Confederate "Heritage" Month 2010, April 24: Racial voting patterns in 2008

Stephen Ansolabehere, Nathaniel Persily and Charles Stewart III did an article that publicly available for the April 2010 Harvard Law Review called Race, Region, and Vote Choice in the 2008 Election: Implications for the Future of the Voting Right Act. There's a lot of talk these days about the role of racism in current politics. More specifically, white racism, though out star pundits are reluctant to be quite that specific most of the time: that might imply that there's an issue on which "one side" is the main problem.

Our Big Pundits often do a sloppy job of talking about it. (Big surprise there!) But this article by Ansolabehere et al is a reminder that a very official determination about racial voting patterns and the heightened risk of racial discrimination in voting is part of the legal system in connection with the Voting Rights Act.

The current Voting Rights Act is a continuation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which delivered the death blow to the old, corrupt segregation-era of suppressing African-American votes in Deep South states. Maybe "death blow" is too strong a term, since the Republicans are now attempting vote-suppression efforts straight out of the old segregationist playbook and doing it on a nationwide basis. But the Voting Right Act remains a legal barrier to that practice.

The opening Abstract of the article summarizes the bottom line:

The election of an African American as President of the United States has raised questions regarding the continued relevance and even constitutionality of various provisions of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). Barack Obama’s apparent success among white voters in 2008 has caused some commentators to question the background conditions of racially polarized voting that are key to litigation under section 2 of the VRA. His success in certain states, such as Virginia, has also raised doubts about the formula for coverage of jurisdictions under section 5 of the VRA. This Article examines the data from the 2008 primary and general elections to assess the geographic patterns of racial differences in voting behavior. The data suggest that significant differences remain between white and minority voters and among jurisdictions that are covered and not covered by section 5 of the VRA. These differences remain even when controlling for partisanship, ideology, and a host of other politically relevant variables. This Article discusses the implications of President Obama’s election for legal conceptions of racially polarized voting and for decisions concerning which jurisdictions section 5 ought to cover.

Conservatives like to use the argument that Obama's election as President shows that white racism is effectively ended for all practical purposes. Whether they imagine that anyone believes that, least of all the most devoted followers of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and the lesser lights of hate radio. But that argument not only becomes a one-size-fits-all excuse to deny that there's any manifestation of white racism among conservatives. It also serves as an argument to weaken the protection of the VRA at a time when Republicans have been mounting aggressive efforts at suppression on nonwhite voting. Ansolabehere et al give this more realistic summary of the racial implications of the Obama election:

Obama’s relative success in many other states may reveal the potential for minority candidates in those jurisdictions. In many states, all outside the South, Obama was able to win the white vote and therefore win the state. In still others (ten states according to the exit polls, including North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida), he lost among whites, but minority voters put him over the top. Finally, there are the states he lost, where he did not win a substantial share of the white vote and/or the minority population was not sizable enough for him to make up for that loss. To use the parlance of [VRA] section 2 to describe the geography of his victory: some states exhibited low rates of white bloc voting, and in others, despite high bloc voting, the minority community could still elect its candidate of choice. [my emphasis]

As the article explains, VRA opponents have mounted a Constitutional challenge to a section of the current version of the law which states, "The continued evidence of racially polarized voting in each of the [covered] jurisdictions ... demonstrates that racial and language minorities remain politically vulnerable, warranting the continued protection of the Voting Rights Act of 1965." The article deals with the issue of the constitutionality of the "racially polarized voting" provision. But my main interest here is in the factual determination that racially polarized voting is a reality in several states, most of them from the old Confederacy.

States currently covered by VRA, which requires additional monitoring and review of those states' voting procedures and practices, include all of the states of Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, though some municipalities in Virginia have been excluded. Individual counties in some other states are also covered. See the Justice Department's current map at Section 5 Covered Jurisdictions.

Yes, Sarah Palin's home state is one of the two states not from the old Confederacy that have statewide coverage under VRA. Does anyone need to wonder why Arizona is included? Although as the irrepressible JC Christian ("Jesus' General) points out, Arizona has made Jim Crow into "Jose Crow". He also tweets, "Lester Maddox family to sue AZ for trademark infringement" and "AZ's new #JoseCrow law is the perfect way to end Confederate Heritage Month."

The article also discusses some real problems complicating the effort to fairly estimate the racial component of voting patterns, such as the correlation between party affiliation and race. They observe:

... in a strict statistical sense, neither race nor party causes someone to vote for a particular candidate. Rather, at most, they represent group characteristics that might shed light on the reasons — racial identity or animus on the one hand, or ideological affinity and partisan loyalty on the other — why a voter might prefer one candidate over another. Even if multivariate analysis might demonstrate that partisanship is a more powerful predictor of candidate preferences than race, divergent voting behavior is still what prevents minorities under certain districting arrangements from having an “equal opportunity to elect” their preferred candidates.

Equal opportunity to elect is a particular legal concept used in voting rights law.

The Ansolabehere et al piece provides a wealth of voting statistics and analysis to warm the hearts of political junkies everywhere. But the point I'm emphasizing here is that their findings point to the same phenomenon documented in the "Old Times There Are Not Forgotten: Race and Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South" American Journal of Political Science 49:3 (July 2005) article that I discussed two days ago. Voting patterns in the South continued to show significant differences from the rest of the country with race counting as a major factor, a heritage of generations of Jim Crow laws and Lost Cause ideology and education - a heritage enthusiastically continued by today's Republican Party.

Ansolabehere et al were looking at "covered" states and counties, i.e., those falling under the VRA, which therefore include Alaska and Arizona and a few other non-Southern counties. They found, if anything, racial polarization in voting increased in the covered areas between the 2004 and 2008 Presidential elections. And this is after controlling statistically for both partisan and ideological factors:

Almost half of the variance in presidential voting results [in 2008] between covered counties can be explained by their racial makeup. ...

Although demographic and ideological variables account for much of the difference between whites in the covered and noncovered states, living in a covered state was a statistically significant factor for whites voting against Obama in 2008. This was not the case in 2004. The differences between whites in the covered and noncovered states could be attributed to such demographic and ideological variables when John Kerry ran against George W. Bush. The same cannot be said when Barack Obama ran against John McCain.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, neo-confederate, us south

Army dis-invites Franklin Graham to prayer fest

The fundis and their Republican political allies are freaking out over the Army rescinding an invitation to Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham and heir to leadership of his evangelical empire, to pray at a National Day of Prayer event. The reason? Graham's blowhard polemical statements on Islam: Andrea Stone, Graham Booted From Pentagon Prayer Event AOL News 04/22/10

Media Matters provides this video: Johnson Jr. blows gasket over Army's decision to rescind Rev. Graham's National Prayer day invite County Fair 03/23/10, featuring FOX News legal analyst Peter Johnson, Jr., who seems almost to have discovered the virtues of separation of church and state!



