There's an amazing and gripping new documentary out this week that -- like The Cove -- may prove to be at least a small turning point in how humans treat our fellow animals, wild and otherwise. It's titled Blackfish, and it's well worth your time.
And if the noises coming from Sea World -- the chief target of the documentary -- prove substantive, you may want to see it before it gets pulled from theaters under threat of lawsuit.
The New York Times has the story:
In an unusual pre-emptive strike on the documentary “Blackfish,” set for release on Friday in New York and Los Angeles by Magnolia Pictures, SeaWorld Entertainment startled the film world last weekend by sending a detailed critique of the movie to about 50 critics who were presumably about to review it. It was among the first steps in an aggressive public pushback against the film, which makes the case, sometimes with disturbing film, that orca whales in captivity suffer physical and mental distress because of confinement. ...
... It was also deliberating possible further moves, which might conceivably include informational advertising, a Web-based countercampaign or perhaps a request for some sort of access to CNN, which picked up television rights to “Blackfish” through its CNN Films unit and plans to broadcast the movie on Oct. 24.
... Asked whether SeaWorld was contemplating legal action against the film, G. Anthony Taylor, the general counsel, said decisions about any such step would have to wait until executives were able to more closely assess the movie. “Blackfish” made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January and has since screened at other festivals in the United States and abroad.
Here are the eight points Sea World raises -- along with the filmmakers' responses. As you can see, Sea World's arguments are made out of some pretty thin gruel. For example, they try to pretend that orcas live as long or longer in captivity than they do in the wild -- an outrageously laughable claim:
SeaWorld Assertion 2
The assertion that killer whales in the wild live more than twice as long as those living at SeaWorld. While research suggests that some wild killer whales can live as long as 60 or 70 years, their average lifespan is nowhere near that. Nor is it true that killer whales in captivity live only 25 to 35 years. Because we’ve been studying killer whales at places like SeaWorld for only 40 years or so, we don’t know what their lifespans might be—though we do know that SeaWorld currently has one killer whale in her late 40s and a number of others in their late 30s.
Film Response
In the wild, average lifespan is 30 for males, 50 for females. Their estimated maximum life span is 60-70 years for males and 80-90 years for females. In captivity, most orcas die in their teens and 20s and only a handful have made it past 35.The annual mortality or death rate for orcas is 2.5 times higher in captivity than it is in the wild. These are not controversial data.
In the film, we depict what seems to be a deliberate attempt by SeaWorld to misrepresent these well documented data to their visitors.
The film's director, Gabriela Cowperthwaite, observed in an interview with Salon that the facts just aren't on Sea World's side, so it is trying the usual right-wing tactic of creating an alternative reality in which they are:
And yet it did surprise us that they would want to take on the facts. Anyone who knows anything about SeaWorld knows that this has always been a losing battle for them; the facts are indisputable. Their intention is to cast a shadow of doubt right before the film goes nationwide. We expected it. But I didn’t know they would’ve taken this tactic. It’s not one they tend to win.
But they have been good at shutting down and mucking up investigations of their operations, including those by local and federal animal-welfare authorities, and they've been expert at throwing up lots of fog about what they do and the nature of their "zoological facilities" -- which are, as Cowperthwaite observes, really entertainment venues that generate multibillon-dollar revenues for their ownership.
And let's not forget just who those owners are: None other than our right-wing friends at the Blackstone Group, well noted for their attempts in cahoots with the Koch Brothers to astroturf such campaigns as "Social Security reform", and whose CEO notably compared President Obama to Hitler for having the audacity to raise taxes on him and his fellow 1 percenters.
But more important, as the Times review observes, the film's power is driven by the immense charisma of the animals themselves -- and the growing realization on our part that tiny concrete tanks are no place for six-ton giants with powerful brains:
Calmly and methodically countering SeaWorld’s contention that whales benefit from captivity — the Web site “Orcas in Captivity” places the current total at 45 — Ms. Cowperthwaite questions the advisability of exploiting mammals whose brains, the neuroscientist Lori Marino suggests, may be more complex than our own.
“When you look into their eyes, you know somebody is home,” one of the trainers says. Perhaps that’s why SeaWorld’s most well-known show was called “Believe.”
Blackfish isn't showing everywhere this weekend; it's coming out in staggered releases nationally. Check the film's screen schedule for a complete rundown.
Via Stephen Lemons, a story that will surprise exactly no one familiar with the history of Chris Simcox and the Minuteman movement he cofounded:
Simcox's new home is Maricopa County's Lower Buckeye Jail, where he
is being held nonbondable on several charges related to child
molestation, attempted child molestation and sexual conduct with minors.
Phoenix police say the three victims are all under 10 years of age.
According to Arizona's statute regarding dangerous crimes against
children, any adult convicted of sexual conduct with a minor who is
under 12 years of age "may be sentenced to life imprisonment."
Otherwise, the sentence for one count could be 13 to 27 years. The
law also calls for consecutive sentencing in four out of the five counts
listed for Simcox on his court paperwork. Meaning they would run
back-to-back.
Details of the allegations were released this morning in the Phoenix Police Department's probable cause statement.
During a forensic interview with detectives, one of the girls, victim
number two, refers to Simcox as "dad," and is identified as one of
Simcox's daughters.
Victim number two mentions that her "sister was in the shower with her" during the time of one of the alleged incidents.
Apparently, victims number one and number three are not related to Simcox.
The first victim states that Simcox touched her while they were both
in the kitchen of his home. This, as his two daughters were outside
playing. She also alleges that Simcox showed her pornographic movies on
his computer.
"She has been shown the movie more than one time," reads the summary.
"The victim stated that these movies give her bad nightmares."
The third victim does not allege touching, but says Simcox asked to see her underwear and then what was beneath.
As if that weren't bad enough, the tale of Arizona's vigilante border
watchers took a similarly ugly twist last year when neo-Nazi border
watcher J.T. Ready massacred his girlfriend and her family before taking his own life. Most observers agreed that by then, the Minuteman movement was officially finished.
But this latest arrest should be the final nail that manifests once
and for all what many observers said at the time (despite media fanfare
to the contrary) -- that the Minutemen were a huge magnet for
extremists, racists, mentally unstable people, and psychopaths.
It was also something that was long foreseeable, given Simcox's
erratic behavior and volatile personality. I described this in some
detail in And Hell Followed:
When Chris Simcox first arrived in Tombstone in 2002, he
found work as one of these [Showdown at the OK Corral] actors. It was a
way of staying afloat until he could get his feet on the ground. He had
been drawn by the myth, and now he was on a mission to transform it into
a kind of living reality.
A few months before, he had thrown away his previous life as a
schoolteacher in California, moved out to the Arizona desert, and had an
epiphany, all because of the terrorist attacks on New York and
Washington on September 11, 2001. Traumatized by repeatedly watching the
collapse of the Twin Towers, Simcox had sold off his belongings and
moved out to camp in the Sonoran desert, where he witnessed all kinds of
human and drug trafficking – or so he was fond of repeatedly telling
reporters in later years. Concluding that the porous nature of the
Mexican border posed a post-9/11 security threat to America, he had
decided to pour all his efforts into doing something about it. That was
his basic story, and it eventually became a kind of mythos unto itself.
In reality, Chris Simcox's life had been falling apart for awhile.
