No, Nazis, No

Wow! The response to the "Say No To Nazis" fund-raiser has been phenomenal. I'm touched and honored.

The tally, after just two days: over 120 donations totaling more than $2,500. That more than doubles the total after more than a week of regular fund-raising.

To say it's heartening is understating it badly. The breadth and depth of the response tells me that not just the regional community, but the larger blogging community, understands the importance of standing up to the cancer of racial hatred.

As if to illustrate the character of the people we're dealing with here, the very same group that named me (along with Sarah of OlyUnity) a "race traitor" went and made the local newscasts with their antics in the Olympia area.

Seems they were leaving Easter eggs containing pornographic images and obscenities on neighborhood lawns. Maybe it was part of their Kiddie Outreach program:

Words of hate and pornographic images are circulating in a most unexpected way in Thurston County.

Plastic Easter eggs loaded with obscenities have landed on lawns in Olympia, Lacey and Tumwater.

"Every house had two or three," said Tumwater resident Steve Newbon, who picked up several from his own lawn in a residential neighborhood.

At first, he thought Easter had come early. Then he got a closer look.

"It upset the living bejeezus out of me," he said.

Dozens of eggs like this one, with hate messages on them, were found in Olympia, Lacey and Tumwater, Wash.

Police say a neo-Nazi type group spread the eggs and flyers. The containers held obscene images, slurs against homosexuals and slurs against certain minorities. Newbon's most concerned because his young son gets on the bus close by.

He also has an adopted grandmother from another country and both English and Spanish are spoken in his house.

Police say the eggs have shown up on lawns all over the area including Olympia and Lacey. An officer found more than 40 in Tumwater alone.

I watched this report when it was broadcast, and it was unfortunately marred by a hyperbolic lead-in by the anchors that referred to the egg laying as "neo-Nazi attacks," as well as some not exactly accurate information:

But despite the messages, police say the only crime is littering.

"At this time, we really don't have much. We have littering. They have a right to free speech. There's not much we can do … We don't have any suspects," said Tumwater Police Det. Jennifer Kolb.

This is contrary to some of what we've been told: If there really were pornographic images, then there certainly may have been charges related to that, since these were left on families' lawns. It's not a free-speech right to distribute pornography to minors.

There also was some confusion among the interviewees chosen for the "man on the street" portion of the report:

While police look for suspects, neighbors hope they're caught before they hatch more hate.

"They shouldn't be doing the eggs. That's not right at all," said Shirleyann Westman.

"That's not first amendment rights, that's bigotry," said Newbon.

Actually, bigotry is part of Americans' First Amendment rights. People who hold such beliefs do, for better or worse, have every right to voice them in a lawful fashion. Hate speech becomes a hate crime only when it enters the criminal realm: that is, when it becomes a threat, intimidation, or criminal incitement.

Which is why counter-speech -- standing up to them -- is so absolutely essential. Bad speech cannot be countered by silence; people like these only interpret the silence as implicit endorsement. They thrive on the illusion that they represent the silent wishes of the white majority, and shattering it is the only effective means of defanging them.

So the outpouring of support this week has been especially gratifying. I think we made a powerful statement that every hateful move they make will only be turned to strengthen our side. Every threat, implicit or explicit, will only stoke our fires higher.

I'd especially like to thank the following bloggers for stepping up and directing readers this way, and pat them on the back for locking arms:

Crooks and Liars

Jesus' General

Steve Gilliard's NewsBlog

Horses Ass

LGF Watch

Voice of a Native Son

GOTV

Jesus Politics

OlyUnited

Steve Sailer Sucks

Ahistoricality

Thanks to all these folks, and to the many donors. I really was looking more for sheer numbers of donations by way of making a statement, and we certainly achieved that; but many went well over and beyond the call of duty in how much they donated. I'm very grateful. A special thanks in that regard to Asher, Joseph, Kay, Nadia, Devon, Steven, Marianne, Robert, Christopher, Adam, Mr. SJ, Steve Gilliard, and The General.

Stay tuned throughout the year.

Faith of the faithful

Dwight Meredith wrote in recently in response to my post on the conservative movement as a political religion, which he said "reminded me of a letter to the editor I saw recently from The Salt Lake Tribune:"

Bush the Messiah

Right-leaning conservatives seeking political domination need not fret over the seculars kicking God out of our country.

When President Bush presented himself as the Messiah of world democracy and was re-elected, we assured ourselves that ours had finally become a faith-based government. The voters' message was that we trust the president as a man of faith.

We trust Him to do the right thing. We trust that under His command, our government will spy on those needing to be spied upon, torture those who are in need of torturing, start wars wherever wars ought to be fought, bomb those who need to be blown away, and castigate as evil those who are of Satan. God bless Him.

Horst Holstein
Salt Lake City

Dwight notes: "I see no evidence that the letter is satire although it would be good satire if so intended."

Having been born in Salt Lake City and raised in southeastern Idaho, I'm pretty sure the letter was meant quite seriously.

In the meantime -- as I continue to gather my thoughts on all this -- be sure to read Mahablog's continuing discussions along these lines, notably a terrific post on nationalism and a followup on hate speech.

Also, be sure to drop over to Dwight's place and plug in some nickels for the Koufax Awards. They recently had an emergency fund-raiser, and could always use the help.

UPDATE: Several commenters have pointed out that several of Mr. Holstein's previously published pieces were decidedly anti-Bush. I think it's clear that the letter was intended satirically. But it's also obvious that Holstein knows his neighbors well.

Swift Minutemen

Now there's a marriage made in hell: Minutemen leader Jim Gilchrist is teaming up with Swift Boater Jerome Corsi to write a book about how illegal immigrants are part of a Mexican conspiracy to trash America:

Jim Gilchrist, co-founder of the Minuteman Project, and Jerome Corsi, Harvard Ph.D. and co-author of the #1 New York Times bestseller "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry," have teamed up to write a shocking account of the endless flow of drugs, terrorists, and economic refugees at America's borders -- and to expose the Mexican government's open complicity in this full-fledged crisis. The to-be-titled book will be published by World Ahead Publishing and available in bookstores nationwide this July.

The Minuteman Project is a volunteer-based organization that gained national prominence last year for organizing a citizen watch along the nation's southwestern border to report suspicious activity to authorities. While denounced by politicians in the nation's capital -- including President Bush -- over-worked Border Patrol agents privately praised the Minuteman Project volunteers for their efforts.

"Illegal immigration is bankrupting states along the border, but this is about more than economics -- we're placing our national security at risk," says Gilchrist, who along with other Minuteman Project volunteers has come under fire while on patrol and carrying nothing more than binoculars and cell phones. "Drug lords and violent gangs like MS-13 are streaming into the U.S. from Mexico. Terrorists are also walking in unopposed; our southwestern border is littered with Arabic papers and Islamic prayer rugs."

[Note how Arabs are equated with terrorists. Never in the mind of someone like Gilchrist could a terrorist be white.]

"Politicians who believe that illegal immigration can be ignored must realize that Mexicans and others are dying every day along our nation's borders," adds Corsi, whose book "Unfit for Command" played a key role in convincing the American people to reject John Kerry's 2004 presidential bid. "These economic refugees are often abandoned and left to die by the human traffickers and Mexican soldiers who smuggle them across the border. It's nothing less than a tragedy."

I don't know about you, but it just makes me feel all warm and fuzzy outside to see Corsi waxing sensitive about the deaths of illegal immigrants on the border. After all, last year marked a record number of deaths on the southwestern border. Many of them were the result of people being forced to attempt more dangerous crossings because of the presence of the Minutemen in less dangerous spots.

But then, we know all about Corsi's ethnic sensitivity, since he is the same fellow who penned the following lines over at Free Republic:

Islam is a peaceful religion as long as the women are beaten, the boys buggered, and the infidels killed.

So this is what the last days of the Catholic Church are going to look like. Buggering boys undermines the moral base and the laywers rip the gold off the Vatican altars. We may get one more Pope, when this senile one dies, but that's probably about it.

Isn't the Democratic Party the official SODOMIZER PROTECTION ASSOCIATION of AMERICA -- oh, I forgot, it was just an accident that Clintoon's first act in office was to promote "gays in the military." RAGHEADS are Boy-Bumpers as clearly as they are Women-Haters -- it all goes together.

Not that Gilchrist is any better:

Less than a year ago, Jim Gilchrist's vision of the future was plainly apocalyptic. The country, he predicted to one newspaper reporter, will have "100 tribes with 100 languages," a situation from which "mayhem" will result. "I see neighborhood armies of 20 to 40 going out and killing and invading one another," he said. Too many immigrants, he added, could even result in a full-scale civil war -- a situation he suggested might be avoided by inciting a revolution in Mexico.

"Illegal immigrants will destroy this country," Gilchrist said last May. "Every time a Mexican flag is planted on American soil, it is a declaration of war."

