Border Violence And Immigration: Arizonans Invert Reality, Turn A Blind Eye To Vigilantes Murdering Latinos

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

[Note: Video not really safe for work. But true.]

There was a funny smell to the way Arizona's police-state immigration law was passed -- especially the way factions with ties to white supremacists whipped up the phantom menace of a wave of crime associated with illegal immigration, focusing on the still-unsolved murder of a border rancher named Robert Krentz, even though officially the crime is being laid at the doorstep of Mexican drug cartels -- but even on that score, the truth is unclear at best. Notably, the Arizona Daily star reports that the chief suspect in the crime lives in the USA, not in Mexico.

Moreover, as Sam Seder acidly observes, the entire claim that crime has skyrocketed in Arizona is so much cattle offal. In fact, violent crime in Arizona has been steadily declining in recent years.

It kind of makes you wonder, doesn't it, why Arizonans -- and particularly the Arizona media, not to mention the national media -- never picked up on the case of Shawna Forde and her gang of rogue Minutemen, who invaded the home of a Latino family near the border in Arizona and shot them, killing the father and his 9-year-old daughter in cold blood as she pleaded for her life, and wounding the mother -- who managed to get her own gun and shoot back, wounding one of the killers.

Even more incredible, really, is that this 911 call from the wounded mother received so little attention at the time, much less that it did not become a focus of Arizonans fretting about violent crime:



What brings all this into laser focus is what's actually happening right now on the Arizona border: Latinos (some of them American citizens bearing blood-soaked birth certificates) are being shot and killed, and it's beginning to appear that white vigilantes -- not Mexican drug gangs -- are doing the killing.

The shootings that first raised this likelihood occurred a little over a week ago in Pinal County, where two Latino men who called 911 pleading for help, saying they had been shot, were found dead near a locale where a sheriff's deputy had reportedly been wounded by drug smugglers on the border (though many questions remain about that incident as well).

Initially, as you can see both from the Arizona Republic report above, as well as from the local TV coverage, the crime was blamed on "drug smugglers."

But Jill Garvey at Imagine 2050 reports that something far more insidious may be involved:

In addition to shootings of Latinos by Border Patrol agents, there have been mysterious shootings and even murders in Arizona deserts. Troubling details are emerging that suggest these attacks on Latinos are not drug-related, as often reported, but the work of violent border vigilantes.

In the wake of the uproar over the passage of racist SB 1070 in Arizona, border vigilantes like Barbara Coe and Glenn Spencer, just to name a few, are revving up their anti-immigrant rhetoric. In a trend that has disturbing parallels, several immigrants were targeted by camouflaged gunmen last week. And two Latino men were found murdered in the Arizona desert on June 6. Mainstream media reports pin the cause squarely on drug smuggling; however, bloggers who have followed the story continue to uncover suspicious details surrounding the murders. Foremost of which is that no drugs were found on or near the victims, but an automatic rifle commonly used by border patrol agents was. Also, the murders occurred within close proximity to the high-profile Pinal County shooting involving sheriff’s deputy Louie Puroll. Pinal County’s Sheriff Babeu is rivaling notorious Sheriff Joe in his quest to publicize his unfair vilification of immigrants.

Perhaps the most disturbing incident occurred on June 12, as Dee Perez-Scott at Immigration Talk With a Mexican-American reports:

At 5:00 am on Friday, June 12, five undocumented migrants who had crossed into the United States and were walking through the canyon near Rio Rico, AZ., were shot at with a high powered rifle by two unidentified white males wearing camouflage clothing.

"The victims claimed no demands were made. They were just walking and fired upon,” said Sheriff Antonio Estrada. Estrada said when the group ran away from the shooters, one of the men, Manuel Esquer Gomez, 45, from Nogales, Sonora sustained a gunshot wound to the left forearm. As the group continued to run, the men stumbled upon skeletal remains of what they thought were two people.

Deputies from the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office, along with a U.S. Border Patrol special response team and air support, responded and found the skeletal remains of one man. Documents found on the man identified him as Alberto Donato Lopez, 40, from Puebla, Mexico. Lopez’s body was taken to the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office in Tucson to determine the cause of death.

“It is unknown at this time if the deceased was killed or died of natural causes,” Estrada said. “There’s always a concern that these people could possibly be victims of violence.” Estrada said the Border Patrol tracked footprints from the scene of the shooting, but no suspects were found. “At this point we don’t know who they are,” said Estrada. “It’s perturbing to hear of people with high-powered rifles and camouflage. It raises some real red flags.”

Just as disturbing -- and almost certainly not coincidentally -- is the news, from Stephen Lemons at Phoenix New Times, that some of Russell Pearce's neo-Nazi pals intend to start patrolling the border with weapons:

Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu recently announced that "drug cartels" control the area in his county where deputy Louie Puroll was allegedly shot at, and where two men were recently gunned down.

Now Babeu may be getting some assistance from an unwelcome and unsavory source: Vigilantes led by National Socialist Movement member J.T. Ready.

As I blogged back in May, Ready and fellow neo-Nazi Harry Hughes have been going on illegal alien "patrols" in Pinal County's Vekol Valley, dressed in camouflage and armed with assault rifles.

Now Ready has announced a "Border Ops" alert for this Saturday via his profile on the white supremacist New Saxon site, inviting participants to "bring plenty of firearms and ammo."

"Camouflage or earth tone clothing [is] preferred," according to the announcement. "Bandanas, balaclavas, or other identity concealing items are permissible and encouraged."

Ready's statement promises that, "This is the Minuteman Project on steroids! THE INVASION STOPS HERE!"

Be sure to read the whole thing -- it's frightening and disturbing and important. As our good friend Sara Robinson observes at AmericasFuture.org:

First: this a perfect example of how right-wing vigilantism, once permitted, quickly escalates. The Minutemen weren't uniformed, only casually armed, and careful to cloak their deep racism -- though it tended to leak out at inopportune moments anyway. Now, because we enabled and tolerated that, we've got self-proclaimed Nazis down there in full battle dress, carrying military weapons and telling us quite openly that they're on a mission to cleanse the country of the brown scourge. If Arizona officials -- already overwhelmed by a situation that they're getting no federal help in resolving -- don't find a way to stop these guys, they're creating the conditions for the paramilitary right-wing scene on their border to become the national breeding ground for a full-on armed militia movement -- a movement that could, in time, endanger the whole country.

Second: This is also the next step down the road for the state of Arizona as a whole. They've put the country on notice that they're just fine, thank you, with being the State of Hate -- and in doing so, opened the door to the whole national circus of haters. Ready and his National Socialists are out front of that parade, but you can bet that there's a long line of acts queuing up to come out to the desert and follow them. (Note to Gov. Jan Brewer: be careful what you wish for, for you will surely get it.)

... This is what we know about hate groups: they are an evil that can only flourish where good people do nothing. The State of Arizona is now issuing what amount to official engraved invitations to the country's far-right vigilantes, sovereign citizens, would-be fascists, self-styled "patriots" (we need to take that word back, seriously), and paranoid race warriors. They cannot be surprised when people like J.T. Ready and his New Saxons take them up on the offer.

And their choice demands a response from everybody in the other forty-nine as well. No American state has voluntarily chosen to go down this path since the KKK takeover of Indiana and Oregon in the 1920s. And when hate holds that much state power, the only way it stops is when the voters of Arizona decide they've had enough, and vote the bastards out of office.

(It's a great, thoughtful post -- again, be sure to read it all.)

Arizonans have fundamentally turned the situation on it head by indulging in the lowest form of hysteria: by freaking out about crime caused by Latinos, they have in fact unleashed a wave of vigilante crime against those same people. Even if they don't already regret this spasm, they will.

None Dare Call It Sedition

-- by Sara

Sedition: Crime of creating a revolt, disturbance, or violence against lawful civil authority with the intent to cause its overthrow or destruction -- Brittanica Concise Dictionary

Well, finally. It's high time somebody had the guts to say the S-word -- sedition -- right out loud.

When the indictments against the Hutaree were unsealed last week, the S-word was right there, front and center, in Count One. The Justice Department accused them of "seditious conspiracy," charging that the defendants "did knowingly conspire, confederate, and agree with each other and other persons known and unknown...to levy war against the United States, and to prevent, hinder, and delay by force the execution of any United States law."

