Justin's Political Corner

In her latest column, Ann Coulter laments the 1965 immigration bill that ended a racist quota system which favored immigrants from northern and western Europe. She said that “Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 Immigration Act was designed to boost the number of immigrants from the Third World,” and now “we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel by holding ourselves out as the welfare ward of the world.”

Just in case it wasn’t clear already, Coulter is talking about Latino immigrants, warning that the “Gang of 8” immigration reform bill will “turn the country into Mexico” and expand the welfare state.

“Was there a vote when the country decided to turn itself into Mexico?” Coulter asked, arguing that if “Rubio’s amnesty goes through, the Republican Party is finished.”

h/t: Right Wing Watch

Racism has been a consistent thread weaving through the American Right from the early days when Anti-Federalists battled against the U.S. Constitution to the present when hysterical Tea Partiers denounce the first African-American president. Other factors have come and gone for the Right, but racism has always been there.

Though definitions of Right and Left are never precise, the Left has generally been defined, in the American context, by government actions – mostly the federal government responding to popular movements and representing the collective will of the American people – seeking to improve the lot of common citizens and to reduce social injustice.

The Right has been defined by opposition to such government activism. Since the Founding, the Right has decried government interference with the “free market” and intrusion upon “traditions,” like slavery and segregation, as “tyranny” or “socialism.”

This argument goes back to 1787 and opposition to the Constitution’s centralizing of government power in the hands of federal authorities. In Virginia, for instance, the Anti-Federalists feared that a strong federal government eventually would outlaw slavery in the Southern states.

Ironically, this argument was raised by two of the most famous voices for “liberty,” Patrick Henry and George Mason. Those two Virginians spearheaded the Anti-Federalist cause at the state’s ratifying convention in June 1788, urging rejection of the Constitution because, they argued, it would lead to slavery’s demise.

The irony of Henry and Mason scaring fellow Virginians about the Constitution’s threat to slavery is that the two men have gone down in popular U.S. history as great espousers of freedom. Before the Revolution, Henry was quoted as declaring, “Give me liberty or give me death!” Mason is hailed as a leading force behind the Bill of Rights. However, their notion of “liberty” and “rights” was always selective. Henry and Mason worried about protecting the “freedom” of plantation owners to possess other human beings as property.

At Virginia’s Ratification Convention, Henry and Mason raised other arguments against the proposed Constitution, such as concerns that Virginia’s preeminence might not be as great as under the weak Articles of Confederation and that population gains in the North might erode Virginia’s economic welfare.

But the pair’s most potent argument was the danger they foresaw regarding the abolition of slavery. As historians Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg wrote in their 2010 book, Madison and Jefferson, the hot button for Henry and Mason was that “slavery, the source of Virginia’s tremendous wealth, lay politically unprotected.”

The Slavery Card

At the center of this fear was the state’s loss of ultimate control over its militia which could be “federalized” by the President as the nation’s commander in chief under the new Constitution.

“Mason repeated what he had said during the Constitutional Convention: that the new government failed to provide for ‘domestic safety’ if there was no explicit protection for Virginians’ slave property,” Burstein and Isenberg wrote. “Henry called up the by-now-ingrained fear of slave insurrections – the direct result, he believed, of Virginia’s loss of authority over its own militia.”

Henry floated conspiracy theories about possible subterfuges that the federal government might employ to deny Virginians and other Southerners the “liberty” to own African-Americans. Describing this fear-mongering, Burstein and Isenberg wrote:

“Congress, if it wished, could draft every slave into the military and liberate them at the end of their service. If troop quotas were determined by population, and Virginia had over 200,000 slaves, Congress might say: ‘Every black man must fight.’ For that matter, a northern-controlled Congress might tax slavery out of existence.

“Mason and Henry both ignored the fact that the Constitution protected slavery on the strength of the three-fifths clause, the fugitive slave clause, and the slave trade clause. Their rationale was that none of this mattered if the North should have its way.”

At Philadelphia in 1787, the drafters of the Constitution had already capitulated to the South’s insistence on its brutal institution of human enslavement. That surrender became the line of defense that James Madison, a principal architect of the new governing structure, cited in his response to Mason and Henry.

Burstein and Isenberg wrote, “Madison rose to reject their conspiratorial view. He argued that the central government had no power to order emancipation, and that Congress would never ‘alienate the affections five-thirteenths of the Union’ by stripping southerners of their property. ‘Such an idea never entered into any American breast,’ he said indignantly, ‘nor do I believe it ever will.’

“Madison was doing his best to make Henry and Mason sound like fear-mongers. Yet Mason struck a chord in his insistence that northerners could never understand slavery; and Henry roused the crowd with his refusal to trust ‘any man on earth’ with his rights. Virginians were hearing that their sovereignty was in jeopardy.”

Despite the success of Mason and Henry to play on the fears of plantation owners, the broader arguments stressing the advantages of Union carried the day, albeit narrowly. Virginia ultimately approved ratification by 89 to 79. However, the South’s obsession over perceived threats to its institution of slavery remained a central factor in the early decades of the Republic.

Arming Whites

Though today’s Right pretends that the Second Amendment was devised to give individual Americans the right to own and carry any weapon of their choice – so they can shoot policemen, soldiers and other government representatives in the cause of anti-government “liberty” – it was primarily a concession to the states and especially to the South’s fears that were expressed at the Virginia convention.

Approved by the First Congress as part of the “Bill of Rights,” the Second Amendment explained its purpose as the need to maintain “the security of a free State,” an echo of Mason’s concerns about “domestic safety,” i.e. a Southern state’s ability to maintain slavery by force and defend against slave uprisings.