By late August, Gilchrist wasn't talking like that any more.

... Gilchrist, conceding that Gov. Wallace "was probably a bigot," insists he is no racist. But he is a close friend of Barbara Coe, who routinely describes Mexicans as "savages" and recently said she was a member of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a hate group which opposes "race-mixing." Gilchrist also is a member of Coe's California Coalition for Immigration Reform, another hate group.

Coe is a real piece of work who is a member of the Council of Conservative Citizens and who regularly refers to illegal immigrants as "savages."

Together, they all make just one cozy little right-wing sensitivity seminar, don't they?

[Hat tip to Matt Stoller.]

Killer whales at large

I'm sort of celebrating my return to print journalism today with a cover story on orcas for Seattle Weekly. It examines, among other thing, the impact of the recent endangered species listing for the Puget Sound's southern resident killer whales. As I report, that impact could reach as far as the hotly constested dams on the Snake River that are choking off the Columbia spring chinook runs.

Rereading the story, I realize that I neglected to point out one important aspect of the orcas' impact for people on the Wet Side of the mountains: whale watching has become a multi-million-dollar industry here. The whales probably mean more to the local economy than either the Seahawks or the Mariners. So their symbology is more than just skin deep.

Say No to Nazis

Following the recent outbreak of neo-Nazism in my own neighborhood, I've become even more acutely aware of the silent tide of white supremacism that's creeping back into our lives, if that's possible.

It's one thing when it happens elsewhere, as I usually find myself documenting. But having it in your own back yard drives home the reality in a particularly pungent fashion.

And it does continue to manifest elsewhere too, in nearly identical fashion: Until they unfurl their flags and don their costumes, today's white supremacists dress, talk, and comport themselves like normal people. They present their ideas as though they were simply normative, rather than the hateful aberrations they've been widely considered to be over the past half-century.

They see the current political environment as ripe for their return. So they constantly stress the need for movement followers to blend in and appear normal. They often call themselves "ghost skins" because their skinhead beliefs are often invisible. As Margaret Kimberley at the Black Commentator explained:

The ghost skins eschew goose stepping and rioting, and proclaim their intention to blend in with their neighbors. They are skinheads, but kinder and gentler in their approach, hence the ghostly aspect of their movement. The ghost skin who distributed the most flyers denouncing "the Oregon cesspool of Niggers, Spics, Kikes, Faggots, Ragheads, Chinks, Gooks, Roaches & leftist communist swine," received among other prizes, 1,000 white power songs as a bonus for work well done.

Alina Cho at the Anderson Cooper blog recently wrote about her own experiences in dealing with these folks:

I met Jarred Hensley, a Ku Klux Klan member, six months ago while working on a story about racial tensions in Ohio. I remember being struck by his age: At 23, he was -- and remains -- the second most powerful Klansman in the state.

Hensley told me the Klan was growing younger and larger, information we later verified with the Southern Poverty Law Center. I asked Hensley if we could attend one of his Klan meetings. He told me non-members are not allowed. But he eventually agreed to videotape the meeting for us. His tape arrived a few months later.

After reviewing the tape (only portions of the meeting were filmed), I went to Ohio to interview Hensley. He told me there was an increase in Klan membership after 9/11. He also said the Internet is the Klan's number one recruiting tool.

Skins, Klansmen, and neo-Nazis will often talk openly to white reporters like myself, but it can be very difficult for anyone of color to work on these stories. As Cho explains:

Personally, this has been a hard story for me to report. As an Asian-American journalist, I found it difficult at times to listen to his views objectively. At one point in the interview, he told me I should leave the country.

Some people have asked me why we are giving the Ku Klux Klan a platform. I respond by saying there is clear evidence the white supremacist movement is on the rise in this country and around the world. This story cannot be ignored.

Neo-Nazis often express these ideas -- particularly their repugnance of minorities -- to white reporters as if they should be naturally understood. The leader of a group of white supremacist skinheads in Pennsylvania, described in a recent piece in News of Delaware County, talked exactly this way:

However, according to a member of the Pennsylvania skinhead movement, the organization is not what people perceive it to be.

"It's about love of your people and love of your country," said Ron, a self-proclaimed white nationalist and a college student who grew up in Chester County, Pennsylvania.

Ron -- who did not want his last name released -- has been an active member of the skinhead movement for about one-and-a-half years and believes that white nationalists have received a bad rap.

"Everyone to a certain extent prejudges people," Ron said. "White nationalists are just more open about it.

"It's not about blind hatred, just wanting the best for myself and my country. There are people in our country that are hurting it," Ron said.

The new resurgence of skinheads can be attributed to the fall of other hate groups and the skinhead music industry, according the head of ADL's Philadelphia Office, Barry Morrison.

The skinhead music industry creates passion for young people to gravitate to, according to Morrison. Teardown, a Pennsylvania-based group on the label Final Stand Records is a favorite among white nationalists, according to Ron.

While the old skinheads' cachet used to be with rebellious young thugs, selling themselves as "normal" is a big part of their schtick now:

Many of the new skinheads are young, impressionable, undisciplined and violent, according to Morrison.

"To be a skinhead is to be violent," Morrison said. "They have a great tendency to engage in criminal activity."

Ron, who is not a member of KSS but insists he does frequent their functions, agreed that many of the new members are in their 20s, but added that violence and crime are not characteristics of the skinheads.

"We're definitely not violent ... these people just care seriously about protecting their family," Ron said. "If one of us goes to jail, we're useless to the movement."

He added that the notion that members of the skinhead movement are uneducated is far from the truth.

"These people [skinheads] are very well educated," said Ron -- who is a junior and college and said he intends to go to medical school, or work as a financial analyst.

Public image makeover notwithstanding, it doesn't take long for these skinheads to start peddling the same old hate that's always been their raison d'etre:

Although skinheads are misunderstood, according to Ron, he echoes ideas of complete racial separation that have been championed by other "hate groups."

"This country was meant for white Christians," Ron said. Adding that members of the movement advocate for non-whites and non-Christians to return to their homes of origin and begin a government like white Christians did in America.

"Black people should be given the opportunity to return to their homeland and do the same thing," Ron said. "There wouldn't be anymore interracial crime.

"Asians ... I don't have any problem with them," Ron said. "I [just] think it would be better if they stayed in their land and we stayed in ours."

Got that, Alina Cho? Oh, and you too, Michelle Malkin.

Fortunately, there aren't many indications that this tactic is succeeding any more than previous mainstreaming efforts. Certainly, as the Stranger reported, there weren't exactly a lot of eager recruits to be had at the Fremont rally.

Still, what they represent is so poisonous, and their dark intent so undying, that is warrants eternal vigilance. So you can count on this blog and others to continue to monitor and report on their activities.

In that spirit, please welcome to my blogroll Olympia United Against Hate, which is doing a marvelous job of tracking this local band of neo-Nazis.

Both of us were recently named "race traitors" at the Website of the regional National Socialist Movement outfit (sorry, I won't link to it). There is an innate threat in such a listing, of course, but it's one I'm accustomed to, not to mention well prepared to deal with.

Still, it underscores the potential problems that lie in wait for anyone publishing a blog like this. In addition to the harassment that comes with these things (the NSM folks kindly urged their followers to dump hate material in my comments, which I've been very easily deleting), there's always the potential for these things to trickle over into your private life. The NSM is a tiny contingent, really, but all of these groups attract unstable and violent followers, and they are an actual threat.

I recently wrapped up my regular fund-raiser (I raised over $2,000, and will report in a separate post on that). But I've decided to run a supplemental fund-raiser, based on a campaign of refutation for this kind of intimidation.

What I want is to be able to turn their campaign against them: For every post and threat they make, people can donate to the cause of keeping Orcinus afloat.

I'm asking folks to toss a fiver (or whatever amount you like) in the PayPal kitty at the upper corner (or write me at P.O. Box 17872, Seattle WA 99107), and designate it with the phrase, "Say No to Nazis". I'll report on the fund's progress in the coming weeks.

Here's hoping we can hoist them on their own petard.

Swimming in Coulter's cesspool

I suppose we should take it as an encouraging sign that a lot of voices -- including many on the right -- have been raised in objection to Ann Coulter's bit of performance theater at the Conservative Political Action Committee conference last weekend, wherein she uttered the now-infamous line:

"I think our motto should be, post-9-11: 'Raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences.'"

The ethnic bigotry couldn't have been more naked. And that, unsurprisingly, is what everyone has focused on.

But there's a deeper problem that Coulter's comment represents -- indeed, it's only the tip of a Titanic-sized iceberg. With similar potential for real disaster.

Coulter's remarks -- which included an assassination fantasy about Bill Clinton -- were received with warm applause from the CPAC. And folks on the left, of course, jumped all over them. That's how Coulter's routine always has worked. What's noteworthy is that this time, she crossed a line.

