David Neiwert on "toxic masculnity" and school shootings

Dave Neiwert of the SPLC spoke to The Real News' Aaron Maté "toixc masculinity" in relations to cases like the accused Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz. (Cruz' surname is an adopted one. He has an Anglo family background, not Latino.) Guns, Toxic Masculinity, and the Alt-Right 02/16/2018:

The transcript is available here.

Dave guesses that Cruz was likely involved in far-right networks in some significant way, online and maybe elsewhere. But he cautions about the claim of the far-right "Republic of Florida" (if it really is a "group") that they had trained Cruz:

The reports of him being part of a white supremacist militia are dubious, at best. The people who are claiming he was part of their militia is an outfit that's there in Florida, it's 430 miles away from where this guy was, and the guy who's making these claims is someone that the SPLC previously had dealings with where he was actually calling the SPLC up and trying to get on their hate list because he wanted to have that validation. And the guy actually wound up in a county jail when the SPLC went down to talk to him. So, they've never actually put him on their hate list because the guy, it's not really a real organization and as far as we can tell, they were actually just trying to troll the ADL and the media by making this report.

However, I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that this young man had some kind of very far-right orientation, ideologically this is very often very much part of the package that we're seeing with these kinds of cases. It's very much woven into the whole thread of or fabric of toxic masculinity that we're dealing with nationally. And it's really, it's not just in these shooting incidents that we're having to deal with it. [my emphasis]

And he addresses the lop-sided, politically motivated attention that Muslim terrorists get in comparison to rightwing versions, the latter being actually far more common in the US:

Well I actually do think they take it fairly seriously, but there ... First is really two major observations here, one is that if this young man had been named Abdul and was talking about Jihad, the FBI would have been on this guy like smell on poop. But, and that's part of the real problem. I put together a database on domestic terrorism that we published in Reveal News last year that pointed out, essentially established very clearly, that actual domestic terrorism in this country happens primarily at the hands of right-wing extremists. By about a two to one rate.

And yet, our resources and investigative resources, the judicial punishments and sort of prosecutions that happen to right-wing extremists is very much minimal compared to what happens to Islamist radicals. So, there's really a huge disparity there. [my emphasis]

But he's also not ready to jump on the bandwagon of trashing the FBI for not responding more vigorously to the specific tip they had received about Cruz:

The flip side is, that I will say, there, the FBI has a really horrible phenomenon on its hands right now because this is actually happening at such a massive level that it's really hard to discern, you know this kind of intelligence is flowing into them at such a constant rate, this guy was going to be one of probably thousands of similar reports that they were receiving about similar threats. I mean, it's really become a tide and they're having, I think they're having a tough time sorting out which ones are real and which ones are not.

There's a lot of, a lot of this is taking place on the internet, a lot of it's through 4Chan or social media, and these places where people can really kind of go crazy because of the anonymity of the web affords them that luxury. And it's, so I don't know that the FBI could have done a whole lot. They certainly should have been on this guy, but he is one of literally hundreds of thousands. [my emphasis]

Netroots Nation 2017 and protesting against Charlottesville rightwing terrorism

I'm just winding up an interesting and enjoyable long weekend at the annual Netroots Nation convention in Atlanta. The pressure from the grassroots on the Democratic Party to be more forceful in standing up for its own claimed programs and principles was very evident and encouraging to see and experience. And the murderous white supremacist rally in Charlottesville added a extra sense of immediacy to resisting Trumpism and pressing the Democratic Party to become a more progressive presence in US politics. After Al Gore's closing plenary presentation, organizers had arranged for a march from the downtown conference hotel to the Statehouse in protest of white supremacy and in solidarity with the victims of the rightwing white terrorist attack there.

The local paper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, gave particular attention to the ways in which Georgia state politics made its presence felt at the conference in a front-page article today by Greg Bluestein that doesn't seem to be online at this writing, "Liberal activists display divide among Democrats") 08/13/2017) but also highlighted the reform vibe of the event:

The nation's leading liberal activists came to Atlanta for the Netroots Nation conference spoiling to sharpen their fight with President Donald Trump. But they proved just as willing to poke, prod and pummel their fellow Democrats.

He obviously means that mainly metaphorically, though he does mention that "a minor scuffle broke out in the audience" when some attendees were loudly protesting Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Evans. The two main candidates in the Democratic gubernatorial contest are both named Stacey, the other being Stacey Abrams, who spoke at the opening plenary on Thursday. Evans is white, Abrams is black, which is some kind of factor in the contest. But part of the rap on Stacey Evans, in particular, is that she has supported some school privatization efforts.

This hour-long segment from TYT Network features three of the anti-Evans protesters, Jordan [Chariton] From Netroots Nation: Protests vs. Establishment 08/12/2017. I believe at least one of the three people interviewed here and maybe all three also spoke at the mini-rally at the Statehouse on Saturday:

More from Bluestein's print report:

Primary challenger to long-serving Democrats were treated like stars. Panels instructed the 3,000 or so activists how to wrest control of their local parties.

Others encouraged them to challenge establishment Democrats, whether they be on local school boards or in Congress, if they aren't liberal enough.

If anything was clear, the internal Democratic fissures sharpened by Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign have solidified, if not deepened, since Trump's election. In panels and in side conversations, organizers talked about forcing Democrats toward more liberal policies, such as single-payer health care and free college tuition.

I didn't attend the last two years' Netroots Nation conventions. But comparing my impressions this year to those from 2014 and earlier, my impression was similar.

Jordan Chariton in the video above gives a different perspective, arguing that Netroots Nation attendees are a more Establishment group than those at the People's Summit earlier this year. But he also explains that there are plenty of progressive people here, it's just they tend to be part of more organized groups that normally support the Democratic Party. And I think that's a fair assessment. Netroots Nation tends to attract people who are comfortable with working within the Democratic Party. But not the Blue Dog variety. Not a lot of Joe Manchin fans at NN gatherings. Whereas the People's Summit drew more people who were new to politics and/or attracted to left groups who keep their distance from the Democrats, and tended to attract younger participants on the average. (I haven't attended the People's Summit.)

I selected panels to attend that addressed foreign policy issues - there weren't many of those! - and panels that addressed Islamophobia, which is a key ideology for the radical right in the US and in Europe. Just after the news of the car attack in Charlottesville broke, I attended the panel organized by Dave Neiwert, who is himself an authority on the far right in the US, titled "The White Face of Domestic Terrorism: How Islamophobia Distorts the Reality of Terrorist Violence in America." It also featured anti-terrorism expert Daryl Johnson and Rabiah Ahmed of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).

That was immediately followed by the closing plenary session, where Al Gore did a presentation in interview format, mostly dealing with the climate crisis. At the end, he addressed the Charlottesville disgrace, repeatedly referring to the white supremacists as alt-right, KKK and Nazis. Political junkies gravitate toward quibbles over labels. But as Dave Neiwert and his panel explained, actual Nazis, i.e., Hitler-worshipers and those who explicitly admire the Third Reich, are a distinctive segment of the far right which form part of the "alt-right" spectrum. But the latter also includes other currents, including the "Men's Rights Movement."

Bluestein also covered Gore's speech (In Atlanta, Gore urges Trump to ‘try again’ with response to Charlottesville attacks AJC Online 08/2/2017):

Trump condemned the protests that resulted in at least three deaths and prompted the governor to declare a state of emergency, but he didn’t criticize the white nationalist rally, which featured anti-Semitic chants and neo-Nazi slogans. Instead, he called for unity among “all races, creeds and colors.”

Gore said Trump should “give more thought to what it means to have a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi movement marching and creating this kind of hatred.”

“The country would be better served if the president would come back before the people,” he said, “and think of a more thoughtful and appropriate statement about how we can understand what’s going on in America – and how we can go forward.”

The quickly-organized march after the plenary session was impressive. Apparently there were about 500 people, pretty much all from the NN conference. Delores Huerta, the famous farmworkers' leader who worked closely with Cesar Chavez who had also spoken at the convention, led the procession to the Statehouse. Whoever the people were directly involved in organizing the march, they did an impressively good job of setting up the march, getting official permissions quickly, and keeping the marchers focused and walking in orderly groups. Huerta also spoke at the small rally at the Capitol. But that part of the event was not so well planned. The organizers never noticed, it seemed, that the loudspeaker connected to her mike wasn't working, so that most people couldn't hear what she said. That was followed by several other speakers, apparently from the same group that had organized the protest against Stacey Evans. There wasn't a clear theme to the presentations.

