Rick Snyder Hasn't Been Arrested And The Bundy Gang Is Still Terrorizing Oregon, But Tamir Rice Got His

In 2009 I wanted a peaceful, unstressed vacation. I went to Bali, which fits that bill perfectly. For excitement, though, I brought Dave Neiwert's then brand new book, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right, which isn't so much about Hate Talk Radio per se as it is about the gradual transformation of mainstream conservatives to full blown fascists and all the steps that lead in that direction. Neiwert wrote how the conservative movement had become "a precursor to fascism," which he defines as "explicitly antidemocratic, antiliberal, and corporatist, and it endorsed violence as a chief means to its ends. It was 'revolutionary' in its fervor, yet sought to defend status quo institutions, particularly business interests. It was also, obviously, authoritarian." Sound at all familiar? No, this isn't going to be another post about Herr Trumpf or Ted Cruz. I just noticed a Washington Post report by Neiwert about the outbreak of Bundy-family domestic terrorism in Oregon. His premise was exactly what I said the day the standoff began: Not punishing the Bundys for the Nevada standoff led to the occupation in Oregon.

"If," he wrote, "authorities let anti-government protesters get away with breaking the law, they'll keep doing it." And he doesn't mean protesters picketing and marching with signs and chanting. He means armed-to-the-teeth domestic terrorists trying to get their way through armed rebellion. Ammon and Ryan Bundy, sons of that same Cliven Bundy who instigated an armed standoff in Nevada in 2014, are the ringleaders of this little reprise.

So why do federal officials once again find themselves in this position-- awkwardly wringing their hands in hopes that the radicals’ demands and willpower will erode with a little time and cold weather? And facing the same cast of characters who humiliated law enforcement officials less than two years ago?

The answer, to a large extent, lies in that Nevada canyon where Bundy’s compatriots aimed their weapons at the federal agents and police officers who had come to enforce a court order requiring the confiscation of the ranch’s cattle, after Bundy refused for years to pay federal grazing fees for using public lands. When those guns were brandished, multiple violations of federal and state law occurred: It is a felony to point a weapon at a law enforcement officer and a federal felony to take aim at a U.S. government agent.

And yet there were no arrests that day. Moreover, despite the FBI’s assumption shortly afterward of the investigation into weapons use at the Bundy ranch-- along with vows to hold the people responsible for the standoff fully accountable-- no meaningful action has yet been taken against anyone involved.

That includes, of course, Cliven Bundy himself (who still hasn’t paid the fees and fines he owes the government) and his sons-- who have now turned up in Oregon, threatening again to take over public lands, in defiance of the local community and the wishes of the people on whose behalf they’re ostensibly protesting, all in pursuit of their campaign to destroy the federal government’s ability to administer land policies.

Bundy explained his rationale, such as it is, in a press release shortly before the occupation began: “The United States Justice Department has NO jurisdiction or authority within the State of Oregon, County of Harney over this type of ranch management. These lands are not under U.S. treaties or commerce, they are not article 4 territories, and Congress does not have unlimited power.”

The men leading the protest believe in an arcane interpretation of the Constitution that radically limits the reach and scope of the federal government-- in their alternate universe, the county sheriff is the highest authority, while the feds are limited to regulating overseas trade and waging war. Derived from the racist swamplands of far-right extremism, their version of “constitutionalism” reflects a paranoid culture in which government officials are believed to be trading away Americans’ freedom on behalf of a nefarious New World Order that seeks to enslave all mankind.

If federal law enforcement authorities had taken their roles as stewards of the rule of law seriously, many of these players would be facing justice in federal courts right now, instead of opportunistically raising hell out in poverty-stricken rural areas. Certainly, there is no small irony in the fact that the tepid response from federal authorities demonstrates how little resemblance they have to the tyrannical thugs the Bundys say they are. But it also shows how just that accusation, when wielded by white conservatives, can cause federal law enforcement to back down.

...There should have been a number of arrests after the nonsense at the Bundy ranch. That there were none not only emboldened these right-wing radicals-- and encouraged them to believe that their bizarre misinterpretation of the Constitution has some legitimacy-- but, in the case of the Bundy brothers, directly empowered them to carry on as they did before.

“We believe these armed extremists have been emboldened by what they saw as a clear victory at the Cliven Bundy ranch and the fact that no one was held accountable for taking up arms against agents of the federal government,” said Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project.

The failure of federal law enforcement to adequately respond to this kind of threatening behavior has also become a source of low morale in agencies the Bundys and their ilk like to demonize, such as the BLM and the Forest Service. This is particularly the case among federal field employees, who, according to those I’ve spoken with, are encountering increasing incidents of radicalized (and armed) “patriots” claiming that the agencies have no jurisdiction on federal lands.

That’s not to suggest that federal law enforcement should respond immediately with tactical units and guns blazing. That approach was attempted in the 1990s at two armed standoffs with far-right extremists-- at Ruby Ridge in northern Idaho and at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas-- to disastrous effect. Those incidents inspired a fresh wave of far-right radicalism (including the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995) and were seen by many on the right as omens of looming government oppression.

It’s understandable that federal law enforcement might be reluctant to act precipitously after those disasters. A failure to act in any way whatsoever, though, invites more of the same and certain escalation, as the Oregon standoff demonstrates.

The brass back in Washington and agents in field offices throughout the West should look back to a different, less infamous siege from 20 years ago, one that offers a more helpful model for responding to these situations. In 1996, a group calling itself the Montana Freemen-- which operated a number of money-making scams and made armed threats against county officials in Jordan, Montana-- similarly defied the federal government in an attempt to create its own homeland out on the prairie.

It took 81 days to wait them out, during the harsh Montana winter and into the muddy Montana spring, but rather than rush in, as in Waco and Ruby Ridge, FBI negotiators eventually persuaded all the people inside the Freemen compound to surrender peacefully. Several of the chief perpetrators wound up doing extensive federal prison time for a variety of bank, wire and mail fraud charges, as well as for making threats against county and federal officials.

There can be a middle ground between the bloodshed of Ruby Ridge and Waco and the tacit acceptance of what’s going on in Burns. We know from how the FBI handled the Freemen that federal authorities are perfectly capable of bringing extremists who brandish weapons and threaten government employees to justice without creating martyrs or worsening the situation. Somehow, in the intervening 20 years-- and amid the changes in administrations along the way, not to mention personnel and law enforcement philosophies-- that lesson got lost.

Federal authorities in the Justice Department and elsewhere have seemingly made a tactical decision to avoid confronting right-wing radicals, though their rationale has never been made clear. Maybe they fear backlash from a conservative media pack that has made efforts to track and confront right-wing extremist terrorism difficult, if not impossible, for federal law enforcement agencies (thanks in no small part to the nonsensical uproar that arose in 2009 over a Department of Homeland Security bulletin regarding recruitment and terrorist violence among right-wing extremists). But no one from any federal agency has come forward to explain their inaction, and in the meantime, people like the Bundys are taking exactly the wrong lessons from it.

What’s become abundantly clear in Oregon is that federal agents made a horrific mistake in failing to enforce the law after the Bundy ranch showdown. They are paying the price for that failure now. Maybe it’s time they remembered that it’s possible to stand up for the rule of law without breaking it.

Netroots Nation-- What Next?

