Since so much of their extremist worldview hinges on the idea that
the county sheriff is the highest authority in the land, the
“constitutionalists” who seized the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Ore., last week have been extremely vocal about their displeasure with Sheriff David Ward of Harney County.
Ward, they say, has failed in his “constitutional duty”
to defend ranchers in his county against the federal government. It’s
widely believed the sheriff is one of the chief targets of the “citizens grand jury” the Ammon Bundy-led invaders plan to convene soon.
Sheriff Glenn Palmer of Grant County, Oregon
So the militiamen recently turned to a sheriff they believed to be
more sympathetic to their cause: Glenn Palmer, the sheriff of Grant
County, which is adjacent to Harney County directly to the north.
According to Palmer,
the men showed up in the town of John Day and arranged a meeting at a
local restaurant. In the end, they failed to get what they came for
–– Palmer’s assistance.
“I had no idea who I was meeting with when we had lunch yesterday,”
he said. “I walked in, I realized who they were and I sat and listened
to them. ... They actually wanted me to come down there and make a
stand, and I said, ‘not without the sheriff’s blessing.’”
The men had reason to believe that Palmer would be sympathetic to
their cause. Palmer calls himself a “constitutional sheriff” and is not
only a member in good standing of the far-right Constitutional Sheriffs
and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), but was named that organization’s “lawman of the year” in 2012. He also traveled to Washington, D.C., in 2014 to participate in a CSPOA-led meeting with two U.S. senators about immigration.
Palmer’s claim to fame among their ranks lies in his feud
with the U.S. Forest Service over policing powers in Grant County.
Palmer told USFS officials that their rangers only had jurisdiction in
the federal building in John Day.
And while the sheriff was unwilling to go to Harney County to help bolster the Bundys’ cause, Palmer told the East Oregonian
that while he has “a pretty good working relationship” with the
neighboring sheriff, he was also unwilling to go to Burns to support
Sheriff Ward.
“About the only thing (Ward) really told me is I’m welcome to come
down there if I would shame and humiliate them into giving up and I
said, ‘No, I won’t do that,”’ Palmer said. “I’m not in the business of
denouncing or shaming or humiliating anybody.”
Palmer described the participants in the takeover as “patriots,” and
generally spoke of the occupation in glowing terms: “I think it’s
brought some things to light that might not have otherwise got the
attention that they did. … I do believe that the resolution and solution
to the way this is going to be handled, if it’s handled properly, could
have a long-lasting effect on our county as well.”
He was also clear in his view that such an outcome would require the government to make concessions.
“I believe the government is going to have to concede to something,”
he said. “I don’t think these guys are going to give up without knowing
that they’ve done something that benefits the people of our country or
our region.”
CSPOA president Richard Mack, who participated in the rally
in Burns supporting two local ranchers whose imminent imprisonment
served as the Bundys’ excuse for the takeover later that day, initially backed away from the protest, saying the “CSPOA does not support or condone the occupation.”
But in a video released earlier this week, Mack told right-wing interviewer Joshua Cook
that while he disagreed with the takeover tactically, he fully
supported the ideology behind it, explaining that it was a logical
response to federal “tyranny.”
“The media that wants to label Ammon Bundy as a nut and extremist,
that is a lie,” he said. "I don’t agree with what Ammon’s doing, I’ve
told Ammon so. But Ammon Bundy is a friend of mine; he is a good man, he
is a good person. Anybody who knows him, they’ll tell you the same.”
Mack not only excoriated David Ward in the interview – saying “the
sheriff of Harney County should have stopped this”– he called for
sheriffs around the country to begin arresting federal officials, who he
claimed were just as guilty of arson: “Every sheriff now, in this
country, needs to start filing charges against federal officials who do
the same thing, and charge those people with domestic terrorism and
arson and put them in prison, just as they did the Hammonds.”
For his part, Ward has been clear and outspoken about the
antigovernment militiamen who have invaded his county, telling them
repeatedly that they need to pack up and “go home.”
Ward recently excoriated the Bundy group and other militiamen for the
reports of intimidating and threatening behavior that have beset
residents of Burns since even before the standoff got under way. According to Ward,
some federal employees have been harassed in town while grocery
shopping or running errands, while others have reported vehicles
following them and parking outside their homes.
"The people on the refuge – and those who they have called to our
community – obviously have no consideration for the wishes or needs of
the people of Harney County," Ward said. "If they did, they, too, would
work to bring this situation to a peaceful close."
Ward, who has weathered death threats from the militiamen’s supporters, has received the official support of the Western States Sheriffs Association, which noted in its press release
that “the WSSA does not support efforts of any individual or groups who
utilize intimidation, threats or fear in order to further an agenda.”
He also has broad support in Harney County, where local crowds gathered to discuss the standoff have made overwhelmingly clear their support
for his tough approach to the militiamen. “This county is a united
family and we don’t need people to come here from someplace else and
tell us how to live our lives,” Ward told one community gathering. They
gave him a standing ovation.
The internal dissent over the invasion of the Malheur National
Wildlife Refuge by Ammon and Ryan Bundy and a group of out-of-state
militiamen has, in fact, been very public. Indeed, the majority of
“Patriot” and “constitutionalist” organizers have adamantly denounced
the takeover and pleaded with the Bundy brothers to back off.
For their part, the Bundys and their militia cohort have been
defiant, insisting that the cause of the Hammond family – the ranchers
whose arson convictions provided the centerpiece of the original protest last Saturday that led to the takeover – is worth “taking a stand” over.
But other “Patriots” who participated in the Saturday protest
disavowed the takeover, notably the leadership of the contingent of
militiamen from the “III Percent of Idaho” organization who had traveled
from Boise to participate.
“The 3% of Idaho, 3% of Oregon, The Oregon Constitutional Guard, and
PPN organizations in no way condone nor support these actions,”
announced a press release.
“They do not mirror our vision, mission statement, or views in regards
to upholding the Constitution, The Rule of Law, or Due Process.”
Similarly, “constitutionalist” Sheriff Richard Mack – who was present at the Saturday rally as well – issued a statement denouncing the action:
“CSPOA does not support or condone the occupation by those individuals
who have taken over the Federal Wildlife building just outside Burns,
OR. With all our hearts we appeal to all those occupying the federal
facility to immediately vacate the building and to go home to their
families!”
Likewise, Stewart Rhodes, president of the Oath Keepers, the
antigovernment group that was a major participant in the Bundy Ranch
standoff in 2014, backed away from any involvement in the takeover.
“By doing this, they have given Obama the best New Years present he
could hope for – an example of militia movement/patriot aggression,
which gives up the high ground while also having the least credibility
and support from the locals possible, after lying to them, and also the
least support from the patriot community, who were also blind-sided by
Ammon and Ryan Payne,” read a statement issued by Rhodes.
Conspiracist radio host Alex Jones took that speculation to the next level,
claiming on his daily show that the Oregon standoff was actually the
work of agents provocateur who had supposedly swindled the Bundys into
taking this course of action.
“Guaranteed provocateurs are showing up and other things are
happening, the whole Soros group is saying, ‘Here are our white
terrorists, here are our cowboy-hat wearing terrorists,’ it gives them
the backdrop they need, they want to start a civil war,” he told his
national audience.
He went on: “Ladies and gentlemen, don’t let Obama be successful when
it comes to starting civil unrest and riots in this country. They will
use that as a civil emergency to bring in a type of soft martial law.”
Mike Vanderboegh, the national cofounder of the “III Percent” movement, was equally conspiratorial and vociferous at his blog:
“My initial reaction was to observe that at least afterward we’ll know
who the federal snitches are because they will be the only ones who
survive the raid to take back the building,” he wrote.
“There is nothing on the talking heads channels as yet, but by
Monday, when Obama meets with his Attorney General on the subject of
citizen disarmament, you can bet the farm that this will play right into
that narrative. Perfect timing. You’ve got to give the federal handlers
of these pukes credit. This is precisely the sort of offensive action
on the part of the ‘militia terrorists’ that they needed.”
Ammon Bundy and the militiamen accompanying him have been defiant.
One of the militia leaders, Jon Ritzheimer of Phoenix – who has been
previously involved in organizing armed anti-Muslim events at mosques around the nation – filmed a much-mocked video of himself bidding farewell to his family, which included some shots at Rhodes and the Oath Keepers.
“I am 100 percent willing to lay my life down to fight against
tyranny in this country,” a teary-eyed Ritzheimer declared. Then he
launched into a rant against what he called a “smear” campaign against
the Hammonds, saying it wasn’t true that they wanted to turn themselves
in, because they were being coerced.
He named the perpetrator: “Stewart Rhodes, the founder of Oath
Keepers, saying, ‘Well, they want to turn themselves in, so it’s, they
have their right to turn themselves in.’ By your logic, I guess we
shouldn’t offer any help to these veterans who want to commit suicide.
Just let them suck-start their 9-mil, because it’s their right.”
Ammon Bundy also issued a videotaped response to Rhodes and other critics, claiming that he had been called by God to stand up on behalf of the Hammonds:
“I have respect for Stewart Rhodes,” Bundy said. “But he does not
understand what is truly transpiring, or he has chosen to be in
opposition.”
Bundy went on to explain that he had come to envision the plan to
take over the wildlife refuge because God led him there. “And so I am
asking you to come to Harney County – to make the decision right now, of
whether this is a righteous cause or not, whether I am some crazy
person – or whether the Lord truly works through individuals to get his
purposes accomplished.
“I know that we are to stand now, and that we are to do these things
now, or we will not have anything to pass on to our children.”
So far, things haven’t devolved that far in Burns. However, no one
has spread rumors (as they did at Bundy Ranch) of an imminent drone
attack over their encampment, either – though Rhodes’ Oath Keepers website
did post a warning that “military special op assets have been assigned
for the standoff,” along with the advice to “keep women and children out
of there.”