But that's a quibble. It was an impressive march. They used some chants familiar to me. But there were ones new to me, too, my own favorite being, "No Trump! No KKK! No fascist USA!" In a different context, I might have thought that was too sectarian sounding and maybe obscure for such an event. But unfortunately, on Friday it clearly addressing a white terrorist attack very much in the national news at that very moment.

The violent edge of politics on Wednesday

Early Wednesday we had a case of political violence committed by someone who reportedly was a volunteer of some kind for Bernie Sanders' Presidential campaign in Virginia. (Matt Pearce, Virginia gunman was a Bernie Sanders supporter who was recently practicing his shooting Los Angeles Times 06/14/2017)

Sanders, unlike our current President, hasn't been encouraging political violence of any kind. But some Republicans are already trying to smear him with it.

.@SenSanders statement that alleged shooter was presidential campaign volunteer: "I condemn this action in the strongest possible terms." pic.twitter.com/iLjxDdnftN

— CSPAN (@cspan) June 14, 2017

Emma Vigeland is about two generations too young to have been around personally involved in the debates of the 1960s and early 1970s. But she has a serious and nuanced view, and seems to have a good instinct for the kind of polemics that the Republicans will use in a case like this, BREAKING: Bernie Sanders Denounces Volunteer Who Shot Congressman TYT Politics 06/14/2017:

I understand when Emma or others say "violence is never the answer." And I wouldn't criticize her for how she puts it, because she's speaking in a particular moment and trying to discourage murder, which is a good thing to discourage.

Unfortunately, in real life, "violence is never the answer" is not universally applicable. Even the small number of genuine pacifists in the United States would recognize a right of self-defense when confronted by imminent danger. Instances of sexual assault or domestic violence come immediately to mind.

The Republicans use the right of self-defense as justification for things like the "stand your ground" laws now in effect in various states now, which essentially makes it easier to people to get away with murder. Especially white people murdering black people or Latinos.

The fact that the gun lobby misuses the concept of self-defense for its own purposes doesn't make it invalid. But trying to assassinate Congresspeople and their staff on what appears in today's case with a rifle from a distance doesn't fit with any kind of sensible concept of self-defense. The shooter

One further point this brings to mind for me. Sanders never advocated violence during his campaign. But to me, the ugliest act of Hillary Clinton's campaign and then-DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz claimed that Bernie supporters at the Nevada state caucus were throwing chairs and sending death threats to delegates. If there is any evidence for that having happened, I've yet to see it. But that was a truly irresponsible ploy.

The "radical Islamic terrorism" spell

Here's what Franklin Graham said on his Facebook page today:

I appreciate President Barack Obama speaking to the nation yesterday in the wake of the Orlando massacre. He was right in saying that this tragic shooting was an act of terror and hate. But why didn’t he say it was an act of radical Islamic terrorism? Mr. President, with all due respect, don't forget Fort Hood; don't forget the Boston Marathon; don't forget San Bernardino; and don’t forget 9/11. What do they all have in common? They were all Islamic terrorists carrying out their treachery in the name of their religion. Mr. President, your administration has cut our military to the bone and some experts say we're the weakest we have been in modern times. It’s time we were rebuilding our military force worldwide to take on this enemy. It’s time we tighten America’s borders until we can clearly vet those we’re letting into the country. Mr. President, how many more American lives have to be lost before you understand the threat radical Islam is to every freedom-loving person?

This is contemptible stuff. But that's not to say it won't be politically effective for the Republicans.

This piece by Jonathan Chait (Donald Trump Is the Fearmonger Republicans Have Been Waiting For New York 06/13/2016) is right about how illogical the Republicans' approach is.

But hatred, fear and politics don't work strictly by formal logic. And Chait also holds up Shrub Bush and his ritual of calling Islam a "religion of peace" to suggest the Republicans could be more reasonable. But the xenophobia and Islamophobia that Trump is exploiting today was fomented relentlessly by the Cheney-Bush Administration. Even while Bush occasionally said vaguely nice things about Islam so as not to tick off his BFFs in Saudi Arabia.

I'm intrigued by how even supposedly Godly Christians like Franklin Graham treat the phrase "radical Islamic terrorism" as something very like a magic spell. If Obama and Hillary would say the words, the Republicans tell us, then ... well, what? ISIS will disappear? All Muslims will convert to Christianity? On the face of it, it looks like magical thinking. And maybe it really is that, at least in part.

It's also a manifestation of Republican Patriotic Correctness. This is a phrase that Republicans are expected to use as a self-identifier. And it's held against the Democrats not just that they say something different, but that that don't use that exact phrase.

But the "political correctness" of not being hateful to nonwhites or LGBT people is something they regard at completely despicable?

As silly as it is, though, on a logical basis, I share Ed Kilgore's concern that Hillary Clinton's response may not be adequate. (The Problem With Hillary Clinton’s Proposal for an Anti-Terror ‘Intelligence Surge’ New York 06/13/2016)

Racists and paranoids and Christianists, oh my!

A November 2012 report by Arie Perliger on the violent Radical Right in the US, titled Challengers from the Sidelines: Understanding America's Violent Far-Right and published under the auspices of the Combating Terrorism Center At West Point (with a stock disclaimer, "The views expressed in this report are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of the Combating Terrorism Center, U.S. Military Academy, Department of Defense or U.S. government") is causing quite a bit of grumping among people who pass for "conservatives," it seems. David Sirota reports on the grumbling in Right-wing terrorism is real Salon 01/22/2013.

I'll say here at the start that I have questions and reservations about an Army institution doing this kind of research on domestic political groups. But that's not the main topic of this post. Military educational institutions are generally recognized for maintaining high academic standards. And this paper certainly doesn't read like some kind of PR publication.

I would also note that the military has reason to know something about the characteristics of violent Radical Right groups, because they can not only cause serious problems if they enlist. The military also doesn't want to be providing weapons and explosives training to people whose aim is to overthrow the Constitutional government.

Perliger's paper provides a history of the violent Radical Right in the US over the last couple of decades. He devotes some time to the academic task of defining his subject, which provides an always useful reminder that there is both continuity and constant change and evolution on the far-right scene. He concentrates in this study on American groups that are violent or heavily oriented toward violence.

He characterizes them into three broad ideological categories: the racist/white supremacy movement (KKK, National Socialism/Nazism, Skinheads); the anti-federalist movement (Patriot Militia groups); and, Christian fundamentalist groups (Christian Identity, anti-abortionist).

I found his discussion of the doctrinal roots of Christian Identity particularly interesting. It apparently was spawned in the same historical moment in which John Nelson Darby's (1800-1882) theories of the end of the world offered a religious justification for British colonial ambitions in the Middle East. The trend that led eventually to today's Christian Identity was a special mixture of white racism, identification with the Jews of the Old Testament and undisguised hatred of the real existing Jews of the present.

The fact that some of these theories are complex don't mean they should be counted as sophisticated if mistaken views of the world. Neurotic symptoms can be complicated and creative, as well. But that doesn't mean they are either healthy or desirable or the product of good reality-testing.

