Hate among the young

One of the most troubling aspects of the recent resurgence of white-supremacist ideology and its attendant hate crimes is the reality that young people -- especially young males -- are now the primary target of recruitment by hate groups.

Even if they never join such groups (which is most often the case), young men are targeted by white-supremacist ideologues specifically because they know they are likely to act out on the belief system spread by the rhetoric they engender, which is often picked up and used by non-members who are nonetheless sympathetic. Hate groups carefully tailor their messages to appeal to young men's sensibilities, running the gamut from inflaming urban and suburban racial tensions in high schools to promoting so-called "racist rock."

Accordingly, it's mostly among young people that we've been seeing this fresh wave of currency for white-supremacist ideology and hate crimes. We may be gradually approaching the day that most of those who monitor right-wing extremism have always dreaded: the day when racism and white supremacism become "hip" and "cool" because they embody the ultimate in rebelliousness.

This concern was raised by a recent Dwight Lewis column in the Tennessean that details the racist material taken from a teenager by his grandmother in Nashville.

It's worth noting how the teen obtained the material:

Jackie told me her grandson got involved in hatred groups such the Klan and neo-Nazis after going to Florida during spring break this year.

"He met a girl in Orlando whose father was said to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan," Jackie said. "She fed on my grandson, and then he started getting all this stuff in the mail.

"When I went to visit him, he started telling about some of it. I said, 'Andy, that's not the way you're supposed to think about people.' And then he said to me, 'If I came home with a black girl, you wouldn't have any problem with it?'

"I said, 'No, Andy, I wouldn't.' "

Jackie said her grandson has been using both of his parents' computers to get in the chat rooms of hate groups.

"I think if he keeps this up, it could lead to trouble for him," Jackie said. "And I think other people ought to know that stuff like this is taking place, that it's out there on computers and kids such as my grandson are having their brains filled with this garbage."

The column references a recent Southern Poverty Law Center report titled "Age of Rage" that details what's happening on the ground:

Hate among kids has probably never been more widespread — and it doesn't stop with racist graffiti, Confederate flag T-shirts, swastika tattoos and homophobic slurs in high-school hallways.

Studies by hate-crime experts like Jack Levin, director of Northeastern University's Brudnick Center and co-author of the new book, Why We Hate, show that incidents perpetrated by youngsters, which became more frequent from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, "plummeted" during the Clinton years.

But since 9/11, the number of hate crimes by kids has risen sharply — and they appear to be more brutal than ever. "What we're seeing," says Eric Ward, a longtime observer of extremist youth who works at Chicago's Center for New Community, "is a more militant, street-fighter culture."

As both the Boston and Farmingville incidents show, the targets of this militance have multiplied -- and so have the perpetrators. After 9 /11, a disproportionate number of the assaults on Muslim-Americans were committed by teenagers. The same appears true for attacks against sexual and gender minorities, Hispanics and the homeless.

And hate activity is no longer the province of white boys, though they're still the main offenders. Not only are more Hispanic and African-American kids getting involved in hate, but more girls as well.

Social ecologist Ronald Huff, a longtime student of both street and racist youth gangs, estimates that in many cities "anywhere from a third to 50% of gang members are girls."

In another demographic shift, the bulk of hate activity now bubbles up in the suburbs -- among reasonably well-off youth.

"Twenty years ago, big cities were hotbeds of hate," says Levin. "But as more and more minority families have moved into suburban areas, the prevalence of hate attacks has also increased there -- much of it perpetrated by kids."

Where the classic profile of a young hater in the 1980s was a blue-collar juvenile angered by economic displacement, the more typical picture now is a teenager "raised in a middle-class family in a place where almost everyone is a racial rubber-stamp of himself," Levin says.

The article also explores the underlying dynamic of what is attracting young people:

No single factor is sufficient to explain the spread of youth hatred. But the upsurge in one of its main manifestations — white supremacy — has inspired a theory developed by sociologists like Pamela Perry and Randy Blazak.

In Perry's 2002 book, Shades of White, she chronicled the racial attitudes of white kids at two contemporary California high schools — one predominantly white, one minority white. She found what Blazak calls "anomie" — French sociologist Emile Durkheim's term for the sense of confusion brought on by rapid social change.

The confusion, in this case, amounts to a basic question: "[W]hat is the new role of whites in the multicultural chorus?"

As Blazak points out in his forthcoming book, Ethnic Envy, "contemporary youth were born in the 1980s and 1990s, long after the frontline civil rights battles." White kids lack a long-term perspective on racial oppression in the U.S. — and end up saying, for instance, that "racism ended in the 1960s" and they're tired of hearing blacks "complaining about it."

They also see Hispanics, lesbians and gay men, Asian-Americans and others embraced and recognized — while straight white culture seems, from their limited vantage points, to be dissed and demonized.

"White kids feel like their racial identity is murky nowadays," says Ward. That's been partly responsible for the outbreak of Confederate flag T-shirts in high schools, both North and South, and also in several efforts — usually snuffed out by administrators — to start Caucasian clubs, mostly in California high schools.

"When they bring it up, they get their hands slapped," Ward says, "and they become pariahs. Pariahs can be dangerous."

Hate groups have tailored their recruitment pitches to these frustrated white kids. A perfect example is Jeff Schoep, "commander" of the National Socialist Movement, who says his group "lets our young people know it's all right to be white, and better yet, something to be proud of."

As I've previously explained, one of the chief manifestations of the spread of hate-group ideology is the appearance of hate crimes, largely because so much of white-supremacist rhetoric is specifically intended to inspire such acts, and so many such crimes indeed feature such rhetoric and symbology.

There certainly has been a recent spike in reported hate crimes, though whether that represents a real increase in the crimes remains anyone's guess. And it's important to note that not all of them are being committed by teenagers: two recent cases in Wisconsin -- one in Waukesha and the other in Sturgeon Bay -- were committed mostly by younger men and women in their 20s, but with supporting help from older men.

More typical, however, is a recent hate crime in Chico, California, involved racist grafitti, which is predominantly committed by teenagers. There has also been a recent influx of white-supremacist literature appearing on doorsteps in the Chico area, a clear sign of both increased recruitment activity and the likelihood of increased violence.

Fortunately, community leaders in Chico are doing the right thing. Rather than following the classic Chamber of Commerce approach and trying to sweep the problem under the rug, a local human-rights group organized an anti-hate march in Chico last Tuesday to draw community attention to the problem.

Public demonstrations such as these may on the surface seem trite or "politically correct," but they really are essential steps in sending a signal to would-be perpetrators -- who typically believe they are acting out their community's real values -- that nothing but condemnation and opprobrium await them if they commit such crimes.

Another important step, along the way, is to make hate-crime laws effective. Only a little more than half of all states actually have effective laws on the books, and it should be incumbent on state legislators to make sure they're in place. It's worth noting that a prosecutor in Kentucky recently denounced his state's bias-crime law, remarking that the current statute -- which "states that if hate were determined as a primary factor in the commission of a crime, officials may use that to deny probation or parole" -- is one of the most toothless pieces of law on anyone's books. The same is true of many other states.

Dwight Lewis's column included a passage from John Seigenthaler's introduction to My Life In The Klan, by Jerry Thompson, particularly this:

During placid periods of relative social calm, we tend to ignore or forget the still-segregated mosaic of life in the United States, knowing that our instincts for decency and equity eventually will right the diminished wrongs. In the meantime, we are a tolerant people -- willing to tolerate a modest measure of intolerance. But a few seeds of intolerance take root in extremist fields and grow wild in a climate of unconcern. The environment is ripe for trouble.

The question is, will we have the courage to confront it when it ripens in our own children?

Making a martyr

Regular readers may recall the case of Marvin Heemeyer, the man who went on a rampage in a small Colorado town with an armored bulldozer, leveling a number of local buildings before becoming stuck and apparently shooting himself. I noted back then that a number of conspiracy theories had already sprung up around Heemeyer's case, and speculated that he might become yet another accidental martyr for right-wing extremists.

A recent piece by Martin Smith in the Los Angeles Times Magazine indicates that this is precisely what's happening:

Martyr Without a Cause:
The Antigovernment Crowd Declared Marvin Heemeyer a Hero After He Died Trying to Level a Colorado Town With an Armored Bulldozer. Never Mind That the 'Patriots' Got It All Wrong.

"Getting it all wrong" is, of course, a trademark of the extremist right, which thrives on distortion and outright falsehood. And in Heemeyer's case, it seems that they're once again taking a case of outrageous miscreancy and recasting it as yet another instance of evil government tyranny:

That back story was mostly lost in the energetic mythmaking that followed Heemeyer's rampage. In truth, this was not a one-man crusade against government tyranny, as some people saw it; instead, it was a nasty personality clash between two rough-edged men with a fair amount of money at stake. And so the Granby town board became the referee in an apparent public policy dispute that masked a history of personal animosity.