There seems to have been a realization on the right -- long, long overdue -- that Coulter had gone too far. Sure, she can wish aloud for Tim McVeigh to blow up the New York Times Building all she wants, but even they could see that using an ethnic slur was beyond the realm of acceptable discourse.

But it wasn't so much the slur itself, as how it might reflect badly on the rest of the conservative movement. (I think everyone's favorite remark on the right was that "she isn't helping anyone.") After all, reassuring all those middle-class voters that they aren't the Party of Bigots has been an important talking point for them in recent years.

That seemed to be the main concern at places like Right Wing Nuthouse and Outside the Beltway. There was little reflection on the ugliness that these kinds of remarks reveal not just in someone who is a major spokesperson in the media for the conservative movement, but in a movement that would lionize her. She wasn't up on that stage by accident.

Others, like Shape of Days and Jonah Goldberg, were content to dismiss it as just part of Coulter's "schtick," as if she were just a naughty child who got a little out of hand. It's not that she thinks such things; it's that she had the bad form to voice them in public:

I don't think Ann does anybody but herself any good when she jokes about killing presidents, Supreme Court justices or uses terms like raghead. I don't think she should do it and I don't think conservatives should applaud it.

There were some honest expressions of revulsion, like that from Tom Briggs ("I think I'm going to be ill"), and Sean Hackbarth at The American Mind offered a harsh assessment of her rhetoric. On the other hand LaShawn Barber just thought it was "much ado about nothing." Ta-ta.

The refrain heard most, though, was like that from Michelle Malkin, who after lightly slapping Coulter's wrists -- she called the remarks "spectacularly ill-chosen and ill-timed" (words like "reprehensible" or "unacceptable" or "unhinged" seem only to be in her vocabulary with people from the left) -- and worrying about how the remarks would go down with young conservative Muslims, got down to her real problem with the remarks:

Ann's comment gives cover to smug liberals in denial about their own pervasive bigotry (I'll show you 100 liberal hate mails and blog posts referring to me as a "gook" or a "chink" or a "filipina whore" for every 1 "raghead" controversy on the right.)

Glenn Greenwald's response to similar whining about mean lefties from Glenn Reynolds was direct and to the point:

Republicans have been playing this game for years. They wildly inflate the importance of fringe, extremist figures and then -- every time one of those individuals makes an intemperate remark or comment that can be wrenched out-of-context and depicted as some sort of demented evil -- they demand that Democrats ritualistically parade before the cameras and either condemn those individuals or be branded as someone who is insufficiently willing to stand up to the extremists "in their party."

... Unlike, say, Ward Churchill, Ann Coulter is not some fringe, obscure figure for the right-wing crowd. To the contrary, she is one of the most popular and influential pro-Bush speakers around, which is exactly why she was invited to be one of the featured speakers at one of the most significant conservative events of the year. And Glenn Reynolds, just like Coulter, was also an invited speaker at this event.

So, Coulter isn’t just the leader of a substantial faction in Reynolds’ political party (although she is that), but they also have the nexus of both being invited speakers at the same event. Put simply, Coulter’s importance is infinitely greater than Ward Churchill’s (or Harry Belafonte's or Barbra Streisand's or any other left-wing bogeyman), and Reynolds’ connection to Coulter is far more substantial than all of those Democrats who never even heard of Churchill before and yet, according to the sermonizing Reynolds, nonetheless somehow had a compelling obligation to denounce him.

The comments Coulter made during her speech were reprehensible in the extreme. And those comments prompted not condemnation from the audience but its opposite -- what one observer described as a "boisterous ovation." Certainly under the denuncation standards that have been applied to Democrats for years, every attendee at that event, and anyone pledging featly to the "conservative" cause, has an obligation to say what their views are of Coulter generally and to address specifically why she was invited to be a featured speaker and why she plays such a prominent role, and commands such popularity, in the Bush movement. Although her comments were extreme, they are neither new nor surprising, as she has a long and documented history of urging violence against her political opponents and making comments quite similar to those she made at the CPAC.

Coulter's prominence on the right-wing scene is matched only by her long record of similarly hateful and eliminationist remarks, often in the guise of "jokes". As Jenna K. at The Girl Gets Away adroitly observes, Coulter's jokes just ain't funny, except as a way to vent some genuinely hateful beliefs.

Let's face it, Coulter has been spewing hate -- ethnic and otherwise -- for a long time under the guise of "political humor." In terms of poisoning the public discourse, just how much worse is an ethnic slur than calling for us to invade Muslim nations and forcing them to convert to Christianity? Or, for that matter, wishing for the bombing of the New York Times Building? Calling liberals innately "treasonous," and calling for their oppression? Disenfranchising women? Extolling the benefits of "local fascism"? Fantasizing about shooting the president?

Considering that Malkin devoted an entire chapter in her book Unhinged, to decrying supposed left-wing assassination fantasies, you'd think that the frequency of the latter (inclduing an appearance in this latest speech) from Coulter would earn almost as much ire from Michelle Malkin as an ethnic slur. But of course, Malkin makes no mention of it in her rebuke.

That's par for the course. As I pointed out a bit ago regarding Malkin's treatment of Coulter:

Has Malkin ever spoken up about this kind of extremism? It doesn't appear so. A quick Google of her site reveals plenty of references to Coulter -- but they're all adulatory and approving; many are about painting Coulter as a right-wing martryr.

As Greenwald points out in his post, the same is true of Glenn Reynolds, who boasts a similar Google record despite claiming that he "mostly ignores" her. Across the board, would-be mainstream conservatives behave the same: they invite her onto their talk shows, book her for their conferences, and buy (and promote) her books by the bushel. Then, when she says something outrageous, either simply pretend it didn't happen or sniff that no one takes her seriously.

Conservatives, in fact, have been happily swimming in the Coulter cesspool for a long time and have not only failed to notice the stink, they've positively extolled its virtues.

However, it's also important to give credit where it's due, and Glenn Reynolds, nearly alone on the right, correctly identified the real problem with Coulter's remarks:

[H]er ongoing treatment of Muslims has followed this general pattern of fostering alienation. The result of this sort of behavior is aid and comfort to the enemy.

To win this war, we need to kill the people who want to kill us. But we need to win over the rest. The terrorists of Al Qaeda want to polarize things so that it appears to be a war of Christianity against Islam, of America and the West against all Arabs and Muslims. With remarks like those, she's helping their cause, not ours. Call it "objectively pro-terrorist."

This point has, of course, long been a core operating principle at this blog:

Those who foment war against Islam are objectively furthering the agenda of Osama bin Laden, and are thus an effective Al Qaeda 'fifth column.'

Osama bin Laden wants you to make this into an Islam-vs.-the-West conflict. That was the explicit purpose behind 9/11.

The more that conservatives make the rest of Islam culpable for 9/11, the more they make enemies of our allies in the Islamic world. These include such major strategic partners as Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Their own Republican president has been working hard not to allow this to turn into an anti-Islamic crusade. Yet their own ignorance about the nature of Islam is nonetheless increasing the chances that the "war on terror" could explode into an uncontrollable global cultural conflict.

Remember that shortly after 9/11, bin Laden told his followers, "Tell them that these events have divided the world into two camps, the camp of the faithful and the camp of infidels. May God shield us and you from them." Bin Laden's larger strategy behind 9/11 is to create such a large conflagration that Western society cannot contain it, and it is his religious belief that God will eventually grant Muslims the victory.

Rhetoric like Coulter's poses a real danger to us all. Because rather than keeping the conflict contained to a handful of radical terrorists -- which was our best hope for winning, before Bush's heedless Iraq incursion -- she would have us take on all of Islam in a massive world war. No doubt, given her previous remarks, she would not consider it a victory short of "killing all their leaders and converting them to Christianity." Talk like this plays directly into bin Laden's hands.

What's genuinely troubling is that Coulter loves to be on the cutting edge of right-wing ideology, and so her clarion call for a revival of open bigotry against Muslims -- which is the only realistic interpretation of pointedly featuring a naked ethnic slur in her remarks -- is almost certain to be picked up. At the same time, she also has a history of rather slyly tuning into the right-wing dialogue that's occurring just beneath the surface. The truth is that she's hardly the first right-winger to call them "ragheads," nor will she by any means be the last.

In fact, one of the really disturbing trends of the past year is the extent to which you see conservatives conflating radical Islamists with mainstream Muslims -- not merely conflating, but essentially identifying and failing to make any distinction between them whatsoever. The festering capital of the use of "ragheads" is of course the Free Republic, but you can also find it present throughout the right blogosphere, at sites ranging from Little Green Footballs to Jawa Report to Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler to Dr. Sanity to Ace of Spades to RedState. These all are sites where conservative Muslims are consistently identified with Islamists -- and identified as the Enemy. The comments at these sites are particularly vicious, and rife with the use of "ragheads."