But the religious element appears to be sincere, if sincerely fanatical:

The exploitation of biblical texts to promulgate racial and other ideological notions is a common practice in the ideological construction of the Identity movement. Another example is the Identity movement’s interpretation of God's revelations to Abraham and his sons of the transformation of Israel into a dominant, flourishing and powerful nation as an indication of the destiny of the Aryan people. Two further related trends are worth mentioning. The first is the use of apocryphal historical revisionism to associate each architectural achievement of ancient times to the white race, i.e., Egypt's Middle Kingdom pyramids, Wiltshire’s Neolithic post-and-lintel structure of Stonehenge, or the 17th century Mughal mausoleum, the Taj Mahal. The second is the inclination to associate the non-Aryan seed-line with anti-Christian historical events, in particular the persecution and murder of Jesus. (pp. 35-36)

I was also intrigued to see that Gerald K. Smith, one of the most notable far-right figures of the 1930s, was also a significant figure in the development of Christian Identity thought. Perliger notes that he was one of several leaders who continued the crackpot "British Israelite" theology:

Cameron and Rand's followers after WWII, especially the preachers Gerald K. Smith, Wesley Swift, Richard Butler and William Potter Gale, continued to develop the British-Israelite ideological paradigm in their respective Identity churches and groups (such as Church of Jesus Christ Christian, and The US Christian Posse Association), consistently employing theological analysis to further proselytize extreme anti-Semitism, notions of white supremacy and racial segregation, and to exult in apocalyptic visions, transforming the British Israelites into the current day Identity movement. (p. 33)

He adds this biographical summary:

This new coalition of groups moved further from the British-Israelite ideological tradition with the rise of Gerald K. Smith to a leadership position within the movement. Smith was a Southern political operative who was the main aide to Louisiana Senator Huey P. Long during the Great Depression. He moved to Los Angeles in the early 1950s and quickly became the major organizational force behind the emerging Identity movement via its own organization, The Christian Nationalist Crusade. Smith magnified the importance of anti-Semitic ideas in the movement’s ideology and worked intensively to tighten its ties with the American political far-right by recruiting the movement for campaigns against the Civil Rights Movement and the perceived communist threat. He was also able to mentor and nurture a new cadre of political and religious leaders such as Conrad Gaard, Jonathan Perkins, Bertrand Comparet and Wesley Swift. (p. 74)

He also discusses the phenomena of "lone wolves" and "leaderless resistance." And he makes the important point that mass-casualty incidents should be seen as the tip of an iceberg whose base is made up of a multitude of less deadly incidents.

One of Perliger's more intriguing findings is his analysis of the correlation between political violence and partisan strength nationally:

The number of Democratic senators (α=-.271*)355 and congressmen/women (α=-.411**) is negatively correlated with the number of attacks per year, whereas positive correlation of the latter exists with the number of Republican senators (α=.222*) and representatives (α=.413**).356 An additional multivariate (stepwise) regression analysis reveals that the single most significant factor is the number of Republicans in the House (β=.41**, R2=.17**). [my emphasis]

This is counterintuitive to common theories that associate a rise in far-right violence is a response to Democratic/liberal political hegemony.

Perliger suggests some possible interpretations of this finding that shows "the level of [far-right political] violence is positively correlated with a conservative political environment":

The correlation between increased conservative political power and far right violent activism need not imply causality. It is possible that far-right groups may feel that conservative political authorities are more tolerant of their activities, or believe that their actions have the potential to embolden their representatives to pursue an extreme right agenda. It is equally possible that increased levels of violence might be caused by relative deprivation, which occurs when the high expectations of far-right activists during a conservative legislature are not fulfilled. The deprivation explanation is less likely to occur under Democratic-controlled legislature since the expectations are low.

In the case of the Republican Party since at least the "Gingrich Revolution" House crew of 2005, the kind of rhetoric in which elected officials and respected Republican figures like Rush Limbaugh indulge could certainly contribute to violent extremists deciding they had a relatively permissive environment in which to commit acts of violence.

For instance, Orrin Hatch, who served as Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee ... and was one of the most prominent Republicans during Clinton's Presidency, said as far back as 1982 that having guns is "the right most valued by free men." (Quoted in Carl Bogus, The Hidden History of the Second Amendment U.C. Davis Law Review 31/2; Winter 1998; p. 312)

There are weaknesses in Perliger's paper. One the annoyance level, he uses the FOXist partisan grammar of "Democrat" as an adjective, e.g., "Democrat presidents." (p. 90)

In discussing theories of violence, he doesn't always make clear the difference in what is being studied. For instance, he writes:

... as in the case of the study of far-right activism, scholars initially focused on the personal/psychological traits which characterize those who joined militant far right groups. Adorno's "authoritarian personality" is probably the most renowned study in this context and, like the ones that followed it, argued that those who tend to support far-right ideology have unique mental and personal traits. The mixed empirical support for Adorno's approach, and the dramatic rise in the power of the European far-right during the 1980s and 1990s, led to the emergence of a long list of theories and explanations that departed from the individual-psychological approach ...

But the Authoritarian Personality study published in 1950, which was part of a larger Studies in Prejudice project directed by Adorno's Frankfurt School colleague Max Horkheimer and sponsored by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), was a study directed toward understanding individual psychological traits that would lead people to sympathize with authoritarian political movements, not specifically toward understanding individuals directly engaging in far-right political violence.

Much of the historical background Perliger provides is based on secondary sources. The original research in the paper comes from the analysis of the database of incidents constructed for the research. I found myself doing a double-take on a couple of the sources used. He cites a 1967 report on the Ku Klux Klan from the House Un-American Activities Committee (p. 47). HUAC is more known for its hackwork than for the care of its investigative studies, though that means that the source should be used with particular care rather than disregarded. He also cites a piece from the Fortean Times as a source (p. 10) on Timothy McVeigh. The Fortean Times, seriously? The Fortean Times is a British magazine that publishes stories of weird phenomena in the credulous tradition of Charles Fort. A "weird news" magazine, in other words, not especially scrupulous about ideals of journalistic professionalism. I wouldn't take as well-established a claim that I could only source to the Fortean Times, entertaining as some of their items might be to read. Does West Point's Combating Terrorism Center really consider the Fortean Times a valid source for information like this?

But Perliger's paper provides us a useful contemporary source on far-right violence in the US.

Tags: anti-semitism, domestic terrorism, christian identity, radical right, white racism

The shooter at the Family Research Council

A man named Floyd Lee Corkins II was arrested for showing up with a gun last week at the Washington office of the far-right Family Research Council (FRC) and wounding a security guard with a handgun. Peter Hermann and Keith L. Alexander reported for the Washington Post in Floyd Lee Corkins charged in Family Research Council shooting 08/16/2012.

As in all these cases, initial reports can and often are misleading or mistaken in some notable fact claimed in the case. And so far as I'm aware, the FBI and prosecutors have not yet released any details on their theory of his motivation. From the Post report:

The man authorities say was angry with the conservative stance of the Family Research Council and shot the group’s unarmed security guard in a downtown D.C. office was ordered by a judge Thursday to undergo a mental evaluation.

An FBI affidavit quotes 28-year-old Floyd Lee Corkins II of Herndon telling the guard, “I don’t like your politics” as he pulled a 9mm Sig Sauer pistol from a backpack he had carried with him on Metrorail from East Falls Church. ...

In his bag, court documents say, police found 50 rounds of ammunition and 15 sandwiches from Chick-fil-A, which combined with the suspect’s statement added a political dimension to the shooting.

The head of the Atlanta-based fast-food chain has spoken out against same-sex marriage, a stance embraced by the Family Research Council. Corkins had been volunteering at a U Street NW support center for the gay community. ...

No one answered the door at Corkins’s home Thursday. The FBI affidavit says agents interviewed Corkins’s parents, who said their son "has strong opinions with respect to those he believes do not treat homosexuals in a fair manner."

So it may be that finally, there is someone of left-leaning sentiments that is implicated in an attempted violent political crime, after years of attacks by far-right zealots, who are typically written off by the press as "deranged individuals" or something similar.

FOX News and the Republican echo chamber have tried to label some of these shooters lefties. But in their world, neo-Nazis count as left-wingers.

The FRC fairly quickly set about blaming the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for provoking the shooting by having labelled them a hate group for their venomous descriptions of gays. I've never seen anything from the SPLC that even suggested they were encouraging violent attacks on the FRC or other hate groups. It's notable that the right has been especially scornful of any suggestion that far-right groups and media figures that have spent years, even decades, demonizing liberals as traitors, enemies of God, destroyers of the family, friends of terrorists, baby-killers and the like might bear any moral responsibility whatever for encouraging violent attack by far right types on targets they view as representing The Enemy.

Rachel Tabachnick of Talk to Action has done some research into the accused man's background: Shooter That Targeted FRC Attended Conservative Christian School with Anti-Gay Policy 08/19/2012. She discusses the school he attended up until he was 18 or so. She's careful in not drawing pop psychology conclusions. She doesn't provide any information about his life or group affiliations since finishing high school.