I don't know a lot about Netroots Nation and I've never been to one, although everyone else from Blue America usually goes and generally speaks well of it. I always thought Markos from Daily Kos was the founder and owner. But over the weekend I read a post he wrote about next year:, Netroots Nation is going to Arizona, Daily Kos is not. That provoked an evolving discussion of Netroots Nation both at Kos and among progressive bloggers in general. And it certainly went beyond Markos' complaints about Arizona's anti-immigrant posture. Our old pal, author Dave Neiwert, summed up a lot of complaints about how Netroots Nation has been evolving:

For me, Markos' decision underscores a lot of my growing unhappiness with NN. It's been obvious for some time that this convention is less and less about its heart and soul-- the bloggers, journalists, and other content providers who gave its founding impetus-- and more about organizers and political professionals. That's a natural and probably necessary evolution, to some extent, and understandable, but it has now reached a tipping point to where that heart and soul has been completely marginalized and shunted into a corner.

Look at this year's panels: Not a single one was about blogging. And where is the environmental community? They were nohere to be seen, and not a single panel focused on environmental issues. That's inexcusable in an era when Keystone XL and climate change are defining issues for progressives.

Instead, the overwhelming majority of panels were about and for organizers. The meat-- a discussion of the issues themselves that face progressives-- was as thin as a slice of prosciutto. It all felt like a big fat fuck-you to the bloggers and journalists.

My overwhelming feeling this year was that there was little there for me and my friends and writing colleagues. The chief draw always been and will be about the great NN community, and that is being systematically gutted into nothingness.

Considering that it usually costs a large sum out of my not-very-large personal account to attend, it no longer seems worth that expense or my time. If NN works to repair that damage over the coming months, I will reconsider, but as things now stand, I cannot justify going to Phoenix for what would have been my ninth Netroots.

Wow, 9 Netroots nations; I think that's every one of them! I never went to any although I almost did a few times and I've been supportive financially and used to encourage Blue America candidates to go and to participate and network. But it reminded me too much of the music business conventions had had seen start up so strongly and then devolve into profit-making, corporate endeavors whose ideals and vision were easily compromised away.

In 1980 I had been running a small independent record label in San Francisco, 415 Records, for a couple of years, writing for local alternative rock publications and doing a weekly alternative/punk radio show. There were people all over the country working on the same kinds of projects. Some of them worked with alternative rock bands-- managers, agents, indie labels-- and other worked at supporting the bands and the ethos around a DIY music scene-- publications, radio, a new distribution network, etc. Organizers in NYC launched the New Music Seminar at an SIR rehearsal studio in Manhattan. Everyone in the alternative/punk rock business was there-- all 200 of us-- from everywhere in the U.S. If it cost anything-- I don't recall that it did-- it was certainly never about making money for the organizers. It was about building a community and an infrastructure for a cultural revolution we were helping to define.

That first New Music Seminar was great in so many ways and for me that included meeting, for the first time, promoters who were booking my label's bands, journalists, record store owners and djs who were getting our music out across the country, other record label folks who who facing the same trials we were facing... It was a major turning point for a new genre of music. And it became an annual event and got even better-- for a few years. But then it got so much better that the major labels-- the Establishment it was organized in opposition to-- wanted in, a music biz version of the DNC, DCCC, DSCC... Joe Biden. And it died. It died ugly and unloved, but-- by then a stinking wretched zombie corpse-- it kept moving, although it really was just for the Establishment by then-- no one could even afford it anymore unless they were having their expenses picked up by corporate entities-- and had nothing substantive to do with the indie spirit.

15 years after it started, it finally realized it had been dead for a decade and... well, not many who hadn't been making money from the corporate enterprise bothered going to the funeral. And no one missed it. For some reason-- not sure exactly why-- it was relaunched in 2009, an entirely corporate affair with relatively minimal pretense about having anything whatsoever to do with anything grassroots. Mayor Bloomberg's office was a cosponsor by 2012. The president of Clear Channel gave the keynote address. (Another president of Clear Channel gave the keynote the following year too. And-- note to people who don't know about the music biz-- Clear Channel means the exact same thing there that it means to people working in progressive politics.) I had stopped going many years before and never heard anything since that would have made me want to go again.

Like Dave suggested, this is usually the way these kinds of great ideas become victims of their own initial success. Genuine progressive champions like Elizabeth Warren, Raul Grijalva and Shenna Bellows still go-- worth the price of admission, I'm sure-- but hey also invite conservative careerists like New Dem Gary Peters, Third Way mainstay Joe Biden, and Chuck Schumer who represents Wall Street banksters in the U.S. Senate. NSA enablers/partners Google and Facebook were sponsors, as was the anti-progressive Beltway political operation EMILY's List. I have no first-hand knowledge about where Netroots Nation is in the cycle-- getting better, declining, zombie-like... True believers I trust, who are not on the commercial side of it, have assured me they are getting value out of it. When I read Markos' post, I sympathized with the personal and political argument he made for reconsidering Phoenix. Sounds like it might be worth doing even if just to avoid a schism-- either moving it to a random other city not in Arizona or compromising on Tucson, a progressive bastion in Arizona. Maybe some day John and Digby will persuade me to go with them... although, neither one of them-- for whatever reason-- went this year... so they haven't been to as many as Dave. Hard to imagine going to a convention with Chuck Schumer other than to throw rotten tomatoes at him though.

Always an early adapter, I think this is when I may have stopped going to the New Music Seminar:




UPDATE: Netroots Nation And The Environment

Brad Johnson sent me a note this morning:

Hey-- I appreciated the critique of NN14, but one of the factual claims in the post was straight-up false.

"And where is the environmental community? They were nowhere to be seen, and not a single panel focused on environmental issues."

This is simply false. There were three exclusively enviro panels (all with a focus on environmental justice, not the mainstream green priorities), the enviro caucus, and three panels that were cross-issue and included environmental/climate voices.

Fighting Fake Science: When the Right tries to Derail Your Movement with Misinformation

Panel; Thu, 07/17/2014 - 10:30am, 140 G

This panel will discuss right wing tactics-- from climate change deniers to misinformation campaigns on birth control, sex ed, and abortion-- that use fake science to try to attack progressive movements. Panelists will present successful strategies devised to counter the right’s attacks, and identify best practices on how to respond when the right comes at you with fake science.

Led by: Travis Ballie
Panelists: Peter Sinclair, Felipe Sousa-Rodriguez, Erika West

Climate Justice Against Koch's Tar Sands from Detroit to New York

Panel; Thu, 07/17/2014 - 04:45pm, 140 AB

The Koch brothers’ petrochemical empire is poisoning the world and the American political process. From Detroit, home of the Koch petcoke mountain, to Sandy-ravaged New York City, where David Koch is the richest resident, leading climate justice activists will speak about how they’re fighting back against the corrupt fossil-fuel barons and building a better future.

Led by: Brad Johnson
Panelists: Marion Berger, Lisa Graves, Rae Breaux

Hunger First: The Importance of Food Security in Detroit, and Why We're so Hungry (for Change)

Panel; Fri, 07/18/2014 - 11:00am, 140 D

Detroit natives can easily point to any number of challenges to food security in their community. Whether it’s the lack of fresh and affordable options or the insidious targeting of our kids by fast food outfits, the “healthy meal” is under attack. This problem isn’t unique to Detroit: these are problems facing communities of color and children across the country. Join us to explore the importance of—and threats to—food security in Detroit and lessons we can apply to broader campaigns around food justice. This panel will tell stories you’ll remember, offer lessons you can use in your work, and further weave us together as a community of food activists.

Led by: Dream Hampton
Panelists: Monica Patrick, Tepfirah Rushdan, Kadiri Sennefer

Changing the Climate on Climate Change: A Showcase of Films for Environmental Action

Screening Series; Fri, 07/18/2014, 12:15pm, 142 C

This screening showcase focuses on films that address our environmental challenges, and the moral questions these issues raise.

