Springtime for Mussolini

Per Atrios, who recently posted about neoconservative leader Michael Ledeen's reputed fondness for fascism ...

I dug the following out of Ledeen's archives at National Review. It's a bit of Newspeak/projection in which he accuses the Gore contingent with incipient fascism during the Florida debacle:

Fascism in Florida

Not the admiring tone, especially when it comes to Mussolini:

Worse still, the leftists still don't understand what fascism was all about, because they think that Hitler was the paradigm. Actually, it was Mussolini, who came to power more than a decade before Hitler, and who was widely admired, even in the Western democracies. Mussolini did indeed seize power, first in the streets and then in Rome, but they took to the streets in response to years of violent demonstration by the Left. Many moderate people, first in Italy and then in Germany, welcomed the anti-Leftist mobs because they hoped it would teach the Left that street fighting was no way to conduct the nation's business. Mussolini knew all about this sort of thing, having been a leader of the Socialist Party before the Great War.

Also worth reading, of course, is the piece Atrios links to:

Flirting With Fascism

It contains some important information, if accurate, particularly Ledeen's writings about fascism. His admiration for fascist ideas is fairly self-evident.

However, it's important to consider the source in this case. American Conservative is Pat Buchanan's magazine, and he has proven over the years all too willing to publish distortions and falsehoods. Let's put it this way: Buchanan is not in any position to throw stones at anyone when it comes to admiring fascists.

Interview alert

For anyone interested, I'm scheduled to be interviewed tomorrow morning (Saturday the 5th) on Chuck Mertz's Chicago-based broadcast, "This Is Hell."

We'll be talking about the "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism" essay -- which is in the final stages of completion as we speak. (I hope to have it available in PDF form early next week.)

The scheduled interview time is 10:30 am Central time (which means 8:30 in my time zone -- ack!). I've been fighting a head cold, so I may not be in top form, but I'm hopeful we'll have a lively conversation.

Mertz broadcasts his show from WNUR 89.3 FM. You can pick up the Webcast at WNUR's Web site by clicking on the "live webcast" button.

Just a reminder

Brett Kavanaugh's recent nomination to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals -- one of the most powerful of all the federal courts -- brings to mind this passage from David Brock's Blinded by the Right [p. 280], in which Brock discusses his gathering pariahhood for not having smeared Hillary Clinton:

I reluctantly accepted Laura Ingraham's invitation to watch Bill Clinton's State of the Union address in Jaunary 1997 with her and her friends at her town house in Woodley Park. As I arrived at the hose, which was decked out in an oversized southwestern motif more appropriate for a bachelor's mountain hideaway, the network cameras were coming on. When I saw one of Ken Starr's deputies, Brett Kavanaugh, who was sitting across from me, mouth the word "bitch" when the camera panned to Hillary, I excused myself and sat in the darkened pine-scented dining room alone, smoking. I started again soon after Seduction was published because I didn't know what else to do.

I always thought this was an instructive anecdote because it gave a great deal of insight into the mindset of Starr's team of prosecutors and their conduct.

It also tells us, I think, a great deal about the kind of people President Bush is nominating for the most powerful judicial seats in the country.

Bush the Liar

[Thanks to the Propaganda Remix Project. Buy the book!]

In all the brouhaha over the yet-to-be-found weapons of mass destruction used by the Bush and Blair administrations to justify invading Iraq, much of the discussion so far has revolved around the question of whether or not George W. Bush and his team lied.

Well, I guess we all remember what a big stinking deal it was that Bill Clinton "lied to the American people" -- when he wagged his finger on national TV -- about an obviously political invasion of his private life. To this day, that lie is raised by conservative partisans to justify the whole bizarre spectacle of his impeachment -- though of course it was his alleged falsehoods in court, not those on TV, that were the basis of that travesty.

Does this mean that if George Bush is found to have lied to the American people, he should be impeached? Not necessarily. The truth is that politicians of all stripes either lie or stretch the truth with great regularity. Washington would soon be emptied if lying were outlawed. In reality, there are only two questions about lying that are relevant: For what purpose was the lie told? And what were the consequences of telling the lie?

Of course, so far Bush's GOP cohorts and his apologists in the media have bent over backwards to find ways of saying that Bush didn't exactly lie -- he just exaggerated, or told a sort of white lie that had a beneficent purpose as well as a grand result. See, for instance, Fred Kaplan's Slate piece, Was Bush Lying About WMD?:

Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and the other Pentagon officials who made these claims so fiercely probably weren't lying. Clearly, they had formed their conclusions first, then went scrounging for the evidence. Clearly, they stretched the evidence they found right up to, and in some cases beyond, the logical limits. However, it's a fair bet that they genuinely believed that Saddam had these weapons.

This, of course, utterly ignores the possibility (not to mention the likelihood) that these officials, including Bush himself, were willing in fact to make knowingly false assertions (that is, to lie) in support of their predetermined conclusions. One of the foremost of these was Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's assertion in September 2002 that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction:

"We do know that the Iraqi regime has chemical and biological weapons," Rumsfeld told the House Armed Services Committee on Sept. 18. "His regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons -- including VX, sarin, cyclosarin and mustard gas."

Later, on March 30, 2003, Rumsfeld told ABC's "This Week" program: "We know where they are."

Claiming to know something when, in fact, you do not know it (even if you believe it dearly) is a lie -- regardless of how you spin it afterward.

Equally egregious in this regard has been President Bush. By any measure the most outrageous falsehood asserted by the president regarding Saddam Hussein's acquisition of WMD came when he claimed, on Sept. 7, 2002, that the International Atomic Energy Agency had reported that Hussein was in the final phases of getting his hands on a nuclear bomb:

"I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied, finally denied access, a report came out of the Atomic -- the IAEA -- that they were six months away from developing a weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need."

As The Likely Story (which has deftly compiled Bush's WMD falsehoods and distortions) observes:

The IAEA did issue a report in 1998, around the time weapons inspectors were denied access to Iraq for the final time, but the report made no such assertion. It declared: "Based on all credible information to date, the IAEA has found no indication of Iraq having achieved its program goal of producing nuclear weapons or of Iraq having retained a physical capability for the production of weapon-useable nuclear material or having clandestinely obtained such material."

By any accounting, it is clear that the Bush team was responsible for a broad range of false assertions that step well beyond the line of being simply a mistake (since when did incompetence become an excuse anyway?) or a product of arrogance.

Did Bush lie about WMDs? Ultimately, it's hard to avoid that conclusion, particularly when it comes to assertions about the extent and nature of their knowledge.

This should not, however, come as any great surprise. Bush, after all, has a well-established (if largely unreported) predilection for lying.

This dates back (on a national scale at least) to 2000, when the Bush team ran a political campaign predicated on spreading falsehoods about his opponents (from McCain to Gore), which worked spectacularly with a compliant press corps, and openly resorting to blatantly false assertions (e.g., the contention that machine vote-counts were more accurate than manual counts) during the struggle in Florida in order to win the presidency.

Bush also lied -- about his military service -- during the run-up to the campaign, and he did it in print. In his ghost-written autobiography, A Charge to Keep, Bush describes his pilot's training in some detail, then concludes:

''I continued flying with my unit for the next several years."

In fact, Bush was suspended from flying 22 months after he completed his training. Bush blew off his commitment to the Texas Air National Guard by failing to take a physical, and thereafter failing to report to his superior officers at his old unit for at least seven months. His flight status was revoked, and he never flew again.

But the most egregious of Bush's falsehoods was his announced (and later enacted) tax-cut plan, which despite Bush's false demurrals amounted to little more than a huge bonus for the nation's wealthiest 1 percent. As Paul Krugman described it in his 2001 book Fuzzy Math:

The Bush tax plan is irresponsible, but America will surely survive it, just as we survived the Reagan tax cut. What is different this time is the utter dishonesty of the sales campaign. At every stage in this debate, Bush and his people have tried to obscure what they were really proposing. They have radically understated the cost of their plan, while overstating the money available to pay that cost. They have pretended that a plan that mainly cuts the taxes of the extremely well-off is basically a middle-class tax cut, and have misrepresented the size of the tax cut that middle-income families will actually receive. And they have falsely sold the plan as an appropriate answer to a short-run economic slowdown, when it is almost perfectly designed not to deal with that sort of problem.

No previous administration has tried to sell its economic plans on such false pretenses. And this from a man who ran for president on a promise to restore honor and integrity to our nation's public life.

Importantly, a key component to Bush's campaign (and later) promises was his absolute vow not to use the Social Security surplus for anything other than paying down the national debt. As Krugman later pointed out in an August 2001 New York Times column, Truth And Lies:

But the important point for now involves honor and credibility. Mr. Bush promised not to dip into the Social Security surplus; he has broken that promise. Critics told you that would happen; they have been completely vindicated. Mr. Bush told you it wouldn't; he lied.

Bush continued to lie, rather openly and brazenly, about his mismanagement of the economy, even resorting to hiding behind the tragedy of Sept. 11 as an excuse for his own misfeasance.

Remember the "trifecta" story?

For the better part of six months, Bush regaled audiences, private and public, with several slightly differing versions of the following anecdote:

"You know, when I was running for President, in Chicago, somebody said, would you ever have deficit spending? I said, only if we were at war, or only if we had a recession, or only if we had a national emergency. Never did I dream we’d get the trifecta."

Bush told the joke on the record at least 14 times. It originated, evidently, as an anecdote he told to business leaders Oct. 3, 2001, when he explained his three-part reasoning for going into deficit spending -- but evidently did not yet suggest that he had "hit the trifecta."

That came later. He appears to have added the "trifecta" joke for the first time before a group of visiting Republicans at the White House on Nov. 9, 2001. He pulled it out again for a huddle with congressional GOP leaders on Feb. 1, 2002. After that, Bush apparently decided to make it part of his stump speech, beginning with a GOP luncheon on Feb. 27. The tellings of the joke then occurred regularly, largely at GOP fund-raising functions.

For awhile, it appeared that Bush had dropped it from his stump speech, possibly in response to the controversy that erupted in mid-May over his administration’s alleged pre-knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks (the last previous appearance of the joke was May 10). But after a month-long hiatus, he pulled it out again for a pork farmers’ gathering in Iowa on June 7, and began wielding it with glee again for another week or so. The last appearance of the joke was June 14, 2001, at a reception for Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s re-election campaign in Houston.

The real problem with the joke, and the story on which Bush based it, is that it is a complete falsehood.

Bush never told an audience in Chicago that he could foresee three conditions under which deficit spending might be necessary. In fact, he never stated any conditions at all that might lead to deficit spending.

Throughout the campaign, Bush had been insistent that budget surpluses would be continuing, and never does he appear to have told any public audience at any time that deficit spending might become necessary. Indeed, the only times that Bush ever seems to have brought up the subject of deficit spending were those when he accused Al Gore of planning to lapse back into the practice.

Moreover, the story is fundamentally false as a purely chronological matter: Bush was already facing the certainty of deficit spending at the end of the summer of 2001, well before the attacks of Sept. 11. The surplus built up during the Clinton years -- some $4 trillion worth -- vanished over the spring and summer that year, and budget experts sounded the alarm about looming deficits then. The Congressional Budget Office warned Bush on Aug. 29 that Social Security funds would be needed to balance the books, forcing him to abandon a campaign promise not to use the retirement fund for other government spending.

