Alex Jones' Defense of Trump Unleashes Obscene, Homophobic Attack on Congressman

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]


Alex Jones keeps saying he has nothing against gay people and thinks they’re wonderful. But then he keeps saying hateful and ultimately insane things about LGBT folk.

The most recent outburst came Wednesday, when Jones posted a video featuring the latest of his wildly obscene and homophobic rants directed at Rep. Adam Schiff—this time with a bug-eyed outburst worthy of Dr. Strangelove, urging President Trump to hit China with nuclear weapons pre-emptively and claiming: “The United States is preparing to nuke China!”


The video, posted to Jones’ YouTube channel, features an increasingly unhinged disquisition warning that China planned to engage the U.S. in a nuclear showdown—and then blaming liberals in Congress, particularly Rep. Schiff, for causing the problems:

JONES: This is what Communism delivers. This is what Venezuela delivers. This what all you people that want collectivism, and hate prosperity. Because you’re socially envious, and hate the prosperity because it makes you feel bad. And now you nihilistically want to start World War III, you assholes. If I wasn’t totally committed to stopping this, I would be getting out of the country with my family and getting to the Southern Hemisphere two years ago.

The world’s in the greatest danger ever, and the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are lined up, showing weakness in the face of all this garbage. And that’s why the Communist Chinese, the biggest mass murderers in history, don’t respect us. Because the Democratic Party and snot-nosed people like the intel deputy head, Adam Schiff over there, are scumbags.

You think having all those fairies and pansies up there, little chicken-necks, running around attacking our president all day, makes us strong? It makes us look weak. It doesn’t matter we’ve got ten to one nuclear weapons against China. Those crazy people have proven they’ll go to war. They’re completely psycho, like Kim Jong Un on power trips.

So if China keeps pushing, the only option is full commitment to hit China pre-emptively. That’s the only way to survive this nuclear and Trump knows it. And Russia has already been told they better stand down. The United States is preparing to nuke China! So get ready, assholes! You wanted it, you’re gonna get it! Turn that off! Goddamn it!

Jones is no stranger to hysterical vitriol; during the 2016 campaign, he worked himself up into a red-faced frenzy making the bizarre claim that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were literally possessed by demons. But if recent broadcasts are anything to judge by, nothing gets Jones quite as agitated as potential political threats to President Trump, the object of Jones’ furiously ardent admiration.

Jones has been on a mission attacking Schiff, D-CA, recently, fueled primarily by the congressman’s work as the Democrats’ leader on the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation of Donald Trump’s campaign ties to Russia. In a March 29 interview with Trump adviser/operative Roger Stone, he unleashed a tide of vitriol unusual even by Jones’ standards, particularly for its unapologetic obscenity:

STONE: What we’re hearing from the Democrats both in the House and Senate is red-baiting --

ALEX JONES: That’s on Drudge.

STONE: -- fear-mongering -- It is well beyond the point of recklessness, whether it is Adam Schiff who has maligned me or whether it is Senator Mark Warner or whether it is Senator John McCain. But let me tell you something, Alex, these guys are pussies. They talk a tough game. “We’re going to get Roger Stone in front of the committee.” Gentlemen, ladies, I am ready, I am more than ready --

JONES: In fact, let me say this right now. Let me tell -- I’m not against gay people. OK. I love them, they’re great folks. But Schiff looks like the archetypal cocksucker with those little deer-in-the-headlight eyes and all his stuff. And there’s something about this fairy, hopping around, bossing everybody around, trying to intimidate people like me and you, I want to tell Congressman Schiff and all the rest of them, “Hey listen asshole, quit saying Roger and I” -- and I’ve never used cussing in 22 years but the gloves are off -- “listen you son of a bitch, what the fuck’s your problem? You want to sit here and say that I’m a goddamn, fucking Russian. You get in my face with that I’ll beat your goddamn ass, you son of a bitch. You piece of shit. You fucking goddamn fucker. Listen fuckhead, you have fucking crossed a line. Get that through your goddamn fucking head. Stop pushing your shit. You’re the people that have fucked this country over and gangraped the shit out of it and lost an election. So stop shooting your mouth off claiming I’m the enemy. You got that you goddamn son of a bitch? Fill your hand.”

I’m sorry, but I’m done. You start calling me a foreign agent, those are fucking fighting words. Excuse me.

STONE: Yeah, I don’t think I have ever been in a campaign in which we disparage the patriotism of our opponents. Now, I’m not going to go there. But I think Adam Schiff has acted irresponsibly and I think he needs to be confronted with his exact words.

JONES: He’s sucking globalist dick.

Newsweek noted that some legal experts viewed Jones’ threat against Schiff as a potential violation of federal law prohibiting direct threats to elected federal officials. Rep. Schiff is married and has two daughters.

As with Jones’s declaimer at the outset of his rant saying he “loves” gay people, he has frequently claimed that, because he is a “libertarian,” he is ardently neutral on the issue of whether or not homosexuality is acceptable.

Meanwhile, out the other side of his mouth, Jones has blamed the gay community for the Orlando Pulse massacre in which 49 people, most of them LGBT, were killed and 53 wounded. (He first claimed the murders were “a false flag” event.) He has claimed the United Nations is ‘space cult’ plotting to make our children gay, or more precisely, “an asexual humanoid.” He claims that toxins introduced to Americans’ diets have been responsible for turning children gay.

Jones, the nation’s most prolific conspiracy theorist, has been an ardent Trump supporter since the spring of 2016. One of his favorite theories before and after the election has revolved around his claims that liberals and the intelligence community are plotting to assassinate Trump.

When Obama Was Elected: An Outpouring of Hate in 2008

Klansman Randy Gray, protesting Obama's election in November 2008 in suburban Detroit

I'm in the middle of writing my manuscript, Alt America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump (due out this summer from Verso Books) and I wanted to share this excerpt (derived from previously published text) to remind people that what is happening now with regard to the recent outbreak of hate crimes is starkly reminiscent of what happened immediately after Barack Obama's election in 2008.

And yes, I'm offering this somewhat in repudiation of the Trump defenders who are angry about anti-Trump protesters taking to the streets immediately after Trump's election without "giving him a chance." It's true that it took several more months before we saw "Impeach Obama" and "Where's The Birth Certificate" signs showing up at Tea Party rallies, but then, it did take awhile before the Koch Brothers and other corporate sponsors who footed the bill for those events to get their acts together. (And no, there is not a scintilla of evidence that George Soros is funding the current anti-Trump rallies.)

This is what happened immediately after Barack Obama's election. See if it sounds like anything happening currently.

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On the day Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, much of the nation – particularly those who supported and voted for him – celebrated the election of the first African American to the country’s highest office. For those who voted for his opponent, John McCain, there was naturally the usual bitterness and disappointment.

Among a certain subset of those Americans, however – especially those who opposed Obama precisely because he sought to become the nation’s first black president – it went well beyond the usual despair. For them, November 5, 2008, was the end of the world. Or at least, America as they knew it.

So maybe it wasn’t really a surprise that they responded that day with the special venom and violence peculiar to the American Right.

Like the noose strung in protest from a tree limb in Texas. Students at Baylor University in Waco discovered the noose hanging from a campus tree the evening of Election Day, near a site where angry Republican students had gathered a bunch of Obama yard signs and burned them in a big bonfire. That same evening, a riot nearly broke out when Obama supporters, chanting the new president’s name, were confronted by white students outside a residence hall who told them: “Any nigger who walks by Penland (Hall), we're going to kick their ass, we're going to jump him." The Obama supporters stopped and responded, "Excuse me?" Somehow they managed to keep the confrontation confined to a mere shouting match until police arrived and broke things up.

Then there were the students on the North Carolina State University campus in Raleigh, who spent Election Night spray-painting such fun-loving messages about Obama as “Let's shoot that Nigger in the head” and “Hang Obama by a noose.” The N.C. State administration was so upset by this behavior that it protected the students’ identities and refused to take any legal action against them or discipline them at all.

But those were just warm-ups from the student cheering section. The real thugs, exemplars of the dark side of the American psyche, were shortly making their mark.

