a domestic terrorist (probably one with right-wing political beliefs, though not necessarily acting solely from those beliefs). Just as certainly, though, he was consciously piggybacking off the 9/11 attacks to enhance the effectiveness of his weapon, which was not to kill people, but to terrorize the populace.

That is to say, there is an important symbiotic relationship between foreign and domestic terrorists, as exemplified by this case: the latter creates an "echo" effect that enhances the intent of the original foreign terrorist attack, while also advancing the agenda of the former (which is to destabilize public confidence in the government so that it can present itself as an authoritarian alternative to a system unable to keep its citizens secure).

Moreover, both events represent the aspect of terrorism (as I've argued till I'm blue in the face) most absent from the popular understanding of the phenomenon which is, ostensibly, our real enemy in the War on Terror: its asymmetry as a threat.

Thanks to a combination of technology and increasingly virulent and violence-prone forms of extremism, it's now possible for just a tiny number of people -- in some cases, one or two -- to wreak major damage, killing hundreds, even thousands of innocent civilians. That was as true of Oklahoma City as it was of 9/11.

It's too bad it took an attack committed by a previously small faction of Islamic extremists -- who, as it happened, were both foreigners and brown-skinned, unlike the Oklahoma bombers -- for us to declare a "war on terror." The question I've always had is this: Why didn't we declare it after April 19, 1995, instead of September 11, 2001? Because it was the former date that actually hailed the arrival of this threat on our doorsteps.

Unfortunately, it is that same lack of perspective that allows us to pursue wars of power, invading other nations under false pretext, all in the name of the "war on terror." It's this same failure to understand the nature of the beast that leads us to blithely create a cauldron for breeding a fresh generation of terrorists in Iraq.

In the meantime, we yawn when federal authorities arrest a hard-core "Patriot" in Idaho named David Roland Hinkson for plotting to kill a federal judge, an assistant U.S. attorney, and an IRS agent:

During pretrial proceedings, an FBI agent testified that Hinkson's anger toward Judge Lodge was long-standing, stretching back to the judge's dismissal of charges against an FBI sharpshooter who killed Vicki Weaver during a standoff with white separatists at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992. Prosecutors said Hinkson was affiliated with Idaho militia groups who shared his hatred of Lodge.

It's true that, generally speaking, domestic terrorists are neither as competent nor as likely to pose a major threat as most international terrorists, particularly Al Qaeda. And the belief systems that feed the domestic terrorists have not become pervasive in popular Western culture the way Al Qaeda and Wahhabism generally have insinuated themselves in the Islamic world (though there has been an increasing blurring of the lines between the mainstream and extremist right in recent years).

Nonetheless, given the right actors, the right weapons, and the right circumstances, they remain nearly as capable of inflicting serious harm on large numbers of citizens as their foreign counterparts. This is especially true because they are less likely to arouse suspicion and can more readily blend into the scenery.

Most of all, what they lack in smarts or skill, they make up for in numbers: Since the early 1990s, the vast majority of planned terrorist acts on American soil -- both those that were successfully perpetrated and those apprehended beforehand -- have involved white right-wing extremists. Between 1995 and 2000, over 42 such cases (some, like Eric Rudolph, involving multiple crimes) were identifiable from public records.

Some of these were potentially quite lethal, such as a planned attack on a propane facility near Sacramento that, had it been successful, would have killed several thousand people living in its vicinity. Krar's cyanide bomb could have killed hundreds. Fortunately, none of these plotters have proven to be very competent.

The rate has slowed since 2000, but the cases have continued to occur. And someday, our luck is going to run out. Certainly, if we are counting on their incompetence, the fact that the anthrax killer (whose attacks in fact were quite successful in their purpose) has not yet been caught. Likewise, if Al Qaeda attacks again, that will likely signal a fresh round of piggybacking.

That is only possible, of course, if we continue to succumb to the notion that domestic terrorists represent "isolated incidents," while foreign terrorists are the "real enemy." Let's be truthful: They are all The Enemy.

She's the expert

I see Michelle Malkin has taken to calling Greg Robinson "gutlessly underhanded."

Well, Michelle is, after all, an expert on gutlessness and underhandedness.

UPDATE: Greg Robinson has responded. [Via Eric Muller.] Seems this is vintage Malkin: Twist an act of graciousness on the part of your opponents into an attack on their character. It's not as if we didn't know already, but it's worth repeating: These people see decency as a weakness to be exploited.

Onward Young Christian Soldiers

A strange and disturbing story out of Lompoc, California, about a "summer camp" for Christian children that reveals a great deal about the direction some fundamentalists take their beliefs:

Christians in combat boots

It's Sunday morning at Trinity Church of the Nazarene and staff member Mark "Gunny" Hestand is on his belly behind a tree, an imitation M-16 in his hands, showing six teen-age boys in fatigues how to ambush an enemy.

Hestand, 43, and a teen-age squad leader have been barking at the "soldiers" who are cranking out pushups and line sprints beside the church.

"You girls are going on a hike tomorrow," shouts squad leader Zach Smith, 15. "How are you girls going to hike tomorrow if you can't do 25 pushups?"

Thirty minutes later, the teens march into the church cafeteria in two single-file lines to the cadent commands of Smith. They gather around a table with Hestand and Bible study leader Tom Gilbert.

"Man has lost his focus on purpose," Gilbert says to the boys, in a lesson taken from the best-selling and controversial Christian book "Wild at Heart," John Eldridge's examination of masculinity.

"Life needs man to be fierce. Aggression is part of the masculine heart," Gilbert says.

The teens are part of "Boot Camp," a youth group that mixes Marine Corps values and combat techniques with Bible study. The concept is the brainchild of Hestand, who started the group in 2001 to encourage youth involvement in the church. As far as he knows, Boot Camp is unique in the Christian world.

One can only hope so. Because these folks practice a peculiarly militaristic brand of Christianity:

Once the 90-minute service commences, the boys gather outside, usually in the church's south parking lot, where for 20 minutes they do physical training like new recruits under the barks and orders of drill sergeants.

"We really get in their face," Hestand said.

The next 20 minutes are dedicated to combat techniques, such as ambushes or guerrilla tactics. The last 45 minutes are spent on Bible study.