Simcox grew up in rural Illinois and Kentucky; after high school, he
moved briefly to New York in pursuit of a baseball career, then moved
out to California with his first wife, Deborah Crews, who harbored
ambitions as an actress, and their daughter. Simcox himself would later
suggest he had tried his hand at acting too, but he also went to school,
getting a degree in education from L.A.'s Pacific Oaks County.
Eventually, he found work as a teacher in Los Angeles – first in a
gang-infested high school in South Central L.A., before he found more
sedate work as a kindergarten teacher at a prestigious private school
called Wildwood. He also divorced Crews and married an African-American
woman named Kim Dunbar, who later gave birth to a son. He was a popular
teacher, but his colleagues at Wildwood recalled Simcox as something of a
condescending know-it-all who prided himself on being updated on the
latest educational techniques and letting everyone else know it too: "He
had this real holier-than-thou attitude, like he was so far above the
other teachers they should be grateful he was even discussing his
methods with them," one of them told a reporter. "He was insulting."
Some of them also witnessed a dark side to his sunny public persona.
His then-teenage daughter from his first marriage came to live with him
in Los Angeles in 1998, and Simcox got her a babysitting gig with one of
his Wildwood colleagues. One night, she showed up suddenly at the
colleague's house, visibly upset, seeking shelter: She claimed her
father had tried to sexually molest her. Simcox later claimed he had
just tried to give her a leg massage and she had gotten the wrong idea.
No charges were filed. She returned to New York and her mother and broke
off contact with her father.
Gradually, it all crumbled. Convinced of his own superiority, Simcox
left Wildwood to start up his own tutoring business. But Dunbar said he
was also displaying symptoms of a mental breakdown. According to her
sworn depositions in their eventual divorce, she had to endure episodes
of Simcox's violent rages, followed by numb, glass-eyed staring sessions
mumbling to himself. He refused professional help. And he abused and
threatened their then-4-year-old son. After ten years of marriage,
Dunbar testified, "the only thing I could do was file for divorce."
Even as his tutoring work spiraled away because of his erratic
behavior, Simcox was also becoming increasingly xenophobic and paranoid.
He later told a reporter that he was dismayed by the way Hispanic gangs
and students who couldn't speak English were overwhelming Los Angeles
schools, and at the same time he was becoming increasingly fearful of
the prospect of a terrorist attack. "You could see it coming," he said.
"And then Sept. 11 hit, and that was it."
The 9/11 attacks convinced Simcox that he was right in his paranoid
belief that Los Angeles was primed to become a terrorism target, and he
freaked out. He called Kim Dunbar two days after the attacks and left a
series of voice-mail rants about the Constitution and the impending
nuclear attack on L.A. and how he intended to give his now-teenage son
weapons training: "I will begin teaching him the art of protecting
himself with weapons," he said. "I purchased another gun. I have more
than a few weapons, and I intend on teaching my son how to use them. … I
will no longer trust anyone in this country. My life has changed
forever, and if you don't get that, you are brainwashed like everybody
else."
Simcox also called his son and ranted at him over the phone. Kim
Dunbar recorded the conversations and submitted them in court
proceedings as evidence of his mental instability. On the tapes, you can
hear Simcox angrily challenge the boy to become "a man and a real
American."
"You better stop playing baseball, buddy, and you better do something
real, 'cause life will never be the same," Simcox shouted. "I'm going
to go down to the Mexican border and sign up for the government for
Border Patrol to protect the borders of the country that I love. You
hear how serious I am."
Simcox indeed applied to join the Border Patrol, but was rejected
because, at age 40, he was too old. So he sold off his belongings and
headed out to the Sonoran desert, camping for three months on the wild
Arizona border and, he claimed later, witnessing all kinds of criminal
border activity. He had his epiphany while camping at Organ Pipe
National Monument and seeing drug traffickers: "At that moment, it
clicked," Simcox recalls. "The borders were wide open. Terrorists could
come through."
He eventually took up permanent residence in Tombstone, getting
part-time work as a shootout-show actor – playing, aptly enough, one of
the ex-Confederate "Cowboy" gunmen who died in the showdown. ("I always
got killed," he wryly observed to a reporter.) Responding to an ad for
an assistant editor at the Tombstone Tumbleweed – a local weekly/shopper
that made its living with classified ads – he was hired on the spot.
The Tumbleweed was that kind of paper. It didn't really have a
reporting staff or try to cover local news. Mostly it ran a hodgepodge
of free material from local contributors around the edges of its twenty
pages or so of local classifieds. It was run out of a little
hole-in-the-wall office just off the town's main street. And like a lot
of such papers in dusty rural locales in 2002, it was having a hard time
staying afloat, and its then-owner wasn't merely desperate for an
assistant editor – hell, he wanted a buyer. Sure enough, a few months
after Simcox had been hired, he cashed in his personal reserves – at one
time, Simcox told reporters he had liquidated his son's college fund,
but in later versions it was his own retirement fund – and bought the
paper himself for $60,000 in August of 2002.
Simcox's epiphany had given him a focus for his new career: Within
short order, the Tumbleweed became all about illegal immigration a la
Roger Barnett and his nativist cohort, from whom he later acknowledged
he had received his inspiration. The headlines shouted: "ENOUGH IS
ENOUGH! A PUBLIC CALL TO ARMS! CITIZENS BORDER PATROL MILITIA NOW
FORMING!"
He initially called it the Tombstone Militia, but shortly changed its
name to the much more broadly marketable Civil Homeland Defense Corps.
At its first gathering in December, Simcox told reporters he expected
about fifty people to participate, but only a handful, about five or
six, actually showed.
They may have been discouraged by the official resolution opposing
Simcox's plans for border militias passed by the city council of the
nearest big town, Douglas. The city's mayor, Ray Borane, authored the
bill, writing: "Douglas is a bicultural and binational community, and
the majority of its residents do not wish to encourage, be involved with
or associate with these types of people, nor do they want our
relationship with Mexico compromised by outside, xenophobic groups
perpetuating hatred of humanity."
When Simcox held a border-watch training event for his militia in
January 2003, all of two volunteers showed up to take part. Four
reporters were there to cover them.
That was pretty much how it went for Simcox's militia for a couple of
years: At best, the actual border watches would attract a handful of
volunteers, many of them of dubious background at best. But there were
always journalists of various kinds to be found: TV reporters, newspaper
scribes, documentary filmmakers. They became Simcox's target audience.
It's certain that he wasn't making many inroads with his neighbors in
southern Arizona. The city councils in both Douglas and Tombstone,
along with the Cochise County Board of Supervisors, passed resolutions
condemning efforts to form citizen-militia border-watch operations.
"We want the citizens of Tombstone, Cochise County and Arizona to
know that the city of Tombstone doesn't agree with the vigilante
approach he's taking," said Tombstone Mayor Dusty Escapule. "It can't
end in a good situation. It's gonna get somebody hurt or killed."
There were pragmatic aspects to officials concern as well – namely,
that adding amateur firepower to a complex and dangerous situation was
like pouring gasoline on a fire. Cochise County Supervisors Chairman Pat
Call pointed out that Simcox's armed civilians were in way over their
heads: "The Border Patrol is facing fire power greater and more
sophisticated than anything they carry," he said. "Right now, every
evening, there are armed, nervous Border Patrol agents walking around in
the dark, armed and nervous drug smugglers, people smugglers and armed
and nervous residents. To add to this mix nervous, armed or poorly
trained civilians, it just isn't good."