And, perhaps not surprisingly, they are all on the blogrolls of Glenn Reynolds and Michelle Malkin and all those other supposedly mainstream conservatives horrified by Coulter's remarks. Consistency would suggest they would be as ready to denounce the steady patter of rhetoric that plays into the hands of our very real enemies coming from throughout the conservative movement.

But no. They've all been too busy making hay by denouncing the behavior of the Islamic cartoon rioters -- and linking to all these sites in the process. And committing, by extension, the same mistake.

There's no doubt the cartoon riots are yet another example of the violence that can be wielded almost at will by the forces of fundamentalism, and are deeply disturbing for that reason alone. No doubt, there are serious free-speech issues at play, and I think the ramifications could be profound for Europeans especially.

Yet one thing you'll notice that's decidedly absent in all the right-wing horror at the riots is any recognition of the power relationship that is the real context in which they are occurring. There seems to be no recognition that we're talking about a people -- namely, Third World Muslims -- who've suffered a century and more of economic and political deprivation, a setting that has made them ripe for exploitation by fundamentalist demagogues.

Of course we don't riot or engage in violence when someone is disrespectful of our culture and our beliefs; we Westerners have been perched in the catbird seat for some time now and can afford to ignore it if we choose. That's not how people on the bottom rung, though, are likely to respond to high-handed mistreatment and disrespect. Making fun of the high and mighty and privileged and powerful is an honorable thing, even if not very profitable. Making fun of the downtrodden -- especially from a position of privilege -- is a despicable thing ... but it sure is easy.

Muslims are rioting because the Danish cartoons that sparked the anger have come to symbolize the ethnic arrogance of Europeans and Americans, typified by ethnic slurs like "ragheads," that they blame as the engines of their dienfranchisement, and from which they now believe they are finally able to rise up and restore their societies. Certainly the way that Westerners on both sides of the Atlantic have responded to the riots -- holding them up as evidence of innate Muslim barbarism -- has only served to deepen that anger.

The American voices who have joined in this chorus have almost certainly not gone unnoticed. Just today, Muslim rioters in Indonesia (another one of our Muslim allies) targeted an American embassy, though it's hard to tell if this is a product of the Iraq war or just the general sense of American complicity in the spread of the supposedly sacrilegious cartoons.

Yet we have to be extremely careful and measured in how we respond to this. The thousands of rioters, for all their ugliness, are almost certainly ordinary fundamentalist Muslims and not radical Islamists. Yet it's also clear that they are being manipulated by fundamentalist clerics whose sympathies appear well in line with the cause of Al Qaeda.

Certainly, they are being pushed into bin Laden's arms. After all, bin Laden has, like the Wahhabists generally, scapegoated the West (and the USA in particular) in the process of trying to stake a claim to representing the true Islam. Recall that immediately after 9/11, he cast the coming "war on terror" as one involving all of Islam rising up against the West: "What America is tasting now is only a copy of what we have tasted. Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more than 80 years of humiliation and disgrace, its sons killed and their blood spilled, its sanctities desecrated."

He also has warned: "Every Muslim must rise to defend his religion." And so, it seems, they are beginning to heed him. That this is occurring is bin Laden's dream, and our worst nightmare.

People like Ann Coulter, and the thousands of little Freepers and wingnuts who are part of the "raghead" chorus, and their cartoon-drawing counterparts in Europe, have not only been swimming in their own little hate-filled cesspool, they are slowly dragging the rest of us into it with them. Not just the nation, but the world.

They drive ordinary Muslims into the waiting arms of bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi even as they convince more Americans that their enemies really are those same ordinary Muslims. In the process, they help bin Laden realize his strategy exactly as planned.

Coulter's book Treason, it will be said in the years to come, really was just a classic piece of right-wing projection.

The Conservative faith

Much of the blogosphere, both left and right, has been abuzz over Glenn Greenwald's excellent post limning the cultic nature of the modern conservative movement. It created, as Greenwald observed in a followup post, a predictable response from right-wing circles.

Among the responses, incidentally, was a post pointing out that Greenwald had served as World Church of the Creator founder Matt Hale's lawyer in his attempts to obtain a law license. Now, I obviously hold no brief for Hale: I've been dogging him at this blog from my very first post. But I've also been around the block enough to know that civil libertarians take up these kinds of cases all the time as a matter of deep principle, and I've seen no indication Greenwald was any kind of exception. I may disagree with them, but I respect their reasons for doing so.

This is simply an ad hominem smear job. Which, as Greenwald points out, is precisely the response one would predict from a cultic mindset.

Some of Greenwald's commenters pointed out the similarities of his observations to some of mine. I suspect they were thinking of this:

When trying to make sense of the seemingly inextricable political morass into which we've descended, one of the real keys to understanding our situation is realizing that conservatism and the "conservative movement" are in fact two entirely different things.

Conservatism, like liberalism, is not a dogmatic philosophy, but rather a style of thought, an approach to politics or life in general. It stresses the status quo and traditional values, and is typified by a resistance to change. Likewise, liberalism is not relegated to a discrete "movement" but rather describes a general politics that comprises many disparate concerns.

The "conservative movement," however, is a decidedly dogmatic political movement that demands obeisance to its main tenets (and exiles those who dissent) and a distinctly defined agenda. Movement followers proudly announce their membership. (In contrast, there is no "liberal movement" worth speaking of -- just a hodgepodge of loosely associated interests.) Importantly enough, their raison d'etre has transformed from the extenuation of their "conservative" impulses into the Machiavellian acquisition of power, usually through any means necessary.

... When movements like this take shape and gain real power -- and especially when they consolidate complete control of the reins power, as the conservative movement has done in the past four years -- they often take on a real life of their own, mutating into entirely separate entities that often bear little resemblance to their root values. In the process, they almost always become travesties of their original impulses.

Certainly, one only needs review the current state of affairs to recognize that the "conservative movement" -- especially as embodied by the Bush administration -- has wandered far astray from its original values. Just how "conservative" is it, after all, to run up record budget deficits? To make the nation bleed jobs? To invade another nation under false pretenses? To run roughshod over states' rights? To impose a radical unilateralist approach to foreign policy? To undermine privacy rights and the constitutional balance of power? To quantifiably worsen the environment, while ignoring the realities of global warming? To grotesquely mishandle the defense of our national borders?

I've also explored the way the movement has exploited Bush's religiosity in a way that elevates his presidency to near-divine status, and questioning him becomes tantamount not just to treason but blasphemy:

It's clear that not only does Bush see himself as a man on a divine mission, but he actively cultivates this view of his importance among his staff. Moreover, the White House similarly promotes this image to the public, particularly among conservative Christians.

... The sum of all this identification of Bush with a Divine Agenda -- which has reached such heights that now conservative Christians are even organizing fasts for Bush -- is especially troubling in light of the presence of a proto-fascist element within the ranks of those who openly and avidly support him. While Bush himself may not be charismatic in any kind of classic sense, his adoption of this image may be an effective substitute for rallying a fanatical following -- one which is all too willing to discard of such niceties as free speech and constitutional rights in the name of homeland security -- in a time of war.

But as much as I agree with Greenwald, I think there is a difference between his argument and mine. Greenwald argues that this is a Bush-specific cult, and for good reason, but Atrios points to the important caveat in all this:

The interesting paradox is, as I've written before, that they'll dump Bush and transfer the cult onto the next Daddy figure that comes along.

Along the same lines was Digby's take, in which he also identifies the conservative movement as an "authoritarian cult," but notes:

So, it isn't precisely a cult of George W. Bush. It's a cult of Republican power. We know this because when a Democratic president last sat in the oval office, there was non-stop hysteria about presidential power and overreach. Every possible tool to emasculate the executive branch was brought to bear, including the nuclear option, impeachment. Now we are told that the "Presidency" is virtually infallible. The only difference between now and then is that a Republican is the executive instead of a Democrat.

(Be sure to read his followup post too.)

I wonder if there isn't another way of framing this that can help progressives get a handle on what we're dealing with. Particularly, I wonder if it wouldn't help to think of the discrete conservative movement as a political religion.

Here's the Wikepedia entry, which is actually rather accurate on the subject:

In the terminology of some scholars working in sociology, a political religion is a political ideology with cultural and political power equivalent to those of a religion, and often having many sociological and ideological similarities with religion. Quintessential examples are Marxism and Nazism, but totalitarianism is not a requirement (for example neo-liberalism can be analysed as a political religion).

... The term political religion is a sociological one, drawing on the sociological aspects of religion which can be often be found in certain secular ideologies. A political religion occupies much the same psychological and sociological space as a theistic religion, and as a result it often displaces or coopts existing religious organisations and beliefs; this is described as a "sacralisation" of politics. However, although a political religion may coopt existing religious structures or symbolism, it does not itself have any independent spiritual or theocratic elements - it is essentially secular, using religion only for political purposes, if it does not reject religious faith outright.