I'm briefly quoted in this piece, incidentally, but the real meat comes at the end:

... [H]is sister, living in Oregon, and his sister-in-law in Castlewood, S.D., also consider it "unfair" that some people have tried to twist Heemeyer's rage at a few local enemies into something else. "Marv's father served in World War II," Cindy Heemeyer says. "And Marv was very proud of his service in the Air Force. Going through his keepsakes and stuff, those were some of the things he kept. He paid his taxes. He wasn't antigovernment at all. His problem was with just a few people."

In 2001, patriot groups also tried to adopt the McGuckin family of Sandpoint, Idaho, whose land seizure by county officials led to an armed standoff between law enforcement and mother JoAnn and her six children. Still, JoAnn McGuckin was so concerned about unwanted support from patriot groups that she later released a written statement from her jail cell: "You all are most welcome to make your own political ideas known, of course, as you wish. Please, not in my name. I cannot honor your cause[s]."

But out there in the ideological abstract, where details don't much matter, the hijacking of Marvin Heemeyer continues. Conspiracy theories multiply against all logic: One suggests that the five guns and boxes of ammo in Heemeyer's bulldozer were a figment of law enforcement imagination, and that all those bullet holes around town were the result of ricocheting police fire. (Some of them were, no doubt, as one undersheriff emptied 37 rounds into the greased rhino's few orifices, hoping to disable or kill the unknown driver). The chatter got so loud that, nearly two weeks after the rampage, the Grand County Sheriff's Department felt compelled to clarify that Heemeyer wasn't the harmless man with a gripe his supporters wished him to be. Its news release noted the "significant amount of information circulating regarding Mr. Heemeyer's lack of intent to hurt anyone during this incident" and said "statements of witnesses and physical evidence contradict that belief." It also noted that Heemeyer fired his guns at both Docheff and police officers.

No matter. The misguided mythmaking goes on. Responding to an e-mailed question for this story, John Trochmann of Noxon, Mont., cofounder of the seminal Militia of Montana, prefaced his reaction to the rampage by stressing that his organization does not "condone violence whether it comes from a private source or from public service (government)."

In signing off, though, Trochmann couldn't resist adding one last flourish. He noted that, among his compatriots, "there is suspicion that Mr. Heemeyer did not take his own life as has been alleged. We shall see."

Oh yes indeed, we shall see.

Domestic terrorism and Boston

Ask yourselves what would happen under the following scenario:

A credible threat of terrorist violence against Republicans at their convention in New York planned by a radical Islamist faction is reported by a widely respected news service. Law-enforcement and Homeland Security officials respond to the threat with an all-out security clampdown.

Would this story, you think, receive major play on the networks nightly newscasts? Fox News and the cable gabfests? How long would it be before Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity blamed liberals for aiding and abetting this threat?

Strangely enough, a scenario very much like this appears to be exactly what has happened with this year at the Democratic Convention in Boston, where Reuters reported last week that there may be attacks on media vehicles at the convention (none of which, we hasten to note, have occurred so far):

"The FBI has received unconfirmed information that a domestic group is planning to disrupt the Democratic National Convention by attacking media vehicles with explosives or incendiary devices," the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Boston field office said in a statement.

The Associated Press reported the same threat.

That's apparently not all. According to the current [Aug. 2, 2004] edition of U.S. News and World Report, the convention itself may be the target of a chemical/bioweapon attack:

We're told that party bigwigs heading to Boston for this week's Democratic National Convention and New York for the GOP gaggle ... are being warned about a potential chemical or biological attack from terrorists. While little is known for certain, security officials reveal that the threat is worse in New York than Boston. 'Who'd want to attack [Sen. John] Kerry?' asked one."

As it happens, I can think of a broad range of right-wing extremists who would plan an attack on John Kerry well before any on George Bush. But maybe that's just me.

Now obviously, it makes a certain amount of sense not to overplay the presence of these threats, because that treads into the realm of needless fearmongering. But there ought to be some kind of serious discussion of them, and the consequences of them, in the press and elsewhere, particularly in the context of our current "war on terror."

On the other hand, I am far from assured that the current "restraint" regarding domestic-terrorist threats in Boston would remain in place were there a similar threat -- from a non-domestic source -- in New York.

I'm wondering: Has anyone heard anyone on any of the cable channels discuss these threats? Have you seen any mention of them in the nightly newscasts? I'm asking partly out of serious hope that someone in fact has brought them up. I've tried to watch as much of the coverage as possible and have seen and heard absolutely nada, nil, zippo. But it's possible I missed something.

However, I did in fact find an account of the kind of stepped-up security that has descended on Boston. Some of this, it should be clear, is the simple product of the Sept. 11 attacks; security officials have been quoted in various news accounts saying that the level of security planned for this convention was unprecedented anyway. The domestic-terrorist threat, however, has almost certainly amplified that.

Joel Connelly of the Seattle P-I reported this morning that security was reaching new heights, as it were:

No fewer than 12 Massachusetts state police cruisers were working Interstate 93 where the freeway headed north into downtown Boston. Troopers stepped into the highway, directing delivery trucks to pull over for inspection.

Bill Hamilton, a transplanted Seattleite, was riding the MBTA orange line subway back into town. One of the city's main commuter stops -- North Station -- has been shut down for the convention.

"Wasn't the half of it," said Hamilton. "At the stop before North Station, armed guards boarded the train and started to search everybody's packages, backpacks and suitcases."

But according to Connelly, all this security was because of Osama bin Laden.

Because, of course, if they're white, they aren't terrorists.
____

[Thanks to John H., Daniel G. and Terry A. for the tips and links.]

Orca report

Just returned from another orca-watching trip to the San Juans. It's been a sketchy year for orca sightings, but Monday we had a great experience.

I had taken Fiona, who sits in a child seat in the middle of the boat, out to just paddle around and maybe see some seals along the west coast of San Juan Island. It was a gorgeous, sunny day and a light breeze kept everything cool. My sister-in-law, Trish, was in the front seat.

We rounded a corner and discovered a phalanx of whale-watching boats stretching southward for a mile or so. And heading right toward us was a large pod of orcas.

We simply stopped, unsure which way the whales were headed. As it happens, they were headed directly for us -- at least, a large portion of the pod was. Some swam by further out, but by the time the pod of 30 or so orcas had passed us by, about 20 of them had passed near our kayak. We thumped furiously on the hull of the boat the whole time so they could detect our presence.

One drifted by just under the rear of the boat, seemingly chasing a salmon, and then surfaced about five feet behind my rudder. One tail-lobbed us in an apparent warning; another rolled and wagged its pectoral fin in the air at us. A large male fully breached about twenty yards away from the front of the boat, and you could probably hear us gasp all the way back on shore.

Fiona had been near to drifting off for her regular 3-year-old's afternoon nap just before the whales appeared, but the first one who came near the boat awoke her fully. "Wow! They're really big, Dad!" she cried.

The night before, as she was going to bed in the tent, I had read her Paul Owen Lewis' Davy's Dream, a charming story about a boy who dreams of making friends with orcas by, among other things, singing to them.

As it also happens, her very favoritest favoritest movie in all the whole wide world right now is The Little Mermaid, which happens to feature a singing mermaid whose main theme is a short melody -- "Ah ah ah, ah ah ah" -- that Fiona has of course memorized.

Shortly after the first orca appeared near our boat, she decided to sing to them. The Little Mermaid Theme, of course. And over the course of the next 45 minutes or so, she sang to them. And when the orcas began appearing regularly, closer and playing, she cried out:

"It works, Daddy, it works!"

Of course, we both congratulated her for her awesome mermaid singing skill.

Later, when we got back to shore, Auntie Trish asked Fiona: "Were you ever scared of the orcas, honey?"

"Nooooo!" Fiona retorted scornfully, as though Auntie Trish was just being silly.

What Bush's records reveal

The bizarre spin emerging over the recent release of a portion of George W. Bush's military records has to leave anyone who's followed the story closely shaking their head. Just how is it, exactly, that the failure to dispel an iota of the suspicion that Bush was absent without leave for at least three months, and likely more, somehow prove that he was fulfilling his duty? It's probably the first time in recent memory that a complete lack of evidence has been cited as evidence. Newspeak, anyone?

Worst of all, once again, is the role the press is playing as the transmitter of these false memes. But then, that's largely what's happened all along.

Fortunately, a handful of dogged researchers are doing the press' work and combing through the documents that have been released. Among these is my old Table Talk chum Paul Lukasiak, who many of you will recall recently released the first of his reports for The AWOL Project on what's actually contained in Bush's records.

Now he's issued the second, and it's well worth checking out:

FRAUD: The Secrets of Bush's Payroll Records Revealed

Like the first report, it's thorough and detailed. What's significant about this report is that Lukasiak has managed to decode the lines of data at the bottom of Bush's records, data that was at first thought to be incomprehensible but which in fact contains significant information about Bush's conduct in the military.