Johnson's complaint that "the Army wants to decide what the religious content should be. ... And the government should keep it's hands off what ministers are saying what to what group of people on National Prayer Day. That's wrong." Duh! Guess what? When religion mixes with government, the influence runs both ways. If government is sponsoring a religious event, can any adult actually be surprised that they expect to have some control over the content?

See also:

Jennifer Riley, Franklin Graham Dropped from Pentagon Prayer Event Christian Post 04/23/10

Candace Chellew-Hodge, Army Disinvites Graham to Prayer Day Religion Dispatches 04/23/10

David Corn, National Day of Prayer: Franklin Graham Deserved to Be Booted Politics Daily 04/23/10

Sarah Posner, Franklin Graham Supporters Attack Military Religious Freedom Activist As Anti-Christian Religion Dispatches 04/23/10

Welton Gaddy, The Car Wreck that is Sarah Palin and the National Day of Prayer Religion Dispatches 04/22/10:

Frightened people looking for a quick fix for their fears and alleviation of their anxieties are being hurt by a distorted version of American history and a perverted vision of the future. This past week in Louisville, Kentucky, the former governor of Alaska told a crowd, in response to a federal court ruling that a government celebrated National Day of Prayer was unconstitutional, that “America needs to get back to its Christian roots.”

Sadly, Sarah Palin cannot distinguish between fanciful images of revisionist historians and actual facts documentable in the chronicles of the nation’s archives. She has turned a deaf ear to George Washington who asserted that “The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion,” and to his successor John Adams—who knew the Constitution better than Ms. Palin—when, after signing a treaty with a mostly Muslim nation, repeated Washington’s comment almost verbatim.

Tags: christian right

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2010, April 23: Christopher Centner on neo-Confederacy

I wish the article by Christopher Centner, "Neo-Confederates At the Gate: The Rehabilitation of the Confederate Cause and the Distortion of History" Skeptic 9:3 (2002) were freely available online. It gives a solid overview of the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate pseudohistory scam. A portion of it is available here.

Centner writes (perhaps a touch overdramatically):

The Neo-Confederates' power is in their conviction and their dedication to ancestral, religious and ethnic pride. History is a full-contact sport and the Neo-Confederates take their evangelism seriously. Neo-Confederates are well organized, educated, and have a vision. They have heard the call to battle, and wage it relentlessly with revisionist zeal. Those more loyal to historical accuracy need to defend historical truth or lose the future to an ugly past.

Centner discusses several strands of neo-Confederate propaganda: "heritage defenders" like the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC); "Agrarian Romantics" inspired by the essays in I'll Take My Stand (1930) which romanticized the Old South and segregation - he writes that Southern Partisan magazine "takes much of its inspiration" from that book: libertarians, in particular the LewRockwell.com website; "Christian Soldiers" who bring a fundamentalist religious emphasis to idolizing the Confederate - he cites Jim Langcuster and Charles Jennings as examples of this tendency; and, overt racists, among whom he includes Michael Andrew Grissom and far-right groups who emphasize their supposed Celtic heritage.

Although he doesn't group them all under those classifications, he also mentions several organizations and individuals then prominent among the neo-Confederate set: the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC; the successor organization to the White Citizens Council); the Heritage Preservation Association (which may be defunct now); the League of the South (which is pretty much a white supremacist group); the Southern Party (which if this Wikipedia entry is correct was a front group for the League of the South and was disbanded in 2003); the Lawful Government of the South Fellowship (also apparently defunct); Mad Annie Coulter; columnist Charley Reese; and, The Washington Times. It's not unusual for fringe groups to come and go. They merge and change their names, dissolve in faction fights, lose all their members, whatever. But, as Republican Governors Bob McDonnell of Virginia and Haley Barbour of Mississippi have reminded us this month, neo-Confederacy is alive and well, including among senior figures in the Republican Party.

Centner makes a couple of good points about typical styles of neo-Confederate/Lost Cause arguments. One is technically known as, making stuff up (I've inserted an extra paragraph break):

Inaccurate or made-up quotes are favorite Neo-Confederate tools. Fraudulent quotations are nearly impossible to falsify, since they have no antecedent. Thus, Neo-Confederates have Grant keeping slaves until the Thirteenth Amendment passed, justifying his actions by saying, "Good help is so hard to come by these days."

"As for the alleged quotation from Grant, I have never seen it before and cannot believe it for a single moment," commented the Ulysses S. Grant Association's John Y. Simon. "[H]e freed the only slave he ever owned in 1857. The slaves to whom the writer referred were owned by his wife, which was a different matter. These slaves, incidentally, would have been freed by Missouri law in early 1865, rather than awaiting the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Old Confederates used to crow that Grant owned slaves when he accepted the surrender at Appomattox, Lee did not. This is wrong."

He also does a take-down of the "Black Confederates" claim that African-Americans served in the Confederate army. As he points out, most of these claims are "based upon second-hand reports, obviously false reports, and folklore." The claim of Black Confederates has been a favorite hobby-horse of the Lost Cause crowd for years now. It's used to reinforce their key pseudohistorical claim, that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War.

For a more recent takedown of one current favorite piece of SCV propaganda on this topic, see Kevin Levin's Looking For Silas Chandler Civil War Memory 03/28/10.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, neo-confederate, slavery, us south

Richard Barrett (1943-2010), White Power zealot

This could turn out to be an actual case that kinda-sorta looks like political violence by a leftwinger: Arrest made in white supremacist Richard Barrett's death in Rankin County Jackson Clarion-Ledger 04/22/10.

A nasty old white supremacist got murdered and a young African-American guy has been arrested in the case.

White supremacist Richard Barrett (1943-2010), now departed to his eternal reward


Vicent Justin McGee, 22, arrested in the case


Does Glenn Beck finally have a martyr? But then, I've been watching Beck the last few days describing with the help of some bizarre chalkboard drawing of railroad tracks how Communist and socialist and fascist and Nazi and progressive and liberal and European are all the same thing. So he may think a skinhead White Power guy is a leftwinger.

From the Clarion-Ledger report:

Barrett campaigned throughout the country against Communism and civil rights laws. In 1968, he served on the 1968 presidential campaign staff of Alabama Gov. George Wallace.

Between 1967 and 1969, Barrett was under FBI surveillance because of his racial rhetoric. ...

Barrett was also an author. "The Commission,” a self-published book trumpeting his viewpoints, was published in 1982 by Barrett & Co. Publisher. In the book he tells how and why he decided to protest integration in 1954.

"Nausea hit me in the pit of my stomach. Fear of my country overshadowed me," he said, remembering his thoughts after he heard about the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on Brown vs. the Board of Education, which ended school segregation.

"Nature not men decreed that Negroes were different," he wrote in his book. "Those who mingled with colored were as much an aberration as the unwanted bluebird in the redbird's nest and every bit as disruptive of natural and societal disorder."