That night, four young white men from Staten Island “decided to go after black people” in retaliation for Obama’s election. They first drove to the mostly black Park Hill neighborhood and assaulted a Liberian immigrant, beating him with a metal pipe and a police baton, in addition to the usual blows from fists and feet. Then they drove to Port Richmond, where they assaulted another black man and verbally threatened a Latino man and a group of black people. They finished up the night by attempting to drive next to a man walking home from his job as a Rite Aid manager – he was actually white, but this crew of geniuses managed to misidentify him as a black man – and club him with the police baton. Instead, they simply hit him with their car, throwing him off the windshield and into a coma for over a month.

All four of these men wound up convicted of hate crimes and would spend the duration of Obama’s first term in prison.

In Midland, Michigan, the day after the election, a discarded Ron Paul activist named Randy Gray (he had been peremptorily dismissed from the Paul campaign when his white-supremacist activism was revealed) stalked the sidewalk in the middle of a heavily trafficked intersection in town, dressed in full Ku Klux Klan regalia, waving an American flag. He also was toting a handgun. Police approached and talked to him, but let him continue his display after he told them it had nothing to do with Obama winning the presidency.

A busful of schoolkids in Rexburg, Idaho, started chanting “Assassinate Obama” just to tease the tiny minority of their fellow schoolkids who were Obama supporters. In Rexburg – where the population is over 90 percent Mormon – that’s about three kids in the entire school. District officials didn’t discipline the children who had led the chants, but it did send out a letter to their parents reminding them that students are to be told such behavior is unacceptable.

Then there were the arsons.

On election night, a black family in South Ogden, Utah, came home from volunteering at their local polling station to discover that their American flag had been torched.

The morning after the election, in Hardwick Township, New Jersey, a black man taking his eight-year-old daughter to school emerged from his front door to discover someone had burned a six-foot-tall cross on his lawn – right next to the man’s banner declaring Obama president. It had been torched too.

Another cross was burned on the lawn of the only black man in tiny Apolacon Township, Pennsylvania, the night after the election. A black church in Springfield, Massachusetts, was also burned to the ground the night of the election; eventually, three white men were arrested and charged with setting the fire as a hate crime.

And if the election itself wasn’t enough to bring the haters out of the woodwork, there was always Obama’s inauguration on January 21, 2009.

Two days before the big event, arsonists in Forsyth County, Georgia, set fire to the home of a woman who was known as a public supporter of Obama. Someone painted a racial slur on her fence, along with the warning, “Your black boy will die.”

On inauguration day, someone taped newspaper articles featuring Obama onto the apartment door of a woman in Jersey City, New Jersey, and set fire to it. Fortunately, the woman had stayed home to watch the inauguration on TV and smelled the burning, and she was able to extinguish the fire before it spread. If only she could have done the same for the hate that sparked the act.

The day after, a large 22-year-old skinhead named Keith Luke decided it was time to fight the “extinction” of the white race, so he bashed down the door of a Latino woman and her sister and shot them both; one died. Police cornered and arrested Luke before he could pull off the next planned stage of his shooting rampage, which was to have taken place at a local Jewish synagogue towards which he was driving when arrested. According to the DA, Luke intended to “kill as many Jews, blacks, and Hispanics as humanly possible ... before killing himself.” When he appeared in court a month later, Luke had carved a swastika into his forehead with a razor blade.

But the pain and violence inflicted by these haters was just beginning.

In all, the Southern Poverty Law Center counted more than 200 “hate-related” incidents around the election and inauguration of Barack Obama as the nation’s first African-American president.

Donald Trump May Not Be a Fascist, But He is Leading Us Merrily Down That Path

People who have studied the extremist right as a historical and sociopolitical phenomenon in depth are acutely aware of a simple truth: America has been very, very lucky so far when it comes to fascistic political movements.

And now, with the arrival of the Donald Trump 2016 phenomenon, that luck may be about to run out.

Nor is this phenomenon just a flash in the pan. Trump is the logical end result of an endless series of assaults on not just American liberalism, but on democratic institutions themselves, by the American right for many years. It is the long-term creep of radicalization of the right come home to roost.

Fascistic elements and tendencies have always been part of America’s DNA. Indeed, it can be said that some of the worst traits of fascism in Europe were borrowed from their American exemplars – particularly the eliminationist tendencies, manifested first in the form of racial and ethnic segregation, and ultimately in genocidal violence.

Hitler acknowledged at various times his admiration for the American genocide against Native Americans, as well as the segregationist policies of the Jim Crow regime in the South (on which the Nuremberg Race Laws were modeled) and the threat of the lynch mob embodied in the Ku Klux Klan. According to Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler was “passionately interested in the Ku Klux Klan. ... He seemed to think it was a political movement similar to his own." And indeed it was.

Despite the long-running presence of these elements, though, America has never yet given way to fascism. No doubt some of this, in the past half-century at least, was primarily fueled by the natural human recoil that occurred when we got to witness the end result of these tendencies when given the chance to rule by someone like Hitler – namely, the Holocaust. We learned to be appalled by racial and ethnic hatred, by segregation and eliminationism, because we saw the pile of corpses that they produced, and fled in terror.

Those of us who study fascism not just as a historical phenomenon, but as a living and breathing phenomenon that has always previously maintained a kind of half-life on the fringes of the American right, have come to understand that it is both a complex and a simple phenomenon: in one sense, it resembles a dynamic human psychological pathology in that it’s comprised of a complex constellation of traits that are interconnected and whose presence and importance rise and fall according to the stages of development it goes through; and in another, it can in many ways be boiled down to the raw, almost feral imposition of the organized violent will of an angry and fear-ridden human id upon the rest of humankind.

That’s where Donald Trump comes in.

In many ways, Trump’s fascistic-seeming presidential campaign fills in many of the components of that complex constellation of traits that comprises real fascism. Perhaps the most significant of these is the one component that has been utterly missing previously in American forms of fascism: the charismatic leader around whom the fascist troops can rally, the one who voices their frustrations and garners followers like flies.

Scholars of fascist politics have remarked previously that America has been fortunate for most of its history not to have had such a figure rise out of the ranks of their fascist movements. And in the case of Donald Trump, that remains true – he has no background or history as a white supremacist or proto-fascist, nor does he actually express their ideologies.

Rather, what he is doing is mustering the latent fascist tendencies in American politics – some of it overtly white supremacist, while the majority of it is the structural racism and white privilege that springs from the nation’s extensive white-supremacist historical foundations – on his own behalf. He is merrily leading us down the path towards a fascist state even without being himself an overt fascist.

The reality that Trump is not a bona fide fascist himself does not make him any less dangerous. In some ways, it makes him more so, because it disguises the swastika looming in the shadow of the flamboyant orange hair. It camouflages the throng of ravening wolves he’s riding in upon.

There is little doubt that Trump is tapping into fascistic sentiments, which is why so many observers are now beginning to finally use the word in describing Trump’s campaign. From Rick Perlstein and Digby and Chauncey deVega (as well as a number of other writers at Salon) to Thom Hartmann at AlterNet to the typically staid Seattle Times, “fascism” is the word more and more people are using in relation to the campaign that Trump is running. Even some of his fellow conservatives are beginning to use the word.

And they have a valid point, because Trump fills out so many of the key components that collectively create genuine fascism. And while it’s true that, as Josh Marshall suggests, there really is no single, agreed-upon definition of fascism, there’s also no doubt that we can grasp the idea of fascism not just by studying its history, but also by examining the various attempts at understanding and defining just what comprises fascism. And in doing so, we can recognize exactly what it is that Trump is doing.

What it’s decidedly not, no matter what you might have read, is the simple-minded definition you’ll see in Internet memes attributed to Benito Mussolini: “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” As Chip Berlet has explained ad nauseam, not only did Mussolini never say or write such a thing, neither did the fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile, to whom it is also often attributed.

For one thing, as Berlet explains: “When Mussolini wrote about corporatism, he was not writing about modern commercial corporations. He was writing about a form of vertical syndicalist corporatism based on early guilds.” The Skeptical Libertarian explains that the term “corporatism” and “corporate” meant an entirely different thing in 1920s Italy than it means today:

“Corporations” were not individual businesses. Under fascist corporatism, sectors of the economy were divided into corporate groups, whose activities and interactions were managed and coordinated by the government. The idea was to split the difference between socialism and laissez faire capitalism, letting the state control and direct the economy from the top-down without itself owning the means of production.