This is very serious stuff. But the Hutaree are getting nailed for sedition only because they crossed the line with inches to spare. They're by no means the only ones. Advocating, encouraging, and sanctioning sedition is the new norm on the conservative side.

We saw it again last Thursday, when the Guardians of the Free Republics -- a Sovereign Citizen group that believes that the oath of office taken by state governors is invalid under their twisted Bizarroland interpretation of the Constitution -- sent letters to most or all sitting state governors telling them to either a) take what they consider to be a legitimate oath of office; b) stand down; or c) or be removed "non-violently" within three days. The FBI, rightly, regards this as a potentially seditious threat against the governors.

These two events are a wake-up call for progressives. They're telling us that it's time to openly confront the fact that conservatives have spent the past 40 years systematically delegitimizing the very idea of constitutional democracy in America. When they're in power, they mismanage it and defund it. When they're out of power, they refuse to participate in running the country at all -- indeed, they throw all their energy into thwarting the democratic process any way they can. When they need to win an election, they use violent, polarizing, eliminationist language against their opponents to motivate their base. This is sedition in slow motion, a gradual corrosive undermining of the government's authority and capacity to run the country. And it's been at the core of their politics going all the way back to Goldwater.

This long assault has gone into overdrive since Obama's inauguration, as the rhetoric has ratcheted up from overheated to perfervid. We've reached the point where you can't go a week without hearing some prominent right wing leader calling for outright sedition -- an immediate and defiant populist uprising against some legitimate form of government authority.

Moderates and liberals are responding to this rising threat with feckless calls for "a return to civility," as if all that's needed to put things right again is a stern talking-to from Miss Manners. Though that couldn't hurt, the sad fact is that we're well past the point where it's just a matter of conservatives behaving like tantrum-throwing spoiled brats (which they are). When a mob is surrounding your house with torches and telling you they intend to burn it down, "civility" really isn't the issue any more.

At that point -- and we're there -- criminal intent and action become the real issues. Progressives need to realize that the right began defiantly dancing back and forth over the legal line, daring us to do something about it, quite some time ago. And it's high time we called it out -- and, where appropriate, start prosecuting it -- for exactly what it is.

What is Sedition?
Before we start throwing around inflammatory terms like "sedition," it's essential that we understand the strict definition of the word -- and use it carefully and precisely, lest it lose all meaning.

(That's what happened with the word "fascism," which has been distorted into meaninglessness by hyperbolic overuse on the left and willful redefinition on the right. Once a word is abused and distorted this way, it's very hard to recapture it and restore its original meaning. And that's no small thing, because losing the word makes it functionally impossible to even discuss the political idea the word represents. Worse: as Orwell told us, when we no longer have the language to describe what we're dealing with, we also lose our ability to deal effectively with fascism at all. That's a real danger with loaded words -- so, please, let's be extremely careful about how we brandish this one.)

Here's the defining line we need to hold on to. People who promote subversive ideas, no matter how dangerous those ideas might seem, are completely protected under the First Amendment. Even calling for the overthrow of the government is protected (though not benign, as we'll see later, because it creates justification, permission, and incitement to seditious acts). That's why the conservatives have been safe -- so far.

It's only when those people start actively planning and implementing a government rebellion that it turns into criminal sedition. In this case: the weird rantings on the Hutaree website -- not seditious. The group's allegedly operational plans to assassinate a police officer, ambush the resulting funeral, and thus bring on a national militia uprising -- absolutely seditious, if the charges stick.

This bright-line distinction, which has been part of American sedition law for the past 50 years, parallels closely the line drawn by terrorism analysts in sussing out which groups are benign and which ones are headed for trouble. As I've noted before, one of the cardinal signs these experts watch and listen for is a fundamental shift in rhetoric. In the early stages of dissent, groups establish the lines of conflict by obsessively focusing on their enemies and loudly denouncing their essential evilness. You hear this kind of talk in politics all the time these days. It's always ugly, but not inherently dangerous.

But in the latter stage, the talk turns overtly eliminationist, and the group starts expressing its clear desire and intention to eradicate specific enemies. When they shift to that second stage, it's a sign that they've made the mental commitment to violent action -- and are more likely to be acquiring arms, selecting targets, and getting ready to act in the near future. When a group starts actively planning an attack on government offices or officials, it's officially crossed the line into sedition.

Sedition on The Right
Openly advocating acts of sedition has become the conservatives' main political stock in trade over the past year. (The SPLC offers a strong summary here.) You hear it everywhere from Rush to Glenn to Michelle Malkin to Michelle Bachman. Everybody on the right is now roundly convinced that the fairly-elected President of the United States isn't even a citizen. He's a Muslim, and thus in treasonous league with terrorists. The main goal of his administration is to turn the country over to the One World Government. He's a socialist. He's a fascist. All of these are direct attacks on Obama's fundamental legitimacy and authority to lead the country -- and thus a deliberate incitement to revolt against his administration.

These narratives are coupled with a rising us-versus-them blaming of progressives for all the problems of the country. These days, the screeds sound eerily like free-market fundamentalists freebasing Hitler: they're clouded over with the typical eliminationist vitriol that reduces liberals to subhuman vermin that must be violently exterminated from the body politic in order to restore the virtue of the country. (For those who groove on that sort of thing, there's even a slight dash of anti-Semitism in the mix.) This is dangerous stuff. And in the context of the conservatives' longstanding effort to delegitimize the government, it's also an open invitation to sedition.

This seditious intent is obvious in the increasingly overt firearms displays at right-wing events. The media took to their fainting couches, aghast, when a small handful of people showed up packing heat at last summer's Tea Party disruptions. Now, we've advanced the point where not one, but two, 100% gun-toting marches on Washington, DC are planned for this coming April 19. Their organizers are hoping the marches will draw tens of thousands of armed protestors. Get used to seeing guns in the streets wherever the law allows -- because the conservatives have told their base explicitly that they need to be "exercising their rights" on this front to the fullest extent. Carrying guns in public is now an essential symbol of how the the right defines freedom. It also expresses just how afraid they are, and what they're planning to do about that fear.

These escalating armed demonstrations, accompanied by belligerent sloganeering, are a clear signal that these folks are done talking -- and, worse, have already decided that democracy is futile, and taking up arms is the only appropriate response to the threats we now face. They're carrying weapons to scare us weak-kneed girly libs into submission, and to show us they mean business. Growing up in gun country, I was taught at my daddy's knee that when someone says they're going to shoot you, it's always smart to take them at their word and handle yourself accordingly. Right now, I think that's good advice for anybody in America who considers themselves a member of the reality-based community.

But it's not just armed individuals. They're also busily forming armed groups, which are gearing up for a fight. For the past five years, armed Minutemen have been usurping the job of the US Border Patrol. And within the past year, according to the SPLC, the number of right-wing militias has more than doubled to over 500, many of which present themselves as alternative law-enforcement posses that are adjunct to the ones staffed by the county sheriffs.

What these groups are telling us is that they no longer recognize the government's sole franchise on the use of force; and they're actively organizing to seize and exercise at least some of that power for themselves.

Most alarming of all: some of these right-wing warriors have advanced to the point of actual target acquisition. This should worry us, because law enforcement and terrorism experts know that when groups like this get to where they're settling on specific targets, they've reached the final stages of gearing up for violent confrontation.

When Bernard Goldberg wrote a book listing the "100 people who are destroying America" -- which included some government officials -- he was writing a target list with seditious intent. (And at least one guy took him up on it, in his own deranged way.)

When the "spiritual warriors" of the Transformations movement proudly announce that they've mapped every town in America -- literally creating target maps of "demonic activity" that pinpoint government offices, non-Evangelical houses of worship, clinics, theaters, Indian mounds and sites; or even just households with Muslims, neo-pagans, Goth-baby teenagers, or Obama stickers on their cars -- they're putting us on notice that they've identified the specific people and places that need to be "cleansed" in order to purify their communities. According to researchers Rachel Tabachnik and Bruce Wilson, these "transformation" attempts have already become government-level issues in New Jersey, Arizona, Texas, and Hawaii.

At present, they claim that they're only mapping their neighborhoods so they can pray over us all; and their attempts to take over local government are being done by purely democratic means. But, as has often happened before (yes, the Nazis started out just this way), the day may come when they'll decide that mere prayer and organizing is not enough. Like any street gang, they've taken proprietary responsibility for a piece of turf; and they believe God is holding them accountable for everything that happens there. The resulting performance pressure is a perfect setup to justify more aggressive cleansing tactics if they can't convert the town by peaceful means.

