The Great White Peril

Y'know, by Gar, there may be some good come out of this Minuteman thing yet.

Fresh after hanging up their lassos and sidearms and calling it quits by declaring victory well before the end of their originally avowed 30-day vigil, the Minuteman Project's organizers, according to the Washington Post, are turning their sights northward to the Canadian border:

Minuteman Project leaders said their volunteers this month alerted federal authorities to more than 330 cases of illegal immigrants crossing into the United States over a 23-mile stretch of Arizona's southern border. Now they plan to extend their patrol along the rest of the border with Mexico and are helping to organize similar efforts in four states that neighbor Canada.

"In the absence of the federal government doing its mandated duty to secure our borders, we will pick up the slack. Reluctantly," said Chris Simcox, a Minuteman co-organizer who also operates Civil Homeland Defense, another Arizona group that monitors illegal immigrants.

"We shouldn't have to be doing this," Simcox told reporters in Washington, where he was to meet with lawmakers Wednesday. "But at this point, we will continue to grow this operation _ also to the northern border."

Simcox offered no timeline on when the Canadian border patrol _ to be organized in Idaho, Michigan, North Dakota and Vermont _ might begin. But he said he hoped to start patrols near San Diego, Calif., by June and along the rest of the Mexico border by October.

I read this and I thought: At last! Someone is going to make us face up to the real threat facing this country! Maybe now we can begin talking about the Great White Peril!

Now I know that all this talk by the Minutemen about clamping down on the Canadian border too is in most regards a kind of cover for the campaign's claims to be primarily concerned about the threat posed by terrorists crossing our supposedly loose borders. After all, the only known terrorist who entered the United States via a border crossing -- Ahmed Ressam, whose case is well known locally -- did so from Canada.

But let's be honest here: The real cause that fueled the Minuteman Project was immigration, not terrorism. That's evident from the focus on the subject at the group's Web site, as well as places that championed it, from VDare to American Patrol to the Aryan Nations (which, in fact, actually lauded the 9/11 attacks). And if you talked to people on the ground at the Project, it was pretty clear what was driving them too: the Brown Peril.

So we should be equally frank about what the objectives should be for any planned watch along the Canadian border: stopping the similarly noxious flow of white illegal immigrants from the north.

After all, these people are whiter than white. They like hockey and curling and ice fishing and eat lots of cheese. They come sneaking here over the border in silent hordes and pretty soon, they start taking over. Nobody talks about it, but the evidence that it's happening is everywhere.

I mean, look around at all these American cities near the Canadian border: White people. Lots of white people everywhere. And way too many of them still saying, "Eh?" And why are there all those cheese shops?

They're infecting our popular culture, too, by exporting Canadian-ness over the borders. Why, exactly, are we playing hockey (when it's not on strike) in Florida and California nowadays? Doesn't that seem suspicious to you?

And then there's the music scene. For awhile Canada exported hippie subversives like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, then homosexual subversives like k.d. lang. Now, however, they're responsible for the most insidious cultural invasion of all: Celine Dion. It doesn't get much more hair-raisingly white than that. (Indeed, it seems like grounds for invading their country, executing their leaders, and converting them to Christianity, but that might be a bit over the top.)

Oh, I know it's not "politically correct" to point out this kind of cultural pollution. But it's happening, slowly, surely, and demonstrably to the detriment of our society.

It's time somebody did something about it. Of course, completely sealing off the Canadian border will entail manning some of the most rugged and frigid territory in America, a landscape that will make the Arizona desert seem like a Sunday in the park. It'll require lots of high-tech equipment and well-trained, fit participants.

But hey, I'm sure the Minutemen will be up to the task. They were successful before, right?

Caught up in the tide

After all that talk about "black-robed tyrants" and hints that any violence directed their way might be well earned, the prominent Republicans involved in the new right-wing attack on the judiciary backed down -- a bit -- at "Justice Sunday" last weekend.

Bill Frist did his best to sound moderate, especially after his earlier intemperate remarks about Democrats attacking "people of faith". I guess when people like Ted Olson and Charles Krauthammer are telling you that this whole line of attack is a bad idea, Republican leaders have decided to step back from the brink and reconsider where their old friends on the extremist right are carrying them.

There's one little problem, though: They're too late. They've created a beast they think they can control. I wonder if they're about to get a rude awakening.

No doubt a lot of their hesitation has to do with the kind of image the Republicans have gotten out of their association with the extremists driving the attacks on the judiciary, from Terri Schiavo to "Justice Sunday." That is, they're beginning to look a lot like the folks with their eyes rattling around in their sockets screaming for Judge Greer's scalp.

Columns like Colbert King's in the Washington Post probably helped:

The statement by one of the sponsors of tomorrow's event, Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, is an example of the Holy War that is being launched by the right. In one of the most outrageous smears to be uttered by a so-called religious leader, Perkins said that "activist courts, aided by liberal interest groups . . . have been quietly working under the veil of the judiciary, like thieves in the night, to rob us of our Christian heritage and our religious freedoms." That is an unmitigated lie that should not be allowed to stand.

Which judges are out to rob Christians of their heritage? That is religious McCarthyism. Perkins should name them, provide evidence of their attempted theft of "our Christian heritage" or retract that statement with an apology. Don't count on that happening.

Of course, it didn't happen. As Max Blumenthal reported in The Nation, the conference -- Frist's seeming meekness notwithstanding -- was a wall-to-wall attack upon the integrity of the judiciary. Moreover, Perkins was in fact the figure who benefited most from the attention lavished upon the conference by ostensibly "mainstream" Republicans like Frist:

Four years ago, Perkins addressed the Louisiana chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), America's premier white supremacist organization, the successor to the White Citizens Councils, which battled integration in the South. In 1996 Perkins paid former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke $82,000 for his mailing list. At the time, Perkins was the campaign manager for a right-wing Republican candidate for the US Senate in Louisiana. The Federal Election Commission fined the campaign Perkins ran $3,000 for attempting to hide the money paid to Duke.

It also became clear that Perkins has national aspirations, and intends to use the anti-judiciary campaign as his springboard:

On Justice Sunday, Perkins introduced Frist as "a friend of the family." "I don't think it's radical to ask senators to vote," Frist said from a giant screen above the audience. "Only in the United States Senate could it be considered a devastating option to allow a vote." His face then disappeared, and Perkins returned onstage to urge viewers to call their senators.

But there is more at stake here than the fate of the filibuster. With Justice Sunday, Perkins's ambition to become a national conservative leader was ratified; Bill Frist's presidential campaign for 2008 was advanced with the Christian right; and the faithful were imbued with the notion that they are being victimized by liberal Democratic evildoers.

Of course, a claim of persecution and martyrdom is central to the campaign. Christians are being singled out and persecuted for their beliefs, "Justice Sunday" believers were told time and again. The federal judges being filibustered by Democrats were chosen just because they were Christians, they were told. See, for instance, the sympathetic report at the Baptist Press site on the speech by R. Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in which he described nominee Charles Pickering as just such a victim:

The Senate Judiciary Committee thought Pickering was radical because he believes Christians should base their worldview on the teaching of Scripture, Mohler said. Senators who opposed Pickering focused on comments he made while serving as president of the Mississippi Baptist Convention.

"That (Pickering's view) is normative Christianity," Mohler said. "That is what it means to be a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ and to be a Christian incorporated into the body of Christ and to be a faithful believer in the church.

"He (Pickering) was speaking as a Christian to fellow Christians about our Christian responsibility, but in the views of some radical secularists, that invalidates him from serving on the federal bench. And we as Americans had better hear that as a wakeup call because if it is judge Pickering now, it will be you and me tomorrow."

Of course, what Mohler describes has little to do with why Pickering's nomination was held up. As I've explored a couple of times, the problems with Pickering's appointment had a great deal more to do with the tremendously bad judgment he has displayed in several key cases, including a cross-burning case that reverberated with his past connections to white citizens' councils -- not to mention his less-than-forthcoming testimony on those subjects.

But hey, a few facts never stood in the way of a good martyrdom story before, so why stop now?

But as Blumenthal describes, there is indeed a great deal at stake: namely, the very shape of jurisprudence itself, which would be transformed by these religious fundamentalists into a kind of legal fundamentalism. It would have dramatic ramifications for Americans across a broad variety of issues from gay rights to abortion to birth control to scientific research to basic matters of privacy, perhaps even to segregation -- and ultimately, for the heart of their campaign, the separation of church and state.

See, for instance, these key passages from the BP News story:

Mohler singled out two pivotal cases from the past 35 years: the 1973 Roe v. Wade case, which established a "constitutional right" for abortion on demand, and the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas case, in which judges overturned anti-sodomy laws.

"[Roe v. Wade] was a wakeup call for Americans to say, 'Now wait a minute; there is nothing in the Constitution about abortion.' By no stretch of the imagination did the founders of this nation and the framers of that document intend for anyone to be able to read those words and find a right to kill unborn children," he said.

" ... [And] does anyone believe that the framers of our Constitution intended for [a constitutional right to practice sodomy] to be there? By no means. If it's not there, how did the court decision get there? By reading into the Constitution what they wanted to find, which isn't there but is constructed there by expanding the Constitution by reinterpretation."

