The return of the 'New World Order'

As remarkable as it might be that a leading pundit for a major news organization like Glenn Beck of CNN can broadcast to the nation recycled far-right "New World Order" conspiracy theories, it's even more remarkable that he can do so without any consequence whatsoever.

Outside of the eyebrows raised in the blogosphere and at Media Matters, you won't find anyone -- least of all, any of his fellow members of the pundit class (Keith Olbermann notwithstanding) -- pointing out how his credulousness on these matters renders his journalistic credibility nothing but a negative. The silence has been deafening.

And of course, for people like Beck, it is a green light to ratchet it all up even farther rightward. Alex Koppelman at Salon notes that Beck has again topped himself by hosting a spokesman for the John Birch Society and portraying him as an enlightened thinker:

Beck himself referred to the group's reputation, introducing his guest, JBS spokesman Sam Antonio, by saying, "Sam, I have to tell you, when I was growing up, the John Birch Society, I thought they were a bunch of nuts." But Beck's views on that score seem to have changed -- "You guys are starting to make more and more sense to me," Beck told Antonio.

Naturally, Antonio -- who was there to talk about immigration issues and the controversial prosecution of two former Border Patrol agents convicted of shooting an unarmed man, not to mention some conservatives' conspiracy theory that the prosecution is part of a breaking down of U.S. borders into a "North American Union" -- agreed.

"Yes, we at the John Birch Society are not nuts," Antonio said. "We are just exposing the truth that's been out there for many, many years."

Here's the transcript:

BECK: Congressman, thank you. I appreciate it. And keep up the good work. We'll continue to follow it.

I want to turn now to Sam Antonio. He's a national spokesperson on immigration for the John Birch Society.

Sam, I have to tell you, when I was growing up, the John Birch Society, I thought they were a bunch of nuts, however, you guys are starting to make more and more sense to me. There is something dirty in this -- in this whole thing. I happen to believe it's connected to the SPP.

Can you float some of the theories here by the American -- by the American public?

SAM ANTONIO, NATIONAL SPOKESPERSON, JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY: Well, first and foremost, Glenn, it's great to be on your program. And yes, we at the John Birch Society are not nuts. We are just exposing the truth that's been out there for many, many years.

Now this news that just came from Congressman Rohrabacher has been very shocking, but at the same time is not shocking. And as you just mentioned in your segue, it is part of the bigger picture of the Security and Prosperity Partnership that was signed by the Bush administration in 2005.

What this all means to me, just taking in all this information, leads to me again, that it's the breakdown of our law enforcement, the breakdown of our men and women at the border, to prepare our country for an opening of our borders for Canada and Mexico and eventually all throughout the Americas.

BECK: OK. The SPP -- in case somebody doesn't know, you should go and look at this at SPP.gov. It's a government web site and it's -- you have to read between the lines. And a lot of people say that you're a conspiracy freak if you believe any of this stuff.

But if you really think about it is the one answer that makes sense, that we want to share trade. We want to share workers. We want to have an open border. We want to have one border around Canada, Mexico and the United States. And we share everything including information.

You contend that the information that we're sharing has -- has allowed the Mexican government to get a hold on our enforcement of laws here in America. What do you mean by that?

ANTONIO: That is correct. Again, your viewers, if they go to the web site, SPP.gov, it talks about exchanges of information between our governments.

Now in this case with Ramos and Compean, it was the Mexican government that really drove this agenda to get these innocent Border Patrol agents convicted and sent to jail for these terms.

Now, since this exchange of information, under the Department of Homeland Security, we're going to see more and more and more of this. And what this is going to lead to, Glenn, is really a demoralization of our men and women on the Border Patrol. And it's happening now.

BECK: Right.

ANTONIO: I live here in San Diego, Glenn. I'm 15 minutes away from the border. I've spoken with Border Patrol agents, you know, active and retired, and I'm telling you, this case has really demoralized them.

BECK: I have to tell you, Sam, that you know, whether you want to believe in the black helicopters or not, America, you should look into this. And this is the warning to the Bush administration, by not releasing the documents. And this is the stuff they're holding back.

Well, the people want to know what was the communication between our government and the Mexican government? Give us those records. They will not release them. And by not releasing them, they further these conspiracy theories of black helicopters and all kinds of things.

Sam, thank you very much.

Think Progress has the video.

As Steve Benen at The Carpetbagger Report points out, the whole episode reflects the extent to which the national political center has shifted to the right. Tristero at Hullabaloo also notes that this has certainly been the Birchers' agenda all along.

Beck is hardly the only "New World Order" conspiracist out there making gains in recent months. GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul has similarly been improving his mainstream profile, though notably, he hasn't been pushing his old NWO theories to the fore, either.

We've primarily been hearing it, however, from the nativist anti-immigrant bloc, particularly the Minutemen -- which makes sense, considering that they are themselves directly descended from the militia movement. When they held a rally in Everett a couple of weeks ago, the North American Union theory was one of the prominent talking points, and Minuteman leader Jim Gilchrist in particular was promoting it, as Michael Hood at The Stranger reported:

"The Great Gringo awakens from siesta..." the event's promos read, but the number of gringos wasn't all that great -- about 100 newly awakened patriots were gathered while a dozen chanting protesters (whom Gilchrist called "anarchists") paraded outside on Rucker Avenue.

The destruction of our peace and civil order, according to Gilchrist, will be accomplished via the same lawless chaos and "soft immigration laws," that brought down the Roman Empire. He predicted the national U.S. language will be Spanish by 2030.

"What's the solution?" he shouted. "Deportation!" roared the crowd.

Disparate statistics were thrown around: Gilchrist alternately said 12 million and 20 million illegals are in the country, but at one point, he claimed there are "over 33 million" hiding in the shadows, propagating so-called "anchor babies," kids born in the U.S. of illegal parents who get automatic citizenship as granted by the 14th Amendment. (The Pew Hispanic Center estimates a current total of 11.5 million to 12 million illegal immigrants.)

A bipartisan Bush bill defeated last week would have called for a program to grant temporary-worker status to illegal immigrants already here. That was "shamnesty," to the Minutemen conferees. Gilchrist said he's baffled by Bush's role. "I think he wants to go down in history as the father of the North American Union, the George Washington of the United States of North America."

Gilchrist was referring to a conspiracy theory bouncing around on talk radio and right-wing websites that says Bush and globalists have secretly negotiated creation of the North American Union, a megastate created by erasing the borders between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Say goodbye to U.S. sovereignty, as well as the greenback currency soon to be replaced by the "Amero," modeled after the Euro, or so goes the theory.

Fortunately, Heidi Beirich at the Intelligence Report has the rundown for all this. As she explains, this is all simply a regurgitation of 1990s-style Patriot paranoia:

Since 2005, the dominant conspiracy theory animating the anti-immigration movement has been the so-called "North American Union," described as a plot to surrender American sovereignty in a planned merger with Canada and Mexico. The plotters are typically said to be various foreign leaders, President George W. Bush and his "neo-conservative" allies, and an array of leading American liberals.
If the John Birch Society (JBS) and others pushing this theory are to be believed, President Bush began ceding American sovereignty on March 23, 2005, at a meeting in Waco, Texas, with Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin and Mexican President Vicente Fox. The meeting ended with the signing of what was called the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), which set up a series of working groups to study cooperation in transportation, energy, aviation, the environment and more.

Most people familiar with the SPP understand that it is a benign and slow-moving attempt to coordinate trade and security policies in a bid to improve the lives of citizens in all three countries. But to the conspiracy theorists, it is a plot that will end with Mexico sending millions more of its citizens to the United States, international courts that overrule American justice, hate crime laws that will send anti-gay Christian preachers to prison, and more. The plotters are said to include the militia bogeyman of the Council of Foreign Relations and are supposedly directed by American University Professor Robert Pastor.

Lately, the paranoia about the SPP process has become so intense that a proposed highway linking Canada, Mexico and the United States is seen as part of evil machinations that will end with the Mexican government seizing control of the key Missouri River port in Kansas City. Other conspiracy theorists fear that a new currency, the "Amero," will displace good, old-fashioned American dollars.

The leader in "educating" the public about the North American Union (NAU) plot has been the JBS, which says "politicians and internationalists" in America are "effectively destroying the United States." In fact, the long dormant group has been reanimated by the theory, assigning writer Mary Benoit to cover it relentlessly in the JBS magazine The New American. JBS has allied itself on this issue with Howard Phillips, leader of the anti-immigrant Constitution Party, and added nativist leader Chris Simcox of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps to its speakers bureau.

