Seeping into the system

Since the creep of right-wing extremism into mainstream conservatism is a major topic of this blog, I'd be remiss in not bringing to your attention a recent report from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting's Steve Rendall describing some of the more noxious examples of this trend in the mainstream media:

Racism, in fact, may be gaining a firmer foothold in American media institutions as its promoters adopt more stealthy and sophisticated ways of presenting it. Consider two recent episodes in which David Brooks and John Tierney, both conservative New York Times writers, touted the work of Steve Sailer, a well-known promoter of racist and anti-immigrant theories.

Following the November elections, David Brooks used his column (12/7/04) to celebrate something he called the "natalist" movement. Natalists, said Brooks, defy Western trends toward declining birth rates by having lots of children and leaving behind the "disorder, vulgarity and danger" of cities to move to "clean, orderly" suburban and exurban settings where they can "protect their children from bad influences." According to Brooks, natalists are more churchgoing and conservative than their less wholesome neighbors in more liberal urban areas, and are an increasingly important political force.

Though the movement sounds a bit like the post–World War II demographic trend dubbed "white flight," Brooks makes no reference to ethnicity until halfway through the column, when he cites Sailer on white fertility:

As Steve Sailer pointed out in the American Conservative, George Bush carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility rates, and 25 of the top 26. John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest rates.

Brooks is well-known for lightly documented demographic analysis (Philadelphia, 4/04), but he never explains why he believes white fertility is more important than that of other groups.

Did Brooks understand his source's views? A look at the American Conservative article (12/20/04) that Brooks presumably read, since he cited it, ought to have raised the suspicions of an engaged columnist. In it, Sailer describes the undesirable urban traits he says white people are trying to escape: "illegal immigrants and other poor minorities," "ghetto hellions" and "public schools." Are these the things Brooks meant when he alluded to "disorder, vulgarity and danger" and "bad influences" in his Times column?

As American Prospect Online found (12/7/04), a little research reveals Sailer as a leading promoter of racist pseudoscience. As a principal columnist on the white nationalist website VDare.com, named for Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the "New World," Sailer (e.g., 2/23/03; 12/12/01) extols the work of academic racists who say Africans as a group are innately less intelligent than whites or Asians. He is also a staunch defender of the Pioneer Fund, a primary funder for such racist research (as well as of VDare.com).

On the rare occasion Sailer gives race a rest, it's usually to make some other mock-Darwinian argument, as when he ruled out the possibility of a gay gene, suggesting instead that homosexuality is a disease, possibly caused by a germ (VDare.com, 8/17/03): "An infectious disease itself could cause homosexuality. It's probably not a venereal germ, but maybe an intestinal or respiratory germ."

A New York Daily News column (12/13/04) rebuked Brooks for plugging Sailer, suggesting that the Times columnist "might want to do a background check on the next 'expert' he quotes," pointing out that "Sailer also writes for VDare.com, which the KKK-fighting Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled a 'hate group.' " According to the News, the Times failed to respond to inquiries about the matter. No other mainstream outlets seem to have commented on the affair.

The piece gives more background on Sailer, and notes that Tierney's NYT report citing Sailer preceded Brooks':

Weeks before the Brooks column, Times reporter John Tierney (10/24/04) quoted Sailer, describing him as "a conservative columnist at the Web magazine VDare.com and a veteran student of presidential IQs." Tierney cited Sailer's claim that George W. Bush’s IQ was likely greater than John Kerry's, information Sailer extrapolated from the results of different tests the two had taken—tests that were not intended to measure IQ.

Were Brooks and Tierney aware of Sailer's racist work? Were they sucked in by Sailer's sophistication, his academic sounding arguments? Or was it his bona fides with "mainstream" conservative outfits like the National Review and American Conservative?

The report goes on to describe other major players in the mainstreaming of white-supremacist ideologues, including the late Sam Francis (infamous for remarking at an American Renaissance conference that whites need to "reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites").

Even more relevant, perhaps, is the career of American Renaissance's Jared Taylor, whose mainstreaming (especially by MSNBC's Joe Scarborough) we have previously noted. The FAIR report includes some noteworthy recent instances of this, particularly one noted in January by Pittsburgh Gazette columnist Dennis Roddy:

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day last week, when much of the nation took a holiday, "race-relations expert" Jared Taylor was hard at work. He began at 6:45 a.m. with an interview with a Columbus radio station. At 7:05 he was on the air in Orlando. An hour later his voice greeted morning commuters in Huntingdon, W.Va.

At 10:10 a.m., he was introduced no fewer than four times as "race relations expert Jared Taylor" on Fred Honsberger's call-in show on the Pittsburgh Cable News Channel. Four hours later, he was back on the air with Honsberger on KDKA radio, where he repeated the message he'd been thumping all day: Martin Luther King Jr. was a philanderer, a plagiarist and a drinker who left a legacy of division and resentment, and was unworthy of a national holiday.

What Taylor did not say, and what Honsberger didn't seem to know until I picked up the phone and called in myself, was that Jared Taylor believes black people are genetically predisposed to lower IQs that whites, are sexually promiscuous because of hyperactive sex drives. Race-relations expert Jared Taylor keeps company with a collection of racists, racial "separatists" and far-right extremists.

I attribute the failure of the mainstream media to be cognizant of the tactics of these folks, and the way they disguise their agendas and beliefs, more to ignorance than maliciousness.

Unfortunately, there is all too often a willingness (if not outright eagerness) among mainstream conservatives, from pundits to politicians, to conveniently overlook these matters when it suits their purposes -- see especially Michelle Malkin, who writes for VDare. And I don't think ignorance explains it all away.

Teens and the terrorism laws

One of the more troubling aspects of anti-terrorism laws generally -- and the Patriot Act in particular -- has been the likelihood that they are open to a kind of prosecutorial abuse: namely, that they can be used to charge people whose crimes have little or nothing to do with terrorism.

This was especially clear in the case of the Patriot Act's "sneak and peek" provisions that allow federal agents to conduct searches of people's homes without ever notifying them. These provisions were already available to the FBI in terrorism investigations; what the Patriot Act did was enable law enforcement to use them in non-terrorism-related cases. And sure enough, as TalkLeft's TChris reported recently, there has been a dramatic expansion of sneak-and-peek warrants since Bush took office.

Now comes an Associated Press report out of Michigan that says that teens who are suspected of plotting attacks on their schools are being charged under anti-terror laws:

LANSING -- Michigan's use of an anti-terrorism law to curb school violence has sparked debate over the law's intent and raised an important question among prosecutors, school officials and others: When is a troubled teen a terrorist?

Law enforcement officials say the law against threatening terrorism, enacted in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, gives them a vital tool to avert shootings like the one last month in Minnesota, where a student shot and killed nine people before turning the gun on himself.

With no specific state law against threatening to kill someone, law enforcement official say, the terrorism law is the only one that works.

But many school-violence experts say labeling a disturbed or angry teen a terrorist is going overboard. In some cases, they say, what the student needs is psychological help, not jail time.

"(We have to) discern between students who pose a threat and students who are making threats," said Glenn Stutzky, a clinical instructor at the Michigan State University School of Social Work. "It appears the terrorism law doesn't make that distinction."

Two Michigan cases, one in Macomb County northeast of Detroit and one in adjoining Oakland County, appear to be among the first in the country where terrorism laws are being applied to school violence.

One involves a 17-year old accused of threatening to bring a gun to school to kill a school liaison officer and whose home, when checked by police, revealed a cache of firearms, ammunition, bomb-making materials and instructions, Nazi flags and books about white supremacy and Adolf Hitler.

Andrew Osantowski of Macomb County's Clinton Township was arrested last September after authorities received a tip from an Idaho girl who had been exchanging messages with Osantowski over the Internet. He has been charged as an adult and faces up to 20 years in prison.

The other case involves a 14-year-old whose backpack contained a notebook with a "kill list" that included a dozen people, including his mother, several students and school officials.

A police search of Mark David O'Berry's home in Oakland County's White Lake Township in mid-March found no weapons, and he has denied making the list. He is being dealt with as a juvenile and could be held until age 19 if found guilty.

Prosecutors in both cases say they used the state's terrorism law because no other charge applied.

There's little doubt, I think, that school rampages like Columbine and, more recently, the killings in Minnesota, represent a kind of inchoate terrorism, since it's clear that the purpose is to terrorize their classmates and teachers. They generally, however, lack the real policy-driven and issue-specific nature of most terrorism (see, e.g., Eric Rudolph).

Applying anti-terrorism laws to cases involving troubled teens strikes me as deeply wrong-headed. Not only do we dilute the meaning of terrorism, and expand the law into places it was not intended to be used, but we really blur the line between intention and action.

People talk loosely about committing acts of terrorism relatively regularly, especially in Internet chat rooms and forums like Free Republic and Liberty Forum. Generally, however, law enforcement draws the line at taking concrete action toward making those fantasies into realities -- say, buying guns and ammo or making pipe bombs or incendiary devices.

Now, in the case of the teen with the weapons cache -- which included bomb-making materials and instructions -- the arrest seems prudent, and it appears from the outside at least that there's a gap in Michigan's laws if someone with such a cache (especially a minor) can't be charged with some kind of explosives violations. But in the case of the teen caught with the "kill list," I'm still looking for evidence that he had moved beyond simply talking about it (in which case he needs counseling, not jail) to doing something to implement it (at which point law enforcement should be able to act).