And some of these groups have already effectively crossed the line, in spirit if not in prosecutable fact. When the Christian dominionists train up "Joel's Army" by sending their sons to the US armed services so they can get the combat experience they'll need to set up a worldwide theocracy, that's evidence of an active plan to effect an armed government takeover. When senior US military officers put their commitment to Jesus ahead of their commitment to uphold the Constitution and regard the military as God's force in the world, we should be very afraid.

For years now, we've dismissed all of this as crazy talk, the rantings of a loony fringe that will never get enough traction to become a material threat to our democracy. But we're well past the point where it's no longer quaint and funny, or an embarrassing breach of democratic etiquette that polite people should just ignore.

It's time to confront the sobering fact that the entire right wing -- including the GOP establishment, which encourages, endorses, and echoes these sentiments almost every time its officials appear in public -- is now issuing nearly constant invitations to criminal sedition. They're creating a climate and using language that lowers their base's inhibitions around violence -- and irresponsibly eggs on the handful of sociopaths in their midst who are already primed to kill. They've given their newly-expanded corps of flying monkeys permission to brandish their guns in public, empowered their militias, promised them glory, and are now telling them explicitly which targets to hit.

We'd be idiots not to regard this as an overt threat. Especially when they keep telling us, very explicitly, that they mean it to be. When somebody says they're going to shoot you, believe them.

We need to start talking about this for what it is, and calling it out whenever it happens. Leonard Zeskind points out that the feds have never been able to make a sedition charge stick against a right-wing group (if the Hutaree are convicted, it'll be a first); but the first step in stopping sedition is making sure everybody knows exactly what it is when they see it. And that means calling out the S-word every time we see the conservatives defiantly flinging their hands and feet out over that line to score a few cheap political points.

The challenge I once threw down on the conservatives still stands. Do they want a civil war? Are they out to overthrow the US government?

If this is just political grandstanding to energize the base, they're playing with fire, and they need to bring this incendiary campaign to a screeching halt. Right now. This Mickey Mouse pussyfooting around, play-acting at sedition is criminally dangerous chickenshit politics that puts the short-term needs of the Republican party ahead of the long-term viability of the American democracy they've sworn to uphold. In case the party leaders haven't noticed, their base has taken them as seriously as a heart attack -- and they're genuinely making ready for armed revolt.

On the other hand, if they're actually serious about seditious rebellion against the US government, then let them stand up, follow through, and face the charges. They're either Americans, committed to working in good faith within the democratic process to create our common future; or else they're seditionists in intention or fact -- and thus enemies of the state, plain and simple.

For the good of the country, we cannot continue to let them have it both ways. They need to choose whose side they're on: America's, or their own.

Those Wild Minutewomen

-- by Sara

I'm finding it curious that, unique among nativist movements, the Minutemen seem to let women take leadership roles.

The all-too-aptly-named Laine Lawless. Shawna Forde. And now Brandi Baron. With the rarest of exceptions, that's about three more women in public positions that we've ever seen in the whole history of racist movements (their racism is usually exceeded only by their sexism). There's a good argument to be made that authoritarianism is, at its core, a fetishization of all things "masculine," which means it generally can't exist without the reflexive subjugation of all things feminine.

I frankly have only the barest of guesses as to why this group should be so much different in its gender balance than the other far-right movements. Since Dave's off on his annual Kayaks With Orcas camping trip -- and I'm set to join him out there in Haro Strait tomorrow -- I thought I'd throw this question to our brilliant readers, and glean your theories as to why the Minutemen should be the exception to this rule.

From right to left: Sara, Dave, orca. Taken by Evan Robinson, Haro Strait, 2007

Update: The Seattle Weekly has a new article today on Shawna Forde's rather checkered history. It's not pretty: foster care, shoplifting, prostitution arrests, repeated marriages and name changes...a very strained and difficult life. It would not surprise any of us, I think, to find out that Brandi Baron and Laine Lawless had similarly troubled biographies -- as do almost all of the men who commit acts of far-right extremist violence.

When feminism promised to give us all the same opportunities men had, I'm pretty sure this is not what the movement's foremothers had in mind.

I guess this means we've finally arrived. It doesn't feel much like victory, though.

Mythbusting Right-Wing Domestic Terrorism

-- by Sara

It's been a wild couple of weeks for those of us in the wingnutology business. Our services have been in tremendous demand as the mainstream media tries to sort out the meaning of what Scott Roeder and James von Brunn did. I've done an average of one radio show every day for the past two weeks trying to help various lefty talkers around the country make some sense of it all; and I'm generally gratified at how seriously people are starting to take this.

At the same time, I'm also appalled (though, sadly, hardly surprised) by the conservative mythmaking that's going on around the very serious issue of right-wing domestic terrorism. So it's obviously time to pull together another "Firing Back" piece to give progressives what they need to separate fact from fiction when these talking points start flying.

I've actually had every one of the following myths pitched to me by on-air interviewers, phone-in callers, and/or online commenters over the last two weeks. Most of them have come up over and over, which suggests to me that you're likely to encounter them, too. So let's walk 'em through:

1. These are just "lone wolf" psychos who are acting alone. You can't hold anybody else responsible for what crazy people decide to do.

True and false. But mostly false.

It's true that every one of the nine right-wing terrorists who've made the news since January 20 had a history of mental illness, domestic violence, and/or drug abuse. Several were veterans who were having a really hard time adjusting to civilian life. None of these people could reasonably be considered sane; and, for whatever twisted reasons, they made a personal choice to do what they did.

But it's not true that they were acting alone. People who are dealing with these kinds of demons are often drawn into movements that offer a strong narrative that helps them make sense of a world that never seems to add up right for them. They're usually drawn into organizations like Operation Rescue or the Minutemen that are nominally non-violent; but which also indoctrinate them into a worldview that justifies and motivates people to commit terrorist acts. They come to believe that they must do this to save the world, to serve God, and to be the heroes they desperately want to be.

They're already walking sticks of dynamite. But it takes the heat of that apocalyptic, dualistic, eliminationist, pro-violence narrative to light their fuses and make them explode.

Unfortunately, these groups also make it easy to take that final step over the line, because they often have close ties to other more secretive groups that do advocate and plan terrorist violence as a solution. Operation Rescue teaches that killing abortion doctors is justfiable homicide; and then feeds its most extreme members into the Army of God. The Aryan Nations and several other white nationalist groups supplied the nine members of The Order, a racist terrorist group that killed two people (including left-wing talker Alan Berg) and stole over $4 million during a nine-month spree in 1984. Al Qaeda got many of its recruits from the nominally non-violent (but still radical) Hizb al-Tahrir. Of course, when violence actually occurs, these groups always denounce it -- but they also usually have a very good idea of who was involved, because they've been hanging around with the perpetrators for quite a while themselves.

One of the things the public is finally beginning to understand is that the "lone wolf" story has never been accurate, because these guys are never really alone in the world. Every one of them was well-marinated in large, long-established subcultures that put them up to terrorism, and promised to make heroes out of them if they succeeded.

2. These terrorists are really left-wingers, not right-wingers. Because everybody knows that fascism is a phenomenon that only occurs on the left.

False does not even begin to cover the absurdity of this claim.

Fascism has always been a phenomenon of the right. Every postwar academic scholar of fascism -- Robert Paxton, Roger Griffin, Umberto Eco, and onward -- has been emphatically clear about this. Mussolini admitted as much. It's part of the very definition of the word.

Jonah Goldberg has gotten a lot of traction on the right for his argument that fascism is somehow a left-wing tendency; but in his badly argued, barely-researched tome Liberal Fascism, he gets here by taking logical leaps that no college professor would accept from the greenest freshman. The worst, perhaps, is the way he conflates "fascism" with "totalitarianism." There is such a thing as left-wing totalitarianism: Stalinism and Maoism both qualify. But they were communist, not fascist, movements. It's only when totalitarianism happens on the right that we call it fascism.

Still, this idea has caught on like wildfire, and is being widely promoted by right-wing talkers like Glenn Beck. If you want the full takedown on this, I refer you to Dave Neiwert's exhaustive series of debunking articles, which are linked to in the sidebar at Orcinus.