… The bottom line is that corporate groups meant classes of people in the economy, which were allegedly represented through appointments to the Council. The system was not about welfare for private companies, but rather about totalitarian central planning of the whole economy through legislation and regulation. Corporatism meant formally “incorporating” divergent interests under the state, which would resolve their differences through regulatory mechanisms.

Moreover, as Berlet explains, this fake definition of fascism directly contradicts many of the things that Mussolini himself did in fact write about the nature of fascism. If he or Gentile ever did actually say it, it’s likely it was a bit of propaganda intended to ease and mislead business-minded followers.

Another thing that fascism decidedly is NOT is the grotesque distortion made by Jonah Goldberg, to wit, that fascism is a kind of socialism and therefore “properly understood as a phenomenon of the left.” This claim, in fact, is such a travesty of the idea of fascism that it functionally negates its meaning, rendering it, as George Orwell might describe it, a form of Newspeak. Indeed, it was Orwell himself who wrote that “the idea underlying Fascism is irreconcilably different from that which underlies Socialism. Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state of free and equal human beings. It takes the equality of human rights for granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite.”

Fascism, in reality, is a much more complex phenomenon than either of these definitions. Let’s look, by way of example, at some of the more recent efforts at defining it:

Stanley Payne, in Fascism: Comparison and Definition (1980):

A. The Fascist Negations:
-- Antiliberalism
-- Anticommunism
-- Anticonservatism (though with the understanding that fascist groups were willing to undertake temporary alliances with groups from any other sector, most commonly with the right)

B. Ideology and Goals:
-- Creation of a new nationalist authoritarian state based not merely on traditional principles or models
-- Organization of some new kind of regulated, multiclass, integrated national economic structure, whether called national corporatist, national socialist, or national syndicalist
-- The goal of empire or a radical change in the nation’s relationship with other powers
-- Specific espousal of an idealist, voluntarist creed, normally involving the attempt to realize a new form of modern, self-determined, secular culture

C. Style and Organization:
-- Emphasis on esthetic structure of meetings, symbols, and political choreography, stressing romantic and mystical aspects
-- Attempted mass mobilization with militarization of political relationships and style and with the goal of a mass party militia
-- Positive evaluation and use of, or willingness to use, violence
-- Extreme stress on the masculine principle and male dominance, while espousing the organic view of society
-- Exaltation of youth above other phases of life, emphasizing the conflict of generations, at least in effecting the initial political transformation
-- Specific tendency toward an authoritarian, charismatic, personal style of command, whether or not the command is to some degree initially elective

Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, p. 218:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal constraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Paxton's nine "mobilizing passions" of fascism:

-- a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;

-- the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether universal or individual, and the subordination of the individual to it;

-- the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment which justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against the group's enemies, both internal and external;

-- dread of the group's decline under the corrosive effect of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;

-- the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;

-- the need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group's destiny;

-- the superiority of the leader's instincts over abstract and universal reason;

-- the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group's success;

-- the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group's prowess in a Darwinian struggle.

Roger Griffin:

Fascism: modern political ideology that seeks to regenerate the social, economic, and cultural life of a country by basing it on a heightened sense of national belonging or ethnic identity. Fascism rejects liberal ideas such as freedom and individual rights, and often presses for the destruction of elections, legislatures, and other elements of democracy. Despite the idealistic goals of fascism, attempts to build fascist societies have led to wars and persecutions that caused millions of deaths. As a result, fascism is strongly associated with right-wing fanaticism, racism, totalitarianism, and violence.

To these I would add one other important component, taken from Harald Oftstad’s Our Contempt for Weakness: Nazi Norms and Values – And Our Own (1989), namely, the logical extension of the Darwinian struggle against the “lesser” that pervades so much fascist literature: the deep-seated hatred and contempt in which all persons deemed “weaker” (be this ethnic, racial, medical, genetic, or otherwise) are held, and the desire to eliminate them entirely that it fuels.

In Hitler’s own words:

The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he after all is only a weak and limited man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher development of organic living beings would be unthinkable.

… [We will try to] “save” even the weakest and most sickly at any price, and this plants the seed of a future generation which must inevitably grow more and more deplorable the longer this mockery of Nature and her will continues. [Mein Kampf]

Taking a careful look at Trump’s campaign, the fascist traits immediately emerge:

• 1.     Eliminationist rhetoric is the backbone of Trump’s appeal. His opening salvo in the campaign – the one that first skyrocketed him to the forefront in the race, poll-wise, and proved wildly popular with Republican voters – was his vow (and subsequent proposed program) to deport all 12 million of the United States’ undocumented immigrants (using, of course, the deprecatory term “illegal alien”) and to erect a gigantic wall on the nation’s southern border. Significantly, the language he used to justify such plans – labeling those immigrants “criminals,” “killers,” and “rapists,” contending that they bring crime and disease – is classic rhetoric designed to demonize an entire class of people by reducing them to objects fit only for elimination.
  
  Trump’s appeal in this regard ultimately is about forming a “purer” community, and it has been relentless and expansive: When an audience member asked him at a town-hall-style appearance when and how he was going to “get rid of all the Muslims,” he responded that “we’re going to be looking at a lot of different things.” He now also claims that if elected, he will send back all the refugees from Syria who have arrived in the United States: “If I win, they’re going back,” he told one of his approval-roaring campaign crowds. And shortly before he encouraged a crowd that “maybe should have roughed up” a Black Lives Matter protester, he told an interviewer that the movement is “looking for trouble.” Most recently, he tweeted out a graphic taken from a neo-Nazi website purporting to demonstrate (falsely) that black people commit most murders in America (though he later claimed that he hadn’t endorsed the graphic).
• 2.     The palingenetic ultranationalism. After the race-baiting and the ethnic fearmongering, this is the most obviously fascistic component of Trump’s presidential election effort, embodied in those trucker hats proclaiming: “Make America Great Again.” (Trump himself puts it  this way: "The silent majority is back, and we’re going to take the country back. We're going to make America great again."
  
  That’s almost the letter-perfect embodiment of palingenesis – that is, the myth of the phoenix-like rebirth from the ashes of an entire society in its “golden age.” In the meantime, Trump’s nationalism is evident not just in these statement but are the entire context of his rants against Latino immigrants and Syrian refugees.
• 3.     Trump’s deep contempt not just for liberalism (which provides most of the fuel for his xenophobic rants, particularly against the media) but also for establishment conservatism. Trump’s biggest fan, Rush Limbaugh, boasts: “In parlaying this outsider status of his, he’s better at playing the insiders’ game than they are, and they are insiders. He’s running rings around all of these seasoned, lifelong, highly acclaimed professionals in both the consultant class, the adviser class, the strategist class, and the candidate class. And he’s doing it simply by being himself.”
• 4.     Trump constantly proclaims America to be in a state of crisis that has made it “the laughingstock” of the rest of the world, and proclaims that this has occurred because of the failures of (primarily liberal) politicianss.
  
  
• 5.     He himself embodies the fascist insistence upon male leadership by a man of destiny, and his refusal to acknowledge factual evidence of the falsity of many of his proclamations and comments embodies the fascistic notion that the leader’s instincts trump logic and reason in any event.
• 6.     Trump’s contempt for weakness is manifested practically every day on the campaign trail, ranging from his dissing of former GOP presidential candidate John McCain (a former prisoner of war) as “not a hero” because “I like people who weren’t captured,” to his recent mockery of a New York Times reporter with a disability.

This list could probably go on all day. But eventually, as we consider the attributes of real fascism, we also can begin to discern the difference between that phenomenon and the Trump candidacy.

Fascists have, in the past, always relied upon an independent, movement-driven paramilitary force capable of enacting various forms of thuggery on their opponents (as in the Italian Blackshirts, aka the Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale, and the German Brownshirts, the Sturmabteilung). Trump, however, has no such force at his disposal.

What Trump does have is the avid support not only of various white-supremacist organizations, as well as that of very real paramilitary organizations in the form of the Oath Keepers and the “III Percent” movement, many of whose members are avid Trump backers, but neither of which have explicitly endorsed him. Moreover, Trump has never referenced any desire to form an alliance or to make use of such paramilitary forces.