Jeffersonian Influences

Of course, slavery and racism were not the only defining characteristics of the Right during the country’s early years, as economic interests diverged and political rivalries surfaced. James Madison, for instance, had been a key protégé of George Washington and an ally of Alexander Hamilton during the fight for the Constitution.

Madison had even advocated for a greater concentration of power in the federal government, including giving Congress the explicit power to veto state laws. However, after the Constitution was in place, Madison began siding with his Virginian neighbor (and fellow slave-owner) Thomas Jefferson in political opposition to the Federalists.

In the first years of the constitutional Republic, the Federalists, led by President Washington and Treasury Secretary Hamilton, pushed the limits of federal power, particularly with Hamilton’s idea of a national bank which was seen as favoring the financial interests of the North to the detriment of the more agrarian South.

The Jeffersonians, coalescing around Jefferson and Madison, fiercely opposed Hamilton’s national economic planning though the differences often seemed to be driven by personal animosities and regional rivalries as much as by any grand ideological vision regarding government authority. The Jeffersonians, for instance, were sympathetic to the bloody French Revolution, which made a mockery of the rule of law and the restraint of government power.

Nevertheless, history has generally been kind to Jefferson’s enthusiasm for a more agrarian America and his supposed commitment to the common man. But what is left out of this praise for “Jeffersonian democracy” is that Jefferson’s use of the word “farmers” was often a euphemism for his actual political base, the slave-owning plantation aristocrats of the South.

At his core, despite his intellectual brilliance, Jefferson was just another Southern hypocrite. He wrote that “all men are created equal” (in the Declaration of Independence) but he engaged in pseudo-science to portray African-Americans as inferior to whites (as he did in his Notes on the State of Virginia).

His racism rationalized his own economic and personal reliance on slavery. While desperately afraid of slave rebellions, he is alleged to have taken a young slave girl, Sally Hemings, as a mistress.

Jefferson’s hypocrisy also surfaced in his attitudes toward a slave revolt in the French colony of St. Domingue, where African slaves took seriously the Jacobins’ cry of “liberty, equality and fraternity.” After their demands for freedom were rebuffed and the brutal French plantation system continued, violent slave uprisings followed. Hundreds of white plantation owners were slain as the rebels overran the colony. A self-educated slave named Toussaint L’Ouverture emerged as the revolution’s leader, demonstrating skills on the battlefield and in the complexities of politics.

Stopping Napoléon

In 1802, the French expeditionary force achieved initial success against the slave army, driving L’Ouverture’s forces back into the mountains. But, as they retreated, the ex-slaves torched the cities and the plantations, destroying the colony’s once-thriving economic infrastructure. L’Ouverture, hoping to bring the war to an end, accepted Napoléon’s promise of a negotiated settlement that would ban future slavery in the country. As part of the agreement, L’Ouverture turned himself in.

But Napoléon broke his word. Jealous and contemptuous of L’Ouverture, who was regarded by some admirers as a general with skills rivaling Napoléon’s, the French dictator had L’Ouverture shipped in chains back to Europe where he was mistreated and died in prison.

Infuriated by the betrayal, L’Ouverture’s young generals resumed the war with a vengeance. In the months that followed, the French army – already decimated by disease – was overwhelmed by a fierce enemy fighting in familiar terrain and determined not to be put back into slavery. Napoléon sent a second French army, but it too was destroyed. Though the famed general had conquered much of Europe, he lost 24,000 men, including some of his best troops, in St. Domingue before abandoning his campaign. The death toll among the ex-slaves was much higher, but they had prevailed, albeit over a devastated land.

By 1803, a frustrated Napoléon – denied his foothold in the New World – agreed to sell New Orleans and the Louisiana territories to Jefferson, a negotiation handled by Madison that ironically required just the sort of expansive interpretation of federal powers that the Jeffersonians ordinarily disdained. However, a greater irony was that the Louisiana Purchase, which opened the heart of the present United States to American settlement and is regarded as possibly Jefferson’s greatest achievement as president, had been made possible despite Jefferson’s misguided – and racist – collaboration with Napoléon.

“By their long and bitter struggle for independence, St. Domingue’s blacks were instrumental in allowing the United States to more than double the size of its territory,” wrote Stanford University professor John Chester Miller in his book, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery. But, Miller observed, “the decisive contribution made by the black freedom fighters … went almost unnoticed by the Jeffersonian administration.”

Consequences of Racism

Without L’Ouverture’s leadership, the island nation fell into a downward spiral. In 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the radical slave leader who had replaced L’Ouverture, formally declared the nation’s independence and returned it to its original Indian name, Haiti. A year later, apparently fearing a return of the French, Dessalines ordered the massacre of the remaining French whites on the island. Jefferson reacted to the bloodshed by imposing a stiff economic embargo on Haiti. In 1806, Dessalines himself was brutally assassinated, touching off a cycle of political violence that would haunt Haiti for the next two centuries.

Even in his final years, Jefferson remained obsessed with Haiti and its link to the issue of American slavery. In the 1820s, the former president proposed a scheme for taking away the children born to black slaves in the United States and shipping them to Haiti. In that way, Jefferson posited that both slavery and America’s black population could be phased out. Eventually, in Jefferson’s view, Haiti would be all black and the United States white.