This showcase will tie films to action directly.  After the discussion, presenters will invite the audience to join them at the nearby rally asserting that access to water is a basic human right-- and calling on the city of Detroit to keep the water turned on for all its citizens.

Please join us for short presentations on three films followed by a moderated discussion. At 12:50, there will be a pause for anyone who wishes to join the march for water rights.  We will end promptly at 1:30 to join the rally for water rights taking place at 1:45 (only a 7-minute walk away).

Led by: Matthew Filipowicz
Panelists: Angela Alston, Julie Bergman Sender, Dave Saldana

Civil Disobedience Gets Results: Lessons from the Immigration, Labor and Climate Movements

Panel; Fri, 07/18/2014 - 03:00pm, 140 D

Across the progressive movement, activists and organizations are embracing civil disobedience on a large scale as a tactic to escalate pressure in our most crucial fights—and getting results. We’ll share how progressives have leveraged the commitment of activists to increase pressure on decision makers.

Led by: Becky Bond
Panelists: Rae Breaux, Cristina Jimenez, Eric Schlein

Environmental Caucus

Caucus; Fri, 07/18/2014 - 04:30pm, 354

Join us for an engaging discussion on environmental issues. We’ll seek to come away with some tangible steps on two key questions.

1. With the recent introduction of the EPA Clean Power proposal, the retirement of almost half of the nation’s coal plants, and the increase in clean energy generation, the environmental movement has witnessed great strides in the right direction. However, there is still more to be done. What are our next efforts going to be to build on this momentum? What are the next challenges, major or minor, we expect to face?

2. As the world adopts a more global approach to problem solving, consider how can we promote the concept of “the global environment” (as others have promoted the concept of “the global economy)? Outside of bringing attention to the issue of climate disruption and how it relates to the global problem, what other issues should we use to highlight the global environment “brand”?

Led by: Alison Flowers, Marta Stoepker

48217: What One of the Country's Most Polluted Zip Codes Can Teach Us about Environmental and Digital Justice

Panel; Sat, 07/19/2014 - 11:00am, 140 C

With only 8,200 residents, southeast Michigan’s 48217 zip code is sandwiched between I-75 and giant industrial polluters. Smokestacks billow above schoolyards in River Rouge, MI, where more than 1.6 million pounds of hazardous chemicals are released into the community every year. The zip is part of Wayne County, which has the highest number of pediatric asthma cases in the state, combined with the highest state population of those living in poverty. Clean air and water violations abound the physical space, coupled with barriers to affordable cyberspace, threatening many residents’ ability to survive in a digital age. Learn about the interplay between environmental and digital justice in one community, from fighting for equal access to the internet, launching community media labs, and improving air quality.

Led by: Dr. M. K. Dorsey
Panelists: Rhonda Anderson, Jenny Lee, Michelle Martinez

Rep. John Campbell (R-CA) Is Retiring... Yawn?

CA-45 is entirely within Orange County... and not the more liberal part on the coast. The district goes from the Anaheim Hills, North Tustin and Irvine down to Mission Viejo and Lake Forest. The eastern part of the district beyond Silverado and Trabaco Canyon is uninhabitable. Last year Campbell won reelection against a credible Democrat, Sukee Kang, 59-41%. Campbell spent $1,421,706 and Kang spent $754,627. The DCCC completely ignored the race and spent zero, same as they did when Beth Krom ran in 2010 and when Steve Young ran in 2008 and 2006. They don't see this R+7 district as worth investing in. McCain bested Obama 51-47% and Romney won there 55-43%.

There doesn't appear to be a Democratic challenger yet, although someone will probably give it a try. So far, the action is all in Crazyville. Every Orange County GOP officeseeker who can walk upright and string a sentence together wants to run. The primary should be a joy to watch-- and it won't be the first time. In his new book, And Hell Followed With Her, about the Minutemen mayhem, Dave Neiwert recounted how ambitious extremist Jim Gilchrist ran for Congress against Campbell. (This was a year before Gilchrist told the Orange County Register that "I'm not going to promote insurrection, but if it happens, it will be on the conscience of the members of Congress who are doing this. I will not promote violence in resolving this, but I will not stop others who might pursue that." Bush appointed Wall Street shill and super-reactionary Congressman Christopher Cox to the chair of the SEC (which turned out to be an absolute catastrophe for America and helped trigger the Great Recession) and it created a rare open seat in Orange County.

The special election rules created a wide-open field in the primary in which ten Republicans and four Democrats vied for their parties’ respective nominations. Gilchrist ran instead as the sole candidate of the American Independent Party, which is the California affiliate of the Constitution Party. That organization, as it happens, is essentially the Patriot movement’s own party: in the 1990s, it was one of the original promoters of the militia concept among mainstream conservatives, and its politics and candidates have been in that same mold ever since.

Gilchrist got a brief scare when former congressman Robert Dornan-- an archconservative in the John Birch Society mold, notorious in his time for inflammatory and frequently bigoted remarks (his nickname was “B-1 Bob”), who had lost his seat in the 1996 election to Loretta Sanchez-- made brief waves by indicating he wanted to run for Cox’s old seat under the AIP banner. But party leaders, who saw Gilchrist as a potential rising political star, rebuffed his efforts.

After the primary, only an establishment Republican named John Campbell and a Democratic attorney named Steve Young remained on the ballot-- along with Gilchrist, who campaigned hard against Campbell on the basis of his supposedly “soft” stance on immigration. And when Election Day came around on December 5, it was a testament to Orange County’s deep-red conservatism that Campbell still won handily with 44 percent of the vote, while Young came in second with 27 percent, and Gilchrist finished a close third with 25 percent.

Afterward, Gilchrist declared victory anyway: “The time of the modern Minuteman, the Patriot, the time of the American people is here, and America WILL return to the rule of law-- whether the special interests, and the party label enforcers, and the open borders lobby-- and the mainstream media-- like it or not!”

Yes, 25% of the voters in this OC hellhole were willing to vote for a murderous neo-Nazi fanatic whose goal is to destroy America. What a place! And next year is already looking like another wild jungle primary in Crazytown. This week another Republican crackpot, State Sen. Mimi Walters, joined the fray. She's already been endorsed by 7 reactionary California congressmen-- Darrell Issa, Ed Royce, Kevin McCarthy, David Valadao, Doug LaMalfa, Jeff Denham, and Paul Cook-- which is very inconvenient for Rep. Gary Miller, who finds himself in a blue district and wants to run for the open seat in CA-45 to avoud political oblivion.

Walters is largely considered a wholly owned subsidiary of religionist lunatic Howard Ahmanson, Jr., who is no longer living in an insane asylum. Think Progress was first to point out the connection to Walters and the far right's attempt to overthrown democracy and replace it with a "Christian" version of Sharia law, what the lunatic fringe behind Walters calls "total integration of Biblical Law." Ahmanson funneled money into her failed campaign for state Treasurer through his shady Fieldstead operation.

Fieldstead & Co. is an incorporated private company which Ahmanson uses to distribute money to his favorite causes without having to disclose the donations publicly.

Most notorious among these was the Chalcedon Foundation. Ahmanson served for decades on the board of this radical Christian Reconstructionist organization and heavily funded its efforts. The group’s late founder, Rousas John Rushdoony advocated for American laws to literally follow those in the Book of Leviticus, including death by stoning for gay and lesbian people and similar execution for adulterers, juvenile delinquents, non-believers, and most other Americans. While Ahmanson has made clear he personally does not advocate “the stoning or execution of homosexuals,” he conceded to the Orange County Register in 1985: “My purpose is total integration of biblical law into our lives.”

