It was mostly a chance to sneer at the report because it mentioned the likelihood that some extremists might display third-party political stickers for such candidates as Paul and Chuck Baldwin. The purpose of the exchange was to sneer at the report's concerns, and of course eventually veered into distortion falsification on Beck's part, and paranoia on Ron Paul's part:
BECK: Let me ask you this. We looked up today, and we couldn't figure out why Missouri was putting this whole report together because nobody has been killed in Missouri by a militia member. There was one that I think — where did we find it, in Michigan? And it was an alleged militia member. Yet, ELF has done unbelievable damage, 2,000 crimes since 1979 and over $110 million in damage, but nobody seems to be looking at radicalized terror groups like ELF. Why is that?
Factual point here: Obviously Beck didn't look very hard, since Missouri was notable for having law enforcement officers tangle with hardline "Patriots" during the 1990s, as we detailed here. Did he and his crack research squad somehow overlook Timothy Thomas Coombs?
PAUL: Well, I guess they're in charge and we're not. Sometimes I think, you know, when they attack anybody outside the mainstream means that if our conclusion is correct, that both major parties are about one party, then they want no opposition whatsoever.
But those who are in charge of this must have liberal leanings if they never addressed any liberal groups that commit violence. So it is a pretty good question or pretty good point. Hopefully, it will wake up more Americans to what is going on.
BECK: I mean, we called the FBI. The FBI has four ELF members on their most wanted list — four. But there's not a single person from a militia. Congressman Paul, do you believe this is some sort of a setup? I mean, why all of a sudden the interest in these militias?
Once again, this is a flat-out falsehood. One of the most prominent names on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list is Edward E. Harper, wanted on a variety of child-molestation charges; Harper, as you can see, "reportedly subscribed to Sovereign Citizen ideology and claimed to be a member of the Montana Freemen, a group involved in domestic terrorism activities".
PAUL: Well, it may be a backhanded compliment, because a lot of us have worked real hard to change our government. We have addressed the subject of sound money and foreign policy and limited government. And you know, we even mentioned the Constitution.
And if you have too many people believing that way, we challenge the status quo. So I think if they see us as a threat, they may come out with these tactics to try to demonize us. So it's best to look at it as a more positive thing.
BECK: OK.
PAUL: And interestingly enough, you know, we are having a rally out there in St. Louis, Missouri coming up this weekend. Maybe it had something to do with them. Maybe they wanted to discredit what we were trying to do in St. Louis.
The whole episode was designed to let Beck and Paul scoff at the accusations that Ron Paul's followers might be militia members, or that Ron Paul himself might promote Patriot-movement beliefs.
The problem with that: Paul in fact has a long history not just of associating with the extreme populist right, but of promoting their beliefs in the public square:
Glenn Beck spent a little while on his Fox News show yesterday explaining to his audience that law enforcement in Missouri shouldn't be concerned about right-wing extremists because the real problem is cop-killing parolees on the loose in Oakland, California.
Or something like that. It was hard to piece the argument together, but the nub of it seemed along those lines. First he went on at length about how the weekend's horrible shootout in Oakland, which left four police officers dead alongside the shooter/parolee, was another sign of things going to hell in California. OK, whatever. But then he makes the big leap:
Beck: Next, look at the government's priorities. This is an actual cop killer, who clearly wasn't rehabilitated. But the Missouri State Troopers now -- and wait until you hear the rest of the story, the update on this one coming up in a few minutes -- they're worried about militias.
Beck then goes on to mostly regurgitate last week's rant about a Missouri State Patrol intelligence report discussing the recent resurgence of militia activity in their neck of the woods specifically and in the country generally.
But as we reported then, the report (you can read it for yourself here) is in fact entirely factual, and simply a normative report giving an accurate profile of right-wing extremists' behavioral tendencies.
Beck added some new charges to his already dubious case:
Beck: Let's put this into perspective here: Our researchers couldn't find a single report of a single death specifically linked to a militia group, or an individual member of a militia, in over a decade. Yet an average of more than 150 officers die every year nationwide. Have you counted the number of dead police officers in Philadelphia? And militia numbers are reportedly down after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 -- seems it gave them a bad name. So why are militias getting so much attention from Missouri?
Well, it might just have something to do with the fact that, per square mile, the Ozarks have as rich a history of right-wing extremism as any section of the nation. And while they haven't been making news in recent years, the very report that Beck dismisses in fact details not just the decline of the militias after 1995, but also their current ongoing revival, particularly in the wake of Barack Obama's presidential victory.
Included in the report are such incidents as the Montana Project 7 gang, which was plotting to kill local police officers; a plot by Idaho militiamen to murder a federal judge; and the Alabama militiamen who were plotting to murder as many Hispanics as they could get away with in a shooting spree.
What all of these cases have in common, of course, is that in fact they were all potentially deadly situations all nipped in the bud. And how did that happen? Through effective local law-enforcement work that relied on intelligence-gathering like this.
Beck wants to fob this kind of activity off as disenfranchisement, but when it comes to these folks -- especially in places like rural Missouri -- it's something much deeper and much uglier. (Just read the above link to the piece about Ozark extremism to see what I mean.) So while he's busy showing off pictures of black cop killers from Oakland by way of attacking a police intelligence report in Missouri, I'd like to introduce to him to someone from Missouri.
In 1994 authorities in McDonald County raided the Sacerdotal Order of the David Company and were stunned at what they found.
Stockpiled inside the compound were weapons, ammunition and dynamite. The group's leader, Pastor Robert Joos, claimed the weapons were meant for trading.
Unfortunately for Joos, authorities didn't see it his way. Police say the religious leader forged an illegal court document and served it to a Missouri State Trooper.
When authorities went to his compound to arrest Joos, cops say he put up a fight and had to be maced. Joos was released from jail in April of 1997, but one member of his militant group vowed revenge---that man was Timothy Coombs.
Investigators say that on the evening of September 16, 1994, Timothy Coombs went to the home of the man who busted his friend and religious leader.....Missouri State Highway Patrol Trooper Bobby Harper.
Harper, who was recovering from liver transplant surgery, was making a bowl of ice cream when he was shot sniper-style through the kitchen window of his McDonald County home. The bullet ripped through his stomach and newly transplanted liver.
The Trooper's 12-year old daughter, who was standing near him when he was shot, wasn't hurt in the attack.
Indeed, right-wing extremists -- not just militiamen, but their more virulent cousins, the white supremacists -- are still a potent presence in Missouri. See, for instance, the ADL's reported activity in Missouri just in 2009:
Law enforcement officers have many safety concerns, ranging from domestic disputes to belligerent drunk drivers, and they will likely face those situations far more often than situations involving extremists, who by their nature are a minority of the population.
Nevertheless, officers need to be alert to possible encounters with extremists and the safety issues involved. Even if members of hate groups are less common than spouse abusers, officers will eventually encounter them. Generally speaking, extremist criminals pose all the same risks to officer safety as other criminals. However, because of their beliefs, extremist criminals also pose additional risks and concerns.
Three particular factors underscore the importance of officer safety when dealing with extremists.
* First, law enforcement officers are often the people most likely to confront extremists who have committed criminal acts. * Second, criminals motivated by extremism very often act in distinctly different ways than criminals motivated by traditional motives such as greed or anger. * Third, for a variety of reasons, extremist criminals may often specifically target law enforcement officers.