President Obama is a secret Muslim conspiring to destroy the United States and is using the Justice Department to squelch anti-Muslim speech.
Liberals are covertly working with radical Islamists to transform the
country into a radical socialist state while Muslims are pouring over
our borders. Hillary Clinton is not only a liar and criminal, she is
likely blackmailing the FBI director and other authorities to keep out
of prison.
All these theories and many more were featured Monday at the Nevada version of the Center for Security Policy’s “National Security Action Summit”
at the International Peace Education Center in Las Vegas, a meeting
hall owned by the Unification Church. It was everything its chief
organizer, noted anti-Muslim extremist Frank Gaffney, could have hoped for.
Gaffney’s CSP has been riding high on the tidal wave of Islamophobia
he and similar anti-Muslim organizations have created, with the help of
right-wing political candidates who have legitimized their dubious and
often outrageous claims. CSP made headlines this past week when Donald
Trump, the leading Republican presidential candidate, cited dubious statistics generated by Gaffney’s group in defending his proposal for a ban on all immigration by Muslims into the United States.
Indeed, Monday’s gathering was timed and located to coincide with
Tuesday’s GOP presidential debate at the Las Vegas Hilton, the better to
attract the participation of the candidates. Gaffney’s hopes were
largely realized: Four candidates participated in the gathering, three
of them (Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, and Ben Carson) via videotaped
messages, and one – Rick Santorum – in person. The procession
underscored the extent to which CSP’s extremism has been embraced by
ostensibly mainstream conservatives.
That extremism was on full, if not constant, display Monday. By the
end of the eight-hour conference, attendees had been treated to a
nonstop cavalcade of extremism and conspiracy.
Leading off the parade was a retired Navy admiral, James “Ace” Lyons,
who claimed that not only had President Obama “embraced” the Muslim
Brotherhood, but that its radical Islamists had infiltrated the nation’s
security agencies and the administration itself (a claim he has made previously).
Lyons frequently seized the microphone to ramble about various topics,
including gays in the military and women in combat, even at the end of
other speakers’ appearances during question-and-answer sessions.
His official speech was mostly an extended rant about Obama’s supposed Muslim affinities:
You understand that we have not
only a constitutional crisis, because our Congressional leadership
fails to understand why they were given that leadership role. It was to
stop the fundamental transformation of America – not to facilitate it.
But it was [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan, the
prime minister of Turkey, who said it best: “Islam is Islam. There are
no modifiers. Democracy is the train we ride to our ultimate objective,
which is imposing Sharia law throughout the world, and replacing our
Constitution with Sharia law.” [Note: While Erdogan did say
“There is no moderate or immoderate Islam -- Islam is Islam and that's
it,” the remark was widely interpreted as arguing against the legitimacy
of radical Islamists. Erdogan also is credited, somewhat dubiously,
with saying that “Democracy is the train we get off once we reach our
destination,” he has never said anything regarding the imposition of
Sharia law.] What else needs to be said? So here we go.
I’ve gotta say: We cannot let this stand. We have to take up and
challenge everything by this administration.
… You know, for those of you who say the
Obama administration has no policy, well let me tell you, you’re all
wrong. They have a policy, and they’ve been executing it brilliantly –
with the complicity of our Congressional leadership, and the mainstream
media. And let me tell you – any thinking American can grasp it. It’s
anti-American, anti-Western, but pro-Islam, pro-Iranian and pro-Muslim
Brotherhood.
I have to ask you: Why would an American
president embrace the Muslim Brotherhood when their creed is to destroy
America from within by our own miserable hands and replace our
constitution with Sharia law? It makes absolutely no sense.
And here is a group that has been able to
penetrate all our national-security agencies, our intelligence agencies,
and have had a massive impact on our rules of engagement, our foreign
policy. This has got to stop.
Lyons also turned his venom toward Clinton, calling her “the
pathological liar” and castigating her for her role in the so-called
Benghazi scandal, which Republicans and right-wing media generated by
claiming that Clinton had ordered American forces to “stand down” rather
than rescue the American ambassador to Libya who was killed in the
incident. Lyons claimed that “we switched sides in the war on terror, we
facilitated the Al Qaeda militia and the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Lyons also claimed that administration officials had committed crimes by lying to Congress:
“What more do you need? All of our senior leadership –
[CIA directors Leon Panetta, David Petraeus, and Michael Hayden, as well
as Gen. Martin Dempsey, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] – all lied
before a congressional committee. They must be held responsible. Those
are felonies. You go to jail for 15 years.”
Lyons was followed by Mark Krikorian of the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies, which specializes in manufacturing dubious statistics and pseudo-academic “studies” purporting to support various smear-driven claims against immigrants, and which has a history of dalliances with white nationalists.
Krikorian, whose remarks were delivered via videotape, focused on
Trump’s proposed Muslim immigration, which he dismissed as a “crude,
sledgehammer approach.” However, he also defended its legitimacy, saying
the matter was “not a constitutional issue” since “there is no right
for foreigners to come to the United States.”
He went on to explain his own proposal for dealing with Muslim immigrants:
This is purely a question of
‘is it good policy to simply keep all Muslims out of the United States,
or not?' The way it’s formulated by Mr. Trump is not good policy,
certainly not in my opinion. Because the issue is not keeping out anyone
who identifies as a Muslim, or is identified as a Muslim. Rather, the
issue is to keep out people who adhere to the political aspects of
Islam. If someone prays five times a day and fasts during Ramadan,
that’s none of anybody’s business. But, someone who supports killing
homosexuals, killing adulterers, using the law to punish blasphemers,
that sort of thing – the Sharia aspect of Islam, rather than the
strictly religious parts of it. That, we can and should exclude people
for.
And there are a number of ways we can do
it. The simplest, first thing to do is to use ideological exclusion –
that’s a provision, a concept that’s been in the law, or was in the law
for a long time, that a person who wasn’t actually a member of a
totalitarian party, isn’t actually a terrorist or using violence but
still expresses support for essentially overthrowing the Constitution or
replacing the Constitution can be kept out, should be kept out.
We changed the law after the Cold War,
thinking history had ended. We need to reinstitute that idea so that on
visa applications and what have you, we ask some very basic,
lowest-common-denominator types of questions: Do you support freedom of
speech for people, even if it insults religious sensibilities? Do you
support freedom of religion, or changing religions? And you know, some
people will lie, but we will be setting a marker, you know – these are
things that are not permitted, that Islamic supremacism has no place in
the American constitutional order or American society.
Krikorian is referring to laws passed in the 1950s during the height of anti-Communist hysteria, notably the 1950 Internal Security Act (which excluded communists, totalitarians, and fascists from immigrating) and the 1952 Walter-McCarran Act,
which further codified those exclusions. Those exclusions were largely
overturned in the Immigration Act of 1990, which limited the exclusion
of aliens to those whose "entry or proposed activities within the United
States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy
consequences."
However, the kind of exclusion that Krikorian favors is actually present in current immigration law,
which requires that applicants be "attached to the principles of the
Constitution of the United States, and well disposed to the good order
and happiness of the same.” There also remain several ideological bars,
including “advocates of assassination, government overthrow by force,
destruction of property, and sabotage.”
Krikorian’s comparatively reasonable remarks shortly gave way to a
presentation by James Simpson, introduced by Gaffney as an
“investigative journalist” and the author of The Red-Green Axis: Refugees, Immigration, and the Agenda to Erase America, a book available for free online at CSP’s website. Simpson has previously promoted similar conspiracy theories, including one claiming that communists were behind major Latino-rights organizations.
Simpson’s latest bête noire is the U.S.’s
refugee-resettlement program, which he claimed is providing “extreme
leftists” all the pretext they need to “fundamentally transform
America.” According to Gaffney, Simpson travels the country providing
training sessions for anti-Muslim activists in communities dealing with
an influx of refugees under these programs, which are all overseen by a
nefarious United Nations and its cabal of conspirators who want to
“erase America.”
He opened his presentation by claiming a quote from a supposed 1960s
left-wing radical (actually sourced as an unnamed “SDS radical”
ostensibly quoted by right-wing pundit David Horowitz) that he claimed showed their true nature: “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”
What he meant was that issues
for them – and it doesn’t matter. You can pick immigration, gay rights,
welfare, civil rights, it doesn’t matter. The issue for them is only
relevant insofar as it can be used as a vehicle to advance them into
positions of power so that they can move forward with the fundamental
transformation of this country into a leftist – God knows what. Yes,
thank you – socialism.
… This is what we are up against. And the
resettlement immigration open-borders agenda is a perfect vehicle for
the Left to complete its agenda. And let’s just be clear about it. This
is not a new agenda. It’s been going on since the dawn of time. These
are simply unscrupulous people, corrupt people who are willing to use
any and every tactic to insinuate themselves into positions of power.
That’s all it is.
Socialism puts a pretty face on it – ‘We’re
here to help the little guy.’ No we’re not. We’re here to insinuate
ourselves into power, suck all resources into the federal government, so
we can redistribute to our friends and people who are gonna support us.
That’s what it’s about.
The resettlement immigration issue is
perfect for that. We’re all seeing it. It dilutes American culture by
bringing in people from all over the world of disparate cultures who
have no understanding of our Constitution, no understanding of the rule
of law, no interest in any of that, but only what American society can
provide in benefits to them.
They will not support the notion of a
constitutional Republican government. That is what is critical and
essential, that’s what has made us special, that’s what’s made us the
most prosperous nation in the world, and that’s what the Left wants to
destroy, because it’s standing in the way.
Simpson explained that the United Nations is the center of this
leftist conspiracy, working in cahoots with Islamist radicals to allow
in more extremists. Their main vehicle, he claimed, is refugee
resettlement.
As evidence of the danger, he claimed that “at least two Paris
attackers entered as refugees” (in reality, the only supposed refugee
passports found near the bodies carried of two of the ISIS terrorists
who killed 140 people in Paris in mid-November are now considered fakes).