Barrett founded a tiny sect called the Nationalist Movement.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) describes him this way in an undated article:

Richard Barrett is the founder and leader of the Nationalist Movement, a white supremacist organization based in Learned, Mississippi. While the group has never enjoyed significant influence on the far right -- due in part to Barrett's reluctance to share the spotlight -- it has been able to attract a steady (if small) number of aggressive skinheads. An attorney and tireless promoter, Barrett is best known for staging well-publicized rallies, often following legal actions that uphold the group's free speech rights. He has repeatedly drawn large crowds of counterprotestors, some of whom have responded violently. Since the mid-1990s Barrett has extended his legal battles to the Internet arena, successfully waging a campaign to have Web pages characterizing members of his Nationalist Movement as “haters” taken down.

Barrett grew up in New York and New Jersey and served with the Army in Vietnam:

A partisan of the American South, particularly Mississippi ("Mississippians were endowed with an unconquerable anti-communist spirit because they had to perennially guard against a takeover by Negroes...."), he moved to the Magnolia State in 1966. He later received a law degree from Memphis State University in Tennessee.

Once in Mississippi, he began organizing anti-integrationist, anti-civil rights and a variety of "patriotic" and pro-white "heritage" events. For more than a decade, he organized an annual dinner honoring white male athletes called "Spirit of America." The gathering enjoyed the support of United States congressmen, governors and local politicians as late as 1984 (long after Barrett's racist views were publicly known), in part because he was successful in promoting the event as a celebration of civic values.

This is the kind of legacy of white bigotry this sad old man leaves behind:

Back in Mississippi, Barrett spearheaded a movement to support Byron de la Beckwith, who was convicted in February of 1994 for the 1963 killing of Medgar Evers, a regional leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Barrett collected 4,000 signatures demanding that Mississippi Governor Kirk Fordyce pardon Beckwith, whom Barrett called "the prisoner of an affirmative-action jury," but the governor refused to meet with Barrett.

Undaunted, in September 1994, Barrett, along with members of the Ku Klux Klan, led a march in Alabama calling for Beckwith's pardon. The two dozen marchers also rallied in support of Hulond Humphries, the principal of Randolph County High School, who had been fired for threatening to cancel the senior prom if mixed-race couples attended.

He published a hate rag called All The Way, which has a website, as does the Nationalist Movement. The June 1990 issue gives a sample of his perspective:

Nationalist Television aired a pro-flag show here on Flag Day. The Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish pressure group, immediately announced plans to "counter" the program. "It'll be our Wal-Mart duds up against their $2,000.00 suits," said N-TV. "Our pennies will beat their millions in the name of the American Way of Life." Minority spokesman, Carolyn Moncrief, stated that Negro and Jewish groups were combining to air anti-Nationalist shows following Airlink, the nation's largest pro-majority public access broadcast.

The May 1, 2010 edition will hopefully be the last for All The Way. On page 6 is a column signed by the late Barrett, "Moguls do not have a clue, until their world is shattered by popular uprising: Hollywood-Japanese axis propels Africanism." It's, well, a very dumb and bigoted review of the movie 2012:

The “hero” manages to convince the leaders of the world that he is correct, by being more “compassionate” and “globalist” than the mere whites around him. In fact, they unofficially elect him leader of the world, as the planet collapses and the Dark Continent emerges as the new homeland for an integrated, shipwrecked remnant. So, Back-to-Africa finally takes place, interspersed with a small group of whites, which will eventually dissolve via miscegenation. Even the John-Birch-Society conspiracy theories never took quite so many liberties. Negroes in space? A given. America wiped out? No problem. The church toppled? Par for the course. Even nature sides with amalgamation, as a character, who had objected to his son marrying an Oriental, meets his doom, while the couple survives. The upshot is that “the brown will inherit the earth.” If the Negroes, Israelis and Japs cannot pull it off, nature will. So, give up trying to take America back, Crackers.

Then he jumps from there to drawing a broad social conclusion, one that makes me think that anyone whose mind is really haunted by this kind of stuff really will find peace in the grave:

The 2012-theme harks back to Clayton Williams, with his illfated advice to the woman being raped to “lay back and enjoy it.” The only problem is that the same scenario has played out before. The Moors in Spain. The Royalists in America. The Soviets in Russia. The Weimars in Germany. And even the Obamists in Washington. Hollywood delights in producing films depicting miscegenation, integration and “diversity” as “normal” and, even, delightful. But, such excesses invariably get enough dander up to prompt a ferocious backlash. It is as though the Oriental potentates and Hollywood moguls, however, do not have a clue, until their world is shattered by universal revulsion and popular uprising.

I must admit to being morbidly curious about just what he meant by the "Weimars in Germany".

I wonder if anyone will miss this guy. Even his handful of followers.

See also:

Who was Richard Barrett? by Howard Ballou WLBT 04/22/10

The life and ideology of Richard Barrett by Marsha Thompson WLBT 04/22/10 With video.

Tags: radical right, white racism

Bring a chicken/To the doctor

It's got a catchy beat.



Tags: health care reform, radical right

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2010, April 22: The Republican Southern Strategy

Nicholas Valentino and David Sears reported on their study about white racism in Southern voting patterns in "Old Times There Are Not Forgotten: Race and Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South" American Journal of Political Science 49:3 (July 2005). They concluded that what pretty much everyone involved with politics assumes is actually demonstrably true: that appeals to white racism among Southern white voters played a decisive role in the shift of national voting patterns to the Republican Party since the mid-1970s.

Their article is a reminder, though, of how challenging it is to measure the actual effects on voting patterns of a factor like racism, which doesn't translate easily into numerical factors, in contrast to a factor like income levels or occupation.

I won't try here to recite the various results of their regression analysis. But they tried to differentiate between what they call "Jim Crow racism" and "symbolic racism", which roughly translate to, respectively, support for explicit official segregation and emotional racism. They note of "symbolic racism":

In recent years, ... it has consistently been conceptualized and measured in terms of four themes: the denial of discrimination, criticism of blacks' work ethic, and resentment of blacks' demands and treatment by the broader society, which together form a logically, psychologically, and statistically coherent belief system ...

They also tried to differentiate between racial attitude and more general ideological attitudes in Southern whites' voting patterns. They state their findings this way:

This result is consistent with the conventional wisdom about the increasing regularization [i.e., alignment] of ideology and party in the South. What we add is that the impact of specifically racial conservatism on party identification also has been growing in the white South. ...

The regional difference in the effects of symbolic racism, but not in the effects of ideology, suggest that specifically racial attitudes have structured the Southern-based partisan realignment of the past four decades. ...

We would conclude that racial conservatism seems to continue to be central to the realignment of Southern whites' partisanship since the Civil Rights era. [my emphasis]

They make an important point, though their explanation doesn't make it jump out at the reader. But what they found is that during the three-decade period under review, white racism had become increasingly important in the South in attracting white voters to the GOP.