Marine recruiter Sgt. Thomas Bustamante swings by once a month - without compensation and on his own time - to instruct the physical training and combat portion of the service. Recruiting isn't part of Bustamante's involvement, Hestand said.

Hestand sees no contradiction in instructing military combat techniques alongside the teachings of Jesus, who often is considered a pacifist because of his doctrine of "turning the other cheek." Neither does it bother Trinity's Pastor Jim Morris, an ex-Marine.

"His turn-the-other-cheek comment was talking about confronting things in life that seem unfair: An opportunity to be gracious rather than combative," Morris said. "Having said that, we're not preparing these guys to go into the military. We're using a military model as a hook."

It would be comforting to think that this worldview is relegated to a small range of fundamentalist thought. And it's true that the camp is unique. It seems, however, that the philosophy behind it actually enjoys broad popularity with many fundamentalists:

This aggressive and combative nature is at the heart of Boot Camp. Hestand and company say that men - particularly Christian men - have become domesticated, boring and divided from their natural instincts of adventure and drive to tackle challenges. The end result is a docile and unhappy man.

The idea that Christian men must be reshaped is straight from Eldridge's "Wild at Heart," which argues that man's wild heart is a mirror of God's and that man's three natural and worthy desires are to: fight a battle, live an adventure and rescue a beauty.

"Wild at Heart" has sold over a million copies since its 2001 release. It has sparked debate, but is used as a manual by many churches and is prominently displayed in Christian bookstores.

Other Christians consider Eldridge a demagogue who shapes God in his own "muscular Christian," outdoorsman image. They say his teachings - which favor movie icons like the character William Wallace of "Braveheart" and bash "Mr. Roger Christians," who hold office jobs and "make decisions at the kitchen table," - are dangerous and heretical concepts.

The Braveheart imagery, incidentally, is also significant. Because the Mel Gibson film (like his most recent release, The Passion), with its gory glorification of violence and self-sacrifice, represents a kind of theme that is appearing more frequently with an aggressively violent brand of Christianity that has many roots in the extremist right.

Max Blumenthal recently had an excellent post exploring this aspect of the Christian right, which he correctly identifies as a "fascist aesthetic." Notably, he cites an instance in which an official from Focus on the Family -- the same folks who have been attacking SpongeBob as a way of undermining the concept of tolerance -- referred to the Braveheart iconography in association with Eldridge's "masculine" form of Christianity:

Jim Chase, an advertising copywriter from La Crescenta, California, has had a replica of the sword actor Mel Gibson used when he played legendary Scottish warrior William Wallace in "Braveheart" hanging above his desk since attending a Wild at Heart retreat with 350 other men last year.

"It is just a reminder that we are in a battle every day. It can be just facing boredom and routine, but it is a battle," Chase said.

"Life isn't just about going to work and sitting in front of a computer and bringing in as much money as you can. We all have a story. God has written a story and we are meant to find out what the story is and live it," Chase said.

Blumenthal correctly points out that Braveheart enjoys icon status with European far-right figures. It also enjoys (I can report from personal experience) an avid audience with the Patriot/militia crowd. See, for instance, the fellow arrested last summer in Erie, Pa., with a massive cache of illegal weapons; the name of the organization he operated locally was the "Braveheart Militia."

Moreover, attacking the "feminization of Christianity" has long been a major theme of the white-supremacist Christian Identity movement. A taped sermon with that title has long been a staple of Peter Peters' Identity catalog. It's also worth noting how Peters views the source of this "feminization":

The Jewish leaders believe they already control America. Recently, one of them stated publicly: "We have castrated Gentile society, through fear and intimidation. It's manhood exists only in combination with a feminine outward appearance. Being so neutered, the populace has become docile and easy to rule. As all geldings are by nature, their thoughts are not concerned with the future, or their posterity, BUT ONLY WITH THE PRESENT and the next meal." What a perfect "word picture of modern American society. It is the attitude of Christians, who don't want to be involved, and allow Jews, to control the school and often the church. We MUST break these fatal bonds, if we are to remain free.

If this trend continues to manifest itself among supposedly mainstream fundamentalists as well, that should be serious cause for concern.

Naked self-promotion

No, really, you don't want to see me naked. Trust me on this.

However, I will stoop to alerting readers that, once again, Orcinus has been honored with multiple nominations in the annual Koufax Awards at Wampum. I normally pay absolutely no attention to most Web awards and their nominees (I was nominated in thiz year's meaningless Weblog awards, too), but the Koufax awards mean something, in no small part because of the quality of the competition, as well as the spirit in which they are overseen by the folks at Wampum.

This year I've been nominated in the following categories: Best Blog by a Non-Professional, Best Single Issue Blog, Best Expert, Best Writing, Best Series, and Best Post.

The Best Series nomination is for "The Rise of Pseudo Fascism," the entire links to which can be found in the upper left margin of the site. (I'm working on a PDF, I promise.)

There are three "Best Post" nominations: for "A liberal war on terror," "Media Revolt: A Manifesto," and "The Political and the Personal," the latter of which is a mistake, since I wrote it in 2003. (In fact, it was a finalist in last year's Best Post competition, and was nudged out, I think, by a stroke of Billmon's brilliant pen.) So please don't vote for it.

I always have mixed feelings about these things. As regular readers know, this isn't really a single-issue blog; on the other hand, I write regularly enough about right-wing extremism (and related areas of hate crimes and domestic terrorism) to make this a close enough approximation. I'm not really an expert (I just play one on TV, is my line); I'm in fact simply a journalist who does a lot of research and groundwork, though this does lend itself to a certain kind of expertise in the fields I specialize in. And I have few illusions about seriously competing for either Best Non-Professional Blog (we all know who's gonna win that) or the one category I'd be most honored to win (namely, Best Writing).

I have decidedly mixed feelings in the Best Series category (which I was honored to win last year). I think "Pseudo Fascism" is overall a stronger, more cohesive essay, than most of what I've written here, and I think it may prove important some day. Still, one of my chief competitors this year is Eric Muller for his (and Greg Robinson's magnificent series of posts debunking Michelle Malkin, to which I linked copiously as well. If I were voting, I'd vote for myself, but you could certainly make the case that Muller is more deserving, since he at least had a discernible real-world impact with his work.

This gets back to my general uneasiness with awards, because they pit apples against oranges sometimes -- or rather, rubies against emeralds.

