Orcinus

The Pontifex Maximus and His Lawyer: Glenn Greenwald and his strange far-right blind spot

2019-05-20T16:42:00.001-07:00

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[Cross-posted at Daily Kos.]

You may be like me, confused about how nationally known pundits who label themselves “progressives” can go on Fox News and encourage Tucker Carlson in his attacks on liberal Democrats. Or how they can tell their readers that the threat of white nationalism and its violence is “nonexistent,” or that calling attention to the threat of hate groups and neo-Nazis is exactly like the neocons blaming all of Islam for 9/11.

But this has been happening with increasing regularity within a certain faction of “progressive” journalists who, as it happens, are also convinced that Russian interference in the 2016 election is a complete non-story—particularly Glenn Greenwald and Michael Tracey.

Over the weekend, Tracey tweeted out his view that the threat from white nationalism is “nonexistent” and that liberals were being politically overwhelmed by the hysteria of it all:

I replied with an extended thread pointing out the many acts of white-nationalist terrorism before and after Charlottesville, more than enough evidence that the violent hate being stirred into action by the new generation of young fascists is a serious problem that deserves our full attention. We are being inundated in a disturbingly large wave of hate crimes, against an increasing range of victims. We’re even seeing assassination attempts being made by far-right ideologues who believe they are doing the bidding of the authoritarian figure they worship—namely, Donald Trump.

These trends are not contained just to the United States, of course. From Norway in 2011 to Christchurch in 2019, the problem of rising fascist authoritarianism and its attendant violence has become a global one. We’ve seen authoritarian regimes take power in Hungary, in Turkey, in the Phillipines, and the results have all been predictably brutal and frightening for anyone who believes in open democracies.

One of the worst examples of this, of course, is in Brazil, where the ascendance of the proto-fascist authoritarian Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency has been accompanied by assassinations of his opponents and a surging tide of hate crimes that has resulted in hundreds of deaths and thousands of assaults targeting the LGBT community—mirroring, perhaps on a more intense scale, what we are seeing in the United States. (Certainly Bolsonaro is more openly fascist and thuggish than Trump.)

So when Greenwald, who lives in Brazil and is highly active against Bolsonaro and his regime, published a tweet describing the kind of fear and loathing that exists within the LGBT community in Rio because of the regime, I politely reminded him that, while many communities (including the immigrant and Muslim, as well as LGBT) in the United States are under a similar cloud of fear, especially amid the current rising tide of hate crimes, people like Tracey—who Greenwald frequently promotes in his Twitter feed—were actively hurting our efforts to combat the problem by dismissing it as “nonexistent”: they “want to tell us that having white nationalists killing people in acts of targeted terrorism in our streets and houses of worship is just a figment of our overactive liberal imaginations.”

Greenwald—who apparently has a different interpretation of “nonexistent” than I do—responded that Tracey was saying “no such thing,” rather, that he was “saying it's important to keep the threat in perspective & not be alarmist about it so politicians can't exploit it.” We went to and fro, with me pointing out that “alarmist” is a label that could just as easily—and just as unjustifiably—be plastered on him as on me. And that I’ve been documenting the rise of this problem for years, which he full well knows.

I also pointed out that, in the not terribly distant past, he has himself been an enabler of fascist movements, much as Tracey is being now. So he dismissed me as a liar.

Well, here are the receipts. It’s a little story I call “The Little Pontifex Maximus Who Wanted to Make America White Again and His Lawyer.”

Ben Klassen

It all kind of begins in 1956, when a man named Ben Klassen invented an early version of an electric can opener and patented the device. Klassen was a tinkerer who had made a killing in real estate; he was one of the cofounders of Silver Springs, NV, and had walked away with a bundle. Klassen’s invention was a wall-mounted design, and he made another bundle off his patent for the first few years, mostly in industrial use. However, other designs that were cheaper, more portable and applicable to household appliances came along. By 1962 he had closed shop.

Having made a couple of small fortunes (mostly in real estate), Klassen decided to become a politician. A longtime member of the John Birch Society, he ran for the Florida House from his home in Broward County 1966 and won on an anti-busing, anti-government platform. He only served one term. Klassen also headed up a local group supporting George Wallace’s presidential candidacy.

After losing his seat in 1968, Klassen decided the Republicans and Democrats were too corrupted by Jews and founded his own party, the Nationalist White Party, in 1970. The NWP was aimed at recruiting white Christians: “We believe that the White Race was created in the Image of the Lord...” was No. 1 on the party’s official 14-point program. But it fell apart quickly when Klassen began expressing doubts about Christianity.

Klassen explained his apostacy in later books.

His main concern (elucidated at length in later works) was that Jesus was a Jew and the entire Christian faith was thus the tainted offspring of Judaism. Klassen regarded the Jews as children of Satan and believed no worthwhile religion could come from them. So he decided to found an entirely new religion, separate from Christianity and Judaism, predicated essentially on the worship of whiteness. He called it Creativity, and his organization the Church of the Creator.

Klassen’s first book, Nature’s Eternal Religion, explains the theology (such as it is) in detail: White people are the obvious cream of God’s creation, and as such should be held as the repositories of God’s Will, the holders of all religious, political and economic power. It’s also incredibly crude and vile, essentially third-grade-level racism expressed with sixth-grade-level intelligence. Klassen insisted on the persistent use of degrading stereotypes and epithets regarding all nonwhites and Jews. He reveled in it.

Klassen moved to rural North Carolina and set up his church operations near the rural town of Otto in 1982. He continued to churn out texts, notably The White Man’s Bible—a sort of refined version of the earlier texts—and an autobiography, Against the Evil Tide.

Here are some more prime pages from these texts. As I said, this is some of the most vile and hate-filled white supremacist propaganda you’ll find anywhere. The David Dukes and Richard Spencers are sagacious compared to Klassen. Klassen’s one major contribution to white supremacism was coining the war cry “RaHoWa!”, which is a shortened version of his core credo, “Racial Holy War.”

The Church of the Creator didn’t attract a large following, but those who did join were fairly predictable as far as white-supremacist groups go: Vicious, violent, thuggish, and not terribly bright. If anything, they seemed to attract a particularly cretinous stripe of hater, many of them criminals. Over the years they collected a very extensive track record.

George Loeb

One particular case brought real strife to Klassen: the 1991 shooting of a black man in Florida named Harold Mansfield by a Church of the Creator acolyte named George Loeb. The victim’s family took Klassen to court.

Fearing the lawsuit might result in him having to hand over his church and property to a black family, Klassen in 1992 sold it at a steep discount to William Pierce, leader of the infamous National Alliance hate group and author of The Turner Diaries.

Klassen by now was rather elderly, and there was already a scramble within the COTC membership for church leadership after his departure from the role of Pontifex Maximus. In 1990, Klassen had announced he would turn the job over to one Rev. Rudy Stanko.

Based in Billings, Montana, Stanko was a “deacon” in COTC. He was a former cattleman who had been sent to prison for selling tainted meat to Montana schoolchildren. It was during that prison stint that he was converted to the faith, such as it was. Upon his release, Stanko returned to Billings in the late ‘80s and began proselytizing on behalf of the COTC and formed a relatively active “church” there. He also penned a book titled The Score, an anti-Semitic screed that blamed Jews for his imprisonment.

Klassen adopted Stanko’s cause and promoted his work at the Creativity newsletter. Eventually, this led to Klassen anointing him his successor. Stanko, however, let his imminent Maximushood go to his head. Before the change had been made official, he began announcing his plans to move the church headquarters out to Montana. This did not sit well with Klassen, who wanted to keep the church in the South.

Klassen's Creativity church in South Carolina

So Klassen cancelled Stanko’s ceremonial anointment announced that he was changing the successorship, handing the title of next Pontifex Maximus to a pizza delivery man from Baltimore named Charles Altvater, who was later arrested for attempting to firebomb a cop’s car.

Klassen by then had already changed his mind again, and instead named a Milwaukee man named Mark Wilson as the successor. That lasted a few months before finally settling on a man named Rick McCarty. Upon being named leader, he moved COTC back to Florida.

Church members were continuing to commit violent hate crimes, in ways indicating its spread nationally. In the Pacific Northwest, a couple of young COTC members bombed NAACP offices in Tacoma and a Seattle gay bar in July 1993. Two more COTC members, Geremy von Rineman and his girlfriend Jill Scarborough, were part of a group of neo-Nazis charged in Los Angeles with plotting to bomb the city’s largest black church, also in July 1993.

Apparently depressed by his wife’s recent death from cancer, and the looming likelihood that his church was about to be sued out of existence by the SPLC, working with the victims of COTC hate crimes, Klassen committed suicide on Aug. 7, 1993, with sleeping pills.

His worst fears shortly came true. Representing the family of Harold Mansfield, George Loeb’s victim, the SPLC took Rick McCarty and COTC to court in 1994 and won handily, with McCarty not contesting. It won a $1 million judgment and seized all of its assets.

Seizing the opportunity, a 20-year-old white supremacist from Peoria, Ill., named Matthew Hale announced he was dissolving the organization he headed, the National Socialist White Americans Party, and reforming it as a religion: the World Church of the Creator. The remaining Creativity true believers all quickly lined up behind him. This included Rudy Stanko, who still had a fairly active Creativity church group spread throughout Montana. He also had come into possession of most of the stock of Klassen’s library of books.

This is when I became more intimately familiar with the “Creativity” religion, due mainly to the recurring criminality emanating from its ranks in the Pacific Northwest, and in Montana particularly. At the time, I was reporting on the activities of the Militia of Montana and the Montana Freemen (I met my wife while working in Missoula and still have family scattered around the state). Stanko’s little congregation of haters, true to form, had been committing hate crimes in the Billings area: Defacing a Native American home, entering a black church during worship and threatening congregants, knocking over markers in a Jewish cemetery.

Things came to a head around the holidays in 1993, when someone threw a rock through the window of a 6-year-old Billings boy who had placed a Menorah in his window. The faith community, outraged, organized a public response in which everyone in town put Menorahs up. The response led to a PBS documentary titled Not In Our Town, the making of which itself led to the formation of a national organization with that name, devoted to enabling communities to stand up to hate groups and their toxic effects. They do great work to this day.

Stanko’s group became more muted in their activities, though they were known for going around and leaving copies of Klassen’s vile books on people’s doorsteps, apparently as a kind of proselytizing. The Montana Human Rights Network collected most of these.

Even though his operations were based in Illinois, the WCOTC held its annual national convention in the western Montana town of Superior every year, likely due to the prevalence of Montanans in the church’s membership. Matt Hale appeared to enjoy the annual trips.

Back in Illinois, Hale had gone to law school at Southern Illinois and obtained a degree and passed the bar, intent on using it on behalf of his ‘religion.’ However, the Illinois Bar had other ideas: A special panel refused to admit him, denying him a license. So he sued.

Hale’s case attracted media attention. He began hiring lawyers to assist him in his legal battle – notably, he seemed to have a thing about hiring _Jewish_ lawyers specifically. The first attorney he hired was none other than Alan Dershowitz. However, Hale soon discovered that Dershowitz’s fees were extraordinarily high, so he dropped him and turned to the services of another Jewish attorney, Robert Herman of the St. Louis firm Schwartz, Herman and Davidson.

Eventually he hired a young hotshot Jewish lawyer from New York to spearhead his legal challenge. Hale liked to trot this young man out for the press as proof (for dumb reporters who hadn’t bothered to crack open a Klassen text) he didn’t hate Jews. His name was Glenn Greenwald.

Yes, that Glenn Greenwald. As most of us know now, Greenwald has a long track record of defending the civil liberties of even the most questionable of cases, and they frankly didn’t come much more questionable than Matt Hale. In any event, this case launched his legal career, and probably ended it too. Greenwald never practiced law afterwards.

From a purely abstract and legalistic standpoint, it’s possible to make a case, as Greenwald has, for a Jewish attorney to defend the civil rights of a militaristic anti-Semite and neo-Nazi. And from the first news story I read about his involvement, I understood this. The ethical case, however, is not so clear. After all, Hale’s group was primarily engaged in the business of depriving minorities—particularly blacks and Jews—of their civil rights through hate crimes, threats, and intimidation. They saw spreading such hate as one of their own rights.

So, from where I sat in Montana, spending time with the frightened victims of WCOTC thugs, someone who was defending their ability to use the levers of the legal system essentially was enabling their “right” to deprive other people, vulnerable people, of theirs. More to the point, in a world in which there are myriad opportunities to defend genuinely needy, innocent people being wrongly deprived of their civil and free-speech rights, I struggled to understand why any humane and capable attorney would devote their efforts to defending neo-Nazis’ rights.

The most disturbing aspect of Greenwald’s advocacy on Hale’s behalf, however, involved the viciousness with which he attacked Hale’s critics, as well as the strange and frankly dishonest twists of logic and rhetoric he deployed. It went well beyond the usual legal advocacy, as we’ll see.

Hale’s legal case wound through the state bar’s appeals process. He had two more hearings before the bar. On June 30, the second and final appeal was rejected. Hale had also looked into getting a license through the Montana bar but couldn’t. He was out of luck.

Benjamin Smith

Two days later, July 2, his longtime second-in-command—a hotheaded young man named Benjamin Smith, 21, whom Hale had recently named “Creator of the Month”—went on a killing rampage targeting minorities wherever he could find them.

He first took drive-by shots at Orthodox Jews in Chicago’s West Rogers Park neighborhood, wounding nine. Next he drove to Skokie, where he encountered a black man walking with two of his children outside his home. The man, as it happened, was former Northwestern University basketball coach Ricky Birdsong. Smith shot and killed him in front of his children.

Smith drove away from Skokie and headed to Northbrook, where he shot at an Asian-American couple but missed. On July 3, he drove through Urbana, Springfield, and Decatur, shooting and wounding two more black men and an Asian man. In Bloomington, Ind., he murdered Won-Joon Yoon, a 26-year-old Korean Indian University student as he walked into his church. Smith also shot at but missed about nine other people. Police soon tracked him down back in Illinois on July 4. After a high-speed chase, he shot himself in the head and crashed his car into a metal pole. Still alive, he shot himself once more in the chest, finishing the job.

In Evanston that week, a public memorial provided an opportunity for all of the victims of Smith’s rampage to mourn. There is an annual race held to this day in Evanston in Ricky Byrdsong’s memory.

