'Molon labe': Folks on the fringe right are fearfully fingering their triggers

-- by Dave

That surge in gun sales that was reported right after Obama's election appears not to be waning:

President-elect Barack Obama's election has spurred a surge in gun sales, firearms retailers and enthusiasts say, as gun owners brace for what they believe will be a new era of gun control in Washington.

An electronic news service that covers outdoor news has even named Obama its "Gun Salesman of the Year."

Firearms associations began to suspect that political considerations were driving gun sales late last year as the number of background checks increased. But end-of-year figures showed a big spike in background checks for the last three months of 2008, and in November, the month Obama was elected, the number of background checks was 42 percent greater than in November 2007.

On the surface, this seems to be just about guns. But it runs much deeper than that -- and darker.

The fear being whipped up by the NRA and the gun fanatics has no known basis in reality. In the list of thirteen priorities for action in Obama's first year and beyond (see the New York Times on this), jobs and the economy completely predominate. Gun control not only is not on the list, there hasn't even been a whisper of it from the Obama team this year.

Yet that hasn't diminished the paranoia of the gun-love set (I'm afraid nothing is capable of that, actually), and that includes their shills inside the world of mainstream Conservatism. This week at the hearings for Attorney General nominee Eric Holder, one of the voices testifying against his confirmation was Stephen Halbrook, who also happens to have authored a recent book about the Second Amendment that's being promoted (via "book bomb") by such folks as Richard Viguerie, from whom we recently received an e-mail urging us to buy it.

What has the gun nuts already worked up about Holder, by the way, is his position supporting the gun ban in D.C., as well as an op-ed piece he wrote in October 2001 for the Washington Post titled "Keeping Guns Away From Terrorists." If you read it, it's only an eminently sensible piece about closing up gun-sales loopholes because in fact many terrorists use them to obtain weapons. Evidently, the "War on Terror" for Conservatives means sacrificing all other kinds of rights -- like the right not to be wiretapped, or the right not to be tortured -- but by Gawd, the gummint is gonna hafta pry the right to sell any weapon they like under the table at gun shows from their cold, dead fingers.

These fears are becoming widespread on the ground, particularly in the rural areas where gun rights have been a favorite bugaboo since the days of gas-station attendants and Beaver Cleaver. I know about this somewhat from personal experience; the fear that "Obama is gonna take our guns away" is certainly commonplace when I spend time in the rural West. But you can hear it bubbling up in a Washington Post piece about rural dwellers' mistrust of Obama:

"That comment he made about guns and religion, it's frightening, you have to admit," says the secretary at his accountant's office.

Loewer agrees. "I don't believe in going around with a gun strapped to your hip, Wild West-style," he says. "But you ought to be able to protect yourself."


... Near the refrigerated cases, a petite woman holding an inventory scanner greets him. She's wearing a name tag that says "Audrey Loewer, general manager, serving you since 1972."

Obama did not get her vote, either. "I don't know what will happen to people around here if he puts restrictions on guns," Audrey says. "Me and Wayne, we're lucky, we have jobs. With the tight economy, there's gonna be more thefts.

"You see people come in here, you can watch how they buy. They fill up two or three baskets when the check comes in at the first of the month. Then they'll come in at the end of the month and you see Vienna sausages and Spam in their cart. They'll load up on bread."

Those are the sentiments among more mainstream members of the Conservative set. Travel a little farther out to the fringes of right-wing thought, and it becomes virulent and potentially violent.

On those fringes, what we're seeing is a reformation of the militia movement of the 1990s, which organized in large part over hysteria ratcheted up by Bill Clinton's gun-control measures, particularly the assault-weapons ban that passed in 1994. But there are a couple of twists this time around -- Barack Obama does not appear eager to push any gun-control measures through Congress for the time being, so the fear and paranoia required are even more ephemeral in their basis than in the '90s; and more importantly, the new militia is being constituted of a different base -- younger, more militant, more paranoid, and more likely to have an actual military background.

A lot of this organizing is happening quietly, and the Internet is playing a key role. Among the more common places you'll find militiamen networking is at Web social-networking platforms like MySpace.

Much of the networking is going on at private pages that you need permission to access, but others are public. For instance, there's this site, run evidently by an ex-Marine from Colorado, which features discussion of such subjects as "Training a Survival of Militia Group, Part 1."

A common organizational theme popping up among the new militiamen -- you'll find it scattered throughout the above site -- is "Μολών Λaβέ" -- or "Molon labe," which is Greek for "Come and get them." As Wikipedia notes, it's the sentimental equivalent of "Over my dead body."

I have voted in Safety Joe's poll for the next friend's list he should make and I have suggested a state by state Μολών Λaβέ so that those who are near each other can prepare a response plan.

We grossly outnumber them - if we organize. How can 5, 10, 20, or even 30 cops stand down every Μολών Λaβέ patriot who bands together in defense of each other?

Talk is nice but now is the time for action. Organize with your geographically close Μολών Λaβέ friend and prepare a response plan.

Another glimpse into this mindset can be found at the MySpace website for Come and Take It Radio:

Join hosts Matt Conner and Erin Cassity as they proudly lead the way into the dark bleak abyss that will be the Obama Presidency as the drum beating leftys that have joined with us for the past eight years run off into the shadows to back pedal and support Obama's wars for the Elite. We will speak the truth that the true "Conservative" will be so desperately seeking in this new age of world governance. Everything from preserving our gun rights to how to prepare for the fun of the looming depression, these Texas Nationalists will cover in this Sunday evening show.

If you scroll around the site (recommended only for those with a shower handy), you'll find posts from likeminded souls, such as the white supremacist who posted this:



[Full-size version here.]

Of course, this bubbling cauldron has ramifications for the nation down the road. There's been a lot of discussion already of the increased security around Barack Obama at his inauguration this week:

Federal agents are on “a higher state of alert” because of hate talk by white supremacists about Barack Obama’s inauguration, officials told the Daily News on Tuesday.

“That chatter is out there, no doubt about it,” one senior FBI agent in Washington said this afternoon, adding that no credible plots against the 56th Presidential Inauguration have been detected.

The Bureau has ordered agents in all 56 field offices to “shake the trees” in advance of the Jan. 20 swearing-in of the 44th President, who will become the first African-American to occupy the Oval Office.

“They’re talking to sources to determine if there is any threat information in regard to the Inauguration,” the FBI source said.

“Everybody in law enforcement dealing with that particular (white supremacist) ‘clientele’ is on a higher state of alert,” a senior agent at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives told The News.

The ATF has expertise infiltrating white supremacist groups. A classified threat assessment for the Inauguration by the FBI and Homeland Security Department citing agitated hate groups was sent to police agencies this week.

Counterterrorism officials have also picked up chatter from Islamic militants, but the agitated domestic hate groups are “the big concern,” said another FBI official.

A CNN report today had more details:

[I]nterest in racist ideology was so high right after the election that computer servers for two White supremacist Web sites crashed, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups.

But the violence and interest soon subsided. Leaders within the white supremacist movement are now seeking to capitalize on Obama's presidency by using his election to help grow their organizations.

"President-elect Obama is going to be the spark that arouses the 'white movement,' " reads a posting on the National Socialist Movement Web site. "Obama's win is our win. We should all be happy of this event."

In an interview posted on his Web site on election night, former Louisiana state Rep. David Duke said Obama's election "is good in one sense -- that it is making white people clear of the fact that that government in Washington, D.C., is not our government."

"We are beginning to learn and realize our positioning," Duke, a prominent white supremacist, later said in the election night recording. "And our position is that we have got to stand up and fight now."

The extra precautions this week are only sensible, given the magnitude of the event. But as you can see, most of the rhetoric around his ascendance to the presidency isn't focused on harming Obama but rather in "resisting" his "New World Order" rule.

All of which suggests that the danger in these trends lies not this week, and probably not in an assassination plot (though that certainly is plausible too), but rather over the longer term, and the threat is directed more toward government generically, especially including law enforcement. But as we have seen with other right-wing lone-wolf avengers -- like Tim McVeigh or Eric Rudolph -- that animus often translates in action into a lot of dead and injured innocent citizens.