And as Beirich notes, the theory is getting a lot of mainstream play, both from politicians and from ostensible journalists:

The theory has made its way into the mainstream. U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) has demanded an end to the SPP and insisted that the NAU theory is not limited to "right-wing kooks." Other congressional conservatives have joined a "Coalition to Block the NAU" headed by U.S. Rep. Virgil Goode (R-Va.). CNN anchor Lou Dobbs has devoted several segments to the issue, telling listeners that the NAU is a "shadow government" that should concern all Americans. Most remarkably, the theory has enjoyed widespread legislative endorsement. At press time, the houses of representatives of 18 states had passed resolutions opposing the alleged NAU plan. In Idaho and Montana, the state senates have added their voice, resulting in official legislative resolutions.

Be sure to also check out Heidi's careful debunking of numerous false "facts" that form the core of the nativists' positions. Not that they'll really help anyone dealing with the Glenn Becks of the world, because they have a gift for tuning out anything that contradicts their pet narratives.

And Beck is busy building a narrative that not only opens the Pandora's Box of mass public consumption of far-right conspiracism, it also portrays the most hateful and paranoid and poisonous bloc of American politics as credible and normative.

In the 1990s, the main reason that most "New World Order" theories gained little traction was that mainstream journalists understood that they were sheer crackpottery and refused to treat them seriously. Now, in the name of "pushing the envelope" and garnering ratings by courting controversy, we're witnessing mainstream pundits report them to the public as credible.

Evidently, this sort of thing not only doesn't hurt Glenn Beck's career, we've now entered the realm where it positively helps it. It's not only a journalistic travesty, it's a cultural one. Glenn Beck may gain, but the rest of us, within the next few years, will wind up paying the price.

The good stuff

-- by Dave

I've read a lot of responses to Bill O'Reilly's ongoing assault against the liberal blogosphere, but the one that made me want to stand up and cheer was Rick Perlstein's barn-burner over at .commonsense. What especially hit home was his description of how the kind of hate being peddled by the right for the past decade poisons personal relationships, embodied by the transformation he witnessed in his grandmother into a fearful, paranoid old woman:

I'd look out of her eighth floor picture window, down at the scene she saw every day, half expecting to find that nightmare landscape before me. Nope: same as always, the brightly colored sailboats on Lake Michigan, kids and their parents feeding the ducks (Grandma used to take me to feed the ducks), happy, strolling Milwaukee couples—paradise. Where was she getting these fantasies?

One evening's visit, all became clear. She gestured at the blaring TV set. The excruciating grandma-volume was even more excruciating than usual, because she was visiting with her best TV friend. She told me how much she adored Bill O'Reilly. My wife and I cringed. Watching our latter-day Joe McCarthy on TV every night, she had learned, late in life—for this development was entirely new—how to hate her fellow Americans. I almost cried, because one of the people she was learning how to hate was me.

Read the whole thing. And be sure to check out the video above (available also at Perlstein's post), which is a brilliantly edited piece showing how the rhetoric gradually ratchets higher and higher. It's a promotional piece for a Fox Attacks! campaign to organize people in a letter-writing drive targeting the advertisers on O'Reilly's program, which is a terrific idea. I've signed up.

Meanwhile, speaking of brilliant videos, be sure to check out the lastest from Max Blumenthal, on the "Christians United for Israel" tour led by none other than the Rev. John Hagee. You may remember Hagee; he's best known for wishing ardently for Armageddon in Israel. As you can see from watching Max's video, it hardly stops with Hagee; his followers are even more keyed up for the Big Bada Bang.

Some more recent brilliance from Max: Generation Chickenhawk: With the College Republicans, and Take Bake America: The Censored Video.

Harry Potter and the Last Crusade

-- by Sara

Dave's Harry Potter piece below led to a lively comments discussion on why fundamentalists are so bothered by myth-and-magic stories. There are several things going on all at once here -- but all of them, in the end, touch back to one thread at the deepest core of their theology.

The first thing to bear in mind about fundamentalists is that, in the darkest depths of their minds, almost all of them harbor deep, unspoken doubts about their belief system. In fact, for all their protestations about truth and certainty, doubt is perhaps the main wellspring of their zeal: only people who live in a perpetual state of guilty unbelief can be strung along for a lifetime in such a desperate, grasping quest for assurance that their faith is sufficient for a God who offers grace, but demands constant efforts at perfection in return.

My ex-fundie friends all acknowledge that they never felt good enough, pure enough, "saved" enough to be true Christians. Always, deep down, there was the feeling that if everybody really knew who they were, they'd be shunned by God and the church. Much of their passionate prayer and seeking was driven by this secret dread. Manipulative pastors foster these doubts deliberately, precisely to ignite that passion and keep their flock insecure, ever dependent on them for guidance and that elusive assurance of salvation.

So doubt is a standard feature of the fundamentalist package. And it's also why they're so defensive about their own mythos. We reality-based folk don't need to feel terribly defensive about our worldview. We can verify truth with our own eyes. If our beliefs are questioned, we'll debate the observable facts, and perhaps either change the other person's mind or our own accordingly (and, either way, feel richer for the exchange). Acknowledging reality can't shake our mythos, since we don't have a mythos to shake.

But once you've rejected the reality-based world in favor of a mythic worldview, you are -- by definition -- building your life on an epistemology that has no verifiable support structure. Which means there are always going to be moments when faith dissipates just long enough to admit a quiet, nagging doubt about the foundations of your reality. It also means that you're going to regard any and all competing myth systems -- no matter how fantastic -- as a serious existential threat that stands in direct competition to your own (equally fantastic) myth system. They have to be treated as equivalent, because they're all made of the same flimsy stuff.

In this no-reality-allowed zone, no rational exchange of ideas is possible, and logic and reasoned debate have no power to cool the resulting conflicts. The battle can only be won by stirring up people's emotions until they're high, hot, and loud enough to drown out those nagging fears -- at least for a while. And, like an addict, you need frequent and increasing doses of that emotional juice to keep the doubts at bay, because they're never really gone for good.

Voltaire concisely summarized the potential dangers that lurk in this willful and escalating abandonment of reason when he said: "Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." Left to run, the endless rush to quench doubt does end up, often enough, in atrocity.

The second thing (which several commenters touched on) is the observation that fundamentalists reject almost anything that takes people's mindshare off God, bible, and church. They're not fond of popular culture in any of its forms; and many live in carefully-constructed personal bubble zones within which everything they read, hear, see, touch, buy, and use is Christian-oriented. Anything secular is "of the Devil," and therefor unfit for someone seeking to live a godly life. It was easy enough to predict that they'd reject Harry Potter on these grounds alone.

But that, on its own, doesn't explain the extreme hysteria we see in the video Dave linked to. Harry Potter, like Dungeons & Dragons (disclaimer: Mr. R worked on several D&D games as an employee of the game's original publisher), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sabrina, Magic: The Gathering, Kiki's Delivery Service (which also got its share of this) or Pokemon pushes some extra buttons that can't be rationalized by a mere desire to avoid all things secular. So, what's that about?

The common thread that runs through all of these is magic. And that, I think, is the real burr that gets under fundamentalist saddles. In fundieland, magic is the most frightening and legitimate of all the competing myth systems -- the Devil's own preferred alternative to prayer and submission. Other belief systems (Buddhism, Hinduism, the Greek myths) are viewed as sad and rather pathetically delusional; but anything that smacks of magic is feared as actively Satanic.

Why is magic such a hot button? The reasons go to the heart of fundamentalist theology. At their core, fundamentalists believe that humans are wretched creatures who aren't really even human unless touched by God's grace. (And, yes, this does mean that those of us who are unsaved can rightly be considered subhuman.) We cannot do anything right; we do not deserve to have control over our own affairs; and any notion that we have intrinsic power to achieve good in the world (or even the authority to define "good" or "bad" on our own terms) is a diabolical delusion. Left to our own devices, we will not only screw it up for ourselves; we will ultimately ensure the Devil his victory over the world -- including them -- as well.

Implicit in this is the idea that all authority is necessarily, rightfully external. The fate of the entire world depends on how completely we can give up our desire to control our destinies, and submit to God and his appointed earthly overseers. This obsession with the need for external authority is, in a nutshell, is why fundamentalism is a form of religious authoritarianism.

