As if it weren't already clear that the so-called "IRS scandal" is
nothing of the sort, now it's becoming even clearer that it's a just
another bit of that down-the-rabbit-hole-up-is-downism in which
conservatives have come to specialize in recent years.
The Institute for Research and Education in Human Rights -- which,
among other things, monitors the far-right extremists who have been
filling the ranks of the Tea Party -- has an excellent takedown of the
IRS nonsense:
While it is well-known that the so-called IRS scandal has been used by
Tea Partiers to bash the IRS, less well known are the actual facts of
the case.
Some of the flagged groups did have their tax-exempt status delayed
or did face some additional scrutiny, but not a single group has been
denied tax-exempt status.
A May 14 draft report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax
Administration found that none of the 296 questionable applicants had
been denied, “For the 296 potential political cases we reviewed, as of
December 17, 2012, 108 applications had been approved, 28 were withdrawn
by the applicant, none had been denied, and 160 cases were open from
206 to 1,138 calendar days (some crossing two election cycles).” (p. 14)
In fact, the only known 501(c)(4) applicant to recently have its
status denied happens to be a progressive group: the Maine chapter of
Emerge America, which trains Democratic women to run for office.
Although the group did no electoral work, and didn’t participate in
independent expenditure campaign activity either, its partisan nature
disqualified it from being categorized as working for the “common good.”
The Inspector General’s report found that in the “majority of cases,
we agreed that the applications submitted included indications of
significant political campaign intervention.” (p. 10). In fact, only 91
of the 296, roughly 31%, of the applications reviewed for the report
did not have “indications of significant political campaign
intervention.” In other words, more than two thirds of those flagged for
processing by a team of specialists had those indications.
That sort of political campaign intervention would normally
disqualify a group from 501(c)(4) status, but the deluge of Tea Party
applications combined with the politicization of the process has allowed
them to slip through. A closer look by IREHR at the activities of some
of the Tea Party groups that are currently under review or have received
non-profit status from the IRS, reveals a difficult and dangerous
situation.
Rather than the so-called scandal cooked up by Tea Party groups, the
real criticism of the IRS may be that it has let so many of these groups
get away with what are apparently egregious violations.
That's what all the yelling's about. It's to keep people from seeing
the plain truth: Many of these people really are tax cheats trying to
game the system for partisan advantage.
Clearly, the chief reasoning of NBA owners for declining to add Hansen and Steve Ballmer to their list of owners was that they were from Seattle. When the NBA ripped their team of 41 years out of Seattle back in 2007, it was intended as an object lesson for the rest of the league: Unless you bow to our extortion demands, you will lose your team.
Sacramento, obviously, got that lesson. After teetering on losing the Kings because of the failure to build a new arena, the city gave up every ounce of its soul in its desperate effort to keep the NBA in town. The new arena deal requires the taxpayers to foot about 60 percent of the tab.
So of course the NBA was going to reward the city that gave in to their extortion demands. And it would continue to punish the city that insists on limiting the taxpayers' role in enriching billionaire owners and their exposure to ever-ratcheting arena costs.
You see, Seattle thought it had done everything right for years. Its fans always supported the Sonics -- even when they sucked, the team still averaged 15,000 a game -- and were among the most rabid and knowledgeable in the league. (I was myself a season ticket holder for over a decade.) There's a reason so many NBA teams are populated with players from Seattle high schools: It is a basketball-saturated town.
We even bellied up to the bar in the 1990s on the arena demands -- spent $100 million tearing apart and renovating the old Seattle Center Coliseum, three-quarters of which was paid for by Seattle taxpayers. When it reopened in 1995, David Stern came and proclaimed the new facility as state-of-the-art for the next generation.
Six years later, it was no longer good enough for the NBA. Or so said then-owner Howard Schultz, who demanded a whole new arena from city, state, and regional leaders. Those folks, of course, were still paying off the bonds for the supposedly state-of-the-art arena they had just refurbished, not to mention their new football and baseball stadiums, and weren't exactly eager to take Schultz's extortion demands seriously -- especially since, in the early part of the decade, much of the town was hurting economically.
So Schultz -- who to this day is the least popular billionaire in town -- threw a fit of pique and sold the team to Oklahoma City businessman Clay Bennett. Everyone immediately understood that Bennett intended to move the team to Oklahoma. But Bennett, wide-eyed and innocent, proclaimed piously that this was not the case.
Bennett, as documents later unearthed during the departure debacle disclosed, is a prodigious liar. At the same time he was telling Seattle fans all they had to do to keep their team was step up to the plate and deliver on their new arena plan, he was telling his business associates that moving the team to OKC was a done deal.
And that arena plan was a doozy. Bennett proposed building a $500 million arena in the relatively remote southern suburb of Renton, right next to the two worst traffic intersections in the state. Oh, and his investors were only willing to pay $100 million, at the most, for their share of the building. Of course, the state Legislature knew when it was being gamed and declined to play along. Soon the moving trucks had backed up and our team was playing in Oklahoma City for an ownership group comprised of proven liars and scumbags.
Clay Bennett, of course, was then named to head up the same relocation committee that was summarily slapped down the Seattle bid this time. Because that's the kind of league this is.
