'Boys will be boys'

-- Dave

I'm not sure how this slipped through the cracks, but I recently came across the following hate-crime case out of Bonners Ferry, Idaho, that happened earlier this month. The news is disheartening, to say the least.

The original Bill Morlin story is here. The AP story containing full details of the case, mostly culled from Morlin's reportage, have been scrubbed from the Web, but I have a copy of it, so here it is:

BONNERS FERRY, Idaho (AP) -- Northern Idaho human rights groups are decrying a 20-day sentence given to a man who picked up and then dropped a 17-year-old girl too close to a bonfire and whose words, the groups say, made the actions a hate crime.

"This is not Nazi Germany, it's Idaho in the United States of America," said Marshall Mend, a member of the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations.

"We witnessed a shocking miscarriage of justice at the Boundary County Court House," the Boundary County Human Rights Task Force said in a prepared statement.

Brian Todd Davis, 21, was sentenced Wednesday to 20 days on a work detail by visiting 1st District Magistrate Debra Heise.

Davis initially faced a felony aggravated battery complaint before agreeing to a plea bargain Friday and pleading guilty to battery, a simple misdemeanor.

Some witnesses testified at Friday's hearing that at a beer keg party on July 27, Davis picked up Ilaura Fleck and said Fleck's father was Catholic and her mother was Muslim and "that makes you a Jew. All Jews should burn" and then threw Fleck into a bonfire on Katka Mountain in Boundary County.

But Davis' friend, Jock Desmaria, testified that Davis and Fleck "were joking around" and that he saw Davis "set down the victim" near the bonfire after picking her up.

Heise ruled that Fleck wasn't thrown into the fire but fell into the flames after being dropped on a log. She also ruled that a hate crime wasn't involved because Fleck isn't Jewish, The Spokesman-Review reported.

"The words used here are hate-filled but have to be examined in context," Heise said. "The words were stupid. The words were mindless, but this was not a hate crime."

She also said that "boys will be boys."

Heise did not immediately return a telephone call Friday from The Associated Press.

Fleck, who could need reconstructive surgery, suffered first- and second-degree burns on her legs, arm and buttocks.

"I honestly don't believe justice was served here," said Fleck. "What happened to me was a hate crime."

Mend said: "We have a hate crime law, and that was a hate crime when he said to her, 'Jews burn.' It's a hate crime whether she's Jewish or not."

Heise ordered restitution for Fleck's medical bills, which will be determined later.

Davis apologized in a written statement read by his attorney, Bryce W. Powell. Davis declined to comment after the sentencing.

Fleck's father, Joe Fleck, has filed a complaint with the Idaho Bar Association because the attorney he hired works in the same Sandpoint law office where the attorney who defended Davis works. Joe Fleck contends that helped Davis avoid a felony conviction because the defense received information to fight the criminal trial.

Also, Ilaura Fleck said she thought that Davis' sentence was influenced by the fact that Davis' stepfather, Mark Strangio, used to work in law enforcement in Boundary and Bonner counties, where Heise presides. Strangio resigned in May and is now working for a private contractor in Iraq.

Ilaura Fleck's mother, Haleema, said: "Justice has not been served. This is just the beginning. We're not done fighting yet."

Just on the merits of the law, it's clear from the facts of the case that:

A: Fleck was the victim of an assault that caused her to be burned, regardless of the "joking" intent.

B: The perpetrator committed the assault with a bias motivation, regardless whether it was accurate or not.

There are, it should be noted, numerous hate crimes committed annually in which the perpetrator is mistaken in the identity of the victim: non-Jews are assaulted because they were believed to be Jewish, non-Muslims are assaulted for supposedly being Muslim, non-gays are mistakenly assaulted for being gay. Yet these are all specifically hate crimes, not the least reason for which is that the terroristic intent of the crime -- to send a "message" to the larger target community -- is fully intact.

The Spokesman-Review's editorial was on point here:

The sentence was woefully inadequate, regardless of whether Davis' actions and comments meet the criteria for a hate crime. A teenage girl suffered first- and second-degree burns on her legs, arm and buttocks and faces extensive reconstructive surgery as a result of the thuggish assault. Heise's dismissive attitude toward this heinous crime raises serious questions about her judgment. So does her decision that a hate crime didn't occur because the victim wasn't Jewish. The favorable treatment given the witness by local law officers and a possible conflict of interest involving the defense attorney raise more questions.

It's especially unfortunate that this kind of hate crime is varnished over in a place like the Idaho Panhandle, which is still struggling to emerge from the shadow of having been host to the Aryan Nations for over a generation. Even worse is the judge's incredibly poor reasoning, which one hopes will be overturned on appeal, if the victims and the county choose to pursue it.

Rural areas in general, as I argue at length in my second book, Death on the Fourth of July: The Story of a Killing, a Trial, and Hate Crime in America, are particularly vulnerable to hate crimes -- both to playing host to them, and to being victimized by them:

There is a deep irony that resides in the typical response of small towns like Ocean Shores and Aberdeen to the phenomenon of hate crimes: Even as they run in terror-stricken denial from facing up to the crimes -- what Donald Green calls "the embarrassment factor" -- they are themselves chief among the victims.

The main theoretical justification for hate-crime laws -- which typically enhance punishment for crimes committed with a bias motivation -- is that the acts cause greater harm than the simple crimes (say, assault and battery or vandalism) that they resemble. Most of the time, this expanded harm is viewed in the context of the direct victim (who is usually traumatized to a considerably greater extent), the target community (that is, the minorities who typically are terrorized by the crimes), or society at large, which finds its goals of racial equity and social justice undermined by these kinds of acts.

What often goes unremarked, though, is that the communities in which the crimes occur are victimized by them as well. "It is one thing when groups are rightfully identified with the immediate offenders, for example, the association of a bias crime offender who is a member of a Skinhead organization with other members of that organization," observes Frederick Lawrence in Punishing Hate: Bias Crimes Under American Law. "It is quite another when groups [or communities] are wrongfully identified with the immediate offenders. ... In addition to generating concern and anger over lawlessness and the perceived ineffectuality of law enforcement that often follow a parallel crime . . . a single bias crime may ignite intense and long-standing inter-community tensions."

As I explained a little later, rural hate crime also has the broader effect of making those kinds of communities inhospitable to minorities:

The significant difference in the rural and urban response to bias crimes is how it affects the cultural landscape. Rural hate crimes make minorities even more apprehensive about setting foot in such places, just as urban black-on-white hate crimes compound the already common misgivings of whites in the surrounding areas about visiting the city. Likewise, the failure to adequately deal with hate crimes compounds and widens that mistrust, on all sides.

In real-world terms, there is a profound effect arising from the geographical and demographic differences between urban and rural America. The urban world, because it represents the majority of the nation's population, tends to dominate its cultural life. But cities and suburbs represent only a tiny portion of the nation's total landscape. When you get out a map and look at America, its mass is dominated by its cultural rural half. There are many more rural places in the United States than urban or suburban.

When hate crimes erupt, the racial and cultural discord they sow manifests itself in a kind of balkanization of the country: their respective target communities feel unsafe or disinclined to travel there, even in passing. For minorities who are cut off from white rural America, though, this effect is multiplied exponentially by the extent of the landscape which has become off-limits to them. This is what African American journalist Lynne Varner meant when she wrote, "Suddenly, the country seems a lot smaller."

Hate-crime expert Donald Green puts it this way: "If you had to kind of step back and ask, does hate crime pay? You'd say yes." If, as Green argues, this effect is to create "a massive deadweight loss of freedom," then it is incumbent on all Americans, right and left, urban and rural, regular citizens and law-enforcement officials, to take them seriously—to finally, after generations of grappling with the problem, grasp its enormity and bring it to heel. At some point, the debate over hate crimes must evolve beyond meaningless and distorted myths and mature into a serious discussion of how to wisely deal with them, through means that preserve our cherished rights to free speech while simultaneously standing up for the rights of equal opportunity essential for democratic society and against the bullies and thugs who would use violence to harm it.

Unfortunately, there are still small-town judges in places like Idaho who dismiss these kinds of acts as "boys will be boys." One can only hope that the Idaho Attorney General's office sees what's really at issue here.

The other kind of terror

-- Dave

Imagine, for a moment, what would have happened if a Muslim extremist with an apparent hatred of the American government had been apprehended in, say, Tennessee, and charged with plotting to blow up Congress with a briefcase bomb.