Indeed, that is just what Bush proceeded to do in his actual budget, presented in January. According to the CBO, Bush’s budget plan would drain every dollar of the $527 billion surplus from the Social Security Trust Fund for the next two fiscal years even while creating a deficit. It would continue to raid the fund for varying amounts each year through 2012. Even with the fund’s help, the federal budget is expected to be in deficits through at least 2005.

Most serious economists peg the source of these nagging deficits on Bush’s tax-cut plan, the deepest portions of which have yet to kick in. The administration sternly denies this, with Bush offering a familiar defense: "This nation might have to run deficits in time of war, in times of a national emergency or in times of recession, and we’re still in all three," he told reporters in January. "It makes sense to spend money necessary to win the war."

Yet it’s clear that while Sept. 11 may have deepened and broadened the budget-deficit problem, the administration was faced with chronic budget deficits no matter what -- largely because of the Bush tax breaks. As Krugman put it in his Feb. 2, 2002, column on Bush’s budget:

The events of Sept. 11 shocked and horrified the nation; they also presented the Bush administration with a golden opportunity to bury its previous misdeeds. Has more than $4 trillion of projected surplus suddenly evaporated into thin air? Pay no attention to the tax cut: it’s all because of the war on terrorism.

That, after all, was the whole purpose of the "trifecta" joke: By essentially blaming the deficit on Sept. 11 and its aftermath, it gives Bush a serendipitous excuse. Thus it lets Bush escape any serious questions about either his failure to balance the budget or, particularly, his campaign pledge to use the Social Security Trust Fund to pay down the national debt.

Without Sept. 11, Bush almost certainly would have faced a barrage of criticism for bringing back the bad old days of deficit spending -- and for breaking a well-known campaign vow to boot. The national tragedy gave him unparalleled political cover for his administration’s failures -- and Bush, to no one's surprise, displayed no hesitation whatsoever about using it. Not only that, it became his favorite joke.

When reporters have sought the original remarks, the White House press office has been unable to come up with any evidence that Bush ever made the remarks that he claims. Jonathan Chait first pointed this out in the New Republic, and ABC News' The Note likewise came up empty in its search for any Bush speeches or remarks that indicated a willingness to resume budget deficits, concluding: "[W]e have never been able to find, even with the help of reporters who covered the campaign every day, and from Mr. Bush’s own advisers, any reference to the president saying this even ONCE.”

Other journalists have gone looking too, which has made for some uncomfortable moments for the administration’s defenders. Tim Russert, on a late-June 2001 Meet the Press, tried to confront OMB chief Mitch Daniels about it:

Russert: Now, we have checked everywhere and we’ve even called the White House as to when the president said that when he was campaigning in Chicago, and it didn’t happen. The closest he came was he was asked, "Would you give up part of your tax cut in order to ensure a balanced budget?" And he said, "No." But no one ever talked about a war, a recession and an emergency, the trifecta. … [It] was not talked about in the campaign by the president, and the White House keeps saying, "Oh, yes, he made that caveat." No one can find it.

Daniels demurred, declaring, "I’m not the White House librarian," but added that he was certain Bush had often stated those preconditions: "I do know that I’ve heard the president say it privately and publicly, over and over, for a long time, as have scholars and theorists and supporters of balanced budgets …" If that is so, the record has not yet sustained this claim.

It was about this same time, just as the press' interest in Bush's prevarication was rising (I wrote a piece for MSNBC.com that ran on June 28) that Bush, according to the Chicago Tribune's Jeff Zeleny [July 14], was told by "senior advisers" [read: Karl Rove] to drop the joke:

So in recent days, some senior advisers have asked Bush to eliminate the Chicago line from the stump speech. They hope the move will quash the talk among Washington critics that Bush may be telling tall tales. One White House adviser said privately that the administration wants the label of exaggerated storyteller to remain precisely where it was in the last campaign — with Gore.

There is no small irony in this, since Al Gore, in fact, had told reporters during the campaign that he might consider deficit spending under those three conditions. [See Dana Milbank's July 2, 2002, report, "A Sound Bite So Good, the President Wishes He Had Said It," buried on Page A13.] Bush had in effect lifted the line from Gore, and then lied about it. Yet according to this same press corps, it was Al Gore, not George Bush, who had a "problem with the truth."

Bush has told other blatant falsehoods to cover up not only his incompetence, but his potential implications in political and financial scandal, particularly his behavior related to the collapse of Enron. The largely defunct energy company, of course, was one of Bush's chief supporters (it lent the Bush campaign the use of its private jets during the Florida recount effort, as well as donating a tidy sum of $300,000 to the Bush inauguration fund) and its CEO, Kenneth Lay, was a Bush "Pioneer" (an elite class of fundraiser) who actually slept in the Lincoln Bedroom during the White House tenure of Bush's father.

But on Jan. 10, 2002, all that was forgotten as Enron collapsed in flames. Bush told reporters:

Well, first of all, Ken Lay is a supporter. And I got to know Ken Lay when he was the head of the -- what they call the Governor's Business Council in Texas. He was a supporter of Ann Richards in my run in 1994. And she had named him the head of the Governor's Business Council. And I decided to leave him in place, just for the sake of continuity. And that's when I first got to know Ken, and worked with Ken, and he supported my candidacy.

In fact, Lay supported Bush over Richards, giving Bush some $30,000, though Richards did collect $19,500 from Enron sources in that 1994 race. Lay told PBS's "Frontline" in a March 27, 2001 interview that he had in fact supported Bush.

Moreover, the entire thrust of Bush's remarks obfuscated the closeness of his campaign with Enron, as well as the extent of his personal closeness with Lay, which is reported to have been substantial and long-term.

The press again conveniently ignored this prevarication, and more importantly, shrugged off the Enron fiasco as a "business scandal." Bush's pledges to reform corporate behavior and the accounting industry have become so much forgotten ephemera. (Meanwhile, one wonders why Martha Stewart is being prosecuted by the Ashcroft Justice Department over $43,000, while Lay continues to enjoy his retirement unmolested by such concerns.)

However, the nation's continuing economic doldrums are not so easily shrugged off, and continue to be the chief source of Bush's vulnerability. Not surprisingly, then, Bush continues to prevaricate to cover up for his mishandling of the economy.

On his final radio address of the year last December, Bush opened by saying:

In 2002, our economy was still recovering from the attacks of September the 11th, 2001, and it was pulling out of a recession that began before I took office.

Oh really? If the recession began before Bush took office, then why did he submit a budget to Congress in August 2001 that presumed a rosy economic outlook and continuing budgetary surpluses?

In fact, there is no evidence that there was a recession in effect when Bush took office. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research -- the national arbiter of all things economic -- the economy peaked and started shrinking shortly after Bush took office:

The determination of a peak date in March is thus a determination that the expansion that began in March 1991 ended in March 2001 and a recession began in March.

Unsurprisingly, Bush continues to try to blame the recession on his predecessor. As Dana Milbank reported this week, he has made the claim into a trifecta-like talking point in his stump speech:

"Two-and-a-half years ago, we inherited an economy in recession."

(Milbank also catches Bush in a couple of other fibs.)

The long and short of it is that Bush not only is a liar, he is both a prodigious and a brazen one. He is so skilled at it, indeed, that his supposed honesty and integrity is often cited as one of his endearing traits by his many acolytes, even in the face of repeated evidence to the contrary.

Saying that Bush is a liar doesn't always mean that he has traded in outright falsehood. Distorted characterizations and mangled "facts" are every bit as misleading, and ultimately every bit as dishonest, particularly when it comes to dealing with the public. As it happens, Bush's record is rife with both.

This has been especially the case with the mystery of the missing weapons of destruction. The depth and breadth of the false pretenses under which Bush led the nation not only to war, but to invade a sovereign nation that had not attacked us, are immanently apparent in any serious examination of the record. But rather than recognize the outrage that has been perpetrated in the name of American security, Bush's many apologists continue to rationalize away reality.

Still, for those who have been observing Bush's behavior and rhetoric over the years, the fact of his mendaciousness really is not a surprise. His father, like most politicians, was a skilled liar (remember "I was out of the loop"?), and W. learned most of his political chops at the feet of Lee Atwater, the famed Republican attack dog whose ruthlessness is still legend in political circles.

In reality, the act of lying itself -- Bill Clinton's example notwithstanding -- is probably not enough to invoke a serious effort to impeach a president. What matters the most is the nature of the deception: what the lie is about, and what damage it wreaks.

I'll let others wrangle over how important a lie (about a blow job!) in a minor civil action actually was. But lying about the reasons to take the nation to war -- and in the process cost hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people their lives -- is in another category altogether. As John Judis and Spencer Ackerman put it in their superb New Republic report on the WMD issue, "The First Casualty":

Three months after the invasion, the United States may yet discover the chemical and biological weapons that various governments and the United Nations have long believed Iraq possessed. But it is unlikely to find, as the Bush administration had repeatedly predicted, a reconstituted nuclear weapons program or evidence of joint exercises with Al Qaeda--the two most compelling security arguments for war. Whatever is found, what matters as far as American democracy is concerned is whether the administration gave Americans an honest and accurate account of what it knew. The evidence to date is that it did not, and the cost to U.S. democracy could be felt for years to come.

Who really cares, in the end, if Bush is a liar? What matters most is this: Did America invade another nation, which it now occupies, under false pretenses? If so, what kind of nation has George W. Bush made us into?

Camp fires

My friend Kari Huus reports in on the latest Aryan Congress in northern Idaho:

Aryan Nations plots a comeback at Idaho campout

As other reports have suggested, the white-supremacist movement is largely in disarray, for which we can all be thankful.

I particularly noted this quote, near the end:

"My impression is that people of Coeur d’Alene don’t like Aryan Nations because it is a fringe group and because it was bad for business," said one Idaho lawyer who asked not to be named. "It bothered me that they didn’t seem as disgusted by what (the racist groups) were saying."

A telling point, and one worth making: Even still, there is far too much excuse-making, rationalization and easy dismissal of white supremacists from all sectors of society, including local sentiments in places where they set up shop.

In the meantime, I could have sworn that was Richard Butler under that hood in O Brother, Where Art Thou? singing, "O death, won't you spare me over till another year..."

To infinity and beyond

Stuart Turner writes in to point out that Orcinus just surpassed the 100,000 visits mark. I have to admit that I don't pay close attention to these things, though I do enjoy cruising through the "Referrals" a great deal. I'm a bit disconnected from the traffic counts, which I gather is kind of a form of idiocy in the blogosphere.

In any case, reaching this benchmark in the five months that Site Meter has been counting (just as an indicator of how clueless I am, I neglected to add any kind of counter for the first month or so that I was blogging) is worth noting, if for no other reason to say THANK YOU to all those visitors who tallied up all those hits. Your interest in Orcinus is deeply appreciated, and I hope to keep it interesting in the months ahead.

Of course, as many of you have probably noted, I'm fully in my previously announced "light blogging" phase. My primary focus right now is working on Death on the Fourth of July (look for an announcement soon) which means only the occasional post for the next two months. I have been applying the finishing touches to the "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism" essay (it came in at 40,000 words and 100 pages) and will have the PDF file to you sometime next week (I hope).