If Chris Hansen had really wanted to be part of this league, he should have understood that. If Hansen had really wanted to succeed in getting a team back to Seattle, he should have followed the established NBA model. Clay Bennett's model.\
He should have bought the Kings and lied about it. He should have claimed that he wanted to try to keep the team in Sacramento and was willing to work with locals. Then he could have proposed building a new arena in Davis and soaking taxpayers for 80 percent of the tab. And when they balked (as anyone sane would) Hansen and Co. could have packed up stakes and moved them up to Seattle.
That's the established NBA model. Which raises the question: Why would anyone want to get in bed with a business that toxic and dysfunctional in the first place?
We really don't want to be the NBA's Los Angeles -- the extortion threat the league can hang over every other city. Having just been the NBA's bitch, there's really no appetite here to be its tool as well.
This just-finished episode has just reminded everyone in Seattle what they were first taught eight years ago: The NBA is a malignant, dysfunctional entity that preys on cities people's normative civic pride and exploits that for the sake of enriching a few millionaires, who are the real owners of these teams. Cities don't own them, and Seattle was always intended to remind everyone else of that.
Thanks to David Stern, the NBA today is by, about, and for the 1 percent, while suckering the 99 percent into thinking it's about them. Quite a game, really. And when you see that from the outside, as Seattle basketball fans must, the desire to get back in just melts away.
It's time to just walk away from the NBA. We can still be a hoops city. It will be harder, but the foundation is already well in place. And we can find other diversions as well. How about those Sounders, eh?
The NBA can come back some day. But it has to be on our terms. It has to be our team, not something stolen from another city. By then, David Stern will be long gone. And so, perhaps, will be the scumbag ethos that rules the league.
Have you noticed how many right-wingers are decrying the "tyranny" of the Obama administration these days?
It's particularly rife on the Tea Partying far right, where it's extremely common to hear Obama being portrayed as a "tyrant," particularly regarding his recent attempts to promote gun-control measures. (See Ben Shapiro whining thus in the video above.) So you'll often find crap like this floating about on their Facebook pages.
But it's becoming common among mainstream right-wingers, particularly after the president dismissed these characterizations during a speech at Ohio State. Sure enough, everyone from Jonah Goldberg to Michelle Malkin piled on with the "yeah, whatever you say, dude" retorts.
A bald fact: Generations would hear how the South suffered “tyranny”
under Reconstruction. Conveniently forgotten was the way that word was
universally defined by white Southerners at the time: as a synonym for
letting black men vote at all. A “remonstrance” issued by South
Carolina’s Democratic Central Committee in 1868, personally signed by
the leading native white political figures of the state, declared that
there was no greater outrage, no greater despotism, than the provision
for universal male suffrage just enacted in the state’s new
constitution. There was but one possible consequence: “A superior race
is put under the rule of an inferior race.” They offered a stark
warning: “We do not mean to threaten resistance by arms. But the white
people of our State will never quietly submit to negro rule. This is a
duty we owe to the proud Caucasian race, whose sovereignty on earth God
has ordained.”
“No free people, ever,” declared a speaker at a convention of the
state’s white establishment a few years later, had been subjected to the
“domination of their own slaves,” and the applause was thunderous.
“This is a white man’s government,” was the phrase echoed over and over
in the prints of the Democratic press and the orations of politicians
denouncing the “tyranny” to which the “oppressed” South was being
subjected.
A bald fact: more than three thousand freedmen and their white
Republican allies were murdered in the campaign of terrorist violence
that overthrew the only representatively elected governments the
Southern states would know for a hundred years to come. Among the dead
were more than sixty state senators, judges, legislators, sheriffs,
constables, mayors, county commissioners, and other officeholders whose
only crime was to have been elected. They were lynched by bands of
disguised men who dragged them from cabins by night, or fired on from
ambushes on lonely roadsides, or lured into a barroom by a false friend
and on a prearranged signal shot so many times that the corpse was
nothing but shreds, or pulled off a train in broad daylight by a body of
heavily-armed men resembling nothing so much as a Confederate cavalry
company and forced to kneel in the stubble of an October field and shot
in the head over and over again, at point blank.
So saturated is our collective memory with Gone With the Wind stock
characters of thieving carpetbaggers, ignorant Negroes, and low
scalawags, that it comes as a shock not so much to discover that there
were men and women of courage, idealism, rectitude, and vision who
risked everything to try to build a new society of equality and justice
on the ruins of the Civil War, who fought to give lasting meaning to the
sacrifices of that terrible struggle, who gave their fortunes, careers,
happiness, and lives to make real the simple and long-delayed American
promise that all men were created equal—it comes as a shock not so much
to be confronted by their idealism and courage and uprightness as by the
realization that they were convinced, up to the very last, that they
would succeed. Confident in the rightness of their cause, backed by the
military might of the United States government, secure in the ringing
declarations, now the supreme law of the land embodied in the
thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments of the Constitution,
that slavery was not only dead but that equality and the right to vote
were the patrimony now of all Americans, they could not imagine that
their nation could win such a terrible war and lose the ensuing peace.
Indeed, it's common to hear neo-Confederate agitators -- those folks who are still pushing for modern secession by the South -- describe Lincoln to this day as a "tyrant."
The idea of being governed by a black president? To many of these people even today, that is itself the essence of tyranny.