They also found:

... that at the end of the Civil Rights era Southern whites were more racially conservative than whites living elsewhere. More important for our purposes, the regional gap in racial conservatism has not closed since then, despite the sharp drop in Jim Crow racism. Southern whites remain more racially conservative than whites elsewhere on every measure of racial attitudes ordinarily used in national surveys. ...

Racial policy attitudes were more closely linked to the vote in the South than elsewhere in the 1990s, but nonracial policy attitude yielded no such regional differences.[my emphasis]

They caution, however, that their study may have over-controlled for the effects of non-racial ideology, and therefore they may have "underestimated the effects of racial conservatism." (my emphasis) In other words, "seemingly race-neutral conservatism may itself have become partially racialized" in a way that they approach couldn't adequately distinguish.

Part of the evidence for the salience of racial issues among Southern white voters comes from Lost Cause/neo-Confederate themes:

... a number of quite heated and largely symbolic racial issues have arisen in the South. Several states have witnessed roiling debates about the use of Confederate battle symbols on public insignia. The NAACP organized a boycott of tourism in South Carolina in 2000 until the state legislature voted to remove the Confederate battle flag from atop the state house. The victory for opponents of the flag was limited, since the agreement provided that it be flown near a Confederate monument on the statehouse lawn. A similar flag controversy played out in Mississippi in 2001. Georgia's flag controversy may have contributed to the victory of the state's first Republican governor since Reconstruction, Sonny Perdue.

The Southern parties today are split quite decisively along racial lines. Republicans are almost all white, and blacks are the dominant core of the Southern Democratic party ... [my emphasis]

They make these informed speculations about the reasons for the larger role of white racism in Southern politics:

We have argued that racial conservatism has been a significant contributor to party realignment in the white South. But what have been the mechanisms by which this has happened? At the level of the individual voter, the primary cause of the persistence of these regional differences is presumably the transmission of a broad culture of racial conservatism in the South across generations. For example, lifelong white Southerners seem to be more racially conservative than in-migrants ... and even young white Southern adults were consistently more racially conservative than their counterparts in other regions in the late 1980s ... Beyond that, our reasoning suggests that the linkage between racial attitudes and political preferences should be strongest for the youngest white Southerners, who were socialized as the parties were realigning. In-migrants to the South in the latter half of the twentieth century may also have adopted partisan identities consistent with their racial attitudes prior to, or following, their migration. It is also possible that race continues to be more salient in Southern culture than elsewhere, which might explain the added potency of racial attitudes there. These questions go beyond the scope of this article, but they are important for understanding the persistence of regional cultures and the dynamic processes underlying partisan realignments. [my emphasis]

They called it a presumption. But in many cases, it's a cold fact, and one that still gives me a particularly sad feeling, though it's not surprising at all: "the transmission of a broad culture of racial conservatism in the South across generations." Racial conservatism is, of course, in plain English, white racism.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, neo-confederate, us south

Monday's gun protests in Washington

I'm happy to see we made it through April 19, which is something like a holy day for the militia crowd, without any incidents of political violence.

I was especially curious how the gun-rights rallies would go, one of them an unarmed event at the Washington Monument promoted as the Second Amendment March, the other an "open-carry" event where participants were invited to bring their weapons, billed as a Restore Our The Constitution event. The latter was heal at Gravelly Point, a national park where it's legal to carry weapons because President Obama dropped the regulations that previously had forbidden it.

According to the report by Marisol Bello and Oren Dorell, D.C. gun rally packs less heat than Va. event USA Today 04/19/10, the Washington Monument event drew several hundred people, the open-carry rally only about 100. That is consistent with what I've seen from other reports, photos and video from the rallies. (See below.)

I wouldn't want to draw too many conclusions about what didn't happen. But that kind of turnout doesn't provide evidence of some huge upsurge in public support for armed militias or violent political confrontation with the federal government over the "tyranny" of access to buying health insurance.

But that in itself doesn't say much about the potential for violence from "Patriot Militia"-type domestic terrorist or terrorist-wannabe groups. To the extent such events as Monday's gun protests occur, with their militant anti-government rhetoric and seditious posturing and without criticism or condemnation from Republican and "movement conservative" leaders - and even with some active encouragement from those sources - they are likely to encourage the violent fantasies and paranoid fears of the violence-inclined Patriot Militia crowd.

See also:

Daivd Weigel, Taking the oath, and other Second Amendment March scenes and Pro-Second Amendment marchers fear much more than gun laws Right Now 04/19/10

Heather, Matthews Allows Gun Rights Protesters to Show Their Blind Hatred for President Obama Crooks and Liars Video Cafe 04/21/10

Dave Neiwert provides video and commentary provides video of Glenn Beck talking about the gun protests from his very warped worldview, taking the militia line justifying Timothy McVeigh's Oklahoma City terrorist bombing in 1995 as a response to Waco: Glenn Beck calls progressives a 'cancer,' but compares Tea Partiers to progressive civil-rights marchers like M.L. King Crooks and Liars 04/21/10

Tags: radical right

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2010, April 21: Neo-Confederacy in present-day politics

Frank Rich, like most star pundits, is often careless in his analysis and not always as careful of factual narrative as we should be able to expect. But in Welcome to Confederate History Month New York Times 04/17/10, he does a reasonable job of placing the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate ideology into the context of today's politics. He gives an example of the kind of make-up-your-own-facts approach that the whole Lost Cause/neo-Confederate tradition has always promoted:

It's kind of like that legendary stunt on the prime-time soap "Dallas," where we learned that nothing bad had really happened because the previous season's episodes were all a dream. We now know that the wave of anger that crashed on the Capitol as the health care bill passed last month — the death threats and epithets hurled at members of Congress — was also a mirage.

Take it from the louder voices on the right. Because no tape has surfaced of anyone yelling racial slurs at the civil rights icon and Georgia Congressman John Lewis, it’s now a blogosphere “fact” that Lewis is a liar and the “lamestream media” concocted the entire incident. The same camp maintains as well that the spit landing on the Missouri Congressman Emanuel Cleaver was inadvertent spillover saliva from an over-frothing screamer — spittle, not spit, as it were.

Obviously, there are other sources of people making up their own facts, as we see with the creationists and climate-change deniers.