Locals in Tombstone pretty quickly adopted a view of Simcox very much
like that of his former colleagues at Wildwood. "He's got an ego
problem," said Bob Krueger, himself a relatively recent transplant.
"He's got some kind of psychological need to be important and be
recognized. This has more to do with him than with the real problems on
the border."
Douglas Mayor Ray Borane also made his disdain for Simcox
unmistakable: "That asshole is nothing but a media-publicity hound. He
re-creates himself all of the time; he resurrects himself, and he will
affiliate himself with anybody who can get any attention."
Joanne Young, a bartender at the Crazy Horse Saloon in Tombstone,
observed: "Simcox doesn't have 10 people in this town on his side."
Noting Tombstone's reliance on tourism, she said in 2003 that "visitors
are down this year from last. People are calling and saying, 'I don't
want to bring my children there; it isn't safe.' "
Sheriff Larry Dever tried to discourage them too: “Unfortunately,
this kind of circumstance and these kinds of cries for forming posses
invite fringe associations and agendas we don't need. They think it's a
game or a sport.”
Around the corner from the Tumbleweed, Pete Tiscia was watching it all
develop from the vantage point of his pawnshop, which specialized in
buying and selling guns. "I think it's a big accident waiting to
happen," he said. "Somebody's gonna get 'cowboy crazy' and shoot
somebody."
Given this bunch, it might even be themselves getting shot.
Especially if the guy leading them was sticking a gun down the front of
his jeans.
It probably didn't help when, out on a Civil Homeland Defense patrol
on January 26, 2003, Simcox wandered onto the Coronado National
Monument, which prohibits guns within its boundaries. He was ticketed by
the park ranger and his gun confiscated. Police also found the
following among Simcox's possessions: a document entitled "Mission
Plan," a police scanner, two walkie-talkies, and a toy figure of Wyatt
Earp on horseback.
The last we heard of Simcox before this was in 2010:
Chris Simcox, who briefly flirted with a primary challenge to Sen. John
McCain in 2010, has largely vanished from public view since April 2010,
when his estranged wife, Alena, obtained a protection order against him
after Simcox "brandished a gun and threatened to shoot her, their
children and any police officers who tried to protect them."
Simcox was skilled at fooling people with a pleasing first impression, embodied in the makeover he made in 2006
at the hands of a group of Beltway media consultants he hired, after
which he made public appearances trying to soothe people into believing
the Minutemen were a benign organization. Here's a photo from his
appearance that spring before the Bellingham Human Rights Commission:
As I say, he cleaned up real well. It was, of course, a con job.
I wonder if Lou Dobbs will do a segment. Well, no, actually, I don't.
As a fourth-generation Idaho native, I used to proudly wear a T-shirt
promoting my home state. It read: "Idaho -- Where the Men Are Men and
the Sheep Are Nervous".
Of course, I also at one time sported a bumper sticker that read,
"Welcome to Idaho -- The Tick Fever State!" But that was mostly intended
to dissuade all those Orange County folks (and other fellow
Californians) who were fleeing the brown people up to the lily-white
pastures of rural Idaho. Unfortunately, it didn't work.
The T-shirt, though, was a way of making fun of the manly men who
populated the state even then, by suggesting that the whole facade might
just be a cover for a broad variety of not-so-manly manliness in
private. And it contained a wry observation about the unspoken
anything-goes sexual ethos that was always part of the reality of life
for those rugged mountain men and chap-slappin' cowboys later celebrated
by much more self-righteous people who don't know any better.
Of course, nobody falls for that stuff quite like my fellow Idahoans,
especially the kind who decorate their camper trailers with giant
murals of eagles and bears and still read Louis L'Amour novels. And they
also -- more notably in recent years, thanks in large part to all those
ex-Orangeites -- sucker avidly for right-wing politics and its embrace
of a much stricter sexual ethos than what really prevailed in the ole pioneer days. It is a deep red state, much more so than it was thirty years ago.
Which is why, no doubt, the whole shift permitting gay teens into the
Boy Scouts has wrapped their knickers into a tight little knot in
places like Idaho. I remember growing up in the Scouts in Idaho -- the
whispers about some leaders, or more pointedly, the whispers about other
boys. They're, um, very uptight about this subject.
So much so that, in Kootenai County, the local (Republican, of
course) sheriff is threatening to cut off any ties between his office
and the Scouts. This is evidently either a display of manly manliness, a
legalistic attempt at purification, or a religious meltdown. Or, most
likely, all three.
From Ian Millhiser at Think Progress:
Kootenai County, Idaho Sheriff Ben Wolfinger threatened
on Friday to drop his department’s sponsorship of a Boy Scout troop
because “[i]t would be inappropriate for the sheriff’s office to sponsor
an organization that is promoting a lifestyle that is in violation of
state law.” Just in case there was any ambiguity regarding what
“lifestyle” Wolfinger was referring to, he also sent a copy of an
anti-sodomy statute that is still on the books in Idaho to an official
for the Boy Scouts. Boy Scouts of America’s National Council voted last
week to stop discriminating against gay scouts, although they will
continue to exclude LGBT people from scout leadership.
As Millhiser observes, Idaho does have an anti-sodomy statute on the
books, but it has been superseded by federal court rulings that such
laws are unconstitutional.
Not that it matters to a Republican sheriff like this clown. He just assured himself re-election, after all.
And those boys in his troop? Well, they can go off and find someone better to be an example than this self-righteous homophobe.
I would suggest they try a nice Methodist troop like the one my
brother and I both enrolled in growing up in Idaho. I know they won't be
turning away any gay boys, either.
Because that's the real Idaho. Sometimes clowns, even crowds of them, obscure that reality, too.
It's like they say: The more things change, the more they stay the same. Especially when it comes to right-wing extremists.
As Karoli reported yesterday,
now the conspiracy theorists are claiming that President Obama
deliberately created the killer tornadoes that swept Oklahoma last week,
with Alex Jones (of course) leading the way.
It's not just Jones. Some Oklahoma versions of Truther nutcases, as Alexander Abad-Santos reports at The Atlantic, are also jumping aboard with a variation on Jones' theory:
So, yes, the Oklahoma tornado truthers claim the
administration whipped up a storm that killed 24 people through HAARP,
the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, in Alaska. Here's a
screen grab of a contributor post on Before It's News, a citizen
journalist website that's home to many of these conspiracy theories,
from a contributor who says this is "compelling evidence" that HAARP is
at work:
As Gawker's Ken Layne writes, the "stated goal of HAARP is to study
the ionosphere and how the spectrum of radio waves works within these
upper layers of the Earth's atmosphere." Essentially, HAARP researches
communications. But there are budding conspiracy theories that HAARP
could be ultimately used to disrupt the ionosphere, and manipulate
weather patterns.
As one Redditor pointed out, one of the permutations
of the conspiracy theory in Moore is that the left-wing financier George
"the Sorcerer" Soros is behind all of this.
Actually, the HAARP theory has been around since about 1994, when it
was being avidly promoted by Militia of Montana founder John Trochmann.
Here's how he explained it to his audience at a militia meeting in
western Washington in 1995, as I reported it in my first book, In God's Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest:
Trochmann then turns on the overhead projector and puts on the cover
page. It reads: ``Enemies, Foreign and Domestic: Part I -- The
Problem.’’ A few words: ``You’ll have to excuse me, I’m going to fly
right through this, because it takes about an hour and a half.’’ He
flips to the next sheet. It’s the cover of a military journal with a
story about international armed forces cooperating under United Nations
auspices, and the cover illustration shows a number of nations’ flags,
including the Stars and Stripes, all subordinately positioned beneath a
U.N. flag.