There are probably fewer pundits more consistent at their intellectual
dishonesty than James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal. This week he
topped himself -- no easy task.
The headline, responding to the recent reports of a woman in Wyoming
who perpetrated a hoax pretending to have been threatened with rape by a
right-wing hater, read:
Why are phony "hate crimes" so common, especially on college campuses?
Oh really? Phony hate crimes are common? Taranto arrives at this
conclusion from ... a single case? (He later cites two cases of phony
hate crimes ... from thirty and twenty years ago, respectively. Neither
were on a college campus.)
Where is the data to back up this claim? Can Taranto show us any more cases of phony hate-crime
reports from college campuses? Yes, there have been some (we know of a
few others), but just how many are there? Enough to claim that it's
"common"?
Contrast this to what Taranto says about real hate crimes:
Oppression of minorities, and certainly of women, scarcely exists in America in the 21st century. Genuine hate crimes happen, but they are very rare.
In 2011, U.S. law enforcement agencies reported 6,222 hate crime incidents involving 7,254 offenses,
according to our just-released Hate Crime Statistics, 2011 report.
These incidents included offenses like vandalism, intimidation, assault,
rape, murder, etc.
So, in order for hate-crime hoaxes to be "common" they either have to
number quite a few more than 6,222 a year (when in fact the number is
probably closer to 6), or Taranto has to be claiming that the vast
majority of hate crimes prosecuted in this country annually are
"hoaxes." I'm sure the prosecutors and police who pursued those crimes
and reported them to the FBI's database will be interested to know the
latter, if that's the case.
Or more likely, Taranto is just indulging in his favorite right-wing
pastime: Inverting reality on its head by trumpeting anomalistic
incidents as representative.
Federal law has required states to collect hate crime
data since the early 1990s. Congress has defined a hate crime as a
"criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in
part by an offender's bias against a race, religion, disability, ethnic
origin or sexual orientation."
But states don't have to report their data to the FBI if they don't
want to. Four states -- Indiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Ohio --
don't even have a Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program.
The result, critics say, is a federal data system that costs $1
million-plus but offers very little help to authorities who investigate,
identify and track hate crimes.
"We can only report by the numbers we are given," said the FBI's
Michelle Klimt, who says the lack of data could be because of a lack of
state funding.
In states that do have UCR programs, the FBI offers training for state and local law enforcement on how to collect and report hate crime data.
On Capitol Hill, 26 senators have asked U.S. Attorney General Eric
Holder to expand UCR programs to include tracking of hate crimes against
Hindus, Arabs and Sikhs. Last year's deadly attack on a Wisconsin Sikh
temple raised awareness about crimes targeting Sikhs.
"Without accurate, nuanced reporting of these crimes, it is more
difficult for federal, state, and local law enforcement to assess and
respond to the particular threat that the Sikh community faces," the
senators said last month in a letter to Holder.
If authorities don't know how many hate crimes are committed, it's
difficult to get an accurate picture of whether hate crime laws are
effective.
No, James Taranto, the real question is: Why are phony hate crimes
such an object of fetishization by right-wing apologists, when in fact
they are relatively rare?
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced on
Monday that it had arrested a Minnesota man for plotting a “localized
terror attack.”
A press release
from the Minneapolis Division said that “special agents of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, in conjunction with the Montevideo Police
Department; the Chippewa County Sheriff’s Office; the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; the Minnesota State Highway Patrol;
the Bloomington Police Department; the Minnehaha County Sheriff’s Office
(South Dakota); the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources; and
members of CEE-VI (Cooperative Enforcement Effort), executed a search
warrant at 1204 Benson Avenue, Lot #8, in Montevideo, Minnesota. Several
guns and explosive devices were discovered during the search of the
residence” on Friday.
Buford “Bucky” Rogers, 24, was arrested for unlawful possession of a
firearm by a felon. An Associated Press report said that he had
previously been convicted for felony burglary in 2011 and a misdemeanor
charge of dangerous handling of a weapon in 2009.
It appears he came by his nuttiness the natural way -- via his family:
Throughout the interview with FOX 9 News, Jeff Rogers insisted he still doesn't know why his family is considered a threat.
"We are peaceful people, okay? We're not out to blow up the world -- none of this crap," Jeff Rogers said.
Investigators claim to have removed a computer, a military-style
Romanian rifle and explosives from his shed -- specifically, Molotov
cocktails and pipe bombs. Jeff Rogers said that isn't the case,
describing the seized items as household chemicals.
"That's a bunch of s---," he said.
Police and Jeff Rogers both point out that Buford Rogers does not
live at the home. Rather, he lives across town with his girlfriend and
their new baby. Neighbors say they don't see him much, but residents
told FOX 9 News the family is very dedicated to their Black Snake
Militia, which some consider un-American.
Jeff Rogers is not coy about the family's political leanings,
displaying an upside down American Flag and signs suggesting the
government wants to implant microchips inside citizens outside his home.
"We are patriots. You guys are patriots," he said. "You see the country is going to s----."
Yet, Buford Rogers' Facebook page suggests a sinister side to his
politics. In publicly visible posts from 2011, he wrote, "We already
started fighting. I'm sure you'll hear about it in a bad way."