Ahmanson is a major funder and director of the Discovery Institute, a group which promotes creationism and tries to obstruct science education. He was one of the largest contributors to the unconstitutional Proposition 8 campaign to take away the right of same-sex couples to marry in California, spent heavily in support of school vouchers efforts in Colorado and California, backed CareNet (a group that provides “crisis pregnancy centers,” which mislead women about abortion), and, reportedly, funded a $1 million smear campaign against the Episcopal Church’s first openly gay bishop and efforts to split the worldwide Anglican Communion over LGBT inclusion. And, he was the second-largest donor to a 2006 California ballot initiative effort which would have required the government to compensate any property owners if land-use or zoning laws hurt the value of their property; Walters served as honorary chair for the unsuccessful effort and called the position her “proudest accomplishment.”

In her time in the California Assembly and Senate, Walters has accumulated a voting record that is very much in line with Ahmanson’s far-right views. She has consistently voted against LGBT equality, endorsing Prop. 8, protecting harmful “ex-gay” therapy, and opposing anti-discrimination laws. She opposes women’s reproductive rights. She also is a strong supporter of “school choice” and vouchers.

Walters has called herself a “proven conservative” and has drawn criticism for her anti-immigrant campaign ads. She voted against California’s same-day voter registration law and amassed an embarrassing 3 percent lifetime score from the California League of Conservation Voters.

In the past, even anti-LGBT conservatives like Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) and former Gov. Linda Lingle (R-HI) have returned campaign contributions from Ahmanson in light of his radical views and record (Full disclosure: in 2004, the author was president of an LGBT-rights group that successfully pushed Wolf to return a $1,000 contribution from Ahmanson). But Walters has accepted his money since her 2006 campaign.

Minutemen-- Liars, Rapists, Murderers, Nazis... And, Of Course, Republicans

3 American Nazis with a toxic agenda- Gilchrist, Simcox, Hannity

Last week David Vitter's viciously anti-immigrant amendment was defeated in the Senate, 58-36, with 7 Republicans rejecting it and only the most reactionary Democrat in the Senate-- Mark Pryor-- crossing the aisle and voting with Republican anti-immigrant extremists. Vitter's amendment was meant to slow down the temporary grant of legal status or adjustment to citizenship status of immigrants. John Cornyn's poison pill amendment suffered a similar fate two days later-- 54 senators voting to table it, only 43 backing it (just Manchin and Pryor among Democrats). When you hear respectable Senate Republicans-- not to mention less respectable ones like Ted Cruz and Chuck Grassley-- ranting about their Quixotic quest for “border security,” it’s a legacy of how the Minutemen changed the ground rules of the debate. And no one has covered that development better than David Neiwert, whose spectacular new book, And Hell Followed With Her: Crossing The Dark Side Of The American Border paints the definitive picture of what the Minutemen plague really consisted of, rather than the propaganda pumped out by political grifters like Tom Tancredo (R-CO), Tom DeLay (R-TX), John Culberson (R-TX), and Phil Gingrey (R-GA) and anti-immigrant media shills Lou Dobbs on CNN and Sean Hannity on Fox.

Right after Neiwert's book was released, Dobbs', Hannity's and Tancredo's close buddy, a founder of the Minuteman movement in Arizona, Chris Simcox, was arrested and jailed for raping a series of prepubescent girls. Hopefully Simcox will get what's coming to him in prison. Unfortunately Dobbs, Hannity and Tancredo are still free and still doing great damage, if not to 9 year old girls, then to Americans in general.

Chris Simcox, co-founder of the Minuteman border watch movement, was arrested Wednesday morning for allegedly having sexual contact with three young girls. Phoenix police booked Simcox on two counts of molestation of a child, two counts of sexual conduct with a minor, and one count of attempted molestation of a child.

Simcox, 52, co-founded the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, an armed volunteer group who assigned themselves the task of securing the southwest border. The group’s mission was to prevent “the unlawful and unauthorized entry of all individuals, contraband, and foreign military” in to the U.S.

Phoenix police spokesman Sgt. Tommy Thompson told Phoenix-based ABC 15 that authorities “developed probable cause to believe Simcox had sexual conduct with the girls, all under the age of ten.” ABC 15 reports Simcox has denied the allegations.

Before he founded the Minutemen, Simcox had a long history of working with children. In a 2006 USA Today profile, Simcox explained his first job was at a "a very bad high school in South Central L.A." Simcox then moved to work at a private elementary school where he taught kindergarten through third grade for 13 years before becoming a private tutor.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate-group activities, points out Simcox has been accused of child molestation before. His first ex-wife, Deborah Crews, accused him of pedophilia in 1998. "He tried to molest our daughter when he was intoxicated," Crews told the SPLC. "When she ran out, he tried to say he was just giving her a leg massage and she got the wrong idea.”

Dave's book begins with the story of one band of Minutemen who broke into homes to rob people, murdered a family in cold blood-- including a 9 year old girl-- and then loudly blamed it on Mexican immigrants. Not every Minuteman was a home invader, a murderer or a child rapist. But almost every one of them was a violent Nazi, KKK or militia militant. Heroes to the GOP, this was a group of murderous extremists, dangerous misfits and Glenn Beck-quoting racists who would have conversations like this, when, according to Neiwert's book, they didn't know informers were among them:

[Undercover journalist] Dave Holthouse listened as his fellow Minutemen explained their border philosophy: like Simcox’s old friend Craig Howard, they thought that a few well-placed rifle shots would solve the nation’s border problems.

“It should be legal to kill illegals,” said one of them, a sixty-nine-year old retired Special Forces veteran who fought in Vietnam. “Just shoot ‘em on sight. That’s my immigration policy recommendation. You break into my country, you die.”

His neo-Nazi compatriots nodded in assent. “I agree completely,” one of them said. “You get up there with a rifle and start shooting four or five of them a week, the other four or five thousand behind them are going to think twice about crossing that line.”

The locals down in the border area tended to not agree-- and to not support Simcox and his Nazi brigades. Border Patrol officials he interviewed told Holthouse that the Minutemen were "more hindrance than help because they so frequently called in false alarms and set off ground sensors."

“The Border Patrol didn’t want them, my community didn’t want them here, and I didn’t want them here,” said Ray Borane, the Douglas mayor who frequently crossed swords with Chris Simcox and the other border watchers. “All they succeeded in doing was creating hard feelings and spreading a racist message. The amount of media attention they received has been totally out of proportion to their actual impact. The Mexicans have a saying that I think applies quite well to the Minuteman Project: ‘It was all song and no opera.’”

Monday, just before the Senate started voting, Obama had a high visibility meeting with prominent businessmen who back immigration reform. He made the economic case for why reform would be helpful to the country. "All of these business leaders," he said, "recognize the degree to which immigration is a contributor to growth, a contributor to expansion, a creator of jobs, but they also recognize that the immigration system that we currently have is broken." He hit all the talking points:

We have a system in which we bring outstanding young people from all across the world to educate them here, and unfortunately, too often, we send them right back so that they can start companies or help to grow companies somewhere else instead of here.

We have a situation in which millions of individuals are in the shadow economy, oftentimes exploited at lower wages, and that hurts those companies that are following the rules, because they end up being at a disadvantage to some of these less scrupulous companies.

And so, all of us I think recognize that now is the time to get comprehensive immigration reform done -- one that involves having very strong border security; that makes sure that we're holding employers accountable to follow the rules; one that provides earned citizenship for those 11 million, so that they have to pay back taxes, pay a fine, learn English, follow the rules, get to the back of the line, but ultimately can be part of the above-board economy, as opposed to the low-board economy; and a system that fixes and cleans up our legal immigration system so that we can continue to be a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants.