Still, the Wampum folks run the awards in a real spirit of openness and fairness, the competition is always good-spirited, and I think the left side of the blogosphere is genuinely represented there, so in the end they make a real contribution to the commonweal. Please be sure to click the little "Make a Donation" button at the top of the Wampum home page and chip in for a good cause.

The meaning of revisionism

The conservative victory at the polls in November 2004 has some inevitable consequences. Since so much of what passes as conservative dogma is actually anti-liberalism, the most significant of these consequences is that many of the progressive advances of the past half-century are being challenged and overturned.

This is true of a broad range of domestic policy issues from abortion to the environment to taxation and economic policy to affirmative action to Social Security, not to mention the implementation of an aggressively militaristic foreign policy. But the conservative-movement enterprise extends beyond mere policy, and appears determined to overturn the very way the populace at large thinks and sees itself.

Historical revisionism plays an essential role in achieving this. Thus, Ann Coulter's rehabilitation of Joe McCarthy in Treason was only the first iteration of this trend. (Trent Lott's nostalgia for Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrats was an ill-received version of it as well.) It was shortly followed by Michelle Malkin's defense of the Japanese American internment.

Now we have Thomas Woods' right-wing bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, which explains why such progressive advances as civil rights for minorities were actually harmful to the nation. Over at Is That Legal?, Eric Muller cuts to the chase by explaining why Woods' extremist background -- he claims to be a co-founder of the secessionist (and white supremacist) League of the South -- is essential to understanding the purpose of this book:

Some will undoubtedly say that it's not fair to call Woods' book into question on the basis primarily of his other writings, and on the basis of the positions of a private organization that he helped found and has assisted. And you know what? If he were a physicist who wrote a book about quarks and string theory, I guess I'd agree that his views (and those of his organization) on politics and race wouldn't really be fair game.

But there is a short, direct line from the rabid anti-statism and wholesale civil rights revisionism of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History" to the agenda of the League of the South and its ilk.

This is what we all need to understand about the current spate of historical revisionism: It is occurring in the service of a broader agenda to recast our very understanding of the meaning of our history, and thus the meaning of America itself.

Thus we have the spectacle of the GOP recasting itself as the "party of civil rights," which as Hunter suggests might be laughable -- coming, as it does, from the party of the Southern Strategy -- were it not of a piece with the Newspeak that permeates the conservative march on America.

Sure enough, Virginia Sen. George Allen took the first step in promoting this "new image" for the GOP by joining Mary Landrieu, a Democrat, in sponsoring a resolution apologizing for the Senate's failure to pass anti-lynching legislation in the 1920s and 1930s. (For a little more on the history of that legislation, see the end of this post; for more on the lynching era, see this post.)

There are more than a few problems with this. It is, to begin, with more than a little convenient to be denouncing Southern filibusters at a time when Republicans are hoping to overturn longstanding rules regarding filibusters as a way of attacking Democrats. Moreover, as Kos notes, Allen is not exactly the best person to be apologizing for racially insensitive acts of Congress.

What's especially hypocritical about this, though, is that Republicans are not in any position to regret the fate that befell the anti-lynching laws. After all, this is the same party whose leaders in the House this autumn officially killed the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act -- which, had it passed, would have been the first real federal anti-hate crimes statute. Indeed, this same political leadership was responsible for killing a federal hate-crimes bill on two previous occasions -- first in 1999, then again in 2001.

As I've argued at length, there is a real connection between the anti-lynching laws of the 1920s and the currently proposed federal hate-crimes statutes; the latter are clearly descended from the former, and serve largely the same purpose. Today's Republicans should be every bit as ashamed of their current leadership as they are of those Southern conservatives who blocked the national will back in 1922.

Speaking of hate crimes, over at Pandagon, Jesse has written a couple of posts that cut beautifully to the heart of the matter. He also directs us to a report of a Republican effort in New Hampshire to repeal its hate-crimes law, just as the Missoulian recently suggested.

Revising history also means revising how we understand our nation today; it is only possible to oppose hate crimes statutes by flagrantly ignoring the realities of hate crimes in our history, especially the lynching era, and pretending that those realities are all in the past. Likewise, when Republicans recast their image as pro-civil rights, they are abusing the factual course of history.

If the nation succumbs to the notion that progressive advances of the 20th century have harmed us, and becomes intent on rolling back those advances, we need to be realistic about what kind of path this will lead us down. It is not a bright one.

Is anyone on the Democratic side paying any attention to this? Besides Robert F. Kennedy Jr., that is?

Soft on extremism

I had a post last week at American Street discussing the latest iteration in something that seems to come up a lot lately: the spread of extremism into the mainstream of conservatism (contra the Professor).

The most recent example is colorfully illustrative of the nature of the extremist right -- particularly the way hate-filled beliefs come to permeate the entire worldview of the people who adopt them.

As with a lot of recent cases, this incident involves Republican politicians from the South, whose growing embrace of all kinds of neo-Confederate activism (particularly from the Council of Conservative Citizens) is the most serious form of interaction between the extremist and mainstream right.

Seems that, as predicted, in the wake of the passage of the anti-immigrant Protect Arizona Now initiative, a plan to pass identical legislation in other states is rising to the surface. The most revealing instance of this is in Arkansas, where a fellow named Joe McCutchen of Fort Smith is heading up the statewide Protect Arkansas Now campaign. Seems McCutchen not only has an interesting past, he has the full-fledged and quite public support of leading Republican legislators:

Sens. Jim Holt, R-Springdale, and Denny Altes, R-Fort Smith, on Wednesday filed the proposed Arkansas Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act. The measure would require stricter proof of citizenship for voter registration and forbid public assistance for non-citizens unless mandated by the federal government. The bill also requires state and local authorities to report illegal aliens to federal immigration officials.

Holt introduced McCutchen on Friday as the head of Protect Arkansas Now, a lobbying group modeled after Protect Arizona Now, the lobbyists for a similar immigration law in Arizona that passed by referendum last November.

McCutchen denied Southern Poverty Law Center's claims Wednesday that he was a member of the Council of Conservative Citizens, but acknowledged that he wrote about his campaign to tighten immigration laws in the February 2000 edition of "American Renaissance," identified as a "hate sheet" by the racism watchdog group.