Obviously, this movement embraces religious faith outright, which may give it certain advantages over more secular political religions, since it so readily taps into ordinary people's deeply held beliefs and exploits them.

Nonetheless, when we begin to run down the various aspects of political religions, the resemblance becomes even sharper:

Key memetic qualities often (not all are always strongly present) shared by religion (particularly cults) and political religion include:

Structural

-- differentiation between self and other, and demonisation of other (in theistic religion, the differentiation usually depends on adherence to certain dogmas and social behaviours; in political religion, differentiation may be on grounds such as race, class, or nationality instead)

-- a charismatic figurehead, with messianic tendencies; if figurehead is deceased, powerful successors;

-- strong, hierarchical organisational structures

-- a desire to control education, in order to ensure the security of the system

Belief

-- a coherent belief system for imposing symbolic meaning on the external world, with an emphasis on security through purity;

-- an intolerance of other ideologies of the same type

-- a degree of utopianism and the aim of radically transforming society into an end-state (an end of history)

-- the belief that the ideology is in some way natural or obvious, so that (at least for certain groups of people) those who reject it are in some way "blind"

-- a genuine desire on the part of individuals to convert others to the cause

-- a willingness to place ends over means -- in particular, a willingness to use violence

-- fatalism -- a belief that the ideology will inevitably triumph in the end

Another significant resemblance is the religion's reliance on fear: "The state often helps maintain its power base by instilling fear of some kind in the population." It also consistently externalizes the blame for the nation's problems, either on Muslims, Hispanics, or just "unAmerican" liberals. And there is no shortage conservative propaganda to be found on the airwaves and in print.

Now, there are obvious differences between the current state of the conservative movement and the mature, state-based political religions described here. No one has mandated the construction of W statues. Loyalty oaths have not been prescribed, nor are there reeducation camps. There are no mandated leisure or cultural activities, and there is no secret police.

Not yet. And yet we can see hints even of these things: Why exactly, for example, does Bush want to create a uniformed Secret Service police, and empower them to arrest protesters under Patriot Act II?

Using this model to frame the discussion, I think what we can readily see is that -- as with pseudo-fascism -- the conservative movement is still in a somewhat nascent stage as a political religion. The examples of more mature religions provide us with a fairly clear picture of where it's headed, however.

And it won't necessarily be under the leadership of George W. Bush. The discrete conservative movement is structured such that it needs a "charismatic" figure at its head; it's essentially a psychological imperative for this kind of belief system.

So if the leader it elevates happens not, in fact, to actually be charismatic, as Bush really is not, then the movement will tailor its reality to make him so. True Believers -- having been steadily propagandized with Fox News and RNC talking points about Bush's superior character -- now really do see Bush as a charismatic figure, which leaves most non-believers shaking their heads.

But he is in essence disposable, an empty suit filled by the psychological needs of the movement he leads. He's sort of like a Fraternity President on steroids: Bush's presidency is all about popularity, not policy. He's a figurehead, a blank slate upon which the movement's followers can project their own notions of what a good president is about. And when his term is up, the movement will create a new "charismatic" leader.

Leaders like this, as True Believers themselves, usually have a symbiotic relationship with the movement they lead. Most of the time, his initiatives and policies are perfectly in synch with the rest of the movement, and they feed off the cues they give one another. But the movement itself will quickly reel in any leader who presumes that the movement is about him.

This explains, for instance, seeming anomalies (cited much by Greenwald's critics) like the uproar over Bush's attempts to place Harriet Myers on the Supreme Court. Bush consistently tried to sell her to conservatives on the basis that she was personally loyal to him; but she did not meet muster with the movement itself, and in the end was jettisoned for someone who did.

The reality I think we're all seeing is that genuine conservatism has been usurped by a political religion in metastasis that is no longer conservative but simply power-mad. Communicating that to the public is going to be an essential problem for progressives in the coming campaigns, especially given the deep emotional and psychological investment in the movement that so many followers have made.

But talking about it openly is a great place to start.

Hunting advice

While Republicans fantasize about putting Democrats in reach of Dick Cheney's gun, the rest of the country is ducking for cover from the Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight.

What's become almost bizarre is the way it has brought out a naked victim-blaming response from the White House, though of course, that's just par for the course from the Party of Personal Responsibility. Cheney must have a sign on his desk reading, "The Buckshot Stops There."

But I don't think they've done it so publicly before, particularly not in a way that a large part of their base knows is just wrong. Those of us who were raised around guns and hunting and took NRA gun-safety courses from the time we were kids are perfectly aware that you are responsible for where the gun is pointing when you pull the trigger. Skeet and bird shooters especially have this drilled into them.

So does Mike Leggett, a Texas outdoors writer:

Be a man. You shot a guy.

That would be my unsolicited advice for Vice President Dick Cheney.

You shot a guy. At least stay in town until he's out of the hospital.

You shot a guy. Don't blame the sun or the wind or the rotation of the Earth. And for goodness' sake, don't blame Harry Whittington.

He's the guy you shot, and unless he pulled the trigger himself, it wasn't his fault. Unless he was invisible, it wasn't his fault. And it wasn't his fault that he didn't "announce his presence," either. He was supposedly 30 yards behind you. His only fault was being a human being standing on two legs.

He's in the hospital. You're in Washington. And others are making excuses for you.

You shot the guy.

I've been hit with pellets, and it felt like a swarm of bees coming upside my head. I didn't spend several days in the hospital. I've picked shot out of other people sitting on the tailgate of a pickup, and they didn't even have to go to the doctor. They went back out hunting.

They got peppered. Whittington got shot. By you.

As Leggett points out, no one who's gone hunting will blame Cheney particularly for the accident, because they happen. We all know it.

But what's unforgiveable is Cheney's attempt to dodge responsibility and blame Whittington for the accident. Especially since he is a highly visible role model:

All is not lost here, though. Cheney can use the opportunity to make a strong statement for hunting safety, for wearing hunter orange behind bird dogs, for honesty. It would mean a lot to youngsters, and to everyday guys who make the same mistake, that the vice president didn't try to shuffle the blame onto someone else.

I won't be holding my breath. It's not in his track record or his nature.

After all, being Republican means never having to say you're sorry.

[Via Adventus.]

UPDATE: Well, whaddya know: Hell froze over. Which no doubt means we'll be regaled with right-wing bloviations about what a Heckuva Guy that Cheney is, having stepped up and taken responsibility for it like a man.

Yeah, after four days of letting his staff blame Whittington.

Fightin' Jesus

Well, the General did indeed check out the fine folks at Combat For Christ. Go read it. Not only does he work in a Dick Cheney angle, he also dug up some noteworthy info about the compound's owner/operator:

WDEF-TV News 12
Jun 15, 2005 5:04 PM EDT

An Ooltewah Minister faces domestic assault charges..

Police say he beat up his own daughter.

A family argument over whom the girl was dating led to the charge.

According to Bradley County Sheriff's reports, Community Baptist church Pastor Bryan Mowery spanked the girl with a belt first -- then threw her into a closet, kicked her and hit her in the face with his fist.

Mowery reportedly also got a nine millimeter handgun from his bedroom and fired it outside his Trewitt Road home.

... For now, Mowery is out of jail on his own recognizance.

Sound like my kind of role model!

General, we salute you.

Not My Fault

It's not my fault! cried the Republican.

It's not my fault that I shot one of my hunting partners, says Dick Cheney. It's his fault.

It's not my fault the invasion of Iraq is turning into a nightmare, says Donald Rumsfeld. It's those evildoers!

It's not my fault that we outed the identity of a valuable CIA operative involved in weapons of mass destruction proliferation, says Karl Rove. It was, um, um, um ... Lewis Libby! Yeah!

It's not my fault that FEMA so badly bungled the response to Hurricane Katrina, says Michael Brown. It's those local Democrats!

It's not my fault there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, says Condoleezza Rice. It's the CIA's fault!

It's not my fault we ignored official warnings and were asleep at the wheel on Sept. 11, says George W. Bush and the whole cabal. It's Bill Clinton's fault!

Ah yes. It's a refrain we've come to know so well: The Buck Stops There.

The Republicans currently running the United States have now polished the art of blaming others for their mistakes. I suppose it's a necessary skill when you have all the power and thus all the responsiblity, but you only want the credit for things that go right.

It being Not My Fault must be a requirement for doing a Heckuva Job.

Backyard Nazis

One reason that pseudo-fascism is so harmful is that it creates an environment that positively encourages genuine fascists.

Thus, it is no mere accident that we've been seeing increasing signs of a genuinely emboldened white-supremacist far right, with recruitment rising among disaffected young people. It's no accident that they keep getting bolder and bolder and bolder.