Unfortunately, it's pretty common for kids to fantasize about killing classmates or authority figures -- common enough that, were we to charge every kid who did so, our jails would need to triple in size. Arresting troubled teens for such fantasies seems like another step toward Minority Report-style law enforcement.

Minutemen and the mainstream

It should be clear by now, I hope, that one of the chief achievements, as it were, of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is that the infiltration of the extremist agenda in mainstream conservatism has become rampant in the past months since the 2004 election, embodied by the Schiavo mess.

Even more noteworthy, perhaps, has been the mainstream embrace of the far-right extremists operating the Minuteman Project, and the extent to which they are being portrayed both by media and officialdom as jes' plain folks.

Leading the charge today was none other than Tom DeLay himself, interviewed in the Washington Times, who even went so far as to suggest that President Bush might want to change his tune on these patriotic folk:

Mr. Hanner: Do you agree with the president that the Minuteman Project on the border right now are vigilantes?

Mr. DeLay: No. I'm not sure the president meant that. I think that they're providing an excellent service. It's no different than neighborhood-watch programs and I appreciate them doing it, as long as they can do it safely and don't get involved and do it the way they seem to be doing it, and that's just identifying people for the Border Patrol to come pick up.

This line of reasoning, of course, emanates from the apologists for extremism who populate the right-wing pundit class, from Michelle Malkin (who first compared them to a "neighborhood watch") to Mark Krikorian at The Corner, who described them as "a handful of ordinary Americans." The same storyline, of course, is a regular feature at Malkin's immigration blog as well.

Perhaps no one has been more prominent in promoting the Minutemen's image as a group of law-abiding, concerned citizens than CNN's Lou Dobbs, who has made the Minutemen into the symbol of his ongoing campaign on behalf of immigration reform -- meaning he has adopted, essentially, far-right anti-immigrant nativism.

On several occasions, Dobbs' program has featured remarks from Minuteman organizer Chris Simcox, including an extended interview with Simcox that featured some genuinely noteworthy exchanges. Dobbs had reported on his program that the Minutemen were unarmed, and Simcox had to correct this:

DOBBS: And to be clear, you're not permitting any of your volunteers to be armed.

SIMCOX: No, that's not true. I can't do that. We have encouraged them, if you've read our standard operating procedure, that they are to be, again, aware of the laws of the state of Arizona. They're not to carry long arms, because that would make us an offensive -- that would give it an offensive-type attitude.

DOBBS: Well, Chris, let's...

SIMCOX: ... (UNINTELLIGIBLE), but...

DOBBS: ... be straight up, 1,500 volunteers, untrained, unorganized, and without drill, that is not a reassuring statement that you just made, if you're going to have people with weapons, whether they are sidearms or not.

SIMCOX: Well, Lou, we have -- most of our volunteers are retired law enforcement officers, military veterans, and professional people who -- and not all of them are going to be armed, but the ones that want to be have that right to be.

But we have interaccountability by grouping people together in teams, so that we have people watching each other and making sure that we hold each other accountable. Because this is a political protest, no matter what. We know that. And it would be hypocritical of us to want the government to enforce the laws if we were out there to break the laws.

What was really appalling, though, was the way Dobbs fawned on Simcox, especially at the end:

DOBBS: Outstanding. We wish you all of the success in the world. And you know, you said it at the outset, that it's a shame that it takes activism on the part of citizens. You know, I think that we could also make a counterargument. It's kind of nice to know that Americans still have that activism in their hearts, the capacity to volunteer to do the right thing. And we thank you, Chris Simcox, for being with us.

Mind you, Simcox is someone with a history of militia organizing and spouting extremist beliefs, including bizarre conspiracy theories linking Latino immigrants to the Chinese Army. He also has a conviction for carrying a loaded firearm in a National Park. In March 2003, he told a crowd in California that "so far, we've had restraint, but I'm afraid that restraint is wearing thin. Take heed of our weapons because we're going to defend our borders by any means necessary."

There have been a lot of other warm-and-fuzzy treatments of the Minutemen in other organs, including a largely friendly account in the Ventura County Star, which does nonetheless mention the paranoia that pervades the scene in Arizona:

As the sun sank, rumors descended across the border like darkness.

Minutemen organizers said they were warned that the Central American drug-smuggling MS-13 gang was planning an attack on the Minutemen.

McCutchen had a flak jacket and a .38-caliber snub-nosed pistol, in case.

But the night would grow darker without immigrants or gangs.

Far more disturbing was the report from a news team that went undercover for KPHO in Phoenix, and produced a pretty remarkable report that largely ripped the lid off the Minutemen's carefully controlled image of being a cooperative neighborhood watch:

[B]ehind the scenes, our hidden cameras show there are problems and plenty the Minutemen are not telling reporters.

A lady on Hidden cam says, "We don't want the press to find out where the information is being handed out because we'll have CNN and FOX and yeah." They're controlling what you hear, from why some of these volunteers "really" came to southern Arizona:

John says, "If the border's gone, they're going to be pushing drugs on every one of our kids at school." To problems the organizers are having controlling the extremists who showed up.

John says, "The guys up here, on what we were talking about earlier on Mountain View, with the shotguns and the flag and lighting the fire. And lighting a fire on G-----n BLM land."

The piece goes on to explore in some detail the extent to which the Minutemen organizers are controlling what's given out to the media. It also features some deeply disturbing material captured in chats with some of the volunteers, in which it becomes clear that the project is having its most trouble keeping a lid on the collection of extremists who are part of the scene:

But as the sun goes down, problems keeping control of a group as big as the Minutemen begin to surface. Marc says, "There was a standoff and people got killed." The man from Tucson is asked to leave our group - because he keeps talking to reporters. John says, "People like that, they'll drag down, they'll drag down the whole thing." And as the night goes on, a drama unfolds across the highway. Some of the volunteers are carrying shotguns, which is against the rules and our group leader admits: Minuteman organizers are having trouble deciding what to do about it. Adahm/John says, "(What's up with the shotgun guys? How are you going to deal with those two?) I have no idea.. that's out of my.. I don't even want to go up there." Adahm/John says, "(Well don't they have a guy like you are with us? Don't they have their?) He's not there. I can't find him." The man says, "I hope they're not drinking or anything. I didn't see any beer there."

Jim Gilchrist, the Project spokesman, explains these folks away later by claiming, "They are not Miuteman Project volunteers. They are rogue patrollers posing as Minutemen."

Be sure to check out the video link to the story. It includes some chilling footage, as well as a disturbing footnote from the anchor for the piece, Morgan Lowe, who adds that the crew heard plenty of racial remarks out in the field, including one from a volunteer who told him he looked forward to "hunting a certain group of people."

You can also get a sense for some of the paranoia that pervades the camp from reading the first-person report filed by a Freeper named "Spiff":

Nine days of blockade has begun to result in desperation.

We believe 500-700 illegals and their coyotes are bottled up in the Huachuca Mountains at present. They are running out of food and water. We have also figured out the system used here for putting out food and water caches and have been routinely using them to add some variety to our dogs’ diets. Our canine companions are most appreciative.

A recap of last night’s action: several Minuteman were almost run down by a fleeing load vehicle last night. Fellow LePer idratherbe painting is now on the injured reserve list after a bad fall into a dry wash at the same location. Another Minuteman is “under investigation” for making physical contact after saving an illegal from a bad fall.

This morning began with round up of the illegals who missed their ride in the fleeing vehicle the night before. Two had become thoroughly lost and confused and walked up to one of the MMP teams asking for directions. When the realized who they had approached, they took off running and practically jumped into a Border Patrol vehicle.

The daylight hours were uneventful other than a prolonged visit by CNN’s Lou Dobbs. He spent most of his time out on the Naco Line along the border fence. Those of us in the canyons got a visit from those fine folks from the ACLU. They chose to set up in a dull spot with a fine view of Ash Canyon.

All hell has broken loose since nightfall. Several groups have come down out of the mountains to attempt a getaway. Scanner traffic gives a tally so far of five load vehicles captured, about 70 illegals in custody, and a similar sized group scattered throught the west end of Hereford and being picked up piecemeal. We have recovered three coyote cell phones and the call histories should prove interesting.

As I said before, we'll be lucky if the month of April passes in Arizona without some grotesque tragedy occurring. Actually, I'm beginning to think the Minutemen are more a danger to each other (as well as any law enforcement in the vicinity) than they are to any immigrants who happen into their clutches, though that danger hasn't exactly subsided.

Simcox and his project have inspired some of his cohorts, including Casey Nethercott of Ranch Rescue. According to report from KVOA in Tucson, Nethercott is planning to ratchet the craziness even higher:

Eyewitness News 4 has learned an armed militia along the border near Douglas may take matters into its own hands this July.

Casey Nethercott, the leader of the group said Friday that he doesn't yet want to go into detail on his plans.

He supports the Minutemen, but his backup plan is a much more aggressive approach.

Nethercott pointed to two black SUV's, saying, "These are armored vehicles. They got quarter-inch steel in them. They'll stop small arms fire and some rifles."

The headquarters of the militia, called the Arizona Guard, sits along the U.S./Mexico border near Douglas, Arizona, in the Southeastern corner of the state.