Stories about magic openly defy this whole belief system. Magic-using characters like Harry usurp the supernatural power and prerogatives of God -- a sufficient heresy in its own right. But it's worse than that: they're also exercising their own internal authority, and acting out of their own agency. And that's the last thing fundamentalists want their children -- or anyone else -- learning how to do.

That's why we're hearing all the shrieking hysterics from the fundie side. Stories and games like Buffy and Harry and D&D put us in the shoes of heroes who take charge of their power and use it to shape their own realities -- and worse, to defy overweening, intrusive authority. They contain messages that undermine the power of external leaders, and encourage people to believe in their own limitless power to create change. They show us protagonists who overcome doubt, take risks, and gain confidence; and who make their world better without waiting around for God to act.

If everyone thought that way, where would we be then? We wouldn't follow our leaders. We'd try to rule ourselves. We might get the idea that our destinies were in our own hands. We might even entertain the delusion that we're somehow "free" people who don't have to answer to anyone but ourselves. And then where would God's designated regents -- the would-be dictators, oligarchs, and theocrats -- be?

Dave has promised his thoughts on the deeper implications of Harry Potter's final volume. My point here is that the fundamentalist panic over these books is not something we can just laugh off as more deranged weirdness from people who don't understand the world they live in. They do understand, perhaps better than we do, that the stories we tell ourselves ultimately create the reality we'll be living in at some point in the future. And they also know that stories like these have the power to raise our awareness, focus our intention, and steel our resistance against the unholy authoritarian plans they have laid for our obedient "salvation."

Add this to your blogroll

-- by Dave

The folks at the Southern Poverty Law Center have been busy these days: their latest Intelligence Report is chock full of excellent work, some of which I'll be commenting on soon (particularly the report on the San Diego Minutemen and Heidi Beirich's superlative deconstruction of the latest round of conspiracy theories from the far right).

But you all need to check out the new SPLC blog, Hatewatch. It kicked off this week with an excellent brief history of how a certain video -- which you can view at the top of this post -- played a role in bringing down William Pierce's neo-Nazi organization, the National Alliance. It follows up today with news of two new lawsuits filed in an effort to bring a halt to Ku Klux Klan activity.

Check 'em out, add 'em to your favorites. The journalists at the Intelligence Report do phenomenonal work.

That executive order

-- by Dave

Sara's post on Bush's recent executive order regarding seizure of property in the "war on terror" has stirred quite a bit of commentary around parts of the blogosphere, as well as a long comment thread.

As I noted in the comments, I remain somewhat skeptical of the gravity of this order. Some of this is reflexive; when I covered the militia movement in the 1990s, a virtual cottage sub-industry among the Patriots emerged that revolved around the claim that various of Bill Clinton's executive orders constituted a nefarious plot to enslave America under the auspices of the New World Order. Seeing similar claims arise regarding George W. Bush raises immediate red flags for me.

That said, I think the bulk of Sara's post was reasonable conjecture, even if the concern over this particular executive order fails to pan out. We won't always agree, but I think she's right to stir the pot in this case anyway. Heaven knows the Bush administration has not given us anything but cause for concern when it comes to the limitations of their lust for power.

Still, not being legally trained, I'll leave it up to actual legal minds to hash out the ramifications of this order. To that end, I'd like to pass along an e-mail from one of our regulars, Den Valdron, who knows a bit more about this than I do. To wit:

I was very interested in Sara Robinson's piece on the recent Executive Order of July 17, 2007.

I was quite concerned to read the comments of 'Rusty Shackleford' suggesting that it wasn't so bad... "I think you're overstating the outrageousness just a bit... I just don't think it helps your argument if you fail to mention the "violence" requirement. You have correctly identified the weasel words - "significant risk." With respect to bloggers, commenters, organizers, and letter-writers, I simply don't think this raises as much of a red flag as you do. The "significant risk" must be of committing an act of violence, not merely inciting it (which itself would be hard to prove)."

With all due respect to Rusty, maybe he does house transactions or something, or he's a wills and estates man, but he's absolutely dead wrong on the subject.

I was also disappointed to read your own comments:

"Actually, I agree with Rusty and Fiat on this. I saw a lot of fearmongering around executive orders by the far right during the '90s and refuse to fall prey to similar fears a decade later. As near as I can tell, this EO doesn't constitute a fascist policy, largely because **any action by authorities is closely tied to acts of violence.**"

In point of fact, it is not closely tied to acts of violence.

I don't normally pull rank, but I am a lawyer, and I believe that both Rusty Shackleford and yourself, David, might be a little too sanguine about the limiter on this one. Both seem to take comfort in this governing clause:

"to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of:"

On statutory interpretation there is room here that you could drive trucks through. Let's break it down:

"to have committed.... acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of."

Okay, that's one thing, there's a clear threshold that 'acts of violence' must be committed. If that was the end of it, we might be very concerned. But we might take some comfort.

But look at this:

"to pose a significant risk of committing... an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect"

Excuse me? What the hell does 'significant risk of' mean? This is an anticipatory clause. No act of violence needs to be committed. No act of violence needs to be imminent. No act of violence needs to be planned or conceived.

All that is required is an assessment that a person 'poses a significant risk of committing' an act of violence, and bob's your uncle.

Think about that. How does law enforcement rate and register threats and risk potential?

a) Personality profiling... remember what happened to Richard Jewell? A great deal of money is being sunk into statistical profiling models. Profiling, for better or worse, is a recognized investigative tool which is used to narrow or zero in on suspects. I believe that there may be cases where profiling has been accepted as probative evidence in criminal or civil courts in the United States.

b) Association directly or indirectly with persons known or suspected to have committed acts of violence... a potentially very broad net that encompasses not only family, neighbors and people at the workplace, but also potentially the charities you donate to, and the people who are writing in to your blog.

c) Certain political activities. For instance, suppose you intend to attend an anti-globalization demonstration. Those things have gotten a reputation for being unruly, windows get broken, jerks throw rocks, etc. The intention to attend a political rally where there may be an expectation on the part of the authorities of violence may be sufficient to trigger the pre-emptive power. This net can be cast very, very widely. Remember that it is documented that the police have conducted surveillance on and even infiltrated all sorts of peace groups, environmental groups, civil rights groups etc. Agents provocateurs are also occasionally documented and much rumoured. The anticipatory nature of this clause creates a situation where it becomes de facto risky to attend or participate in any event or process sponsored by these groups, even in a casual manner. I could anticipate a chilling effect on social activism of any sort.

Ultimately, the anticipatory nature of "significant risk of committing..." is terrifying in its scope.

Significant risk explicitly does not speak to a specific act planned or anticipated. Rather, 'significant risk' speaks to an assessment of potential.

Potential. Think about it.

Who makes the determination of significant risk?

Reading the Executive Order, this risk appears to be assessed by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with state and defense. None of these departments have jurisdiction or interest in law enforcement or domestic peace, they are not qualified to assess what laws are being broken or who is breaking them. State's mandate is foreign affairs, Defence's mandate is foreign aggression, either defending from it or inflicting it.

In short, you've got a terrifying level of discretion being vested in a sector of government which has no particular foundation in assessing or quantifying "a significant risk of committing acts of violence." Think about that.

There is no explicit provision for civil judicial review here. There is nothing in this Order that suggests that you could go to any court and have them set aside the Secretary of Treasury's finding that you pose a significant risk of committing an act of violence.

Assuming that you could argue an inherent or implicit right to civil judicial review (which in fact appears to be the current case, and which has existed or been exercised in the past), there are a couple of problems.

First, this right, even if it exists now, is potentially in danger of being taken away by fiat or legislative action. The termination of this right could be so disconnected from any apparent consequences that only the people victimized by it would ever know what had been done to them.

Secondly, the right to civil judicial review requires financial resources to contest... How are you going to contest when all your resources are seized? Better yet, how are you going to contest when anyone willing to help you may be putting their own resources at risk? Remember, association is potentially one test of "significant risk of committing acts of violence." If you've been found to be of significant risk through persons supporting or associating with you, then by the simple act of association or support other persons may also be deemed to be 'significant risks.'

A little farfetched? Maybe. Maybe not.

Why am I focusing on civil judicial review? Because here's an interesting thing. This Order is divorced from any issue of criminality -- i.e., you do not have to be charged with any criminal offense in order to come under the purview of this order.