Do you suppose that the case would then be relegated to the back pages of the local papers? Do you suppose it would go unmentioned by the 101st Keyboard Kommandos in their ever-vigilant search for proof that the War on Terror is right here in our midst?

Of course not. You can be certain Fox News would have splashed the case across its broadcasts, and Michelle Malkin and Little Green Footballs would have been all over it.

Now consider the case of Demetrius "Van" Crocker, who just happens to be a white right-wing extremist:

Demetrius "Van" Crocker of McKenzie, convicted in April of attempting to obtain a chemical weapon and possession of stolen explosives, was sentenced to 30 years in prison Tuesday by U.S. District Judge James Todd in Jackson.

Crocker, who told undercover FBI agents of his desire to explode a briefcase bomb while Congress was in session, was found guilty by a jury in about 90 minutes in April.

The 40-year-old farmhand and father of two was convicted of accepting what he thought were ingredients to make Sarin nerve gas and a block of C-4 explosive from undercover agents in October 2004.

The maximum penalty Crocker could have faced for the convictions would have been a life sentence. Todd did order lifetime supervised release for Crocker once he gets out of prison.

In all, Crocker was convicted on five charges: one count of attempted possession of a chemical weapon, one count of inducing another person to acquire a chemical weapon, one count of possession of stolen explosives, one count of possession of explosive material with intent to harm an individual or damage or destroy a building, and one count of possession of an unregistered destructive device.

During the trial, prosecutors introduced video- and audio-taped conversations that Crocker had with undercover agents, laced with profanity, racial slurs and Crocker's open hatred of all things to do with the government.

Of course, this story is not even on the front page of the Jackson paper, so I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for any Fox coverage, either.

The fog of delusion

-- Dave

Bob Geiger has a little fun at the expense of those intrepid exposers of liberal-media perfidy in the right-wing blogosphere, particularly Michelle Malkin and Powerline:

And here we have so many conservative bloggers, after days of castigating the Associated Press for running what the wingnuts claimed was a fictitious story about six Sunnis being burned alive in sectarian violence in Iraq on Friday, having to once again face what a bunch of putzes they really are.

As Geiger notes, the most recent Associated Press story has confirmation not merely from the police captain but from independent eyewitnesses:

Seeking further information about Friday's attack, an AP reporter contacted Hussein for a third time about the incident to confirm there was no error. The captain has been a regular source of police information for two years and had been visited by the AP reporter in his office at the police station on several occasions. The captain, who gave his full name as Jamil Gholaiem Hussein, said six people were indeed set on fire.

On Tuesday, two AP reporters also went back to the Hurriyah neighborhood around the Mustafa mosque and found three witnesses who independently gave accounts of the attack. Others in the neighborhood said they were afraid to talk about what happened.

It continues with more details about the killings, including the burial of the bodies and the identity of at least one of the victims.

Mind you, this isn't the first time Malkin's predilection for accusing working journalists of unethical -- or even treasonous -- behavior on questionable grounds has been highlighted. As always, it raises real questions among journalists, at least, just what kind of "professional journalist" this is.

Because Malkin isn't merely questioning the data professionally: she flat-out accuses the Associated Press of running a phony story and being in cahoots with the terrorists in Iraq. She writes, with no sense of irony: "MSM credibility, R.I.P."

In this case, we'd have to create a new category: "Malkin credibility, E.S.D." [Extreme State of Decomposition] After all, her supposed professionalism has been a dubious matter from the beginning. Now its dessicated corpse is crumbling apart.

Even now, after her utter credulousness when it comes to right-wing disinformation out of Iraq has been exposed, she continues to label the "blabbermouth" New York Times as the "biggest terrorist propaganda tool" (complete with an echo-chamber poll to prove it!).

Meanwhile, in her meandering update to the Sunni-burning atrocity story, there's almost no recognition whatsoever that her entire thesis -- which was nothing less than a grossly incendiary accusation against the Associated Press -- has been blown to pieces.

What we get is this deeply insightful snippet:

Update: This is getting interesting.

No "looks like I might have been grossly mistaken, folks". No "I may owe the AP a big fat apology". Nope. Just "interesting."

To her credit, she at least publishes the AP's response:

The Associated Press denounces unfounded attacks on its story about six Sunni worshipers burned to death outside their mosque on Friday, November 24. The attempt to question the existence of the known police officer who spoke to the AP is frankly ludicrous and hints at a certain level of desperation to dispute or suppress the facts of the incident in question.

Yes, the 101st Keyboard Commandos have an infinitely better sense of what's truthful and what's not than actual reporters working on the ground in Iraq. See, those Cheetos stains have magical qualities.

You've especially gotta love Malkin's take:

Also interesting: AP's attitude toward those trying to verify its sources. "Frankly ludicrous," says Daniszewski.

It would be one thing, of course, if all the Keyboard Kommandos had done was try to verify AP's sources. But they didn't -- they, with Malkin and Powerline leading the charge, flatly accused the AP of fraudulent reporting and condemned them as having no credibility. Powerline accused them of "shamelessly" stoking "hysteria" about Iraq and said the report indicated "an abandonment of all journalistic standards" (as though they had any understanding themselves of such matters). Malkin informed journalists that they were "writing their own" obituary. Nice.

"Frankly ludicrous" was the nice description for this kind of atrocity. "Flagrantly delusional" would be more to the point.

Powerline's update plays this, in the headline, as a kind of gambling competition -- no doubt to more easily dismiss their own malfeasance, which has been their standard way of handling cases in which their own utter lack of credibility has been exposed. Their own update, at least, is slightly more forthcoming than Malkin's:

I have infinitely more faith in the U.S. military than in the Associated Press, but that doesn't mean the military is always right or the AP always wrong. It seems that the AP believes it is in a strong position. I'm tempted to say that one institution or the other must emerge from this affair with its credibility damaged. But perhaps it's just as likely that the facts will remain unresolved, lost in what sometimes seems like an epistemological fog. Or maybe it's just a fog of bad reporting.

Oh, it's a fog, all right. Or perhaps "blinkers" might be more appopriate.

You Don't Have To Be Crazy...But It Helps

Sara Robinson

Here's Andy Bromage, writing this week in the New Haven Advocate:

A collective “I told you so” will ripple through the world of Bush-bashers once news of Christopher Lohse’s study gets out.

Lohse, a social work master’s student at Southern Connecticut State University, says he has proven what many progressives have probably suspected for years: a direct link between mental illness and support for President Bush.

Lohse says his study is no joke. The thesis draws on a survey of 69 psychiatric outpatients in three Connecticut locations during the 2004 presidential election. Lohse’s study, backed by SCSU Psychology professor Jaak Rakfeldt and statistician Misty Ginacola, found a correlation between the severity of a person’s psychosis and their preferences for president: The more psychotic the voter, the more likely they were to vote for Bush.

But before you go thinking all your conservative friends are psychotic, listen to Lohse’s explanation.

“Our study shows that psychotic patients prefer an authoritative leader,” Lohse says. “If your world is very mixed up, there’s something very comforting about someone telling you, ‘This is how it’s going to be.’”

The study was an advocacy project of sorts, designed to register mentally ill voters and encourage them to go to the polls, Lohse explains. The Bush trend was revealed later on.

The study used Modified General Assessment Functioning, or MGAF, a 100-point scale that measures the functioning of disabled patients. A second scale, developed by Rakfeldt, was also used. Knowledge of current issues, government and politics were assessed on a 12-item scale devised by the study authors.

“Bush supporters had significantly less knowledge about current issues, government and politics than those who supported Kerry,” the study says.

Lohse says the trend isn’t unique to Bush: A 1977 study by Frumkin & Ibrahim found psychiatric patients preferred Nixon over McGovern in the 1972 election.

Rakfeldt says the study was legitimate, though not intended to show what it did.

“Yes it was a legitimate study but these data were mined after the fact,” Rakfeldt says. “You can ask new questions of the data. I haven’t looked at” Lohse’s conclusions regarding Bush, Rakfeldt says.

“That doesn’t make it illegitimate, it just wasn’t part of the original project.”

For his part, Lohse is a self-described “Reagan revolution fanatic” but said that W. is just “beyond the pale.”

As Stephen Colbert reminds us: Reality has a liberal bias.

Behind the mask

'Is there anyone in this rout to treat with me?' he asked. 'Or indeed with the wit to understand me? Not thou at least!' he mocked, turning to Aragorn with scorn. 'It needs more to make a king than a piece of elvish glass, or a rabble such as this. Why, any brigand of the hills can show as good a following!'