While the racism of Jefferson and many of his followers may be undeniable, it is not so easy to distinguish between Right and Left in those early years of the American Republic. Though Hamilton was more open-minded toward freedom for black slaves, there were elements of his government intervention on behalf of the fledgling financial sector that might today be regarded as “pro-business” or elitist as there were parts of Jefferson’s attitude toward greater populism that might be seen as more “democratic.”

H/T: AlterNet

The Heritage Foundation’s analysis of the economic consequences of immigration reform uses absurd methodology to come to conclusions entirely at odds with the organization’s own findings in 2006. Perhaps one explanation for this incoherence is that one of the paper’s coauthors, a new hire, opposes Hispanic immigration because he thinks Latinos are stupid.

Jason Richwine joined Heritage in 2010, after finishing his PhD in Public Policy in 2009. The Washington Post’s Dylan Matthews dug up Richwine’s dissertation, which was titled “IQ And Immigration.” In it, Richwine argues that Hispanics have and will always have lower IQs than whites. Matthewssummarizes:

Richwine’s dissertation asserts that there are deep-set differentials in intelligence between races. While it’s clear he thinks it is partly due to genetics — ‘the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in IQ’ — he argues the most important thing is that the differences in group IQs are persistent, for whatever reason. He writes, ‘No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.‘

Richwine concludes from this that American immigration policy should encourage high IQ individuals to immigrate, but limit low IQ immigration: as he puts it, “I believe there is a strong case for IQ selection, since it is theoretically a win-win for the U.S. and potential immigrants.” Since this eugenic language is politically toxic, Richwine advocates dressing it up in the language of “high skill” and “low skill” immigration. As Matthews details, the Heritage report does exactly that.

Richwine is not the only author of the Heritage report with questionable views. Robert Rector, the paper’s lead author, was the source for then candidate Romney’s racially charged attack on President Obama’s welfare policy, and has spent his career dismissing the idea that poverty hurts people. On Tuesday, Rector admitted he hadn’t read the whole immigration bill before coauthoring his analysis of it with Richwine.

H/T: Zack Beauchamp at Think Progress Immigration

On August 5, 2012, just before 10:30 in the morning, Wade Michael Page pulled up outside the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisc., took out his semi-automatic handgun and started killing worshipers. An Army veteran and an avid bass player in a neo-Nazi rock band, Page killed two Sikhs outside the house of worship and then made his way inside. There, he reloaded and killed four more, including the president of the temple who was shot while trying to tackle Page. Three more were critically wounded in the massacre.

When local police descended, Page opened fire and shot one officer nearly ten times. When the authorities returned fire and shot Page in the stomach, he took his 9mm pistol, pointed it at his own head, and pulled the trigger.

According to acquaintances, the 40-year-old killer hated blacks, Indians, Native Americans and Hispanics (he called non-whites “dirt people”), and was interested in joining the Ku Klux Klan. Immersed in the world of white power music, Page’s band rehearsed in front of a Nazi flag.

Note that back in August 2012, Fox News didn’t care very much about Wade Page and the wild gun shootout he unleashed in an act of domestic terror in the Milwaukee suburb, nor did Fox suggest the event was connected to a larger, more sinister terror trend. In fact, in the days that followed the gun massacre, there were just two passing references to Page during Fox’s primetime, one from Bill O’Reilly and one from Greta Van Susteren. No guests were asked to discuss the temple shooting, and after one day the story was completely forgotten.

In one rare occasion when the conversation did turn to Page’s motivations, Fox’s opinion hosts were quick to criticize the notion that he was a far-right extremist. (He clearly was.) On The Five, after co-host Bob Beckel referred to Page as “right-wing skinhead,” he was quickly shouted down by his colleagues. Co-host Andrea Tantaros stressed that the killing was an isolated event that didn’t have any larger implications. “How do you stop a lunatic?” she asked. “This is not a political issue.”

Fox’s guarded response to an extremist’s killing spree was striking, considering that in the wake of the Boston Marathon bomb attack Fox News has gone all in (again) with its war on Islam as the channel fights its latest bigoted chapter in the War on Terror. It’s striking as Fox tries to blame a larger community for the act of two madmen because it’s the same Fox News that often can’t find time to even comment, let alone report, on what’s become regular, and often deadly, right-wing extremist attacks in America.

From neo-Nazi killers like Page, to a string of abortion clinic bombings, as well as bloody assaults on law enforcement from anti-government insurrectionists, acts of right-wing extreme violence continue to terrorize victims in the U.S. (“Fifty-six percent of domestic terrorist attacks and plots in the U.S. since 1995 have been perpetrated by right-wing extremists.”) But Fox News is not concerned. And Fox News does not try to affix collective blame.

It’s clear that Fox is only interested in covering and hyping a single part of the War on Terror; the part that targets Muslims and lets Fox wallow in stereotypes. The part that lets Fox accuse Obama of being “soft” on Islamic terrorists and perhaps sharing a radical allegiance. The part that lets Fox advocate for bugging mosques and eliminating other Constitutional rights, and lets it unleash a collection of anti-Islam crusaders onto the cable airwaves.

Most importantly, Fox covers a War on Terror that lets it uniformly blame Muslims.

Keep in mind though, there’s been no reported evidence that anyone in the Cambridge, Mass., Muslim community knew about, condoned or helped plan the bombing perpetrated by Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. In fact, it’s possible the bomber brothers told nobody of their plan because local Muslims would have reported them to the police, the way a local imam tipped off Canadian officials who made arrests this week and thwarted an alleged rail bombing plot. (And the way local Muslims in Virginia and New York have helped prevent terror plots.)