The good news is, is that we've got a strong bipartisan bill that meets many of those principles. As I've said before, it's not a bill that represents everything that I would like to see; it represents a compromise. And I think all the business leaders here recognize that there are elements of it that they might want to tweak one way or another. But it does adhere to the core principles that we need for comprehensive immigration reform, and now is the time to do it.

Just this past week, the Congressional Budget Office noted that this would end up bringing more money into the federal government. It would reduce our deficits-- people would be paying taxes. It would end up strengthening our economy, growing our economy. And so you've got a broad consensus all throughout the country, not just business leaders who are represented here today-- many of whom are immigrants themselves, many of whom started businesses and are now creating opportunity all across the country-- but we're also seeing labor leaders, we're seeing clergy, we're seeing people from all different walks of life saying now is the time to get this done.

Monday afternoon, the Senate voted 67-27 (with several supporters stuck at airports and on planes) to move forward with the immigration bill by further militarizing the U.S.-Mexican border and screwing with immigrants in various and sundry ways-- Democrats giving in to dozens of petty Republican demands in return for their votes. (One was to confiscation billions of dollars paid into Social Security by undocumented workers.) The Republicans who voted YES were John McCain (AZ), Lindsey Graham (SC), Marco Rubio (FL), Jeff Flake (AZ)-- Gang of Eight members-- and Bob Corker (TN), Lamar Alexander (TN), Kelly Ayotte (NH), Jeff Chiesa (NJ), Susan Collins (ME), Orrin Hatch (UT), Dean Heller (NV), Mark Kirk (IL), John Hoeven (ND), Lisa Murkowski (AK) and Roger Wicker (MS).

And yesterday there was another Republican filibuster of the immigration reform bill. It was shot down 67-31, with every single Democrat plus 13 Republicanos voting to shut it down. That should be similar to the final vote, although Dems might persuade Chiesa (NJ) and Chambliss (GA) to cross the aisle as well and vote for reform. The Republicans who voted with the Democrats yesterday:

• Lamar Alexander (TN)
• Kelly Ayotte (NH)
• Susan Collins (ME)
• Bob Corker (TN)
• Jeff Flake (AZ)
• Lindsey Graham (SC)
• Orrin Hatch (UT)
• Dean Heller (NV)
• John Hoeven (ND)
• Mark Kirk (IL)
• John McCain (AZ)
• Lisa Murkowski (AK)
• Marco Rubio (FL)

Pillars Of A Shared Faith-- And The Celebration Of Stupidity

Earlier today I attempted to indict Palin and Beck and that crowd for their supporting roles in the mass murder in Tucson. I gave a swing at comparing their hate-mongering and winking and nodding at right-wing terrorists to the actions of Pakistani fundamentalists who spew out identical hate-filled messages-- and were directly responsible for the assassination of Punjab Gov. Salmaan Taseer. Most Americans haven't a clue who Taseer was so it may have caused some readers to just blur over. But, aside from being the governor of Pakistan's biggest and most important province, Taseer was an extremely well known and greatly admired secular icon from a prominent literary and left-wing family. His father was a well-known progressive poet and his mother was an Englishwoman who went to British India in the '30s to support the struggle for independence against her own country. Taseer himself was arrested 16 times and was once in solitary confinement for over 6 months, shackled to the ground. His political allies Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and, more recently, Benazir Bhutto, were both victims of right-wing assassinations-- as he was on January 4th.

Yesterday Dave Neiwert, our country's foremost expert on domestic right-wing terrorism, posted a map at Crooks and Liars of all those "isolated incidents" involving terroristic violence directed at "liberals" and the "government" that have added up into a serious trend, which has been, of course, studiously ignored by the corporate media. You can find everything you need to know about right-wing terrorism in Dave's book, The Eliminationists but today I want to expand on the matter by quoting from a book I'm currently reading, Will Bunch's brilliant follow-up to Tear Down This Myth, The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama. Chapter 2, "The Incredible Story of How Obama Lost in 2008," finds Bunch ay Kirby & Holloway's Family Restaurant in Dover, Delaware with 3 very typical, completely bigoted, brainwashed right-wing imbeciles, Alex and Theresa Garcia and Russ Murphy, founder of the Delaware 9-12 Patriots, a Glenn Beck support group. They're explaining why drooling right-wing clowns can tell you with a straight face that Obama lost the election in 2008 (and isn't a legitimate president, even if he was born in the U.S.-- which, of course, they all know for sure he wasn't).

Murphy gets the ball rolling by explaining that "people voted for him because he was black... they thought they were making history." But it was Theresa who cut to the chase: "He did not win the popular vote. He won the electoral vote. If you took into account the popular vote, he lost by a landslide." You see this is the revealed wisdom of Tea Bag Nation. Apparently they are entitled to their own facts. In the alternative universe known as reality, Obama won 365 electoral votes to McCain's 173, so Theresa was partially correct. Obama won the electoral vote. He also won the popular vote-- with 67,842,818 (52.8%) to McCain's 58,989,852 (45.9%). It wasn't close. And Obama won more votes than anyone ever running for president in history. His was also the biggest percentage win since 1988 when George H.W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis with 53.4%. [As for winning the popular vote and losing the electoral vote, the only presidential election in contemporary history where that happened was in 2000 when the Supreme Court awarded George Bush the presidency by shutting down the Florida vote count. The final vote was 50,999,897 for Al Gore (48.4%) to 50,456,002 (47.9%) for Bush. Because 5 partisan right-wing Supreme Court judges awarded Bush Florida's 25 electoral votes, Bush wound up with 271 votes to Gore's 266.]

[The] urban nature of Obama's support was exactly the point that the Garcias and Russ Murphy were awkwardly trying to make. When Alex Garcia has finished his monologue [how McCain won more land] about the big states and the small states, you sheepishly note-- more of a question than a statement, really-- that Obama and his native-son running mate Joe Biden actually carried Delaware, did they not? (By a landslide margin of more than 100,000 votes in fact.)

"What it is," said Alex Garcia, "... is Wilmington."

"Wilmington!" chimes his wife, Theresa.

Wilmington, with 72,826 people, an hour north of your diner booth, is the largest city in Delaware by far-- capital of the American credit-card industry and also plagued by more violent criminal enterprises, a crowded world apart from the marshy spaces of lower Delaware. The city of Wilmington is roughly 10 percent Latino and about 35 percent black; in 2008, Obama carried New Castle County-- Wilmington and the surrounding suburbs-- by a two-to-one margin while McCain narrowly won the rest of the state, including small towns that his running-mate Sarah Palin once called "the pro-America parts of the country."

Wilmington?

"They get a lot of influence from New Jersey and New York because a lot of the New York and New Jersey people live in Wilmington, and that's a big influence," Alex is saying, "and they're really into the welfare state-- it's a handout area up there. When you start coming down below the [Delaware] Canal into Kent County and Sussex County, it's a totally different way they voted."

A long silence settles in over the table. Plates clink. Toddlers babble in the background, as soft rock descends from a speaker overhead. The big platters of spaghetti and meatloaf arrive, and the once talkative Murphy is bent over his mound of pasta, handing off to the Garcias the task of further explaining McCain's glorious 2008 victory.

But, you finally stutter, should votes from Wilmington actually count less?

"There's more of them," Theresa says.

"It's population," adds Alex.

"They're in the big cities," says Theresa. "That's what the problem is."

So are you saying that voters from Wilmington aren't the real America?

