Just a minute, men

Well, the anticipation is palpable now as participants in the so-called "Minuteman Project" are gathering near the Mexican border even as we speak to defend Mom and apple pie against an invasion of anchor-baby-carrying brown people. We've been promised 1,000 of them.

And hey, even Michelle Malkin has endorsed them, calling the project "the mother of all neighborhood watch programs." Funny, that: That happens to be exactly how John Trochmann described the Militia of Montana to me. But then, these ideas are the products of people who have been organizing "border militias" all along -- that is, they are bona fide extremists.

Actually, we'll be very fortunate, as always, if the month of April -- supposedly the duration of the project -- passes uneventfully without some tragedy occurring. Because that's what's we're asking for here.

The project is noteworthy alone for having the potential to create a genuine international incident. The president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, earlier demanded that President Bush do something about the Minutemen. When they met last week in Texas, Bush took the unusual step of speaking out against them:

Last week, President Bush stepped into the controversy over border issues, saying he opposed the Minuteman Project.

"I'm against vigilantes in the United States of America," Bush said during a meeting in Texas with Mexican President Vincente Fox and Canadian Prime Minster Paul Martin. "I'm for enforcing law in a rational way. It's why we've got a Border Patrol, and they ought to be in charge of enforcing the border."

Simcox said Bush's statement was disrespectful to citizens who simply want to help solve border problems. "We challenge the president to join us and come down and see for himself what's really going on," he told CNN.

Fox has also expressed concern over citizen border patrols. He told reporters he was watching the Minuteman Project carefully and would take action in U.S. courts or international tribunals if any activists break the law.

"We totally reject the idea of these migrant-hunting groups," Fox said. "We will use the law -- international law and even U.S. law -- to make sure that these types of groups ... will not have any opportunity to progress."

"We don't have any evidence or any indication either that terrorists from al Qaeda or any other part of the world are coming into Mexico and going into the United States," Fox said, countering recent statements made by senior Bush administration officials. "If there is any of that evidence, we will like to have it. But as I said, it does not exist."

The genuinely ugly side of the Minuteman Project and the related border vigilantes was limned by a recent story in the Arizona Daily Star:

The stories of illegal entrants abused by Cochise County vigilantes are buried in sheriff's deputy reports -- complaints of guns drawn, dog bites, shouts and humiliation -- in official language, using terms such as aggravated assault and disorderly conduct.

Since 1999, the Mexican consul in Douglas, Miguel Escobar, has documented 65 cases in which illegal border crossers reported being detained by U.S. citizens in Cochise County.

In at least six reports taken by Cochise County Sheriff's Department deputies, illegal entrants have reported being kicked, shouted at, bitten by dogs and had guns pointed at them -- yet there's never been a single Cochise County resident prosecuted in these cases.

Human-rights activists say it's because there's a culture of looking the other way when it comes to illegal-entrant abuse. Cochise County law enforcement officials say it's because the victims -- illegal entrants -- choose not to pursue charges. And without witnesses, there are no cases.

The debate has led to civil lawsuits involving millions of dollars. And it has fueled concerns by activists that lax enforcement will allow participants in the upcoming Minuteman Project to abuse illegal entrants without fear of prosecution in Cochise County.

The story also reported that the Aryan Nations was working hard to recruit for the project:

The Minuteman Project is being touted now as a "political assembly" promising to bring 1,022 people to the banks of the San Pedro River for a monthlong protest of border enforcement, starting Friday. But activist groups point to elements within the group and cite a potential for violence.

Last year, one of its leaders, Chris Simcox, was convicted on federal weapons charges. More recently, the white supremacy group Aryan Nation has openly recruited for the Minuteman Project, promoting the monthlong protest as a "white pride event."

Organizer James Gilchrist said he didn't know the Aryan Nation was promoting the event.

Some neighborhood watch you've got there, Michelle.

Finishing off the whole toxic mix is a healthy dose of paranoia, also given a "mainstream" shot in the arm, from the Washington Times, which is reporting that Latino gang members are planning to show up and run counter-actions:

Members of a violent Central America-based gang have been sent to Arizona to target Minuteman Project volunteers, who will begin a monthlong border vigil this weekend to find and report foreigner sneaking into the United States, project officials say.

James Gilchrist, a Vietnam veteran who helped organize the vigil to protest the federal government's failure to control illegal immigration, said he has been told that California and Texas leaders of Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, have issued orders to teach "a lesson" to the Minuteman volunteers.

"We're not worried because half of our recruits are retired trained combat soldiers," Mr. Gilchrist said. "And those guys are just a bunch of punks."

More than 1,000 volunteers are expected to take part in the Minuteman vigil, which will include civilian patrols along a 20-mile section of the San Pedro River Valley, which has become a frequent entry point to the United States for foreigner headed north.

About 40 percent of the 1.15 million foreign nationals caught last year by the U.S. Border Patrol trying to gain illegal entry to the United States were apprehended along a 260-mile stretch of the Arizona border here known as the Tucson sector.

Having sat around many a Patriot campfire, and heard many a tale of a looming army of well-armed brown people, often gang members, preparing to attack the patriotic militiamen defending their country, well ... I think it's highly likely the Times reporter was being, shall we say, a bit credulous.

In fact, given their propensity for jumping to the wroung conclusions and attacking innocent people, their fondness for heavy weaponry, their itchy trigger fingers, and the heavy paranoia in which they have been bathing themselves, I'd say we have, as the Star's editors put it, a recipe for disaster.

Just about the time some hapless family stumbles across one of their watchpoints at about, say, Day 17 of the Project, when everyone is tired of waiting for something to happen and worked into a paranoiac state of frenzy.

Saved

I must be a member of the Culture of Death, because I find myself relieved that Terri Schiavo finally passed away this morning.

But largely because it prevents folks like Bo Gritz and Norm Olson and the Michigan Militia from "rescuing" her:

Norm Olson, senior adviser to the Michigan militia and pastor of a strong right-to-life church in Wolverine, said Tuesday he had put together an unarmed coalition of state militias that were prepared to storm the Florida hospice where Terri Schiavo has been left to die, and take her to a safe house.

Olson said he needed only the OK from Schiavo's father, Robert Schindler, either directly or through his attorney David Gibbs, to put the plan, called "Operation Resurrection," into action on Sunday.

But Olson said Gibbs contacted the FBI instead of passing his message on to Schindler.

Olson said the FBI had been monitoring e-mails within militia groups and on Tuesday, March 29, sent an agent from Traverse City to his home in Alanson and other agents to militia leaders in the South to question them about the plan.

The FBI was unavailable for comment.

Olson said that last Thursday he phoned Gibbs' secretary with a message that he had organized 1,500 to 2,000 militia members from Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, Georgia and Michigan, who were ready to remove Schiavo from the hospice and take her in a convoy to a safe house.

Olson said he never was able to speak directly to the Schindlers or Gibbs.

"Gibbs probably told the Schindlers not to get the militia involved. That's why Schindler came out with statement that he did not want any civil disobedience. Now they're begging for someone to do something, but it's too late," Olson said.

Olson said the militias needed time to arrange for an ambulance, medical support staff and a safe house before the plan could be put into action.

"We would have overwhelmed the local law enforcement," Olson said, adding the militias would not have been armed.

The story also includes a rundown of Olson's e-mails to his supporters:

Wednesday, March 23:

"Are there militia in Florida who are willing to go rescue Terri?

"How about Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana?

"I've got some very angry Michigan militia folks chomping at the bit ..."

"Shall we save Terri Schiavo?

"The Courts say NO

"The Law Makers say NO

"The Executives say NO

"It's time for us to say: 'Let's Roll!'

Thursday, March 24:

"Florida Militia: Please contact me. We're going to need several hundred willing to storm the building. I suspect that hundreds of 'civilians' may go with us. There is very little time, but I've got people ready to roll tonight."

"Failure is very probable, but not to try is to fail already."

"Too small of a force will mean total failure. It is a 'Bridge Too Far' but with enough people it may work.

"It isn't a commando raid or sneak attack. It is a mass saturation of people able to overwhelm the minimal forces there at this time."

"A large scale military assault need not be bloody. As much as we might like to, care must be taken to avoid inflicting injury on the bad guys."

Reality check: I met Olson at the Freemen standoff in Montana. He, like about 99 percent of all militiamen, is a loudmouthed fantasist whose chief combat capabilities involve scratching their posteriors. Olson has no significant remaining influence within the Patriot movement. If he actually gave such a call, it would be ignored. The only thing Olson seems capable of doing anymore is attracting attention to himself and pretending to represent a large movement, when in fact his supporters probably number in the low double digits --if that high.

But it is well worth noting just how avidly the Schiavo cause was adopted by right-wing extremists. Bill Berkowitz at Media Transparency has already detailed the far-right money trail in this brouhaha, especially the prominent role of the noxious Randall Terry, who earned special notice for accusing Michael Schiavo of adultery, a point on which Terry himself lives in something of aglass house. Terry, along with his cohort Matthew Trewhella, was one of the first public advocates of forming militias, back in 1994.

'Anchor babies' away

Calling Michelle Malkin! We need your expertise, on a key immigration issue. It should be right up your alley.

Maybe you've heard about this. One of the more audacious efforts of the anti-immigration crowd with whom you've aligned yourself -- you know, Tom Tancredo, Nathan Deal, those folks -- has arrived in the form of legislation that would strip the children of illegal immigrants born in the United States of citizenship rights:

[A] bill co-sponsored by Rep. Gary Miller, R-Brea, would deny citizenship to children born to undocumented immigrants in the United States, but opponents say the bill uses immigrants as a scapegoat for poorly developed policies.