Mohler said that Christians, above all people, should understand the importance of a strict interpretation of the Constitution because of the way in which some have twisted the Bible to "say what it doesn't mean."

"We have seen that pattern (of distorting Scripture)," he said. "God's people have had to learn to discern and say 'no, the text is the inerrant and infallible Word of God. It is what God said it is.' But now there are judges who are using the same exercises of interpretation to find in the Constitution of the United States what is not there."

Now, as I've argued previously, the "strict construction" of which fundamentalists are so enamored is nothing but a new name for old-style "formalism," the approach to jurisprudence that wrought such exemplars of the law as Dred Scott and Plessy v Ferguson. As such, its ramifications for American law could be profound, since widespread adoption would mean overturning an entire slate of progressive innovations of the 20th century and return us to the bad old days of the late 19th century, when robber barons ruled the land.

At the Family Research Council's own site, one can get a sense that just such a radically reactionary course is what they have in mind:

Q -- How have activist judges abused their power?

A -- Judges are abusing their power if they read into the Constitution principles that are not declared by the plain language of the Constitution. For example, the First Amendment says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." But nowhere does it say that there should be a strict "separation of church and state" at all levels of government, barring any acknowledgment of God. The decision legalizing abortion was based on the "right to privacy" -- but no such right is declared in the Constitution.

That response should make clear the two issues, above all, that are directly in the sights of the religious right:

1. The separation of church and state.

2. The right to privacy.

Of course, most Americans tend to take a right to privacy for granted, but little realize that it exists almost solely, according to Supreme Court rulings, as a Ninth-Amendment "natural right" not enumerated by the Constitution, or as a "penumbra" of other rights that have been written out.

Likewise, they understand that "separation of church and state" -- like "religious freedom" -- exists as a principle of the Constitution, even though the phrase doesn't appear written there. (The educated among us are even aware of the use of the phrase by founders Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in later explanatory letters.)

But what they little understand, for now, is that those rights are in the gunsights of the religious right -- and they are zeroing in even now.

The more thoughtful conservatives remaining in Republican ranks may hesitate for now. But the religious right has built up its impetus, and it seems unlikely that the GOP, in the end, will be able to resist going along for the ride.

Rudolph's plea

Seems I'm not the only one with questions about how the Justice Department handled Eric Rudolph's case. Now we're hearing from the conservative side of the aisle -- namely, Bill Shipp, a longtime observer of the Georgia political scene:

Pardon the paranoia, but something smells about the deal to let killer-bomber Eric Rudolph cop a plea and avoid a trial.

The Justice Department says it decided to spare Rudolph a death-sentence trial in exchange for information about the locations of relatively small amounts of explosives. Bull!

A determined prosecutor might have extracted the map to the dynamite with a promise not to seek the death penalty. And Rudolph's trial could have proceeded.

Former U.S. Attorney Kent Alexander says a trial and death sentence would have made "a martyr" of Rudolph, so waiving the trial was a good idea.

That is a curious position for Alexander, who was the government's chief lawyer in Atlanta when Rudolph planted a bomb at the 1996 Olympics that killed one person and injured scores of others.

If the martyrdom-avoidance defense worked for Rudolph, can you imagine what it might do for alleged Fulton courthouse killer Brian Nichols, the self-proclaimed "black warrior," when he is ready for trial in heavily black Atlanta?

The government says Rudolph set off four bombs -- the most famous one at the Olympics, another at an Atlanta gay bar, a third at a Sandy Springs family-planning office and a fourth at a Birmingham abortion clinic. At the end of his run, he had killed two people, wounded at least 120 and terrified thousands.

He is as much a terrorist as 9/11 plane-hijacker Mohammed Atta or Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

Ah, but the problem really is an administration that does not want us to think of terrorists in that fashion, and Shipp explains this as well as anyone I've seen:

Similarly, Rudolph's plea leaves us in the dark about his whole story. To be sure, he may have been as advertised: a government-hating, anti-abortion, survivalist crackpot. Still, we don't know who aided him or why. Who were his mentors and associates? Who helped him choose his targets and on what basis? Who protected him from arrest for all those years? Why did they harbor him when one simple phone call could have put a million dollars in their pocket?

Why did Washington agree to skip a trial that may have revealed the answers to all those questions? One possibility: The Justice Department doubted the ability of its attorneys to deliver a guilty verdict. The prosecutorial record in comparable cases is spotty at best. (The feds nailed McVeigh but struck out with Terry Nichols in the Oklahoma City bombing.)

If you're a conspiracy theorist, you have another answer. The government is reluctant to dig deeply into Rudolph's background or to identify publicly the forces that inspired him to become a pro-life killer. Letting him enter a guilty plea serves the purposes of the politically-attuned Justice Department as well as the defense. That sounds a bit nutty, you say? That explanation is no nuttier than a leading lawman's assertion that Rudolph's avoidance of trial "finally brings closure" to the case. Surely he is kidding.

One other thing: The government through the media has embedded in the national mind a portrait of terrorists as sinister-looking, bearded Middle Easterners who pray five times a day and have a fondness for taking flying lessons.

The trial of Eric Rudolph might have given us another picture: fair-skinned, clean-cut men claiming to be Christians, wearing fatigues and speaking American English, not unlike you and me.

Taken a step further, a picture might even be drawn of a home-grown terrorist who embraces the culture of life and then uses the tools of the death to protect that culture. The parallels with a president who speaks in defense of the sanctity of life, yet has built his legacy on death penalties and two overseas wars might make the U.S. judiciary a bit too uncomfortable.

It's pretty hard, in fact, to examine this administration's record without reaching the conclusion that it is more interested in marketing the idea of terrorism to the public than it is in actually combating terrorism.

Justice well served

I've spent a chunk of time in Judge John Coughenour's federal courtrooms, particularly during the trials of the Washington State Militia in Seattle and the Montana Freemen in Billings. (See In God's Country for more details.)

He probably has more experience in dealing with far-right conspiracy theories -- particularly so-called "constitutionalist" pseudo-legal theories -- than any other federal judge. He also is the epitome of the "no-nonsense judge": blunt, plain-spoken, impatient with obfuscation. And there's no room for any kind of folderol, whether from attorneys or their clients or jurors.

So I was more than a little amused to read of Coughenour's latest courtroom confrontation with a constitutionalist scam artist in a Seattle P-I report:

Anderson's Ark moved client cash into overseas bank accounts and falsely deducted the funds from income tax returns as consulting or management expenses, the government said. In order to make the deductions look legitimate, Anderson's Ark told its clients to send the money through an Anderson's Ark affiliate to a shell company operated by co-defendant Richard Marks, prosecutors said.

Convicted leaders of the scam included brothers Keith and Wayne Anderson, and Karolyn Grosnickle, who ran the operational headquarters out of a home in Hoodsport in Mason County.

The Anderson brothers and Marks represented themselves in the proceedings, which were notable for lengthy political harangues.

Marks challenged Coughenour yesterday, asking: "What kind of a court are you running here?" He got a quick response from the judge: "I'll have you bound and gagged if you don't stop to listen to me."

Marks proclaimed: "I have repeatedly challenged the jurisdiction of this court. This court is committing treason. You judge, are committing treason ... when you usurp the authority of the Constitution." Then he launched into an incomprehensible monologue challenging the court's jurisdiction, which centered on his true identity being that of a "human being" rather than a "fictitious legal entity."

Coughenour cut him off and asked Corey Smith of the Justice Department's Tax Division for his sentence recommendation. Smith noted Marks' "utter lack of contrition" and recommended 25 years in prison.

The attorney from the Justice Department's Tax Division at the hearing, Corey Smith, boiled it down to the fundamentals:

Smith rose and told Coughenour "some of these Anderson Ark members might look at Mr. Anderson as a slightly odd man. I would submit that is not the case. Mr. Anderson is a financial predator. Mr. Anderson is a professional con artist."

I've described the ways other far-right ideologues are actually running relatively lucrative cons. It's pretty much endemic to the extremist right, in fact. For that matter, it would be fair to say their ideology is a scam as well.

I don't know about Bill Frist, but I happen to think the federal judiciary functions well at serving the American public and the interests of justice. Judge Coughenour is the ultimate example of that. Though the people he just put away, no doubt, are more than happy to partake in all that talk about "black-robed tyrants."

Blogging about

Be sure to check out the new blog from Russ Baker, one of the best independent journalists working today, which he's titled BakerMuckraker. It kind of looks like he's still figuring out the links thing, but the content as always is what counts most ...

eRiposte has finished up his great 15-part series, How the Liberal Media Myth is Created, which recaps information many of us already knew, but puts it together in a cogent way that offers some insight into how to battle the meme. He's also begun a follow-up series at The Left Coaster titled "Why the Liberal Media Myth Persists", with Part 1 and Part 2 already up.

I was pleased to read in the New York Times that the late Will Eisner's final book, The Plot -- which tells the story of The Protocols of the Seven Elders of Zion -- is soon to hit the bookshelves. I've already pre-ordered it.