What Trump has done is wink, nudge, and generally encouraged spontaneous violence as a response to his critics. This includes his winking and nudging at those “enthusiastic supporters” who committed anti-Latino hate crimes, his encouragement of the people at a campaign appearance who assaulted a Latino protester, and most recently, his endorsement of the people who “maybe should have roughed up” the “disgusting” Black Lives Matter protester who interrupted his speech.

That’s a clearly fascistic response. It also helps us understand why Trump is an extraordinarily dangerous right-wing populist demagogue, and not a genuine, in-the-flesh fascist.

A serious fascist would have called upon not just the crowd to respond with violence, but also his paramilitary allies to respond with retaliatory strikes. Trump didn’t do that.

That, in a tiny nutshell, is an example of the problem with Trump’s fascism: He is not really an ideologue, acting out of a rigid adherence to a consistent worldview, as all fascists are. Trump’s only real ideology is the Worship of the Donald, and he will do and say anything that appeals to the lowest common denominator of the American body politic in order to attract their support – the nation’s id, the near-feral segment that breathes and lives on fear and paranoia and hatred.

There’s no question these supporters bring a singular, visceral energy to the limited universe of the GOP primary, though I don’t know anyone who expects that such a campaign can survive the oxygen and exposure of a general election. Indeed, it is in many signs an indication of the doom that is descending upon a Republican Party in freefall, flailing about in a death spiral, that it is finally resorting to a campaign as nakedly fascistic as Trump’s in its attempts to secure the presidency.

This is why Trump has never called upon the shock troops of a paramilitary wing for support, and why he has always kept an arm’s-length distance from the white nationalists and neo-Nazis who have become some of his most enthusiastic backers. He isn’t really one of them.

What he is, as Berlet has explained elsewhere, is a classic right-wing nativist populist demagogue: “His ideology and rhetoric are much more comparable to the European populist radical right, akin to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, the Danish People’s Party or Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. All of them use the common radical right rhetoric of nativism, authoritarianism and populism.”

Of course, it’s also important to understand that fascism, in fact, is a subspecies of right-wing populism, very similar to the Klan in nature – that is, its malignant, metastasized version, crazed in its insatiable lust for power, fueled by fear and hatred, and fed by the blood of its vulnerable targets.

Trump is not fascist primarily because he lacks any kind of coherent, or even semi-coherent, ideology. What he represents instead is the kind of id-driven feral politics common to the radical right, a sort of gut-level reactionarism that lacks the rigor and absolutism, the demand for ideological purity, that are characteristic of full-bore fascism.

That does not, however, mean he is any less dangerous to American democracy. Indeed, he may be more dangerous than an outright fascist, who would in reality be far less appealing and far less likely to succeed in the current milieu. What Trump is doing, by exploiting the strands of right-wing populism in the country, is making the large and growing body of proto-fascists in America larger and even more vicious – that is, he is creating the conditions that could easily lead to a genuine and potentially irrevocable outbreak of fascism.

Recall, if you will, the lessons of Milton Mayer in his book, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945 – namely, the way these changes happen not overnight, but incrementally, like the legendary slow boiling of frogs:

"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

… "But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.”

It is by small steps of incremental meanness and viciousness that we lose our humanity. The Nazis, in the end, embodied the ascension of utter demonic inhumanity, but they didn't get that way overnight. They got that way through, day after day, attacking and demonizing and urging the elimination of those they deemed their enemies.

And this is what has been happening to America – in particular, to the conservative movement and the Republican Party – for a very long time. Donald Trump represents the apotheosis of this, the culmination of a very long-growing trend that really began in the 1990s.

That was when we first saw the popular rise of eliminationist hate talk, wielded with thoughtless glee and great regularity by an increasingly rabid set of right-wing pundits led by Rush Limbaugh, and then deeply codified by the talking heads who have subsequently marched across the sound stages at Fox News. It rose to the surface with the vice-presidential candidacy of Sarah Palin in 2008, followed immediately, in reaction to the election of Barack Obama, by the birth of the Tea Party, which is perhaps the single most significant manifestation of right-wing populism in the nation’s history.

Trump aligned himself very early with the Tea Party elements, remarking in 2011 that “I represent a lot of the ingredients of the Tea Party.” And indeed he does – in particular, with its obeisance to the captains of industry and their untrammeled right to make profits at the expense of everyone else.

This is a phenomenon known as Producerism, and it is one of the hallmarks of right-wing populism. It's accurately defined in Wikipedia as:

a syncretic ideology of populist economic nationalism which holds that the productive forces of society - the ordinary worker, the small businessman, and the entrepreneur, are being held back by parasitical elements at both the top and bottom of the social structure.

... Producerism sees society's strength being "drained from both ends"--from the top by the machinations of globalized financial capital and the large, politically connected corporations which together conspire to restrict free enterprise, avoid taxes and destroy the fortunes of the honest businessman, and from the bottom by members of the underclass and illegal immigrants whose reliance on welfare and government benefits drains the strength of the nation. Consequently, nativist rhetoric is central to modern Producerism. Illegal immigrants are viewed as a threat to the prosperity of the middle class, a drain on social services, and as a vanguard of globalization that threatens to destroy national identities and sovereignty. Some advocates of producerism go further, taking a similar position on legal immigration.

In the United States, Producerists are distrustful of both major political parties. The Republican Party is rejected for its support of corrupt Big Business and the Democratic Party for its advocacy of the unproductive lazy waiting for their entitlement handouts (Kazin, Stock, Berlet & Lyons).

Berlet has written extensively about the long historical association of producerism with oppressive right-wing movements and regimes:

Producerism begins in the U.S. with the Jacksonians, who wove together intra-elite factionalism and lower-class Whites’ double-edged resentments. Producerism became a staple of repressive populist ideology. Producerism sought to rally the middle strata together with certain sections of the elite. Specifically, it championed the so-called producing classes (including White farmers, laborers, artisans, slaveowning planters, and “productive” capitalists) against “unproductive” bankers, speculators, and monopolists above—and people of color below. After the Jacksonian era, producerism was a central tenet of the anti-Chinese crusade in the late nineteenth century. In the 1920s industrial philosophy of Henry Ford, and Father Coughlin’s fascist doctrine in the 1930s, producerism fused with antisemitic attacks against “parasitic” Jews.

The Producerist narrative is why Henry Ford – who, as the ostensible author of The International Jew, a 1920 conspiracist tome that inspired Hitler’s paranoia, and whose capital later helped build the Nazi war machine in the 1930s, was also (and not coincidentally) perhaps the ultimate American enabler of fascism – is such a seminal figure for American right-wing populists, both as a leader in the 1920s and ‘30s, as well as a figure of reverence today. (Glenn Beck, in fact, on several occasions on his old Fox News show referenced Ford as something of a holy figure for his efforts to resist FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s.) The same narrative is also why, in today’s context, Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged – a tendentious novel speculating on the disasters that would befall the world if its great industrial leaders suddenly chose to stop producing – are so important in their mythology.

Right-wing populism is essentially predicated on what today we might call the psychology of celebrity-worship: convincing working-class schlubs that they too can someday become rich and famous -- because when they do, would they want to be taxed heavily? It's all about dangling that lottery carrot out there for the poor stiffs who were never any good at math to begin with, and more than eager to delude themselves about their chances of hitting the jackpot.

The thing about right-wing populism is that it’s manifestly self-defeating: those who stand to primarily benefit from this ideology are the wealthy, which is why they so willingly underwrite it. It might, in fact, more accurately be called "sucker populism."

Nonetheless, right-wing populists have long been part of the larger conservative movement – though largely relegated to its fringes. Some of the more virulent expressions of this populism, including the Posse Comitatus movement, Willis Carto’s Populist Party, and the “Patriot”/militia movement of the 1990s, have been largely relegated to fringe status. However, there have been periods in America’s past when right-wing populism was not thoroughly mainstream but also politically ascendant. Probably the most exemplary of these was during the wave of Ku Klux Klan revival between 1915 and 1930.