So begins a sojourn for the audience that comes closer to two hours in
length, as Trochmann treads through 190 pages of "documentation," each
page a strand in a web the bearded man spins, all pieces of a puzzle
Trochmann claims proves there’s a conspiracy to destroy the United
States.
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.
The conspirators’ evil designs, he says, already have surfaced in numerous key ways, including:
* Gun control. ``What is it about the word `infringe’ they don’t
understand?’’ Trochmann asks, referring to the Second Amendment, which
he believes completely protects people’s guns rights.
* The botched police raids at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas.
"These things prove our government is out of control," he says.
Moreover, Trochmann claims they are harbingers of a future government
crackdown on law-abiding citizens.
* Troop and equipment movements throughout the country. Trochmann
flashes pictures of armored vehicles, tanks, missiles, all kinds of
military hardware -- some marked with U.N. symbols or lettering, some
with red Russian stars. These pictures are sent in from all over the
country, Trochmann says, and the government can’t explain them.
* Black helicopters. They’re being used for training now, says
Trochmann. What they’re training for: rounding up citizens to put them
in concentration camps.
* "Unconstitutional" executive orders. These range from the inclusion
of U.S. troops among U.N. forces in Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia under
Presidents Bush and Clinton to seemingly innocent preparations for
disaster under the Federal Emergency Management Administration. All,
says Trochmann, are meant to undermine the U.S. Constitution.
* Floods, hurricanes and other natural disasters. Government
conspirators are manipulating the world’s weather (using, Trochmann
claims, technology at an Alaska project called HAARP), causing all these
horrible weather patterns that affect crop production around the world.
The intent, he says, is to induce food shortages, which will become a
pretext for imposing martial law. Then, he says, they’ll start rounding
people up.
"It's going to end up like this -- the most mild and calm of
scenarios will be: `Would you like to eat today? Give me your guns.
Would you like your children back from school today? Give me your guns.'
That's the mildest of versions you'll see."
I also encountered Trochmann's beliefs in weather manipulation when I interviewed him in Montana:
Federal conspirators, he said, had already put the mechanisms in
place for the big coup. "Most of this Emergency Powers Act that's we've
been studying that they put together ... They have to have a replacement
for war to get down to those levels and still retain the legitimacy of
power. What might that be? Catastrophes to deal with? We know that
electromagnetically, they control our weather now. There's all kinds of
documentation of that. We've got documentation right from the United
Nations that say that people have to get a permit to change the weather
somewhere."
On the big-screen TV behind us, pictures from a national broadcast
showed a hurricane slamming into Florida, and an announcer displayed the
storm’s path on a map.
Trochmann looked at the owner of the cafe, and they exchanged knowing
glances. "See the hurricane?" John asked him. "Boy, that's really late,
isn't it?" The owner nodded.
You mean, I asked, this is part of the weather-control pattern?
"Sure," Trochmann said. "Naples, Florida, got hit at the same time Naples, Idaho, did."
Coincidence, maybe?
"Yeah, right," he said. "And I have another bridge for sale for you."
Most right-wing extremists aren't as imaginative in their
paranoia as John Trochmann. Mostly, they just recycle old conspiracy
theories that were cooked up liked the Mad Men of MOM.
As if it weren't already clear that the so-called "IRS scandal" is
nothing of the sort, now it's becoming even clearer that it's a just
another bit of that down-the-rabbit-hole-up-is-downism in which
conservatives have come to specialize in recent years.
The Institute for Research and Education in Human Rights -- which,
among other things, monitors the far-right extremists who have been
filling the ranks of the Tea Party -- has an excellent takedown of the
IRS nonsense:
While it is well-known that the so-called IRS scandal has been used by
Tea Partiers to bash the IRS, less well known are the actual facts of
the case.
Some of the flagged groups did have their tax-exempt status delayed
or did face some additional scrutiny, but not a single group has been
denied tax-exempt status.
A May 14 draft report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax
Administration found that none of the 296 questionable applicants had
been denied, “For the 296 potential political cases we reviewed, as of
December 17, 2012, 108 applications had been approved, 28 were withdrawn
by the applicant, none had been denied, and 160 cases were open from
206 to 1,138 calendar days (some crossing two election cycles).” (p. 14)
In fact, the only known 501(c)(4) applicant to recently have its
status denied happens to be a progressive group: the Maine chapter of
Emerge America, which trains Democratic women to run for office.
Although the group did no electoral work, and didn’t participate in
independent expenditure campaign activity either, its partisan nature
disqualified it from being categorized as working for the “common good.”
The Inspector General’s report found that in the “majority of cases,
we agreed that the applications submitted included indications of
significant political campaign intervention.” (p. 10). In fact, only 91
of the 296, roughly 31%, of the applications reviewed for the report
did not have “indications of significant political campaign
intervention.” In other words, more than two thirds of those flagged for
processing by a team of specialists had those indications.
That sort of political campaign intervention would normally
disqualify a group from 501(c)(4) status, but the deluge of Tea Party
applications combined with the politicization of the process has allowed
them to slip through. A closer look by IREHR at the activities of some
of the Tea Party groups that are currently under review or have received
non-profit status from the IRS, reveals a difficult and dangerous
situation.
Rather than the so-called scandal cooked up by Tea Party groups, the
real criticism of the IRS may be that it has let so many of these groups
get away with what are apparently egregious violations.
That's what all the yelling's about. It's to keep people from seeing
the plain truth: Many of these people really are tax cheats trying to
game the system for partisan advantage.
Clearly, the chief reasoning of NBA owners for declining to add Hansen and Steve Ballmer to their list of owners was that they were from Seattle. When the NBA ripped their team of 41 years out of Seattle back in 2007, it was intended as an object lesson for the rest of the league: Unless you bow to our extortion demands, you will lose your team.
Sacramento, obviously, got that lesson. After teetering on losing the Kings because of the failure to build a new arena, the city gave up every ounce of its soul in its desperate effort to keep the NBA in town. The new arena deal requires the taxpayers to foot about 60 percent of the tab.
So of course the NBA was going to reward the city that gave in to their extortion demands. And it would continue to punish the city that insists on limiting the taxpayers' role in enriching billionaire owners and their exposure to ever-ratcheting arena costs.
You see, Seattle thought it had done everything right for years. Its fans always supported the Sonics -- even when they sucked, the team still averaged 15,000 a game -- and were among the most rabid and knowledgeable in the league. (I was myself a season ticket holder for over a decade.) There's a reason so many NBA teams are populated with players from Seattle high schools: It is a basketball-saturated town.
We even bellied up to the bar in the 1990s on the arena demands -- spent $100 million tearing apart and renovating the old Seattle Center Coliseum, three-quarters of which was paid for by Seattle taxpayers. When it reopened in 1995, David Stern came and proclaimed the new facility as state-of-the-art for the next generation.
Six years later, it was no longer good enough for the NBA. Or so said then-owner Howard Schultz, who demanded a whole new arena from city, state, and regional leaders. Those folks, of course, were still paying off the bonds for the supposedly state-of-the-art arena they had just refurbished, not to mention their new football and baseball stadiums, and weren't exactly eager to take Schultz's extortion demands seriously -- especially since, in the early part of the decade, much of the town was hurting economically.