Tags: christian right, radical right, domestic terrorism

Civility, Alabama Republican style: "empty the clip, and do what has to be done"

An Alabama Republican state senator, Scott Beason, told a local Republican Party breakfast last Saturday that what they needed to do about the immigration problem was to "empty the clip, and do what has to be done". (Sam Rolley, Beason: Dems don't want to solve illegal immigration problem The Cullman Times 02/06/2011) He later denied that he was encouraging his audience to murder people. I'm not exactly sure what other message "empty the clip" would have conveyed.

Oliver Willis gives an awfully generous commentary on this at his Think Progress blog, Immigrants: They’re People Too! 02/08/2011.

The article to which Willis links makes it even more puzzling that he's generous about it. Because in that article (Dana Beyerle, Beason: 'Empty the clip' comment taken out of context The Gadsden Times 02/07/2011) Beason was actually doubling down on the shooting imagery:

"I talk about people who ignore the problem and people (who) won’t take a shot at the problem and then those who continue to shoot until it’s fixed,” Beason said Monday in a telephone interview. “You can’t just say you’re going to do something. You have to work at it until you do so effectively.”

Beason said his reference to “empty the clip” was taken out of context. He said he had told his audience an Internet-circulated joke about how you can tell the political beliefs of a liberal, a conservative, and an armed Southerner who are confronted by a mugger in New York City.

“If it’s all taken in context, it makes perfect sense,” Beason said. “Anyone sitting in the meeting completely understood it and I’m a little bit surprised that it left it hanging out there.”

I assume the "joke" to which he was referring is some version of this. Confronted with a mugger threatening his wife and little daughter, the liberal stands there and worries. It continues:

Conservative's Answer:

BANG!

Southerner's Answer:

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! click...(sounds of reloading).

Wife: "Hun, he looks like he's still moving, whadda y'all kids think?"

Son: "Mama's right Daddy, I saw it, too."

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! click.

Daughter: "Nice group, Daddy! Were those the Winchester Silver Tips?"

And this reference is supposed to make Beason's reference to emptying the clip seems more benign?!?

He did make the standard nudge-nudge wink-wink denial that he was advocating killing people:

Beason said his reference to shooting had nothing to do with illegal immigration, but was about the legislative response to illegal immigration in Alabama.

"There’s no advocacy of violence," he said. "It's unfortunate (that's the way it was taken but) that’s not the way it was."

But given the rest of his response, that's clearly just a sneer. This guy is obviously a jerk.

Some of these anti-immigration fanatics actually are murdering people: Odio en Arizona: Valeria Fernández/New America Media, Madres en duelo por sus hijos La Opinión 02/08/2011.

Tags: comprehensive immigration reform, domestic terrorism, terrorism

Gene Lyons on the merchants of hate

Gene Lyons weighs in with his view on Sarah Palin's callous take on the Tucson assassination attack earlier this month in Profiting from political road rage Salon 01/19/2011

My theory: Ever since Rush Limbaugh adapted the techniques of drive-time sports radio to politics -- the loudmouth hyperbole, the fake omniscience, the mute button -- the mass-marketing of outrage to people stuck in freeway traffic with blood-pressure levels already approaching the blowout range has coarsened public discourse to the level of road rage.

You want "blood libel"?

Limbaugh, last week: "What (accused assassin) Mr. Loughner knows is that he has the full support of a major political party ... The Democrat party is attempting to find anybody but him to blame. He knows if he plays his cards right, he's just a victim ... plus a local sheriff doing everything that they can to make sure he's not convicted of murder -- but something lesser."

If you believe that, you'll believe anything.

Tags: domestic terrorism, gene lyons, radical right, rush limbaugh, terrorism

Violence and the anti-abortion movement

Mississippi's Republican Sen. Roger Wicker spoke to the big anti-abortion protest in Washington this week, as reported by Human Khan and Amy Bingham, Activists at March for Life Rally Demand Tougher Abortion Laws, Overturn of Roe v. Wade ABC News 01/24/2011:

"We are here because Roe v. Wade is bad law. We are here because we believe it was wrongly decided," said Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss. "We believe Roe v. Wade has led to a three-and-a-half decades-long holocaust in the United States of America, and it amounts to a stain on our national conscience, and it's time for it to end."

The last elected official to compare abortion to the holocaust was heavily criticized. In 2007, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee told a gathering of conservatives that "we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973."

Most recently, anti-abortion activist Randall Terry launched a 2012 presidential bid in front of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., but received little attention.

Wicker, who for years has attempted to pass his "Life at Conception Act," today announced that he will reintroduce the bill in the Senate Tuesday. The legislation would establish that human life begins at conception and calls for legal protection for fetuses.

"It's time for the 14th Amendment protection to be afforded to the unborn," he said. [my emphasis]

Randall Terry acquired a national reputation as head of the radical-right Operation Rescue. In the early 1990s, he played an important role in promoting the Patriot Militia movement. he has not changed his basic political course since then.

I doubt very seriously that Huckabee is the only elected official who used the abortion-as-Holocaust metaphor since 2007! Because it seems to have become common as dirt among anti-abortion activists and has been for years.

This is a real problem presented by the antiabortion movement. Even apart from the emotionally-charged Holocaust comparison, the "abortion is murder" framing of the issue can't avoid giving validation to people who attack abortion clinics and medical providers. As Vicki Saporta reports in Violent Rhetoric Has Consequences—Just Ask Abortion Providers Women's Media Network 01/21/2011:

While some people purposefully use violent rhetoric to incite others to action in order to advance their own agendas, others do so without considering the consequences of their actions. In a civilized society, there is no room for political rhetoric or imagery that encourages and incites others to commit acts of violence. Those in politics and the media have a responsibility to use their influence to foster civil dialogue and debate.

Ed Kilgore wrote about this aspect of the antiabortion movement last year in Abortion and the Tea Party The New Republic 09/16/2010:

Perhaps because the national media tend to be secular, we are persistently underestimating the role that abortion plays in right-wing politics.

... it is worth remembering that the RTL [right-to-life] movement considers abortion analogous to the Holocaust, and pro-choice pols to be enablers of monstrous evil—at worst conscious advocates of genocide.

... For all the endless and interminable talk about "constitutionalism" on the right, it's rarely acknowledged that lurking in the background is wrath about Roe v. Wade. The same is true with the rage about health care reform; if you read a lot of right-wing blogs, as I do, you'd note that fear about Obamacare producing a massive expansion of publicly-funded abortion was a major motivator of right-wing opposition.

More generally, the anger associated with the entire Tea Party movement is, I suspect, traceable among many activists to endless frustration of its desire to end the "genocide" of legalized abortion, to which the GOP "establishment" has given little more than lip service. [my emphasis]

There are alternative ways that the antiabortionists could frame the issue. But they're not likely to listen directly to my suggestions.

Still, as long as they present abortion as "murder" and even as a Holocaust against innocent babies, as long as they attack abortion providers and counselors as "baby-killers", that rhetoric will encourage the more violent and fanatical in their circles of influence to follow the examples of Dr. George Tiller's assailants by Shelley Shannon and Scott Roeder. That would be the man that Bill O'Reilly called "Tiller the Baby-Killer" on his FOX News show.

Tags: abortion, domestic terrorism,, radical right

Stephen Walt on incitement to violence

Stephen Walt last has a thoughtful take on incitement to violence by political leaders in Following the trail of political rhetoric to violence: Can we deny that words matter? Foreign Policy 01/13/2011:

One problem, of course, is that causality in a case like this is always murky. When someone arrives at a public event and starts shooting people, how do we determine the relative weight of mental illness, personal experience, opportunity, lax gun-control laws, and the toxic soup of violent rhetoric to which he had been exposed, when we try to figure out how something like this could have happened? Granting that Rep. Giffords's assailant was by all the evidence a deeply disturbed individual, it is still true that his madness manifested itself as an attack on a politician. He didn't shoot up his workplace, or a school, or even a random shopping mall: He chose a political target. And whatever his personal motives or internal dialogues may have been, he did this at a moment in our history when self-interested hatemongers have combined violent rhetoric and political polarization to an unprecedented degree. Yet for the American right, the violent, and frequently Manichaean, rhetoric that has been the stock in trade of some of their most prominent spokespeople (including Sarah Palin) is totally irrelevant, and anyone who says differently is just playing partisan politics. ...