Here's the summary:

An examination of George W. Bush's payroll records lead to the conclusion that Bush consciously and deliberately defrauded the United States government for pay and "points" to which he was not entitled. The White House probably doesn't even know that the payroll records include the data necessary to prove fraud -- the proof is found in the "incomprehensible" lines of data at the bottom of the payroll records.

Lieutenant Bush was required to attend scheduled monthly training with his Texas Air National Guard unit, or perform "substitute training" instead. However, under Air Force policy, advance authorization was required for "substitute training", and this training could be done no more than 15 days before his unit met for the scheduled mandatory training. The payroll records show that, during his last year as a member of the Texas Air National Guard, fraud was involved in over 40% of the pay Bush received that was credited toward mandatory monthly training. Bush was paid for, and received "point credit" for "substitute training" more than 15 days before the corresponding scheduled training for five separate weekends of mandatory training.

Moreover, without advance authorization, Bush could not be paid or credited with any "training" he claims to have performed in Alabama.

Yet the payroll records are completely inconsistent with Bush having received advance authorization for the "substitute training" supposedly done in Alabama. If training had been authorized, paychecks would have been issued no more than five weeks after the training had been done. Instead, it took an average of seven weeks (and as much as nine weeks) for pay to be processed.

Other documents in the Bush files provide additional evidence that the training that Bush was paid for in Alabama was never properly authorized. And the statements made by officers of the Alabama Air National Guard also confirm that Bush did not get the authorization necessary from Alabama for him to be paid and credited with training.

Finally, the White House has never released any of the paperwork that could show that this training was approved in advance, or that the training was actually accomplished. Additional circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that none of the training done in Alabama was properly authorized. When the evidence is considered as a whole, the obvious conclusion is that this paperwork never existed, and that Bush was paid for training that he never performed.

The last sentence, incidentally, may be a touch strong -- I'd probably call it the "most logical" conclusion or something along those lines. Otherwise, this is another strong contribution to what we know about Bush's records.

The Hunting of the President

I had the good fortune to attend last night's Seattle premiere of The Hunting of the President, Harry Thomason's documentary based on the book by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons. The latter is clearly becoming the definitive text on what happened to the Clinton presidency -- and the film, one hopes, is the first serious step in the public's reassessment of that period.

As it happened, I was invited by Gene Lyons, who flew up from Arkansas for the show and talked with the audience afterward. I also had the chance to chat briefly with Gene outside the theater and thank him for the tickets. He is, as I gathered from our e-mail conversations, both a very genial and a very wise fellow. Next time, perhaps, we can talk about the fishing in Montana.

Susan McDougal was also there, signing copies of her book. As we went in, my wife (who hasn't yet read THOTP) asked: "Why would I be interested in her book?" By the time we left, she knew.

McDougal, in fact, becomes the emotional centerpiece of the film in a way she never was in the book. I wasn't sure how well this would work, but seeing the film, it works very well indeed.

As you'd expect, the film takes a great number of short-cuts -- but then, if you wanted a movie that included all the detail in the book, you'd have a 15-hour opus on your hands. McDougal, in a way, represents one of these short-cuts -- because, as the book details, the campaign to bring down Bill Clinton destroyed many people's lives, most of them innocent pawns in a Machiavellian power grab orchestrated by Kenneth Starr and Co.

Even those familiar with the book, though, will be appalled by the extremes to which Starr & Co. went in their efforts to twist a "confession" out of McDougal. Torquemada would have been impressed: Placing her on death row, subjecting her to inmate abuse, even defying a judge's order to change the conditions of her confinement. The wreckage of McDougal's life is both convincing and gut-wrenching, as well as frightening to anyone who contemplates the ramifications of her ordeal for the rest of us.

Importantly, the film is quite different from Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, which is much more entertaining and engaging, but at times is too clever by half. THOTP has more of the gritty feel of a straight-ahead documentary, relying on archival footage and interviews to carry the narrative, and its heavy factual orientation at times makes for a more plodding but convincing narrative.

Even more than Moore's film, however, THOTP drives home what is, to me, the most important aspect of the dilemma we face: namely, the fact that the multiple problems we now face -- whose origins, it should be clear, can be readily found in the Clinton madness -- boil down to a malignant and disgracefully dysfunctional media.

What drives the Fahrenheit 9/11 phenomenon (from which THOTP stands to immediately benefit as well), in fact, is the very presence of this dysfunction -- and the reality that a large portion of the population is perfectly aware of it. Both films present important information that should have been part of the national dialogue and which instead has been systematically excluded, suppressed and ignored. (Check out the ridiculous pattern of non-reviews that greeted the publication of THOTP, for instance.) There is in fact a great demand, a real hunger, for this information. Both films help satisfy that hunger -- and feed even more.

THOTP is both stylistically and contextually quite different from Moore's film, and in some ways is an important second voice, because it provides much of the backdrop for the latter. It's not as emotionally involving or as entertaining, but it may be more essential.

I do have one question, though: What the hell is Howard Kurtz doing in this film actually making sense and asking intelligent critical questions about the press behavior during the entire impeachment episode? Because as has been pointed out many times by many people, Howard Kurtz was one of the worst of the lot when it came to "looking the other way" regarding press malfeasance -- not to mention indulging it himself from time to time.

Well, dammit, he did ask good questions, too. Hope he practiced them before a mirror.

UPDATE: Hey, if any of you are in the Seattle area, try to get out and see this film this weekend at the Varsity in the U District. Friday night's showing -- at which Gene Lyons spoke -- was sparsely attended. If that trend continues, the film may wind up hardly showing here at all; in fact, it may get yanked after this weekend. Call your friends and tell them to go too! (Here's a handy link to the Varsity's Web site.)

Hysteria, race, and reality

It's been pretty impressive, really, how quickly the American right has jumped aboard Annie Jacobsen's account in Women's Wall Street of an apparent band of brown-skinned terrorists doing a preparatory "dry run" on a flight from Detroit to Los Angeles. The story is circulating everywhere (I'm sure I haven't been alone in receiving, from various friends and acquaintances, links and queries about it) and it's been receiving quite a bit of play in the right-wing media.

Problem is, of course, that it's entirely bogus.

What Jacobsen was describing, in fact, was a group of Syrian musicians en route to playing a date in San Diego or Las Vegas. The men's story completely checks out -- and a careful readaing of Jacobsen's account reveals in fact nothing "suspicious" at all, except a group of travelers observing their own religious rituals. Some of them -- including the fellow who kept opening and closing his prayer book -- were probably anxious about flying.

World O'Crap provides a definitive takedown of the story today, including a link to a piece from National Review Online which examined the case and found that the musicians were indeed a band for a fellow named "Nour Mehana (a.k.a. Noor Mehanna, or Nour Mhanna, plus various permutations of those spellings)" who "is, in fact, Syrian. He performs both 'new-agey' hits and old sentimental Middle Eastern classics in a style called Tarab. ... Followers of news from Iraq may have heard about the U.S. tour of the 'Iraqi Elvis.' Well, Mehana comes across not as an angry jihadi, but rather more like the Syrian Wayne Newton."

Jacobsen, like any self-respecting hysteria-monger, is sticking to her guns. Indeed, as W'OC notes, she appeared on CNN last night and continued to insist the men were terrorists. [Oddly enough, no transcript of the show appears available yet.]

The whole episode reveals, in a pretty public way, just how problematic the entire notion of recruiting the public to be on the lookout for terrorist activity really is. Because Jacobsen's piece created such a maelstrom in a mudpit among right-wingers, a large section of Homeland Security officialdom and airline-security apparatus have been obliged to spend large chunks of taxpayer-funded time responding to the irrational fears she's whipped up.

The end result is that a large cross-section of the populace -- most of whom will never read the debunkings -- will be left with the impression Jacobsen's fears were justified. And by extension, their own fears will be, once again, amplified as well.

I mentioned earlier that the effort to recruit truckers and other workers to provide information on "suspicious activity" was proving to be more an exercize in enabling the ostracization and harassment of anyone "different," particularly men with brown skin and turbans. Jacobsen's piece was more of the same, with the general public the target.

There should be little doubt that race plays a major role in this kind of hysteria. As we've mentioned numerous times, Islamic extremists are not the only terrorists who pose real threats to the public's well-being. So are certain American whites.

What if Annie Jacobsen had encountered, say, a thin young kid from Buffalo who reeked of racing fuel and fertilizer and was fueling up a Ryder truck at the gas pump next to hers? Do you think we would be reading her breathless account of the encounter now?

Jacobsen's kind of hysteria, it must be emphasized, is not harmless. It breeds an already unhealthy level of fear in the populace, and worst of all, it directs it toward an identifiable (but only vaguely so) racial minority.