Among Peter Jackson’s more memorable creations in the film version of The Lord of the Rings was the Mouth of Sauron (played by the inimitable Bruce Spence). His broad, false smile was more a grimace, part of an incongruous mask of civility over a mouth out of which the most vicious things came writhing.

Yet as creep-inducing and vile as he appeared outside the Gates of Mordor, you had the sense that he would be twice as frightening if he removed that mask. (In the film version, Aragorn simply relieved him of his head.)

That's roughly the feeling you gets anymore whenever you come into contact with the denizens of the rabid right: The nasty face they're showing us is only half the story.

This is particularly so regarding the thugs who are creeping out of the woodwork and trying to intimidate anyone they deem insufficiently aligned with their personal ideologies -- embodied by the mouthpiece pundits whose inflammatory, eliminationist rhetoric goads them on. The Coulters, Limbaughs, Savages, and Malkins of the world.

The hate and bile they spew on a daily basis is vicious enough as it is. But you can't help get the feeling that we're only starting to scratch the surface with these people. They reveal psyches so grossly malformed that it's clear they're just putting on a barely civil front for the sake of the audience. Let them loose in a situation where they actually possessed the power to do as they wished and you'd have genuinely monstrous evil on your hands -- not just words, but actions.

Their public face, claiming the mantle of morality and decency, is belied by nearly every action they take. Their real face is revealed in their tolerance for every amoral practice from inhuman sweatshops to the overt advocacy of white supremacism. It's revealed in the incessant insistence that liberal war critics are the enemy itself -- and by their targeting those critics for outright attacks on their personal lives. It's revealed in their unmistakable misogyny. And it's revealed, most of all, in their willingness to abide torture itself, excused by the need to keep "terrorists" at bay.

Coulter, Limbaugh, et. al., are just the names most readily known to most of us. But they are only the most visible component of this growing segment of the population. Many of the leading hatemongers are actually secondary voices whose venom quotient is in direct proportion to their all-consuming desire to be noticed. They try to not only imitate the Coulters of the world, but to outdo them -- which is saying something.

Some of these are generally local or regional pundits, while others are lesser-known figures on the national scene. All of them are eager to make their marks, and the only way they know to do that is to constantly "push the envelope," shoving the national discourse ever farther to the right.

This also has an effect on those right-wing pundits already atop the heap, who have to keep up just to retain their "edge." Thus their whole business revolves around fresh ways to outrage, and as they push the boundaries, eventually even the unacceptable becomes acceptable.

On the West Coast, probably the most noteworthy of these is the Bay Area radio talk-show host Melanie Morgan, who broadcasts weekdays on KFSO-AM, which happens to be a Disney-owned station. (Gee. What a coincidence.)

Morgan recently announced that "We've got a bull's-eye painted on [Pelosi's] big, wide laughing eyes" -- a fairly overt invitation for her audience to imagine someone shooting the new Democratic Speaker of the House.

Spocko's Brain has been dogging Morgan's schtick for some time now, and has a virtual library of her vicious and outrageously eliminationist rhetoric -- all in the name of "pushing the envelope" for the sake of attracting and retaining an audience. Judging by her remarks, it must be some audience.

A sampling of Spocko's audio files:

-- Laughing with Coulter about executing New York Times editor Bill Keller.

-- Agreeing with guest Peter Mulhern as he says, "A great deal of good could be done by arresting Bill Keller having him lined up against the wall and shot."

-- Joking with "Officer Vic" as he imitates Keller being electrocuted.

-- Joking about killing a black man after torturing him. (This clip features co-host Lee Rogers talking about shooting a black man between the eyes and torturing him by attaching electrodes to his testicles while Morgan laughs.)

-- At the end of a shared rant describing their utter loathing for all liberals, her co-host, Rogers, warning that "the day will come when unpleasant things are going to happen to a bunch of stupid liberals and it's going to be very amusing to watch."

Morgan's misliberalanthropy has also been thoroughly limned by Joe Conason at Salon, who noted Morgan's role in the incredibly vicious attacks on the New York Times for its reporting on an anti-terrorism program.

Morgan is hardly alone. Some of the more notable examples of this kind of behavior come from the "Hey! I'll say any kind of crazy shit just to get noticed" bloc of the right-wing blogosphere. Take, for example, the strange case of Pam at Atlas Shrugs; as D at LG&M observes, Pam has been running pictures of atrocities from Indonesia dating back more than a decade and which are mostly related to ongoing sectarian strife (particularly aimed at the Chinese there), while claiming that they're actually part of the supposed current Muslim jihad. Just a little while before this, Pam tried to hamhandedly channel Shakespeare in darkly revealing fashion, suggesting we "kill all the diplomats (before they get us killed)."

Then there's Glenn Beck, whose record as a hatemonger is already well noted. But this latest enterprise -- his supposedly hard-hitting series on Islamic extremism -- tells us next to nothing new, and as Scott Lemieux notes, is nothing more than a stereotype-laden rant against Islam itself. It's the kind of thing, like Coulter's "convert them all to Christianity" remark, that enjoys an extended nuclear half-life in the Muslim world, repeated endlessly as evidence of the hatred among Americans for Muslims. In other words, it's the kind of remark that actually helps our enemies recruit fresh terrorists.

You know, it's really quite simple: If you want to encourage more Muslims to become radical terrorists, spend your time declaiming to the world on the necessity of wiping out the lives of millions of them. It's part of the core dynamic of the recurring cycle of war and violence: Each side names the other as the Enemy, and then sets about acting in a way that justifies that naming for the other side, and simultaneously justifies their own self-perception as heroic.

The other day Roy at Alicublog (via TBogg) caught a prime example of this kind of destructive idiocy from the relentlessly execrable Ace of Spades:

"There are those who shriek in high dudgeon when it's suggested that, at some point, it may be necessary to kill off an awful lot of the Islamic world to secure our own lives." He briefly considers the shriekers' point of view, then decides, "I think what a lot of these people mean, but won't say, is that it's actually about time to consider giving Israel to the Muslims, and let them wipe out most of the Jews."

Only the most perverse kind of illogic would produce a syllogism equating a desire to avoid one kind of genocide with a wish for another kind. Ace would have us believe we have only the choice of one act of mass murder or another. And he obviously prefers the choice that makes us the murderer rather than the spectator -- not that either choice is in any event either desirable or inevitable.

I think a key to understanding this illogic, if such a thing is possible, lies in recognizing that these people conceive of themselves as heroes engaged in a heroic task. Once a person claims that status for himself, at least in his own self-conception, all kinds of obvious contradictions are immediately resolvable, since the blunt force of the hero's moral superiority rub out any such distinctions. They are right no matter what "facts" may argue otherwise.

This was illustrated vividly, in fact, by one of Ace's commenters, whose contribution was picked up by Roy in an update:

Part of my crazy, is that I have VERY vivid dreams. I tend to remember a great many details.

After I left service, and after 9/11 I would start to find comfort in dreams/thoughts that were absolutely horrible in their brutality. I won't go into details, but it had to do with me viewing horror from above and causing that horror.

After a while, my friends at work started to ask me why I looked like hell, and I confided in them. It became a simple statement to explain why I looked like such hell (after all I'm a sexy mother fucker, and for me to look like hell, I have to REALLY look like hell) "The village?" I would nod, and whenever anyone would come at me, my friends, coworkers and bosses would interdict because they understood that I just spent a night dreaming of slaughtering villages, to teach a lesson.

I know, it's just a dream, but that cruelty has seaped into me to the point that I find comfort in believing that grotesque violence might teach these people to stop killing us in the same way.

I usually don't pay any more than passing attention to random anonymous commenters, but this post perfectly captured the operative pathology among the contingent of conservatives who populate places like Ace's, and Little Green Footballs, and Atlas Shrugs, not to mention the whole panoply of Malkinites, Coulterettes, and Dittoheads. All places where, at one time or another, it's intimated that the only way to win the war is to "do what it takes." To "get tough." No one ever says exactly what that means, but everyone has a pretty good idea. It means villages full of slain women and children.

Note, if you will, the generic quality of the fantasy. We don't know what kind of village he's describing -- somewhere in the Middle East? a South American jungle? northern California?