Rich mentions the long history of Lost Cause dogma:

In “Race and Reunion,” the definitive study of Civil War revisionism, the historian David W. Blight documents the long trajectory of the insidious campaign to erase slavery from the war’s history and reconfigure the lost Southern cause as a noble battle for states’ rights against an oppressive federal government. In its very first editorial upon resuming publication in postwar 1865, The Richmond Dispatch characterized the Civil War as a struggle for the South’s “sense of rights under the Constitution.” The editorial contained not “a single mention of slavery or black freedom,” Blight writes. That evasion would be a critical fixture of the myth-making to follow ever since. [my emphasis]

And Rich gives a good, brief description of the weird contradiction the present-day Republican Party has embraced:

What is known is that the nearly all-white G.O.P. is so traumatized by race it has now morphed into a bizarre paragon of both liberal and conservative racial political correctness. For irrefutable proof, look no further than the peculiar case of its chairman, Steele, whose reckless spending and incompetence would cost him his job at any other professional organization, let alone a political operation during an election year. Steele has job security only because he is the sole black man in a white party hierarchy. That hierarchy is as fearful of crossing him as it is of calling out the extreme Obama haters in its ranks.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, neo-confederate, slavery, us south

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2010, April 20: John Wilkes Booth's racism

John Wilkes Booth (1838-1865), actor, assassin and white supremacist

David Talbot reviewed the biography of Abraham Lincoln's assassin, the actor John Wilkes Booth, American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies (2004) by Michael Kauffman, in Old times there are not forgotten Salon 11/19/2004. Wilkes was a passionate Confederate sympathizer who infamously shot President Lincoln in the head in Ford's Theater on April 11, 1865. As Talbot characterizes it, Lincoln's assassination "was the first act of political terror as public spectacle in American history."

Talbot's review draws some forced and not very perceptive comparisons to the sectionalism of the Civil War and that of American politics in 2004. But he also gives this description of Booth's outlook that shows what a prominent role white racism played in his decision to kill Lincoln:

According to Kauffman, Booth found the resolve he needed to carry out his monumental deed on the evening of April 11, as a crowd gathered underneath a window in the north portico of the White House to hear President Lincoln speak on the recent surrender of Gen. Robert E. Lee to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. Among those at the front of the crowd were Booth and his co-conspirator Dave Herold. When Lincoln told the crowd that he favored giving voting rights to those "colored" men who were "very intelligent" and who had served in the Union Army, that was all Booth needed to hear. "That means nigger citizenship. Now, by God, I'll put him through," spat Booth, as he spun on his heels and pushed his way out of the throng.

Much of Booth's anti-Lincoln zeal derived from his code of Southern white supremacy. He believed that slavery was not a sin, but a boon for black Americans, who were much better off living on a Southern plantation than in Africa. "I have been through the whole South," he declared, "and have marked the happiness of master and of man." According his sister Asia's memoir, young Booth liked to spread happiness on his family farm in Maryland by throwing candies from his saddlebag onto the ground and watching "the Nigs" scramble to pick them up. "After it Nigs! Don't let the dogs get it!" Booth would yell to the family servants. "The never-forgotten bag of candies was longingly looked for by the blacks, young and old, whenever 'Mars Johnnie' came from town or village," Asia lovingly recalled. Booth's idyllic society -- where whites and blacks, the well-bred and the common, all knew their place -- was threatened by Lincoln, a man Booth, steeped in Southern chivalry, reviled as a coarse demagogue. A reporter once told Booth that the president, who was an avid theatergoer, had "rapturously" applauded one of his performances; he'd rather have the applause of a black, snapped the actor. [my emphasis]

Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, slavery, us south

Guantánamo

Karen Greenberg (Obama’s “Remainees”: Will Not One But Two Guantanamos Define the American Future? TomDispatch 04/18/10) in discussing Obama's failure to close the Guantánamo station of the gulag that continues to exist, writes:

For those who have been following events at Guantanamo for years, perhaps this should have come as no surprise. We knew just how difficult it would be to walk the system backwards toward extinction, as did many of the former lawyer-critics of Guantanamo who joined the Obama administration. The fact is: once a distorted system has been set in stone, the only way to correct it is to end the distortion that started it: indefinite detention.

As of today, here’s the Guantanamo situation and its obdurate math. One hundred eighty-three detainees remain incarcerated there. Perhaps we should call them “remainees.” According to the estimates of the Guantanamo Detainee Review Task Force set up by Attorney General Eric Holder, about half of them will be released sooner or later and returned to their homelands or handed over to other “host” countries. They will then join approximately 600 former Guantanamo inmates released from custody since 2002. Another thirty-five or so remainees will be put on trial, according to reports on the task force’s recommendations and, assumedly, convicted in either civilian courts or by military commissions. For the remaining 50 or so — those for whom evidence convincing enough for trial and conviction is absent, but who are nonetheless deemed by the president to constitute a threat to the nation — the legal future is dim, even if the threat assessment which keeps them behind bars has nothing to do with normal American legalities. [my emphasis]

This is a grim legacy of the Cheney-Bush administration that Obama's administration has continued. It's an abuse and dangerous practice in itself. Indefinite detention without charges is also a situation that virtually guarantees individual abuses of the prisoners beyond their detention itself. And it creates yet another political and legal precedent for the next President Cheney to expand Executive power and abuses even more.


Greenberg talks about the emerging alternatives, which she calls a "two-prison" solution: one maximum security prison in the US, the other at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan:

If a two-prison solution were to go into effect, that would mean President Obama had fully accepted the Bush administration’s notion of a generational global battlefield against terror. After all, that’s what underlay Gitmo from the beginning and that’s what would underlie a rejuvenated Bagram as well. In theory, there could be a workable solution lurking somewhere in all this murky planning, if it were undergirded with actual legal definitions; if, in the case of Thomson, the Illinois facility-to-be, the prisoners placed there were first charged, tried, and convicted; and if, in the case of Bagram, anyone placed there was declared a prisoner of war, or given some legally recognized status according to the laws of war or the Geneva Conventions. But as of now, it looks like both facilities will instead offer an endorsement of so-called preventive detention.

The administration’s disingenuousness on this point is overwhelming. On the one hand, we are told that the terms “war on terror” and “enemy combatants” are history and that Guantanamo will soon join them. But Guantanamo was never purely a place in Cuba. What made it so wrong was the system of indefinite detention that lay at its core and that continues to defy the rule of law as defined by the U.S. Constitution, U.S. military law, and the international conventions that this country has signed onto. [my emphasis]

As the Constitutional scholar Barack Obama surely knows, restoring the rule of law in this area is critical. Continuing this preventive detention practice is a gaping hole in the rule of law that needs to be closed, not kept or expanded. Greenberg doesn't go into it. But I assume that a facility directly on American soil that practiced preventive detention with be problematic. If that is legal for accused terrorists against whom there is not sufficient evidence to even attempt to prosecute them, why would it not be legal for wider classes of offenders?

She says in her conclusion:

In reality, a two-Guantanamo policy is likely to prove an unwieldy disaster and will hardly lead the country out of the quagmire of incarceration that the Bush administration mired us in. In the end, that quagmire is not legal (though the legal issues it raises are fundamental), nor political (though it may look that way from Capitol Hill): it’s psychological. And there is only one way to escape from it: end once and for all the notion of preventive detention by placing firm and unbending confidence in our military, our intelligence agencies, and our system of justice to identify enemies, prosecute those whom they can, and abide by the laws of war for prisoners of war.