Pointing again to the vehicles, Nethercott continued, "You'll get killed without them, here's been so many shootouts out here."

Gosh, Lou, that sure is some nice little neighborhood watch you've got going there.

The lingering question: Will President Bush take DeLay's advice and change his tune on these folks?

The old Injun disguise

American white men have a colorful history when it comes to dressing up as Indians, dating back at least to the Boston Tea Party. They also have quite a history of using the ruse to make money, while simultaneously victimizing the Indians they're pretending to be.

One of the very last Indian wars, the Sheepeater War of 1879, was a classic case of this. Having seen how deeply the Nez Perce War of 1877 had enriched the towns of LaGrande and Baker in northeastern Oregon, which had served as supply depots for the cavalry, community leaders in the Yankee Fork mining district in south-central Idaho decided that a little Indian war was just what was needed in their neck of the woods.

Mind you, it little mattered that there were only scattered bands of Shoshoni, known as Sheepeaters, who were known to dwell in the vicinity, and they rarely posed a threat to the lives of locals, because they tended to keep to themselves. As it happened, there were also a number of Chinese in the Yankee Fork, and some of them had the audacity to cross the line from providing services to miners to trying their hands at staking some mining claims themselves.

So it happened that a group of five Chinese miners were found massacred at their claim a little ways west of the Yankee Fork district that summer, and the corpses were littered with arrows, though supposedly they all died of gunshot wounds. Indeed, there was no evidence that Sheepeaters had even been in the vicinity, but the legend of the massacre soon spread, and an "Indian panic" shortly resulted.

Sure enough, the cavalry was called in, and a battalion of soldiers spent the next several months traipsing up and down the high mountain ridges of the Middle Fork country, chasing a few Indians hither and yon. Finally, at the end of the campaign, they managed to round up 50 or so women, children, and elderly Indians who they had captured as prisoners, and sent them off to the Shoshone-Bannock reservation in Fort Hall, thus declaring victory. The Yankee Fork communities briefly benefited from the influx of government money, but it didn't last long. By the turn of the century, the district had dried up, and all that remains there now are ghost towns.

I was reminded of the Sheepeater scam recently with the rise of the Little Shell Pembina Band, which made a brief appearance on the local scene in the Seattle area by trying to give posthumous tribal membership to a slain cop.

Essentially, the "tribe" is actually an operation that allows anyone of any ancestry to claim tribal membership, a status that is supposed to confer all kinds of tax and insurance exemptions. It is, in essence, a bunch of whites (and other non-Indians) dressing up in tribal sovereignty in a way that undermines the rights of legitimate tribes, and enriches the scamsters in the process. As I explained in a follow-up post, the Pembina scam includes insurance and tax schemes that are closely related to old far-right conspiracy theories.

Now my longtime source Mark Pitcavage and his merry band of researchers at the Anti-Defamation league have put together a definitive report on the Pembina Band scam, laying out how it is the latest manifestation of the right-wing attempt to establish "sovereign citizenship." It also makes clear its origins:

At some point during these unsuccessful legal battles, Delorme transformed the Little Shell Band into a sovereign citizen group. Its ideology was not new to the region: sovereign citizens had been active in North Dakota, where Delorme and his extended family lived, dating back to the 1980s, when Posse Comitatus leader Gordon Kahl ambushed and killed two federal marshals in Medina in 1983.

By 2004 the Little Shell Band claimed to be a "completely sovereign tribe" that held "allodial title" to over 53 million acres of land (for some reason, this figure was later increased to 62 million). Saying it no longer sought federal recognition, the group declared its own executive, legislative and judicial powers, bestowing on itself the right to establish a legal bar and "tribal lawyers" as well as a "sovereign tribal financial and banking institution."

Perhaps most importantly, the "new" version of the Little Shell Band allowed anyone, regardless of ancestry, to become a member of the group, opening the door for a variety of anti-government figures to join (for a fee) and claim membership in the "sovereign" Little Shell Band. As a result, Little Shell Band activity spread around the country.

Also noteworthy is its cast of characters, including a couple of figures I described earlier:

Navin Naidu (Circuit Court Judge and Finance/Economic Advisor). Naidu is perhaps the strangest Little Shell character of all. He first achieved notoriety when he appeared in Fiji in 2001 as the lawyer for George Speight, a former insurance salesman who had spearheaded an unsuccessful coup d'etat and was subsequently charged with treason. When the Fiji government checked Naidu's qualifications, it discovered that his University of London law certificate was spurious, as was his claim to be practicing at the "International Ecclesiastical Law Offices" in Seattle, which turned out to be non-existent. Naidu, a Singapore-born ethnic East Indian and U.S. resident, admitted that he had no license to practice law in the U.S. but that his credentials came from "Jesus." Naidu was arrested and later deported. Back in the United States, Naidu moved to Kent, Washington, where he identified himself as an "ecclesiastical lawyer" and began devising plans to create a church court that could marry or divorce people and even decide criminal cases.

John Lloyd Kirk (Clerk; Tribal Lawyer). A Tukwila, Washington, sovereign citizen and anti-Semite and a friend of Montana Freeman Leroy Schweitzer, Kirk was one of a group of seven Washington sovereign citizens and militia members arrested in 1997 on a variety of weapons and explosives charges. Convicted of possession of a pipe bomb and conspiracy to possess and make destructive devices, Kirk received a 46-month prison sentence. It was not his first conviction: in 1980, according to author Jane Kramer, he had been found guilty of statutory rape in an incident involving his daughters.

You know the saying: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Corrections Department

In a couple of previous posts, I unfairly characterized the coverage of the Irving-Lipstadt trial by T.R. Reid of the Washington Post.

Specifically, in the first post, I charged that Reid hadn't attended the trial itself, but only became involved in coverage of the trial at its tail end. I clarified this further in the second post, but let the charge remain uncorrected.

It is clear to me, after some conversations with Mr. Reid, that he did in fact attend at least several days of the trial itself.

This characterization of his work (largely a surmise from the actual reporting that Mr. Reid produced) was incorrect and unfair. I owe Mr. Reid a sincere apology for that.

However, all other aspects of the posts, including the observation that the Post did not cover the trial in the traditional sense -- which is to say, by assigning a reporter who was there nearly every day, who in addition to regular (if not daily) reports, filed pretrial and postrial reportage as well -- remain uncorrected.

---

Some background on this:

I was a cops-and-courts reporter for some time, and have covered a number of trials in subsequent years as well (most notably the Washington State Militia trial in 1997 and the Minh Hong/Ocean Shores trial in 2000). "Covering a trial" has always meant, for me, two things: a) having a reporter there for most court sessions, and b) consequently providing your readers with regular reports from the court. I've also attended sessions of certain trials (notably the Montana Freemen's trial), but decline to claim I've "covered" those trials.

I've always tended to take a dim view of those of my colleagues (TV reporters and major-metro types especially) who show up on the day the trial opens and then return the day of the verdict, and then proceed to report on it as though they were as expert on its contents as the rest of us (and often, subsequently, go on to claim they've covered the trial). This is, of course, something of a gross insult to those who've done the nitty-gritty work of sitting through those tedious daily court sessions and gleaning facts from them, reporting on the ebb and flow of testimony as it occurs.

From the outside, it certainly appeared that this was what Reid had done at the Irving trial. If you look at the index compiled by Dan Yurman of the Irving trial coverage, you'll note that there were some 430 pieces written on the trial -- nearly four months' worth of coverage -- before the Post ran any pieces on it by Reid. This first piece, titled "Historians Fight Battle of the Books," ran April 6, 2000 (the trial opened on Jan. 11 that year). This was just after closing arguments. Reid wrote only one other piece on the trial, from April 12, describing Lipstadt's court victory.

My characterization of Reid's work, though, jumped the gun. He wrote me over the weekend:

I see from your web site that you are an award-winning journalist. So I'd expect you'd would want to be sure you have the facts straight before you report something. But your "reporting" about T. R. Reid's coverage of the Lipstadt-Irving trial is wrong.

You didn't bother to check with me before maligning me. And Dan Yurman specifically told you that your reporting on me was wrong.

You say I did no reporting on the London trial, and did not attend it. But this is wrong. I interviewed almost all the principals, plus lawyers, historians, etc. I did attend the trial, over and over again.

You also "report" that I didn't mention on C-SPAN the historians who testified. If you would watch the program, you'll see that that I did.

Once again I ask you to correct your mistakes about my reporting. When you post these errors, they show up all over the Internet, copied by people who believe, incorrectly, that David Neiwert is a reporter who checks his facts before writing.

I don't understand why you're so reluctant to get this right.

I replied:

I'm more than happy to run a correction if I'm factually in error; however, like any journalist, I also want to make sure the correction is accurate.

For instance, you'll have seen, I'm sure, the fact that I clarified what I meant by saying that you didn't cover the trial: Specifically, I meant that you didn't cover it in the traditional sense of having provided the Post's readers with reportage from the trial as it happened. Why should I correct that when it's a simple part of the record that there were no stories in the Post on this trial until the judge began deliberating?

I'm an old cops-and-courts reporter, Mr. Reid, so perhaps you'll excuse me if I'm over-rigorous, but for me, "covering a trial" means something specifically: being there every day of the trial itself and, if I'm writing for a daily, filing daily reports from the trial. If I can't make it (not an uncommon occurrence), I've always made sure I had immediate access to transcripts or other details of what transpired. Trial coverage, to me, also includes pretrial reporting; that is, not merely gathering info before the trial, but also providing my paper's readers with background before the trial even begins. And you don't appear to have provided that, either.