"They represent the welfare America, the handout America-- what do they call it, the nanny state, everybody is taken care of," explains Alex. "When you get into the big areas like that, everybody is expecting their free handout... You have a lot more of the... how would I put it... a lot more of the welfare recipients, stuff like that."

There is a famous and somewhat apocryphal anecdote about the New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael saying from her liberal bastion in Manhattan that Richard Nixon could not have won the 1972 election because every single person she knew voted for George McGovern. Here is the flip side: that looking out on the "pro-America" horizon from the Kirby & Holloway, it is impossible to imagine that someone like Barack Hussein Obama could have won a presidential election-- or even that he is a United States citizen. These things are the pillars of a shared faith.

...Their uprising was something the likes of which America had never seen before-- whiter, older, and more affluent, yet angrier than anyone could have expected, whipsawed into rebellion not by the hormonally raised expectations of youth but instead by a nonstop sedentary couch-potato bombardment of unfiltered fear.

...The proof came in conversations like this one-- with their search for a Pyrrhic victory, their contention that Obama's win couldn't be legit because it sprang instead from the "handout areas" like Wilmington, that the real America would be killed by majority rule as opposed to the Constitution-embodied values that their movement embraced. The more that you talked to people like Theresa Garcia, the clearer it became that the deep-seated psychological roots of this quest to deny the legitimacy of the forty-fourth president arose from a first vague and then growing discomfort that a man like Barack Hussein Obama had the audacity to put himself forward as the face of their America.

It's exactly how Qari Hanif Qureshi, Mumtaz Qadri and their people felt about Salmaan Taseer.

I know, I know, neither pulled the trigger

Anti-Government Rage Brings On More Threats-- And An Arrest

Last week we introduced you to another greed-obsessed anti-government fanatic, Charles Turner Habermann, a social parasite/trust fund baby who was arrested for threatening to kill Democratic elected officials Jim McDermott, Chellie Pingree and Manny Perez. Now another one has been arrested, Vincent McCrudden of Long Island, a money manager who hates regulators. Hates them so much, in fact, that he's been threatening to kill them, dozens of them. A clear danger to society, he was denied bail and is rotting in jail. The 49 year old fouled-mouthed MCCrudden had threatened to kill 47 U.S. officials, posting an online "execution list" on his website that included Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro, Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Gary Gensler and his arch-nemisis Dan Driscoll of the National Futures Association.

Federal prosecutors said the threat came shortly after the CFTC brought an enforcement action accusing the former commodities trader and two of his companies with operating unregistered investments.

McCrudden threatened officials in emails and web postings at the SEC, CFTC, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and the National Futures Association, authorities said.

"Go buy a gun, and lets get to work in taking back our country from these criminals," McCrudden allegedly wrote, in a statement calling for the four regulators to be abolished. "I will be the first one to lead by example."

McCrudden wrote threatening e-mails to his targets, like this one to Driscoll: "It wasn't ever a question of if I was going to kill you, it was just a question of when... And now, that question has been answered. You are going to die a painful death."

"But..."



They're coming after you next? This guy (who made the video above) is really confused and caught up in himself. I bet he's a Ron Paul supporter. Dave Neiwert is neither confused nor a Ron Paul supporter. He's also the most preeminent expert on right-wing rage and violence. Writing about the teabag terrorism Tucson massacre in a post called Violent Rhetoric And The Mentally Ill, he makes a lot more sense than the video maker.

For some time now, it's been something of a reflexive response by media pundits, particularly conservatives and "moderate" liberals, to point to mental illness when some violent and unstable person commits a horrifying act in the name of extremist right-wing beliefs. If they're just mentally ill, you can't blame the people whose ideas they happened to pick up, can you?

Thus we have witnessed a steady stream of "isolated incidents" in which angry, mentally unstable men walk into churches and shoot their liberal targets in the head, or walk into public spaces and open fire, or crash their planes into government offices and gun down police officers. Yet when all these, and a long list of similar incidents, occur, they are dismissed as "isolated incidents." Because, you see the perpetrators are just "nutcases."

He made an even stronger case at Crooks and Liars this morning:

there is indeed an abundance of evidence that not only was Loughner's rampage a political act, it was an act of domestic terrorism committed by someone who had been unhinged by far-right conspiracy theories.

Let's review just the facts we already had in hand, even before this weekend:

-- Loughner self-identifies as a terrorist. (See the videos he left behind; in our version, the page in which he identifies himself as a "terrorist" is at the 1:00 mark).

-- He also clearly has adopted two strands of right-wing conspiracism: He believes that American currency is "phony" because it no longer is on the gold standard, and he believes Alex Jones-esque conspiracy theories about "mind control." The SPLC's Mark Potok has more on this.

-- He had developed an unhealthy fixation on Giffords, but his hatred of her was largely political in nature and not personal.

-- There was a powerful campaign of demonization directed at Giffords throughout the 2010 campaign, including but hardly limited to Sarah Palin's attack ads -- much of it featuring rhetoric condoning the idea of targeting Giffords with guns.

-- Giffords was a mainstream moderate Democrat -- a classic target of hatred from the conspiracist right, which despises real liberals but reserves its special venom for centrist Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

If you have any doubt that this was an act of terrorism -- and is thus inherently political -- just consider one of the basic criteria of the definition of the word: Were people -- not just the public generally, but the target group as well -- terrorized by the act? Clearly the answer is yes: Democrats in Arizona, who already feel on edge, are clearly feeling terrorized now.

It cannot be emphasized enough that the target of a political act is a powerful indicator of the perpetrator's intent. Terrorists always intend to send a message with their acts, and the message is conveyed in the persons who are are targeted and become victims of their violence. There's no doubt that Jared Loughner sent a message with these killings: The lives of government-coddling Democrats and their enablers are forfeit.

And if there was any doubt that Loughner was unhinged by right-wing conspiracism, there was the report on Wednesday's Good Morning America:

Of course, there are worse things than violent right-wing terrorism. Imagine this on every channel, every radio station, every day, all day-- just this.

Rachel Maddow's Got More On The Right-Wing Hutaree Militia

April 19 is the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing and these militia goons are going to celebrate it by marching on Washington, armed. They're not just violent, ignorant, delusional malcontents and domestic terrorists-- heavily armed ones-- but they are also a lifestyle... for the whole family. (And, by the way, Oklahomans celebrate the bombing of their own state by becoming and more and more crackpot reactionary, electing people like Inhofe, Coburn, Fallon, Cole, Sullivan and Boren.

Our pal Dave Neiwert, author of The Eliminationists joined Rachel tonight and helped put right-wing anti-government domestic terrorism into context.

You Don't Have To Go To A Tea Party Or To CPAC To Be A Teabagger-- Flying A Plane Into A Building Will Do Quite As Well

There are points being made by the Tea Party Movement that sound very attractive. It even makes some naive and disappointed Democrats think there could be common ground with them. And some of the young Tea Partiers-- high school kids who are attracted to the stated ideals-- are all about the refreshing idealism. But, as I've said before, when you scratch beneath the surface of the actual teabaggers you find one of two strains: the virulent racists and Know Nothing xenophobes or the partisan Republicans with the same old anti-working family agenda.

I have no way of knowing if Joseph Stack ever went to a teababagger gathering or if he was a follower of Glenn Beck's, Rick Perry's, Ayn Rand's, or Michael Savage's. And no one at CPAC has been spotted wearing "Free Joseph Stack T-Shirts"... yet (not even Scott Brown, who dismissed the tragedy by saying that the people who voted for him feel the same way about paying taxes. I bet they do; most of them are thoroughly brainwashed by right-wing propagandists like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter and the rest of the anti-tax/anti-government choir singing nightly for their suppers for the 500 families who own most of America and don't want to share it with anyone else.