"If you're coming here illegally, you shouldn't be benefiting from it," Miller said. "If I rob a bank, and left some money to my kids, should they be allowed to keep it?"

About 1 million people legally enter the United States from other countries each year, and an additional estimated 500,000 cross the border undocumented, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which supports the bill.

The 14th Amendment grants citizenship to individuals born in the United States, though the 1868 ratification of the amendment was intended to give citizenship to freed slaves, according to federation spokesman Ira Mehlman.

"It was intended to apply to a specific group of people -- it wasn't likely that people could travel thousands of miles to give birth to a child in a different country," Mehlman said.

The chief sponsor of the bill in Congress is actually Rep. Nathan Deal, R-Ga., who hails from a part of the country that is wrestling with old demons when it comes to the new wave of Latino immigrants.

California, where Miller hails from, is another such place. Miller, in fact, is rated the most conservative member of the California delegation, which is saying something. Meanwhile, Miller's own press release reiterates the hoary charge that the 14th Amendment was never meant to include these people:

"More than 120 nations, including Germany, Japan and Italy, do not grant automatic citizenship to children born to illegal immigrants," said Miller. "The United States must wise up and join the rest of the industrialized world in acknowledging that caring for, educating and integrating unregulated waves of immigrants is not sustainable."

The 14th Amendment grants citizenship to individuals born in the United States, though the 1868 ratification of the amendment was intended to give citizenship to freed slaves. Miller argues the authors of the amendment would not approve of its current application.

There's no sign the legislation will actually succeed, and considering how radical it is in nature, it seems unlikely; but then, a couple of months ago, it seemed unlikely that Congress would meet in special session in an attempt to butt its nose into a family tragedy involving a brain-dead woman. So you never know.

Another of the obvious hurdles the bill will have to face is that it is nakedly unconstitutional and is nearly certain to meet an ugly fate in the courts. But that's never stopped the True Believers of the right before, has it? They can just declare the judges who slap them down as "judicial activists," and right-wing radio creeps will begin broadcasting their home addresses.

Well, the mere fact that a number of Republicans have signed on to support it should give pause to anyone who thinks that so-called "pro-life" issues are the only ones to have been hijacked by wackaloons and yet pandered to by politicians. Of course, we know you're not among that crowd, Michelle.

Still, I'm having trouble seeing you support this. Even you must realize that immigration, after all, has for all of this nation's history been closely associated with citizenship, and the familial ties that spring from having citizen children has always been an essential ingredient in that formula. You have a little personal experience in that area, right?

I mean, even the normally quite conservative San Diego Union-Tribune blasted this legislation:

Actually, it's not enough to say that this bill would simply deny U.S. citizenship. Since the people impacted are already citizens under current law, what this legislation really intends to do is to revoke one's citizenship. That's a punishment so severe that it is usually reserved for traitors and enemies of the state. And this bill would mete out that punishment to children. And what did these pint-size subversives do to deserve all this? Absolutely nothing. They only managed to be born to parents who entered the country illegally.

Now this is not exactly a new phenomenon. One is likely to find this story told over and over again in the pages of U.S. history. Scores of pregnant women boarded ships in Italy or Ireland, headed for Ellis Island -– not always with the proper documents -– so that their children could enter the world as U.S. citizens. That's a beautiful tradition, and it's one worth preserving.

Such sentiments, of course, carry little weight with the anti-immigrant crowd, which is, as always, intent on its pound of flesh.

Indeed, you can find examples of it throughout history, always associated with Nativism and the worst, most bigoted elements of American society.

For instance, after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Senator Tom Stewart of Tennessee proposed stripping citizenship from anyone of Japanese descent: "A Jap's a Jap anywhere," he said.

This proposal had wide support on the Pacific Coast. Fairly typical was a letter to the Post-Intelligencer from Charlotte Drysdale of Seattle:

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. 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.

Er, um, now that I think about it, maybe you'd have actually agreed with Mrs. Drysdale, wouldn't you, Michelle?

It's all so confusing. You are, after all, so devoted to all major immigration issues that I see you've even begun a separate blog devoted to the subject. So far -- and hey, it's early in the thing, so maybe I'm just impatient -- you don't seem to have managed to address H.R. 698. Nor have you seem to have written on it at your regular blog. Though I see your colleagues at VDare have done so enthusiastically.

But everyone has to wonder if there's at least a possibility that, were this bill to pass, you yourself could be stripped of your citizenship, Michelle Maglalang Malkin. After all, it doesn't take much to be declared an "illegal alien"; all you have to do is miss some paperwork or lack certain documents, and under this legislation, voila! Your children are no longer citizens.

You, like many other citizen children of immigrants in this country, might have your citizenship revoked if it is found that, at the time of your birth, your parents did not qualify as "legal residents." Now, I'm not impugning them or their reputations -- I'm sure they were here perfectly legally in every jot and tittle at every step of their residency -- I'm just pointing out that such vagaries are fairly common for most children of immigrants, and sometimes involve obscure paperwork the children might not even be aware of.

And like most of us descended within a few generations from immigrant forebears, I'm sure this smacks of a betrayal of our heritage as a nation of immigrants to you just as it does to me. It's one thing to argue for smarter immigration; it's another to deny children their traditional birthright. A birthright I'm sure you treasure as deeply as do I.

Maybe you can clear up the confusion for us.

In the meantime, I'll sure you'll be happy to note that not only has this bill found great favor at VDare (itself designated a "hate group" by the SPLC), but it also has drawn the full-fledged support of the the fine folks at White Revolution.

I guess that's called "expanding the base." Or is it?

Priorities

So far, most of the evidence that the Bush administration is mishandling the domestic side of the "war on terror" has been a matter of omission, that is, what isn't being done: We haven't caught the anthrax killer. The William Krar case was swept under the national carpet. Even the recent concerns raised by the Lefkow killings raised nary an eyebrow.

There have been clearer indications that this administration is playing politics with the "war on terror," particularly in the skewing of priorities at the FBI, where investigators who specialize in right-wing extremists have been shunted to the back, and the FBI instead has announced "eco-terrorists" as the top domestic-terror threat.

There is also, of course, the clear failure of this administration to recognize the asymmetrical nature of terrorism, embarking on a costly and diversionary war in Iraq that has so far only worsened the root causes of terrorism in the Middle East (current right-wing optimism notwithstanding; we've heard rose-petal scenarios before). As I've argued before, this kind of mishandling of our response to the threat of terrorism only ensures that we'll have more of the same soon.

Now comes a report from Congressional Quarterly that makes clear just how badly the federal agencies supposedly in charge of confronting terrorism have skewed their priorities:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not list right-wing domestic terrorists and terrorist groups on a document that appears to be an internal list of threats to the nation's security.

According to the list -- part of a draft planning document obtained by CQ Homeland Security -- between now and 2011 DHS expects to contend primarily with adversaries such as al Qaeda and other foreign entities affiliated with the Islamic Jihad movement, as well as domestic radical Islamist groups.

It also lists left-wing domestic groups, such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), as terrorist threats, but it does not mention anti-government groups, white supremacists and other radical right-wing movements, which have staged numerous terrorist attacks that have killed scores of Americans. Recent attacks on cars, businesses and property in Virginia, Oregon and California have been attributed to ELF.

DHS did not respond to repeated requests for comment or confirmation of the document's authenticity.

The report makes clear that this is, by nearly any standard, a gross misappropriation of priorities, especially when it comes to the level of actual threat represented:

Domestic terror experts were surprised the department did not include right-wing groups on their list of adversaries.

"They are still a threat, and they will continue to be a threat," said Mike German, a 16-year undercover agent for the FBI who spent most of his career infiltrating radical right-wing groups. "If for some reason the government no longer considers them a threat, I think they will regret that," said German, who left the FBI last year. "Hopefully it's an oversight."

James O. Ellis III, a senior terror researcher for the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT), said in a telephone interview Friday that whereas left-wing groups, which have been more active recently, have focused mainly on the destruction of property, right-wing groups have a much deadlier and more violent record and should be on the list. "The nature of the history of terrorism is that you will see acts in the name of [right-wing] causes in the future."

Here's a reality check for the Department of Homeland Security: After the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995, through Jan. 1, 2000, there were over 40 serious cases of domestic terrorism -- some of it realized, some of it thwarted -- committed by right-wing extremists.

These were not petty or mere property crimes. They included the bombing of the Atlanta Olympics and abortion clinics by Eric Rudolph; a plan to attack a gathering of military families in the Midwest; and a plot to blow up a California propane facility. In every instance, the planned or perpetrated act involved serious violence in which potentially many people could be killed or injured.

Since that time, the rate has declined dramatically, but the cases keep occurring with some regularity, and the lethal nature of the threat has if anything become worse. Since 2000, we're talking about an actual anthrax attack; plans to set off cyanide and sarin bombs; more planned bombings of abortion clinics; and threats against federal judges. All emanating from either lone wolves or organized extremists from the far right.

These are not torchings of SUVs and vacant condos or trashing of research laboratories, which are bad enough, and certainly a problem worth confronting on a level deserving the actual threat they pose. But the level of violence, and the lethality of the threat posed, is of another order altogether when it comes to right-wing extremists.

The CQ report does point out that eco-terrorists are in fact seemingly more active now, which may be why they are more on the radar. But no one should be fooled by the current lull in the numbers participating in far-right groups. They have always been cyclical in nature, and during downswings like the current ones, the remaining True Believers tend to become even more radicalized, and are far more likely to spin off into violence.

The report also makes clear that this apparently is only a draft version of the list of apparent threats. But if it emerges that this in fact is the DHS view of domestic terrorism, then it should be clear there is something seriously wrong with its priorities.