In the meantime, I also want to say THANKS to the many bloggers who've driven so much traffic my way, and are primarily responsible for whatever success the blog enjoys. One of the drawbacks to being so ignorant about protocols in the blogosphere is that I'm sure I overlook the mutual linking that helps create a blog community, and often unintentionally ignore my many benefactors.

In particular, I owe a great debt to Atrios at Eschaton, whose many links over these past months are responsible for the lion's share of those hits; Avedon Carol at Sideshow, Jeralyn Merritt at TalkLeft, Eric Muller at Is That Legal?, Patrick Nielsen Hayden at Electrolite, and Eric Alterman at Altercation. I also owe a great many thanks to Jennifer at Media Whores Online.

I'm hoping the next 100,000 come away as entertained and informed.

A soldier's prayer

This item was in the most recent [July 2003] Harper's:

From "A Christian's Duty in Time of War," a pamphlet published by In Touch Ministries. The pamphlet exhorts its readers to pray for President Bush and to "consider fasting as you beseech the Lord" on his behalf. Thousands of the pamphlets were distributed by unknown persons to U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

MONDAY: Pray that the President and his advisers will be strong and courageous and do what is right, regardless of critics.

TUESDAY: Pray that the President and his advisers will have the unified support of the American people as well as that of other countries around the world.

WEDNESDAY: Pray that the President, his advisers, and their families will be safe, healthy, well rested, and free from fear.

THURSDAY: Pray that the President and his advisers will be successful in their mission and that world peace will be realized.

FRIDAY: Pray that the President and his advisers will recognize their divine appointment and will govern accordingly in compassion, mercy, and truth.

SATURDAY: Pray that the President his advisers will remember to keep their eyes on Almighty God and be mindful that He is in control.

SUNDAY: Pray that the President and his advisers will seek God and His wisdom daily and not rely on their own understanding.

And the following day's prayer, no doubt:

MONDAY: Pray that the antiwar protesters who seek to distract the President from his Biblical duty as warrior king are struck down by God's terrible lightning bolts and are immediately sent to hell where they may roast screaming for eternity.

Poison ivy

Bratty kids getting on your nerves? Want to ship 'em off to a camp certain to inflict permanent psychological and perhaps physical injury? Have we got the camp for you!

Camp American: Where God's Truth and Patriotism Go Hand In Hand

Be sure they sign up for the class taught by Larry Pratt.

'The Hitler concept'

A couple of months ago, Harper's ran a story by Jeffrey Sharlett, a religion writer, on a secretive Washington, D.C., group that calls itself 'The Family':

Jesus Plus Nothing: Undercover among America's secret theocrats

It was chilling, particularly considering the way these supposed Christians let slip their underlying, and apparently undying, admiration for Adolph Hitler:

"Yes," Doug said, "it's good to have friends. Do you know what a difference a friend can make? A friend you can agree with?" He smiled. "Two or three agree, and they pray? They can do anything. Agree. Agreement. What's that mean?" Doug looked at me. "You're a writer. What does that mean?"

I remembered Paul's letter to the Philippians, which we had begun to memorize. Fulfill ye my joy, that ye be likeminded.

"Unity," I said. "Agreement means unity."

Doug didn't smile. "Yes," he said. "Total unity. Two, or three, become one. Do you know," he asked, "that there's another word for that?"

No one spoke.

"It's called a covenant. Two, or three, agree? They can do anything. A covenant is . . . powerful. Can you think of anyone who made a covenant with his friends?"

We all knew the answer to this, having heard his name invoked numerous times in this context. Andrew from Australia, sitting beside Doug, cleared his throat: "Hitler."

"Yes," Doug said. "Yes, Hitler made a covenant. The Mafia makes a covenant. It is such a very powerful thing. Two, or three, agree." He took another bite from his plate, planted his fork on its tines. "Well, guys," he said, "I gotta go."

The story details the Family's incredible wealth of genuine power connections, as well as its thoroughgoing fundamentalism, coupled with its steely intentions to run the world. It's fascinating and disturbing.

The first time I read the piece, its broader impact didn't hit home. But Sharlett recently was interviewed by Anthony Lappé at Alternet, and he was much more expansive, explicit and disquieting:

Meet the Family

SHARLET: The goal is an "invisible" world organization led by Christ – that's what they aspire to. They are very explicit about this if you look in their documents, and I spent a lot of time researching in their archives. Their goal is a worldwide invisible organization. That's their word, and that's important because it sounds so crazy.


What they mean when they say "a world organization led by Christ" is that literally you just sit there and let Christ tell you what to do. More often than not that leads them to a sort of paternalistic benign fascism. There are a lot of places that they've done good things, and that's important to acknowledge. But that also means they might be involved with General Suharto in Indonesia and if that means that God leads him to kill half a million of his own citizens then, well, it would prideful to question God leading them.

….

The religious context is real. The Old Boys Network is about business. This is about more than business. This is about maintaining a certain kind of power, a certain view of how power should be distributed. The Episcopalian Old Boys Network was a lot more easygoing than this. This is a lot more militaristic. Really at its fundamental core, almost monarchist. We would be told time and time again, "Christ's kingdom is not a democracy" This is their model for leadership. They would often say, "Everything you need to know about government is right there in the cross - it's vertical not horizontal."

And he explains the continuing obsession with Hitler:

This goes back to the 1960's, Vereide was instructing young men by having them read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich – "Look at what those guys did." But they will say, "We are not trying to kill Jews." What we are talking about is imagine if you took the "Hitler Concept," and they'll use that phrase, the Hitler Concept, to work for Christ, or the Mao Concept. We're not right wingers, they'll say. You can use the Mao Concept.


GNN: Define what they mean by Hitler Concept.


SHARLET: A loyal leadership cadre, which is interesting because guys like Hitler and Stalin were famous for purging, but they seem to focus on a couple of guys. "If two or three agree" is a phrase they use a lot. If you can get together and focus you can accomplish anything. You don't need to sway the electorate. You don't need to convert everyone to Christ. Everyone doesn't have to believe in Christ, and that's where they differ from other fundamentalists. Some fundamentalists really distrust them for that. [They say] "We need to convert everyone, the high and the low." The Family says, "No we don't need the high." All these guys Hitler, Lenin, Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden is another guy they cite a lot, are guys who understood the power of a political avant garde. That's what they mean by the Hitler Concept. Also keeping your message simple, and repeating it again and again because there is only one message and it is "Jesus Loves." You can express lots of different things with that term.

I read this last night after posting "Fascism and fundamentalism" and thought I was being slapped upside the head. I'm aware that I suggested that fascimentalism was largely only latent in the landscape. The existence of this group, however, makes me wonder if it isn't fully active now. Certainly I can't think of a group that better fits the description:

"A political movement that claims to represent a Phoenix-like resurrection of a true national spiritual identity, focused on building a theocratic state that receives its imprimatur from God, ultimately adopting a rule based on scriptural inerrancy, and intent on dominating and imposing its will upon the rest of the world."

[Many thanks to Margaret in New York for the heads-up.]

Fascism and fundamentalism

[A Life magazine spread on "Fascism in America" from March 6, 1939.]

[Note: Below is the final installment of supplemental material for the "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism" series. Some of the material may be familiar; a few passages have been lifted from previously blogged items. In any event, the bulk of this is new, and is designed to fit in near the end of the series (between Parts 11 and 12). I'll be editing the series into a single whole this week and will be preparing the PDF file for mass consumption very soon. Please stay tuned.]

Over the past two decades, the most important meeting ground for the broad range of rightist beliefs has been in the field of fundamentalist Christianity. Extremists frequently organize around an arcane brand of fundamentalism like Identity; mainstream conservatism has become increasingly identified with mainstream fundamentalism; and even ostensibly secular conservatives like Rush Limbaugh and George W. Bush pay great obeisance both to its belief system and its political agenda.

When mainstream conservatives, religious ideologues and far-right extremists coalesce, it has consequences. The former has real-world power; the latter have agendas. To the extent that connections are made, the more likely those agendas are to actually be enacted. It becomes especially problematic as extremist elements exert an increasing influence on the broader fundamentalist sector, because this means their influence is extending into mainstream conservatism.

A sort of reciprocal danger arises when someone like George W. Bush makes overt political appeals to the fundamentalist views of his followers -- particularly in portraying himself as receiving divine guidance. This gives him not only a kind of immunity from fault, giving his every step the Lord's imprimatur, but places him in a charismatic position of dual political and religious leadership. It has the effect of leading individual followers to identify their religious beliefs with Bush's political agenda. It also draws the entire fundamentalist bloc behind him politically. This includes the proto-fascist element, whose impact, as we've seen, can far outweigh their numbers. The more we hear talk about Bush leading a national political and religious rebirth, the more we approach the conditions needed for a genuine fascism to arise.

The Manichean dualism -- the cut-and-dried black-and-white worldview -- that comprises the totalist mindset is especially evident among fundamentalists. This has the potential to make them, in many ways, ideal footsoldiers for a kind of Christo-fascism, one which backs theocratic impulses and right-wing extremism with actual political power. In the wake of a severe social disturbance like Sept. 11, this kind of dualism becomes potent in its appeal.

I'd earlier discussed totalism as an essential component of the individual mentality underlying right-wing extremism, drawing as my chief source the essay "Religious Totalism, Violence and Exemplary Dualism: Beyond the Extrinsic Model," by Dick Anthony and Thomas Robbins, which can be found in the collection, Millennialism and Violence (1995), edited by Michael Barkun of Syracuse. But as they explain, the underlying worldview has a much broader audience in the field of mainstream fundamentalism and so-called cults:

Nine characteristics which appear to us to be shared by authoritarian personalities, fundamentalists and authoritarian cults such as Hare Krishna, the Unification Church, etc.:

(1) Separatism or the heightened sensitivity and tension regarding group boundaries. This usually includes 'Authoritarian Aggression' which entails rejecting and punitive attitudes toward deviants, minorities and outsiders.

(2) Theocratic leanings or willingness to see the state expanded so as to enforce the group's particular moral and ideological preferences at the expense of pluralism or church-state separation.

(3) Authoritarian submission entailing dependency on strong leaders and deferential attitudes toward authorities and hierarchical superiors.

(4) Some form of conventionalism in terms of both belief and practice. Apparent exceptions such as antinomian groups, for example, the Bhagwan movement of Rajneesh or the quasi-Marxist Peoples Temple of Jim Jones …

(5) Apocalypticism.

(6) Evangelism or a focus on proselytization and conversion.

(7) Coercive tendencies in terms of either punitive reactions toward internal dissidence and non-conformity (for example, exile from fellowship, shunning, harsh 'self-criticism,' confessional sessions) or willingness to have non-conformists suppressed or discouraged by the state.

(8) Consequentialism or a tendency to see moral or ideological virtue producing tangible rewards to believers. This may entail belief in a 'just world' in which the good are tangibly rewarded and the wicked undone on the human plane.

(9) Finally, groups whose members tend to score high in authoritarianism or dogmatism tend to have strong beliefs and tend to make doctrinal acceptance a membership criterion. As with 'Moonies' studied by Galanter (among whom strong belief was correlated with feelings of group solidarity and the 'relief effect'), authoritarians and fundamentalists appear to have a strong 'investment' in their beliefs.