John Aravosis did use a screenshot to capture a Facebook page by far right fanatics lionizing the latest in a string of domestic terrorists from the fringes of the Republican Party. Teabaggery at its essence:

It's pretty hideous. The page has the "Don't Tread On Me" flag that Tea party teabaggers like to use, and it has a wonderful Thomas Jefferson quote that domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh used. A lot of the nastiest stuff got deleted the first time around. Including a number of anti-Obama comments.

The mainstream media may have decided to not call flying a plane into a government office building "terrorism" since there were no Muslims involved, but as domestic terrorism/right-wing fanaticism expert Dave Neiwert explained at Crook and Liars yesterday, Joseph Stack was another violence-prone malcontent encouraged by right wing propaganda to act out Republican social nihilism that is just a few steps beyond standard operating procedures of your Mitch McConnells, Jim DeMints, Virginia Foxxes and Michele Bachmenn.

Since when, after all, is attempting to blow up a federal office as a protest against federal policies NOT an act of domestic terrorism?

You know, Timothy McVeigh used a "dangerous instrument" to kill 168 people in Oklahoma City. He too was angry at the federal government, and was converted to the belief that acts of violence was the only means possible to prevent the government from overwhelming our freedom and replacing it with tyranny. He also believed that his act of exemplary violence would inspire others to take up similar acts to stave off the threat of tyranny.

And that's exactly what Joseph Andrew Stack believed too:

I know I’m hardly the first one to decide I have had all I can stand. ... I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be white washed and ignored that the American zombies wake up and revolt; it will take nothing less. I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are. Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.

Digby summed it up nicely: "Nobody should be surprised that the right wing doesn't see anything wrong with nice white, anti-government lunatics try to kill people, that's for sure. Their leaders certainly aren't. And Sean Paul Kelley took on the task of explaining it to our friends in Engalnd with a column at the Guardian:

While members of Washington and Wall Street elites transfer the accumulated wealth of 200 years to themselves, the desperation in the rest of America becomes palpable. And today it hangs in the air like the smoke billowing from the Echelon Building here in Austin, into which Joseph Andrew Stack crashed a Piper Cherokee PA-28.

Stack's chief complaint was the American tax code, the right's go-to instrument of class warfare in America since Ronald Reagan's presidency. This warfare accelerated during Bush's tenure, as David Cay Johnston writes: "The effective income tax rate [of the top 400 family earners] fell to 16.62%, down more than half a percentage point from 17.17% in 2006, the new data show. That rate is lower than the typical effective income tax rate paid by Americans with incomes in the low six figures, which is what each taxpayer in the top group earned in the first three hours of 2007."

And now, instead of condemning the violence and loss of innocent life, as every citizen of the United States should do, many on the right are lionising Joseph Andrew Stack. While Massachusetts' newest Senator stopped short of praising Stack, he hardly condemned the violence. The right wing is riding the populist tiger.

There's a national mood-- an insanity that's overtaken a third of the country-- brought about by Obama's election. The far right has gone loco and the teabagger "movement" is one manifestation of that. Anti-social propagandists and nihilists made it clear from the very beginning that they are willing EAGER to see America fail rather than see Obama succeed. And that trail of treachery leads from your Michael Savages, Glenn Becks, and Rush Limbaughs right up to partisan hacks and demented ideologues like Jim DeMint (R-SC), Trent Franks (R-AZ), Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Patrick McHenry (R-NC). Let me offer you something I'm lifting out of Rick Perlstein's marvelous most recent book. While you're reading it, try to imagine who it's directed at and who spoke it-- and who wrote it for the speaker:

"Every Americans has the right to disagree with the president of the United States and to express publicly that disagreement. But the president of the United States has a right to communicate directly with the people who elected him, and the people of the country have the right to make up their own minds and form their own opinions about a presidential address without having the president's words and thoughts characterized through the prejudices of hostile critics even before they can even be digested" by "this little group of men who not only enjoy a right of instant rebuttal to every presidential address, but more importantly wield a free hand in selecting, presenting and interpreting the great issues of our nation." They became, "in effect, the presiding judge in a national trial by jury.

"... What do Americans know of the men who wield this power?... Little, other than that they reflect an urbane and assured presence, seemingly well-informed on every important matter... To a man, these commentators and producers live and work in the geographical and intellectual confines of Washington, D.C., or New York City... Both communities bask in their own provincialism, their own parochialism... They talk constantly to one another, thereby providing artificial reinforcement to their shared viewpoint." That viewpoint, what was more, did "not represent the view of America. That is why such a great gulf existed between how the nation received the president's address-- and how the networks reviewed it.

"The American people would rightly not tolerate this kind of concentration of power in government. Is it not fair and relevant to question its concentration in the hands of a tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one, and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by government?"

No, that was not Van Jones calling for an investigation of Clear Channel, Murdoch, Cheney, Limbaugh and O'Reilly. It was Vice President Spiro Agnew before he resigned in disgrace after being caught pocketing bribes from wealthy interests, reading a speech written for him by President Richard Nixon before he resigned after being caught subverting American democracy, calling for populist censorship against... Averell Harriman and David Brinkley.

Historians who ignored Jonah "Jughead" Goldberg's trashbook "Liberal Fascism" now put their views on the record

by Ken

In a "reply" to a colloquium of historians organized on George Mason University's History News Network by our good friend David Neiwert to set the record straight about Jonah "Jughead" Goldberg's trashbook Liberal Fascism, our Juggy professes surprise and delight that suddenly, after two years of post-publication silence, everybody is talking about the book. This proves he's been right all along, right?

Um, no. It's true, as Dave points out in his introduction, that the book "was greeted largely with silence among those academic historians and political scientists." But there's a simple reason.

Few spoke out, as Roger Griffin suggests, because they recognized that Goldberg’s book was more of an exercise in polemics than a historical work, and as such not really appropriate for academic consideration. Its use of history was so shoddy and propagandistic, and its claims so frankly absurd, that very few of them considered it worth taking seriously.

And Juggy knows perfectly well why why his book is being talked about now, two years after publication, by people independent of the Right-Wing Noise Machine. (They've been screeching its lies all along.) It's because, thanks to the effectiveness of the loony-right propaganda effort, his big crock of doody, or rather the Right-Wing Talking Points version of it, has become an inspiration for the Hitlerite Teabag brawlers, whose brains have been pre-addled over these last four decades for just such confusion. It has become a sacred text for Glenn Beck in his crusade against sense and decency, and is now generally accepted wisdom among the lying heads of the Loony Right in their movement to bring down any U.S. government to the left of Haley Barbour.

Even Juggy acknowledges that what the book is really about is him being sick and tired of being called a fascist just because of his beliefs. (Okay, he may not admit that last part, but he's pretty free about the first part.) And so -- in the tradition, as I've pointed out, of the Holocaust deniers -- he set out on a historical pogrom, laying waste to the historical record and the work of responsible historians in search of bits and pieces he can use, or at least twist, to his revolutionary thesis that fascism was a movement of the Left, and never mind who and what the fascists themselves thought they were. To make the whole thing really, hilarious, he concocts his own utterly fantastic "definitions" of terms like "fascist" and "liberal" and "left" and "right." Of course, if you make your own definitions, you can prove almost anything. Unless you're our Juggy, in which case even with your own definitions you can't prove anything except that you're full of doody.