But more noteworthy is the purpose of all this killing: "to teach a lesson." This is the fantasy of instructive wanton violence, delivered by the hero against the enemy in order to chasten them into submission. It is precisely the same fantasy that was being pursued by Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden on Sept. 11, a fantasy that made their own heroic self-conception metastasize into a pack of demonic murderers. This same fantasy is what the mavens of the right would thrust upon us if they could.

Mind you, it's a very American thing, as all our history of eliminationism has been. We massacred thousands of Indians in the 1800s, many in acts of outright genocide that wiped out entire villages in wholesale slaughter, with the purpose of "teaching them a lesson." We set the horrific fury of the mob upon thousands of African Americans during the "lynching era" in order to "teach them a lesson."

The concept of wanton violence as a heroic duty, especially for "instructive" purposes, has been with us a long time, and appears alive and well today -- on both sides of the violence. The rabid American right is now waging war on its mirror image but is incapable of recognizing it.

For the most part, this concept has been closely associated with religious fundamentalism and its tendency toward authoritarianism, expressed in what sociologists call "exemplary dualism," which I've described in some detail previously. As Chip Berlet explains:

"Exemplary dualism" is the term originated by [Dick] Anthony and [Thomas] Robbins to identify a form of apocalyptic belief in which "contemporary sociopolitical or socioreligious forces are transmogrified into absolute contrast categories embodying moral, eschatological, and cosmic polarities upon which hinge the millennial destiny of humankind."

Anthony and Robbins argue that some people who feel their basic identity has been fractured by being buffeted by social and political forces may turn to a "totalist movement" including various "[i]deological and religious groups with highly dualistic worldviews" and "an absolutist apocalyptic outlook", where members are taught to project "negativity and rejected elements of self onto ideologically designated scapegoats."

Anthony and Robbins describe this in more detail in their essay "Religious Totalism, Violence and Exemplary Dualism":

Social movements with distinctly dualistic worldviews provide psycho-ideological contexts which facilitate attempts to heal the split self by projecting negativity and devalued self-elements onto ideologically devalued contrast symbols. But there is another possible linkage between these kinds of movements and individuals with split selves in the throes of identity confusion. People with the whole range of personality disorders, which utilize splitting and projective identification, tend to have difficulties in establishing stable, intimate relationships. Splitting tends to produce volatile and unstable relationships as candidates for intimacy are alternately idealized and degraded.

Thus, narcissists tend to have vocational, and more particularly, interpersonal difficulties as they obsessively focus upon status-reinforcing rewards in interpersonal relations. They have difficulty developing social bonds grounded in empathy and mutuality, and their structure of interpersonal relations tends to be unstable. Thus, individuals may be tempted to enter communal and quasi-communal social movements which combine a more structured setting for interpersonal relations with a dualistic interpersonal theme of 'triangulation' which embodies the motif of 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend.' Such movements create a sense of mutuality by focusing attention on specific contrast groups and their values, goals and lifestyles so that this shared repudiation seems to unite the participants and provide a meaningful 'boundary' to operationalize the identity of the group.

Solidarity within the group and the convert's sense of dedication and sacrifice on behalf of group goals may enable him or her to repudiate the dissociated negative (bad, weak or failed) self and the related selfish and exploitative self which they may be aware that others might have perceived. These devalued selves can then be projected on to either scapegoats designated by the group or, more generally, non-believers whose values and behavior allegedly do not attain the exemplary purity and authenticity of that of devotees.

What's noteworthy about movement conservatives is that their dualistic fervor is not necessarily religious, though it often is. However, some of these advocates of genocide and eliminationism, such as Coulter, Limbaugh, Morgan, or Ace, are decidedly not religious. For them, the conservative movement itself has taken the form of a religion, and thus is a kind of faith-based system of belief, resistant to logic, reason, or fact. And above all, it's deeply authoritarian.

This is why movement conservatism holds so much appeal for mentally unstable personalities such as Chad Castagana and David McMenemy. As Tom Tomorrow notes, there is actual scientific evidence connecting right-wing authoritarianism with mental illness: people with psychoses and neuroses are naturally more attracted to authoritarian figures and belief systems. That doesn't mean that right-wingers are necessarily psychotic or neurotic, but it does increase the likelihood that right-wing pundits are going to have mentally unstable people in their audiences.

The reasons for this appeal are many, but psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has identified the national trauma of Sept. 11 as a significant wellspring of the "splitting" that Anthony and Robbins describe. For one, as he explained in The Nation, the attacks were a humiliation for a nation that viewed its superpower status as identical to a kind of invulnerability.

More importantly, as he described in more detail in his book Superpower Syndrome, it produced an actual trauma to our psyches:

As a result of 9/11, all Americans shared a particular psychological experience. They became survivors. A survivor is one who has encountered, been exposed to, or witnessed death and has remained alive. The category extends to those who were far removed geographically from the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, because of their immersion in death-linked television images and their sense of being part of a painful national ordeal that threatened their country's future as well as their own. How people deal with that death encounter -- the meaning they give it -- has enormous significance for their subsequent actions and for their lives in general.

What has distinguished movement conservatives after 9/11 -- including a number of "former liberals" -- is their constant and pronounced insistence that everything they do henceforth is informed by that horrid event. Meanwhile, those who disagree with them have "forgotten we were attacked on 9/11." These pronouncements have the effect of claiming for themselves the hero's mantle. Their task is the heroic task of national redemption itself.

Yet fundamentalist totalism, as Lifton has written elsewhere, is "always on the edge of violence, because it ever mobilizes for an absolute confrontation with designated evil, thereby justifying any action taken to eliminate the evil." Thus, as movement heroes, they are immune from niggling moral considerations and the need to reconcile the demonic aspect of their own actions.

In both Christian and Muslim cultures, the heroic task historically has entailed energetically taking up arms to redeem the world. It also entails creating an enemy and naming him; the heroic warrior, after all, needs an enemy against which to fight, something to give his life meaning. The drama that results is a holy war to drive out an alien darkness or disease, and it is a drama that has played out innumerable times throughout the long history of the West.

What these self-anointed heroes fail to see is their own certain descent into the demonic. However, as they sneer and threaten and condemn their fellow Americans as the Enemy, fit for elimination, the rest of us see it. All too well.

Then the Messenger of Mordor laughed no more. His face was twisted with amazement and anger to the likeness of some wild beast that, as it crouches on its prey, is smitten on the muzzle with a stinging rod. Rage filled him and his mouth slavered, and shapeless sounds of fury came strangling from his throat. But he looked at the fell faces of the Captains and their deadly eyes, and fear overcame his wrath. He gave a great cry, and turned, leaped upon his steed, and with his company galloped madly back to Cirith Gorgor.

Take Our Sheckels -- And Accept Our Shackles

Sara Robinson

This morning, Phil Yost of the AP writes:

The Supreme Court decided Monday not to plunge into the issue of school choice, passing up a dispute over a Maine law that bars the use of public funds to send students to private religious schools.

A conservative group, the Institute for Justice, had asked the justices to take the case. The group is representing eight Maine families who would receive public tuition funds but for the fact that their children attend religious schools.

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and President Bush's homestate of Texas had weighed in, saying in filings to the Supreme Court that Maine is unconstitutionally discriminating against religion….

School districts in 145 small towns in Maine that have no high schools currently offer tuition for 17,000 students to attend high schools of their choice, public or private, in-state or out-of-state. But religious schools are no longer on the list….

In asking the Supreme Court to take the case, the Maine families cited the court's 2002 decision allowing the use of public funds in inner-city Cleveland to underwrite tuition at private or parochial schools if parents retain a wide choice of where to send their children.

If the fundamentalists pushing for school vouchers want to see where the voucher path ends up, they need look no farther than Canada.

The issue of religious education has always been a central front in the cultural conflicts between the country's two leading groups. As in the US, the mostly-Protestant English established secular public schools; but here, it's been the French Catholics (and other Catholic immigrants who followed) who have insisted that their parochial educational system deserved a similar level of public support.

Different provinces and cities have worked this out in different ways; but in almost all areas, it's come down to some form of government subsidy for both private and parochial schools. In Edmonton, for example, there's an entirely parallel public school system that's run by the Catholic Church; and parents decide which of the two systems their tax revenues will support. Evidently, it's not uncommon for Protestant parents to choose to send their kids and their tax dollars to the Catholic schools, many of which have excellent reputations and programs.

Here in British Columbia, the provincial government decided long ago that subsidizing private schools gave parents more options, while also reducing the need to build more public schools on their own dime. This is how it came to pass that my own two kids attend secular private schools on vouchers, which cover about 25% of their annual tuition bills. And we'd be getting these same vouchers if the kids were attending the local Episcopal, Baptist, or Catholic academies instead.