In other words, given the security womb around him, Barack Obama will probably be fine. The rest of us, however, will need to be watchful and alert.


[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

More Maroons in Federal Way

-- by Sara

Back in 2007, the school administrators in the working-class Seattle suburb of Federal Way found themselves on the wrong end of Jon Stewart's wit when they refused to allow An Inconvenient Truth to be shown in their classrooms because the movie was "controversial."

The same maroons are back at it again today. According to a Daily Kos post by Andrew Villeneuve (which in turn pulls from Seattle's KING5 news), the Federal Way school administrators in their manifold wisdom have decided that kids need permission slips from their parents to watch the Obama inauguration at school.

Evidently, they also consider our new president "controversial." (One wonders if they'd have made the same call if John McCain had won; or if in that case, attendance would have been mandatory.) Somebody in the front office is all too well aware that reality has a liberal bias, and is doing their level best to make sure that it doesn't intrude on their attempted indoctrination of Federal Way's youngest citizens.

Of course, being accomplished bureaucrats, they cooked up a procedural excuse for this decision:

The concern is that the televised inauguration was not listed in syllabus handed out at the beginning of the term. The district considers the inauguration a full length documentary, unlike some newspaper or internet reference articles which do not require pre-approval.

As Andrew points out, they're trying to argue that the inauguration is some kind of feature-length film -- not one of the most important historical live events of these kids' lives.

This is the kind of insanity the blogosphere eats for breakfast, so the Federal Way school administrators will no doubt be getting a big fat national earful -- maybe even another one from Jon Stewart come Monday night. But if your kid is actually a student in the Federal Way school system, you have another, much better way to fight back: Simply keep your kids home from school that day, and watch the inauguration as a family. If you're a stay-at-home parent, invite the kids of paycheck parents to come hang out at your place for the day, and make a party of it.

Schools get paid by the day for every student sitting in their seats. This kind of stupidity will come to a quick halt when the district realizes that it's going to bounce back and hit them squarely on their own bottom line. Even a few hundred extra absences on Tuesday, January 20 would make a pretty strong point, aimed right where it's most likely to get the attention of these administrators.

In the meantime, we need these people's names. And in the long run, Federal Way needs a new school board that's willing to fire administrators whose idea of "education" is to keep students away from the actual science and history that are happening around them, and the events that will have the biggest impact on their lives.

Typical Americans

-- by Dave

What's a typical American? According to Michael Barone, it's white married Christians:

The Republican Party throughout our history has been a party whose core constituency has been those who are considered, by themselves and by others, to be typical Americans. In the 19th century, that meant white Northern Protestants. Today, it means white married Christians. Yet such people, however typical, have never made up a majority in our culturally and regionally diverse nation.

Evidently, the core constituency of the Democratic Party that just elected Barack Obama is "atypical Americans."

The idea that only white Americans are real Americans has been with us for much longer than Michael Barone has been alive. Someday, we hope, it will become as extinct as the Klansmen and eugenicists who once promoted it.

The language animus

-- by Dave

So what is it about people speaking in foreign tongues that sets some Americans off? I've noticed that even in civil settings, a lot of white Americans -- especially those who aren't particularly well-educated -- consider it insulting that such words are even being spoken in their presence. It's almost as if they suspect that the foreign speakers are communicating in secret code as a conspiracy against them.

Yesterday in Seattle someone took it a step further:

Seattle police are looking for a man who became so enraged when he heard someone speaking a language other than English that he attacked him and a friend.

The attack happened around 3:15 p.m. Monday in the 8800 block of Rainier Avenue South, according to a police report.

The victims, described by police as African men, were in a store near Rainier and South Henderson Street when one of them received a phone call. The man stepped outside to talk on his cell phone.

While he was talking on the phone, he heard a man stopped in traffic yell at him to "speak English," according to the report. Police described the attacker only as a man who drove a dark-blue Chevrolet pickup truck.

The victim "tried to tell him he didn't speak English very well and that seemed to anger the suspect," the report stated.

The man in the pickup pulled out of traffic, got out of his truck, calling the victim a Muslim using a slur and told him to "go back home."

The victim tried to walk away, but the pickup driver continued to insult him, at one point reportedly saying, "I'll kill all of you."

The driver then grabbed the victim by the front of his shirt and punched him twice when the man tried to flee. The victim was hit in the shoulder and was able to block the second blow.

His friend inside the store saw the tussle and when he came out to break it up, he was punched in the eye.

Again, the attacker threatened to kill the men and headed for his truck.

Neither of the men was seriously hurt.

And yes, it's being investigated as a hate crime. As it should.

As the going gets tough, the white haters get going

-- by Dave

We've been reporting steadily on the drumbeat of post-election racial hate that's being stirred up by the far racist right, particularly revolving around the election of Barack Obama. The most recent incident was the post-election assaults in New York by three teens who went looking for blacks to beat up in revenge for Obama's victory.

It's important to understand that -- just as with most hate crimes -- there isn't necessarily a direct connection between the hate groups that promote such violence and the thuggery itself. (In fact, only about 8% of all bias crimes are committed by members of recognizable hate groups.) What these crimes indicate instead is the larger spread of their toxic beliefs into the mainstream, and thus how their influence is belied by their numbers.

There was a noteworthy piece on this yesterday in the Washington Post:

Now, as McIntyre prepares to retire from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, he and other analysts are warning that the threat from hate groups and splinter organizations connected to the Klan should not be underestimated, especially at a time of economic unrest.

"In society, you have a very small number of people who are going to push the envelope and take it to the next step," said McIntyre, the resident ATF agent in charge in Roanoke.

Veteran investigators say they have advocated for increased attention to the problem since late September, when the nation's economic troubles widened, giving white supremacists a potent new source of discontent to exploit among potential recruits.

The number of U.S. hate groups has increased by 48 percent, to 888, since 2000, according to experts at the Southern Poverty Law Center, an independent organization that monitors racist movements.

Although questions persist about the ability of such groups to carry out violent plans, several recent national developments have combined to worry analysts, said Mark Potok, chief of the law center's Intelligence Project. In addition to the economic downturn, he cited rising immigration, demographic changes that predict whites will not be a majority within a few decades, and what some might see as "the final insult -- a black man in the White House."

These warnings are almost certainly going to prove prescient in the coming years, in part because of a component that's missing from this report: namely, the significant demographic shift that has occurred in the United States in the past decade, particularly in areas that tended previously to be predominantly white.

In fact, the focus on economic downturns is slightly misleading, because there's no real data to substantively connect hard financial times with an increase in racist activity, particularly as they are embodied by hate crimes.

What researchers have found instead is that bad economic conditions can amplify interethnic tensions when they have already been created by shifts in demographics -- particularly the influx of a readily identifiable ethnic subgroup into an area that has long been predominated by a single large ethnic bloc.

I explain this in more detail in Death on the Fourth of July:

These kinds of demographic shifts, as it happens, often become the primary breeding grounds for hate crimes -- even in decidedly non-rural settings. A study published by [Yale University political scientist] Donald Green in 1998 focused on New York City, and it found that demographic change in 140 community districts of the city between 1980 and 1990 predicted the incidence of hate crimes. The balance of whites and whatever the target group happened to be in a given community district was an important factor, but the rate at which that balance changed was perhaps even more significant. The most common statistical recipe was an area that was almost purely white in the past which experiences the sudden and noticeable immigration of some other group.

In the case of New York, what occurred was a rapid inmigration of three groups: Asians, Latinos and blacks, though in the latter case the migration was often a response to the other groups' arrival; blacks were in some ways moved around, or their neighborhood boundaries changed. A number of previously white areas—Bensonhurst being the classic case, or Howard Beach -- experienced a rapid inmigration of various nonwhite groups. What was particularly revealing about the hate-crime pattern was that the crimes reflected the targets who were actually moving in -- that is, they revealed that this was not a kind of generalized hatred. Where Asians moved in, the researchers found a surge in anti-Asian hate crimes, and likewise with Latinos or blacks. Bias crime has more of a kind of reality-based component, at least in the aggregate, than is implicated by those psychological theories that suggest that there only exists a generalized sense of intolerance on the part of those who practice extreme forms of bigotry.