It's true that in the past eight years, while going mostly into hibernation, the violent side of right-wing extremists has been largely dormant. But it's worth remembering what occurred in the 1990s, when they were very active:
* June 1994: White supremacist Robert Joos is charged with resisting arrest and carrying a concealed weapon following a traffic stop confrontation with Missouri State Highway Patrol officers.
* July 1994: Steven Garrett Colbern is pulled over in a traffic stop in Upland, California, but resists arrest and has to be subdued by five officers. His car is found to contain an assault rifle, a silencer, and a part necessary to convert the rifle to full automatic file (he is later briefly thought to be the John Doe #2 sought after in the Oklahoma City bombing investigation).
* October 1994: A routine traffic stop of three Michigan militia activists near Fowlerville, Michigan, uncovers loaded three semi-automatic rifles, four other guns, armor-piercing ammunition, and night vision goggles. The militiamen are arrested but never show up in court for their trial (later, one of the fugitives allegedly murders another one).
* Early 1995: Tim Hampton is charged with assaulting a police officer near Dallas, Texas, over an incident that occurred at a traffic stop.
* May 1995: James Boran is pulled over because of outstanding traffic warrants in Massachusetts. Boran refuses to exit his van and instead drives away. After his path is blocked, he continues his escape on foot, barricading himself in his apartment. After he finally surrenders, police find bombmaking materials and militia manuals.
* June 1995: Michael Hill, a militia and common law court activist in Ohio, is shot and killed by a Frazeysburg, OH, police officer after pulling a gun on the officer during a traffic stop.
* October 1995: Donald Lee Smith, of Cherokee County, Georgia, is pulled over for a traffic stop, resists arrest and is found to be in possession of a concealed assault weapon.
* November 1995: "Sovereign citizen" Reinaldo A. DeJesus of White Creek, New York, is arrested for numerous traffic and vehicle charges, and two charges of resisting arrest, following a traffic stop for a burned-out headlight.
* January 1996: Larry Martz, a militia and common law court activist in Ohio, attacks a Highway Patrol trooper during a traffic stop near Cambridge, OH. Martz had 23 weapons in his truck.
* February, 1996: Washington militia leader Bruce Alden Banister is pulled over for expired license tabs. The confrontation which follows ends with him eventually convicted of third-degree assault of a police officer and resisting arrest.
* August 1996: Kim Lee Bonsteel of Franklin, North Carolina, is convicted on 18 charges stemming from a 1994 incident in which he led law enforcement officers on a chase through three counties after he refused to produce his driver’s license or get out of his truck at a traffic stop. The chase destroyed several patrol cars, injured three officers, and caused a sheriff’s deputy to die of a heart attack.
* January 1997: A routine traffic stop involving skinhead and militia leader Johnny Bangerter of Utah turns into a chase and brief standoff at a trailer park.
* February 1997: Cheyne and Chevie Kehoe engage Ohio law enforcement officers in two well-publicized gun battles following a traffic stop in Wilmington, Ohio.
* March 1997: Aryan Nations member Morris Gulett rams a police cruiser during a chase following an attempt to pull him over for going the wrong way down a one-way street. Gulett claimed he drover away because he did not have a drivers’ license and he "was just in one of those moods." One week earlier, another Ohio Aryan Nations member was arrested following a traffic stop during which police found that he had a loaded handgun stuffed in a beer carton.
* August 1997: In New Hampshire, Carl Drega is stopped near a supermarket in Colebrook, New Hampshire, because of the rust holes in his pickup. Drega opens fire on the state trooper, killing him, then kills his partner as well. Drega then drives into town and kills two more people before fleeing into Vermont, where he has a final gun battle with police there. He dies, but not before injuring three more officers.
* September 1997: Craig and Doug Brodrick, two brothers who had recently moved to Boise, are stopped for failing to signal. They begin a gun battle which results in their own deaths as well as the death of a Boise police officer and the wounding of another.
If they become active again, these kinds of incidents will return. Glenn Beck may weep for Ron Paul bumper-sticker owners. The rest of us will weep for the widows of the police officers killed by the violent nutcases Beck wants you to forget about. When he's not busy promoting them and their conspiracy theories, that is.
Gobsmacking. There's no other word for it. What else can you call it when a national TV network's most popular anchor goes onscreen and reports a story that not only completely inverts reality, but does it by unleashing a camera crew that engages in the behavior of stalkers, actually tracking down a woman blogger on her weekend getaway and ambushing her at her hotel? It's not just hypocrisy: This is a psychotic perversion of press rights in a way that violates basic American privacy rights. And it's dangerous as hell.
That's what Bill O'Reilly did tonight on the O'Reilly Factor. Here's the report from O'Reilly's own sector of Planet Wingnuttia:
O'Reilly: Now, for the evil part. Last month, after the charitable event was announced, a bunch of far-left loons picked up some propaganda from the hate group Media Matters, that said I am unsympathetic to the plight of crime victims -- a preposterous lie. Along with America's Most Wanted, the Factor has done more for the victims of crime in America than any other television program on the air. The loons pointed to a Radio Factor episode from three years ago. We've posted the entire commentary on BillOReilly.com.
Elements at NBC News then encouraged the loons to protest the Alexa Foundation, causing Alexa and her family major grief.
That's right: O'Reilly is claiming that these reports actually harmed rape victims, since the Alexa Foundation was probably acutely embarrassed by the reports. So to prove his sensitivity to rape victims, he sent out a news crew to stalk a woman on her private weekend getaway.
What so infuriated O'Reilly was a Think Progress report -- itself a pickup from NewsHounds, and which in turn was picked up by MSNBC -- pointing out that while O'Reilly was going to give a speech before the Alexa Foundation, which benefits rape victims and their families, he had something of a history of gross insensitivity to the victims of rape himself. Here's what Amanda Terkel at Think Progress actually reported:
Our post — which never criticized the Alexa Foundation — highlighted the fact that in the past, O’Reilly has implied that women who dress in a certain way or consume too much alcohol should perhaps expect to be raped. Here is what he said on his radio show on Aug. 2 about Jennifer Moore, an 18-year-old woman who was raped and murdered:
Now Moore, Jennifer Moore, 18, on her way to college. She was 5-foot-2, 105 pounds, wearing a miniskirt and a halter top with a bare midriff. Now, again, there you go. So every predator in the world is gonna pick that up at two in the morning. She’s walking by herself on the West Side Highway, and she gets picked up by a thug. All right. Now she’s out of her mind, drunk.
O’Reilly’s comments about Moore were part of a larger segment about the dangers of drunkenness. His other example was Mel Gibson going on a drunken tirade and yelling anti-Semitic comments. “I think it’s safe to say that if Mel Gibson didn’t get drunk, he wouldn’t be in this terrible situation he finds himself in,” said O’Reilly. “And if a young woman, 18-year-old Jennifer Moore of Harrington Park, NJ, didn’t get drunk, she’d be alive today.”
No doubt O'Reilly is still reeling from the embarrassment of a previous case where his grotesquely insensitive remarks came back to haunt him: namely, the Shawn Hornbeck incident, in which O'Reilly first suggested that a boy who had been kept a captive of a child molester for years had somehow "wanted it." As it happened, he was scheduled to speak before a conference for the families of missing kids. The ensuing uproar didn't subside until his appearance was cancelled.
In other words, the guy who should have at some time apologized for belittling the victims of sexual assault -- and never has -- instead is claiming that his critics "hurt a rape victim and her family."