Much of Anthony's and Robbins' work builds upon the work of sociologist Robert Lifton and his colleague Charles Strozier, whom they cite extensively:

Both writers have explicitly linked totalism and fundamentalism. Interestingly, they tend to define fundamentalism in terms very close to descriptions of authoritarianism: for example, fundamentalist childrearing practices -- allegedly strict, repressive, corporally punitive and guilt-inducing -- resemble the familial milieux associated with authoritarian personalities. The emphasis by Lifton and Strozier on fundamentalist scriptural literalism, textual fetishism, obsession with disorder, nostalgia for a strongly ordered golden age less chaotic than the present, and emphasis on restoration keyed to inerrant scriptural texts, appears to evoke classic descriptions of authoritarian personalities.

Of course, it's worth noting that Anthony and Robbins consider the Lifton/Strozier formulation overbroad, and suggest some limits to the connection between totalism and fundamentalism. Nonetheless, the broader connection is otherwise fairly clear.

In the American context, this is significant because experts on fascism, which explicitly relies upon a totalist mindset among its following, have likewise identified religiosity as an important element of any kind of manifestation of it here. Earlier I cited Robert O. Paxton's "The Five Stages of Fascism," which appeared in the March 1998 edition of The Journal of Modern History:

…[E]ach national variant of fascism draws its legitimacy ... not from some universal scripture but from what it considers the most authentic elements of its own community identity. Religion, for example, would certainly play a much larger role in an authentic fascism in the United States than in the first European fascisms, which were pagan for contingent historical reasons.

While Paxton concludes this by surveying what comprises the "authentic" American experience, there is a historical context that fully substantiates his hypothesis. Earlier forms of fascism in America -- particularly the extremists who formed small but widespread societies built around neo-Nazi philosophies and admiration for Hitler, most notably the Silver Shirts, who were led by the crypto-fascist mystical "philosopher" William Dudley Pelley -- were explicitly "Christian" in nature.

Pelley's legions earned their name by wearing silver uniforms modeled after Hitler's brownshirts and marching through the streets on various occasions. Despite the theater (or perhaps because of it), Pelley drew large numbers of former Klansmen and other white supremacists, particularly those attracted to his anti-Semitic rantings (which included the infamous "Franklin Prophecy" hoax, whose legacy is still with us). Pelley's support was broad enough that he ran for President in 1936, though he only garnered a tiny portion of the vote. Nonetheless, he maintained some impetus through the later 1930s, especially in working-class and rural districts. A Life Magazine spread (reproduced above) depicted a gathering of Silver Shirts in Chehalis, Washington, at a local home. Both the audience and the activity of the meeting resembled nothing so little as a militia meeting in the 1990s.

Karen E. Hoppes, a graduate student at Western Oregon State College, wrote extensively about Pelley in the 1980s, notably “An Investigation of the Nazi-Fascist Spectrum in the Pacific Northwest: 1924-1941.” Hoppes of course addressed the Christian fundamentalism that was a significant feature of Pelley's "philosophy":

Finally, the link with fundamental Christianity establishes the uniqueness of American fascism. The majority of fascist groups justified their existence by their desire to change the United States into a Christian society. ... The relationship between the religious identity of these groups and their political demands can be shown by a careful survey of their rhetoric. The Christian fascist does not distinguish between the application of the terms anti-Christ, Jew and Communist. Neither does he distinguish between Gentile and Christian.

Hoppes particularly notes Pelley’s sermons arguing that “Christians of the United States must put the issue of conniving Jewry above all other issues and treat with it drastically. This means a pogrom ... of colossal proportions.” Observes Hoppes:

For the Christian fascist, this up-and-coming war against the Jew would result in the founding of a new moral community -- a Christian America. This community would tie itself to Christian ethics and Christian structure, as interpreted by these Christian fascists. Thus, the link with Christianity provided a unifying element for the membership in American fascist organizations. Members not only prayed with their comrades, but fought the "Christian" battle against the anti-Christ Jew. This gave them a surpassing sense of righteousness. Most of the membership came from the evangelical styled churches, with each Christian fascist group claiming to be under the umbrella of Christian thought and action.

This uniquely American Christo-fascism was not short-lived, even though Pelley was convicted (on dubious grounds) of sedition in 1942, and by the time he emerged from prison in 1950, his Silver Shirts movement had been long since abandoned and dismantled. However, some of his associates kept the flame alive. The most notable of these was Gerald L.K. Smith, who went on to play a central role in taking over the Christian Identity movement in the 1930s and '40s and remaking it into the proudly racist religion it is today. Likewise, the Posse Comitatus movement -- which in turn spawned the Patriot/militia movement of the 1990s -- had its ideological origins in "Christian fascism"; one of its founders, Mike Beach, was a former Silver Shirt.

Through most of the intervening years, these extremists were relegated entirely to the fringe. It was easy to distinguish between mainstream conservatives and the participants in the Identity and Posse movements, and only at the edges of both sectors (see, for example, the colorful career of former Rep. George Hansen, R-Idaho) was there much exchange of ideas and agendas. Likewise, there was a tremendous gulf between mainstream Christianity, even the fundamentalist variety, and the Christian fascists.

That began to change in the 1990s, thanks to the confluence of two forces: the emergence of the Patriot movement and the growing revolutionary fervor of conservatives in their drive to dominate the halls of power. The proto-fascist Patriots represented the efforts of Christian fascism to mainstream itself, and their relative success, though fleeting, gave a surprising indication of the presence of a totalist mindset in America, particularly among conservative fundamentalists. Conservatives, looking to broaden their appeal and undercut mainstream liberalism, began adopting more ideas and memes that had their origins in the Patriot movement, thereby blurring the barriers that had once clearly delineated the mainstream and extremist right.

Fundamentalism was particularly ripe territory for this, especially since so many of the issues that attract both mainstream conservatives and extremists -- abortion, education, gay rights, taxes -- revolve significantly around organizing by conservative Christians. And as we have seen, fundamentalism is particularly hospitable anyway to a totalist worldview. In this kind of crucible, the barriers all but dissolved. The trend has continued into this decade, even as the former footsoldiers of the Patriot movement have returned to the GOP fold, which has further blurred the lines.

It became apparent, for instance, after the recent arrest of right-wing terrorist Eric Rudolph, the man who bombed the Atlanta Olympics as well as a string of abortion clinics and gay bars in the 1990s. A story in the New York Times pondered whether Rudolph should properly be called a "Christian terrorist." It included an interview with one of Rudolph's local sympathizers:

"He's a Christian and I'm a Christian and he dedicated his life to fighting abortion," said Mrs. Davis, 25, mother of four. "Those are our values. And I don't see what he did as a terrorist act."

Both Mrs. Davis and the reporter's basic question eliminated the distinction between Identity and Christianity -- something that has become increasingly easy to do as Identity rhetoric attunes itself to the mainstream, and conservatism itself becomes increasingly bellicose and intolerant. These lines blurred even further as other media reports picked up the "Christian terrorist" idea and played with it.

The more Identity and similar extremist beliefs are identified with fundamentalist Christianity, the greater becomes their ability to influence the agenda of mainstream conservatism. This is why maintaining the delineation is important in terms of containing the forces of fascism that are abroad today.

This point was suggested in a Washington Post piece that tackled the same question:

Another expert on such groups, Idaho State University sociology professor James A. Aho, said he is reluctant to use the phrase "Christian terrorist," because it is "sort of an oxymoron."

"I would prefer to say that Rudolph is a religiously inspired terrorist, because most mainstream Christians consider Christian Identity to be a heresy," Aho said. If Christians take umbrage at the juxtaposition of the words "Christian" and "terrorist," he added, "that may give them some idea of how Muslims feel" when they constantly hear the term "Islamic terrorism," especially since the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Religiously inspired terrorism is a worldwide phenomenon, and every major world religion has people who have appropriated the label of their religion in order to legitimize their violence," Aho said.

Democratic societies around the world are up against all the many faces of radical fundamentalism. It is, after all, an explicitly anti-modern movement. Religious scholars such as Karen Armstrong in her excellent The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism, like to point out that the movement arose specifically as a reaction to modernism, or more specifically, as a reaction against the many failures of modern society.

Both Islamic and Christian fundamentalism have been gaining considerable momentum over the past generation, but the ascendance of the radical segment which all fundamentalist movements host has become much more pronounced in Islam. These are popularly referred to as the "Islamofascists," the factions that would weld a Muslim theocratic worldview to state and corporate power around the world.

But as Rudolph and others (like Tim McVeigh) illustrate, the Christo-fascists are equally eager to bring down democratic society and replace it with theocratic authoritarianism. And while they trail the Islamofascists in influence, their impact on American society has been substantial, if unnoticed by the media.

Annually, right-wing extremists within our borders are responsible for a sizeable number of crimes. These range, as Mark Pitcavage of the ADL points out, from "bombings and bombing plots to assassination plots and murders to weapons and explosives violations to hate crimes to massive frauds and scams (amounting in some cases in the hundreds of millions of dollars) to the myriad of lesser crimes." Even if you totaled up several years' worth of criminal activity related to Islamic extremism, it would fail to come close to the levels produced by our own homegrown terrorists.

It's important to recall, too, that the still-unsolved anthrax attacks of October-November 2001 may well have been the work of a right-wing extremist -- perhaps not someone with any organizational connection, perhaps even an idiosyncratic type, but nonetheless with largely right-wing beliefs.

Indeed, leaders of extremist factions have been fairly explicit in advocating "piggyback" terrorism that seeks to increase the levels of chaos in conjunction with international terrorism -- creating an echo effect that exponentially enhances the psychological damage inflicted by a Sept. 11-type event. Consider, for instance, a couple of post-Sept. 11 remarks by William Pierce, the late leader of the neo-Nazi National Alliance.

From a radio address: "Things are a bit brittle now. A few dozen more anthrax cases, another truck bomb in a well chosen location, and substantial changes could take place in a hurry: a stock market panic, martial law measures by the Bush government, and a sharpening of the debate as to how we got ourselves into this mess in the first place."

In an essay on his Web site, Pierce declared that "terrorism is not the problem," going on to explain that the current threat is "the price for letting ourselves, our nation, be used by an alien minority to advance their own interests at the expense of ours" -- meaning, of course, Jews.

And when you consider that right-wing extremists have in fact been arrested for the anthrax hoax letters sent to abortion clinics in the same time period -- a clear-cut case of "piggybacking" -- I think it becomes clear that these extremists have not only the means but probably also the clear intention of amplifying any kind of terrorist attacks perpetrated by Al Qaeda. For that reason alone, they remain a very serious threat indeed.

It is also important to keep in mind exactly what the long-term strategy of the extremist right is: To undermine the existing government and democratic institutions to as great a degree as possible by creating as much social chaos as possible. Terrorism is central to this strategy, because through terrorist acts like Oklahoma City, they intend to make the public come to believe that their government can no longer keep them safe. They then intend to present themselves as the "strong" alternative that will secure our borders, imprison the internal dissidents and make the trains run on time -- and although swelling their own ranks is key to this strategy, they do not intend to seize power by democratic means. In all these respects, the essentially fascist nature of their agenda becomes increasingly clear.

It boils down to this: The War on Terror, if it is to take on all forms of terrorism that genuinely threaten both American lives and our democratic institutions, is not a war against Islam. It is not even necessarily a war against fundamentalism. Rather, it is against the religious fascism that has embedded itself within the broader fundamentalist sectors of both Christian and Muslim societies.