So Schultz -- who to this day is the least popular billionaire in town -- threw a fit of pique and sold the team to Oklahoma City businessman Clay Bennett. Everyone immediately understood that Bennett intended to move the team to Oklahoma. But Bennett, wide-eyed and innocent, proclaimed piously that this was not the case.
Bennett, as documents later unearthed during the departure debacle disclosed, is a prodigious liar. At the same time he was telling Seattle fans all they had to do to keep their team was step up to the plate and deliver on their new arena plan, he was telling his business associates that moving the team to OKC was a done deal.
And that arena plan was a doozy. Bennett proposed building a $500 million arena in the relatively remote southern suburb of Renton, right next to the two worst traffic intersections in the state. Oh, and his investors were only willing to pay $100 million, at the most, for their share of the building. Of course, the state Legislature knew when it was being gamed and declined to play along. Soon the moving trucks had backed up and our team was playing in Oklahoma City for an ownership group comprised of proven liars and scumbags.
Clay Bennett, of course, was then named to head up the same relocation committee that was summarily slapped down the Seattle bid this time. Because that's the kind of league this is.
If Chris Hansen had really wanted to be part of this league, he should have understood that. If Hansen had really wanted to succeed in getting a team back to Seattle, he should have followed the established NBA model. Clay Bennett's model.\
He should have bought the Kings and lied about it. He should have claimed that he wanted to try to keep the team in Sacramento and was willing to work with locals. Then he could have proposed building a new arena in Davis and soaking taxpayers for 80 percent of the tab. And when they balked (as anyone sane would) Hansen and Co. could have packed up stakes and moved them up to Seattle.
That's the established NBA model. Which raises the question: Why would anyone want to get in bed with a business that toxic and dysfunctional in the first place?
We really don't want to be the NBA's Los Angeles -- the extortion threat the league can hang over every other city. Having just been the NBA's bitch, there's really no appetite here to be its tool as well.
This just-finished episode has just reminded everyone in Seattle what they were first taught eight years ago: The NBA is a malignant, dysfunctional entity that preys on cities people's normative civic pride and exploits that for the sake of enriching a few millionaires, who are the real owners of these teams. Cities don't own them, and Seattle was always intended to remind everyone else of that.
Thanks to David Stern, the NBA today is by, about, and for the 1 percent, while suckering the 99 percent into thinking it's about them. Quite a game, really. And when you see that from the outside, as Seattle basketball fans must, the desire to get back in just melts away.
It's time to just walk away from the NBA. We can still be a hoops city. It will be harder, but the foundation is already well in place. And we can find other diversions as well. How about those Sounders, eh?
The NBA can come back some day. But it has to be on our terms. It has to be our team, not something stolen from another city. By then, David Stern will be long gone. And so, perhaps, will be the scumbag ethos that rules the league.
Have you noticed how many right-wingers are decrying the "tyranny" of the Obama administration these days?
It's particularly rife on the Tea Partying far right, where it's extremely common to hear Obama being portrayed as a "tyrant," particularly regarding his recent attempts to promote gun-control measures. (See Ben Shapiro whining thus in the video above.) So you'll often find crap like this floating about on their Facebook pages.
But it's becoming common among mainstream right-wingers, particularly after the president dismissed these characterizations during a speech at Ohio State. Sure enough, everyone from Jonah Goldberg to Michelle Malkin piled on with the "yeah, whatever you say, dude" retorts.
A bald fact: Generations would hear how the South suffered “tyranny”
under Reconstruction. Conveniently forgotten was the way that word was
universally defined by white Southerners at the time: as a synonym for
letting black men vote at all. A “remonstrance” issued by South
Carolina’s Democratic Central Committee in 1868, personally signed by
the leading native white political figures of the state, declared that
there was no greater outrage, no greater despotism, than the provision
for universal male suffrage just enacted in the state’s new
constitution. There was but one possible consequence: “A superior race
is put under the rule of an inferior race.” They offered a stark
warning: “We do not mean to threaten resistance by arms. But the white
people of our State will never quietly submit to negro rule. This is a
duty we owe to the proud Caucasian race, whose sovereignty on earth God
has ordained.”
“No free people, ever,” declared a speaker at a convention of the
state’s white establishment a few years later, had been subjected to the
“domination of their own slaves,” and the applause was thunderous.
“This is a white man’s government,” was the phrase echoed over and over
in the prints of the Democratic press and the orations of politicians
denouncing the “tyranny” to which the “oppressed” South was being
subjected.
A bald fact: more than three thousand freedmen and their white
Republican allies were murdered in the campaign of terrorist violence
that overthrew the only representatively elected governments the
Southern states would know for a hundred years to come. Among the dead
were more than sixty state senators, judges, legislators, sheriffs,
constables, mayors, county commissioners, and other officeholders whose
only crime was to have been elected. They were lynched by bands of
disguised men who dragged them from cabins by night, or fired on from
ambushes on lonely roadsides, or lured into a barroom by a false friend
and on a prearranged signal shot so many times that the corpse was
nothing but shreds, or pulled off a train in broad daylight by a body of
heavily-armed men resembling nothing so much as a Confederate cavalry
company and forced to kneel in the stubble of an October field and shot
in the head over and over again, at point blank.
So saturated is our collective memory with Gone With the Wind stock
characters of thieving carpetbaggers, ignorant Negroes, and low
scalawags, that it comes as a shock not so much to discover that there
were men and women of courage, idealism, rectitude, and vision who
risked everything to try to build a new society of equality and justice
on the ruins of the Civil War, who fought to give lasting meaning to the
sacrifices of that terrible struggle, who gave their fortunes, careers,
happiness, and lives to make real the simple and long-delayed American
promise that all men were created equal—it comes as a shock not so much
to be confronted by their idealism and courage and uprightness as by the
realization that they were convinced, up to the very last, that they
would succeed. Confident in the rightness of their cause, backed by the
military might of the United States government, secure in the ringing
declarations, now the supreme law of the land embodied in the
thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments of the Constitution,
that slavery was not only dead but that equality and the right to vote
were the patrimony now of all Americans, they could not imagine that
their nation could win such a terrible war and lose the ensuing peace.
Indeed, it's common to hear neo-Confederate agitators -- those folks who are still pushing for modern secession by the South -- describe Lincoln to this day as a "tyrant."
The idea of being governed by a black president? To many of these people even today, that is itself the essence of tyranny.
There are probably fewer pundits more consistent at their intellectual
dishonesty than James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal. This week he
topped himself -- no easy task.
The headline, responding to the recent reports of a woman in Wyoming
who perpetrated a hoax pretending to have been threatened with rape by a
right-wing hater, read:
Why are phony "hate crimes" so common, especially on college campuses?
Oh really? Phony hate crimes are common? Taranto arrives at this
conclusion from ... a single case? (He later cites two cases of phony
hate crimes ... from thirty and twenty years ago, respectively. Neither
were on a college campus.)
Where is the data to back up this claim? Can Taranto show us any more cases of phony hate-crime
reports from college campuses? Yes, there have been some (we know of a
few others), but just how many are there? Enough to claim that it's
"common"?
Contrast this to what Taranto says about real hate crimes:
Oppression of minorities, and certainly of women, scarcely exists in America in the 21st century. Genuine hate crimes happen, but they are very rare.
In 2011, U.S. law enforcement agencies reported 6,222 hate crime incidents involving 7,254 offenses,
according to our just-released Hate Crime Statistics, 2011 report.