3. Public right-wing groups like Operation Rescue or the Minutemen don't advocate violence, so these acts have absolutely nothing to do with them.

As noted above: these groups may not engage in violence themselves, but they do provide the narrative and worldview that convinces people that terrorism is the only available means of getting what they want. As I wrote here, these narratives have a very specific structure that sets people up for terrorism:

Long before they turn dangerous, political and religious groups take their first step down that road by adopting a worldview that justifies eventual violent action. The particulars of the narrative vary, but the basic themes are always the same. First: their story is apocalyptic, insisting that the end of the world as we've known it is near. Second: it divides the world into a Good-versus-Evil/Us-versus-Them dualism that encourages the group to interpret even small personal, social, or political events as major battles in a Great Cosmic Struggle -- a habit of mind that leads the group to demonize anyone who disagrees with them. This struggle also encourages members to invest everyday events with huge existential meaning, and as a result sometimes overreact wildly to very mundane stuff.

Third: this split allows for a major retreat from consensus reality and the mainstream culture. The group rejects the idea that they share a common future with the rest of society, and curls up into its own insular worldview that's impervious to the outside culture's reasoning or facts. Fourth: insiders feel like they're a persecuted, prophetic elite who are being opposed by wicked, tyrannical forces. Left to fester, this paranoia will eventually drive the group to make concrete preparations for self-defense -- and perhaps go on the offense against their perceived persecutors. Fifth: communities following this logic will also advocate the elimination of their enemies by any means necessary, in order to purify the world for their ideology.

Once people have accepted these ideas as truth, terrorist violence begins to seem like an unavoidable imperative -- and lone wolves, smelling blood, will start to hunt for targets.

4. This is just a minority movement that isn't really capable of changing anything. We don't really need to worry about it.

False. And evidence of tremendous denial.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of hate groups in the US is up 40% since 2000, with nearly 1000 such groups active across the country right now. Fueled by bone-deep racism, an unnatural terror of liberal government, frustration over the economic downturn, and fears about America's loss of world standing, they tell us, the militant right is rising again. You can find groups in every corner of the country, incidents of racist violence are rising; and the traffic on far-right websites is up, too.

Make no mistake: the right-wing radicals are angry, and there are enough of them out there to do some real damage. As noted, they're far more cohesive and better-connected than they've ever been. And they're only getting started.

5. It's not fair to hold right-wing media talking heads responsible for the things their listeners might do.

Riiight.

Advertisers will spend about $50 billion this year on TV ads, and another $15 billion on radio. That's a lot of money. These ads take up roughly one-third of every hour of airtime -- and sponsors pay up gladly, because long experience has shown that broadcast ads are a very powerful way to influence consumer behavior.

But this argument asks us to believe that what happens during the other 40 minutes per hour has absolutely no effect on anybody, ever. Got that? Ads: Powerful influences on behavior. Featured content: No influence whatsoever. Absurd.

Furthermore: conservatives have railed against Hollywood for decades, claiming that movies, TV shows, music, and videogames are a powerful corrupting influence on the country's morals. They've howled even louder in recent years about Al-Jazeera's perceived negative effect on the political discourse in the Middle East. But when it comes to their own media -- no, no, nothing to see here. Nobody's really listening to us, let alone acting on anything we might say. How could you even suggest such a thing?

As usual, they're trying to have it both ways. The religious right came to power almost exclusively on the persuasive (and fundraising) strength of cable TV shows. The conservative grip on the country's red counties is largely attributable to right-wing talk radio and FOX News. Obviously, conservatives strongly believe that other people's media have tremendous power to undermine their preferred narratives; and there's no denying that they've been very aggressive in using it to promote their own worldview for decades.

But now they're turning around and insisting that nope -- nobody ever did anything because some talking head told them to. And that sound you hear? Don't worry -- it's just the head of the ad sales department quietly having a stroke because we've completely undermined her ability to ever sell another spot.

6. All that crazy stuff you hear on the right -- you can find the left wing saying things just as bad. They're equally culpable for how bad it all its.

False. There is no equivalency whatsoever to be drawn here.

It’s absolutely true that the commenters can get just as out of hand on liberal sites as they do on conservative ones. (And most of us who've been hanging around the Internets for a while have the flamethrower scars to prove it.) But the problem has nothing to do with the commenters. It has to do with the opinion leaders who are driving the conversation.

On the right, it's actually hard to name a single major voice who hasn’t called for the outright extermination, silencing, harassment, or killing of liberals. Rush. Bill O’Reilly. Ann Coulter. Sean Hannity. Laura Ingraham. Michelle Malkin. Michael Savage. Glenn Beck. Bernard Goldberg, who has been cited by at least one assassin as the inspiration for his actions. Michael Reagan, just yesterday. This kind of eliminationist language is stock in trade on the right. A lot of them literally cannot get through the week without it.

And I’m sorry -- but you just don’t hear anything like this same murderous vitriol coming from any of the major voices on the left. Kos’ commenters may engage in that, but Kos himself does not. Nor does Arianna. Ed Schultz talks tough, but he's never called for liberals to silence conservatives. Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow are flaming liberals — but they would choke on air before actually threatening anyone with bodily harm. Both of them have said repeatedly that they regard that kind of thing as a grossly irresponsible use of a media soapbox. Every reputable left-wing leader or talker wholeheartedly agrees.

Furthermore: you don’t see Volvos and Priuses (Prii?) out there sporting "conservative hunting licenses,” despite the fact that "liberal hunting licenses" have been a hot item on the right for years. We’re not the ones driving the huge surge in gun purchases, either. And most importantly: You don’t see us out there shooting up fundamentalist churches, crisis pregnancy clinics, conservative gatherings, or cops. You have to go all the way back to the 1970s to find anything like that kind of overt political terrorist violence coming from the left. But starting in the 1980s, we've had ongoing waves of it coming out of the right -- now including the nine separate violent right-wing attacks on innocent Americans since Obama was inaugurated.

I agree that it’s time to dial this down. But since it's the right wing who gathers power by whipping up people’s fear and anger — and it's the right wing (and only the right wing) that's now actually taking up arms and killing people — then all I have to say is:

You first.

7. "Dial it down?" Don't you mean that you want to use the power of government to forcibly shut up right-wing hate talkers?

False. There are a few folks in Congress who tried to gin up support for some kind of legislation -- but progressives should resist this impulse, and denounce it as the shameless grandstanding that it is. We believe in the First Amendment. And if we compromise it now, we're no better than the Bush-era conservatives who were so eager to shred the Constitution when they felt threatened. We are better than that -- or should be.

Besides, we've already perfected a tried-and-true method that actually works. Even better: it's grounded completely in conservative free-market philosophy; so if when the right wing starts blustering about it, we get to fire right back and call them out as hypocrites. Big fun all around...and so much more elegant than wantonly trampling on people's civil rights.

Short and simple: we take our appeal to the advertisers. We note who the hate talkers are, what they're saying, what date and time they said it -- and then we write letters to the CEOs of the companies that sponsored those shows. Do these people speak for you? Is this the kind of media you want your product associated with? If the answer is no, what do you intend to do about it?

Note that this is not a boycott -- just a call for moral accountability. Being associated with hate speech is so bad for business in so many ways that no boycott should be required. It taints the brand. It usually violates the sponsors' own HR standards -- any employee who said that stuff at the office would be canned on the spot. It's horrible PR, especially if some enterprising blogger decides to make an issue out of it. Simply pointing that out has often been enough to convince executives that it's a bad idea, and they need to get out before it blows up in their faces.

Don Imus lost his show this way. So did KSFO's Melanie Morgan. (There's even a verb for it -- "spockoed" -- referring to the blogger who used this technique to get Morgan and several other California hate talkers off the air.) It turns out that advertisers actually read these letters -- especially when they're getting them by the hundreds. It doesn't take much of this before they pull back their ads; and when their major sponsors walk away, the talkers lose their shows. They may thrash a little -- but usually, it's all over in a matter of just a few weeks.

Note, too, that both TV and radio stations are already losing revenue year over year at a rate that's starting to rival newspapers, so they're probably even more exquisitely sensitive to this kind of pressure now than they were just a couple years ago. If we want these people off this air, this is the way to get them gone for good -- and make the cultural point that this garbage is no longer acceptable on the nation's airwaves.