A few months later, the Center for Constitutional Rights led a lawsuit filed on behalf of the victims against Matt Hale and WCOTC. Here are excerpts from the original story published in the April 6, 2000, edition of American Lawyer:

Elevating the profile of last July's racially-motivated shooting spree to still a higher level, the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights has filed suit against the white supremacist group it claims is responsible for the two-state tear that left two dead and nine wounded.

In a federal lawsuit filed here Tuesday, lawyers for a Decatur pastor wounded during the spree allege World Church of the Creator leader Matthew F. Hale not only encouraged, but conspired with shooter Benjamin Nathaniel Smith to "commit wholesale acts of genocidal violence in furtherance of their self-proclaimed 'racial holy war' against any and all African-Americans, Jews, Asians and other ethnic groups."

…

This is the second such suit filed against Hale, an Illinois bar applicant who has been denied a law license on moral fitness grounds.

Indeed the Center's suit appears to link Hale's rejection into the bar to Smith's "rampage." In late June, the state bar's Committee on Character and Fitness again denied Hale's petition to join the bar. Smith, who had testified as a character witness for Hale that April, began shooting two days later. "Immediately after the Illinois State Bar's decision and as part of the World Church of the Creator's war, Smith ... began a rampage of genocidal violence," the lawsuit states.

And while Hale himself has linked the shootings to his bar application in the past, he said Tuesday that it's ridiculous to think he had any control over Smith.

"Certainly I had a lot of contact with Ben Smith, I never denied that for one minute," Hale said. "If every lawyer who knows someone who commits a crime is a conspirator, the legal profession would cease to exist."

Hale's lawyer, New York attorney Glenn Greenwald, took a similar tact in responding to the suit.

"It's all just guilt by association," said Greenwald, who isn't sure yet whether he will be representing Hale on this latest federal action.

He did, however, seem interested in taking the case on. He compared it to the first suit, which alleged Hale ordered Smith to target minorities.

"All they can say Matt Hale did is express the view that Jews and blacks are inferior,” he said. "There's just no question that expressing those views is a core First Amendment activity."

Further, Greenwald said, "I find that the people behind these lawsuits are truly so odious and repugnant, that creates its own motivation for me."

Take note of Greenwald’s comments. It’s common to see some hyperbole on a defendant’s behalf in such cases. What’s not common is talk like this: "I find that the people behind these lawsuits are truly so odious and repugnant, that creates its own motivation for me." (Also, note how Greenwald bandies the phrase “guilt by association” to describe Matt Hale’s culpability in the rampage. Many of Glenn’s critics would become accustomed to hearing the same phrase, abused in exactly the same fashion, in the years ahead.)

He was also interviewed for an August 2000 Los Angeles Times piece describing how civil-rights groups were using civil courts to bankrupt hate groups. Greenwald was quoted thus:

"Nobody has found a shred of evidence that Matt Hale even knew about the crimes, let alone participated in them," said his lawyer, Glenn Greenwald. Civil rights groups "have said their intent . . . is to bankrupt these hate groups by forcing them to put their resources into litigation so they don't have any money for anything else, which I think . . . is an abuse of the court system."

"By suing us, they demonstrate the correctness of our cause," Hale added. "They're demonstrating how desperate they are to stop us."

Yes, for some reason, survivors of a shooting and families of the victims do, indeed, become desperate to stop neo-Nazis replicating their murderous rampages.

Moreover, there are a number of noteworthy issues here regarding Greenwald’s truthfulness. First, in fact, it shortly emerged that not only had Hale just given Smith his group’s top award, he had spent 16 hours on the phone with Smith in the two weeks before the rampage.

Even more significant is Greenwald’s view that the standard tactics used by the SPLC and other civil-rights groups to bankrupt hate groups that actively deprive minorities of their civil rights (both via advocacy and action) via the civil process is “an abuse of the courts.”

In his subsequent attempts to help Hale get his law license, Greenwald’s rhetoric was similarly over the top, as in this lawsuit before the Illinois Supreme Court in 2001 (which, unsurprisingly, failed badly):

The denial of Matthew Hale's application to practice law in the State of Illinois embodies the most egregious -- and most dangerous -- constitutional abuses which have, again and again, been resoundingly declared by courts in this Nation to be patently unlawful. In sum, Hale, a well-known and vigorous advocate of racist and anti-Semitic ideas, was barred from the legal profession and denied his livelihood because the individuals sitting on the Committee of Character and Fitness for the State of Illinois happened to disagree -- strongly -- with Hale's political and religious views. To describe the denial of Hale's application to practice law, then, is to illustrate the profound dangers it poses to the most basic and valued liberties guaranteed to all citizens by the United States Constitution.

Eventually, Greenwald ran afoul of the courts on ethical grounds, when he recorded interviews with witnesses in the lawsuit brought by one of Ben Smith’s victims without their knowledge or permission. The magistrate judge granted both motions, finding defense counsel's conduct unethical under two separate rules: Local Rule 83.58.4(a)(4), prohibiting ‘dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation;’ and Local Rule 83.54.4, stating ‘a lawyer shall not ... use methods of obtaining evidence that violate the legal rights of [another] person.’”

Hale explicitly depicted Smith’s “free speech martyrdom” as a good thing. Indeed, here’s how Matt Hale was quoted in a July 2000 Peoria Journal Star article examining the effects of Smith’s murder spree, headlined “Hate Changing Us in Good, Bad Ways.”

The past year has been a roller coaster ride for Matt Hale.

Hale, 28, has found himself known worldwide. His organization, the World Church of the Creator, couldn't have asked for better publicity than what it got after Smith's shooting spree, which ended in Smith's suicide.

"It's what Ben would have wanted," Hale said from his East Peoria home, which also doubles as his group's headquarters.

While refusing to disclose numbers, Hale said the World Church has grown greatly, and he credits the media with spreading the word.

An Oak Park-based watchdog group, the Center for New Community, issued a report last week saying the group has gained about 100 members since last year. Still, that puts the World Church at only about 300 members - far less than the numbers hinted at by Hale.

Hale failed in his attempts to get a law license - a matter he says probably played a role in one-time Morton resident Smith's decision to begin his killing spree.

For Hale, the immediate legacy is that he, an unlicensed attorney, finds himself the defendant of several lawsuits brought by the victims' families. A little-known group in Oregon even filed suit against Hale and his World Church, alleging Hale's group stole their name and tarnished it.

All the work and talk by religious groups, Hale says, hasn't done anything to change the climate of tolerance in Peoria.

"I think these so-called plans and programs are a joke," he said. "When people say we are combating racism, that's a crock - everywhere I go, I see racism."

Any discussion of race or hatred must involve him, Hale maintains, since his religion is based upon the notion that whites are superior to all other races or religions.

"Until they invite me to the table, we have a monologue, not a dialogue," he states flatly.

Judge Joan H. Lefkow

As the story notes, an Oregon church called Te-Te-Ma Truth Foundation, based in Ashland, which had some years before copyrighted the named Church of the Creator for their multiple congregations, sued Hale’s organization in federal court for trademark violation. Hale initially won that lawsuit: District Judge Joan H. Lefkow dismissed the trademark case in 2002. However, an appeals court reversed her decision, forcing her to order Hale to remove the World Church’s name from its websites and literature.

Judge Lefkow then became the early victim of what we now think of as a “troll storm,” but in this event by rabid neo-Nazis around the country. White supremacist radio host Hal Turner said she was “worthy of being killed” … “it wouldn't be legal, but in my opinion it wouldn't be wrong." Photos of her home were posted on the web.

The whole enterprise blew up for good on January 8, 2003, when Matt Hale was arrested for conspiring to murder Judge Lefkow. An informant had assembled a collection of video and audio evidence showing him doing exactly that. He was convicted in April 2004.

While Hale was awaiting sentencing, on Feb. 28, 2005, a man entered Judge Lefkow’s home and murdered her mother and her husband. Initially assumed to be related to the Hale case, it turned out to be a man angry over another case.

Hale’s allies on the Web and elsewhere celebrated. “I can barely contain my glee,” one of them wrote.

Matthew Hale was handed a 40-year prison sentence a few weeks later. The judge called it an “extreme, egregious attack on the rule of law.” Hale called it “a horrible miscarriage of justice.” Greenwald concurred, telling the New York Times that Hale had been “wrongly imprisoned.” The interview occurred when it emerged that Hale had attempted to send a coded message of some kind through Greenwald via his mother. He denied he had delivered it.

The Church of the Creator promptly fell into complete disarray. In Montana, one key member who happened to have possession of the stock of Klassen books that Rudy Stanko had originally obtained decided to defect. He sold them all, $41,000 worth, to the Montana Human Rights Network for $300. As often happens with such orgs when they begin to decay, the WCOTC continued to rack up an impressive and disturbing record of hate-fueled violence.

Now, as someone who tracked the WCOTC carefully due to their presence in the Northwest, I was familiar with most of this information at the time. As I said, though I understood and, on general principle, respected Greenwald’s reasons for taking on Hale, I had questions about how he went about it.

So I was surprised in a good way by much of what I began reading at Greenwald’s blog, Unclaimed Territory, in fall of 2005. It was smart, thoughtful, and quite insightful about what he rightly saw as an executive power grab in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy. I began citing it favorably at my own blog, Orcinus, which at that point was also pretty well established (I opened shop there in January 2003). One of the first times I did so, in fact, was to defend him for having taken on Hale as a client, with which critics tried to smear him.

There were stumbles—such as his now-infamous (and disavowed) post describing the “parade of evils caused by illegal immigration”—that harkened back to my earlier concerns about his work. The disavowal, written years later and defensively blaming “Obama cultists,” is also less than persuasive.

I also was an admirer of Greenwald’s terrific 2006 book How Would A Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok. Having just wrapped up my study of the Japanese American internment, I wrote a number of posts concurring with its thesis.

I finally met Glenn in person at the 2007 Yearly Kos gathering in Chicago, the year before it was renamed to Netroots Nation. We really only had a brief conversation, and so even though I was bursting with questions for him, I never got to ask them.

Questions like:

· Do you have any regrets about everything that went down around having Matthew Hale as a client?
· Did it ever bother you that the organization whose rights (not altogether clear in any event, since you lost all the rulings on his law license denial) you were expending your expertise defending was itself in the business of depriving vulnerable minorities of their civil rights?
· Did it ever bother you that by trying to make it possible for Hale to practice law, you were actively assisting WCOTC’s explicit efforts to become part of the mainstream – that is, normalizing them?
· Do you still believe using the civil courts to bankrupt hate groups for their followers’ criminal acts, as the SPLC, Center for New Community, Center for Constitutional Rights, and many others do, is an abuse of the system?

I continued to cite Greenwald’s work quite bit over the years anyway. But beginning in the fall of 2007, as he increasingly promoted the presidential candidacy of Rep. Ron Paul, I chimed in by pointing out Paul’s long record of dalliances with the far right. My then-blog partner Sara Robinson and I began publishing a series of posts about Ron Paul and this history. It culminated with a post I composed with the help of readers, detailing the long legislative record of Paul’s extremism in Congress—some 161 bills, all linked.

A couple of days later, Greenwald attacked me at Salon. It opens: “I’m not trying to be Ron Paul’s advocate, but still, outright distortions and smears are distortions and smears.”

I responded the next day, pointing out that those “distortions and smears” were comprised of a laundry list of legislation with links. Also known as cold dry facts.

Now, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that a smear by definition is false. And I'm having difficulty fathoming how a post comprised almost solely of links to legislation Paul has sponsored -- 161 of them, in fact -- could constitute a smear. In the world of the blogosphere, the posts don't get much more fact-oriented.

In one of his updates, Greenwald countered with his favorite phrase.

For reasons I’ll detail at another time [ed note: He never did], I found virtually all of that to be unpersuasive, relying almost entirely on lame guilt-by-association arguments that could sink most if not all candidates (the only arguably disturbing evidence in this regard is this 1996 Houston Chronicle article, which Neiwert didn’t mention [ed. Note: Actually, I did] and the pro-Paul response is here).

As I pointed out, that’s not how “guilt by association” works, no more than you can dismiss Matt Hale’s ties to Ben Smith’s rampage with by waving that phrase about.

The problem with Ron Paul isn't that he has irrelevant associations with far-right extremists—it’s that he seeks out their support, openly advocates their agenda, and receives financial and ideological support from them. … Those grim realities make his associations all too relevant, especially for a public official in the position of a serving congressman, and now, presidential candidate.

… [T]his isn't "guilt by association"—first, the argument isn't that Paul is a racist per se, but that he is an extremist who shares a belief system held not just by racists but other anti-government zealots as well. Paul is identified with their causes not simply because he speaks to them, but because he elucidates ideas and positions—especially regarding the IRS, the UN, the gold standard, and education—identical to theirs. This is why he has their rabid support. There is an underlying reason, after all, that Paul attracts backers like David Duke and the Stormfront gang: he talks like them.

Second and perhaps most importantly, there are legitimate reasons for anyone to raise objections to Paul's associations, speaking before the Patriot Network, the CofCC, and similar groups—he's a public official, and he is lending the power of his public office to legitimizing radical-right organizations like this. Think of why it would be wrong to appear before the Klan, or the CofCC, as Trent Lott and Hayley Barbour have done in the latter case.

It's not merely what it implies about your own beliefs and standards—it’s that you've lent the power of your public office to empowering and raising the stature of racists and extremists. You of course have the right to do so—but the public has every right to criticize you for it as well, as it should. After all, what this comes down to is not so much beliefs and values but judgment. One expects, after all, a congressman to display better judgment than to appear before a group of nutcases. Ron Paul didn't, and hasn't, for a simple reason—he’s one of them.

And just as his associations with far-right extremists have empowered those groups—a favor now being returned in the form of their avid support for him even as he attempts to strategically distance himself from them—his recent stunning successes mean the further empowerment of these groups. And that is why, over the long term, we ought to take much greater pause in considering the value of his success.

Before signing off, I offered one more missive, which Glenn sniffed at and dismissed.

At this point, it had become manifestly clear to me that Greenwald has an immense blind spot—an inexplicable one, really—when it comes to far-right extremism and its spread into the mainstream, and the toxic effects of that spread.

This isn’t a matter of whether Greenwald is a racist or an extremist or an anti-Semite or anything like that. I don’t believe he is, even remotely. I’m glad I defended him initially. And no doubt, Glenn will dismiss this entire piece as a lie and a smear in which I make him out to be a racist. But seriously, I don’t believe for a minute that he is.

I just believe his sort of principled rigidity on free-speech issues blinds him to the real-world effects of fascism—particularly how it manipulates free-speech principles in order to destroy them. Fascists use people like Greenwald to leave a trail of wreckage.