These incidents included offenses like vandalism, intimidation, assault,
rape, murder, etc.
So, in order for hate-crime hoaxes to be "common" they either have to
number quite a few more than 6,222 a year (when in fact the number is
probably closer to 6), or Taranto has to be claiming that the vast
majority of hate crimes prosecuted in this country annually are
"hoaxes." I'm sure the prosecutors and police who pursued those crimes
and reported them to the FBI's database will be interested to know the
latter, if that's the case.
Or more likely, Taranto is just indulging in his favorite right-wing
pastime: Inverting reality on its head by trumpeting anomalistic
incidents as representative.
Federal law has required states to collect hate crime
data since the early 1990s. Congress has defined a hate crime as a
"criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in
part by an offender's bias against a race, religion, disability, ethnic
origin or sexual orientation."
But states don't have to report their data to the FBI if they don't
want to. Four states -- Indiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Ohio --
don't even have a Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program.
The result, critics say, is a federal data system that costs $1
million-plus but offers very little help to authorities who investigate,
identify and track hate crimes.
"We can only report by the numbers we are given," said the FBI's
Michelle Klimt, who says the lack of data could be because of a lack of
state funding.
In states that do have UCR programs, the FBI offers training for state and local law enforcement on how to collect and report hate crime data.
On Capitol Hill, 26 senators have asked U.S. Attorney General Eric
Holder to expand UCR programs to include tracking of hate crimes against
Hindus, Arabs and Sikhs. Last year's deadly attack on a Wisconsin Sikh
temple raised awareness about crimes targeting Sikhs.
"Without accurate, nuanced reporting of these crimes, it is more
difficult for federal, state, and local law enforcement to assess and
respond to the particular threat that the Sikh community faces," the
senators said last month in a letter to Holder.
If authorities don't know how many hate crimes are committed, it's
difficult to get an accurate picture of whether hate crime laws are
effective.
No, James Taranto, the real question is: Why are phony hate crimes
such an object of fetishization by right-wing apologists, when in fact
they are relatively rare?
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced on
Monday that it had arrested a Minnesota man for plotting a “localized
terror attack.”
A press release
from the Minneapolis Division said that “special agents of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, in conjunction with the Montevideo Police
Department; the Chippewa County Sheriff’s Office; the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; the Minnesota State Highway Patrol;
the Bloomington Police Department; the Minnehaha County Sheriff’s Office
(South Dakota); the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources; and
members of CEE-VI (Cooperative Enforcement Effort), executed a search
warrant at 1204 Benson Avenue, Lot #8, in Montevideo, Minnesota. Several
guns and explosive devices were discovered during the search of the
residence” on Friday.
Buford “Bucky” Rogers, 24, was arrested for unlawful possession of a
firearm by a felon. An Associated Press report said that he had
previously been convicted for felony burglary in 2011 and a misdemeanor
charge of dangerous handling of a weapon in 2009.
It appears he came by his nuttiness the natural way -- via his family:
Throughout the interview with FOX 9 News, Jeff Rogers insisted he still doesn't know why his family is considered a threat.
"We are peaceful people, okay? We're not out to blow up the world -- none of this crap," Jeff Rogers said.
Investigators claim to have removed a computer, a military-style
Romanian rifle and explosives from his shed -- specifically, Molotov
cocktails and pipe bombs. Jeff Rogers said that isn't the case,
describing the seized items as household chemicals.
"That's a bunch of s---," he said.
Police and Jeff Rogers both point out that Buford Rogers does not
live at the home. Rather, he lives across town with his girlfriend and
their new baby. Neighbors say they don't see him much, but residents
told FOX 9 News the family is very dedicated to their Black Snake
Militia, which some consider un-American.
Jeff Rogers is not coy about the family's political leanings,
displaying an upside down American Flag and signs suggesting the
government wants to implant microchips inside citizens outside his home.
"We are patriots. You guys are patriots," he said. "You see the country is going to s----."
Yet, Buford Rogers' Facebook page suggests a sinister side to his
politics. In publicly visible posts from 2011, he wrote, "We already
started fighting. I'm sure you'll hear about it in a bad way."
A website
for the Minnesota Minutemen Militia, which says it is not
anti-government, claims the Black Snake Militia is comprised of 73
members. The leader's profile shows a man who claims to be 29 years old
wearing a ski mask
and holding an assault rifle. His bio reads, "Im an american patriot
willing to lay down my life so we may take our republic back…. [sic]"
Meanwhile, the media -- and Fox News especially -- yawn. Eric Boehlert observes:
You will likely not be surprised that none of Fox News' primetime hosts
mentioned the Rogers arrest last night or the looming threat of
right-wing extremist violence. That, despite the fact the shows have
dedicated countless programming hours in recent weeks to ginning up fear
and angst surrounding the terror attack in Boston on Patriot's Day.
Prompted by the arrest of a Muslim suspect, Fox News has spent weeks
demonizing Islam by assigning collective blame, as well as targeting
Muslims who travel here to study. But yet another far-right,
anti-government plot to possibly kill law enforcement officials? At Fox
News, that's not a story that draws much concern, especially not from
its primetime talkers.
Of course, none of this is particularly a surprise. Yes, there has
been a significant upsurge in right-wing-extremist domestic terrorism in
the past four years, and it has gone unreported in the mass media, who
have instead focused exclusively on "Islamist" domestic terrorists
(whose plots and acts are occurring at less than half the rate of RWEs).
Yes, we were recently witness to another domestic-terrorism incident
by a right-wing extremist -- the ricin attacks on the Senate and White
House -- and yet you would not be aware of it if judging from the media
response (though it is true that the picture was muddled by the initial
arrest of the wrong man).
And yes, there is at least a substantial possibility that the Newtown
shootings will be revealed to be another domestic-terrorism incident by
a right-wing extremist if those initial reports from CBS
indicating that Adam Lanza was attempting to imitate Anders Breivik
prove substantive, and if it emerges that Lanza adopted Breivik's
ideology in the process.
Rest assured: If Adam Lanza were of a Muslim background and his
"hero" an Al Qaeda terrorist, the media would not rest until they found
the answer to that question. As it is, we'll have to wait until the
investigation is complete and the results released to know. Which,
frankly, is how it should be. But the difference in treatment is
noteworthy.
There's a reason for this: Anytime the media report on right-wing
extremist terrorism, they are descended upon by the flying monkeys of
the wingnutosphere, who complain that calling them right-wing extremists
is "an abuse of the term 'right wing'" (trust me on this: it's not).
Witness what became of the DHS's section on right-wing extremists after the screaming hissy fit over a remarkably accurate and prescient law-enforcement bulletin.
It's creating a dangerously skewed picture, and a dangerously
misinformed public. And when something really awful happens as it
inevitably will, the media will all wring their hands and ask, "Why
didn't we see this coming?"
One of the ways I always used to chat up potential sources -- especially if they were participants or attendees at militia gatherings in the 1990s -- was by smoking with them. That's what I was doing when I met Paul deArmond the first time.
It was in Maltby, Washington, at the community meeting hall above, in February 1994. The meeting featured Bob Fletcher of the Militia of Montana (MOM), who had come to explain to the gathered "Patriots" how the government was plotting to round up American gun owners and place them in concentration camps hidden deep in the North Cascades. It was a fairly typical militia gathering of the time, featuring tables full of far-right conspiracist books and VHS movies and endless, droning explanations of various conspiracy theories.