This was driven home for me in a pointed way today when a little cluster of neo-Nazis -- representing a variety of groups, including the National Socialist Movement, the World Church of the Creator, and the National Alliance -- decided to hold a picket in my neighborhood, all of about two miles from my home.

Paul O'Connell, another Seattle resident, was in Fremont to check out the weekly Sunday Market there, and came across them. He snapped these pictures, reporting that there were only seven of them all told: six men and a woman. There were a number of police on hand too. They set up their protest directly across the street from a statue of Lenin that was salvaged from a Slovakian landfill.



O'Connell said there were more people confronting them than there were protesters. Some of these folks tried to engage them; others just insulted them. He also said the rally didn't appear to last very long; when he came by an hour later, they were gone.

It's hard to say what they were trying to accomplish. Fremont is one of the real arts centers of Seattle, and its politics are well to the left -- as the Lenin statue suggests. It's not likely they were looking for (at least hoping for) recruits. More likely is that they hoped to start some kind of confrontation. Evidently, they went away disappointed.

It seems to me that what these rallies are about is shoving their presence in our faces. For the past several decades, Nazis and white supremacists have been shoved so far back to the fringes that they scarcely ever would show their faces.

Now, they're feeling that the tide is turning in their favor. They're showing up in notably liberal venues not to recruit, but to make their presence known, and to send a message that they don't intend to hide anymore.

Who can blame them for being so bold? After all, we now have a national discourse in which one of the leading figures of the conservative movement can stand up and spew hatred about "ragheads." And the room will stand and applaud.

If I were a Nazi, I'd feel encouraged, too.

It's fund-raising week

... here at Orcinus.

Click the PayPal button at the left to donate to the cause of independent journalism. Or read here for some thoughts on what it's all about.

UPDATE: So far, a very discouraging response ... which I suppose could be the blogosphere's version of a hint.

UPDATE 2: Thanks to everyone for the heartening response. And while I'm at it, here's my snail-mail address for those who can't use PayPal:

David Neiwert
P.O. Box 17872
Seattle, WA 98107

UPDATE 3: After a slow start, things are rolling along nicely. I'm still only at half what I raised last year, but then, I don't have an essay to sell in PDF form this year, either. However, I have decided to put up links to my two most recent series by way of having something up there.

A special thanks to Crooks and Liars, Matt Stoller at MyDD, Pacific Views, Wulfgar, Live From Silver City, and OlyBlog. I'll provide a final tally in a few days.

Onward Christian Soldiers

I really think the General should check out the Combat For Christ site. Seems like his kinda place: Indoctrinating the younguns into the violent, manly side of Jesus' teachings.

I especially like the Course Descriptions:

Rappelling Course: Utilizes a 30-foot rappel tower which contrasts the two types of faith. Self vs. The Savior

"Woops! You weren't supposed to pick the Self!" "Aaaaaaah!"

Climbing Wall: Shows the student the importance of "having a good anchor" to climb upon. Also, teaches the principle of satanic sabotage!

"Now, Timmy, can you guess which wall anchor was secretly loosened by Satan?" "Aaaaaaaaah!" "Oops, bad guess!"

Weapons Course: This course challenges the Christian Soldier to engage and eliminate his greatest enemies.

"OK, you get 50 bonus points for head shots for liberals, 100 for homosexuals! And 200 if you get a Hillary!"

They're located nowhere near me, in the Cleveland, Tennessee, area. Thank goodness.

Tinfoil off

[A black helicopter image from the Militia of Montana's conspiracy manual, Enemies: Foreign and Domestic, p. 155]

Now, I understand that people have grave reservations about the government constructing mass detention centers without clear reasons for doing so. They should. (In fact, I'm a little surprised there hasn't been more discussion of it so far. Perhaps because anyone tackling it seriously runs the risk of coming off as an alarmist. )

But some of the responses to this news have been awfully fearful, if well-meaning. I don't think "arrests are coming," but I've always thought it was a good idea to acquaint oneself with fascism and how it works, because you can only effectively combat it if you understand it.

Do I think this is a sign of incipient fascism? No. I only think it's another progression in a trend I've already discussed at length, namely, that conservatives appear (consciously or not) to be laying the groundwork for an eventual outbreak of genuine fascism.

Still, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that you can find liberal commenters who take this to the next step, claiming that we're on the verge of mass roundups. Then they begin culling information from far-right conspiracy sites to buttress their positions. There's no small irony in the fact that many of these same conspiracy theorists are themselves part of a far-right fringe that is essentially proto-fascist.

When I first began covering the Patriot/militia movement in 1994, I spent considerable energy chasing down the many and multifaceted claims of the militia leaders. In the process, I became well acquainted with their many conspiracy theories.

Chief among these theories was the claim that the Clinton administration was busy building concentration camps in preparation for a New World Order takeover, in which gun owners would be stripped of their rights and dissenters herded into the camps. They described various camps being built in remote rural locales in the Northwest, including Washington, Montana, and Idaho.

But the militiamen, when pressed, could never pinpoint the actual location of said camps. It was all secondhand information. At least one tip, in northwestern Montana, turned out to be a wildlife-management deer fence. The rest -- nothing.

Probably the leading proponent of these theories was John Trochmann, leader of the Militia of Montana, who I interviewed several times and observed in action a couple of others. I describe some of Trochmann's beliefs in my first book, In God's Country:

The New World Order, he says, is a shadowy one-world-government group that conspires to put an end to the U.S. Constitution by subsuming it under the "Communist" United Nations. Conspirators include the President, the Speaker of the House, and most financial and political leaders around the world.

The new world government Trochmann envisions would be a population-controlling totalitarian regime. Guns will be confiscated. Urban gangs like the Bloods and the Crips will be deployed to conduct house-to-house searches and round up resisters. Thousands of citizens will be shipped off to concentration camps and liquidated, all in the name of reducing the population.

These claims lingered well through the Y2K panic, which turned out to be a debacle for the militia movement: thousands of obedient Patriot movement followers (many with basements stocked full of beans, rice, generators, and other survival supplies) realized, a few months after the claims of impending apocalypse dissipated into the ether, that they'd been snookered. After that, the survivalist militias largely faded back into the woodwork, though the Patriot movement has continued to resurface in new guises, most recently in the form of the Minuteman Project.

The concentration-camp claims have continued to enjoy a kind of half-life as well. You can still find them on the Web at sites like this one, which offers the standard number of "over 800 camps" that we now see floating around the current claims.

Note some of the camp descriptions:

IDAHO

Minidoka/Jerome Counties - WWII Japanese-American internment facility possibly under renovation. Clearwater National Forest - Near Lolo Pass - Just miles from the Montana state line near Moose Creek, this unmanned facility is reported to have a nearby airfield. Wilderness areas - Possible location. No data.

[The renovations at the Minidoka camp are strictly for purposes of making it into a national monument in commemoration of the internment. The Lolo Pass facility is a Forest Service work camp. As for the wilderness area sites, well ...]

MONTANA

Malmstrom AFB - UN aircraft groups stationed here, and possibly a detention facility.

[There is no detention facility at Malmstrom.]

WASHINGTON

Seattle/Tacoma - SeaTac Airport: fully operational federal transfer center

Okanogan County - Borders Canada and is a site for a massive concentration camp capable of holding hundreds of thousands of people for slave labor. This is probably one of the locations that will be used to hold hard core patriots who will be held captive for the rest of their lives.

Sand Point Naval Station - Seattle - FEMA detention center used actively during the 1999 WTO protests to classify prisoners.

Ft. Lewis / McChord AFB - near Tacoma - This is one of several sites that may be used to ship prisoners overseas for slave labor.

[The three known facilities listed here all have legitimate purposes as part of the law enforcement or military systems. But the "concentration camp" in Okanogan County is entirely fanciful and does not exist. Nor is there any known project to hold or transport people for slave labor.]

Anyway, you get the idea. None of the so-called detention centers were designed or constructed for that purpose. Certainly there was never any publicly acknowledged program to build them during the Clinton years.

So that's part of what makes the recent announcement of contingency plans to construct mass detention centers for an "immigration emergency" so noteworthy: It marks the first time that such plans have actually been announced by the government in recent years.

Indeed, I can scarcely imagine the apeshit response from the militia contingent had it been Bill Clinton's administration making such an announcement. Not to mention that it certainly would have been headline-worthy to boot.

But then, I recall that the right also used to claim that Clinton was not just building concentration camps, but he was also secretly wiretapping American citizens. That he was assassinating political enemies in secret. That he was remaking the presidency into a virtual dictatorship with limitless powers. All without a smidgen of anything approaching factual evidence.