And I have to say that Abstinence Only.com made me laugh. A lot. But it's probably not work-safe.

Minutemen uber alles

Well, the Minutemen apparently are running low on volunteers -- their Web site currently features an urgent plea for volunteers "on the border to the end of April." According to my sources, the project's numbers have been in precipitous decline in the past week, while the Project is officially supposed to last until April 30.

That hasn't prevented them from declaring victory anyway, even before they've officially wrapped up their three-ring anti-immigration circus:

"In just 17 days, the Minuteman Project has successfully sealed the San Pedro River Valley border from illegal activity," Minuteman organizer Jim Gilchrist said on the project's Web site this week, halfway through the monthlong venture.

Gilchrist pointed to a drop in Border Patrol apprehensions in the area as proof: The agency caught about 2,500 illegal immigrants in the Naco area during the first half of the month; agents apprehended nearly 7,700 during the same period last year.

But others aren't so sure:

"They're taking credit for securing the border, and surely no one with any credibility believes that," said Michael Nicley, chief of the U.S. Border Patrol's Tucson sector, which encompasses most of the Arizona border.

... Nicley and others attributed the drop to U.S. agents and the increased presence of Mexican police and members of Grupo Beta, a Mexican government-sponsored organization that tries to discourage people from crossing illegally and aids those stranded in the desert.

Authorities suggested that illegal immigrants are simply going around the Minutemen's lines.

"They are going west of Naco, but they are still trying," said Bertha de la Rosa, a coordinator with Grupo Beta.

But in a way, Gilchrist is right: the Minuteman Project has been a success. Not for actually doing anything substantive about immigration. Rather, it's been eminently successful in mainstreaming and legitimizing extremist vigilantism.

After all, they've even gotten a United States Senator ready to give them official imprimatur. Sen. Wayne Allard, a Colorado Republican, came up with the idea yesterday:

A Republican senator said Wednesday the government should consider deputizing private citizens, like the Minuteman Patrol in Arizona, to help secure U.S. borders.

Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., said the U.S. Border Patrol also should look to local law enforcement and state officials for help along the most porous parts of the U.S.-Mexico line.

"I wonder sometimes if maybe we're not looking too much to a federal solution," Allard told Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing.

"I happen to believe that those people down along the border that formed the Minutemen organization have some real concerns," Allard said.

Sure, if you consider the imminent "minority status" of the white race to be a "real concern."

The mainstream conservative pundit corps -- particularly Sean Hannity and Michelle Malkin, not to mention Lou Dobbs of CNN -- have been adamant that the Minutemen haven't a racist bone in their bodies, and insist that they're just a gigantic "neighborhood watch."

The Minuteman organizers have assiduously promoted this line as well, insisting that the volunteers' backgrounds are being thoroughly checked, and that anyone who doesn't meet their standards (which appear mostly to involve criminal backgrounds) is not being accepted. What they're not telling you, of course, is that the Aryan Nations types and similar assorted extremists who've attached themselves to the Project hung around the scene anyway, setting up their own camp spots, and the Project, as I reported earlier, had no way of controlling them.

And it doesn't appear that their background checks are exactly weeding out the racists, either. For instance, in the largely sympathetic portrait of the Minutemen that ran recently in the Ventura County Star, we get a description of this fellow:

"Something is going to happen here," said Joe McCutchen, 73, of Fort Smith, Ark. "We are hopeful."

As the sun sank, rumors descended across the border like darkness.

Minutemen organizers said they were warned that the Central American drug-smuggling MS-13 gang was planning an attack on the Minutemen.

McCutchen had a flak jacket and a .38-caliber snub-nosed pistol, in case.

But the night would grow darker without immigrants or gangs.

McCutchen, it seems, was a model Minuteman. A piece on the Minutemen for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette featured McCutchen prominently:

Armed with binoculars, a video camera and a.22-caliber pistol, Joe McCutchen manned his post Tuesday, braving 105-degree heat and 50-knot winds to guard a lonely stretch of Arizona desert where Mexicans sneak across the border.

"The desert is mean -- it's brutal," McCutchen said. Besides the elements, there are rattlesnakes.

Nonetheless, the 73-year-old retired Fort Smith pharmacist set out Tuesday afternoon for another unpaid shift monitoring a porous stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border near Tombstone.

And it featured a familiar refrain at the end:

"The president hit the lowest of low blows when he called us 'vigilantes,'" McCutchen said.

But there's just one teensy little problem. As Daryl at One People's Project points out, Joe McCutchen has a long history of involvement with all kinds of white-supremacist organizations, including Jared Taylor's American Renaissance and the Council of Conservative Citizens.

Indeed, I devoted a previous post to McCutchen's activities as a leading example of the way right-wing ideologues play footsy with real extremists.

If Joe McCutchen is a model "Minuteman," it should be interesting to see what happens if Wayne Allard succeeds in federally deputizing him.

Black robes

It begins, it seems, with right-wing extremists threatening judges on the radio for failing to bend the law to their desires. Then you have right-wing fringe transmitters spewing the same kind of hatred of the judiciary on multiple TV appearances, and Oxycon-artist radio hosts ranting out the same lines over the nation's airwaves.

Next thing you know, you have House leaders threatening retribution for judges who refused to jump through their hoops, and Senators warning judges that they might be bringing violence upon themselves for making decisions people don't like. Suddenly, a focused, heavily organized campaign springs into action, poised to combat those evil liberals who pervert the normal American way of life -- the dark, dreaded men in black robes. (And hey, just coincidentally in time, you can buy the book!)

Huh? Where did this come from? This wasn't even an issue in the last election! It all seems like it's coming out of far right field, doesn't it?

Well, duh.

In fact, this very subject -- especially the rhetoric involving "black robed traitors" and "betrayal of our Christian heritage" -- has long been a hoary staple of the extremist right in America. You used to hear this kind of talk all the time at militia meetings ten years ago, and at Aryan Nations congresses ten years before that. Hatred of the judiciary is a centerpiece for the Posse Comitatus, the tax-protester extremists and Identity adherents like the Montana Freemen, and the Bircherite paranoids who have accused the judiciary of harboring Communist subversives since the days of, well, Brown v. Board of Education. Funny, that.

Nowadays, these themes enjoy much more powerful -- and supposedly mainstream -- proponents, as well as their respective audiences. Case in point: this coming Sunday's right-wing hatefest, dubbed "Justice Sunday", though as the New York Times reports, it really is a chance to promote Bill Frist's campaign to portray Democrats as "against people of faith" for opposing Bush's most radical nominees to the federal bench. (See Frederick Clarkson for more.) As the NYT story pointed out:

Some of the nation's most influential evangelical Protestants are participating in the teleconference in Louisville, including Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family; Chuck Colson, the born-again Watergate figure and founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries; and Dr. Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

This kind of lineup offering singularly mainstream support for an all-out ideological attack on the judiciary was reflected in the kickoff event for the anti-judiciary campaign: "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith," a conference organized by a bevy of right-wing figures, notably Phyllis Schlafly.

As Dana Milbank's report on the event for the Washington Post pointed out:

This was no collection of fringe characters. The two-day program listed two House members; aides to two senators; representatives from the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America; conservative activists Alan Keyes and Morton C. Blackwell; the lawyer for Terri Schiavo's parents; Alabama's "Ten Commandments" judge, Roy Moore; and DeLay, who canceled to attend the pope's funeral.

Milbank's story was also noteworthy for pointing out the viciousness of the rhetoric being deployed:

Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, "upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law."

Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem,' " Vieira said.

The full Stalin quote, for those who don't recognize it, is "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." Presumably, Vieira had in mind something less extreme than Stalin did and was not actually advocating violence. But then, these are scary times for the judiciary. An anti-judge furor may help confirm President Bush's judicial nominees, but it also has the potential to turn ugly.

Movement-conservative defenders of the rhetoric (notably Vieira himself) later tried to soft-pedal his remarks, claiming they were intended within the the context of impeachment only. Vieira's exchange with Eric Muller at Is That Legal, I think, laid bare the dishonesty of this defense. As Muller put it:

Mr. Vieira's questioned reference to Stalin in his speech was absolutely not "to the point" that many judges today are acting as communists. Mr. Vieira can call Justice Kennedy a commie all he wants, and nobody is going to care or take notice.

The questioned Stalin reference in Mr. Vieira's speech, which, incidentally, he repeated for added effect, was to Stalin's phrase "No man, no problem." "He [Stalin] had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: no man, no problem." That is what Mr. Vieira said, and that is what people have (rightly) been screaming about.

Max Blumenthal had even richer detail on this gathering, and the naked hatred it festered, in The Nation:

Michael Schwartz must have thought I was just another attendee of the "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" conference. I approached the chief of staff of Oklahoma's GOP Senator Tom Coburn outside the conference in downtown Washington last Thursday afternoon after he spoke there. Before I could introduce myself, he turned to me and another observer with a crooked smile and exclaimed, "I'm a radical! I'm a real extremist. I don't want to impeach judges. I want to impale them!"