It's likely that a criminal conviction would be de facto proof, as far as the secretary of treasury is concerned, either of acts of violence or of significant risk. A criminal charge alone, either in advance of conviction or even with an acquittal, would probably be satisfactory to treasury though. Being a suspect in a criminal investigation, but not charged, might get you nicked by treasury. Or even having a criminal record would be sufficient to justify a finding of 'significant risk.'

Indeed, act or acts of violence in no way connects to any inference of criminal wrongdoing. Conceivably one might destroy one's own property, like burning a flag on your own land as a gesture, and this would be an act of violence.

If we look to civil law, assault is usually a direct physical attack. However, assault also encompasses the verbal threat of a physical attack, or even acting in a manner that leads the victim to believe that a physical attack is imminent. Think about that.

Would graffiti be an 'act of violence'? Given that it could be construed as vandalism or trespass on public or private property without consent with the intention of employing physical action to deface or alter said property... yes it would be.

What about postering? What about unfurling a banner at the campaign rally of an opposing politician?

Expressing or advocating or promoting unacceptable political views in anything but strictly limited channels might potentially be construed as violence or acts of violence...or as evidence of "posing a significant risk of acts of violence" of undefined and unproven nature which might potentially occur at some indefinite point in the future.

Prohibited or unacceptable speech in blogs might be considered to be violence rather than incitement to violence. On a civil basis, there may not be a distinction drawn between incitement and the actual act... or again, writings from blogs may be taken as demonstrating a 'significant risk of acts of violence.' Since the risk may be nothing more than potential.

Violence can be like obscenity. Everyone knows it when they see it. But sometimes the definition can become a bit squishy. And here, it isn't defined at all, except to the extent that the language clearly implies that violence includes but is not limited to criminal activity.

Chew on that.

Now, let's turn to the last part...

"an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of:"

"Purpose *or* Effect of."

That means that there's a twofold test there. Obviously "purpose of" implies that there's a nexus of intention between the act or risk of an act. Your act, or your risk, has to be directed at a specific goal "threatening... the Iraqi government" or
"undermining efforts..."

Okay, that's not so bad. But consider the second test:

"Effect of"?

So your act or significant risk of committing an act has the 'effect of' 'threatening... the iraqi government' or 'undermining efforts...'

This is dangerous. This has the effect of eliminating any element of intention or mens rea from this executive order.

Mens rea, or criminal intention is a vital part of the criminal law. It essentially deals with the issue of choice and decision. For many crimes, to be guilty, you have to actually have intended to commit that crime. You had to have known the law, known that your actions were against that law, and then gone ahead. Volition, while diminished, is still a key element of civil law.

Not necessary here.

It is no longer necessary for you to want to hassle the Iraqi government or undermine efforts. It is not necessary for you to even know that your efforts have this result. It is not necessary for you to be aware of any line that you must not cross. In fact, your state of mind, your intentions, your beliefs, your own interpretations of your actions are utterly unnecessary.

It is only necessary that someone decide that such is the result of your efforts. And who makes that decision? Secretary of the treasury.

Finally, I given my previous comments with respect to 'guilt by association', allow me to refer you to excerpts of the two latter provisions:

"(ii) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, logistical, or technical support for, or goods or services in support of .... any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; or

(iii) .... to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order."

Item (ii) is frightening. The wording that I deleted for effect of course refers to committing acts of violence. However, it is followed by an "or". What this means is that the "materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, logistical, or technical support for, or goods or services" punishment comes about in one of two alternative instances -- you're either assisting the acts of violence, or you have provided it to the person without any connection to the acts of violence.

Essentially, this is 'cooties' law. Once a person is designated under this executive order, any person who has any substantive dealings with them for any reason may also be liable to be designated under this executive order.

This 'cooties' law is reinforced later on at section 4 (abridged):

"Sec. 4. I hereby determine that the making of donations of the type specified in section 203(b)(2) of IEEPA (50 U.S.C. 1702(b)(2)) by, to, or for the benefit of, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order ....I hereby prohibit such donations as provided by section 1 of this order."

And what about notice, another key part of due process? I would also point out section 5, which I reproduce, abridged (for clarity and impact):

"Sec. 5. For those persons whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order ... there need be no prior notice of a listing or determination made pursuant to section 1(a) of this order."

In other words, the first you might hear of this, is after they've done it to you.

Essentially, in this Executive Order the President is assuming unbelievably vast powers to simply sidestep normal criminal or civil procedure, and to operate quite explicitly on the basis of guilt by anticipation, guilt by pre-emption, guilt by association and guilt for any reason in the mind of the decider. There is literally no limitation on authority, except that the person's actual physical being is unaffected.

However, a person so designated by this Order could be rendered into a non-person literally instantaneously. They could be stripped of every asset, have every financial or commercial opportunity denied to them. Worse, this literally creates a power to shun. Anyone who employs this person, who hires them, who pays them for work, lends them money to tide them over, who rents them an apartment, or allows them to sleep on the couch, who drops them a few coins as they panhandle would be liable to becoming subject to this order. The only protection would be to fire this person, to not hire them, to not pay them, to not lend them money, evict them from your apartment, kick them off the couch, and look away if you see them begging on the street.

If the potential implications of this make you think of Jews in Nazi Germany, think again. The Jews pre-war had it good compared to the potential of this.

The most disturbing thing is that this Executive Order need not be actually used.

Consider it as a weapon of intimidation. Most Americans are not rich. Most people live in apartments, they may have a house that the bank owns, they may have a car they're making payments on, they struggle with credit card debt, live paycheque to paycheque. We all live in these little islands of stability that can be so easy to disrupt.

So imagine that you are a dedicated, committed, politically active person. You're donating to the Green Party, perhaps active in local politics, going to demonstrations...

Then one day, a person from the treasury department comes to visit. He shows you this executive order, and he tells you that you have been identified by your actions and associations as being a 'significant risk to commit acts of violence.' He says that by their lights, you may already be deemed to have committed acts of violence. He tells you that it has been concluded that these acts of violence undermine the Iraqi government and the reconstruction campaign...

You protest of course. He says it doesn't matter, these are the findings of the Secretary of the Treasury under the executive order. You challenge him to prove what act of violence they think you are about to commit. He replies that there's no particular act, only that you're a 'significant risk.'

Then he tells you, in very clear terms, what they can do. That they can and will take your house. That they can and will take your car and your bank account. That you will be fired from your job. That you will find it impossible to get another job, or find another place to live. That anyone who helps you will be similarly punished, so no one will help you. He tells you that if this isn't enough, they are prepared to take the same tactic against your parents, your children, your girlfriend, your friends, based on their association with you making them a 'significant risk of committing violence' or of 'providing support to you.'

He asks you if you are prepared to see your life erased? Are you really that brave? Do you really want to lose your job, your home, your nest, your savings, your income, your retirement...

And if you are that brave, are you really prepared to see this done to your girlfriend, your parents, whoever is close to you...

You could take it to court and fight it, of course. All you need is a lawyer that will work for free, because you won't be able to pay him. And he'll have to be a lawyer willing to risk winding up in the same situation you'll be in. He's sure there's lots of those around.

They have lots of lawyers, he notes, all sorts, and very highly paid, with big budgets and expense accounts, for fighting just these sorts of cases.

Fighting it will take two or three years. That's a long time to spend eating out of dumpsters and sleeping on heating grates. It's possible of course, that you'll win and be vindicated. Or you could lose.

Are you feeling lucky?

So most people in that situation, what would they do? They'll just shut their mouths, stop making waves, they'll do their jobs, collect their paycheques and mind their own business. They'll stay out of trouble.

But sometimes, when they see the Sheriff driving down the street to evict someone, when there's a hiccup in their credit card, when they get a call from the bank, or a call into their boss's office... well, they'll get a cold sweat running down their backs, and their stomach will flutter, and they'll search their memories for anything that they might have done wrong, maybe said the wrong thing to the wrong person, had the wrong friend, went to the wrong place... And of course, most times, it'll turn out to be nothing. They'll recover from the scare, their life will go on. But the fear will remain somewhere, and the cold sweat, and the only choice they have will be to be good little citizens.

As a final thought, my compliments to Spice300 who correctly noted that near identical provisions were struck down on Judicial review, but that it took five years to do so. Clearly, there is an agenda and a strategy at work.

I'll only add this: I'm not thoroughly persuaded, if only because I'd like to see some legal minds involved in civil-liberties law take a look at this order and get their opinions. I'll be writing to a couple of folks I know, but in the meantime, if anyone else wants to advance this conversation, I'm more than happy to play the host.