Fox’s ugly religious attacks represent a brazen display of bigotry and bullying. The hypocrisy is that Fox News routinely downplays acts of political, and religious, violence from far-right extremists, while making sure not to condemn those indirectly associated with them.

Such acts have been legion. During a robust period of political violence last decade, women’s health clinics were attacked in January, May, and September 2003, January and July 2004, January, May, and July 2005, as well as May and December 2007, according to the National Abortion Federation.

Then in 2009, five clinics in Florida were the target of acid attacks.

More recently, two antiabortion firebombings occurred in 2011. And last year a woman’s health clinic in Wisconsin was damaged when a homemade bomb was set off on the building’s windowsill.

Of course, in May 2009, antiabortion extremist Scott Roeder shot and killed Dr. George Tiller while he attended church in Wichita, Kan.

And then there are the right-wing hate extremists who have plotted attacks against the government and minorities. Below is a partial list of attacks, or planned attacks, unleashed by radicals in recent years. The descriptions are taken from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2012 report, “Terror From the Right: Plots, Conspiracies and Racist Rampages Since Oklahoma City.”

h/t: AlterNet

The right-wingers have been in full-on gloat mode since the capture of the Boston Marathon bombers — not because it turned out that they were right about the nature of the perpetrators (they weren’t), but because speculation that they might be right-wing extremists was wrong. Only wingnuts can convert a sigh of relief into an attack on their opponents.

The problem is that all they’re really doing is attempting, yet again, to whitewash away the very real existence of violent extremists on their own side.

Leading the charge is William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection, who published a post over the weekend titled“Add Boston Marathon Bombing to pile of Failed Eliminationist Narratives”:

Yet there was a theory behind the madness, the Eliminationist Narrative created by Dave Neiwart of Crooks and Liars about an “eliminationist” radical right seeking to dehumanize and eliminate political opposition. It was a play on the over-used narrative of Richard Hofstadter’s “paranoid style” in American politics.

The Eliminationist Narrative was aided and abetted by an abuse of the term “right-wing” to include groups who are the opposite of conservatism and the Tea Party movement.

In the case of Sparkman, the accusations were just Another Failed Eliminationist Narrative. And the Eliminationist Narrative would fail time and time again:

James Holmes
Jared Loughner
The Cabby Stabber
The “killer” of Bill Sparkman
Amy Bishop
The Fort Hood Shooter
The IRS Plane Crasher
The Pentagon Shooter

We can now add the Boston Marathon Bombing to the pile. The wild speculation that there was a Tea Party or “right-wing” connection proved false.

Of course, it would always help if people like Jacobson managed to review the posts of the people he’s attacking — since neither I nor anyone at Crooks and Liars ever speculated in print that the perps were white right-wing extremists. Others did, however — and frankly, we discussed it among ourselves. But we knew that it was irresponsible to speculate publicly until we knew more, and so we waited — unlike a few progressives, and even many, many more conservatives. (More about that in a moment.)

The fact, however, is that the speculation about right-wing extremism’s potential role was entirely rational, considering that in the past four years, there have been nearly 70 acts of domestic terrorism committed by right-wing extremists in the United States, compared to just over 30 such acts committed by Islamist extremists here. (I have prepared a report on this that Mother Jones will be publishing soon.)

Trust me on this, Mr. Jacobson, as a person who has attended their gatherings and spent time observing their ideology up close and personally: There is nothing remotely left-wing, or anything other than right wing, about the ideology promoted by people like the Aryan Nations and the Ku Klux Klan and American Renaissance and a whole bevy of other hate groups out there operating in America today. The notion that they are not from the political right is simply risible.

It just depends where on the very real spectrum of right-wing thought each happens to fall. You see, the reason they call these people right wing extremists is that they begin with simple, perhaps even mainstream, conservative positions and extend them to their most outrageous and illogical extreme.

Conservatives are, for instance, skeptical of the power of the federal government to intervene in civil-rights matters; right-wing extremists believe it has no such power whatsoever, but it has been usurped by a Jewish conspiracy that is imposing its will on white people.

Conservatives are skeptical of internationalism and entities like the United Nations. Right-wing extremists believe the U.N. represents a diabolical plot to overthrow American sovereignty and impose totalitarian rule.

Conservatives believe that abortion is murder of a living being and oppose its use on demand. Right-wing extremists believe that this justifies committing murder and various violent crimes in order to prevent it.

Conservatives believe affirmative action is a form of reverse discrimination. Right-wing extremists believe it is part of a plot to oppress white people.

Conservatives oppose taxation, and tax increases in particular, on principle. Right-wing extremists believe that the IRS is an illegitimate institution imposed on the body politic by the aforementioned Jewish conspiracy.

Conservatives oppose increased immigration on principle and illegal immigration as a matter of law enforcement, and believe the borders should be secure. Right-wing extremists believe that Mexicans are coming here as part of an “Aztlan” conspiracy to retake the Southwest for Mexico, and that we should start shooting border crossers on sight.

You get the idea.

Moreover, the claim that right-wing extremists have nothing to do with the Tea Party is just flatly risible. I have two simple words regarding that claim: Oath Keepers.

But the conspiracist Oath Keepers are hardly the only extremist element that has been absorbed within the ranks of the Tea Party. The list is long, but it’s headed up by the Minutemen who have become Tea Party leaders. Moreover, as I explored in an investigative piece for AlterNet, the movement became a functional extension of the Patriot/militia movement in many precincts, especially in rural areas, away from the television crews.

Jacobson’s limitations on what constitutes “right wing” are not only ahistorical, afactual, and fully at odds with reality, they’re also predictably self-serving. So it’s not surprising that, given his criteria, even his list of “failed eliminationist narratives” is fatally flawed.

