About the only recent successful title that harkens back to the older intellectual style is Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism," which argues that modern liberalism has much more in common with European fascism than conservatism has ever had. But because it deployed the incendiary f-word, the book was perceived as a mood-of-the-moment populist work, even though I predict that it will have a long shelf life as a serious work. Had Goldberg called the book "Aspects of Illiberal Policymaking: 1914 to the Present," it might have been received differently by its critics. And sold about 200 copies.
There's one little problem with this: The entire thesis of Goldberg's book is a fraud. Goldberg not only deployed the F-word, he built the entire book on a false, historically untenable, claim: that "fascism, properly understood," is not a right-wing phenomenon but a left-wing one.
One of the most persistent components of this is the right's ardent embrace of the fraudulent thesis of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism -- to wit, that "properly understood, fascism is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left." The embrace of this fraud as somehow truthful has produced those teabaggers' signs bearing swastikas (suggesting that health-care reform is fascist) and signs showing Barack Obama as Hitler and, moreover, the claims that Obama is marching the nation down the road to fascism.
The impact of this embrace on our national discourse has been deeper than probably anyone suspected when the book was first published last year. Not only is Goldberg's thesis now taken as an article of faith by such right-wing talkers as Rush Limbaugh (who probably helped inspire Goldberg's thesis in any event), Glenn Beck,Michael Savage,, but also among the teabagging protesters whose ranks are increasingly filled by real right-wing extremists.
What's most noteworthy, perhaps, is that Goldberg's thesis is being used to attack anyone who points out the frequently violent and intimidating behavior of these extremists. It's not the right-wing protesters carrying open weapons, Obama=Hitler signs, and openly disrupting the discussion of health-care reform at town-hall sessions who are behaving like Brownshirts, they insist -- it's the liberals who show enough nerve to stand up to them!
Oddly enough, though, Hayward then goes on to suggest that perhaps Beck himself is the chief hope for ending conservatism's intellectual drought. Oy.
If Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Beck are the leading intellectual lights of this generation of conservatives, there can be no other answer to Hayward's question than an affirmative one.
This was too funny to pass up. We've known all along that Glenn Beck is a two-bit phony. Now we see how Glenn Beck gets himself properly weepy for the cameras: A little Vicks Vaporub.
One might dismiss this as merely a one-off for this shoot. But you can hear Beck himself say:
Beck: I think it's getting used to it -- my eyes are getting used to it.
From regular and continuous use, mayhaps?
The whole scene reminds us that Beck practices his schtick over and over before he performs. Which means he's gotten real good at working up those tears and choking up to say, "I love my country -- but I fear for it!"
This may be what Sen. Lindsey Graham had in mind the other day:
"Only in America can you make that much money crying," Graham said of Beck. "Glenn Beck is not aligned with any party. He is aligned with cynicism and there has always been a market for cynics. But we became a great nation not because we are a nation of cynics. We became a great nation because we are a nation of believers."
Fox News' Glenn Beck has heavily promoted the writings of far-right activist W. Cleon Skousen, even making Skousen's book, The 5000 Year Leap, a central part of his 9-12 Project. Skousen is the author of several controversial works, including The Making of America: The Substance and Meaning of the Constitution, which presented as "the story of slavery in America" a passage from a book that attacked abolitionists for delaying emancipation; cast slave owners as "the worst victims of the system"; claimed white schoolchildren "were likely to envy the freedom of their colored playmates"; and claimed that "[s]lavery did not make white labor unrespectable, but merely inefficient," because "the slave had a deliberateness of motion which no amount of supervision could quicken."
-- Finally, has anyone else noticed that, on the cover of his new book, Beck looks exactly like the illegitimate love child of Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz? Just wondering.
I hadn't seen Eric Burns, the president of Media Matters, on TV previously, but he appeared on Countdown with David Shuster yesterday, and finally said what has needed saying for some time:
Fox News is not a news source. It's a political propaganda operation. And it needs to be treated that way.
Shuster and Burns were launching off Fox's most ludicrous recent endeavor to smear the Obama administration, by using videos of schoolchildren to charge that Obama wants to "indoctrinate" them. As they discuss, this is so hypocritical and absurd that it's hard to believe anyone actually is buying it:
SHUSTER: So explain to me, why is it indoctrination when kids sing about President Obama, but it's patriotism when kids sing about President Bush and FEMA?
BURNS: Well, David, it's not indoctrination to anybody except Karl Rove, Josh Bolten, Roger Ailes -- the rest of the Bush administration in exile over at Fox News, because they are trying to push a political agenda. And they're trying to destroy this administration, and they'll use any means necessary to do it.
And just to give you a little example of this, James O'Keefe, who is the author of one of the suspect ACORN videos that there have been a lot of questions surrounding, told Chris Wallace recently on Fox News that he was employing tactics that would, quote, "destroy his political enemies." So that's what this is about.
There's nothing abnormal about folks talking and children learning about their president and learning to be -- learning about their democracy through talking about the president. I did it when I was a kid.
Then they got to what this is really all about:
SHUSTER: And is that the general theme here with the right-wing media, I mean, undermining the president by manufacturing controversies, because many of the actual Obama policies are favored by the majority of Americans?
BURNS: Absolutely. We've seen it day after day. You know, Glenn Beck is the smearer in chief over at Fox News. And we see new charts, you know, documenting some new vast conspiracy theory every day, new attacks, and it's a constant barrage.
And I'll tell you, this right-wing noise machine has been ginned up. It's never been more ferocious, and their goal is simple -- as Rush Limbaugh stated at the beginning of the year -- they want Obama to fail. Roger Ailes said that this is the Alamo for conservatives and that Fox is the voice of the opposition.
So, this is no longer a news organization. This is a political organization, and their aim is to destroy a progressive policy agenda. They'd rather win in the ballot box than see any sort of real debate on health care. It's a real shame.
Every liberal who even considers going on Fox to act as props for their propaganda machine should stop and think again.
Moreover, every consumer of the news -- conservative, centrist, or liberal -- needs to understand that Fox is not a reliable source of information.
Mainstream media in general have become less reliable, but most of them strive to be factually accurate, even if they skew ideologically somewhat. But this skew has more to do with framing and news selection than the actual reporting.
This is not the case at Fox. It deliberately broadcasts falsehoods and fake information to serve its ideological agenda.
No doubt this makes the Kool-Aid drinkers of the right happy. But for anyone else -- particularly anyone who relies on accurate information for their business or occupation or the livelihoods -- Fox News is a wasteland or outright disinformation that anyone with smidgen of intelligence will avoid.
We need more people like Eric Burns making this point.
Last weekend at the Beck rally in Seattle, one of his supporters (you can see him in the video) was upset that one of the protesters carried a sign proclaiming, "Glenn Beck Lies". He wanted to know when Beck had ever lied.
Answer: Oh, about nightly.
Case in point: His program Tuesday night.