The Alexa Foundation is sticking with O'Reilly (a spokesperson was on afterward to fiercely denounce the protests). There apparently were pickets outside O'Reilly's appearance, and a groups called Concerned Women Against Sexual Violence created a petition of protest as well -- which got a big shout-out from Keith Olbermann.
So of course, Bill O'Reilly sent out his flying monkeys -- namely, the same ambush news crews, headed by an uber-cretin named Jesse Watters, who have attacked other hapless miscreants who had the audacity to bother O'Reilly's august ego -- in swift and nasty retaliation, as Terkel describes:
- The Stalking: Watters and his camera man accosted me at approximately 3:45 p.m. on Saturday, March 21, in Winchester, VA, which is a two-hour drive from Washington, DC. My friend and I were in this small town for a short weekend vacation and had told no one about where we were going. I can only infer that the two men staked out my apartment and then followed me for two hours. Looking back, my friend and I remember seeing their tan SUV following us for much of the trip.
– The Ambush: Shortly after checking into our lodgings, we emerged and immediately saw two men walking toward us calling out my name. Watters said he was from Fox News, but never said his or his companion’s name, nor did he say he was with The O’Reilly Factor.
Read the rest to see how the rest of the encounter went. Then compare it to O'Reilly's version above.
This whole episode itself is a gross bit of hypocrisy, considering that O'Reilly himself has complained about journalists invading celebrities' privacy -- a point for which he was recently slammed by Jon Stewart.
And that raises an important point about press ethics. O'Reilly's ambush crews claim to be "investigative journalists" acting in the crusading tradition of the old '60 Minutes' crews of the '70s and '80s. And indeed those journalists did excellent and serious work tracking down various official miscreants.
But they did it at their offices or their places of work. They didn't invade their homes.
Moreover, there is a big difference between people who anger you, or people with whom you disagree, and public officials or powerful people who have abused their positions. I think we all can understand why it's ethical for journalists to pursue the latter, and why everyone who has a shred of ethical decency as a journalist pauses long and hard while considering the former.
The power of the press is very easily abused, especially against ordinary private citizens who aren't celebrities, and whose privacy is every bit as sacred as Bill O'Reilly's.
If this kind of harassment continues, however, then it may comes time to turn the tables -- and they've picked a set of victims more capable of fighting fire with fire than they reckon. O'Reilly and his crew may not like it when bloggers start camping out on their lawns and demanding answers to insultingly partisan questions, shouted aggressively, as they try to get to their cars. Jesse Watters, what's your address?
Greater Wingnuttia wants to get all in an uproar about Nancy Pelosi's remarks the other night in San Francisco before a pro-immigrant gathering:
"Who in this country would not want to change a policy of kicking in doors in the middle of the night and sending a parent away from their families? It must be stopped. ... What value system is that? I think it's un-American."
Of course, Michelle Malkin and her wingnutospheric band of flying monkeys are in a nice little tizzy about this.
The clip also has been all over Fox News. Sean Hannity was all outraged about it Thursday night, and then yesterday it turned up again with the "All Star Panel."
But Juan Williams -- who often goes soft on liberal issues -- hit back hard at Charles Krauthammer, affirming that, indeed, these kinds of raids are un-American. He also managed to get to the heart of the matter -- namely, that our immigration laws themselves are profoundly un-American:
Williams: That's an unjust, wrongheaded law, and you see people who are benefiting this economy, people who are struggling for American values, absolutely being abused. It's an outrage.
Krauthammer: Controlling our borders is un-American?
Williams: It's not controlling our borders to go knocking on somebody's door in the middle of the night!
Krauthammer: You're enforcing the law.
Williams: You're enforcing an unjust law, and they are right to challenge it. She's saying it's wrong.
Williams is right, while Krauthammer is, well, Krauthammer. Ever since Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents began their campaign of massive raids last spring, they have terrorized Latino communities -- including the substantial portion of those communities that are here legally. There was also, from the outset, a decided and obvious racial component to the raids.
From the living room of the battered trailer she and her mother call home, Mancha described what happened when she came out of the shower that morning. "My mother went out, and I was alone," she said. "I was getting ready for school, getting dressed, when I heard this noise. I thought it was my mother coming back." She went on in the Tex-Mex Spanish-inflected Georgia accent now heard throughout Dixie: "Some people were slamming car doors outside the trailer. I heard footsteps and then a loud boom and then somebody screaming, asking if we were 'illegals,' 'Mexicans.' These big men were standing in my living room holding guns. One man blocked my doorway. Another guy grabbed a gun on his side. I freaked out. 'Oh, my God!' I yelled."
As more than twenty Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents surrounded the trailer, said Mancha, agents inside interrogated her. They asked her where her mother was; they wanted to know if her mother was "Mexican" and whether she had "papers" or a green card. They told her they were looking for "illegals."
After about five minutes of interrogation, the agents--who, according to the women's lawyer, Mary Bauer of the Southern Poverty Law Center, showed no warrants and had neither probable cause nor consent to enter the home--simply left. They left in all likelihood because Mancha and her mother didn't fit the profile of the workers at the nearby Crider poultry plant, who had been targeted by the raid in nearby Stilwell. They were the wrong kind of "Mexicans"; they were US citizens.
That was in one state. As I described elsewhere, this happened all over the country, producing scenes like the one in Idaho:
One family with members who are U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents said they were terrified by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who came to their home in the predawn hours accompanied by Blaine County sheriff's deputies. No one in their home was arrested.
"They pounded on my door so hard that my walls shook," Dana Ayala, a Wood River Valley resident and U.S. citizen, told the Idaho Community Action Network. "My 19-year-old son opened the door to see what was happening, and six agents armed with guns, Tasers and flashlights pushed their way into my home."
... "It is clear that ICE agents terrorized the community, including U.S. citizen children who were sleeping when the raid occurred," said Leo Morales, a community organizer for ICAN. "In several homes, children were left crying as ICE agents interrogated parents and hauled them away.
Testimonies gathered on Tuesday also indicated that in several instances ICE agents walked into the home looking for individuals not living there, then arrested the people in the home with no proof of immigration status.
In some instances, federal agents rushed into the house when a child opened the door."
The most pointed portrait of this came in the form of an essay by Erik Camayd-Freixas, a Spanish-language court interpreter who was called in to help process detainees in the raid. It makes the devastating case that the Department of Homeland Security, in collusion with the Justice Department, is (in the words of one observer we heard from about this case) "basically gaming the Federal judiciary using existing law, rules and regulations to force the judiciary to act as a coerced agent of the executive to imprison undocumented workers, after which they are deported with a prison record."
As Camayd-Freixas makes clear, these workers were charged improperly with a crime of which they were innocent as the means of forcing them to plead guilty to a lesser charge, for which they then accepted five-month prison sentence.
The New York Times, in reviewing the evidence, editorialized:
Under the old way of doing things, the workers, nearly all Guatemalans, would have been simply and swiftly deported. But in a twist of Dickensian cruelty, more than 260 were charged as serious criminals for using false Social Security numbers or residency papers, and most were sentenced to five months in prison.
What is worse, Dr. Camayd-Freixas wrote, is that the system was clearly rigged for the wholesale imposition of mass guilt. He said the court-appointed lawyers had little time in the raids’ hectic aftermath to meet with the workers, many of whom ended up waiving their rights and seemed not to understand the complicated charges against them.