Most of the examples he provides, notably the Bill Sparkman episode, were never discussed by me or by anyone at C&L as instances of right-wing violence, because we never considered them such. However, there are three cases here that we did indeed describe as involving right-wing extremists. And you know what? We still do.

We realize, for instance, that the post-shooting narrative favored pretending that Jared Lee Loughner was somehow not a terrorist because he was mentally ill (a claim they for some reason do not make when it comes to Nidal Hasan, the mentally ill gunman in the Fort Hood shooting rampage). They also found other mitigating factors, such as Loughner’s youthful liberalism, to claim that he was not a right-wing extremist, despite the obvious liberal-ness of his targets. However, none of that can overcome the reality that at the time he acted, Loughner was carrying out what he saw as a mission on behalf of his now-adopted right-wing beliefs involving a global monetary conspiracy. He was indeed a right-wing extremist, and other experts on the subject who have examined the record have reached the same conclusion.

Similarly, we found that the IRS plane bomber was indeed a terrorist, and that he was acting on behalf of the very same extremist anti-tax ideology we described above. And the Pentagon shooter, John Patrick Bedell, was acting out on his beliefs derived from Alex Jones’s conspiracy theories — and Jones, despite many efforts to pretend otherwise, is clearly a classic right-wing conspiracy theorist and extremist from the old John Birch mold.

Yes, we recognize very much that there is a significant difference between mainstream conservatives and right-wing extremists, as we’ve outlined above — but those differences, frankly, keep diminishing, and the ideological distances keep shrinking.

We would love nothing more than to report that conservatives were bravely standing up against extremists on the right and doing their part as citizens to bring an end to their toxic contributions to our society. Believe me, as a onetime moderate Republican from a conservative state, I would love nothing more than to see mainstream conservatives stand up against right-wing extremism, as they once did in the 1980s when Idaho became one of the first states to pass a hate-crimes law.

But those days are long gone. There are still a handful of thoughtful and decent conservatives remaining who will stand up to confront this problem, but they are tiny in number and nil in influence. Instead, conservatism is dominated by the likes of Michelle Malkin and Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Beck and William Jacobson (not to mention nearly everyone at Fox News), who instead of taking the problem of right-wing extremism seriously, dismiss its presence, downplay its influence and spread, and otherwise look the other way while viciously attacking anyone with the nerve to point it out.

Conservatives have instead made a cottage industry out of whitewashing away their extremists, most notably when decrying any efforts by law enforcement to confront the issue, and this latest effort in the wake of the Boston bombing is just the latest chapter.

In the meantime, of course, the tide is rising as the number of extremist groups in America reaches record proportions. And mainstream conservatives are aiding and abetting them — first by pretending that they don’t exist while attacking anyone who points out that they do, and second by silently giving them a warm embrace into the ranks of the Tea Party. It bodes ill for us all.

H/T: David Neiwert at Crooks and Liars

Rush Limbaugh claimed that the government only arrested suspect Paul Kevin Curtis for allegedly sending ricin-tainted letters to government officials because he was a white southerner. But the letters were signed with Curtis’ initials and catch phrase.  

Curtis, who is from Mississippi, was arrested last week for allegedly mailing letters containing the poison ricin to President Obama, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), and Lee County, Mississippi Justice Court judge Sadie Holland. Though his case is still pending, Curtis was released from federal custody on bond after investigators failed to find evidence of ricin in Curtis’ possession.

Limbaugh interpreted his release as evidence that authorities merely arrested Curtis because they wanted the ricin suspect to be a white southerner. He told listeners, “You know the ricin letters that were sent? The drive-bys so desperately wanted the culprit to be a hayseed, hick southerner, so they went out and found this poor guy from Mississippi and they accused him of it,” and concluded, “They really wanted the ricin guy to be a white southern guy and not a dark-skinned something-or-other.”

According to the criminal complaint against Curtis, as ABC News reported, each ricin letter was signed “This is KC and I approve this message,” a phrase Curtis frequently used in internet postings and other letters.   

Limbaugh’s theory is just another example in his long history of race-baiting. 

From the 04.23.2013 edition of Premiere Radio Networks’ The Rush Limbaugh Show:

See Also: http://mediamattersforamerica.tumblr.com/

h/t: MMFA

In a WorldNetDaily column today, Ted Nugent claims that President Obama has no interest in pursuing the perpetrators behind the Boston marathon bombing and that liberals are partly to blame for the tragedy because they “champion keeping nuts out of nuthouses.”

“Liberal logic is evil’s best friend,” Nugent writes.

He adds that if the marathon bomber “is found to be from a Middle East country,” the U.S. should deport all people from the Middle East and “put a boot in their ass.”

h/t: Right Wing Watch

Journal Communication’s right-wing talker Charlie Sykes (WTMJ Radio 620), delights in stirring controversy. But last week he went too far. In a segment discussing whether food stamp recipients should be allowed to buy unhealthy food, Sykes played a clip of an incredibly offensive video that is a favorite of neo-Nazi websites.


Dwelling on a popular Sykes topic the “growing gigantic culture of dependent people” or “moocher culture,” Sykes slips in a long clip (at 29.20) where the voice of an African American woman can be heard listing all the fast food joints — liquor stores — where one can allegedly use an electronic benefits (EBT) card. Sykes did not explain the clip or where it originated. The full song portrays women as having kids in order to receive food stamps to fund a party lifestyle. (For the record, you can’t buy booze with food stamps.)