A website
for the Minnesota Minutemen Militia, which says it is not
anti-government, claims the Black Snake Militia is comprised of 73
members. The leader's profile shows a man who claims to be 29 years old
wearing a ski mask
and holding an assault rifle. His bio reads, "Im an american patriot
willing to lay down my life so we may take our republic back…. [sic]"
Meanwhile, the media -- and Fox News especially -- yawn. Eric Boehlert observes:
You will likely not be surprised that none of Fox News' primetime hosts
mentioned the Rogers arrest last night or the looming threat of
right-wing extremist violence. That, despite the fact the shows have
dedicated countless programming hours in recent weeks to ginning up fear
and angst surrounding the terror attack in Boston on Patriot's Day.
Prompted by the arrest of a Muslim suspect, Fox News has spent weeks
demonizing Islam by assigning collective blame, as well as targeting
Muslims who travel here to study. But yet another far-right,
anti-government plot to possibly kill law enforcement officials? At Fox
News, that's not a story that draws much concern, especially not from
its primetime talkers.
Of course, none of this is particularly a surprise. Yes, there has
been a significant upsurge in right-wing-extremist domestic terrorism in
the past four years, and it has gone unreported in the mass media, who
have instead focused exclusively on "Islamist" domestic terrorists
(whose plots and acts are occurring at less than half the rate of RWEs).
Yes, we were recently witness to another domestic-terrorism incident
by a right-wing extremist -- the ricin attacks on the Senate and White
House -- and yet you would not be aware of it if judging from the media
response (though it is true that the picture was muddled by the initial
arrest of the wrong man).
And yes, there is at least a substantial possibility that the Newtown
shootings will be revealed to be another domestic-terrorism incident by
a right-wing extremist if those initial reports from CBS
indicating that Adam Lanza was attempting to imitate Anders Breivik
prove substantive, and if it emerges that Lanza adopted Breivik's
ideology in the process.
Rest assured: If Adam Lanza were of a Muslim background and his
"hero" an Al Qaeda terrorist, the media would not rest until they found
the answer to that question. As it is, we'll have to wait until the
investigation is complete and the results released to know. Which,
frankly, is how it should be. But the difference in treatment is
noteworthy.
There's a reason for this: Anytime the media report on right-wing
extremist terrorism, they are descended upon by the flying monkeys of
the wingnutosphere, who complain that calling them right-wing extremists
is "an abuse of the term 'right wing'" (trust me on this: it's not).
Witness what became of the DHS's section on right-wing extremists after the screaming hissy fit over a remarkably accurate and prescient law-enforcement bulletin.
It's creating a dangerously skewed picture, and a dangerously
misinformed public. And when something really awful happens as it
inevitably will, the media will all wring their hands and ask, "Why
didn't we see this coming?"
One of the ways I always used to chat up potential sources -- especially if they were participants or attendees at militia gatherings in the 1990s -- was by smoking with them. That's what I was doing when I met Paul deArmond the first time.
It was in Maltby, Washington, at the community meeting hall above, in February 1994. The meeting featured Bob Fletcher of the Militia of Montana (MOM), who had come to explain to the gathered "Patriots" how the government was plotting to round up American gun owners and place them in concentration camps hidden deep in the North Cascades. It was a fairly typical militia gathering of the time, featuring tables full of far-right conspiracist books and VHS movies and endless, droning explanations of various conspiracy theories.
One of the people manning the book table for MOM was David Trochmann, a man I wanted to meet. It was Trochmann, you see, who had an outsize role in the origins of the Ruby Ridge standoff that had unfolded tragically in northern Idaho two years before: ATF agents suspected that Trochmann had been smuggling weapons over the border into Canada from his Montana home, and so they had tried to put the squeeze on Trochmann's friend Randy Weaver by threatening him with jail time if he wouldn't act as an informant. Weaver, of course, refused, and then balked at the jail time too, and the rest became history.
I was more interested in learning about MOM's theological leanings: There were indications from other sources that Trochmann and his cofounder brother John were both adherents of Christian Identity, the white-supremacist religion that was also practiced at the nearby Aryan Nations headquarters. When Trochmann went outside to have a smoke, I went out and joined him. And Paul deArmond came with us.
Dave
Trochmann has the same kind of intense demeanor as his brother, but
there's something vaguely unsettling about him. I've known men like him,
that hard-eyed working-class kind of man, and they are not people you
want to mess with. If you do, they'll fix you and anybody close to you.
It's hard to believe that Randy is his son. Randy, a skinny, dark-haired
twentysomething, is doe-eyed and easygoing, a little jittery like all
the Trochmanns, but you get the feeling he'd find it possible to like
you even if you were a liberal.
I asked Dave about the Identity Bible studies. Any truth to that?
"Well,"
he said, looking about before answering, "you know, we're not white
supremacists. We just think the races should be separate."
I'd heard the distinction made before.
"We
just don't believe in race mixing," Trochmann said. "It's the laws of
Nature. You don't see robins and sparrows mating, do you? We don't have a
bunch of spobbins flying around."
I started explaining the genetic distinction between race and species, but realized it was a useless argument here.
"We
don't hate other races," Randy said. "We just don't think they should
mix. That's all Identity means to us." I let it go at that, and we
wandered off to other topics, and eventually back into the meeting hall.