I particularly found this portion of Camayd-Freixas' essay chilling:
When the executive responded to post-9/11 criticism by integrating law enforcement operations and security intelligence, ICE was created as “the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)” with “broad law enforcement powers and authorities for enforcing more than 400 federal statutes”. A foreseeable effect of such broadness and integration was the concentration of authority in the executive branch, to the detriment of the constitutional separation of powers. Nowhere is this more evident than in Postville, where the expansive agency’s authority can be seen to impinge upon the judicial and legislative powers. “ICE’s team of attorneys constitutes the largest legal program in DHS, with more than 750 attorneys to support the ICE mission in the administrative and federal courts. ICE attorneys have also participated in temporary assignments to the Department of Justice as Special Assistant U.S. Attorneys spearheading criminal prosecutions of individuals. These assignments bring much needed support to taxed U.S. Attorneys’ offices”. English translation: under the guise of interagency cooperation, ICE prosecutors have infiltrated the judicial branch. Now we know who the architects were that spearheaded such a well crafted “fast-tracking” scheme, bogus charge and all, which had us all, down to the very judges, fall in line behind the shackled penguin march. Furthermore, by virtue of its magnitude and methods, ICE’s New War is unabashedly the aggressive deployment of its own brand of immigration reform, without congressional approval.
This, I suspect, may be what Pelosi had in mind in her fuller remarks on this matter:
"Also of great importance to the border communities is of course the issue of immigration. And by that I mean we need comprehension immigration reform. For the first time in a long time, the opportunity exists to enact comprehensive legislation. President Obama has made this a priority for his Administration. I know that yesterday he met with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to reiterate his commitment to immigration reform.
"The CHC, Congressional Hispanic Caucus, has long taught the House Democratic Caucus and indeed the entire Congress what comprehensive immigration reform would look like. It would of course, secure our border, it would protect our workers, it would prohibit the exploitation of workers coming into our country and it would unite our families. Family unification is an important principle of our immigration and always has been.
"About a week and a half ago, Congressman Gutierrez was in San Francisco on a Saturday night. We were packed and jammed in St. Anthony's Church, hundreds and hundreds of people came. We heard from families who have had raids into their homes and into their families where families were separated. And at the time, I said it there and I'll say it here, that raids that break up families in that way, just kick in the door in the middle of the night, taking father, a parent away, that's just not the American way. It must stop. It's just not the American way. So we need this comprehensive reform, and we need it soon. And we need to stop those kinds of ICE raids in the meantime.
The wingnuts may stamp their feet and have a fit. But what must really anger them -- and maybe frighten them a little -- is the knowledge that a lot of Americans very much agree with her.
I'll wager that Glenn Beck, like a lot of people, has heard the famous Thomas Jefferson quote:
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
Maybe he's even seen one of the T-shirts bearing that inscription.
But then, there's one of these T-shirts that's especially notable: It was the one Timothy McVeigh was wearing when he was arrested for blowing up 168 people at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City back in 1995.
Does this mean that anyone wearing one of these shirts, or expressing these sentiments, is a crazed militiaman eager and willing to blow up government workers and their children? Er, no. But at the same, the meaning of that T-shirt is actually critical to understanding what happened in Oklahoma City.
The Missouri State Patrol's information arm recently compiled a report about militias (you can read it here), largely as a way of helping to inform their officers in the field, who are the people most at risk when it comes to random encounters with armed right-wing extremists.
The report, unsurprisingly, created a firestorm among the conservatives who suddenly found they had more of a resemblance to a right-wing extremist than they thought:
A new document meant to help Missouri law enforcement agencies identify militia members or domestic terrorists has drawn criticism for some of the warning signs mentioned.
The Feb. 20 report called "The Modern Militia Movement" mentions such red flags as political bumper stickers for third-party candidates, such as U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, who ran for president last year; talk of conspiracy theories, such as the plan for a superhighway linking Canada to Mexico; and possession of subversive literature.
"It seems like they want to stifle political thought," said Roger Webb, president of the University of Missouri campus Libertarians. "There are a lot of third parties out there, and none of them express any violence. In fact, if you join the Libertarian Party, one of the things you sign in your membership application is that you don't support violence as a means to any ends."
But state law enforcement officials said the report is being misinterpreted.
Lt. John Hotz of the Missouri State Highway Patrol said the report comes from publicly available, trend data on militias. It was compiled by the Missouri Information Analysis Center, a "fusion center" in Jefferson City that combines resources from the federal Department of Homeland Security and other agencies. The center, which opened in 2005, was set up to collect local intelligence to better combat terrorism and other criminal activity, he said.
"All this is an educational thing," Hotz said of the report. "Troopers have been shot by members of groups, so it's our job to let law enforcement officers know what the trends are in the modern militia movement."
When I saw this story a few days ago, I knew that sooner or later it was going to get trotted out on Glenn Beck's Fox News show as proof of evil government perfidy. After all, it's already becomean Alex Jones special -- which is to say, the air is thick with black helicopters and jetstream contrails.
Sure enough: Yesterday on his show Beck had a segment in which he and Penn Gillette discussed how crazy it was for law enforcement to be profiling people as potential domestic terrorists for behaviors that ordinary citizens like themselves indulge happily, as they should.
They noticed, at one point, that there's actually very little about Patriot movement beliefs to which they subscribe. It's just that their libertarianism might trip some of the outward indicators suggested in the report.
One of the people interviewed in the Kansas City report expressed similar views:
But Tim Neal, a military veteran and delegate to last year's state GOP convention, was shocked by the report's contents.
"I was going down the list and thinking, 'Check, that's me,'" he said. "I'm a Ron Paul supporter, check. I talk about the North American union, check. I've got the 'America: Freedom to Fascism' video loaned out to somebody right now. So that means I'm a domestic terrorist? Because I've got a video about the Federal Reserve?"
Neal, who has a Ron Paul bumper sticker on his car, said the next time he is pulled over by a police officer, he won't know whether it's because he was speeding or because of his political views.
More to the point, there's nothing in the report suggesting that any of these traits taken individually is a sign of radicalism. Rather, officers are expected to be able to take in certain signals simply as warning signs and indicators, not evidence of either criminal intent or radical behavior.
What the report reflects is a reality that law enforcement trying to deal with domestic terrorism in America must confront: Their subjects are thoroughly American; many of the people drawn into these movements are, if anything, "hyper-normal." Their version of "patriotism," for instance, is so extreme that they actually hate not just their government but their fellow citizens -- in essence, their country: because, you see, it has been "perverted" from its original purposes.
The hyper-normality is a kind of intentional camouflage. The Patriot movement, and militias in particular, were a very specific and intentional strategy adopted in the 1990s by the white supremacists and radical tax protesters of the American far right -- and the whole purpose of the strategy was to mainstream their belief systems and their agendas. The tactic was to adopt the appearance of normal, "red-blooded" Americanism as a way of pushing out the idea that their radical beliefs are "normal" too.
In the process, they often adopted time-worn "patriotic" sayings and symbols, such as the "Don't Tread On Me" flag Beck wears, as their own -- though with a much more menacing meaning. If you've seen that flag at an Aryan Nations compound, as I have, you never quite look at it the same.
This is why the meaning of Thomas Jefferson's quote above is quite different for them than it is for you and me. To all outward appearances, it is just an expression of avid patriotism. But to a Patriot movement follower, it means something potentially deadly.
Any time law enforcement offices encounter people with extreme ideologies, safety issues potentially arise. However, for a variety of reasons, certain circumstances pose a heightened threat of violent confrontation. Some situations, for instance, are particularly stressful for extremists, increasing the chances that they may lash out or overreact.