It’s not about whether or not he’s racist—which, after all, would indeed make the whole issue one of guilt by association. That’s not the point of all this. No, this is a question of judgment: If you’re so short-sighted that you can’t see how your ethical choices wind up enabling harmful behavior, then exactly how astute is your judgment in any event?

It’s not guilt by association, it’s the guilt of association: People in responsible mainstream positions who lend legitimacy to people from far-right hate groups—whether Klansmen, skinheads, neo-Nazis, or militiamen—are exercising profoundly poor judgment. Lending them that legitimacy not only normalizes them, it empowers them. It helps fuel the twisted psychology of the far right that inevitably, like a law of physics itself, produces violent horrors and ruptured communities. Ask the folks in Billings, or in Illinois.

The closest anyone has come to getting an answer out of Greenwald about the questions about judgment raised by his work on Matt Hale’s behalf was in an interview in Rolling Stone in 2013. His answer was typically self-serving, and certainly indicates a lack of any regret: “To me, it's a heroic attribute to be so committed to a principle that you apply it not when it's easy ... not when it supports your position, not when it protects people you like, but when it defends and protects people that you hate."

All very noble-sounding of course, but it hardly squares with the reality of how he conducted himself. There is no indication Glenn hated Hale or WCTOC in any of his dealings with them; indeed, you can easily find expressions of admiration both in his public remarks and his legal filings. But his expressions of hatred for Center for Constitutional Rights and SPLC were vivid, not to mention anyone who dared oppose his cause. Equally vivid were his dismissal of the families of Ben Smith’s victims for being “desperate to stop us”—and assertion that their desperation proved the “correctness of our cause.”

Over the ensuing years, he’s manifested this blind spot, and supremely bad judgment, many times. Once he posted a tweet promoting an ad by the far-right conspiracist outfit the Oath Keepers, soft-pedaling them as “a coalition of former police, military and public officials.”

More recently, of course, he has appeared frequently on Fox News with Tucker Carlson. Carlson’s record of promoting white-nationalist causes and ideas clearly doesn’t bother Greenwald. In the process, of course, he has become exactly what he once derided caustically: a “Fox News liberal,” one whose appearance on the network is mainly used to help forward right-wing talking points and destroy the left. He’s now a Useful Tool.

And now he is defending his fellow faux progressives as they join Carlson in his campaign to minimize and defend fascist white nationalism as Not Really A Problem.

But apparently, fascist authoritarianism is only a problem in Brazil. Because Glenn lives there and he is seeing the consequences in person. Perhaps Greenwald should try living in the States again, so he can experience firsthand that the consequences are here too. It’s not clear what alternative universe Michael Tracey is living in, however.

Orcas and Vessel Noise: Don’t Scapegoat Whale-Watch Boats

2018-08-14T12:04:00.001-07:00

Everyone who lives in vicinity of the Salish Sea wants to save our endangered population of killer whales, and there have been a lot of ideas floated about how to do so. Donna Sandstrom’s recent Seattle Times op-ed (“Cut the toxins and boat noise, and boost salmon, so orcas can survive,” Aug. 18) suggested that, along with restoring the salmon runs that everyone needs, we need to do something about the whale-watch boats that often crowd around them in the summertime.

Her argument: The boats’ noise is causing these orcas to go hungry by interfering with their ability to echolocate their prey. It’s a solid argument, except for one fact: The whale watch boats are not the primary source of noise in the orcas’ waters.

From a visual viewpoint, it’s easy to lay the blame on the whale-watch boats. On some days you’ll see as many as forty or more of them jockeying for position in the waters of Haro Strait to get their customers the best possible view of the whales as they pass through.

Meanwhile, you’ll also see, off further in the distance, any number of large shipping vessels passing by, either heading in to Vancouver to unload their freight or heading out to see in the other directions. They usually are quite distant from the whales and don’t seem to pose a problem.

For the orcas, though, this is an illusion, since their universe is primarily an acoustic one. And in that universe, the large ships, not the small boats, pose the greatest challenge.

Listening by hydrophone, as I often do from my kayak in Haro Strait, opens a window into this universe. When the whale boats approach, their noise can be acute and high-pitched (though a number of the newer boats are impressively quiet), and the more of them, the worse it is. But the noise is also typically very short-lived and transient in nature.

The large shipping vessels, however, are another story. Both the noise created by water hitting their hulls and the sounds of their large engines can be nearly deafening under water. This is especially the case with older ships if the screws are old and bent or rusty. And worst of all, it is relentless: These auditory barrages can last continuously for 45 minutes or longer.

On more than one occasion, I’ve been listening to a pod of orcas communicating underwater when a large ship came into auditory view. The pod not only essentially fell silent and ceased communicating and echolocating, they essentially froze into position until the sound subsided enough that they could again see underwater with their echolocation sense. I’ve never seen this happen around the whale watch boats.

University of Washington marine scientist Scott Veirs has been studying this issue for years, assembling an impressive collection of data and transforming it into studies that make clear that large-ship noise in fact profoundly impacts killer whales.

“These ships are not only prevalent, but quite loud compared to other sources of noise in the ocean,” Veirs told one reporter. “Ships are dominating the soundscape.”

That doesn’t leave the whale-watch boats blameless, of course. One study found that the presence of whale watch boats increased the time that orcas spend altering their behavior due to noise, though only marginally – from 3.0 hours daily to 3.2.

It’s clear to most observers that there needs to be some kind of regulation of whale-watch boats in the San Juans, just to keep the crush from becoming too overwhelming. Certainly we should look at licensing them, with revocation of the license a potential punishment for bad behavior. And there need to be limits on how many boats can be around them at once. But banning them altogether will not help the orcas.

But if we’re concerned about vessel noise, then the first target has to be the gigantic freighters that are creating most of the racket out there and doing the most harm to orcas’ echolocation capabilities. Of course, it’s much easier politically and financially to go after small businesses like whale watch operations than large international shipping interests, but that doesn’t make it right.

Most of all, the entire issue is almost completely a diversion from the only real issue that matters for killer whales, and that issue is salmon. In times of salmon abundance, these issues fade to insignificance; but when there are few salmon, as there are now, they become increasingly magnified in importance.

Thanks to the tightness of all federal environmental budgets under the current administration, virtually every dollar spent on attempting to regulate them would be dollars NOT spent on recovering salmon habitat throughout their range.

Attacking scapegoats never solves the problem. In fact, it largely guarantees they will never be solved.

Ah, 'Civility': The Right-Wing Version

2018-06-26T18:30:00.002-07:00

I made a video. Enjoy.

How Not to Normalize Nazis -- In Print, and In the Real World

2017-12-15T11:57:00.000-08:00

The last days of the Aryan Nations compound near Hayden Lake, Idaho, in January 2000.

[This is another op-ed I submitted recently to the New York Times and then to Columbia Journalism Review, both of whom declined it. Since the subject is now growing stale, I'm putting it up here so at least my readers can enjoy it. -- Dave]

All reporting is like a mirror: If it’s distorted or at an odd angle, it’s not a true picture, even if it tells us something. Reporting on the American extremist right, especially its darker and more toxic corners, is an especially difficult thing, as the New York Times recently discovered, because it’s so very hard to focus on a movement that deals in shadows.

There’s a lesson in this not just for the Times, but for us all. Because sometimes even a half-reflection can tell us more about ourselves than we want to know.

My first lesson in the intricacies of balancing reportage about neo-Nazis and crypto-fascists came in the late 1970s, when I was the then-21-year-old editor of a small-town daily in the Idaho Panhandle, about 20 miles north of the just-established rural compound of the Aryan Nations near Hayden Lake. After consultations with my reporters and the publisher, we came to the joint decision to avoid providing the new arrivals with anything other than cursory coverage: Attention, we reckoned, was what they wanted, and it seemed wise not to give it to them.

Yet within a few short years, the region found itself awash in a tide of hate crimes – Jewish businesses vandalized, mixed-race schoolchildren harassed by adults, and a host of other ugliness closely associated with the burning crosses and Klan outfits that were part of the scene outside Hayden. It all culminated in 1984 with the multistate crime-and-terror spree of the neo-Nazi gang The Order, which included the assassination of a radio talk show host in Denver.

By then, of course, the Sandpoint Daily Bee had long disposed of its previous policy regarding coverage of the Aryan Nations and the extremists it attracted to the region. And it remained an important and essential lesson that led me to always take seriously the need to shine a spotlight on their activities, because they always interpret silence as tacit approval.

Richard Faussett’s reportage for the Times (“A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland,” November 25) clearly was in this spirit, intended to shine a light on the thinking that led a seemingly ordinary American to adopt such a radical belief system as white nationalism. Yet it failed signally to provide as whole and truthful, and thus accurate, a portrait of its subject as reportage like this needs to, in large part because it only looked at the individuals and not the movement they represented.

Reporters experienced in dealing with radical racists know well this secondary pitfall: Giving them a soft-focus kind of exposure, the kind they are likely to hand you, only serves to enhance their toxic influence, both by “normalizing” them and by gliding over the nature of their ideology. If you’re going to report on them, you have to be not just precise but thorough.

The mistake is an easy one to make, an aspect of the spotlight-shining nature of the enterprise, because it is easy at first to dwell too long on the surface of the subject, readily exposed by the light, and too little on the shadows that define its real shape. Context is everything in journalism, and especially when reporting on a subject with potentially dire consequences if mishandled.

So the Times’ piece told us the many ways in which Tony Hovater was an ordinary guy, but it told us very little about the ways in which he was anything but. Just giving us a taste of Hovater’s extremist social-media posts, many of them laden with bizarre conspiracism and overt racism, would have been helpful.

Likewise, any historical context was missing. There was nothing explaining where Hovater’s ideas originated, what the history of the Traditionalist Workers Party was, or how these ideas dated back to the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. Nor was there really even any more recent context that could have shed more light on the subject, including TWP’s involvement in the ugliness at Charlottesville, in which a neo-Nazi ran over and killed a counter-demonstrator.

Most of all, it missed the essential context a reporter experienced in dealing with the movement would know about radical racists: They operate in a kind of constructed alternative universe of their own, one fueled and ruled by an ever-growing web of conspiracy theories, a belief system in which rules of factuality and evidence are replaced with paranoid speculation, groundless smears, and endless innuendo. I call this epistemological bubble “Alt-America.”

In Alt-America, up is down, right is left, and reality has no visible basis other than the shifting sands of Alex Jones’ pronouncements. In this universe, President Obama is a white-hating racist and secret Muslim, part of a “globalist” (read: Jewish) conspiracy to enslave mankind under a New World Order. In the white-nationalist sector of this universe, “cultural Marxists” and feminists are conspiring to use “political correctness” to prevent white men from achieving their natural greatness.

So when Hovater made vague references to Holocaust-denial theories in his quotes, it was the reporter’s job to explain that to readers. Likewise Hovater’s many other coded references to racist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that were woven into many of the things he was quoted as saying went largely unremarked.

However, for all of its flaws, the Times story got one important thing right: It showed the ease with which right-wing extremists fit into mainstream culture, and it showed their humanness, revealing them without horns or self-evident psychopathy. The latter is important, first because denying humanity in others is precisely the neo-Nazi enterprise, and it’s not one an ethical journalist should want to replicate; moreover, exploring this gives readers a complete picture that explains just how it is they can fit in alongside the rest of us. This is how they can number in the hundreds of thousands online and their presence next to us in person can barely register.

This is the reality which most shocks and frightens us, the reason so many of us want to reject the Times’ portrait of young white nationalists’ seeming normalcy: It is not so much that they can resemble so many ordinary white Americans, but rather, that so many ordinary white Americans resemble them. The mirror is looking back at us, too.

For how many years, we need to ask ourselves, have we allowed the longtime white-nationalist agenda – to foment a culture war between liberals and minorities and the rest of America, to incessantly demonize them and cast them as the embodiment of evil itself – to seep into our mainstream culture? How long have we permitted right-wing demagogues, from Rush Limbaugh to Michael Savage to Sean Hannity to Alex Jones, to spew their irrational, fact-free, paranoid conspiracy-mongering freely over our airwaves and into our homes, coaching one group of Americans on how and why they should virulently hate a whole class of their fellow citizens, without anyone capable of standing up to them and calling them out for it?

Why is there in fact no real accountability, no culpability for this toxic hatemongering? Why are we even remotely surprised that it has metastasized into this toxic army of proto-fascists? And why are we shocked that they look and sound like ordinary Americans who watch Fox and tune in to Infowars?

Because in the end, the only real agenda of white nationalism is to destroy this once-great nation, especially the democratic institutions they make no bones about their hostility towards – to bring those institutions to their knees, to drive them into oblivion.

That was missing from the Times’ report, too. But it is the reality that lurked behind every word. And as frightening and unpleasant as it is for Americans to face, it is well past time we did so.

Fake News and 'Glorious Leader' Trump: The Key to His Authoritarian Following

2017-12-14T16:26:00.001-08:00

Trump's authoritarian followers remain voluntarily within his alternative universe with the help of his press-baiting "fake news" claims, which drive a wedge between his True Believers and the reality the rest of us inhabit.

[Note: I originally wrote this essay three weeks ago as an op-ed for potential use by newspapers. We approached several to see if we could raise interest in the issue. No one responded, so I am publishing it here.]

There’s a reason Donald Trump bandies the term “fake news” about so readily and gleefully. It’s more than just a tic or a theme. It’s actually a tool he uses to drive a wedge between his followers and reality.

This week he even seemed to lay ownership to the phrase. “The media is really, the word, one of the greatest of all terms I've come up with, is ‘fake’,” Trump told Mike Huckabee in an interview. “I guess other people have used it perhaps over the years but I've never noticed it. And it's a shame. And they really hurt the country. Because they take away the spirit of the country.”

Fact-checkers such as PolitiFact have observed that, beyond the extremely dubious notion he actually “came up with” the phrase, Trump’s use of it actually turns its original meaning on its head in a peculiarly self-serving way. Instead of describing fabricated content with no basis in fact, he uses it to mean any news that criticizes him – that is, any news he chooses not to believe because he does not like it.

Any person using normative rules of factuality, evidence, and reason would defer to the original meaning of “fake news.” However, Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters, and many more similarly inclined, instead agree with him. Their version of reality, as such, becomes very different from the rest of us.

It works, too: Recent polling found that 46 percent of all voters believe the media make up stories about Trump. Even 20 percent of Democrats believed this.