In a later study, Green found this trend replicated itself elsewhere -- namely, in Germany after the fall of the Iron Curtain in the late 1980s. In that case, there was rapid inmigration of immigrants into formerly homogeneous eastern Germany, which replicated the conditions in New York as the perfect recipe for bias crime. And indeed, there was a huge surge in hate crimes, which only slowed when the flow of immigrants was halted in the summer of 1993.

In any event, those conditions certainly can be found across a broad swath of the American landscape, which has seen a significant influx of Latino immigrants into formerly all-white areas of the Midwest, the South, and the West.

In other words, hate groups are almost certainly going to be exploiting fresh opportunities for recruitment, both ideological and actual. The stage has been set by the past decade's demographic shift, but the Bush Recession will in any event give them a big jug of gasoline for their bonfire. Obama's election will give them a figure upon whom they can focus their hate, and the immigration debate will give them an issue to recruit and organize around.

How to deal with it? The first step entails realizing that hate speech is in fact protected free speech -- but that we don't have to take it quietly. Moreover, it will always be smoke for law enforcement to begin sniffing out the fires. As the WaPo piece observes at its conclusion:

The trick for investigators, the ATF's Cavanaugh said, is separating hateful words from impending violence. "They all hate, they all go to rallies, but for the most part, most of them will not go out and plant a bomb or shoot," he said. "Maybe four or five out of 100 will go out and do that. The hard part for us is to sort out the free speech and find the person who's really going to make a bomb or shoot someone."

Those, of course, are the limits for law enforcement. Citizens, however, are not constrained from doing their part when it comes to the eruption of hate speech: indeed, if they're serious about combating it, they will stand up to it. This entails holding the speakers and their words up for public repudiation, both in the press and among the general public.

Because ignoring it doesn't work. Haters always interpret silence as implicit support. And besides, standing up to haters can actually be fun.

In the coming weeks and months, we may find it even more necessary than we'd like to think.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Who's Gonna Build Your Wall?

Yeah, I know it's been knocking around the blogsphere for a couple of years, but it absolutely belongs here.

-- Sara

Rove and O'Reilly: Torture keeps us safe

-- by Dave

Bill O'Reilly devoted another Talking Points Memo segment last night to his new pet thesis that Barack Obama is going to make the nation vulnerable to terrorist attack by taking torture off the table, and then brought Karl Rove on to back it all up:

You know, when he gets behind that desk, and has the awesome responsibility of protecting our country, anybody who's chief executive of the United States is going to want to have the ability, in a time of a great crisis, to call upon enhanded interrogation techniques.

A little later, he closes with this:

Look, if you've taken techniques that have kept America safe and you discard them, you are putting the country at risk and you're going to have to bear the consequences of that.

OK, let me see if I can keep this all straight.

We're now getting advice on how to prevent a terrorist attack from "the Brain" of an administration that manifestly failed at that because it was asleep at the wheel on 9/11, am I right? And they're telling us the torture regime they installed in the interim is responsible for the lack of subsequent attacks afterward -- rather than making the likelihood of future attacks greater?

Karl Rove was a key player in an administration that, in the first eight months of its tenure, specifically undermined counterterrorism programs in an essentially political dismissal of such work as "a Clinton thing."

There was the Aug. 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing titled "Bin Laden determined to strike in US," which concluded that terrorists planned to attack us using airplanes. It was ignored.

There was that briefing George Tenet gave Condi Rice on the immensity of the threat, which both she and George W. Bush also ignored -- and then lied about doing so afterward. Indeed, Rice and the Bush administration ent to great measures to cover up their own incompetence.

There was the Hart-Rudman Commission report, which warned the White House in May 2001 that it needed to take serious steps to prevent a terrorist attack. The report was ignored.

So was Richard Clarke's memo of January 2001 warning of the terrorist threat.

And finally, there were the Bush White House's pre-9/11 actions on a pure policy level: "Attorney General John Ashcroft not only moved aggressively to reduce DoJ's anti-terrorist budget but also shift DoJ's mission in spirit to emphasize its role as a domestic police force and anti-drug force." The administration also shifted Department of Defense counter-terrorism funding into missile-defense-system programs.

And yet for all that record, everyone in the press -- most especially Bill O'Reilly -- gave the Bush administration a pass for its massive malfeasance on terrorism, and came to believe that the lack of subsequent attacks meant that suddenly this gang knew what it was doing.

Even though what it was doing entailed violating basic international war-crimes laws and stoking the flames of hatred for the United States. As the 2006 National Intelligence Estimate found, Bush's invasion-under-false-pretenses of Iraq has actually made it far more likely we will have to endure future terrorist attacks.

That report noted that "actions by the United States government that were determined to have stoked the jihad movement" included "the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal."

In other words, Karl Rove and his Jet Set Junta made it far more likely that we're going to be hit by terrorists in the coming years, the credit going in part to misbegotten torture policies that have been proven ineffective and counterproductive. And calling an end to those policies will make us more vulnerable? Oh really?

And if such an attack happens, it will be Obama's fault, according to Bill O'Reilly. Because only Republicans get to skate when terrorists strike on their watch.

These people are not just crooks and liars. They're also insane.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Breaking News: BC's FLDS Patriarch Arrested for Polygamy

Photo of Winston Blackmore by Ian Smith of the Vancouver Sun

-- by Sara

The Canadian press has erupted in the last hour or so with the news that former Bountiful, BC polygamist Mormon patriarch Winston Blackmore and his second-in-command Fred Oler have been arrested and charged with polygamy.

Blackmore ran the Bountiful compound until being displaced in a power struggle with Warren Jeffs two years ago; these days, he's set up nearby with a new place of his own. He's thought to have 26 wives -- including, as he publicly announced at a 2006 polygamy conference, several "very young ones" and at least one who was under the age of 16 at the time he made that claim. And then he repeated that statement on Larry King. This is a man who knows he's a child rapist, and is rather pleased with himself for his ability to get away with it.

Today, that ended. What's most interesting about this, though, is that the two men were directly charged with polygamy -- a step no jurisdiction dealing with the FLDS has yet dared to take. Through the decades, prosecutors have focused on the fallout crimes that result from these communities: child abuse and abandonment, forced marriage, rape, consipiracy to transport minors for immoral purposes across state lines, that kind of thing. But, so far as I know, no prosecutor has yet dared to stand up and charge any of these men directly for committing polygamy. Which makes today's arrest a historical landmark of sorts.

Polygamy's a tough charge to make. In this day and age, most of us agree that it's nobody's business what consenting adults do, or what domestic arrangements they make. It's in even trickier in Canada, where the very idea of marriage itself is up for legal grabs right now. There are older marriage laws in place, of course -- mostly rather conservative ones derived from English Common Law (in the Anglo provinces) and the Napoleonic Code (in Quebec). But few of these definitions have been revisited since the country's Charter of Rights and Freedoms was passed in 1982. And when they have been revisited -- as in the gay marriage discussion four years ago -- the new intrepretations have generally tended to favor the most expansive definition of marriage possible.

In the face of that, the BC government has been very reluctant in the past to slap a polygamy charge on the Bountiful boys. Their biggest fear was that if they did, the case would end up in the Supreme Court, which would then rule that the anti-polygamy laws on the books are now illegal. The upshot is that, for decades, prosecutors have refused to use the legal tools at their disposal for fear that those tools would be taken away entirely. Nice Catch-22 ya got there.

Back in June, Attorney-General Wally Oppal -- an Indo-Canadian who is by all accounts possessed of great big brass ones and very much ready to deal with the FLDS once and for all -- named a special prosector to explore the legal options. That prosecutor's analysis has apparently convinced Oppal that the polygamy law can withstand a Supreme Court challenge. That's why he's decided to take the FLDS head-on in a way that's likely to make history, one way or another.

