Standing up

In my youth, Bozeman was known as a rrrredneck town. It was the kind of place where, if you had long hair and you hitchhiked, you did your best to avoid it. Arlo Guthrie was only one of many long-hairs famously beaten up there.

Sure, it was home to Montana State University, but that only meant the students there were considered redneck too. It was the ag and engineering school.

That's all changed a lot in the past 20 years. The town has mellowed, become a lot friendlier, with a pretty strong hippie/environmentalist subculture. But even with all that, the old reputation lingers.

Redneck or not, the town recently made everyone in Montana proud by standing up and repudiating the candidacy of a white supremacist named Kevin McGuire, who ran for an open seat on the local school board.

In the just-finished vote, McGuire garnered 157 votes, or 3.6 percent:

Turnout was the highest in 21 years, said Steve Johnson, assistant superintendent and district clerk in charge of elections. At noon when the polls opened at the Willson School gym, there were already a couple hundred people lined up, eager to vote.

"That's unheard of," Johnson said. "It was kind of neat."

By 2 p.m., people were lined up 23 deep at the table for last names starting with F through H. "Nobody complained about waiting -- a couple threatened to change their last name," one election worker joked.

Turnout was 4,260 voters, which was twice last year's and 17 percent of the total registered voters in the Bozeman elementary district.

Leaving the polls, Jessica Reed, 21, an office assistant, said she voted because she didn't want "anything having to do with white supremacists" in the schools.

"I wanted to see Mr. McGuire get trounced as badly as possible," said Tom Davey, a Galavan driver. "I didn't worry he would win, but I thought the larger the numbers, the better the message."

"I really do think this is a great referendum," said Don Bachman, an avalanche technician. "We don't often get to vote for those feelings and ideals."

For a first-person account of the wave that drove Bozeman voters to the polls, be sure to read renaissance grrrl's terrific Kos diary detailing her day:

We could have defeated Kevin McGuire, probably, if only 50 people had voted. But-- I don't know the tally -- but I would guess it was thousands. Everybody wanted to be part of the giant "NO" handed to Kevin on this night. You think you represent us, white boy? Think again. NO.

And... despite the fact that I always knew he wouldn't, couldn't win... and despite the fact that his loss does not magically turn Bozeman more diverse... and despite the fact that it was only a school board election... I left the gym and cried. Because people, many people, are good. And they cared enough to show up and be counted, many more than needed to be counted. And it made me proud to be... dare I say it... an American. For today.

Wulfgar correctly points out that McGuire's 157 votes is about a hundred more than he should have gotten. But at the end of the day, Bozeman deserves everyone's applause for a job well done in standing up to hate-filled ideologues.

It may still be a redneck town. But it's my kind of redneck town.

Minuteman history

A little history, perhaps, is in order to help bring into focus just what the problem with the Minutemen is. As I just got done explaining, they do represent an open endorsement of extremist vigilantism by leading media and authority figures.

It should be clear that the Minuteman Project's origins lie with so-called "border militias," whose activities have been documented many times here. These "militias," it must be understood, are direct products of the far-right Patriot movement that produced the same "movement" in the 1990s.

One of the symbolic ways this shows up is in the project's name: the original Minutemen were the heart and soul of the militias who defeated the British army in the Revolutionary War. The name claims a kind of descent from these historical forebears in exactly the same way as the "militia movement".

Finally, a thorough review of its core of support -- from the white-supremacist American Renaissance and Aryan Nations to less noxious but nonethless racist outfits like VDare and American Patrol -- as well as the words of its own founders and participants will reveal right-wing extremism in every nook and cranny. Portraying them as "jes' folks" is not merely irresponsible, it's dangerous.

Especially when you consider the most recent previous incarnation of another organization claiming the "Minuteman" name -- namely, the right-wing anti-Communist group of the 1960s. They too started out presenting themselves as merely patriotic citizens acting on concerns about the nation's well-being. But they ended up being something else altogether.

I wrote about them in Chapter 3 of In God's Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest, pp. 52-54:

Then there were the Minutemen. Not only did they preach a more rabid style of anti-Communist paranoia than the Birch Society, their activities also manifested, for the first time, the violent undercurrent of these beliefs.

Led by a Missouri man named Robert DePugh, the Minutemen not only believed that government had been infiltrated at its highest levels by Communists, but that a Communist takeover was virtually inevitable; therefore, they told their believers, you should arm yourselves with whatever weaponry would be effective as a counterforce to strike back when the takeover occurred. DePugh, a onetime associate of [JBS founder] Robert Welch before DePugh was dropped from the John Birch Society, also told his followers to harass "the enemy," and compiled at his headquarters a list of 1,500 people he identified as members of the "Communist hidden
government," with the intent to assassinate them in the event of the Communist coup.

The Minutemen soon became associated with groups like Wesley Swift's Church of Jesus Christ Christian, a Christian Identity church located in Hollywood. Swift preached the "two-seed" brand of Identity, holding that not only are white people are the true Israelites and descendants of Adam, but that blacks, Asians, and other non-whites thus are "pre-Adamic" people without souls, and Jews are either descendants of Satan himself (the offspring of conjugal relations with Eve) or practitioners of a Satanic religion. Among Swift's more notable adherents: retired Col. William Potter Gale, a former MacArthur aide who eventually became a key figure in Posse Comitatus; and a quiet-spoken Lockheed engineer named Richard Girnt Butler.

Also in attendance at Swift's Sunday services was Keith Gilbert, a gunshop owner who also was a Minutemen member. Gilbert was arrested in 1965 and convicted for the theft of 1,400 pounds of TNT that he later said was part of a plot to plant a bomb under the stage of the Hollywood Palladium during an Anti-Defamation League convention, and to detonate it during the keynote speech by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. -- a plot only disrupted by his arrest.

Other Minutemen were getting into trouble around the nation. The group was connected to an October 1966 plot, broken up by the FBI in New York City, to bomb three summer camps operated by liberal East Coast organizations. And illegal caches of weapons and ammunition linked to Minutemen kept popping up around the countryside.

By this point, though, DePugh had decided to move into the political arena. Using the Minutemen's agenda as a platform, he formed the Patriotic Party and made public speeches around the country touting its potential in the wake of Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential election defeat. Two of those appearances were in Seattle in 1966. A mail-room employee of Seattle City Light named Duane I. Carlson put up $500 of his own money to sponsor the Northwest convention of the Patriotic Party at the Hyatt House. A few months later, DePugh made a stump speech for a November Patriotic Party gathering; some 600 people, paying $1 apiece, were in attendance. DePugh, however, only spoke to the crowd by a telephone hookup. The Minutemen's fearless leader was temporarily indisposed: he and an associate had been recently convicted on a variety of felony firearms violations and sentenced just the week before to four years in prison.

Over the next year, DePugh fought that conviction, and managed to stay out of jail through a string of appeals. But the legal troubles started taking their toll on the organization's finances -- and pressure mounted to find alternative sources of revenue.

Soon, Duane Carlson's activities moved well beyond public meetings. He gathered a group of six other Seattle-area men -- a longshoreman, a church sexton, a grocery clerk, a civilian driver at the Fort Lewis Army Base, a self-employed draftsman, and an unemployed ship's oiler -- and began plotting ways to finance the Minutemen's arms operations and strike a blow against the "Communist controlled" government at the same time. Their plan: set off a bomb at the city hall of a small Seattle suburb, Redmond, while simultaneously detonating another at the local power station, thereby creating a major distraction while taking out police communications at the same time. This would enable the gang to strike three Redmond banks they had targeted for a series of successive robberies.

Their downfall, however, came when a federal informant infiltrated the group. On the day the Minutemen planned to strike -- January 26, 1967 -- the FBI swooped down on them in two parking lots, one in Bellevue and another in Lake City, where the conspirators were meeting to carry out their plot, and arrested all seven. DePugh denied they were part of his organization, claiming Carlson had been dropped from his rolls for "non-payment of dues." Federal prosecutors, who found evidence that DePugh actually was party to the plan from its early stages, put out a warrant for his arrest.

DePugh went into hiding but was caught a few months later hiding out in Spokane, where he was charged in the Redmond plot. Five of the seven Seattle plotters were charged, and all five were convicted. DePugh, convicted in September 1970, wound up serving four years out of a ten-year sentence on the original firearms charges, but by then, his career in politics was in the ashheap. He later tried to resuscitate his ambitions by heading up an ultra-conservative organization called the Committee of 10 Million, but the numbers fell well short of those suggested by the group's name. DePugh currently is in prison again, this time on a 1992 conviction for sexual exploitation of a minor.

Regular readers will recall that Keith Gilbert recently cropped back up in the news in Seattle recently.