One of the people manning the book table for MOM was David Trochmann, a man I wanted to meet. It was Trochmann, you see, who had an outsize role in the origins of the Ruby Ridge standoff that had unfolded tragically in northern Idaho two years before: ATF agents suspected that Trochmann had been smuggling weapons over the border into Canada from his Montana home, and so they had tried to put the squeeze on Trochmann's friend Randy Weaver by threatening him with jail time if he wouldn't act as an informant. Weaver, of course, refused, and then balked at the jail time too, and the rest became history.
I was more interested in learning about MOM's theological leanings: There were indications from other sources that Trochmann and his cofounder brother John were both adherents of Christian Identity, the white-supremacist religion that was also practiced at the nearby Aryan Nations headquarters. When Trochmann went outside to have a smoke, I went out and joined him. And Paul deArmond came with us.
Dave
Trochmann has the same kind of intense demeanor as his brother, but
there's something vaguely unsettling about him. I've known men like him,
that hard-eyed working-class kind of man, and they are not people you
want to mess with. If you do, they'll fix you and anybody close to you.
It's hard to believe that Randy is his son. Randy, a skinny, dark-haired
twentysomething, is doe-eyed and easygoing, a little jittery like all
the Trochmanns, but you get the feeling he'd find it possible to like
you even if you were a liberal.
I asked Dave about the Identity Bible studies. Any truth to that?
"Well,"
he said, looking about before answering, "you know, we're not white
supremacists. We just think the races should be separate."
I'd heard the distinction made before.
"We
just don't believe in race mixing," Trochmann said. "It's the laws of
Nature. You don't see robins and sparrows mating, do you? We don't have a
bunch of spobbins flying around."
I started explaining the genetic distinction between race and species, but realized it was a useless argument here.
"We
don't hate other races," Randy said. "We just don't think they should
mix. That's all Identity means to us." I let it go at that, and we
wandered off to other topics, and eventually back into the meeting hall.
Paul was there and began chuckling at Trochmann's biology lesson. I had noticed him acting a bit like a reporter inside the meeting hall, taking notes and standing off to the side, as I had been doing. When we got back inside the hall, we began chatting and I discovered that, while he wasn't a reporter, he was there to do much the same as I was, namely, observing, taking notes, and listening to what was being said at these meetings.
Paul was a political researcher, and he had a special flair for focusing on right-wing extremists. He had been doing this for awhile, and much of the data he collected helped fuel some fine studies and journalism exposing the toxic effects of these extremists and their politics.
He once told me that he got involved in doing this as a way to counter some of the bizarre land-use policies and politics that were arising locally in Whatcom County, where he lived, but that pretty soon it grew to encompass a much broader scope. But fighting the far right was something he grew up with: Paul's father had been a filmmaker whose career had been essentially destroyed by a cabal of McCarthyite witch-hunters who had prowled the Washington state political scene in the 1950s and '60s.
And, like me, he was good at digging up information because he was good at talking to right-wing extremists as though they were otherwise ordinary people (and a number of them are). One of the ways he did that, also like me, was that he would smoke with them. It's an easy way to form an artificial bond with someone and begin chatting them up.
Of course, there is eventually a price to pay for that technique, especially if you are a heavy smoker, as Paul was (I was more of an opportunistic smoker, though there undoubtedly will be a price to pay for that too). A couple of weeks ago, Paul died of lung cancer. I for one will miss him deeply. Tim Johnson at Cascadia Weekly has a beautiful obituary:
Yet Paul was equally adept with the rest of the political landscape.
In splendid political analysis, he was penetrating, articulate and—above
all—droll. He could read polling data with inerrant and deadly accuracy. In prophecy, Paul was gracious as Cassandra.
He understood the nature of politics as satire, without surrendering
to the smug view that politics is therefore unimportant and deserving of
being shunned or ignored. He knew the enduring vitality of a sticker or
slogan, the dirty trick turned on its head. Mailers and mailing lists
were his tea leaves. He gloried in the WTO protests and Occupy
movements. In one of his most endearing stunts, Paul documented the
entire schematic of the cut-and-flip greenfield land grab that has so
polluted local politics for the past two decades, mashed up so a child
could grasp it in a series of old comic strip panels long in the public
domain.
The public domain was Paul’s domain. He was—as David Ronfeldt,
a retired senior researcher at RAND Corporation, notes—a pioneering
practitioner of what political analyst John Keane calls “monitory
democracy,” the power of citizens to hold their government accountable
not just at the polls, but every day, through the assembly of data and
documents and networks in all their forms.
Be sure to read the whole thing, especially the many encomiums from the people who knew Paul and worked with him. I especially like this one from Jane Kramer:
“What impresses me most about Paul de Armond,” she said, “is his immense
generosity of mind, his collegiality, his commitment to
enlightening—you could call it benign forced feeding—all of us who are
trying in one way or another to understand, with him, what is happening
to our country.”
Paul had the loveliest dry sense of humor, and many other personal qualities that endeared him to people. He was also unflaggingly tenacious -- a bulldog has nothing on Paul -- and that was why he also had many enemies, especially the politicos who loved to play footsy with far-right nutcases while pretending to just be mainstream conservatives.
He was also unflinchingly, demandingly, honest. Even his friends and allies were not spared if they dared leap to unproven conclusions or play games with facts, or worst of all, make afactual assertions. I grew to inherently trust Paul's data and his analysis because it not only proved consistently inerrant but prescient. Anything he produced was tested eight ways to Sunday.
But most of all, Paul was my friend, a superb bartender, a compulsive tinkerer (we won't even talk about his basement), and a great gatherer of fine people around his fire pit. There will never be another like him, and we are all the poorer for it.
The right-wingers have been in full-on gloat mode since the capture
of the Boston Marathon bombers -- not because it turned out that they
were right about the nature of the perpetrators (they weren't), but
because speculation that they might be right-wing extremists was wrong.
Only wingnuts can convert a sigh of relief into an attack on their
opponents.
The problem is that all they're really doing is attempting, yet
again, to whitewash away the very real existence of violent extremists
on their own side.
Yet there was a theory behind the madness, the
Eliminationist Narrative created by Dave Neiwart of Crooks and Liars
about an “eliminationist” radical right seeking to dehumanize and
eliminate political opposition. It was a play on the over-used
narrative of Richard Hofstadter’s “paranoid style” in American politics.
The Eliminationist Narrative was aided and abetted by an abuse of the
term “right-wing” to include groups who are the opposite of
conservatism and the Tea Party movement.
In the case of Sparkman, the accusations were just Another Failed
Eliminationist Narrative. And the Eliminationist Narrative would fail
time and time again:
James Holmes
Jared Loughner
The Cabby Stabber
The “killer” of Bill Sparkman
Amy Bishop
The Fort Hood Shooter
The IRS Plane Crasher
The Pentagon Shooter
We can now add the Boston Marathon Bombing to the pile. The wild
speculation that there was a Tea Party or “right-wing” connection proved
false.
Of course, it would always help if people like Jacobson managed to
review the posts of the people he's attacking -- since neither I nor
anyone at Crooks and Liars ever speculated in print
that the perps were white right-wing extremists. Others did, however --
and frankly, we discussed it among ourselves. But we knew that it was
irresponsible to speculate publicly until we knew more, and so we waited
-- unlike a few progressives, and even many, many more conservatives.
(More about that in a moment.)