And then, perhaps, we should begin asking some of the uncomfortable questions that naturally arise, to wit: Does this administration's heavy rightward political tilt have any role in its failure to recognize right-wing extremists as the serious security threat that they objectively are?

It seems, after all, a perfectly logical question to ask.

Blogging about

I've got a fresh post up at the newly redesigned American Street titled "Right wing scamsters," a follow-up to the recent post about the "Little Shell Pembina Band."

Eriposte has put together all the links to an excellent series at the Left Coaster on "How the Liberal Media Myth is Created." Be sure to check it out.

Philosoraptor has the definitive assessment of David Brooks' latest installment in his long-running "liberals are moral-relativist weenies" crock o' bobo.

Sean-Paul Kelly at the Agonist has posted an open letter to the National Press Club regarding its latest panel on blogs and journalism -- which includes faux journalist James Guckert, but no bloggers -- urging it add John Aravosis to the panel. I'm signing it; you should too. (Via Majikthese.)

And Part 1 of Natasha's "A Canticle for Lieberman" at Pacific Views is a must-read.

'Balance' and the tipping point

A lot of people see the Schiavo case as a kind of tipping point in the Culture War, though exactly what kind depends on the perspective. My old friend Danny Westneat at the Seattle Times sees it as the demise of the conservative movement. Tristero goes even farther, declaring it the point at which we jumped the shark into full-fledged fascism.

Even the normally reserved editorial pages of the Los Angeles Times (which called it a "constitutional coup d'etat") and the New York Times were alarmed by the behavior of Republicans in this matter:

President Bush and his Congressional allies have begun to enunciate a new principle: the rules of government are worth respecting only if they produce the result we want. It may be a formula for short-term political success, but it is no way to preserve and protect a great republic.

Most of the well-earned opprobrium has been directed at the politicians in this fiasco. But just as worthy for its behavior has been the nation's supposedly "mainstream" media -- because its handling of the Schiavo case has revealed, irrevocably, the utter bankruptcy of what it nowadays calls "balance."

As much as right-wing politicians have leapt into the breach to exploit Terri Schiavo for their own purposes, it's the media who have driven the story incessantly.

Feeding frenzies are typically the product of two common traits of editors and producers: a pack mentality, and a craven impulse to provide the public with stories they think will drive up their respective shares of the audience. The former often leads them to misjudge the latter, as in the Schiavo case: It's clear that the public's disgust with the politicians' behavior is primarily over their grotesque invasion of an agonizing private family matter, and on that score, the media's behavior is even more reprehensible.

What is especially appalling about the media treatment of the Schiavo case is how ardently, and unmistakably, it has adopted the supposedly "pro life" side of the argument. This ranges from outrageous bomb-throwing like that from Fox's John Gibson, to fingerpointing from MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, and Rush Limbaugh, to subtler bias like the omnipresent "Fight For Terri" label that is being used by half the networks to accompany their coverage logos.

We're seeing reporters credulously refer to highly dubious medical claims waved by Schiavo's parents -- including the recent claim that she indicated to them she did not want her tube removed -- as though they had anything other than the thinnest veneer of truth to them. We're watching news anchors openly accuse Michael Schiavo of being a bad husband. If there's a propaganda line out there that isn't being parroted in the mainstream media as fact, it might only be Bo Gritz's buffoonery. And they're working on that.

They're wallowing in it. Cheering it on. Even if it is only the viewpoint of about 20 percent of the country, at best, that politicians and reporters have any business, as Knute Berger put it, poking their ugly noses inside the dying room.

This is the way "balance" manifests itself in journalism nowadays.

Now, there is such a thing as real balance. Real balance is a genuine striving for truth: a willingness to both recognize and honestly explore the multiplicity of viewpoints as well as facts that are part of the naturally complex nature of truth. It is complicated and hard work. Of course, real, hard truth is elusive and rare; but the striving is what brings us closer to it.

However, a genuine balance does not countenance obvious falsehoods where it encounters them. It does not treat misinformation as a legitimate "counter" to reasonably established facts, as though a falsehood were just another opinion. It does not put lies on an even footing with facts.

Unfortunately, that is exactly what we have gotten, in increasing doses, as standard practice from the nation's press for the past decade. As I argued previously regarding the growth of "intelligent design" as a right-wing religious stratagem:

The key piece of illogic is one that has especially lodged itself in the media in recent years: The notion that a demonstrably true fact can be properly countered by a demonstrably false one -- and that the two, placed side by side, represent a kind of "balance" in the national discourse. This is the Foxcist model of Newspeak, in which "fair and balanced" comes to mean its exact opposite.

This kind of "balance" is a direct product of the right-wing myth of the "liberal media". Having worked in the media for many years, I can attest that it may often exhibit a bias, but it is not a liberal one; it is a self-interested one. And having dealt with many ideologues of all stripes in my various media capacities over the years, one of the distinguishing characteristics of movement conservatives that I observed is their knee-jerk and oft-shouted belief that any position contrary to or critical of their official party line is, by definition, "liberal."

What "balance" has become, in essence, is a fig leaf for broadcasting falsehoods on behalf of right-wing propaganda efforts. In the process, it has become a major means for transmitting extremist beliefs into the mainstream. The Schiavo matter is only the most prominent recent example of this.

Perhaps less noticed, but even more illustrative, was the recent case of C-SPAN's decision to "balance" its coverage of Deborah Lipstadt's book on her ordeal with Holocaust denier David Irving by insisting that Irving be given equal airtime.

Richard Cohen of the Washington Post (who has, it must be noted, been known for succumbing to right-wing notions of "balance" himself) was the first to raise the issue, in a column that gets it right, for once:

You will not be seeing Deborah Lipstadt on C-SPAN. The Holocaust scholar at Emory University has a new book out ("History on Trial"), and an upcoming lecture of hers at Harvard was scheduled to be televised on the public affairs cable outlet. The book is about a libel case brought against her in Britain by David Irving, a Holocaust denier, trivializer and prevaricator who is, by solemn ruling of the very court that heard his lawsuit, "anti-Semitic and racist." No matter. C-SPAN wanted Irving to "balance" Lipstadt.

The word balance is not in quotes for emphasis. It was invoked repeatedly by C-SPAN producers who seemed convinced that they had chosen the most noble of all journalistic causes: fairness. "We want to balance it [Lipstadt's lecture] by covering him," said Amy Roach, a producer for C-SPAN's Book TV. Her boss, Connie Doebele, put it another way. "You know how important fairness and balance is at C-SPAN," she told me. "We work very, very hard at this. We ask ourselves, 'Is there an opposing view of this?' "

As the New York Times reported, this raised immediate concerns among historians:

More than 200 historians at colleges nationwide sent a petition to C-Span yesterday to protest its plan to accompany its coverage of a lecture by Deborah E. Lipstadt, a professor of Holocaust studies at Emory University, with a speech by David Irving, who has argued that Hitler was not fully responsible for the mass murder of Jews.

"Falsifiers of history cannot 'balance' histories," said the petition, delivered to Connie Doebele, the executive producer at C-Span who planned the coverage. "Falsehoods cannot 'balance' the truth."

Mr. Irving, a British writer, sued Professor Lipstadt for libel for calling him a Holocaust denier, but the British Royal High Court of Justice dismissed the lawsuit on April 11, 2000, concluding that Mr. Irving was anti-Semitic and racist and that he persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence.

Professor Lipstadt has been promoting her new book, an account of the case titled "History on Trial: My Day in Court With David Irving," which Ecco published last month.

C-Span wanted to feature the book on its weekend program "Book TV" and asked Professor Lipstadt if it could record a speech she was making on March 16 at Harvard Hillel, a Jewish organization at Harvard University.

But when Professor Lipstadt learned that the cable network planned to include a lecture by Mr. Irving along with her remarks, she refused to allow C-Span to tape the event.

"I called the producer at C-Span and told her that this was a man who was a Holocaust denier, and this idea of using both of us made no sense to me," Professor Lipstadt said.

She and many of her supporters believe that including such a figure in an account of her views would be as wrongheaded as accompanying a story on slavery in the United States with remarks from someone who said that slavery never happened.

"I told C-Span that I assumed that if they weren't going to tape my lecture, they also wouldn't use David Irving, but they said no, they were committed to having him on," Professor Lipstadt said yesterday. "This is a man who's said that Holocaust survivors are all liars, and that more people died in Senator Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than in the gas chambers."

C-Span did tape the speech Mr. Irving made last weekend at the Landmark Diner in Atlanta. But Peggy Keegan, a spokeswoman for the network, said in an interview yesterday that its plans were now up in the air.

Indeed, as the Los Angeles Times later reported, C-SPAN is in full "reconsideration" mode on this decision.

It must be noted that this isn't the first time that C-SPAN has pandered to right-wing extremists. In the past, it has broadcast conferences of Jared Taylor's American Renaissance organization, as well as Council of Conservative Citizens conferences. Both are white-supremacist organizations, designated hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. And no, C-SPAN didn't see fit to find "balancing" viewpoints to these conferences. I wonder if might have been hard to find someone who would go on-air and to argue that blacks, contra Taylor, aren't a "retrograde species of humanity."

What was most amusing about this, though, was the way right-wing bloggers used the matter to position themselves on the side of the angels. Even the hatemongers at Little Green Footballs and Free Republic got into the act.

Roger Simon hit the truly classic note in all this:

It seems that C-SPAN has lying confused with opinion. How pathetic and shameful.