The other important thing about this story is that it's another example of how the FLDS' intricate strategy of moving people between compounds in various states and countries is continuing to unravel. (For example: Bountiful is literally walking distance from another, smaller compound just over the border in Idaho. Wives and children routinely fled from one to the other to avoid unwanted attention.) Not only are the attorneys general in Utah, Texas, Arizona, and now BC on warpath; they're often sharing information and coordinating strategy. Oppal's bold move creates fresh trouble in a jurisdiction that's never been much trouble before, and that can only be a good thing in the long run.

As always, the Vancouver Sun's Daphne Bramham is the reporter with the edge on this. More as it unfolds.

In Katrina's wake, white neighborhood 'militia' murdered blacks

A.C. Thompson has a devastating piece in The Nation this week describing the all-white militia that took up arms to defend one of the few neighborhoods in New Orleans to stay dry after Hurricane Katrina broke the levees in 2005:

Facing an influx of refugees, the residents of Algiers Point could have pulled together food, water and medical supplies for the flood victims. Instead, a group of white residents, convinced that crime would arrive with the human exodus, sought to seal off the area, blocking the roads in and out of the neighborhood by dragging lumber and downed trees into the streets. They stockpiled handguns, assault rifles, shotguns and at least one Uzi and began patrolling the streets in pickup trucks and SUVs. The newly formed militia, a loose band of about fifteen to thirty residents, most of them men, all of them white, was looking for thieves, outlaws or, as one member put it, anyone who simply "didn't belong."

It started out as a classic case of white paranoiac overreaction to fears of looting and rioting and whatever else it is those black people do -- rather like the reaction you saw in sundown towns in the 1920s, which were similar in being "defended communities," to supposed threats of black depredations -- but quickly morphed into something else altogether:

Fellow militia member Wayne Janak, 60, a carpenter and contractor, is more forthcoming with me. "Three people got shot in just one day!" he tells me, laughing. We're sitting in his home, a boxy beige-and-pink structure on a corner about five blocks from Daigle's Grocery. "Three of them got hit right here in this intersection with a riot gun," he says, motioning toward the streets outside his home. Janak tells me he assumed the shooting victims, who were African-American, were looters because they were carrying sneakers and baseball caps with them. He guessed that the property had been stolen from a nearby shopping mall. According to Janak, a neighbor "unloaded a riot gun"--a shotgun--"on them. We chased them down."

Janak, who was carrying a pistol, says he grabbed one of the suspected looters and considered killing him, but decided to be merciful. "I rolled him over in the grass and saw that he'd been hit in the back with the riot gun," he tells me. "I thought that was good enough. I said, 'Go back to your neighborhood so people will know Algiers Point is not a place you go for a vacation. We're not doing tours right now.'"

He's equally blunt in Welcome to New Orleans, an hourlong documentary produced by the Danish video team, who captured Janak, beer in hand, gloating about hunting humans. Surrounded by a crowd of sunburned white Algiers Point locals at a barbeque held not long after the hurricane, he smiles and tells the camera, "It was great! It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it." A native of Chicago, Janak also boasts of becoming a true Southerner, saying, "I am no longer a Yankee. I earned my wings." A white woman standing next to him adds, "He understands the N-word now." In this neighborhood, she continues, "we take care of our own."

Janak, who says he'd been armed with two .38s and a shotgun, brags about keeping the bloody shirt worn by a shooting victim as a trophy. When "looters" showed up in the neighborhood, "they left full of buckshot," he brags, adding, "You know what? Algiers Point is not a pussy community."

... Some of the gunmen prowling Algiers Point were out to wage a race war, says one woman whose uncle and two cousins joined the cause. A former New Orleanian, this source spoke to me anonymously because she fears her relatives could be prosecuted for their crimes. "My uncle was very excited that it was a free-for-all--white against black--that he could participate in," says the woman. "For him, the opportunity to hunt black people was a joy."

"They didn't want any of the 'ghetto niggers' coming over" from the east side of the river, she says, adding that her relatives viewed African-Americans who wandered into Algiers Point as "fair game." One of her cousins, a young man in his 20s, sent an e-mail to her and several other family members describing his adventures with the militia. He had attached a photo in which he posed next to an African-American man who'd been fatally shot. The tone of the e-mail, she says, was "gleeful"--her cousin was happy that "they were shooting niggers."

I'm just waiting for some Republican to tell us once again that "racism is dead."

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]>

Hate crimes: It's time to finally pass a federal law

-- by Dave



The most recent well-publicized anti-Latino bias crime -- this time involving the death of an Ecuadorean immigrant -- has prompted the National Council of La Raza to push for the passage, at long last, of a federal hate-crimes law:

Today the National Council of La Raza (NCLR)—the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States—joined leaders from the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda on Capitol Hill to urge Congress and the new Administration to make passage of the “Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act” a priority. Following on the heels of November's brutal battery and murder of Marcelo Lucero in Suffolk County, NY, another senseless death has provoked outrage in communities throughout the nation. Two Ecuadorean brothers were assaulted on December 8 in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. Jose Osvaldo Sucuzhanay died last week as a result of his injuries.

“President-Elect Obama and the new Congress should not waste any time in immediately passing the ‘Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act’ so that more lives are not lost in senseless attacks,” said Janet Murguía, NCLR President and CEO. “The wave of hate unleashed by the polarized debate over immigration has led to an increase in violence and hate groups targeting Latinos. These recent deaths are a direct outcome of the anger and hatred spurred on by people who mischaracterize all Latinos and the institutions that serve them as a threat to our country.”

No doubt Lou Dobbs and Bill O'Reilly will promptly find ways to distort this debate. But they need a little reality check:



As the SPLC reports:

Hate crimes targeting Latinos increased again in 2007, capping a 40% rise in the four years since 2003, according to FBI statistics released this fall.

As anti-immigrant propaganda has increased on both the margins and in the mainstream of society — where pundits and politicians have routinely vilified undocumented Latino immigrants with a series of defamatory falsehoods — hate violence has risen against perceived "illegal aliens." Each year since 2003, the number of FBI-reported anti-Latino hate crime incidents has risen, even as a swelling nativist movement has become larger and more vitriolic.

This about more than just Latinos, though. This is about black people (remember the Jena 6?), gays and lesbians, Muslims ... every kind of minority. And for that matter, it's about white straight people too:

Bias-crime laws are a way for society to make clear its condemnation of such acts, recognizing them as more heinous than simple crimes because they cause greater harm. Indeed, pretending as opponents do that a cross burned on the lawn is the same as being egged and toilet-papered, or that a gay-bashing rampage by young thugs is the same thing as a bar fight, simply tries to pretend away the truly hateful and terroristic element of the former of these, as though it doesn't exist. But it does exist, and its effects poison our society and make a joke out of our self-belief in ourselves as an "equal opportunity" society.

This, in the end, is the single clearest reason why progressives should avidly support a federal hate-crimes law: These are crimes whose primary purpose is to disenfranchise, to expel, to deny the most basic rights of association and opportunity to millions of Americans of all stripes. Civil libertarians need to come to grips with the fact that these crimes are real, their effects are real, and they represent, as Donald Green argues, a real "massive dead-weight loss of freedom" for those millions of Americans.

Americans lose their freedoms not just through government oppression; an honest appraisal of our history forces us to recognize that there is a substantial track record of Americans losing their freedoms (up to and including their lives) through the actions of their fellow citizens: the genocide of Native Americans; the long reign of terror of the "lynching era" and associated "sundown towns" that infected the entire nation; the expulsion and incarceration of Asian Americans; the long-running campaign of vicious hatred directed against gays and lesbians.

Hate crimes are an integral part of that history, and laws intended to punish their perpetrators with stiffer sentences are an important blow for the cause of very real and substantial freedoms for millions of Americans. Trying to argue that, in some esoteric sense, they constitute "thought crimes" that somehow deprive us of our freedoms (to what? commit crimes?) turns this reality on its head.