For two days, on April 7 and 8, conservative activists and top GOP staffers summoned the raw rage of the Christian right following the Terri Schiavo affair, and likened judges to communists, terrorists and murderers. The remedies they suggested for what they termed "judicial tyranny" ranged from the mass impeachment of judges to their physical elimination.

The threatening tenor of the conference speakers was a calculated tactic. As Gary Cass, the director of Rev. D. James Kennedy's lobbying front, the Center for Reclaiming America, explained, they are arousing the anger of their base in order to harness it politically. The rising tide of threats against judges "is understandable," Cass told me, "but we have to take the opportunity to channel that into a constitutional solution."

Cass's "solution" is the "Constitution Restoration Act," a bill relentlessly promoted during the conference that authorizes Congress to impeach judges who fail to abide by "the standard of good behavior" required by the Constitution. If they refuse to acknowledge "God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government," or rely in any way on international law in their rulings, judges also invite impeachment. In essence, the bill would turn judges' gavels into mere instruments of "The Hammer," Tom DeLay, and Christian-right cadres.

I've discussed the "Constitution Restoration Act" at length previously. As I said then:

Here's the core of the would-be law:

Notwithstanding any other provision of this chapter, the Supreme Court shall not have jurisdiction to review, by appeal, writ of certiorari, or otherwise, any matter to the extent that relief is sought against an element of Federal, State, or local government, or against an officer of Federal, State, or local government (whether or not acting in official personal capacity), by reason of that element's or officer's acknowledgement of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.

In other words, the law would forbid any court to review cases involving the invocation of God in the courtroom, or the placement therein of the Ten Commandments.

But, like a set of Ginsu knives, that's not all! As this piece from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram explains:

That's sweeping enough, but it doesn't stop there. The bill would declare that federal judges interpreting the Constitution may not rely on anything besides "English constitutional and common law."

Judges, even those on the Supreme Court, could not look to other court rulings, administrative rules, executive orders -- and no foreign law, dadgummit -- though the bill says nothing about reliance on divine inspiration.

Any judge who entertains a legal claim based on a public official's "acknowledgement of God" would be committing an impeachable offense.

... Bringing the courts to heel has long been a pipe dream of the religious right, ever since the days of Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade. For years, they have complained that "activist courts" have taken over the law of the land and become too involved in shaping public policy --something, they contend, that is strictly the purview of the Congress. At various times, proposals have been floated to pass laws limiting the courts' jurisdictions (one example that springs to mind was the plan by a right-wing Washington legislator in the early 1990s to give the state Legislature the power to overturn court rulings and place severe limits on the courts' purview). Now, it appears they're driving hard to make it a reality.

The forthcoming campaign is a noteworthy departure from many previous mainstream efforts in that it engages in vicious, demeaning rhetoric that demonizes the judiciary as a conspiratorial brotherhood of black-robed traitors. But in that regard, it has a great deal in common with the anti-judiciary rhetoric of the extremist right.

Talk about "black-robed traitors" or "tyrants" has been, as I mentioned, a staple of various gatherings of the far right for many years, ranging from Aryan Congresses and Posse Comitatus meetings to militia gatherings, common-law courts, and Freemen "training sessions."

A quick sampler of the far right's reading troves shows the theme's pervasiveness. Red Beckman -- a key figure in both the Posse Comitatus and Montana Freemen movements, as well as various "jury nullification" schemes -- once wrote a book titled "The IRS and the Black Robed Cover-Up" that was commonly offered on tables at "Patriot" gatherings.

So was Judicial Tyranny and Your Income Tax by Jeffrey A. Dickstein, Atty., as well as former Republican Rep. Robert Dornan's 1980 conspiracy screed, Judicial Supremacy: The Supreme Court on Trial.

The Freemen went so far as to utterly dismiss the legitimacy of the mainstream court system. As this Ablion Monitor piece on the Sonoma County Freemen explained:

This is the crux of their claims: there are really two judicial systems. Those courtrooms down at the county building are "Admiralty" courts -- or, as Cozio sneers, "monkey courts" presided over by "black-robed terrorists." On the other side are common-law courts, organized by everyday citizens.

The hatred of "men in black robes" likewise shows up among current white-supremacist hate groups. The National Vanguard's "Declaration of White Independence" includes the following observation:

The modern Federal Government has politicized the judicial system by allowing our People to become brainwashed by the Jewish media, and thereby the black-robed tyrants have obstructed the administration of justice; consequently, every Judge renders decisions that dovetail with the agenda of the inner party (i.e., the state within a state, the Jew), and every jury deliberates in sky castles created for them by the Jewish media system of control and indoctrination: this is our land of the free, this is our home of the brave.

Reliably enough, you can find the theme of "black robes" appearing in various "transmitter" media organizations, people who pose as mainstream observers but who take extremist ideas and massage them into presentable messages in the mainstream. A fine example of this was WorldNetDaily's Devy Kidd, who recently opined:

A nation divided will always be conquered which is why the attack on our Christian nation must stop and the only way that will happen is for the churches in this country to find their backbone and we get rid of these black robed judges who hallucinate decisions such as the 1947 Everson v Board of Education.

It is not such a far leap, then -- after numerous reinforcements from the likes of Randall Terry and Bo Gritz -- for the notions of "black robed tyrants" destroying the "culture of life" and "our Christian heritage" to ripple through the national airwaves as seemingly respectable opinion.

This is how the far-right echo chamber works: Ideas and policies bubble up all the time on the right, but those from the far right typically have a history of long-term traction in its meeting halls. Once they have that traction, it seems only a matter of time before a transmitter picks the idea up, massages it, and presents it as "conservative."

The phenomenon, as I've explained previously, has a dual effect: it draws the mainstream farther right steadily, and it legitimizes and empowers within the mainstream people who, not so long ago, were considered extremists.

The whole attack on the courts has a real screeching quality to it. If you filter out all the noise, though, two clear strategies for attacking the fundaments of the nation's judiciary emerge:

-- Eliminate the filibuster in the Senate (the so-called "nuclear option") in the name of forcing Bush's Federalist Society-anointed nominees upon the judiciary.

-- The "Constitution Restoration Act." This latter seems to have little chance of passage in a sane world, and thus should pose no serious threat.

However, I am not so sure we are living in a sane world anymore.

10 years later

And you may ask yourself,
Well, how did I get here?

How did we reach the point, as a nation, where treat the terrorists in our midst as "anomalies" -- despite their long record of wreaking havoc in our own back yards -- while embarking on a global "war on terrorism" that involves invasions and occupations of foreign lands?

How did it come to pass that, on the 10th anniversary of the second-worst act of terrorism on American soil -- the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City -- one of the nation's best-known newsmagazines completely ignores the date and its meaning (that's right; there's not a story in either the April 18 edition of Time or the Ann Coulter edition of April 25), and instead devotes its cover to plumping for a woman who has made light of the bombing?

I think Digby has nailed it just about right:

It has become clear to me that we are frogs being slowly boiled to death. And the media are enjoying the hot tub party so much that they are helping to turn up the heat.

It's become clear that not only the public, but the nation's mainstream media have bought in whole to the Bush approach to the "war on terror," which is nothing less than a political marketing machine. And anyone who questions it risks the wrath of being declared, a la Coulter, a traitor.

This was made clear most recently during the coverage of Eric Rudolph. As Paul McLeary at CJR observed, news reports concerning Rudolph were reluctant to call him what he is: a domestic terrorist.

The whole sorry situation, if nothing else, reveals one of the nation's abiding racial blind spots: We shrug off terrorism when it's committed by white Americans, but we fire up the bombers and declare a "war on terror" when it's committed by brown-skinned foreigners. Pointing this out, of course, is deeply unAmerican.

It's not that Al Qaeda is not a more serious threat: as I've explained in depth, it is. But ignoring the very real threat of homegrown terrorism -- particularly in its potential role as a kind of piggyback terrorism that echoes larger threats, as with the anthrax killer -- prevents us from coming to grips with the asymmetrical nature of terrorism as a global phenomenon.

One of the most thorough of the 10th-anniversary reports on domestic terrorism came from Steve Johnson at MSNBC, which gave a pretty thorough rundown on the current nature of the domestic-terror threat, especially from right-wing extremists. But notably, the report got little play and was quickly buried at the site.

[I was especially pleased with one aspect of the Johnson report: The special popup titled "Threat From Within" is a remnant of the 1999 report I put together for MSNBC that won the National Press Club Award for Online Journalism in 2000. If you click on it, you'll see the data I compiled for 1995-2000, though the recent years are missing quite a few actual incidents. At any rate, this little item had long since disappeared, so I was pleased to see it resurrected again. It's a very handy and enlightening little tool.]

Another solid roundup appeared in a Washington Post report by Lois Romano that covered many of the same bases. I noted especially these remarks from my old friend Ken Toole:

"If Krar had a Middle Eastern name, we would have had the military in there," said Ken Toole, director of the Montana Human Rights Network, which tracks militia and hate groups. "The war on terror continues to focus on the external threats, but do not kid yourself. The hard core is still out there in this country."

... Others argue that the most dangerous times can be during a power vacuum. "You have more marginal people trying to act out and hard-core believers trying to fill the void," Toole said, adding: "Everyone has to understand that they are just regrouping -- a new generation will come in."