... Traffic stops are potentially some of the most dangerous situations that law enforcement officers can face when dealing with extremists. Numerous officers have been killed, wounded, shot at, or attacked during traffic stop incidents involving extremists during the past twenty years.
Some of these confrontations have been well-publicized. In 1997, television audiences across the country watched a police car video of a shootout in Ohio between two white supremacists, Cheyne and Chevie Kehoe, and local police officers. Yet some of the more incredible incidents have received remarkably little publicity. In one recent case in March 2000, three anti-government extremists (Lloyd Burrus, his son Jeff Burrus, and Cheryl Kate Maarteuse) were stopped for speeding by a Nevada highway patrol officer about sixty miles north of Las Vegas. The officer spotted a shotgun in the vehicle and radioed for backup. While he waited, the extremists sped off. During the ensuing chase, they shot at police vehicles from both Nevada and California, then turned off-road, where their BMW became stuck. Burrus and his accomplices abandoned the vehicle but took their weapons and ammunition, which they used to shoot down a California Highway Patrol helicopter that had arrived on scene. Eventually, after a twelve hour standoff involving over a hundred law enforcement officers, they gave themselves up.
There's nothing in the Missouri report that suggests anyone of the Patriot persuasion be arrested or treated as a terrorist -- because it's perfectly legal, in fact, to hold as radical beliefs as one likes in this country. The report simply tries to give officers a factual overview of some of the motivations of right-wing extremists, and what kinds of things are likely to set them off.
What's not legal is to act criminally on behalf of those beliefs. Unfortunately, Patriot beliefs -- particularly the more radical beliefs about the government's legitimacy (or lack thereof) -- actually tend to help induce such behavior. The police officers whose job it is to stop such criminality need to be able to assess what they're dealing with on the ground -- whether someone they've pulled over for not having license plates on their car is likely to pull something stupid.
Law enforcement officers need complete and accurate information in order to survive in the field. Maybe Glenn Beck is more worried about the tender paranoias of your average Ron Paul supporter -- none of whom have been affected in the least by this report in any real-world way -- but I tend to stand with the men and women who keep us safe.
Especially when it comes to making sure they have complete and accurate information. The more they know, the more likely they are to both enforce the law appropriately, and to stay alive at the same time.
Jackie Mahendra points out an Associated Press story describing some of the most recent information about how we're detaining illegal immigrants -- and it's profoundly disturbing:
The U.S. detention system for immigrants has mushroomed in the past decade, creating a costly building boom in an effort to sweep up criminals and ensure that illegal immigrants are quickly deported.
However, an Associated Press computer analysis of the entire detention population on a Sunday night in January found that most did not have a criminal record and many were not about to leave the country soon — voluntarily or through deportation.
A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement database, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, showed a U.S. detainee population of exactly 32,000 on the evening of Jan. 25.
Of those, 18,690 immigrants did not have a criminal conviction, including for illegal entry or low-level crimes such as trespassing. More than 400 of those with no criminal record had been incarcerated for at least a year. A dozen had been held for three years or more; one man from China had been locked up for more than five years.
Almost 10,000 had been in custody longer than 31 days, the average detention stay.
For an up-close look at what's going on at these detention centers, check out Breakthrough Media's incredibly informative site, Homeland Guantanamos, which describes the detention system we've created in response to right-wing agitation about illegal immigration. You know, the same right-wingers who are now stewing over non-existent FEMA concentration camps.
The video below also explores the subject in some depth, focusing on the situation in Illinois.
David Shuster was making fun of Glenn Beck's preoccupation with militia-style right-wing conspiracy theories yesterday on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and wondering why mainstream conservatives have so much trouble standing up to and denouncing this stuff.
There's actually a reason why mainstream conservatives never stand up to the far-right elements within their own coalition: they find them very useful.
It has ever been so. Harkening back to the days when Monarchists attacked the Enlightenment's pro-democracy thinkers as a plotting cabal of elites (which is where the old Illuminati conspiracy theories originate), the wealthy and those otherwise invested in maintaining the status quo in our civilization have always found these kinds of conspiracy theories a handy way of stirring up working-class resentment against progressive reformers.
That's why they'll be gaining in popularity as long as Democrats are in power: Because mainstream conservatives need them to make their wedge politics work.
So watch Beck telling folks that he "couldn't debunk" the existence of supposed concentration camps being built by FEMA:
Funny thing about "not debunking" the FEMA camps: Beck no doubt is discovering that it's not easy to "debunk" the existence of something for which there is simply no evidence of its existence in the first place.
In reality, these claims originated back in the 1990s with the far-right "Patriot"/militia movement. I first heard about them back in 1994, when I attended this militia meeting in Maltby, Wash.:
The fellow up on the stage is a guy named Bob Fletcher, who at the time was the chief spokesman for the Militia of Montana. The map he has up on the stage with him shows what he claimed was a "United Nations reserve" being created just to the east of us, in the Northern Cascades, in which the feds were busy creating concentration camps, run by FEMA, which he assured us were being built to hold gun owners after the government rounded them all up.
Of course, no such camps existed. When I tried to get Fletcher or other MOM officials to help me pinpoint their exact location so I could go check them out, they never were able to get back to me on that.
I described these characters in my first book, In God's Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest,:
Fletcher is a self-described ``congressional researcher’’ who came to work for the Militia of Montana in the fall of 1994. Within a short span of time, Fletcher became the prime speaker at MOM events, delivering the militia message with a little more deftness than the often-erratic [John] Trochmann [the founder of the Militia of Montana].
For the better part of the next year, especially during the uproar that followed Oklahoma City, Fletcher was the point man for the militia movement. When there was a televised Town Hall meeting on the militias in Seattle, Fletcher -- backed by an audience stacked with Patriots -- was the spokesman. When informal congressional hearings were held on the militias, Fletcher and Trochmann sat together and answered questions.
... Fletcher also ran the militia meetings very smoothly. He was adept at saying things that were simultaneously pessimistic and empowering: ``My personal feeling is that it's too late to stop this,'' he would tell crowds. As for surviving, he’d say, ``I recommend a year's worth of food and plenty of ammo.''
John Trochmann either originated or became the chief promoter of many of these conspiracy theories:
The New World Order, he says, is a shadowy one-world-government group that conspires to put an end to the U.S. Constitution by subsuming it under the "Communist" United Nations. Conspirators include the President, the Speaker of the House, and most financial and political leaders around the world.
The new world government Trochmann envisions would be a population-controlling totalitarian regime. Guns will be confiscated. Urban gangs like the Bloods and the Crips will be deployed to conduct house-to-house searches and round up resisters. Thousands of citizens will be shipped off to concentration camps and liquidated, all in the name of reducing the population.
... Trochmann told me that Ruby Ridge and Waco were mere harbingers, test runs for what they intended to start doing to average citizens. Street-gang members from the Bloods and Crips, he said, were being trained in Spokane right then for house-to-house-search-and-seizure techniques. When the big crackdown came, they’d round people up, ship them off to concentration camps (which he said were already being built), and then ``liquidate’’ them until the population was stabilized.
The pretext, he said, would be ``most likely a food shortage.’’ And they would start with urban dwellers.
``Look at the cities,’’ he said. ``Look at them. They're totally captive. Somebody supplies their heat, somebody supplies their light, their transportation, their water, their communications, food. Look how vulnerable they are. They'll obey to the letter, or they'll die, because they're not ready for what's going to happen.’’
