Michael Reagan: ‘Take Them Out And Shoot Them’

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

I have little to no patience with the 9/11 Troofers — I’ve spent too much of my career debunking crazy-ass conspiracy theories not to consider them roughly the left-wing equivalents of the OKC and New World Order conspiracy theorists (and they have their strands of right-wing nuttery thrown in for good measure, like most of these folks) — but earlier this week another right-wing nutcase — radio talk-show host Michael Reagan — went completely ’round the eliminationist bend in attacking them:

There is a group that’s sending letters to our troops in Iraq … claiming 9/11 was an inside job — oh, yeah, yeah — and that they should rethink why they’re fighting. Who — we ought to — excuse me, folks, I’m going to say this: We ought to find the people who are doing this, take them out and shoot them.

Really. Just find the people who are sending those letters to our troops to demoralize our troops and do what they are doing, you take them out, they are traitors to our country, and shoot them. You have a problem with that, deal with it. But anyone who would do that doesn’t deserve to live. You shoot them. You call them traitors — that’s what they are — and you shoot them dead. I’ll pay for the bullet.

Later on, he adds:

How about you take Mark Dice out and put him in the middle of a firing range. Tie him to a post, don’t blindfold him, let it rip and have some fun with Mark Dice.

Just on the face of it, this is vile and threatening speech that should earn Reagan his immediate removal from the airwaves; it clearly violates basic FCC standards. You can complain to the FCC here.*


But there’s a bigger issue at stake. I couldn’t disagree more strongly myself with the targets of Reagan’s eliminationism, but if they are engaging in treasonous communications, well, there are laws against that. If Michael Reagan wants to urge their criminal prosecution, he might be able to make a case for that; but urging people to take the letter-senders out and shoot them is another ball of wax.

Much as we might object to them, they are exercising their basic free-speech rights. Once you start deciding that we should start shooting people because you think they are "traitors" based on free speech we disagree with, then it suddenly becomes a lot easier to expand the definition and start shooting lots more people.

Especially when you start adding into the equation Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter and the rest of the right-wing gang that’s already shown an easy predilection for calling all liberals and antiwar protesters traitors. As Jeff Feldman says: Americans everywhere are tired of this.

We all remember Radio Rwanda, don’t we? Michael Reagan just brought us one step closer. If the public fails to stand up against this kind of violent hate talk, it will become a permission-giving precedent.

*Instructions for filing a complaint at the FCC site:

– Click on the button for "Broadcast (TV and Radio), Cable, and Satellite Issues."

– At the next page, click on the button for "Unauthorized, unfair, biased, illegal broadcasts (does NOT include Obscene, Profane or Indecent material)" [because this complaint involves threatening speech, which is illegal]

– Select whichever form of complaint filing method you prefer on the next page and proceed.

The crazies and Obama

-- by Dave

If there is a President Obama come next Jan. 20, normal folks better brace for what the right-wing crazies have in mind. Because it's becoming clear that they are winding themselves up now for a fresh spate of violence if Obama wins.

You can find the signs in the things they're saying now, both on Internet forums and in the things they say when they think no one is listening. For instance, read some of the details emerging from that militia bust in Pennsylvania that the media have been studiously ignoring. To wit:

Bradley T. Kahle, 60, of Troutville, was one of five people arrested in last weekend's sweep. He told undercover agents he hoped Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama would be killed if they were elected president, and that he would shoot judicial and law enforcement officials if he became terminally ill, according to an affidavit of probable cause made public Tuesday.

"Kahle said words to the effect of, that 'if Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama, get elected, hopefully they will get assassinated, if not they will disarm the country and we will have a civil war,'" the affidavit stated.

The same man also told authorities he planned to visit Pittsburgh so he could get on top of a high rise and start shooting black people. And of course, the judge let him go on bail. Would I be crazy to suspect that if he were a Muslim talking about shooting white people from a high rise and hoping John McCain would get killed, no judge on earth would let him go?