And he touted the growing “pockets of resistance” in communities, particularly smaller rural towns such as Twin Falls, Idaho, and Duncan, S.C., where there is growing resistance (some of it led by extremist militiamen) to the possibility that refugees from Syria might be relocated in their midst.
Simpson claimed that these communities face demonization at the hands of “leftist” organizations such as the SPLC:
The resettlement agencies and
their various supporters actually went forward and created this campaign
designed specifically to oppose these pockets of resistance. And it’s
an organized nationwide campaign of vilification. Guess what? Can you
just fill in the blanks? What is anybody who opposes the out-of-control,
insane refugee resettlement program? You wanna fill in the blank?
“Racist! Bigot! Xenophobe! You’re all bad people!”
And it’s an organized effort using the
Southern Poverty Law Center and other organizations funded by George
Soros and other radical leftist organizations. They’re trying to change
the culture by changing the narrative. And it’s a massive, massive
operation.
But people are fighting back all over the
country. And we call ourselves pockets of resistance. That’s what we’re
doing. We’re resisting them.
Simpson was shortly followed by a video presentation from right-wing
stalwart Phyllis Schlafly, who has made a career out of leading a number
of arch-conservative political battles, beginning with women’s rights
and continuing with battles over gay rights and education. But it was
immigration and refugee resettlement that were her main focus Monday.
She opened with praise for Gaffney and the CPS:
The American people need
someone to alert them to the dangers to our sovereignty. … Illegal
immigration is a tremendous attack on our sovereignty. Because the
people coming in don’t necessarily want to be Americans, they don’t want
to speak English, they don’t want to adopt our ways. They want to help
Obama engage in his transformation of the United States of America. But
we think we have a perfectly wonderful country, and we want to make it
great again.
Obama seems to want to bring into our
country anybody who shows up at the border, but we need to be careful
about who we let into our country. We want people to come who love us,
who want to be Americans.
A few months ago, I wrote about the Syrian
immigrants, and they are a real danger. And it’s not only the people who
might be vetted – and I don’t think they are vetted when they come in –
but even if they were, we find that the next generation of people can
be easily radicalized. And they are a danger right in the midst of our
country.
Just before lunch, Gaffney introduced Connie Foust, the
self-proclaimed “Border Granny” who has made a career as a nativist
border watcher based in Arizona.
Foust had a long and colorful career, beginning in 2005, as one of
the leaders of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, where, as she
described for the audience she eventually became “national border
operations director for Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas.”
The MCDC, however, has been defunct since 2010, and its onetime leader, Chris Simcox, is currently awaiting trial in Phoenix
on two counts of child molestation. Nowadays, as Foust explained, she
is primarily involved with another Arizona border-watch operation called
Project Bluelight.
Project Bluelight is run by a resident of Arizona’s Altar Valley,
south of Tuscon in the desert borderlands, named Joe Adams. Adams is
something of a shadowy figure himself, with a background as a CIA
operative and drug smuggler. He was indicted in 1988 for violations of
the Neutrality Act as a result of his work helping to fund (often
through drug smuggling) and organize the right-wing Contra death squads
in Nicaragua in the 1980s, and he later became a private investigator
with ties to the Jimmy Hoffa family.
He told a reporter he was naturally attracted to the Minutemen and
first joined Chris Simcox’s Minuteman Civil Defense Corps in 2006, but
he then left (saying MCDC was “a bunch of people who want to do a good
job but don’t know what they’re doing”) to eventually form his own
offshoot, which he called Project Bluelight, suggesting that it operates
with the tacit cooperation of law enforcement (“blue light” being law
enforcement lingo for proceeding with the blessing of police).
Adams also had a yearlong, frequently contentious association with
onetime Minuteman border-watch leader Shawna Forde, whom he met when she
showed up to promote her own border-watch outfit at a Bluelight
border-watch operation. Forde was later charged and convicted
in the murders of an Arivaca, Arizona, marijuana smuggler and his
nine-year-old daughter in their home in the early morning hours of May
30, 2009, and now sits on Arizona’s Death Row. Adams sent Forde an email
breaking off their association the same day the murders took place.
During her speech, Foust described Project Bluelight as “some pretty
cool guys” and added: “These are American patriots like no other.” Then
she went on to claim that the border watchers had “assisted over the
course of these years the Department of Homeland Security, ICE and
Border Patrol in the apprehension of 10,000 persons plus. They have
seized over 200 loads of narcotics, they have rescued over 100 persons
in distress.”
“We have no interest in the worker coming over for a better life. We
have an interest in securing our border so we can all have life.”
She then went on to describe in detail how she and other border
watchers had observed Muslims coming over the border with “full beards”
and “prayer rugs,” and claimed she had the video to prove it.
The extremism and conspiracism reached a real fever pitch, however,
when right-wing pundit Wayne Allyn Root – who nowadays styles himself as
“the poor man’s Donald Trump” – took to the stage.
Root covered a range of topics. He opened up by ranting against
Obamacare, claiming that President Obama nakedly lied in his claims
while selling it to the American public. “Now, if I do that, I’m in
prison for life like Bernie Madoff,” he said. “It’s called fraud.
Someone needs to hold them accountable. Someone needs to put people in
jail.”
He called Obama the “worst gambler, degenerate gambler in history”
because he is someone who “makes bets he cannot win” and he is “betting
with your money and your children’s lives.”
Root also joined in castigating plans to bring in Syrian refugees,
and also claimed that he had eyewitness accounts of Muslims coming over
the Mexico border.
“No one gives a damn in the media, they don’t care,” he said.
Because their agenda is helping Obama, supporting Obama,
defending Obama, championing Obama, and soon it will be helping,
championing, and supporting Hillary Clinton, even though we all know in
this room that if it was a Republican guilty of everything Hillary’s
guilty of, he’d be in prison for the next 20 years. Everyone knows
that."
The crimes that Hillary Clinton has committed, no Republican on Earth
could get away with – and I’m not talking about Benghazi, I’m not
talking about the emails, I’m not talking about the secret surveillance
emails.
All I’m talking about is: Can you imagine a Republican Secretary of
State working for a Republican president starting a foundation for
charity that collects money from foreign governments by the hundreds of
millions and billions and then takes the money and hands out government
contracts to the same country that made the contribution from the State
Department? That’s not a criminal offense, that’s a hanging, treasonous
offense.
During the question-and-answer session, a member of the audience
asked Root “when we are going to nail Hillary. Is she gonna go to jail?”
Root replied that he wasn’t sure: “I don’t know if Comey, the FBI
director, is totally on the straight-and-narrow.”
“I believe we’ve got massive blackmail going on in the United States
government,” he said. “The NSA, the IRS, their goal is to find out
everything about Republicans — not everybody. Republicans.”
“They want to know everything about us, especially Republican
politicians in Washington, D.C., and then they blackmail them,” he
explained. “Is Comey susceptible to that? I have no idea, but I
certainly have my suspicions about the Supreme Court justice of the
United States voting twice for Obamacare.”
The day wrapped up with a series of appearances from GOP presidential
candidates, who themselves managed to pile on with more extremism.
That was especially the case with Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, whose
15-minute video message ran earlier in the day. Cruz also had praise for
Gaffney, who he described as a “patriot” who “has been attacked over
and over again for having the courage to stand up and speak the name
‘radical Islamic terrorism’ of the enemy that is waging jihad against
us.”
He then went on to claim that President Obama was using the
Department of Justice to “attack the First Amendment” by threatening
anyone critical of Muslims with prosecution:
It raises the specter that Americans will be labeled as
bigots if they dare utter the word “Islam” in connection with a
terrorist attack. Our president refuses to do so – in fact, he spent a
significant portion of his Sunday address as an apologist for Islam.
… And the Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, told a gathering the day
after the attacks in San Bernardino, that her department would move to
prosecute anyone whose, quote, “anti-Muslim rhetoric edged toward
violence.” As has been the case all too often in the Obama
administration, we may be facing the weaponization of one of our own
government agencies, deployed not to protect Americans, but to try to
force them to submit to the Obama administration’s code of what is and
is not acceptable speech.
The day's events ended with the Senator Rick Santorum and the
videotaped messages from fellow GOP candidates Carly Fiorina and Ben
Carson, giving Gaffney and the CSP exactly what they wanted: a stamp of approval from mainstream political leaders of all the conspiracy and extremism that came before it.
Last week, a number of
Republican presidential candidates – including Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina,
and Rick Santorum – devoted time to criticizing fellow candidate Donald
Trump for his proposal to ban all Muslim immigration into the United
States.
The “National Security Action Summit” in Las Vegas was primarily
devoted to exploring all the possible dark corners of the possibility of
a terrorist attack committed by Muslim immigrants, a constant theme of
the Center for Security Policy, the extremist anti-Muslim group run by Frank Gaffney.
This included discussions of the possibility that President Obama is
secretly a Muslim, the fear that refugees from Syria will include large
numbers of embedded terrorists and the notion that American communists
and liberals are conspiring with Muslim radicals to end democracy in the
United States. One speaker even claimed that Democratic candidate
Hillary Clinton is blackmailing people in Washington, including the
current director of the FBI, just to stay out of prison.
But the highlight of the conference was undoubtedly the guest
appearances by four presidential candidates – Cruz, Fiorina, Santorum
and Ben Carson. Santorum appeared in person, while Cruz, Fiorina and
Carson all sent recorded messages that were played for conference
attendees.
Cruz was especially effusive in his praise for Gaffney, saying he was
“a patriot, he loves this country, and he is clear-eyed about the
incredible threat of radical Islamic terrorism.”
“Frank Gaffney has been attacked over and over again for having the
courage to stand up and speak the name ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ of
the enemy that is waging jihad against us,” Cruz said, claiming that
Obama won’t use the term.