I've covered over the years several federal trials. I've also, as it happens, been forced to only partially cover other federal trials, poking my head in when possible. In these latter cases, I've always been careful not to claim that I actually covered the trial. Because, as you know, covering a trial daily provides you with real expertise in its contents in a way that secondary coverage simply cannot.

Now, I was careful to say that it only appears that you didn't cover the trial, because I couldn't say so definitively. But your protests notwithstanding, I haven't seen any indication that you actually did. The trial, after all, lasted 32 days -- not counting the days the judge spent deliberating, and the announcement of the verdict. How many days did you actually sit through the court session? I'm not insisting, of course, that you have covered every single day, but in order to claim you covered the trial, you should at least be able to demonstrate you were there a majority of the time the court was in session.

But if you can at least do that, I will correct my post to indicate that you did cover the trial, and will offer an unconditional apology. However, regardless of your work, I will note that the Post itself (as per my description) did not cover the trial until its end. Because as far as the Post's readers were concerned, there was no coverage of it at all until the final stages. Certainly there were no regular dispatches.

I'm hoping we can clear this up to everyone's satisfaction.

He responded:

As you know, it's fairly common for a foreign correspondent to put in days, or sometimes weeks, of work to produce one or two stories. I did cover the trial, in the traditional sense and every other sense. I did do "pre-reporting," days and days of it, and in fact interviewed everybody I could find, including the principals.

It's not surprising that the WashPost didn't have room for a daily file from a trial in London. I don't think any American paper did. For that matter, I don't think the London papers ran stories every day. Given all that was going on in the world in early 2000, I think our coverage was about right. We fronted the trial at the end, and I think we gave our readers a good picture of what happened. That was possible because I was there covering the trial even when we didn't run stories on it.

I don't understand why you didn't contact me before you wrote about what I was doing in the winter of 2000. I don't understand why you are so reluctant now to get this right.

Actually, I'm quite serious about getting this right, which is why I've been trying to explore the facts of it with Mr. Reid and weigh them.

One minor point, first of all: I didn't "report" that Reid didn't mention on C-SPAN the historians who testified. What I said was this:

The worst part of Reid's description of the trial was his failure to explain the many historical facets that emerged, particularly the testimony of other historians that laid bare the utter poverty of Irving's methodology. He regaled the TV audience with quaint details about the courtroom setting and the appearances of the bewigged barrister, solicitors, and judge -- but seemed incapable of describing some of the key historical points involved.

... Reid also was content to characterize the bulk of Irving's "Holocaust denial" as consisting of a claim he actually does make: that Hitler himself was unaware of the mass murder operation his underlings had set into motion. This is, of course, only a small portion of the distortions and falsehoods which he promotes.

I stand by that in every regard, and I think a review of the C-SPAN program will corroborate it.

More to the point, I think it's instructive to look at reportage from other major American news outlets. Returning again to the index of Irving coverage, you'll note that, for instance, Ray Moseley of the Chicago Tribune filed a story from the trial's opening day, and continued to file stories for its duration (again on Jan. 23, Feb. 4, March 11, and March 16), finishing with verdict coverage on April 12. D.D. Gutenplan wrote a piece for the New York Times on the case June 25, 1999 (the first piece in the index) and went on to file dispatches for the Atlantic and Guardian on the trial, as well as conducting a couple of NPR radio interviews. Guttenplan, who evidently did attend nearly all of the trial, is writing a book on it as well. Both of these constitute what I would fairly characterize as having covered the trial.

Perhaps more comparably, the Los Angeles Times ran a pretrial story on the Irving matter Jan. 7, and an opening-day piece Jan. 12, but had only a few pieces in between, with a wrapup on April 12.

At the same time, it's perhaps worth noting that when it comes to covering the Michael Jackson trial, the Post so far been running nearly daily reports (mostly by Libby Copeland). That too would constitute what I think most journalists and editors see as "covering the trial." I'm sure a case can be readily made that the Jackson trial is the more newsworthy and significant of the two, but I'm not sure I want to hear it.

As Yurman has noted in my comments, there are more than a few mitigating circumstances, of course: Being a foreign-office bureau chief is usually a thankless and over-assigned affair, and reporters like Reid are always being spread thin. He also had to cover proceedings in the Augusto Pinochet trial there that winter. Much as I might not have liked the Post's choices, they were at least defensible.

What's not as defensible, I think, is the relatively thin gruel that Reid served up for BookTV's national audience -- a natural result, I think, of his not having read Lipstadt's book. I also think, given what we saw on TV, it remains an open question just how deeply Reid was acquainted with the trial testimony; "days and days" certainly represents honest and hard work, but I still doubt that he comes close to having attended a majority of the trial's 32 days.

That said, I'd like to also apologize to my readers for this bit of sloppiness. I can't promise it won't happen again, but I can only try.

Busy, busy

It's spring break at my daughter's preschool, which means my writing time is being sharply reduced this week. I'll be posting as I'm able (and I have some good stuff in the works) but it's kind of touch and go.

Young hate

I've been writing a lot here about the seeming emboldenment of the extremist right in America, particularly manifested in the growth of hate-group ideologies among young people.

A recent spate of incidents in Boone County, Kentucky, provide the latest incarnation of this trend, noteworthy because the perps appear to be not only unchastened about it, but have escalated the threats:

Chloe Jones, 14, is black, and Cassie Blanton, 13, is biracial. Chloe said Wednesday the boy started making racial comments to them a few weeks ago in school, when he told them he hates black people and wants to kill all blacks, using various slurs.

He talked to one of the girls' friends last Wednesday on the school bus, deputies say. Chloe said the boy told the friend he was going to "bring a .22 to school" and again threatened to kill all black people, especially Chloe and Cassie.

Ebe Orndorff, Chloe's mother, said she drove her daughter to school the next morning and told the principal and a school resource officer what had happened.

Tom Scheben, spokesman for the Boone County Sheriff's Department, said Wednesday that the officer filed the charge against the boy that morning. The charge carries a maximum penalty of 45 days in juvenile detention.

The school suspended the boy for 10 days (not counting spring break this week), but Cassie was once again harassed, she said.

A message was left on her cell phone from a person who said, "Don't (expletive) with my brother." The girl also said, "Just hang yourself from a tree and save me the trouble," and "I'll (expletive) hang you ... KKK style." The "n-word" was used at least 15 times in the message.

A week later there was a second incident in which four boys were caught vandalizing a local high school with white-supremacist grafitti, including a swastika, "KKK," and racial slurs.

Interestingly, school officials said this:

Scheben said he does not believe the two incidents were connected. Nor does he believe they are connected to a cross-burning incident in July in Burlington.

This is actually not very good news, because it means the total number of young people in the county participating in this kind of hate-mongering and threatening goes beyond just the suspects in hand. At the same time, the response suggests a certain naivete: These incidents aren't just occurring in a vacuum, either.

A follow-up report finds that parents are apparently conflicted about what it all means:

Concerns developed last week after an eighth-grade boy at the school was charged with terroristic threatening, accused of threatening to kill black people and singling out two eighth-grade girls.

Adding to the parents' anxieties, the boy has told deputies that he has guns and is a frequent hunter, Boone County sheriff's spokesman Tom Scheben said Thursday.

"I think he definitely needs to be kept away from school," said parent Pat Rowland. "It does concern me."

The problem is the extent to which we see this trend spreading: young people adopting white-supremacist beliefs as a rule does not just happen in a vacuum, either, especially on a national scale. A good place to look, I think, is in the atmosphere of general intolerance that has been sprouting up in all kinds of odd places in the past year and longer. Or would that be un-American?

Chosen behaviors

One of the many holes in civil-rights protections for minorities in Washington state is that it remains legal to discriminate against gays and lesbians -- in hiring and employment practices, as well as in housing.

It's one of our blue state's ugly little secrets, largely because the GOP remains a potent force. Changing the law, you see, would advance the "homosexual agenda," even if everyone knows that this kind of discrimination isn't right.

So with Democrats finally in charge of both houses of the Lege, party leaders had their sights set on rectifying that oversight. After a bill adding gays and lesbians to RCW 49.60, the state's anti-discrimination law, passed the House readily, some late maneuvering, and a couple of DINOs, have helped to apparently scuttle the bill in the Senate.

Interestingly, there was this:

The Senate Republican caucus yesterday handed out a five-page "talking points" document opposing the measure. One of the talking points states: "This bill establishes minority status for individuals based on sexual behaviors many believe they choose to engage in."

Ah yes. We've heard this line before. Because being gay is a "chosen behavior," it is undeserving of civil rights protections.

It's the same reason given by many evangelicals -- and particularly black and minority evangelicals, and people who claim they support civil rights -- for not supporting gays and lesbians in hate-crime protections: "You can't compare being gay to being black. One's immutable, one's chosen."

Well, yes, this is true when it comes to race. And even ethnicity. These are, after all, two of the three main legs of anti-discrimination and hate-crimes laws.

But it's not true of the third leg of these laws: religion. Last I checked, this too was a "chosen behavior."

In RCW 49.60, the matter of faith is defined more broadly as "creed." This thus includes atheism, agnosticism, and other belief systems.