8. But what you're suggesting is censorship! You're trying to censor free speech!

Oh, please. Anybody who argues this with a straight face shouldn't be allowed into a voting booth until they're sent back to eighth-grade civics for a basic refresher, because they apparently know less about the Constitution than the average immigrant who's had to take a citizenship test.

Follow me here: "Censorship" is strictly defined as "government suppression of free speech."

When citizens appeal directly to advertisers, that's not censorship, because the government isn't anywhere in the mix. It's just the Almighty Divine Hand of the Unfettered Free Market at work, y'all. The sponsors are voting with their dollars -- which, in the conservative free-market utopia, is precisely how it's supposed to work.

9. What about that guy who shot the recruiters in Arkansas -- isn't that proof that the left wing is just as bad as the right?

False. I mean: really, really false.

Abdulhakim Mohammed's assassination of two military recruiters was an act of Muslim terrorism, no different than 9/11 or the London subway bombings or Richard Reid and his amazing explosive sneakers. He didn't have a pile of Thom Hartmann books in his apartment. There have been no reports that his computer bookmarks linked to Firedoglake and Crooks & Liars. Near as we can tell, Mohammed was radicalized after being held and abused in a Yemeni prison -- and had absolutely no association with the American left at all.

Yes, he said that he did it because he protested the war. (I actually fielded a radio caller who insisted that his opposition to the war was de facto proof that he's a raving liberal.) But here's a news flash, kiddos: You don't need to be a progressive to think the war was a bad idea. It may come as a surprise to learn that there are a lot of people in other parts of the world who also think it was a bad idea. An absolutely shocking number of them are Muslims and/or people who've spent time in the Middle East. Go figure.

It's a sign of how far detached from reality the right wing is that it no longer can tell the essential difference between Muslim terrorists and garden-variety American progressives. We're not wrong to ask: should people who are that thoroughly blinded by their prejudices be issued drivers' licenses?

* * *

This is terrorism we're dealing with. We can't afford to let ourselves be distracted by spin. We will not be able to respond effectively until we're able to deal in facts. The sooner we shoot down these myths, the sooner we'll be able dispel fear, think clearly, and start having some real, honest conversations about the actual threats we face.

Cross-posted from Blog for Our Future

The Two Evangelical Futures

drawing by Art Spiegelman

--by Sara

Over the past year, my maunderings on the fate of the Religious Right in America have gone off in two apparently opposite and contradictory directions. On one hand, I've been making the argument that Evangelicals are undergoing a significant cultural shift, which is changing the face of fundamentalism as we've known it for the past 30 years; and that this may be an occasion for some sunny optimism concerning the future of our democracy. On the other, I've been writing dire reminders that religious authoritarians have been with us from the beginning, and will be with us always -- and these posts have been clouded with warning, caution, and despair.

Contrary to appearances, this is not evidence of incipient schizophrenia on the part of your loyal reporter. Rather, I presented both scenarios because both of them are substantially true. And the future they point to is not one that's either/or. We're now entering new era that's going to be increasingly both/and for a while; and if we're going to read the signs properly, we need to understand the dynamics of the new dialectic that's emerging.

One The One Hand....
On the "new day dawning" side, there's been a lot of buzz this week over David Kirkpatrick's article in the New York Times about the changes that lie ahead for Evangelicals. It's a well-researched, insightful article, and essential reading for anyone who's concerned with the interplay between religion and politics. And it strongly supports the best-case scenario. Kirkpatrick points out that the old guard is passing, and the new guard isn't interested in governing their flocks by manipulating the same old hot-button issues. He's mostly right, and we need to understand why. Taking the long futures view, there are a couple large-scale forces at work that will continue to support this trend.

The first is simple demographics. The existing far-right religious coalition first congealed around people's fear of the social changes brought by the 1960s and 70s. Many of those changes were centered around gender roles, sexuality, and family structures -- which is precisely why the religious right's backlash aimed very specifically at issues like controlling sexuality, shoring up rigid gender roles, and limiting the definition of "family" to one tight script with no deviations (or deviants) allowed. These topics were deliberately chosen as a calculated response targeted to the passions of that moment in time.

These messages are losing their impact for one simple reason: that moment is over. It's all ancient history now. Nobody under 40 remembers the '70s; increasingly, the old-style culture war is an obsession that's only shared by the aging members of the congregation. After all, you can't scare the kids with a boogeyman they grew up living next door to, and learned to get along with better than their elders ever did. As the recent Barna study revealed (and Obama is learning the hard way), over 80% of them see the old anti-gay crusades as simply hateful. While they may never come to terms with abortion, and some are still quite committed to traditional family structures, they're understandably reluctant to throw their energies into the ancient, narrow political battles that have left their elders feeling cynical, defeated, and used. Their generation has its own challenges, and Kirkpatrick notes rightly that they're far more eager to engage those instead.

This is an old and familiar cycle in American Protestantism. Any number of firebrand sects, from the Quakers to the Methodists, have emerged in a blaze of theological passion tailor-made for the issues of the day -- only to find their relevance dimming as times changes, and other issues emerged. It's very typical for these sects to either go mainstream or vanish entirely within three or four generations. The core ideas that made their voices so essential in one moment make them irrelevant in the next. They reach a point where they either re-invent themselves and find some new and more compelling messages, or they die.

A second force at work here is the natural lifecycle of fundamentalist movements. Karen Armstrong writes that, throughout history, fundamentalisms end in one of two ways. The vast majority of movements fall apart due to internal schism, or are betrayed by their (what we would now identify as high-SDO) leadership, long before they ever achieve their goals. But the handful that succeed in acquiring real social or political power face another problem. These movements are, by definition, based on utopian idealism rooted in a literal interpretation of ancient scripture. Unfortunately, when they're finally put in charge, reality bites back hard: there's always a day of hard awakening when they realize those old texts provide almost no useful advice for governing a modern society.

I've said before that the surest cure for fundamentalism is a big, healthy dose of Life In The Real World; and Armstrong corroborates that this same principle works for governments and movements as just well as it does for individuals. Historically, putting fundies in charge always forces them to moderate their positions and reconnect with the complexities of the reality-based world. Suddenly, you hear die-hard Biblical literalists talking about how important it is to interpret scripture in light of the cultural context of its time. People who thought they were going to rule by the word of Jesus suddenly realize just how many of those words were about taking care of other people, including non-believers. They realize that good policy requires good research (and good science, and good history); and that responsible, accountable people don't have the luxury of behaving like emotional six-year-olds. Armstrong says that a big sobering dose of reality moderated the politics of post-revolutionary Iran within just three or four years. People expected the mullahs to actually govern, not just pontificate. And they realized, quickly, that they had to stop being so heavenly-minded if they were going to be any earthly good.

Here in the US, history will remember the Bush years as the explosion that resulted when a wide variety of right-wing utopian fantasies collided with reality. Within the religious right, they're now having to make serious choices about how they're going to wield their new-found power; and work through complex moral arguments about what those scriptures mean in dealing with real-world issues. Nothing, it turns out, is remotely as black-and-white as they thought it was. Learning to see reality in all those messy shades of gray is, in the end, how all successful radical movements eventually calm down and join the mainstream.

On The Other Hand....
It's not all happy news, though. While the softer core of fundamentalists will likely be swept off into the mainstream, we're still left with Bob Altemeyer's bald fact: at any given time, about 25% of the population has right-wing authoritarian tendencies. And the harder core of those people -- the 12% who organize their whole lives around their addiction to anger -- are not going anywhere. Indeed, some of the old-line leaders already working overtime to install some new Pavlovian drool bells on these people, buttons can be pressed at will to stimulate the two-minute hate that gives their followers their daily buzz and keeps those donor checks rolling in.

Over at Talk2Action, Rob Boston of Americans United argues that reports of the demise of the old-line religious right are greatly exaggerated:

One recent poll found that 27 percent of Republican voters would bolt the party if a pro-choice candidate is nominated. It's a good bet these are Religious Right voters, and their defection from the GOP could not help but alter the dynamic of the race.

The recent "Values Voter Summit" is further evidence of the Religious Right's continued power. The turnout of more than 2,000 activists rivaled the numbers the Christian Coalition brought to Washington during its heyday. Every Republican candidate was there, pledging fealty to the Religious Right's pet issues. One wonders why they came to woo a dead movement.