Last week, Cruz addressed Trump’s proposed ban, saying: “I disagree with that proposal. … I believe we need a plan that is focused on the direct threat."
Fiorina’s video appearance was relatively brief. She told the
audience: “I apologize that I can’t be with you today,” and then
launched into harsh criticism of Obama and Clinton, saying their
response to terrorist attacks made her “angry."
“Our most pressing national security threat is radical Islamist
terrorism around the world and here at home, both lone wolves and packs
of wolves. ISIS is an evil that must be confronted, it must be
destroyed. They are at war with us and all we represent. And so we must
wage this war and we must win.”
But last week, Fiorina had told an audience:
“Donald Trump, for example, has been saying we’re going to use a
religious test and ban people from coming into this country. … It’s a
violation of our Constitution, but it also undermines the character of
our nation. We stand for religious liberty.”
Santorum, who had been more temperate in his criticism of Trump,
appeared in person, and never addressed the issue of Muslim immigration.
He devoted most of his remarks to attacking Iran and defending Israel.
At the end of his question-and-answer session, he was asked by a black
woman to compare ISIS to American police who killed black men in
custody, and adamantly insisted that the comparison was invalid.
Gaffney praised Santorum afterward, saying he had “maintained a
perfect record” when it came to attending the “National Security
Summits” the CSP had organized in various locales around the country.
Last week, he said he disagreed with Trump’s proposed blanket ban on
Muslim, but suggested he would favor something similar, focusing the ban
on travel from nations where extremism is rampant.
“I think that there are countries where we should not be bringing in
people. Obviously, we should not be bringing in Muslims from those
countries. I am not worried about radicalized Christians from Yemen, but
I am worried about radicalized Muslims from those countries,” Santorum told a Des Moines audience.
Carson, who declined to criticize Trump’s proposal, also sent in a
video, saying, “I wish I could be there with you. It’s such an important
topic, particularly with the things that happened in France lately. And
obviously, we all need to be thinking about what kind of security can
we have at home.”
He continued: “We must recognize that we are at war. That means we
must throw all this political correctness out the window, because that
does not work when it comes to the safety of the American people. We
have to learn how to prioritize. Safety of the people should always be
right on the top shelf when it comes to our decision making.”
All of the Republican candidates are in Las Vegas today to participate in the final GOP primary debate.
[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]
The murderous rampage by two apparently radicalized Muslims in San Bernardino, Calif., on Dec. 2
has become the latest flashpoint in the massive bonfire of Islamophobia
being whipped up by anti-Muslim extremists and their mainstream
conservative enablers in the United States.
In the week since the massacre of 14 people by Syed Farook and
Tashfeen Malik, Muslims around the country have been confronted with a
wildfire of retaliatory threats, vandalism, and attacks – even as
politicians and pundits have stoked the flames of bigotry higher.
The ugliness began almost immediately after the shootings with a
series of phoned-in and social-media threats, vandalizing attacks on
mosques, and arsons of Muslim businesses, in locations all around the
United States:
In St. Louis, Mo., a man phoned in a threat
to the local offices of the Council on American-Islamic Relations,
vowing to kill any Muslims who dared show up on his property. That man is unlikely to be charged with any crime.
In Manassas, Va., the local mosque was similarly threatened
with a phoned-in threat from a man claiming to be a member of the
extremist Jewish Defense League and vowing that his group “will do to
your people what you did to them.” “We are checking now to see if one
Jew has been shot or killed in California,” he said. “You all will be
sorry. You all will be killed.”
In Philadelphia, Pa., someone in a red pickup truck
rolled up next to a neighborhood mosque and hurled a severed pig’s head
onto the steps of the building. Security cameras caught images of the
perpetrators, but so far, investigators have had no luck tracking them
down. The act was widely denounced, including by Mayor-elect Jim Kenney,
who said: "We cannot allow hate to divide us now, in the face of
unprecedented difficulties. I ask all Philadelphians to join me in
rejecting this despicable act and supporting our Muslim neighbors.”
In Grand Forks, N.D., someone scrawled graffiti featuring a Nazi
symbol and the words “Go home” on the walls of a Somali restaurant owned
by a Muslim family. Two nights later, someone deliberately set an arson fire at the restaurant, causing an estimated $90,000 in damage.
In Twin Falls, Idaho, someone spray-painted boards
that covered the windows of the local Islamic center with the words
“Hunt Camp ?” The graffiti referred to the old Minidoka Relocation
Center in nearby Hunt, the site of the massive Japanese American
internment erected during World War II, apparently suggesting the same
fate for Magic Valley Muslims. Local police were investigating the
matter as a potential hate crime.
Graffiti at the Islamic Center in Twin Falls, ID
There has been a rash of other, mostly petty, ugliness as well: A
sixth-grade Muslim schoolgirl in Brooklyn was attacked at the school –
punched, her headscarf yanked, and called “ISIS” by classmates – but police declined to file a report in the matter. Two Muslim women were verbally assaulted by a fellow patron
at an Austin, Texas, restaurant, and then told that “nobody” cared
about them. A woman in Fort Worth, Texas, reported that an angry woman
confronted her in her car, rolling down her window and shouting at her,
before she spat on her.
The Twin Falls case provides a stark example of how extremist
anti-Muslim rhetoric trickles down to create permission for violence in
local communities. The local refugee resettlement center has in recent
months become the focus of a virulent campaign
stoked by national groups designated as anti-Muslim extremist and hate
groups by the SPLC, even attracting the high-volume participation of
armed militiamen from the antigovernment “III Percent” movement.
The spate of ugliness has wounded the Muslim community: “I think
people are upset, people are humiliated,” observed Marwan Kreidie,
director of the Arab American Development Corp., in an Associated Press
interview following the incident with the pig’s head. “We’ve never had
incidents like that – even after 9/11, we didn’t have anything like
this.
“Unfortunately, some of the rhetoric – especially coming from the
Republican candidates for president – has been atrocious. And words have
consequences.”
Indeed, the GOP presidential field – led by Donald Trump – has already played a substantial role
in whipping the embers of Islamophobia into flames in recent weeks,
aided and abetted by both right-wing and mainstream media. Much of that
focused on whether or not Muslim refugees from Syria should be welcomed,
with Trump announcing that if he were elected, “They’re going back!”
After last Wednesday’s massacre, the issue blew up altogether, with a number of politicians and pundits lining up
to declare that their fears about admitting Muslim refugees had been
proven right. At the same time, the floodgates of ugly behavior toward
Muslims appeared to open wide all across the country.
On Monday, in the wake of the San Bernardino shootings, Trump turned
the issue into a national uproar by declaring that he wanted to see all Muslim immigration into the United States shut off altogether – temporarily, he claimed, “until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on.”
"In a country that is already thick with hateful anti-Muslim
ideologues, Donald Trump may well be the person who has done more than
any other to demonize Muslims and, ultimately, to subject them to
criminal hate violence,” observed Mark Potok, the SPLC’s Intelligence
Report editor. “Words have consequences. Although the hateful comments
of Trump — not to mention those of a number of the other Republican
presidential candidates — are protected by the First Amendment, there is
little doubt that they will ultimately lead to more violence directed
at minorities. What Trump is saying is despicable, un-American and a
shameful moment for our country.”
The Republican candidates’ fearmongering, however, is only the culmination of a long-running campaign by extremist organizations to whip up fears about Muslims. A number of these groups – in particular, Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, whose misinformation was cited by Trump
in his attempts to justify his call for a Muslim immigration ban – have
been claiming for years that all Muslims are extremists in waiting. One
of Gaffney’s acolytes, Ann Corcoran, has played a leading role in the effort to associate the refugee-resettlement programs with the ostensible threat of terrorism.
As a consequence of this rhetoric, hate crimes against Muslims
have skyrocketed in recent years, even at a time when hate crimes
against other minorities are declining. CAIR officials recently expressed concern
about the recent escalation in bias crimes: “We don’t literally have
time to issue a statement on every incident because they’re coming in so
fast and furious,” CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said. “When the
leading Republican presidential candidate can say, ‘Bar all Muslims
coming to America’ and know he can get more support for it — it is truly
frightening.”
In the meantime, Pentagon officials explained Tuesday
that this kind of bigotry was playing directly into the hands of the
terrorists, whose whole intention is to attempt to create bigoted
attacks on Muslims in America and Europe so that those Muslims will have
an incentive to become radicalized.
“Anything that bolsters ISIL’s narrative and pits the United States
against the Muslim faith is certainly not only contrary to our values
but contrary to our national security,” Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook
told a news briefing.
Maybe it was the rain, which came down in buckets all day Sunday in Seattle.
Or maybe it was the massive crowd of over 500 people, a large number
of them black-clad and masked anarchists, waiting to greet them up in
the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.
Or maybe, as the white supremacists who took part in this year’s
“Martyrs [sic] Day” commemoration in western Washington tried to claim
afterward, it was all just a hoax, a massive prank meant to tweak
Seattle liberals.
Whatever the cause, the contingent of neo-Nazi skinheads who boasted
beforehand that “we will be marching through Capitol Hill in Seattle to
show these liberals, anarchists antifa and fags that we are here and
here to stay” after a day of listening to white-power bands, in reality
turned out to be complete no-shows Sunday as far as any kind of public
appearance.
The same could not be said of their opponents, who significantly
outnumbered them in any event. The anti-Nazi protesters blocked traffic
and created a scene in the neighborhood; there were reports of minor
vandalism attributed to the presence of anarchists. The black-clad and
masked young men remained in clusters around the neighborhood well after
the march, waiting for someone to show.
Organizers from the Northwest Hammerskins,
a well-known racist skinhead outfit, had posted on the
white-supremacist website Stormfront their plans for this year’s version
of “Martyrs Day,” held annually on Dec. 6, usually on Whidbey Island, to commemorate the death of Robert Mathews, leader of the neo-Nazi criminal gang The Order,
at the hands of the FBI in 1984. This year, they vowed in the posts,
they planned to hold it in the form of a white-power rock concert in the
Seattle neighborhood of Ballard, followed by a cross burning, and then a
march up to Capitol Hill.