This has happened before in America. In the spring of 1942, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a similar kind of racial hysteria swept the Pacific Coast, focusing suspicion on anyone of Japanese descent, playing on long-established conspiracist beliefs that the Nikkei immigrants were traitors in waiting.

I described this briefly in Strawberry Days: The Rise and Fall of Japanese-American Community, my account of a farming community destroyed by the nightmare that befell the Nikkei during World War II (the book is scheduled to be published this spring by Palgrave/Macmillan). As I explain at length, the leading figure in fomenting this hysteria was Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt, the Western Defense commander based in San Francisco, who repeatedly fed the public fears about imminent attack along the coastline. However, it quickly spread:

DeWitt was hardly alone in fanning the flames of hysteria that ran rampant on the Pacific Coast in the months following Pearl Harbor. A broad array of federal and local officials chimed in, often trumpeting unfounded rumors to the press as stated fact. Navy Secretary Frank Knox, for instance, had declared to reporters that the Pearl Harbor disaster had been a direct result of "fifth column" activity by Japanese-American spies in Hawaii (a report that later proved to be completely groundless). Not surprisingly, politicians of nearly every stripe joined in the headline-grabbing spree. The old anti-Japanese legends of the 1920s surfaced for a fresh retelling: The immigrants were insular mercenaries who intended to return to Japan anyway. Their children were all thoroughly indoctrinated subjects of Tojo. They could never be "American." And they secretly hated us.

A popular consensus had already been reached, confirming suspicions many had held for years: The "Japs" in their midst were spying for Japan.

"People in positions where they could influence the population, they sure did," recalls Tosh Ito. "I think people listened a lot more to them. There was a lot of hysteria because of the media, too."

For a war-happy press anxious for a local angle on the conflict, the prospect of a West Coast invasion made great-selling copy. The Los Angeles Times ran headlines like "Jap Boat Flashes Message Ashore" and "Caps on Japanese Tomato Plants Point to Air Base." Pretty soon, everyone was getting into the act. Reports of "signals" being sent out from shore to unknown, mysterious Japanese boats offshore began flowing in. One report, widely believed at the time, came from someone who heard a dog barking somewhere along the shore of Oahu, and believed that it was barking in Morse code to an offshore spy ship.

In the Seattle area, the stories were almost as ridiculous. "Arrows of Fire Aim at Seattle" shouted the Seattle Times' front-page headline of December 10. It told of fields in the Port Angeles area, between Seattle and the Pacific Ocean on the Olympic Peninsula, that had been set afire by Japanese farmers in a shape resembling an arrow, when viewed from the air; ostensibly, the arrow pointed to the Seattle shipyards and airplane-manufacturing plants, a likely target for incoming bombers. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer blared a similar front-page story the next morning. Neither paper carried any subsequent stories about the fires —- which investigators soon determined had been set by white men who were clearing land.

"Then I heard stories about these guys at Midlakes," says Joe Matsuzawa. "They had these wires, and cloth hanging on the wire, out in their crops to scare the birds away. And they said that was pointed to help guide the planes in." The tomato-cap story first circulated in Los Angeles was bandied about in Seattle, too.

Despite having his father locked away, Ty Matsuoka found that his family came under suspicion just for being Japanese. "Our house was on top of the hill there on Bel-Red there, and we had a yard light," he says. "And you know, you're supposed to shut the yard light off. All lights are supposed to be off at sundown. Ah, you know, kids will be kids, and sometimes you forget to shut the darn yard light off because you'd be out there. I guess 8 or 9 o'clock it'd get dark. And this woman lived on 116th, which would be down the hill and across. And she would call the sheriff's office whenever we didn't shut the light off by 9 o'clock. So he'd have to come. And the thing is, I was in the same grade as her son. Those kinds of things you tend to remember."

Self-appointed protectors of the community also forced Japanese Americans out of their jobs. In Seattle, 26 young Nisei women were forced to resign their positions as clerks in the Seattle School District after a group of mothers in the Gatewood PTA protested their employment.

The end result of this hysteria, of course, was that we violated the constitutional rights of some 120,000 Japanese-Americans, over 70,000 of them citizens, by rounding them up en masse and incarcerating them for the war's duration in concentration camps.

A number of scholars -- most notably Testsuden Kashima, whose recent Judgment Without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment during World War II provides some of the keenest insights on this point -- have subsequently pointed out that the internment was in fact a well-planned event many years in the making at the highest levels of government. But the role played by the wartime hysteria was significant nonetheless, because not only did the public view the internment favorably, it positively demanded it, in the most vicious terms, as I describe a little later in Strawberry Days:

By late February [1942] the removal of all Japanese from the West Coast had become a favorite topic from Los Angeles to Seattle, led particularly by politicians. One of these was Rep. Andrew Jackson Hinshaw, an Orange County Republican, who demanded in early March that the Roosevelt administration "stop fiddling around" and begin removing all Japanese from the coast. According to the Associated Press, Hinshaw "said he had word that Japanese plans call for a major attack on Hawaii and West Coast sabotage next month. His information, he added, came 'from a source which has been heretofore reliable, though unheeded by our government.' "

The removal would not be without problems, warned some. "Approximately 95 percent of the vegetables grown here are raised by the Japanese," noted J.R. Davidson, market master for the Pike Place Public Market in Seattle, where Eastside Japanese sold many of their goods. "About 35 percent of the sellers in the market are Japanese. Many white persons are leaving the produce business to take defense jobs, which are not open to the Japanese." Letter writers to the local newspapers raised the same concern.

Their fears were quickly derided. "It has been interesting to note how many contributors have been afraid we would have no garden truck if the Japs are sent to concentration areas," wrote Charlotte Drysdale of Seattle in a letter to the Post-Intelligencer. "We had gardens long before the Japs were imported about the turn of the century, to work for a very low wage (a move for which we are still paying dearly) and we can still have them after we have no Japs.

"Isn't that discounting American ability just a little too low?

"And by Americans I mean not the children of the races ineligible to naturalization. The mere fact that a child is born in this country should not give him the rights and privileges of citizenship.

"The fourteenth amendment, granting automatic citizenship to American born, was placed there for the protection of the Negro and at that time the great infiltration of Japs was not even thought of. In recent years there has been so much fear of hurting the feelings of these people that no one has had the courage to try to rectify the situation. Now it would seem that the time is ripe to put things right, for once and for all time." (She was not alone in this sentiment. Senator Tom Stewart of Tennessee proposed stripping citizenship from anyone of Japanese descent: "A Jap's a Jap anywhere," he said. )

The press became the chief cheerleaders for removing the Japanese. The Seattle Times ran a news story alerting its readers: "Hundreds of alien and American-born Japanese are living near strategic defense units, a police survey showed today. ... There are Japanese in the neighborhood of every reservoir, bridge and defense project."

The Times also ran columns by noted conservative Henry McLemore, who frequently attacked the presence of Japanese descendants on the West Coast. In one column, headlined, "This Is War! Stop Worrying About Hurting Jap Feelings," McLemore fulminated: "...I am for the immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior. I don't mean a nice part of the interior, either. Herd 'em up, pack 'em off and give 'em the inside room of the badlands. Let 'em be pinched, hurt, hungry and dead up against it. ... Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them."

His sentiments were shared by many of the locals. Wrote W.M. Mason of Seattle, in a letter to the editor of the Post-Intelligencer: "If there be those who would say we can't do this to citizens, let them remember that we took this country from the Indians, killed thousands of them, arbitrarily moved other thousands from their homes to far distant lands, and to this day have denied them the rights, duties and privileges of citizenship.

"If we could do that to the Indians, we can do something about the Japs.

"Let's do it now!"

And so they did.

The reality, just as it was in 1942, is that focusing on a single race as "the enemy" is not only wrong-headed and grotesquely unjust, it's amazingly ineffective. The United States wasted a large portion of its wartime food production by incarcerating Japanese farmers, devoted millions of taxpayer dollars to rounding them up and incarcerating them, and eventually paid billions more in reparations for having done so.

More to the point, the reality is this: It's extremely, extremely unlikely that you will witness real terrorists in action, whether merely "warming up" or actually carrying out a plot. Suspecting someone merely because they are a different color or are acting in a way you think is unusual is almost certainly a leap of logic based in prejudice and false stereotypes.

Of course, genuinely suspicious activity should be reported. But even then, it's important to keep your feet on the ground and not stir up any unnecessary fearfulness, either in yourself or in others around you. Recognize that the authorities will in fact address your concerns and investigate anything you report, and it's best to let them do so. Whatever you do, don't leap to assumptions based on nameless fears and stereotypes.

This is the frank advice that government officials should be giving to the would-be citizen watchdogs it is recruiting to be the "eyes and ears" of Homeland Security. You may reach your own conclusions about why they are not.

Radio Free Orcinus

I'm scheduled to be interviewed this morning on USA Radio Network's Daybreak USA morning talk program. My segment is scheduled to begin at about 9:40 a.m. EDT, or 6:40 a.m. my time. If I sound a little slow, well, it may be that the first cup of coffee has yet to hit. You can listen to it live here.