From there, the theories filtered out to a variety of like-minded "Patriots" who then held their own militia meetings. Locally, it was a Monroe, WA, landscape contractor named Don Kehoe:
[Kehoe] suggests that ecosystem-management efforts, like the international plan proposed by local environmental groups for the North Cascades extending into Canada, are part of a government plan to drive people out of those areas altogether. The New World Order, Kehoe says, plans to install concentration camps in the Cascades to house and liquidate the masses needed to implement population control.
The flyer below was a popular handout at MOM meetings:
While its "documentation" books included such entries as the one below:
Now, only a couple of years back, progressives had a similar wave of paranoia hit them about concentration camps being built in the heartland by the Bush Administration. It didn't go very far, because it quickly became clear that there was no there there. No one was actually building any new camps; all that had happened was that a Halliburton subsidiary had been given a contract to build them in the event of an emergency, but the contracts had never been activated.
But the list of camps being touted by Glenn Beck's friends is identical to the list I examined in 2006, and here's what I reported then:
The [FEMA] concentration-camp claims have continued to enjoy a kind of half-life as well. You can still find them on the Web at sites like this one, which offers the standard number of "over 800 camps" that we now see floating around the current claims.
Note some of the camp descriptions:
IDAHO
Minidoka/Jerome Counties - WWII Japanese-American internment facility possibly under renovation. Clearwater National Forest - Near Lolo Pass - Just miles from the Montana state line near Moose Creek, this unmanned facility is reported to have a nearby airfield. Wilderness areas - Possible location. No data.
[The renovations at the Minidoka camp are strictly for purposes of making it into a national monument in commemoration of the internment. The Lolo Pass facility is a Forest Service work camp. As for the wilderness area sites, well ...]
MONTANA
Malmstrom AFB - UN aircraft groups stationed here, and possibly a detention facility.
[There is no detention facility at Malmstrom.]
WASHINGTON
Seattle/Tacoma - SeaTac Airport: fully operational federal transfer center
Okanogan County - Borders Canada and is a site for a massive concentration camp capable of holding hundreds of thousands of people for slave labor. This is probably one of the locations that will be used to hold hard core patriots who will be held captive for the rest of their lives.
Sand Point Naval Station - Seattle - FEMA detention center used actively during the 1999 WTO protests to classify prisoners.
Ft. Lewis / McChord AFB - near Tacoma - This is one of several sites that may be used to ship prisoners overseas for slave labor.
[The three known facilities listed here all have legitimate purposes as part of the law enforcement or military systems. But the "concentration camp" in Okanogan County is entirely fanciful and does not exist. Nor is there any known project to hold or transport people for slave labor.]
Anyway, you get the idea. None of the so-called detention centers were designed or constructed for that purpose. Certainly there was never any publicly acknowledged program to build them during the Clinton years.
As Jeffrey Feldman observes, the idea of FEMA being involved in concentration camps came gurgling up into popular media through X-Files scripts:
Rumors that FEMA has set up 'concentration camps' as part of a plot to take over America and the world flourished after the X-Files film, died down, and then resurfaced as the video site YouTube became more popular in 2006.
One video expounding on the X-Files theory of FEMA concentration camps, which was posted to YouTube in mid-2006, has been watched almost one million times. The theory Glenn Beck is pushing is a version of the X-Files plot adapted to support Beck's argument against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed recently by the Obama administration.
And now, thanks to Glenn Beck, they're receiving mainstream media play by Fox News people who say they "can't debunk" their existence.
How much longer before Beck just organizes his own militia group? Is that what the "912 Movement" is going to evolve into? Stay tuned ...
Last summer's church shooting in Knoxville, TN hit close to home for me. As a Unitarian Universalist -- and a liberal -- the idea that the right wing's eliminationist rage toward the left would end up in the death of two members of my own tribe wasn't unexpected; but it was a gutpunch, and a moment of awakening.
But, for other reasons entirely, last Sunday's shooting in a Baptist chuch in Maryville, IL hits even closer to home.
The shooter, Terry Sedlacek, had struggled for years with long-term, chronic Lyme disease, contracted after being bitten by a tick some years ago. Though this description of his symptoms seems extreme even among Lyme patients, his struggle to get treatment is an infuriatingly common one. The media debate over the role this disease may have played in the shooting has tapped into one of the most furious and tragic medical debates in modern medicine. On one hand: there are doctors on TV claiming that it's entirely possible that Lyme can create the kind of psychiatric problems that would lead to this kind of catastrophe. On the other are doctors saying that it's impossible -- Lyme is a relatively benign bacterial infection that's easily treated with a few weeks of antibiotics.
What you're seeing here is the public version of a medical furor that's been raging more privately for over 20 years, with a million or two patients caught in between. The stakes are incredibly high. Doctors caught on the wrong side commonly lose their licenses. Patients caught in the crossfire commonly lose their lives.
Lyme and Me I came by my own ringside seat at these festivities courtesy of a tick bite incurred, probably on a hiking trail somewhere in the Sierra, in the late summer of 1984. I don't remember the bite. I never saw the tell-tale bulls-eye rash (I'm a country kid -- I got bit all the time by one noxious thing or another) that one of the warring camps insists must be present for a Lyme diagnosis to be accurate. But I do know that I went to bed one day in October of that year, and was never the same afterward -- and that I've been struggling with devastating bouts of exhaustion, body pain, and brain fog ever since.
Over the years, various doctors pinned assorted diagnoses on these symptoms, all of which promised exactly zero hope for a cure. Occasionally, one would recommend a symptomatic treatment that would alleviate some of the pain, or forestall at least some of the damage; and through the years, these little wins added up to a decade of gradual recovery that allowed me to reclaim at least some of my life. It wasn't enough to keep me from having to abandon my career; but at least the pain wasn't constant, and the neuropathies weren't crippling -- which is more than many Lymies can say. Eventually, in 2005, I lucked into an experimental pilot study for a treatment that alleviated the neurological and cognitive issues to the point where I could actually go to grad school. And blog. And, at least virtually, begin to rejoin the human race. It wasn't a cure; but it was something much more like a life, and I took it for all it was worth.
But it wasn't until a year ago this past week -- nearly 24 years and a dozen or so doctors after my first collapse -- that I finally got a firm diagnosis of Lyme disease. Last August, after returning home from the convention in Denver, I started the difficult and demanding high-dose multi-layered antibiotic treatment. The average case of chronic Lyme takes two to five years of treatment to cure. At this late date, though, the odds are only about 70% that I'll ever be able to shake it. Still, six months in, my joints work again. I can exercise and travel without having to pay it back with weeks in bed. And my mind grows sharper by the day. The drugs are working -- and every day I'm better is a day of grace I never thought I'd see.
Two Definitions of Lyme The treatment takes so long because Lyme is the most cunningly persistent bacterium known to science. In its native state, it's a spirochete -- a cousin to syphilis. But if you hit it with penicillin, it will convert in a matter of minutes into an intracellular form that's more like a mycoplasma, which will only respond to a macrolide antibiotic like azithromiycin or Biaxin. Or, just for fun, it will roll up into a hard cyst form that can hide, dormant, in the macrophages of cells, and then emerge to re-infect the host years on down the road. This well-armored third form responds -- only very reluctantly -- to Flagyl and a couple of the TB drugs. Curing the disease means taking large doses of several classes of antibiotics together for months at a time -- either orally, or through an IV -- so the germ will have nowhere to hide. And all the while, we also need to be carefully watching for and mitigating the drugs' own very real consequences to the body.