I posted almost two years ago about this problem:

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told the Pakistani Ambassador Maleeha Lodhi on 9/11/2001, "History starts today." And that's the way Cheney and Bush and Rummy approached creating a gulag system outside the rule of law. They were going to start history anew. Now they find themselves recapitulating the ABC's of justice:

• We don't have time to bother with legal procedures and such niceties, The Terrorists are out to get us and we're peeing our pants with fear.

• We'll stick the people we consider suspects in a gulag and figure out what to do with them later.

• Later comes around, and we start having to think about: do we release them? What if they're guilty? And what if they're so angry about being abused and tortured for years that they go out and commit terrorist acts?

• Why, what we need is a procedure! So lets create a new one.

• Dang, our new procedure is presenting the same kinds of problems as the old one. It's hard to convince any judge even pretending to apply the law to admit evidence derived from torture. So we may have to let them go. But what if they're guilty? And what if ... etc.

• Gee, we could have saved ourselves a lot of trouble and had better results in our supposed aim of targeting The Terrorists if we hadn't started all this gulag-and-torture crap to begin with. Why didn't we think about that before?

History started a long time before 9/11/2001. And trying to erase it and hoping to start over from scratch, whether it's the too-easy assumptions of a hippie commune in 1968, or the "second virginity" promoted for teenagers by fundamentalist chastity advocates, or the grim, dictatorial-minded gulag-and-torture complex of Dick Cheney is a recipe for trouble. Or disaster.

The only way to end it is to end it. And that means putting a Constitutional legal system to work in these cases.

rule of law

Confederate "Heritage" Month, 2010: April 19

Jon Grinspan in "'Young Men for War': The Wide Awakes and Lincoln's 1860 Presidential Campaign" The Journal of American History 96:2 (Sept 2009) writes about a Republican campaign organization in 1860 called the Wide Awakes, which organized young men to take active part in the Republican campaigns that year, including Lincoln's Presidential campaign.

Grinspan makes an argument that fits nicely into a Lost Cause version of the Civil War. It's validity as historical analysis is another matter.

The argument is that the Wide Awakes were nonviolent groups but organized on military-like disciplines. And their existence scared white Southerners into thinking the Black Republicans (as the Southerners called them) were out to forcibly conquer them. And thus the existence of the Wide Awakes was an important factor in the outbreak of the Civil War. As he frames his argument:

The militarism of the Wide Awakes helps explain how the election of Lincoln sparked the Civil War. Historians have long pondered the missing link between the complex politics of the 1850s and the war. It is difficult to believe that the Civil War could have erupted as a popular conflict—with hundreds of thousands of excited volunteers—unless political debates were transformed into larger cultural motivators. The Wide Awakes enabled that transformation. The movement’s dangerous use of militarism for political purposes unintentionally bled into powerful cultural agitation that terrified southerners. Young northerners equipped with uniforms and torches sent an ominous message to those already apprehensive about the Republican party’s antisouthern attitudes. While certainly not a cause of the war, the Wide Awakes’ presence ratcheted up sectional pressure and invested Lincoln’s election with weighty significance. Understanding how the organization worked helps connect the political and military campaigns. [my emphasis]

His article shows signs of trying to put some original conclusion on top of a set of arguments that don't begin to bear its weight.

Grinspan's argument that the Wide Awakes particularly alarmed the South doesn't amount to much more than finding the occasional reference to the Wide Awakes as one more sinister sign of the North's nefarious intentions. The slave states were finding more immediate dangers to fret over during 1860s than peaceful demonstrations by Republicans campaigners in Yankee cities. As William Freehling describes in The Road to Disunion, Vol. 2: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861 (2007), during 1860 they were obsessing over the possibilities of arson and poisonings by their loyal, loving slave property. Like most of these types of things, the rumors were at least 99% paranoia.

The real threat to slavery from a Lincoln victory came from two key considerations. Having immediate emancipation forced upon the slaveholders was not one of them; Lincoln and the Republicans had no intention of imposing such a solution. Nor was the danger of Republicans inciting slaves to insurrection. But the Republicans did intend to block the further extension of slavery, either from expanding slavery into existing territories or through acquiring new territories in the Caribbean or Central America.

And once the Republicans had the Presidency, they would control federal patronage in the Southern States. That meant they could use their power to appoint postmasters and other officials to build an active Republican Party in the South and thus overcome the near-total block on dissenting opinions among whites over the basic issue of slavery's existence in many parts of the South.

The two things together would have eventually meant the end of slavery. The slaveowners and their white publics were rational in seeing that threat. The fears they built around that rational core were something else again. And the decisions they made in relation to the situation after Lincoln's election were truly disastrous.

Grinspan's argument for the so-called "militarism" of the Wide Awakes doesn't come down to much more than the fact that they were generally well-organized and carried out orderly marches when they staged such demonstrations: "the Wide Awakes maintained a martial seriousness that distinguished them from the rowdy political clubs of the era," as he puts it. They also sported uniforms:

Original Wide Awake club, Hartford CN 1860

In fact, the following sounds more like peaceful democratic activism - in the best Jacksonian tradition, I might add - than anything that could reasonably be described as militaristic:

The tools that built the Wide Awake machine—partisan competition, social bonds, political newspapers, and youthful activism—were rarely forged by nefarious bosses. Though the deliberate construction of the network challenges the facile image of a “spontaneous outburst” by an undifferentiated mass of Republicans, the individuals who assembled it were rarely members of established elites. The young men who directed the movement, such as Henry Sperry, had little or no previous campaign experience or party standing. Popular interest from below, in the form of thousands of unsolicited letters, helped push them into action, and the movement’s immense social appeal to young men and women demonstrates an easy fit between the political club and contemporary culture.

He gives a dramatic account, taking off from the New York demonstration pictured at the top of this post (the picture is from Harper's Weekly 10/13/1860):

The march that shook New York was one of thousands that poured through America’s cities, towns, and villages in 1860, started by a revolutionary new political organization. Stumping for the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, the strange movement electrified the presidential election. Young men from Bangor to San Francisco and from huge Philadelphia clubs to tiny Iowa troupes donned uniforms, lit torches, and “fell in” to pseudomilitary marching companies. They flooded every northern state and trickled into upper South cities like Baltimore, Wheeling, and St. Louis. Launched in March by “five young dry goods clerks” in Hartford, Connecticut, by November the Wide Awakes had developed into a nationwide grassroots movement with hundreds of thousands of members. Many of the movement’s supporters—and even some of its vociferous opponents—believed “there never was, in this country, a more effective campaign organization than the Wide Awakes.” [Quote from “Wide Awakes” Chillicothe Scioto Gazette 10/02/1860]

Youth and militarism distinguished the Wide Awakes from the hundreds of other clubs milling around nineteenth-century American elections. The organization appealed to white men in their teens, twenties, and thirties, attracting ambitious upstarts sporting youthful goatees who were “beginning to feel their true power.” Using popular social events, an ethos of competitive fraternity, and even promotional comic books, the Wide Awakes introduced many to political participation and proclaimed themselves the newfound voice of younger voters. Though often remembered as part of the Civil War generation stirred by the conflict, these young men became politically active a year before fighting began. The structured, militant Wide Awakes appealed to a generation profoundly shaken by the partisan instability of the 1850s and offered young northerners a much-needed political identity. [my emphasis]

Their composition also sounds very Jacksonian:

Established party leaders also looked askance at the Wide Awakes because of their non-elite roots. Though the movement incorporated members from most sections of society, wage laborers and farmers predominated. Some Republican leaders even complained about the absence of “the intelligent classes” in the Wide Awake ranks, which they claimed were made up of “the mechanic, or laborer, or clerk.” Census records from Ohio and Connecticut indicate many farmers, factory workers, and carpenters in the Wide Awakes, in addition to some middle-class young men employed as store clerks or railroad ticket agents.