The clip is part of a video “It’s Free, Swipe Yo EBT” made by a young woman named LaToya “Chapter” Hicks, but the production credits go to Christopher Jackson. He is reportedly the same Christopher Jackson who wrote an incredibly offensive piece about teaching black children, another fave of the “we heart Hitler” crowd. The Jackson essay is featured on the white nationalist site WhiteReference.org and Chapter’s video on the Nazi site Stormfront.org.


The Wisconsin Democratic Party promptly put out a release denouncing the clip as racist and offensive. The party contacted reporters at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and also wrote to the broadcast side of the Journal Communications firm (which owns the paper and the radio station) asking VP Steve Wexler to look into it. While the newspaper recently put the inopportune Tweets by the Democratic Party spokesman on the front page of its paper prompting disciplinary action, it could not be bothered to write a word about the controversy over the weekend. 

Sykes defended the use of the video in a blog post Sunday night on “Right Wisconsin.”

“Pshaw,” says Sykes — she’s black, it’s art, just because neo-Nazis love it doesn’t mean it’s a problem. In fact, Sykes so loves the video “about welfare programs run amok” that he says he uses it all the time and has previously posted it as an “anthem” for his nation of moochers theme. The Journal Sentinel covered the issue briefly online Monday, but only because Sykes wrote about it. 



Sykes might think that he and Stormfront have a uniquely discerning eye for art, but by any measure the video is highly offensive. It shouldn’t be used by any news source and Journal Communications should make it clear to Mr. Moocher that he shouldn’t be using it either.

Journal Communications has given Sykes a lot of rope lately. He is the center of their new experiment called “Right Wisconsin” a subscriber-based, paid content news site for right-wingers which Sykes touted in January as a means ofhelping to get more Republicans elected. One of the sponsors and “partners” is the phony issue-ad group Wisconsin Club for Growth, which has spent millions in the state defending Governor Scott Walker and GOP candidates. The site features long-time GOP operatives like Brian Fraley, now at the MacIver Institute, and “reporting” by Media Trackers, a Breitbart-style attack dog operation. Both the MacIver Institute and Media Trackers are funded by the Bradley Foundation.

h/t: PRwatch.org

Fear itself, President Franklin Roosevelt famously observed in his First Inaugural Address, can present the greatest obstacle to progress. It can easily overwhelm our discourse, paralyze our politics, and splinter the social construct that binds us together as a people. Given enough time, this fear might even convince some that our democratic institutions are a lost cause, our shared problems obviously insurmountable, our collective solutions hopelessly inadequate. In this frightening world, then, the only safe bet worth making is on oneself.

To get a sense of how part of America is going all-in on this bet look no further than National Geographic Channel’s hit reality show Doomsday Preppers. Filmed in an unblinking documentary style, each show profiles a few individuals from the modern-day survivalist movement, all of whom have become convinced that the arrival of a stark, dystopian future is only a matter of when, not if. Though even FEMA believes we’d all be better off doing a little prepping, for these folks, not preparing for what they see as unavoidable disaster is a life-or-death gamble. And though the show often descends into caricature, dismissing the popularity of Doomsday Preppers as mere pop-cultural voyeurism would be a mistake.

That’s because the show is a microcosm of something else stirring in our country, something more foreboding. The ominous prophecies of government tyranny, financial meltdown and violent anarchy featured on Preppers inform more than just the survivalist movement circa 2013. They’re also being absorbed into contemporary conservatism, which has increasingly bought into these same doomsday storylines hook, line and bunker.

Rose McDermott, a political scientist at Brown University, recently published a study in the American Journal of Political Science that analyzed people’s susceptibility to succumb to fearful thinking. In it, she found a correlation between heightened fear and current conservative attitudes toward immigration and segregation. “It’s not that conservative people are more fearful, it’s that fearful people are more conservative,” McDermott explains. “People who are scared of novelty, uncertainty, people they don’t know, and things they don’t understand, are more supportive of policies that provide them with a sense of surety and security.”

This latent conservative anxiety is also the bubbling undercurrent that runs throughout the 60-odd-year history of the survivalism movement in America. A vast majority of its adherents are undoubtedly harmless “small-s survivalists,” as then Chicago Tribune reporter James Coates calls them in his 1987 book, Armed and Dangerous: The Rise of the Survivalist Right. But Coates also points out that the survivalist movement’s origins nonetheless rest upon a virulently right-wing, or “big-S,” foundation of violence, racism, and anti-Semitism.

“The godfather of latter-day American survivalism of both the big-S and the small-s variety is Robert DePugh,” writes Coates. In the late 1950s, DePugh’s thinking began to coalesce around racist conspiracy theories and tales of imminent societal collapse, many of which form the rootstock of today’s apocalyptic scenarios. By the 1960s, DePugh had founded the Minutemen, the notorious precursor of the anti-government resistance group Posse Comitatus. Across the decades, these Survivalist Right groups and their spinoffs have developed a frightening reputation for criminal activity and violent behavior. Just last summer, five men, including one with suspected Posse Comitatus ties, were arrested in Louisiana for the murder of two sheriff’s deputies.

In recent years, a sort of rebranding has taken place within the survivalist movement to distance it from the poisonous “big-S” worldview as well as from fatalistic End Times religious sects. As a result, around 2008, the more artful, less incendiary term “prepper” began to appear on survivalist message boards, and it has gained momentum ever since. Nevertheless, it’s almost impossible for prepper types to avoid encountering the extremist elements within the movement. “When the small-s survivalists set out to swap ideas with like-minded people,” Coates writes, “they don’t have very far to look before running up against the Survival[ist] Right.”