He said he had never heard of "American Renaissance," but recognized his letter to its editor appealing for money for his campaign to help unseat then-U.S. Sen. Spencer Abraham, R-Mich., who eventually lost the 2000 election and became President Bush's energy secretary.

McCutcheon said "American Renaissance" was one of many publications and organizations on a list of donors to efforts to limit immigration, although his political action committee was essentially self-funded and received only about $5,000 from contributions.

Of course, we can be sure, on his say-so, that those associations were merely accidental and did not reflect on his judgment or beliefs, right? And to listen to the rest of McCutchen's defense, you'd think he was being smeared:

McCutchen also acknowledged participating in a 2001 anti-immigration forum in North Carolina, sponsored by the Council of Conservative Citizens, which the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a successor of the old White Citizens Council. In a 2001 CCC publication, McCutchen is identified as a member, but he said Wednesday that the only organizations he's ever belonged to are four Masonic orders and the American Airplane Pilots Association.

McCutchen said that after participating in the 2001 forum with self-described racial separatist Virginia Abernethy, who later became chairwoman of Protect Arizona Now, he decided to break all ties with CCC.

"I decided this wasn't my schtick," he said. "I'm strictly working on an illegal immigration basis, and they're in other areas. I'm strictly looking for the stability of this country and upholding the rule of law."

McCutchen said he resented having to make such a disclaimer, but said he has been careful to point out that people who want to tighten laws against illegal immigration "are not bigots, xenophobes, racists or anti-Semites."

Certainly not. There are many reasonable people seeking immigration reform who are not bigots, xenophobes, racists, or anti-Semites.

On the other hand, people who write letters to the editor like this [from June 2003] certainly are all of the above:

Duped again! Weapons of Mass Delusion. Who orchestrated Bush’s illegal Iraqi war? Official reports indicate that 25 Zionists were the architects. Examination of Bush’s predominately neo-con Jewish/Zionist inner circle reveals all advocate continuing illegal preemptive strikes against Middle-Eastern countries.

A partial list: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Ari Fleischer, Donald Rumsfeld, Michael Chertoff, Elliot Abrams, Michael Ladeen, David Wurmser, Lewis Libby and Karl Rove — a combination of dual-citizenships, Israel-Firsters, or offspring of Trotskyists. These men all hold strategic positions in the federal government. Cover for the aforementioned is supplied by Falwell/Robertson fundamentalists.

Jewish media control, i.e. Viacom, CBS, MTV, ABC, Clear Channels, Turner Broadcasting, Warner Bros., Sony, Disney, coupled with goodly numbers of Jewish editorialists, print and spoken, guarantees a Jewish/Israeli slant.

Bush and his mostly Jewish neo-cons' war against Iraq was illegal, immoral and resulted in the emasculation of the Constitution. There are no weapons of mass destruction and no evidence that Iraq has harmed U.S. interests, i.e. no Iraqi terrorists. Evidence indicates Bush I was a party to installing Saddam and was formerly a business partner, and U.S. furnished Iraq with start-up material for bacterial warfare.

Bush and his neo-con handlers have vaporized the 14th Amendment, shades of Nazi German differing only in role-reversal. Additionally, Globalist Bush refuses to secure our southern border, and estimates state that in excess of 10,000 illegals are crossing daily. The aforementioned, accompanied by "Homeland Security" and the "Patriot Acts" guarantees a U.S. citizen lock-down! American culture is in a melt-down.

Who benefited? Bush oil, Israel and the military/industrial complex.
The Bush administration is involved in a criminally arrogant disdain for the Founders' formula for a free society.

Joe McCutchen
Fort Smith

So are people who write follow-up letters like this:

On June 5 this paper published my letter stating that the Iraqi war was provoked by Neo-con Zionists. Before the Iraqi war, Bush’s Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, along with Abram Shulsky, Elliot Abrams and Michael Ledeen created for Rumsfeld the Office of Special Plans to circumvent Pentagon Intelligence. They openly call themselves "The Cabal" and have admitted they used "weapons of mass destruction" as a motivational tool for war.

I further stated the central government, banking, media (radio/TV/print) and entertainment are controlled by Jews, which is easily proven.

Two gentlemen writers attacked me with personal smears, choosing not to address the substance of the letter, indicating a lack of knowledge and/or refusal to deal with facts.

Jews were the force that created and have sustained a mass immigration and open-borders policy — a practice that is in the process of destroying Western Culture and is about to create a slave-state. Witness Patriot Acts I and II written by a non-citizen Vietnamese, Viet Dinh employed by John Ashcroft.

Since the passage of the Balfour Agreement, creating the state of Israel, U.S. taxpayers have poured in $3 trillion. Ten million Americans unemployed, and this year alone we have dumped $19 billion into Israel.

American and international Jews own the world monetary system. Would it not be appropriate if they used their own financial resources to subsidize Israel? For example, Bill Gertz, aka Bill Gates.

The Iraqi war was unconstitutional and immoral; the best that can be said of Bush, Ashcroft and their Neo-con Zionists is that their blather is full of factual elasticity.

To survive, America must surmount P.C., revisionism and incendiaries enemies hurl, i.e. racists, anti-Semitic, xenophobe, et. al.

Americans, emerge from your cocoons.

Joe McCutchen
Fort Smith

I especially loved the "Bill Gertz" line. That's a new one.

While self-described "centrists" wring their hands over the "authentic face of the Left," the real face of the Right is coming clearer into focus. And boy, is it ugly.

[Hat tip to Mark Potok.]

Roadside assistance

[Lori Cain / Statesman Journal]

Consider this a sign of the times. It represents not only the natural outcome of a a recent Supreme Court decision, but also the latest iteration of the white supremacist program to rehabilitate itself in the mainstream.

The above sign appears along a road near Salem, Oregon, where county officials recently decided to allow a group calling itself the "American Nazi Party" to take part in its road-cleanup volunteer program:

Several local residents, some of them who live on Sunnyview Road, said they are upset that the county would allow the signs or attach its own name to that of a hate group.

"To me, it just screams hate," said Jacque Bryant of Salem. "It screams doesn't belong here."

Bryant heard about the sign from her grandmother and had a strong emotional reaction to it when she saw it for herself. She hopes enough community outrage will force the county to remove the sign.

Salem resident Mike Navarro, whose mother lives near the area, also was stunned by the sign.