In any event, a pattern is already developing, ranging from the Klan fellows who promise that Obama will be shot to the white supremacists who are actually rooting for him to win because they're certain he will fail. We're hearing a lot of language from the racist and "Patriot" right indicating that they expect a Democratic president to enact policies (particularly regarding gun control) that will inspire "civil war." Which means they are looking for excuses to act out.

As always with these folks, there's a lot of projection going on here. Because even if a President Obama follows only the most moderate of liberal agendas, the far right will look upon those policies as cause for "civil war." That was how they responded to Bill Clinton, after all -- a white male Southerner with generally conservative leanings. One can only imagine how a liberal black man from Illinois would fare.

The extremist right went into remission, largely, with the election of George W. Bush; militias disbanded because their followers believed the threat of an oppressive, gun-grabbing, baby-killing "New World Order" had largely passed. They bided their time by forming Minutemen brigades. Now they can see that their "safe" era is coming to an end.

All this time, there really has been hankering for an excuse to start acting out violently, and they see any Democratic presidency as providing that excuse. But an Obama presidency in particular will do so.

Pining for that 'Old America'

-- by Dave

So I see that Peggy Noonan is harkening us back to the days of "Old America" -- as a way of contrasting that heathen Barack Obama with the noble John McCain.

But if McCain represents "Old America" of the Magic Dolphin Lady's fevered imagination -- that nonexisent golden yesteryear of right-wing myth -- then he must logically also symbolize the "Old America" of historical reality:




















I'm not so sure that Noonan isn't pining for this 'Old America' too.

Wingnut E-mails Smear Obama As A Racist — By Quoting A Racist

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

We’ve all gotten those vile right-wing e-mail forwards — usually from that right-wing brother-in-law or cranky uncle — which, it turns out, is one of the right’s more effective under-the-radar techniques for spreading smears and various falsehoods about their liberal targets, since it’s so devoid of any kind of accountability.

So the most recent iteration making the rounds is probably one you’ve seen: Featuring various "real quotes" from Barack Obama, it pretends to demonstrate to the reader what an anti-white racist and radical he really is. (Maybe this is meant to eventually tie into the Obama-equals-Hitler meme.) It is, of course, complete horseshit.

Snopes has posted a pretty thorough debunking that makes clear how the quotes in question are either grotesquely twisted out of proportion, are jammed-up misquotes, or outright fabrications. One fake "quote" in particular stands out:

I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother’s race.

As Snopes notes, "no such sentence (nor anything close to it) appears anywhere in either Dreams from My Father or The Audacity of Hope." Nor can anything like it be found in any speech or article by him. Never said it, and he never would.

So who did say it?

The "quote" is actually taken (and slightly edited) from a line in a March 2007 American Conservative magazine article about Barack Obama:

In reality, Obama provides a disturbing test of the best-case scenario of whether America can indeed move beyond race. He inherited his father’s penetrating intelligence; was raised mostly by his loving liberal white grandparents in multiracial, laid-back Hawaii, where America’s normal race rules never applied; and received a superb private school education. And yet, at least through age 33 when he wrote Dreams from My Father, he found solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against his mother’s race.

The author of the article in question?

Why, our old friend Steve Sailer, who has been peddling this schtick about Obama — making his presidential candidacy into nothing but a referendum on race, and insisting that Obama reflects a malignant "foreign" influence — for a good long while. Remember when he called Obama a "wigger"?

And he’s been peddling racially incendiary horseshit for even longer. Both the folks at Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting and Media Matters have the complete rundown. He’s a racist, a white supremacist in pseudo-academic clothing. And his words, his depiction of Obama, are being promoted around the Intertoobs as being Obama’s own words.

Chutzpah doesn’t begin to describe it.

Incidentally, it’s worth recalling that Sailer’s American Conservative article was the very piece that inspired Alexander Konetzki to leave that rag. What he said about it at the time:

I realized that, in addition to the racist associations he employs, Sailer frequently quotes Obama out of context and makes assertions about Obama’s racial identity that the book flatly contradicts.