Grinspan's description of the Wide Awakes here indicates some far more powerful factors spurring Southerners to revolt over their "sacred institution" of slavery than well-organized political marches in far-away Northern states:

Born in the years between the elections of John Quincy Adams in 1824 and William Henry Harrison in 1840, most Wide Awakes were infants during the shift from “corrupt bargain” [Adams' 1824 election] to the hard cider populism [Jacksonian Democracy] that signaled the democratization of American politics. Unfortunately, these boys came of age during less optimistic times and were shaken by the bitter tensions and overwhelming political malaise of the 1850s. The sectional pressures of the Mexican War, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska conflict, and the caning of Charles Sumner combined to create the political world view of a generation of northerners. They inherited a nation that had just gained five hundred thousand square miles of Mexican territory but had lost its two-party system and some of its most prominent elder statesmen. Many young men were painfully aware of the capacities of their political system, both to conquer abroad and to crumble at home. [my emphasis]

Grinspan also explains that although there were acts of violence in some of the more competitive areas of the North, they tended to be attacks by Democratic pro-slavery rowdies on the Wide Awakes:

It is deceptively easy to see a link between the militarism of the movement and those violent episodes, but to do so ignores key aspects of the Wide Awakes’ clashes. Despite their imposing image, the clubs’ mode of demonstrating made its members more vulnerable to the guerrilla warfare of nineteenth-century political violence. A tightly packed group of Wide Awakes surrounded by large crowds of anonymous spectators made an easy target for a few teenage brick throwers. When violence did occur, Wide Awakes rarely maintained their formation. As it broke up, some individual members charged their opponents while others fled for cover. The Wide Awakes also never displayed weapons, and those who used knives or revolvers brought them individually and hid them beneath their capes. Even the torches, though often used as clubs, proved unreliable. With a few highly publicized exceptions, the Wide Awakes fought like Democrats or Know-Nothings, not as an organized militia.

In the end, the historical material he discusses undermines rather than supports his contention that it was the Wide Awake organizations in particular "that alerted the public to the organizational power of militarism."

Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, slavery, us south

How serious is the far-right threat of violence?

Sara Robinson in None Dare Call It Sedition Orcinus 04/06/10 argues that it's very serious. Her title is a play on the title of one of the best-known far-right books on the 1960s, None Dare Call It Treason.

This April 2010 paper from the Violence Policy Center (VPC), Lessons Unlearned: The Gun Lobby and the Siren Song of Anti-Government Rhetoric, looks at the way the gun lobby, particularly the National Rifle Association (NRA), promotes ideas and rhetoric that feed the paranoia of potentially violent far-right "militia" groups. The VPC relates how the NRA was forced to backtrack from its extremist positions of the early 1990s after the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995:

During this period, the NRA adopted the anti-government language of the militias and other components of the “Patriot movement,” a loose coalition whose adherents are “animated by a view of the federal government as the primary enemy, along with a fondness for antigovernment conspiracy theories.” [Quote from Mark Potok, Rage on the Right: The Year in Hate and Extremism Intelligence Report Spring 2010 .] Offering a soft embrace to many of the conspiracy theories that drove the anger and fear of the Patriot movement, the NRA declared in its official publications that “The Final War Has Begun,” equated Federal Bureau of Investigation agents with goose-stepping Nazis, labeled other federal agents “jack-booted government thugs” in its direct mail, and repeatedly warned of conspiracies—allegedly concocted by forces ranging from the Clinton administration to the United Nations—to disarm American gun owners. Presumably undertaken initially to engage and activate its membership while opening the door to a new strata of potential supporters, the NRA’s shift in rhetoric and action—as seen in the organization’s magazines, public statements, and nascent on-line efforts during this period—had the ancillary effect of validating the most paranoid fears of the most extreme elements of American gun owner. Eventually, the NRA found itself exploring potential partnerships with militia leaders.

After the Oklahoma City bombing and stung by widespread public criticism including the resignation of Life Member President George H.W. Bush, the NRA acted quickly to make its public face appear more moderate. The anti-government “Final War” trumpeted in the NRA’s publications prior to the bombing metamorphosed into the values-based “culture war” as articulated by eventual NRA President Charlton Heston. Through this rhetorical shift, the NRA sought to maintain its ability to tap into the same societal and anti-government anger that often drove the political engagement of many of those concerned with gun rights while appearing to distance itself from attacks on government itself. [my emphasis]

But now, with a new Democratic President and with memories of the Oklahoma City terrorist attacks largely supplanted by fears of Muslim terrorist attacks and with a media that steadfastly refuses to call domestic far-right terrorists "terrorists", the NRA has returned to its previous ways along with some other gun-lobby groups:

Now, 15 years after the Oklahoma City bombing, it appears that the National Rifle Association and other members of the gun lobby are once again enticed by the grassroots potential represented by anti-government sentiment spurred by the economic collapse of 2008, the election of Barack Obama, and the perceived threat of a Congress controlled by the Democratic party. The gun lobby is once again embracing—and, equally important, validating—the anti-government rhetoric being offered by activists that range from Tea Party members, through pro-gun advocates, to members of the militia movement.

The report goes on to offer numerous examples.

For instance, they quote this piece by Skip Coryell, founder of the "Second Amendment March", Rattling the Second Amendment Saber, from the long-influential conservative site Human Events 03/23/2010, discussing the so-called Second Amendment March demonstration scheduled for Washington tomorrow:

My question to everyone reading this article is this: “For you, as an individual, when do you draw your saber? When do you say “Yes, I am willing to rise up and overthrow an oppressive, totalitarian government?”

Is it when the government takes away your private business?
Is it when the government rigs elections?
Is it when the government imposes martial law?
Is it when the government takes away your firearms?

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating the immediate use of force against the government. It isn’t time, and hopefully that time will never come. But one thing is certain: “Now is the time to rattle your sabers.” If not now, then when?