There's no association at all between Chris Simcox's modern-day border-watch organization and DePugh's. But if recent history is any harbinger, their claim to the real Minutemen's legacy is as troubling as it is specious.

Beyond the Minutemen

The drumbeat of official support for the Minuteman Project keeps on thumping.

First it was media figures like Lou Dobbs and Sean Hannity (taking a cue from Michelle Malkin) trumpeting the notion that these were just average citizens voicing their concern through a kind of "neighborhood watch". Then Sen. Wayne Allard suggested the federal government actually deputize the Minutemen.

Now California's Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has endorsed them:

In an interview on Los Angeles radio station KFI, Schwarzenegger said of the armed volunteers, "They've done a terrific job." According to the Governator, who drew criticism last week when he suggested it was time for the U.S. to "close the borders," the federal government isn't taking border security seriously enough. "Our federal government is not doing their job," Schwarzenegger said. "It's a shame that the private citizen has to go in there and start patrolling our borders."

Schwarzenegger pegged his concerns to the time he watched Fox News footage showing "hundreds and hundreds of illegal immigrants" coming across the border. "I mean, what's that?" he asked.

Not a great deal better was a piece in the Christian Science Monitor that largely gave a warm and fuzzy review of the Minutemen's "accomplishments":

Retired pilot Joe McCutchen spent three weeks, $6,000, and put 4,600 miles on his car driving round trip from Fort Smith, Ark., to the Arizona border. In between, he spent 14 days in a folding chair, buffeted by wind storms, face- cutting sand, freezing cold, and scorching sun.

He says he'll be back to do it again in October.

"The terrain and weather were utterly brutal," says Mr. McCutchen, who spent eight hours a day manning lookout posts. "I have a new sense of compassion for the illegals who are being exploited by both countries ... and the Border Patrol that is not being given what it needs to do the job properly."

Of course, we've discussed Mr. McCutchen's background previously, particularly his rather clear-cut anti-Semitism, but for some reason that goes unmentioned here.

The piece also neglects to note that the Project actually shut down early for a lack of volunteers. And in the end, the Project seems to be lauded more for not having had any tragedies occur during its tenure than anything else:

Still, to those on both sides of the issue, the Minuteman Project's initiative in Arizona came off largely without incident. Both the US Border Patrol, which was concerned that volunteer citizens would create problems for agents, and the ACLU, which worried that conflicts would ensue in encounters with illegals, now say the activists weren't overly intrusive.

"The month came and went and we are grateful that there were no major incidents to report, no one got hurt or killed," says Salvador Zamora, spokesman for the US Border Patrol. Early reports in US media and continued coverage by Mexican media created the wide impression that gun-toting vigilantes would be using physical force.

The Border Patrol does not encourage such actions by citizens, and says the minuteman volunteers and media presence "tripped off ground sensors and created distractions ... but nothing we were not able to overcome," says Mr. Zamora.

Thankfully, a far more realistic assessment of the Minuteman Project was provided by Marc Cooper at the Los Angeles Times:

For two solid weeks, thousands of news stories cascaded from the hardscrabble border zone, focusing on what was, in reality, a group of True Believers whose real numbers were tiny.

Though the Minuteman organizers vowed that 1,600 or more mad-as-hell volunteers had signed up for duty and that "potentially several thousands" would participate in the kickoff rallies during April Fools' weekend, turnout was an unmitigated flop — less than a tenth of the promised throngs showed up at the rallies. The entire Minuteman spectacle, indeed, easily qualified for that journalistic catchall phrase, "a fizzle," but virtually none of the news media reported it as such.

On its opening day, I could count no more than 135 participants, even at the two kickoff public rallies along the Arizona border. At one near the border town of Douglas, two dozen reporters and a handful of TV cameras swarmed over no more than 10 Minutemen -- most of them sitting in lawn chairs or in pickup truck beds. During the entire kickoff weekend, the media troops clearly outnumbered the Minutemen. And in the days that followed, piecing together the various reports and reading between the lines, it's obvious that the Minuteman numbers dwindled to no more than a few dozen at a time. If that many people marched down Hollywood Boulevard for any cause, who'd report it?

Indeed, only 18 days into the monthlong project, the effort collapsed. Predictably, a few hundred illegal immigrants had chosen not to cross in that area during the media ruckus. Minuteman organizers preposterously declared victory, claiming they had shut down the border to illegal immigration and packed off home. Even then, most news reports failed to acknowledge the project's obvious failure -- which may explain why on Thursday Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger offered sappy praise for the fiasco.

Most of Cooper's ire is directed, for good reason, at the media:

"They came by the hundreds," is how the Los Angeles Times breathlessly led its first-day report out of Tombstone, only to tell us deeper in the story that the actual number of Minutemen who showed up were "200 or so." A Times follow-up three days later got us closer to the truth when Minuteman organizer Jim Gilchrist admitted: "This thing was a dog-and-pony show designed to bring in the media and get the message out, and it worked."

It worked so well that less than a week later another Times reporter filed a 1,200-word of profile of Gilchrist, an obscure, retired Orange County accountant. Even though, by then, the Minuteman Project was into its 11th day, the reporter made no mention of the actual status of his collapsing border event.

The situation along the U.S.-Mexican border continues to sink into chaos, and Congress and the White House do little more than aggravate things. In spite of billions of dollars spent to bolster the line, every year hundreds of thousands (or perhaps millions) of desperate migrants manage to evade the human, physical and environmental barriers and make the crossing to wind up as our maids, nannies and gardeners.

More than 3,000 died trying to make the crossing in the last decade — 10 times more than all those who perished trying to jump the Berlin Wall.

It's a complex and vexing issue that is getting hotter by the day. Now more than ever the public needs news media that are serious, thoughtful and analytical, not compliant suckers for the wound-up partisans and pandering politicians who are increasingly likely to inflame or obfuscate the issue with goofball dog-and-pony shows.

Cooper is right: Our officials -- as well as the mavens of the media -- are being grotesquely irresponsible by endorsing these kinds of demagogic displays. But it runs deeper than that.

My greatest concern is that this is, in effect, the first official embrace of right-wing extremist vigilantism by supposedly mainstream authorities on record. That is a benchmark with deeply disturbing ramifications.

This is, after all, an organization that has indicated it intends to expand its purview. And the concept of the Minutemen as a right-wing citizen vigilante force has uses well beyond even border patrols. These endorsements may wind up giving the Minutemen more than their 15 seconds of fame -- and that could be a problem for many years to come.

Missed motives, hoaxes, and hate

As we've all been discovering lately, sometimes appearances are misleading when it comes to criminal motivations -- especially when it comes to high-profile acts like hate crimes and their related acts of domestic terrorism.

The problem is that in the resulting confusion, it's not uncommon for acts of genuine racial hatred to get glossed over or ignored.

The most prominent national case in which we saw such confusion involved the killings of Judge Lefkow's husband and mother in Chicago. White supremacists, rather logically -- in light of the threats they had directed Lefkow's way -- were considered the chief suspects, and I and many others spent quite a bit of time contemplating the consequences of that.

However, it turned out to have been committed by a mentally ill man with a beef against the judge. The story went away. What went little noticed, as a result, was the deeply disturbing threats that emanated from other white supremacists over the course of the affair.

There have been even more egregious cases, though, of conclusion-jumping from the right side of the blogosphere. The most notable was the murder of a Coptic Christian family in New Jersey, which the right-wing bloggers, led by Michelle Malkin, hastened to dub it "a hate crime" committed by evil Muslims, because the family had been prominent in anti-Islamist activist circles -- though there was no history of them having been threatened by Muslims. While speculation might be understandable, there certainly was no reason to conclude it was a hate crime.

After several weeks and several thousand words spilled on the subject, it all came to a halt with a brief correction ("I was wrong") because the murders actually were committed in the course of a home-invasion robbery committed by the upstairs neighbor. There was, unsurprisingly, a paucity of reflection on the broad swath of accusation she and others had hurled during the course of the case at various targets, including CAIR and the left in general. Auguste at MalkinWatch has all the details.

Far more problematic, however, are cases in which people for various motives fakes hate crimes. Not only are the motives for the crimes misjudged, but like the boy who cried "fascist," these do real damage to efforts to tackle the matter.

Another recent incident in Illinois involved the situation at a small Christian college where minority students were moved off campus after someone wrote letters to another student threatening to kill all the school's blacks. Then it turned out to be a hoax concocted by one of the school's students to convince her parents the school was not safe for minorities.

Here in western Washington, we had the case in which a black family was apparently the target of a vandalization hate crime, spurring a remarkable response of broad community support. But then it turned out to have been committed by the family's teenage son as a ruse to cover up a burglary.