Navarro said that the group has a right to its own opinions but that it's poor judgment for a county to put itself in the position of appearing to endorse a hate group. There should be some level of sensitivity in these kinds of decisions, Navarro said.

"To me, that's kind of cowardly. 'We don't want to get sued,' " Navarro said. "You're probably offending the majority of the people in your county just to pacify the needs of a very select group of people who thrive on hating."

It's worth noting that court rulings in question only outlaw the banning of a group from these programs based on the content of its beliefs. What it doesn't prohibit is limiting participation based on a group's actual ability to perform the cleanup, as well as the likelihood of its participation becoming an attractive nuisance. Both of these avenues are available to Oregon officials.

Both of these issues, as it happens, have arisen in previous cases where the Klan or other extremist groups sought to participate in roadside-cleanup programs. The first was in the mid-1990s in Arkansas, an experiment that ended badly when the Klan failed to ever perform the promised cleanups.

They perhaps had a good reason not to: the stretch of road that they claimed attracted an unusual amount of garbage. It was as though, for some reason, everyone in the county who had noxious waste (ranging from loads of soiled disposable diapers to animal carcasses) to toss from their pickups chose that stretch of road to do it. Guess they wanted to be sure the Klan had plenty of busy work. But it became something of a public health hazard.

Likewise, in Missouri, the Ku Klux Klan's participation in the Adopt-a-Highway program sharply plummeted shortly after they were admitted. It didn't help, of course, that Missouri renamed the highway after Rosa Parks. Nor did it help that, once again, the road attracted inordinate amounts of garbage.

These are issues the Salem officials should stay atop of if they're serious about their civic responsibilities. There's more than one way to deal with haters. Sometimes it just takes being a little creative.

Should we repeal hate-crimes laws?

That's the radical argument proposed last week by my former colleagues at the Missoulian, where I was a staff writer and copy editor from 1985-87.

The paper ran an editorial (its official position) last week proposing abolishing Montana's hate-crime law rather than expanding it to include sexual orientation, gender, and handicap as categories of bias:

Do you suppose someone beaten bloody by a complete stranger feels less victimized than, say, a naturalized citizen who is beaten bloody by a complete stranger?

Neither do we.

Should it be less of a crime to murder a person of color than a white person? Of course not. Then can you explain why, under Montana law, it's a worse crime to murder a person of color than it is to murder some races than it is others? Neither can we.

Don't think the line in the Montana Constitution that guarantees "No person shall be denied the equal protection of the laws" means what it says - that we're all equal in the eyes of the law?

So do we.

Montana legislators once again are debating expanding the state's "hate crime" statute. As it now reads, the law allows judges to impose tougher sentences on criminals who victimize people based on race, creed, religion, color and national origin. Now lawmakers are talking about adding gender, disability and sexual orientation to the list of special victims against whom crimes are to be considered worse than the crimes committed against other Montanans.

... All of the offenses covered by the hate-crime statute already are against the law. If that doesn't deter offenders, making them against two laws won't either. This is feel-good legislation that, because it reneges on the constitutional guarantee of equal protection, shouldn't make anyone feel very good.

Here is my response, which I sent today to the paper's editorial page editor and its editor, both of them old friends:

I have to admit I was somewhat astonished to read the Missoulian's attack on hate-crime laws in its Jan. 20 editorial. It wasn't so much that my former colleagues would adopt such a right-wing position; nothing surprises me much anymore in that regard. What astonished me was that they could publish something so rife with misinformation, steeped in a fundamental misunderstanding of how these laws work. From start to finish, this editorial gets it wrong. It was disappointing work, for more than just journalistic reasons.

The editorial essentially argues from two key positions: that it is somehow inappropriate to apply different sentences to crimes with identical outcomes but different motivations; and that hate-crime statutes create protected "classes" of victims who are treated differently than others. Both are simply wrong.

First: The principle of proportionality in sentencing is a fundamental aspect of criminal law. Society has always chosen to punish crimes more or less harshly according to the culpability of the perpetrator, particularly the level of harm he inflicts. This is why, in the case of the death of another person, someone may face charges ranging from first-degree murder to third-degree manslaughter.

Take, for instance, the case of an elderly woman smothered in her sleep. If the perpetrator is her nephew eager to collect on his inheritance, then he is likely to face first-degree murder charges and a possible death penalty. If it is a begrieved husband carrying out the wishes of a dying Alzheimer's victim, then prosecutorial discretion comes into play. Which do you think is more worthy of a harsh sentence?

The principle responsible for the difference here is mens rea, or the state of mind of the accused. Mens rea involves both intent and motive. Harsher sentences traditionally have been assigned to crimes committed with intentions and motivations considered more harmful to society at large.

Now, you may ask, are hate crimes more harmful than the crimes for which, as the editorial points out, there are already laws on the books? Well, ask yourself this: Is a swastika painted on a synagogue the same thing as graffiti scrawled on a downtown wall? Is an assault in which the perpetrators sought out gay or black people to send a "message" the same thing as a bar fight?

Are hate crimes truly different from their parallel crimes? Quantifiably and qualitatively, the answer is yes.

The first and most clear aspect of this difference lies in the breadth of the crimes' effects. Hate crimes attack not only the immediate victim, but the target community -- Jews, blacks, gays -- to which the victim belongs. Their purpose today, just as it was in the lynching era, is to terrorize and politically oppress the target community. The laws against them resemble anti-terrorism laws (which, it must be noted, are also predicated on enhancing the sentence based on the motivation of the perpetrator) in this respect as well.

But this is only one aspect of how different hate crimes are from their parallel crimes. There are several more, and they are substantial. Bias crimes are far more likely to be violent than are other crimes. They also may be distinguished by their extraordinary impact on the victim. As bias-crimes expert Frederick Lawrence notes, "Bias-crime victims have been compared to rape victims in that the physical harm associated with the crime, however great, is less significant than the powerful accompanying sense of violation. The victims of bias crimes thus tend to experience psychological symptoms such as depression or withdrawal, as well as anxiety, feelings of helplessness, and a profound sense of isolation."

Finally, bias crimes cause an even broader injury to the general community, both local and national. They create racial distrust and misunderstanding within the immediate communities where they occur, and their occurrence can cast a shadow over an entire community's reputation. (Just ask folks in Jasper, Texas.) Perhaps just as important, they violate basic principles of equality of opportunity and freedom of association by threatening and intimidating targeted segments of society, and widen the not-insignificant racial divide in this country.