This is what authoritarians throughout history have done: Set themselves up not only as the arbiters of right and wrong and other mainstream values, but of reality itself. They keep their followers close under their banner by creating a separate lived universe for them, an epistemological bubble that inevitably becomes a cult of personality and fanaticism. In the Trump era, I have dubbed this alternative universe “Alt-America.”

Most Americans have a healthy skepticism about American news outlets, as our mainstream media landscape becomes increasingly littered with charlatans and corporate interests out to make a buck. But some Americans have elevated that skepticism to another and frankly unhealthy level, leading them to view anything produced by the mainstream media or official government or academic sources with an extreme form of “selective skepticism” – that is, they refuse to believe any kind of “official” explanation for events, actions, or policies, but instead go seeking any kind of alternative explanation for these.

When this happens, their extreme skepticism is reversed into an extreme gullibility, so that they become vulnerable suckers for just about any kind of conspiracy theory or fantastic fabrication, so long as it confirms the narrative they want to believe. In this environment, conspiracists like Alex Jones of Infowars and a coalition of like minds calling themselves the alt-right have thrived, both politically and financially, peddling their own set of “alternative facts.”

This gullibility shapes – or rather, distorts – people’s relationship to authority. Any kind of authority that exists outside of that person’s universe -- in the current Trump era particularly, anything with the taint of liberalism -- is innately viewed as illegitimate and untrustworthy and is to be vehemently rejected and ardently opposed. In the meanwhile, any authority within the “Alt-America” universe, especially political figures, conspiracist pundits, and Patriot movement leaders, are revered as absolute, and become objects of abject devotion. There is a reason that some of Donald Trump’s followers refer to him as “Glorious Leader,” or “G.L.”

Translated from individual psychology to mass politics, these traits, and in particular the conspiracism, become the manifestation of right-wing authoritarianism. It becomes manifest in polls that reveal profoundly disturbing attitudes rampant among Trump’s supporters.

One poll found that half of Republican voters were OK with Trump postponing the 2020 election if he decided that “voter fraud” was too massive a problem. Another poll found that 61 percent of his current supporters say they can think of no circumstances under which they would ever stop approving of what he does, regardless.

When most people think of authoritarianism, they think of the strongman dictators who have led such rule in various nations around the world throughout history, and they commonly view it as a political phenomenon in which whole nations are subsumed by dictatorial rule imposed from above. The reality, however, is that authoritarians usually are swept to power and maintained in it by an army of followers, people who desire precisely that kind of governance, by a singular figure whose charisma and instincts can chart a nation’s course.

It’s also a phenomenon studied in depth by psychologists, whose focus is less on those figures atop the pack, and more on the hordes they control – the ordinary people who willingly sacrifice their personal freedoms in the name of an orderly society shaped that imposes their personal beliefs and prejudices.

How could supposedly freedom-loving Americans (or Germans, or anyone else, for that matter) subscribe to an authoritarian worldview? As psychologists have explored, most people have some level of authoritarian tendencies, but these are often leveled out by such factors as personal empathy and critical thinking skills. In some personalities, however, a combination of factors ranging from strict upbringing, personal traumas, harsh rearing environments, or any number of other similar issues, can produce people who are inclined to insist on a world in which strong authorities produce order and peace, often through iron imposition of “law and order.”

As a psychological phenomenon, authoritarianism arises around three clusters of behavior and attitudes:

n Authoritarian submission: The eager submission to edicts, rulings, and opinions of the authorities and leaders who are deemed legitimate.

n Authoritarian aggression: The physical, verbal, and social aggression displayed toward anyone or any trend that runs counter to those authorities, or in the case of leadership, is deemed illegitimate.

n Conventionalism: The adamant embrace of what is perceived as the social norm and the “real” national identity, and the belief that oneself reflects that “real” identity.

Psychologist Robert Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba, one of the world’s leading experts in this research, describes how this authoritarianism is manifest in Donald Trump supporters. They are highly ethnocentric, inclined to see the world as their in-group versus everyone else. They are highly fearful of a dangerous world. They are highly self-righteous. They are aggressive. They are highly prejudiced against racial and ethnic majorities, non-heterosexuals, and women in general. Their beliefs are a mass of contradictions. They reason poorly. They are highly dogmatic. They are very dependent on social reinforcement of their beliefs. Because they severely limit their exposure to different people and ideas, they vastly overestimate the extent to which other people agree with them.

Most of all, Altemeyer says, they are easily duped by manipulators who pretend to espouse their causes when all the con-artists really want is personal gain. And they are largely blind to themselves, and almost inevitably will blame others when their own gullibility as marks for con men is exposed.

Their demand for leadership by powerful authority figures also helps explain their vehement rejection of the presidencies of such liberal politicians as Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton in every jot and tittle. An authoritarian by nature wishes to follow the orders of the president, but can never do so when an illegitimate usurper holds the position. Proving the fundamental illegitimacy of these presidencies – as the regimes of a sexual pervert, a Muslim foreigner, and a lying crook, respectively – has thus formed the overwhelming preoccupations of their various campaigns to attack them politically.

Authoritarianism as a worldview always creates a certain kind of cognitive dissonance, a feeling of unreality, because it runs smack into the complex nature of the modern world and attempts to impose its simplified, black-and-white explanation of reality onto a factual reality that contradicts and undermines it every turn. People with authoritarian personalities willingly slip into the alternative universe of Alt-America because it helps soothe this dissonance, allowing its occupants to glide over inconvenient facts because they participate in a larger “truth.”

So conspiracism is especially appealing to people with these personality traits – the people who tell pollsters they “don’t recognize their country anymore” and are discomfited and bewildered by the brown faces and strange languages that have been filling up their cultural landscapes in places where they never used to be. One study found that conspiracy theories seem to be more compelling to “those with low self-worth, especially with regard to their sense of agency in the world at large.” They often long for a 1950s-style America with lawns and cul-de-sacs, and are angry that the world no longer works that way.

While the mainstream media simply present the world as it is, conspiracy theories offer narratives that explain to them why the country is no longer what they wish it to be, why it has that alien shape. And so in their minds it comes to represent a deeper truth about their world, while repeatedly reinforcing their long-held prejudices, and enables them to ignore the real, factual (and often uncomfortable) nature of the changes the nation is undergoing. Simply put, it provides a clear, self-reinforcing answer to the source of their personal disempowerment.

The deep irony in all this is that the larger psychological and even political effect of conspiracy theories is that they are profoundly disempowering in and of themselves. They create a toxic mindset, a worldview in which the world is actually being run by secretive, powerful schemers intent on suppressing them, against whose immense power an ordinary individual is almost entirely powerless.

People who are “red-pilled,” as the conspiracy-loving alt-righters have dubbed themselves, see themselves as utterly disattached from their communities, fighting a desperate battle with only the help of their fellow conspiracists against truly dark and evil forces. Alex Jones constantly refers to his targets as “demonic.” It’s not just a bleak world, it’s one in which people can become overwhelmed with feelings of helplessness and anger.

That’s one of the primary reasons conspiracist beliefs are so often associated with horrific acts of terrorist violence. Think of Anders Breivik’s massacre of 69 schoolchildren in Norway in 2011, or Tim McVeigh’s destruction of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 that killed 168, or Jared Loughner’s horrifying rampage in Tucson in 2011, or Dylann Roof’s rampage at the Charleston church in 2015. All of these people, and their many other domestic-terrorist cohorts, acted out of a desperation fueled by anger over their sense of deep disempowerment – all of it a product of a belief in conspiracy theories.

Beyond individuals, however, authoritarianism is also toxic for any kind of democratic society – which is unsurprising, given the alt-right’s express hostility to democracy and its institutions. And it is rising as a political phenomenon not just in the United States, but around the world, especially in Europe.

This is why a number of political scientists have recently begun speaking up about the trend. “If current trends continue for another 20 or 30 years, democracy will be toast,” recently warned Yascha Mounk, a lecturer at Harvard.

They warn that democracies die all the time, and there is no reason the United States would be immune, despite its longevity and comparative stability – until recently, at least. And the reasons have to do with people – both the leaders and the citizenry – taking its institutions for granted and permitting them to fall into decay.

These include the values of community and generosity that have previously guided the American spirit at crucial junctures, as well as the basic value of empathy as a personal characteristic. Defending them vigorously, and reviving them to full life, will be the key to defeating the authoritarian spirit unleashed in recent years.

When white nationalists chant their weird slogans, what do they mean?

2017-10-10T17:22:00.000-07:00

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Torch-bearing white nationalists led by racist "alt-right" figure Richard Spencer once again marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend, in a repeat of their appearance on August 11, when a similar polo-shirt-bedecked crowd carried tiki torches to the University of Virginia, chanting a variety of slogans and far-right catchphrases.

“You Will Not Replace Us!” they shouted in unison Saturday. Later, they sang a rendition of the adopted Confederate anthem, “Dixie,” and also chanted, “Russia is Our Friend!” and “The South Will Rise Again!”

The chants even included an odd attack on a fantasy fiction character: “Harry Potter is Not Real!”

The rally occurred eight weeks after the August “Unite the Right” event that turned into a murderous melee the next day when an alt-right protester rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one person and maiming numerous others.

Unlike the earlier torch-bearing rally, however, which saw an estimated 1,000 marchers with torches marching through the city, Saturday’s event only drew an estimated 40 to 50 participants.

As with the earlier rally, however, the marching white nationalists shouted a variety of chants, all of them with very particular meanings to their movement. They enjoy wide circulation within the alt-right movement, particularly at online white-nationalist forums as well as chat sites like 4chan, but are unfamiliar to most of the general public.

Here’s what they mean, beginning with the chants from the August 11 march on the Virginia campus:

“You Will Not Replace Us!” This slogan was coined from a statement by Nathan Damigo, founder of the white-nationalist campus group Identity Evropa, who retorted to an anti-Donald Trump “He will not divide us” campaign by actor Shia LeBeouf on social media: “Shia LeBeouf, you will not replace us with your globalism.” The chant is closely related to the white-nationalist “White Genocide” meme, reflective of their fears that white people and white culture are under attack from multiculturalism and nonwhite races. According to the Anti-Defamation League, the slogan began appearing on white-nationalist fliers and banners in May, and has spread widely since then. (At times during the first Charlottesville march, the chant morphed into “Jews Will Not Replace Us!”)
“Blood and Soil!” Possibly the most disturbing of all the chants heard in Charlottesville, this is the English rendition of Nazi Germany’s most fervent chant, “Blut und Boden!” Originally devised as a slogan of 19th-century German nationalists and popularized by Nazi ideologue Richard Walter Darre, the phrase is intended to invoke patriotic identification with native national identity, and built on a foundation of virulent anti-Semitism and racism. It later became a key component of Adolf Hitler’s “Lebensraum” program, seeking to expand territories occupied by Germans, that was a major factor in the Holocaust. The slogan has been adopted by the alt-right, particularly its openly neo-Nazi element, to emphasize its own nativist and eliminationist agenda.
“White Lives Matter!” Ostensibly a retort to the anti-police-violence movement Black Lives Matter, this catchphrase very quickly morphed into both a slogan and the name of an outright white-supremacist movement aimed at attacking black civil rights, ostensibly “dedicated to promotion of the white race and taking positive action as a united voice against issues facing our race.” Numerous neo-Nazi groups around the country have reshaped themselves under the “WLM” banner, and the movement was designated a hate group in 2017.
“Hail Trump!” This catchphrase needs little explanation, but its presence as a marching chant is significant. Donald Trump is a hero to the alt-right, where some leading figures refer to him as “Glorious Leader” and similar superlatives, in large part because he mimics their agenda and talking points, and has on numerous occasions shied away from denouncing white nationalists, including after Charlottesville. Many of the Charlottesville marchers have also worn Trump’s trademark “Make America Great Again” ball caps.

At Saturday’s rally, the gathering again chanted “You Will Not Replace Us.” The rallygoers also joined together in singing a rendition of “Dixie”, the unofficial anthem of the Confederacy, reflecting their affiliations with the far-right neo-Confederate movement (as well as the fact that the rally occurred at the base of the statue of General Robert E. Lee, slated for removal by Charlottesville city officials, the focus of the alt-right protests). Soon a variety of other chants were heard:

“Russia Is Our Friend!” The alt-right has been unabashed in its open admiration of Russia’s authoritarian strongman president, Vladimir Putin, and the nationalist agenda he has promoted both in Europe and in the United States. A number of alt-right figures, including Spencer, have well-documented connections to the Russian regime, which also has played a major role in underwriting far-right movements in Europe. It later emerged after the 2016 election that Russia’s propaganda machine had a powerfully symbiotic relationship with the alt-right in spreading its ideology and memes through social media during the campaign.
“The South Will Rise Again!” Again reflective of the alt-right’s neo-Confederate sympathies, this slogan dates back to the post-Civil War period, when the apologist “Lost Cause” revision of the war’s history was in full swing, leading to the widespread (and incorrect) belief that the war was primarily about “states rights” rather than slavery; that same movement, mostly at the turn of the 19th century, also was responsible for the construction of many of the same Confederate monuments that are now the focus of much of the alt-right recent agitation. The “Lost Cause” ideology remains popular with neo-Confederates.
“Harry Potter Isn’t Real!” This seemingly odd chant, which in many ways reflects the alt-right’s fluency in popular culture, is directed at white nationalists’ enmity towards multiculturalism, since the underlying thesis of J.K. Rowling’s massively popular youth-fantasy series is about combating prejudice, racial and otherwise. The Potter books are frequently attacked at alt-right online forums and castigated for ostensibly brainwashing schoolchildren. Moreover, Rowling herself has been notably active on social media, attacking both the alt-right and politicians associated with it, including Donald Trump.
“We Will Be Back!” Another fairly self-explanatory chant — and possibly the most chilling of them all.

In Wake of Las Vegas Massacre, Alex Jones Claims 'Democrats Are Going to Be Killing People'

2017-10-05T14:39:00.003-07:00

"Democrats are going to be killing people, a lot of folks ... They are making their move for race war in America."

The nation’s foremost conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, jumped the shark years ago when it came to promoting crackpot ideas. But his rantings in the wake of Sunday’s horrific massacre in Las Vegas are treading from mere insanity into the realm of dangerously targeting his fellow citizens.

The day after the massacre, Jones speculated that it had been perpetrated by his usual menu of favorite villains: Islamic State, antifascists, leftists, Communists, and globalists. On Tuesday’s Infowars show, Jones went even further, warning his audience that liberals were going to be killing them.