I think, considering the increase in hate-group activity and recruitment among young people we've been seeing lately, that the new generation is already coming in, and is making its presence felt.

The Post story also noted something that we noticed awhile back, namely, that priorities are being skewed:

Officials at the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI acknowledge that since the Sept. 11 attacks they have viewed foreign threats as a higher priority than domestic ones. A recent department internal assessment of threats did not list militias, white-supremacist groups and violent antiabortion activists. The assessment, first reported by Congressional Quarterly, did mention radical environmental groups and animal rights activists as potential threats.

Fortunately, some Democrats -- notably Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee -- appear to be wising up:

ALF and ELF "are the left-leaning groups that they identified," said Thompson, the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee. "But they absolutely left out any of the other groups."

"If your responsibility is to protect the homeland from these domestic terrorists, then you have an obligation to identify all of them -- not just some of them," Thompson said.

Sounds like another unAmerican traitor to me. I'm sure Ann Coulter will have a fresh dish of venomous desserts to serve Rep. Thompson soon.

And the talking heads on Hardball will politely applaud and laugh. Isn't she a hoot? Same as it ever was.

The Rudolph manifesto

Probably no news event of the past year has made me as queasy as watching Eric Rudolph "confess" to his crimes as part of his plea agreement. What was especially disturbing was the way Rudolph turned his public confession into a defacto manifesto, justifying his murderous spree and clearly issuing a clarion call to other True Believers to take up his mantle.

For anyone genuinely concerned about domestic terrorism and the havoc it wreaks, Rudolph's smugness in justifying the deaths and injuries he caused was enough to set a lot of jaws on edge:

"I certainly did, your honor," Rudolph told the judge when asked if he detonated the bomb outside the Birmingham clinic in 1998. He was expected to plead guilty to three other bombings in Atlanta later Wednesday, including the blast at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996.

With his admission, a nurse who was nearly killed in the blast began weeping in the front row of the courtroom.

"He just sounded so proud of it. That's what really hurt," said Emily Lyons, who lost an eye in the bombing.

Rudolph, dressed in a red jail uniform, winked toward prosecutors as he entered court and spoke tersely to answer a series of questions from the judge, saying the government could "just barely" prove its case if it went to trial.

He drummed his fingers on the side of a podium as a prosecutor told of the Wal-Mart hose clamp that was found inside the body of the off-duty police officer who died in the blast, then described pieces of a remote control receiver found in Lyons' body.

The performance, and the way it was broadcast without commentary or rebuttal, clearly alarmed abortion providers who recognized that Rudolph was issuing a call to action to the like-minded, as a recent Christian Science Monitor report detailed:

Abortion clinics around the US are "bracing for attacks" after convicted murderer and Olympic bomber Eric Rudolph issued a "manifesto" justifying attacks against such clinics and their workers. Associated Press reports that federal officials from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are calling US clinics to make sure their security is up to date.

'When one of these extremists puts out a call to action, oftentimes others do try to follow in their footsteps,' said Vicki Saporta, head of the National Abortion Federation, which represents 400 US clinics. 'He clearly is speaking to the extremists who believe in justifiable homicide.'

It's not as though they aren't out there, either. Remember that just a year and a half ago, another would-be domestic terrorist, who specifically cited inspiration from Rudolph's example, was arrested before he could mount his planned killing spree.

And then there are all the supporters of abortion-doctor killers like Randall Terry and his minions, who just made a big national splash in the Terri Schiavo debacle. Perhaps the next time Terry is on Fox, one of their fair'n'balanced hosts can ask him about Eric Rudolph.

But then, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised if the new "mainstream" right begins making a John Cornyn-like assessment of Rudolph: Gosh, we don't condone violence, but when those baby killers won't listen to reason and a bunch of black-robed judges won't stop them, then patriotic people like Eric Rudolph are just bound to take matters into their owns hands.

In the meantime, there is a lingering question that still hasn't been settled, and doesn't look like it will be: What about those who helped Rudolph?

Initially, there was some hope that the plea might reveal who assisted Rudolph, though those familiar with the case were skeptical that he would ever "snitch" on anyone still alive. But as the earlier story pointed out:

Investigators also have said it's possible Rudolph, an outdoorsman and former soldier, could have survived alone. But Long doesn't buy it.

"I don't think you could make your way up here without driving. You'd have to drive or have someone drive you. There's no taxis, no MARTA," Long said, referring to the Atlanta rail system. "If there were accomplices, they should be prosecuted."

People around town said they've heard others say they don't think Rudolph did anything wrong. Wade said she never sympathized with Rudolph, but added, "I understand why a lot of people would help him or sympathize with him."

This hope was seconded by another victim:

Both the defense and prosecutors declined comment on exactly what evidence will be revealed during the plea hearings, but the owner of the Alabama clinic that Rudolph bombed hopes his confession leads to the arrest of others she believes may have assisted in the attack.

"Absolutely he had help. There's not a doubt in my mind," said Diane Derzis, whose New Woman All Women Health Care installed security cameras after the attack.

Those hopes were dashed, of course, by what Rudolph actually said. As the CNN story explained:

That said, Rudolph was not cooperating in the "classic sense," said Nahmias. Rudolph has never disclosed who, if anybody, has helped him during his years on the run.

Nahmias said investigators have so far found no evidence that Rudolph had any co-conspirators. Although Rudolph did approach one friend six months after going into hiding, he had apparently surveilled the friend for weeks, Nahmias said.

And when Rudolph was finally caught in May 2003, it was at a dumpster while foraging for food, evidence that he had no helpers, Nahmias said.

Still, as Mark Potok on NPR's Talk of the Nation pointed out, "the statement boils down to an attempt to kind of strip away from himself the uglier parts of his ideology," as well as to disguise the extent of help he may actually have gotten:

I think the probability is that he did not get at least any organized help. I think it is possible that he got perhaps involuntary help. ...

On the other hand, I think it has to be said that at one point Rudolph came out of the mountains, and approached this man George Nordman, who runs an organic-food store there. And Nordman is known to have right-wing views of his own. Now, I'm not accusing him of having illegally aided and abetted Rudolph. But the fact is that Rudolph left Nordman's store with a great deal of food and his truck as well, and Nordman did not report this to federal authorities for three days.

So, you know, it's hard to say. I don't think there's any question that Rudolph was seen by many in western North Carolina as a kind of Butch Cassidy character -- good-looking, you know, kind of a wild man who was defying all the forces of the federal government: planes, helicopters, dogs, infrared heat-detection equipment, and doing it very successfully. So I think he was something of a folk hero.

Moreover, as Potok pointed out, there was much about Rudolph's confession that was simply a kind of cover-up. His claims of non-affiliation with Christian Identity simply don't hold water, especially because of his long membership in Nord Davis' Identity church in North Carolina. These are detailed to a great extent in the book Hunting Eric Rudolph by Henry Schuster and Charles Stone -- a book that Rudolph singled out for attack in a postscript to his confession.

This isn't taking place in a vacuum. Rudolph broadcast his manifesto right at a time when extremism is gaining a real toehold in the upper echelons of mainstream conservatism, and a general environment of nasty intolerance, embodied by relentless attacks on multiculturalism, has descended on the national discourse. So Derrick Jackson's thoughts on Rudolph's legacy and its broader meaning are exactly on the money:

Rudolph will be put away for life. A Los Angeles Times feature this week said his guilty plea marked the continued fall of extreme, antigovernment individuals and paramilitary, right-wing militia groups that stirred controversy at the time of the Oklahoma City bombing. The Times quoted Vincent Coppola, author of Dragons of God: A Journey Through Far-Right America, as saying, "My guess is today we're at the low ebb of a movement that comes and goes." He said Rudolph "is sort of an artifact of another time. That doesn't mean the time won't come again."

Artifact? Another time? Rudolph may be put away for all time because he used deadly violence. But there are still many people doing his bidding. After Massachusetts's highest court legalized gay marriage, 11 states passed amendments to ban gay marriage in last November's elections. President Bush supports a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

On abortion, several states and the Bush administration have added restrictions in American domestic and foreign policy, behind the code language of the "culture of life." As to "global socialism," which can easily be interpreted as the sharing of Americans' wealth in a multi-cultural world, the signs are pretty obvious that Rudolph's spirit is alive and well there, too.

The most inflaming current story is the "Minuteman Project." A right-wing militia of several hundred people is "patrolling" a 23-mile stretch of Arizona's border with Mexico, reporting illegal crossings to US border agents. The head of the minutemen, Vietnam veteran and retired accountant Jim Gilchrist, said in newspaper interviews: "Too many immigrants will divide our country. We are not going to have a civil war now, but we could."

Like many paranoid groups trying to ignore minor details -- such as that Gilchrist could not buy produce so cheaply at his local supermarket without illegal immigrants picking his broccoli or that construction costs in the Sun Belt would be far higher without illegal labor -- Gilchrist turns imagery on its head. Despite the fact that many of them carry guns and knives, he called his minutemen "a bunch of predominately white Martin Luther Kings."