In his opening rant, Beck talked about his Seattle appearances, and opened up by pointing out that there were only "about 40" protesters outside his Safeco Field shindig. And this was true. But what Beck didn't bother to explain to his viewers was that up in Mount Vernon, at his main event, there were more than 500 who showed up to protest him.
Then he said this:
Beck: Now they're worried about bombings taking place. Well, let me show you some new footage. A bombing did take place this past week in a town just north of Seattle called Everett. The only reason why I know this story is 'cause I was there. Radio station KRKO, their towers were blown up. When freedom of speech is being squelched, the left usually says, "That's fascist!" But in this case the left doesn't even call them anything!
But in reality, there were no bombs in this incident at all. All Beck and his staff had to do was read the actual news reports -- you know, the same ones from which they obtained their ELF quote:
"What they used was a machine called an excavator, it has a front arm off the front end of the machine. They stole it out of the yard," Andy Skotdal, president and general manager of KRKO. "They went and attached it to the tower and pushed one of them over and pulled the other one down."
Moreover, the vandalism had nothing to do with "free speech" and everything to do with the towers being a public nuisance:
The towers have been at the center of controversy for years. There are four towers currently at the location and there have been plans to build two more towers. Opponents have claimed that AM radio waves can harm people and wildlife.
More recently, nearby residents claim radio signals coming over home phone and intercom lines have increased since KRKO recently boosted its broadcasting power.
Just to be clear: Eco-terrorism, even without bombs, is a despicable act that deserves to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The people who brought these towers down need to be caught and jailed.
But the threat they pose, at least so far, is strictly to property, not to people. The same cannot be said of the right-wing extremists who Beck is calling out of the woodwork now.
Someone needs to ask Beck: When, exactly, was the last time a left-wing activist walked into a church or a museum and opened fire with a gun? When was the last time an eco-terrorist gunned down police officers because he feared the President and his New World Order were trying to take his guns away?
Because just in the past year alone, there have been five such incidents involving right-wing extremists. Nancy Pelosi is right to be concerned about the potential for extremist violence from the right -- because it's already happening. And when we talk about right-wing violence, we're not talking about damage to property or facilities -- we're talking about terrorists who kill people.
Moreover, we can thank Glenn Beck for his share of fomenting it.
This wasn't the only case of Beck lying on Fox last night. He also went on The O'Reilly Factor and lied about the size of the crowds that came out to protest him:
You'll note he repeats the bit about how "only 40" showed up to protest him in Seattle. But then he claims that there were "about 400" among both the anti-Beck and the pro-Beck protesters in Mount Vernon.
That's simply a baldfaced falsehood. I was there, and can tell you that the anti-Beck protesters outnumbered the pro-Beck side by about a three-to-one margin. By my count, there were about 600 anti-Beck marchers, and less than 200 who supported.
I also asked people where they were from. I couldn't find a single pro-Beck protester who was actually from Mount Vernon; most of them came from the Seattle area, particularly from the Eastside suburbs. Most of the anti-Beck protesters came from Skagit and Island counties.
And yes, there was a single busful of protesters who arrived, though there was no indication they were brought in by SEIU, as Beck claimed. Rather, these were farm workers who came down from the nearby town of Linden, a conservative farming community a little to the north, in Whatcom County.
The way Beck described it to O'Reilly, SEIU was busing in inner-city protesters to Mount Vernon. But there were no such creatures there. Again, Beck lied. It's what he does -- practically every time he opens his mouth.
From the very moment he was elected, right-wingers have been waiting, hoping, and watching anxiously for President Obama to take some kind of action -- any kind of action -- relating to guns. Just so they can start screaming, "He's trying to take away our guns!!!! Lock and load!!! Molon labe!!!"
Of course, he's done nothing. Nada. Zippo.
Which means they're now forced to just make stuff up.
This is never a problem for the paranoid, gun-toting right anyway. It's what they do.
DOBBS: A record 1 million background checks on gun sales were completed by the FBI in the month of August alone. Those numbers show that gun owners are increasingly concerned that the Obama administration is on a mission to restrict Second Amendment rights in this country.
Supporters of those rights gathered in St. Louis over this weekend to fight attempts to strip Americans of their right to keep and to bear arms. Bill Tucker with our report.
And what exactly is the source of that fear? Um, well ...
TUCKER: Ask them why, and they recall the words of Attorney General Eric Holder on the need to ban assault weapons to help reduce drug violence in Mexico.
They point to the president's regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein, who personally is not just opposed to hunting, but said back in 2007 it should be banned. Or they will point to the president's consistent voting record for gun control, both in the Senate and back in Illinois.
Nor do these gun rights enthusiasts trust the newest Supreme Court justice, who in her only ruling on gun rights said the Second Amendment could only be applied to the federal government.
The only new thing is the bit about Cass Sunstein, the demonization of whom began with Glenn Beck and has now spread to Dobbs' show. Dobbs and Tucker delve this in more detail:
TUCKER: All of them, of course, united under the banner of securing their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. For his part, the president does say he respects the constitutional right and promised that he will "protect the rights of hunters and other law- abiding Americans to purchase, own, and transport, and use guns."
But gun activists remain skeptical -- Lou?
DOBBS: I mean, the attorney general, Eric Holder, has said "They just want to do a few things with the Second Amendment." And the czar here, Cass Sunstein -- I mean, what's his deal?
TUCKER: He's a vegetarian, and he believes that hunting ought to be banned.
DOBBS: So, he's not big on hunting.
TUCKER: He's not big on hunting at all. But he has openly supported the right of animals to sue. He believes animals ought to have rights...
DOBBS: I'm sorry, repeat that again?
TUCKER: He believes animals should have rights, which would include the right to sue if they have been mistreated.
DOBBS: If they were hunted.
TUCKER: Or I guess hunted.
DOBBS: If they were hunted -- really?
TUCKER: I can't explain it, Lou, I'm just telling you.
DOBBS: I just think we should let this sort of percolate, because, presumably, the president knows this man, knows who he put there...
TUCKER: Yes.
DOBBS: ... as the regulatory czar over guns. That's truly, truly interesting.
Thank you very much, Bill Tucker.
TUCKER: You're welcome.
Cass Sunstein, the regulatory czar over guns? Not exactly. And by "not exactly," we mean, "not even remotely related to the truth."
Sunstein has been nominated to head up the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, whose role it is to review draft regulations under Executive Order 12866; additionally, "OIRA reviews collections of information under the Paperwork Reduction Act, and also develops and oversees the implementation of government-wide policies in the areas of information technology, information policy, privacy, and statistical policy."
Guns are nowhere near this picture, except hypothetically (it would be possible, as a matter of conjecture, that Sunstein's office would review the efficacy of proposed gun regs coming out of the ATF). And that's it. That's the entire "connection" here.
But hey, don't worry, Lou. When the next Richard Poplawski kills three cops because he was afraid Obama was gonna take his guns away, we'll know who to thank.
I went on Countdown last night to chat with Lawrence O'Donnell -- who was filling in for Keith Olbermann -- about Bill Clinton's remarks the other day about the never-ending bloodlust of the "vast right-wing conspiracy".