Now, it's true that many people are born into faiths and don't really choose their creed, but it's also a fact that everyone is free to change their creed at any time of their choosing. It's truly a chosen behavior.

So I'm going to propose new legislation for Luke Esser and the rest of the Republican crew in Olympia to pursue, just for the sake of legislative consistency. I mean, if you're going to insist that anti-discrimination laws only affect "immutable characteristics" and not "chosen behaviors", then obviously, we're in serious need of reform here.

I propose that they seek to strip "creed" out of the state's anti-discrimination statutes, so that the only categories included are race, color, national origin, sex, or disability.

They should think about the advantages, especially from their viewpoint of advancing their traditional positions.

First of all, removing these protections would finally allow employers to refuse to employ atheists and agnostics and godless Communists if they so choose. And Lord knows those people don't deserve jobs. They're just amoral parasites who undermine moral society and righteous authority.

It would also allow housing discrimination against these losers. Throw them out of their homes. They don't deserve decent homes anyway.

And then we could cut off all those Muslims and Hindus and whatever else has been infesting our shores with eeebil terrorists all these years. No jobs, no homes, no nuttin'. Outta here.

And hey, while we're at it, we can finally go back to the good ol' days when you could discriminate against Jews, too. Considering how horribly those connivers have corrupted modern society, they'd have it coming too.

Oh, and, y'know, can't we do something about those Mormons, too? They're not really Christians, and they're secretly doing dirty things in those temple ceremonies. Actually, they're lunatics, even if they are good Republicans. That's a mitigating factor, sure, but I see no reason why they should have good jobs or homes.

And finally, don't talk too much about this, but we might be finally able to do something about those, y'know, Papists. You know what I mean. There are Catholics, and then there are real Christians.

Speaking of real Christians, we ought to be able to discriminate against any of those godless "liberal" churches like the Episcopalians and the United Methodists, who have proven their utter godlessness by allowing gay and lesbian clergy.

After awhile, we might finally see the kind of state Republicans have been hankering for: white, real Christian, and Republican. Real Republican.

I hope they take this under consideration. We know that Republicans in Washington state are big on consistency -- after all, they keep hammering King County for relatively minor inconsistencies in its voting procedures, none of them evidence of fraud or malfeasance.

So let's be consistent all around. Opposing extending basic civil rights to gays and lesbians because it is a "chosen behavior" demands that we deny those protections on the basis of religious faith, too.

But then, discrimination is a "chosen behavior" too. Even when someone uses their faith, or their constituents', to justify it.

Self-correcting indeed

So, can someone explain to me exactly how this "self-correcting nature of the blogosphere" thing is supposed to work?

Because it's just a masturbatory fantasy if the people who make mistakes fail to adequately correct themselves when their errors are pointed out.

Which means, when it comes to right-wing bloggers, we can pretty much fuggedaboutit. Being conservative, as we know, means never having to say you're sorry.

Case in point: Powerline, the Time "Blog of the Year."

Powerline, you'll recall, made its reputation for supposedly exposing "Rathergate," even though none of its claims held up under careful scrutiny. But stardom being what it is on Planet Conservative, no one paid that any mind.

So when Powerline began leading a fresh bandwagon questioning the authenticity of the Republican memo calling the Terri Schiavo matter a "great politicial issue" for the GOP, many wondered how it would turn out. Notably, Powerline, just as it did with the Rathergate memos, posted a copy of the memo, pointing to technical and authorial details it believed revealed that, once again, the memo was "fake" -- a characterization it maintained over subsequent weeks.

John Hinderaker, the chief author of the Powerline posts, went on to publish a piece in the Weekly Standard claiming it had the smell of a "political dirty trick" (talk about projection!), and even went into "Rathergate"-like ruminations on its authenticity:

Questions about the genuineness of the memo intensified when, later the same day, the far-left website Raw Story published, for the first time, a JPEG version of the scanned memo, which it said "[a] source on Capitol Hill has leaked." The print version of the memo, as posted on Raw Story, was identical to ABC's "exact, full copy of the document," except that the four typos that ABC had identified with a "sic" were all corrected. Interestingly, however, the fifth typo--"applicably" instead of "applicable" in the sixth paragraph--which ABC did not so identify, was not corrected in Raw Story's "leaked" version of the document.

Powerline's obsession with the "Schiavo memo" lasted for at least a couple of weeks. Throughout, it consistently called it "fake" or "apparently fake." It even repeated the charge opn Wednesday.

But then it turned out this morning in the Washington Post that they were all wet:

Counsel to GOP Senator Wrote Memo On Schiavo

The legal counsel to Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) admitted yesterday that he was the author of a memo citing the political advantage to Republicans of intervening in the case of Terri Schiavo, the senator said in an interview last night.

Brian H. Darling, 39, a former lobbyist for the Alexander Strategy Group on gun rights and other issues, offered his resignation and it was immediately accepted, Martinez said.

It's noteworthy that, even when caught, the mendacity from Republicans continues. Martinez was effusive in his mea culpa, but then tried to claim that he "inadvertently passed it to Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who had worked with him on the issue. After that, officials gave the memo to reporters for ABC News and The Washington Post."

Of course, this characterization of events -- from a senator whose previous veracity has not held up well -- was immediately seized upon by the bloggers whose own miserable relationship with the truth had just been exposed. Powerline does report the memo's authorship, but nowhere points out that its voluminous speculation on the matter, as well as its constant characterization of the memos as "apparently fake," was wrong, wrong, wrong. Then it goes on expend thousands more words explaining that it's all Tom Harkin's and Mike Allen's fault!

Roughly translated: "Yes, well, the memo was real, and we were kinda a little bit teensy wrong, mumble mumble. (If you're going to start talking about the gross irresponsibility of my groundless speculation, I'll just cover my ears.) But hey! We can still find someone else to blame."

One problem with that: Harkin says otherwise, according to the Post story:

Harkin said in an interview that Martinez handed him the memo on the Senate floor, in hopes of gaining his support for the bill giving federal courts jurisdiction in the Florida case in an effort to restore the brain-damaged Florida woman's feeding tube. "He said these were talking points -- something that we're working on here," Harkin said.

Not only does conservatism mean never having to say you're sorry, now we can add a corollary: The blogosphere is self-correcting, but this only pertains to the left, since the right never needs correcting, because it is always right even when it is wrong.

UPDATE: Media Matters gives a thorough accounting.

C-SPAN plays the fool

Though it no doubt would like to have put the controversy behind it, C-SPAN's Sunday broadcast of its BookTV program on Deborah Lipstadt's book on her ordeal by libel trial with Holocaust denier David Irving wound up only demonstrating that the concerns over its highly questionable approach were indeed well grounded.

The chief guest on the program was Washington Post reporter T.R. Reid, who, as noted earlier, was probably not the best-informed "expert" the program could have featured. As Reid himself told the New York Sun, he has not read Lipstadt's book.

"I haven’t read her book. I told them that. I told C-SPAN I hadn't read the book," the reporter said. "They asked me to come and talk about a trial."

Why, one must ask, did a program about books ask Reid to come talk about a trial?

Moreover, he did not actually cover the trial, at least not in the traditional sense. Usually, covering a trial requires being there for most if not every session; he resisted reporting on it at all, did no pre-reporting on the case, and appears not to have been in court for many (if not most) of the days the trial was in session. He did not even file a story on the case until after the judge began deliberating, and then filed only one further report after the verdict was announced.

Even the one bit of exclusive reporting he was able to claim -- an interview with Irving the morning before the verdict was announced -- was extraordinarily slipshod. In the interview, Irving told Reid he expected to lose; but as Lipstadt's book makes clear, all the major parties in trial, including Irving, had been informed of the verdict the night before. So Irving was only telling Reid something he already knew. Reid failed to mention this, perhaps out of ignorance.

The BookTV interview reflected these shoddy foundations, revealing lack of a clear understanding of the issues at stake in the trial. Reid, for instance, described Irving as having said in his opening statement that no one denies that the Holocaust happened -- and therefore, Reid suggested, this was not really about "Holocaust denial."

That is, of course, an extraordinarily disingenuous -- not to mention absurdly credulous -- description of the matter. "Holocaust deniers" don't deny that many thousands of Jews and other "undesirables" were exterminated by Nazi Germany; what they deny is the scope and magnitude of those atrocities, as well as many of the essential mechanics of how the Holocaust occurred.

The Wikipedia entry on Holocaust denial explains this rather clearly:

Holocaust deniers prefer to be called Holocaust revisionists. Most people contend that the latter term is misleading. Historical revisionism is the reexamination of accepted history, with an eye towards updating it with newly discovered, more accurate, and/or less biased information. Broadly, it is the approach that history as it has been traditionally told may not be entirely accurate and should be revised accordingly. Historical revisionism in this sense is a well-accepted and mainstream part of history studies. It may be applied to the Holocaust as well, as new facts emerge and change our understanding of its events.

... Holocaust deniers make all or most of the following claims:

1. There was no specific order by Adolf Hitler or other top Nazi officials to exterminate the Jews.

2. Nazis did not use gas chambers to mass murder Jews. Small chambers did exist for delousing and Zyklon-B was used in this process.

3. The figure of 5 to 6 million Jewish deaths is an irresponsible exaggeration, and that many Jews who actually emigrated to Russia, Britain, Israel and the United States are included in the number.