In his contribution to the HHN colloquium, "The Scholarly Flaws of Liberal Fascism," emeritus Columbia history professor Robert Paxton, author most recently of The Anatomy of Fascism, bends over backward to be fair:

[T]here really is a subject here. Fascism -– a political latecomer that adapted anti-socialism to a mass electorate, using means that often owed nothing to conservatism –- drew on both right and left, and tried to transcend that bitter division in a purified, invigorated, expansionist national community. A sensitive analysis of what fascism drew from all quarters of the political spectrum would be a valuable project. It is not Jonah Goldberg’s project.

The bottom line is that Goldberg wants to attach a defaming epithet to liberals and the left, to “put the brown shirt on [your] opponents,” as he accuses the liberals of doing (p. 392). He goes about this task with a massive apparatus of scholarly citations and quotations. But Goldberg’s scholarship is not an even-handed search for understanding, following the best evidence fully and open-mindedly wherever it might lead. He chooses his scholarly data selectively and sometimes misleadingly in the service of his demonstration.

Let me recall once again David Brock's startling realization (as reported in his account of his political awakening, Blinded by the Right), as he came to question (finally!) the kind of "journalism" practiced at The Weekly Standard and other organs of the Far Right, which had made him a star. He came to grasp that they weren't doing journalism, which involves going out and getting a story, which in turn means finding out what the story is. No, they started with the story all laid out in their minds, usually from current Right-Wing Talking Points, and then went in search of anything they could find -- snippets of facts suitable for twisting, lies (bought if necessary), whatever -- to decorate the preconceived story.

As I always point out when I recall this blinding revelation of Brock's, a lot of Infotainment Media News "reporters" indeed do something similar way too much of the time, which is why we scream so much about them. But they don't usually do it as a matter of journalistic doctrine. It's more laziness than ideological thuggery -- and the knowledge that if you're reporting the same sludge as all your peers, even if you're not right, you're almost surely safe.

Here's Oxford historian Roger Griffin, author of The Nature of Fascism and, more recently, Modernism and Fascism: The sense of a beginning under Mussolini and Hitler:

Goldberg’s book perverts historical and historiographical truth with the scarcely hidden agenda (perhaps the real ‘secret’ alluded to unwittingly in the subtitle) of tarring and feathering with negative, anti-democratic, and inhumane connotations a broad current of reformist policy and social justice campaigns which has for decades been a legitimate current of liberalism within U.S. democracy (and not exclusively the Democratic sector of it). It does so with the blatant aim of making this current guilty (by association) of some of the most heinous crimes ever committed against humanity. It is a work of sustained pseudo-historical calumny and defamation disguised under the (constantly slipping) carnival mask of an ‘alternative history’.

Matthew Feldman, senior lecturer in 20th-century history at the University of Northampton, begins his contribution, "Poor Scholarship, Wrong Conclusions," by quoting Mussolini himself on fascism's "absolute" opposition to liberalism. His take on the book:

[T]his is certainly not a book for anyone attempting a better understanding of fascist ideology, although it may be a useful barometer of the so-called "culture wars" in the contemporary United States. At points, Liberal Fascism even admits as much; for example, "one of the main reasons I've written the book [is] to puncture the smug self-confidence that simply by virtue of being liberal one is also virtuous" (317-8). Indeed, the book's first paragraph already sets out the real antagonists in Goldberg's account, namely "[a]ngry liberals" and "besieged conservatives." Regrettably, his hostility better characterizes the rhetoric of ideological rivals like fascism and communism -– radical right-wing and radical left-wing, respectively, despite Goldberg's sleight of hand -– rather than one end of a democratic spectrum. And you certainly wouldn't know that fascists and communists fought it out on the streets and battlefields for very different ideological doctrines. Instead, reading Liberal Fascism, you might think they rather liked one another.

Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates and co-author of Right Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort, focuses on the historical lineage of Juggy's line of argument:

Jonah Goldberg does not list the John Birch Society as a major source, but he should have, since his book is like a compendium of JBS articles published over the last fifty years. These ideas are now ubiquitous among right-wing populists in the Tea Party movement. Am I suggesting that Birchers, the Christian Right, and right-wing libertarians have taken over the Republican Party? Yes, although old-fashioned conservatives and political pragmatists are putting up a splendid fight for control of the Party. Do I think right-wing TV, radio, and print media are awash with right-wing conspiracy theories pioneered by the Birchers? Yes, that’s what my research shows. . . .

No serious scholar of fascism disputes the fact that Italian Fascism and German Nazism borrowed themes and personnel from existing socialist movements. . . . Fascism, Nazism, Communism, the Roosevelt administration, and the modern Welfare State share degrees of government intervention in the economy. They are not equivalent, and there is no evidence that government planning leads to totalitarianism any more than drinking tea leads to opium addiction. This is a classic logical error. [Hannah] Arendt detailed how it was the totalitarianism shared by Hitler and Stalin that created similarities in terms of ruthless government repression.

Even a right-wing-stooge foreign-policy analyst like Michael Ledeen, who has provided a separate response for HNN, while doing his best to provide cover for Juggy, winds up digging him an even deeper hole. And he does it by offering a representation of the book that I think would astonish everyone who knows anything about it, after knocking down a bunch of straw men:

[H]e's not saying that liberalism is the same as fascism, or that fascists were really liberals [um, Mikey, he absolutely, unequivocally is saying that fascists are leftists-- Ed.], or any such thing. What he does say is that many of the iconic figures in American liberalism (and among the British left as well) greatly admired Mussolini. As well they might, he says, since he was really one of them in many ways.

And Ledeen is prepared to defend this much because he has a personal affection for a blazing right-wing "discovery" that links Mussolini to Robespierre and the radicals of the French Revolution (those famous liberals). This is mostly irrelevant bullshit, of course, involving multiple layers of obfuscation (if Mussolini started out as a socialist, what did Ronald Reagan and Whittaker Chambers and the entire Commentary crowd start out as?) and is certainly irrelevant to Juggy's arguments in Liberal Fascism. Even Mikey acknowledges:

While certain French revolutionary ideas played into the creation of the fascist movement, and while Mussolini started life as a socialist, and while various radical anarcho-syndicalists supported Mussolini from the very beginning (and some remained to the end), it is still a real stretch to say that fascism was fundamentally leftist. Mussolini came to power because his thugs won the street battles with socialist thugs, not because he won the support of left-wing voters. . . .

[W]hile there were fascists with leftist tendencies, they were alienated from the regime, embittered by its reactionary nature, and eventually went elsewhere.

What's more, it isn't really Mussolini Juggy is concerned about, it's Hitler. He uses not-so-fancy footwork dancing between them when one is especially inconvenient for the line of bull he's slinging at the moment, and Mussolini is often more useful this way. Of course he's also wildly misrepresented. Still, does anyone -- like the Teabaggers, for example -- really care now about the "authentic" fascism of Mussolini? Surely what's got Juggy down is being thought a Nazi. (When he's called a fascist, he knows that what's really meant is a Nazi.)

Whether it was his intent or not, his book has been used on the Right to equate liberalism with Nazism. The thugs of the Teabagger movement don't call the president "Mussolini," as Juggy, their figurehead pseudo-historian, knows this perfectly well. And even Mikey Ledeen notes, "The weakest part of the book has to do with the Nazis." Given how far Ledeen is prepared to stretch to cover Juggy's butt, this is seems basically to be saying that Juggy knows from nothing about Nazis.

I suppose we can give Juggy credit for seeing a market opening here: lots of other American far-right-wingers who, despite being unmistakably Hitler's Children, are sick and tired of being called Fascists or Nazis. It may not make for good history, but it's made for some good sales numbers. And neither buyers nor sellers have any sense of shame.

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