O'Donnell was critical of Clinton for suggesting that the power of the conspiracy was less today than what he faced -- and regarding that aspect of Clinton's remarks, I agree with him. The reality, as I explained in the segment, is that the spread and reach of the really virulent wingnuttery that plagued Clinton -- the black-helicopter conspiracy theories like Mena, or the Vince Foster suicide, or the Clinton Body Count -- was largely relegated, until later in his tenure, to the fringes of the militia movement.
Obama, by contrast, is not even through his first year as president and he's already being plagued by Birthers and Tenthers and Teabaggers and Death Panels (along with, of course, the obligatory "He's Going To Grab Our Guns" conspiracies).
And it's true, moreover, the Clinton is right that the country has changed demographically since he was president, which means they do not possess the actual political power they held during much of his tenure. But they've made up for the lack of power with a much deeper reach into the mainstream. I dunno about you, but it sure looks to me like the Teabaggers are the new Patriots -- and there's a hell of a lot more of them.
Perhaps more to the point, they've already demonstrated -- by at least temporarily derailing the debate over health-care reform with wingnutty distractions like the "death panels" and the gun-brandishing nutcases showing up at health-care town hall forums -- that they continue to have an outsize influence on the national discourse. Especially because of Fox News and the rest of the mainstream media's willingness to be bullied by them -- led, as always, by the wise media poobahs of the Beltway Village.
That is -- and you can file this under the L'esprit de l'escalier Dept., since I meant to say it in this segment -- what they lack in power they've more than made up for by continuing to pull the media reins and shape the national discourse. They're able to move the media needles still -- which is, of course, the problem. The Village gives movement conservatives far more respect than they deserve, especially at this juncture, with the movement fully in the hands of nutty populist demagogues.
Glenn Beck is as popular as he is because everyone in the "mainstream" is too busy running fawning puff pieces to point out his actual extremism. No one has the guts to explain that these people are driving the Republicans over a cliff into political oblivion.
In The Eliminationists, I do talk a lot about how vicious the campaign against Clinton got to be -- and how many bridges and alliances were built between the far right and mainstream conservatives during those years as a result, particularly in the way right-wing talkers started picking up and transmitting memes from the far right.
Finally, I should add that, while I disagree with Clinton on this point, I generally agreed with the overall thrust of his recent comments, particularly his warning that the "conspiracy" (as it were) remains a potent force, capable of undermining Obama's presidency in unexpected ways. One can't help but suspect that Obama has been naive on this front -- how many times does he have to reach out to Republicans and come back with a chewed-up hand to get it? -- and I suspect Clinton intended to point out the cold reality. To which I can only add: Hear! Hear!
-- by Dave
Fox News' morning crews -- both Fox and Friends and the regular newsroom -- were going ape about the Moonie Times' report on the pushback by liberal Democrats on including undocumented immigrants in the current health-care reform effort:
Fearful that they're losing ground on immigration and health care, a group of House Democrats is pushing back and arguing that any health care bill should extend to all legal immigrants and allow illegal immigrants some access.
The Democrats, trying to stiffen their party's spines on the contentious issue, say it's unfair to bar illegal immigrants from paying their own way in a government-sponsored exchange. Legal immigrants, they say, regardless of how long they've been in the United States, should be able to get government-subsidized health care if they meet the other eligibility requirements.
"Legal permanent residents should be able to purchase their plans, and they should also be eligible for subsidies if they need it. Undocumented, if they can afford it, should be able to buy their own private plans. It keeps them out of the emergency room," said Rep. Michael M. Honda, California Democrat and chairman of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus.
Of course, this really is only common sense, especially from a public-health perspective; do we really want people not getting treated for contagious diseases simply because they can't prove they're here legally?
However, as sensible as it may be, these efforts realistically have little chance of succeeding, given the toxic political environment about immigration and health-care reform that's been floating about us ever since Joe Wilson shouted out, "You lie!"
Nonetheless, this set wingnut gums a-flapping about the horrid prospect of actually using taxpayer dollars for something they're already required by law to pay for anyway.
And the folks at Fox were all over this angle. Notably, they kept referring to these immigrants as "illegals". Illegals, illegals, illegals -- it was running on the chryon and out of their mouths.
There's a reason the National Association of Hispanic Journalists urges their colleagues to avoid dehumanizing terms like "illegals":
The term criminalizes the person rather than the actual act of illegally entering or residing in the United States without federal documents. Terms such as illegal alien or illegal immigrant can often be used pejoratively in common parlance and can pack a powerful emotional wallop for those on the receiving end.
But the phrase "illegal immigrant" is misleading. There's a grain of truth, but the emphasis is only selectively applied -- it's misapplied -- we don't call speeders "illegal drivers" or people who jaywalk "illegals." And that selective application to immigrants is harmful.
Most people don't understand that "illegal immigration" is in fact only a civil misdemeanor -- which, as legal infractions go, places it on the same scale as speeding or illegal parking. Instead, we've managed to work it up in our minds that being undocumented in the United States is a big-time crime, and thus the undocumented are criminals.
Thus we get Rep. Steve King saying this in response to the Democrats' common-sense efforts:
"If anybody can, with a straight face, advocate that we should provide health insurance for people who broke into our country, broke our law and for the most part are criminals, I don't know where they ever would draw the line," he said.
I wonder if Steve King has ever exceeded the speed limit while driving on the freeway. Because, applying his own logic, he would himself also be "a criminal."
Moreover, nearly half of the undocumented workers in this country didn't "break into" the country -- they came here on legal visas that then expired, and they simply didn't leave.
Calling them "illegals" and "illegal immigrants" is a noxiously dehumanizing habit -- one that only encourages hatefulness and violence against Latinos. It would always help, as Marisa Trevino at Latina Lista points out, if President Obama himself would stop using it.
Because the logic of "illegals" eventually leads to a mindset like that noted by Albor Ruiz at the New York Daily News, describing the kind of commentary that usually accompanies discussions of immigration:
"Save the taxpayers of this country a great deal of money and kill them [the undocumented immigrants] on the spot, along with those who think [they] deserve anything better," he said as a reaction to "Immigration's self-deportation program is a real government gem," a column that ran in this space on Aug. 6.
Ironically, the writer used the case of an illegal immigrant who committed murder in Texas to justify calling - patriotically, I guess - for a much more horrible crime, an "ethnic cleansing" of sorts against all immigrants and - why stop there? - thousands of people "who think these pieces of (I'll spare the reader the disgusting epithet) deserve anything better." If this guy and others like him had their choice, I and others like me would be well advised to "go back to where we came from." Or else.
That, of course, is classic eliminationism. It underlies the use of "illegals." And that alone is reason for major-network TV anchors to stop using it.
Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.