4. Many photos and lots of film footage shown after World War II was specially manufactured as propaganda against the Nazis by the Allied forces. For example, one film, shown to Germans after the war, of supposed Holocaust victims were in fact German civilians being treated after allied bombing of Dresden. Pictures we commonly see show victims of starvation or Typhus, not of gassing.

5. Claims of what the Nazis supposedly did to the Jews were all intended to facilitate the Allies in their intention to enable the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and are currently used to garner support for the policies of the state of Israel, especially in its dealings with the Palestinians.

6. Although crimes were committed, they were not centrally orchestrated and thus the Nazi leadership bore no responsibility for the implementation of such a policy.

7. Historical proof for the Holocaust is falsified or deliberately misinterpreted.

8. There is an American, British or Jewish conspiracy to make Jews look like victims and to demonize Germans. Also, it was in the Soviets' interest to propagate wild stories about Germany in order to frighten related nations into accepting soviet rule (Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc.). The amount of money pumped into Israel and reparations from Germany alone give Israel a strong incentive to maintain this conspiracy.

9. The overwhelming number of biased academics and historians are too afraid to actually admit that the Holocaust was a fiction; they know they will lose their jobs if they speak up.

10. In any event, the Holocaust pales in comparison to the number of dissidents and Christians killed in Soviet gulags, which they usually attribute to Jews.

Irving himself makes most of these claims, and in fact did so during the course of the trial.

Irving, for instance, has frequently argued that the common estimate of the numbers of Jews killed (between 5 and 6 million) is grossly inflated. In court testimony in 1988, on behalf of another Holocaust denier, Ernst Zundel, he gave a base figure of 100,000 -- though in recent years he has upgraded that figure to 1 million.

Irving's rationale for these figures is extraordinarily revealing: Since many millions of the Jews who died in Nazi death camps actually succumbed to disease and starvation, he does not include them in his tally of people "killed." Apparently, in order to qualify as a Holocaust victim, one had to have been either gassed or shot. He also, of course, wholly bought into Fred Leuchter's phony claims that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.

The worst part of Reid's description of the trial was his failure to explain the many historical facets that emerged, particularly the testimony of other historians that laid bare the utter poverty of Irving's methodology. He regaled the TV audience with quaint details about the courtroom setting and the appearances of the bewigged barrister, solicitors, and judge -- but seemed incapable of describing some of the key historical points involved.

Many of these would have made clear to both his readers and C-SPAN's viewers just how completely off the wall is Irving's approach to history. A prime example: While cross-examining historian Christopher Browning, Irving compared Hitler's original plan for dealing with the Jews -- a project to ship the entirety of European Jewry off to the island of Madagascar, where they could be supervised by the SS -- to the creation of the Israeli state:

Q. [Irving] In what way is Madagascar a fantastic plan?

A. [Browning] Fantastic in the sense that one is bizarre, the notion that you could take 4 million Jews and put them on ships and send them to Madagascar, and that anything other than the vast bulk of them would die under the conditions of being dumped into the jungle of Madagascar. Even that a plan that clearly in its implications involved vast decimation, they still talked in these words of resettlement.

Q. Is this not exactly what happened with the state of Israel? Millions of these people were taken and dumped in Israel, so to speak, although they did it voluntarily? It was an uprooting and a geographical resettlement.

Reid also was content to characterize the bulk of Irving's "Holocaust denial" as consisting of a claim he actually does make: that Hitler himself was unaware of the mass murder operation his underlings had set into motion. This is, of course, only a small portion of the distortions and falsehoods which he promotes.

The rest of the BookTV program was equally slipshod, and in its entirety it was clear that the producers were simply out of their depth in their handling of this matter.

At her blog, Lipstadt commented:

1. I wish CSpan had just admitted that they made a mistake from the outset and had not claimed that they were intending to just show a few clips of Irving. CSpan is an important national institution. It gets people to read and think about books. I have no desire to fight with CSpan, but they should have been more honest about how they messed up from the outset.

2. I wish TR Reid, who usually is a pretty careful journalist, had refamiliarized himself with the basic facts of the case before agreeing to talk about it. The case was not about whether Irving says Hitler knew about the Holocaust. It's about whether this man denies the most basic facts of the Holocaust and he does.

3. Finally, I was not trying to deny Irving a right to speak. I was simply refusing to be pushed into a debate which is no debate and with someone who is a proven liar. How can you debate a liar?

4. Never, in all the years I have been watching CSpan, have I seen a policy towards "balance." Why here?

That may be the most troubling question of them all.

C-SPAN has since issued a statement saying it regrets using the word "balance" to describe its plans, calling the term just "internal jargon" referring to the use of other voices.

Right. That would explain why no other book has ever been handled by either BookTV or its predecessor, BookNotes, in this fashion. In every previous broadcast of both shows, it has simply let the author come on and talk about his or her book. Why not Lipstadt?

Regrets about terminology notwithstanding, C-SPAN's approach to this subject makes clear that it has a great deal to learn about how extremists like Holocaust deniers operate. They count on the ignorance of those unfamiliar with their tactics to handle them "fairly" -- which is to say, to treat their lies as though they merely represent another viewpoint, and thereby spread their vicious falsifications into the mainstream,. Sunday's broadcast was a classic case of this.

Drinking Moderately

I'm really only a centrist drinker, but I've been invited to join the monthly Seattle gathering of Drinking Liberally tonight. It'll be at 8 p.m. at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Ave. E. Be there or be ... sober.

The cold embrace

A number of observers, both right and left, have concluded that the Terri Schiavo case was a watershed moment, a turning point of sorts in the national discourse.

On the right, they see it as the moment when the left's "culture of death" was seriously confronted for the first time. On the left, it's being hopefully viewed as the moment when the right finally jumped the shark and revealed their ugly, intrusive underside to the public at large.

It will take some time, of course, to ascertain which of these views is closer to the truth, though obviously I've already endorsed the latter wholly.

However, I think that we can defintively say that it was a watershed event in a gathering trend we've been observing for some time here: It clearly marked the open embrace of extremists by the mainstream Republican Party.

It was apparent that the "fight for Terri" attracted a large number of extremists to the cause, notably Bo Gritz and Hal Turner. But they were not as openly adopted by the supposedly mainstream conservatives who joined in the fray as the anti-abortion extremist Randall Terry.

Terry, of course, was everywhere: Popping up on Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, and various local networks as the chief spokesman for the Schindler family, who sought him out for support.

Numerous others have remarked on Terry's long career in anti-abortion radicalism, including Media Matters, Mark Kleiman, World O'Crap, and TalkLeft. Sean Baptiste has put together a six-part series on Terry that has even greater detail.

But what few have remarked upon is Terry's long history of association with the most violent elements of right-wing extremism, and his early role in fomenting the formation of "citizen militias" and the "Patriot" movement. Terry's extremism is very broad-ranging, and includes some of the most dangerous and nakedly anti-democratic elements in American society.

In fact, my first awareness of the existence of a "militia movement" came in 1994, when I watched a video tape of Terry and his frequent cohort, Matthew Trewhella, exhorting a gathering of Howard Phillips' U.S. Taxpayers Party (now known as the Constitution Party). Terry called for the "justifiable" killing of abortion doctors, while Trewhella painted militias as one of the solutions for dealing with abortion.

An earlier report from 1995 describes some of his activities in this regard:

Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, is working with the radical right U.S. Taxpayers Party (USTP) launching a new "leadership institute" to train "militant" and "unmerciful" activists. Terry has recently assumed a leadership position at the USTP, writing newsletters and speaking at events. He says he plans to run as a USTP candidate in the state of New York in 1996. "I'm anxious to run," he said "I am chomping at the bit to actually be in office."

Terry said a new "leadership institute" will be held near his hometown of Binghamton, New York in October and will offer "three days of intense training on vision, courage, biblical ethics, raising up a cadre of people who are militant, who are fierce, who are unmerciful to the deeds of darkness, unmerciful to the ideologies of hell." At the same conference Matthew Trewhella, leader of Missionaries to the Pre-born urged delegates to form armed militias and to establish a "militia day" in their churches. Conference organizers sold copies of a manual on how to create an armed underground army. Jeffrey Baker, USTP National Committee member touted that "Abortionists should be put to death" during his convention speech. The audience erupted in applause.

The U.S. Taxpayers party is headquartered in Vienna, Virginia. In 1992 the USTP presidential candidate, Howard Phillips, ran a series of controversial campaign commercials which featured the photograph, name, and home address of medical directors at a Planned Parenthood in Iowa while the narrator stated "Howard Phillips urges you to contact these baby killers and urge them to mend their ways. A vote for Howard Phillips is a vote to prosecute the baby killers for premeditated murder."

Some other significant quotes from Terry make clear the depths of his anti-democratic inclinations:

"I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you... I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good... Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a biblical duty, we are called by God, to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism."

He also is clear in his advocacy of a singularly intolerant "Christian nation", especially for abortion providers:

"When I, or people like me, are running the country, you'd better flee, because we will find you, we will try you, and we'll execute you. I mean every word of it. ... I will make it part of my mission to see to it that they are tried and executed.

"You say, 'This is extreme!' Yeah, you're right. But imagine God Almighty sending people to hell just because they didn't follow His son? That's extreme. That's intolerance. Imagine Jesus saying that all other religions are false. Christianity claims to be the only way."