A woman (using the nom de plume “Hardcore Honey”) associated with
Northwest skinheads posted that this year’s event would be “something
you will NOT want to miss!” She also included a poster of the planned
concert.
"Join us Sunday, Dec. 6th in Ballard,WA. We will be meeting up at an undisclosed location in Ballard …
"The event will present five white power bands including Ironwill and
Beer Hall Putsch and a couple others making their NW debuts. Comrades
and crews from across the country will be in attendance and about 300
people are to be expected for a day of comraderie, music, hailing our
heroes and good ol' goosestepping. Food and drinks will also be
provided.
"After the bands and a traditional cross burning we will be marching
through Capitol Hill in Seattle to show these liberals, anarchists
antifa and fags that we are here and here to stay.
"This will be the biggest event in NW history as of yet so let's put
the beautiful Pacific Northwest back on the map and make Robert Mathews
proud!"
That set off a flurry of activity by anti-fascists and socialists in
the region, who organized a large rally Sunday in Capitol Hill intended
to make the neo-Nazis feel unwelcome. By the time darkness had fallen on
Seattle – along with the heavy rains – a crowd estimated at over 500
had collected at Cal Anderson Park, in the heart of the district.
Capitol Hill, as the city’s most prominent gay neighborhood, also has a long and unfortunate history of attracting anti-LGBT hate-crimes from outside the area. The problem dates back to at least 1990, when a group of neo-Nazis from northern Idaho
came to Seattle intent on setting off a series of pipe bombs inside
Neighbours, a popular gay nightclub in the area (those men were arrested
before enacting their plot and wound up serving federal prison time).
Organizers of the rally included Rose City Antifa, a Portland,
Ore.-based antifascist group, who spread the word about the skinheads’
intentions through social media, using the hashtag #DefendSeattle. Soon a
number of socialist and feminist organizations, as well as some
anarchist groups, had joined in, and on Sunday, they made their numbers
known. As the evening darkened and the rain grew heavier, the crowd
headed out from the park and marched down Broadway, the main avenue on
Capitol Hill.
Many carried handmade signs: “Nazis Go Home” and “Skinhead Fascists
Not Welcome Here,” were fairly typical. A big banner read: “Smash White
Supremacy.” Some signs even had a sense of humor: “Thor Hates You,” read
one.
Chanting various anti-Nazi slogans – “Nazis are not welcome here,”
and “Nazis out, refugees in” were favorites – the crowd traveled down
about five city blocks, then circled back around to the park where the
march started, at which time police ordered them to disperse, and they
did.
A news van for KIRO-TV was vandalized by some of the masked young men
– several windows were broken in the van, and it had been tagged with
graffiti. Other graffiti had been left behind: “Fags Against Nazis” read
one tag that had been hastily painted across a stark white building
wall. And some business owners reported having their windows broken as
well.
Lol. Well I hope you nerds enjoyed the hoax
played on you by us idiot boneheads. Our memorial went off with no
problems yesterday. All you revolutionaries managed to do was to
vandalize the city you say you where defending. You've also managed to
expose yourselves and now we have lots of info on people who try
desperately too hide their identities. Places of work, your residents,
and places of leisure may no longer be a safe space. So much for
outsmarting us idiotic boneheads. Playing Che can be a lot of fun, but
it's time to realize that you really are a bunch of white nerds who live
in all white neighborhoods from middle class white families. None of
you are oppressed, unless you count your drug addiction and low iqs
oppression. Funny how you guys where at the SPD earlier before your
rally. Making sure they where there to keep you safe lol. Fight the
system man. Well thanks for the laugh, in solidarity, antifa hahaha.
In reality, the skinheads had indeed held their usual commemoration
on Whidbey Island earlier in the day Sunday, but had in fact
subsequently also gathered at a Seattle-area private residence at which a
few dozen neo-Nazis were treated to a white-power rock show by a couple
of white-power bands, according to information received by the SPLC.
The show ended in the early evening and the participants did not,
apparently, make the trek to Capitol Hill.
[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]
The Republican presidential candidates who spent much of the past
four months roundly demonizing Planned Parenthood were scrambling over
the weekend and beyond, busily trying to distance themselves and their
rhetoric from last week's bloody shooting rampage of a North Carolina transplant in Colorado Springs, Colo., on Friday.
Carly Fiorina – whose attacks on Planned Parenthood in the wake of the release of a series of deceptively edited smear videos purporting to show officials from the organization callously selling “aborted baby parts” were credited with fueling her rise as a candidate among a crowded GOP field – called any linkage of her rhetoric to the shooting just “typical left-wing tactics.”
“This is so typical of the left to immediately begin demonizing a messenger because they don’t agree with the message,” Fiorina told Fox News’ Chris Wallace on Sunday.
Reportedly, the shooter, Robert L. Dear,
a 57-year-old transplant from Asheville, N.C., said to authorities in
interviews after he was captured that the attack was about “no more baby parts,” along with oblique references to President Obama.
Sen. Ted Cruz, who also devoted a lot of campaign airtime to attacking Planned Parenthood – at one point telling a reporter that “I have encouraged every American to watch these videos” – complained to reporters
on Sunday that "the media promptly wants to blame him on the pro-life
movement when at this point there’s very little evidence to indicate
that."
Reminded about Dear’s reported “baby parts” comment, Cruz retorted:
"It’s also been reported that he was registered as an independent and a
woman and a transgendered leftist activist. If that’s what he is, I
don’t think it’s fair to blame on the rhetoric on the left. This is a
murderer.”
He added: “We know that he was a man registered to vote as a woman.” [In reality, this claim – based on a clerical error made by county officials in Colorado – was completely untrue, though it was bandied about widely by right-wing blogs.]
Fiorina and Cruz led the charge against Planned Parenthood by
Republican candidates this summer, based on the smear videos, that
resulted in virtually every candidate calling for abolishing federal
funding for Planned Parenthood. Cruz, in fact, promised to introduce
legislation in the Senate to do just that.
At the Sept. 16 GOP presidential debate, Fiorina attacked the organization viciously:
As regards Planned Parenthood,
anyone who has watched this videotape, I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack
Obama to watch these tapes. Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its
heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it
alive to harvest its brain. This is about the character of our nation,
and if we will not stand up in and force President Obama to veto this
bill, shame on us.
In reality, no such video existed among those released as part of the smear campaign, and Fiorina was never able to produce evidence that it did. Her defenders later released a video purporting to show a fetus being treated as she described, but it shortly emerged that the video was of a miscarriage, at a hospital with no affiliation with Planned Parenthood.
Now, what should we be doing?
Number one, in the course of these videos, it appears both of these
officials are admitting to multiple felonies, both federal felonies and
state and local felonies. If the Department of Justice wasn't a partisan
arm of the DNC, it should open an investigation, prosecute these
individuals and Planned Parenthood as an entity.
Thankfully, there are state and local
attorneys general and DAs that are opening investigations. We need to
prosecute Planned Parenthood, and also we need to cut off every penny of
taxpayer funding. I'm leading the fight in the Senate to do exactly
that and insure that we are not funding people who are buying and
selling body parts of unborn children in violation of federal criminal
law!
Cruz and Fiorina were hardly alone. Most of their fellow candidates joined the dogpile:
Ben Carson told an Iowa radio host that “the whole purpose” of Planned Parenthood is to “eliminate black people.”
Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida told a TV interviewer that Planned
Parenthood was in the business of “pushing people into abortions”: “If
you go to one of these centers young women are provided very few
options. In many places they’re not told anything about, for example,
adoption services that might be available to them. In essence, you come
in, and it’s already predetermined. This is the direction –– this is
what this place does. It provides abortions, and we are going to channel
you in that direction. And I just think you’ve created an industry now
–– the situation where very much you’ve created an incentive not just
for people to look forward to having more abortions, but being able to
sell that fetal tissue for purposes of making profit off of it, as
you’ve seen with some of these Planned Parenthood affiliates.” [This
claim, like many others levied against the women’s health-care provider,
is utterly false, a product of the claims of an extremist fringe group.]
Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky issued a statement: “I am more appalled
than ever by Planned Parenthood's complete disregard for the sanctity of
human life. The recent revelation that this taxpayer-funded
organization is selling body parts of the unborn further proves that
this agency deserves our scorn not our tax dollars.” He also told an interviewer: “I don’t know how they live with themselves.”
Donald Trump told interviewer Hugh Hewitt
that he would be all for Cruz’s proposal to shut down the federal
government in order to force President Obama to sign their plan to
defund Planned Parenthood: “If the Republicans stuck together you could
have done it with Obamacare also, but the Republicans decided not to
stick together and they left a few people out there like Ted Cruz. If
they had stuck together they would have won that battle. I think you
have to in this case [on Planned Parenthood] also, yes.”
The candidates having already set the bar for acceptable
mainstream attacks on Planned Parenthood, the already-extreme rhetoric
turned even more so in the hands of lesser politicians, right-wing
pundits, and far-right evangelical Christians. Rep. Trent Franks,
R-Arizona, warned that if Planned Parenthood was not defunded, America itself would collapse,
since Americans had become so “desensitized” to the “horror” of the
“abortion industry,” to “a degree that I think threatens the survival or
the necessity of the survival of America.
I don’t believe these people
for a moment, do you? In fact, we can discern upon them the spirit of
lying, the spirit of death, the spirit of murder, the spirit of greed. I
mean, whenever I look at a picture of those executives, if you look in
the spirit, at the demons inside of them, you can see the blood dripping from their fangs. These people are just evil.