Harry Potter and the Cauldron of Thumpers

-- by Dave

I've been settling into my couch and reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows and rather enjoying it. I'm something of a Potter admirer; the only bumper sticker on my car reads "Republicans for Voldemort". Of course, I don't come close to Mrs. Orcinus, who finished the book within the first day and who reread all six in the series just before the release of No. 7.

In any event, my enjoyment of the books is enhanced by the knowledge that it also drives the fundamentalist right nuts. Ever since the books gained great popularity, they've been on the warpath against Harry Potter, as you can see from the excerpt from Jesus Camp above, in which we see the head of the camp telling children that Potter should be put to death. (Talk about Republicans for Voldemort!)

It's worth remembering just how deep that animus runs, as CLS at Classically Liberal explains in painstaking detail:

[I]t seems that when someone is campaigning against the book or the films, the leader of the campaign is invariably a fundamentalist Christian. For instance, fundamentalist Laura Mallory, of Lawrenceville, Georgia, tried to ban the Potter books from the public school library. She says the books have “evil themes” because they speak of witchcraft and spells. And the Bible clearly teaches such things are immoral. One child who opposed her efforts saw things more clearly. He said, “never at any time did I think the books are true.” But fundamentalists do think that there is truth in these books. Unlike most rational people, they do believe that witches and spells exist. They have no choice since the Bible condemns such things. To say they don’t exist questions the infallibility of Scripture. Most people are not offended by the theme of the Potter series because they don’t believe the “dark forces” actually exist.

It should be noted that Mallory was not alone. Numerous fundamentalists joined her campaign in an attempt to ban the book from the library.

In Cedarville, Arkansas, the school board restricted access to the Harry Potter books unless a student could produce a signed permission slip from their parents. The board passed the rule because fundamentalist parents complained after “hearing a series of anti-Potter sermons in 2001 by Mark Hodges, pastor of the Uniontown Assembly of God Church and a member of the Cedarville School Board.”

And Christianity Today, certainly a main journal on the Religious Right, reported on a parent who wanted the book banned from school and reported that “She is among Christian parents nationwide arguing that classrooms are no place for Harry Potter...”

... Baptist youth ministries leader Jennifer Zebel said in Baptist Press, “I cannot believe that any secular book, character or movie advocating witchcraft of any kind could be this wildly successful without Satan having an agenda for it. The bottom line is that we know the right choice is to steer clear of these books and movies, but we don’t want to make the sacrifice. Satan is a wonderful writer and movie producer.” To be clear, Baptist Press is an arm of the largest fundamentalist sect in the United States-- the Southern Baptist Convention.

The post goes on to describe a number of other Harry-bashing preachers, notably our old fave, Jack Chick:



I happen to think there is a larger right-wing antipathy to the Potter books, and it's for a specific reason that I intend to explore in a little more depth soon. Let me finish the book first, and then we'll talk some more.

Normalizing white supremacy

-- by Dave

Something kept popping up while I was researching Bill O'Reilly's remarks comparing DailyKos to the Klan and neo-Nazis. It was kind of a repeating theme, the kind of note that keeps popping up enough to create a pattern -- in this case, a very telling one.

While I was cruising through far-right racist websites -- something I do with some regularity anyway -- I kept running across a familiar theme: white male Christians are under siege, an "endangered species," and "white culture" is likewise on the brink of vanishing in a swamp of brown people.

Even though we've been hearing this pap from the white-supremacist right for lo these many decades now (really, this meme dates back to the early 20th century), and it has been a standard plaint of neo-Nazi and Klan websites for most of their existence, there was a reason it kept popping up on my radar: I was looking for material relating to Bill O'Reilly.

And it is a familiar claim because it's one we heard not too long ago from O'Reilly himself:

Bill O'Reilly: But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you're a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have. In that regard, Pat Buchanan is right.

O'Reilly, in fact, is one of the major media figures responsible for whitewashing the reality that Buchanan's recent work has finally tipped the scales into outirght white supremacist extremism. O'Reilly, in fact, had previously hosted Buchanan in 2005, an interview in which they discussed Buchanan's "Decline of the West" thesis.

Indeed, as Media Matters has observed, the decline of white male dominance is a frequent concern of O'Reilly's:

-- On the May 16, 2006, edition of The O'Reilly Factor, O'Reilly claimed that The New York Times and "many far-left thinkers believe the white power structure that controls America is bad, so a drastic change is needed." O'Reilly continued: "According to the lefty zealots, the white Christians who hold power must be swept out by a new multicultural tide, a rainbow coalition, if you will." O'Reilly's comments came during a discussion of opposition by the Times and others to deploying the National Guard to help secure the border.

-- On the May 1, 2006, edition of Westwood One's The Radio Factor, O'Reilly alleged that the "organizers" of nationwide pro-immigrant protests had a "hardcore militant agenda of 'You stole our land, you bad gringos,' " and that the protest organizers were seeking to "take it back by massive, massive migration into the Southwest.' "

-- On the April 12, 2006, broadcast of his radio show, O'Reilly claimed that on the April 11 edition of The O'Reilly Factor, guest Charles Barron, a New York City councilman, had revealed the "hidden agenda" behind the current immigration debate. O'Reilly told his listeners: "[T]he bottom line is Charles Barron said last night is there is a movement in this country to wipe out 'white privilege' and to have the browning of America." O'Reilly suggested that this "hidden agenda" included plans to let "people who live in the Caribbean, people who live in Africa and Asia ... walk in and become citizens immediately."

From the May 17 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor:

O'REILLY: Reluctantly, and I mean reluctantly, "Talking Points" is going to support this legislation. It's the best we can get and does improve the situation. But make no mistake, it's not fair. It drastically alters the United States of America. And there will be unintended consequences all over the place.

The new census report says America's now one-third minority. And in four states -- California, New Mexico, Texas, and Hawaii -- whites are the minority. So with the infusion of as many as 20 to 30 million new citizens in the next 10 years, the landscape of America will absolutely change.

Compare all this, if you will, with the kind of rhetoric you can find at Klan sites like the Knights' Party [warning: racist site], which opens its official platform with the following as its top items:

The recognition that America was founded as a Christian nation.

As James Madison, known as the "Chief Architect of the Constitution" stated; " We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves to control ourselves to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God."

The recognition that America was founded as a White nation.

America was born as an extension of White European heritage. Those who formed the very ideals that we cherish such as freedom of speech, trial by jury, innocent until proven guilty, free enterprise, etc. were of White European heritage. All of the early laws of the United States from its very inception restricted citizenship to White people and all of the early charters, laws, compacts, etc were signed into effect by White people.

This particular site is hardly alone in voicing these beliefs as being among the most important sources of their political involvement. Visit Stormfront, or the National Socialist Movement site, or David Duke's website, and you'll not only be able to find similar statements, you'll discover that they are prominent and pervasive throughout the sites.

None of these sites (except the commenters at Stormfront) cite O'Reilly in these rants; he is only occasionally a source for them on this. Rather, it's evident that he is channeling them. What O'Reilly provides for them is confirmation of the self-evident truth of their core beliefs -- as well as encouragement that their message is spreading and being adopted by more and more Americans.

Now, O'Reilly has on various occasions attempted to make clear he is not on the side of white supremacists, particularly the anti-Semitic types that populate the Klan and neo-Nazi organizations -- O'Reilly being an outspoken defender of Israel. And there is no real evidence that he sympathizes with the kind of naked bigotry that is the essence of hate groups.

Yet there is no question that O'Reilly has nonetheless appropriated -- almost certainly from secondary sources like Buchanan, who in fact cites extremist sources in his published work -- the longtime core message of white supremacists and transmitted it, stripped of the obvious bigotry but still containing the core idea, to his broadcast audience of millions.

As one of my regular commenters, s9, observes in the comments to the previous post:

It's obvious what Billo is doing: exaggerating the threat of extremism among mainstream liberals while simultaneously communicating the extremism of the racist far right in comfortable terms for mainstream conservatives. What explains this behavior? That's what I think it's important to note.

The reason Billo is exaggerating the threat of extremism among mainstream liberals is that he's agitating, softening the ground in advance, for an extremist backlash against the "secular-progressives" that he (and people like our own Whiteman) hate so much.

It isn't just Billo doing this, of course. Guys like Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin have started cranking up the rhetoric lately too. It's clear they're all looking forward to having the opportunity to take out their frustrations in a decentralized campaign of discrimination against 'liberals' in the aftermath of the next major mass-casualty terrorist attack in the U.S.