Not only are bias crimes substantially different in nature from their parallel crimes, there is no question that they cause substantially greater harm, so a harsher punishment is fully warranted.

Second: Hate-crime statutes are neither written to protect specific classes of persons from assault nor to enhance the charges simply when a person from a "protected class" is the victim of a crime. We don't have laws that create stiffer time if you simply assault a black or a Jew or a gay person. The laws don't even specify races or religions. Such laws would be in clear violation of basic constitutional principles, including the equal-protection clause.

In fact, the actual class status of a victim is almost secondary to the decision whether or to file a hate-crimes charge or not. The primary concern is the motivation of the perpetrator. All of these laws are written to punish people more severely for committing a crime committed with a bias motivation.

Traditionally, all states have included three categories of bias: race, religion, and ethnicity. (In Montana's case, the categories are: "race, creed, religion, color, national origin, or involvement in civil rights or human rights activities.") Some states have included other categories, most notably sexual orientation.

Now, think about what this means: Everyone has a race. Everyone has a creed. Everyone has beliefs about religion. Everyone has an ethnic origin, and for that matter a sexual orientation. As such, the laws are written to protect everyone equally from criminals who select them intentionally because of their racial, ethnic, religious, or sexual identity. There are no "protected classes" or "special victims" per se, only prosecutable motives.

This is why someone who assaults a Sikh under the mistaken belief he is Muslim, or a straight man believing he is gay, may still be charged with a hate crime. It also explains why, if you look at annual FBI statistics for hate crimes, you'll see that nearly a thousand black-on-white hate crimes, and several hundred anti-Christian hate crimes, are reported (and most of them prosecuted) annually. The law is written to protect everyone equally.

Now, the editorial asks an important question: "How are we to prevent hate crimes, then?" But it poses this as a matter of deterrence rather than a matter of proportionality in the law: "All of the offenses covered by the hate-crime statute already are against the law. If that doesn't deter offenders, making them against two laws won't either." The same logic (or lack thereof) could apply to anti-terrorism laws as well.

In reality, deterrence has always been a secondary factor when it comes to determining the worth of a law. There's very little evidence, for instance, that laws against murder have a deterrent effect on would-be killers, either. This does not mean we should not have laws against murder. Indeed, deterrence is often the weakest argument for or against any kind of law that affects punishment.

Rather, there is an expressive value in the law at work here: that is, the law expresses our core community values. We punish murder harshly because, as a society, we wish to express our harshest condemnation for such acts. We punish other violent crimes on a scale that reflects, similarly, the harm they inflict upon the community.

Preventing hate crimes in the end comes down to the community and its recognition of the real harm they inflict, well over and above their parallel crimes. The laws alone, it must be said, are half-measures at best. If a community takes hate crimes seriously, and confronts them in a meaningful fashion that uses the law simply as a starting point -- a line drawn in the sand, as it were -- then it has a chance to make a real difference.

Actually preventing crimes, as always, is hard and often complex work; there are no panaceas when it comes to hate crimes. But a good place to start is understanding the mindset of the people motivated to commit them.

Typically, we're talking about a young male age 16-20 who has both a strong sense of racial identity and a persecution complex, perhaps even an antisocial personality disorder. He is most likely a broadly accepted member of his community (only about 8 percent of all bias crimes are committed by members of so-called hate groups) with some likelihood of previous police contact.

Most are so-called "reactive" offenders: that is, they react against what they perceive as an "invasion" of their community by "outsiders," often spontaneously. What's remarkable about the crimes is their real viciousness, particularly in the case of gay-bashing, in which an overkill of violence is the norm.

But many if not most hate-crime offenders refuse, even after incarceration, to admit that what they did was morally wrong. This is because they believe they are acting on the unspoken wishes of their previously homogeneous community, and thus taking action on a moral plane all their own.

This is why it's important for communities to stand up and be counted when hate crimes occur in their midst. Making public their utter condemnation of such acts sends an important message to the would-be perpetrators: the community does not condone violence to expel outsiders. Using the stiff arm of the law to back that message up is essential, especially when the need is so clear.

Conversely, pretending that a swastika on a synagogue is just another case of vandalism, or treating (especially in law enforcement terms) a "fag bashing" as just another bar fight, sends quite another message, one that in the mind of a hate-crime perpetrator equates with approval. A slap on the wrist is too often seen as a pat on the back; equanimity as forbearance.

The work of preventing hate crimes requires having an involved community that stands up publicly, not just in the law, against them. It entails confronting and publicizing them when they occur; it entails taking them seriously on the part of law enforcement officers and prosecutors; it entails an engaged faith and civic community that works on the grass-roots level to reduce the conditions that encourage hate crimes. These especially involve changing the racial attitudes of young people well before they turn to scapegoating minorities.

All of this requires a similarly engaged and informed, as well as informative, press that also takes hate crimes seriously and helps lead the charge on behalf of its community's long-term self-interest. Unfortunately, the Missoulian seems intent on charging in the other direction.

I have no idea whether they'll run this. Steve Woodruff, the edit-page editor and author of the editorial, tells me they're planning to prioritize local input, which I (as an old edit-page editor myself) well understand. So this may be the only place you read this.

That's a no-no now

Apparently, it's no longer just a matter of bad taste to announce your dislike of President Bush.

In Colorado, a woman was threatened with arrest by a Denver police sergeant for sporting a bumper sticker on her car that read, "Fuck Bush":

About 11 a.m., Shasta Bates, 26, was standing in the shopping center store in the 800 block of South Monaco Parkway when a man walked in and started arguing with her about a bumper sticker on the back of her truck that had "F--- Bush" in white letters on a black background.

"He was saying it was very sick and wrong and you shouldn't be doing that," Bates said. "He was very offended by it. I said, 'You didn't have to take it so personally.' "

The two argued for a few minutes, and then the man walked out of the store and stood behind Bates' truck. A few minutes later, the man flagged down police Sgt. Michael Karasek, who was patrolling the area.

Rocky Mountain News reporter Katie Kerwin McCrimmon, who happened to be at the store at the time, walked up to the two and asked what was going on.

The man pointed the bumper sticker out to McCrimmon, and then Karasek told her that it was illegal because it was profane, McCrimmon said.