Paul was there and began chuckling at Trochmann's biology lesson. I had noticed him acting a bit like a reporter inside the meeting hall, taking notes and standing off to the side, as I had been doing. When we got back inside the hall, we began chatting and I discovered that, while he wasn't a reporter, he was there to do much the same as I was, namely, observing, taking notes, and listening to what was being said at these meetings.
Paul was a political researcher, and he had a special flair for focusing on right-wing extremists. He had been doing this for awhile, and much of the data he collected helped fuel some fine studies and journalism exposing the toxic effects of these extremists and their politics.
He once told me that he got involved in doing this as a way to counter some of the bizarre land-use policies and politics that were arising locally in Whatcom County, where he lived, but that pretty soon it grew to encompass a much broader scope. But fighting the far right was something he grew up with: Paul's father had been a filmmaker whose career had been essentially destroyed by a cabal of McCarthyite witch-hunters who had prowled the Washington state political scene in the 1950s and '60s.
And, like me, he was good at digging up information because he was good at talking to right-wing extremists as though they were otherwise ordinary people (and a number of them are). One of the ways he did that, also like me, was that he would smoke with them. It's an easy way to form an artificial bond with someone and begin chatting them up.
Of course, there is eventually a price to pay for that technique, especially if you are a heavy smoker, as Paul was (I was more of an opportunistic smoker, though there undoubtedly will be a price to pay for that too). A couple of weeks ago, Paul died of lung cancer. I for one will miss him deeply. Tim Johnson at Cascadia Weekly has a beautiful obituary:
Yet Paul was equally adept with the rest of the political landscape.
In splendid political analysis, he was penetrating, articulate and—above
all—droll. He could read polling data with inerrant and deadly accuracy. In prophecy, Paul was gracious as Cassandra.
He understood the nature of politics as satire, without surrendering
to the smug view that politics is therefore unimportant and deserving of
being shunned or ignored. He knew the enduring vitality of a sticker or
slogan, the dirty trick turned on its head. Mailers and mailing lists
were his tea leaves. He gloried in the WTO protests and Occupy
movements. In one of his most endearing stunts, Paul documented the
entire schematic of the cut-and-flip greenfield land grab that has so
polluted local politics for the past two decades, mashed up so a child
could grasp it in a series of old comic strip panels long in the public
domain.
The public domain was Paul’s domain. He was—as David Ronfeldt,
a retired senior researcher at RAND Corporation, notes—a pioneering
practitioner of what political analyst John Keane calls “monitory
democracy,” the power of citizens to hold their government accountable
not just at the polls, but every day, through the assembly of data and
documents and networks in all their forms.
Be sure to read the whole thing, especially the many encomiums from the people who knew Paul and worked with him. I especially like this one from Jane Kramer:
“What impresses me most about Paul de Armond,” she said, “is his immense
generosity of mind, his collegiality, his commitment to
enlightening—you could call it benign forced feeding—all of us who are
trying in one way or another to understand, with him, what is happening
to our country.”
Paul had the loveliest dry sense of humor, and many other personal qualities that endeared him to people. He was also unflaggingly tenacious -- a bulldog has nothing on Paul -- and that was why he also had many enemies, especially the politicos who loved to play footsy with far-right nutcases while pretending to just be mainstream conservatives.
He was also unflinchingly, demandingly, honest. Even his friends and allies were not spared if they dared leap to unproven conclusions or play games with facts, or worst of all, make afactual assertions. I grew to inherently trust Paul's data and his analysis because it not only proved consistently inerrant but prescient. Anything he produced was tested eight ways to Sunday.
But most of all, Paul was my friend, a superb bartender, a compulsive tinkerer (we won't even talk about his basement), and a great gatherer of fine people around his fire pit. There will never be another like him, and we are all the poorer for it.
The right-wingers have been in full-on gloat mode since the capture
of the Boston Marathon bombers -- not because it turned out that they
were right about the nature of the perpetrators (they weren't), but
because speculation that they might be right-wing extremists was wrong.
Only wingnuts can convert a sigh of relief into an attack on their
opponents.
The problem is that all they're really doing is attempting, yet
again, to whitewash away the very real existence of violent extremists
on their own side.
Yet there was a theory behind the madness, the
Eliminationist Narrative created by Dave Neiwart of Crooks and Liars
about an “eliminationist” radical right seeking to dehumanize and
eliminate political opposition. It was a play on the over-used
narrative of Richard Hofstadter’s “paranoid style” in American politics.
The Eliminationist Narrative was aided and abetted by an abuse of the
term “right-wing” to include groups who are the opposite of
conservatism and the Tea Party movement.
In the case of Sparkman, the accusations were just Another Failed
Eliminationist Narrative. And the Eliminationist Narrative would fail
time and time again:
James Holmes
Jared Loughner
The Cabby Stabber
The “killer” of Bill Sparkman
Amy Bishop
The Fort Hood Shooter
The IRS Plane Crasher
The Pentagon Shooter
We can now add the Boston Marathon Bombing to the pile. The wild
speculation that there was a Tea Party or “right-wing” connection proved
false.