We must also look at resources. A recent report by Americans United found that the nation's top Religious Right groups are better funded than ever. James Dobson's Focus on the Family took in $142.2 million in 2006, a $4.4 million increase over the previous year. Tony Perkins' Family Research Council took in $10.3 million in 2006, an increase of over $900,000 over the previous year.

It is true that some Religious Right leaders have died recently, notably Jerry Falwell and D. James Kennedy. But movement leaders come and go. Falwell's son, Jonathan, is already working to take his place. (The younger Falwell is mobilizing pastors on behalf of the GOP in state elections next month.) Behind the scenes, figures like far-right pastors Rick Scarborough and Rod Parsley are working to build a national presence.

The money will always be there, as long as there's a Reverend Moon, a Howard Ahmanson, and a Richard Sciafe to fund them. Selling authoritarian hate is a big business in America; and those who do it well will never want for backers.

But money is only half of the survival equation. The other is finding a new red-meat issue. The right wing needs a new boogeyman: it cannot survive without one. The ghosts of their ancient failed campaigns against blacks and gays (and, occasionally, Asians and Jews -- either of whom, for good measure, can also be read as code for "Communist") will always be invoked -- but since those fights are over, they don't generate the emotional heat required to keep the country's current authoritarian leadership in power. They need a fresh target that's worthy of a renewed chorus of eliminationist rhetoric -- some group that can reliably keep those rallies full and those checks rolling in.

For a while, fronted by the Minutemen, they tried to declare war on Mexicans. Unfortunately, they forgot one important criterion for the any hate campaign: you need to pick on someone that the target audience doesn't actually see every day. Too many Americans actually live or work among Mexicans, which makes it much harder to mass-market cartoon stereotypes about them. And (perhaps more importantly) too many of our high-SDO authoritarian class make a handsome living by exploiting them, and don't want that fact to become part of the public discussion. As an issue, Mexican-hating has some limited potential; but it's doesn't generate hysteria and panic on the vast scale that race-baiting and gay-bashing did. Compared to those past campaigns, it's small potatoes. They need something bigger. Much bigger.

And it appears that they've found it. It turns out that there are a billion people to hate -- and even better, they're all way over on the other side of the world where there's no danger that RWA followers will ever meet up with them (unless they're sent as soldiers to kill them) and have their stereotypes challenged. Building on post-9/11 insanity, religious and political authoritarians are working overtime to cement the frame that the entire Muslim world constitutes the new existential threat to America. You can hear it in the pulpits; you can hear it on Fox News. Muslims are the New Frontier in American hate, the coming investment in the authoritarian future, the place where today's ambitious hatemongers are now staking their claim to glory in the decades ahead.

It's a powerful narrative, with a lot of potential for future mischief -- the best bet for a big, gnarly, long-term enemy they've had since they lost the Commies. And there's a significant portion of the younger generation for whom hating ragheads, whom they don't know, has far more appeal than hating gays, whom they do.

This sales job is going to be big trouble if it succeeds. It will justify endless war in the Middle East, which will, very soon now, bankrupt America and destroy any hope we may have for future greatness. (Disaster capitalists, on the other hand, stand to profit handsomely from this meme.) Tagging all Muslims as terrorists not only results in humiliating gaffes and massive injustices; it also blinds us to the fact that people of other races, religions, and nationalities can be terrorists, too -- a wrong assumption that may someday prove fatal. Fanning a white-hot fear of Muslims now will add extra fury to the "stabbed-in-the-back" argument when it's used to persecute liberals at war's end. The more Muslim-hatred they can foment now, the worse this "treachery" will appear to be. So it's very much in our interest to strangle this idea before it takes hold.

But there's even more at stake. It's possible that the ultimate success or failure of the new, re-directed authoritarian right will directly depend on how well they can sell the fear of the Muslim boogeyman in the months ahead. Without it, they will have no control over their followers -- and hence, no political leverage. Right now, they're still rolling it out; it hasn't spread too far even within far-right circles yet. If we can contain it while it's still a fringe idea, the implications for our future political discourse will be truly world-changing.

Americans are notorious for succumbing to the appeal of the boogeyman as a means of self-identification; sometimes, it seems our entire sense of ourselves has always depended on having an enemy to contrast ourselves with. It's time to recognize that this soul hunger for an enemy to hate is a classically authoritarian instinct; and throughout our history, nobody but authoritarians have ever profited from indulging it. If the dominant culture confidently rejects the new enemy they're offering now, we'll go a long way toward cutting off the right wing's ability to influence our future.

Kirkpatrick is right. The soft core RWA followers are finally melting away (as I predicted they would a year ago), finding ways and means to re-join the real world and re-engage with American society. But Boston's right, too: the hard core is going nowhere. It will be smaller -- and without the soft-core to keep them in touch with real-world concerns, it will be far more rigid and angry, too. Ironically, our best hope may be that the more extreme they become, the more anathema they'll be in the eyes of the rest of America. Nobody serious will want to be seen with the crazies.

This discussion about "whither the religious right" will keep unfolding over the next several months, as people look for signs and wonders indicating the arrival of one predicted future or the other. But the clear-eyed course is the one that refuses to pick. Both stories are true. Both factions are in the process of re-negotiating their places in American society, and both will inevitably undergo large-scale changes as a result. It's in the way those re-negotiations unfold, and the choices that get made, that the real future of the religious right will be written.

The swiftboating of American journalism

-- by Dave

Every time I hear a professional journalist bleat about how unreliable and unprofessional bloggers are, it's difficult refrain from indulging a low mordant chuckle. It's not as though the public is falling for this high-and-mighty "we're professionals with standards that matter" schtick much anymore.

As Sam Smith of Scholars and Rogues points out, the bloom has long since departed that particular rose:

-- A 2004 Gallup Poll says “Americans rate the trustworthiness of journalists at about the level of politicians and as only slightly more credible than used-car salesmen.”

-- Only about one in five Americans “believe journalists have high ethical standards, ranking them below auto mechanics but tied with members of Congress.”

-- Only “one in four people believe what they read in the newspapers.”

-- Chicago Tribune Editor Charles M. Madigan says: “If you are a journalist, you should probably just assume that you come across as a liar.”

-- A 1999 American Society of Newspaper Editors survey said that “53 percent of the public view the press as out of touch with mainstream America, while 78 percent think journalists pay more attention to the interests of their editors than their readers.”

-- About 22 percent of respondents to a 2003 Pew survey said they thought “the unethical practices of [Jayson] Blair, which included fabricating sources and events, occur frequently among journalists, while 36 percent said they thought wrongdoing happened occasionally. Another 58 percent believed journalists didn’t care about inaccuracies.”

The fact is that the utter failure of the professional media in America to adequately perform its function as truth-tellers and guardians of the public interest in the past decade has had catastrophic consequences for the country, beginning with 9/11 and continuing through the Iraq war. And it's been that failure which is largely responsible for the rise of the blogosphere and related Web media, especially as the way more and more Americans are getting their information.

Indeed, we've been its sharpest critics, and blogs and sites devoted primarily to media criticism -- particularly those on the left, including The Daily Howler and Media Matters, as well as Eschaton or Hullabaloo -- have become some of the most successful, visible and effective voices on behalf of progressives, especially because they recognize the role the media have in fomenting right-wing crap aimed primarily at demonizing and belittling progressives and their causes.

If you've read these sites over the years, you can't help but be impressed by the mounting evidence of a serious dysfunction in the former profession of ink-stained wretches. The basic pathology is a simple failure to be committed to the truth based on known facts, a pathology that embodies itself in the false middle reporting that offers its audience a fake "balance" between the factual and the fraudulent. But now I think it's reaching the point of metastasis: an epidemic of crisis proportions.

Because now, thanks to figures like CNN's Lou Dobbs and Fox's Bill O'Reilly, it's possible to run completely bogus information and successfully pawn it off as real without paying any consequences whatsoever. Indeed, they can now fob off this false reporting as the highlight of their news broadcasts.

Exhibit A: Alex Koppelman's riveting Salon piece (which, unfortunately, seems to have attracted very little blogospheric attention) on the phenomenal case of the grotesque misreportage, by Dobbs and others, of the cases of two border-patrol agents who were convicted of shooting an escaping border crosser.