Of course, there will always be opportunists who attach themselves parasitically to any kind of worthy cause, including civil rights and anti-hate movements. They are especially noxious because they provide those movements' critics with such ready ammunition.

Still, what was truly noteworthy about the incident, as Robert Jamieson pointed out, was the heartening community reaction to the crime. But you have to wonder how many people who showed up to support the victimized family wound up feeling burned. You have to wonder how many times these fake hate crimes will happen before people start shying away from recognizing the real hate crimes, and their enormity, when they do occur.

I'm talking about incidents like the one in Bremerton last week, when a couple of white supremacists who apparently have terrorized their neighborhood for years got out of hand and wound up in jail:

Abdul Woodruff, 21, says a pair of racist neighbors were drunk and blowing stuff up in their front yard late Monday night when he finally had enough.

"I'm getting very angry. I'm enraged," he said.

Woodruff said the two threatened to lynch and kill him while screaming "white power" before setting fire to their own driveway with lacquer thinner.

Police say the suspects threatened to shoot officers when they arrived on the scene and that the pair have terrorized non-white neighbors on the street for years, even blaring sirens and lights from an ambulance on their property in the middle of the night.

"One lady reported to us that she won't even let her daughter, who's a teenager, walk down the street because she has dark skin and she would be taken as a minority," said Sgt. Kevin Crane, Bremerton Police.

"You can't come out and cut the grass, you got me worried what they're going to say, what they're going to do, if they're going to do something to your family," said Woodruff.

The two suspects now face felony hate crime charges and more.

There were further details on the incident in the local paper, The Sun:

Detective Sgt. Kevin Crane said a neighbor had approached a home asking that the music be turned down. Bremerton police officers had come to the area because of a noise complaint, but were out of sight when a 34-year-old white man allegedly began yelling death threats and racial slurs at the neighbor who had asked him to lower the volume.

Crane said the neighbor, who is black, didn't do anything to provoke the threats.

When police approached the suspect's home, a 21-year-old man alerted the older man and both retreated inside.

Eventually, they came out, police said, and poured flammable lacquer on their yard, driveway and fence and ignited the fluid, creating 5-foot flames.

The older man, who police believe was drunk, then allegedly began waving a flaming wooden oar in the air.

Cases like this are pretty clear-cut, involving multiple witnesses, including the police. But so far, the response both in the community and the media has been terribly muted.

It is, as I've argued many times, a mistake on the part of community leaders to try to brush over incidents like these. Hate crimes, because of their terroristic nature, victimize not just the immediate victims, but in cases like this especially, much broader swaths of the community -- not just an entire neighborhood, but any black person living in Bremerton.

More to the point, typical hate-crime perpetrators like to believe they are secretly carrying out the wishes of their respective communities. When the community glosses over their actions, they see that as tacit approval -- and a green light to escalate their behavior.

This is especially the case when law enforcement fails to take the crimes seriously and prosecute them as hate crimes. Such slaps on the wrist are often interpreted as pats on the back.

The most noteworthy example of this involved an arson case in Maryland that many initially believed was the work of eco-terrorists, notably Glenn Reynolds and, yep, Michelle Malkin, who also dismissed suggestions that race might have been a factor.

But then, when police police arrested a group of young white men in the case, it turned out not to be a case of eco-terror, but rather race-motivated arsons, from all appearances. Of course, rather than concede that these may have been hate crimes, Malkin in her "correction" instead speculated at length on the perps' various personal motivations for the arsons.

That was the men's legal strategy as well, with one defendant claiming the arsons were just a "notoriety ploy" for the street-racing club. The Washington Times was quick to describe the men as mere "street racers."

Unfortunately, it was a line that prosecutors appear to have bought into as well. In the stories describing the guilty plea entered by one of the defendants last week, there was this:

Parady admitted that during the early morning hours of Dec. 6, he drove a vehicle from house to house to light the fires.

He acknowledged the accuracy of a statement of facts submitted in court by Assistant U.S. Attorney Donna C. Sanger. The document said Parady "selected or aided and abetted the selection of the Hunters Brooke development as the object of the arsons because he knew or perceived that many of the purchasers of the houses in that development were African-American."

Neither Parady nor any of the other defendants has been charged with a hate crime, and federal prosecutors have said there was more than one motive.

There are immediate problems with what prosecutors are saying. The presence of other motives does not obviate or mitigate the bias motive, especially when it is as prominent a factor as it is in this case. And it is quite strikingly clear from the prosecutors' own statement that the targets were intentionally selected because of race.

"Intentional selection" due to race is the classic determiner of what is a hate crime and what isn't. Usually, a prosecutor's bedrock question is: Would this crime have occurred if not because of the (perceived) victims' race? It's clear that, in this case, against these particular homes, it wouldn't have.

Late in the story, the politicians weighed in:

County Commissioner Edith J. Patterson (D-Pomfret), who in January became the county's first black commissioner, said that she hoped Parady's guilty plea would send a "resounding message" that the county "will not tolerate heinous hate crimes."

Um, well, that would only work if you actually prosectuted them as hate crimes. In reality, by limiting the scope of the charges, the county sent precisely the opposite message -- one that, unforunately, encourages the like-minded to engage in more of the same and worse.

Which is what, in a milieu that sows nothing but confusion about the nature of hate crimes, we can probably expect for the foreseeable future.

The March of the Taliban

If you think the concern about the effects of the right's attack on church-state separation might be overblown, take a gander at what a Republican legislator down in Alabama has cooked up: a bill to ban books from public school libraries that are either written by gays and lesbians or contain references to them:

Republican Alabama lawmaker Gerald Allen says homosexuality is an unacceptable lifestyle. As CBS News Correspondent Mark Strassmann reports, under his bill, public school libraries could no longer buy new copies of plays or books by gay authors, or about gay characters.

"I don't look at it as censorship," says State Representative Gerald Allen. "I look at it as protecting the hearts and souls and minds of our children."

Books by any gay author would have to go: Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal. Alice Walker's novel "The Color Purple" has lesbian characters.

Allen originally wanted to ban even some Shakespeare. After criticism, he narrowed his bill to exempt the classics, although he still can't define what a classic is. Also exempted now Alabama's public and college libraries.

A reminder: This kind of narrow-minded insanity isn't just relegated to the South. But it certainly seems to enjoy a kind of cutting-edge quality there.

The Great White Peril

Y'know, by Gar, there may be some good come out of this Minuteman thing yet.

Fresh after hanging up their lassos and sidearms and calling it quits by declaring victory well before the end of their originally avowed 30-day vigil, the Minuteman Project's organizers, according to the Washington Post, are turning their sights northward to the Canadian border:

Minuteman Project leaders said their volunteers this month alerted federal authorities to more than 330 cases of illegal immigrants crossing into the United States over a 23-mile stretch of Arizona's southern border. Now they plan to extend their patrol along the rest of the border with Mexico and are helping to organize similar efforts in four states that neighbor Canada.

"In the absence of the federal government doing its mandated duty to secure our borders, we will pick up the slack. Reluctantly," said Chris Simcox, a Minuteman co-organizer who also operates Civil Homeland Defense, another Arizona group that monitors illegal immigrants.

"We shouldn't have to be doing this," Simcox told reporters in Washington, where he was to meet with lawmakers Wednesday. "But at this point, we will continue to grow this operation _ also to the northern border."

Simcox offered no timeline on when the Canadian border patrol _ to be organized in Idaho, Michigan, North Dakota and Vermont _ might begin. But he said he hoped to start patrols near San Diego, Calif., by June and along the rest of the Mexico border by October.

I read this and I thought: At last! Someone is going to make us face up to the real threat facing this country! Maybe now we can begin talking about the Great White Peril!

Now I know that all this talk by the Minutemen about clamping down on the Canadian border too is in most regards a kind of cover for the campaign's claims to be primarily concerned about the threat posed by terrorists crossing our supposedly loose borders. After all, the only known terrorist who entered the United States via a border crossing -- Ahmed Ressam, whose case is well known locally -- did so from Canada.

But let's be honest here: The real cause that fueled the Minuteman Project was immigration, not terrorism. That's evident from the focus on the subject at the group's Web site, as well as places that championed it, from VDare to American Patrol to the Aryan Nations (which, in fact, actually lauded the 9/11 attacks). And if you talked to people on the ground at the Project, it was pretty clear what was driving them too: the Brown Peril.

So we should be equally frank about what the objectives should be for any planned watch along the Canadian border: stopping the similarly noxious flow of white illegal immigrants from the north.

After all, these people are whiter than white. They like hockey and curling and ice fishing and eat lots of cheese. They come sneaking here over the border in silent hordes and pretty soon, they start taking over. Nobody talks about it, but the evidence that it's happening is everywhere.