Of course, it would always help if people like Jacobson managed to
review the posts of the people he's attacking -- since neither I nor
anyone at Crooks and Liars ever speculated in print
that the perps were white right-wing extremists. Others did, however --
and frankly, we discussed it among ourselves. But we knew that it was
irresponsible to speculate publicly until we knew more, and so we waited
-- unlike a few progressives, and even many, many more conservatives.
(More about that in a moment.)
The fact, however, is that the speculation about right-wing
extremism's potential role was entirely rational, considering that in
the past four years, there have been nearly 70 acts of domestic
terrorism committed by right-wing extremists in the United States,
compared to just over 30 such acts committed by Islamist extremists
here. (I have prepared a report on this that Mother Jones will be
publishing soon.)
And let's not overlook the OTHER terrorist attack that occurred in the same week -- namely, the ricin attacks on the White House and Senate,
a case that is still officially unsolved, now that the original suspect
has been released. However, considering both the targets and the fact
that ricin has long been a favorite weapon of right-wing extremists,
there is a high likelihood that one or more of them will eventually
prove to be the source of these attacks.
Indeed, just in the past year alone, we've observed the following
entirely successful acts of domestic terrorism, perpetrated by
extremists animated by various kinds of far-right ideologies and their
eliminationist rhetoric:
White privilege is knowing that even if the Boston
Marathon bomber turns out to be white, his or her identity will not
result in white folks generally being singled out for suspicion by law
enforcement, or the TSA, or the FBI.
White privilege is knowing that even if the bomber turns out to be
white, no one will call for whites to be profiled as terrorists as a
result, subjected to special screening, or threatened with deportation.
White privilege is knowing that if the bomber turns out to be white,
he or she will be viewed as an exception to an otherwise non-white rule,
an aberration, an anomaly, and that he or she will be able to join the
ranks of pantheon of white people who engage in (or have plotted)
politically motivated violence meant to terrorize — and specifically to
kill — but whose actions result in the assumption of absolutely nothing
about white people generally, or white Christians in particular.
It turned out, of course, that the bombers were white Chechen
Muslims, which basically threw out everyone's guesses and predictions.
That has nonetheless not stopped right-wingers from scapegoating all
Muslims for the act.
Right-wing movements attract people who are likely to act out violently
because they indulge so overtly and, in recent years, remorselessly in
the politics of fear and loathing: indulging in eliminationist rhetoric,
depicting their opposition as less than human, and aggressively
attacking efforts to blunt the toxic effects of their politics as
"political correctness" -- or, in the case of both Anders Breivik and
Andrew Breitbart, "Cultural Marxism".
Scapegoating is, as Chip Berlet explains, "the social process whereby
hostility and aggression of an angry and frustrated group are directed
away from a rational explanation of a conflict and projected onto
targets demonized by irrational claims of wrongdoing, so that the
scapegoat bears the blame for causing the conflict, while the
scapegoaters feel a sense of innocence and increased unity."
Now, readers of blogs like Legal Insurrection will be forgiven if
they are unaware of many of the incidents listed above, because
generally speaking, they get short shrift in the media, and hardly a
word about them thus appears in places like right-wing blogs. When they
do appear in the media -- as in the cases of the Wisconsin Sikh massacre
and Anders' Breivik's rampage -- they are addressed dismissively if at
all at places like Jacobson's blog.
Jacobson, you see, has simply defined the problem away for mainstream
conservatives: These extremists are not definably "right wing" in any
discernible way, it seems, and therefore no taint exists. That's his
rationale in claiming, in this weekend's post, that calling neo-Nazis
and white supremacists right-wing extremists constituted an "abuse of
the term 'right wing'". This was also his rationale in dismissing Anders Breivik's rampage as somehow unconnected with his American friends' hatemongering.
Needless to say, the MSM and left-blogosphere have
concluded the shooter was a white supremacist/neo-Nazi based on tattoos
and being a former member of what they describe as a “skinhead” band —
which they then obscenely generalize to be “right-wing,” a way of trying
to link him to the political right. This is the age-old tactic. If Page was a white supremacist/neo-Nazi/skinhead, then he stood against everything the political right stands for.
Trust me on this, Mr. Jacobson, as a person who has attended their
gatherings and spent time observing their ideology up close and
personally: There is nothing remotely left-wing, or anything other than
right wing, about the ideology promoted by people like the Aryan Nations
and the Ku Klux Klan and American Renaissance and a whole bevy of other
hate groups out there operating in America today. The notion that they
are not from the political right is simply risible.
It just depends where on the very real spectrum of right-wing thought each happens to fall. You see, the reason they call these people right wing extremists
is that they begin with simple, perhaps even mainstream, conservative
positions and extend them to their most outrageous and illogical
extreme.
Conservatives are, for instance, skeptical of the power of the
federal government to intervene in civil-rights matters; right-wing
extremists believe it has no such power whatsoever, but it has been
usurped by a Jewish conspiracy that is imposing its will on white
people.
Conservatives are skeptical of internationalism and entities like the
United Nations. Right-wing extremists believe the U.N. represents a
diabolical plot to overthrow American sovereignty and impose
totalitarian rule.
Conservatives believe that abortion is murder of a living being and
oppose its use on demand. Right-wing extremists believe that this
justifies committing murder and various violent crimes in order to
prevent it.