The enemy’s engaging us. Everybody needs to be packing, like I told you on Friday and on Sunday. Get ready -- Democrats are going to be killing people, a lot of folks. And obviously, just like you don’t see conservatives going out and doing mass shootings, they don’t want to blame the Second Amendment, they don’t want to go out and kill people.

It’s almost always drug-head Democrats, devil worshippers, you name it. That’s their M.O. The Democrats know when they mass-kill now, they know to not say they’re Democrat operatives. They just want to use that to get the Second Amendment and get a civil war going.

According to Jones, the whole event is part of a scheme to cow the American public into accepting sweeping gun controls:

With this event and this attack, the leftists, the globalists, the social engineers are going to use those dear lives of those poor people who were snuffed out to try to wound what’s left of our republic and complete our journey into disarmament.

Jones claimed that comments after the shootings by Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton (Mrs. Obama actually was discussing the lack of trust in politics, while Clinton attacked the NRA) were proof they intended to start a “race war”:

They are foisting this guilt down on all of us, and it’s a horrible assault, and Michelle Obama has come out and said white people are the problem, yes we have video, Hillary said the same thing. They are making their move for race war in America. It’s cold-blooded. It’s admitted in the Wikileaks.

One of the apparent keys to Jones’ theory about Las Vegas is that the Southern Poverty Law Center is somehow central to the nefarious plot. Jones claims the shooter donated large sums to the SPLC, which he also blamed as being behind the plot to blow up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

This is not 1995, where they can carry out an event like Oklahoma City, which was a real bomb, but which was staged by criminal elements of the federal government working with German intelligence, and a major tax-free foundation who’s recently been caught with a lot of money overseas.

Yes, the Southern Poverty Law Center was running Elohim City, where the attack came out of. They weren’t infiltrating it, they ran it. They commanded it.

In reality, the SPLC indeed carefully monitored Elohim City and received information from informants inside the white-supremacist compound with which Oklahoma bomber Tim McVeigh was associated. However, as journalist James Ridgeway noted, even that information was second-hand.

Later in the broadcast, Jones claimed that the Vegas shooter, Stephen Paddock, had been “giving massive amounts of money to the very suspect groups who had their hands in OKC and other events” – namely, the SPLC. For the record, there is no indication that Paddock ever donated anything to the center, nor ever indicated any affinity or affiliation with it.

While Jones has been promoting the idea of a civil war for some time now, his projection-fueled rhetoric reached stochastic-terror levels as the broadcast went along:

This is a leftist Democratic Party operation, with mainstream media, corporate media hyping the climate of ‘kill the Republicans, kill the white people.’

They’ve gotten so radicalized with their own propaganda that they’re believing all this stuff. And then when their folks go out and kill, they cover it up, and they blame it on the victims.

… They’re getting ready for war! And in full spectrum dominance, they’re going to carry out the attacks, and then they’re going to turn around and blame us and say our rights and our freedoms are to blame! Get it? That’s 21st-century warfare. You carry out the attack, and then you blame your enemy, who you just killed.

Near the end, he concluded with a red-faced rant warning his audience that their “globalist” enemies intended to round them up in concentration camps and murder them en masse, with a flourish worthy of Slim Pickens:

You think you’re hunting us? We’re going to destroy you politically. And we’re going to hold our fire. But you watch, they’re going to false-flag even bigger now. They’re going for total broke to break your will. And if they do that, then they’re gonna put 50 million people in forced-labor camps. That’s mainstream news. And they can’t wait to give every one of these little Communist time with your wife and kids in some dungeon. ‘Cuz that’s what they want.

I’m not kiddin’. They’re comin’. You wanted to see the fight for America, you’re living it, 2017, baby! This is it! Toe-to-toe combat with the globalists, politically.

At Seattle 'March Against Sharia,' Opposition Makes Islamophobes Look Small

2017-06-12T08:00:00.000-07:00

The crowd reminded the anti-Muslim activists about the Portland train murders.

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

SEATTLE — A small gathering of less than a hundred ACT supporters showed up at Seattle’s City Hall Plaza on Saturday and soon found themselves outnumbered by a massive counter-protest of around a thousand people who showed up to voice their disapproval.

The large crowd was deafening at times, though held back by a large police cordon, and various speakers inside the plaza had to shout to be heard.

“ACT! for America is not an anti-Muslim organization!” asserted rally organizer Anthony Parish. “We are anti-radical Islam!”

Meanwhile, ACT! supporters carried signs labeling the Muslim prophet Muhammad a pedophile; others denounced Islam and the supposed threat of Sharia law: “No Shitria” read one.

Several Oath Keepers were present in the crowd, providing “security” by escorting random protesters from the plaza.

The huge crowd across the street from the plaza, which called itself “Seattle Stands With Our Muslim Neighbors,” remained during the three hours or so the rally went on. A handful of fights broke out as the diminutive cluster of anti-Muslim marchers attempted to march from the plaza to Occidental Park in Pioneer Square, a few blocks away. Police said several protesters were arrested in the fighting.

More photos from the scene:

This woman, from Spanaway, met with representatives from the Muslim community
before the rally; during the rally, she joined the anti-Sharia crowd in shouting at them.

There were over a thousand people marching in support of Muslims.

Various signs carried by alt-righters belied the claim their rally was not anti-Muslim.

The sea of faces on one side.

Rally organizer Anthony Parish.

One of several alt-right banners making appearances at the rally.

Wrapping himself in the flag.

Flag waver.

Portland alt-right organizer Josh Gordon was present.

An exuberant alt-right supporter.

Fighting Sharia, one flag at a time.

More exuberance.

Tusitala 'Tiny' Toese of Portland also made his presence felt.

Community members remained defiant afterward.

Defiant Alt-Right 'Patriots' Encounter Portland's Simmering Anger After Train Killings

2017-06-06T13:00:00.000-07:00

'Based Stick Man' Kyle Chapman, at right, mugs with his alt-right fans.

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

PORTLAND, Ore. – The mood of the 300 or so Trump supporters and alt-right “free speech” defenders at Terry Schrunk Plaza in the heart of downtown Portland on Sunday was mostly defiant. After all, they were holding the event only a little over a week after a horrific hate crime committed by a white nationalist acting out alt-right talking points had shaken the city to its core.

The city’s mayor had even taken the unusual step of requesting the federal government to revoke the permit for the rally, though that was refused. Yet the organizers and their “Patriot” movement supporters came anyway – some of them prominent alt-right and militia leaders from around the country.

As it turned out, so did thousands of counter-protesters, angry over the week’s events, who vastly outnumbered the small crowd inside the park, chanting and shouting at them from all sides.

“It is so awesome that you guys came out here today, because you are challenging the corrupt belief system, I hope you understand that,” said Joey Gibson, whose Patriot Prayer organization was the event’s main organizer. “Think about the belief system in Portland. You’re not supposed to be here. And by challenging the current belief system, that is how revolutions begin!”

Yet for all their bravado, the assembled “Patriots” could not escape the reality that they were heavily outnumbered, outprotested, and surrounded by the various factions of Portlanders who came out to protest their gathering and their message. To the west, a coalition of socialist and liberal organizations occupied the plaza in front of City Hall with a large banner reading, “Portland Stands Against Hate,” backed by a crowd of about 500. To the east, and within direct earshot, a collection of over a hundred labor union activists stretched along Third Avenue, their banner reading “Portland Labor Against the Fascists”.

However, it was the collection of black-clad anarchists and “antifascist” activists who took up occupancy of Chapman Park, the large open space directly to the north of the alt-righters’ designated spot, that drew most of the attention and concern of the gathered Trump supporters, especially as the day wore on and they grew larger, louder and more raucous, numbering in the hundreds, many of them with their faces obscured by kerchief masks.

Two alt-righters gave benign explanations for their Pepe banner to onlookers.

Eventually, while the alt-right crowd listened to speeches and waved their Gadsden flags and Kek and Pepe banners, the antifascist crowd grew increasingly agitated. Police began arresting protesters, and then used flash-bang devices to clear them out of the park altogether. A large group of antifascist activists then marched en masse downtown along Fourth Avenue, their progress halted at the intersection with Morrison, where police in riot gear ordered them to disperse, and then began rounding up and arresting protesters who were caught within their cordon. By the day’s end, 14 arrests had been made.

The dark shadow looming over the day was the shocking knife murders of two men on May 26, after they had attempted to intervene in the verbal harassment of two young nonwhite women, one wearing a hijab, aboard a commuter MAX train in northeast Portland. Both of the men had their throats cut in a sudden knife attack, and a third man suffered similar injuries but survived.

The killer, 35-year-old Jeremy Christian, was arrested by police shortly after the attacks. His background revealed a political gadabout (he had earlier supported the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders) who, in the previous year, had become enamored of white-nationalist ideology and seized upon it obsessively on social media. He voiced admiration for Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, a far-right icon, and adopted the longtime white-supremacist agenda of converting the Pacific Northwest into a whites-only homeland.

He also was obsessed with the claim that left-wing oppression was stifling free speech, the raison d’etre of recent right-wing “pro-Trump” events in Seattle and Berkeley, CA, that were met with violent shows of force from left-wing antifascists. It soon emerged that Christian had attended a previous Patriots Prayer-sponsored “Free Speech” rally, blurting racial epithets and carrying a baseball bat that was confiscated by police. After giving Nazi salutes and shouting “Hail Vinland!”, he eventually was ejected from the event by organizers.

More broadly, the threats that Christian was making at the time of the attacks – using anti-Muslim rhetoric directed at the young woman’s hijab – reflected a popular alt-right talking point first engendered by neo-Nazi organizer Andrew Anglin.

Christian made his motives clear at his first hearing. "Free speech or die, Portland,” he shouted. “You got no safe place. This is America – get out if you don't like free speech."

Then, as he was escorted out, he added: "Death to the enemies of America. Leave this country if you hate our freedoms. ... You call it terrorism. I call it patriotism."

The crime sent shock waves through the city, long regarded as a bastion of progressive politics. Many local citizens, the mayor most notably, feared that given the simmering anger over the killings, another right-wing provocation in the form of an alt-right “free speech” rally might unleash more civic violence.

Certainly, the crowd that gathered to protest their presence had no hesitation in laying the killings at the alt-right’s feet. “You Have Blood On Your Hands,” read one banner. The labor activists chanted: “Fascist murderers!”

An African-American woman gives the alt-righters a piece of her mind

The interactions between the two sides were angry and inflamed. Early in the gathering, a lone black woman stormed through the park where the pro-Trump crowd gathered, threw down a ballcap she had taken from one of the alt-righters bearing the word “Coon,” shouted that she was a proud black woman, “not a coon,” and then proceeded to lecture the crowd about the rights of black people; most of the crowd responded meekly. Police eventually escorted her from the park.

At first, some activists from the pro-Trump crowd wandered over to where the black-clad antifascists gathered and attempted to engage them, but found themselves being chased around the park and shoved back across the street. Alt-right activist Brian Fife found himself confronted by a sea of angry antifascists who blocked his attempts to enter their park.

The rally’s organizers not only were acutely sensitive about the association with the train murders, but angrily rejected it, claiming that Christian’s ejection from their event proved he wasn’t one of them. The hate, they asserted, was all coming from the angry Left.

“It’s not about politics anymore,” Gibson told the crowd. “It’s about a lack of respect, a lack of courage. And I see it all over the place. These protesters come to my rallies and they say they want to fight hate, but then they say, ‘Eff you, Joey!’ and they spread hate all over the place. We gotta knock it off!”

Event organizer Josh Gibson

Gibson led a moment of silence for the two men who died: Ricky John Best, 53, of Happy Valley, and Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche, 23, of Portland, and described them as “heroes.” One speaker similarly described them as heroic, and eagerly mentioned that Best was a Republican. Another speaker claimed that the mayor and the media missed the real story behind the killings, namely, Christian’s alleged mental-illness issues.

At other times, however, the “love” was not altogether apparent. Gibson at one point explained to the crowd that opposing Muslims “is not racism,” because “Muslim isn’t a race, it’s an ideology.” He compared it to the Ku Klux Klan.

Brian Fife told Guardian reporter Jason Wilson that Jeremy Christian “did everything right up until the point he started killing people”.

“I do not support killing people,” he said, “I don’t think anyone does. But calling out the changing elements of our culture, I think that’s something I wish more of us would do.”

Some of the alt-right movement’s celebrities came from around the country and posed for photos and signed autographs for admirers, then spoke to the gathering. Tim “Treadstone” Gionet, better known as alt-right troll “Baked Alaska,” told the crowd to be proud of its mostly white heritage.

“I never thought I would live in a country, where I say I’m proud to be a white Christian male, and they say I’m racist, OK?” he told the crowd to applause. “Can we say this? You should be proud of who you are. I don’t care what you look like, what you believe, you should be proud of who you are. And the Marxists, the Left, the liberals, they don’t want you to be proud of who you are. And frankly, I’m sick of it. I think we’ve had enough. I’m not going to feel guilty because I’m a white male. I’m sorry, I’m not.”

Kyle Chapman, a Bay-area-based commercial diver who gained fame in alt-right ranks as “Based Stick Man” after bringing homemade weapons and shields to the Berkeley rally – and then forming a band of alt-right “warriors” called “Proud Boys,” some of whom were present Sunday – attracted perhaps the most attention.

“If you want this country to stay free, you have to be willing to sacrifice,” he told the crowd. “Our Founding Fathers, our ancestors, my ancestors that were on the boats in the Boston Tea Party, they knew they faced the threat of violence, death, incarceration for their actions – actions that brought us our constitutionally free republic. If that republic that they gave us is to stay free, you have to be willing to bleed.”

Among the other right-wing luminaries drawn to the event was Stewart Rhodes, founder and president of the Oath Keepers, who wandered the crowd and chatted with militiamen and alt-right characters alike. As promised, Rhodes’ camo-clad and heavily armed “security detail” arrived early at the scene to provide extra muscle to stave off the threat of attacks from antifascists or other protesters.

Shortly after their arrival at mid-morning, the Oath Keepers – readily identifiable by the bright yellow stripes they attached to their clothing – were seen conferring with several police officials. Rhodes had said beforehand that his organization was “conferring” with local police, though Portland police denied it.

Reports from other observers at the scene suggested that some of these militiamen actively engaged in helping make arrests of antifascist protesters, and one journalist published a photo of what appears to be such an arrest.

After the police battalions cleared out Chapman Park and then followed the antifascists down Fourth Avenue before finally making their culminative arrests, the mood of the crowd began to simmer down. The alt-right speakers finished up and the rallygoers began to drift away.