I mean, look around at all these American cities near the Canadian border: White people. Lots of white people everywhere. And way too many of them still saying, "Eh?" And why are there all those cheese shops?

They're infecting our popular culture, too, by exporting Canadian-ness over the borders. Why, exactly, are we playing hockey (when it's not on strike) in Florida and California nowadays? Doesn't that seem suspicious to you?

And then there's the music scene. For awhile Canada exported hippie subversives like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, then homosexual subversives like k.d. lang. Now, however, they're responsible for the most insidious cultural invasion of all: Celine Dion. It doesn't get much more hair-raisingly white than that. (Indeed, it seems like grounds for invading their country, executing their leaders, and converting them to Christianity, but that might be a bit over the top.)

Oh, I know it's not "politically correct" to point out this kind of cultural pollution. But it's happening, slowly, surely, and demonstrably to the detriment of our society.

It's time somebody did something about it. Of course, completely sealing off the Canadian border will entail manning some of the most rugged and frigid territory in America, a landscape that will make the Arizona desert seem like a Sunday in the park. It'll require lots of high-tech equipment and well-trained, fit participants.

But hey, I'm sure the Minutemen will be up to the task. They were successful before, right?

Caught up in the tide

After all that talk about "black-robed tyrants" and hints that any violence directed their way might be well earned, the prominent Republicans involved in the new right-wing attack on the judiciary backed down -- a bit -- at "Justice Sunday" last weekend.

Bill Frist did his best to sound moderate, especially after his earlier intemperate remarks about Democrats attacking "people of faith". I guess when people like Ted Olson and Charles Krauthammer are telling you that this whole line of attack is a bad idea, Republican leaders have decided to step back from the brink and reconsider where their old friends on the extremist right are carrying them.

There's one little problem, though: They're too late. They've created a beast they think they can control. I wonder if they're about to get a rude awakening.

No doubt a lot of their hesitation has to do with the kind of image the Republicans have gotten out of their association with the extremists driving the attacks on the judiciary, from Terri Schiavo to "Justice Sunday." That is, they're beginning to look a lot like the folks with their eyes rattling around in their sockets screaming for Judge Greer's scalp.

Columns like Colbert King's in the Washington Post probably helped:

The statement by one of the sponsors of tomorrow's event, Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, is an example of the Holy War that is being launched by the right. In one of the most outrageous smears to be uttered by a so-called religious leader, Perkins said that "activist courts, aided by liberal interest groups . . . have been quietly working under the veil of the judiciary, like thieves in the night, to rob us of our Christian heritage and our religious freedoms." That is an unmitigated lie that should not be allowed to stand.

Which judges are out to rob Christians of their heritage? That is religious McCarthyism. Perkins should name them, provide evidence of their attempted theft of "our Christian heritage" or retract that statement with an apology. Don't count on that happening.

Of course, it didn't happen. As Max Blumenthal reported in The Nation, the conference -- Frist's seeming meekness notwithstanding -- was a wall-to-wall attack upon the integrity of the judiciary. Moreover, Perkins was in fact the figure who benefited most from the attention lavished upon the conference by ostensibly "mainstream" Republicans like Frist:

Four years ago, Perkins addressed the Louisiana chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), America's premier white supremacist organization, the successor to the White Citizens Councils, which battled integration in the South. In 1996 Perkins paid former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke $82,000 for his mailing list. At the time, Perkins was the campaign manager for a right-wing Republican candidate for the US Senate in Louisiana. The Federal Election Commission fined the campaign Perkins ran $3,000 for attempting to hide the money paid to Duke.

It also became clear that Perkins has national aspirations, and intends to use the anti-judiciary campaign as his springboard:

On Justice Sunday, Perkins introduced Frist as "a friend of the family." "I don't think it's radical to ask senators to vote," Frist said from a giant screen above the audience. "Only in the United States Senate could it be considered a devastating option to allow a vote." His face then disappeared, and Perkins returned onstage to urge viewers to call their senators.

But there is more at stake here than the fate of the filibuster. With Justice Sunday, Perkins's ambition to become a national conservative leader was ratified; Bill Frist's presidential campaign for 2008 was advanced with the Christian right; and the faithful were imbued with the notion that they are being victimized by liberal Democratic evildoers.

Of course, a claim of persecution and martyrdom is central to the campaign. Christians are being singled out and persecuted for their beliefs, "Justice Sunday" believers were told time and again. The federal judges being filibustered by Democrats were chosen just because they were Christians, they were told. See, for instance, the sympathetic report at the Baptist Press site on the speech by R. Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in which he described nominee Charles Pickering as just such a victim:

The Senate Judiciary Committee thought Pickering was radical because he believes Christians should base their worldview on the teaching of Scripture, Mohler said. Senators who opposed Pickering focused on comments he made while serving as president of the Mississippi Baptist Convention.

"That (Pickering's view) is normative Christianity," Mohler said. "That is what it means to be a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ and to be a Christian incorporated into the body of Christ and to be a faithful believer in the church.

"He (Pickering) was speaking as a Christian to fellow Christians about our Christian responsibility, but in the views of some radical secularists, that invalidates him from serving on the federal bench. And we as Americans had better hear that as a wakeup call because if it is judge Pickering now, it will be you and me tomorrow."

Of course, what Mohler describes has little to do with why Pickering's nomination was held up. As I've explored a couple of times, the problems with Pickering's appointment had a great deal more to do with the tremendously bad judgment he has displayed in several key cases, including a cross-burning case that reverberated with his past connections to white citizens' councils -- not to mention his less-than-forthcoming testimony on those subjects.

But hey, a few facts never stood in the way of a good martyrdom story before, so why stop now?

But as Blumenthal describes, there is indeed a great deal at stake: namely, the very shape of jurisprudence itself, which would be transformed by these religious fundamentalists into a kind of legal fundamentalism. It would have dramatic ramifications for Americans across a broad variety of issues from gay rights to abortion to birth control to scientific research to basic matters of privacy, perhaps even to segregation -- and ultimately, for the heart of their campaign, the separation of church and state.

See, for instance, these key passages from the BP News story:

Mohler singled out two pivotal cases from the past 35 years: the 1973 Roe v. Wade case, which established a "constitutional right" for abortion on demand, and the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas case, in which judges overturned anti-sodomy laws.

"[Roe v. Wade] was a wakeup call for Americans to say, 'Now wait a minute; there is nothing in the Constitution about abortion.' By no stretch of the imagination did the founders of this nation and the framers of that document intend for anyone to be able to read those words and find a right to kill unborn children," he said.

" ... [And] does anyone believe that the framers of our Constitution intended for [a constitutional right to practice sodomy] to be there? By no means. If it's not there, how did the court decision get there? By reading into the Constitution what they wanted to find, which isn't there but is constructed there by expanding the Constitution by reinterpretation."

Mohler said that Christians, above all people, should understand the importance of a strict interpretation of the Constitution because of the way in which some have twisted the Bible to "say what it doesn't mean."

"We have seen that pattern (of distorting Scripture)," he said. "God's people have had to learn to discern and say 'no, the text is the inerrant and infallible Word of God. It is what God said it is.' But now there are judges who are using the same exercises of interpretation to find in the Constitution of the United States what is not there."

Now, as I've argued previously, the "strict construction" of which fundamentalists are so enamored is nothing but a new name for old-style "formalism," the approach to jurisprudence that wrought such exemplars of the law as Dred Scott and Plessy v Ferguson. As such, its ramifications for American law could be profound, since widespread adoption would mean overturning an entire slate of progressive innovations of the 20th century and return us to the bad old days of the late 19th century, when robber barons ruled the land.

At the Family Research Council's own site, one can get a sense that just such a radically reactionary course is what they have in mind:

Q -- How have activist judges abused their power?

A -- Judges are abusing their power if they read into the Constitution principles that are not declared by the plain language of the Constitution. For example, the First Amendment says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." But nowhere does it say that there should be a strict "separation of church and state" at all levels of government, barring any acknowledgment of God. The decision legalizing abortion was based on the "right to privacy" -- but no such right is declared in the Constitution.

That response should make clear the two issues, above all, that are directly in the sights of the religious right:

1. The separation of church and state.

2. The right to privacy.

Of course, most Americans tend to take a right to privacy for granted, but little realize that it exists almost solely, according to Supreme Court rulings, as a Ninth-Amendment "natural right" not enumerated by the Constitution, or as a "penumbra" of other rights that have been written out.

Likewise, they understand that "separation of church and state" -- like "religious freedom" -- exists as a principle of the Constitution, even though the phrase doesn't appear written there. (The educated among us are even aware of the use of the phrase by founders Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in later explanatory letters.)