We're supposed to be discussing Death on the Fourth of July. Here's hoping it's a lively segment.

UPDATE: We wound up taping the interview this morning. It's supposed to run tomorrow sometime. I'll get specific times and post them here.

UPDATE UPDATE: It's scheduled to air Friday morning at 7:35 EDT.

In the meantime, I'll be doing an hourlong interview on Napa Valley's KVON 1440 with Jeff Schechtman, on Friday, July 30, also discussing the book. I'll have more details later.

What kinda conservatism is that?

Liberal, liberal, liberal. John Kerry and John Edwards are just liberal, you know. Liberal. Liberal. Liberal. Did I happen to mention they are liberal?

That, in a nutshell, is the essence of the Republican campaign for the presidency this year. There is very little touting of Bush's record -- but then, that may be due to his having accomplished so little, other than the astonishing heaps of wreckage with which he has littered the political and civic landscape.

When that's what you're left with, all you can really resort to is a strategy that is, as the New York Times described it recently, "relentlessly negative."

A passage in that story is especially instructive:

"When you run against an opponent who is both a committed liberal and a committed flip-flopper, you have to have all that research about him all of the time," Ms. Devenish said. "Because he's going to go on the trail and say something ludicrous, like he did last week when he said 'I share your conservative values,' and you need to rapidly provide reporters with evidence to the contrary."

The line to which Devenish refers, of course, is from a Kerry appearance in Minnesota in which he remarked:

"I actually represent the conservative values that they feel," he told a television interviewer in Minnesota, citing his pledge to balance the federal budget and strengthen the country's standing internationally.

The Bush team propmptly hit the stump specifically to attack Kerry's claims in this area, labeling Kerry and Edwards "out of the mainstream" and claiming that they rank the first and fourth most liberal senators. As Bob Somerby and others have already observed, this claim is based on cherry-picked statistics. But it makes a handy sound bite.

But the entire attack is predicated on two entirely different meanings for the word "conservative."

Bush, after all, lays claim to the mantle of conservatism, at least leadership of the movement that has seized control of all layers of the federal government. But how really conservative is it?

Is it conservative to rack up the largest national deficit in history, with only the vaguest outlines of a plan for putting the national budget back in the black?

Is it conservative to ignore warnings of imminent terrorist threats merely because a preoccupation with terrorism is seen as too similar to your predecessor's presidency?

Is it conservative to jettison a half-century's worth of mulitlateral diplomacy and cooperation to pursue a radical vision of a unilateralist America supposedly capable of imposing its will on the rest of the world?

Is it conservative to attack another nation under false pretenses?

Is it conservative to allow torture, rape and killing of civilians under the purview of interrogating prisoners in the nation we now occupy as a result of that vision?

Is it really conservative to adopt the legal position that the president's wartime powers allow him to supersede international law and the Geneva Conventions, and to argue before the Supreme Court that those powers allow the government to imprison American citizens at will without right to trial indefinitely?

And finally, is it really, really conservative to relentlessly and dishonestly attack your opponent, to smear and distort his words and his positions at every turn, to ultimately demonize him and, by extension all of liberalism?

Is that what conservatism is all about now? Hating liberals?

Because, you know, I grew up in a pretty conservative environment. Rural, like the people John Kerry was talking to. And I don't recall those kinds of people having anything to do with this kind of "conservatism."

When George Bush and the GOP attack dogs talk about "conservative values," they strictly mean the values and positions embraced by the conservative movement, which as we have seen over the years has less and less to do with real conservative values and more to do with a totalitarian corporate impulse to monopolize the reins of power and the national discourse.

When John Kerry talks about "conservative values," he means the small-town values of the Heartland in which hard work, integrity, fair play and decency are bound together in a sense of closely knit community.

And the thing is, Bush can trot out the handy sound bites and call John Kerry liberal, liberal, liberal all day long.

But after awhile, even an honest conservative will have to start wondering just what George Bush has to offer, other than an ability to attack his opponent. And he might even start to notice that Bush and the "conservative movement" aren't really all that conservative. At least, not the kind of conservative that I used to know.

Forbidden reality

Apparently, it is now officially verboten by the Weltanschauungpolizei (also known as the Republican Apparat) to speak openly of reality.

The reality we're speaking of, in fact, is one that lately has gone unremarked even by liberals -- namely, the stark truth that the Republicans' theft of the presidency in the 2000 election remains the real wellspring issue of the 2004 campaign.

Without that theft -- and the widespread recognition of its nature by millions of voters, if only a handful of media pundits -- the depth and breadth of the opposition to George W. Bush would not be what it is.

Mind you, it didn't have to be this way. Bush could have recognized the need to reach out across aisles and govern from the center. He could have appointed moderates to fill his Cabinet and judiciary appointments; he could have taken a conscientious approach to the environment; he could have dealt openly with the public in formulating an energy policy; and most of all, he could have dealt with the war on terror -- and particularly the invasion of Iraq -- in a consultative, cooperative spirit that stressed traditional multilateralism.

Instead, the nation was fed a steady diet of extremist appointments, environmental pillage, arrogant secrecy, and a radical unilateralist approach to the challenges raised by the terrorist attacks of 9/11, directed from on high by a White House quick to paint their critics as unpatriotic traitors.

It was clear, in fact, that this was how Bush would rule from Day One. On Inauguration Day, he drove down Pennsylvania Avenue expecting to be greeted with hosannas -- and instead, was greeted with the largest peacetime protest of a presidential swearing-in ever. Since then, we've seen a president who clearly believes he was divinely appointed, and a governing party who believes in the birthright of wealth and power, whose continuing rule at every step reflects the unholy arrogance of the self-righteous.

And now, as reality sinks in and the fruits of that style of rule are reflected in sinking polls, they are reduced to hamhanded attempts to silence their critics -- even those on the floor of Congress. Critics such as Congresswoman Corrine Brown, a Jacksonville Democrat and an African-American, who this week was officially censured by House leadership for daring to utter the following words:

I come from Florida, where you and others participated in what I call the United States coup d'etat. We need to make sure that it doesn't happen again. Over and over again after the election when you stole the election, you came back here and said get over it. No we're not going to get over it and we want verification from the world.

Of course, the 50,996,116 people who voted for Al Gore in 2000 (or those whose votes were counted, anyway) were browbeaten from the beginning by the right-wing propaganda machine, branded as "sore losers" and told, repeatedly, to "get over it."

But how, exactly, do you "get over" the assault on democracy that the election theft represented? Certainly not by enduring three-plus years of arrogant incompetence. Moreover, any American who cherishes democratic values -- particularly the bedrock principle of having one's vote counted, because it is the essence of political enfranchisement -- would not, should not, readily shrug this off. This is not, and never should be characterized as, a minor issue.

The GOP, of course, has studiously avoided confronting this reality, and Rep. Brown's remarks were simply too much to bear. As the story goes on to explain, Tom DeLay and Co. quickly sprung into action:

Those comments drew an immediate objection from Republican members of the House. Leaders moved to strike her comments from the record. The House also censured Brown which kept her from talking on the House floor for the rest of the day.

[Via Holden at Eschaton.]

Interestingly enough, Joan Chittister of the National Catholic Reporter recently had a similar experience, this time in the field of publishing:

You will read this only here (unfortunately)

Chittister was asked to submit a piece to an unnamed publication as part of a roundtable discussion of what almost certainly was a simple, almost eighth-grade-civics-level question: "What do you think is the major issue in the upcoming November presidential election?"

As it turned out, however, the magazine was operated by a nonprofit organization, and its lawyers informed the editors that the responses produced for the piece might endanger its 501(c)3 status -- primarily because many of the pieces offered scathing assessments of the Bush administration's three-plus years of misbegotten rule.

So Chittister turned to the Reporter to publish her contribution. Here's the nub of it:

I am convinced that the unspoken -- and secretly most impelling -- issue in the election of 2004 is the election of 2000. This election, in fact, will almost certainly be seen by many, both now and in the future, as an attempt to reconfirm the image of governmental integrity in the United States, to reassert real democracy, to reauthenticate the American ballot box. John Kerry himself spoke to the lingering impact of the last election when questioned about whether, as president, he would work to overturn the election of international leaders whose policies did not agree with our own. Kerry put it this way: "As far as I know," he said, "an election is still an election. Except in Florida."

Everywhere the subject never really goes away. Everywhere the continuing dissatisfaction goes deep.

So, there is a campaign issue beyond, but basic to, any of the other ones: Will this election be decided by the people or by boxes of uncounted ballots, a State Attorney General and the Supreme Court? The real American question is: What would have been lost by taking two more weeks to recount ballots in a way that honored the foundation of the entire American system of government?