And now we have a president who really is not just preparing to building mass detention centers, but who has been conducting illegal domestic surveillance, who has claimed the power to order assassinations on American soil, who does appear to be claiming limitless powers as a "wartime" executive. Is it any wonder, really, that people's paranoia meters are running at full blast?

However, the paranoia can obscure the salient issues here, which are (as Tom Hennessy contends): 1) Why is the explanation for the need for constructing the camps so vague? and 2) Why award an open-ended contract that is most likely to just line Halliburton's pockets?

A subsequent New York Times piece carried at least some more details to flesh out an answer to the first question:

A spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Jamie Zuieback, said KBR would build the centers only in an emergency like the one when thousands of Cubans floated on rafts to the United States. She emphasized that the centers might never be built if such an emergency did not arise.

"It's the type of contract that could be used in some kind of mass migration," Ms. Zuieback said.

A spokesman for the corps, Clayton Church, said that the centers could be at unused military sites or temporary structures and that each one would hold up to 5,000 people.

"When there's a large influx of people into the United States, how are we going to feed, house and protect them?" Mr. Church asked. "That's why these kinds of contracts are there."

The problem, though, is that these kinds of facilities are so open to abuse -- that is, they're quite readily converted to other purposes, as some immigrant advocates observe later in the piece:

Advocates for immigrants said they feared that the new contract was another indication that the government planned to expand the detention of illegal immigrants, including those seeking asylum.

"It's pretty obvious that the intent of the government is to detain more and more people and to expedite their removal," said Cheryl Little, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center in Miami.

Nor is that the only potential area of abuse. These facilities also have a history of being used to deprive citizens of their civil liberties, embodied in the World War II internment camps. Some of the camps' most vociferous progressive critics point this out as well:

For those who follow covert government operations abroad and at home, the contract evoked ominous memories of Oliver North's controversial Rex-84 "readiness exercise" in 1984. This called for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to round up and detain 400,000 imaginary "refugees," in the context of "uncontrolled population movements" over the Mexican border into the United States. North's activities raised civil liberties concerns in both Congress and the Justice Department. The concerns persist.

"Almost certainly this is preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters," says Daniel Ellsberg, a former military analyst who in 1971 released the Pentagon Papers, the U.S. military's account of its activities in Vietnam. "They've already done this on a smaller scale, with the 'special registration' detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and with Guantanamo."

Considering these latter points, Ellsberg's fears are at least not groundless, and may prove prophetic.

Where progressives go off the rails is when they pursue theories that the Bush administration has been preparing for martial law and intends to impose it, with these camps being prepared to house civil dissenters. There's simply no evidence to support such a theory -- other than those that were trotted out against Bill Clinton (particularly regarding FEMA orders) in the 1990s, and which proved similarly bogus.

Confronting, and overcoming, the American right's totalitarian impulses requires keeping our heads about us. The last thing that progressives need is to start adopting a conspiracist mindset, watching for the same black helicopters that visited the nightmares of '90s militiamen.

It's important to ask serious questions about the kinds of steps the Bush administration is taking, from the Patriot Act to the NSA surveillance program to the construction of mass detention centers. And they need to be asked seriously, without the taint of wild-eyed charges.

If there is a legitimate need for these preparations, then they should proceed -- but only with complete transparency. The potential for abuse that such facilities create requires real openness on the part of the government, and genuine oversight and accountability. From the outset, that appears not to be the direction this administration is taking.

That doesn't surprise anyone, of course. But it should raise real concerns -- not conspiracy theories.

From rhetoric to action

Regular readers know that the main reason I keep harping on the rise of right-wing eliminationist rhetoric is that history tells us that this rhetoric always precedes action.

Last weekend, Jacob Robida acted out this dynamic in real life: He walked into a tavern in New Bedford, Mass., and, after inquiring whether it was a gay bar -- and being informed that it was -- began a murderous rampage with a hatchet and a handgun, leaving three bar patrons injured, one of them in critical condition. When pulled over in Arkansas for a traffic violation, he shot and killed a Gassville police officer, launching a 20-mile pursuit that culminated when his car was disabled in nearby Norfolk. He then killed his female passenger, 33-year-old Jennifer Rena Bailey, and then was shot himself when he pointed his weapon at police.

Like all such rampages, this one did not occur in a vacuum. Robida had a Web site on which he posted a number of entries regarding his fascination with all things Nazi and murdering people in general. A search of his room turned up Nazi regalia and literature. David Ehrenstein has a pretty complete rundown of the details.

It is a dynamic -- almost a kabuki dance of death, really -- we have seen played out many times among the inhabitants of the fringes of the far right. From Benajmin Smith to Buford Furrow to David Lewis Rice, America over the last couple of decades has seen a regular parade of "lone wolf" killers, often mentally unstable or even mentally ill, who spin off into violence after being inspired by the hateful rhetoric of the extremist right.

Of course, as I've explored before, these cases are always more complicated when mental illness is involved:

Regardless of the outcome in terms what kind of justice the perpetrator will face, this story drives home one of the real truths about hatred -- not just racial hatred, but all kinds of hatred of The Other: It is a festering toxin that infects all our lives and brings ruin to our homes.

Nonetheless, it is not hard to see the wellsprings of their actions -- who are often impotent old men babbling out endless conspiracy theories and vile bigotry neatly packaged together. It is easy to respond with contempt to such men; it is not so easy to do anything about them.

As Radical Russ at Pam's House Blend points out, we can't directly attach the anti-gay hatred people like Fred Phelps foment to people like Jacob Robida. At the same time, the bloodstains are not so easily washed off their hands.

Moreover, as Steven D at Booman Tribune points out, acts like Robida's are a natural product of the kind of hateful eliminationist rhetoric that is common throughout so much of right-wing discourse anyway: "joking" about doing away with liberals, demanding that we round up and deport all illegal aliens -- and most of all, complaining that hate-crimes protections for gays and lesbians represents an "infringement" on the rights of conservative Christians.

The natural implication of this argument -- which has been proffered by a range of fundamentalist organizations from Traditional Values Coalition to the Family Research Council -- is that beating the crap out of gays, even to the point of death, is a God-given right for Christians. Combined with a mood in which "getting rid of them" is a favorite option among the trend-setting pundits, it's not hard to see where people like Jacob Robida get their ideas.

But as I explained in Death on the Fourth of July [p. 140]:

The First Amendment protects speech, not conduct—thoughts, not crimes. One cannot commit a crime and simply claim it as an act of free speech. An assassin cannot kill the president and pretend he is protected by First Amendment rights to political speech.

Indeed, underlying many of the arguments offered by opponents of hate-crime laws (reflected, for instance, in the Traditional Values Coalition's charge that they are "anti-Christian") is the notion that criminal behavior (such as assaulting or threatening a gay person) somehow deserves First Amendment protections. But crimes are not a form of free speech. Gay-bashing is no more a right than is lynching or even, say, assassinating the president. Political thought may motivate all of them, but that doesn't mean the Constitution protects any of them.

The problem is that, logic notwithstanding, the fundamentalists' argument has held sway for the past decade or more when it comes to a federal hate-crimes statute. It was, after all, at the behest of the religious right that the Republican leadership killed -- for the third consecutive time -- legislation that would have enacted the first true federal hate-crimes law in October of 2004. Since then, there have been only empty gestures and no action to finally pass the bill.

If there is anything good to be obtained from tragedies like Robida's rampage, it is that finally, perhaps, the rhetoric on our side can also turn to action. As Pam Spaulding at Pandagon notes, a number of politicians -- including Ted Kennedy, who has been chief sponsor of the LLEEA all along -- have taken the rampage as a call to action and are moving ahead to once again pass the bill.

Perhaps this time, both fence-sitting liberals and freedom-loving conservatives can see the bigger picture when it comes to these laws:

[H]ate-crimes laws are not about taking away anyone's freedoms -- rather, they are about ensuring freedoms for millions of Americans.

As I point out in the book, hate crimes have the fully intended effect of driving away and deterring the presence of any kind of hated minority -- racial, religious, or sexual. They are essentially acts of terrorism directed at entire communities of people, and they are message crimes: "Keep out."

Rural dwellers' dread of the dark colors of the inner city is something of a cliche, one based nonetheless on reality. What is less observed, however, is the common dread held by many minorities for America's more rural spaces. Black people fear stepping foot in Idaho because of the presence of the Aryan Nations in the state's Panhandle. Gays and lesbians view driving through places like Wyoming and Montana with a palpable anxiety.

If you get out a map of the country and put yourself in the shoes of a person of color or another sexual persuasion, and start looking at the places you would feel safe visiting, you'll suddenly realize that this can be a very small country indeed for people who are not white heterosexuals. This is what Yale hate-crimes expert Donald Green means when he says that hate crimes annually create a "massive dead-weight loss of freedom" for Americans.