Yes, that is precisely the problem with this model of "balance." But what seems to have eluded everyone on the right is that this is not an isolated problem with C-SPAN. It is, in fact, pervasive throughout the media -- and particularly from self-identified "conservative" media like the "fair and balanced" Fox. And it has been going on for a long time now.

It was not uncommon, in the 1990s, to see clearly outrageous liars like Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and L. Jean Lewis treated not only with kid gloves, but as the chief source of supposedly credible "investigations" into Bill Clinton's private life.

As impeachment fever reached its crescendo in 1999, this willingness to treat blatant falsehoods as "the other side of the story" became pervasive. It was not uncommon to see Barbara or Ted Olson, or Mark Levine, or Ann Coulter, or some other congenital frothing-at-the-mouth Clinton-hater fulminate all over the tube daily with some bizarre speculation or other based in nothing but groundless conspiracy theories and a heavy dose of bile. It continued through the 2000 election, when we were told constantly that "Al Gore says he invented the Internet" and, later, that machine recounts were more accurate than hand recounts.

And it has continued apace since. We've been continually bludgeoned with weapons of mass destruction, orange-code warnings, Swift Boat Veterans and the phony "Rathergate" brouhaha -- all of them exercises in overt mendacity, all designed to bolster conservative-movement propaganda, and all accorded respectful treatment by a "balanced" media.

Perhaps the defining moment was the treatment given to Michelle Malkin, whose book defending the Japanese-American internment was boosted by a fawning press (and right-wing blogosphere) onto the New York Times bestseller list, despite the fact that it represented, rather clearly, an extension of David Irving-style historical revisionism. If Irving is so reprehensible to the folks at Little Green Footballs, why isn't Malkin?

Such hypocrisies, though, are second nature to today's conservatives, which is how they can continue to complain about a "liberal media" (the entire purpose of the "Rathergate" fiasco) even as right-wing propaganda overwhelms mainstream reportage. A quick survey of the Schiavo coverage only makes abundantly clear how far gone are the bulk of our "mainstream" media.

It is one thing, of course, to point out that both our politicians and our media are being grossly irresponsible. What's equally important is to recognize the potentially horrific consequences of this.

Hateful propaganda is just the beginning, because it creates an army of True Believers -- who I previously described as "their oxyconned, Foxcized, Freeped-out, fanatic army of followers" -- who will not be as restrained, either in their words or their actions, as their leaders. The limits on awful behavior are already being pushed to extremes by people like Randall Terry and Bo Gritz.

The vultures are already coming to roost. Hal Turner has been calling for the use of force to "save" Terri Schiavo, and killing anyone who interferes. And sure enough, someone has already been caught putting out a bounty on Michael Schiavo, while another man was arrested for stealing a gun in hopes he could "take some action and rescue Terri Schiavo."

As John Cole has been pointing out, genuine conservatives should be as horrified by these events as liberals -- and at some point, must come to grips with the fresh monsters in our midst. All of us: citizens, politicians, the media.

It won't happen, though, until we recognize the current model of "balance" for what it is: an open invitation to the spread of lies and misinformation. And get back to the time-honored traditions of striving for the truth.

The Succubus

There are many kinds of evils, but there is a truly unique and awful quality to the evil produced by naked racial and religious bigotry. People in Red Lake, Minnesota, can tell you all about it.

What the strange saga of Jeff Weise reveals is one of the more remarkable qualities of that evil: Even when consigned to the fringes and shadows, it retains a kind of vampiric half-life that has an ability to not only survive but adapt, finding fresh clawholds wherever it can, and then fester and grow -- almost inevitably exploding in violence.

Many of the attempts at analysis so far have emphasized the peculiarity of a minority -- Weise was Native American -- adopting neo-Nazi beliefs. But for researchers of the far right, it's perhaps not so surprising. After all, it has been known for some time that the Ku Klux Klan has actively attempted to recruit tribal members from the Lakota Sioux and other reservations for years.

Some Indian leaders who have caught wind of these activities have undertaken high-profile efforts to combat recruitment by extremist organizations within the tribes, partly because the far right's virulent anti-government beliefs struck a chord with some Indians. Some adherents of the white-supremacist Christian Identity movement are known to argue that Indians are Aryans, while others voice admiration for Native Americans who insist on marrying only within their tribal nations. Such notions of "racial purity" obviously were all the common ground a kid like Jeff Weise needed.

There is also a real fascination on the far right with Native American tribal sovereignty and how it might relate to their shopworn theories about "sovereign citizenship, which was a staple of the Posse Comitatus and Montana Freemen, as well as numerous militias. Tribal sovereignty, in essence, offers the far right whole new horizons in kookery. In recent years, this has mutated into such far-right scams as the Little Shell Pembina Band.

At the same time, there is little question that the racist right has been stepping up its recruitment efforts, particularly among young people. I've discussed this phenomenon and its ramifications numerous times over the past year. It should be clear that Weise's rampage is the kind of ramification I've been warning against.

There's no sign of it slowing down, either -- largely because the issue has been getting zero attention from the Fifth Estate. But nature abhors a vacuum, and the succubus loves the shadows.

Just recently, the white supremacists at the National Vanguard [warning: hate site] boasted of their "successful" roadsigns in Florida:

In the distance, another billboard, set apart from the rest, comes slowly into focus. It shows a lovely White woman seated in a field of flowers. She has no Black arm around her. She is part of no multiracial "team." Her fair skin is softly shining in the lights as you get closer. She is the image of natural beauty, innocence, wholesomeness. You notice she bears the symbol of life on her simple White dress. The message, too, is simple: "News. For us. For a change." And then the url of our news site, NationalVanguard.org, in letters thirty feet across. Different enough and intriguing enough to get people to visit -- our kind of people. Our people.

"News. For us. For a change." Seems like a message tailored to an audience conditioned by Fox News and its conception of "balance." [More on that soon.] Which is, of course, exactly what they intend: Make themselves look like normal people. Because, for all intents and purposes, they are.

The Vanguard also boasted of another billboard in Las Vegas demanding, "Stop Immigration." Again, tailored to resonate with mainstream conservatives, at least those of the Michelle Malkin/VDare crowd.

The haters on the far right are also becoming much bolder about operating openly. The same characters at National Vanguard also organized an attack on various supposedly "pro-Jewish" professors:

A few weeks ago, participants on an anti-Semitic Web site became angry when a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles refused to participate in an exchange of e-mail messages.

The professor was Jewish, and the Web site responded by placing photographs of and biographic material about UCLA professors and anti-Semitic diatribes online. In recent days, the Web site ? Vanguard News Network ? has expanded its campaign, which it says is designed to draw attention to the high percentage of Jewish professors on law schools? faculties.

The Web site is now publishing a variety of information ? photographs, results of Google searches, phone numbers ? of faculty members who are Jewish (or have Jewish-sounding names) at leading law schools all over the United States.

Among the institutions who have faculty members discussed by name on the Web site are Georgetown, Harvard, New York, Stanford and Yale Universities; and the Universities of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Most of the comments attack Jewish faculty members at law schools, with a theme being that they make up a larger share of law school faculties than do Jews in the U.S. population, and that this over-representation signifies Jewish control of American society.

The attacks were inspired by the wise refusal of Eugene Volokh to participate in an exchange with them.

All this is happening even as the far right, to all appearances, is at a real low tide in sheer numbers. A recent Judy Thomas piece in the Kansas City Star explored this further:

Despite disarray in the anti-government movement, no one should let their guard down, said Leonard Zeskind, director of the Kansas City-based Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights.

"At the end of the day, this movement never loses the impulse for violence," Zeskind said.

"They reconfigure it, and they think about whether they need small cells, big cells, underground armies, lone-wolf killers. But the fact of the matter is the pulse of violence just never goes out on this thing. And that's really the ugly truth."

Those left in the white-supremacist movement agree that the turmoil in their organizations could lead to increased violence.

"What's changed is that because of the way the country's going, it's basically sent the luke-warmers and the fence-sitters running for cover,? said August B. Kreis III, national director of the Aryan Nations, a white-supremacist group. "And the only people that will really stay are the hard-core people."

But Kreis said he preferred it that way.

"I want the hardest of the hard," he said. "When enough white people say that we've had enough, we're not going to take it any more and we realize now that blood is going to have to be spilled, then it's going to get bad. I really believe that, and I'm really hoping I'm here to see that."

A former Kansas City Ku Klux Klan leader also says the movement today is not for "wimps."

"After the bomb went off in Oklahoma City, the White Knights completely collapsed," said Dennis Mahon, who now lives in Tulsa, Okla. "They shut down the post-office box, they shut down the hot line. They were scared to death. They just went down the hidey hole."

The militia movement also went into hiding after the bombing, Mahon said. He said now a different strategy is needed.

"There'll be a time when we can go ahead and go with leadership movements," he said. "But right now, I think it's just we all want to overthrow the government and get a state of our own. There's many ways to do that. It's called small cells and lone wolfism."

The apparent downturn is deceptive in another important way: It lulls the rest of society into thinking the problem has been licked. But what we have known historically of the far right is that it is cyclical in nature -- and the low tides are almost inevitably followed by a waxing and finally a high tide. What's more, the remaining "true believers" who are active during the low periods inevitably seem more radicalized, more likely to spiral crazily into violence.

As Lenny Zeskind says, these haters never really go away. They're like demonic versions of the Energizer Bunny: Combined, they become part of the Succubus, which just keeps on going and going and sucking the life and souls of whatever hapless victims it encounters.

And chief among these are people like Jeff Weise: vulnerable, angry, unstable. Ready to explode.

People who study the far right have known many of these people over the years: Gordon Kahl. Robert Matthews. Tim McVeigh.