But don't be fooled. This issue is not a trivial one, coming out of pique or fostered by sore losers. On the contrary. This is the issue that determines every other issue on the agenda. Worst of all, perhaps never have there been greater issues than now, and all at one time. Until we assure ourselves that our elections are safe, nothing else in this country is safe.

Because of those ballots, lost or stolen, misused or miscounted, obstructed or not, the country found itself with one set of programs rather than another.

As a result, the issues that only a ballot can decide are this time more momentous than ever.

It's probably just as well that the Democrats on the campaign trail generally are not talking about the 2000 election at this point. But it is not a moot point -- and trying to pretend that it is ultimately is nothing less than gaslighting.

Something is wrong here

If ever one needed evidence that there is a real problem with the American press' handling of the occupation of Iraq, one need look no further than the fact that it is impossible to find anywhere in the American press -- outside of, apparently, Bloomberg News and the Washington Times (!) -- the report that Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi summarily executed six Iraqi detainees by shooting them in the head.

This is a story that has been available since early this morning. It is a a story with obviously devastating ramifications. (I'm speaking as an old wire-service ripper and news-desk hand.) And yet none of the major American news organs or wire services have picked it up.

Thanks especially to Holden for flogging the story. So far, blogs are making clear their now self-evident worth in disseminating vital information.

The Neo-Nazi landlord

Reinventing the meaning of "slumlord":

Landlord denies allegations of sinister agenda

Turns out that none other than Bill White -- one of the SPLC's "40 to Watch" -- has gotten into the business of buying up rentals in low-income neighborhoods. You tell me whether you'd want to be paying rent to this guy:

White, 27, said he's not a Nazi or a racist -- he's a "libertarian socialist" and "radical traditionalist" -- and that critics are targeting him as part of a political and personal vendetta. He said he's simply a businessman who moved to Roanoke to make a profit in the rental business by investing his money and helping raise the quality of life in neglected neighborhoods.

"I wouldn't be out here buying and fixing up houses if I had some agenda against the black community," he said. "I don't have anything against black people. The Jews, I despise. They hate me. I hate them. They can kiss my a--."

The article titled "Niggers Are Plotting Against My Shrubs" has been taken down from his site. He said a version being circulated by his critics has been altered and distorted. But he acknowledged writing the headline.

He also acknowledged declaring in the article that "the local nig-rats are already conspiring to test me" and opining that "trying to get a broad section of the black population to accept a higher standard of living is always an uphill battle. ... For centuries blacks -- particularly blacks descended from the Bantu tribes of Central Africa -- have been lying to and stealing from not only white men, but each other."

White first burst onto the scene about six years ago with his virulent anti-Clinton material (he was a big subscriber to New World Order theories) that pretty quickly devolved into anti-Semitic hatred. All along, though, he's claimed he's just a "libertarian." Right.

The waxing of the dark tide

Of all of humanity's most primitive and destructive traits, racial and religious hatred and their attendant bigotry are probably the most difficult to eradicate. Modern society often congratulates itself on how far we've come in bringing hate to bay -- and the resulting complacency provides the fecund dark space needed for it to fester and grow anew.

People who have had direct dealings with hate groups and their adherents know this. It's one of the reasons why I expend as much energy as I do in exposing the machinations of right-wing extremists.

I have at various times been accused, unsurprisingly, of being obsessed with them, perhaps unhealthily so. My view is somewhat different, of course; it's my feeling that the haters and their activities are in reality more significant than is usually recognized, particularly by the press. The smallness of their numbers belies the breadth and depth of their reach.

In the early years of the new millennium, there was something of a collective sigh of relief in the press as it became clear that right-wing extremists were in decline, particularly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. A number of media accounts focused on reports from the Southern Poverty Law Center that certain kinds of right-wing extremism -- expecially "militias" -- were in serious decline.

But the naked hatred of the far right never really dies, and it always awaits fresh opportunity, which is why it always comes and goes in cycles. For every waning of the far right and dark impulse it embodies, there is always the inevitable waxing.

What these reports described, in reality, were part of a typical "down" cycle for the far right. But those of us with more experience also understood that the remaining adherents were, if anything, typically more radicalized during such cycles, were far more likely to eventually act out, and were capable of springing back to life at any time -- with new faces and new strategies, of course, but as vicious and virulent as ever.

And in the past six months or more, it has gradually become clear that just such a resurgence is happening.

A recent report from Newhouse News Service's Chuck McCutcheoon describes the way it's happening:

Right-Wing Extremist Groups Becoming More Active After Post-9/11 Lull

Radical right-wing activity slowed after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, as internal disagreements erupted over the merits of the attacks and leaders of several organizations died or went to jail, several authorities said. But the groups are becoming more active -- distributing leaflets in neighborhoods, holding public rallies, starting Web sites and reaching out to like-minded activists overseas.

"We have to understand that these groups are not passe and are starting to re-emerge," David Carter, a criminal justice professor at Michigan State University, told law enforcement officials at a recent Justice Department conference in Washington.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama civil rights watchdog that monitors the groups, counted 751 active U.S. chapters in 2003, up from 708 the year before. The number of hate-related Web sites rose from 443 in 2002 to 497 last year, the center said in a report.

Some of the activity, as the report details, is in the form of public meetings and gatherings of like-minded true believers, often organizing in fresh guises that pick up where some of the far right's decaying older groups have left off.

These include the simultaneous events by white-supremacist Christian Identity groups, as well as the gathering in western Montana of a relatively new white-supremacist sect. Even the seemingly moribund Aryan Nations is still going, though its planned Aryan parade this coming weekend is generally viewed as a kind of death rattle that is, perhaps appropriately, being mostly ignored.

Then there's the scheduled rally this weekend in Lincoln, Nebraska, of the National Socialist Movement, an event that is expected to cost local officials some $28,000 to police.

The bulk of the new activity is manifesting itself in the form of flyer distribution. Every day, it seems, brings a fresh news account from somewhere in the nation of white-supremacist fliers being left on people's doorsteps or being passed out on neighborhood streets.

In the past week alone, we've seen fliers popping up in such places as Citrus Heights, California, Vancouver, Wash., and Williamsburg, Va..

There's nothing about the flier distributions that indicate any actual increase in numbers by these groups; and it's difficult at best to tell whether they have any actual effect on recruitment. But they do indicate a real increase in activity and energy. These groups are becoming clearly more active now in their efforts to expand their appeal -- and it is equally clear that they are doing so because they believe the environment is ripe for success.

But concern about recruitment into these groups is only a small part of the picture when it comes to appreciating the effect they have on larger society. Even more worrisome is the way their hateful beliefs are spread into the mainstream, infecting not just potential recruits but ordinary people who have no desire to join a skinhead organization but for whom, for various reasons, their racial scapegoating resonates.

One of the important ways this manifests itself is in the form of hate crimes. As I explain in Death on the Fourth of July, only a small portion (roughly 8 percent) of the 9,000 or so bias crimes that are committed every year in America are committed by members of organized hate groups. Contrary to the stereotype, the average hate criminal is a young white male with little or no previous criminal record and no known association with hate groups. Typically he participates in the crime as part of a group.

Yet in the vast majority of hate crimes, the rhetoric and symbology of hate groups, such as "White power!" chants and the brandishing of Confederate flags or burning crosses, are used during their commission. This clearly suggests the extent to which these groups' influence extends well beyond their sheer numbers and have infected the public discourse.

So it is perhaps not surprising, then, that in an environment in which hate-group rhetoric is gaining increasing circulation, hate crimes appear to be surging as well. The connection, of course, can probably never be proven, but the pattern is becoming fairly clear.

In recent weeks, we have seen disturbing hate crimes being committed in various parts of the country. Last weekend in Clinton, Iowa, a young Illinois man nearly killed a white acquaintance with his vehicle -- pinning him against another car -- because he was a "race traitor" (that is, the victim had black friends). Meanwhile, three young whites in Valrico, Florida, painted a black neighbor's house with swastikas and Klan epithets.

And then there was the case of the gay Seattle man attacked by three thugs who left him with a huge gash in his back as well as various other injuries. The case so outraged the local community that a march protesting the attack was held in Seattle last week. Two of the three suspects -- who attacked the man after inquiring whether he was a "faggot" -- have been arrested.

There is a disturbing thread that runs through all these cases (as well as other recent hate crimes): All the perpetrators were young men, either teenagers or men barely out of their teens.

This, of course, fits the profile. But it also fits the trend that has developed in the past year in which young teens have also begun adopting the rhetoric, symbology and even the ideology white-supremacist groups, even though they may never join such groups. I discussed the appearance of this trend in the San Diego area previously, but the apparent adoption of racist beliefs by these young men is especially worrisome. There has always been a tendency among hate criminals in this regard, but the unapologetic defense of these beliefs has usually been relegated to a minority of cases. Now it appears to be growing.