They would all disavow Rudolph, of course, but it sounds like the minutemen share Rudolph's basic premise about the "dangers" of global socialism when Gilchrist says, "We are becoming a country run by mob rule," The Minuteman Project's website disavows any assistance from "separatists, racists, or supremacy groups." But the current headline on the Aryan Nation's white supremacy website is, "Minuteman Project: A call for action on part of ALL ARYAN SOLDIERS."

The next headline is, "Mexican Invasion." The third headline is, "Mexican army escorts border drug runners."

As Faulkner said: "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." We may like to think we've reached some kind of closure with Rudolph's guilty plea, but it has all the look of yet another beginning.

DeLay's Golden Oldies

Considering the focus being leveled at House Majority Leader Tom DeLay right now regarding his fondness for junkets with lobbyist Jack Abramaoff, it might be worthwhile to revisit one of the previous incidents involving such a trip, uncovered by Jeff Stein for Salon back in 1999, describing garment factories in Saipan that are more slave dens than manufacturing plants:

Wages in the factories average about $3 per hour -- more than $2 less than the U.S. minimum wage of $5.15. No overtime is paid for a 70-hour work week. But that's hardly the worst of it. Far away from the swank beachside hotels, luxurious golf courses and the thousands of Japanese tourists snorkling around sunken U.S. Navy landing craft in the clear waters, some 31,000 textile workers live penned up like cattle by armed soldiers and barbed wire, and squeezed head to toe into filthy sleeping barracks, all of which was documented on film by U.S. investigators last year.

The unhappy workers cannot just walk away, either: Like Appalachian coal miners a generation ago, they owe their souls to the company store, starting with factory recruiters, who charge Chinese peasants as much as $4,000 to get them out of China and into a "good job" in "America." Their low salaries make it nearly impossible to buy back their freedom. And so they stay. The small print in their contracts forbids sex, drinking -- and dissent

The Clinton administration was moving to change these conditions when DeLay and Abramoff sprang into action:

Enter Tom DeLay and his Texas Republican sidekick, Dick Armey. When the Clinton administration sought to yank Saipan's factories into the 20th century in 1994, requiring the workers be paid a minimum wage, overtime and their living conditions improved, the island government hired a platoon of well-connected Washington lobbyists, headed by former DeLay aide Jack Abramoff, to block the plan. Abramoff, in turn, personally or through his family, contributed $18,000 to DeLay's campaign coffers. So far, the island government has paid the firm of Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds $4 million for their efforts, records show. They also treated DeLay and Armey to trips to the island, where they played golf, snorkled and made whirlwind visits to factories especially spiffed up for the occasion, according to several accounts.

"Even though I have only been here for 24 hours, I have witnessed the economic success of the Marianas," DeLay told a banquet crowd. As for the critics of the plantation system, DeLay told the dinner crowd darkly, "You are up against the forces of big labor and the radical left."

Right. Unlike the workers in Saipan, who merely are up against the forces of big money and the radical right. But then, the same is true of American workers.

And if you go through the catalog of DeLay/Abramoff scandals, you'll see that the identical alignment is at work in each of the instances of lawbreaking behavior by the Republican power cadre. (Indeed, the Marianas lobbying has become one of the focal points of the Justice Department investigations.)

DeLay's scandals are part of a larger pattern of abuse of ordinary working people in defense of moneyed interests. That probably needs pointing out.

Seeping into the system

Since the creep of right-wing extremism into mainstream conservatism is a major topic of this blog, I'd be remiss in not bringing to your attention a recent report from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting's Steve Rendall describing some of the more noxious examples of this trend in the mainstream media:

Racism, in fact, may be gaining a firmer foothold in American media institutions as its promoters adopt more stealthy and sophisticated ways of presenting it. Consider two recent episodes in which David Brooks and John Tierney, both conservative New York Times writers, touted the work of Steve Sailer, a well-known promoter of racist and anti-immigrant theories.

Following the November elections, David Brooks used his column (12/7/04) to celebrate something he called the "natalist" movement. Natalists, said Brooks, defy Western trends toward declining birth rates by having lots of children and leaving behind the "disorder, vulgarity and danger" of cities to move to "clean, orderly" suburban and exurban settings where they can "protect their children from bad influences." According to Brooks, natalists are more churchgoing and conservative than their less wholesome neighbors in more liberal urban areas, and are an increasingly important political force.

Though the movement sounds a bit like the post–World War II demographic trend dubbed "white flight," Brooks makes no reference to ethnicity until halfway through the column, when he cites Sailer on white fertility:

As Steve Sailer pointed out in the American Conservative, George Bush carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility rates, and 25 of the top 26. John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest rates.

Brooks is well-known for lightly documented demographic analysis (Philadelphia, 4/04), but he never explains why he believes white fertility is more important than that of other groups.

Did Brooks understand his source's views? A look at the American Conservative article (12/20/04) that Brooks presumably read, since he cited it, ought to have raised the suspicions of an engaged columnist. In it, Sailer describes the undesirable urban traits he says white people are trying to escape: "illegal immigrants and other poor minorities," "ghetto hellions" and "public schools." Are these the things Brooks meant when he alluded to "disorder, vulgarity and danger" and "bad influences" in his Times column?

As American Prospect Online found (12/7/04), a little research reveals Sailer as a leading promoter of racist pseudoscience. As a principal columnist on the white nationalist website VDare.com, named for Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the "New World," Sailer (e.g., 2/23/03; 12/12/01) extols the work of academic racists who say Africans as a group are innately less intelligent than whites or Asians. He is also a staunch defender of the Pioneer Fund, a primary funder for such racist research (as well as of VDare.com).

On the rare occasion Sailer gives race a rest, it's usually to make some other mock-Darwinian argument, as when he ruled out the possibility of a gay gene, suggesting instead that homosexuality is a disease, possibly caused by a germ (VDare.com, 8/17/03): "An infectious disease itself could cause homosexuality. It's probably not a venereal germ, but maybe an intestinal or respiratory germ."

A New York Daily News column (12/13/04) rebuked Brooks for plugging Sailer, suggesting that the Times columnist "might want to do a background check on the next 'expert' he quotes," pointing out that "Sailer also writes for VDare.com, which the KKK-fighting Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled a 'hate group.' " According to the News, the Times failed to respond to inquiries about the matter. No other mainstream outlets seem to have commented on the affair.

The piece gives more background on Sailer, and notes that Tierney's NYT report citing Sailer preceded Brooks':

Weeks before the Brooks column, Times reporter John Tierney (10/24/04) quoted Sailer, describing him as "a conservative columnist at the Web magazine VDare.com and a veteran student of presidential IQs." Tierney cited Sailer's claim that George W. Bush’s IQ was likely greater than John Kerry's, information Sailer extrapolated from the results of different tests the two had taken—tests that were not intended to measure IQ.

Were Brooks and Tierney aware of Sailer's racist work? Were they sucked in by Sailer's sophistication, his academic sounding arguments? Or was it his bona fides with "mainstream" conservative outfits like the National Review and American Conservative?

The report goes on to describe other major players in the mainstreaming of white-supremacist ideologues, including the late Sam Francis (infamous for remarking at an American Renaissance conference that whites need to "reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites").

Even more relevant, perhaps, is the career of American Renaissance's Jared Taylor, whose mainstreaming (especially by MSNBC's Joe Scarborough) we have previously noted. The FAIR report includes some noteworthy recent instances of this, particularly one noted in January by Pittsburgh Gazette columnist Dennis Roddy:

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day last week, when much of the nation took a holiday, "race-relations expert" Jared Taylor was hard at work. He began at 6:45 a.m. with an interview with a Columbus radio station. At 7:05 he was on the air in Orlando. An hour later his voice greeted morning commuters in Huntingdon, W.Va.

At 10:10 a.m., he was introduced no fewer than four times as "race relations expert Jared Taylor" on Fred Honsberger's call-in show on the Pittsburgh Cable News Channel. Four hours later, he was back on the air with Honsberger on KDKA radio, where he repeated the message he'd been thumping all day: Martin Luther King Jr. was a philanderer, a plagiarist and a drinker who left a legacy of division and resentment, and was unworthy of a national holiday.

What Taylor did not say, and what Honsberger didn't seem to know until I picked up the phone and called in myself, was that Jared Taylor believes black people are genetically predisposed to lower IQs that whites, are sexually promiscuous because of hyperactive sex drives. Race-relations expert Jared Taylor keeps company with a collection of racists, racial "separatists" and far-right extremists.

I attribute the failure of the mainstream media to be cognizant of the tactics of these folks, and the way they disguise their agendas and beliefs, more to ignorance than maliciousness.

Unfortunately, there is all too often a willingness (if not outright eagerness) among mainstream conservatives, from pundits to politicians, to conveniently overlook these matters when it suits their purposes -- see especially Michelle Malkin, who writes for VDare. And I don't think ignorance explains it all away.

Teens and the terrorism laws

One of the more troubling aspects of anti-terrorism laws generally -- and the Patriot Act in particular -- has been the likelihood that they are open to a kind of prosecutorial abuse: namely, that they can be used to charge people whose crimes have little or nothing to do with terrorism.