This Klan crumbled in the late 1920s under the weight of internal political warfare and corruption; many of its field organizers later turned up in William Dudley Pelley’s overtly fascist Silver Shirts organization of the 1930s. After World War II, most of these groups – as well as the renowned anti-Semite radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin, and lingering American fascist groups like George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party – were fully relegated to fringe status. So, too, were subsequent attempts at reviving right-wing populism, embodied by Willis Carto and his Populist Party, as well as other forms of right-wing populism that cropped up in the latter half of the century, from Robert DePugh’s vigilante/domestic terrorist organization The Minutemen in the 1960s, to the Posse Comitatus and “constitutionalist” tax protesters in the 1970s and ‘80s, to the “militia”/Patriot movement of the 1990s. As it had been since at least the 1920s, this brand of populism was riddled with conspiracist paranoia, xenophobic white tribalism, and a propensity for extreme violence.

Yet beginning in the 1990s, as mainstream conservatives built more and more ideological bridges with this sector – reflected in the increasing adoption of far-right rhetoric within the mainstream – the strands of populism became more and more imbedded in mainstream-conservative dogma, particularly the deep, visceral, and often irrational hatred of the federal government. One of the more popular "mainstream" figures among this bloc in the 1990s was Rep. Ron Paul of Texas. And so when he created something of a sensation with his campaign for the Republican nomination in 2008, it meant that these ideas and agendas started receiving widespread circulation among the mainstream Right -- and with it, an increasing number of conservatives who called themselves "libertarians", when what they really meant was "populists."

But if Ron Paul opened the door for right-wing populism, though, he scarcely could have anticipated the overnight political star who would, in short order, come waltzing through it to great fanfare – namely, Sarah Palin. Hers is a somewhat different, more mainstream-friendly brand of right-wing populism – and as a result, it was embraced by a significantly greater portion of the American electorate.

Her populism emerged for national view shortly after John McCain announced her as his running mate. It was more than just the aggressive, McCarthyite attacks on Obama as a “radical” who “palled around with terrorists” and the paranoid bashing of “liberal elites” -- most of all, there was the incessant suggestion that she and McCain represented “real Americans” and were all about standing up for “the people.”

Populism, yes, but indisputably right-wing, too: socially and fiscally conservative, business-friendly, and hostile to progressive causes. The Producerist narrative was a constant current in Palin’s speeches, particularly when she would get the crowd chanting, “Drill, baby, drill!”

The populism whipped up by Palin’s candidacy became manifest as a national movement in short order with the rise of the Tea Party in 2009. Indeed, not only was the Tea Party overtly a right-wing populist movement, it soon became a major conduit for a revival of the 1990s version of this populism, the “Patriot”/militia movement. Many of these Tea Partiers are now the same Oath Keepers and “III Percenters” whose members widely support Trump’s candidacy.

Of course, most of these extremists are only one step removed, ideologically speaking, from the neo-Nazis and other white supremacists of the racist right, and both of those segments of the right lean heavily on nativist and authoritarian rhetoric. And there really is no other good word for Trump’s rhetoric, and the behavior of many of his followers, than “fascistic.” So it’s only somewhat natural that Trump’s right-wing populism would be mistaken for fascism – they are, after all, not just kissing cousins, but more akin to siblings. Not every right-wing populist is a fascist, but every fascist is a right-wing populist.

All of which underscores the central fact: Donald Trump may not be a fascist, but his vicious brand of right-wing populism is not just empowering the latent fascist elements in America, he is leading a whole nation of followers merrily down a path that leads directly to fascism.

Consider, if you will, what did occur in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s remarks about “roughing up” Black Lives Matter protesters: Two nights later, a trio of white supremacists in Minneapolis invaded a Black Lives Matter protest there and shot five people, in an act that had been carefully planned and networked through the Internet.

What this powerfully implies is that Trump has achieved that kind of twilight-zone level of influence where he can simply demonize a target with rhetoric suggestive of violent retribution and his admirers will act out that very suggestion. It’s only a step removed from the fascist leader who calls out his paramilitary thugs to engage in violence.

America, thanks to Trump, has now reached that fork in the road where it must choose down which path its future lies – with democracy and its often fumbling ministrations, or with the appealing rule of plutocratic authoritarianism, ushered in on a tide of fascistic populism. For myself, I remain confident that Americans will choose the former and demolish the latter – that Trump’s candidacy will founder, and the tide of right-wing populism will reach its high-water mark under him and then recede with him.

What is most troubling, though, is the momentum that Trump’s candidacy has given that tide. He may not himself lack any real ideological footing, but he has laid the groundwork for a fascist groundswell that could someday be ridden to power by a similarly charismatic successor who is himself more in the mold of an ideological fascist. And it doesn’t take a very long look down the roll of 2016 Republican candidates to find a couple of candidates who might fit that mold.

Trump may not be fascist, but he is empowering their existing elements in American society; even more dangerously, his Tea Party brand of right-wing populism is helping them grow their ranks, along with their potential to recruit, by leaps and bounds. Not only that, he is making all this thuggery and ugliness seem normal. And that IS a serious problem.

Small-Town Montana Residents Organize to Oppose Presence of White Nationalists

An image from a National Policy Institute promotional video.

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

A collection of citizens in the small resort town of Whitefish, Mont., banded together earlier this week to demand that their local town council take action to deal with the effects of the presence of a nationally prominent white-nationalist organization in their midst.

Calling themselves Love Lives Here, the group packed the Whitefish City Council chambers on Monday night to demand the council pass an anti-hate ordinance that would bar such groups from assembling in the city.

The object of their ire was Richard Spencer and his National Policy Institute, a hate group that is one of the leading exemplars of academic racism. Spencer moved his national headquarters to Whitefish from Washington, D.C., several years ago.

Spencer’s activities in Whitefish recently surfaced in the public eye due to an article in The Daily Beast describing an encounter between Spencer and former John McCain adviser Randy Scheunemann on the ski lift at Big Mountain, the resort that dominates Whitefish. According to the article, Spencer “berated” Scheunemann for “being a neocon and for believing in this whole democracy BS.”

Over 100 Whitefish residents on Monday night voiced concern that the presence of Spencer and his organization would lead to their town being identified with his brand of hatemongering.

“We are committed to co-creating a caring, open, accepting, and diverse community, free from discrimination, and dedicated to the equal treatment of all citizens,” Ina Albert, one of the Love Lives Here co-founders, said, according to a report from KPAX-TV. “The idea of hate and discrimination has no place in Whitefish, and I hope you can figure out a way to say, ‘we will not accept it in our town.’”

“This isn’t about one individual, it is about a way of thinking that is despicable,” said Brian Muldoon, a Whitefish attorney. “This community I believe is standing up strongly against the kinds of ideas that Richard Spencer and his ilk promotes … and it is time to deconstruct the ideas that are so insidious. It is time to take a very clear stance. An unambiguous one.”

The council was sympathetic and promised to take action. Councilor Richard Hildner, choked with emotion, told the audience that “hate, racism, bigotry are not community values in Whitefish.”

“I promise you I will do everything I possibly can to see that we protect the citizens of Whitefish. I want you to know you have my pledge,” Hildner added, to a round of applause.

Spencer was defiant. “I’ve been coming to Whitefish for more than 10 years now,” he told the Whitefish Pilot. “At no point have I published an opinion on local politics, held meetings with local or state politicians, or engaged in civic activism of any kind.”

“Whitefish is a place where I go to get away from it all. I have no desire to do anything that changes the community that I love, nor has my organization ever considered establishing a permanent facility or residence in Montana.”

However, according to Whitefish residents interviewed by Hatewatch, there is concern that Spencer in fact is planning to construct a large new center for his organization in the town, and part of their action on Monday was aimed at forestalling that possibility. According to the Pilot, he already is a partner in the development of a mixed-use building in the city’s Railway District, not far from Montana’s only Amtrak terminal.

Spencer denied adamantly in a friendly article in the nearby Kalispell newspaper, the Daily Inter Lake, that he was engaged in hatemongering.

“When people call you a hate group, it means they hate you,” he said. “They’re looking at a mirror reflection … They clearly think more about me than I think about them. I don’t harm anyone; I haven’t challenged or provoked them.”