Planned Parenthood has hunted
down millions and millions of little innocent babies, stuck a knife into
the uterus, cut them, pulled them out, crushed their skull with
forceps, ripped their body apart, sold their tissue, and threw them
bleeding into a trash bin.
I say, tonight, we punish Planned
Parenthood. I think it’s time that abortion doctors should have to run
and hide and be afraid for their life.
The ultimate escalation of that rhetoric into action, apparently, came in Colorado Springs, along with the spate of four arsons over a 74-day span at Planned Parenthood clinics scattered around the nation.
And despite the denials of the candidates regarding the effects of their extreme rhetoric, extremists on the right couldn’t withhold their expressions of glee on social media even after Dear murdered three people and wounded nine others.
“No sympathy for any pregnant female who was injured in the Planned
Parenthood shooting that was there to get an abortion. She deserved it,”
tweeted one “pro-life” advocate.
“Planned Parenthood shooter has done more in one day to save black
babies then #Black Lives Matter has done in last several months,”
tweeted another.
These murderous pigs at Planned
Parenthood are babykillers and they reap what they sow. In this case,
Planned Parenthood selling of aborted baby parts came back to bite them.
The New York Times on Tuesday published a story quoting anonymous sources who told their reporter that Dear had considered groups like Army of God to be “heroes.”
And at the ostensibly mainstream conservative blog sometime CNN
pundit Erick Erickson, he wrote: “Given the public light shed on the
atrocities committed by Planned Parenthood … it really should be
surprising that Americans … have not taken the law into their own
hands.”
In other words, Robert Dear’s act of domestic terrorism did not slow
down the attacks on Planned Parenthood. If anything, it seems to have
taken them to a new level of viciousness.
People who have studied the extremist right as a historical
and sociopolitical phenomenon in depth are acutely aware of a simple truth:
America has been very, very lucky so far when it comes to fascistic political
movements.
And now, with the arrival of the Donald Trump 2016 phenomenon,
that luck may be about to run out.
Nor is this phenomenon just a flash in the pan. Trump is the
logical end result of an endless series of assaults on not just American
liberalism, but on democratic institutions themselves, by the American right
for many years. It is the long-term creep of radicalization of the right come
home to roost.
Fascistic elements and tendencies have always been part of
America’s DNA. Indeed, it can be said that some of the worst traits of fascism
in Europe were borrowed from their American exemplars – particularly the
eliminationist tendencies, manifested first in the form of racial and ethnic
segregation, and ultimately in genocidal violence.
Hitler acknowledged at various times his
admiration for the American genocide against Native Americans, as well as
the segregationist policies of the Jim Crow regime in the South (on which the Nuremberg
Race Lawswere
modeled) and the threat of the lynch mob embodied in the Ku Klux Klan.
According to Ernst
Hanfstaengl, Hitler was “passionately interested in the Ku Klux Klan. ... He
seemed to think it was a political movement similar to his own." And
indeed it was.
Despite the long-running presence of these elements, though,
America has never yet given way to fascism. No doubt some of this, in the past
half-century at least, was primarily fueled by the natural human recoil that
occurred when we got to witness the end result of these tendencies when given
the chance to rule by someone like Hitler – namely, the Holocaust. We learned
to be appalled by racial and ethnic hatred, by segregation and eliminationism,
because we saw the pile of corpses that they produced, and fled in terror.
Those of us who study fascism not just as a historical
phenomenon, but as a living and breathing phenomenon that has always previously
maintained a kind of half-life on the fringes of the American right, have come
to understand that it is both a complex and a simple phenomenon: in one sense,
it resembles a dynamic human psychological pathology in that it’s comprised of
a complex constellation of traits that are interconnected and whose presence
and importance rise and fall according to the stages of development it goes
through; and in another, it can in many ways be boiled down to the raw, almost
feral imposition of the organized violent will of an angry and fear-ridden human
id upon the rest of humankind.
That’s where Donald Trump comes in.
In many ways, Trump’s fascistic-seeming presidential
campaign fills in many of the components of that complex constellation of
traits that comprises real fascism. Perhaps the most significant of these is
the one component that has been utterly missing previously in American forms of
fascism: the charismatic leader around whom the fascist troops can rally, the
one who voices their frustrations and garners followers like flies.
Scholars of fascist politics have remarked previously that
America has been fortunate for most of its history not to have had such a
figure rise out of the ranks of their fascist movements. And in the case of
Donald Trump, that remains true – he has no background or history as a white
supremacist or proto-fascist, nor does he actually express their ideologies.
Rather, what he is doing is mustering the latent fascist
tendencies in American politics – some of it overtly white supremacist, while
the majority of it is the structural racism and white privilege that springs
from the nation’s extensive white-supremacist historical foundations – on his
own behalf. He is merrily leading us down the path towards a fascist state even
without being himself an overt fascist.
The reality that Trump is not a bona fide fascist himself
does not make him any less dangerous. In some ways, it makes him more so,
because it disguises the swastika looming in the shadow of the flamboyant
orange hair. It camouflages the throng of ravening wolves he’s riding in upon.
There is little doubt that Trump is tapping into fascistic
sentiments, which is why so many observers are now beginning to finally use the
word in describing Trump’s campaign. From Rick
Perlstein and Digby
and Chauncey
deVega (as well as a
number of other
writers at Salon) to Thom
Hartmann at AlterNet to the typically staid Seattle Times, “fascism” is the
word more and more people are using in relation to the campaign that Trump is
running. Even some of his
fellow conservatives are beginning to use the word.
And they have a valid point, because Trump fills out so many
of the key components that collectively create genuine fascism. And while it’s
true that, as Josh
Marshall suggests, there really is no single, agreed-upon definition of
fascism, there’s also no doubt that we can grasp the idea of fascism not just
by studying its history, but also by examining the various attempts at
understanding and defining just what comprises fascism. And in doing so, we can
recognize exactly what it is that Trump is doing.
What it’s decidedly not,
no matter what you might have read, is the simple-minded definition you’ll
see in Internet memes attributed to Benito Mussolini: “Fascism should more
appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and
corporate power.” As Chip
Berlet has explained ad nauseam, not only did Mussolini never say or write
such a thing, neither
did the fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile, to whom it is also often attributed.
For one thing, as Berlet explains: “When Mussolini wrote
about corporatism, he was not writing about modern commercial corporations. He
was writing about a form of vertical syndicalist corporatism based on early
guilds.” The Skeptical
Libertarian explains that the term “corporatism” and “corporate” meant an
entirely different thing in 1920s Italy than it means today:
“Corporations” were not individual businesses. Under fascist corporatism,
sectors of the economy were divided into corporate groups, whose activities and
interactions were managed and coordinated by the government. The idea was to
split the difference between socialism and laissez faire capitalism, letting
the state control and direct the economy from the top-down without itself
owning the means of production.
… The bottom line is that corporate
groups meant classes of people in the economy, which were allegedly represented
through appointments to the Council. The system was not about welfare for
private companies, but rather about totalitarian central planning of the whole
economy through legislation and regulation. Corporatism meant formally
“incorporating” divergent interests under the state, which would resolve their
differences through regulatory mechanisms.
Moreover, as Berlet explains, this fake definition of
fascism directly contradicts many of the things that Mussolini himself did in
fact write about the nature of fascism. If he or Gentile ever did actually say
it, it’s likely it was a bit of propaganda intended to ease and mislead
business-minded followers.
Another thing that fascism decidedly is NOT is the grotesque distortion made by
Jonah Goldberg, to wit, that fascism is a kind of socialism and therefore
“properly understood as a phenomenon of the left.” This claim, in fact, is such
a travesty of the idea of fascism that it functionally negates its meaning,
rendering it, as George Orwell might describe it, a form of Newspeak. Indeed,
it was Orwell
himself who wrote that “the idea underlying Fascism is irreconcilably
different from that which underlies Socialism. Socialism aims, ultimately, at a
world-state of free and equal human beings. It takes the equality of human
rights for granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite.”
Fascism, in reality, is a much more complex phenomenon than either of these
definitions. Let’s look, by way of example, at some of the more recent efforts
at defining it:
Stanley Payne, in Fascism:
Comparison and Definition (1980):
A. The Fascist
Negations:
-- Antiliberalism
-- Anticommunism
-- Anticonservatism (though with the understanding that fascist groups were
willing to undertake temporary alliances with groups from any other sector,
most commonly with the right)
B. Ideology and Goals:
-- Creation of a new nationalist authoritarian state based not merely on
traditional principles or models
-- Organization of some new kind of regulated, multiclass, integrated national
economic structure, whether called national corporatist, national socialist, or
national syndicalist
-- The goal of empire or a radical change in the nation’s relationship with
other powers
-- Specific espousal of an idealist, voluntarist creed, normally involving the
attempt to realize a new form of modern, self-determined, secular culture
C. Style and Organization:
-- Emphasis on esthetic structure of meetings, symbols, and political
choreography, stressing romantic and mystical aspects
-- Attempted mass mobilization with militarization of political relationships
and style and with the goal of a mass party militia
-- Positive evaluation and use of, or willingness to use, violence
-- Extreme stress on the masculine principle and male dominance, while
espousing the organic view of society
-- Exaltation of youth above other phases of life, emphasizing the conflict of
generations, at least in effecting the initial political transformation
-- Specific tendency toward an authoritarian, charismatic, personal style of
command, whether or not the command is to some degree initially elective
Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, p. 218:
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive
preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by
compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of
committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration
with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with
redemptive violence and without ethical or legal constraints goals of internal
cleansing and external expansion.
Paxton's nine "mobilizing passions" of fascism:
-- a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional
solutions;
-- the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every
right, whether universal or individual, and the subordination of the individual
to it;
-- the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment which justifies any
action, without legal or moral limits, against the group's enemies, both
internal and external;
-- dread of the group's decline under the corrosive effect of individualistic
liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;
-- the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if
possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;
-- the need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a
national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group's destiny;
-- the superiority of the leader's instincts over abstract and universal
reason;
-- the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to
the group's success;
-- the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any
kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the
group's prowess in a Darwinian struggle.