Yet progressives haven't yet figured out that framing hate-crime laws as a defense of people's civil liberties is precisely the argument that will instantly deflate the long-running "thought crime" argument. In all the debate over the legislation, I haven't seen the point raised once.

As long as small-town -- and even big-city -- law-enforcement officers labor under misconceptions about bias-crime laws and fail to properly identify, investigate, or prosecute them, places like Jena are going to fester. And this is where the Matthew Shepard Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act comes in -- because its primary mission is to help local law cops and prosecutors do their job well -- by providing logistical and investigative support, grants, training, and other kinds of assistance.

Here’s a link to the most recent version of the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

Spineless Democrats -- facing a certain G.W. Bush veto -- crumbled when it counted last year when there was a historic chance for its passage. This year, they will have no excuse -- especially with Latino groups getting on board.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

No, Bill O'Reilly, they're laughing at you

-- by Dave

My home state has been getting an inordinate amount of attention from Bill O'Reilly lately over that awful, horrible, teeth-gnashing, faint-inducting display by atheists located next to the Nativity scene in the state Capitol.

You can tell it's really been a slow couple of weeks because O'Reilly is still flogging this worthless story. The only thing O'Reilly has to show for it is a group of state workers who've been inundated with out-of-state callers wasting their time.

Oh, that and all the additions to the Capitol display, which now includes a sign honoring the Flying Spaghetti monster and a Festivus display.

It came up in yesterday's O'Reilly Factor show on Fox, while he was discussing the issue with Megyn Kelly. O'Reilly said this:

The Flying Spaghetti Monster holiday display. All these people are doing is mocking her. That's why they're doing it.

No, Bill. They're mocking YOU. That's why they're doing it.

The FSM and Festivus displays were intended to drive O'Reilly and his supporters even further nuts. After all, the core of O'Reilly's original complaint was that the atheists were taking advantage of their free-speech rights; the displays that piled on specifically were intended to make the same point even further. (This is particularly so for the FSM folks, whose whole point is to make as much fun of organized religion as possible.)

Of course, Gov. Gregoire has called a halt to this nonsense, so O'Reilly's story is going away. With a whimper from Papa Bear himself.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Nazis in the military: 'I'm so proud of my kills'

[Shawn Stuart, Iraq War veteran, at a 2006 neo-Nazi rally in Olympia, WA.]

-- by Dave

Two years ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center ran a devastating report describing the infiltration of neo-Nazis into the ranks of the American military. The Pentagon's official response was steadfast denial of the problem.

The SPLC's David Holthouse just published a follow-up report, and found, predictably, that the problem is getting worse as the conflict in Iraq drags on:

A new FBI report confirms that white supremacists are infiltrating the military for several reasons. According to the unclassified FBI Intelligence Assessment, "White Supremacist Recruitment of Military Personnel Since 9/11," which was released to law enforcement agencies nationwide: "Sensitive and reliable source reporting indicates supremacist leaders are encouraging followers who lack documented histories of neo-Nazi activity and overt racist insignia such as tattoos to infiltrate the military as 'ghost skins,' in order to recruit and receive training for the benefit of the extremist movement."

The FBI report details more than a dozen investigative findings and criminal cases involving Iraq and Afghanistan veterans as well as active-duty personnel engaging in extremist activity in recent years. For example, in September 2006, the leader of the Celtic Knights, a central Texas splinter faction of the Hammerskins, a national racist skinhead organization, planned to obtain firearms and explosives from an active duty Army soldier in Fort Hood, Texas. That soldier, who served in Iraq in 2006 and 2007, was a member of the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi group.

I observed at the time that one of the uglier aspects of the presence of neo-Nazis in Iraq would be the behavior of American soldiers among civilians there:

As Atrios notes, the SPLC report raises immediate questions about the kind of men we're sending over to Iraq. To what extent, really, does the spread of white-supremacist attitudes in the military bring about atrocities like the recent murder of a 14-year-old girl and her family, or the Haditha massacre? It isn't hard to see, after all, attitudes about the disposability of nonwhite races rearing their ugly head in those incidents.

Sure enough, as Holthouse reports:

Earlier this year, the founder of White Military Men identified himself in his New Saxon account as "Lance Corporal Burton" of the 2nd Battalion Fox Company Pit 2097, from Florida, according to a master's thesis by graduate student Matthew Kennard. Under his "About Me" section, Burton writes: "Love to shoot my M16A2 service rifle effectively at the Hachies (Iraqis)," and, "Love to watch things blow up (Hachies House)."

Kennard, who was working on his thesis for Columbia University's Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism, also monitored claims of active-duty military service earlier this year on the neo-Nazi online forum Blood & Honour, where "88Soldier88" posted this message on Feb. 18: "I am in the ARMY right now. I work in the Detainee Holding Area [in Iraq]. … I am in this until 2013. I am in the infantry but want to go to SF [Special Forces]. Hopefully the training will prepare me for what I hope is to come."

One of the Blood & Honour members claiming to be an active-duty soldier taking part in combat operations in Iraq identified himself to Kennard as Jacob Berg. He did not disclose his rank or branch of service. "There are actually a lot more 'skinheads,' 'nazis,' white supremacists now [in the military] than there has been in a long time," Berg wrote in an E-mail exchange with Kennard. "Us racists are actually getting into the military a lot now because if we don't every one who already is [in the military] will take pity on killing sand niggers. Yes I have killed women, yes I have killed children and yes I have killed older people. But the biggest reason I'm so proud of my kills is because by killing a brown many white people will live to see a new dawn."

The July 2006 report by the SPLC found this infiltration occurring at an alarming rate. Neo-Nazis "stretch across all branches of service, they are linking up across the branches once they're inside, and they are hard-core," Department of Defense gang detective Scott Barfield told the SPLC. "We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad," he added. "That's a problem."

The source of the problem, as the report explained, was the extreme pressure military recruiters were under to fill their recruitment quotas. "Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces," said Barfield, "and commanders don’t remove them . . . even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members." The military downplayed a neo-Nazi presence in the ranks, Barfield added, "because then parents who are already worried about their kids signing up and dying in Iraq are going to be even more reluctant about their kids enlisting if they feel they’ll be exposed to gangs and white supremacists."

One of the noteworthy aspects of this phenomenon is the increasingly military style of the Far Right in recent years, particularly the militias in the 1990s, who openly recruited veterans and current military members. The two cultures have become increasingly enmeshed, as embodied by Steven Barry's recruitment plan for neo-Nazis considering a military career as a way to sharpen their "warrior" skills.

The FBI's assessment in the "White Supremacist Recruitment of Military Personnel Since 9/11" report found that the numbers of identifiable neo-Nazis within the ranks was quite small (only a little over 200), but warned:

Although individuals with military backgrounds constitute a small percentage of white supremacist extremists, they frequently occupy leadership roles within extremist groups and their involvement has the potential to reinvigorate an extremist movement suffering from loss of leadership and in-fighting during the post-9/11 period.

Looking ahead, current and former military personnel belonging to white supremacist extremist organizations who experience frustration at the inability of these organizations to achieve their goals may choose to found new, more operationally minded and operationally capable groups. The military training veterans bring to the movement and their potential to pass this training on to others can increase the ability of lone offenders to carry out violence from the movement’s fringes.

Military experience—ranging from failure at basic training to success in special operations forces—is found throughout the white supremacist extremist movement. FBI reporting indicates extremist leaders have historically favored recruiting active and former military personnel for their knowledge of firearms, explosives, and tactical skills and their access to weapons and intelligence in preparation for an anticipated war against the federal government, Jews, and people of color.

... The prestige which the extremist movement bestows upon members with military experience grants them the potential for influence beyond their numbers. Most extremist groups have some members with military experience, and those with military experience often hold positions of authority within the groups to which they belong.

... Military experience—often regardless of its length or type—distinguishes one within the extremist movement. While those with military backgrounds constitute a small percentage of white supremacist extremists, FBI investigations indicate they frequently have higher profiles within the movement, including recruitment and leadership roles.