But what they little understand, for now, is that those rights are in the gunsights of the religious right -- and they are zeroing in even now.

The more thoughtful conservatives remaining in Republican ranks may hesitate for now. But the religious right has built up its impetus, and it seems unlikely that the GOP, in the end, will be able to resist going along for the ride.

Rudolph's plea

Seems I'm not the only one with questions about how the Justice Department handled Eric Rudolph's case. Now we're hearing from the conservative side of the aisle -- namely, Bill Shipp, a longtime observer of the Georgia political scene:

Pardon the paranoia, but something smells about the deal to let killer-bomber Eric Rudolph cop a plea and avoid a trial.

The Justice Department says it decided to spare Rudolph a death-sentence trial in exchange for information about the locations of relatively small amounts of explosives. Bull!

A determined prosecutor might have extracted the map to the dynamite with a promise not to seek the death penalty. And Rudolph's trial could have proceeded.

Former U.S. Attorney Kent Alexander says a trial and death sentence would have made "a martyr" of Rudolph, so waiving the trial was a good idea.

That is a curious position for Alexander, who was the government's chief lawyer in Atlanta when Rudolph planted a bomb at the 1996 Olympics that killed one person and injured scores of others.

If the martyrdom-avoidance defense worked for Rudolph, can you imagine what it might do for alleged Fulton courthouse killer Brian Nichols, the self-proclaimed "black warrior," when he is ready for trial in heavily black Atlanta?

The government says Rudolph set off four bombs -- the most famous one at the Olympics, another at an Atlanta gay bar, a third at a Sandy Springs family-planning office and a fourth at a Birmingham abortion clinic. At the end of his run, he had killed two people, wounded at least 120 and terrified thousands.

He is as much a terrorist as 9/11 plane-hijacker Mohammed Atta or Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

Ah, but the problem really is an administration that does not want us to think of terrorists in that fashion, and Shipp explains this as well as anyone I've seen:

Similarly, Rudolph's plea leaves us in the dark about his whole story. To be sure, he may have been as advertised: a government-hating, anti-abortion, survivalist crackpot. Still, we don't know who aided him or why. Who were his mentors and associates? Who helped him choose his targets and on what basis? Who protected him from arrest for all those years? Why did they harbor him when one simple phone call could have put a million dollars in their pocket?

Why did Washington agree to skip a trial that may have revealed the answers to all those questions? One possibility: The Justice Department doubted the ability of its attorneys to deliver a guilty verdict. The prosecutorial record in comparable cases is spotty at best. (The feds nailed McVeigh but struck out with Terry Nichols in the Oklahoma City bombing.)

If you're a conspiracy theorist, you have another answer. The government is reluctant to dig deeply into Rudolph's background or to identify publicly the forces that inspired him to become a pro-life killer. Letting him enter a guilty plea serves the purposes of the politically-attuned Justice Department as well as the defense. That sounds a bit nutty, you say? That explanation is no nuttier than a leading lawman's assertion that Rudolph's avoidance of trial "finally brings closure" to the case. Surely he is kidding.

One other thing: The government through the media has embedded in the national mind a portrait of terrorists as sinister-looking, bearded Middle Easterners who pray five times a day and have a fondness for taking flying lessons.

The trial of Eric Rudolph might have given us another picture: fair-skinned, clean-cut men claiming to be Christians, wearing fatigues and speaking American English, not unlike you and me.

Taken a step further, a picture might even be drawn of a home-grown terrorist who embraces the culture of life and then uses the tools of the death to protect that culture. The parallels with a president who speaks in defense of the sanctity of life, yet has built his legacy on death penalties and two overseas wars might make the U.S. judiciary a bit too uncomfortable.

It's pretty hard, in fact, to examine this administration's record without reaching the conclusion that it is more interested in marketing the idea of terrorism to the public than it is in actually combating terrorism.

Justice well served

I've spent a chunk of time in Judge John Coughenour's federal courtrooms, particularly during the trials of the Washington State Militia in Seattle and the Montana Freemen in Billings. (See In God's Country for more details.)

He probably has more experience in dealing with far-right conspiracy theories -- particularly so-called "constitutionalist" pseudo-legal theories -- than any other federal judge. He also is the epitome of the "no-nonsense judge": blunt, plain-spoken, impatient with obfuscation. And there's no room for any kind of folderol, whether from attorneys or their clients or jurors.

So I was more than a little amused to read of Coughenour's latest courtroom confrontation with a constitutionalist scam artist in a Seattle P-I report:

Anderson's Ark moved client cash into overseas bank accounts and falsely deducted the funds from income tax returns as consulting or management expenses, the government said. In order to make the deductions look legitimate, Anderson's Ark told its clients to send the money through an Anderson's Ark affiliate to a shell company operated by co-defendant Richard Marks, prosecutors said.

Convicted leaders of the scam included brothers Keith and Wayne Anderson, and Karolyn Grosnickle, who ran the operational headquarters out of a home in Hoodsport in Mason County.

The Anderson brothers and Marks represented themselves in the proceedings, which were notable for lengthy political harangues.

Marks challenged Coughenour yesterday, asking: "What kind of a court are you running here?" He got a quick response from the judge: "I'll have you bound and gagged if you don't stop to listen to me."

Marks proclaimed: "I have repeatedly challenged the jurisdiction of this court. This court is committing treason. You judge, are committing treason ... when you usurp the authority of the Constitution." Then he launched into an incomprehensible monologue challenging the court's jurisdiction, which centered on his true identity being that of a "human being" rather than a "fictitious legal entity."

Coughenour cut him off and asked Corey Smith of the Justice Department's Tax Division for his sentence recommendation. Smith noted Marks' "utter lack of contrition" and recommended 25 years in prison.

The attorney from the Justice Department's Tax Division at the hearing, Corey Smith, boiled it down to the fundamentals:

Smith rose and told Coughenour "some of these Anderson Ark members might look at Mr. Anderson as a slightly odd man. I would submit that is not the case. Mr. Anderson is a financial predator. Mr. Anderson is a professional con artist."

I've described the ways other far-right ideologues are actually running relatively lucrative cons. It's pretty much endemic to the extremist right, in fact. For that matter, it would be fair to say their ideology is a scam as well.

I don't know about Bill Frist, but I happen to think the federal judiciary functions well at serving the American public and the interests of justice. Judge Coughenour is the ultimate example of that. Though the people he just put away, no doubt, are more than happy to partake in all that talk about "black-robed tyrants."

Blogging about

Be sure to check out the new blog from Russ Baker, one of the best independent journalists working today, which he's titled BakerMuckraker. It kind of looks like he's still figuring out the links thing, but the content as always is what counts most ...

eRiposte has finished up his great 15-part series, How the Liberal Media Myth is Created, which recaps information many of us already knew, but puts it together in a cogent way that offers some insight into how to battle the meme. He's also begun a follow-up series at The Left Coaster titled "Why the Liberal Media Myth Persists", with Part 1 and Part 2 already up.

I was pleased to read in the New York Times that the late Will Eisner's final book, The Plot -- which tells the story of The Protocols of the Seven Elders of Zion -- is soon to hit the bookshelves. I've already pre-ordered it.

And I have to say that Abstinence Only.com made me laugh. A lot. But it's probably not work-safe.

Minutemen uber alles

Well, the Minutemen apparently are running low on volunteers -- their Web site currently features an urgent plea for volunteers "on the border to the end of April." According to my sources, the project's numbers have been in precipitous decline in the past week, while the Project is officially supposed to last until April 30.

That hasn't prevented them from declaring victory anyway, even before they've officially wrapped up their three-ring anti-immigration circus:

"In just 17 days, the Minuteman Project has successfully sealed the San Pedro River Valley border from illegal activity," Minuteman organizer Jim Gilchrist said on the project's Web site this week, halfway through the monthlong venture.

Gilchrist pointed to a drop in Border Patrol apprehensions in the area as proof: The agency caught about 2,500 illegal immigrants in the Naco area during the first half of the month; agents apprehended nearly 7,700 during the same period last year.

But others aren't so sure:

"They're taking credit for securing the border, and surely no one with any credibility believes that," said Michael Nicley, chief of the U.S. Border Patrol's Tucson sector, which encompasses most of the Arizona border.

... Nicley and others attributed the drop to U.S. agents and the increased presence of Mexican police and members of Grupo Beta, a Mexican government-sponsored organization that tries to discourage people from crossing illegally and aids those stranded in the desert.

Authorities suggested that illegal immigrants are simply going around the Minutemen's lines.

"They are going west of Naco, but they are still trying," said Bertha de la Rosa, a coordinator with Grupo Beta.

But in a way, Gilchrist is right: the Minuteman Project has been a success. Not for actually doing anything substantive about immigration. Rather, it's been eminently successful in mainstreaming and legitimizing extremist vigilantism.