To complicate matters further, the ticks that deliver Lyme usually deliver other diseases, too: babesiosis (a form of malaria), ehrlichiosis, mycoplasma, and others that also must be found and treated for a full cure to happen. Though these are nominally "deer ticks," entomologists have found Lyme-bearing ticks on birds, dogs, rodents, horses, and many other animals. Last week's chimp attack is also being blamed on a form of Lyme psychosis. It's probably true that veterinarians have a better handle on this disease than the doctors who treat humans do.
And here's where the medical battle rages. Infectious disease specialists-- represented by the Infectious Disease Society of American (ISDA) -- have for decades held to the firm position that Lyme is a spirochete that can be killed with a 28-day course of doxycycline. If you're still sick when the month is over, whatever you have isn't Lyme (and, in practice, is generally assumed to be psychosomatic). And this is true, as far as it goes: if you're lucky enough to catch the disease in the first few months after you're bit -- or you've got one of the many strains that's amenable to this treatment -- a short course of doxy usually does do the trick.
However, once some strains of Lyme get dispersed and embedded in the body's tissues, the standard treatment won't touch them. Worse: the standard Lyme tests won't, either, so the results will likely come back negative. The shady politics of how the approved Lyme tests were developed would take a whole separate post to explain; but suffice to say that they're only 70% accurate on their best day, which would make them patently unacceptable as a diagnostic tool were it any other disease. Far more accurate and sensitive tests are available, but insurance companies won't cover the $400 fee.
That's because the IDSA panel doesn't approve of these tests (even though the "controversial" proteins it tests for -- the only ones common to all Lyme strains -- are the same proteins some of these same doctors once tried to build a Lyme vaccine on). It also doesn't accept Lyme's shapeshifting nature; the existence of a chronic form of resistant Lyme that requires long-term treatment; the importance of seeking out and treating co-infections; or the neurological and cognitive issues it can cause. All of these facts are well-documented by the peer-reviewed science; but IDSA's Lyme panel has actually purged new members who brought these studies up for consideration.
All this is part of the background for the dueling doctor interviews we're seeing on TV this week.
The Great Divide Why would ostensibly caring doctors be so resistant to accepting new and better data? As always, follow the money. The IDSA's minimalist view of Lyme is greatly favored by insurance companies, who really don't want to be on the hook for expensive testing or more than a month of treatment. On a broader note: they're absolutely terrified (with good reason) that Lyme could turn out to be another huge budget-busting epidemic like AIDS, and want to do everything they can to make sure they're not stuck with the bills for it. To that end, they've made sure that the ISDA's Lyme experts have been richly rewarded with grants, consulting fees, and so on for aggressively defending the narrowest possible case definition and the most limited treatment standards. For their part, IDSA's Lyme group has held up their end of the deal so reliably that last May, they became the first medical standards board in the history of American medicine to be successfully sued (by the attorney general of Connecticut, no less) for corruption.
On the other side of this preposterous debate are the Lyme patients and the clinicians who are successfully treating them -- and that large and growing body of peer-reviewed research (much of it published in major journals) that the IDSA stubbornly refuses to even consider. This side is also being joined by psychiatrists, rheumatologists, and neurologists who have tended to patients ravaged by Lyme; a new generation of genetics researchers who are getting a handle how Lyme does those Houdini-like invisibility and shapeshifting tricks; and the aforementioned veterinarians, whose experience with Lyme doesn't correlate at all with the ISDA's picture of the disease. Doctors in this camp are gathered under the banner of the Infectious Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS).
The doctors who join this side of the battle do so knowing their licenses are on the line. Testing for and treating long-term Lyme is a risky business: scores of them have been put out of business by either IDSA or the insurance companies, and the rate of attack is accelerating. As a result, people with chronic Lyme are losing what few options they do have, and end up traveling hundreds or even thousands of miles for treatment. (I was diagnosed by Canada's leading Lyme expert -- who gave me the news on a Tuesday, and retired that same Friday because the provincial medical board was coming after him. My successful treatment is being managed by a doctor in Seattle who protects himself in part by refusing to take insurance.) While the doctors, researchers, and insurers rage, upwards of two million Americans with Lyme are going largely undiagnosed and untreated -- unless they can pony up the six-figure sums needed to find a doctor willing to treat them, and then finance their own cures.
In the meantime, there are gathering bits of early research to suggest that Lyme may also play a role in triggering other illnesses as diverse as autism, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and ALS. If any of this proves true, the results of our crippled management of Lyme may ultimately touch many, many more of us.
Blame it on The Gipper As you can tell by now, this issue is a political and medical snake pit. But the thing that I've found most striking about it is that Lyme patients aren't the only ones caught in it. You can find almost identical battles raging -- with insurers and "official" medical groups lined up on one side, and persecuted heretic doctors and their grateful patients lined up on the other -- among the MS, autism, chronic fatigue syndrome, and Gulf War syndrome communities. In fact, almost every chronic disease that's emerged or spread since the early 80s has ended up re-creating this exact split. You have to wonder: Why? What's going on here?
A few perspicacious science journalists think they've got an answer. The problem, they say, started back in 1980, when Ronald Reagan changed the rules governing how scientists (and the entities they work for) profit from their work. Where scientists used to gain fame and fortune by publishing and sharing their work in conferences and journals -- and were thus rewarded for furthering general knowledge -- the new rules encouraged them to hoard their discoveries as trade secrets; and then leverage their patents and their seats on medical boards to write the disease definitions, mandate approved treatments, and completely control the scientific discourse in order to maximize the profits they made.
The upshot -- in all these cases -- is that when a new disease is discovered, a small cadre of researchers rushes in to lock down the disease's definition, patent its treatment, and control the flow of information around it as soon as they can manage it. From that point, any further discussion of the issue is off-limits; and any new discoveries or treatments not controlled by this cadre are discouraged by means both subtle and brutal. So instead of ongoing scientific give-and-take that leads to increasingly better information and treatment over time, the entire research conversation stalls at a very early stage -- and can stay stalled for decades. In the meantime, patients and clinicians are shut out of the discussion and left to work out practical treatments and new theories on their own, often in defiance of well-funded opposition that's staked its careers and fortunes on preventing any challenges to their established theory.
Horror and Hope The Lyme community is watching this week's events with an odd mixture of horror and hope. On one hand, the last thing we need is for America to think that the very real neurologicial problems that come with the Lyme package make us a danger to society. It's important to understand that there are over 100 strains of Lyme in the US, only a few of which lead to chronic Lyme and even fewer of which create anything like the kind of psychosis that afflicted Terry Sedlacek. (One of the reasons diagnosis and treatment are so hard is that the various strains all manifest and respond to the drugs differently.) It's even more important that people realize that Sedlacek might never have gotten to this place if the American medical system were structurally capable of integrating and deploying everything we know now about Lyme, instead of staying willfully stuck in the definitions first laid down in the late 1980s.
He deserved better diagnosis, better treatment, better doctors, better information. So do I. So does everyone infected with Lyme. The fact that we can't get it is just one more national failure that can be laid directly at the feet of short-sighted conservative policies, and the belief that an unfettered market can never do harm.
On the other hand, we're beyond grateful that public awareness of the Lyme debacle has been growing. Over the past year, we've seen the publication of noted science writer Pamela Weintraub's excellent Cure Unknown, the definitive book to date on the Lyme epidemic and political travesty surrounding it; the release of Under Our Skin, an award-winning documentary on Lyme that's being shown to full houses around the country (the film clips above are excerpts from this movie); and serious interest from Oprah's Dr. Oz and other media celebrities in doing shows on Lyme.