Conservatives believe affirmative action is a form of reverse
discrimination. Right-wing extremists believe it is part of a plot to
oppress white people.
Conservatives oppose taxation, and tax increases in particular, on
principle. Right-wing extremists believe that the IRS is an illegitimate
institution imposed on the body politic by the aforementioned Jewish
conspiracy.
Conservatives oppose increased immigration on principle and illegal
immigration as a matter of law enforcement, and believe the borders
should be secure. Right-wing extremists believe that Mexicans are coming
here as part of an "Aztlan" conspiracy to retake the Southwest for
Mexico, and that we should start shooting border crossers on sight.
You get the idea.
Moreover, the claim that right-wing extremists have nothing to do
with the Tea Party is just flatly risible. I have two simple words
regarding that claim: Oath Keepers.
Jacobson's limitations on what constitutes "right wing" are not only
ahistorical, afactual, and fully at odds with reality, they're also
predictably self-serving. So it's not surprising that, given his
criteria, even his list of "failed eliminationist narratives" is fatally
flawed.
Most of the examples he provides, notably the Bill Sparkman episode,
were never discussed by me or by anyone at C&L as instances of
right-wing violence, because we never considered them such. However,
there are three cases here that we did describe as involving right-wing
extremists. And you know what? We still do.
Yes, we recognize very much that there is a significant difference
between mainstream conservatives and right-wing extremists, as we've
outlined above -- but those differences, frankly, keep diminishing, and
the ideological distances keep shrinking.
We would love nothing more than to report that conservatives were
bravely standing up against extremists on the right and doing their part
as citizens to bring an end to their toxic contributions to our
society. Believe me, as a onetime moderate Republican from a
conservative state, I would love nothing more than to see mainstream
conservatives stand up against right-wing extremism, as they once did in
the 1980s when Idaho became one of the first states to pass a
hate-crimes law.
But those days are long gone. There are still a handful of thoughtful
and decent conservatives remaining who will stand up to confront this
problem, but they are tiny in number and nil in influence. Instead,
conservatism is dominated by the likes of Michelle Malkin and Jonah
Goldberg and Glenn Beck and William Jacobson (not to mention nearly
everyone at Fox News), who instead of taking the problem of right-wing
extremism seriously, dismiss its presence, downplay its influence and
spread, and otherwise look the other way while vociferously attacking
anyone with the nerve to point it out.
In the meantime, of course, the tide is rising as the number of extremist groups in America reaches record proportions.
And mainstream conservatives are aiding and abetting them -- first by
pretending that they don't exist, and second by silently giving them a
warm embrace into the ranks of the Tea Party. It bodes ill for us all.
OK, it helps that some of these really nice reviews that are coming in are from friends of mine. But my friends are also brutally honest people who would tell me if And Hell Followed With Her sucked. Here's what they're saying instead:
But trust me on this one. And Hell Followed With Her: Crossing the Dark Side of the American Borderis
one of the best books you can read on one of the most crucial subjects
you can study: how the toxic mindset of white supremacist,
anti-government insurrectionist lunacy migrates again and again into the
mainstream of American political discussion. And if that's not enough
to draw you, here's a bonus: David wraps his lesson in a true crime
story Joe Conason blurbs as “reminiscent of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” I couldn't tell you if that's precisely so; I've never read Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I
can't tell you much about the crime story either: It's just that
gripping and suspenseful, and I don't want to spoil it for you.
But the book is less about the crime itself than it is about the way the
rhetoric, mission, and mismanagement of the Minutemen organizations
made such violence almost inevitable. Minutemen organizers relentlessly
insisted that they were merely about protecting the border. They fought
back against accusations of racism, claiming they conducted background
checks to screen out Nazis, white supremacists, criminals, and other
dangerous elements. Forde's story exposes that lie.
Julie Muhlstein at the Herald in Everett (Scott North's newspaper) wrote up a nice profile of the book that is more an interview with the author than a review. But you may enjoy reading it.
I've also included, atop today's post, the video of Sebastian Wielemans' film A Cycle of Fences, which is a kind of accompaniment to the excerpt of Chapter 12, "Adrenaline Rush," that ran this weekend at AlterNet. If you've read the chapter, you won't be able to help laughing grimly.
Neiwert's insights after covering right-wing extremism movements, his
gift with language, his considerable storytelling skills all combine to
make And Hell Followed With Her a near compulsive—and
frightening—read. His ability to combine the history of these various
organizations with the more immediate crime, and his analysis of the
mindset of those who spent their lives immersed in the delusions of the
right wing, make this book an important one, one with implications that
reach far beyond one woman, two deaths and one border town.
If you'd like a sample, AlterNet published the entirety of Chapter 12 at its website:
You may also want to peruse the discussion of the book that occurred Sunday at the Firedoglake Book Salon (thanks to Brian Tashman for hosting, and to Bev Wright for arranging everything).
My book about the Minutemen and Shawna Forde will
be released tomorrow at a bookstore near you (be sure to ask
your favorite store for a copy). And I'll be signing copies at a number
of stores in the Northwest early this spring. We're planning to expand
later this spring to signings in California and elsewhere, but these are
the dates we've lined up so far.
Tuesday, March 26 University Bookstore 4326 University Way NE Seattle, WA 98105 7:00 p.m.