I have to give Max Blumenthal, who I had the pleasure of hosting here in Seattle this past week, credit for coming up with the ideal question to ask the fans of Glenn Beck who showed up Saturday in the Seattle area to root for their favorite right-wing fearmonger:
The first person I asked was Sean Salazar, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate -- he wants to take on Sen. Patty Murray, and so far appears to be leading the GOP field -- standing outside Safeco Field, where Beck's Seattle event was held.
Salazar, as you can see, hedged and stammered and then quickly found someone else to talk to. But he typified the response in Seattle: "When did Glenn Beck say that? Really? He said that? Well, I need to see the context." One woman said that "Beck explained that," but I pointed out to her that all he said was that he was sorry how it was worded, but that it's still a "serious" question Americans need to be asking. So I was asking them.
I also asked the man who was carrying the big sign making fun of Beck. He pointed out how white the crowd was. And it was true, particularly inside the stadium (more on that shortly). Eventually, I did manage to find an African-American man who was outside gathering signatures on behalf of Ron Paul's "Campaign for Liberty." He said he wasn't going in to see Beck.
Finally, right at the end, I did encounter one honest soul. As you can see.
I met many, many more of these folks at the Beck rally in Mount Vernon later that afternoon and into the evening. Unfortunately, I didn't manage to capture most of them on video (a camera burp) -- just one couple towards the end of the evening. But I had at least five different people at Mount Vernon, supporters of Beck's, tell me they firmly believed Obama was a racist who hated white people.
The scene at Mount Vernon was radically different from the one in Seattle. Outside Safeco, there were only 30 or so anti-Beck protesters. Everyone evidently saved their energies for Mount Vernon, where the mayor, a Republican named Bud Norris, unwisely decided to give the hometown-boy-gone-bigtime the keys to the city.
Locals chanted: "Change the locks! Change the locks!" And there were hundreds of them; the crowd estimate was at about a thousand, including several hundred pro-Beck counter-protesters. Those were the folks I talked to the most, and the toxic Obama-hatred was far stronger among this group than it was with the attendees in Seattle.
Fortunately, they were badly outnumbered.
And they were also, it need be said, uniformly white. The only whiter bunch I saw all day was the reported 7,000 who paid to hear Beck speak at Safeco (actually, it was Beck who reported that number, which makes it dubious on its face).
The only nonwhite face I saw inside at Safeco was that of the actor James McEachin, who was there to open up the event with a stirring tribute to veterans. Which was a big part of the whole spiel -- a Beckian appeal to the virtues of wrapping one's self in the flag and imputing unpatriotic motives to your opponents.
It was actually a pretty tedious affair, including Beck's speech, which really was just a kind of standard Beckian thesis bashing progressives and "big government" and touting the virtue of "real Americans" like the folks gathered that day. Real white Americans, that is. The ones President Obama hates.
The best part was getting to watch Beck pull his weeping schtick. You can watch him getting himself all worked up to do the choked-up thing, because, you know, he just loves him some real Westerners who made it over the mountains. Sniffle. He pulled the choke-up routine a couple times later in the talk too.
Wonder if he gets all choked up thinking about those "real Americans" who now agree with him that the President of the United States is a radical black who hates white people.
Without a doubt the silliest "scandal" raised by right-wingers in many weeks has been the foofara over the supposed video showing schoolkids being "indoctrinated" with pro-Obama "propaganda" -- which is, of course, actually an innocuous video of a class of schoolkids singing as part of a Black History Month program.
But evidently these people weren't around during the Reagan or Bush years, when such encomia to the sitting president were fairly common. Indeed, as Blue Texan pointed out, they even named schools after Bush when he was president.
Mike Stark brought this up on MSNBC Thursday, debating the issue with Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner, who was more interested in playing "gotcha" with Stark than actually, you know, discussing the issue. Like all good Republicans. This, of course, was because he really didn't have a good answer.
One People's Project has the full-length version of this video, taken from the big 912 rally in Washington, D.C., showing a middle-aged white man and his Asian wife chasing after and harassing a trio of black people -- primarily two teenagers and an adult guardian (possibly their mother) who were selling "Don't Tread on Me" flags along the long grassy mall.
As you can see, the man -- who identifies himself as Tim Jones -- shouts after them: "ACORN! These people are ACORN!!! They are frauds!!! ACORN is fraud!!! Obama sucks! This woman sells signs for profit of ACORN!!"
It attracts more harassers, and it verges on the point of an outbreak of violence when the D.C. bicycle police show up and break up the scene.
Now, how does Jones claim to know that they are actually ACORN workers? He says he overheard a police officer ask them if they were selling for ACORN and the young woman -- who appears to be a young teen -- told the cop "yes." The older woman tells him flatly they're not from ACORN, but he keeps shouting it anyway.
Most of all, Jones and his wife are harassing these people based on some shaky presuppositions: that a young teenage girl would answer a cop's question -- particularly the addition of the ACORN element -- accurately is probably the shakiest, but toss in the fact that "off brand" vendors, people who have nothing whatsoever to do with a political entity like ACORN, employing young African Americans often flock to these political events and sell whatever is selling in terms of hats, T-shirts, pins, flags, and whatever gewgaws can be sold. Cops regularly chase them off if they don't have a license.
Which is probably what these people were doing, and why they fled. Well, that and the fear of being lynched by these maniacs.
The bigger question is: Why target African Americans when there are are hundreds of vendors at these things? And why assume that they have anything to do with ACORN?
Because, to the teabaggers, ACORN is synonymous with scary black people. The kind who, in the minds of Glenn Beck and his followers, are lurking, waiting to overthrow America when Obama orders them to. (Even if they later turn out to be a dance troupe.)
As Susie says, ACORN is just the new wingnutspeak code for the 'N' word. It's now become an epithet -- one you can chase black people around with and accuse them angrily. Just what America needs right now.
Michelle Malkin was the featured guest on Sean Hannity's Fox News show last night to talk about President Obama's address to the United Nations, and it was a sight to behold. A wretched, horrifyingly ugly sight, but yeah, a sight:
Malkin: He doesn't like this country very much. And I think you did a great video tour there of all of his wonderful hits on his "We Suck '09" tour, ah, so far. And this latest speech before the United Nations and its cast of villainous characters -- it was really a Legion of Doom parade that he dignified with his presence -- and he solidified his place in the international view as the Great Appeaser and the Groveler in Chief!
Hannity finds it "almost shocking" that "Obama was saying we're not going to force our values on you." Malkin correctly calls this "a rejection of American exceptionalism" -- as though that were a bad thing. Maybe that's one of the differences between movement conservatives and sane people: The latter do not harbor megalomaniacal visions of American power ruling the world and forcing our values on other nations.
Ah, but we liberals are so naive, Malkin says, because "hatred of America is never going to go away" -- which is probably true. On the other hand, policies that arrogantly inflame and deepen that hatred are not, you know, really in our best interests.
And then Malkin finishes with a flourish:
Malkin: With this speech, and over the last eight months with his policies of retreat and surrender, he has solidified his place as the weakest of weak leaders of modern American history. There's no question about it! They laugh at us! He is a laughingstock.
There she goes, projecting again.