And here's the central point to remember: Violent language and hateful political rhetoric don't make most of the people who hear it run out and kill. Rather, the problem is that it makes it more likely that a handful of more fervent, less stable, more susceptible, less socially connected individuals will hear the message and take it to heart. And in a world where guns are cheap and plentiful, all it takes is one.

The solution, needless to say, is not censorship. The solution is to view those who favor violence as a way of dealing with one's political opponents with contempt, and to treat entertainers who use such language and tropes as moneymaking devices as beneath even that. I don't want the government telling Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, or any other xenophobic whack job what not to say; I just want sensible Americans to switch the channel and confine them to the obscurity that they deserve. [my emphasis]

Tags: domestic terrorism, radical right, stephen walt, terrorism

Speculating on the Spokane bombing attempt - and why does the national press not consider it a big deal?

The inmates of Arkham Asylum: FOX News will accuse them of the Spokane bombing attempt before they admit that some rightwingers might have had something to do with it

Let me say clearly here at the start of this post that the attempted bombing of the Martin Luther King Day parade in Spokane, Washington, with an anti-personnel improvised explosive device (IED) could have been made by some leftwing radical group. It's also possible that it could have been done by religious cultists following directions from voices in their heads, by escapees from Arkham Asylum, or by renegade Pleiadians trying to start a galactic civil war.

But I'm guessing it was attempted by some crazy-ass rightwingers out to kill them some libruls. Does it count as a "Second Amendment solution" (to use Nevada Republican leader Sharron Angle's celebrated phrase) if they kill libruls with shrapnel instead of a gun?

One thing that leaped out at me from the news stories is that the bomb was discovered and reported to police by three city employees, presumably on duty in some capacity. Think about that the next time you hear Republicans trashing public employees.

Dave Neiwert, who is very well acquainted with the modus operandi of the criminally violent Radical Right in the Northwest US, explains why police and federal officials are proceeding on the assumption that it was a far-right terrorist group behind this in In Spokane, they know that MLK Day bomb wasn't an 'isolated event' C&L 01/19/2011. He links to this story on the background: Thomas Clouse, FBI: Bomb could have caused 'multiple casualties' The Spokesman-Review 01//18/2011:

The FBI confirmed Tuesday that the Swiss Army-brand backpack contained a bomb that could have caused “multiple casualties” and credited Spokane city employees who noticed the suspicious bag and alerted authorities in time to re-route the parade. A $20,000 reward is being offered for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible.

"It definitely was, by all early analysis, a viable device that was very lethal and had the potential to inflict multiple casualties," said Frank Harrill, the special agent in charge of the Spokane FBI office. "Clearly, the timing and placement of a device – secreted in a backpack – with the Martin Luther King parade is not coincidental. We are doing everything humanly possible to identify the individuals or individual who constructed and placed this device."

Madison Gray, Spokane: Bomb at Parade Attempts to Destroy MLK's Legacy Black Voices 01/19/2011 observes of this incident (emphasis in original):

Do we know who did it? No. Do we really know what the motive is? No, not yet, although the most popular speculation was that it was -- you guessed it -- racial.

But no matter who did it or why, it is clear that what Dr. King stood for is still a threat more than half a century after he began his teachings.

Dave also links to Will Bunch's commentary, Has right-wing carping killed media coverage of major "domestic terrorism" case in Spokane Philadelphia Daily News 01/19/2011. Bunch discusses the seemingly deficient response of the national news media to this story.

Tags: barack obama, domestic terrorism, radical right, terrorism

Civility - and an IED for a Martin Luther King Day parade in Seattle Spokane

MSNBC reports FBI: Bomb found on MLK march route 01/18/2011. Rob Kauder also reports on the discovery for KXLY.com in Device Found Along MLK Parade Route Credible Threat 01/18/2011. This was in Spokane, Washington. Several news outlets are carrying a story by Nicholas Geranios of AP quoting an anonymous "official" who is "familiar with the investigation" as saying that the device, a bomb with remote-control detonation, was a particularly sophisticated one.

Our press and politicians need to start calling this stuff what it is, domestic terrorism. According to the MSNBC report, at least the FBI is doing so. And if the goal of the bombers was to blow up people on an MLK Day parade, it was a "political" act, no matter what kind of mental conditions the wanna-be killers may be suffering from.

No suspects are reported as of this writing. But I'm going to take a wild guess and say it was probably not leftwing radicals planting an IED on the route of a Martin Luther King Day parade.

Whoever this turns out to be behind this - and news consumers should always remember in cases like this that the FBI's first reports on these things are anything but gospel truth - our main domestic terrorism problem right now is rightwingers trying to murder people. And too often succeeding, as they did in Tucscon.

Meanwhile, Dave Neiwert reports Right-wingers want to make Obama's message in Tucson into vindication for their hatemongering C&L 01/18/2011. I know I'm very much in the minority on this, even among Democratic progressives, so far as I can tell. But if Obama's speech in Tucson didn't shame and piss off the rightwing hatemongers at a time when the main domestic terrorism problem that was on display in Tucson this month is rightwing fanatics killing people, then I don't think the President's speech did the main thing it needed to do.

Tags: barack obama, domestic terrorism, radical right, terrorism

Christian Rightists jumped to defend conservatives over the Tucson shooting

Tony Beam wrote on the January 8 Tuscon assassination attack - my description, certainly not his - in A Tragedy in Tucson Brings Out Vitriol on the Left Christian Post 01/11/2011.

He quotes the Rev. Franklin Graham as follows:

To try to place blame before an investigation has occurred is in itself Inciting [sic] hatred. Because we may disagree with a person from another political party, and something bad happens to that person, does that mean that we are responsible for what happens to that person? By no means.

One might think that someone who presents himself as a moral and religious leader, as Graham the Younger does, might want to make the distinction that most adults have no trouble making between moral responsibility for creating a toxic environment with hate rhetoric encouraging violence and the legal responsibility for a particular crimes.

But neither Graham the Younger nor Tony Beam bothers with such sissy nonsense. No, they trash them thar libruls instead!

I don't know if Beam was referring to the statement quoted in this Christian Post story, Stephanie Samuel, Franklin Graham Offers Condolences to Victims of Tucson Tragedy 01/10/2011. Other reports of Graham's position include Graham Warns against Blame Game in Ariz. Shooting CBNNews.com 01/11/2011 and David Patten,
Franklin Graham Defends Palin on Arizona Shootings Newsmax 01/11/2011. (Note: Newsmax is a far-right news source and I don't assume the accuracy of any reporting found only there.)

Samuel reports that Graham the Younger offered general sympathy for the victims. And she writes:

Franklin described Loughner as a "deranged man" but said it was "hasty" to conclude that his attack was motivated by politics.

I wonder how this squares with his own statement, quoted by Beam but not by Samuel, "To try to place blame before an investigation has occurred is in itself Inciting [sic] hatred." Just how did the Rev. Graham know the accused shooter is "deranged" even "before an investigation has occurred"?

From Samuel's article:

"If something horrific happens to a person, it does not mean those who hold differing views are responsible for the actions of a disturbed individual," he cautioned.

News reports digging into Loughner's background and his social media accounts reveal him as a high school drop-out, military reject and loner who was concerned about literacy and mind-control.

His YouTube videos urged viewers to create their own languages and stressed that control over language equaled mind control. None of the videos mentioned any political leanings or affiliation.

Samuel's reporting here is downright misleading. I could see on the face of it when I saw his YouTube video that he was making references to far-right political notions. See for instance, these reports:

Chip Berlet, Alleged Giffords Shooter Shares Currency Plot Obsession with Anti-Abortion Killer 01/08/2011 Talk to Action 01/08/2011; Dave Neiwert, Yes, Jared Loughner was 'crazy'. That doesn't exculpate the milieu that unhinged him C&L 01/09/2011; Mark Potok, Who is Jared Lee Loughner? Hatewatch 01/09/2011

Would it have been too much trouble for a reporter from the Christian Post to call or e-mail Chip Berlet or Dave Neiwert or Mark Potok to ask about this? They are all well-known authorities or the Radical Right.

Still, some have pointed the finger at conservative pundits and rally participants for fostering hate speech in the political spectrum. Others have accused Tea Party leader Sarah Palin who featured a target map which used gun sights to mark Democratic districts.