One of the most memorable of these, for me, was a man named David Lewis Rice.

On Christmas Eve 1985, Charles and Annie Goldmark were at home with their sons Derek, 12, and Colin, 10, preparing for a holiday dinner when the doorbell rang. It was Rice, a 27-year-old unemployed transient, posing as a taxicab driver delivering a package. He brandished a toy gun and forced his way into their home, then set about using chloroform to render all four Goldmarks unconscious. He then proceeded to kill them slowly, using a steam iron and a knife that he used to insert into at least one of the victim's brains. Annie was pronounced dead on the spot, Colin pronounced dead on arrival, while Charles died there a short while later; Derek finally succumbed 37 days later.

But Rice wasn't just a deranged loony -- though he probably fit that description too. He also was a deranged loony who had been set into action by the malicious lies of a group of right-wing haters, whose venom became his inspiration, as the HistoryLink piece explains:

David Rice, a former steel worker from Colorado, joined an extremist group in Washington called the Duck Club. Although the Duck Club was almost defunct, the Seattle chapter still functioned. The group convinced Rice that Charles Goldmark was Jewish and a Communist. (Charles Goldmark's parents, John and Sally Goldmark, had won a highly publicized libel case in 1964 when they were accused of being Communists.)

The Goldmark case is a centerpiece of James Aho's study of the far right, This Thing of Darkness: A Sociology of the Enemy (which I've discussed previously). Aho goes into more detail about what drove Rice, as well as the circumstances surrounding his decision to kill:

Conversion (resocialization) ... occurs not through brainwashing of passive victims or through obsessive self-conversion. It takes place through active efforts of the disciple, sometimes indifferent to ideology or theology as such, to solidify and preserve social ties with his mentors.

... Ed Fasel [fictitious name] was head of the local Duck Club chapter. It was from Ed that Rice received the tragic misinformation that Charles and Annie Goldmark were leading Seattle Communists. In the course of discussions concerning local subversives and crooks who were presumably frustrating Rice's efforts to secure a job, Fasel, mistaking Charles for his father John, related to Rice that the Goldmarks had been investigated and that Charles was "regional director of the American Communist Party." Rice took this to mean that Charles was the "highest obtainable target I could reach, the greatest value informationally." After handcuffing the Goldmarks, Rice intended to interrogate them about the next person in the conspiratorial hierarchy, possibly to preempt at the last moment the impending invasion of alien troops [a conspiracy theory to which Rice subscribed].

What occasioned Fasel to dredge up a name associated with an event that had occurred two decades previously in another part of the state? In a Seattle Port Commission election during the summer of 1985, one of the candidates was Jim Wright, a Republican. Wright's campaign manager was none other than Ashley Holden, a defendant in the Goldmark trial. [Holden had been a leading torchbearer in the McCarthyite "Red fever" that swept Washington state in the late 1940s and '50s, and had been one of the people who falsely accused the Goldmarks in print of being part of the Communist Party.] Upon discovering this unusual link, the Seattle media jumped on it, and the name "Goldmark," with its unfortunate connotations, "got out again," to use one informant's phrase.

In my interview with him, Holden convincingly insisted that he knew nothing of the Duck Club nor any of its members. "I deplored the murder," he said. "There is no question," he went on, parroting local wisdom, "Rice was demented."

I have met some of the old leaders of the Duck Club, including "Fasel" -- whose real name was Homer Brand. They reminded me of Richard Butler: they had a moral stench about them like rotting corpses. Of course, they never faced legal liability for their role in the murders. But they had blood on their hands, just as surely as does the "Libertarian National Socialist Green Party" and whoever else gave Jeff Weise his inspiration.

Much of the conventional wisdom coming out of the Red Lake massacre was that Jeff Weise was "deeply troubled." No doubt in coming days and weeks we'll hear how this was an "isolated incident." How "the only person responsible" for what happened was Weise himself. Heaven forfend that anyone should suggest that the kind of hatred of multiculturalism so common on the mainstream right nowadays -- and so significant a factor in Weise's beliefs -- might have played a role in fueling this rampage.

That's how the Succubus lives. It dwells in the shadows -- unseen by those who purposely deflect their vision from it, because it serves their own interests to do so -- until it becomes strong enough to venture out into daylight. And then it kills.

Every time.

The fruits of hate

Don't you think it's kind of funny that when the rabid right goes a-hunting for people with "a unique hostility toward Western traditional and commonsense attitudes," people whose "true raison d'etre is in practice nothing other than to destroy to destroy utterly whatever allegiance a young person might have to traditional conceptions in morality, religion, politics and culture," they only seem to cobble up relatively insignificant figures on the left?

Because it's also kind of funny how many times the most horrifying cases involving young people whose senses of morality, religion, politics and culture have been monstrously warped by outside forces with a hostility to basic decency turn out, in fact, to involve young people whose beliefs emanate from the far right, like Minnesota teenager Jeff Weise, who just shot up his reservation high school:

Alternately using the online pennames Todesengel_German for "angel of death"_and "NativeNazi," Weise wrote several posts in which he said he believed Hitler and the National Socialist movement that embroiled the world in war and caused millions of deaths got a bad rap.

"When I was growing up, I was taught (like others) that Nazi's were evil and that Hitler was a very evil man ect," he wrote in one posting replete with misspellings. "Of course, not for a second did I believe this. Upon reading up on his actions, the ideals and issues the German Third Reich addressed, I began to see how much of a like had been painted about them. They truly were doing it for the better."

In other posts, he wrote that he believed a National Socialist movement could work on his reservation and planned on trying to recruit some members at school when it started up last fall.

"The only ones who oppose my views are the teachers at the high school, and a large portion of the student body who think a Nazi is a Klansman, or a White Supremacist thug. Most of the Natives I know have been poisoned by what they were taught in school."

This is an unusual case in that it involves a minority, but that only illustrates the larger point: Hateful far-right philosophies poison many wells, and are clearly capable of crossing boundaries. (Another prime example of this is the African-American hate cult calling itself the United Nuwabian Nation of Moors.)

Weise's hostility to multiculturalism was well fed by what he could find on the Internet, the bulk of which was produced by white supremacists, including an outfit called Nazi.org, the National Alliance, and Don Black's neo-Nazi Stormfront organization. You remember: the same folks who broke up Jesse Jackson's Florida appearance in support of George W. Bush in 2000.

Here's a reality check for the mainstream right: right-wing extremism has always been, and always will be, the most vicious proponent of beliefs that destroy the basic fabric of civilization. They worship violence and bigotry and racial and religious hatred. That's as true in the United States as it is in the Middle East.

When you go looking for threats -- and the people who both associate with and benefit from them -- a good place to start might be the American right's own bloody back yard.

Bo to the rescue

[James "Bo" Gritz at a Preparedness Expo in Puyallup, Washington, in 1998.]

Good gawd, if the Terry Schiavo drama -- and especially the atrocious role played in it by Jeb Bush -- weren't enough of a three-ring circus already, it's now drawn the participation of the extremist right. We're escalating from travesty to potential tragedy.

Namely, my old friend Bo Gritz, has leapt into the fray with a chorus of approval from World Net Daily and The Free Republic:

Former Green Beret Commander Bo Gritz is trying to conduct a citizen's arrest of Terri Schiavo's husband and the judge who ordered the brain-damaged Florida woman's feeding tube removed so she can be legally starved.

The 66-year-old retired Army Lt. Colonel with his wife, Judy, arrived in Florida from their home in Nevada yesterday with the intent of arresting anyone involved in removing the life-sustaining tube.

Gritz came bearing a notarized "citizen's arrest warrant" addressed to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Attorney General Charlie Crist.

His intent is to "paper" state and federal law enforcement offices with his warrant today – one day before Pinellas Circuit Court Judge George Greer's deadline to begin denial of food and water to Terri Schiavo.

Gritz says the "arrest" is designed to allow officials additional options as the Florida governor and legislature maneuver to save the woman from starvation.

Gritz says he successfully used the arrest-tool against federal law enforcement in August 1992 when he intervened in the so-called Ruby Ridge incident in Idaho and brought what was left of Randy Weaver's family down the hill without further bloodshed. Sammy, the 14-year-old Weaver boy, was killed along with his mother, Vicki, and U.S. Marshal William Degan. Randy Weaver and another man, Kevin Harris, were wounded by police gunfire.

Er, actually, that wasn't what happened. Bo showed up at Ruby Ridge and read out his arrest warrant at the blockade. But these threats were utterly ignored. In fact, since he was present, and Weaver was a big fan of Gritz's, the FBI decided instead to see if he could negotiate an end to the standoff. And, in fact, he did. But the arrest warrants were not only a nonfactor, they were something of a joke.

Ever since then, Gritz has made a career of showing up at standoffs and other celebrated cases and touting his public reputation, but having no effect whatsoever except perhaps to make things worse. I described in Chapter 7 of In God's Country his arrival at the Freemen standoff in Montana:

The media horde was ready and waiting for Colonel James "Bo" Gritz when he flew in to Jordan. Which, as far as Gritz seemed to be concerned, was just fine.

For that matter, possibly the most dangerous place to be that day in Montana was between Bo Gritz and a television camera. Scarcely had his light plane touched down at the Jordan airstrip before Gritz climbed out and walked out to meet the waiting newsmen. Right behind him was the man responsible for Gritz's chief claim to fame: Randy Weaver, the martyred widower of Ruby Ridge.

It had been nearly a month since the FBI's standoff with the Freemen had begun, and the situation seemingly was going nowhere, although negotiators said they were making progress. Gritz and Weaver, following through on a promise Gritz made earlier that week on his short-wave radio program, had arrived to try to broker an end to the confrontation.