Sailer is, to put it nicely, dishonest — something he’s long been noted for.

Also worth noting is the oh-so-very-special quote at the end of the compilation in the e-mail smear that the writer urges readers to pay special attention to:

I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.

Well, here’s the entire passage:

In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging. They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific reassurances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.

Maybe Steve Sailer wouldn’t, but — knowing the deep history of that episode well — I for one would be proud to stand with Obama. And most of the "real Americans" I know would too.

[Hat tips to lokywocky and Smgumby.]

UPDATE: Obama now has a site dedicated to addressing the smears.

The haters root for Obama -- to fail

-- by Dave

According to Mark Potok at Hatewatch, the country's white supremacists are actually looking forward to the prospect of Barack Obama winning the presidency -- but only because they're certain he will fail:

It’s not that the assortment of neo-Nazis, Klansmen, anti-Semites and others who make up this country’s radical right have suddenly discovered that a man should be judged based on the content of his character, not his skin. On the contrary. A growing number of white supremacists, and even some of those who pass for intellectual leaders of their movement, think that a black man in the Oval Office would shock white America, possibly drive millions to their cause, and perhaps even set off a race war that, they hope, would ultimately end in Aryan victory.

“He will make things so bad for white people that hopefully they will finally realize how stupid they were for admiring these jigaboos all these years,” “Darthvader” wrote on the neo-Nazi Vanguard News Network web forum. “I believe in the motto ‘Worse is Better’ and Obama certainly fits that description.” Just last week, Ron Doggett, a Virginian who has been a key activist in the Klan, the paramilitary White People’s Party and the neo-Nazi National Alliance, chimed in with this: “I hope Obama wins because in four years, white people just might be pissed off enough to actually do something. … White people aren’t going to do a thing until their toys are taken away from them. So things have to be worse for things to be better.”

“Oh man,” enthused “Centimanus” on the white nationalist Stormfront website. “I am gleefully, sadistically looking forward to Obama as president. … It will be a beautiful day when the masses look at the paper and truly realize they have lost their own country. Added “Fulimnata”: “To the average white man and woman, they could look at Obama and see plain as day that whites are not in control.” Another message, from “TheLastOfMyKind,” agreed: “Could it be that the nomination of Obama finally sparks a sense of unity in white voters? I would propose that this threat of black, muslim [sic] rule may very well be the thing that finally scares some sense back into complacent whites throughout the nation.” “Actually,” said another poster, “if Obama were to win, it would be the best thing that ever happened to the Klan. They would have massive growth.” And “TeutonicLegion” said that “a whole bunch of people will join us and find these boards” if Obama becomes president.

Strangely (well, perhaps not that strangely), this is remarkably similar to the line of thinking promoted a couple of months ago by NRO's John Derbyshire, when he urged readers to "Imagine an Obama presidency overwhelmed and floundering" and predicted: "Nonblacks will flee from the Democrats in droves, though. A Republican landslide in the 2010 midterms (think 1994); a clear GOP victory in 2012 (think 1980)."

Of course, none of them seem to have considered the prospect of what will happen if an Obama presidency succeeds -- which, I guess, should be expected, considering their blind spots. Especially the ramifications for improving black-white race relations and the succeeding diminution of old-style white supremacy and its irrational, obsessive hatefulness.

But believe me, a lot of us have.

Of course, it's easy to dismiss such "analysis" as mere racist ranting, but there's also a significant element of self-fulfilling prophecy to the vitriol. That is, these folks have every intent of doing their damnedest to see find a way to make Obama's presidency fail.

If you thought the far right went nuts in the 1990s -- when the Democratic president was a white Southern male -- just wait till there's a President Obama. Progressives should be bracing for it.

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

The Media Don’t Care About The Other Kind Of Terrorists

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

Our ever-astute friends in the mainstream media have apparently identified the latest terrorist threat: Barack and Michelle Obama and assorted other "jabbers".