You all remember the CNN broadcasts about the case, complete with their own "Border Betrayal" logo, such as the piece in the video above. But as Koppelman explains, the facts of the case are almost completely at variance with the cold facts of the case, particularly as they've emerged in court.

That, however, has not stopped Dobbs and the anti-immigrant crowd:

How did Ramos and Compean get reinvented as right-wing heroes? The answer lies in the way Americans get their information, from a fragmented news media that makes it easier than ever to tune out opposing views and inconvenient truths. When people seek "facts" only from sources with which they agree, it's possible for demonstrable untruths to enter the narrative and remain there unchallenged. The ballad of Ramos and Compean is a story that one side of America's polarized culture has gotten all wrong and that much of the other side -- and the rest of the country -- has never even heard.

A number of people, as Koppelman reports, have played leading roles in this, but Dobbs is unquestionably at the fore:

There are five major players in the transformation of Ramos and Compean from cops who tried to cover up a bad shooting into martyred heroes of the great conservative pushback against illegal immigration. The most important of them is Lou Dobbs, the host of CNN's "Lou Dobbs Tonight." Three other players -- journalist Sara A. Carter, activist Andy Ramirez and union official T.J. Bonner -- are previously obscure figures who appeared on Dobbs' show. The fifth is Jerome Corsi, the conservative commentator who coauthored the book, "Unfit for Command," that launched the Swift-boating of John Kerry. Corsi pushed the cause of Ramos and Compean on the Internet while Dobbs was pushing it on TV. All of them have served as megaphones for the right-wing's counter-narrative of the case.

Lou Dobbs, whose show straddles the line between news and advocacy, has nearly doubled his ratings in the past two years by taking a strong stand against illegal immigration. Almost nightly, he includes an opinionated segment on immigration under such rubrics as "Border Betrayal" and "Busted Border." As soon as he noticed the Ramos and Compean story in August 2006, he became the prime mover in its coverage. His program has so far featured more than 100 segments on the Ramos and Compean case, including interviews with both agents that have been clipped and rebroadcast in other episodes.

Dobbs set the tone for his approach to the Ramos and Compean case with his first segment about the agents, on Aug. 9, 2006. (CNN did not respond to a request for an interview with Dobbs.) He introduced a short interview with Ignacio Ramos by saying, "Support is flooding in from all across the country tonight for two Border Patrol agents in Texas who could be sentenced to 20 years in prison for shooting a Mexican drug smuggler. Amazingly, federal prosecutors allowed the smuggler to walk free." The next day, Dobbs ended a second segment on the agents with one of his famous audience polls. The question for viewers was, "Do you believe the Justice Department should be giving immunity to illegal alien drug smugglers in order to prosecute U.S. Border Patrol agents for breaking administrative regulations? ... Yes or no."

Dobbs has been helped along by his CNN Headline News cohort, Glenn Beck, who actually used the occasion of a report on Ramos and Compean to cast his lot with the John Birch Society. Koppelman details the activities of a number of similarly lesser figures, but notes that one in particular has played a behind-the-scenes role in much of the broader reportage: Jerome Corsi.

Yep, that Jerome Corsi. The fellow behind the "Swift Boat Veterans" scam that crippled John Kerry. His views on immigration, of course, are also well known; he teamed up with Minutemen leader Jim Gilchrist awhile back to write a book about the threat to the nation posed by immigrants. Note that back then, Corsi was evincing deep concern about the plight of border crossers in, er, less than convincing fashion:

"Politicians who believe that illegal immigration can be ignored must realize that Mexicans and others are dying every day along our nation's borders," adds Corsi, whose book "Unfit for Command" played a key role in convincing the American people to reject John Kerry's 2004 presidential bid. "These economic refugees are often abandoned and left to die by the human traffickers and Mexican soldiers who smuggle them across the border. It's nothing less than a tragedy."

But when two Border Patrol agents turn out to be among the people shooting at border crossers, Corsi evidently is not all that sympathetic. To wit, from Koppelman:

Lou Dobbs garners more than 800,000 viewers nightly, and he and guests like Bonner have been primarily responsible for the right's reshaping of the Ramos and Compean story. The case, however, has also been a focus of right-wing obsession on the Internet. Reporter Jerome Corsi has been instrumental in advancing the narrative on the Web. A reporter for WorldNetDaily, Corsi is best-known for his role in the Swift-boat movement. His latest book is "The Late Great USA: The Coming Merger With Mexico and Canada," a long conspiracy theory in which he claims to expose secret plans for a "North American Union" that would combine the three countries into one.

Corsi's most important contribution to the reworked conservative version of the Ramos and Compean case is to attempt to absolve the agents of a coverup. In reality, the incident was only discovered, and the agents prosecuted, because Border Patrol Agent Rene Sanchez, hundreds of miles away in Arizona, heard about it through his mother-in-law. In Corsi's version, however, Ramos and Compean's supervisors knew about the shooting as soon as it happened. Corsi relies on an early, ambiguous memo written by the Department of Homeland Security officer who investigated the shooting; the memo lists the agents' two supervisors among the Border Patrol personnel who were either at the location, helped destroy evidence, "and/or knew/heard about the shooting." The memo apparently refers to the known fact that the supervisors were at the scene of the shooting after it occurred but were not aware that it had occurred. At trial, the defense never tried to claim that the supervisors were present during the shooting, the investigator didn't testify that the supervisors were present at the shooting or had knowledge of it, and the supervisors took the stand themselves to insist they'd had no knowledge of the shooting till after Ramos and Compean were arrested. Compean himself admitted at one internal Border Patrol disciplinary hearing that he didn't report the shooting to his bosses because he didn't want to get in trouble.

Corsi is implying that the supervisors perjured themselves at trial. Contacted by Salon, Corsi stood by his scenario.

Unfortunately, there's been little attention paid yet to Koppelman's report, which is damning indeed, and should be broadly viewed by Dobbs' journalistic peers as an indictment of his journalistic standards. But that hasn't happened. Dobbs continues to play the story as factual, and Ramos and Compean are still martyrs of the nativist right.

Sam Smith, I think, has the perspective right on what's happened: The consolidation and commoditization of the nation's media in the past twenty years and more has significantly diminished its capacity to police itself, particularly when the offenders are major media figureheads and work for ratings-driven organizations like major broadcast news networks and major newspapers:

Regardless of publisher perception or economic reality, though, it’s painfully clear that coverage has deteriorated and that cost-cutting and revenue-rage has been at the core of the problem. A concern for the public interest may continue to exist in the newsroom as an inherent artifact of the essential character common in those drawn to the profession (hard reporting is like teaching - nobody is in it for the money), but it will never again be a primary motivator for the dominant organizations of the industry (if, in fact, it ever was).

The result is a news landscape driven by the logic of profit, not by the logic of public and community interest. Established networks, newspapers and magazines are therefore failing in their mission to provide reliable coverage of the events that shape the lives of their constituents.

This explain what’s happening with the news industry, but what does this have to do with “objectivity”? A couple things, actually. First, historically “journalist” has been a profession with canonized ethics and codes of conduct. It has been the physical embodiment of what reporting was, and objectivity was, in some measure, equivalent to the canons in other professions - like the Hippocratic Oath for doctors or the Lawyer’s Oath for attorneys. If the reporter came through a journalism school these principles were ingrained in his or her education from the first day of class; reporters who arrived in the newsroom via other paths got a quick and heavy dose of on-the-job training.

There’s nowhere else I’m aware of where these principles are being taught, so as the traditional institutions fade, so also do the professional codes that defined the activities of those who worked there.

Second, those codes seems to matter less and less even in the legacy organizations. Review the SPJ ethics code, then see how well you think the people at FOX, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, and even places like USA Today are adhering to them. Those reporters may not be the models of professional behavior we wish they were, but they’re smart enough to know that while they’re not going to get fired for trampling an ethics code, they’re out the door the instant ratings and readership slip.

'Swiftboating', since the Kerry campaign, has come to representing a kind of pirating of the truth for partisan purposes. It's often seen primarily as a kind of campaign tactic, a way of undermining an opponent's message.

But it cannot succeed without the acquiesence of a lazy and compliant media dedicated more to ratings, horse races and beauty contests than to their duties as guardians of the public discourse. What 'Swiftboating' really reflects is the abject failure of journalists to reject this for the obvious propaganda strategy it is and to fulfill their obligations to truthfulness.