However: Any Canadian will tell you that taking lots of government money inevitably opens a school up for lots of government oversight as well. Locally, any school that receives public funding is bound to teach the BC provincial curriculum, or lose its accreditation. Every high school, public or private, issues the same high school diploma, certifying that their students have studied the same subjects out of the same books -- and have passed the same rigorous provincial exams to prove it.

Religious schools can hold chapel, have Bible studies, and offer electives on faith-based topics; but there's no religious revisionism in their history classes, no "intelligent design" in their science labs, no flinching from biological realities in the Health course. In the core subjects, it's exactly the same education their public-school peers are getting. It has to be: As long as they're taking public money, their curriculum must conform to public standards, and their administrators be held up to public accountability.

Contrary to the fears of American liberals, issuing vouchers hasn't reduced the overall level of educational quality. Since 2000, Canadian schools have consistently ranked among the world's top five in the rankings compiled every three years by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Within Canada, the Alberta and BC schools are the best of this best, turning out students whose performance compares favorably with their top-ranked Japanese and Finnish peers. (The US, in contrast, has typically finished in the high teens among the 31 OECD countries ranked in recent years.)

But the trade-off that's kept these numbers high has been a level of government control over the process that has essentially turned these "independent" schools into another venue for public education. Any self-respecting American private school, religious or otherwise, would find this level of oversight intrusive to the point of outrage. But almost every Canadian private school accepts it, because their survival depends on those voucher funds.

US voucher advocates are indulging in the worst sort of magical thinking if they honestly believe that taking taxpayer money won't lead, as night follows day, to a similar level of taxpayer involvement in their affairs. The Canadian example shows that their choice couldn't be starker. They can have their independence, and retain the freedom to teach flat-earth creationism and Biblical history; or they can have our cash -- and with it, accept our larger consensus on who, what, and how they teach. In a democracy, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. (And people who think there is probably ought not be trusted with the education of the next American generation.)

The fundamentalist press may be grumbling about "activist judges" today -- but that's only because they lack the foresight to understand just how big a favor the Supreme Court has done them by pointing to the church-state wall, and telling them no.

Sugar Daddies

Sara Robinson



It appears as though the National Science Teachers Association has abandoned its search for truth and is now looking for a good sugar daddy.

Laurie David, one of the producers of An Inconvenient Truth, wrote a piece for today's Washington Post describing her efforts to make 50,000 DVD copies of that movie available to America's science teachers through NSTA.

They said no. And, more weirdly, they explained why. First, they said, they were afraid that if they started taking information from "special interests" like David, they'd have to take them from other groups, too. As though a private organization is obligated to accept and distribute any fool thing the Flat Earth Society may send them? As though they're not scientists, capable of sussing out the factual truth and relative educational value of any given piece of would-be curriculum? As though (as David points out) An Inconvenient Truth isn't already part of the required science curriculum in other countries, including Sweden and Norway?

That was bizarre enough, but then they got to their second reason: It might jeopardize their capital campaign. It turns out that NSTA gets millions each year from groups like Exxon-Mobil and the American Petroleum Institute -- who, in turn, are given access to American science classrooms to promote anti-global-warming propaganda with titles like "You Can't Be Cool Without Fuel." If they started telling kids the truth about global warming, they whined, that money might go away. And then how would that fine organization continue to support America's science teachers in their quest to instill their students with a passion for empirical truth, and teach the rigors of the scientific method to the country's next generation of technology leaders?

Memo to the Christian Coalition: The NSTA is for sale. For a mere million bucks a year, I'll bet you could get them on board with Intelligent Design, too.

Memo to parents: It might be time to find out if your kids' science teachers are members of this group, and have a word with them about it. If you -- or the teachers -- want to complain directly to the NSTA, the complaint form is here. They need to hear from everyone who still thinks that scientific truth shouldn't be auctioned off to the highest donor.

Updated with corrections

Changing Horses

Sara Robinson

The history of religion is characterized by fanatical movements that started out full of ecstatic zeal to change the world one person at a time. From the Wahabists to the Methodists, religions are usually founded in a rush of passion -- which (if it doesn't fatally fracture in the intensity of the initial torrent, which is the fate of most new faith groups) gradually subsides to a calmer, more intellectual and inclusive order. In this second phase, the groups typically become more outwardly-focused. They start dealing with the world as it is, instead of as their theology tells them it should be. Most of what we think of "mainstream" churches started out in the first phase, but have by now been in this second one for a very long time.

This calming typically happens around the time the second generation raised in the faith begins to assume leadership -- say, 30 to 40 years after the initial founding. However, per Karen Armstrong, it can also happen once the group has acquired some real temporal power, and begun to reckon with the limits of its theology.

For both those reasons, I speculated last week that the evangelical right in America is headed for that calmer stage of organizational maturity. I further noted that this was likely to fuel some schisms over the short term, mostly between hard-core religious authoritarians who thrive on high levels of fear, anger, and intensity, and want to stay the old course; and the softer core looking to expand their sights, so that they can live their values.

The coming split in the evangelical right will be fueled by the different ways its various factions adapt to this new reality. The possibilities are likely to take two main forms. On one hand, we'll see the amoral authoritarian leadership fade away, and the hard-core authoritarian followers in retreat. On the other, however, are growing numbers of Christians who are already beginning to moderate -- some of them to the point where we may start seeing them in the progressive mainstream. --What If God Loses? 11/15/06

Well, we didn't have to wait long for the first sign of the split. Here's Willough Mariano of the Orlando Sentinel, desribing one leading indicator that the strain between the evangelical hard core and the moderates is increasing:

Christian Coalition loses leader in dispute

The Florida pastor recently tapped to lead the Christian Coalition of America resigned his position in a dispute about conservative philosophy - more than a month before he was to fully assume his post, he said this week.

The Rev. Joel Hunter, of Northland, A Church Distributed, in Longwood, Fla., said he quit as president-elect of the group founded by evangelist Pat Robertson because he realized he would be unable to broaden the organization's agenda beyond opposing abortion and same-sex marriage.

He hoped to include issues such as easing poverty and saving the environment.

"These are issues that Jesus would want us to care about," Hunter said.

The resignation took place Tuesday during an organization board meeting. Hunter said he was not asked to leave.

"They pretty much said, "These issues are fine, but they're not our issues; that's not our base,' " Hunter said. A statement issued by the coalition said Hunter resigned because of "differences in philosophy and vision." The organization, headed by President Roberta Combs, claims a mailing list of 2.5 million.

Hunter's move signals more tumult for a group that has fallen on hard times. Members have complained the coalition's agenda has become too liberal and diffuse.

Hunter hoped to revive the group by expanding its agenda to include what he called "compassion issues." He also planned to teach evangelicals how to "vote with their life," or integrate and apply their Christian values to public life.

The coalition's rejection of Hunter's approach means it is unwilling to part with its partisan, Republican roots, Hunter said.

"To tell you the truth, I feel like there are literally millions of evangelical Christians that don't have a home right now," Hunter said.

These conversations are being had increasingly on the religious right -- and they are a healthy sign that the worst excesses may be behind us. Of course the Christian Coalition board doesn't want to change issues: Abortion and gays are the twin horses that have pulled them power over the past 30 years, and to them it looks like a huge risk to switch to fresh stock. They have no idea where these other issues might take them; but they know that switching focus after all these years will alienate their hardcore base -- which, by now, regards these two issues as the whole reason God wrote the Bible in the first place.

But Hunter gets it. The American people have seen enough of the cruelty and wanton disregard for people's boundaries that underlie these two issues. And they have, for the most part, rejected them. That 30% of the population the far right has now is all they're ever going to get. The other 70% have decided that abortion, at least on some kind of terms, is here to stay; and the demographics make it clear that gay marriage is only a matter of time. In the long run, both are losing issues. Hunter, it appears, was looking to preserve the group's future by re-focusing its energies toward places where the Coalition's members could do some real good, and sustain some real wins. And the Coalition's short-sighted leadership sealed its own fate by refusing to let him lead them there.

The Christian Coalition (and the rest of the religious right) can either accept their changing reality, and move toward more inclusive issues like poverty and the enviroment; or they can hold fast to their two dying old nags, and go down with them. Evidently -- at least for now -- they've made their choice. And, fortunately for progressives, what they've chosen for themselves is a future of increasing irrelevance.