Fascism: modern political ideology that seeks to regenerate the social,
economic, and cultural life of a country by basing it on a heightened sense of
national belonging or ethnic identity. Fascism rejects liberal ideas such as
freedom and individual rights, and often presses for the destruction of
elections, legislatures, and other elements of democracy. Despite the
idealistic goals of fascism, attempts to build fascist societies have led to
wars and persecutions that caused millions of deaths. As a result, fascism is
strongly associated with right-wing fanaticism, racism, totalitarianism, and
violence.
To these I would add one other important component, taken
from Harald Oftstad’s Our Contempt for
Weakness: Nazi Norms and Values – And Our Own (1989), namely, the logical
extension of the Darwinian struggle against the “lesser” that pervades so much
fascist literature: the deep-seated hatred and contempt in which all persons
deemed “weaker” (be this ethnic, racial, medical, genetic, or otherwise) are
held, and the desire to eliminate them entirely that it fuels.
In Hitler’s own words:
The stronger must dominate and not
blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born
weakling can view this as cruel, but he after all is only a weak and limited
man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher development of
organic living beings would be unthinkable.
… [We will try to] “save” even the
weakest and most sickly at any price, and this plants the seed of a future
generation which must inevitably grow more and more deplorable the longer this
mockery of Nature and her will continues. [Mein
Kampf]
Taking a careful look at Trump’s campaign, the fascist
traits immediately emerge:
1.Eliminationist
rhetoric is the backbone of Trump’s appeal. His opening salvo in the
campaign – the one that first skyrocketed him to the forefront in the race,
poll-wise, and proved wildly popular with
Republican voters – was his vow (and subsequent proposed program) to deport all 12
million of the United States’ undocumented immigrants (using, of course,
the deprecatory term “illegal alien”) and to erect a gigantic wall on the
nation’s southern border. Significantly, the language
he used to justify such plans – labeling those immigrants “criminals,”
“killers,” and “rapists,” contending that they bring crime and disease – is
classic rhetoric designed to demonize an entire class of people by reducing
them to objects fit only for elimination.
Trump’s appeal in this regard ultimately is about forming a “purer” community,
and it has been relentless and expansive: When an
audience member asked him at a town-hall-style appearance when and how he
was going to “get rid of all the Muslims,” he responded that “we’re going to be
looking at a lot of different things.” He now also claims that if elected, he
will send back all the refugees from Syria who have arrived in the United
States: “If
I win, they’re going back,” he told one of his approval-roaring campaign
crowds. And shortly before he
encouraged a crowd that “maybe should have roughed up” a Black Lives Matter
protester, he told an interviewer that the movement is “looking
for trouble.” Most recently, he
tweeted out a graphic taken from a neo-Nazi website purporting to
demonstrate (falsely) that black people commit most murders in America (though
he later claimed that he hadn’t
endorsed the graphic).
2.The
palingenetic ultranationalism. After the race-baiting and the ethnic
fearmongering, this is the most obviously fascistic component of Trump’s
presidential election effort, embodied in those trucker hats proclaiming: “Make
America Great Again.” (Trump himself puts itthis way: "The silent majority is back, and we’re going to take the
country back. We're going to make America great again."
That’s almost the letter-perfect embodiment of palingenesis – that is, the myth
of the phoenix-like rebirth from the ashes of an entire society in its “golden
age.” In the meantime, Trump’s nationalism is evident not just in these
statement but are the entire context of his rants against Latino immigrants and
Syrian refugees.
3.Trump’s
deep contempt not just for liberalism (which provides most of the fuel for
his xenophobic rants, particularly against the media) but also
for establishment conservatism. Trump’s biggest fan, Rush Limbaugh, boasts:
“In parlaying this outsider status of his, he’s better at playing the insiders’
game than they are, and they are insiders. He’s running rings around all of
these seasoned, lifelong, highly acclaimed professionals in both the consultant
class, the adviser class, the strategist class, and the candidate class. And
he’s doing it simply by being himself.”
4.Trump
constantly proclaims America
to be in a state of crisis that has made it “the laughingstock” of the
rest of the world, and proclaims that this has occurred because of the failures
of (primarily liberal) politicianss.
5.He
himself embodies the fascist insistence upon male leadership by a man of
destiny, and his refusal to acknowledge factual evidence of the falsity of many
of his proclamations and comments embodies the fascistic notion that the
leader’s instincts trump logic and reason in any event.
6.Trump’s
contempt for weakness is manifested practically every day on the campaign
trail, ranging from his dissing
of former GOP presidential candidate John McCain (a former prisoner of war)
as “not a hero” because “I like people who weren’t captured,” to his
recent mockery of a New York Times reporter with a disability.
This list could probably go on all day. But eventually, as we consider
the attributes of real fascism, we also can begin to discern the difference
between that phenomenon and the Trump candidacy.
Fascists have, in the past, always relied upon an
independent, movement-driven paramilitary force capable of enacting various
forms of thuggery on their opponents (as in the Italian Blackshirts, aka the Milizia
Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale, and the German Brownshirts, the Sturmabteilung).
Trump, however, has no such force at his disposal.
What Trump does have
is the avid support not only of various
white-supremacist organizations, as well as that of very real paramilitary
organizations in the form of the Oath
Keepers and the “III
Percent” movement, many of whose members are avid Trump backers, but
neither of which have explicitly endorsed him. Moreover, Trump has never
referenced any desire to form an alliance or to make use of such paramilitary
forces.
What Trump has done is wink, nudge, and generally encouraged
spontaneous violence as a response to his critics. This includes his winking
and nudging at those
“enthusiastic supporters” who committed anti-Latino hate crimes, his
encouragement of the people at a campaign appearance who assaulted
a Latino protester, and most recently, his endorsement of the
people who “maybe should have roughed up” the “disgusting” Black Lives
Matter protester who interrupted his speech.
That’s a clearly fascistic response. It also helps us
understand why Trump is an extraordinarily dangerous right-wing populist
demagogue, and not a genuine, in-the-flesh fascist.
A serious fascist would have called upon not just the crowd
to respond with violence, but also his paramilitary allies to respond with
retaliatory strikes. Trump didn’t do that.
That, in a tiny nutshell, is an example of the problem with
Trump’s fascism: He is not really an ideologue, acting out of a rigid adherence
to a consistent worldview, as all fascists are. Trump’s only real ideology is the
Worship of the Donald, and he will do and say anything that appeals to the
lowest common denominator of the American body politic in order to attract
their support – the nation’s id, the near-feral segment that breathes and lives
on fear and paranoia and hatred.
There’s no question these supporters bring a singular,
visceral energy to the limited universe of the GOP primary, though I don’t know
anyone who expects that such a campaign can survive the oxygen and exposure of
a general election. Indeed, it is in many signs an indication of the doom that
is descending upon a Republican Party in freefall, flailing about in a death
spiral, that it is finally resorting to a campaign as nakedly fascistic as
Trump’s in its attempts to secure the presidency.
This is why Trump has never called upon the shock troops of
a paramilitary wing for support, and why he has always kept an arm’s-length
distance from the white nationalists and neo-Nazis who have become some
of his most enthusiastic backers. He isn’t really one of them.
What he is, as Berlet has explained elsewhere, is a
classic right-wing nativist populist demagogue: “His ideology and rhetoric
are much more comparable to the European populist radical right, akin to
Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, the Danish People’s Party or Vladimir
Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. All of them use the common
radical right rhetoric of nativism, authoritarianism and populism.”
Of course, it’s also important to understand that fascism,
in fact, is a subspecies of right-wing populism, very similar to the Klan in nature
– that is, its malignant, metastasized version, crazed in its insatiable lust
for power, fueled by fear and hatred, and fed by the blood of its vulnerable
targets.
Trump is not fascist primarily because he lacks any
kind of coherent, or even semi-coherent, ideology. What he represents instead
is the kind of id-driven feral politics common to the radical right, a sort of
gut-level reactionarism that lacks the rigor and absolutism, the demand for
ideological purity, that are characteristic of full-bore fascism.
That does not, however, mean he is any less dangerous to
American democracy. Indeed, he may be more dangerous than an outright fascist,
who would in reality be far less appealing and far less likely to succeed in
the current milieu. What Trump is doing, by exploiting the strands of
right-wing populism in the country, is making the large and growing body of
proto-fascists in America larger and even more vicious – that is, he is
creating the conditions that could easily lead to a genuine and potentially
irrevocable outbreak of fascism.
Recall, if you will, the lessons of Milton Mayer in his
book, They Thought They Were Free: The
Germans 1933-1945 – namely, the way these changes happen not overnight, but
incrementally, like the legendary slow boiling of frogs:
"You see," my colleague
went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this
is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little
worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking
occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in
resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want
to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the
habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that
restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
… "But the one great shocking
occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes.
That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come
immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have
been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had
come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish
shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all
the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them
preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than
Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C?
And so on to Step D.
"And one day, too late, your
principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden
of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my
little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at
once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed
completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is
not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched,
all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the
concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed
because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is
changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and
fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is
transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even
to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in
order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.”
It is by small steps of incremental meanness and viciousness
that we lose our humanity. The Nazis, in the end, embodied the ascension of
utter demonic inhumanity, but they didn't get that way overnight. They got that
way through, day after day, attacking and demonizing and urging the elimination
of those they deemed their enemies.
And this is what has been happening to America – in
particular, to the conservative movement and the Republican Party – for a very
long time. Donald Trump represents the apotheosis of this, the culmination of a
very long-growing trend that really began in the 1990s.