The fact, however, is that the speculation about right-wing
extremism's potential role was entirely rational, considering that in
the past four years, there have been nearly 70 acts of domestic
terrorism committed by right-wing extremists in the United States,
compared to just over 30 such acts committed by Islamist extremists
here. (I have prepared a report on this that Mother Jones will be
publishing soon.)
And let's not overlook the OTHER terrorist attack that occurred in the same week -- namely, the ricin attacks on the White House and Senate,
a case that is still officially unsolved, now that the original suspect
has been released. However, considering both the targets and the fact
that ricin has long been a favorite weapon of right-wing extremists,
there is a high likelihood that one or more of them will eventually
prove to be the source of these attacks.
Indeed, just in the past year alone, we've observed the following
entirely successful acts of domestic terrorism, perpetrated by
extremists animated by various kinds of far-right ideologies and their
eliminationist rhetoric:
White privilege is knowing that even if the Boston
Marathon bomber turns out to be white, his or her identity will not
result in white folks generally being singled out for suspicion by law
enforcement, or the TSA, or the FBI.
White privilege is knowing that even if the bomber turns out to be
white, no one will call for whites to be profiled as terrorists as a
result, subjected to special screening, or threatened with deportation.
White privilege is knowing that if the bomber turns out to be white,
he or she will be viewed as an exception to an otherwise non-white rule,
an aberration, an anomaly, and that he or she will be able to join the
ranks of pantheon of white people who engage in (or have plotted)
politically motivated violence meant to terrorize — and specifically to
kill — but whose actions result in the assumption of absolutely nothing
about white people generally, or white Christians in particular.
It turned out, of course, that the bombers were white Chechen
Muslims, which basically threw out everyone's guesses and predictions.
That has nonetheless not stopped right-wingers from scapegoating all
Muslims for the act.
Right-wing movements attract people who are likely to act out violently
because they indulge so overtly and, in recent years, remorselessly in
the politics of fear and loathing: indulging in eliminationist rhetoric,
depicting their opposition as less than human, and aggressively
attacking efforts to blunt the toxic effects of their politics as
"political correctness" -- or, in the case of both Anders Breivik and
Andrew Breitbart, "Cultural Marxism".
Scapegoating is, as Chip Berlet explains, "the social process whereby
hostility and aggression of an angry and frustrated group are directed
away from a rational explanation of a conflict and projected onto
targets demonized by irrational claims of wrongdoing, so that the
scapegoat bears the blame for causing the conflict, while the
scapegoaters feel a sense of innocence and increased unity."
Now, readers of blogs like Legal Insurrection will be forgiven if
they are unaware of many of the incidents listed above, because
generally speaking, they get short shrift in the media, and hardly a
word about them thus appears in places like right-wing blogs. When they
do appear in the media -- as in the cases of the Wisconsin Sikh massacre
and Anders' Breivik's rampage -- they are addressed dismissively if at
all at places like Jacobson's blog.
Jacobson, you see, has simply defined the problem away for mainstream
conservatives: These extremists are not definably "right wing" in any
discernible way, it seems, and therefore no taint exists. That's his
rationale in claiming, in this weekend's post, that calling neo-Nazis
and white supremacists right-wing extremists constituted an "abuse of
the term 'right wing'". This was also his rationale in dismissing Anders Breivik's rampage as somehow unconnected with his American friends' hatemongering.
Needless to say, the MSM and left-blogosphere have
concluded the shooter was a white supremacist/neo-Nazi based on tattoos
and being a former member of what they describe as a “skinhead” band —
which they then obscenely generalize to be “right-wing,” a way of trying
to link him to the political right. This is the age-old tactic. If Page was a white supremacist/neo-Nazi/skinhead, then he stood against everything the political right stands for.
Trust me on this, Mr. Jacobson, as a person who has attended their
gatherings and spent time observing their ideology up close and
personally: There is nothing remotely left-wing, or anything other than
right wing, about the ideology promoted by people like the Aryan Nations
and the Ku Klux Klan and American Renaissance and a whole bevy of other
hate groups out there operating in America today. The notion that they
are not from the political right is simply risible.
It just depends where on the very real spectrum of right-wing thought each happens to fall. You see, the reason they call these people right wing extremists
is that they begin with simple, perhaps even mainstream, conservative
positions and extend them to their most outrageous and illogical
extreme.
Conservatives are, for instance, skeptical of the power of the
federal government to intervene in civil-rights matters; right-wing
extremists believe it has no such power whatsoever, but it has been
usurped by a Jewish conspiracy that is imposing its will on white
people.
Conservatives are skeptical of internationalism and entities like the
United Nations. Right-wing extremists believe the U.N. represents a
diabolical plot to overthrow American sovereignty and impose
totalitarian rule.
Conservatives believe that abortion is murder of a living being and
oppose its use on demand. Right-wing extremists believe that this
justifies committing murder and various violent crimes in order to
prevent it.
Conservatives believe affirmative action is a form of reverse
discrimination. Right-wing extremists believe it is part of a plot to
oppress white people.
Conservatives oppose taxation, and tax increases in particular, on
principle. Right-wing extremists believe that the IRS is an illegitimate
institution imposed on the body politic by the aforementioned Jewish
conspiracy.
Conservatives oppose increased immigration on principle and illegal
immigration as a matter of law enforcement, and believe the borders
should be secure. Right-wing extremists believe that Mexicans are coming
here as part of an "Aztlan" conspiracy to retake the Southwest for
Mexico, and that we should start shooting border crossers on sight.
You get the idea.
Moreover, the claim that right-wing extremists have nothing to do
with the Tea Party is just flatly risible. I have two simple words
regarding that claim: Oath Keepers.
Jacobson's limitations on what constitutes "right wing" are not only
ahistorical, afactual, and fully at odds with reality, they're also
predictably self-serving. So it's not surprising that, given his
criteria, even his list of "failed eliminationist narratives" is fatally
flawed.
Most of the examples he provides, notably the Bill Sparkman episode,
were never discussed by me or by anyone at C&L as instances of
right-wing violence, because we never considered them such. However,
there are three cases here that we did describe as involving right-wing
extremists. And you know what? We still do.
Yes, we recognize very much that there is a significant difference
between mainstream conservatives and right-wing extremists, as we've
outlined above -- but those differences, frankly, keep diminishing, and
the ideological distances keep shrinking.
We would love nothing more than to report that conservatives were
bravely standing up against extremists on the right and doing their part
as citizens to bring an end to their toxic contributions to our
society. Believe me, as a onetime moderate Republican from a
conservative state, I would love nothing more than to see mainstream
conservatives stand up against right-wing extremism, as they once did in
the 1980s when Idaho became one of the first states to pass a
hate-crimes law.
But those days are long gone. There are still a handful of thoughtful
and decent conservatives remaining who will stand up to confront this
problem, but they are tiny in number and nil in influence. Instead,
conservatism is dominated by the likes of Michelle Malkin and Jonah
Goldberg and Glenn Beck and William Jacobson (not to mention nearly
everyone at Fox News), who instead of taking the problem of right-wing
extremism seriously, dismiss its presence, downplay its influence and
spread, and otherwise look the other way while vociferously attacking
anyone with the nerve to point it out.
In the meantime, of course, the tide is rising as the number of extremist groups in America reaches record proportions.
And mainstream conservatives are aiding and abetting them -- first by
pretending that they don't exist, and second by silently giving them a
warm embrace into the ranks of the Tea Party. It bodes ill for us all.