Oh, and those "millions of evangelical Christians who don't have a home right now"? They're homeless because they're ready to talk about things like global warming and how we treat the poor. Memo to Democrats: These people are waiting to hear from us.

Our Great North American Holiday

Sara Robinson

One of the religious right's firmest convictions is that America was established by God for a special destiny in the history of humankind. We are a uniquely blessed nation -- first among the Elect in power and strength -- because the Puritans alone had the good sense to consecrate this land to the Protestant God from the very first year, a consecration symbolized every year when we renew it at Thanksgiving.

Our glory, they believe, will endure only as long as we continue to maintain our devotion to God -- which is, they insist, why it's so very important that we get over this wall-of-separation thing and openly submit to Biblical law. If we don't accept God's special choosing, he may withdraw it (as he did with the Israelites), and America will be doomed. In fundamentalist homes, Thanksgiving is a celebration of that compact, an affirmation of America's singular destiny as a Chosen Nation.

Poputonian gives a brief rundown of the history of Thanksgiving in North America that got me thinking some about this. Thanksgiving has become a fraught and complicated issue at our house since we moved to Canada, which celebrates the same holiday on the second Monday in October. Some years, we've had two Thanksgivings. Other years, we've had none. (Today, the kids are in school and going to their dad's, and Mr. R is taking a final exam, so I'm on my own, and birdless.) It's never been my favorite holiday to begin with, so our haphazard observance patterns have reflected that as well. But the struggle to make new meaning out of the holiday has also given me a much wider view than most Americans have of where our own Thanksgiving fits into the grand scheme of history.

In the summer of 2005, I spent a month in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Cuernavaca's a gorgeous little city, famous for a year-round spring climate so delicious that Montezuma built his summer palace there. In 1519, Cortez conquered the city, razed the old palace, and built his own castle on the ruins. (Diego Rivera later painted what may be his greatest mural in the castle's loggia.) A few blocks away, there's a huge adobe cathedral that's been standing there since 1533. It may well be the oldest Christian church in the western hemisphere.

To put this in perspective: The church and castle in Cuernavaca had already been standing for nearly a century when the Pilgrims had their little dinner party in 1620.

In fact, by that time, the Spaniards had pretty much conquered Mexico, and were making strong inroads into what is now the American southwest. Pop notes that Pedro Menendez de Aviles founded St. Augustine, Florida in 1565. Farther inland, Don Juan Onate declared the first Mexican Thanksgiving somewhere just south of El Paso in 1598 -- the same year he founded the city of Santa Fe. By 1620, when New England was just seeing its first Europeans, Santa Fe and St. Augustine were both thriving American cities of a thousand souls or more.

The party was already rolling in the Great White North as well. The first Canadian Thanksgiving was declared in 1578 by English explorer Martin Frobisher, who formally proclaimed a Feast of Thanksgiving for his party's safe arrival in Newfoundland. By 1607, the French explorers living in Acadia with Samuel de Champlain formed "The Order of Good Cheer," whose regular feasts of thanks often included their Huron and Algonquin neighbors. (Two hundred years later, following the American Revolution, these feasts also included banished Loyalist refugees, who contributed their own American foods and customs to the Canadian table.)

When you look at the full scope of North American history, the image of Thanksgiving as a holiday of U.S. exceptionalism becomes much harder to sustain. The Pilgrims were not the first European settlers, as many Americans believe. (Cortez's Spanish troops were.) They weren't even the first English settlers (several English colonies had been doing very well in Canada for decades). Plymouth was not the first European city in the New World (Cuernavaca would have a decent claim there); nor even in America (as anyone from either St. Augustine or Santa Fe will tell you). And theirs was far from the first Thanksgiving. In truth, they were latecomers to a long-standing party that had already become a New World tradition from Montreal to Mexico City.

Living in Canada has given me a bigger view of Thanksgiving. It's not a holiday celebrating American uniqueness and destiny, but rather one that connects us in history to all the people of this continent -- those who came on the boats from Spain, then France, then England to brave a world they could not imagine; those who met the boats and lost the world as they knew it; those who have come in the centuries since from every corner of the planet; and those who share the continent with America now, and are as bound to her fate as surely as we are bound to the brothers and sisters we're feasting with today.

We may celebrate it on different days; but the reasons for our gratitude are as recognizably familiar as the menu and the faces. Our strength is not in America's (or this holiday's) singularity, but rather their universality. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.

Memo to Newt: You Are No Al Gore

by Sara Robinson

Several blogs (here's Tristero's take) are noting that Newt Gingrich is offering himself up as Our New Lincoln, positioning himself for a presidential run by offering visionary solutions on important issues of the day:

I'm going to tell you something, and whether or not it's plausible given the world you come out of is your problem' .... 'I am not 'running' for president. I am seeking to create a movement to win the future by offering a series of solutions so compelling that if the American people say I have to be president, it will happen.'

Much hilarity has ensued as a result of this announcement. But make no mistake: this isn't about Lincoln. It's about Gore. Newt has noticed that this strategy is working very well for Al, thank you very much -- and now wants his piece of that action.

Al Gore has spent the past six years dedicating himself to creating a movement around global warming. Whether or not he ever becomes president, his actions have already had tremendous implications for the future of humankind. Ninety-four years from now (assuming people are still around), when they're making lists of the 10 most important people of the century, Al's work on global warming just so far will put him on everybody's list -- whether or not we ever have the good sense to put him in the White House.

As Newt notes, we may decide that we like Al's principles and leadership well enough to elect him. But the difference is that we all know Al is going to do his global warming thing for as long as it takes, with or without that inducement. Yeah, it may put him in a great position to run; but he seems to see that as an optional side benefit of Doing The Right Thing.

Newt, on the other hand, has already taken himself off that high road by announcing his overt political intentions right up front. He's being very frank that any attempts to create any kind of movement will be an electioneering gambit, a means toward the end of power. Which, right there, tells you all you need to know about his commitment to higher principles and priorities.

Newt, we know Al Gore -- and you are no Al Gore.

That said: If this issues-advocacy-based model does turn out to be a new trend in campaigning, I gotta say that it beats anything else currently on the scene. We could do worse than having our pols running around trying to find real problems to solve, and devoting themselves to creating effective solutions in order to prove to us that they're serious change leaders worthy of our respect and our votes.

Over the river ...

... to Grandmother's house we go. Off to Idaho for Thanksgiving.

I've got a couple of excellent posts brewing, promise. They're just taking more work than planned and I've gotta hit the road. Hope to have them up in the next few days.

-- Dave

The roots of extremism

[A militia meeting at the Maltby, Wash., community hall in 1994.]

As we already know, the nativist right was not exactly chastened by the results of the November election. Rather, they seem to have been even more emboldened -- encouraged, it seems, by the blather of pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin that the reason Republicans lost was that they weren't conservative enough.

Thus the Minutemen are not only continuing their recruitment apace, but stepping it up, particularly in the "heartland" communities that are seeing many more Spanish-speaking brown faces in their midst these days.

Carolyn Szczepanski at the Kansas City magazine The Pitch had a profile last week of just such a recruitment drive. As always, the Minutemen's foremost claim is that they actually represent a mainstream point of view:

"It's not one or two or three coming through in the night," he continues. "It's an invasion. It's nothing short of that. The federal government's not doing anything about it, so, by God, the Minutemen will do it for them."

The crowd erupts into applause. At least one man is carrying a gun and extra ammunition.

"We're not vigilantes. We're not the KKK. We're a majestic form of neighborhood watch," Garza says. "And in the last few years, it's become so powerful in its momentum that we've gone from 10 people to well over 8,000 nationwide."

I've pointed out previously that it was only a decade ago that we heard the same claim, in the same language, issuing forth from the leaders of the Patriot/militia movement. In fact, the militias continued calling themselves a kind of "neighborhood watch" well into the 21st century, and specifically formulated themselves in those terms after Sept. 11.

Here's how John Pitner, leader of the Washington State Militia (described in some detail in In God's Country) put it back in 1996, when a local grange decided not to let him host militia meetings in their hall any longer:

Pitner was furious, protesting that the militia had been unfairly smeared as a pack of radical revolutionaries. "We're not anti-government, we're anti-bad politicians," he said. "We feel it's time to change the way government does things."

He argued that all citizens are members of the militia under the law. "We're volunteering ourselves beforehand," he told Cathy Logg. "We're just painters, carpenters, bricklayers. We're trying to help our communities. We were out sandbagging in the floods and helping save livestock in Lynden. We're directing traffic at accident scenes. We serve when we're called to serve. We have Christmas programs for children. We’re community-oriented people."