Terry also has a thing about insisting on masculine leadership:

"The greatest crisis we face is not child killing, it's not the sodomites, it's not land tax, it's not the intrusion of the federal government into our lives, our families, as they crush our liberties. The greatest crisis we face tonight is a crisis of leadership. We are facing a crisis of righteous, courageous, physically oriented, male leadership. Male leadership!

"God established patriarchy when he established the world. God established a patriarchal world. If we're going to have true reformation in America, it is because men once again, if I may use a worn out expression, have righteous testosterone flowing through their veins. They are not afraid of the contempt of their contemporaries. They are not here to get along. They are not even here to take issue. They are here to take over!"

While Christian Reconstructionists often paint a benign picture of the "Christian nation" they intend to create, Terry is more straightforward:

"Christian government, folks, would prosecute abortionists. Christian government would say that consensual homosexual acts are a criminal offense. Christian government would say that the government cannot property tax your land. The foundation of self government is private ownership of land. Look at the Bible. Look at how much time God spent making sure that the land was distributed, and that you could never lose your land.

"Courage, by definition, is the willingness to die. You've got to be prepared to die before you can be the most courageous man or woman you can be. Because once you're prepared to die for something, or someone, you can't be intimidated; you can't be bullied; you can't be bribed; there's nothing that anyone can do to stop you."

Of course, this kind of rhetorical threatening was a significant part of the right-wing discourse in the Schiavo matter, promulgated at every step by Terry. Nancy Goldstein at Raw Story had an excellent summary of the way things quickly spiraled:

Invariably, things got a little out of hand, as things often do when people are encouraged to believe that innocents are being murdered and God sanctions their every retaliatory action. Typical theo-con incitement-to-riot rhetoric from the "Priests for Life" describes the courts as "un-elected judges" who "authorize violence," then prescribes revolt: "When government fails to protect life, the people must do so directly."

Incendiary rhetoric wasn’t contained to the fringes. House majority leader Tom DeLay warmed up the crowd with his declaration that "murder is being committed against a defenseless American citizen in Florida." And that's just what he said in public. In private, while speaking to the rabidly theo-con Family Research Council in remarks secretly taped and later released to the press by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, DeLay warned his audience of "a huge nationwide concerted effort to destroy everything we believe in," urged them to "participate in fighting back," and claimed that staying out of politics is "not what Christ asked us to do."

Of course, after Terri Schiavo finally died, DeLay continued the attacks on judges in a way that clearly smacked of the threat of violence:

Mrs. Schiavo's death is a moral poverty and a legal tragedy. This loss happened because our legal system did not protect the people who need protection most, and that will change. The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today.

The same theme continued yesterday with similar remarks by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas:

"I don't know if there is a cause-and-effect connection but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country. Certainly nothing new, but we seem to have run through a spate of courthouse violence recently that's been on the news and I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in -- engage in violence."

Who could have predicted that a United States Senator would begin channeling Hal Turner and other extremist ideologues who argue that judges have it coming when they make "bad rulings" (that is, rulings the right doesn't like)?

As Nancy Goldstein put it:

You'd better get to know these folks, because Schivao was a coming-out party for an emboldened radical right wing, not an isolated incident. The GOP gave theo-cons every indication that they would be allowed to set the agenda. The news media gave them carte blanche, never once explicitly connecting prime players like Randall Terry to their violent pasts. And the Democrats went limp. Now theo-cons are going to be taking their show on the road whenever and wherever they want: over the judiciary, gay marriage, and abortion -- whatever God wills.

The Schiavo case indeed could prove to be a watershed event. But if centrists and progressives cannot muster the will to make clear to the public just how deeply enmeshed with the mainstream the extremist right has become, it will not mark a happy turning point for our nation, but a disastrous one.

C-SPAN and Holocaust Denial

I think everyone believed that C-SPAN had simply embarrassed itself a couple of weeks ago when it tried to insist on a phony "balance" on the subject of Holocaust denial by demanding that author Deborah Lipstadt appear with hoaxter David Irving simultaneously to discuss her book on the libel trial to which Irving subjected her.

The last we heard about this from C-SPAN (back on March 19), they were reconsidering: "We are still discussing how to cover this book, and we don't have an immediate timetable."

Well, now we know how they're going to cover it: Neither Lipstadt nor Irving will discuss her book. Instead, they're going to assemble their own panel to talk about the trial, and by extension, the book.

They'll have done so without any consultation with Lipstadt, and with only the briefest of warnings. At least one of their leading "experts" is in fact problematic at best.

Here's the announcement for the show later this afternoon:

Book TV presents a look at the 2000 libel trial between World War II writer David Irving and Emory University professor Deborah Lipstadt. The trial is detailed in Dr. Lipstadt's newest book, "History on Trial." Guests include T.R. Reid of the Washington Post, who covered the trial, as well as video clips of Deborah Lipstadt and David Irving. Historian John Lukacs is also interviewed.

According to my friend Dan Yurman, Lipstadt told him by e-mail that she feels "blind sided" by C-SPAN's action. The network, he said, "resisted all efforts to respond to her communications and indeed refused to even answer her e-mails."

Here's the e-mail that C-SPAN sent to Lipstadt this morning:

Dear Dr. Lipstadt;

I'm writing to let you know that we have produced a program about your 2000 libel trial. It is scheduled to air on C-SPAN2 Book TV today, Sunday, April 3rd, at 4:30 pm eastern time (overnight re-air Monday morning at 3:00 am eastern time.) For more information you can go to our website at www.booktv.org

Connie Doebele Executive Producer Book TV

Lipstadt forwarded the e-mail to friends, with the attached note:

Date: Sun, 03 April 2005 11:20:19 -0400

I received the following email about an hour ago. I had no idea this was in the offing. I have no other knowledge of the program. And now I understand why Connie Doebele had not returned my phone calls last week.

Even more problematic than C-SPAN's dubious professionalism in their handling this was their selection of T.R. Reid, of the Washington Post London bureau, as one of the chief guests.

That's because even though the description says that Reid "covered" the trial, in fact he didn't attend any of the trial itself. He only covered the announcement of the verdict. That's because he resisted covering it, deeming it not newsworthy enough, and then finally jumped in at the last moment.

In an analysis of the media coverage of the trial for Idea Journal, Yurman pointed out that Reid's coverage of the trial stood out for his resistance to even reporting on it:

I corresponded via email with numerous journalists during the trial. In one instance I really thought I'd really hit the wall in my exchanges with T.R. Reid, the London correspondent for the Washington Post. He said he did not consider the trial a priority compared to his other assignments which included the Pinochet extradition controversy which was going on at the same time. I sent Reid copies of the media reviews trying to indicate I wasn't whistling in the wind and to show there was enormous media interest in the trial. He said he was too busy.

Eventually, he wrote about the trial and the decision, but after closing arguments. In fact, Reid actually wrote two major articles about the trial. The Washington Post also published an editorial about Judge Gray's decision. Reid made a comment to Prof. Lipstadt right after the verdict was announced in her favor. He said I "badgered him," about the trial, but he also said this, "Dan Yurman was right." It is not true that I badgered him. I was always polite, but I was persistent. I am indebted to Prof. Lipstadt for sending me this feedback.

I'll watch this afternoon and report back. But the signs are not encouraging. So far, C-SPAN's behavior has been not only unprofessional, it is entirely inconsistent with its previously established standards for "balance": When it broadcast conferences of the white-supremacist organizations American Renaissance and Council of Concerned Citizens, it felt no need to "balance" those discussions with opposing viewpoints. One has to wonder why, once again, truth and fact have to contend on an equal footing with lies and vicious slander.

Up to the Minuteman

Well, I kinda had a hunch the numbers of "Minutemen" might fall a little short of expectations.

Wouldn't you know it, journalists outnumber the Minutemen so far in Arizona, where only 120 of the supposed 1,000 managed to show:

About 400 people attended the opening day of the Minuteman Project Friday, coming from states as far as Pennsylvania and Tennessee to protest a lack of proper border enforcement.

Nearly half the gathered crowd was reporters, photographers and cameramen. Minuteman media liaison Mike McGarry put the number of volunteers at 120 or more.

"I wish I could shoot a picture without a journalist in it," one cameraman was heard to grumble as reporters darted from one volunteer to another.

There were a number of anti-project protesters as well. This is especially clear from reading this Freeper's-eye view of the goings-on:

The rousing speeches ended and I found myself outside amid the din of the crazy protestors. I tried to carry on a conversation with someone right in front of the building rented for the MMP but it was impossible because of the noise. I grabbed one of the ACLU Legal Observers to file a complaint against the protestors and she laughed me off. I searched out another one and actually got him to write up a formal complaint. I explained that the MMP's freedom of speech and right to peaceable assembly were being infringed by the disrupting protestors. He wrote it all down and said he would see what they could do with my complaint. I urged several others to do the same thing - to file a complaint - and several did.

Such sensitive folks. Lord knows they would never engage in disruptive activities.

I did get a kick out of the response from the mayor of Douglas when Minutemen organizer Chris Simcox accused him of spreading Aryan Nations recruitment fliers calling for members to participate:

Chris Simcox, the editor of a local newspaper and a project organizer, has refuted any link between the Minutemen and white supremacists or any other racist organizations. Simcox has accused Douglas Mayor Ray Borane, a frequent critic, of distributing the fliers in an attempt to smear the project.