After all, they've even gotten a United States Senator ready to give them official imprimatur. Sen. Wayne Allard, a Colorado Republican, came up with the idea yesterday:

A Republican senator said Wednesday the government should consider deputizing private citizens, like the Minuteman Patrol in Arizona, to help secure U.S. borders.

Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., said the U.S. Border Patrol also should look to local law enforcement and state officials for help along the most porous parts of the U.S.-Mexico line.

"I wonder sometimes if maybe we're not looking too much to a federal solution," Allard told Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing.

"I happen to believe that those people down along the border that formed the Minutemen organization have some real concerns," Allard said.

Sure, if you consider the imminent "minority status" of the white race to be a "real concern."

The mainstream conservative pundit corps -- particularly Sean Hannity and Michelle Malkin, not to mention Lou Dobbs of CNN -- have been adamant that the Minutemen haven't a racist bone in their bodies, and insist that they're just a gigantic "neighborhood watch."

The Minuteman organizers have assiduously promoted this line as well, insisting that the volunteers' backgrounds are being thoroughly checked, and that anyone who doesn't meet their standards (which appear mostly to involve criminal backgrounds) is not being accepted. What they're not telling you, of course, is that the Aryan Nations types and similar assorted extremists who've attached themselves to the Project hung around the scene anyway, setting up their own camp spots, and the Project, as I reported earlier, had no way of controlling them.

And it doesn't appear that their background checks are exactly weeding out the racists, either. For instance, in the largely sympathetic portrait of the Minutemen that ran recently in the Ventura County Star, we get a description of this fellow:

"Something is going to happen here," said Joe McCutchen, 73, of Fort Smith, Ark. "We are hopeful."

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.

McCutchen, it seems, was a model Minuteman. A piece on the Minutemen for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette featured McCutchen prominently:

Armed with binoculars, a video camera and a.22-caliber pistol, Joe McCutchen manned his post Tuesday, braving 105-degree heat and 50-knot winds to guard a lonely stretch of Arizona desert where Mexicans sneak across the border.

"The desert is mean -- it's brutal," McCutchen said. Besides the elements, there are rattlesnakes.

Nonetheless, the 73-year-old retired Fort Smith pharmacist set out Tuesday afternoon for another unpaid shift monitoring a porous stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border near Tombstone.

And it featured a familiar refrain at the end:

"The president hit the lowest of low blows when he called us 'vigilantes,'" McCutchen said.

But there's just one teensy little problem. As Daryl at One People's Project points out, Joe McCutchen has a long history of involvement with all kinds of white-supremacist organizations, including Jared Taylor's American Renaissance and the Council of Conservative Citizens.

Indeed, I devoted a previous post to McCutchen's activities as a leading example of the way right-wing ideologues play footsy with real extremists.

If Joe McCutchen is a model "Minuteman," it should be interesting to see what happens if Wayne Allard succeeds in federally deputizing him.

Black robes

It begins, it seems, with right-wing extremists threatening judges on the radio for failing to bend the law to their desires. Then you have right-wing fringe transmitters spewing the same kind of hatred of the judiciary on multiple TV appearances, and Oxycon-artist radio hosts ranting out the same lines over the nation's airwaves.

Next thing you know, you have House leaders threatening retribution for judges who refused to jump through their hoops, and Senators warning judges that they might be bringing violence upon themselves for making decisions people don't like. Suddenly, a focused, heavily organized campaign springs into action, poised to combat those evil liberals who pervert the normal American way of life -- the dark, dreaded men in black robes. (And hey, just coincidentally in time, you can buy the book!)

Huh? Where did this come from? This wasn't even an issue in the last election! It all seems like it's coming out of far right field, doesn't it?

Well, duh.

In fact, this very subject -- especially the rhetoric involving "black robed traitors" and "betrayal of our Christian heritage" -- has long been a hoary staple of the extremist right in America. You used to hear this kind of talk all the time at militia meetings ten years ago, and at Aryan Nations congresses ten years before that. Hatred of the judiciary is a centerpiece for the Posse Comitatus, the tax-protester extremists and Identity adherents like the Montana Freemen, and the Bircherite paranoids who have accused the judiciary of harboring Communist subversives since the days of, well, Brown v. Board of Education. Funny, that.

Nowadays, these themes enjoy much more powerful -- and supposedly mainstream -- proponents, as well as their respective audiences. Case in point: this coming Sunday's right-wing hatefest, dubbed "Justice Sunday", though as the New York Times reports, it really is a chance to promote Bill Frist's campaign to portray Democrats as "against people of faith" for opposing Bush's most radical nominees to the federal bench. (See Frederick Clarkson for more.) As the NYT story pointed out:

Some of the nation's most influential evangelical Protestants are participating in the teleconference in Louisville, including Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family; Chuck Colson, the born-again Watergate figure and founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries; and Dr. Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

This kind of lineup offering singularly mainstream support for an all-out ideological attack on the judiciary was reflected in the kickoff event for the anti-judiciary campaign: "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith," a conference organized by a bevy of right-wing figures, notably Phyllis Schlafly.

As Dana Milbank's report on the event for the Washington Post pointed out:

This was no collection of fringe characters. The two-day program listed two House members; aides to two senators; representatives from the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America; conservative activists Alan Keyes and Morton C. Blackwell; the lawyer for Terri Schiavo's parents; Alabama's "Ten Commandments" judge, Roy Moore; and DeLay, who canceled to attend the pope's funeral.

Milbank's story was also noteworthy for pointing out the viciousness of the rhetoric being deployed:

Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, "upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law."

Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem,' " Vieira said.

The full Stalin quote, for those who don't recognize it, is "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." Presumably, Vieira had in mind something less extreme than Stalin did and was not actually advocating violence. But then, these are scary times for the judiciary. An anti-judge furor may help confirm President Bush's judicial nominees, but it also has the potential to turn ugly.

Movement-conservative defenders of the rhetoric (notably Vieira himself) later tried to soft-pedal his remarks, claiming they were intended within the the context of impeachment only. Vieira's exchange with Eric Muller at Is That Legal, I think, laid bare the dishonesty of this defense. As Muller put it:

Mr. Vieira's questioned reference to Stalin in his speech was absolutely not "to the point" that many judges today are acting as communists. Mr. Vieira can call Justice Kennedy a commie all he wants, and nobody is going to care or take notice.

The questioned Stalin reference in Mr. Vieira's speech, which, incidentally, he repeated for added effect, was to Stalin's phrase "No man, no problem." "He [Stalin] had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: no man, no problem." That is what Mr. Vieira said, and that is what people have (rightly) been screaming about.

Max Blumenthal had even richer detail on this gathering, and the naked hatred it festered, in The Nation:

Michael Schwartz must have thought I was just another attendee of the "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" conference. I approached the chief of staff of Oklahoma's GOP Senator Tom Coburn outside the conference in downtown Washington last Thursday afternoon after he spoke there. Before I could introduce myself, he turned to me and another observer with a crooked smile and exclaimed, "I'm a radical! I'm a real extremist. I don't want to impeach judges. I want to impale them!"

For two days, on April 7 and 8, conservative activists and top GOP staffers summoned the raw rage of the Christian right following the Terri Schiavo affair, and likened judges to communists, terrorists and murderers. The remedies they suggested for what they termed "judicial tyranny" ranged from the mass impeachment of judges to their physical elimination.

The threatening tenor of the conference speakers was a calculated tactic. As Gary Cass, the director of Rev. D. James Kennedy's lobbying front, the Center for Reclaiming America, explained, they are arousing the anger of their base in order to harness it politically. The rising tide of threats against judges "is understandable," Cass told me, "but we have to take the opportunity to channel that into a constitutional solution."

Cass's "solution" is the "Constitution Restoration Act," a bill relentlessly promoted during the conference that authorizes Congress to impeach judges who fail to abide by "the standard of good behavior" required by the Constitution. If they refuse to acknowledge "God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government," or rely in any way on international law in their rulings, judges also invite impeachment. In essence, the bill would turn judges' gavels into mere instruments of "The Hammer," Tom DeLay, and Christian-right cadres.

I've discussed the "Constitution Restoration Act" at length previously. As I said then:

Here's the core of the would-be law:

Notwithstanding any other provision of this chapter, the Supreme Court shall not have jurisdiction to review, by appeal, writ of certiorari, or otherwise, any matter to the extent that relief is sought against an element of Federal, State, or local government, or against an officer of Federal, State, or local government (whether or not acting in official personal capacity), by reason of that element's or officer's acknowledgement of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.

In other words, the law would forbid any court to review cases involving the invocation of God in the courtroom, or the placement therein of the Ten Commandments.