It was a nasty, windblown Thursday, with gusts hitting 60 miles an hour, and Gritz's entourage seemed intent on getting out of the winds and on with the mission. Gritz held the cameras at bay, chatting briefly with the newsmen, while Weaver and Gritz's two right-hand men, Jack McLamb and Jerry Gillespie, got out of the light plane and into a large pickup. Then, saying he'd make a statement later, the onetime Green Beret colonel climbed into the truck and headed off to meet with the Freemen -- or at least try to.

Gritz was far from the first person from the Patriot movement to show up on the scene. Only two days after the standoff started, a Kansas militia activist named Stewart Waterhouse and a cohort, Barry Nelson, took advantage of the loose perimeter around the compound and sneaked onto the Clark ranch, bolstering the Freemen's numbers in the process. The FBI clamped down on activity in the area and set up a checkpoint at the four-corner intersection near the Brusett post office. The media were confined to a hill that overlooked the Clark ranch from a considerable distance.

Over the next few weeks, Jordan saw a steady trickle of militia folks come in and out of town. A small group of supporters from Medford, Oregon, took the long drive out with food supplies and a few guns, but they were stopped at the perimeter by the FBI, their guns confiscated, and turned back. Kamala Webb, a Bozeman woman who heads up a Militia of Montana group in Gallatin County, drove up with another small group, including Dan Petersen's stepson, Keven Entzel. They too had food supplies for the Freemen; they too were turned back. And then there was the occasional solitary supporter, like Bill Goehler of Marysville, California, who drove out on his Honda 750 motorcycle and demonstrated in front of the FBI checkpoint by leaning against his bike and holding an American flag upside down.

The most colorful of all the arrivals so far had been "Stormin'" Norman Olson, the onetime commander of the Michigan Militia, who visited Jordan during the third week of the standoff with his longtime sidekick, Ray Southwell. He was there to support the Freemen, he said, and to make sure the FBI didn't try to pull any fast ones.

"I don't think they should surrender," Olson said. "I think they are doing the right thing, and they ought to stay where they are."

Tension was building around the compound at that point. It was April 16, only three days away from the Oklahoma City anniversary, and many townsfolk in Jordan were growing fearful that the Patriots would descend on their town and violence would erupt. Olson only made matters worse, saying he was there to organize a "national response team" that would "meet Janet Reno and the FBI, wherever they attack in the future. Waco, Ruby Ridge, now Montana. Where is it going to end?"

Olson tried several times to enter the compound, but was rebuffed by the FBI, even when he carried a stuffed animal and a Bible and claimed he wanted to go in to "minister" to the group. Finally, on April 19, Olson gave up in disgust.

... Four days later, Bo Gritz, always more affable and media-savvy, flew in to the Jordan airstrip on his own mission: to negotiate an end to the standoff, much as he did on Ruby Ridge. After his initial bow to reporters, he and his entourage headed up the gravel road to Brusett to see if they could talk their way onto the Clark ranch.

They couldn't. At the checkpoint, a grim-faced Montana Highway Patrolman told Gritz he’d have to get clearance from the FBI. A little nonplussed, Gritz turned to the waiting news cameras and did what comes most naturally to him -- he held a press conference.

"We are going to try to do for the Freemen and FBI and the American people what we did at Ruby Ridge," he told the gathered reporters. "We don't want any more Wacos and I don't want to wait for Janet Reno to have a bad hair day to have one."

While Gritz held forth, Randy Weaver and Jerry Gillespie waited inside the pickup. Jack McLamb, on the other hand, stood outside the cluster of newspeople encircling Gritz, looking over the various lawmen who stood nearby. McLamb's specialty in the Patriot movement is recruiting policemen to the belief system; his staredown with the officers at the checkpoint had the look of someone sizing up potential believers.

Gritz spent about twenty minutes with the reporters. He told them he was unsure what standing, if any, he had with the people inside the compound. "I don't think I have any rapport at all, but I got probably the only plan.

"If the Freemen throw me out, then it gives a message to America: they don't care. If the FBI stopped me, isn't it kind of stupid? If we do bring them out, then the FBI can go home where they belong."

When he was done, Gritz got into the pickup with McLamb and headed back up the gravel road to the FBI headquarters, at the Garfield County Fairground just outside Jordan. Gritz walked in alone to talk things over with officials there; his three friends waited outside in the pickup, munching on apples and listening to Garth Brooks tapes. About an hour later, Gritz emerged, got into the pickup without a word, and drove back to the Jordan airstrip, where he had a motor home parked next to his Cessna. Evidently the FBI had said no, at least for the day.

Eventually, Gritz was allowed to negotiate with the Freemen, but it was fruitless, to no one's great surprise:

On the fourth day, Gritz gave up, evidently in disgust. After only three hours, he and Jack McLamb left the Clark ranch no closer to a surrender than when they entered. The Freemen, he said, believed Yahweh had erected an "invisible barrier" around the compound that made them invulnerable. If the feds wanted to negotiate, they said, perhaps onetime Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork could come out to Jordan and take up residence while talks progressed. Failing that, they’d accept Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Or better yet, Colorado State Senator Charles Duke, who they said understood their beliefs.

Gritz and his entourage, wearing baffled scowls, packed up and flew out of town that afternoon. The standoff had reached 38 days with no end in sight.

Gritz's next big adventure was to get involved in the Linda Wiegand case -- involving a mother who had fled with her children as part of a custody dispute -- which wound up getting him charged with attempted kidnapping (of which he was eventually acquitted).

Then, of course, there was the whole attempted suicide thing. Bo eventually remarried, this time to a woman named Judy Kirsch, who was raised in an Oklahoma Christian Identity church.

When I knew Gritz, he worked hard to downplay his Identity involvement -- and, in fact, he had distanced himself from those associations in part because of a public dispute with the Rev. Pete Peters (the nation's leading Identity preacher) over the latter's pronouncements urging the death sentence for homosexuals. However, his marriage to Kirsch has erased much of that old reticence, though not all of it. As the ADL explained:

Even since unreservedly accepting Christian Identity, upon his marriage to Judy Kirsch in 1999, he has avoided the bigoted language typical of that movement.

Through Kirsch, Gritz became active in Dan Gayman's Missouri-based Church of Israel, attending and speaking at its religious celebrations. The influence of Gayman and Christian Identity led Gritz to rename, and spiritualize, the Center for Action. It became the Center for Action -- Fellowship of Eternal Warriors. Pursuing his new mission, and adding a religious gloss to old themes, he "anointed" a small number of God's "Israelpeople" to "meet the increasing challenge of Satan’s globalism." He spent a year, he said, identifying a dozen "warrior-priests" who clearly "embody the strengths of God’s Israelpeople" -- including old friend Richard Flowers, Steve Kukla of the Oklahoma-based Sovereign Studios and Sheldon Robinson, co-defendant in the Weigand case. Gritz recruits new candidates on his Web site, telling readers: "Contact me if you feel that God has called you to be a spiritual warrior for these last days."

The Fellowship of Eternal Warriors represents the most thorough merger to date of Gritz's paramilitary training, opposition to the federal government and religious ardor. While he has since parted ways with the Church of Israel and Dan Gayman, his efforts to prepare for spiritual warfare remain undiminished. Gritz now attends both the Christian Identity Rose Hill Covenant Church in Oklahoma and the Inter-Continental Church of God in California, continues to promote SPIKE training, whose newest edition qualifies participants as a "Master Blaster," and runs the Center for Action. His religious beliefs remain somewhat vague, however, in part because he has not, at least publicly, articulated the racial implications of his Identity faith. Nonetheless, Gritz has upped the ante by enlisting God against the government and its supporters. He says:

I can assure you that if I was ever convinced that it was God's Will for me to commit an act of violence against the laws of our land, I would hesitate only long enough to, like Gideon, be certain. I would then do all within my power to accomplish what I felt he required of me. . . If God does call me into the Phinehas Priesthood . . . my defense will be the truth as inspired by the Messiah.

This latter reference is particularly disturbing, especially for those who've read Chapter 6 of In God's Country and understand the "Phineas Priesthood" reference. Essentially, though, the notion of the "Priesthood" is that one enters it by committing a killing of someone who has broken "God's law"; it is easily the most radical and potentially dangerous component of the extremist right's belief systems, especially within the context of Identity.

This is the kind of element that a scene like the Schiavo case -- with all its attendant supercharged hyperbole -- was bound to attract. People like Gritz are drawn to these events like flies to cloaca.

And of course, when it all spirals out of control, people like Jeb Bush and Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly -- you know, those "mainstream" conservatives who have thrown gasoline on this bonfire at every step of the way -- will somehow find a way to blame the carnage on liberals.

That fanatical contingent

Jonathan Chait, filling in for Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, raised many eyebrows when he wrote earlier this week:

I actually agree with Marshall and the DLC on the suicidal purity of the Democratic party's left wing, embodied by the Howard Dean movement and its fanatical internet contingent, even if I disagree with his support for Lieberman in particular.

Chait appears to be now joining the chorus of "moderates" on the left accusing the activist left of fomenting irrational hatred of Bush and the right, especially expressed by the "fanatical internet contingent" and its "suicidal purity."

Funny thing about that. It was only a few short months ago that the leading example of "irrational Bush hatred" offered up by wags on the right was this piece by Jonathan Chait:

[Bush] reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school--the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it. I hate the way he walks--shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks--blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudo-populist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him. I hate his lame nickname-bestowing-- a way to establish one's social superiority beneath a veneer of chumminess (does anybody give their boss a nickname without his consent?). And, while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more.