Pitner issued a plea for understanding: "Don't judge us by what we say -- judge us by what we do."

A year later, Pitner was on trial in federal court for plotting to build pipe bombs and engage in a wide range of acts of domestic terrorism, charges of which he was eventually convicted. So much for mainstream then.

And so much for mainstream now. While the claims that the Minutemen are not a racist organization are are dubious at best, for the sake of argument let's grant these Minutemen organizers' claims that they are not the KKK in fresh clothes.

Nonetheless, what their own words reveal, beyond any serious doubt, is that they are classic extremists, by nearly any standard.

The first sign of this is their paranoia:

A deep voice accompanied by the sound of shattering glass ominously warns of the perils posed by illegal immigration.

"Every minute, they're crossing our borders looking for quick-cash jobs, transportation and accommodations," the voice intones. "Some may be Mideastern terrorists with look-alike resemblance to our south-of-the-border neighbors."

The second message: "Did you know that your congressmen and the president take an oath of office ... to protect each state from invasion? So what about the millions of illegals from alien nations crossing our borders ... ? Is that an invasion? Would you call a burglar in your home a houseguest?"

And then the third: "These folks in Washington, D.C. ... are granting amnesty to illegal aliens, and giving them everything from Social Security to free health care is just the tip of the iceberg.... Is that what you want? We don't think so."

Even more indicative of their extremism is their willingness to believe things that are provably false and to continue to believe them in the face of contrary evidence or outright proof of their falsity. They also are willing to make incendiary charges without a trace of evidence. These are traits that often go hand in hand with the paranoia:

"They've taken over California," Hayes tells the crowd. "They're working on Arizona, New Mexico, Texas. We're going to become a minority of illegal immigration." He tells them to research the National Council of La Raza -- the nation's largest advocacy organization focusing on the civil rights, education and employment of Hispanic Americans. "They're a Salvadoran group of terrorists. We have them in Kansas City right now. La Raza believes the Southwest is theirs and we should leave. They want illegals to come up here and have babies and take over the United States."

Hayes' emotion builds before he stops for a disclaimer that punctuates each meeting.

"This may insult some of your intelligence. But we're not bigots. We're American patriots. If you're a skinhead or a member of an extremist group, leave now."

(Before the meeting, Hayes told the Pitch: "We've been called bigots, racists, homophobes. I could go on and on. When the pro-illegal-immigration folks start cutting us down like that, though, we know we're doing something right. When they start calling me names, I look at them and I see the real racist. Because we are not. They're either a racist or an employer.")

Hayes tells the group that these issues are too important for the Minutemen to be intimidated by schoolyard name-calling. There are terrorist camps in Mexico, he says.

"They're teaching Middle Easterners Spanish, teaching them how to dress Hispanic, and now they're all over this country, and Lord knows what they'll do." He says illegal aliens are draining the health-care system, bankrupting hospitals and crowding schools. As a former law-enforcement officer, Hayes says, the thing that really burns him is the impact on public safety.

"They're in vehicular accidents where they leave the scene or have no insurance," he says. "Rapes, robberies, killing cops and running back to their home country -- these people are breaking the law every day they're here. They're 10 percent of the nation's crime, and our prisons are full of them."

Note the requisite eliminationism: these border crossers are all criminals. And of course, there's only one thing to do with such types: ship them all out.

The willingness to believe palpable nonsense, particularly the right-wing kind of urban legends that handily conflate the issue of Mexican border security with the Global War on Terror -- a notion pushed with great regularity by Michelle Malkin and her VDare nativist friends -- is also a common trait among the Minutemen's recruits:

The two friends, who met thanks to their adjacent cubicles at a local engineering company, were inspired to join the Minutemen by a trip to the border in March 2006. They set aside 10 days for the trip and checked into a hotel just outside Tucson, Arizona. The plan was to spend three days driving down to the Minuteman Command Center, 50 miles southwest of the city, check in for a briefing and then head to "the line."

They admit that they didn't see much. Griffin says "the line" is actually 30 miles from the border. Volunteers there station themselves on public lands and on the private property of ranchers who are supportive of the Minuteman mission. Cox says they ate a lot of peanut-butter crackers.

Though they didn't witness confrontation, Cox says, they did hear about it.

"It didn't happen directly in front of us, but, from what the Border Patrol said and during different shifts in different areas, a number of the people they were finding coming across the desert weren't from Mexico. A large contingency were from Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan -- many that had confirmed ties to Al Qaeda."

All this brings to mind the militias' favorite legend back in the 1990s, namely, that blue-helmeted United Nations troops were massing secretly on the Mexican and Canadian borders in advance of a long-planned invasion of the USA (wherein, of course, all good freedom-loving gun owners were scheduled to be liquidated in concentration camps).

What's also interesting is the way the jingoism that arose in response to this year's pro-immigration rallies mutated into even further mythologizing:

"I think when these [immigrants' rights] groups started doing demonstrations and burning the American flag and wanting to sing the national anthem in Spanish — these people that are here as criminals, these people who came here illegally and started demanding their rights as U.S. citizens — I think that just took some good old Americans and pissed them off," he says. "I guess, being a U.S. Army vet, I don't take too well to burning the flag, either, especially when it's foreign nationals doing that."

The national anthem brouhaha, of course, was thoroughly contrived, as we saw, since Spanish versions of it (as well as German, French and Italian versions) had been around for decades, and even videotape of President Bush singing it in Spanish cropped up.

As for flag burning, there was only one minor incident of a lone kook burning one at one of the early rallies; at most of the subsequent rallies, the American flag was being waved pronouncedly by the marchers. Most of the outrage over supposed mishandling of the American flag by Latino marchers was whipped up by Malkin with an incident in which the Mexican flag was placed above the Stars and Stripes at a high school.

No, the only flag burnings of note in this debate were Mexican flags being set aflame by right-wingers. Unsurprisingly, all this was being fomented by right-wing pundits like Michael Savage.

This is a special kind of gullibility that was common among the followers of the militia movement. At times, they would express extreme skepticism, especially when it came to the so-called "official story" that appeared in mainstream media and was sometimes generated by the government. But it was a very selective skepticism, reserved almost strictly for those things that might refute or contradict anything they were already predisposed to believe. That which didn't was recast, falsified or distorted to fit those predispositions. And chief among those predispositions, of course, was a powerful and ceaseless paranoia. In other words, they became suckers for anything other than the official story, and were especially drawn to those that underscored their paranoid beliefs and conspiracy theories.

These are all traits of extremism, part of the authoritarian psyche that is its root. And as the nativism advocated by the Minutemen spreads, so do those roots.

Storm victims

Sara just called to inform me that she has no Internet connectivity due to the storms in the Vancouver area tonight. So our regularly scheduled Sunday rant will be forthcoming on Monday.

And I've been preoccupied with a looming deadline, so ... back in action on the morrow.

Personal irresponsibility

Well, we've been waiting awhile, but Michelle Malkin has finally weighed in on the matter of the Freeper fan turned domestic terrorist who sent anthrax hoax letters to a bevy of Malkin's favorite liberal targets.

Malkin put up a nonsequitur of a post at her blog, but the meat of her response is contained in one of her Hot Air segments in which, among other things, she proclaims: "I do not condone violence. I have never condoned violence." (Really? What exactly do you call invading Iraq, killing thousands of Iraqi civilians in the process?)

The essence of her argument, though, lies in comparing Chad Castagana, her ardent admirer, to would-be Reagan assassin John Hinckley Jr., and herself to Jodie Foster, who you may recall was the object of Hinkley's affections:

I have no idea who this loon is. I do not condone his actions or any actions like his by anyone else.

Uh. Michelle. No one said you did. But as for what you call Keith Olbermann's "flying leap of logic" in making the connection between your rhetoric and Castagana's actions, you continue thus:

It's no different than the hero worship that John Hinkley had for Jodie Foster. It's no less absurd to attribute Castagana's actions to Ann or Laura Ingraham or me than it is to attribute Hinkley's to Jodie Foster.

No, Michelle, what's absurd is you comparing yourself to Jodie Foster.

Or, maybe I'm mistaken. Maybe, somewhere that I hadn't read, Jodie Foster spent several years before the assassination attempt on Reagan demonizing Reagan and other conservatives in the press as the essence of evil itself, and wishing someone would shut him up.