"I wonder what he's smoking," the mayor replied. "He has no idea the kinds of people they're going to be attracting."

Well, actually, he probably has a pretty good idea. Now, Michelle Malkin?

Mainstreaming extremism

One of the more troubling realities about white supremacists, as I've written at length, is their seeming normalcy, and how it plays a key role in their ability to worm their way back into the mainstream of American culture.

An instructive example in how this works recently cropped up in Montana, where an avowed white supremacist is running for the school board in Bozeman:

White separatist Kevin McGuire has qualified to run as a candidate for the nine-member Bozeman School Board.

Four candidates filed papers as of Thursday's deadline to run for three open seats in the May 3 election, according to Lori King, assistant to the assistant superintendent for business.

McGuire, an activist with the National Alliance, which advocates creating a whites-only, non-Jewish society, responded to the Chronicle by e-mail, saying he was running to encourage school programs that "foster a sense of racial identity, pride and belonging."

"Our children are taught about the histories and cultures of Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Jews and Native Americans but any sense of White racial solidarity or White racial pride is condemned as White racism; and that is not right," McGuire wrote.

"I stand against the homosexual agenda currently in our school system which not only preaches acceptance of homosexuality but actively encourages it."

Thirty-nine people, including a Bozeman teacher, signed McGuire's petition to be a candidate as he walked up and down South Third Avenue and nearby streets.

As Wulfgar says, this candidacy is a ripe opportunity for progressives to stand up to the growth of these kinds of forces. More to the point, I think they'll have a lot of support. It seems highly likely to me that McGuire will be trounced at the polls: I know my way around Bozeman a little, enough to sense that people there recognize that people like McGuire are blots on their communities.

Of course, it probably won't help McGuire that the voters who signed his petition are now saying they were bamboozled by his nice-seeming appearance:

Benjamin Bennett said he had a "horrible, sinking feeling" when he read Friday that a young white separatist had qualified as a candidate for the Bozeman School Board.

"I feel so taken for a ride," said Bennett, 33, an advertising agency owner.
Bennett was one of 39 people, living in some of the most liberal voter precincts in Bozeman, who signed the candidate's petition for National Alliance activist Kevin McGuire.

Bennett said three or four Sundays ago, McGuire and a buddy wearing a cowboy hat and long coat appeared at his doorstep. McGuire was soft-spoken, looked nice and neat, and seemed timid.

"I was impressed that somebody so young was trying to be on the School Board," Bennett said. "I asked why he decided to run. He said, 'I want to try to help the School Board evolve and do things for children.' ... He never said, 'I intend to educate children against homosexuals and Jews.'"

Another petition signed who was taken in by his "nice appearance" was the one schoolteacher on the list:

Rick Hannula, a Chief Joseph Middle School teacher, said he had asked questions before signing McGuire's petition. McGuire gave him the impression he was an engineering student at Montana State University, although MSU's registrar said on Friday that McGuire is not and has never been an MSU student.

"He said, 'I want to make some changes in the community,'" Hannula said. "I asked, 'Any other agendas?' He said, 'Well, I just want to make some changes.'

"He definitely was less than honest, by omitting what his agenda was," Hannula said. "I felt almost violated, used."

That is, unfortunately, exactly what these folks are all about: white supremacy itself is a profound kind of charlatanism, after all.

But even though McGuire will lose, his whole campaign will have accomplished exactly what it set out to do: Create an image of white-supremacist ideology as a normative part of the community, lending it an air of legitimacy it might otherwise not have.

Inch by inch, it worms its way in. What that means, of course, is that communities have to remain constantly on guard. After the campaign -- and during it -- will come a recruitment drive. They'll keep beating their drums. And as always, the answer is not to silence them, but to outdrum them.

Just a minute, men

Well, the anticipation is palpable now as participants in the so-called "Minuteman Project" are gathering near the Mexican border even as we speak to defend Mom and apple pie against an invasion of anchor-baby-carrying brown people. We've been promised 1,000 of them.

And hey, even Michelle Malkin has endorsed them, calling the project "the mother of all neighborhood watch programs." Funny, that: That happens to be exactly how John Trochmann described the Militia of Montana to me. But then, these ideas are the products of people who have been organizing "border militias" all along -- that is, they are bona fide extremists.

Actually, we'll be very fortunate, as always, if the month of April -- supposedly the duration of the project -- passes uneventfully without some tragedy occurring. Because that's what's we're asking for here.

The project is noteworthy alone for having the potential to create a genuine international incident. The president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, earlier demanded that President Bush do something about the Minutemen. When they met last week in Texas, Bush took the unusual step of speaking out against them:

Last week, President Bush stepped into the controversy over border issues, saying he opposed the Minuteman Project.

"I'm against vigilantes in the United States of America," Bush said during a meeting in Texas with Mexican President Vincente Fox and Canadian Prime Minster Paul Martin. "I'm for enforcing law in a rational way. It's why we've got a Border Patrol, and they ought to be in charge of enforcing the border."

Simcox said Bush's statement was disrespectful to citizens who simply want to help solve border problems. "We challenge the president to join us and come down and see for himself what's really going on," he told CNN.

Fox has also expressed concern over citizen border patrols. He told reporters he was watching the Minuteman Project carefully and would take action in U.S. courts or international tribunals if any activists break the law.

"We totally reject the idea of these migrant-hunting groups," Fox said. "We will use the law -- international law and even U.S. law -- to make sure that these types of groups ... will not have any opportunity to progress."

"We don't have any evidence or any indication either that terrorists from al Qaeda or any other part of the world are coming into Mexico and going into the United States," Fox said, countering recent statements made by senior Bush administration officials. "If there is any of that evidence, we will like to have it. But as I said, it does not exist."

The genuinely ugly side of the Minuteman Project and the related border vigilantes was limned by a recent story in the Arizona Daily Star:

The stories of illegal entrants abused by Cochise County vigilantes are buried in sheriff's deputy reports -- complaints of guns drawn, dog bites, shouts and humiliation -- in official language, using terms such as aggravated assault and disorderly conduct.

Since 1999, the Mexican consul in Douglas, Miguel Escobar, has documented 65 cases in which illegal border crossers reported being detained by U.S. citizens in Cochise County.

In at least six reports taken by Cochise County Sheriff's Department deputies, illegal entrants have reported being kicked, shouted at, bitten by dogs and had guns pointed at them -- yet there's never been a single Cochise County resident prosecuted in these cases.

Human-rights activists say it's because there's a culture of looking the other way when it comes to illegal-entrant abuse. Cochise County law enforcement officials say it's because the victims -- illegal entrants -- choose not to pursue charges. And without witnesses, there are no cases.

The debate has led to civil lawsuits involving millions of dollars. And it has fueled concerns by activists that lax enforcement will allow participants in the upcoming Minuteman Project to abuse illegal entrants without fear of prosecution in Cochise County.

The story also reported that the Aryan Nations was working hard to recruit for the project:

The Minuteman Project is being touted now as a "political assembly" promising to bring 1,022 people to the banks of the San Pedro River for a monthlong protest of border enforcement, starting Friday. But activist groups point to elements within the group and cite a potential for violence.

Last year, one of its leaders, Chris Simcox, was convicted on federal weapons charges. More recently, the white supremacy group Aryan Nation has openly recruited for the Minuteman Project, promoting the monthlong protest as a "white pride event."

Organizer James Gilchrist said he didn't know the Aryan Nation was promoting the event.

Some neighborhood watch you've got there, Michelle.

Finishing off the whole toxic mix is a healthy dose of paranoia, also given a "mainstream" shot in the arm, from the Washington Times, which is reporting that Latino gang members are planning to show up and run counter-actions:

Members of a violent Central America-based gang have been sent to Arizona to target Minuteman Project volunteers, who will begin a monthlong border vigil this weekend to find and report foreigner sneaking into the United States, project officials say.

James Gilchrist, a Vietnam veteran who helped organize the vigil to protest the federal government's failure to control illegal immigration, said he has been told that California and Texas leaders of Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, have issued orders to teach "a lesson" to the Minuteman volunteers.

"We're not worried because half of our recruits are retired trained combat soldiers," Mr. Gilchrist said. "And those guys are just a bunch of punks."

More than 1,000 volunteers are expected to take part in the Minuteman vigil, which will include civilian patrols along a 20-mile section of the San Pedro River Valley, which has become a frequent entry point to the United States for foreigner headed north.

About 40 percent of the 1.15 million foreign nationals caught last year by the U.S. Border Patrol trying to gain illegal entry to the United States were apprehended along a 260-mile stretch of the Arizona border here known as the Tucson sector.

Having sat around many a Patriot campfire, and heard many a tale of a looming army of well-armed brown people, often gang members, preparing to attack the patriotic militiamen defending their country, well ... I think it's highly likely the Times reporter was being, shall we say, a bit credulous.

In fact, given their propensity for jumping to the wroung conclusions and attacking innocent people, their fondness for heavy weaponry, their itchy trigger fingers, and the heavy paranoia in which they have been bathing themselves, I'd say we have, as the Star's editors put it, a recipe for disaster.

Just about the time some hapless family stumbles across one of their watchpoints at about, say, Day 17 of the Project, when everyone is tired of waiting for something to happen and worked into a paranoiac state of frenzy.