At some point, you have to wonder whether these people understand that the angrier and more venomous and more hateful they become, the more disempowered they become? Because the only people who are going to be convinced by this kind of nastiness are already True Believers. And even some of them may take pause at how bottomless is the pit from which this stuff crawls.
Glenn Beck has intimated previously that President Obama wants to destroy you -- after all, who could forget the time he doused another Fox weenie with "gasoline" and then held a match in his vicinity, saying he was Obama?
He did it again last night, by way of explaining why he said he thought John McCain would have been worse than Obama. He put out a pot of boiling water, playing off the old scenario about boiled frogs, and how they can't tell they're in lethally hot water until it's too late if you turn the heat up slowly. That, he argues, is what has been happening to us, and McCain just would have continued the process.
Beck thinks what Obama is actually doing is turning the heat up all at once and then tossing the frogs (that is, the American people) in. So he grabbed a supposedly live frog and tossed it into the water. (Later, he had John Bolton declare that it was actually a fake rubber frog.) Gosh, he says, he was hoping the frog would jump out.
It really is amazing to think how far and how fast Beck has pushed the envelope of acceptable rhetoric for the American Right. I remember when Alan Keyes declared Obama "a radical communist," everyone laughed and shrugged and took it as another sign of just how far out to lunch Keyes really is. But Beck -- who really does increasingly resemble the lunatic who talks to himself on the streetcorner, except that he has a media megaphone and millions of dollars -- can say this stuff now and it scarcely raises a ripple.
Dobbs's irresponsible brand of journalism besmirches the credibility of an organization like CNN. Which means that it needs to choose between preserving its fast-eroding integrity, or sacrificing it on the altar of Dobbs' ego.
America's Voice is stepping up its campaign to have Dobbs removed this week with a series of ads and other measures intended to increase the public pressure on CNN's executives to act.
Dobb's mainstreaming of extremist beliefs and provably false "facts" simply cannot go on if CNN wants to be considered a responsible mainstream news organization:
White nationalist conspiracy theories flow seamlessly from vigilantes and extremist web sites to Dobbs and back again. Watch just a couple of episodes and you'll see how he throws around the term "criminal illegal aliens" with the spite and frequency of a mid-century Southern politician using the N-word. In Dobbs’ world, immigrants are disease ridden criminals who kill cops and are plotting for revolution. Bogus claims that immigrants are bringing a new wave of leprosy to America might be taken with a grain of salt on Fox - but on CNN, it’s news.
Perhaps to quell the criticism, CNN is airing a new mini-series in October called, "Latino in America." The network is in heavy promotion mode, sending the show's host, Soledad O'Brien, around the country to drum up interest.
Yeah, well, nice PR segments never quite wash the bad taste out of your mouth after having to swallow Dobbs' nightly broadcasts of immigrant-bashing.
The movement to challenge CNN to drop Lou Dobbs Tonight is growing. Dozens of local and national advocacy organizations are standing together to take the fight to CNN. Media Matters with DropDobbs.org, Presente.org and dozens of Latino groups with BastaDobbs.org, and Democracia Ahora with TellCNNEnoughisEnough, have all launched excellent campaigns against Dobbs. And groups like the National Council of La Raza have chronicled Dobbs’ extremism through websites like WeCanStopTheHate.org.
Our new campaign to get Dobbs off the air will hit CNN both on the air and online. In addition to the TV ad, we’re running online ads and targeted ads on Face Book. You probably won’t see them unless you work for CNN or Turner – we’re asking Anderson Cooper, Soledad O’Brien, Wolf Blitzer and others how they feel about promoting and enabling Dobbs and his unrelenting campaign of immigrant bashing.
The real question is, what else does Dobbs have to do to get fired? He called Rep. Joe Wilson's outburst a "public service," perpetuated the birther conspiracy, has congratulated the Minutemen, and just last week was honored by the anti-immigrant group FAIR - designated a Hate Group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
It's time that CNN executives and the other "talent" at CNN deport Dobbs to Fox or talk radio where he belongs. He doesn't deserve the CNN seal of approval. Until CNN deals with its Lou Dobbs problem, any attempt to reach out to Latino audiences will be pure hypocrisy.
Max Blumenthal went on Morning Joe today to debate the nature of the unhinged rhetoric and behavior that's becoming part and parcel of the right-wing response to Obama's presidency.
Joe Scarborough often talks a good game about realizing what a huge mistake it is for Republicans to allow themselves to be dragged over the cliff like this, but like David Brooks, he has yet to come to grips with the dimension of the beast he's up against. Max tried to set him straight, but as you can see, this is a very slow process for recovering movement conservatives.
Both Joe and Mike disputed some of Max's facts, and as promised he's posted the substantiation for those facts at his blog. Yes, it's true that Jim DeMint believes that neither single pregnant women nor gays and lesbians -- moral reprobates all, apparently -- should be allowed to teach in public schools.
P.S. Northwest readers, take note: Max will be appearing at Town Hall in Seattle on Thursday, Sept. 24, at 7:30 p.m., to promote Republican Gomorrah. He's also scheduled to appear at Powell's Books on Monday, Sept. 28, at 7:30 p.m.
Rachel Maddow featured a hilarious bit from this weekend's "Values Voters Summit" in Missouri, featuring a fellow named Mike Schwartz, who is Republican Sen. Tom Coburn's chief of staff. Matt Corley at ThinkProgress actually had this first (and deserves credit from those who later make use of it -- ahem!), and has the transcript too:
SCHWARTZ: But it is my observation that boys at that age have less tolerance for homosexuality than just about any other class of people. They speak badly about homosexuality. And that’s because they don’t want to be that way. They don’t want to fall into it. And that’s a good instinct. After all, homosexuality, we know, studies have been done by the National Institute of Health to try to prove that its genetic and all those studies have proved its not genetic. Homosexuality is inflicted on people.
How does Schwartz know this? Well, a friend of his was once tragically caught up in "the homosexual lifestyle":
SCHWARTZ: And one of the things that he said to me, that I think is an astonishingly insightful remark. He said, “all pornography is homosexual pornography because all pornography turns your sexual drive inwards. Now think about that. And if you, if you tell an 11-year-old boy about that, do you think he’s going to want to go out and get a copy of Playboy? I’m pretty sure he’ll lose interest. That’s the last thing he wants." You know, that’s a, that’s a good comment. It’s a good point and it’s a good thing to teach young people.
You can't make this stuff up. This is a truly special level of stupid we are reaching here in America.
It was somewhat gratifying to see Chris Matthews' right-leaning panel on his Sunday show -- which was, as expected, eager to deny the role of racism in the ugly animus that's been directed at Barack Obama -- at least admit the truth:
David Brooks: What Rush and Glenn Beck are doing is race-baiting. 100 percent. That's race-baiting.
...
Kathleen Parker: What Rush Limbaugh and Beck did in those two clips is to empower racists.
But it was even more interesting to watch Brooks in particular somehow manage to stumble upon the core of the problem:
Matthews: Would the White House like the leaders of both parties to say, 'Cool it'?