When the government ignores the First Amendment, it is time to rattle the Second Amendment sabers. It’s all about accountability. So long as our elected officials believe we will rise up and overthrow them under certain conditions, then they will not allow those conditions to occur. Their jobs and their very lives depend on it.

I understand that sounds harsh, but these are harsh times. Now is the time to rattle the saber. Now is the time to answer the very personal, very serious, very intimate question: “When do I remove the saber from its scabbard?”

I hear the clank of metal on metal getting closer, but that’s not enough. The politicians have to hear it too. They have to hear it, and they have to believe it.

Come and support me at the Second Amendment March on April 19th on the Washington Monument grounds. Let’s rattle some sabers and show the government we’re still here. We are here, and we are not silent!

Heidi Beirich in April 19: A Schedule Hatewatch 04/15/10 describes the plans for that march:

Patriot leaders, for whom the specter of gun restrictions is a recurring theme, will join gun rights advocates for a “Second Amendment March” in Washington, D.C. Speakers will include: Stewart Rhodes, founder of Oath Keepers, a conspiracy-minded, antigovernment organization composed mostly of active-duty police and military officers and veterans; Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff who travels the country preaching about the evils of the federal government; Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, who advocated the formation of citizen militias in the United States in the early 1990s; and U.S. Rep. Paul Broun, a Georgia Republican who has questioned President Obama’s citizenship and suggested the administration might use a pandemic or natural disaster as an excuse to declare martial law.

Beirich also discusses the separately scheduled "open-carry" demonstration of arms:

An open-carry rally to “Restore the Constitution” will be held at Ft. Hunt National Park near Mount Vernon, Va. Designated a “call to muster,” those rallying want the federal government to know that they “will not be ignored anymore.” Daniel Almond, who believes the federal government is “bringing totalitarian socialism to America” and is a member of the Georgia chapter of the Oath Keepers, organized the event. Speakers will include Richard Mack and Larry Pratt, who will also speak to the D.C. rally, as well as Bob Wright, who ran the New Mexico militia in the 1990s and has more recently participated in border vigilante operations with the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, and Mike Vanderboegh, a longtime Alabama militiaman who recently called for his supporters to throw bricks through the offices of representatives who voted for health care reform. This past Tuesday, the head of the Oath Keepers withdrew as a speaker due to “published statements by a few outspoken participants.” The group did not ask its members to stay away from the event.

Here are some links of some of the far-right militant groups who seem to present a threat of political violence:

Oath Keepers

Oath Keepers: Potentially the most lethal and dangerous of all the new 'Patriot' groups
By David Neiwert Saturday Mar 06, 2010 3:00pm by Dave Neiwert Crooks and Liars:

You can watch Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers' leader, at the recent CPAC conference being interviewed by the ever-friendly Bill Whittle and come away with the impression that, gosh, these are just folks who want to uphold the Constitution and apple pie. Paranoid, us?

As with all Patriot groups and their leaders, that's the schtick when the cameras are on. When the mask comes off, it becomes quite a different picture.

For the mask-off version, he refers us to Justine Sharrock, Oath Keepers and the Age of Treason Mother Jones Mar/Apr 2010.

You can hear the mask-on version of Rhodes at Scott Horton Interviews Stewart Rhodes Antiwar Radio 01/14/10; despite the title, the interview is actually conducted by Angela Keaton. Antiwar.com has some valuable articles and some good interviews; but they are a hard-right isolationist site, and this interview is an example of that.

Repent Amarillo

Left Blogostan paid quite a bit of attention for a few days last month to what I think of as a neo-Klan organization, called Repent Amarillo. Maybe "neo" suggests too much, maybe it's just a Klan-type organization. Because they are practicing a version of "Christian" intimidation that is likely to turn into outright thuggery if the law in Amarillo doesn't start discouraging them. And, as it now stands as of these reports from late February and early March, it sounds like just the opposite is happening, that the local officials are encouraging the vigilantism.



Plutonium Page, Repent Amarillo: The Hate Group With A Nuclear Twist Daily Kos 03/06/10

Lee Fang, Christian Hate Group ‘Repent Amarillo’ Terrorizes Texas Town, Harassing Gays, Liberals, And Other ‘Sinners’ Think Progress 03/04/10

He Who Casts the First Stone by Forrest Wilder Texas Observer February 24, 2010

Rachel Tabachnick, Repent Amarillo's Spiritual Mapping and Vigilantism Talk to Action

Tags: radical right

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 18: Lincoln and liberty, too

This brief article from the print edition or The Wilson Quarterly 34/1 (Winter 2010), "Slave States, Free Press", refers to a strange anomaly of the Civil War. The Union was harsher on dissent during wartime than the Confederacy:

While Abraham Lincoln suppressed more than 300 newspapers during the Civil War, Jefferson Davis took pride in not suppressing any. On the contrary, media historian Debra Reddin van Tuyll writes in an unpublished paper, Confederate leaders often stepped in and protected journalists from would-be censors in the military. ...

Jefferson Davis suspended the writ of habeas corpus (as did Lincoln) and imprisoned some critics, according to van Tuyll, but he never went after the press. Press freedom was a foundation of the U.S. Constitution, and, Davis asserted, the Confederacy "alone has remained true to the original principles of the United States." To a friend, he reportedly said, "It is a dangerous thing to interfere with the liberty of the press, for what would it avail us if we gain our independence and lose our liberty?"

The Wilson Quarterly is a good publication from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars with a generally liberal bent and not some neo-Confederate rag. But I'd have to say this article is pretty credulous.

Let's put it another way. The Confederate administration had less formal restrictions on what white people could write about war-related issues than was the case in the Union. The portion of the Southern population that was African-American, virtually all of them slaves, had no freedom of the press or freedom of speech. It was a serious crime to even teach a slave how to read. There certainly weren't any slaves newspapers being legally published.

Debate among whites over the desirability of slavery had begun to be suppressed in the slave states after the Virginia legislature's debate over the issue in 1831-2. That ban wasn't absolute. And especially in the border states, there's was some open debate about the phasing out of slavery right up until the Civil War.

The Wilson Quarterly article is the sort of thing that can be twisted by neo-Confederates to argue for pseudohistory, that Lincoln was a dictator and the Confederacy was a freer, more benign government. The neo-Confederate LewRockwell.com site has a whole King Lincoln Archive of propaganda along those lines.

The late Chief Justice William Rehnquist did a book called All the Laws but One: Civil Liberties in Wartime (1998) about Lincoln's wartime abridgements of civil liberties. Rehnquist was a very conservative Justice and not one whose jurisprudence I admire. But that book actually does a decent job of putting those measures into some perspective. One of the important arguments that he makes was that many of the measures that were held legally to be invalid were actually new measures that Lincoln was trying. The country had never faced a civil war situation and there were no precedents at the time for some of what Lincoln did. The Constitutional government was six decades old at the time of the Confederate revolt.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, slavery, us south