Call it fascimentalism: a political movement that claims to represent a Phoenix-like resurrection of a true national spiritual identity, focused on building a theocratic state that receives its imprimatur from God, ultimately adopting a rule based on scriptural inerrancy, and intent on dominating and imposing its will upon the rest of the world.

In the Islamic world, this movement has manifested itself in the growth of Al Qaeda and the ascendance of such radicals as Abdullah Azzam and Omar Abdul Rahman as major influences in Islamism, as well as the entrenchment of Wahabbism as the chief political power in such states as Saudi Arabia. The consequences of this trend have become obvious to all the world since Sept. 11.

In the Christian world, the trend is much less pronounced but still present. It exists in the increasing identification of mainstream fundamentalism with its more radical components, particularly the anti-abortion and anti-gay rights extremists. It is latent in the openly theocratic approach to governance propounded by Christian Reconstructionists and neoconservative moralists like Antonin Scalia.

And it has gained a popular voice in the violently eliminationist rhetoric increasingly aimed at liberals, particularly those opposed to President Bush's war policies, much of it inflamed by conservative propagandists on talk radio like Rush Limbaugh. This kind of inchoate rage has always needed someone to scapegoat. This time around, it's liberals.

As the War on Terror, instead of combating the rise of fascimentalism, transforms itself into a War on Liberals; as conservatives increasingly identify themselves as the only "true" Americans; as Bush continues to depict himself as divinely inspired; as the political bullying that has sprung up in defense of Bush takes on an increasingly righteous religious cast; and as free speech rights and other democratic institutions that interfere with complete political control by conservatives come increasingly under fire, then the conditions for fascimentalism will almost certainly rise to the surface.

These conditions remain latent for now, but the rising tide of proto-fascist memes and behaviors indicates that the danger is very real, especially as fascimentalist terrorist attacks take their toll on the national sense of well-being and security. It may take fully another generation for it to take root and blossom, but its presence cannot be ignored or dismissed.

European fascism was a terrible thing. An American fascism, though, could very well devastate the world.

The tide begins to turn

A must read, from the Washington Post:

Former Aide Takes Aim at War on Terror

"The administration wasn't matching its deeds to its words in the war on terrorism. They're making us less secure, not more secure," said Beers, who until now has remained largely silent about leaving his National Security Council job as special assistant to the president for combating terrorism. "As an insider, I saw the things that weren't being done. And the longer I sat and watched, the more concerned I became, until I got up and walked out."

No single issue has defined the Bush presidency more than fighting terrorism. And no issue has both animated and intimidated Democrats. Into this tricky intersection of terrorism, policy and politics steps Beers, a lifelong bureaucrat, unassuming and tight-lipped until now. He is an unlikely insurgent. He served on the NSC under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and the current Bush. The oath of office hangs on the wall by his bed; he tears up when he watches "The West Wing." Yet Beers decided that he wanted out, and he is offering a rare glimpse in.

"Counterterrorism is like a team sport. The game is deadly. There has to be offense and defense," Beers said. "The Bush administration is primarily offense, and not into teamwork."

In a series of interviews, Beers, 60, critiqued Bush's war on terrorism. He is a man in transition, alternately reluctant about and empowered by his criticism of the government. After 35 years of issuing measured statements from inside intelligence circles, he speaks more like a public servant than a public figure. Much of what he knows is classified and cannot be discussed. Nevertheless, Beers will say that the administration is "underestimating the enemy." It has failed to address the root causes of terror, he said. "The difficult, long-term issues both at home and abroad have been avoided, neglected or shortchanged and generally underfunded."

The truth about this administration's startling incompetence is beginning to emerge.

Who needs hate-crimes laws?

Continuing a little more about hate crimes and the laws meant to combat them:

One of the most pointed critiques of hate-crimes laws comes in the form of the argument that most of these statutes are products of "identity politics" in which various aggrieved minority-interest groups have been responsible for their promulgation, thereby enshrining in law an attempt to cure social ills that might be better served in other arenas, since these laws are constitutionally problematic. The most detailed and thoughtful version of this argument is made by James B. Jacobs and Kimberly Potter in their 1998 Oxford University Press book:

Hate Crimes: Criminal Law and Identity Politics

The essence of this argument appears on page 131:

Our concern is that rewriting criminal law to take into account the racial, religious, sexual, and other identities of offenders and victims will undermine the criminal law's potential for bolstering social solidarity. By redefining crime as a facet of intergroup conflict, hate crime laws encourage citizens to think of themselves as victimized and besieged, thereby hardening each group's sense of resentment. That in turn contributes to the balkanization of American society, not to its unification.

But Jacobs' and Potter's logic is predicated on two false premises:

-- Throughout the text, they consistently describe hate crimes laws as being designed to create special "protected groups," a focus derived solely from viewing the special-interest advocacy that often spurred these laws' passage. Moreover, they consistently describe the laws as protecting only these selected groups and not everyone in society equally.

This is simply a false characterization of the laws themselves. None of these laws specify the race or ethnicity or religion of the victims -- rather, they are focused solely on the motivations of the perpetrator. A person need not be actually gay to be the victim of a gay-bashing hate crime; he need only have been perceived as gay by someone who specifically set out to assault homosexuals. This is only logical, since the terroristic motivation of the assault is present in either case.

Moreover, the laws protect everyone equally. Majority whites are victims of bias crimes too, and every year there are over a thousand prosecutions for such cases. (Indeed, the definitive Supreme Court case, Wisconsin v. Mitchell, involved a black man accused of fomenting a hate crime against a couple of white teens.) Check the FBI statistics for yourself.

Hate-crimes laws generally have three chief categories of bias motivation: racial, ethnic and religious. Some statutes include sexual orientation, others include gender bias. It's important to keep in mind that everyone has a race, an ethnicity, a religion (or even lack thereof). Everyone has a sexual orientation and a gender. This is what makes the laws generally universal and fully in tune with the equal-protection clause.

-- Secondly, their formulation also presents a false characterization of the real purpose of hate-crime laws. These laws do not redefine crime as a mere facet of intergroup conflict -- they specifically recognize that certain crimes are in fact a direct cause of intergroup conflict, and indeed worsen the divide between us. The laws are intended to close the divide, or at least prevent it from worsening. Indeed, it is specifically the failure to enact and enforce hate crime laws throughout history (and this includes their antecedents in the filibusterred-to-death antilynching laws of the 1920s and '30s) that encourages minority citizens to "think of themselves as victimized and besieged," and there is little doubt it hardens their resentment when these crimes are treated generically.

Finally, this characterization utterly evades the core purpose of these laws, reflected in their focus on the criminal instead of the victim: Namely, they are intended to give communities faced with these kinds of crimes the tools to deal with them effectively. An approach that treats hate crimes as equal in harm to their parallel crimes is utterly inadequate for this purpose.

To illustrate this, let me tell a story.
___

Though it is part of the lexicon now, the term “hate crime” was unknown even as recently as the early 1980s. But for those who were dealing with the remnants of white-supremacist ideology and its attendant violence, no one needed such a term. Like pornography, they knew what they were looking at when they saw it.

The first sign in northern Idaho was the fliers. No one knew who was handing them out, but several came across my editor’s desk at the Sandpoint Daily Bee in the rural Panhandle in the spring of 1979, brought in by a reporter on his rounds or an ad salesman who had picked it up around town. They were crude mimeographs, and even cruder humor: An “Official Running Nigger Target,” it was labeled. It showed a cartoon silhouette of a black man with a large Afro and monstrous lips, sprinting, arms akimbo, in apparent full flight. Numbers designated different scores for different parts of the anatomy, with a relatively low score for a head shot, and the highest score for hitting his feet.

There was never a shortage of crackpots in the Idaho backwoods, and normally a sheet like that would have disappeared into the round file. But the sentiments behind it were so nakedly hateful, and the violence it condoned was disturbing. I tucked it into a special file I was keeping.

No one knew for sure who was behind the fliers, but we had a pretty good idea. Just down the road from Sandpoint, about 40 minutes’ drive south, a group of fringe dwellers from Southern California who called themselves the Church of Jesus Christ-Christian had purchased a wooded parcel near Hayden Lake, set up a compound, and began calling it the “Aryan Nations.” The church’s leader, Richard Butler, promised to be a good neighbor, but there were reports of cross burnings at the compound; and then Butler began advertising his call for other like-minded supremacists to move to northern Idaho and create what he envisioned as a “white homeland.”

This was the shabby state into which the ideology of white supremacy, once the dominant worldview of white Americans, had declined: Forced into exile in a shabby backwoods lot, shouting its defiance at the rest of the world, and vowing impotently to wreak vengeance on us. Where once Butler’s claims that African-Americans were a subhuman species bent on the destruction of whites might have been roundly applauded, now they only confirmed his status as a social pariah.

At the time, Butler’s pronouncements were generally dismissed as lunacy by those of us in the mainstream press, including his call for a “white homeland” -- after all, northern Idaho couldn’t have become much more white than it already was. But what none of us anticipated was that even though the numbers that Butler recruited were generally small, their impact on the community was dramatic. Many of the people who moved to settle in the new “white homeland” were ex-cons, recruited into white supremacy while in prison. Others were radical ideologues who were fully inclined to take to heart Butler’s urgings to engage in a “race war” -- guys like Robert Mathews, who moved to nearby Metaline Falls in northeastern Washington to be near to Butler’s church, and found work at the local mines.

And they were changing the face of the northern Idaho community. The region was historically considered among the more liberal precincts in the state, particularly compared to the Mormon-dominated southern half; mining- and timber-rich northern Idaho had a long history of labor activism dating back to the previous century, and in fact had played a key role in the development of radical labor organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World. Now, an undercurrent of reactionary sentiment latent in the landscape (the region had also been home to a number of Confederate Army veterans who settled there after the Civil War), brought to life by the Aryan Nations, began to manifest itself in ugly ways. The file I was keeping at the Daily Bee was an attempt to keep track.

At first, it cropped up in nasty but relatively harmless ways, like the “running nigger” fliers -- hateful, but hardly criminal. Then it began crossing the line:

-- A Jewish restaurateur in Hayden found his business vandalized with anti-Semitic graffiti and swastikas, as well as a sticker with the message, “Do Not Patronize This Place.”

-- A Hispanic family in Coeur d’Alene, some 15 miles south of Hayden, was terrorized by someone calling late at night and making death threats; when they refused to leave, someone tried to set fire to their trailer, then killed their dog by slashing its throat. The family packed up and left.

-- A cluster of young thugs associated with the Aryan Nations assaulted a pair of teenagers (a minority boy and a white girl) outside a bowling alley.

-- Crosses were left burning on the lawns of two area families. One of these was an all-white family who, police believe, were targeted mistakenly.

-- A Baptist church and a printing business in Coeur d’Alene were both defaced with swastikas.

The threats and intimidation came to a head in September 1982, thanks largely to one of the more troublesome hooligans attracted to northern Idaho by Butler’s church: an ex-convict named Keith Gilbert. He had moved to the region after doing time at California’s San Quentin prison for having 1,500 pounds of dynamite at his Glendale home, which he later claimed was intended to assassinate Martin Luther King at a 1965 appearance in Los Angeles. Gilbert had been a follower of Butler’s in California, but shortly after moving to Idaho they had a dispute, and Gilbert attempted to set up his own white-supremacist organization. Gilbert, who later admitted responsibility for distributing the “running nigger” targets, then began his own campaign of threats and intimidation.