Across the street, labor-union activists doggedly kept up their chants, well past 5 p.m. When the last of the Trump supporters left the park, they finally pulled up their stakes and left. The opposition had made its point, too.

More photos:

Across the street from the alt-right, "Portland Stands Against Hate" peacefully protested.

Large crowds of counter-protesters included several notably nonviolent groups.

Labor-union activists formed a large anti-alt-right contingent to the east of the park.

The tattoos on the shoulders of alt-right figure 'Based Trojan' read "White ...

... Pride."

A woman wearing a Kek banner engages a labor protester in conversation.

The pro-Trump crowd waved a lot of banners.

An alt-righter with a Kek banner.

A pro-Trump supporter berates the antifascist protesters.

Alt-right fans at the gathering.

Chapman signs an autograph for a fan.

'Baked Alaska' defends being a white man.

Chapman addresses the crowd.

Gibson introduces his 'Guardians.'

A "Proud Boys" member (left) chats with an alt-righter bearing a Kek banner.

Oath Keepers founder and President Stewart Rhodes.

Tusitala 'Tiny' Toese of Warriors For Freedom hands out flags.

Toese performs a ritual haka before the gathered alt-righters.

A Trump supporter.

Police arrest antifascist protesters several blocks away.

With DHS Position, Clarke Would Be the First ‘Patriot’ Leader to Hold a Federal Post

2017-05-19T23:41:00.002-07:00

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

The apparent elevation of Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke to a position within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security would mark another “first” of sorts for the Trump administration: It’s the first time any known participant in the antigovernment Patriot movement, let alone one of its leading figures, has ever held a federal position of any significance.

Clarke told a radio talk-show host earlier this week that he was accepting the job as assistant secretary in the Office of Partnership and Engagement at DHS, serving as a kind of liaison between local law enforcement the federal agency.

This would be a remarkable position for someone long affiliated with Richard Mack’s extremist Patriot organization, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, to hold. Among the core tenets of CSPOA dogma is the far-right “constitutionalist” belief that sheriffs represent the highest law of the land, and are capable of overturning or ignoring federal laws within their own jurisdictions. Moreover, Clarke's history of incendiary remarks includes his advocacy of "a second American revolution."

“I’m both honored and humbled to be appointed to this position,” Clarke told WISN-AM host Vicki McKenna.

Officials at DHS, however, were not so forthcoming. “The position mentioned is a secretarial appointment. Such senior positions are announced by the department when made official by the secretary. No such announcement with regard to the office of public engagement has been made,” it said in a released statement.

While a number of Donald Trump’s appointments to his new administration have drawn criticism and opposition for holding extreme right-wing views, the president so far had not elevated anyone associated with direct ties to Patriot groups to a federal position, particularly not placed so highly in the hierarchy. No previous administration has ever knowingly employed a leader in any extremist antigovernment movement.

Clarke’s record of extremism is long and multifaceted, as is his history of incendiary remarks. He originally rose to prominence among Patriot organizations, but in 2014 became a favorite pundit on Fox News, called to provide a black face for conservative criticism of civil-rights activists in the Black Lives Matter movement. Nor has he hidden from his extremist associations.

In May 2016, he was honored by the militant Patriot organization Oath Keepers with its second annual “Leadership Award”. During his speech accepting the award, Clarke let his radical flag fly freely:

He asked where the media in the room was, because “it’s always good to know where the enemy is.”
Told the audience: “I’m one of those that believes that only a citizen uprising is going to allow We the People to resume our rightful place in this republic.”
“Our government has been coopted. Our government is corrupt. All of our institutions of government are corrupt. The White House is corrupt. The Congress is corrupt. Our courts are corrupt.”
Demanded that the SPLC designate Black Lives Matter a hate group: “They are a dangerous movement full of rage, bitterness and hate because of some phantom grievance status that they themselves never experienced.”
Fed the group’s conspiracism: “Is there anyone here tonight, and I want to see you hand, if you believe that Barack Obama is living up to his oath with his circumventing the separation of powers, ignoring court orders, his appointment of czars and his executive orders that go beyond the power of the executive. Folks, this a slippery slope into a very dark place. A place called tyranny.”

Notably, Clarke also warned Trump, whose support he openly embraced, that “if he [Trump] doesn’t [break up the “Washington cartel”], then we’ll get rid of him too.”

Since the election, Clarke has become even more inflammatory, particularly on his Twitter account. There, he has continued his incendiary rhetoric, referring to Chelsea Clinton as a “cockroach,” and liberal pundit Marc Lamont Hill as “a jigaboo.”

Even more ominously, given his plans to oversee coordination between federal and local law enforcement, Clarke has posted tweets that suggest the depths of his political radicalism and authoritarianism. In one, published after the Women’s March on Washington and other anti-Trump protests, he displayed a photo of himself holding up one of those pocket Constitutions, declaring: “The left isn't protesting. It's resistance to our constitutionally elected POTUS. It's showdown time. Pushback time. Are you ready? I am.”

Along similar lines, Clarke posted shortly after the election, amid anti-Trump protests: “How to stop riots. 1)Declare state of emergency.2)Impose early curfew. 3)Mobilize Nat Guard.4)Authorize ALL non lethal force. 5)Tear gas.”

[Ironically, one of the Oath Keepers’ major bugaboos is a fear that the federal government will impose martial law through a state of emergency declaration: On the group’s list of “10 Orders We Will Not Obey,” No. 4 reads: “We will NOT obey orders to impose martial law or a ‘state of emergency’ on a state, or to enter with force into a state, without the express consent and invitation of that state’s legislature and governor.” However, no admonition or correction of Clarke has appeared on the Oath Keepers’ website or social-media feeds.]

His influence has spread to other, more ostensibly mainstream venues, including a keynote address to the National Rifle Association (at which he suggested adding an assault rifle to the national seal), as well as a recent CBS News report profiling “other voices” in the national debate over gun rights.

As Media Matters notes, Clarke’s contribution consisted of the discredited claim that mass shootings are occurring largely in “gun-free zones” (in reality, only 13% of such shootings occur in these zones). The report included similar disinformation from gun-rights extremist Larry Pratt.

All of these programs, as well as Clarke’s voluminous media appearances (primarily on Fox News) presented Clarke as some kind of a normative law-enforcement officer with conservative views, but in reality, Clarke’s views and advocacy go well beyond the mainstream and are, in fact, deeply mired in right-wing extremism.

Clarke calls himself a “constitutional sheriff” – which is not the benign label it appears, but rather signifies his membership in the CSPOA, the antigovernment organization that promotes the Posse Comitatus-derived belief, among others, that the county sheriff is the supreme law-enforcement entity in the United States. Not only is Clarke a member in good standing with the CSPOA, he was named its “Sheriff of the Year” in 2013, and addressed its annual convention. His speech openly endorsed the organization’s radical interpretation of the Constitution, and he called its members “the true patriots.” Clarke also emphasized his view that “our common enemy” is “the government,” which he claimed constituted a greater threat to freedom than terrorists.

Earlier that same year, Clarke made an appearance on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars radio program, during which he contended that any attempt by federal authorities to confiscate guns would inspire “the second coming of an American Revolution, the likes of which would make the first Revolution pale by comparison.” He then appeared on a Fox News show to explain that he and Jones were envisioning a scenario with “the feds coming in and going into homes, forcing their way into homes and removing firearms,” an idea he admitted is “preposterous.”

Clarke’s subsequent career as a frequent guest on Fox News included segments featuring vicious attacks on President Obama, whom he claimed was attempting to foment racial unrest due to his “divisive policies,” as well as accusing Obama of waging a “war on cops.” He has been especially vicious in his attacks on black activists and the Black Lives Matter movement, describing them as “scum” and “subhuman” and calling for their eradication.

Clarke put his "constitutionalist" background on public display in February 2016 during a radio show he hosted, when he launched into a strident defense of Ammon Bundy and his cohorts in Oregon, who had just been arrested at the culmination of the monthlong standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. He described the takeover as potentially "that crystallizing moment, where that critical mass builds, and a movement is started by We the People, to push back against this intrusive and overbearing federal government. I certainly hope so." His rant promoted several Patriot conspiracy theories, notably the groundless claim that the federal government is not permitted to hold large tracts of public lands in the West.

Nor is his extremism the only cloud on his record. Clarke faces scrutiny in Milwaukee over the death of an inmate in the county jail operated under Clarke's oversight; the mentally ill man died of dehydration after being denied water for seven days by Clarke's employees.

Clarke's record of extremism is considerable, as we detailed previously in an October 2015 profile:

His rise to conservative media stardom began in early 2013 with a contentious appearance on CNN with Piers Morgan, defending his anti-gun control policies and a controversial public-service announcement Clarke had made urging residents to arm themselves with guns. Mack later said that the appearance caught his eye, since he had not heard of Clarke before then.

Shortly afterward, Clarke was named “Sheriff of the Year” by the CSPOA, a selection which provoked a piece from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s Dan Bice exploring the organization’s background and radical beliefs. Clarke fired back with a press release attacking Bice and defending the CSPOA as “a group of honorable Sheriffs and officers who vow to uphold their oath of defending the U.S. Constitution.”

Joining Clarke on the CSPOA stage that year was Stewart Rhodes, whose Oath Keepers organization has a long record as a fiercely antigovernment, militaristic group. As Media Matters notes, among others attending CSPOA that year were Larry Pratt, head of the far-right Gun Owners of America; Michael Peroutka, an active member of Neo-Confederate hate group League of the South, and Sheriff Joe Arpaio's "chief birther" Mike Zullo.

An excerpt from Clarke’s CSPOA speech:

I want to thank you folks. You’re the true patriots. Every successful movement in the history of mankind started at the grassroots level, with true believers. ….You folks are the modern founders, because you want to return where I want to return, and it’s back to the promise that this document made to the people of the United States of America.

…What’s happening today is what was happening then. And a courageous group of grassroots individuals – that’s what the Founding Fathers were, they were grassroots people – said, ‘Enough,’ and started to push back. And that’s what I started to do, and that’s why I started to become more outspoken.I didn’t just wake up one day and have an epiphany start believing this stuff. But I said it’s not enough to just keep it in here. I know I have to join this movement. You folks. I’m just a footsoldier in this. You folks got it started.

To be successful, this movement’s going to have to have two things: You have to have a common enemy, and you have to have a common language. And I’m not here to tell you what to do, or this group what to do, because as I said, I’m a Johnny-come-lately. But I know about movements. And in this movement, the common enemy – and let’s not make this mistake, because I think sometimes you do – this is not about Democrats and Republicans, this is not about liberals and conservatives. Because the ruling class in Washington, D.C., sees us as nothing more than subjects. We’re not citizens anymore, in their minds.

So don’t get caught up with liberals, Democrats, Republicans, conservatives, and even people. Obama – Obama will be gone in a couple years. But guess what will still be there, and this is the common enemy: It’s government.That’s the common enemy. It’s not Nancy Pelosi, it’s not Barack Obama, it’s not the faces and the names. These people come and go. The government remains. That’s what’s becoming oppressive, that’s what’s starting to become intrusive, more and more intrusive, and that’s what’s encroaching on our liberties.

His interview with Alex Jones earlier that year had rung a number of similar notes from antigovernment conspiracy theorists:

JONES: What about this issue? Many sheriffs have said, Sheriff Clarke, that if the executive orders come down banning semi-autos, or whatever … Seriously, if they try to take physically take semi-autos, I know a lot of veterans and people that have had enough, and I would not want to be the police or sheriff’s department ordered by the Feds to try to go get guns. What is your take on the fact that, from a lot of analysts that I talk to, think that the Obama Marxist types want to start a civil war in this county. Ah, they gotta know what’s gonna happen when they try to confiscate guns.

CLARKE: Well, first of all, to me, that would be an act of terror. So, the people of Milwaukee County do not have to worry about me enforcing some sort of order that goes out and collects everybody’s handgun or rifles or any kind of firearm and makes them turn them in. And the reason is, I don’t want to get shot. Because I believe that if somebody tried to enforce something of that magnitude, you would see the second coming of an American Revolution, the likes of which would make the first Revolution pale by comparison. So the people of Milwaukee County don’t have to worry about me engaging in that sort of tyranny.

In the interview, Clarke also brought up the case of the horrifying massacre of six Sikhs at a temple near Milwaukee, an act perpetrated by a radicalized white supremacist. Clarke questioned the coverage of the case, saying: “This isn’t about reducing violence. This is about attacking the Second Amendment. This is going after the wrong crowd.”

Jones replied: “Exactly. Let me ask you this question: Why does the government class, the socialist class, why do they want our guns so bad right now? What are they worried about in the future?”

Clarke replied: “Well, I don’t want to get way out there and try to guess to what they’re getting at, but you know, government control cannot go on as long as people have some sort of ability to say, ‘Hey, wait just a doggone minute.’ And as long as that exists, the government, they – that’s what the government is, they don’t really scare the criminal, they support the criminal, after they’ve been arrested.

“But what they fear is a law-abiding person who’s gonna load up – I mean, read the Declaration of Independence. It’s right there. We’re a law-abiding people saying enough is enough, you are exerting too much influence in our lives, this is tyrannical, and it’s going to stop. That’s what we’re worried about.”

A year later, he appeared on Fox News to discuss that “second American Revolution” with Judge Jeanine Pirro:

CLARKE: It was talking about the feds coming in and going into homes, forcing their way into homes and removing firearms. And you know, the thought is preposterous.

PIRRO: You know what, the thought of it is preposterous. And people are very concerned about it. I mean, this whole idea of identifying gun owners in newspapers and chipping away at these gun rights. And getting a registry. This guy’s a chief, this guy McCarthy, the chief of the third-largest police department in the nation, who works for Rahm Emanuel, who’s so connected to the White House, who’s saying, ‘You know what, we should be able to put a chip in your gun.’ Are you crazy?

CLARKE: You know, that’s why the American people bristle at the thought of a national gun registry. And if the United States – the White House or anybody – would turn over the names of gun owners in the United States to a foreign nation,that would be an act of betrayal on the American people.

By early 2014, Fox began having Clarke appear on-air to discuss the contentious issue of police brutality when handling African Americans, which spurred the creation of the Black Lives Matter movement. In his Dec. 12, 2014, appearance on Fox News with Megyn Kelly, Clarke blamed President Obama for creating the problem.

“He built this racial divide,” Clarke said. “It was a wound that had been healing for a number of years, a number of decades […] and he reopened it with his divisive politics. … Who would have thought that after the election of the first black president in the history of the United States that we would need a period of reconstruction to try to put this country back together?”