Meanwhile, when a group of actual terrorists is arrested as they prepare to strike in the American heartland … well, the media mostly snooze.

But as usual, it may have something to do with the fact that they were the wrong color:

Marvin Hall of Rimersburg, Perry Landis of the Clarion area, Morgan Jones of Lucinda, as well as Melissa Huet are in custody.

Investigators say they were stockpiling a cache of weapons with plans to target local government buildings.

The FBI, in raids over the weekend, confiscated hundreds of weapons – including everything from hunting rifles, homemade bombs, rudimentary rockets and cannons.

Sources tell KDKA’s Marty Griffin the suspects made threats to blow up government buildings and carry out other extreme acts of domestic terrorism.

Imagine, if you will, how this would have been handled were these folks of Arab extraction or believers in radical Islamist ideology instead of your garden-variety far-right American ideology.

CNN would have the cameras and reporters there, NBC would host an hour discussing the threat, and Michelle Malkin and Little Green Footballs’ Chuck Johnson would bouncing around the walls of their rubber rooms even more frenetically than usual amid shouts of "Jihad!!!!"


Some of the worst damage inflicted by the events of 9/11 was the wreckage to the public’s already limited understanding of the nature of terrorism. Because ever since then, terrorism has been about Scary Brown Foreign People — despite the fact that the vast, vast majority of terrorist attacks planned and carried out on American soil are by white Americans.

Oklahoma City was virtually erased from the public consciousness as an act of terrorism. Since 9/11 — in addition to the anthrax killer, who promptly vanished from public consciousness once it was determined the perpetrator was a domestic terrorist — we’ve had people arrested for planning cyanide bomb attacks, destroying abortion clinics, plotting the deaths of liberal leaders, and a variety of other would-be terrorist plots. And they received ZERO attention from the national press and the cable-TV talkers.

As I’ve explained previously, the most important aspect of terrorism is the asymmetrical nature of the threat: very small numbers of people are now capable of inflicting significant damage and incurring massive loss of life against targets that in most regards are well defended. And white Americans just as easily fit the profile.

It’s true that, generally speaking, domestic terrorists are neither as competent nor as likely to pose a major threat as most international terrorists, particularly Al Qaeda. And the belief systems that feed the domestic terrorists have not become pervasive in popular Western culture the way Al Qaeda and Wahhabism generally have insinuated themselves in the Islamic world (though there has been an increasing blurring of the lines between the mainstream and extremist right in recent years).

Nonetheless, given the right actors, the right weapons, and the right circumstances, they remain nearly as capable of inflicting serious harm on large numbers of citizens as their foreign counterparts. This is especially true because they are less likely to arouse suspicion and can more readily blend into the scenery.

Most of all, what they lack in smarts or skill, they make up for in numbers: Since the early 1990s, the vast majority of planned terrorist acts on American soil — both those that were successfully perpetrated and those apprehended beforehand — have involved white right-wing extremists.

Between 1995 and 2000, over 42 such cases (some, like Eric Rudolph, involving multiple crimes) were identifiable from public records. Some of these were potentially quite lethal, such as a planned attack on a propane facility near Sacramento that, had it been successful, would have killed several thousand people living in its vicinity. William Krar’s cyanide bomb could have killed hundreds. Fortunately, none of these plotters have proven to be very competent.

Annually, right-wing extremists within our borders are responsible for a siezeable number of crimes. These range, as Mark Pitcavage of the ADL points out, from "bombings and bombing plots to assassination plots and murders to weapons and explosives violations to hate crimes to massive frauds and scams (amounting in some cases in the hundreds of millions of dollars) to the myriad of lesser crimes." Even if you totaled up several years’ worth of criminal activity related to Islamic extremism, it would fail to come close to the levels produced by our own homegrown terrorists.