His chief target was a Coeur d’Alene family headed by a white woman named Connie Fort who had been married for several years to a black man and had three mixed-race children. Gilbert began by walking up to the eldest boy and spitting on him, saying: “Your life is condemned. You shall be served in front of the devil.” Having discovered where Fort’s family lived, Gilbert began driving by the home and shouting threats and obscenities at the children. He mailed an envelope containing a death threat for “race traitors” who engaged in “miscegenation.” Another mailing contained a news clipping about the corpse of a black man found floating in Spirit Lake, shot through the head.

Police were initially hesitant to charge Gilbert, partly because Idaho law made racial slander only a misdemeanor. But as the threats escalated, he eventually was charged and convicted of misdemeanor assault, and fined $300 with a 45-day jail sentence. Gilbert merely laughed it off.

The rest of the community, however, did not. Local churches circulated petitions in support of Connie Fort’s family and managed to gather hundreds of signatures. And Fort herself decided that something had to be done about the failure of Idaho law to adequately address this kind of hateful harassment. The previous year, a coalition of church leaders, city and law-enforcement officials, and businessmen from throughout the county had already formed, calling itself the Kootenai County Human Relations Task Force. As Fort’s story gained publicity in the local press, the KCHRTF took up the task of gaining public support for changing the law. It organized town-hall meetings to discuss the issue, and found that its support was deep and broad; at a panel discussion set up by the Idaho Human Rights Commission in 1982, other participants included the Justice Department, the American Civil Liberties Union, and law-enforcement officers.

Out of those discussions, the Human Rights Commission composed legislation -- similar to a law just passed in Washington state, also largely in response to the activities emanating from the Aryan Nations -- that would make it a felony to intimidate or harass another person because of their race or religion, either with physical assault or with threatening words. The bill was introduced in the Idaho Legislature’s 1983 with considerable fanfare, and its advocates claimed the support of over a hundred voluntary organizations in the state that supported its passage.

However, the bill encountered considerable opposition among legislators from the state’s notoriously conservative southern half. Many voiced concern that the law would trample on constitutional rights to religious freedom and free speech. Others accused the sponsors of secretly supporting the United Nations genocide convention. Richard Butler testified against it: “This bill would take away sovereign, inalienable rights of white Christians,” he told legislators.

The tide slowly turned in the bill’s favor, however, as the breadth of support for it became apparent. Kootenai County Prosecutor Glen Walker -- a conservative Republican -- traveled to Boise and patiently explained to lawmakers why the law was needed, particularly as a tool for dealing with a kind of crime they all recognized had deeply corrosive consequences for their community. Walker also shepherded several compromises to the legislation, including a clause that would specify it was not intended to imply support for the United Nations.

The coup de grace, however, was delivered by Keith Gilbert himself. He created a phony “Anti Defamation League” lobby, concocted a letterhead and a nonexistent leader named “Rabbi Schechter,” and sent letters to all member of the Legislature under “Schechter’s” signature voicing full support for the bill. Gilbert assumed that such “Jewish” support would inspire legislators to oppose the measure -- but his ruse was discovered and publicized instead. Angered by his brazenness, legislators rushed to support the bill, and it wound up passing handily.

Idaho thus became the ninth state in the nation to pass what would become known as a hate-crime law. California was the first to do so, in 1978; Washington and Oregon followed suit in 1981, while Alaska, New York, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania passed similar laws in 1982. By 1998, 45 states had passed such laws.

As in Idaho, many of these states had found that even though white supremacy, culturally speaking, had been relegated to the fringes of society, its remaining adherents were every bit as willing to resort to violence to achieve their ends as they were in the days of the lynch mob. And it was also clear that the violent crimes that resulted were not ordinary assaults and murders and threats, but they had several special qualities to them. For one, they were inherently more violent, and much more likely to result in severe harm. More significantly, they clearly victimized not just the immediate sufferer, but the larger racial, ethnic or religious community to which that person belonged -- and that in many cases, that was exactly what the perpetrators intended, as a way of “putting them in their place.” This not only extended the reach of these crimes, but it made clear that they were perniciously anti-democratic, and clearly destructive in a society supposedly dedicated to racial justice and equality.

The laws were passed in Idaho not because of any agitation by special-interest minorities, but by a grass-roots demand from the communities themselves. They arose, as it were, from the kind of common-sense decency that has always been an embedded element of American law.

What motivates terrorists?

Mark Pitcavage, who is the the ADL's director of fact-finding, also continues to operate the old Militia Watchdog listserv, which shares info about right-wing extremists (Mark in fact was the founder of the old Watchdog before the ADL hired him). He's also one of the most knowledgeable people on the planet about right-wing extremists. He recently posted this to the list, and gave me permission to reproduce it here in full. So I will:

Brian Levin and Mark Potok have both made comments recently about some Eric Rudolph commentators who have played down or dismissed Rudolph's ideology. Some of these have been egregious, such as the person who suggested Rudolph wanted simply to be a "bomber" and didn't have any real ideology.

This situation is not limited to the Eric Rudolph incident. In the past year or so, I have noticed a distressing number of times when commentators to the media, trainers of law enforcement officers, and others have significantly downplayed the role that ideology/theology plays in motivating extremists to commit criminal acts.

Typically, there are two forms of this downplaying:

1) It was not "ideology" that motivated the person in question, but "psychology." The person in question is not really passionate about the ideology--he or she simply became involved with an ideology to feed psychological needs and those same psychological motivations were what 'really' drove the person to commit criminal acts.

2) It was not "ideology" that motivated the person in question, but rather the individual's criminal tendencies. The person was someone who *wanted* to commit crimes (murder, violence, fraud, what have you), and the ideology was merely a convenient excuse to allow the individual to act on those criminal impulses. Typically, the way this is expressed is: "If he hadn't joined X, he would have been a normal criminal."

Now, I think it is clear that people join extremist groups/movements for a variety of reasons, and many of them may be psychological. Furthermore, they may well have psychological reasons to commit criminal acts. Similarly, there may be violent people who join an extremist group because it can give them an "accepted" outlet for their violence, or con artists who join an extremist group because it allows them to get money.

However, I think it is crucial to understand that, first of all, those psychological/criminal primary motivations do not always hold true. For many who get involved in these movements, it is the ideology that is the primary motivator. For example, in the 1990s, time and time again people were getting arrested (often on very serious charges), when they had never before had a criminal record. It is very difficult to argue that a 65 year old man with no (prior) criminal record joined an extremist group in order to have an excuse to act on criminal tendencies. Sixty five years is a long enough time for those tendencies to have manifested themselves in other ways! The criminal acts occurred only *after* the person had been exposed to, and had deeply accepted, an extreme ideology.

Secondly, even when psychological and/or criminal motivations play a role, they do not remain unaffected by the ideology. Merely accepting a new ideology can change one's psyche, for example. And getting involved with an extreme ideology can greatly change prior criminal motivations that one may have had. One great example of this can be seen with the sovereign citizen movement, which routinely generates huge scams and frauds from its midst. If criminal motivations were really the dominant factor in such schemes, then when such people are caught, their rational reaction should be to "escape" with as little harm as possible--hire a lawyer, mount the best defense possible, see if you can get away with anything. However, time and time again, what we saw (and continue to see) instead is a "crash and burn" reaction. Such people tend to defend themselves, using "sovereign citizen" arguments, as well as courtroom tactics guaranteed to alienate judge and jury alike, with the result, that they "crash and burn," getting more convictions and longer sentences than would otherwise have resulted with a "normal" defense.

Elizabeth Broderick of Palmdale, California (the "lien queen"), may be a good example of this. She may well have started her bogus money order empire with greed as the primary motivator (she had previously been involved with other schemes), but by the time she came out of it, the ideology was clearly affecting her at least as much. She defended herself, used sovereign citizen arguments, managed to P*ss off pretty much everybody in the courtroom, and got a lengthy prison sentence as a result.

Or take Linda Lyon Block and George Sibley. These two people (who killed a police officer in 1993) were on *death row*, but fired their lawyers and mounted a "missing thirteenth amendment" defense. Block has been executed. Death was on the line there.

I don't think you can ever dismiss the ideology/theology, and I think that even to downplay it is a big mistake. Ideology/theology really can and does play a significant motivating factor in criminal extremism and terrorism. If we ignore that, we do so at our own peril.

What Bush has done right

Via Matthew Yglesias, I see that Paul Muller at Heretical Ideas has a challenge for liberals:

So here's my challenge -- if you are a proprietor of a Democratic blog, and primarily post on how the GOP is the great evil, comment to me on one thing that the GOP has done that's good. And, if you are feeling adventurous, post something on your actual site that does the same thing. Maybe a local Congressman or Senator has done something good for the area you live in. Perhaps a bill has been supported that you agree with. Maybe you actually *gasp* like the policy someone has. Whatever it is, let's hear it.

Yglesias generally declines to join in, but I will say that one of the Bush administration's achievements is very well worth pointing out:

It has very successfully kept in check the elements within the right who would make the war on terror into a war with Islam, and who are inclined to vent their rage on anyone of Arab descent.

The Bush team has been quick to put out any fires that have cropped up in this regard. In the wake of Sept. 11, it has squelched anti-Muslim rhetoric from the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, and its Justice Department in fact has vigorously pursued hate crimes against people perceived to be Muslim or Arab. (Of course, Republicans in Congress continue to hold up hate-crimes legislation in the Senate that might bolster this effort, but that's another story.)

Thus, even though it has created, through the establishment of military tribunals and "enemy combatant" status, the machinery that might effect another mass internment of an ethnic population similar to the Nikkei internment of World War II, it has so far successfully resisted the kind of hysteria and scapegoating that could make such a nightmare reoccur.

I think the administration deserves a great deal of credit for this. It may have perfectly pragmatic purposes in doing so -- after all, conflating the War on Terror into a War on Islam would be disastrous militarily, especially when you consider the tenuous position of people like Pakistan's General Musharraf; besides, the Republicans have made a point of courting Arab-American votes over the past decade, and a number of prominent Arab-Americans in fact are working for this administration -- but it has clearly done the right thing, and so far done it well.

I don't have any compunction about pointing this up because (a) I think credit is due where it's earned and (b) I think it's an important position for the adminstration to take, and I'm very glad they're taking it.

Moreover, it is perhaps the lone genuine achievement by this administration in an otherwise barren wasteland of political and national disaster. There are very few other things the Bush people have done right. The remainder is a litany of incompetence, arrogance, bullying, cowardice, mendacity, and ruthlessness. This ranges from the theft of the 2000 election to the asleep-at-the-wheel routine that brought us Sept. 11, from the wholesale class warfare it has opened on the working class and poor (concomitant with the open looting of the national weal by the rich) to the clearly false pretenses under which it convinced the nation to wage war upon another sovereign nation that had not attacked us.

My dismay with the Bush administration is not based on my admitted personal dislike of both the man and his team. Had this administration shown even an ounce of competence beyond that which I've mentioned, I would be more than willing to acknowledge it. I might not be happy about it, but I value competence above politics when it comes to public servants.

Instead, we've been facing one national disaster after another with this man at the helm. He is himself a disaster unparalleled in the annals of the presidency. He must go.