Judging by these trends, it would not surprise me to see 2004 record a serious increase in the level of hate-crime activity for the first time since the FBI began recording statistics (in 1991). We won't know, of course, for another year and a half, when the numbers are finally released in the bureau's annual reports. In the meantime, we're left with the far more immediate problem of how to contain the appearance of this dark tide.

Why is this happening now? Americans need to begin looking in the mirror for answers. It isn't very hard to see that the current milieu is a prime environment for this to occur.

-- The country is being led by a cadre of thoughtless fearmongers who do not hesitate to wave the bloody shirt of terrorism to silence their critics and stigmatize anyone who acts "different." The harmful effects of this behavior from our leadership on the general populace is incalculable.

-- A particularly shallow brand of patriotism -- replete with jingoist sentiments, hatred of The Other, and a hollow symbolism -- has been promoted in every possible avenue, from national television broadcasts to the corner drugstore. This kind of thoughtless "Americanism" is an important feature of many hate crimes (including the one Death on the Fourth of July focuses upon) and plays a significant role in forumulating the motivations for this violence.

-- Most of all, a fog of intolerance has filtered across the national landscape over the past decade, thanks mostly to right-wing propagandists with massive popular reach: Rush Limbaugh, Michael Weiner (aka Savage), Dr. Laura, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and the whole phalanx of their imitators. The thrust of the modern conservative movement has morphed from any sense of real conservative values into a relentless attack on the very notion of tolerance for anyone who is not part of that movement: liberals, gays and lesbians, other faiths, other colors.

Try to suggest, of course, that these trends are unhealthy, and you'll be denounced -- as unpatriotic, as paranoid, as a smear artist (projection being endemic to both the defense and attack of the American right). So the media, and the rest of us, comfort ourselves with the hollow notion that the above cases, and the many like them, are merely "isolated incidents."

We are all whistling past the graveyard.

[Thanks to Marty Heldt for the tip on the Clinton case.]

Border battles

Arizona's voters will be tested this fall on the question California voters already failed, namely, whether it will revert to bigotry instead of reason in dealing with problems associated with immigration.

As Tamar Jacoby recently observed in the Los Angeles Times, the problems certainly are real. And while government inertia reigns, standing pat should not be an option:

Ranchers on the border complain that bands of illegal migrants file across their lands, cutting fences, disturbing animals and leaving a sea of trash. Others -- liberals and conservatives alike -- feel that the Border Patrol is even more of a nuisance: the number of agents has skyrocketed, mostly to good effect, but they roam the region at will in their four-wheel drives, trampling grassland and interrogating motorists.

Healthcare providers face mounting costs. Crossing the Sonoran desert is a dangerous business; 105 migrants have died of exposure this year alone and many others end up in local hospitals. In Phoenix, immigrant smugglers warehouse their clients in filthy stash houses, then fight over them in gun battles that endanger local residents. No wonder Arizonans are clamoring for a solution -- any solution.

So now we get the "Protect Arizona Now" initiative touted by the fine bigots at Federation for American Immigration Reform and their hate-group cohorts at VDare, which not only would deny state services to illegal immigrants, it would prosecute any state employee who failed to report illegals applying for services.

Fortunately, Arizona's Republicans have learned their lesson from the California debacle -- where Latino support for the GOP vanished after the party supported the anti-immigrant Proposition 187 -- and are staying away from the PAN initiative like the festering carbuncle it is. And even though the initiative seems to enjoy broad support, there likely is time to bring reason to bear on the electorate.

It will all depend on how smart PAN's opponents are. As Jacoby observes:

California's Proposition 187 debacle holds several lessons for PAN's opponents. The biggest mistake then was the failure to create a broad-based, bipartisan coalition to denounce what could easily have been characterized as an extremist measure. Instead, it was the opposition that appeared extremist: all Mexican flags and protest rallies. Arizonans needn't repeat that blunder. After all, the business community, the political establishment, unions, immigrant advocates, Latino leaders and the state's active religious left all share reservations about the measure.

It will be crucial, in the end, for Republicans to step up to the plate on this measure and help knock it down. Otherwise, all that talk about attracting Latino voters will fit the rest of the "compassionate conservative" profile as we've seen it so far -- all talk and no hat.
 
UPDATE: Jeff Smith of the Tucson Citizen has more.

What! Another break?

I've been working on a longer post, but my clock has run out. I'm out of town for a family reunion for the next several days. Look for some fresh material next Wednesday or so.

In the meantime, let me recommend everyone check out a post my friend Rob Salkowitz at Emphasis Added wrote last week titled "Defining Dissent Down," which neatly sums up a number of thoughts I think many of us have had in recent weeks. Rob's an excellent writer with keen insight, so be sure to check out the rest of his site too.

The psychological combat field

It's one thing to realize you've been had. But even more important, perhaps, is to realize why it's happened.

The natural reaction that most people have to the discovery that the shots of the statue of Saddam coming down in Baghdad as Americans took control were not, in fact, a spontaneous demonstration, but were part of a carefully staged event for the TV cameras, is one of simple disgust -- to remark, as Atrios did the other day, that the incident reveals what suckers the Bush administration has played the public for.

Even more disturbing, however, is to read the L.A. Times report carefully and observe that this project was specifically a product of the Pentagon's "psychological combat" program:

The Army's internal study of the war in Iraq criticizes some efforts by its own psychological operations units, but one spur-of-the-moment effort last year produced the most memorable image of the invasion.

As the Iraqi regime was collapsing on April 9, 2003, Marines converged on Firdos Square in central Baghdad, site of an enormous statue of Saddam Hussein. It was a Marine colonel -- not joyous Iraqi civilians, as was widely assumed from the TV images -- who decided to topple the statue, the Army report said. And it was a quick-thinking Army psychological operations team that made it appear to be a spontaneous Iraqi undertaking.

Psychological operations -- or "PsyOps," as they are known in lingo -- are the subject of a multitude of conspiracy theories, in no small part because they are in fact cloaked in so much official secrecy. Much of the accusatory material that circulates about the programs is bogus, but there are serious scholars who have examined it and remain useful sources of what we do know about them. (A reasonably factual collection of documents can be found at The Information Warfare Site, while this Wikipedia page can give you a quick rundown on what's known.)

One of these scholars is Christopher Simpson, the American University professor who has written extensively on the subject, notably in Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare 1945-1960 (an excerpt of which you can read here).

One of the important points that Simpson raises is that the combat field for psychological warfare is not merely the physical field of combat, but the home front as well. In an interview with Simpson, he discussed this point a little further:

From its inception psychological warfare has been the mating of violence on the one hand and what people would call today propaganda or mass communication on the other hand. Another thing that's interesting about psychological warfare, from its inception it has also targeted the people of the United States, the common preconception is that for better or for worse this is something we do to them. The reality is that from the government's standpoint, from the standpoint of those who are paying the bills for its development the targets always involve not only foreign audiences but domestic audiences as well.

We have in fact known from even before the outset that the war against Iraq would prominently feature psychological warfare. Most people have assumed that this warfare would be directed against the enemy and the subject citizens. They have not stopped to consider that, by definition, it would also be directed toward the American public as well.

This reality raises a serious concern about the fragility of democracy during wartime. Because under the aegis of a seemingly eternal war, the American government has clearly been involving the public in its psychological combat, and has hijacked the nation's press in the process. The entire meaning of the Iraq war -- and by extension, the "war on terrorism" -- is inextricably bound up in the psychological manipulation of the voting public through a relentless barrage of propaganda.

This is why the both the runup to the war and its subsequent mishandling have been so replete with highly symbolic media events -- many of them played repeatedly on nightly newscasts -- that have proven so hollow at their core, from the declarations of imminent threat from Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction, to phony images of Saddam's statue being torn down, to flyboy antics aboard airline carriers, to meaningless "handovers" of power. It also explains why certain important and humanizing symbols of wartime -- civilian casualties, the returning flag-draped coffins -- have been so notably absent from our views of the war.

The role of the media in this manipulation cannot be understated. The abdication of the media's role as an independent watchdog and its whole subsumation as a propaganda organ bodes ill for any democracy, because a well-informed public is vital to its functioning.

But the fact that the military establishment, in the context of the "war on terror," clearly views the American public as the subject of a psychological combat operation should give us all pause regarding the ability of democracy to withstand this kind of assault.

In the end, I think there is enough innate resistance to this kind of propagandization in a free society to win out. But the November election will be a crucial test of whether or not this is true.

The good fight

There's some good reading to be had over at Working for Change, where Bill Berkowitz interviews my friend Daniel Levitas, author of The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right, on one of my favorite subjects, the failure to confront domestic terrorism. [It's a two-parter: Part I and Part 2.]

Some excerpts [from Part 1]:

BB: What about the people who didn't quit the movement?