Brooks: Well, I think they would. First, I think Father Coughlin was objecting to FDR, and he -- that's what we're seeing, Father Coughlin, that's what these guys are --
Matthews: And he was far right.
Brooks: He was far right. The White House understands, you've got 10 percent of the country over here on the wacky right, 10 percent on the wacky left, that's not what they can pay attention to. And they're not going to pay attention to it. They're sticking with the independents -- that's what the health care, why it's tending toward the center.
The one danger -- the main danger of all this, the Glenn and the Rush and all that -- they're not going to take over the country. But they are taking over the Republican Party.
And so if the Republican Party is sane, they will say no to these people. But every single elected leader in the Republican Party is afraid to take on Rush and Glenn Beck.
Brooks' percentages are off -- it's more like about 5 percent on the left and 30 percent on the right side, and this latter fact is actually what he identifies as the problem; the right has been so overwhelmed by its wingnutty elements that they have largely taken over the GOP at this juncture in time. And there's no prospect of the David Brookses ever getting it back -- in no small part because they refuse to acknowledge the magnitude of what they're up against.
But at least they recognize the problem. That's a start.
Chris Matthews decided to take seriously Nancy Pelosi's choked-up discussion of concern about the violent undertone of recent right-wing rhetoric -- which of course has the right-wing a-holosphere chortling in blithe dismissal -- on Hardball earlier this week. So he brought on author Gerald Posner and the SPLC's Mark Potok to talk about it.
It prompted an interesting discussion about the relationship between the wild rantings of right-wing talkers and the ugliness that is manifesting itself on the street in our discourse -- especially now that we have right-wing nutcases who attend churches where the preacher tells them killing Obama would not be murder showing up at presidential rallies with AR-15s.
MATTHEWS: ... The question here is very serious. What is it in the atmosphere that allows a person to feel comfortable showing up at a political event carrying a gun, in some cases two guns, and letting people know they're armed? What is it in the atmosphere that lets a person bring a sign that compares the president of the United States to an animal or to a Nazi? What is it makes them feel comfortable doing that kind of crap in public? I wonder if it isn't the atmosphere of language that's being used today. Your thoughts, sir, Mark.
MARK POTOK, SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER: I think it is the atmosphere, the language that's being sort of ejected into the atmosphere, I think that, you know, what we're hearing, in particular from our—quote, unquote—“leaders,” from both political leaders and commentators.
I mean, you know, yesterday Rush Limbaugh was on the air talking about an incident in which black kids attacked a white kid on a school bus, an incident that police said was not racially motivated, and saying that what we need are segregated buses, that this is the only way, I suppose, that white people can be protected from black people.
I think when we have characters like Limbaugh saying that on the air to millions of Americans, many of whom actually revere the man, you know, it's not surprising that people feel that, you know, the race war is around the corner and that we're allowed to say these kinds of things.
...
GERALD POSNER: ... Chris, you have hit the nail on the head. It's a license that allows somebody who's on the edge to cross the edge from thinking about acting out to actually crossing the line and being violent and thinking they can change history with a single bullet. And we have shown time and time again that that's possible.
It's not simply the overt threat to the well-being of the president that's important here. There's also the threatening nature of packing heat openly at a public meeting where the presence of guns is highly likely to be interpreted by your fellow citizens as an implied threat to their well-being should they happen to disagree. That is, they not only threaten the president, these guns intimidate and silence your fellow citizens.
The flip side of this was Glenn Beck, responding also to Pelosi's remarks, and insisting that we pay it no mind, because the people she's concerned about are just crazy, and there's nothing we can do about them.
Beck: Look -- Timothy McVeigh -- nutjob! Nutjob! On the fringe of the right! That, President Clinton tried to blame on Rush Limbaugh. It was ridiculous then, and it's ridiculous now. Harvey Milk -- killed by a guy who was hepped up on Twinkies. It was ridiculous then -- it's ridiculous now. The shooter -- and Timothy McVeigh -- crazy people! It's madness.
When panicky centrists aren't willing to draw an unbroken line from peaceful conservatives to the violent fringe, they posit a somewhat subtler link. The killers, they acknowledge, aren't taking their marching orders directly from Fox News and AM radio. But by giving serious attention to theories associated with the fringe right—that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is preparing concentration camps, that Barack Obama is not a natural-born U.S. citizen—Glenn Beck and other broadcasters are validating the grievances of potential killers, giving them the impression that they aren't alone. This validation is buttressed by the sweeping, sometimes violent rhetoric about "liberals" that you hear from partisan celebrities, such as Ann Coulter's joke that McVeigh should have blown up the New York Times building instead. In The Eliminationists and on his blog, David Neiwert tries to establish a chain linking "eliminationist" behavior in American history (lynchings of blacks and Asians, the slaughter of American Indians), eliminationist rhetoric on the mainstream right (the Coulter wisecrack), and von Brunn–style efforts to eliminate people directly.
The theory is interesting, but it has two enormous problems. The first is that it ignores the autonomy of people on the fringe. Not just the radicals who commit the crimes, but the radicals who don't commit crimes. There's a complex ecology at work here, one demonstrated most clearly in those cases when militiamen alerted authorities to terrorist plots in their midst. Words have influence, but they influence different people in different ways; you can't reduce media effects to simple push-pull reactions. Accusing Glenn Beck or Bill O'Reilly of validating right-wing violence isn't so different from accusing pornography of validating rape, Ozzy Osbourne of validating teen suicide, or Marilyn Manson of validating school massacres.
Actually, it is quite different from that. Because what The Eliminationists describes is not artistic expression or mere point of view, but rather ideological exhortation -- rhetoric specifically intended to inspire both belief and action. The former has only a tenuous causal connection at best, while the latter has a long and well-established causal connection to violent behavior.
Surely Walker doesn't believe for a minute that radical anti-Israeli speech emanating from Hamas has no connection to the suicide bombers who board buses in Tel Aviv. It's hard to imagine anyone not acknowledging that radical Jihadist anti-American speech doesn't inspire Al Qaeda's acts of terrorism. Nor even that the Ku Klux Klan race baiters of the '20s and '30s didn't help inspire various acts of lynching and "race rioting".
Accusing Beck and O'Reilly of validating right-wing violence isn't like connecting Marilyn Manson to Columbine -- which is to say, connecting something that only tenuously could be said to actually inspire or advocate violence. It's much more like connecting radical imams to 9/11.
Ideologues who inspire violent action through radicalizing propaganda have been with us for many decades, even centuries. The fact that, in recent years, the more action-prone of the people who violently respond to these exhortations are increasingly confined to the fringes of American politics doesn't mean there isn't still serious culpability on the part of those who indulge rhetoric that winds up unhinging people.