Media mavens vs. reality

Bob Somerby at the (incomparable) Daily Howler lays into Margaret Carlson, who truly has it coming:

Carlson displays a rare ability to rearrange well-known facts. In one of the ugliest parts of her reprehensible “book,” she struggles and strains to help us see how disgraceful those Clintons really are:

CARLSON (page 157): With the Clintons, transactions trump relationships. Forget that and you end up in prison (Hillary’s law partner and deputy attorney general, Webster Hubbell, whom the two never called once he went off to jail), [or] dead (Hillary law partner Vince Foster, who committed suicide because he couldn’t play the “blood sport” of the White House)…

It’s hard find words for such ugly, evil writing. Did the Clintons ever call Webster Hubbell? We don’t know, but it was hardly their fault that he wound up in jail. As you know—as Carlson’s readers don’t—Hubbell pleaded guilty to defrauding the Rose Law Firm of at least $390,000. Since Mrs. Clinton was a partner at the firm, some of that money belonged to the Clintons! Carlson leaves that out of her piece; instead, she makes it sound like it was the Clintons’ fault that Hubbell landed in jail. Then they cruelly abandoned him. Regarding the Foster matter, no words can suffice. Foster didn’t use the term “blood sport;” that is another of Carlson’s embellishments. And he hardly attributed the ugly conduct described in his suicide note to Bill and Hillary Clinton.

What really struck about me about that passage from Carlson was how it turned reality on its head. In the real world, there is no evidence that transactions trumped relationships for the Clintons; such evidence-free pronouncements smack of projection. But we have grown accustomed over the past eight years to such sanctimonious Beltway froppery. Indeed, it was this same mentality -- embodied by Carlson -- which gave free rein to so much right-wing hatred and viciousness that anyone who dared to get close to the Clintons made themselves likely victims of the collateral damage.

The Clintons' enemies hatred knows no bounds, and they will even now stop at nothing to get to them. Forget that, and you wind up like Web Hubbell and Vince Foster and a hundred others.

Abetting the terrorists

Kynn Bartlett at Shock and Awe has a terrific post about John Noster, the right-wing Los Angeleno who authorities believe was planning a massive terrorist attack of some kind -- and his right-wing enablers, like a writer for David Horowitz's Frontpage Magazine who knew him well:

Gosh, Chris, it's really amazing that one of your churchmates, someone who hung out with you and other right wingers, would turn out to be someone who might plot to do nasty things to people.

After all, it's not like you guys foster and encourage such violence through your obsessively hateful rhetoric or anything, right?

Chris, you see, is the kind of guy who writes columns with titles such as Islamofascism, Inc. and France Surrenders. "Predicably, albeit belatedly, the cheese-eating surrender monkeys in Paris have, well, surrendered," starts the latter column.

Kynn says it all. Go read it.

Hate crimes: a response

Hate crimes, or at least a seminal form of them, have been with us since nearly the founding of this country. They run the gamut from atrocities against Native Americans to the universe of abuses that surrounded slavery, to the nightriders of the Ku Klux Klan to the "lynching era" of 1880-1930.

The laws against, them, however, are really quite new. They did not exist until the early 1980s, when a number of states began trying to grapple with the phenomenon. And for most Americans, they still are somewhat alien; in many regards they feel like any number of other "feel good" laws passed as sops to various minorities seeking to bolster their civil rights. Moreover, there is a dark side to them: Do they create thought crimes? Are they actually a threat to our civil liberties?

Jeralyn Merritt at TalkLeft comes down on this side of the debate, and evidently has for at least awhile, having chaired a committee on the issues for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and subsequently authoring an article making these arguments. She recently posted a condensed version that made a cogent and persuasive response to the posts by Matt Singer and Matthew Yglsesias favoring the laws.

I should note that Jeralyn is one of the rare bloggers with whom I usually agree with nearly everything she writes. But in this case, I a firmly disagree with her position in nearly every detail. (I've mentioned that my next book is about hate crimes in America -- the reality, not the theory -- and much of what follows forms the core of my basic thesis.)

Let me address Jeralyn's points one by one:

The federal judiciary released a statement recently expressing constitutional and practical concerns about hate crime laws. The underlying criminal activity of a hate crime, such as robbery, assault, or murder, traditionally falls under state jurisdiction. The concern is that by passing federal hate crime laws, there will be a mass federalization of crime which should and could be adequately handled at the state level instead of overburdening our already overwhelmed federal courts.

This concern is not very well grounded. Neither the current federal hate-crimes laws, nor the new version currently making its way in the Senate, step into state jurisdictions in any form.

A bit of explanation first: Hate crimes have little to do with "hate," particularly in the legal sense. The correct term for them is "bias-motivated crimes" or "bias crimes." They only exist on the books as a different category of crimes with which we already are well familiar (murder, assault, threatening, intimidation, vandalism, etc.) -- that is, a hate crime always has a well-established "parallel" crime underlying it, with the added layer of motivation by bias (racial, ethnic, etc.).

The federal hate-crimes laws either on the books or proposed so far restrict themselves to sentence enhancements for federal crimes committed with a bias motivation. In this respect, they closely resemble federal anti-terrorism laws, at least structurally; these laws, too, deal only with federal crimes committed with a terroristic intent.

The current federal law, passed in 1995, in fact is extremely limited (and nearly useless) because it restricts federal law enforcers from filing a hate-crimes charge unless the crime is committed on federal property or as a disruption of a federal activity (including voting). The new version, currently making its way forward in the Senate, largely eliminates this limitation, but is even more explicit about maintaining state and local prerogatives, and restricting the federal government primarily to the role of financier, coordinator and helper. Here is the 2001 version of the same bill, which goes by the title, "Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act."

Hate-crimes laws do raise important questions about federalism -- but then, all federal criminal legislation raises them. This includes their antecedents in the Reconstruction (particularly the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Enforcement Act of 1870) and in the anti-lynching legislation of the '20s and '30s. And of course, the federal hate-crimes laws on the books are very circumspect and limited in scope, largely for just this reason.

Now, while Jeralyn tried to limit her arguments to the matter of federal hate crimes, it must be observed that the bulk of the remainder of her arguments militate against hate-crimes laws generally, and thus against the state and local laws as well. Let's look:

There is no evidence to suggest that hate crime laws will have a deterrent effect upon hate crimes.

There's very little evidence, actually, that laws against murder have a deterrent effect on would-be killers, either. This does not mean we should not have laws against murder. Indeed, deterrence is often the weakest argument for or against any kind of law that affects punishment.

Hate-crimes laws, as we shall see, exist for a whole panoply of sound reasons, the main one being that they provide communities with the tools to confront these crimes, which are clearly different in nature and intent than their parallel crimes.

In many cases, it is very difficult to prove a hateful motivation for the criminal act. The decision to charge a hate crime as such should not be left to law enforcement. The F.B.I., for example, includes gestures and other body language in its hate crime statistics. Prosecutions to date in some cases have been based upon bigoted statements made several years before the act in question.

There's no doubt that the main point here is true: Establishing a bias motivation is unquestionably the most difficult aspect of prosecuting these cases. Indeed, the bar is extremely high, since proving this motivation requires relying on both previous statements or associations and with establishing the perpetrator's state of mind, or mens rea, at the time of the act.

Moreover, most prosecutors are reluctant to file such charges for precisely these reasons. As such, it is clear that most hate-crimes prosecutions only occur when the evidence is clear and substantial. In other words, the well-established structure of the criminal courts provides the strongest insurance against abuse or questionable prosecutions. At times this barrier may fail, but not often. This is frankly no different than in any other area of criminal law.

Finally, it is difficult to ascertain what Jeralyn means by suggesting that the decision to prosecute these crimes should not be left to law enforcement. Is she arguing that prosecutors -- who certainly are part of the law-enforcement apparatus, and almost invariably are the officials filing the charges -- should not make this choice? If not they, then who?

There are already sufficient criminal laws and penalties on the books to punish hate crimes. We should punish the act, not the thought process of the actor. If these acts are inadequately prosecuted and punished when the victim is of a minority or disadvantaged class, the answer lies in increased education and sensitization of law enforcement and the judiciary.

These are the most serious of the points that Jeralyn raises, and there are two components of it that need addressing. However, I'll address the "thought crimes" argument when it is raised again below.

First is the suggestion that current laws against the parallel crimes are adequate to the task and that hate-crimes laws intrude unnecessarily on this ground. Indeed, this identical argument was raised in the 1920s and '30s by opponents of the anti-lynching legislation that was the NAACP's raison d'etre during its early years.

Nowadays, it is proffered by such hate-crimes-law opponents as the Traditional Values Coalition and the Family Forum (who fear new laws that include sexual orientation among the categories of bias). A clearly specious version of it is the common Republican meme, "All crimes are hate crimes" -- which, fortunately, does not appear in Jeralyn's arguments, but which can be heard frequently from the likes of George W. Bush and Orrin Hatch.

It should go without saying that in fact not all crimes are alike in nature. Indeed, not even all homicides are alike; they range from second-degree manslaughter to first-degree murder. The difference among them largely stems from the circumstances of the act and from the perpetrator's mens rea. Intent and motive can be the difference between a five-year sentence and the electric chair.

Are hate crimes truly different from their parallel crimes? Quantifiably and qualitatively, the answer is yes.

The first and most clear aspect of this difference lies in the breadth of the crimes' effects. Hate crimes attack not only the immediate victim, but the target community -- Jews, blacks, gays -- to which the victim belongs. Their purpose today, just as it was in the lynching era, is to terrorize and politically oppress the target community. They resemble anti-terrorism laws in this respect as well. As Matt Welch puts it in the post that started this debate:

So, in effect, you add more punishment to those who perpetrate hate crimes because the crime targets and effects more than the immediate victim. It creates a culture of fear to which society must respond.

But this is only one aspect of how different hate crimes are from their parallel crimes. There are several more, and they are substantial. Frederick Lawrence, associate dean of the Boston University Law School, describes these differences in detail in his landmark text, Punishing Hate: Bias Crimes Under American Law (1999, Harvard University Press), which is a truly definitive text on hate-crimes laws (and from which I openly admit I draw many of my arguments, partly because I've explored these issues thoroughly through other avenues -- at one time I too was skeptical of hate-crimes laws' efficacy -- and found that Lawrence was correct in most respects, indeed in nearly every detail):

Bias crimes are far more likely to be violent than are other crimes. This is true on two levels. In the first place, crimes committed with bias motivation are dramatically more likely to involve physical assaults than do crimes generally, One study conducted in Boston found that approximately half of all bias crimes reported to the police involved assaults. This is far above the average for crimes generally, where we find that only 7 percent of all crimes reported to the police involve assaults. Secondly, bias-motivated crimes are far more likely than other assaults to involve serious physical injury to the victim. The Boston study, for example, found that nearly 75 percent of the victims of bias-motivated assaults suffered physical injury, whereas the national average for assaults generally is closer to 30 percent. …

Bias crimes are may also be distinguished from parallel crimes on the basis of their particular emotional and psychological impact on the victim. The victim of a bias crime is not attacked for a random reason -- as the person injured during a shooting spree in a public place -- nor is he attacked for an impersonal reason, as is the victim of a mugging for money. He is attacked for a specific, personal reason: his race [or religion, or sexual preference]. Moreover, the bias crime victim cannot reasonably minimize the risk of future attacks because he is unable to change the characteristics that made him a victim.