Giffords herself once appeared on MSNBC chiding the list. “When people do that, they’ve got to realize that there are consequences to that action.” She also shared on the news program that her office had been recently vandalized.

Franklin warned, "This is not a time for political opportunism."

Instead, he urged Americans to turn a critical eye to the grime [sic] messages being perpetrated in the media.

"What frightens me is that our country has accepted murder, violence and rape as entertainment that we see portrayed every day on TV, movies and video games,” Franklin remarked.

He continued, "I agree with Sheriff Clarence Dupnik when he alluded to the fact that this country needs some serious soul searching. If we as a nation are not careful, we could see the destruction of the foundation upon which this nation was built."

Not having waited for the investigation, why did Franklin the Younger think cop shows on TV or whatever the heck he's talking about had anything to do with the Tucson assassination attack? The accused assassin's YouTube farewell video showed clear evidence of his immersion in kooky far-right political propaganda. It didn't say anything about cop shows on TV teaching him it's all right to kill Democrats.

Beam and Graham reflected pretty much the same circle-the-wagons approach as their supposedly more secular conservative counterparts. So just what was the "Christian" part of Christian conservatives in their response to this shooting in Tuscon?

Tags: christian right, domestic terrorism, terrorism

Sarah Palin's bold moral leadership (yes, of course it's meant sarcastically)

Sarah Palin decided that she needed to make a longer statement than she initially did reflecting the general Republican line that they are going to keep saying any crazy things they like and if people get murdered occasionally by other who take their crazy talk to heart, well, so what?

The full text is in Sarah Palin's Arizona Shooting Statement Blasts Journalists & Pundits' 'Blood Libel' Huffington Post 01/12/2011. This is a key part:

President Reagan said, "We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions." Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own. They begin and end with the criminals who commit them, not collectively with all the citizens of a state, not with those who listen to talk radio, not with maps of swing districts used by both sides of the aisle, not with law-abiding citizens who respectfully exercise their First Amendment rights at campaign rallies, not with those who proudly voted in the last election.

The last election was all about taking responsibility for our country's future. President Obama and I may not agree on everything, but I know he would join me in affirming the health of our democratic process. Two years ago his party was victorious. Last November, the other party won. In both elections the will of the American people was heard, and the peaceful transition of power proved yet again the enduring strength of our Republic.

But as Stephen Colbert and other have noticed, while she here seemingly denies that political rhetoric could have motivated the Tucson shooter in any way whatsoever, in the "blood libel" portion of her statement, the White Princess firmly insisted that political rhetoric (directed against her!) actually could produce violence:

Vigorous and spirited public debates during elections are among our most cherished traditions. And after the election, we shake hands and get back to work, and often both sides find common ground back in D.C. and elsewhere. If you don't like a person's vision for the country, you're free to debate that vision. If you don't like their ideas, you're free to propose better ideas. But, especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible. [my emphasis]

As Susannah Heschel observes in Palin Cries 'Blood Libel': Can Words Harm Us? Religion Dispatches 01/12/2011:

Do words have consequences or not? For Palin, it seems, acts of criminality stand alone; yet in the very next sentence she goes on to assert the opposite: that the "journalists and pundits" who want our political rhetoric toned down, and who've criticized her image of Rep. Giffords and others caught in the "crosshairs," are themselves manufacturing a "blood libel" that may well "incite...violence." So language can manufacture a "blood libel" and incite violence yet she can be so sure that it played no role in motivating a gunman?

Despite that screaming contradiction, much of Palin's statement will sound plausible to a lot of people who have heard our TV pundits carrying on a superficial chatter about "civility" in politics. But her speech doesn't counteract the ugly trend on display in the assassination attack in Tucson last Saturday.

There are ways for politicians to tell people on "their side" to dial it back on rhetoric and actions that are wrong or counterproductive. In Oakland a couple of years ago when the young African-American man Oscar Grant by shot by the transit policeman Johannes Mehserle, who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the case last year, even though Mehserle had the unarmed guy down on the ground and shot him in the back. There were protests in downtown Oakland immediately after the shooting and they escalated to breaking windows and scuffling with the police. Although there were no assassinations involved in that mini-riot, Oakland Mayor Rom Dellums, an African-American Democrat who had called himself a "socialist" when he was in Congress, publicly and clearly denounced the violence. He expressed his own concerns about Grant's death and Mehserle's conduct, clearly affirmed the right to protest over it, and worked with community leaders to channel future protests into non-violent avenues. In other words, a political leader who recognizes an ugly and dangerous trend can clearly condemn it and do something about it. Even when there might be a risk of angering some of his own constituency over it.

Sarah Palin isn't likely to be telling any rightwingers to dial it back, even after this latest in a series of escalating far-right political violence. It would take quite an imagination to read any such clear denunciation of political violence into Sarah Palin's "blood libel" statement. On the contrary, the part of her statement quoted above that begins "There are those who claim political rhetoric is to blame for the despicable act ..." seems to be denying that political rhetoric can ever contribute to inciting violence. But given her long association with the Alaska Independence Party and other far-right political and extreme religious people, I have to assume that she knows very well the effect incendiary rhetoric and paranoid conspiracy theories have on some of the loose screws who are attracted to such groups.

It's really reached a bad state of affairs when political leaders like Palin can't say straightforwardly: there's no reason to murder people! And I don't condone such talk or actions in any way! Given that Republicans like Sharon Angle have been talking this past year about "Second Amendment solutions" against elected officials they don't like, even a general statement like that from Palin might have some positive effects. Even if she didn't cop to her mistakes in using explicit gun language and symbols in targeting Giffords last year.

For Democratic elected officials, I think they are being foolish about their own personal safety at this point if they frame the current problem of perceived liberals being targeted for deadly violence as coming from "both sides". But you would think Palin herself would show some practical concern in that regard. After all, the guys who shot George Wallace and President Reagan really were more the "lone nut" type without particular political views (unless we count Jodie Foster obsession as "political"). But they shot prominent conservatives. You have to wonder why she thought she had a Secret Service detail during the 2008 Presidential campaign.

Conservatives on this issue, including Palin and her good buddy Franklin Graham, are trying to treat the moral responsibility of leadership as though it were equivalent to legal responsibility for acts of violence. That won't prevent the rest of us from judging their leadership by how they've dealt with the Tucson assassination attack, which as you have noted here, is one in a series of such attacks directed at perceived liberals the last three years.

Joan Walsh, in an article that includes the overoptimistic hope expressed in its title, Sarah Palin will never be president Salon 01/11/2011, accurately characterizes Palin's "blood libel" statement on Wednesday:

The narcissism required, on a day the nation is commemorating the Arizona shooting victims, to put her own sense of victimhood front and center, is stunning. The "blood libel" idiocy may be the worst of it, especially given that Giffords herself is Jewish. But that's not the only thing wrong with her performance. Hilariously, after all the times she's mocked President Obama for using a teleprompter, you can see a teleprompter screen reflected in her eyeglasses throughout much of her Facebook chat. Seeing the flickering teleprompter in her eyes is eerie; it's where some flicker of her soul should be, but you don't see any. Looking into Palin's eyes, you see a blazing, self-pitying anger that's shocking, even for the self-described "pit bull in lipstick." [my emphasis]

You don't have to look into her eyes to see it. It's clear from the transcript, too.

Tags: domestic terrorism, radical right, sarah palin, terrorism

Feeling like the town grump on Obama's Tuscon speech

I've started to feel like the town grump on this one. Especially after reading this saccharine praise from Obama's Call for Renewal: Democracy 'as Good as Christina Imagined It' Politics Daily 01/13/2011. But as I expected, it was widely praised, as reflected in this PBS Newshour segment.



But after the Tucson shooter - another "lone nut" who just happened to be steeped in fanatical rightwing notions - applied his "Second Amendment solution" to a serving federal judge, a Jewish Congresswoman and several others, the people who encourage and condone and enable this sort of thing really needed to hear from the President that it's just not okay for them to be doing that. Bill Clinton in his famous Oklahoma City speech exercised some leadership to stigmatize encouragement to violence by "respectable" citizens. I don't think anyone who finds it okay for Republican leaders to call for "Second Amendment solutions" against Democrats heard themselves stigmatized in any way by Obama's Tucson speech. And I'm afraid until that starts happening on a wide scale, that Obama is likely to have more opportunities to give a similar speech.