Reached late Monday, City Attorney Cole Finnegan said he didn't believe there were any city ordinances against displaying a profane bumper sticker.

Karasek then walked into the store and confronted Bates.

"He said, 'You need to take off those stickers because it's profanity and it's against the law to have profanity on your truck,' " Bates said. "Then he said, 'If you ever show up here again, I'm going to make you take those stickers off and arrest you. Never come back into that area.' "

McCrimmon, who had followed the officer into the store, said Karasek wrote down the woman's license-plate number and then told her: "You take those bumper stickers off or I will come and find you and I will arrest you."

Next they'll be writing tickets for leaving your Kerry/Edwards sticker on your car ...

[Hat tip to Brad Hill and Grand Moff Texan.]

The Nazi next door

I suppose you could file this under Bobo's World (from the Los Angeles Times):

The parent of a high school football player who invited teammates over to his house for weightlifting sessions allegedly tried to recruit the teens into a heavily armed white-supremacist group, Riverside County authorities announced Tuesday.

The parent, Howard Marshall of Winchester, was one of 19 alleged white supremacists arrested in November on suspicion of gun and drug violations, news that stunned school officials and parents in the rural communities near Hemet and Menifee in the southwest part of the county.

... Doyle said the investigation, joined by the FBI, was triggered by an allegation in September that Marshall, 44, had given steroids to his son and at least one other player at Paloma Valley High School in Menifee during the 2003 season.

When authorities searched the homes of Marshall and his step-brother in Menifee, they recovered 90 automatic and semiautomatic rifles and pistols, thousands of rounds of ammunition, body armor and drugs, they said. They also said they found German Nazi war helmets and boots and Nazi flags.

"Sixty years and one day removed from the discovery of Auschwitz, I'm amazed we're still fighting this garbage in our country," sheriff's spokesman Tom Freeman said.

The alleged supremacists met frequently at members' homes and at rural locations in the southwest part of the county, sheriff's officials said. Some of the suspects also were affiliated with nationwide white-supremacist organizations, including Public Enemy Number One, a growing "white power" group in Southern California and in state prisons, authorities said.

I've written previously about the growing presence of white-supremacist and hate-crime activity in Southern California, especially noteworthy because of its serious infiltration into high schools and among young people generally. This is clearly the most serious manifestation of that trend to date.

Evidently, Marshall's activities opened up a whole window into how white supremacists are insinuating themselves in mainstream society, particularly by disguising their intentions and evading immediate detection by the schools:

Marshall had been doing strength training and nutritional work for the football players at Paloma Valley High, authorities said Tuesday. Doyle said high school students had joined white supremacist groups because of Marshall. He said the investigation shows that most of those being recruited ranged from ages 13 to adult.

Any contact Marshall had with students at Paloma Valley High was not done in an "official capacity," Barry Kayrell, spokesman for the Perris Union High School District, said Tuesday afternoon.

"His son played on the (football) team," Kayrell said and, like many parents, Marshall became involved with the team. "Nine times out of 10, that's not a problem."

Last year, the then-head coach of the team, Craig Lind, recommended Marshall as a volunteer "walk-on coach," Kayrell said.

What happened next is somewhat in dispute. School officials say a background check was conducted on Marshall and his criminal history was uncovered.

"A Department of Justice check was done," Kayrell said, and Marshall's connection with the school was "immediately unplugged" in August.

However, Lt. Scott Madden said the Sheriff's Department informed the school that Marshall was a convicted felon and it was then that the district took the appropriate action. Sheriff's officials say the district did not do a criminal screening of Marshall.

When asked if Marshall should, at any time, have been allowed on campus to work with the football team, Kayrell replied: "Absolutely not."

The case also opened up a window into the levels of white supremacist activitiy in the region, much of it associated with violent gangs that originate in the prison system:

Madden said information obtained during the investigation shows that many of those arrested ---- including the Marshalls ---- were actively recruiting at the school and throughout Southwest County for the cental cause of white supremacist groups. He said the investigation revealed at least three such major groups were involved.

Photographs seized during the search warrants and displayed Tuesday show many teens standing near adults, all apparently giving the straight-arm, "Heil Hitler" Nazi salute to the camera.

In one photo, two young girls flanked a man, all three doing the salute while a Nazi flag is displayed on a stage in the background. Madden said he believes the two girls were under the age of 12.

The groups would have rallies and periodically throw parties where they would espouse their white supremacist beliefs, authorities said.

One of the most recent, Madden said, was thrown in an attempt to raise money for either the bail or defense fund for one of the 19 people arrested.

The 19 arrests in fact appear to have been just the tip of the iceberg. To date, a total of 42 people have been arrested as a result of the investigations:

Investigations in Riverside and San Bernardino counties have led to the arrest of 42 people associated with white-supremacist hate groups in recent months, authorities said.

In southwestern Riverside County, several raids over the past four months have led to 18 arrests for various crimes and uncovered a trove of weapons, drugs, body armor, stolen vehicles, hate literature and Nazi propaganda, according to a Riverside County Sheriff's Department news release.

... In San Bernardino County, sheriff's deputies announced Wednesday that, since beginning a joint investigation with the FBI in November 2003, they had arrested 24 people with ties to white-supremacist groups in the High Desert, according to a news release. The arrests, mostly for alleged narcotics and firearms violations, resulted from an investigation of hate groups in the Morongo Basin.

Of those arrested, Thomas Powell, 23, a Desert Hot Springs resident, was later convicted of federal weapons charges and sentenced to 2½ years in federal prison, deputies reported. Brant Hardesty, a 31-year-old Yucca Valley man described by deputies as a hate-group leader, has been sentenced to two years in federal prison on weapons violations.

If nothing else, the investigations have gotten a good deal of ordnance off the streets:

As a result of the searches, police seized more than 75 firearms, many of which had been modified or reported stolen, Madden wrote.

Others were illegal assault weapons.

Authorities also seized more than 15,000 rounds of ammunition, a half-dozen stolen vehicles, several bulletproof vests, methamphetamine, steroids, hallucinogenic mushrooms, a marijuana-cultivation operation, marijuana packaged for sale, and a large amount of white-supremacy propaganda material, Madden wrote.

A majority of those arrested were convicted felons, Riverside County Sheriff Bob Doyle reported.