Given all this, there's hope we're finally beginning the long-deferred conversation about how America deals with its gathering epidemic of emergent chronic illnesses, and give the victims of Lyme and other orphaned diseases the treatment and research attention they deserve. In the face of a precipitous environmental decline that seems likely to make emergent chronic illnesses one of the biggest dangers to American health and security in the coming century, our very survival may someday come down to how effectively we can fix what's broken here.
It's tragic -- but, unfortunately, very typically American -- that it took another church shooting to get us here. But now that we're here, let's not let the chance to have a serious discussion about our deranged medical research system -- perverted, as everything else was, by the right wing's euphoria for free-market fundamentalism -- get away from us. There are tens of millions of chronically ill Americans who are counting on us to get it right this time -- and it shouldn't take the death of innocent people to make us aware of the shameful way they're living, and dying, in our midst.
Update: Can Lyme really make someone homicidal? Pam Weintraub gives a great summary of Lyme's potential psychiatric and neurological effects here.
Rachel Maddow last night caught up with that strange domestic terrorism case out of Maine that we reported on awhile back as part of a larger trend we're seeing of ratcheted-up rhetoric and increasingly violent expressions coming from the American far right since Barack Obama's election.
Maddow: But should this guy have been found out -- I dunno, before he died? And, post-9/11, have we focused too much on stopping Bin Laden again at the expense of potentially stopping the next Timothy McVeigh?
Good question. And the answer is clearly yes. The Maine incident is only the latest in a long string of cases of serious domestic terrorism emerging from the extremist Right since 9/11. Some of the others include:
In conversation with Bill O'Reilly yesterday on his Fox News show, Glenn Beck speculated that the cause of that murderous shooting rampage in Alabama might have been the shooter's frustration with "political correctness":
BECK: But as I’m listening to him. I’m thinking about the American people that feel disenfranchised right now. That feel like nobody’s hearing their voice. The government isn’t hearing their voice. Even if you call, they don’t listen to you on both sides. If you’re a conservative, you’re called a racist. You want to starve children.
O’REILLY: Sure.
BECK: Yada yada yada. And every time they do speak out, they’re shut down by political correctness. How do you not have those people turn into that guy?
O’REILLY: Well, look, nobody, even if they’re frustrated, is going to hurt another human being unless they’re mentally ill. I think.
BECK: I think pushed to the wall, you don’t think people get pushed to the wall?
O’REILLY: Nah, I don’t believe in this snap thing. I think that that kind of violence is inside you and it’s a personality disorder.
So, according to Glenn Beck, murderous rampages are the inevitable consequence of conservatives not getting what they want. Never mind that we've no idea whether the man in question was a conservative; it's easy enough to presume a white man from Alabama is a conservative just to make the point that his killing spree is all liberals' fault.
Steve Benen notes that there's a history to this kind of logical leap:
One of the right's more disgusting habits is exploiting violent tragedies for ideological gain. After the shootings at Virginia Tech, Newt Gingrich blamed liberals' "situation ethics" for the tragedy. After the shootings in Arvada, Colo., the Family Research Council blamed the "secular media" for the rampage. After Columbine, then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay took to the floor to blame public school science classes for teaching young people that "they are nothing but glorified apes who are evolutionized [sic] out of some primordial soup." Just 48 hours after 9/11, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell blamed liberals for "helping this happen."
Thankfully Bill O’Reilly (!) was around to act as the voice of reason (!) and observe that spree killing seem more related to mental illness than to political disagreement.
Actually, the dynamic is more complicated than such simplistic formulas. Spree killings often do have a political motive, even when they clearly involve mental illness (and there's no immediate evidence of that here, though it likely will emerge; the Alabama shooter does not appear ever to have been treated for mental illness).
Moreover, as I discussed in some detail recently, there is often an element of pre-event scapegoating, often in the form of overtly eliminationist rhetoric:
Part of the problem is that we actually have seen this happen time after time after time: A mentally unstable person is inspired by hateful right-wing rhetoric to act out violently -- and yet because of that mental state, the matter is dismissed as idiosyncratic, just another "isolated incident." And over the months and years, these "isolated incidents" mount one after another.
But simply ascribing these acts to mental illness is a cop-out. It fails to account for the gross irresponsibility of the people who employed rhetoric that inspired the violent action in the first place, and their resulting moral culpability.
The most notable recent case of this was the church shooter in Knoxville, who wrote out a detailed manifesto explaining why he went on his rampage:
This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book. I'd like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I know those people were inaccessible to me. I couldn't get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It's the only way we can rid America of this cancerous pestilence.
The same is true of people like Tim McVeigh and Eric Rudolph: They may indeed be mentally unstable, but the trigger that makes them kill is always scapegoating, eliminationist rhetoric that inflames their hatred of other people.
This doesn't appear to have been the case in Alabama; the man mostly killed family members and people he thought had "wronged" him. There's no evidence whatsoever of a political motive. Indeed, there isn't a scintilla of evidence for Glenn Beck's thesis except his idle speculation.
But what we can say is that rhetoric like Beck's -- the overt fearmongering, the scapegoating, the paranoid conspiracy theories, the overheated demonization of his opponents -- helps contribute mightily to people's irrational fears of being oppressed, of being under siege, and of feeling the need to lash out.
In other words, if a killing rampage is indeed motivated by "PC backlash," then the far more serious problem is the nonstop rhetoric from the right that tells people that "liberal political correctness", or that various kinds liberal perfidy -- their "treasonous" approach to the war, or the "socialism" or "communism" they are bringing to our economic system -- is the root cause of ordinary people's problems and is destroying the American fabric. In other words, people like Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly.
Now, I know that Sheriff Joe told Glenn Beck he "welcomes" any investigation into his bordering-on-fascist rule in Arizona's Maricopa County. But I bet that nonetheless, he wasn't smiling yesterday:
The U.S. Justice Department has launched a civil-rights investigation of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office after months of mounting complaints that deputies are discriminating in their enforcement of federal immigration laws.
Officials from the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division notified Sheriff Joe Arpaio on Tuesday that they had begun the investigation, which will focus on whether deputies are engaging in "patterns or practices of discriminatory police practices and unconstitutional searches and seizures."
An expert said it is the department's first civil-rights probe related to immigration enforcement.
... The Justice Department frequently receives racial-profiling complaints against police departments, but investigations are rare, said David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor and racial-profiling expert.
"The fact that this has come to their attention and they have announced their intent to investigate is highly significant," Harris said. "It says there is enough there to be investigated. It's not an iffy case that (can be ignored)."
Harris said this is the first civil-rights investigation stemming from immigration enforcement. The probe could last several months.
Maybe the DOJ can take inspiration from Arpaio's Brazil-esque reality-TV show on Fox, in which unsuspecting schlub criminals are duped into being busted on TV. They could build a reality show around investigating Arpaio, including footage of interviews with his victims.
Of course, in the past, Arpaio hasn't been very tolerant of people who criticize him. If you got caught applauding anti-Arpaio comments at county meetings, for instance, you might be arrested by Arpaio's deputies. But I suspect that won't work too well with DOJ investigators, especially the FBI.
This is a hopeful step forward in dealing with the mess Arpaio has made in Maricopa County, and will help make clear to the right-wing nativists out there that scapegoating Latinos is not the way to deal with whatever issues they have with immigration. It makes a mess not just in Arizona, but the whole country.