This strikes me as precisely right. Blaming "secular progressives" for everything amiss with America has been a long-running O'Reilly theme -- they are, after all, the Enemy in his self-proclaimed Culture War. Recall that interview with Buchanan two years ago:

O'REILLY: All right. Now, the secular progressives who were at the forefront of promoting this kind of behavior -- and I'm going to ask you why in a minute -- will point to the declining pregnancy rate among teens. It's going down. Crime rate's going down. Education scores are going up.

And they're going to say, "Hey, we can digest this kind of stuff, and it's not going to have a pernicious effect on our society." How do you answer that with the stats?

BUCHANAN: Well, take a look at the stats. You have something like more than two thirds of all African-American children are born out of wedlock. It was only eight percent in the 1940s. Something like a third of white children and 40 percent of Hispanics or maybe 50 percent. And you've got all these attendant social problems.

Now I'm not saying we lose every battle. You know, the battle of gay marriage, you win it at the ballot box. But the idea you'd be talking about homosexual marriages -- in the 1950s nobody would believe it.

So I think what is happening is there's no doubt that the left is making tremendous progress. We win some battles, but I believe we're losing the war.

O'REILLY: Now, the vanguard, the panzers of the left, are the press, the elite media, The New York Times, L.A. Times, L.A. Times column by this nut -- what's his name? -- Robert Scheer -- attacks the Catholic Church for opposing gay marriage and saying the pope is an awful guy. And they're all a bunch of hypocrites.

I've never figured out why The New York Times and The L.A. Times or even network news, which doesn't actively promote secular progressivism but certainly is comfortable with it, why they want to change the society in that direction. Do you know why they do?

BUCHANAN: Well, do I know exactly why? I'm not exactly sure, but I can tell you this.

The elites, you mentioned the media elites. But you take the culture elites in Hollywood and New York. You take the academic elites. All of them have been converted to what we used to call the counterculture in the 1960s.

This is all-too-familiar far-right scapegoating -- commies, brown people, liberals. It's not just O'Reilly: Limbaugh, Savage, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, and dozens of lesser right-wing lights have all been indulging eliminationist rhetoric directed at these targets for some time now.

And that, folks, is hate. O'Reilly isn't just fantasizing and distorting and misinforming the public when he accuses DailyKos of hatemongering -- he's projecting.

After all, it's clear: When it comes to the ideas you find at Klan and neo-Nazi sites, the person most "just like" them is Bill O'Reilly himself.

O'Reilly and the hate talk

-- by Dave

Bill O'Reilly, I object.

As someone whose work involves tracking the activities of neo-Nazis, the Klan, and other elements of the extremist right, it's time that someone pointed out the profound damage that O'Reilly is inflicting on our national discourse by promoting the notion that somehow, DailyKos is comparable to hate groups like the Klan and the neo-Nazis.

What O'Reilly is telling the public, essentially, is that such hate groups purvey the same kind of discourse that you find at common, garden-variety political blogs. He's not only smearing DKos -- he's seriously downplaying and distorting the kind of hate being spewed by the haters of the racist right.

He did it again yesterday:

But here's what I think. The hate websites on both the left and the right -- I object to. You know I object to. Now, you're a little bit more a libertarian about this in our previous conversations.

But I say this. There's no difference between the KKK and the Nazis, who have websites, than the Daily Kos. Because the Daily Kos is basically saying, "We're allowing this kind of thing to come on. It's good that Tony Snow has a recurrence of cancer; we hope he dies. We're sorry the assassination attempt against Dick Cheney failed; let them try again." And on and on and on and on.

I mean, this is the stuff that they have every day on this website, and they revel in it.

Now, am I overstating this? Because I think hate is hate, no matter where it is.

It is, as Media Matters explains in patient detail, a gross overstatement, of course. Nearly all of the "hate" he cites come in random comments -- not actual DKos posts -- and appear to have been selected from a very few out of the literally millions of such comments that have been posted at Kos over the years.

O'Reilly has been claiming for the better part of a week now that "hate is hate" and thus Kos is just like the haters; the previous outburst went like this:

Hate is hate, sir. That website traffics in it, as do the Nazi websites. No difference.

Kenneth Brown, Jacksonville, Florida: "Mr. O'Reilly, I'm a black American and understand your argument against JetBlue, but I disagree with you comparing the Daily Kos to the KKK. The website simply hates the Bush administration."

What does the pope have to do with the president, sir? How about Israel? The website sells hate, as does the KKK and the Nazis. The comparison is valid.

Actually, there really is no comparison, and anyone claiming so is seriously misleading the public about the nature of the hate that is peddled with great regularity at sites run by neo-Nazis and Klan types.

DailyKos is, by any standard -- whether on the Internet or not -- a fairly mainstream liberal website that specializes in political dialogue. The clear mass of posts at the site are about politics, and they express clearly mainstream views. In a few rare cases, commenters can be found making hateful remarks, but they are statistically quite tiny in number. Moreover, Kos has specific policies regarding hateful speech, and while they may be enforced with varying degrees of laxity, to claim that the site actually encourages hate speech is a gross and absurd distortion of reality.

As for being a purveyor of hate -- ahem -- O'Reilly himself has a noteworthy track record. Witness, for example, his latest adventure in the Bizarro Universe, when he tried promoting the cockamamies theory that lesbian gangs were running rampant and threatening hetero males with pink pistols -- a story that he continued to insist was "legitimate."

This story, in fact, was a classic piece of anti-gay hatemongering, painting them without evidence as violent, ballbusting thugs likely to inflict harm on poor white males, linking them groundlessly with criminal behavior and hateful behavior. It was in the same mold as the anti-immigrant hatemongering in which O'Reilly indulges regularly, and which sparked his onscreen fight with Geraldo Rivera.

Indeed: where, exactly, does O'Reilly think people like the Klan (which also indulges frequently in gay-bashing) get their raw material from, anyway? They get it from supposedly "mainstream" sources like O'Reilly and Lou Dobbs. Were O'Reilly to spend any time perusing far-right websites, he might be appalled to see how many times his reportage is cited by them -- particularly in such chat forums as the neo-Nazi favorite, Stormfront, where O'Reilly's reportage is a real favorite, even though O'Reilly himself is dismissed as a "neocon" by the white-supremacy purists.

But if you really want a taste of what the neo-Nazis and the Klan actually promote at their websites, here's a sampling from various websites and their current offerings, taken today alone:

[From a typical Stormfront post]

A white girl who says she has only slept with 4 guys. One of them happens to be a jew. She says she thought he was white. Yes the guy appears to be white, but she now knows he isn't. She is now aware of what the jews are trying to do to whites, and is completely repulsed by this wreckage of her past, and would like to forget it ever happened.. This is my thought....If she was unaware at the time, it isn't really her fault. She was in no way a liberal, and was under the impression that if someone isn't black, asian, mexican etc. than they are white. This is an extremely nice girl, who may have been naive at one point in time, but I still would not consider her a race traitor. She is currently dating a friend from my gym who is racially aware, and has set her straight. Any thoughts?

A poem posted at Stormfront

We march tired and true
Frowning upon ever n****r and jew
They've taken over our homeland
and we need to take a stand
you see our shaven heads and grin
you know we are proud to be wearing white skin
put on our boots and pull the lace
we are the one true aryan race
we stand tall and ready to fight
the guys on our side arent afriad
and there lifes for our race are laid
We are white and we are proud
We are white and we shout it loud!

Headlines from the American Nazi Party/National Socialist Movement website]

Throwback the Wetback

Eugencis 101:

Mexicans outbreeding whites and blacks!

60 million Californians by mid-century and Latinos the dominant ethnic group, study says.

[From the NSM's 25-point agenda, available atop its website]

We demand land and territory (colonies) to feed our people and to settle surplus population.


Only members of the nation may be citizens of the state. Only those of pure White blood, whatever their creed, may be members of the nation. Non-citizens may live in America only as guests and must be subject to laws for aliens. Accordingly, no Jew or homosexual may be a member of the nation.

The right to vote on the State government and legislation shall be enjoyed by citizens of the state alone.

... All non-White immigration must be prevented. We demand that all non-Whites currently residing in America be required to leave the nation forthwith and return to their land of origin: peacefully or by force.