The invaluable Digby - who actually was initially far more impressed with Obama's speech than I was (like I said, I'm the town grump on this one) - caught this important post by Chris Kromm of the Institute for Southern Studies, Do violent words cause violence? Lessons from the civil rights era Facing South 01/11/2011. He recalls after the notorious 1963 Birmingham church bombing by so Klan thugs that killed three little girls, the Rev. Marting Luther King, Jr. had no problem assigning a share of moral responsibility to then-Alabama Gov. George Wallace:

The governor said things and did things which caused these people to feel that they were aided and abetted by the highest officer in the state. The murders of yesterday stand as blood on the hands of Governor Wallace.

Our culture has made King into such a plaster saint that Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby can paint a picture of him as devoting himself to attacking anyone who criticized white racism in any way whatsover. The real-life King understood what inflammatory rhetoric by reckless political leaders were designed to do. And, as Krumm reminds us:

James Earl Ray, the man eventually convicted for shooting King, was greatly influenced by Wallace and his agenda, even moving to Los Angeles to volunteer in Wallace's campaign headquarters in North Hollywood.

This is the main reason I find the current fru-fru discussion by the TV talking heads over violent rhetoric so silly. People in the Deep South, especially in Mississippi where I grew up, knew in the 1950s and 1960s if they dissented too explicitly over the segregation issue, they were subject to economic retaliation from the likes of the White Citizens Council or violent retaliation from them or some even grungier group like the Citizens for the Preservation of the White Race (there was such a group in South Mississippi and did quite a bit of political violence in the 1960s). There were clearly people who did argue against segregation and for democracy, white and black. But not many of them were fool enough that they couldn't tell the difference between someone calling them a jerk and someone saying that they needed "Second Amendments solutions" applied against them. Especially if the someone was a prominent conservative leader in the state.

Arkansas columnist Gene Lyons takes a sensibly jaded look at the "who me?" attitude of today's hate-mongers in Right-wingers dodge responsibility Salon 01/12/2011. He mentions an important historical factoid: only one sitting member of Congress has ever been murdered, Congressman Leo Ryan who was killed by the Jonestown cult in 1978. That event has even been indirectly embedded into American English in the phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid" to mean adopting a fanatical viewpoint. Congresswoman Giffords came close to being the second member of a very undesirable club.

People in the Deep South in Martin Luther King's day didn't really have much difficulty understanding the difference between moral responsibility for creating a climate of hatred and violence and legal responsibility for individual acts of violence. A big part of the strategy of civil rights leaders was to create a negative stigma toward "respectable" whites who encouraged acts of violence. They wouldn't be able to reach the "hearts and minds" of the thuggier types directly. But they could create an environment in which the thuggier types couldn't count so much on the encouragement and protection of the respectables.

That's why I was disappointed in Obama's Tuscon speech Wednesday. After the Tucscon shooting, those who enable this kind of political violence didn't need to hear Obama appealing to make a democracy that would live up to the expectations of a nine-year-old, however charming the notion would have been coming from a minister doing a funeral. The "respectables" who think it's fine for leading politicians to call for "Second Amendment solutions" needed to hear the President say that such careless incitement to violence is damned well not okay. Without calling out any of those delicate Republican souls explicitly, he could have used an example like the treatment of immigrants to say that everyone has a responsibility not to encourage angry and violent characters to act out their hatreds in antisocial ways.

As I mentioned yesterday, I couldn't help but notice that our country's chief diplomat, who has had some experience as the target of the hatreds of the Radical Right - including in a Deep South context - was willing to call political violence what it is on Wednesday. Hillary got it right.

Tags: barack obama, domestic terrorism, radical right, terrorism

Obama's Tucson speech

I'm going to say what I actually thought of Obama's Tucson speech. It was a beautiful speech. It's likely to be widely praised and quickly forgotten.

But in the circumstances, I found it very disappointing. It was full of pious and forgettable platitudes, occasionally sliding into the maudlin. We really don't need the President to be our Pastor-in-Chief. That's not his job.

Admittedly, at times like this the President's dual role as head of government and head of state does create a particular dilemma. The head of state in countries like Germany or Austria where the two roles are separated is expected to provide broad moral leadership to the country in a moment like this. The head of government, e.g., the prime minister, would be expected to do the same but focus more on some of the more practical issues arising from such an event.

But it's unimaginable to me that the German or Austrian President (head of state) would use an occasion like this, when a member of parliament and a judge who had been targeted with violent rhetoric and death threats by far-right radicals and were then killed by someone who clearly was at least well-acquainted with far-right fanatical notions, to talk about rain puddles in Heaven. And not mentioning at all the more generalized climate of hatred and incitement to violence in which this assassination attack took place and the source of the hate mongering on the far right.

The President needed to address head-on the problem of domestic terrorism. And he needed to find some way to address the inflammatory and insurrectionary rhetoric from the right. Since both Congresswoman Giffords and Judge Roll had been targeted for venomous threats over their support of immigrants' rights, that would have been a natural lead-in. He could have talked about honoring their commitment on that issue by opposing acts of violence and hatred and racial stereotyping directed at immigrants and Latinos. He wouldn't have had to mention Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh by name.

How might a Democratic Chief Executive who wasn't terrified of being criticized by Republicans have handled this? Our Secretary of State gave an example of what could have been a different, more honest, more constructive approach (Clinton: Arizona shooting a form of 'extremism' Arizona Republic/A********* P****01/12/2001):

"Based on what I know, this is a criminal defendant who was in some ways motivated by his own political views, who had a particular animus toward the congresswoman," she said.

"And I think when you cross the line from expressing opinions that are of conflicting differences in our political environment into taking action that's violent action, that's a hallmark of extremism, whether it comes from the right, the left, from al-Qaida, from anarchists, whoever it is," she said. "That is a form of extremism."

In remarks on the shooting in the United Arab Emirates on Sunday, Clinton said the incident was proof there were extremists in the U.S. "I think that when you're a criminal who is in some way pursuing criminal activity connected to - however bizarre and poorly thought through - your political views, that's a form of extremism," she said on Wednesday. [my emphasis]

The CNN interview where she said this can be found here.

So we can say that one of the most senior officials in Obama's Administration managed to call the problem by its name.

The President said in Tucson that what "we" need is "reflection and debate." What we also need is for rightwing fanatics to stop murdering people because they see them as evil libruls.

Tags: barack obama, domestic terrorism, hillary clint, radical right, terrorism

The state of domestic terrorism, white nationalist version

This Arizona shooting story is a grim and sad one. The fact that the discussions of it drift quickly off into the mist is one more sign of how dysfunctional so much of our national media is right now.

For an academic take, see Robin Lakoff's Keep it complicated, stupid Berkeley Blog 01/10/2011. Any explanation of a particular event of violence has to look at a variety of factors if it's trying to approach being complete: psychological, family dynamics, ideological, situational, religious.

But that doesn't mean that the event doesn't fit into a larger pattern. Or rather patterns, because the patterns it fits depend on the questions being asked. If the question is, why do people shoot strangers in public?, the patterns that emerge will be different than if you ask, how many people expressing some form of political justification for their acts gun down people who they perceive as political enemies?

Successful demagogues are masters of simplication. Ironically, that talent also can make them good at using complexity to deflect criticisms of their own simplications. Rush Limbaugh, the junkie bigot who has been the lead ideologist of the Republican Party for the last couple of decades, discovered complexity in the many reasons other than crackpot rightwing politics that likely motivate the (accused) shooter in the Tucson assassination attack. Howard Fineman reports on Rush's list in Rush Bails Water In Wake Of Arizona Shooting Huffington Post 01/10/2011. Ole Rush cranked out more factors to look for than Berkeley professor Robin Lakoff did in the article I linked above!

But then, Rush knows how to make his own simplication out of it, too: Rush Limbaugh: Jared Loughner Has 'Full Support' Of Democratic Party Huffington Post 01/11/2011. The headline writer cleaned up his partisan grammer: Rush actually said "Democrat Party".

But what Democratic elected officials in particular had better recognize is that there has been a definite upsurge in attacks by rightwing extremists in the last three years, including attacks directed at Democratic elected officials.