He then went on to explain to the interviewer the virtues of eugenics and a white ethno-state.
Spencer has spoken frequently about creating a “white homeland” in North America, and like his Flathead Valley neighbor Chuck Baldwin, has at times suggested that racist white people retreat to wide-open spaces such as those in Montana, where relatively few minorities reside, to create it.

Last year Spencer spoke at a gathering of academic racists about his hopes for a “peaceful ethnic cleansing” that would clear parts of North America for Caucasians, meanwhile suggesting that the new state welcome white refugees from Europe. Spencer advocated a “sort of white Zionism” that would infuse whites with the dream of such a homeland just as Zionism helped spur the creation of Israel. “It is perfectly feasible for a white state to be established on the North American continent. Action is the easy part,” Spencer opined, adding, “I have a dream.”

The Flathead Valley has had several brushes with right-wing extremists over the years. Love Lives Here was founded in 2010 when a group of neo-Nazis showed Holocaust-denial films at a Kalispell theater.

Several years before that, local residents organized resistance to a campaign of violent harassment of local environmentalists that was being organized in part through a right-wing radio station. The campaign came on the heels of the arrest of a local extremist named David Burgert for his plot to assassinate local police and political leaders.

Santilli and His ‘Border Convoy’ Stir Resentment, Fail to Close Border

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Pete Santilli keeps trying –– and failing –– to organize protests that will shut down border crossings between the United States and Mexico. What’s more, he hasn’t been completely honest about it.

The latest effort by the extremist right-wing radio host was a multi-state “Border Convoy” campaign that featured protests at various stops along the multi-day route. Participants signed a petition declaring that they “oppose Barack Obama’s foreign invasion of our country” and demanding that authorities “secure our border.” 

And while at least this time there were no problems with his vehicle’s license plates (unlike Santilli’s previous border-shutdown effort, which collapsed into a small heap of frustrated protesters), the campaign was once again notable for failing to achieve anything.

But you wouldn’t know that if you listened to Santilli.The idea was for a string of vehicles, beginning on Aug. 1, to travel from Murrieta, Calif., and follow the border through Arizona and Texas, ending at the border crossing in Brownsville, Texas, on Aug. 9. Murrieta was the point of departure for Santilli’s earlier botched attempt to shut down the border, largely because the town has been the focal point of anti-immigrant protests directed at the influx of child refugees from Central America. A recent report from the Center for New Community details how these protests were orchestrated by a coalition of white nationalists and various nativist extremists.

But along the way, the protest was largely ignored until the convoy began encountering resistance from counter-protesters at their stops.

After departing California, the convoy headed for Phoenix, Ariz., and descended on the offices of Republican Sen. John McCain, whose moderate stances on immigration have drawn the ire of the nativist extremists. While at McCain’s offices, Santilli led the crowd in chanting against legislation McCain has cosponsored to end the crisis with Central American refugees, apparently because it makes it illegal to identify where the refugees are being transported. However, McCain was not at the office that day, and the gathering quickly broke up.




Then the convoy headed for Texas, where it began encountering stiffer resistance. In El Paso, someone driving a black pickup truck joined the convoy and began slowing the group’s progress. When police intervened and pulled the convoy over, the people in the pickup complained to police that someone in the convoy had pointed a rifle at them.

The El Paso Times reported that El Paso activist Miguel Juarez was among the counter-protesters, and he filed a claim that someone in the convoy had pointed a rifle at them. The convoy later filed a police report accusing Juarez of filing a false claim, as well as another claim that the protesters had tried to force them off the road.




“I told him I was not lying that the rifle episode had occurred and that we had witnesses,” Juarez said. “We felt threatened by the convoy member with his rifle and felt a duty to report it to police,” Juarez said in a written statement.

And what would a right-wing border protest be without the concocted claims that drug cartels had targeted their activities? There was plenty of paranoia and phony claims of persecution.

In Van Horn, Texas, according to reports, convoy members were forced to evacuate a hotel at 4:30 a.m. by members of the “Operation Secure Our Border” militia, who informed members that they were being watched over by militia. Those same militiamen, according to accounts, had determined that drug-cartel operatives had surrounded the Comfort Inn hotel where the convoy members were staying and were preparing to ambush them.

“Militia immediately acted to evacuate the property of convoy vehicles and raced the convoy to an undisclosed location some 45 miles away,” explained the convoy’s press release. “While convoy members were initially rattled and concerned by the sudden move, the gravity of the threat was later realized and Militia involvement was met with widespread appreciation.”

The account also claimed that “county law enforcement” had confirmed the presence of the threat. However, Culberson County Sheriff Oscar Carrillo ridiculed the report as “fake.”

“Nothing of that nature happened here,” Carrillo said.

According to the El Paso Times, Carillo’s detectives interviewed several hotel owners in the area and could find no witnesses that the event had even occurred.

“There is no Comfort Inn in Van Horn,” Carrillo said. “We did follow up with most of the motels here in town and none of the property owners, who do reside on the property (of the motels), can validate they (convoy members) even stayed in Van Horn, Texas.”

Finally, the convoy reached a kind of climax on Aug. 8 in McAllen, Texas, where Santilli led a protest against the supposed dumping of “illegal aliens” at the local bus station. There they encountered an even larger group of counter-protesters who outnumbered them.


“It’s fine that they are here, but their message of hate and ignorance is not welcome in the valley and they shouldn’t bring it with them,” said John Michael Torres of La Union del Pueblo Entero, a pro-immigrant advocacy group.

The next day, led by a contingent of bikers affiliated with the convoy calling themselves the “U.S. Defenders,” Santilli’s convoy intended to conclude while “shutting down” the border crossing in nearby Brownsville, Texas, where the object of the protest in  was ostensibly the arrest of U.S. Marine Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi, whose continued detention in a Mexico jail has become the latest cause celebre of the extremist right.

The protest managed to disrupt traffic briefly (for about 20 minutes) at the crossing, and the Border Convoy’s Facebook page boasted: “We fully shut down the main lane of traffic coming through the entry port into Brownsville, TX this am. Thanks to the Brownsville group and Border Convoy travelers for demanding our Marine be allowed to come home!”

Again, the convoy encountered a contentious and large number of counter-protesters. “These people are coming out an disrupting our communities, and that’s what we don’t want,” one counter-protester told a KGBT-TV reporter. A number of commenters at the convoy’s Facebook page also claimed that even the attempt to stop traffic was a failure: “Didn’t shut anything down, liars,” said one. “You simply stood in the way as folks drove around you.”

PBS’s Bonnie Erbe Accepts Award from Anti-Immigrant Group CIS

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Bonnie Erbe, the longtime host of the Public Broadcasting Service’s “To The Contrary” program, has long been a proponent of dubious claims that immigration depletes natural resources and worsens global warming, as well as an apologist for the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). So it was not really a surprise when CIS awarded Erbe its annual journalism prize this year for her “reporting on immigration’s effects on health care, poverty, and natural resources, as well as on birth tourism.”

Erbe, who was given the award Tuesday at a gathering at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., told the audience in her acceptance speech that she “no longer” considers herself a progressive, “because I don’t believe the progressives really support the environment.”

Erbe’s speech explicitly acknowledged the coordination of anti-immigrant activism among various organizations associated with CIS, including the “greenwashing” group Progressives For Immigration Reform (PFIR), and Numbers USA, which along with CIS and another nativist outfit, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, are all part of a network devoted to opposing immigration.

Erbe acknowledged that she works closely with CIS and Numbers USA, and openly accepts their frequently dubious studies as accurate: “We work with them on many projects,” she said, praising them for their growing influence, “shown by the growth of their website and email list they run a very necessary organization with now more than 2 million, I believe.”

She explained her thinking on immigration, saying she doesn’t have a problem with immigrants as people, but as a mass phenomenon: “Anyway, immigrants are fabulous. Immigrants make the best Americans. They work the hardest for the least amount of money. They contribute so much to this country,” she said. “But in the journalistic community, if you dare raise any negative impact of mass immigration that we have now, both legal and illegal, you are shunted aside as some kind of strange person who has – you know, has a very strange approach to reporting.”

Erbe said she became concerned about immigration mostly as an environmental issue, and came to part ways with liberals over the issue of overpopulation, “because they support open-border immigration, pretty much.”