I frequently use the case of David Lewis Rice to explain and illustrate this point:
On Christmas Eve 1985, Charles and Annie Goldmark were at home with their sons Derek, 12, and Colin, 10, preparing for a holiday dinner when the doorbell rang. It was Rice, a 27-year-old unemployed transient, posing as a taxicab driver delivering a package. He brandished a toy gun and forced his way into their home, then set about using chloroform to render all four Goldmarks unconscious. He then proceeded to kill them slowly, using a steam iron and a knife that he used to insert into at least one of the victim's brains. Annie was pronounced dead on the spot, Colin pronounced dead on arrival, while Charles died there a short while later; Derek finally succumbed 37 days later.
But Rice wasn't just a deranged loony -- though he probably fit that description too. He also was a deranged loony who had been set into action by the malicious lies of a group of right-wing haters, whose venom became his inspiration ...
Ed Fasel [fictitious name] was head of the local Duck Club chapter. It was from Ed that Rice received the tragic misinformation that Charles and Annie Goldmark were leading Seattle Communists. In the course of discussions concerning local subversives and crooks who were presumably frustrating Rice's efforts to secure a job, Fasel, mistaking Charles for his father John, related to Rice that the Goldmarks had been investigated and that Charles was "regional director of the American Communist Party." Rice took this to mean that Charles was the "highest obtainable target I could reach, the greatest value informationally." After handcuffing the Goldmarks, Rice intended to interrogate them about the next person in the conspiratorial hierarchy, possibly to preempt at the last moment the impending invasion of alien troops [a conspiracy theory to which Rice subscribed].
What occasioned Fasel to dredge up a name associated with an event that had occurred two decades previously in another part of the state? In a Seattle Port Commission election during the summer of 1985, one of the candidates was Jim Wright, a Republican. Wright's campaign manager was none other than Ashley Holden, a defendant in the Goldmark trial. [Holden had been a leading torchbearer in the McCarthyite "Red fever" that swept Washington state in the late 1940s and '50s, and had been one of the people who falsely accused the Goldmarks in print of being part of the Communist Party.] Upon discovering this unusual link, the Seattle media jumped on it, and the name "Goldmark," with its unfortunate connotations, "got out again," to use one informant's phrase.
In my interview with him, Holden convincingly insisted that he knew nothing of the Duck Club nor any of its members. "I deplored the murder," he said. "There is no question," he went on, parroting local wisdom, "Rice was demented."
Now, did "Fasel" or any of his cohorts have criminal or even civil liability in this matter? Almost certainly not.
But did they have the blood of the Goldmark family on their hands? Most of us would judge that they did indeed.
That is to say, there was a level of moral and ethical culpability involved in the irresponsible speech that inspired David Lewis Rice. When you fill an unstable person's head with a pack of crazy ideas that inspire them to act out violently, there are social and economic consequences that deservedly ensue.
The critical components that distinguish irresponsible free speech from responsible are interworking pieces: whether it is intended to harm by scapegoating or demonizing, and whether or not it is provably false. In the Goldmark case, the things the Duck Club told Rice not only demonized the Goldmarks, but they were also things that were simply not true -- though the tellers wished ardently that they were, they were purely concoctions of their fevered imaginations.
This is true of so much far-right wingnuttery -- the "Birther" conspiracy theories, the FEMA-camp claims, the "constitutionalist" theories about taxation and the Federal Reserve, to list just a few examples -- and yet people believe them anyway.
This rhetoric also acts as a kind of wedge between the people who absorb it and the real world. There is always a kind of cognitive dissonance that arises from believing things that are provably untrue, and people who begin to fanatically cling to beliefs that do not comport with reality find themselves increasingly willing to buy into other similarly unhinged beliefs. For those who are already unhinged, the effects are particularly toxic.
All of these theories, you'll observe, serve the explicit purpose of supporting a scapegoating narrative. And a number of them have been featured in some shape, form, or fashion, in the mainstream public discourse because they have been presented seriously for discussion by various right-wing talking heads, most notably Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs.
Part of the problem is that we actually have seen this happen time after time after time: A mentally unstable person is inspired by hateful right-wing rhetoric to act out violently -- and yet because of that mental state, the matter is dismissed as idiosyncratic, just another "isolated incident." And over the months and years, these "isolated incidents" mount one after another.
But simply ascribing these acts to mental illness is a cop-out. It fails to account for the gross irresponsibility of the people who employed the rhetoric that inspired the violent action in the first place, and their resulting moral culpability.
This is a familiar refrain that comes up every time anyone raises a socially damning issue like this one: We're trying to oppress them, to silence their voices, by pointing out how morally and ethically bankrupt they are.
Actually, we're just pointing out how bankrupt they are. No one here has said anything about silencing their voices -- we just want them to face up to the consequences of their irresponsible rhetoric. It's called culpability: They obviously are not criminally culpable, nor likely even civilly culpable. But they are morally and ethically culpable.
We do have serious differences of opinion here. We strongly believe that there's a clear, common-sense connection between the paranoiac fearmongering that has passed for right-wing rhetoric since well before Obama's election (and has become acute since) and violence like that in Pittsburgh, or in Knoxville: horrifying tragedies, in which the sources of the criminal's unambiguous motives are that very same hysterical fearmongering -- whether it's about the evil socialists, stinking immigrants, or conspiring gun-grabbers who've taken over the country since Election Day.
... The point is not to silence the people saying these things, but to point out how grotesquely irresponsible they are -- in the hopes that they will cease doing so, and start acting responsibly. It's their choice to use irresponsible rhetoric. It's not just our choice but our duty, as responsible citizens, to stand up and speak out about it.
And make no mistake: Rhetoric that whips up irrational fears among the public, that demonizes and dehumanizes and scapegoats -- that's irresponsible rhetoric. And we are calling the American Right on it.
In this country we cherish and guard the right of free speech. We know we love it when we put up with people saying things we absolutely deplore. And we must always be willing to defend their right to say things we deplore to the ultimate degree. But we hear so many loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other. They spread hate. They leave the impression that, by their very words, that violence is acceptable. You ought to see -- I'm sure you are now seeing the reports of some things that are regularly said over the airwaves in America today.
Well, people like that who want to share our freedoms must know that their bitter words can have consequences and that freedom has endured in this country for more than two centuries because it was coupled with an enormous sense of responsibility on the part of the American people.
If we are to have freedom to speak, freedom to assemble, and, yes, the freedom to bear arms, we must have responsibility as well. And to those of us who do not agree with the purveyors of hatred and division, with the promoters of paranoia, I remind you that we have freedom of speech, too, and we have responsibilities, too. And some of us have not discharged our responsibilities. It is time we all stood up and spoke against that kind of reckless speech and behavior.
If they insist on being irresponsible with our common liberties, then we must be all the more responsible with our liberties. When they talk of hatred, we must stand against them. When they talk of violence, we must stand against them. When they say things that are irresponsible, that may have egregious consequences, we must call them on it. The exercise of their freedom of speech makes our silence all the more unforgivable. So exercise yours, my fellow Americans. Our country, our future, our way of life is at stake.