He continued:

We have to begin to ask when white society is going to be through paying for the sins of slavery. We’re now punishing people for sins they didn’t commit. I’ve forgiven and I’ve moved on. I’ve stamped that bill marked for the wrongs of slavery paid in full. This country is now open for opportunities for all people. Instances of discrimination, racism had to go underground. OK, it’s been uprooted, the president of the United States said a couple of days ago that they were deep rooted, and that’s simply not true.

So we have to have that discussion as to when we’re really gonna be ready to move on and forgive people, especially people today who have no connection to what’s being talked about.

Clarke also has indicated his alignment with the CSPOA belief that the county sheriff has the authority to ignore other civic authorities, while discussing the riots in Baltimore this spring with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly:

O’REILLY: If the county commissioner – it’s a speculative question, it certainly could happen – gave you an order to stand down while people rioted and looted in the county, you’d have to obey that order, correct?

CLARKE: No. No. No, that’s not going to happen. I’m going to have to defy that order, obviously. I report to the people, that’s who elected me sheriff.

O’REILLY: So if you had been in Baltimore and you had received the order from the mayor to stand down, as we have credible reporting that she gave, you would have defied the order?

CLARKE: Defied the order, sent my officers out there, made sure they had the proper resources, and made sure that they know that they have the authority to use a reasonable amount of force to accomplish their mission.

Clarke’s rhetoric is frequently laden with racially incendiary vitriol. His remark on Fox that Hillary Clinton was willing to “prostitute herself to secure the black vote” is only one example. He also blamed Sandra Bland, a black Texas woman who died while in custody, for her own demise, saying he would “have been embarrassed” if Bland was his own daughter.

Clarke also regularly indulges in conspiracism, claiming that President Obama is trying to “emasculate” police in order to impose dictatorial control. He has even weighed in on LGBT rights, calling for “pitchforks and torches” in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing same-sex marriage.

Nor has he slowed down on the references to armed revolt, telling a World Net Daily interviewer that it might take a “Lexington moment” to stop gay rights and the “socialist agenda.”

On the Oct. 11 broadcast Jeanine Pirro’s Fox News show, he attacked Obama for flying out to Oregon to meet with townspeople in Roseburg after a mass shooting on the community-college campus there, suggesting the president reduce his security instead:

You know, [President Obama] never misses an opportunity to politicize something. Any time there’s a tragedy that happens in the United States, he goes into his political bag of tricks to see what he can accomplish on his agenda and it’s sad that he exploits these people and I’m glad they saw through it. When he takes advantage and uses them to achieve a political agenda, I’m glad to see that they slapped back. This is a ‘do as I say, not as I do’ president and he speaks as he is surrounded by this protective bubble, which he should have. If he wants to disarm people, he should start with his security staff.

However, he went completely off the rails, veering into eliminationist rhetoric advocating the “eradication” of other citizens, when he went on Fox News with Pirro on August 29, 2015, to discuss the recent murders of a law-enforcement officer in Texas that, according to local law-enforcement officials, had been inspired by the anti-police rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement. (It shortly emerged that, in fact, there was nothing linking the murder to the black activists at all.)

Clarke was in a full rage. “Jeanine, I am too pissed off tonight to be diplomatic about what’s going on, and I’m not going to stick my head in the sand about,” he answered when Pirro asked if it was “open season” on cops out there. “I said last December that war had been declared on the American police officer, led by some high profile people — one of them coming out of the White House, one of them coming out of the Department of Justice.”

He continued: “It’s open season right now, no doubt about it. … I’m tired of hearing people call [Black Lives Matter] black activists. They’re black slime, and it needs to be eradicated from American society and American culture. I need every law-abiding person in the United States of America to stand up and start pushing back against this slime, this filth disparaging the American law enforcement officers within these communities.”

Clarke continued in a similar vein after hearing remarks from the sheriff in Texas suggesting that “all lives matter”:

We need to hear more of that from everybody. This whole movement — 'Black Lies' I've renamed it — because it's based on a lie, the 'Hands up, don't shoot.' That's why I said this slime need to be eradicated from American society and American culture.

That kind of rhetoric is fairly common among the militiamen and hatemongers of the extremist right. It’s fairly uncommon – and downright disturbing – coming from an elected officer of the law, especially for one with designs on a powerful position within the federal law enforcement apparatus.

What the Kek: Explaining the Alt-Right ‘Deity’ Behind Their ‘Meme Magic’

2017-05-08T23:08:00.000-07:00

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Who, or what, is Kek?

You may have seen the name bandied about on social media, especially in political circles where alt-right activists and avid Donald Trump supporters lurk. Usually it is brandished as a kind of epithet, seemingly to ward off the effects of liberal arguments, and it often is conveyed in memes that use the image of the alt-right mascot, Pepe the Frog: “Kek!”

Kek, in the alt-right’s telling, is the “deity” of the semi-ironic “religion” the white nationalist movement has created for itself online – partly for amusement, as a way to troll liberals and self-righteous conservatives both, and to make a kind of political point. He is a god of chaos and darkness, with the head of a frog, the source of their memetic “magic,” to whom the alt-right and Donald Trump owe their success, according to their own explanations.

In many ways, Kek is the apotheosis of the bizarre alternative reality of the alt-right: at once absurdly juvenile, transgressive, and racist, as well as reflecting a deeper, pseudo-intellectual purpose that lends it an appeal to young ideologues who fancy themselves deep thinkers. It dwells in that murky area they often occupy, between satire, irony, mockery, and serious ideology; Kek can be both a big joke to pull on liberals and a reflection of the alt-right’s own self-image as serious agents of chaos in modern society.

Most of all, Kek has become a kind of tribal marker of the alt-right: Its meaning obscure and unavailable to ordinary people – “normies,” in their lingo – referencing Kek is most often just a way of signaling to fellow conversants online that the writer embraces the principles of chaos and destruction that are central to alt-right thinking, as it were.

The name, usage, and ultimately the ideas around it originated in gaming culture, particularly on chat boards devoted to the World of Warcraft online computer games, according to Know Your Meme. In those games, participants can chat only with members of their own faction in the “war” (either Alliance or Horde fighters), while opposing players’ chats are rendered in a cryptic form based on Korean; thus, the common chat phrase “LOL” (laugh out loud) was read by opposing players as “KEK.” The phrase caught on as a variation on “LOL” in game chat rooms, as well as at open forums dedicated to gaming, animation, and popular culture, such as 4chan and Reddit – also dens of the alt-right, where the Pepe the Frog meme also has its origins, and similarly hijacked as a symbol of white nationalism.

A popular meme explaining the Cult of Kek.

At some point, someone at 4chan happened to seize on a coincidence: There was, in fact, an Egyptian god named Kek. An androgynous god who could take either male or female form, Kek originally was depicted in female form as possessing the head of a frog or a cat and a serpent when male; but during the Greco-Roman period, the male form was depicted as a frog-headed man.

More importantly, Kek was portrayed as a bringer of chaos and darkness, which happened to fit perfectly with the alt-right’s self-image as being primarily devoted to destroying the existing world order.

In the febrile imaginations at play on 4chan’s image boards and other alt-right gathering spaces, this coincidence took on a life of its own, leading to wide-ranging speculation that Pepe – who, by then, had not only become closely associated with the alt-right, but also with the candidacy of Donald Trump – was actually the living embodiment of Kek. And so the Cult of Kek was born.

Constructed to reflect alt-right politics, the online acolytes of the “religion” in short order constructed a whole panoply of artifacts of the satirical church, including a detailed theology, discussions about creating “meme magick,” books and audio tapes, even a common prayer:

Our Kek who art in memetics

Hallowed by thy memes

Thy Trumpdom come

Thy will be done

In real life as it is on /pol/

Give us this day our daily dubs

And forgive us of our baiting

As we forgive those who bait against us

And lead us not into cuckoldry

But deliver us from shills

For thine is the memetic kingdom, and the shitposting, and the winning, for ever and ever.

Praise KEK

Kek “adherents” created a whole cultural mythology around the idea, describing an ancient kingdom called “Kekistan” that was eventually overwhelmed by “Normistan” and “Cuckistan.” They created not only a logo representing Kek – four Ks surrounding an E – but promptly deployed it in a green-and-black banner, which they call the “national flag of Kekistan.”

The banner’s design, in fact, perfectly mimics a German Nazi war flag, with the Kek logo replacing the swastika and the green replacing the infamous German red. Alt-righters are particularly fond of the way the banner trolls liberals who recognize its origins.

In recent weeks, alt-right marchers at public events planned to create violent scenes with leftist antifacist counterprotesters have appeared carrying Kekistan banners. Others have worn patches adorned with the Kek logo.

A Kekistan Banner was part of the scene at the
alt-right "free speech" rally April 15 in Berkeley, CA.

Besides its entertainment value, the “religion” is mainly useful to the alt-right as a trolling device for making fun of liberals and “political correctness.” A recent alt-right rally in support of adviser Stephen Bannon in front of the White House, posted on YouTube by alt-right maven Cassandra Fairbanks, featured a Kekistan banner and a man announcing to the crowd a “Free Kekistan” campaign.

One of the leaders of the group offered a satirical speech: “The Kekistani people are here, they stand with the oppressed minorities, the oppressed people of Kekistan. They will be heard, they will be set free. Reparations for Kekistan now! Reparations for Kekistan right now!”

“We have lived under normie oppression for too long!” chimed in a cohort.

“The oppression will end!” declared the speaker.

The main point of the whole exercise is to mock “political correctness,” an alt-right shibboleth, and deeply reflective of the ironic, often deadpan style of online trolling in general, and alt-right “troll storms” especially. Certainly, if any “normies” were to make the mistake of taking their “religion” seriously and suggesting that their “deity” was something they actually worshipped, they would receive the usual mocking treatment reserved for anyone foolish enough to take their words at face value.

Yet at the same time, lurking behind all the clownery is an idea that alt-righters actually seem to take seriously: Namely, that by spreading their often cryptic memes far and wide on social media and every other corner of the Internet, they are infecting the popular discourse with their ideas. For the alt-right, those core ideas all revolve around white males, the patriarchy, nationalism, and race, especially the underlying belief that white males and masculinity are under siege – from feminists, from liberals, from racial, ethnic, and sexual/gender minorities.

In such alt-right haunts as Andrew Anglin’s neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, references to the Kek “religion” have become commonplace, and Kek as the “god of chaos” has been credited at the site with, besides electing Trump, killing over 30 people in a fire at an Oakland artists’ collective. A very early Stormer disquisition on Kek by “Atlantic Centurion,” published in August 2015, explores the many dimensions of the Kek phenomenon in extensive theological detail, connecting their belief system to Buddhism and other religions.

It is the Kek the Bodhisattva who can teach our people these truths, if we are willing to listen and to commit ourselves to the generation of meme magick through karmic morality and through the mantra of memes. By refusing to cuck and by rejecting the foul mindsets of our invaders and terrorizers, we will move the nation away from its suffering under the pains of hostile occupation, and closer and closer to its final rebirth. If instead, our people cuck and adopt the foul mindsets, they will generate not Aryan karma but further mosaic samsara.

The trve power of skillful memes is to meme the karmic nation into reality, the process of meme magick. By spreading and repeating the meme mantra, it is possible to generate the karma needed for the rebirth of the nation.

Anglin himself makes frequent references to Kek, making clear that he too subscribes to the underlying meme-spreading strategy that the “religion” represents. Describing a black artist’s piece showing a crucified frog – which appeared to Anglin to be a kind of blasphemy of the Kek deity – he declared that “there’s some cosmic-tier stuff going on out there.” Another post, published in March, was headlined: “Meme Magic: White House Boy Summoned Spirit of Kek to Protect His Prophet Donald Trump.”

Anglin devoted the post to explaining a teenager’s use of an alt-right hand signal while meeting Trump, concluding that “the only possibility here is that this is an example of Carl Jung’s synchronicity – seemingly acausal factors culminating to create an event based on its meaning. But it is not really acausal – it merely appears that way to the non-believer. It is our spiritual energies, channeled through the internet, that caused this event to manifest,” he wrote. “It is meme magic.”

Whether they really believe any of this or not, the thrust of the entire enterprise is to mock everything “politically correct” so loudly and obtusely – and divertingly – that legitimate issues about the vicious core of white male nationalism they embrace never need to be confronted directly. The alt-right’s “meme war” is ultimately another name for far-right propaganda, polished and rewired for 21st-century consumers. The ironic pose that Kek represents, and accompanying claims that the racism they promote is just innocently meant to provoke, in the end are just a façade fronting a very old and very ugly enterprise: hatemongering of the xenophobic and misogynistic kind.

Husband And Wife Accused of Planning Violence in Shooting at UW Milo Protest

2017-04-26T22:53:00.000-07:00

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

After a three-month investigation that entailed combing through hours’ worth of video recordings, the King County Prosecutor’s office in Seattle announced this week that it was filing felony charges against a married couple accused of shooting a man involved in the Jan. 20 protests outside a Milo Yiannopoulos speech on the University of Washington campus.

Elizabeth Hokoana and her husband, Marc Hokoana, both 29, were charged with first-degree assault in the shooting of Joshua Dukes, a 31-year-old computer programmer who had been acting as a peacekeeper during the protest, which featured multiple violent melees. Marc Hokoana had been a participant in several of them, and according to the charging papers, had been dosing protesters with squirts from a small pepper-spray gun.

During one of these brawls, authorities say, Elizabeth “Lily” Hokoana pulled a Glock semiautomatic pistol from her coat and shot Dukes once. Dukes spent several weeks in the hospital recovering from the wound, which damaged several internal organs.

The charging papers claim that, the day before the event, Marc Hokoana had messaged a friend on Facebook: “I can’t wait for tomorrow. I’m going to the milo event and if the snowflakes get out off hand I’m going to wade through their ranks and start cracking skulls.”

The friend asked him whether he was “going to carry.” Hokoana replied: “Nah, I’m going full melee.” He then added: “Lily … is.”

Marc Hokoana had messaged Yiannopoulos via Facebook from the protest, saying his “Make America Great Again” hat had been stolen. He also asked Yiannopoulos for a new hat, but the alt-right provocateur never replied.

Video recorded by Hatewatch during the protests showed Hokoana acting as a provocateur throughout the evening, egging protesters on and trying to provoke them by demanding his hat back.