Studying how ideas and narratives develop within survivalism is key to understanding how its doomsday thinking has propagated outward into the mainstream. “Survivalism centers around this crafting of tales,” says Oregon State sociology professor Richard G. Mitchell, Jr., who spent fifteen years inside the movement while researching his 2002 book Dancing at Armageddon. “The survivalist trick is to tell their story in such a way that there’s a delicate optimism achieved, that what you have in terms of your personal resources, your material resources, your time, your knowledge and so on, is pretty much what you need.” What a survivalist chooses to prepare for, then, is not based on what is the most statistically probable threat to their safety, but on what fits their individual fears and unique circumstances, he says. For example, large numbers of survivalists stockpile gas masks, but as Mitchell has pointed out before, more people have been killed by vending machines tipping over in the past 30 years than have died from biological or chemical terrorist attacks.

This rigid, irrational worldview, one that tries to force fit reality to one’s beliefs rather than the other way around, is a hallmark of reactionary thought. Nearly 50 years ago, Richard Hofstadter, in his seminal 1964 Harper’s essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” identified how irrational fears had fueled a similarly unhinged, anti-communist wing of conservatism. Hoftstadter’s essay predates the popular usage of the term “survivalism,” but it nonetheless recognizes the broader similarities between individuals with an inward, self-focused paranoia and those with an outward-looking group-based fear, what he calls the “paranoid spokesman” in politics. “They both tend to be overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression,” he writes.

In addition, both survivalism and right-wing political populism experience cyclical ebbs and flows in their popularity. What are subtle shifts, however, become amplified by the press into dramatic boom and bust cycles. After large-scale trigger events—most recently, events like the 9/11 terrorists attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and the dual shocks of Obama’s 2008 election and the Great Recession—media attention in these groups inevitably picks up, and another generation comes forward to put a new gloss on age-old themes.

Thus, a movement like the Tea Party can ride the zeitgeist rollercoaster from non-entity up to sensation and back down to political afterthought in four short years while the demographic cohort that overwhelmingly identifies with it—white, married, male, middle-aged conservatives—is remarkably homogeneous. Likewise, popular survivalist websites of today, such as endoftheamericandream.com and SHTFplan.com (short for “shit hits the fan”), like to repeat the claim that their burgeoning movement has as many as three million followers across the country. But Mitchell says these same numbers were bandied about throughout his many years of research. And in a survey conducted for his book, Mitchell found survivalists to be strikingly homogeneous as well—white (97 percent), married (74 percent), male (89 percent), fairly well educated (52 percent had a bachelor’s or higher degree), and with an average age around 40.

The similarities don’t end there. Just as a New York Times/CBS poll found that “Tea Party supporters over all are more likely than the general public to say their personal financial situation is fairly good or very good,” survivalists also tend to be firmly ensconced in the middle class or well off. For these people the term “survivalism” is an awkward misnomer. “This is not the homeless on the streets of New York,” Mitchell points out. “This is a hobby. It is always done with surplus time, resources, money, interest and so on. You don’t run into a lot of really poor survivalists,” Mitchell notes, laughing.

Because today’s preppers share so many personal characteristics with the modern-day right-wing populists, it’s not unexpected that the former’s doomsday narratives would gain exposure to and a foothold among the latter. (It should be noted that Mitchell also documented a long, if much less prevalent, tradition of left-wing survivalist retreats and communes, which was touched upon in a Season One episode of Doomsday Preppers that featured “Calamity Janet” Spencer, a left-wing survivalist who plans on feeding 1,000 post-apocalyptic survivors in her “Armageddon Inn.”) Nowhere is this give and take more apparent than on the issue of guns. As it is with much of the American right-wing, gun ownership is of fundamental importance to survivalism. Mitchell found that, by far, the most popular step in crisis preparation—taken by nearly 64 percent of survivalists—was to acquire firearms.

Arming oneself becomes a necessity for survivalists who game out the aftermath of societal collapse, explains Coates in Armed and Dangerous. “The most important question, after stockpiling food, water, clothing, machine guns and other gear,” he writes, “is protecting these treasures from the hordes of the less foresighted who are likely to start streaming out of the cities.” This compulsion for a well-stocked arsenal to defend against urban (read: non-white) marauders can have unforeseen and tragic consequences, however.

The violent potential for this intersection of guns and survivalism became tragically apparent last December, after the infamous school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. In the aftermath of the tragedy, it was revealed that the military-style assault rifle Adam Lanza used in the killings was stolen from his mother Nancy, whom he shot and killed first to start his rampage. “Nancy had a survivalist philosophy which is why she was stockpiling guns,” said her former sister-in-law, Marsha Lanza. “We talked about preppers and preparing for the economy collapsing.” Not long after, an unstable survivalist in Alabama stormed a school bus and killed the driver before holding a five-year-old boy hostage for a week in his well-stocked, homemade underground bunker. (Law enforcement authorities eventually stormed the bunker, killed the man and rescued the boy.)

The Newtown massacre rightly shocked the larger national conscience and prompted a renewed awareness about the toll of gun violence. However, the counter-narrative crafted by the gun industry’s main lobbying arm, the National Rifle Association, quickly resorted to sounding survivalist-style alarms to justify the group’s intransigence. NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre raised the specter of sinister motives behind the Obama administration’s plan for universal background checks—a measure supported by nine in ten Americans, incidentally. He claimed that the plan was a precursor to an ominous “universal registry of law-abiding people” that could lead to government confiscation of all guns. In February, LaPierre conjured up even more paranoid fantasies in an op-ed for a right-wing opinion website. “Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Riots. Terrorists. Gangs. Lone criminals. These are perils we are sure to face—not just maybe,” La Pierre wrote. “It’s not paranoia to buy a gun. It’s survival.” By March, a right-wing website was hawking LaPierre’s 336-page, hardcover “survival guide” that he’d originally authored back in 2010.