Of course, the right-wingers mewled piteously after Clinton gave that speech, too. They claimed he was trying to silence them, when in fact he was quite explicit about not doing that. Nonetheless, it became part of established right-wing lore that "Clinton blamed Rush Limbaugh for Oklahoma City."
Because we believe in freedom of speech and freedom of thought, there will probably always be haters like Richard Poplawski among us. Inevitably they will be driven by fear: the fear of difference. Because to them, difference of any kind is a threat.
And what we know from experience about volatile, unstable actors like them is that they can be readily induced into violent action by hateful rhetoric that demonizes and dehumanizes other people. And thanks to human nature and those same freedoms, we will certainly always have fearmongering demagogues among us. But the purveyors of such profoundly irresponsible rhetoric need to be called on it -- especially when they hold the nation's media megaphones.
That was as true in 1995 as it is now. Which brings us to the second part of Jesse Walker's critique:
The second problem is the implicit version of history. Neiwert has uncritically embraced the idea that the militia movement began in 1992, so it's easy for him to imagine a progression from the old lynch mobs to the right-wing '80s underground to the '90s militias to Republicans who tolerate militia-style arguments. But if Churchill is right about the origins of the militia movement, the original eliminationists might have a different, more dangerous set of descendants.
I'm not sure what in the hell Walker is talking about here. Nowhere have I suggested that the militia movement began in 1992. And I haven't uncritically embraced anyone's theories about their origins. After all, I was there and reported on them at the time. I've been reporting on them since.
Walker seems oblivious to the fact that my first published book was a study of the "Patriot" movement of the 1990s from a Northwestern perspective, titled In God's Country. It was published by a small academic press, so I can't blame him if he hasn't read it. But a little research would have revealed to him that the book is based on my on-the-ground reportage involving the extremist right in the Northwest dating back to the 1970s and picking up in the early '90s.
I come by my conclusions honestly -- that is, through firsthand experience as a journalist. I covered the Montana Freemen standoff and subsequent federal trials, as well as the activities (and ultimately federal court trials) of militia activists in western Washington, northern Idaho and eastern Oregon as well. I interviewed numerous militia leaders and even more of their followers, and I dug through the extant sociological research to understand better what made them tick.
What I can tell you is what I laid out in the book, with the full body of evidence: that the militias were actually an outgrowth of the larger "Christian Patriot" movement that became an umbrella term for the American extremist right in the mid-1980s. The militias were seen as a means to recruit new believers from the mainstream, by appealing to their "libertarian" ideals and their fears about guns and government power.
This shift was best recorded by Aho in his seminal text The Politics of Righteousness: Idaho Christian Patriotism, which was published in 1990. It contains the first real dataset of information about this segment of the American Right. It describes, on page 10, the "Christian Patriot" organization calling itself the Oregon Militia. So the concept of Patriots forming militia cells certainly predated 1992.
Now, did the militias' recruitment efforts -- their attempt to mainstream themselves -- entail the very sort of appeals that Robert Churchill describes? Certainly. But the far-right bloc that now calls itself the Patriots have always tailored their appeals in such fashion. They are nothing if not adaptable.
I've only just picked up Mr. Churchill's book, but here's my impression from my initial cursory glance: It's written from the perspective of someone who wasn't there, and is more interested in promoting a provocative thesis than digging to get to the whole truth. Churchill, for instance, devotes a great deal of time to the work and writing of Mike Vanderboegh, who made great show of trying to drive out the racists from the militia movement. But Vanderboegh had virtually no influence within the movement and was generally shunned by "real" Patriots. Yet at the same time, Churchill makes no mention whatsoever of Col. James "Bo" Gritz, who was a major figure in the movement and one of its important figureheads.
The Gritz example is instructive: I interviewed him on multiple occasions, and inevitably tried to get him to discuss the rumors that he was involved in Christian Identity, the white-supremacist religious movement which stipulates that Caucasians are the true children of Israel, and that Jews are Satanic and non-whites soulless brutes. Gritz was almost always evasive on this count, even though it was well known that he'd had a significant falling-out with Identity leader Pete Peters over the latter's insistence on the death penalty for homosexuals. But what he did tell me, on more than one occasion, was that politically, he identified with libertarians (and particularly Ron Paul).
Later, it emerged that Gritz was indeed deeply enmeshed in the Identity movement. He's now fairly public about it, having married the daughter of one of Identity's more prominent preachers.
This is fairly typical of the Patriot movement in general and its "militia" components specifically: They love to present a normative front that is non-threatening and whose deep radicalism is not immediately apparent. But eventually the real agenda emerges.
It's important to understand that these folks in fact see themselves as residing outside the mainstream. They embrace their radicalism and are proud of it, make wry jokes about it. To the far right, even Fox News is part of the "liberal media" establishment that doesn't dare tell the whole real truth about the nefarious Jewish cabal that really runs America.
So when they see someone like Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck or Lou Dobbs repeating for a mass national audience things they believed were only understood by people like themselves, it has not only a powerfully validating effect, but even moreso a permission-giving one. Just as hate-crime perpetrators believe they are acting on the secret wishes of their larger communities, violent extremists have a need to believe that they are acting heroically, on behalf of their nation or their "people". Mainstream validation tells them they are supported.
MATTHEWS: Let me ask you -- let me ask Mark of the Southern Poverty Law Center, let me ask you this thing here of the South. What is it about the cause—we used to hear the phrase the cause for the people who didn't like what happened in the Civil War afterwards. They thought they lost the war they should have won.
This attitude about how you got to carry—I heard a guy talking the other day in front of the Lee Mansion about you got to keep the battle going, the battle, showing up at these rallies in Washington against Obama.
What is the battle out there that's being fought by the right, especially in the South? What is this? What is this thing out there?
POTOK: Well, I think—I think, in the South, it's a very particular form of white nationalism. I mean, you know, there are a great many people down here who truly believe that the war had nothing to do with slavery, the Civil War, you know, that it was about tariffs or the North imposing an industrial system on the South or any one of any number of other things.
You know, this is very much alive in the minds of a lot of people down here, including academics in many cases. So, you know, all of this rhetoric, all of these ideas have consequences.
I mean, I think it's worth saying, overall, when we talk about the subject, that, you know, hate criminals, people who go out and murder people who don't look like them, are not typically people who think of themselves as criminal thugs.
They are very typically people who think that they are acting on the wishes of the community. They are the brave young men standing up to defend their community.
So, you know, when you have a Limbaugh or other public figures saying Obama's a racist, he has a hatred for white people, as Glenn Beck said on FOX News the other day, you know, there are some people out there, some small sliver of the population, who feel, you know, what the brave young warriors ought to do is go out there and defend the white race, and that may very well mean taking a shot at the president.
MATTHEWS: Well, I thank you both for joining us on this terrible subject.
... By the way, I think that everybody who does these horrible crimes in history does so thinking that, somewhere, there will be warmth for him; somewhere in the country or in the world, there will be people who will respect and love him for what he did. That thought is frightening.
And all the more frightening for being hard, cold reality. No matter how ardently the American Right would like to whitewash it all away.