But I'm sure this is just an "isolated incident."

Rich, deep, and genuine

Last week's issue of the New Yorker had an excellent piece by Margaret Talbot titled "The Auteur of Anime," on Hayao Miyazaki, the great Japanese anime master.

It's not available online, but there is available an interview with Talbot that recaps some of the highlights of the piece.

I have an immense admiration for Miyazaki's work, especially My Neighbor Totoro (there's a reason my blogroll features a permanent link to Totoro.org) and Spirited Away. The chief draw is what Talbot calls the "great human warmth in his films." He doesn't give many interviews, but generally chooses to let his work speak for him. And much of what attracts me to Miyazaki is the values his work encompass.

The Talbot piece makes that connection even clearer. This anecdote was rather telling:

Several people who know Miyazaki told me that mothers frequently approach him to tell him that their child watches "Totoro" or "Kiki" every day, and he always acts horrified. "Don't do that!" he will say. "Let them see it once a year, at most!" In an essay he wrote in 1987, he was already concerned: "No matter how we may think of ourselves as conscientious, it is true that images such as anime stimulate only the visual and auditory sensations of children, and deprive them of the world they go out to find, touch, and taste."

This sense of the value of the real, and its discovery as a part of coming into the world, pervades Miyazaki's films. It comes through in another anecdote as well, taken from a Japanese documentary about the making of Spirited Away. It shows Miyazaki working with his team of young animators, and discussing with them the importance of incorporating real-life detail into the films. For one sequence, he tells them to think of how a snake falls out of a tree; but none of his young team members has actually seen a snake fall. For another shot, he tells them to think of how an eel resists being gutted; but none of them have seen that, either. Finally, he tells them for another shot to think of how a dog resists being given a pill; but again, the suggestion draws blank looks.

"Any of you ever had a dog?" Miyazaki asks.

"I had a cat," somebody volunteers.

"This is pathetic," Miyazaki says. The documentary shows the chastened staff making a field trip that night to a veterinary hospital, videotaping a golden retriever's gums and teeth, and then returning to the studio to study the video.

When Talbot finally talks with Miyazaki, he says more on this, including a profound dissatisfaction with modern life: "Everything is so thin and shallow and fake." He also said this:

"I'm not jealous of young people," he said. "They're not really free." I asked him what he meant. "They're raised on virtual reality. And it's not like it's any better in the countryside. You go to the country and kids spend more time staring at DVDs than kids do in the city. I have a place in the mountains, and a friend of mine runs a small junio-high school nearby. Out of twenty-seven pupils, he told me, nine do their schoolwork from home! They're too afraid to leave their homes." He went on, "The best thing would be for virtual reality just to disappear. I realize that with our animation we are creating virtual things, too. I keep telling my crew, 'Don't watch animation! You're surrounded by enough virtual things already.' "

In some regards, this sounds almost Luddite in its conservatism, but I think Miyazaki is onto something that has concerned me for some time, and increasingly so now that I am a father.

I remember my grandfather grousing about modern society along similar lines: "People today, they just go down to the store and buy their meat in a package," he would say. "They have no connection to this meat as once having been a living thing. It might as well be something they make in a factory." He too hated the fakeness that pervades modern life.

This isn't just grousing over "modern ways": it's a recognition that our materialism and desire for convenience and entertainment is leading us down a path where we lose our touch with what it is that makes us human.

Moreover, the right-wing "values" crowd is so eager to tout unbridled capitalism that it never seems to take stock of the fact that such an ethos is driving the very loss of values they're decrying. And I think progressives -- who are, at base, humanists -- should be taking stock of the need for the genuine traditional values we're losing in our rush to modernity as well.

Now, I have to confess: There's no way I'll be able to restrict my daughter's viewing Totoro to a single annual event; after all, a stuffed Totoro sits on the foot of her bed (along with a Catbus) to keep all the other monsters away. (I figure once a month should be OK.) But I do intend to make sure she also knows how a snake falls out of a tree, and a dog refuses to eat its pill. That she gets real-life experience to go along with her TV.

Nowadays, that's probably the best we can do. And thanks to Miyazaki, I don't have to worry that all of the values she consumes through the TV are thin, shallow, and fake.

The worm turns

Surprise, surprise.

It turns out conservative columnist Maggie Gallagher was taking government money for propagandizing on behalf of a government program, just like Armstrong Williams.

Best of all was her reaction to getting caught:

"Did I violate journalistic ethics by not disclosing it?" Gallagher said yesterday. "I don't know. You tell me." She said she would have "been happy to tell anyone who called me" about the contract but that "frankly, it never occurred to me" to disclose it.

Perhaps Gallagher can be forgiven her abysmal ignorance of journalistic ethics. After all she, like the vast majority of right-wing pundits who now populate the journalistic landscape, has zero experience in the nuts and bolts of actual reporting.

So we'll be happy to tell Gallagher: Your career as a journalist is over. Or ought to be. Simply because it didn't occur to you to disclose it.

Funny thing about that, though: Back in September, Gallagher seemed to know enough about journalistic ethics to pontificate at length on the subject in the case of Dan Rather:

Journalists don't talk like that. How could Dan know this story was true? Was he there? Did he see it personally? Of course not. Why was he vouching for the story in the language of faith, not like a hard-headed journalist reporting the evidence?

Yes, Maggie knows all about those hard-headed types reporting the facts. The ones she's paid to report.

It's one thing to commit a monumental screw-up, as CBS did in the case of its broadcast of the Killian memos. People should get fired for those, and did.

It's quite another to be taking money from either private or government interests about whom you are writing as a professional, especially without disclosing it. That usually means it's time to look into a new career.

Gallagher's only hope at this point is that we start getting a regular parade of conservative pundits who turn out to have been on the Bush administration payroll. Then they can all point at each other and say, "See! Everybody else does it!" Then they call all close ranks and pronounce each other vindicated.

And ya know, I'd bet someone in the White House is working on that talking point.

Book report

I mentioned awhile back that I was giving a talk at Seattle University on my book, Death on the Fourth of July: The Story of a Killing, a Trial, and Hate Crime in America.

The student paper at Seattle U, The Spectator, has a story on that talk online now.

It's a pretty good piece. The reporter, Katie Sauro, gets everything pretty much right. There is a little problem with the headline: This book is definitely not a novel.