“I certainly came of age as a progressive, but I am no longer a progressive because I don’t believe the progressives really support the environment, and to me, that’s the most important issue. If we don’t deal with climate change and human impact on the planet, there’s not going to be a planet in 50 years, it’s my personal belief,” she said. “And you can’t – you say that in journalistic or political circles, and people look at you cross-eyed. And some – and we get objections from viewers sometimes. We also get great, you know, emails saying, thank you for doing this; I have – I hear this nowhere else on TV. But we also get people who say – you know, call me bad names and say that our – that begins with R – and call us out for just reporting what are the facts.”

Those facts, as Erbe sees it:

We’re not dealing with the fact that we are the major contributors to greenhouse gases and what we do – and this is our cultural disadvantage, but when we do take immigrants from developing nations who have very small carbon footprints, we turn them into the rest of us, who have huge carbon footprints, and turn them into greater contributors to global warming.

And we need to do something somewhere. We’re not doing anything on any of the fronts. Immigration is just one of the fronts where we need to start controlling thing – things, but again, is anybody going to listen? Does anybody care? No.

This is not particularly new for Erbe. In the past, she has both praised CIS and its “studies”, and has ardently promoted the view (also long promoted by FAIR and CIS’s founder, John Tanton) that immigration causes environmental degradation in the United States. Indeed, much of Tanton’s work has entailed attempts to transform immigration into an environmental issue.

And Erbe noted at the end of her speech that she was donating the proceeds from her award to PFIR, whose main purpose as a “greenwashing” outfit is to argue against immigration on environmental grounds. Erbe appears to have bought into their claims whole.

The claim, for instance, that immigrants worsen carbon emissions, as ThinkProgress has explained, is based almost entirely on CIS studies that employ “deeply flawed methodology”:

The report claims that a person’s CO2 emissions is directly related to his or her personal income — so a person making $110,000 per year will emit 10 percent more carbon than a person who earns $100,000 per year under the report’s methodology. Thus, because the report claims that each Mexican immigrant earns 53.2 percent of the average U.S. resident, it claims that these immigrants must also produce 53.2 percent of the carbon emissions.

But this is simply absurd. If such a relationship actually did exist, that would mean that Mitt Romney, who earned $21.6 million in 2010 — or more than 600 times the average annual income according to the CIS report — also must have produced 600 times the CO2 emissions. That’s enough of a carbon footprint to fuel over 2,200 vehicles or power more than 1,400 homes for an entire year. Not even John McCain owns that many houses.

Think Progress also notes that data actually demonstrates that immigrants produce lower carbon emissions than their native-born citizen counterparts. “And as CAP Senior Fellow Andrew Light told ThinkProgress, even if we could suddenly remove the entire carbon impact created by immigrants, it would only decrease the U.S.’s carbon emissions by 7.32 percent in a good year. Clearly, immigrants are not to blame for the U.S.’s large climate footprint.”

Of course, that has not stopped CIS and its nativist cohorts from pointing the finger of blame, nor has it stopped Erbe from blithely aiding in that process. These views were adroitly satirized by Stephen Colbert a couple of years ago.

“I say, why stop with global warming?” he asked in a segment on the CIS claims. “There are so many problems on which conservatives and liberals can come together to blame immigrants. … So, liberals, conservatives, let’s make sure America continues to be a country people strive to come to, by kicking out the people who came here.”

The Final Nail in the Minuteman Coffin: Simcox Busted for Child Molestation

Via Stephen Lemons, a story that will surprise exactly no one familiar with the history of Chris Simcox and the Minuteman movement he cofounded:

Simcox's new home is Maricopa County's Lower Buckeye Jail, where he is being held nonbondable on several charges related to child molestation, attempted child molestation and sexual conduct with minors.
Phoenix police say the three victims are all under 10 years of age. According to Arizona's statute regarding dangerous crimes against children, any adult convicted of sexual conduct with a minor who is under 12 years of age "may be sentenced to life imprisonment."

Otherwise, the sentence for one count could be 13 to 27 years. The law also calls for consecutive sentencing in four out of the five counts listed for Simcox on his court paperwork. Meaning they would run back-to-back.

Details of the allegations were released this morning in the Phoenix Police Department's probable cause statement.

During a forensic interview with detectives, one of the girls, victim number two, refers to Simcox as "dad," and is identified as one of Simcox's daughters.

Victim number two mentions that her "sister was in the shower with her" during the time of one of the alleged incidents.

Apparently, victims number one and number three are not related to Simcox.

The first victim states that Simcox touched her while they were both in the kitchen of his home. This, as his two daughters were outside playing. She also alleges that Simcox showed her pornographic movies on his computer.

"She has been shown the movie more than one time," reads the summary. "The victim stated that these movies give her bad nightmares."

The third victim does not allege touching, but says Simcox asked to see her underwear and then what was beneath.

Of course, this is a disgusting coda to the already-depraved saga of the Minutemen, who collapsed in a heap in 2010 after the horrifying 2009 murders of 9-year-old Brisenia Flores and her father in their Arizona home by a onetime movement leader named Shawna Forde and her white-supremacist cohort, a tale I describe in considerable detail in my book And Hell Followed With Her: Crossing the Dark Side of the American Border.

As if that weren't bad enough, the tale of Arizona's vigilante border watchers took a similarly ugly twist last year when neo-Nazi border watcher J.T. Ready massacred his girlfriend and her family before taking his own life. Most observers agreed that by then, the Minuteman movement was officially finished.
But this latest arrest should be the final nail that manifests once and for all what many observers said at the time (despite media fanfare to the contrary) -- that the Minutemen were a huge magnet for extremists, racists, mentally unstable people, and psychopaths.
It was also something that was long foreseeable, given Simcox's erratic behavior and volatile personality. I described this in some detail in And Hell Followed:

When Chris Simcox first arrived in Tombstone in 2002, he found work as one of these [Showdown at the OK Corral] actors. It was a way of staying afloat until he could get his feet on the ground. He had been drawn by the myth, and now he was on a mission to transform it into a kind of living reality.

A few months before, he had thrown away his previous life as a schoolteacher in California, moved out to the Arizona desert, and had an epiphany, all because of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. Traumatized by repeatedly watching the collapse of the Twin Towers, Simcox had sold off his belongings and moved out to camp in the Sonoran desert, where he witnessed all kinds of human and drug trafficking – or so he was fond of repeatedly telling reporters in later years. Concluding that the porous nature of the Mexican border posed a post-9/11 security threat to America, he had decided to pour all his efforts into doing something about it. That was his basic story, and it eventually became a kind of mythos unto itself.

In reality, Chris Simcox's life had been falling apart for awhile. Simcox grew up in rural Illinois and Kentucky; after high school, he moved briefly to New York in pursuit of a baseball career, then moved out to California with his first wife, Deborah Crews, who harbored ambitions as an actress, and their daughter. Simcox himself would later suggest he had tried his hand at acting too, but he also went to school, getting a degree in education from L.A.'s Pacific Oaks County.

Eventually, he found work as a teacher in Los Angeles – first in a gang-infested high school in South Central L.A., before he found more sedate work as a kindergarten teacher at a prestigious private school called Wildwood. He also divorced Crews and married an African-American woman named Kim Dunbar, who later gave birth to a son. He was a popular teacher, but his colleagues at Wildwood recalled Simcox as something of a condescending know-it-all who prided himself on being updated on the latest educational techniques and letting everyone else know it too: "He had this real holier-than-thou attitude, like he was so far above the other teachers they should be grateful he was even discussing his methods with them," one of them told a reporter. "He was insulting."

Some of them also witnessed a dark side to his sunny public persona. His then-teenage daughter from his first marriage came to live with him in Los Angeles in 1998, and Simcox got her a babysitting gig with one of his Wildwood colleagues. One night, she showed up suddenly at the colleague's house, visibly upset, seeking shelter: She claimed her father had tried to sexually molest her. Simcox later claimed he had just tried to give her a leg massage and she had gotten the wrong idea. No charges were filed. She returned to New York and her mother and broke off contact with her father.