But, like a set of Ginsu knives, that's not all! As this piece from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram explains:

That's sweeping enough, but it doesn't stop there. The bill would declare that federal judges interpreting the Constitution may not rely on anything besides "English constitutional and common law."

Judges, even those on the Supreme Court, could not look to other court rulings, administrative rules, executive orders -- and no foreign law, dadgummit -- though the bill says nothing about reliance on divine inspiration.

Any judge who entertains a legal claim based on a public official's "acknowledgement of God" would be committing an impeachable offense.

... Bringing the courts to heel has long been a pipe dream of the religious right, ever since the days of Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade. For years, they have complained that "activist courts" have taken over the law of the land and become too involved in shaping public policy --something, they contend, that is strictly the purview of the Congress. At various times, proposals have been floated to pass laws limiting the courts' jurisdictions (one example that springs to mind was the plan by a right-wing Washington legislator in the early 1990s to give the state Legislature the power to overturn court rulings and place severe limits on the courts' purview). Now, it appears they're driving hard to make it a reality.

The forthcoming campaign is a noteworthy departure from many previous mainstream efforts in that it engages in vicious, demeaning rhetoric that demonizes the judiciary as a conspiratorial brotherhood of black-robed traitors. But in that regard, it has a great deal in common with the anti-judiciary rhetoric of the extremist right.

Talk about "black-robed traitors" or "tyrants" has been, as I mentioned, a staple of various gatherings of the far right for many years, ranging from Aryan Congresses and Posse Comitatus meetings to militia gatherings, common-law courts, and Freemen "training sessions."

A quick sampler of the far right's reading troves shows the theme's pervasiveness. Red Beckman -- a key figure in both the Posse Comitatus and Montana Freemen movements, as well as various "jury nullification" schemes -- once wrote a book titled "The IRS and the Black Robed Cover-Up" that was commonly offered on tables at "Patriot" gatherings.

So was Judicial Tyranny and Your Income Tax by Jeffrey A. Dickstein, Atty., as well as former Republican Rep. Robert Dornan's 1980 conspiracy screed, Judicial Supremacy: The Supreme Court on Trial.

The Freemen went so far as to utterly dismiss the legitimacy of the mainstream court system. As this Ablion Monitor piece on the Sonoma County Freemen explained:

This is the crux of their claims: there are really two judicial systems. Those courtrooms down at the county building are "Admiralty" courts -- or, as Cozio sneers, "monkey courts" presided over by "black-robed terrorists." On the other side are common-law courts, organized by everyday citizens.

The hatred of "men in black robes" likewise shows up among current white-supremacist hate groups. The National Vanguard's "Declaration of White Independence" includes the following observation:

The modern Federal Government has politicized the judicial system by allowing our People to become brainwashed by the Jewish media, and thereby the black-robed tyrants have obstructed the administration of justice; consequently, every Judge renders decisions that dovetail with the agenda of the inner party (i.e., the state within a state, the Jew), and every jury deliberates in sky castles created for them by the Jewish media system of control and indoctrination: this is our land of the free, this is our home of the brave.

Reliably enough, you can find the theme of "black robes" appearing in various "transmitter" media organizations, people who pose as mainstream observers but who take extremist ideas and massage them into presentable messages in the mainstream. A fine example of this was WorldNetDaily's Devy Kidd, who recently opined:

A nation divided will always be conquered which is why the attack on our Christian nation must stop and the only way that will happen is for the churches in this country to find their backbone and we get rid of these black robed judges who hallucinate decisions such as the 1947 Everson v Board of Education.

It is not such a far leap, then -- after numerous reinforcements from the likes of Randall Terry and Bo Gritz -- for the notions of "black robed tyrants" destroying the "culture of life" and "our Christian heritage" to ripple through the national airwaves as seemingly respectable opinion.

This is how the far-right echo chamber works: Ideas and policies bubble up all the time on the right, but those from the far right typically have a history of long-term traction in its meeting halls. Once they have that traction, it seems only a matter of time before a transmitter picks the idea up, massages it, and presents it as "conservative."

The phenomenon, as I've explained previously, has a dual effect: it draws the mainstream farther right steadily, and it legitimizes and empowers within the mainstream people who, not so long ago, were considered extremists.

The whole attack on the courts has a real screeching quality to it. If you filter out all the noise, though, two clear strategies for attacking the fundaments of the nation's judiciary emerge:

-- Eliminate the filibuster in the Senate (the so-called "nuclear option") in the name of forcing Bush's Federalist Society-anointed nominees upon the judiciary.

-- The "Constitution Restoration Act." This latter seems to have little chance of passage in a sane world, and thus should pose no serious threat.

However, I am not so sure we are living in a sane world anymore.

10 years later

And you may ask yourself,
Well, how did I get here?

How did we reach the point, as a nation, where treat the terrorists in our midst as "anomalies" -- despite their long record of wreaking havoc in our own back yards -- while embarking on a global "war on terrorism" that involves invasions and occupations of foreign lands?

How did it come to pass that, on the 10th anniversary of the second-worst act of terrorism on American soil -- the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City -- one of the nation's best-known newsmagazines completely ignores the date and its meaning (that's right; there's not a story in either the April 18 edition of Time or the Ann Coulter edition of April 25), and instead devotes its cover to plumping for a woman who has made light of the bombing?

I think Digby has nailed it just about right:

It has become clear to me that we are frogs being slowly boiled to death. And the media are enjoying the hot tub party so much that they are helping to turn up the heat.

It's become clear that not only the public, but the nation's mainstream media have bought in whole to the Bush approach to the "war on terror," which is nothing less than a political marketing machine. And anyone who questions it risks the wrath of being declared, a la Coulter, a traitor.

This was made clear most recently during the coverage of Eric Rudolph. As Paul McLeary at CJR observed, news reports concerning Rudolph were reluctant to call him what he is: a domestic terrorist.

The whole sorry situation, if nothing else, reveals one of the nation's abiding racial blind spots: We shrug off terrorism when it's committed by white Americans, but we fire up the bombers and declare a "war on terror" when it's committed by brown-skinned foreigners. Pointing this out, of course, is deeply unAmerican.

It's not that Al Qaeda is not a more serious threat: as I've explained in depth, it is. But ignoring the very real threat of homegrown terrorism -- particularly in its potential role as a kind of piggyback terrorism that echoes larger threats, as with the anthrax killer -- prevents us from coming to grips with the asymmetrical nature of terrorism as a global phenomenon.

One of the most thorough of the 10th-anniversary reports on domestic terrorism came from Steve Johnson at MSNBC, which gave a pretty thorough rundown on the current nature of the domestic-terror threat, especially from right-wing extremists. But notably, the report got little play and was quickly buried at the site.

[I was especially pleased with one aspect of the Johnson report: The special popup titled "Threat From Within" is a remnant of the 1999 report I put together for MSNBC that won the National Press Club Award for Online Journalism in 2000. If you click on it, you'll see the data I compiled for 1995-2000, though the recent years are missing quite a few actual incidents. At any rate, this little item had long since disappeared, so I was pleased to see it resurrected again. It's a very handy and enlightening little tool.]

Another solid roundup appeared in a Washington Post report by Lois Romano that covered many of the same bases. I noted especially these remarks from my old friend Ken Toole:

"If Krar had a Middle Eastern name, we would have had the military in there," said Ken Toole, director of the Montana Human Rights Network, which tracks militia and hate groups. "The war on terror continues to focus on the external threats, but do not kid yourself. The hard core is still out there in this country."

... Others argue that the most dangerous times can be during a power vacuum. "You have more marginal people trying to act out and hard-core believers trying to fill the void," Toole said, adding: "Everyone has to understand that they are just regrouping -- a new generation will come in."

I think, considering the increase in hate-group activity and recruitment among young people we've been seeing lately, that the new generation is already coming in, and is making its presence felt.

The Post story also noted something that we noticed awhile back, namely, that priorities are being skewed:

Officials at the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI acknowledge that since the Sept. 11 attacks they have viewed foreign threats as a higher priority than domestic ones. A recent department internal assessment of threats did not list militias, white-supremacist groups and violent antiabortion activists. The assessment, first reported by Congressional Quarterly, did mention radical environmental groups and animal rights activists as potential threats.

Fortunately, some Democrats -- notably Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee -- appear to be wising up:

ALF and ELF "are the left-leaning groups that they identified," said Thompson, the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee. "But they absolutely left out any of the other groups."

"If your responsibility is to protect the homeland from these domestic terrorists, then you have an obligation to identify all of them -- not just some of them," Thompson said.

Sounds like another unAmerican traitor to me. I'm sure Ann Coulter will have a fresh dish of venomous desserts to serve Rep. Thompson soon.