This was especially clear in the case of the Patriot Act's "sneak and peek" provisions that allow federal agents to conduct searches of people's homes without ever notifying them. These provisions were already available to the FBI in terrorism investigations; what the Patriot Act did was enable law enforcement to use them in non-terrorism-related cases. And sure enough, as TalkLeft's TChris reported recently, there has been a dramatic expansion of sneak-and-peek warrants since Bush took office.

Now comes an Associated Press report out of Michigan that says that teens who are suspected of plotting attacks on their schools are being charged under anti-terror laws:

LANSING -- Michigan's use of an anti-terrorism law to curb school violence has sparked debate over the law's intent and raised an important question among prosecutors, school officials and others: When is a troubled teen a terrorist?

Law enforcement officials say the law against threatening terrorism, enacted in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, gives them a vital tool to avert shootings like the one last month in Minnesota, where a student shot and killed nine people before turning the gun on himself.

With no specific state law against threatening to kill someone, law enforcement official say, the terrorism law is the only one that works.

But many school-violence experts say labeling a disturbed or angry teen a terrorist is going overboard. In some cases, they say, what the student needs is psychological help, not jail time.

"(We have to) discern between students who pose a threat and students who are making threats," said Glenn Stutzky, a clinical instructor at the Michigan State University School of Social Work. "It appears the terrorism law doesn't make that distinction."

Two Michigan cases, one in Macomb County northeast of Detroit and one in adjoining Oakland County, appear to be among the first in the country where terrorism laws are being applied to school violence.

One involves a 17-year old accused of threatening to bring a gun to school to kill a school liaison officer and whose home, when checked by police, revealed a cache of firearms, ammunition, bomb-making materials and instructions, Nazi flags and books about white supremacy and Adolf Hitler.

Andrew Osantowski of Macomb County's Clinton Township was arrested last September after authorities received a tip from an Idaho girl who had been exchanging messages with Osantowski over the Internet. He has been charged as an adult and faces up to 20 years in prison.

The other case involves a 14-year-old whose backpack contained a notebook with a "kill list" that included a dozen people, including his mother, several students and school officials.

A police search of Mark David O'Berry's home in Oakland County's White Lake Township in mid-March found no weapons, and he has denied making the list. He is being dealt with as a juvenile and could be held until age 19 if found guilty.

Prosecutors in both cases say they used the state's terrorism law because no other charge applied.

There's little doubt, I think, that school rampages like Columbine and, more recently, the killings in Minnesota, represent a kind of inchoate terrorism, since it's clear that the purpose is to terrorize their classmates and teachers. They generally, however, lack the real policy-driven and issue-specific nature of most terrorism (see, e.g., Eric Rudolph).

Applying anti-terrorism laws to cases involving troubled teens strikes me as deeply wrong-headed. Not only do we dilute the meaning of terrorism, and expand the law into places it was not intended to be used, but we really blur the line between intention and action.

People talk loosely about committing acts of terrorism relatively regularly, especially in Internet chat rooms and forums like Free Republic and Liberty Forum. Generally, however, law enforcement draws the line at taking concrete action toward making those fantasies into realities -- say, buying guns and ammo or making pipe bombs or incendiary devices.

Now, in the case of the teen with the weapons cache -- which included bomb-making materials and instructions -- the arrest seems prudent, and it appears from the outside at least that there's a gap in Michigan's laws if someone with such a cache (especially a minor) can't be charged with some kind of explosives violations. But in the case of the teen caught with the "kill list," I'm still looking for evidence that he had moved beyond simply talking about it (in which case he needs counseling, not jail) to doing something to implement it (at which point law enforcement should be able to act).

Unfortunately, it's pretty common for kids to fantasize about killing classmates or authority figures -- common enough that, were we to charge every kid who did so, our jails would need to triple in size. Arresting troubled teens for such fantasies seems like another step toward Minority Report-style law enforcement.

Minutemen and the mainstream

It should be clear by now, I hope, that one of the chief achievements, as it were, of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is that the infiltration of the extremist agenda in mainstream conservatism has become rampant in the past months since the 2004 election, embodied by the Schiavo mess.

Even more noteworthy, perhaps, has been the mainstream embrace of the far-right extremists operating the Minuteman Project, and the extent to which they are being portrayed both by media and officialdom as jes' plain folks.

Leading the charge today was none other than Tom DeLay himself, interviewed in the Washington Times, who even went so far as to suggest that President Bush might want to change his tune on these patriotic folk:

Mr. Hanner: Do you agree with the president that the Minuteman Project on the border right now are vigilantes?

Mr. DeLay: No. I'm not sure the president meant that. I think that they're providing an excellent service. It's no different than neighborhood-watch programs and I appreciate them doing it, as long as they can do it safely and don't get involved and do it the way they seem to be doing it, and that's just identifying people for the Border Patrol to come pick up.

This line of reasoning, of course, emanates from the apologists for extremism who populate the right-wing pundit class, from Michelle Malkin (who first compared them to a "neighborhood watch") to Mark Krikorian at The Corner, who described them as "a handful of ordinary Americans." The same storyline, of course, is a regular feature at Malkin's immigration blog as well.

Perhaps no one has been more prominent in promoting the Minutemen's image as a group of law-abiding, concerned citizens than CNN's Lou Dobbs, who has made the Minutemen into the symbol of his ongoing campaign on behalf of immigration reform -- meaning he has adopted, essentially, far-right anti-immigrant nativism.

On several occasions, Dobbs' program has featured remarks from Minuteman organizer Chris Simcox, including an extended interview with Simcox that featured some genuinely noteworthy exchanges. Dobbs had reported on his program that the Minutemen were unarmed, and Simcox had to correct this:

DOBBS: And to be clear, you're not permitting any of your volunteers to be armed.

SIMCOX: No, that's not true. I can't do that. We have encouraged them, if you've read our standard operating procedure, that they are to be, again, aware of the laws of the state of Arizona. They're not to carry long arms, because that would make us an offensive -- that would give it an offensive-type attitude.

DOBBS: Well, Chris, let's...

SIMCOX: ... (UNINTELLIGIBLE), but...

DOBBS: ... be straight up, 1,500 volunteers, untrained, unorganized, and without drill, that is not a reassuring statement that you just made, if you're going to have people with weapons, whether they are sidearms or not.

SIMCOX: Well, Lou, we have -- most of our volunteers are retired law enforcement officers, military veterans, and professional people who -- and not all of them are going to be armed, but the ones that want to be have that right to be.

But we have interaccountability by grouping people together in teams, so that we have people watching each other and making sure that we hold each other accountable. Because this is a political protest, no matter what. We know that. And it would be hypocritical of us to want the government to enforce the laws if we were out there to break the laws.

What was really appalling, though, was the way Dobbs fawned on Simcox, especially at the end:

DOBBS: Outstanding. We wish you all of the success in the world. And you know, you said it at the outset, that it's a shame that it takes activism on the part of citizens. You know, I think that we could also make a counterargument. It's kind of nice to know that Americans still have that activism in their hearts, the capacity to volunteer to do the right thing. And we thank you, Chris Simcox, for being with us.

Mind you, Simcox is someone with a history of militia organizing and spouting extremist beliefs, including bizarre conspiracy theories linking Latino immigrants to the Chinese Army. He also has a conviction for carrying a loaded firearm in a National Park. In March 2003, he told a crowd in California that "so far, we've had restraint, but I'm afraid that restraint is wearing thin. Take heed of our weapons because we're going to defend our borders by any means necessary."

There have been a lot of other warm-and-fuzzy treatments of the Minutemen in other organs, including a largely friendly account in the Ventura County Star, which does nonetheless mention the paranoia that pervades the scene in Arizona:

As the sun sank, rumors descended across the border like darkness.

Minutemen organizers said they were warned that the Central American drug-smuggling MS-13 gang was planning an attack on the Minutemen.

McCutchen had a flak jacket and a .38-caliber snub-nosed pistol, in case.

But the night would grow darker without immigrants or gangs.

Far more disturbing was the report from a news team that went undercover for KPHO in Phoenix, and produced a pretty remarkable report that largely ripped the lid off the Minutemen's carefully controlled image of being a cooperative neighborhood watch:

[B]ehind the scenes, our hidden cameras show there are problems and plenty the Minutemen are not telling reporters.

A lady on Hidden cam says, "We don't want the press to find out where the information is being handed out because we'll have CNN and FOX and yeah." They're controlling what you hear, from why some of these volunteers "really" came to southern Arizona:

John says, "If the border's gone, they're going to be pushing drugs on every one of our kids at school." To problems the organizers are having controlling the extremists who showed up.

John says, "The guys up here, on what we were talking about earlier on Mountain View, with the shotguns and the flag and lighting the fire. And lighting a fire on G-----n BLM land."