DL: They have become even more radicalized, more hard core. After all, they believe that the Clinton administration bombed the Murrah building on purpose -- and set up Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols as patsies in order to persecute the "Patriot" movement. This is the same crowd that believes that the planes used on 9/11 were remote-controlled by the Israeli Mossad and the CIA. They used the tragedy at Waco to bolster their argument. "Look," they said, "If Bill Clinton and Janet Reno could kill all those innocent Branch Davidians down in Waco, what makes you think they weren't behind the Oklahoma City bombing?" This all fit in rather nicely with fanatical gun culture and extreme religious beliefs of the radical right. After all, the Davidians were wanted on gun charges and had unconventional religious beliefs. So, for those white supremacists that worship fully automatic weapons and believe that Jews are the children of Satan, it wasn't all that difficult to convince them that the government was out to murder them, as well.

[From Part 2]

BB: Given all that you've said, what is the state of the far right movement today?

DL: Thankfully, much of the movement is in pretty serious disarray, due to a combination of factors, but that doesn't mean the potential for violence is all that significantly diminished. If anything, the arrests in Tyler, Texas in April 2002 show that even small numbers of right wing activists can build up a terrifying arsenal. The death of William Pierce, in July 2002, left a big leadership vacuum, both in his group and in the movement. Smaller, but equally militant groups like the World Church of the Creator, based in Illinois, have been hit hard by recent arrests. In the case of the WCOTC, its leader, Matthew Hale, is currently in federal prison facing charges that he attempted to solicit the murder of a federal judge. Even though membership in the Klan and other hate groups is down, the people that have remained in the movement are more hard-core. But there is another, more dangerous problem that is affecting the political mainstream.

BB: What is that?

DL: What concerns me most is the rising level of prejudice and bigotry in American society, and these attitudes have penetrated well beyond the confines of the far right. More specifically, we're experiencing rising anti-Semitism, skyrocketing anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry, heightened hostility toward foreigners and immigrants and persistently high levels of racism. In short, these trends don't bode well for the fabric of a democracy ostensibly devoted to protecting civil rights and liberties. Of course it is easy to point to the bombers and shooters of the radical right and identify them as the problem. And they certainly pose a threat and a challenge. In the end, however, their actions basically require a law enforcement response, and there is not a whole lot that everyday citizens can do to counteract the hard core criminality of domestic right-wing terrorists.

And while you're at it, be sure to check out the conclusion of Tacitus' exchange with VDare columnist Steve Sailer, one of the so-called "racial realists" of the Jared Taylor school. Tacitus acquitted himself marvelously; people like Sailer are real tar babies, incapable of comprehending that their core arguments have been demolished, and responding by piling phony "fact" upon phony "fact." Considering Sailer's background as a promoter of pseudo-science, he handled the situation just right.

I don't give enough credit to serious conservatives who make real efforts to repudiate the racist element of the right. Tacitus deserves a round of applause.

The Whale Sells Out

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You can buy your own Orcinus T-shirts here, with a special election-year message like the one above on the back. A mere $19.99, with proceeds going toward my fall research projects (some travel involved), which I'll be sharing here.

I may expand the repertoire later. This is all for fun.

Change the channel

Just so that festering core of Clinton-haters won't feel altogether left out -- what with the release of Bill Clinton's My Life and Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 -- the fine folks at ABC News decided to remind its audience just what the corrupt press corps thought was really important back in the 1990s:

'It Started With Me': Paula Jones Reacts to Clinton Memoir; Talks About 'Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy'

Y'know, with the benefit of hindsight, you'd think ABC could've discussed something that really mattered during Clinton's tenure -- e.g., the war on terrorism or the economy. But that might have entailed interviewing people who had, say, lost their jobs in the ensuing four years. In the minds of our so-called liberal media, the only Clinton legacy worth discussing is a fiasco that actually stands as an enduring testament to their own manifest failures.

But then, what should we have expected? The senior producer was none other than Chris Vlasto.

And it is outta here!

From David Letterman:

Top Ten George W. Bush Complaints About Fahrenheit 9/11

10. That actor who played the President was totally unconvincing

9. It oversimplified the way I stole the election

8. Too many of them fancy college-boy words

7. If Michael Moore had waited a few months, he could have included the part where I get him deported

6. Didn't have one of them hilarious monkeys who smoke cigarettes and gives people the finger

5. Of all Michael Moore's accusations, only 97% are true

4. Not sure -- I passed out after a piece of popcorn lodged in my windpipe

3. Where the hell was Spider-Man?

2. Couldn't hear most of the movie over Cheney's foul mouth

1. I thought this was supposed to be about Dodgeball

[Via James Benjamin.]

Input, please

Paul Lukasiak, who compiled that recent outstanding analysis of Bush's military records, "Deserter: The Story of George W. Bush After He Quit the Air National Guard", is about to release the second part of his work, titled "Discharge? or Desertion? How the Bush Files Show that Bush Deliberately Ignored His Legal Obligations to America's National Security". He's asking for readers to critique the work before he officially "releases" it.

If you're interested, write to him at awol@glcq.com. He'll send you a URL for the latest installment.

I'm particularly eager to read the portion of his work that Paul described in a post at Table Talk:

the "Deserter" article is just a fraction of what I've been able to come up with by comparing the records themselves to the laws and policies of that era.

right now, I'm working on the documents concerning Bush's actual discharge. Those documents make it clear that Bush's INTENTION was to blow off his Military Service Obligation.

The really fun part of all of this is that the White House doesn't realize how much information is in the payroll records that were released...

if they knew, they would never have released them.

At the bottom of each page, there are all these lines of incomprehensible "data"....as it turns out, those lines are the data that was entered INTO the payroll system.....and THAT information makes it clear that Bush engaged in pre-meditated fraud.

[Update: I see Paul has posted the working draft URL. You can get a sneak peek at it here.]

Big Brother Trucker

Time magazine has a disturbing report on the "Highway Watch" program designed to put 400,000 truckers and the like on the lookout for terrorists:

Highway Watch, which will receive an additional $22 million next year, preserves the part of TIPS concerned with monitoring behavior in public space. The Department of Homeland Security has also launched Port Watch, River Watch and Transit Watch. Then there are the familiar Neighborhood Watch groups, many of which have expanded their missions to include homeland security. In New York City, government outsourcing of surveillance has even trickled down to doormen and building superintendents, thousands of whom are being trained to watch out for strange trucks parked near buildings and tenants who move in without furniture.

After the session in Little Rock, two newly initiated Highway Watch members sat down for the catered barbecue lunch. The truckers, who haul hazardous material across 48 states, explained how easy it is to spot "Islamics" on the road: just look for their turbans. Quite a few of them are truck drivers, says William Westfall of Van Buren, Ark. "I'll be honest. They know they're not welcome at truck stops. There's still a lot of animosity toward Islamics." Eddie Dean of Fort Smith, Ark., also has little doubt about his ability to identify Muslims: "You can tell where they're from. You can hear their accents. They're not real clean people."

Um, yes, Ann Coulter would agree on the cleanliness thing. Except there are also a few other teeny little problems:

-- "Islamic" terrorists planning an attack are extremely unlikely to make themselves stand out or otherwise draw attention to announce their presence by wearing something like a turban.

-- In much of the country, as the story goes on to explain, many of those turban-wearing truck drivers are Sikhs, not Muslims.

-- Tim McVeigh did not wear a turban.

This whole passage makes clear that the purpose of the program is not to do anything serious about terrorism: It's to enable these truck drivers in harassing "non-American" minorities.

In the end, it is not significantly different than government law-enforcement actions that encouraged citizens to "crack down" on their neighboring Japanese Americans on the Pacific Coast during World War II.

The story explains further:

That kind of prejudice is hard to undo, but it's a shame Beatty's slide show did not mention that in the U.S., it's almost always Sikhs who wear turbans, not Muslims. Last year a Sikh truck driver who was wearing a turban was shot twice while standing near his tractor trailer in Phoenix, Ariz. He survived the attack, which police are investigating as a hate crime.

Worst of all is the reality that Highway Watch's program is amateurish -- a kind of secret-decoder-ring approach to security at best, and an official sanction of vigilantism at worst.

The Highway Watch website boasts that the program is open to "an elite core [sic] of truck drivers" who must have clean driving and employment records. In fact, their records are not vetted by the American Trucking Associations. At the Little Rock event, some came in off the street without preregistering. However, the organization is highly security conscious about other parts of its operations. It refuses to disclose the exact location of its hotline call center or the number of operators working there. "It could be infiltrated," says Dawn Apple, Highway Watch's director of training and recruitment.

What's clear is that Highway Watch is a morale booster for drivers. "I don't want to sound too hokey, but truck drivers are a very patriotic bunch," says Mike Russell, a spokesman for the organization. "It made sense for us to take advantage of what we do every day -- which is, basically, patrol major highways through a windshield."

Somehow, I'm less than comforted.

Here, BTW, is the Highway ISAC Web site.

[Via BoingBoing and Tom Paine.]