[From the White Camelia Knights of the Ku Klux Klan website]

Racial suicide all in the name of equality is insane. In the Klan’s opinion, it shows a lack of love and caring for the White Race. The Klan believes Whites are superior to the Non-Whites. When someone comes to a Klansman and makes the comment, ‘we are all God’s creation and the only difference in the Race’s is the color of the skin’, we tell them that they are partially correct. God is the creator, and he did create us all, but there is a world of difference between the races besides skin color.

Why are so many people bent on promoting race-mixing and racial equality? Because, it is Satan’s goal to have us violate our Heavenly Father’s law on mixing our seed with the other people of the world. What use to be wrong is now right. What use to be bad is now good. Our world has been turned upside down and we have only ourselves to blame for being so gullible.

... We’re often asked if there will be a race war in America's future. Our answer to this question is “yes”. What most people don't realize is there are racial battles breaking out all across America right now. These racial battles are going to lead us into an all out race war. As the non-white race population is growing the White population is decreasing.

Our constitution was designed for White Christian America by White Christians and is not going to be adequate for or accepted by non-whites in the future. Today most Blacks and other non-whites blame White's for everything that has gone wrong in their communities. They expect White taxpayers to financially fix their problems for them; White's are tired of taking the blame and or no longer willing or able to support non-white communities. This of course will breed even more hatred against Whites.

I could go on all night, of course. But you get the picture: Hate groups specialize in purveying hate -- not just generic nastiness, the kind inspired by the Michael Savages and Rush Limbaughs of the world everyday but real hate: ethnic, racial, religious and sexual bigotry in its most noxious form. It's not merely a bug that crops up in comments -- it is the entire raison d'etre of these organizations and websites.

That is not even close to the kind of comparatively mild rhetorical heat that emanates from the political blogosphere, particularly not from mainstream sites like DailyKos -- though one could, pretty accurately, make a case that such hate is in fact rhetorically endemic to right-wing sites like Little Green Footballs and the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler. But even that comparison, frankly, does not do justice to the ugliness that is the everyday grist of the far right's mill.

The hate that comes from the extremist right has a special quality, an extraordinary viciousness that makes clear that its purveyors are simply monsters with rotted smegma for souls. Pretending that what comes out of a mainstream political website like DailyKos bears any relation to them is false, irresponsible, and profoundly misleads the public that is Bill O'Reilly's audience.

UPDATE: Crooks and Liars on O'Reilly's latest attempt at "balance." [And thanks to John for the nice link.]

Taco trucks in Chocolate City

-- by Dave

The ongoing demographic shift in America, led by the heavy influx of Latinos from south of the border, is creating a lot of discomfort in places that were pretty much homogenously white before the 1990s -- many of them, as I've explored previously, are indeed all-white, historically speaking, very much by design.

But whites aren't the only segment of the population that's being discomfited by it. So, in fact, are some largely black urban neighborhoods that are beginning to feel under siege -- most notably, in New Orleans, according to a Los Angeles Times story about the city's decision to crack down on taco trucks:

But not everyone is enamored of the newest cheap eats to captivate the Crescent City. Jefferson Parish politicians, who have long turned a blind eye to whites and blacks peddling shrimp out of pickup trucks and snow cones on the street, recently outlawed rolling Mexican-food kitchens, calling them an unwelcome reminder of what Hurricane Katrina brought. Soon, Sanchez will be run out of business.

"What they're doing is just mean," the Texas native, 49, said in Spanish, noting that he'd secured all needed permits before officials changed the rules last month. "I do think they want the Mexicans out. I don't see any other explanation."

Nearly two years after Katrina led thousands of Latino immigrants to New Orleans in search of reconstruction work, it's obvious that the new arrivals are having a cultural influence that reaches beyond repairing homes and businesses — and that's making some people uncomfortable.

Authentic Mexican food is now widely available here in taco trucks and storefront taquerias, adding a contemporary Latin tinge to a famously mixed-up culinary scene that's always managed to preserve its unique Cajun and Creole flavor even as most of America has become homogenized.

But the new ethnic eateries are emerging at a time when many traditional New Orleans restaurants are struggling in the face of sagging tourism and a smaller population — one that's noticeably browner than before Katrina. New Orleans now has about 260,000 residents, down from about 460,000. Roughly 50,000 are Latinos, up from 15,000.

So taco trucks have become fodder for a larger debate over whether to recreate the past or embrace a new future in New Orleans — a discussion that's thick with racial undertones.

To advocates of reclaiming the old ways, new establishments that do not build upon the city's reputation, and may not even be permanent, represent a barrier to progress. As New Orleans City Council President Oliver Thomas recently put it in an interview with the Times-Picayune, "How do the tacos help gumbo?"

One of the natural effects of creating and maintaining a system of race-based residential segregation built out of "defended" communities -- as white Americans have since the early years of the 20th century -- is that the resulting population centers for minorities become defended communities themselves.

This was particularly the case for African Americans, who in fleeing the horrific violence of race riots, lynchings, and other acts of racial cleansing throughout the American countryside (and not merely in the South), sought refuge in urban centers where other blacks also lived in large numbers: Detroit, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, and yes, New Orleans.

Many blacks saw, and continue to see, these as places were they can live without being harassed or murdered simply for the color of their skin, places where their children can grow up without being treated like freaks or presumed criminals. In communities like New Orleans, where black accomplishment was everywhere to be seen, the sense of pride is palpable -- as is the willingness to defend.

I think this is what Mayor Ray Nagin was talking about when he talked about New Orleans as "Chocolate City"; there were in fact white elements eager to remake New Orleans in their own image, and Nagin was certainly aware of that. The overreaction from the eager-to-be-offended Bill O'Reilly types -- whose outrage was built on a phony analogy about race that necessarily deisregarded the reality of racial demographics in America -- revealed more about themselves than anything about Nagin. The mayor, in fact, saw himself as defending the black community from whites who sought to sweep away their hard-earned gains, using Katrina reconstruction as cover. But because whites have deliberately covered over and forgotten the history of the racial balkanization that they created and maintained, it was easy for right-wing white commentators like O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh to misrepresent this and instead eagerly portray Nagin's remarks as an example of reverse racism.

Yet there is little doubt that, for blacks especially, there is a sense of violation when the barriers of balkanization break down and others begin moving into their formerly defended communities -- not because they want to protect their privileges, as is the case in all-white communities, but because of the sense that this is all they have left to defend.

So it should not be a surprise that when demographic change comes to these quarters, there's a lot of angst and anger. It's a delicate and complex problem, and resolving it requires large doses of understanding on all sides.

The people moving in, particularly Latinos, need to respect the reasons for their defensiveness, which are not about defending economic privilege and elitism but about preserving hard-earned gains. And the black community, likewise, needs to understand that America needs to break down those walls we spent a century building and maintaining -- including those built to defend against the effects of racism.

But tearing them down is our only option, even if it means mixing taco trucks with servings of gumbo. When they are finally gone, I believe we'll discover that the flavor suits us all just fine.

Are We There Yet?

-- by Sara

It has come to this:

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
July 17, 2007
Executive Order: Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, as amended (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.)(IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.)(NEA), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code,

I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, find that, due to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by acts of violence threatening the peace and stability of Iraq and undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq and to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people, it is in the interests of the United States to take additional steps with respect to the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 of May 22, 2003, and expanded in Executive Order 13315 of August 28, 2003, and relied upon for additional steps taken in Executive Order 13350 of July 29, 2004, and Executive Order 13364 of November 29, 2004. I hereby order:

Section 1. (a) Except to the extent provided in section 203(b)(1), (3), and (4) of IEEPA (50 U.S.C. 1702(b)(1), (3), and (4)), or in regulations, orders, directives, or licenses that may be issued pursuant to this order, and notwithstanding any contract entered into or any license or permit granted prior to the date of this order, all property and interests in property of the following persons, that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of United States persons, are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in: any person determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense,

(i) to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of:

(A) threatening the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq; or

(B) undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people;

(ii) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, logistical, or technical support for, or goods or services in support of, such an act or acts of violence or any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; or

(iii) to be owned or controlled by, or to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order.

(Full text here)

It's that B clause that concerns me -- and should concern all of us who blog, comment, organize, write letters, and otherwise exercise our rights to agitate against this unholy war. "Undermining the efforts" is a term that can be defined very, very broadly. And since those of us opposing this war have been told repeatedly, from the beginning, that our efforts to change our fellow citizens' minds were in fact treasonous acts that undermined the war effort, emboldened America's enemies, and harmed our troops, it's not unreasonable to believe that those warnings are now being backed up by official action. "At risk of committing significant acts of violence" is more overbroad weasel-speak: How many of us have said things that could be construed (at least by the certifiable paranoids in the White House) as a threat of violence against the Bush Administration?