... New groups led or significantly populated by military veterans could very likely pursue more operationally minded agendas with greater tactical confidence. In addition, the military training veterans bring to the movement and their potential to pass this training on to others can increase the ability of lone offenders to carry out violence from the movement’s fringes.

This problem doesn’t involve only the Nazis, gang-bangers, and other violent personalities worming their way into the military. It also affects the many more formerly normal, non-racist recruits who have been dragged into multiple tours of duty in Iraq, regardless of the psychological dangers of such treatment. This includes many people whose evaluations have recommended they not be returned for duty but have been sent back regardless. Thus the Timothy McVeigh Finishing School continues to operate.

This has the deadly potential to become a significant component of the predictable surge in far-right activity likely to manifest itself in the United States in the coming months and years, especially as Democrats and liberals expand their hold on power. We run the risk of re-creating the conditions that arose in Germany and Italy after World War I: the presence of scores of angry, disaffected, and psychologically damaged war veterans, fed a steady diet of "Dolchstosslegende," poised to organize into a political force aimed at "rebirthing" the nation and its heritage.

In our current situation, these veterans not only will have served with neo-Nazis amid their ranks, they will likely be faced with unemployment and a wrecked economy, eager for someone to blame and fully trained and capable of violent action.

SPLC Chief Counsel Richard Cohen has written another letter to the Defense Secretary pleading that the DoD take concrete steps to deal with this problem. Here's hoping he produces something other than denial this time.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

George W. Bush and those whites-only Texas suburbs

-- by Dave

At a cursory glance, the news about George W. Bush moving into a former whites-only enclave in Texas called Preston Hollow looks to be one of those minor, one-day stories. After all, it's not as if these kinds of covenants are still in existence or are being enforced, right?

But there's a lot more to this story, because it tells us a lot about not just George W. Bush, but about the conservative worldview and how it plays out as governance, and moreover, about the real reasons for the nation's lingering racial divide.

For starters, it's worth remembering that this isn't the first former "sundown suburb" that the Bushes have lived in. When Bush returned to Texas in 1989, he moved to the Dallas suburb of Highland Park, where he lived until becoming governor in 1994.

James Loewen -- who has written the definitive text on the subject, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism -- has compiled a Sundown Town database that includes a number of Texas towns, (though not Preston Hollow, an apparent omission; Loewen is adding to this database as evidence comes in). The database describes Highland Park thus:

Highland Park is one of Dallas's most exclusive suburbs. President George W. Bush lived there at one time, and Dick Cheney still maintains a home in Highland Park. When it was developed in 1913, restrictive covenants applied to every home. After Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Highland Park sent its few black students to school in Dallas rather than allow them to attend Highland Park schools. Eventually this was overturned on the basis of Texas's desegregation laws, to which an alderman suggested that the city ask homeowners to fire their live-in servants (the parents of those black schoolchildren). In 1961, the city of Dallas stopped accepting children from the suburbs, and at least one white employer paid rent for a Dallas address for her black servant's children.

In 1981, 104 people filed a class-action lawsuit against the town, alleging discrimination and racial profiling by police against African Americans and Hispanics. The police often charged people of color with being "drunk in car", a crime which the plaintiff's lawyers pointed out was not actually on the books. Although the police denied the allegations, the Justice Department became involved, and reached an agreement with the town to halt the practice.

A black couple who purchased a house in Highland Park in 2003 are believed to be the first black homeowners in the city. According to a June 2003 Newsweek web article, the local paper ran a story about the couple on the front page, with the lead "Guess who's coming to dinner? and staying for a while?" The article also referred to the female of the couple as "girl". The woman, Karen Watson, told Newsweek she was "disappointed" with the lead but happy that race and racial discrimination in housing were being discussed. Watson is a mortgage officer and reported that she had seen racial discrimination in her work.

The city has a reputation for exclusivity applied any outsiders, not just people of color. Eating lunch and picnicing is forbidden the local parks. The city also required fishing permits to fish in any waters within Highland Park, which violates Texas law as a state fishing permit is good for all public waters in Texas and all of the waters within Highland Park are public. Usage of tennis courts in the public parks is forbidden to Dallas residents. Two white graduate students were arrested for violating this ordinance and offered the choice of a $5 fine or a night in jail. The students chose jail.

When it comes to race in America, we've always thought of the persistent poverty and concomitant crime of the inner city as "the problem," or at least its chief embodiment. But as Loewen notes [pp. 374-75], the problem, or at least its source, is embodied in the all-white communities that have a history of, if not eliminating them outright, at least making nonwhites unwelcome:

Most people, looking around their metropolitan area, perceive inner-city African American neighborhoods as "the problem." It then follows all too easily that African Americans themselves get perceived as the source of the problem. ... So whites generalize: blacks can't do anything right, can't even keep up their own neighborhoods. All African Americans get tarred by the obvious social problems of the inner city. For that matter, some ghetto residents themselves buy into the notion that they are the problem and act accordingly.

... It takes an exercise of the sociological imagination to problematize the sundown suburb. As one drives west from Chicago Avenue toward Oak Park, the problems of the Near Northwest neighborhood in Chicago are plain. Oak Park then presents its own problem: can it stay interracial, having gone from 0.2% African American in 1970 to 22.4% in 2000? The source of both problems lies not in Chicago Avenue in either city, however, but elsewhere -- in neighborhoods miles away that look great, such as Kenilworth, which in 2000 had not one black household among its 2,494 total population. Once one knows its manifestations, white supremacy is visible in Kenilworth, the sundown suburb, and in Near Northwest Chicago, and it is inferable in Oak Park as well. Lovely white enclaves such as Kenilworth withdraw resources disproportionately from the city. They encourage the people who run our corporations, many of whom live in them, not to see race as their problem. The prestige of these suburbs invites governmental officials to respond more rapidly to concerns of their residents, who are likely to be viewed as more important people than black inner-city inhabitants. And they make interracial suburbs such as Oak Park difficult to keep as interracial oases.

Towns like Highland Park and Preston Hollow, as Loewen explains in his book, represent one of the important ways "defended" white communities export their social problems to the urban centers many of their residents are hoping to flee:

Once they get into the NIMBY mind-set, they try to keep out any problem or "problem group," pawning off their own social problems of central cities and multiracial, multiclass inner suburbs. Consider those members of society who are dramatically downward mobile -- some alcoholics and drug addicts; some Downs syndrome children; many schizophrenics; elderly people whose illness and incapacity have exhausted their resources and their relatives; employees fired when an industry downsizes and no one wants their skills. Every social class -- even the most affluent -- generates some of these people. Elite sundown suburbs offer no facilities to house, treat, or comfort such people -- no halfway houses for the mentally ill or ex-criminals, no residential drug treatment facilities, no public housing, often not even assisted-living complexes for the elderly or persons with disabilities. This is no accident. Elite white suburbanites don't want such facilities in their neighborhoods and have the prestige, money, and knowledge to make their objections count. "Without such homes, people with mental illnesses often wind up homeless, especially in wealthy areas," according to an AP article telling how an elite white neighborhood in Greenwich, Connecticut, blocked a halfway house for years.

When sundown suburbanites do become homeless, they simply have to leave. Most sundown suburbs do not allow homeless people to spend the night on their streets, and of course they provide no shelters for them. "In suburban jurisdictions," said Nan Roman, of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, in 2000, "there is no sense that these are our people." Community leaders worry that if their suburb provides services, that will only bring more homeless people to their town because no other suburb does. The result, nationally, is that cities provide 49% of all homeless assistance programs, suburbs 19%, and rural areas 32%. Yet suburbs have more people than cities and rural areas combined. Less affluent inner suburbs and central cities must cope with the downwardly mobile people that more affluent sundown suburbs produce, as well as with their own. These social problems burden cities twice. ...