Maybe Foster spent five years before the attempt publicly fomenting hatred of Reagan, labeling him a treasonous bastard and the root of all the nation's ills, and we somehow just didn't hear about it.

Maybe I missed the part where she wished aloud that someone would commit an act of domestic terrorism against him.

Or maybe it was in one of those unpublished scripts for Taxi Driver. Who knows?

What we do know is that, unlike Jodie Foster, the Termagant Triumvirate of Malkin, Coulter and Ingraham have done precisely that for the past five years and longer. Their entire raison d'etre, it seems, has revolved around pushing eliminationist rhetoric aimed at liberals.

And that reason, and no other, is why the domestic terrorism committed by Chad Castagana is connected to them.

As I've said repeatedly, this is not necessarily a matter of legal culpability, because there is no direct connection between their words and Castagana's acts. But because there is a clear, common-sensical connection -- that is, he heard the hatemongering and constant demonization of liberals and rather plainly decided to act upon it -- there is also a rather clear moral culpability on their parts.

When you're in media work -- and especially when you have a nationally prominent platform -- you not only have freedom, you have responsibility. And chief among those responsiblities is not to abuse your power in a way that harms your fellow citizens or inspires others to harm them:

You can use your megaphone to lie shamelessly. You can use it to smear the good name of public officials. You can use it to rewrite history. And you can use it to intimidate the "little people" who don't possess the same kind of power.

Because these potential abuses exist, a sense of ethics is obligatory for anyone who possesses this power. It's why the Society of Professional Journalists has a Code of Ethics that abjures such behavior.

Violating the Code won't get you fired per se, but it certainly brings into question your professionalism and honor. It also brands you, forever, as deeply irresponsible.

Particularly when it comes to using that power to attack ordinary citizens and subject them not just to ridicule but actual threats and potential violence.

But just as she has before, Malkin, of course, is running far and fast from this responsibility.

The cop-out that some of these actors might be mentally unstable -- which was evidently the point of comparing Castagana to Hinckley -- is simply another evasion. Because these people never act in a vacuum. There is almost always someone who inspired them.

The case of David Lewis Rice is still stark in the memory of Seattleites, and it is a classic illustration of the problem:

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.)

As James Aho described it in his book This Thing of Darkness:

... 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, not entirely different from the "Reconquista" theory that Malkin promotes].

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."

Ashley Holden offered the same lame defense as Malkin. So did "Fasel," whose real name was Homer Brand. But everyone in Seattle knew what they had done. There were no legal consequences for them, but there were social consequences. The men were moral lepers, and were shunned by decent people thereafter to the end of their lives (Holden died in 1994; Brand just died this year at the age of 78.)

But Malkin wants us to think that her hatemongering has no effect on her audience. She tells her Hot Air viewers:

Bullcrap. I don't have readers and I don't have acolytes. I have readers and I have audience members who think for themselves and who are responsible for each of their own actions.

Sure. We're all just independent actors. And Mohammad Atta was just responsible for his own actions too, right? No one else?

How about Naveed Al Haq? When he went on a shooting rampage at the Jewish Federation in Seattle, Malkin was eager to blame it on Muslim hatemongers. Indeed, she eagerly posited that a whole panoply of shooters was actually the work of a larger Muslim conspiracy.

Yet the reverse logic is what Malkin uses in denying any responsibility in this matter, saying that Olbermann is using "the most desperate rhetoric to discredit and stifle our voices" and claiming he was trying to "slime me as some sort of domestic terrorist". (Actually, Michelle, he was trying to slime you not as a domestic terrorist, but as someone whose reckless rhetoric helped set one off. Accurately, too, I might add. Which makes it precisely a non-smear.)

In both the Hot Air segment and the responsive post at her blog, she mentions the matter of Oklahoma City and Timothy McVeigh:

As I note, speciously blaming conservative pundits for domestic terrorism is old hat. Remember when the left blamed Rush Limbaugh and talk radio for the Oklahoma City bombing?

It wasn't just the left: it was, quite specifically, President Clinton. And it's worth remembering exactly what he said:

In this country we cherish and guard the right of free speech. We know we love it when we put up with people saying things we absolutely deplore. And we must always be willing to defend their right to say things we deplore to the ultimate degree. But we hear so many loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other. They spread hate. They leave the impression that, by their very words, that violence is acceptable. You ought to see -- I'm sure you are now seeing the reports of some things that are regularly said over the airwaves in America today.

Well, people like that who want to share our freedoms must know that their bitter words can have consequences and that freedom has endured in this country for more than two centuries because it was coupled with an enormous sense of responsibility on the part of the American people.

If we are to have freedom to speak, freedom to assemble, and, yes, the freedom to bear arms, we must have responsibility as well. And to those of us who do not agree with the purveyors of hatred and division, with the promoters of paranoia, I remind you that we have freedom of speech, too, and we have responsibilities, too. And some of us have not discharged our responsibilities. It is time we all stood up and spoke against that kind of reckless speech and behavior.

If they insist on being irresponsible with our common liberties, then we must be all the more responsible with our liberties. When they talk of hatred, we must stand against them. When they talk of violence, we must stand against them. When they say things that are irresponsible, that may have egregious consequences, we must call them on it. The exercise of their freedom of speech makes our silence all the more unforgivable. So exercise yours, my fellow Americans. Our country, our future, our way of life is at stake.

As I pointed out awhile back:

Of course, Clinton did not name anyone, even though the voices he probably had more in mind were those belong to the likes G. Gordon "Head Shots" Liddy and some of the more vicious Patriot types like Chuck Harder, who constantly hawked Patriot conspiracy theories outright, alongside a full dose of rhetoric about the violent resistance of federal agents. But in fact Clinton used very general terms probably because he recognized the reality as well, which was that characters like Limbaugh and his fellow movement arch-conservatives have been irresponsible as well -- perhaps not to the same degree, except for the fact that the reach of transmitters like Limbaugh is so massive.

And the bitter truth, for people like Limbaugh, is that Clinton was right: Words have consequences. When you carefully tailor memes and ideas that promote an essentially extremist worldview to fit a mainstream audience, you're spreading poison into the community that can have extremely violent consequences. Anyone who's read American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing has a pretty clear picture of how closely McVeigh's hatred of the government was fanned by both extremist and mainstream voices. And it was to all these voices which Clinton alluded.

Limbaugh's protests notwithstanding, it is not hard to see that while, of course, Limbaugh cannot be blamed directly for Oklahoma City, neither can he be wholly absolved. Whining does not relieve him from the responsibility for his words. Timothy McVeigh, and the wave of Patriot domestic terrorists who followed him, did not occur in a vacuum. They were creatures in a milieu in which Limbaugh and other ostensibly "mainstream" media, political and religious figures helped transmit and reinforce extremist ideas that, when nursed with a violent predisposition, became extremely volatile in real life.

... If nothing else, Oklahoma City should at least have been a signal to Limbaugh that it was time to tone down the rhetoric, to stop demonizing government employees and federal officials. That, as we have seen, has never occurred. Anti-government bile is still a constant of his radio rants, as anyone reading the transcripts at Web sites like Rush Transcript can see for themselves. ...

However, since the election of George W. Bush, Limbaugh's anti-government venom is largely reserved for liberal officials. In general, Limbaugh has now shifted his focus from demonizing the government to demonizing anything liberal. Of course, this sentiment has always been part of his schtick, but in recent months he has been stepping it up another notch. Not only are liberals to be opposed politically, they are in fact treasonous. This was explicit in his attacks on Sen. Tom Daschle, the leader of the Senate Democrats, and was a continuing theme as antiwar protests grew in volume and intensity, referring to dissenters as, among other things, "anti-American, anti-capitalist Marxists and Communists."

This is extremely dangerous talk, and not merely because it is divisive. It actually threatens to simultaneously harden the growing alliance between extremist and mainstream conservatives, and create a milieu in which violence against dissenters becomes acceptable. It is when we see this kind of coalescence that we are in real danger of seeing fascism blossom in America.

Unfortunately, people like Chad Castagana have inched us all a little farther in that direction. And for that, we can thank a lot of people who have contributed to a larger atmospher of hatefulness and venom directed at American liberals. Foremost among them is Michelle Malkin.

That's so because Malkin, and Coulter, and Ingraham, and the bulk of the rabid-right pundit class, are all fundamentally irresponsible. We know that. So in the end, it's really no surprise that they should run from any responsibility for it as well.