Dave Neiwert in Terror in Arizona: Just another 'isolated incident'? Funny how that list keeps mounting C&L 01/10/2011 lists 18 other instances since 2008. He doesn't include the presumed Islamist-minded accused shooter in the Ft. Hood massacre of November, 2009. Islamists understand themselves as conservatives or radical right, but pretty much all the white-nationalist, Patriot Militia type groups regard Muslims as their enemies. Given the kind of coverage on FOX News, I assume that large numbers of Republicans think of Islam as being "leftwing" in general. But that's not the case in the real world.

Regardless of how condemning one wants to be (or not!) of the hate talk from Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, these terrorist attacks are a real problem. They are a problem for law-enforcement, they are a problem for their potential targets, and as we saw in Tucson, they are a problem even for nine-year-old girls who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when one of these terrorists strikes.

Some liberals are looking wistfully back to Bill Clinton's speech after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and hoping Obama will take some similar stand. But Clinton was willing to put defenders of the radical right on the defensive and anger Republican officials in the process of doing so. Obama has at times been incredibly deferential to Republican criticism, and Republicans have been almost (though not quite) unanimous in the established position that paranoid conspiracy theories and fear-mongering and suggestions of violence from Republicans like Sarah Palin and by Republican media like FOX News have anything to do with the present trend of far-right terrorist attacks against perceived liberals.

The least Obama can do is avoid the now phony and dishonest pious scolding of "both sides" for violence-inciting rhetoric. As Paul Krugman puts it in Climate of HateNew York Times 01/09/2011:

It’s important to be clear here about the nature of our sickness. It’s not a general lack of “civility,” the favorite term of pundits who want to wish away fundamental policy disagreements. Politeness may be a virtue, but there’s a big difference between bad manners and calls, explicit or implicit, for violence; insults aren’t the same as incitement.

The point is that there’s room in a democracy for people who ridicule and denounce those who disagree with them; there isn’t any place for eliminationist rhetoric, for suggestions that those on the other side of a debate must be removed from that debate by whatever means necessary.

And it’s the saturation of our political discourse — and especially our airwaves — with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence.

Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be “armed and dangerous” without being ostracized; but Representative Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the G.O.P.

And there’s a huge contrast in the media. Listen to Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, and you’ll hear a lot of caustic remarks and mockery aimed at Republicans. But you won’t hear jokes about shooting government officials or beheading a journalist at The Washington Post. Listen to Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly, and you will.

Obama shouldn't pretend otherwise.

Tags: domestic terrorism, terrorism

Can liberals recognize when people want to kill them?

Most can, I'm very sure. But you have to wonder about some of them when I see these two pieces from Salon: Laura Miller, The real message of Loughner's book list 01/09/2011; Steve Kornacki, Let's not make this something it isn't 01/09/2011.

In Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s, anyone who favored racial integration would have been a damned fool not to know who was being targeted by hate propaganda from the White Citizens Council, the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan and its various imitators, the dishonest and hysterical press outlets in the state, and the hardline segregationist politicians like Ross Barnett. And unless they were particularly clueless, they were very much aware that being targeted by such rhetoric could also mean being targeted economically and physically.

So, liberals/progressives/leftists whatever you want to call yourselves, don't stick your heads in the sand or other dark places on this stuff. You don't have to tremble like scared children when some rightwinger slings sleaze at you. But you also don't have live up to the stereotype of liberals that they're so opened-minded that they won't even take their own sides in an argument. When people are calling you traitors and vermin and America-haters and baby-killers and the like, saying, "Gee, let's not jump to conclusions about their intentions" may not be the best advice. Oh, and if you receive actual death threats, make a habit of reporting them to the law.

Here's a couple of more sensible takes on the weekend assassination attack in Tucson. From Dave Neiwert (Yes, Jared Loughner was 'crazy'. That doesn't exculpate the milieu that unhinged him C&L 01/09/2011):

They're all going to say Jared Loughner is crazy -- especially the right-wing hate talkers and Sarah Palin defenders who everybody's looking at right now. And you know what? They're right. But that doesn't mean they're blameless, either.

Mark Potok, Who is Jared Lee Loughner? Hatewatch 01/09/2011):

At this early stage, I think Loughner is probably best described as a mentally ill or unstable person who was influenced by the rhetoric and demonizing propaganda around him. Ideology may not explain why he allegedly killed, but it could help explain how he selected his target. [my emphasis]

It's not surprising that a rightwing favorite like Bernie Goldberg would take the nothing-to-see-here, move-right-along position (The Rush to Blame the Right for Giffords' Shooting AOL News 01/09/2011). But it's not Bernie Goldberg that is being blasted with hateful and often plainly dishonest attacks daily by FOX News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and their less prosperous imitators.

The Republicans are well on the way in their effort to turn the whole country into something closely resembling the Deep South circa 1960, except with the Republicans being the segregationist party in control. How many terrorist attacks and assassinations aimed at liberals and Democratic officials is it going to take for people like Sen. Dick Durbin to stop blowing smoke about the extreme rhetoric on "both sides"?

At this point, for John McCain or any Republican official to condemn violence and individual acts without specifically calling out rightwing hatemongers like Limbaugh and Beck is just hot air. Worse than hot air, it's covering for today's main purveyors of hatred, fear and violence.

And just a reminder: whether he was a nut or not, the shooter in Tucson didn't go after some local dentist he thought was planting radio transmitters in his teeth or the community college employees with whom he had a beef. He gunned down a Democratic Congresswoman who had been prominently attacked by Sarah Palin and Tea Party fanatics and a federal judge, who along with Congresswoman Giffords had been opposed to the racist and xenophobic anti-immigrant movement being promoted by the Republican Party and their various propaganda outlets today. People he perceived as political liberals, in other words.

Tags: domestic terrorism, radical right, terrorism

Tuscon terrorist attack: vague platitudes of regret aren't enough

After Saturday's Tucson terrorist attack on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords took us a bit closer to becoming the Weimar Republic, the Chicago Sun-Times decided to break with one of the brain-dead clichees of recent years and say what is plainly true: that the incitement to violence and the venomous hate rhetoric in American politics is coming almost exclusively from the right (We can't say we weren't warned about Arizona shooting tragedy 01/09/2011):

Only in time will we know if the killer was among those who threatened Giffords with physical harm last year when she voted in favor of President Obama’s health-care reforms. We may never know whether he was the one who shattered the windows of her Tucson office. And it’s entirely possible that he was not among those — the many — who threatened her with death after she spoke out against Arizona’s harsh new immigration law.

But would any intelligent person be surprised to learn otherwise?

The safe observation for us to make now — you will hear it from others all week — is that the angry and irresponsible talk that might lead an unhinged person to pick up a gun is common across the political landscape, from right to left.

But that simply is not true.

Overwhelmingly today, the fear-mongering and demonizing flow from the right, aided and abetted by cable TV and talk-radio hosts. They may represent only the irresponsible fringe of conservatism in America, but they are drowning out the thoughtful voices of the vast majority of conservatives. [my emphasis]

Only in that last bit would I have to disagree with that statement. Today's Republican Party is not "thoughtful". Its leading spokespeople include people like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Its Party TV channel is FOX News, which cranks out fabrications, distortions and shameless fear-mongering constantly. If the Republican Party represents what passes for conservatism in the US today, then conservatism in the US is not speaking with "thoughtful voices."

Presuming there are such "thoughtful voices" in the Republican Party, now would be the time for them to come out publicly and unambiguously against the hate-mongering generated by their own Party and its de facto ideologists like the junkie bigot Rush Limbaugh. Denouncing the shooting itself and not addressing the larger context doesn't cut it. Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik gave an example on Saturday of how it can be done.

But if Republican leaders are serious about dialing this back, they will have to do more than talk in general terms. They will have to name names, including Rush Limbaugh's and Glenn Beck's. And they will have to be specific about condemning things like Sarah Palin's crosshairs map that identified Gabrielle Giffords' district as a target, and which she promoted with slogans like "Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!" McCain biographer Danny Schechter provides screen captures in Breaking: Targeted by Palin, AZ Congresswoman Shot The News Dissector 01/08/2011.

Tags: domestic terrorism, gabrielle giffords, christian terrorism, radical right, republican party