And it can't be any more painfully manifested than in the phony reportage on Ramos and Compean.

What's Lynching Got To Do With The Price of Cotton?

-- by Sara

Via Will Shetterly, this Livejournal entry, written last month by loligo:

As early as 1940, social scientists noticed that if you looked at the history of the Deep South, whenever cotton prices fell, lynchings tended to jump. The link seems to pass what one of my professors used to call "the intra-ocular trauma test" ("It hits you right between the eyes!"), but in the decades since then, the size, the meaning, and indeed the very existence of that link have been debated.

Today we have many more sophisticated statistical techniques on hand than we did in the 1940's. In 1990 in the American Sociological Review, Stewart Tolney and E.M. Beck published what is probably the definitive study of the cotton/lynching connection for the years 1882-1930. Importantly, they controlled for price changes due to inflation (among many other variables). They found that when they examined the price of cotton in constant dollars, falling prices meant more lynchings and rising prices meant fewer. However, when the price of cotton rose as part of general inflation, lynchings increased.

In the "King Cotton" regions of the South in that era, there was a dramatic economic gulf between the major planters and employers on the one hand (all white), and the day laborers, sharecroppers, and tenant farmers on the other (some white and some black). Predictably, the black workers were on average even poorer than the whites. So when cotton prices dropped, white and black workers shared all the typical stressors of poverty, though in differing amounts. But this economic pressure brought about another stressor for African-Americans that was completely absent for whites: increased risk of being murdered by an angry mob.

...[T]his study of lynchings shows that race can play a dynamic role in the maintenance of class systems. It certainly worked out well for the white elite, didn't it, that poor whites chose to ally themselves with wealthy whites in racial oppression of poor blacks, rather than making common cause with the blacks against their economic oppressors? I don't know much about the history of progressive movements in the US, but Tolnay & Beck say that there was a brief time at the beginning of the Populist movement when whites and blacks *were* starting to work together... before someone, somewhere stirred shit up, and the Populist movement became radically racist, and the first great wave of lynchings was unleashed.

The "brief wave" was indeed at the very beginning, back in the 1880s when the first Populist stirrings were starting to rise out of a series of financial panics that left American farmers in dire straits. In the years after the Civil War, as James Loewen has pointed out, there was hardly a town of any size in the country that didn't have at least a handful of African-Americans trying to make a go of it -- often, quite successfully. They were the Populist movement's natural allies -- until that "first great wave of lynchings," which really began to take off around 1890, gathered momentum, and swept throughout the South for the next 60 years. (In the North and West, this is also when sundowning began in earnest.)

It's old news that economic stress increases tension between the various working classes in America. But this study brings up a couple points that shed some new light on where we find ourselves today.

First, the study is striking in that it shows very directly how a poorly-performing economy correlates with extreme forms of racial violence. Whether it's violence against African-Americans in the South during the lynching years, Asians on the West Coast in the first part of the 20th century, or Mexicans in today's faltering market, a depressed white working class always means those just below them in the economic pecking order are sitting ducks for a wave of vigilante violence. The more you look at the history, the clearer it appears that the cause-and-effect relationship is both ubiquitous and inevitable. It's a fact of American life that whenever the economy tanks, people of color are going to pay the price in blood.

Right now, of course, the wealth gap in this country is yawning ever-wider. It's as big now as it was during the 1920s heyday of sundowning and lynching across the country. And so we shouldn't be surprised to find "Minutemen" and other racists threatening (and, occasionally, actually committing) violence against Mexican workers -- usually without much regard for their legal status. When you get this many have-nots, there are only two ways to go. They're either going to turn on each other -- or organize.

Which brings me to my second point. This kind of violence has always been instigated with a hard shove from the economic royalists, who would rather have the lower classes killing each other on the courthouse lawns rather than going inside the courthouses to challenge the structural inequalities they find so profitable. We know the Minutemen are backed by wealthy supporters, who are using the group to promote exactly the same kind of racial scapegoating that tore apart the early Populists -- and, no doubt, for exactly the same reasons. Now, as ever, divide-and-conquer is proving to be a handy-dandy little trick that never fails to prevent people with similar economic interests from recognizing their common concerns, and pulling together for real, long-term change.

We've seen this trick so many times before that you'd think we'd be onto it by now. But, now as ever: when the price of cotton falls, the number of lynchings rises. And somehow, the people who actually created both the gross inequalities and the racial animosities that lead to this kind of violence never seem to be the ones who actually end up swinging on the end of the rope.

------------------------

Back last June, I wrote a piece on how the ghosts of that wave of lynching still haunt communities throughout the South; and the ways that some of these towns are starting to confront that past -- and move beyond it at long last -- using the truth and reconciliation process. My homie Lower Manhattanite over at The Group News Blog has written a story from the inside about the ways this old history lingers on, poisoning families and communities even to this day. It's long -- his stuff always is -- but, even more than usual, it's worth every minute of your time.

More Minutemen

-- by Sara

PastorDan at Street Prophets posted recently on this "Minuteman" group in Ohio that's taken to making protests during services at liberal Christian churches. From the Columbus Dispatch's report:

A conservative Christian values group has been interrupting services at two central Ohio churches to protest their support for homosexuality.

Minutemen United vowed to attend services every Sunday.

The group started its crusade when First Baptist Church in Granville hosted "Love Makes a Family," a traveling exhibit by the Family Diversity Project showing photos of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender families.

The night the exhibit opened in July, members of Minutemen United stood outside and protested the exhibit and the church's open attitude toward homosexuality, said the Rev. Kathy Hurt, senior pastor at the Granville church.

Since then, the group has been visiting the church every Sunday, she said. On one of the first Sundays, six people came to the church's 11 a.m. service and addressed the congregation during a time designated for prayer requests and comments.

Hurt said a man, who introduced himself as a minister from the New Beginnings Church in Warsaw, Ohio, started to give a sermon about how the church was acting against God's word by accepting homosexuals.

Members of Minutemen United also visited King Avenue United Methodist Church in Columbus that same morning, said the Rev. John Keeny.

"They rebuked me as a pastor for preaching that God's love is for everyone," Keeny said.

Dan wanted to know if this group had any attachment to the Minutemen border patrol groups we've so often discussed here. Looking over their website, there doesn't appear to be any connection. This group, "Minutemen United," was organized in Ohio in 2002, and claims to comprise a group of culture warriors concerned about issues like Playboy ("entry-level pornography") in grocery stores and shutting down businesses where gays gather.

It's clear from reading their site that their agenda is driven by over-the-top hysterical homophobia; but I didn't find a word about border patrols. Like the border groups, they've appropriated the military imagery of the original Massachusetts patriots; however, their "Who We Are" page concludes with the obligatory statement that they are strictly non-violent and do not advocate the use of force in promoting their agenda; and the site is also free of the coded racist hate language that's a stock in trade of the border groups. (On the other hand, there's an absolutely bizarre page listing female teachers nationwide who've sexually abused their students -- though I didn't find a corresponding page on male teachers, of course. Did I mention that the founder of this group is a defrocked football coach?) So, Dan: no, this doesn't look like the same guys at all.

But their bullying attitude is definitely of a piece with a larger trend in right-wing behavior that's begun to emerge in recent months. I've written recently about the increasingly pushy way the religious authoritarians have been muscling others aside, revealing by their actions a new and dangerously expanded sense of entitlement. If the God's Bible trumps man's Constitution, they believe, then those who believe in the Bible have more rights than those who believe in the Constitution. And they're starting to act on that belief, elbowing their way to the front of the national microphone wherever it's offered, regardless of whether or not they have a legal right to it. Showing up at other people's churches -- invading their private property and sacred worship time -- with the intention of disrupting their services is right in line with this larger pattern of intimidation. (Can you imagine a left-wing political group doing something like this to a conservative church? Boundaries, people. They're called boundaries.) It's more evidence of the kind of escalating bully behavior I've been noting.

Though there's no connection between the groups, they partake of this same anti-democratic spirit that regards any difference as an existential challenge; and demonizes those who don't conform to their narrow ideas. Authoritarians are authoritarians wherever you find them; and it's a loss to the American civic religion that the good name of the Minutemen -- the original patriots who first put themselves on the line in defense of our individual rights so long ago -- has been co-opted by more than one group seeking to re-impose exactly the kind of reign of tyranny those first Minutemen fought to liberate us from.