This government has now asserted -- without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress -- its right to take away our houses, cars, savings accounts, the stuff of our lives, on the say-so of the President and his Treasury Secretary. They are not kidding. What we do here, what I am doing right now (unless I choose my words very carefully) is being done in defiance of the Law According to George Bush.

For the past four and a half years, Dave has carefully and thoughtfully argued that there's a difference between proto-fascism -- the sprouts that are present in the garden, but have not yet borne flower or fruit -- and the real thing.

When the President can take away your life's savings without due process, under authority of a law no people's legislature ever approved, for simply disagreeing with his policies and publicly stating your intentions to do something about them, we are treading so close to that line that it's hard to tell whether we're actually over it.

And, worse, we've reached the point where these outrages seem to occur weekly -- bigger and more blatant every time, but by now we've seen so many so often that we're inured. We don't even know where to start fighting. In any other administration we've ever had, this one act on its own would be an impeachable offense. In this one, it's just another drop in an overflowing bucket.

And that, too, is how fascism works. As Milton Mayer explained in They Thought They Were Free:

"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.

"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have....

"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.

The America that would accept this kind of edict in silence is not the America that we grew up in. Something has changed. We are poised to accept this like we've accepted every other insult. It's hard to imagine that, even when bloggers and other dissenters start losing their property, that there will be tens of thousands in the streets to protect us. As long as the forms are still there, and the system continues to do what it must to sustain itself, we will simply be collateral damage.

If we accept the forcible removal of our property without due process, forcible removal of our lives will not be far behind. And there are people eager to accomplish this: according to Barna Research, there are about 50 million hardcore fundamentalists who have been eagerly awaiting the day, training and planning and praying for the chance to do just that -- to take out their frustrations on the liberal traitors whom they have been taught to believe are responsible for everything that's wrong with their lives. They believe, in their bones, we have stabbed God's America in the back; and they are out for vengeance. This is the edict that will provide "legal" support and justification for their first tentative steps toward mob rule.

Are we there yet? Not quite. But Bush has just put the capstone on the doorway leading to the coming fascist state. Whether your own B clause is a passport or a gun, it's probably time to make sure both are in good working order.

Update: Thom Hartmann did a long interview with far-right economist Paul Craig Roberts on Friday that sheds more light on the implications of this. (There are plenty of people on the right who are at least as concerned about Bush's intentions as we are.) You can go hear the audio here.

Mmmmm. Sea lice

I've written previously about the problems associated with farmed Atlantic salmon, especially those raised in Pacific Coast waters. A quick roundup: the fish are loaded with chemicals, the farms pollute the local waters, and worst of all, they are harming native Pacific salmon stocks.

Unfortunately, more and more of them are coming, especially up in British Columbia, where the government is avidly promoting salmon farming because it brings jobs. Washington state is not far behind. And as Rafe Mair at The Tyee explains, the bullshit coming from the promoters of this environmental disaster is seemingly endless.

First, there is the overwhelming scientific consensus on the issue:

Here is what well-known fish biologist John Volpe had to say: "The independent scientific community speaks with a single voice with regards to sea lice and their impact on wild salmon. Salmon farms kill wild salmon. There's no debate around that. It's been known and acknowledged in Europe for more than a decade."

Dr. Volpe, a distinguished marine biologist from the University of Victoria, did considerable research on escapees from the Atlantic salmon cages and found hundreds of them in the few rivers his funds enabled him to examine. At the same time then agriculture, food and fish minister John Van Dongen said that only three had been found, while his colleague Stan Hagen said there were only two!

Dr. Volpe then participated with two doctoral students from the University of Alberta, Martin Krkosek and Mark Lewis, on the sea lice issue and concluded that beyond a doubt, lice from these cages were slaughtering migrating pink and chum salmon smolts. In order to understand the issue you should know that pink salmon smolts spend very little time in rivers, but quickly migrate. They have a two-year cycle unlike other salmon species here and in Europe; pinks have no scales when they migrate and thus have no protection against lice.

Mair then runs down the list of excuses coming from the industry, and points out that each of them is just so much nonsense. The bottom line is profits, and even environmental considerations won't prevent them from proceeding. Indeed, there's a real motive for the farmers to destroy wild salmon stocks:

Gee, Mr. Fish Farmer, I guess the good news is that as your Atlantic salmon kill off the Pacific salmon we'll need more and more of your product?

You're a smart lad.... It's rather like the Vietnam war, where they had to destroy villages in order to save them.

There's a popular bumper sticker around here: "Friends don't let friends eat farmed salmon." It's worth keeping in mind.

Bush vs. the whales

[A dead harbor porpoise in the San Juans, May 15, 2003. Photo by Sandy Dubpernel.]

One of the reasons to pay attention to the Bush administration's towering mendacity in its ongoing attempts to reconfigure the American political system -- particularly in its attempts to claim nearly illimitable executive-branch powers -- is that it doesn't just manifest itself in the prominent, well-noted ways. These include the ongoing claims of executive privilege in shielding itself from congressional investigations, or the White House's assertion of immunity from judicial review in such matters as military tribunals.

No, this madness infects everything this administration does, including its environmental policy. Witness, for example, what is going on this very moment in the administration's intent to deploy new high-tech sonar devices along the Pacific Coast as part of the ongoing "war on terror".

The P-I's Robert McClure, one of the nation's best environmental reporters, notes in his blog that the administration is only allowing two weeks for the public to comment on the use of sonar in Washington state waters:

[T]oday the National Marine Fisheries Service gave members of the public two weeks to get their say-so typed up and shipped in on a five-year extension of a rule allowing the Navy to use low-frequency sonar that enviros insist will harm whales and dolphins.

And note that this comes as many members of the public are on vacation. I wonder how much comment NMFS really wants? The AP story on this fails to mention this short public-comment period as an issue, although the Natural Resources Defense Council, the greenie group that has stayed on top of this issue the most, complained vociferously about it.

This low-frequency sonar is different from the more-common mid-frequency sonar that witnesses said spooked orcas and other marine mammals near the San Juan Islands a few years ago. NMFS said in issuing the proposed rule that one reason it would allow the low-frequency to be used is that it's only going to be on a handful of ships. That's on page 37414 of the Federal Register notice. (Don't worry -- the proposal isn't 37,000 pages long. It's just the Register's arcane page-numbering system.)

One thing I've learned from watching this administration is that when it breaks well-established norms, and then tries to pretend that doing so is normal, it's all a pretense to cover something devious in the offing. Think of the case of the eight fired U.S. attorneys, an action that reflected the White House's now-evident determination to politicize the Justice Department.

In this case, the administration is short-circuiting the normal hearing process -- typically, the public is given 60 to 90 days for comment, not 14 -- because it's self-evident that it is determined to deploy its deadly new sonar in the Puget Sound, the public -- and the wildlife -- be damned. What ulterior motives lie beneath that are hard to discern.

Certainly, its effects on wildlife are likely to be profound. As the Center for Whale Research reported when the sonar was tested in the Sound's canyon walls back in 2003, both orcas and porpoises were profoundly disturbed by the tests. Some 15 harbor porpoises washed up dead in short order. (More details on the tests and their aftermath can be found at the Orca Network).

Scientists and activists alike fired off letters of protest to the Navy, and a federal judge ruled that the tests had to cease because they hadn't gone through the usual environmental processes. The Navy and environmentalists reached an agreement to suspend the tests.

But now it's clear that they are determined to proceed with using this sonar here, regardless of their effect on such endangered species as the southern resident killer whales. The military in Puget Sound is accustomed to having its way, and it's clear that this time it intends to get it.

The only thing that could possibly stop them, or at least slow the process, would be a mass letter writing campaign to protest both the resumption of tests and the extraordinarily short comment period. Unfortunately, the clock is now ticking.

Here's info on how you can write:

You may submit comments on the application and proposed rule, using the identifier 062206A, by any of the following methods:

E-mail: PR1.062306A@noaa.gov.

Federal e-Rulemaking Portal: http://www.regulations.gov.

Hand-delivery or mailing of paper, disk, or CD-ROM comments should be addressed to: P. Michael Payne, Chief, Permits, Conservation and Education Division, Office of Protected Resources, National Marine Fisheries Service, 1315 East-West Highway, Silver Spring, MD 20910-3225.