Gradually, it all crumbled. Convinced of his own superiority, Simcox left Wildwood to start up his own tutoring business. But Dunbar said he was also displaying symptoms of a mental breakdown. According to her sworn depositions in their eventual divorce, she had to endure episodes of Simcox's violent rages, followed by numb, glass-eyed staring sessions mumbling to himself. He refused professional help. And he abused and threatened their then-4-year-old son. After ten years of marriage, Dunbar testified, "the only thing I could do was file for divorce."

Even as his tutoring work spiraled away because of his erratic behavior, Simcox was also becoming increasingly xenophobic and paranoid. He later told a reporter that he was dismayed by the way Hispanic gangs and students who couldn't speak English were overwhelming Los Angeles schools, and at the same time he was becoming increasingly fearful of the prospect of a terrorist attack. "You could see it coming," he said. "And then Sept. 11 hit, and that was it."

The 9/11 attacks convinced Simcox that he was right in his paranoid belief that Los Angeles was primed to become a terrorism target, and he freaked out. He called Kim Dunbar two days after the attacks and left a series of voice-mail rants about the Constitution and the impending nuclear attack on L.A. and how he intended to give his now-teenage son weapons training: "I will begin teaching him the art of protecting himself with weapons," he said. "I purchased another gun. I have more than a few weapons, and I intend on teaching my son how to use them. … I will no longer trust anyone in this country. My life has changed forever, and if you don't get that, you are brainwashed like everybody else."

Simcox also called his son and ranted at him over the phone. Kim Dunbar recorded the conversations and submitted them in court proceedings as evidence of his mental instability. On the tapes, you can hear Simcox angrily challenge the boy to become "a man and a real American."

"You better stop playing baseball, buddy, and you better do something real, 'cause life will never be the same," Simcox shouted. "I'm going to go down to the Mexican border and sign up for the government for Border Patrol to protect the borders of the country that I love. You hear how serious I am."

Simcox indeed applied to join the Border Patrol, but was rejected because, at age 40, he was too old. So he sold off his belongings and headed out to the Sonoran desert, camping for three months on the wild Arizona border and, he claimed later, witnessing all kinds of criminal border activity. He had his epiphany while camping at Organ Pipe National Monument and seeing drug traffickers: "At that moment, it clicked," Simcox recalls. "The borders were wide open. Terrorists could come through."

He eventually took up permanent residence in Tombstone, getting part-time work as a shootout-show actor – playing, aptly enough, one of the ex-Confederate "Cowboy" gunmen who died in the showdown. ("I always got killed," he wryly observed to a reporter.) Responding to an ad for an assistant editor at the Tombstone Tumbleweed – a local weekly/shopper that made its living with classified ads – he was hired on the spot.

The Tumbleweed was that kind of paper. It didn't really have a reporting staff or try to cover local news. Mostly it ran a hodgepodge of free material from local contributors around the edges of its twenty pages or so of local classifieds. It was run out of a little hole-in-the-wall office just off the town's main street. And like a lot of such papers in dusty rural locales in 2002, it was having a hard time staying afloat, and its then-owner wasn't merely desperate for an assistant editor – hell, he wanted a buyer. Sure enough, a few months after Simcox had been hired, he cashed in his personal reserves – at one time, Simcox told reporters he had liquidated his son's college fund, but in later versions it was his own retirement fund – and bought the paper himself for $60,000 in August of 2002.

Simcox's epiphany had given him a focus for his new career: Within short order, the Tumbleweed became all about illegal immigration a la Roger Barnett and his nativist cohort, from whom he later acknowledged he had received his inspiration. The headlines shouted: "ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! A PUBLIC CALL TO ARMS! CITIZENS BORDER PATROL MILITIA NOW FORMING!"

He initially called it the Tombstone Militia, but shortly changed its name to the much more broadly marketable Civil Homeland Defense Corps. At its first gathering in December, Simcox told reporters he expected about fifty people to participate, but only a handful, about five or six, actually showed.

They may have been discouraged by the official resolution opposing Simcox's plans for border militias passed by the city council of the nearest big town, Douglas. The city's mayor, Ray Borane, authored the bill, writing: "Douglas is a bicultural and binational community, and the majority of its residents do not wish to encourage, be involved with or associate with these types of people, nor do they want our relationship with Mexico compromised by outside, xenophobic groups perpetuating hatred of humanity."

When Simcox held a border-watch training event for his militia in January 2003, all of two volunteers showed up to take part. Four reporters were there to cover them.

That was pretty much how it went for Simcox's militia for a couple of years: At best, the actual border watches would attract a handful of volunteers, many of them of dubious background at best. But there were always journalists of various kinds to be found: TV reporters, newspaper scribes, documentary filmmakers. They became Simcox's target audience.

It's certain that he wasn't making many inroads with his neighbors in southern Arizona. The city councils in both Douglas and Tombstone, along with the Cochise County Board of Supervisors, passed resolutions condemning efforts to form citizen-militia border-watch operations.
"We want the citizens of Tombstone, Cochise County and Arizona to know that the city of Tombstone doesn't agree with the vigilante approach he's taking," said Tombstone Mayor Dusty Escapule. "It can't end in a good situation. It's gonna get somebody hurt or killed."

There were pragmatic aspects to officials concern as well – namely, that adding amateur firepower to a complex and dangerous situation was like pouring gasoline on a fire. Cochise County Supervisors Chairman Pat Call pointed out that Simcox's armed civilians were in way over their heads: "The Border Patrol is facing fire power greater and more sophisticated than anything they carry," he said. "Right now, every evening, there are armed, nervous Border Patrol agents walking around in the dark, armed and nervous drug smugglers, people smugglers and armed and nervous residents. To add to this mix nervous, armed or poorly trained civilians, it just isn't good."

Locals in Tombstone pretty quickly adopted a view of Simcox very much like that of his former colleagues at Wildwood. "He's got an ego problem," said Bob Krueger, himself a relatively recent transplant. "He's got some kind of psychological need to be important and be recognized. This has more to do with him than with the real problems on the border."

Douglas Mayor Ray Borane also made his disdain for Simcox unmistakable: "That asshole is nothing but a media-publicity hound. He re-creates himself all of the time; he resurrects himself, and he will affiliate himself with anybody who can get any attention."

Joanne Young, a bartender at the Crazy Horse Saloon in Tombstone, observed: "Simcox doesn't have 10 people in this town on his side." Noting Tombstone's reliance on tourism, she said in 2003 that "visitors are down this year from last. People are calling and saying, 'I don't want to bring my children there; it isn't safe.' "

Sheriff Larry Dever tried to discourage them too: “Unfortunately, this kind of circumstance and these kinds of cries for forming posses invite fringe associations and agendas we don't need. They think it's a game or a sport.”

Around the corner from the Tumbleweed, Pete Tiscia was watching it all develop from the vantage point of his pawnshop, which specialized in buying and selling guns. "I think it's a big accident waiting to happen," he said. "Somebody's gonna get 'cowboy crazy' and shoot somebody."

Given this bunch, it might even be themselves getting shot. Especially if the guy leading them was sticking a gun down the front of his jeans.

It probably didn't help when, out on a Civil Homeland Defense patrol on January 26, 2003, Simcox wandered onto the Coronado National Monument, which prohibits guns within its boundaries. He was ticketed by the park ranger and his gun confiscated. Police also found the following among Simcox's possessions: a document entitled "Mission Plan," a police scanner, two walkie-talkies, and a toy figure of Wyatt Earp on horseback.

The last we heard of Simcox before this was in 2010:

Chris Simcox, who briefly flirted with a primary challenge to Sen. John McCain in 2010, has largely vanished from public view since April 2010, when his estranged wife, Alena, obtained a protection order against him after Simcox "brandished a gun and threatened to shoot her, their children and any police officers who tried to protect them."

Simcox was skilled at fooling people with a pleasing first impression, embodied in the makeover he made in 2006 at the hands of a group of Beltway media consultants he hired, after which he made public appearances trying to soothe people into believing the Minutemen were a benign organization. Here's a photo from his appearance that spring before the Bellingham Human Rights Commission:

As I say, he cleaned up real well. It was, of course, a con job.

I wonder if Lou Dobbs will do a segment. Well, no, actually, I don't.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.