Jacob Robida's rampage was all about reminding gay Americans that they are unsafe in our society -- that their lives are forfeit because haters like Robida say so. People like this get their fuel from demagogues who claim that inflicting this kind of violence on such outcasts is their right. Not only is it their right, but it is the right thing to do.

Now, is there any chance a hate-crimes law would have stopped Jacob Robida? No, of course not. But having a hate-crimes law on the books is an essential first step in changing the environment in which all the little Jacob Robidas out there become possible.

Haters like these always believe that they are acting out the real wishes of the majority community. And so it is essential -- always -- that they be repudiated. Publicly and with great fanfare.

Passing, after all these years, a true federal hate-crimes statute would be a good place to start.

A question of when

You know, it seems pretty obvious that Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee had good reasons not to have Attorney General Alberto Gonzales sworn in before he gave his testimony on the NSA surveillance program earlier this week.

Because it's very questionable whether Gonzales was telling the truth, particularly regarding when the Bush administration authorized the NSA surveillance. Gonzales was adamant that it came after Congress authorized the use of military force against Al Qaeda:

LEAHY: Let me just ask you a few questions that could easily be answered yes or no.

I'm not asking about operational details, I'm trying to understand when the administration came to the conclusion that the congressional resolution authorizing military force again Al Qaida, where we had hoped that we would actually catch Osama bin Laden, the man who hit us -- but where you came to the conclusion that it authorized warrantless wiretapping of Americans inside the United States.

Did you reach that conclusion before the Senate passed the resolution on September 14th, 2001?

GONZALES: Senator, what I can say is that the program was initiated subsequent to the authorization to use military force.

LEAHY: Well, then, let me...

GONZALES: And our legal analysis was completed prior to the authorization of that program.

LEAHY: So your answer is you did not come to that conclusion before the Senate passed the resolution on September 14th, 2001?

GONZALES: Sir, I certainly had not come to that conclusion. There may be others in the administration who did.

LEAHY: Were you aware of anybody in the administration that came to that conclusion before September 14th, 2001?

GONZALES: Senator, sitting here right now I don't have any knowledge of that.

LEAHY: Were you aware of anybody coming to that conclusion before the president signed the resolution on September 18th, 2001?

GONZALES: No, sir.

The only thing that I can recall is that we had just been attacked and that we had been attacked by an enemy from within our own borders and that...

LEAHY: Mr. Attorney General, I understand. I was here when that attack happened. And I joined with Republicans and Democrats and virtually every member of this Congress to try to give you the tools that you said you needed for us to go after Al Qaida, and especially to go after Osama bin Laden, the man that we all understood masterminded the attacks, the man who's still at large.

LEAHY: Now, back to my question: Did you come to the conclusion that you had to have this warrantless wiretapping of Americans inside the United States to protect us before the president signed the resolution on September 18th, 2001? You were the White House counsel at the time.

GONZALES: What I can say is that we came to a conclusion that the president had the authority to authorize this kind of activity before he actually authorized the activity.

LEAHY: When was that?

GONZALES: It was subsequent to the authorization to use military force.

LEAHY: When?

GONZALES: Sir, it was just a short period of time after the authorization to use military force.

LEAHY: Was it before or after NSA began its surveillance program?

GONZALES: Again, the NSA did not commence the activities under the terrorist surveillance program before the president gave his authorization.

Unsurprisingly, the White House is withholding the documents authorizing the program, because those indeed would tell us when Bush signed them.

The problem with Gonzales' testimony is that it is contradicted by what we already know about the surveillance, as Jason Leopold explains at truthout.org: namely, that Bush authorized it before 9/11. He points to James Risen's State of War:

"The president personally and directly authorized new operations, like the NSA's domestic surveillance program, that almost certainly would never have been approved under normal circumstances and that raised serious legal or political questions," Risen wrote in the book. "Because of the fevered climate created throughout the government by the president and his senior advisers, Bush sent signals of what he wanted done, without explicit presidential orders" and "the most ambitious got the message."

... According to the online magazine Slate, an unnamed official in the telecom industry said NSA's "efforts to obtain call details go back to early 2001, predating the 9/11 attacks and the president's now celebrated secret executive order. The source reports that the NSA approached U.S. carriers and asked for their cooperation in a 'data-mining' operation, which might eventually cull 'millions' of individual calls and e-mails."

Of course, even if Gonzales' chronology were correct, his entire claim is of course dubious, as former CIA General Counsel Jeffrey Smith points out:

"It is not credible that the 2001 authorization to use force provides authority for the president to ignore the requirements of FISA," Smith wrote, adding that if President Bush's executive order authorizing a covert domestic surveillance operation is upheld as legal "it would be a dramatic expansion of presidential authority affecting the rights of our fellow citizens that undermines the checks and balances of our system, which lie at the very heart of the Constitution."

If indeed Bush took these steps before 9/11, then it should be plain it has little, indeed, to do with fighting terrorism, and everything to do with expanding presidential powers.

And the more I watch them twist and deny, the more inclined I am to believe that someday, when the details are exposed, we will be reading about grotesque abuses of the program -- including expanding it to surveillance of political opponents.

Don't mind that barbed wire

I guess it only makes sense, in that Bushworld kinda way, that when the government starts building mass detention centers that Halliburton would get the contract:

A Houston-based construction firm with ties to the White House has been awarded an open-ended contract to build immigration detention centers that could total $385 million, a move some critics called questionable.

The contract calls for KBR, a subsidiary of oil engineering and construction giant Halliburton, to build temporary detention facilities in the event of an "immigration emergency," according to U.S. officials.

"If, for example, there were some sort of upheaval in another country that would cause mass migration, that's the type of situation that this contract would address," said Jamie Zuieback of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"Essentially, this is a contingency contract."

The concern raised in the story, though, is more over who got the contract and its nature:

The open-ended nature of the contract raises concerns about overcharging and other potential abuse, said Charlie Cray, director of the Washington-based Center for Corporate Policy and a frequent Halliburton critic.

Which is fair enough: It does have the reek of corrupt cronyism that is the hallmark of the Bush administration:

There's no guarantee that any work will be performed under the contract; if no immigration emergency or natural disaster occurs, there won't be anything for KBR to do, said company spokeswoman Cathy Mann.

But the bigger question went unasked: What the hell is the government doing building mass detention centers?

Columnist Tom Hennessy asked just this question a few days later:

That sounds a tad fuzzy, but let's concede that the camps do have something to do with immigration, illegal or not. In fact, there already are thousands of beds in place at various U.S. locations for the purpose of housing illegal immigrants.

But for anyone familiar with history -- U.S. or European -- the construction of detention camps for whatever purpose should prompt a chilling scenario.

The new detention camps will be built by Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton. The latter, as you likely know, is the defense-related corporate giant with fists full of contracts involving the war in Iraq.

... KBR, in fact, had the $9.7 million contract to build the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba. This facility, popularly dubbed "Gitmo," holds 660 prisoners classified by the government as "enemy combatants."

This column is written with the distinct feeling that not many people will give a hoot about any or all of this. But as already noted, a news story about construction of government detention centers should give us all pause.

Considering what took place in Nazi Germany, as well as the shameful incarceration of Japanese-Americans in 1942, no detention camp should be built without the widest possible public scrutiny.

Bottom line: The contract cries out for greater attention. So far, the government's expressed reason for building them is insufficient and ill-defined. And even if the camps do relate to illegal immigration, their purpose could be changed overnight.

This is an instance in which we could be well served by our representatives in Congress. They need to look at this and give constituents a better picture of what is going on.

Let's not have it said, years from now, that no one ever questioned this.

Hennessy's point is especially vital for those of us familiar with the history of the Japanese American concentration camps of World War II.

After all, as Testsuden Kashima established in his landmark work, Judgment Without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment during World War II, preparations for a mass incarceration of citizens based on their ethnicity had been long underway in the halls of American government well before the outbreak of war -- dating back, in fact, to the early 1930s, before Japan even began its military aggression. Most of these preparations, of course, were kept well under wraps.

And remember that the first two concentration camps holding Japanese Americans -- Manzanar and Poston -- were originally constructed by the Wartime Civil Control Administration in early 1942 as "reception centers" that were supposed to only provide temporary housing for Japanese evacuees seeking new homes under the original "voluntary relocation" scheme.

What happened next, as Eric Muller describes in Free To Die For Their Country, was a classic instance of the critical role played by overt racism in the drama: A group of governors from various Western states got together and announced that they would not accept these evacuees within their borders unless they were placed under armed guard and behind barbed wire. So those innocent-seeming "reception centers" became de facto concentration camps ... with just a twist of the euphemism. The new name was "relocation centers."

So, as Hennessy suggests, it would behoove all of us to begin asking: Just what crisis of "mass immigration" does the government foresee as a possibility? And is it strong enough to warrant the actual construction of concentration camps?

And most of all: Why now?