But of course, reportage like that doesn’t do much for your ratings. It’s much more important to repeat favored and established media narratives than to actually inform the public — because doing the latter just isn’t as profitable. Or easy.

My kind of luck

-- by Dave

Apropos of absolutely nothing. I just saw this on the bulletin board at the local park the other day and, well, thought I would share.

When everyone is packing heat

-- by Dave

I was raised in an NRA household. My dad is an amateur gunsmith; he's very good at fixing the arcane and often delicate machinery of firearms, and is a real problem-solver -- so much so that I recall the local gunsmith begging him for help with special problems. I used to help him in his shop, watching and learning -- loading ammo, fixing rifles, carving stocks.

So I'm reasonably comfortable around guns, though I only own a couple of memento pieces. What I'm not comfortable around are the people who make fetishes out of the damned things.

This weekend's LA Times piece about people advocating the open carry of firearms really made me squirm -- with dread, mostly.

The Jensens are part of a fledgling movement to make a firearm as common an accessory as an iPod. Called "open carry" by its supporters, the movement has attracted grandparents, graduate students and lifelong gun enthusiasts like the Jensens.

"What we're trying to say is, 'Hey, we're normal people who carry guns,' " said Travis Deveraux, 36, of West Valley, a Salt Lake City suburb. Deveraux works for a credit card company and sometimes walks around town wearing a cowboy hat and packing a pistol in plain sight. "We want the public to understand it's not just cops who can carry guns."

You hear a lot of this kind of nonsense from the gun lobby whenever there is some kind of horrendous massacre involving guns: "Oh, if only the victims had been allowed to carry guns openly, somebody could have stopped this from happening."

Besides having watched too many bad action movies to understand the realities of gunplay, none of these geniuses seem to have stopped to think about what a culture in which people openly and casually carry guns would look like. Every interpersonal conflict would take on life-and-death dimensions because of the constancy of the implicit threat of guns becoming part of the human equation. If you think we're paranoid now, just wait.

The press can't hear those dog whistles

-- by Dave

Yesterday the Los Angeles Times ran a story about Floyd Brown's plans to use racially incendiary ads against Barack Obama in the upcoming campaign with the headline "Opening shot in the battle over crime."

Now, did you know that crime was going to be a major electoral issue this year? Me neither. In fact, with violent crime rates continuing to reach record lows, the issue hasn't exactly been burning up the front pages or the wires.

Of course, "crime" is also one of those code words for "black thuggery" that has been used by racists and white supremacists since the 1960s as a way of scaring insecure white men with guns and their insecure housewives.

Indeed, the LAT headline should have read "... in the battle over scary black people". Its story was about the ads that Brown has already field-tested in North Carolina, as we noted at the time:

The new ad recounts the deaths of three Chicago residents in 2001 at the hands of criminal gangs. "That same year, a Chicago state senator named Barack Obama voted against expanding the death penalty for gang-related murders," an ominous female narrator intones. "So the question is, can a man so weak in the war on gangs be trusted in the war on terror?"

The story does discuss the fact that Brown was responsible for the 1988 anti-Dukakis "Willie Horton" ad, which made the same sort of dog-whistle racial appeal, a well-known component of classic race-baiting. But you won't find a word discussing the fact that these current ads are every bit as racially incendiary as the Horton ad, especially considering that Obama himself is a black man.

Neither, we might add, does the story mention that Brown's outfit, ExposeObama, is being run by a scam artist with a long history of involvement with far-far right tax-fraud schemes.

This is, frankly, a disturbing trend. We know that Republicans are going to try to make race a major issue in the coming campaign, and we know that their favorite tactic is going to be engaging in dog-whistle politics that employ coded but clear racial appeals without being explicit about the matter. Indeed, they already have been warming up for awhile.

The only way that it will work, however, is if the press continues to pretend that it can't hear the whistle -- and that the people doing it are legitimate political operatives, when in fact they're fringe nutcases who the GOP is letting do their dirty work, as always.

So far, they're doing a splendid job of that.