[Thomas and Mary Edsall, in Chain Reaction] point out that the principle of self-interest explains what otherwise might seem to be an ideological contradiction: sundown suburbanites usually try to minimize expenditures by the state and federal governments, but locally they favor "increased suburban and county expenditures, guaranteeing the highest possible return to themselves on their tax dollars." The Edsalls cite Gwinnett County, Georgia, as an example. Gwinnett, east of Atlanta, is "one of the fastest growing suburban jurisdictions in the nation, heavily Republican (75.5% for Bush [senior]), affluent, and white (96.6%)." Its residents "have been willing to tax and spend on their own behalf as liberally as any Democrats." Such within-county expenditures increase the inequality between white suburbs and interracial cities. They do nothing to redress or pay for the ways that Gwinnett residents use and rely upon Atlanta and its public services.

As I've observed previously:

The chief dynamic driving this is a certain dishonesty on the part of many whites on the issue of race. Most people understand that racism is deeply stigmatized in our society -- "racist" is a negative, ugly word, and no one likes being accused of being one. But privately -- being the products of mostly white enclaves where the stereotypes on race, both negative for blacks and nonwhites, and contrastingly positive for whites, persist -- they cling to views that are most charitably explained as the end result of generations of ignorance.

... The impulse to defend "white culture" by residential segregation has come surging to the forefront of the national consciousness with the immigration debate, which has proven, more than anything, to be a conduit for extremist thought into the mainstream of the national discourse. Probably the most prominent, and high-level, example of this is Patrick Buchanan and his race-baiting screed, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, which at its core is about reviving old eugenicist myths about race and whiteness, all couched in such terms as "defending white culture." This mindset, in fact, is infecting all levels of conservative discourse.

This is one of the important long-term reasons for repudiating conservative governance, the kind embodied by the denizens of all-white enclaves: Until we do so, we'll never be able to find long-term solutions to festering racial issues we've never properly addressed. It's long overdue.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Chenoweth on Global Warming: The Proto-Palin

-- by Dave

Sarah Palin reminds me, for some reason, of the late Helen Chenoweth -- the congresswoman from Idaho's 1st District from 1992 to 2000. Well, I actually can think of a lot of reasons: Maybe it's the slightly stilted, doll-like delivery in a red business suit. Or the beauty-queen smile. Or the absurd right-wingnuttery she sells with a distinctly populist style. Watch and judge for yourself.

Chenoweth was perhaps best known for being an avid promoter of the militia movement in Congress (though towards the end of her tenure shee made headlines for her extramarital affairs. Indeed, the above video is one I made from a video sold by the Militia of Montana as part of its New World Order conspiracy promotion, titled "America In Peril." It features Chenoweth speaking before an obviously preselected audience, prior to her election to Congress in 1992, as a "Natural Resources Consultant."

This snippet (the video is nearly an hour long) is from the first five minutes or so, and features Chenoweth holding forth on the causes of global warming:

What is some of the programs that the environmentalists are engaging in? Well, some of the programs are programs of fear -- fear that is so broad and so expansive that you and I can do nothing about it.

What about the idea that the earth is warming? You know, we hear that every day -- that the earth is warming. But when we look back, where are temperatures taken? Well, they’re taken from airports. Weather balloons go up from airports, where heat rises from miles and miles of concrete.

And you see, the satellites that are recording data around the globe will tell us that today, the earth is not warming. But you see, what the pseudoscientists -- who have turned into political scientists and lobbying scientists -- are saying is that these issues are so huge that you and I can do nothing about it.

You can almost envision Sarah Palin sitting at the back of the room taking notes. Indeed, as you can see, the camera irregularly pans to the nodding audience members, and one of these happens to bear a striking resemblance to Palin (she's at about the 5:40 mark of the video; you can see a still here). Not that this actually is Palin, but let's just say the imagery is complete.

The rest of the talk is similarly nutty, bizarrely commingling her fundamentalist religious beliefs with a kind of John Bircher conspiracism, all devoted to attacking the environmental movement as the embodiment of Satanic Marxism or something.

Some excerpts:

When we begin to realize what the battle really is, then we begin to focus on what we need to do. Because ladies and gentlemen, the battle isn't a scientific battle. The battle isn’t even a battle for species. The battle isn’t even a battle for certain areas of timber or certain wilderness areas. Only until we're able to understand that this battle is a full-fledged spiritual battle will we begin to understand and have the weapons to deal with it.

You see, always in the past, armies have clashed, and we've had physical lines of battle. We've had armies and armaments battling out back and forth for the conquering of countries. We’ve been able to see over the course of history battle lines drawn and battle lines moved. We've seen countries conquered, we’ve seen countries victorious. But ladies and gentlemen, today as I stand here in front of you, we are in a battle today that is far more insidious and far more dangerous as far as conquering our people, their soul and this great nation than we have ever faced before -- because the battle lines are invisible.

But the battle lines are spiritual in nature. Who are these environmentalists? These environmentalists are a group of people whose members are driven by a certain sect of esoteric concepts, with all the trappings of religious dogma. They believe that nature is God, where we know that the Creator, God Himself, is the one who created nature. And there comes the conflict.

... A man by the name of Marx developed what he called the Communist Manifesto. And ladies and gentlemen, when we understand that that was where the very depths of the darkness of this spiritual war began. They declared war on private ownership in the Communist Manifesto.

... But you see, of greater significance, and in more frightening detail, that manifesto went on to lay out a series of sequential steps by which this would be accomplished. Among the many goals that the Communist Manifesto predicted was the abolition of property and land and the application of all rents of land to public purposes. Today we call it taxes. The abolition of all rights of inheritance. That's a constant battle that we're waging. ...

You see, what the environmental movement is doing is breaking down state and national boundaries. And so with that one enactment, and the listing of that one species, we encompass northern California, Oregon and Washington. The unfortunate thing is that it breaks down the sovereignty of states -- and you see acid is no respecter of the national boundaries between Canada and America. And that’s part of the way we begin to globalize and break down the sovereignty of this great nation.

And ladies and gentlemen, the bottom line is that if we are forced to place our world resources in the hands of a few who are controlling a world government, that isn't what God planned for us, and it certainly is not in our best interest. We will certainly lose our liberties, and it begins with the breakdown of our state boundaries. And that's what the spotted owl issue did.
Because you see, for any land management, they believe in their spirit that we are trying to manage and move in and desecrate their sacred ground. Nature is God to them.

You see, this country flourished very well because we understood the role of God in this country....

Sure sounds like Sarah Palin's political mentor to me.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Derek and the white-power dominoes

[Derek Black, right, with his father, Don Black, center, and Rep. Ron Paul, at the January 10, 2007, "Values Voters" Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.]

-- by Dave

White supremacists have been trying to reinsert themselves back into the mainstream (where once upon a time they were common) for a long time now. One of the chief avenues for this effort has for years been the Republican Party in the South, particularly in places like Louisiana, where David Duke operates, and Mississippi, where the Council of Conservative Citizens has a friend in Gov. Haley Barbour. It's all part of the legacy of the Southern Strategy.

In Florida, Republicans are now being confronted with the legacy of the Southern Strategy in the person of 19-year-old Derek Black:

Derek Black says "of course" he will attend a meeting Wednesday for new members of Palm Beach County's Republican Executive Committee. Never mind that the party chairman says Black's "white supremacist" associations are not welcome and he will not be seated.

"I was elected," Black, 19, says.

Sporting a black hat, the son of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Don Black was seated last week in a restaurant off Southern Boulevard. Sitting next to him was one of his supporters: David Duke, former Louisiana state legislator and another former KKK grand wizard.

"We're going to fight," Duke said. "I know Derek Black is going to fight for his constitutional liberties. That's why I'm here, because I want to assist Derek."

Sorry, says county GOP Chairman Sid Dinerstein. In the qualifying period in June, Black didn't sign a loyalty oath pledging he would not do anything injurious to the party. And that's not the only problem.

"He participates in white supremacist activities," Dinerstein said. "We're the party of Lincoln. We're the party that says we don't judge anybody by the color of their skin."

There's a familial connection between David Duke and Derek Black: Derek's mother, Chloe Black, was previously married to Duke, and their son is Derek's half-brother. But there's also a strategic connection, in that Duke did the same thing himself in the 1980's and '90s in Louisiana, largely taking advantage of the Republicans' Southern Strategy.