A bias crime thus attacks the victim not only physically but at the very core of his identity. It is an attack from which there is no escape. It is one thing to avoid the park at night because it is not safe. It is quite another to avoid certain neighborhoods because of one's race. This heightened sense of vulnerability caused by bias crimes is beyond that normally found in crime victims. Bias-crime victims have been compared to rape victims in that the physical harm associated with the crime, however great, is less significant than the powerful accompanying sense of violation. The victims of bias crimes thus tend to experience psychological symptoms such as depression or withdrawal, as well as anxiety, feelings of helplessness, and a profound sense of isolation. …

… Bias crimes cause an even broader injury to the general community. Such crimes violate not only society's general concern for the security of its members and their property but also the shared value of equality among its citizens and racial and religious harmony in a heterogeneous society. A bias crime is therefore a profound violation of the egalitarian ideal and the anti-discrimination principle that have become fundamental not only to the American legal system but to American culture as well.

Not only are bias crimes substantially different in nature from their parallel crimes, there is no question that they cause substantially greater harm, so a harsher punishment is fully warranted.

Since 41 states already have hate crime laws, expanding federal laws in this area could result in double prosecution in many instances, with the federal government following up in cases where they simply do not like the results in state trials.

This is not only unlikely, under both the current and proposed federal laws, it simply cannot happen. (See the response to the first point above.) The only time that the federal government has room to move in and prosecute is if state and local authorities simply choose not to act.

The gender provision of the proposed federal expansion bill could make run-of-the-mill rape and domestic violence incidents “federal hate crimes.” The disability provision could result in basic crimes against disabled victims -- such as mugging a person in a wheelchair -- being prosecuted as “federal hate crimes.” The result risked is a trivialization of the federal criminal sanction.

This is simply so unlikely to happen as to border on being simply false. Establishing a bias motivation -- which is the core of filing a hate-crimes charge -- is, as already noted, an extremely high bar that requires more than simply a few words uttered during or before the commission of the crime. Prosecutors typically must prove several aggravating factors; they must demonstrate a pattern of behavior consistent with the bias, as well as a willingness or desire to use extreme or criminal means to act upon it. A simple mugging or rape does not meet this standard; but a gang of youths who systematically attack handicapped people over the course of a night, or a rapist who delights in terrorizing not just his victims but the community with misogynist taunts -- these do.

However, it is always possible that an out-of-control prosecutor (Kenneth Starr, perhaps?) could attempt such a case. My experience in federal courts, however, is that neither the juries nor the judges will often countenance that kind of behavior. I have heard of such flimsy cases occasionally being tried -- and many more in other areas of criminal law as well -- but fortunately, they largely end in acquittals. But this is a problem with the court system, not with the law itself.

Thought is the core value of the First Amendment’s freedom of speech clause. It is absolutely protected and any attempt to regulate it cannot be tolerated.

Do hate-crimes laws create thought crimes? The issue has certainly been addressed in the courts, notably in the definitive Supreme Court case, Wisconsin v. Mitchell:

Mitchell argues [via the First Amendment] that the Wisconsin penalty-enhancement statute is invalid because it punishes the defendant's discriminatory motive, or reason, for acting. But motive plays the same role under the Wisconsin statute as it does under federal and state antidiscrimination laws, which we have previously upheld against constitutional challenge. … Title VII, of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for example, makes it unlawful for an employer to discriminate against an employee "because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin." … In Hishon, we rejected the argument that Title VII infringed employers' First Amendment rights. And more recently, in R.A.V. v. St. Paul, 505 U.S. at 389-390, we cited Title VII (as well as 18 U.S.C. 242 and 42 U.S.C. 1981 and 1982) as an example of a permissible content-neutral regulation of conduct.

Nothing in our decision last Term in R.A.V. compels a different result here. That case involved a First Amendment challenge to a municipal ordinance prohibiting the use of "`fighting words' that insult, or provoke violence, `on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender.'" … But whereas the ordinance struck down in R.A.V. was explicitly directed at expression (i.e., "speech" or "messages"), … the statute in this case is aimed at conduct unprotected by the First Amendment.

Moreover, the Wisconsin statute singles out for enhancement bias-inspired conduct because this conduct is thought [508 U.S. 476, 488] to inflict greater individual and societal harm. For example, according to the State and its amici, bias-motivated crimes are more likely to provoke retaliatory crimes, inflict distinct emotional harms on their victims, and incite community unrest. … The State's desire to redress these perceived harms provides an adequate explanation for its penalty-enhancement provision over and above mere disagreement with offenders' beliefs or biases. As Blackstone said long ago, "it is but reasonable that, among crimes of different natures, those should be most severely punished which are the most destructive of the public safety and happiness."

Of course, this is William Rehnquist, but the ruling was unanimous. Nonetheless, I think Matt Singer puts more or less the same argument much more elegantly in his first post on the matter:

[T]he real answer is that hate crimes laws don't punish individuals for their thoughts. They punish individuals for acting on their thoughts in unacceptable ways, by targeting a community for violence.

Frankly, I've always found the argument that these laws are "thought crimes" to be a little creepy, since it is echoed in the claims of the Christian Right that hate-crimes laws that include sexual orientation are an attempt to impinge upon their freedom of speech. But gay-bashing is no more a free-speech right than is lynching or even, say, assassinating the president. Political thought may motivate all of them, but that doesn't mean the Constitution protects any of them.

In many cases, enhanced penalties are not even possible. In most states, the penalty for murder is life in prison, and in many, the death penalty is already available.

This is both true and untrue. It is certainly true that at the upper end of the criminal spectrum -- particularly with murder -- there is very little sentence enhancement to be obtained by trying the case under hate-crimes laws. Indeed, because the bar is so high on those laws, it is extremely rare to see a prosecutor even attempt it, especially if the evidence related to the parallel crime is overwhelming.

The most prominent example of this was the Jasper case -- James Byrd's killers were not tried under a hate-crimes law, but rather under Texas' murder law. (Because it was clearly a hate crime, the federal government was able to chip in and assist the state prosecutors who were handling the case. This is the reality of how hate-crimes laws work vis a vis the federalism issue.) However, it's worth recalling that Buford Furrow, the fellow who shot up the Jewish synagogue in Los Angeles three years ago, in fact faced both local and federal hate-crimes charges, even though his crimes neared the upper end of the spectrum.

But it is simply not true that these constitute "many" cases. In fact, murder is probably the least prosecuted of all hate-crimes charges. There are annually only a tiny handful of such cases at best. The vast bulk of hate-crimes charges involve assaults, intimidation, property crimes and vandalism.

Granting increased powers of investigation to federal officials over our thought processes to prove bias and prejudice will become exceedingly Orwellian. Do we want to authorize the subpoena of book store records so that the fact that our spouse owns, say, a copy of The Turner Diaries can be used against him or her to prove the requisite mental intent for a hate crime?

Well, I'd like to think most of us would oppose such a system were it being proposed in any fashion. However, neither current nor proposed hate-crimes laws would authorize any such invasions of our privacy. All evidence in these cases must be gathered according to the standards of any criminal prosecution.

Do we want to support laws that will increase the investigator’s search and seizure powers into the sanctity of our houses, property and personal effects, which is guaranteed to us by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution?

This final, seemingly rhetorical question more or less repeats the same issues raised in the point previous -- and warrants the same response.

I should make it clear that I believe there are many problems with hate-crimes laws in America. The landscape is currently littered with a hodgepodge of state laws that are wildly inconsistent both in their constitutionality and their efficacy; Washington state's "malicious harassment" statute, for instance, is nearly useless and might not pass constitutional muster anyway.

And the federal statutes are currently so limited as to be useless as well. Consider, for instance, that the Justice Department has charted some 300 hate-crimes cases being either investigated or prosecuted related to anti-Muslim bias after the events of Sept. 11. Yet fewer than 10 of these so far have been charged under the 1995 federal hate-crimes law.

The most significant problem, however, is that prosecutions under these laws is wildly inconsistent and often unevenly applied. What is becoming increasingly apparent, as hate-crimes statistics are compiled, is that in rural America, hate-crimes laws go virtually unenforced -- not just by prosecutors, but by police. Minorities as a result are extremely vulnerable in these areas, and the problem, I believe, provides significant fuel for the fires of racial mistrust.

Hate-crimes laws in a sense were an unfunded mandate: Nearly everyone (41 states) passed the laws, but then failed to ensure that law-enforcement officials were given the tools to enforce them. Most of this comes down to education: Teaching LEOs how to identify hate crimes accurately and differentiate them from ordinary crimes; how to deal with the victims; and how to gather evidence. Similarly, local prosecutors, too, need to be better educated on these issues, particularly on what comprises these crimes and why they are important to pursue.

[For more reading on this point, see the Justice Research and Statistics Association's 2000 report, Improving the Quality and Accuracy of Hate Crime Reporting, as well as the Southern Poverty Law Center's damning 2002 follow-up, "Discounting Hate: Ten years after federal officials began compiling national hate crime statistics the numbers don’t add up".]

In the final analysis, all logic notwithstanding, I have to draw on my personal experience with hate crimes, their perpetrators, and their victims -- which includes the communities where they take place. And what my experience has told me is that hate-crimes laws are really about something that draws on Americans' sense of decency and fair play.

The old antilynching laws from which hate-crimes laws are descended were never approved, mostly because of the vehement opposition of the Deep South (whose senators three different times, over a 15-year period, filibustered the various versions of the legislation after it had passed the House and was headed for Senate approval). But the spirit that drove them has remained alive and resurfaced in more congenial times -- and it is a spirit, I believe, that runs deep in the American grain.

I think Fred Lawrence sums it up best in Punishing Hate [p. 169]:

Society's most cherished values will be reflected in the criminal law by applying the harshest penalties to those crimes that violate these values. There will certainly be lesser penalties for those crimes that in some respects are similar but do not violate these values. The hierarchy of societal values involved in criminal conduct will thus be reflected by the lesser crime's status as a lesser offense included within the more serious crime.

The enshrinement of racial harmony and equality among our highest values not only calls for independent punishment of racially motivated violence as a bias crime and not merely as a parallel crime; it also calls for enhanced punishment of bias crimes over parallel crimes. If bias crimes are not punished more harshly than parallel crimes, the implicit message expressed by the criminal justice system is that racial harmony and equality are not among the highest values in our society. If a racially motivated assault is punished identically to a parallel assault, the racial motivation of the bias crime is rendered largely irrelevant and thus not part of that which is condemned. The individual victim, the target community, and indeed the society at large thus suffer the twin insults akin to those suffered by the narrator of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Not only has the crime itself occurred, but the underlying hatred of the crime is invisible to the eyes of the legal system. The punishment of bias crimes … therefore, is necessary for the full expression of commitment to American values of equality of treatment and opportunity.

Hate-crimes laws are indeed relatively new laws. But they represent something that I think is a long thread running through our history, something many of us almost instinctively understand -- that is, the ethical imperative to stand up against the bullies and the thugs and the nightriders, because their whole purpose is to terrorize, oppress and disenfranchise the people they deem different or "not American."

I witnessed this decency -- the only possible antidote to the obscenity preceded it -- playing out firsthand a couple of years ago, and I'll be writing about it this summer in Death on the Fourth of July (scheduled for publication in 2004). Please stay tuned.