As Bob Somerby pointed out at the time:

Much of the column was a critique of Bush policy. But Chait framed the piece as a tongue-in-cheek confession of his visceral "hatred" for Bush. And it isn’t just Bush’s policies, Chait says. "I hate the way he walks," the scribe writes -- "shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo." Chait also hates the fact that Bush gives nicknames, and says, "I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more."

Does Chait really "hate" the way Bush holds his arms? If so, he ought to be sent to a home. But, although Chait’s piece was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, the result was one thousand percent predictable. In yesterday's New York Times, David Brooks discarded Chait's serious ruminations -- and quoted the list of his trivial complaints ... . Gravely faking for his national audience, Brooks then drew the scripted conclusion: Can't you see how crazy these liberals are? Can't you see that irrational "hatred" is driving these complaints about Bush?

Guys like Jonathan Chait did their best to thoughtlessly hand ammunition to right-wing propagandists about irrational Bush hatred from the left.

So how is it that they're the ones pointing fingers now?

Our little Osamas

Now that the dust has settled from the Lefkow murders, it's clear that the killer was not connected to any known hate group. That idiosyncratic outcome might ordinarily leave us to write it off to the vagaries of crime in our society, but it's worth reflecting a little on what the incident, perhaps incidentally, revealed.

The most striking feature of the incident involved the reaction by the extremist right to the murders: openly cheering them, and urging similar action for other judges. This is consistent, it should be observed, with the far right's historic approach to violence that benefits their cause: Even if they cannot claim credit for it, they will exploit it.

It's called piggybacking, and it was evident, as I've explained previously, in the aftermath of September 11, particularly in the actions of the anthrax killer. The domestic terrorists of the American far right see any kind of violent disturbance as an opportunity to spread chaos, which is the centerpiece of their long-term strategy.

This is why I've argued consistently that any serious "war on terror" will, by its nature, consistently recognize domestic terrorism as a significant component of the real threat that confronts us.

Unfortunately, this has been twisted by some of my critics on the right into something I (for obvious reasons) didn't say, to wit, that "if (and only if) our enemy list is broadened to include right-wing domestic terrorists, then the left will recognize that its values are threatened and react by confronting both the domestic terrorists and the Islamic fundamentalists."

What I am arguing is that any serious war on terror will of its own encompass the domestic-terror threat and deal with it appropriately. The current war on terror is predicated on a symmetrical military response, which is exactly the wrong approach to an asymmetrical threat.

It's not that domestic terrorism should be given the focus of our approach; rather, it's that the failure to focus on it at all leaves us vulnerable in a way that also reveals the incoherence of our antiterrorism policy. The reason I keep stressing our handling of domestic terrorism is that it gives us a prism for understanding what's wrong with our ongoing response to the broader phenomenon of terrorism.

Nicholas Kristof's recent column on our "Homegrown Osamas" touched on some of this, discussing the white supremacists whose ugliness was again on display for all to see in this most recent incident:

After the Oklahoma City bombing, American law enforcement authorities cracked down quite effectively on domestic racists and militia leaders. But Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors 760 hate groups with about 100,000 members, notes that after 9/11, the law enforcement focus switched overwhelmingly to Arabs.

The Feds are right to be especially alarmed about Al Qaeda. But we also need to be more vigilant about the domestic white supremacists, neo-Nazis and militia members. After all, some have more W.M.D. than Saddam.

Two years ago, for example, a Texan in a militia, William Krar, was caught with 25 machine guns and other weapons, a quarter-million rounds of ammunition, 60 pipe bombs and enough sodium cyanide to kill hundreds of people.

We were too complacent about Al Qaeda and foreign terrorists before 9/11. And now we're too complacent about homegrown threats.

The problem was underscored by a recent report in a conservative publication of a plea by white supremacists for an alliance with Islamist radicals:

In a letter posted on its Web site the head of the white supremacist group Aryan Nations offers his thanks to radical Islamic terrorists and extends the group's hand of friendship.

Aryan Nations National Director August Kreis writes (www.aryan-nations.org), "We as an organization will also endeavor to aid all those who subvert, disrupt and are (sic) malignant in nature to our enemies. Therefore I offer my most sincere best-wishes to those who wage holy Jihad against the infrastructure of the decadent, weak and Judaic-influenced societal infrastructure of the West. I send a message of thanks and well-wishes to the methods and works of groups on the Islamic front against the jew such as Al-Qaeda and Sheik Usama Bin Ladin, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and to all Jihadis worldwide who fight for the glory of the Khilafah and the downfall of the anti-life and anti-freedom System prevalent on this earth today.

Kreis continues by saying (sic), "I ask our Islamic fellow fighters against jewry to remember the co-operation between Mufti Haj Mohammad Amin al-Husseini and Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler during the last century and to remember that all that is of the past it is our duty to surpass!"

Allying themselves with "real" terrorists has always been something of a fantasy of the extremist right. And the history of such gestures is that they have always been refused with scorn, for good reason.

Nonetheless, such gestures do underscore the reality that Islamist radicalism is a form of right-wing extremism, and its most natural allies in America are not -- as people like David Horowitz and Powerline are fond of suggesting -- on the left, but on the far right. The claims to the contrary are just another instance of the "up is down" kind of Newspeak that has become pervasive in conservative discourse.

But that's not to say that the response to American neo-Nazi "lone wolf" terrorists and white-supremacist terror cells should be the same as that to Al Qaeda. For all their occasional similarities, there are important differences between them, and the response has to reflect that as well.

My sometime correspondent Dr. Jeffrey Bale of the Center for Proliferation Studies outlines some important caveats when assessing the domestic right-wing threat, and they're well worth heeding:

[T]he fact is that the overwhelming majority of acts of domestic right-wing violence have up until now been incidents of opportunistic street violence, as opposed to carefully planned and organized campaigns of terrorism, which are an entirely different thing. There are of course small cells of extremists who have been and still are busily plotting acts of more serious terrorism, but fortunately most of their actions have hitherto been interdicted or failed because the would-be perpetrators were 1) not terribly sophisticated from an operational standpoint, 2) easily infiltrated or "stung" by members of the law enforcement community, or 3) so amateurish as to be unable to maintain secrecy about their plans.

But rat-packing members of "out-groups," setting off the occasional homemade bomb at an abortion clinic, shooting an occasional "enemy" (like Alan Berg or abortion doctors), or robbing banks to fund other violent or criminal activities (like the Phineas Priesthood) -- however horrible these actions are, especially for the actual victims -- are in no way comparable in scale or impact to the systematic, large-scale campaigns of terrorism that have been and continue to be carried out in other parts of the world by well-trained, operationally sophisticated groups of professional terrorists. Anyone who is intimately familiar with the details of numerous operations carried out by left-wing and neo-fascist terrorists in Europe, left-wing and right-wing terrorists in Latin America, or religious terrorists in various parts of the Muslim world -- as I am -- cannot fail to be impressed, by way of contrast, by the extraordinarily amateurish quality of most acts of domestic right-wing violence. This certainly doesn't mean that they should be ignored or that their perpetrators should not be severely punished, only that it is apparent that the kinds of serious terrorist actions carried out by the Order and McVeigh have been -- fortunately -- relatively rare in this country.

Moreover, the fact that small, violence-prone fringe groups are capable of carrying out gruesome acts of violence does not mean that they are politically, sociologically, or culturally significant, in the sense that they represent extensive constituencies or broad-based social forces in the U.S. The fact is that such groups have long been confined to the margins of society and politics in America -- unlike, say, the general Christian right -- and short of a total social breakdown that is likely to be where they remain.

I agree with most of this analysis, though I differ on a couple of significant points:

-- The ongoing ideological traffic between the mainstream right and its extremist counterpoint is increasingly blurring the line behind which the far right has traditionally remained. I am not so complacent about the prospects of their remaining there, especially given the likelihood of future terrorist attacks that will further traumatize the national psyche.

-- I disagree that domestic right-wing violence has been "relatively rare" in this country. Relative, perhaps, to the Middle East, but not to America insofar as it has experience terrorism on its soil.

As I explained before:

It's true that, generally speaking, domestic terrorists are neither as competent nor as likely to pose a major threat as most international terrorists, particularly Al Qaeda. And the belief systems that feed the domestic terrorists have not become pervasive in popular Western culture the way Al Qaeda and Wahhabism generally have insinuated themselves in the Islamic world (though there has been an increasing blurring of the lines between the mainstream and extremist right in recent years).

Nonetheless, given the right actors, the right weapons, and the right circumstances, they remain nearly as capable of inflicting serious harm on large numbers of citizens as their foreign counterparts. This is especially true because they are less likely to arouse suspicion and can more readily blend into the scenery.

Most of all, what they lack in smarts or skill, they make up for in numbers: Since the early 1990s, the vast majority of planned terrorist acts on American soil -- both those that were successfully perpetrated and those apprehended beforehand -- have involved white right-wing extremists. Between 1995 and 2000, over 42 such cases (some, like Eric Rudolph, involving multiple crimes) were identifiable from public records.

Some of these were potentially quite lethal, such as a planned attack on a propane facility near Sacramento that, had it been successful, would have killed several thousand people living in its vicinity. Krar's cyanide bomb could have killed hundreds. Fortunately, none of these plotters have proven to be very competent.

The rate has slowed since 2000, but the cases have continued to occur. And someday, our luck is going to run out. Certainly, if we are counting on their incompetence, the fact that the anthrax killer (whose attacks in fact were quite successful in their purpose) has not yet been caught. Likewise, if Al Qaeda attacks again, that will likely signal a fresh round of piggybacking.