The piece goes on to explore in some detail the extent to which the Minutemen organizers are controlling what's given out to the media. It also features some deeply disturbing material captured in chats with some of the volunteers, in which it becomes clear that the project is having its most trouble keeping a lid on the collection of extremists who are part of the scene:

But as the sun goes down, problems keeping control of a group as big as the Minutemen begin to surface. Marc says, "There was a standoff and people got killed." The man from Tucson is asked to leave our group - because he keeps talking to reporters. John says, "People like that, they'll drag down, they'll drag down the whole thing." And as the night goes on, a drama unfolds across the highway. Some of the volunteers are carrying shotguns, which is against the rules and our group leader admits: Minuteman organizers are having trouble deciding what to do about it. Adahm/John says, "(What's up with the shotgun guys? How are you going to deal with those two?) I have no idea.. that's out of my.. I don't even want to go up there." Adahm/John says, "(Well don't they have a guy like you are with us? Don't they have their?) He's not there. I can't find him." The man says, "I hope they're not drinking or anything. I didn't see any beer there."

Jim Gilchrist, the Project spokesman, explains these folks away later by claiming, "They are not Miuteman Project volunteers. They are rogue patrollers posing as Minutemen."

Be sure to check out the video link to the story. It includes some chilling footage, as well as a disturbing footnote from the anchor for the piece, Morgan Lowe, who adds that the crew heard plenty of racial remarks out in the field, including one from a volunteer who told him he looked forward to "hunting a certain group of people."

You can also get a sense for some of the paranoia that pervades the camp from reading the first-person report filed by a Freeper named "Spiff":

Nine days of blockade has begun to result in desperation.

We believe 500-700 illegals and their coyotes are bottled up in the Huachuca Mountains at present. They are running out of food and water. We have also figured out the system used here for putting out food and water caches and have been routinely using them to add some variety to our dogs’ diets. Our canine companions are most appreciative.

A recap of last night’s action: several Minuteman were almost run down by a fleeing load vehicle last night. Fellow LePer idratherbe painting is now on the injured reserve list after a bad fall into a dry wash at the same location. Another Minuteman is “under investigation” for making physical contact after saving an illegal from a bad fall.

This morning began with round up of the illegals who missed their ride in the fleeing vehicle the night before. Two had become thoroughly lost and confused and walked up to one of the MMP teams asking for directions. When the realized who they had approached, they took off running and practically jumped into a Border Patrol vehicle.

The daylight hours were uneventful other than a prolonged visit by CNN’s Lou Dobbs. He spent most of his time out on the Naco Line along the border fence. Those of us in the canyons got a visit from those fine folks from the ACLU. They chose to set up in a dull spot with a fine view of Ash Canyon.

All hell has broken loose since nightfall. Several groups have come down out of the mountains to attempt a getaway. Scanner traffic gives a tally so far of five load vehicles captured, about 70 illegals in custody, and a similar sized group scattered throught the west end of Hereford and being picked up piecemeal. We have recovered three coyote cell phones and the call histories should prove interesting.

As I said before, we'll be lucky if the month of April passes in Arizona without some grotesque tragedy occurring. Actually, I'm beginning to think the Minutemen are more a danger to each other (as well as any law enforcement in the vicinity) than they are to any immigrants who happen into their clutches, though that danger hasn't exactly subsided.

Simcox and his project have inspired some of his cohorts, including Casey Nethercott of Ranch Rescue. According to report from KVOA in Tucson, Nethercott is planning to ratchet the craziness even higher:

Eyewitness News 4 has learned an armed militia along the border near Douglas may take matters into its own hands this July.

Casey Nethercott, the leader of the group said Friday that he doesn't yet want to go into detail on his plans.

He supports the Minutemen, but his backup plan is a much more aggressive approach.

Nethercott pointed to two black SUV's, saying, "These are armored vehicles. They got quarter-inch steel in them. They'll stop small arms fire and some rifles."

The headquarters of the militia, called the Arizona Guard, sits along the U.S./Mexico border near Douglas, Arizona, in the Southeastern corner of the state.

Pointing again to the vehicles, Nethercott continued, "You'll get killed without them, here's been so many shootouts out here."

Gosh, Lou, that sure is some nice little neighborhood watch you've got going there.

The lingering question: Will President Bush take DeLay's advice and change his tune on these folks?

The old Injun disguise

American white men have a colorful history when it comes to dressing up as Indians, dating back at least to the Boston Tea Party. They also have quite a history of using the ruse to make money, while simultaneously victimizing the Indians they're pretending to be.

One of the very last Indian wars, the Sheepeater War of 1879, was a classic case of this. Having seen how deeply the Nez Perce War of 1877 had enriched the towns of LaGrande and Baker in northeastern Oregon, which had served as supply depots for the cavalry, community leaders in the Yankee Fork mining district in south-central Idaho decided that a little Indian war was just what was needed in their neck of the woods.

Mind you, it little mattered that there were only scattered bands of Shoshoni, known as Sheepeaters, who were known to dwell in the vicinity, and they rarely posed a threat to the lives of locals, because they tended to keep to themselves. As it happened, there were also a number of Chinese in the Yankee Fork, and some of them had the audacity to cross the line from providing services to miners to trying their hands at staking some mining claims themselves.

So it happened that a group of five Chinese miners were found massacred at their claim a little ways west of the Yankee Fork district that summer, and the corpses were littered with arrows, though supposedly they all died of gunshot wounds. Indeed, there was no evidence that Sheepeaters had even been in the vicinity, but the legend of the massacre soon spread, and an "Indian panic" shortly resulted.

Sure enough, the cavalry was called in, and a battalion of soldiers spent the next several months traipsing up and down the high mountain ridges of the Middle Fork country, chasing a few Indians hither and yon. Finally, at the end of the campaign, they managed to round up 50 or so women, children, and elderly Indians who they had captured as prisoners, and sent them off to the Shoshone-Bannock reservation in Fort Hall, thus declaring victory. The Yankee Fork communities briefly benefited from the influx of government money, but it didn't last long. By the turn of the century, the district had dried up, and all that remains there now are ghost towns.

I was reminded of the Sheepeater scam recently with the rise of the Little Shell Pembina Band, which made a brief appearance on the local scene in the Seattle area by trying to give posthumous tribal membership to a slain cop.

Essentially, the "tribe" is actually an operation that allows anyone of any ancestry to claim tribal membership, a status that is supposed to confer all kinds of tax and insurance exemptions. It is, in essence, a bunch of whites (and other non-Indians) dressing up in tribal sovereignty in a way that undermines the rights of legitimate tribes, and enriches the scamsters in the process. As I explained in a follow-up post, the Pembina scam includes insurance and tax schemes that are closely related to old far-right conspiracy theories.

Now my longtime source Mark Pitcavage and his merry band of researchers at the Anti-Defamation league have put together a definitive report on the Pembina Band scam, laying out how it is the latest manifestation of the right-wing attempt to establish "sovereign citizenship." It also makes clear its origins:

At some point during these unsuccessful legal battles, Delorme transformed the Little Shell Band into a sovereign citizen group. Its ideology was not new to the region: sovereign citizens had been active in North Dakota, where Delorme and his extended family lived, dating back to the 1980s, when Posse Comitatus leader Gordon Kahl ambushed and killed two federal marshals in Medina in 1983.

By 2004 the Little Shell Band claimed to be a "completely sovereign tribe" that held "allodial title" to over 53 million acres of land (for some reason, this figure was later increased to 62 million). Saying it no longer sought federal recognition, the group declared its own executive, legislative and judicial powers, bestowing on itself the right to establish a legal bar and "tribal lawyers" as well as a "sovereign tribal financial and banking institution."

Perhaps most importantly, the "new" version of the Little Shell Band allowed anyone, regardless of ancestry, to become a member of the group, opening the door for a variety of anti-government figures to join (for a fee) and claim membership in the "sovereign" Little Shell Band. As a result, Little Shell Band activity spread around the country.

Also noteworthy is its cast of characters, including a couple of figures I described earlier:

Navin Naidu (Circuit Court Judge and Finance/Economic Advisor). Naidu is perhaps the strangest Little Shell character of all. He first achieved notoriety when he appeared in Fiji in 2001 as the lawyer for George Speight, a former insurance salesman who had spearheaded an unsuccessful coup d'etat and was subsequently charged with treason. When the Fiji government checked Naidu's qualifications, it discovered that his University of London law certificate was spurious, as was his claim to be practicing at the "International Ecclesiastical Law Offices" in Seattle, which turned out to be non-existent. Naidu, a Singapore-born ethnic East Indian and U.S. resident, admitted that he had no license to practice law in the U.S. but that his credentials came from "Jesus." Naidu was arrested and later deported. Back in the United States, Naidu moved to Kent, Washington, where he identified himself as an "ecclesiastical lawyer" and began devising plans to create a church court that could marry or divorce people and even decide criminal cases.

John Lloyd Kirk (Clerk; Tribal Lawyer). A Tukwila, Washington, sovereign citizen and anti-Semite and a friend of Montana Freeman Leroy Schweitzer, Kirk was one of a group of seven Washington sovereign citizens and militia members arrested in 1997 on a variety of weapons and explosives charges. Convicted of possession of a pipe bomb and conspiracy to possess and make destructive devices, Kirk received a 46-month prison sentence. It was not his first conviction: in 1980, according to author Jane Kramer, he had been found guilty of statutory rape in an incident involving his daughters.

You know the saying: The more things change, the more they stay the same.