In his book on the Southern Strategy, Joseph Aistrup describes this (cited here):

Using the basics of Reagan’s rhetoric, and mimicking the Reagan administration’s attack on civil rights, Bush vetoed the first version of the Civil Rights Act (1990) on the basis that it represented a “quota” bill. This strategy most likely would have succeeded, except for the emergence of Louisiana Republican and former Klansman, David Duke. David Duke's emergence as a Republican is an unintended consequence of the Southern Strategy’s race issue orientation (Page 1991, B7). Although Republican strategists are fully aware that the Southern Strategy entices voters of the same mold as David Duke (Evans and Novak 1991, A27), they find it extremely distasteful when a racial reactionary leader becomes a Republican candidate, wins a state legislative seat as a Republican, and is one of two finalists in the Louisiana U.S. Senate (1990) and governor (1991) contests. White House press spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said of Duke: “He’s not a Republican, he never will be a Republican ... We don’t like him.”

Aside from Duke’s overt racism, the Duke affair is distasteful to Republicans because candidates like Duke expose how the Southern Strategy’s conservative message can be racially interpreted by many Southern whites, lending credence to Democrats’ claims concerning the racially divisive nature of the Southern Strategy’s issues (McQueen and Birnbaum 1991, A18). However, the most disturbing aspect of David Duke for the Republicans and Bush was that he elicited rhetoric straight from the Bush campaign: Opposing “quotas,” affirmative action, and any type of minority preference; assailing those who are on welfare; and blaming government and special interests for the poor state of Louisiana’s economy.

Sure enough, as Jesse notes at Pandagon:

In true Republican fashion, rather than realize that there’s something fundamentally screwy and in need of fixing given a process in which a white supremacist not only feels comfortable running on your ticket, but wins, they’re instead seeking to throw him off the committee to which he was elected fair and square because of a technicality.

There's a secondary dynamic at work here too: Derek Black and his dad Don were big fans of Ron Paul -- Paul even posed with them for a pic back in 2007, as you can see atop this post (this is taken from Stormfront, and was shot at the January 10, 2007, "Values Voters" Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.).

Indeed, Stormfront itself was a big booster of the Paul campaign, with multiple threads discussing him and communicating about Paul events. One of Stormfront's editors liveblogged the Ron Paul convention in Minneapolis this year too.

So Derek Black, by seeking to gain an official foothold within GOP officialdom, likely sees himself following not just in David Duke's footsteps, but Ron Paul's too.

Why Bush's presidency was an Epic Fail

-- by Dave

Karen DeYoung at the WaPo had an interesting report on the change of style that Obama is bringing to the White House, particularly in how it approaches the military:

Obama has been careful to separate his criticism of Bush policy from his praise of the military's valor and performance, while Michelle Obama's public expressions of concern for military families have gone over well. But most important, according to several senior officers and civilian Pentagon officials who would speak about their incoming leader only on the condition of anonymity, is the expectation of renewed respect for the chain of command and greater realism about U.S. military goals and capabilities, which many found lacking during the Bush years.

"Open and serious debate versus ideological certitude will be a great relief to the military leaders," said retired Maj. Gen. William L. Nash of the Council on Foreign Relations. Senior officers are aware that few in their ranks voiced misgivings over the Iraq war, but they counter that they were not encouraged to do so by the Bush White House or the Pentagon under Donald H. Rumsfeld.

"The joke was that when you leave a meeting, everybody is supposed to drink the Kool-Aid," Nash said. "In the Bush administration, you had to drink the Kool-Aid before you got to go to the meeting."

There's no better way to lose a war than to have your on-the-ground decisions be forced through an ideological prism. And it was obvious even to outsiders that this was how Bush was conducting the Iraq war -- indeed, it was the decisive factor behind the very decision to invade in the first place. It's even more telling that the military minds involved saw that this was occurring too.

But in truth, this constitutes not merely the entire Bush approach to governance, but conservative governance as well. Thus -- to use one example out of many -- during Bush's tenure there was not a single economic problem that could not be solved by anything other than tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation of the financial sector.

Of course, we now realize that this was simply a prescription for gobbling PCBs after a diagnosis of cancer.

So when we hear conservatives tell themselves that the reason they lost this last election was their failure to adhere to "conservative principles," we know they're continuing to cling to the very reason they lost. Because such adherence inherently means that these "principles" -- that is, conservative dogma about how they believe the world ought to be, particularly the insistence that government itself is the problem, when the reality is that bad governance is the problem -- trump their ability to face realities on the ground.

From the outset, it's clear that reversing that approach is the most fundamental aspect of the "change" that Barack Obama intends to bring to the White House. And that is a very good sign indeed.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Hate crimes and illegal immigration: O'Reilly reverses the reality

-- by Dave

Earlier this week on The O'Reilly Factor, the Papa Bear did what right-wingers constantly do when discussing hate crimes: he conflated them with ordinary crimes in a way that deliberately confuses the public regarding the nature of these crimes.

As you can see in this clip (or from the transcript), O'Reilly starts out by discussing the horrendous hate crime on Long Island wherein a group of six young white thugs went out looking for Latinos to harm for "sport", and they wound up killing an Ecuadoran immigrant named Marcelo Lucero.

But then he seems to connect this crime to a completely unrelated tragedy involving the deaths of two women at the hands of a drunken driver who happened to be an illegal immigrant.

How are they connected? O'Reilly explains:

So, three human beings are dead because of irresponsible conduct and failed government.

The New York Times and Newsday have covered the Lucero murder extensively, as they should. It is a horrible crime, and seven young men may pay a steep price for being violently stupid.

But the Times and Newsday have pretty much ignored the deaths of the two women. This is a pattern in America.

People killed by illegal aliens can expect little coverage from a media that wants amnesty for foreign nationals here illegally.

But in the end, it is the federal government that is truly responsible for the deaths, and for the entire illegal alien problem. ...

It would be nice to think that O'Reilly simply doesn't comprehend the difference between a hate crime and an ordinary crime. I've explained this many times:

Hate crimes are message crimes: They are intended to harm not just the immediate victim, but all people of that same class within the community. Their message is also irrevocable: they are "get out of town, nigger/Jew/queer" crimes.

That's why bias-crime laws are about imposing stiffer sentences on their perpetrators: they cause more real harm to the community. This principle -- greater harm brings stiffer punishment -- is a basic element of criminal law.

Think, if you will, about the different effects of these two tragedies. In the Lucero case, the fully intended terroristic effects are clear: the Latino community on Long Island naturally feels vulnerable and fearful, and relations with the white community have been permanently stained. In the case of the drunken driver, the community is bound to feel somewhat more vulnerable to the effects of drunken drivers, but it doesn't require one to be an illegal immigrant to be one of those.

Indeed, as with most crimes, the rate for such crimes is actually lower within the immigrant community than with the public at large. There is in fact no correlation at all between immigration and crime.

Which is why when people like Bill O'Reilly and Lou Dobbs constantly harangue their audiences with morbid tales of incidents involving Latinos who commit crimes or are responsible for tragedies, it not only distorts the reality regarding immigrants and crime, but it profoundly demonizes immigrants by linking them with criminality.

In turn, it is this very demonization, particularly in the mainstream media, that actually leads to more hate crimes.

So in effect what O'Reilly is doing is encouraging more hate crimes by suggesting that illegal immigration was the cause of those two women's deaths.

And at the same time, in a twist of logic one can only call bizarre, O'Reilly's inherent thesis is that somehow the federal government's failures on illegal immigration are responsible somehow for the death of Marcelo Lucero as well.

How so? Did that pack of white thugs go out looking for Latinos to beat up because of the failures of the federal government? That seems to be O'Reilly's logic here. Isn't that blaming the victims? And doesn't O'Reilly preach "individual responsibility" for minorities who commit crimes?

O'Reilly finishes up his tirade by demanding that Barack Obama adopt a "zero tolerance policy" towards illegal immigrants.

Better the rest of us develop a "zero tolerance policy" for Bill O'Reilly's hatemongering.

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]