It's vital that we take domestic terrorism seriously not because it represents a threat as immediately lethal as Al Qaeda. It doesn't. It's vital because we need to keep it that way.

The far right's clear willingness to piggyback on all kinds of public violence means that the subsequent aftershocks of a major terrorist attack could prove to be equally devastating to the national well-being. Their small-potatoes aspect belies their ability to wreak tremendous havoc.

We cannot say we are dealing with terrorism seriously until we confront this reality.

[Originally posted Monday at The American Stree.]

Blogging about

I've got a post up at The American Street on "Our little Osamas". Be sure to check it out.

John McKay at archy has an interesting take on the role of nationalism in genocidal atrocities, with an interview from Yugoslavia.

Discover Your Mommas Network makes me laugh. Hard.

Check out the very, very nice redesign by Eric Muller at Is That Legal?, as well as his very thoughtful piece on judging our ancestors. Eric's redesign may inspire me to finally do something with this site.

Hal Turner: The right's Ward Churchill

One of the real consequences of the right-wing transmission belt is that it has an amplifying effect. It's often described as an echo chamber, but what actually occurs is more of a two-sided dynamic of upwardly spiraling ugliness: the mainstream "transmitters" indulge in a little bit of rhetorical nastiness, and soon those on the extremist right are playing the same tune, but even more hatefully, more viciously, more ... fascistically.

They keep pushing the envelope, and after awhile, they can't push any farther without becoming explicit bigots and unmistakable fascists. So they push farther anyway.

Usually, Michael Savage provides some of the more vivid examples of this amplification -- as when he said of the tsunami disaster, "It's not a tragedy. I wouldn't call it a tragedy." However, Savage occupies a somewhat unique space somewhere exactly in between the mainstream and genuine extremism; most "transmitters" tend to align more clearly with movement conservatism (see especially Rush Limbaugh) or the extremist far right.

One of the most repugnant of these latter figures is the fellow who pushed himself to the fore during last week's investigation into the murders of a federal judge's husband and mother in Chicago: Hal Turner.

Turner's case is particularly instructive, because he not only is unusually -- even eagerly and proudly -- vile, he also has history of activity within the Republican Party. On top of that, he reportedly has (or had) a friendship with one of the conservative media's leading figures: Limbaugh Jr. himself, Sean Hannity.

What it illustrates is how the dynamic of the transmission belt works: the extremist side of the equation provides the mainstream right-wing agitators with a fresh supply of outrage and talking points, and the mainstream connections give the far right a legitimacy, a connection with the larger political discourse, they would not otherwise have.

During the 1990s, Turner made a habit of calling into Hannity's WABC radio program as "Hal from North Bergen," one of the show's regular callers. "Hal" liked to say increasingly outrageous things: in August 1998, according to the One People's Project profile [Google cache],
he remarked on Hannity's show that "if it weren't for the white man, blacks would still be swinging from the trees in Africa." Hannity not only failed to rebuke "Hal" for the remark, he continued plugging into Turner whenever he called.

Turner in fact had a history of quasi-racist activism, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which profiled Turner last year:

As early as 1994, he was defending racism, holding a rally for New York radio talk show host Bob Grant, who had been fired from his show for making racist comments about blacks. In the late 199s, Turner often called in to local radio shows as "Hal from North Bergen," telling their hosts things like, "The problem with police brutality is that cops don't use it enough."

All this culminated in 2000, when Turner stepped forward to run for the Republican nomination for Congress in his home district in New Jersey. He appeared on Hannity's Fox News program and received his old friend's endorsement. Turner himself has claimed that during this time, he and Hannity were "good friends." Hannity himself has since remained mum on the subject -- because as noxious as Turner may have been before 2000, afterward, his true stripes became unmistakable.

Turner lost that race, and it became something of a turning point for his ideological career. Where before his bigotry had been of the "edgy" variety, he soon openly embraced the ideology of various hate groups and white supremacists, as the SPLC explained:

In 2000, Turner sought the local Republican nomination for Congress, and was enraged when GOP leaders instead supported Theresa de Leon, a dark-skinned Hispanic who was the chief financial officer for New York's Legal Aid Society and the mother of 10 children. It was at this moment that Turner had a reported "epiphany," deciding the system was rigged against white men and abandoning all ties to the mainstream.

Not long after, he started up "The Hal Turner Show," renting time on shortwave radio maverick Allan Weiner's WBCQ, located in Monticello, Maine.

Building up a substantial audience and paying for the five-nights-a-week, two-hour show with advertising and donations, he became a favorite of many on the radical right, including several in the neo-Nazi National Alliance*. After neo-Nazi World Church of the Creator* leader Matt Hale was arrested in late 2002 for allegedly soliciting the murder of a federal judge, Turner openly supported Hale.

"I don't think killing a federal judge in these circumstances would be wrong," he said, referring to the judge's ruling against Hale's group in a copyright dispute over its name. "It may be illegal, but it wouldn't be wrong."

Turner's reptilian nature, of course, was revealed for all to see this past week as he expanded on the earlier remarks -- "I have rendered an opinion that what she did on the bench makes her worthy of being killed, yeah" -- as well as posting "Gotcha!" over a picture of Judge Lefkow after the killings in her home by someone, it turned out, who had no connection to the white-supremacist movement.

This isn't the first time that Turner has threatened judges. As Farmer at Corrente details, citing Daryle Jenkins' One People's Project material:

In one instance he has threatened to incite people to "dispense revenge" on Federal Judge Maryanne Trump Barry and New Jersey NAACP officials and their attorneys after a fire in North Bergen claimed the lives of four people in 1998. Turner charged the NAACP with the deaths because they filed an anti-discrimination lawsuit against the local fire department. Barry was the judge who presided and imposed a hiring freeze on the department until the matter was resolved. After the fire, Turner, a real estate agent with access to the names and addresses of virtually everyone who lives in the state, wrote a letter that appeared on deja.com (now Google) that said that he was going to release the names and addresses of Barry, the NAACP officials, and their lawyers to the families of the fire victims. "It would be interesting to see how those families dispense revenge on those who are really responsible for the deaths of their loved ones, he wrote."

At other times, Turner has voiced other kinds of extremism, as when he defended the Bush side in the 2000 election by openly advocating civil war if Al Gore were to win the then-contested outcome of the Florida vote:

Not since the early 1860's, prior to the Civil War, has the US population been so divided and openly talking about violent civil warfare. Radio callers are making unprecedented open and public calls to employ the Second Amendment (right to keep and bear arms) to protect the integrity of the Constitution and of the Bush election.

This election has pitted brother against brother, parent against child, young against old, white against black, Gentile against Jew. The anger is palpable and the situation grows steadily worse.

An examination of Turner's record reveals a long and sordid history of all kinds of outrageous remarks, particularly those expressing the ugliest kind of racial bigotry. This is how Turner "pushes the envelope." But it is the open advocacy of the intimidation of judges by invading their personal lives in a way that purposely exposes them to the threat of violence.

Turner did this last week, too, publishing the names and office addresses of three federal judges who ruled in the same case in which Lefkow was involved with Hale, and vowing to publish their home addresses. It's possible to do this while advocating merely for civil protests, as Turner claimed to be doing -- he even added a disclaimer urging everyone not to break any laws.

But it's not possible to do this while simultaneously celebrating -- which is to say, condoning and encouraging -- the murders of Judge Lefkow's family members. It's not possible to claim you are merely advocating nonviolent protests when you make it clear that you see the killer as having carried out a "comeuppance," and that you believe some judges "deserve to die."

It was this moment that should have crystalized, in the national consciousness, just what it is these people stand for: they openly condone, and indeed encourage, the use of criminal violence as a way of intimidating (or "sending a message to") the nation's judiciary.

Here's Turner's message, in a nutshell: "Nice family you got there, judge. Be a shame if anything should happen to it."

Could you imagine the uproar if, say, a spokesman for radical Islam did the same on the airwaves? Hell, we wouldn't stand for it if it were the Mob.

And could you imagine what would happen if such a figure had run as a Democrat for Congress? If he had a long-term friendship with a prominent "liberal media" figure?

We already have an idea what would happen in terms of law enforcement. The case of Sherman Austin -- arrested for merely having a link on his Web site to another site that discussed bomb making, something that would have gotten half the Patriot movement in trouble back in the 1990s -- does not compare favorably with Turner's.

An even more germane comparison, though, is to Ward Churchill. The right has been eagerly trying to drape Churchill around the left's neck for the past several months, even though he has no connection to Democrats or prominent liberals, and no one on the left seriously endorses his views.

The same can't be said of Turner. Indeed, it seems to me that people like Sean Hannity, who have made Turner's career possible, have a lot to answer for in this regard.

It's possible that Hannity has severed all ties with Turner, and disavows any prior relationship with him now. If that's so, though, we don't know, because he refuses to say. But we do know that, even before Turner went completely off the deep end, he engaged in nakedly racist banter even on Hannity's show and not only suffered no consequences, but used the reputation gained from that kind of outrageousness to run for Congress and to launch his own talk-show career.

Maybe a gentle letter-writing campaign will produce some answers. Hannity's e-mail address at Fox is Hannity@foxnews.com. You can also send him e-mail at this page. However, these kinds of form e-mails have a history of being giant black holes, especially for those impertinent enough to ask pointed questions.

You might have better luck by also contacting his superiors at Fox at the various addresses here.

Did Sean Hannity help launch the career of a notorious racist and hatemonger who has called for terroristic retaliation against federal judges? Is he still personal friends with this moral reprobate?

Discerning viewers want to know. Especially after having their own decency and patriotism impugned, over the last several years, by the likes of Sean Hannity.