And the talking heads on Hardball will politely applaud and laugh. Isn't she a hoot? Same as it ever was.

The Rudolph manifesto

Probably no news event of the past year has made me as queasy as watching Eric Rudolph "confess" to his crimes as part of his plea agreement. What was especially disturbing was the way Rudolph turned his public confession into a defacto manifesto, justifying his murderous spree and clearly issuing a clarion call to other True Believers to take up his mantle.

For anyone genuinely concerned about domestic terrorism and the havoc it wreaks, Rudolph's smugness in justifying the deaths and injuries he caused was enough to set a lot of jaws on edge:

"I certainly did, your honor," Rudolph told the judge when asked if he detonated the bomb outside the Birmingham clinic in 1998. He was expected to plead guilty to three other bombings in Atlanta later Wednesday, including the blast at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996.

With his admission, a nurse who was nearly killed in the blast began weeping in the front row of the courtroom.

"He just sounded so proud of it. That's what really hurt," said Emily Lyons, who lost an eye in the bombing.

Rudolph, dressed in a red jail uniform, winked toward prosecutors as he entered court and spoke tersely to answer a series of questions from the judge, saying the government could "just barely" prove its case if it went to trial.

He drummed his fingers on the side of a podium as a prosecutor told of the Wal-Mart hose clamp that was found inside the body of the off-duty police officer who died in the blast, then described pieces of a remote control receiver found in Lyons' body.

The performance, and the way it was broadcast without commentary or rebuttal, clearly alarmed abortion providers who recognized that Rudolph was issuing a call to action to the like-minded, as a recent Christian Science Monitor report detailed:

Abortion clinics around the US are "bracing for attacks" after convicted murderer and Olympic bomber Eric Rudolph issued a "manifesto" justifying attacks against such clinics and their workers. Associated Press reports that federal officials from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are calling US clinics to make sure their security is up to date.

'When one of these extremists puts out a call to action, oftentimes others do try to follow in their footsteps,' said Vicki Saporta, head of the National Abortion Federation, which represents 400 US clinics. 'He clearly is speaking to the extremists who believe in justifiable homicide.'

It's not as though they aren't out there, either. Remember that just a year and a half ago, another would-be domestic terrorist, who specifically cited inspiration from Rudolph's example, was arrested before he could mount his planned killing spree.

And then there are all the supporters of abortion-doctor killers like Randall Terry and his minions, who just made a big national splash in the Terri Schiavo debacle. Perhaps the next time Terry is on Fox, one of their fair'n'balanced hosts can ask him about Eric Rudolph.

But then, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised if the new "mainstream" right begins making a John Cornyn-like assessment of Rudolph: Gosh, we don't condone violence, but when those baby killers won't listen to reason and a bunch of black-robed judges won't stop them, then patriotic people like Eric Rudolph are just bound to take matters into their owns hands.

In the meantime, there is a lingering question that still hasn't been settled, and doesn't look like it will be: What about those who helped Rudolph?

Initially, there was some hope that the plea might reveal who assisted Rudolph, though those familiar with the case were skeptical that he would ever "snitch" on anyone still alive. But as the earlier story pointed out:

Investigators also have said it's possible Rudolph, an outdoorsman and former soldier, could have survived alone. But Long doesn't buy it.

"I don't think you could make your way up here without driving. You'd have to drive or have someone drive you. There's no taxis, no MARTA," Long said, referring to the Atlanta rail system. "If there were accomplices, they should be prosecuted."

People around town said they've heard others say they don't think Rudolph did anything wrong. Wade said she never sympathized with Rudolph, but added, "I understand why a lot of people would help him or sympathize with him."

This hope was seconded by another victim:

Both the defense and prosecutors declined comment on exactly what evidence will be revealed during the plea hearings, but the owner of the Alabama clinic that Rudolph bombed hopes his confession leads to the arrest of others she believes may have assisted in the attack.

"Absolutely he had help. There's not a doubt in my mind," said Diane Derzis, whose New Woman All Women Health Care installed security cameras after the attack.

Those hopes were dashed, of course, by what Rudolph actually said. As the CNN story explained:

That said, Rudolph was not cooperating in the "classic sense," said Nahmias. Rudolph has never disclosed who, if anybody, has helped him during his years on the run.

Nahmias said investigators have so far found no evidence that Rudolph had any co-conspirators. Although Rudolph did approach one friend six months after going into hiding, he had apparently surveilled the friend for weeks, Nahmias said.

And when Rudolph was finally caught in May 2003, it was at a dumpster while foraging for food, evidence that he had no helpers, Nahmias said.

Still, as Mark Potok on NPR's Talk of the Nation pointed out, "the statement boils down to an attempt to kind of strip away from himself the uglier parts of his ideology," as well as to disguise the extent of help he may actually have gotten:

I think the probability is that he did not get at least any organized help. I think it is possible that he got perhaps involuntary help. ...

On the other hand, I think it has to be said that at one point Rudolph came out of the mountains, and approached this man George Nordman, who runs an organic-food store there. And Nordman is known to have right-wing views of his own. Now, I'm not accusing him of having illegally aided and abetted Rudolph. But the fact is that Rudolph left Nordman's store with a great deal of food and his truck as well, and Nordman did not report this to federal authorities for three days.

So, you know, it's hard to say. I don't think there's any question that Rudolph was seen by many in western North Carolina as a kind of Butch Cassidy character -- good-looking, you know, kind of a wild man who was defying all the forces of the federal government: planes, helicopters, dogs, infrared heat-detection equipment, and doing it very successfully. So I think he was something of a folk hero.

Moreover, as Potok pointed out, there was much about Rudolph's confession that was simply a kind of cover-up. His claims of non-affiliation with Christian Identity simply don't hold water, especially because of his long membership in Nord Davis' Identity church in North Carolina. These are detailed to a great extent in the book Hunting Eric Rudolph by Henry Schuster and Charles Stone -- a book that Rudolph singled out for attack in a postscript to his confession.

This isn't taking place in a vacuum. Rudolph broadcast his manifesto right at a time when extremism is gaining a real toehold in the upper echelons of mainstream conservatism, and a general environment of nasty intolerance, embodied by relentless attacks on multiculturalism, has descended on the national discourse. So Derrick Jackson's thoughts on Rudolph's legacy and its broader meaning are exactly on the money:

Rudolph will be put away for life. A Los Angeles Times feature this week said his guilty plea marked the continued fall of extreme, antigovernment individuals and paramilitary, right-wing militia groups that stirred controversy at the time of the Oklahoma City bombing. The Times quoted Vincent Coppola, author of Dragons of God: A Journey Through Far-Right America, as saying, "My guess is today we're at the low ebb of a movement that comes and goes." He said Rudolph "is sort of an artifact of another time. That doesn't mean the time won't come again."

Artifact? Another time? Rudolph may be put away for all time because he used deadly violence. But there are still many people doing his bidding. After Massachusetts's highest court legalized gay marriage, 11 states passed amendments to ban gay marriage in last November's elections. President Bush supports a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

On abortion, several states and the Bush administration have added restrictions in American domestic and foreign policy, behind the code language of the "culture of life." As to "global socialism," which can easily be interpreted as the sharing of Americans' wealth in a multi-cultural world, the signs are pretty obvious that Rudolph's spirit is alive and well there, too.

The most inflaming current story is the "Minuteman Project." A right-wing militia of several hundred people is "patrolling" a 23-mile stretch of Arizona's border with Mexico, reporting illegal crossings to US border agents. The head of the minutemen, Vietnam veteran and retired accountant Jim Gilchrist, said in newspaper interviews: "Too many immigrants will divide our country. We are not going to have a civil war now, but we could."

Like many paranoid groups trying to ignore minor details -- such as that Gilchrist could not buy produce so cheaply at his local supermarket without illegal immigrants picking his broccoli or that construction costs in the Sun Belt would be far higher without illegal labor -- Gilchrist turns imagery on its head. Despite the fact that many of them carry guns and knives, he called his minutemen "a bunch of predominately white Martin Luther Kings."

They would all disavow Rudolph, of course, but it sounds like the minutemen share Rudolph's basic premise about the "dangers" of global socialism when Gilchrist says, "We are becoming a country run by mob rule," The Minuteman Project's website disavows any assistance from "separatists, racists, or supremacy groups." But the current headline on the Aryan Nation's white supremacy website is, "Minuteman Project: A call for action on part of ALL ARYAN SOLDIERS."

The next headline is, "Mexican Invasion." The third headline is, "Mexican army escorts border drug runners."

As Faulkner said: "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." We may like to think we've reached some kind of closure with Rudolph's guilty plea, but it has all the look of yet another beginning.