That was when we first saw the
popular rise of eliminationist hate talk, wielded with thoughtless glee and
great regularity by an increasingly rabid set of right-wing pundits led by Rush
Limbaugh, and then deeply codified by the talking heads who have subsequently
marched across the sound stages at Fox News. It rose to the surface with the
vice-presidential candidacy of Sarah
Palin in 2008, followed immediately, in reaction to the election of Barack
Obama, by
the birth of the Tea Party, which is perhaps the single most significant
manifestation of right-wing populism in the nation’s history.
Trump aligned himself very early with the Tea Party
elements, remarking
in 2011 that “I represent a lot of the ingredients of the Tea Party.” And
indeed he does – in particular, with its obeisance to the
captains of industry and their untrammeled right to make profits at the expense
of everyone else.
This is a phenomenon known as
Producerism, and it is one of the hallmarks of right-wing populism. It's
accurately defined in
Wikipedia as:
a syncretic ideology
of populist economic nationalism which holds that the productive forces of
society - the ordinary worker, the small businessman, and the entrepreneur, are
being held back by parasitical elements at both the top and bottom of the
social structure.
... Producerism sees society's strength being "drained from both
ends"--from the top by the machinations of globalized financial capital
and the large, politically connected corporations which together conspire to
restrict free enterprise, avoid taxes and destroy the fortunes of the honest
businessman, and from the bottom by members of the underclass and illegal
immigrants whose reliance on welfare and government benefits drains the
strength of the nation. Consequently, nativist rhetoric is central to modern
Producerism. Illegal immigrants are viewed as a threat to the prosperity of the
middle class, a drain on social services, and as a vanguard of globalization
that threatens to destroy national identities and sovereignty. Some advocates
of producerism go further, taking a similar position on legal immigration.
In the United States, Producerists are distrustful of both major political
parties. The Republican Party is rejected for its support of corrupt Big
Business and the Democratic Party for its advocacy of the unproductive lazy
waiting for their entitlement handouts (Kazin, Stock, Berlet & Lyons).
Berlet has written
extensively about the long historical association of producerism with
oppressive right-wing movements and regimes:
Producerism begins in
the U.S. with the Jacksonians, who wove together intra-elite factionalism and
lower-class Whites’ double-edged resentments. Producerism became a staple of
repressive populist ideology. Producerism sought to rally the middle strata
together with certain sections of the elite. Specifically, it championed the
so-called producing classes (including White farmers, laborers, artisans,
slaveowning planters, and “productive” capitalists) against “unproductive”
bankers, speculators, and monopolists above—and people of color below. After
the Jacksonian era, producerism was a central tenet of the anti-Chinese crusade
in the late nineteenth century. In the 1920s industrial philosophy of Henry
Ford, and Father Coughlin’s fascist doctrine in the 1930s, producerism fused
with antisemitic attacks against “parasitic” Jews.
The Producerist narrative is why Henry Ford – who, as the ostensible author of The International Jew, a 1920 conspiracist tome that
inspired Hitler’s paranoia, and whose capital later helped build the Nazi war
machine in the 1930s, was also (and not coincidentally) perhaps the ultimate
American enabler of fascism – is such a seminal figure for American right-wing
populists, both as a leader in the 1920s and ‘30s, as well as a figure of
reverence today. (Glenn Beck, in fact, on several occasions on his old Fox News
show referenced
Ford as something of a holy figure for his efforts to resist FDR’s New Deal
in the 1930s.) The same narrative is also why, in today’s context, Ayn Rand and
Atlas Shrugged – a tendentious
novel speculating on the disasters that would befall the world if its great
industrial leaders suddenly chose to stop producing – are so important in their
mythology.
Right-wing populism is essentially predicated on what today we might call the
psychology of celebrity-worship: convincing working-class schlubs that they too
can someday become rich and famous -- because when they do, would they want to
be taxed heavily? It's all about dangling that lottery carrot out there for the
poor stiffs who were never any good at math to begin with, and more than eager
to delude themselves about their chances of hitting the jackpot.
The thing about right-wing populism is that it’s manifestly self-defeating:
those who stand to primarily benefit from this ideology are the wealthy, which
is why they so willingly underwrite it. It might, in fact, more accurately be
called "sucker populism."
Nonetheless, right-wing populists have long been part of the larger
conservative movement – though largely relegated to its fringes. Some of the
more virulent expressions of this populism, including the Posse Comitatus
movement, Willis Carto’s Populist Party, and the “Patriot”/militia movement of
the 1990s, have been largely relegated to fringe status. However, there have
been periods in America’s past when right-wing populism was not thoroughly
mainstream but also politically ascendant. Probably the most exemplary of these
was during the wave of Ku Klux Klan revival between 1915 and 1930.
This Klan crumbled in
the late 1920s under the weight of internal political warfare and corruption;
many of its field organizers later turned up in William Dudley Pelley’s overtly
fascist Silver Shirts organization of the 1930s. After World War II, most of
these groups – as well as the renowned anti-Semite radio preacher Father
Charles Coughlin, and lingering American fascist groups like George Lincoln
Rockwell’s American Nazi Party – were fully relegated to fringe status. So,
too, were subsequent attempts at reviving right-wing populism, embodied by
Willis Carto and his Populist Party, as well as other forms of right-wing
populism that cropped up in the latter half of the century, from Robert
DePugh’s vigilante/domestic terrorist organization The Minutemen in the 1960s,
to the Posse Comitatus and “constitutionalist” tax protesters in the 1970s and
‘80s, to the “militia”/Patriot movement of the 1990s. As it had been since at
least the 1920s, this brand of populism was riddled with conspiracist paranoia,
xenophobic white tribalism, and a propensity for extreme violence.
Yet beginning in the 1990s, as mainstream conservatives built more and more
ideological bridges with this sector – reflected in the increasing adoption of
far-right rhetoric within the mainstream – the strands of populism became more
and more imbedded in mainstream-conservative dogma, particularly the deep,
visceral, and often irrational hatred of the federal government. One of the
more popular "mainstream" figures among this bloc in the 1990s was
Rep. Ron Paul of Texas. And so when he created something of a sensation with his
campaign for the Republican nomination in 2008, it meant that these ideas and
agendas started receiving widespread circulation among the mainstream Right --
and with it, an increasing number of conservatives who called themselves
"libertarians", when what they really meant was
"populists."
But if Ron Paul opened the door for right-wing populism, though, he scarcely
could have anticipated the overnight political star who would, in short order,
come waltzing through it to great fanfare – namely, Sarah Palin. Hers is a
somewhat different, more mainstream-friendly brand of right-wing populism – and
as a result, it was embraced by a significantly greater portion of the American
electorate.
Her populism emerged
for national view shortly after John McCain announced her as his running mate.
It was more than just the aggressive, McCarthyite attacks on Obama as a
“radical” who “palled around with terrorists” and the paranoid bashing of
“liberal elites” -- most of all, there was the incessant suggestion that she
and McCain represented “real Americans” and were all about standing up for “the
people.”
Populism, yes, but indisputably right-wing, too: socially and fiscally
conservative, business-friendly, and hostile to progressive causes. The Producerist
narrative was a constant current in Palin’s speeches, particularly when she
would get the crowd chanting, “Drill, baby, drill!”
The populism whipped up by Palin’s candidacy became manifest
as a national movement in short order with the rise of the Tea Party in 2009.
Indeed, not only was the Tea Party overtly a
right-wing populist movement, it soon became a major conduit for a revival
of the 1990s version of this populism, the
“Patriot”/militia movement. Many of these Tea Partiers are now the same
Oath Keepers and “III Percenters” whose members widely support Trump’s
candidacy.
Of course, most of these extremists are only one step
removed, ideologically speaking, from the neo-Nazis and other white
supremacists of the racist right, and both of those segments of the right lean
heavily on nativist and authoritarian rhetoric. And there really is no other
good word for Trump’s rhetoric, and the behavior of many of his followers, than
“fascistic.” So it’s only somewhat natural that Trump’s right-wing populism
would be mistaken for fascism – they are, after all, not just kissing cousins,
but more akin to siblings. Not every right-wing populist is a fascist, but every fascist is a right-wing populist.
All of which underscores the central fact: Donald Trump may
not be a fascist, but his vicious brand of right-wing populism is not just
empowering the latent fascist elements in America, he is leading a whole nation
of followers merrily down a path that leads directly to fascism.
Consider, if you will, what did occur in the immediate
aftermath of Trump’s remarks about “roughing up” Black Lives Matter protesters:
Two nights later, a
trio of white supremacists in Minneapolis invaded a Black Lives Matter
protest there and shot five people, in an act that had been carefully planned
and networked through the Internet.
What this powerfully implies is that Trump has achieved that
kind of twilight-zone level of influence where he can simply demonize a target
with rhetoric suggestive of violent retribution and his admirers will act out
that very suggestion. It’s only a step removed from the fascist leader who
calls out his paramilitary thugs to engage in violence.
America, thanks to Trump, has now reached that fork in the
road where it must choose down which path its future lies – with democracy and
its often fumbling ministrations, or with the appealing rule of plutocratic
authoritarianism, ushered in on a tide of fascistic populism. For myself, I
remain confident that Americans will choose the former and demolish the latter
– that Trump’s candidacy will founder, and the tide of right-wing populism will
reach its high-water mark under him and then recede with him.
What is most troubling, though, is the momentum that Trump’s
candidacy has given that tide. He may not himself lack any real ideological
footing, but he has laid the groundwork for a fascist groundswell that could
someday be ridden to power by a similarly charismatic successor who is himself
more in the mold of an ideological fascist. And it doesn’t take a very long
look down the roll of 2016 Republican candidates to find a couple of candidates
who might fit that mold.
Trump may not be fascist, but he is empowering their
existing elements in American society; even more dangerously, his Tea Party
brand of right-wing populism is helping them grow their ranks, along with their
potential to recruit, by leaps and bounds. Not only that, he is making all this thuggery and ugliness seem normal. And that IS a serious problem.