LaPierre is not alone in leveraging survivalist imagery in service of stopping new gun control legislation. Not long after President Obama unveiled a commonsense package of reforms in mid-January, GOP Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell sent out an incendiary fundraising email chock full of similarly paranoid allusions. In it, he stoked conservatives’ fears and talked of them being “literally surrounded,” where “freedom is under direct assault,” due to Obama’s “attempt to gut our Constitution.”

These statements are provocative, to be sure, and to see them enjoy the imprimatur of such prominent public figures is even more unsettling. Still, it would be a mistake to think of this rhetoric as the source code of doomsday myths. “Those who are on the fringe don’t get their ideas from Mitch McConnell,” Mitchell remarks. “They’re going to turn to Glenn Beck or Laura Ingraham or Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly.” Though these and other right-wing media personalities act independently through their respective TV, radio and Internet platforms, they form a powerful chorus that picks out, rearranges and amplifies tales of impending chaos or looming oppression in an ever-churning feedback loop. To see this vicious cycle in action, look no further than the months-long campaign organized around the lie that Obama’s healthcare reform law would set up unaccountable government “death panels” that could deny coverage, encourage suicide and even institute euthanasia.

Some right-wing sites, like World Net Daily, tread boldly into deeper, murkier waters. Despite counting as contributors such conservatives as Rick Santorum and Pat Buchanan as well as Fox News personalities John Stossel and Andrew Napolitano—all of whom enjoy, deservedly or not, some mainstream media respectability—WND.com is renowned for pushing crackpot “birther” conspiracies and apocalyptic sensationalism. In December, the site conducted a bizarre poll asking morbid, leading questions about the hypothetical aftermath of a massive power outage. Among its published “findings”: 50 percent of Americans believe that within two weeks of a catastrophic emergency their home would be attacked by looters; 58 percent would be willing or somewhat willing to use a firearm to kill a neighbor they deemed a threat.

Of course, thanks to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy, hundreds of thousands of people in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut did lose power for days, if not weeks. As for those predictions of roving, bloodthirsty gangs and pitched, neighborhood gun battles? They never materialized. Even a favorite right-wing trope—repeated by the NRA’s LaPierre—about looters “running wild in south Brooklyn” turned out to be a gross exaggeration. In fact, New York City saw a widespread decrease in crime immediately following Sandy, even enjoying a record eight-day span without a single homicide. But as is so often the case, facts are no match for the hard-wired doomsday prepper mindset.

Consider a January front-page post on SurvivalBlog.com by “Elizabeth in the Northeast.” A single mother, Elizabeth describes the rather caring, well-organized emergency aid she and her two children received at a local evacuation shelter the frantic night Hurricane Sandy made landfall. Nevertheless, she summed up her experience interacting with the many on-site government workers this way: “I didn’t feel like a refugee from Monster Storm Sandy, I felt deep within my soul and in my heart that my children and I were in a farce of being shipped off to a concentration camp similar to what I had seen in Schindler’s List.”

Fleeing one’s home during a natural disaster can understandably generate overwrought emotions. But what failed Elizabeth last October were not our public institutions; they, by most accounts, performed admirably. What failed was her trust in them. This is perhaps the most insidious aspect of the survivalist mentality—the willful abandonment of faith in civil society’s ability to function, often contrary to all evidence. This doesn’t make someone apolitical—a common, self-identified claim among preppers—it makes them anti-political and an apathetic stance toward government should never be confused with an apocalyptic one. “If you talk about politics, you’re always talking about actions in the collective,” observes Mitchell. “To do that is to negate the very fundamental notion that individual action is the most crucial factor with survivalism.”

Ironically, a not unsubstantial number of people winning elections these days do so under a banner of being thoroughly disenchanted with the idea of government and the value of collective action. On the state level, it’s not hard to find evidence of reactionary, doomsday thinking among these political self-abnegators. To cite three recent examples: an Idaho state senator blithely comparing her state’s proposed health exchange to Nazi concentration camps; a Wyoming state rep advocating the legalization of gold and silver as legal tender due to “the potential coming collapse of the dollar”; a Texas county judge warning that Obama’s reelection could lead to “civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war maybe.”

At the national level, polarization studies show that Republicans have tilted even further toward the extreme right in recent years as well. No surprise then, that Mitt Romney, the party’s 2012 presidential standard-bearer, rehashed the bitterly divisive “maker vs. taker” argument, one that has deep roots in survivalist mythology. Likewise, Representative Paul Ryan, chosen to be Romney’s vice presidential nominee, fast-tracked his reputation within the party by authoring a plan to dismantle Medicare in favor of a go-it-alone healthcare voucher system. And don’t look to Tea Party favorite and Republican rising star Senator Marco Rubio if you want to avoid yet another man-made financial crisis or fear being abandoned after the next major natural disaster. Rubio, recently hailed as “The Republican Savior” on the cover of Time, joined a small cadre of hard-right conservatives who uniformly voted against avoiding the fiscal cliff, raising the debt ceiling, and allocating desperately needed disaster relief to victims of Hurricane Sandy.

h/t: Alternet

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