Wednesday, March 27 Elliott Bay Books 1521 Tenth Avenue Seattle, WA 98122 7:00 p.m.
Thursday, March 28 Powell’s City of Books 1005 W. Burnside St. Portland, Oregon 7:30 p.m.
Friday, March 29 Seattle Public Library, Ballard Branch Secret Garden Books 5614 22nd Ave. N.W. Seattle, WA 98107 7:00 p.m.
Thursday, April 4 Third Place Books 17171 Bothell Way NE Lake Forest Park, WA 98155 7:00 p.m.
Saturday, April 6 Fact and Fiction 220 N Higgins Missoula, MT 59802 2:00 p.m.
Friday, April 12 Village Books 1200 11th Street Bellingham, WA 98225
7:00 p.m.
Saturday, April 20 Barnes & Noble
1315 N. Milwaukee St.
Boise, ID
4-7 p.m.
I'll also be making some radio appearances. I'll be on KUOW's "Weekday"
show with Steve Scher on Wednesday morning, March 27, during the 9:00
a.m. PDT hour. I'll provide a link for that on the morning of the show.
Also, I was interviewed last night on San Francisco's KGO AM by Pat Thurston, discussing the book's contents. You can listen to it here:
David Neiwert’s new book is a taut true-crime story told with a measure
of gravitas, gripping as much for the grisly particulars of a violent
murder as for the fascinating context of the anti-immigrant movement
playing out along the U. S-Mexico border.
... Neiwert shows how credulous media members — especially local television
stations and CNN’s Lou Dobbs — whipped up the hysteria with softball
interviews of Chris Simcox, Jim Gilchrist and other Minuteman leaders.
As the author astutely observes, the anti-Latino, anti-immigrant frenzy
recalls historical racism in the American west, especially anti-Asian
campaigns in the 19th and 20th centuries.
... Though the incidents in this book occurred nearly four years ago, the
circumstances surrounding the murders are still highly relevant. As the
national debate on immigration heats up again, this is a must-read for
those who seek a deeper understanding of the issues and emotions behind
the rhetoric.
Some of you may have noticed that an excerpt ran this weekend in Salon:
The book represents several years' worth of work. Beyond covering the exploits of Forde -- including her trial and those of her cohorts -- the book also covers the entire story of the Minuteman movement, which I have been writing about continuously since 2005, including an earlier investigation of its fundraising activities.
You can read some of the results of my most recent investigative work on the Minutemen and Shawna Forde's role in the movement in the AlterNet article I wrote last year, which in many ways is a condensed version of much of the material in And Hell Followed.
However, as you'll see, there is a great deal more in the book, including much more detail, as well as the full story of what occurred in Arivaca that terrible night in 2009.
The book opens with a recounting of how that night ended, with a 911 call to dispatchers in Tucson. You can hear that call here:
Of course, I have many people to thank for this book. But it is above all a project of the the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute.
It's really an amazing, weird, twisted, and deeply disturbing story, one worthy of the Coen Brothers (and in fact, we are currently working on selling the film rights to the book). I hope you are as moved reading it as I was writing it.
Here's the advance praise, aka the blurbs on the cover:
There is
no more dogged or more courageous chronicler of the radical American
Right than Dave Neiwert. In this latest work, he has found a human
tragedy that is both utterly heartbreaking and utterly infuriating. He
is the polestar by which we navigate the great distance between what we
claim to be as a people, and what we truly are. A devastating, and
extremely important, book.
In a masterwork reminiscent of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, David
Neiwert tells the gripping story of a far-right underworld awash in
criminality, racism, and violence -- except that it happened here and
every word is true.
David Neiwert’s latest book is a cogent and comprehensive look at
contemporary border vigilante groups, built around that movement’s most
infamous crime — the murder of a Latino man and his 9-year-old daughter
by a deranged nativist leader and her followers. This important volume
reveals the stark racism and violence at the core of a movement that
claims disingenuously to be defending America against dangerous
foreigners.
More soon about my upcoming bookstore appearances in support.
As many of whatever few readers I have remaining are probably aware, I've been running John Amato's blog Crooks and Liars for most of the past four years or so. Initially I cross-posted all my C&L work over here, but it wound up just being too much extra work at a time when I was overwhelmed with it. So gradually the cross-posting went away.
However, I stepped down as C&L's managing editor this past December and have now retired to the greener pastures of being a Senior Editor there. Lately I've hardly been posting at all. I wouldn't exactly say I'm retired from blogging, but I have taken a hiatus.
But I'm hoping to get back to blogging, too. What I really would like to do is get back to blogging here as I originally conceived it -- a sketchboard for larger projects, a chance to work out some long-form writing, plus the usual nuggets from subjects that interest me.
Increasingly, a lot of that will be killer whale-related. This summer I'll be doing serious research on my next book, whose working title is Of Orcas and Men: What Killer Whales Can Teach Us. It will be an abrupt departure from my previous work on right-wing extremists, but one that people who know me understand fully.
I'll also be going back and back-filling my old C&L posts, finally cross-posting them here. Just so the record will be complete.
As you can see, I spruced the place up a few weeks ago. Hope those of you who enjoyed my old original blog of ten years ago will pull up a chair and join me from time to time.