The charging papers say a witness identified as “B.F.” described his activities throughout the evening: “B.F. stated that the individual kept going over to the group of protesters and agitating the group by calling them snowflakes, libtards and saying that (Trump) was their president. B.F. stated that the man seemed to be there only to provoke the crowd.”

In a still taken from the video (about 2:00), Elizabeth Hokoana
can be seen reaching inside the back of her coat.

A key portion of the Hatewatch video proved important in establishing the charges against Elizabeth Hokoana. Recorded nearly 30 minutes before the shooting, she can be seen, wearing a two-toned winter coat and pigtails, approaching the scene where a young Milo supporter had been hit with a blue paint ball by black-clad protesters. As the young man’s father pulls him away, she can be seen opening her coat and reaching behind her inside it, appearing to stand guard as her husband confronts the protesters. (He shortly afterward emerged, spoke briefly with his wife, and embraced the young man with the paint on his face.)

A detective cited in the charging papers said the movement “was consistent with a person who was attempting to pull a concealed pistol from a holster.”

Later in the Hatewatch video, Marc Hokoana, now wearing a bright yellow ballcap, can be seen chanting with a crowd of Yiannopoulos fans waving a banner bearing the image of Pepe the Frog, the hate-symbol mascot of the alt-right, and then briefly conferring with friends wearing red "Make America Great Again" ballcaps. In the final frame of that video — taken less than a minute before the shooting — the victim, Josh Dukes, is comes into view.

The Seattle Times reports that further video evidence found Marc Hokoana attempting to keep his wife in check, telling her to “calm down” and “don’t shoot anyone.”

An audio analyst told the Times: “Marc Hokoana can then be heard telling Elizabeth Hokoana that others in the crowd, ‘They have to start this. They have to start it.’ ”

The Hokoanas’ lawyers maintained their innocence. “We have provided the police and the prosecution evidence showing that our clients acted lawfully in defense of others,” a joint statement said. “The accuser, Joshua Dukes, has repeatedly stated that he does not want this to go through the criminal-justice system. We are disappointed that the prosecution has decided otherwise. We look forward to presenting our case to a jury and we anticipate an acquittal.”

Joshua Dukes, who was eventually released after weeks in the hospital since the bullet entered his stomach, traveled up his chest and lodged in his back, has been pleading for “restorative justice” in the case.

“Being shot was devastating for Mr. Dukes, his family, and his community,” his attorney, Sarah Lippek, told reporters. “The Hokoanas harmed many people by their violent actions. Mr. Dukes hopes that the defendants will take accountability for shooting him, for taking guns and other weapons into already unstable circumstances, and for their involvement in escalating violence in the situation. It is crucial for the Hokoanas to understand the damage they caused, in order to reach accountability and resolution for this violence.”

Yianniopoulos attempted to claim in his speech inside the hall that the roles were reversed — that it had been one of his alt-right fans who had been shot by an antifascist. Breitbart News and the Daily Caller both reported the same. The Daily Caller wound up writing a story that corrected the facts but, notably, did not explain that it was a correction of the site's previous reportage. Breitbart, meanwhile, not only never bothered to correct its reportage, it instead (without a hint of irony) accused the UW president of changing her story about the event, and left the shooting utterly unmentioned in its subsequent reportage.

Chobani Bites Back, Sues InfoWars For Smearing Idaho Operation, Refugees

2017-04-25T22:40:00.000-07:00

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

To hear the conspiracy-spawning hosts at Alex Jones’ InfoWars operation describe it, Chobani Yogurt and its Turkish-born owner are part of a vast plot to populate rural areas with disease-bearing and rape-prone criminal refugees from war-torn nations, driven out by the machinations of “globalists” who want to destroy America. Or something like that.

This, more or less, is the conspiracy theory that InfoWars contributors have been spinning for the past year or more, reaching hyperbolic stages in the past month as the site has produced segments with videos titled “MSM Covers For Globalist's Refugee Import Program After Child Rape Case” and “Idaho Yogurt Maker Caught Importing Migrant Rapists.”

This week, Chobani chose to fight back—in the courts.

Pointedly observing that Jones “is no stranger to spurious statements,” Chobani filed a lawsuit in Idaho District Court this week demanding $10,000 in attorney fees, full corrections on its false reportage and an apology from Jones and his InfoWars operation.

“The defendants’ conduct in this matter was extreme, outrageous and warrants punitive damages,” the lawsuit said.

The focus of the conspiracists’ fearmongering was Chobani CEO Hamdi Ulukaya, a native of Turkey who has donated heavily to liberal causes and is well known as an advocate for refugee resettlement in the United States and elsewhere. It opened its Idaho plant near Twin Falls, the nation’s second-largest such operation, in 2012. InfoWars and its army of true believers—who descended upon Ulukaya and other Chobani officials with a deluge of threats and hate mail through social media—claim that this is part of a nefarious scheme to drive “ordinary Americans” out of rural districts and replace them with brown-skinned foreign refugees dependent on their benefactors.

According to InfoWars, Ulukaya not only is bringing in crime in the form of child rapists to Twin Falls, he’s bringing disease in the form of tuberculosis.

The anti-refugee contingent had already been whipped into high dudgeon in the Magic Valley in preceding years over its longtime refugee program by a steady drumbeat of Islamophobia engendered with the help of various extremist anti-Muslim organizations, culminating in the open involvement of armed “III Percent” militiamen in anti-refugee protests.

However, the hysteria whipped into high gear in the summer of 2016 when three refugee boys sexually assaulted a five-year-old in an apartment-complex laundry room, and the story hit local news media, and then went viral. The ensuing sensational news reports—amplified by screeching headlines at right-wing outlets such as Drudge Report and Breitbart News—described the assault as a “rape” and the boys as rapists. Some of the accounts claimed that the boys pulled a knife on the girl; others claimed they were from Syria.

However, as Michelle Goldberg explored in a definitive report on the case for Slate, the facts are much more complicated. There was no rape involved; one boy inappropriately touched the girl’s genitals. There were reportedly other acts involved in the assault that were similarly appalling but did not constitute rape. The boys were from Eritrea and Iraq, not Syria. And there was no knife.

Nonetheless, InfoWars’ reports on the case consistently described it as “the Idaho rape case” and described the boys as rapists. Contributor LeeAnn McAdoo also described Chobani as “the target of a lot of anti-refugee anger. People say that the factory there and other local businesses are linked to the refugee program, because the existence of the refugees as labor is needed to fuel Chobani.”

The three boys, ages 14, 10 and 7, pleaded guilty to committing felonies in the assault earlier this month.

Host David Knight kicked off the reportage on the case in 2016 by describing it as “a story of an unbelievable takeover of our country. It’s not just refugees coming in and taking blue-class factory jobs, or middle-class jobs with H1-B visas. No, they’re coming in and they’re taking over our entrepreneurship. They’re taking over American businesses. They’re taking that role and shutting us down, using their connections in Washington.”

The attacks on Chobani led to a deluge of threats against the company and its founder. Social-media sites were flooded with calls for a Chobani boycott, as well as memes attacking Ulukaya, claiming he was “going to drown the United States in Muslims and is importing them to Idaho 300 at a time to work in his factory.” Twin Falls Mayor Shawn Barigar was subjected to death threats when InfoWars and other sites began suggesting he was part of a “government coverup.”

Knight later repeatedly claimed the refugees were responsible for a rise in disease in the area: “They have a five hundred percent increase in tuberculosis,” he told the InfoWars audience. “That is another one of the costs, along with $54 million dollars from the local and state community. That’s the cost to the taxpayers.”

Knight’s claim was based on a wildly distorted report from Breitbart News that “TB Spiked 500 Percent In Twin Falls in 2012, As Chobani Yogurt Opened Plant.” The Idaho Department of Health shortly thereafter explained that, while seven refugees with tuberculosis had indeed been admitted to the program, none of them had a contagious form of the disease.

Nonetheless, Knight repeated the charge last week, after CBS’s 60 Minutes had featured an interview with Ulukaya: “So the report from the hill said that Breitbart at the time had said that the plant had brought not only refugees but crime and tuberculosis—but of course, [sardonically] that was just fake news. Remember when we heard the reports of that five-year-old special-needs girl who was raped? Everybody said, ‘Aw, that was just fake news. That’s false.’ But now of course we have seen them admit to sexually assaulting five-year-old girl, getting their plea deal done last week.

“And so now it’s time for CBS’ 60 Minutes to let’s sweep all that under the carpet and let’s revitalize the image of Chobani Yogurt.”

As Jennifer Patterson, project director for the federal Partnership for Refugees, explained to the Idaho Statesman, Chobani and similar companies working with refugees are not exploiting them.

“It’s the exact opposite,” Patterson said. “These companies are looking to provide resettled refuges with the ability to live happy and productive lives. There’s never any malicious talk about getting them on the cheap.”

Washington Anti-LGBT Seminars Begin Organizing For Another 'Bathroom Bill' Initiative

2017-04-24T13:13:00.000-07:00

Joseph Backholm of the Family Policy Institute of Washington.

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

In the bigger scheme of things, Joseph Backholm sees the fight over bathrooms and transgender rights as something of a short-term battle in what he calls a “war” against LGBT rights—but, he predicts, it will prove to be the decisive one.

“Same-sex marriage is temporary,” he recently told participants in a “Gender Revolution” seminar in Tacoma, Washington. “It cannot endure because it’s not true. Now, same-sex marriage might survive America, but it won’t survive.”

He continued: “There is no chance that, 300 years from now, we’ll look back and man will realize gender doesn’t matter. That’s not because we’re smarter. Eventually humanity will discover that is a broken model, it doesn’t work. It is going to go away.”

The ostensible purpose of the seminars—organized by the Family Policy Institute of Washington, founded and overseen by Backholm, who lives in suburban Lynnwood—was to discuss the so-called “gender revolution.” Most of the 90-minute talk given by Backholm in the seminars, held in locations around Washington state, was devoted to attacking the transgender movement by ridiculing claims and assertions about gender identity common among people who choose to identify with a gender other than that which they are born with.

The larger purpose of the seminars, however, became clear as the talk wound on and Backholm began describing the “cultural” part of how people could combat the “gender revolution”—namely, to encourage participants to engage in the political battle over gender by supporting and helping to promote the FPIW’s new anti-transgender “bathroom bill,” Initiative 1552.

The new version goes beyond similar legislation in other states. For example, it provides for civil penalties against school districts that allow minors to be exposed to transgender persons.

This is not FPIW’s first go-round with a “bathroom bill.” It attempted to pass an earlier version of the same legislation, dubbed Initiative 1515, in 2016 during the general election. The measure, however, failed when FPIW was unable to gather enough signatures to make it onto the ballot.

Indeed, the organization has a long history of sponsoring anti-LGBT legislation and policies. It also has a long track record of failure when it comes to persuading voters.

Backholm appears on local newscasts as an anti-LGBT
spokesperson frequently.

Founded in 2008 by Backholm, the group is the only organization listed by the anti-LGBT hate group Family Research Council as its affiliated “family policy council” for Washington. Backholm and his group are warmly listed as “alliance” members for another anti-LGBT hate group, the Alliance Defending Freedom, which describes how Backholm “is drawing on all of his [ADF] resources and contacts to generate a strong response to the legislature’s new marriage law.”

In 2009, Backholm and his group helped lead the charge against same-sex “domestic partnerships,” which were then legal in Washington. The FPIW’s initiative to outlaw the status failed, 53% - 47%.
After the Washington Legislature voted in 2012 to legalize same-sex marriage, Backholm’s spinoff organization Preserve Marriage Washington campaign led another initiative attempt to have the law overturned. Instead, voters upheld the law by a similar 54% - 46% margin.
In 2016, FPIW led the campaign for Initiative 1551, a “bathroom bill” which it titled “Just Want Privacy.” That one didn’t even make it onto the ballot.

Backholm’s FPIW has also led the charge on a number of religious-right fronts in the state, including:

Support for anti-abortion legislation to define life as beginning at conception.
Campaigning to require parental consent for anyone under 18 seeking an abortion. There were no exceptions for rape or incest in the legislation, and Backholm dismissed claims that teens’ lives could be put at risk by the requirement.
Opposition to legislation expanding access to birth control for poor women; FPIW claimed that access to contraception was already adequate.
Lobbying against a telemedicine bill, providing for health care services delivered through video and interactive audio. FPIW claimed it would allow "webcam abortions."
FPIW also lobbied against a bill requiring insurance companies that cover maternity care to also cover abortions.
Campaigning in support of a bill about "informed decision making" for Washington state's Death with Dignity Act, which permits people to choose doctor-assisted suicide. The FPIW-supported bill would have required doctors, as with anti-abortion “informed consent” laws, to inform patients about "feasible alternatives" before they could access drugs for assisted suicide.

Backholm has a history of outrageous and bigoted remarks in support of his agenda as well. He contends that gay relations in general are in violation of “natural and moral laws”: "The idea that all sex is good sex, so long as it involves adults, will not survive because it cannot survive,” he writes at the FPIW site. “The natural and moral laws of the universe are not subject to court ruling or UN resolution. While many within the tolerance movement will go to the grave convinced of the justness of their cause, history will inevitably see it differently.”

Arguing against same-sex marriage, Backholm compared it to the medieval practice of bloodletting:

Redefining marriage in this way, saying that there is no difference between men and women, that it’s not important for children to have both a mother and a father, that’s not just bad policy, it’s wrong in the eternal sense. So because it’s untrue, it will ultimately be proven as untrue and we will come around to recognize the error of our ways. We used to believe in bloodletting as good medical practice, culture has embraced a lot of things temporarily until they realized it’s based on things that are not true. This is one of those, it has to be temporary, not just because I want it to be temporary, but because it’s untrue in the eternal sense.

While organizing for Initiative 1515 in 2016, Backholm quipped to an audience he was preparing for signature gathering: “For the gentlemen, what I would encourage you to do, if you want to be so bold and to make the point, take your petition and stand outside the women's restroom at the mall, and if any of the women don't want to sign it, just go ahead and follow 'em on in,” he said, to laughter. “Maybe this will be a better time to sign our little petition.”

Last year, FPIW was sued by Planned Parenthood to prevent the release of names of people from the University of Washington who had become embroiled in the widely disproven claims about the health-care organization’s purported sale of fetal tissue. FPIW had worked to support the claims of the Center for Medical Progress and its leader, David Daleiden, concocted through spuriously edited video recordings, that fetal tissue sales were being promoted by PP; Daleiden and one of his cohorts is currently under indictment in California for conspiracy to invade privacy.

For now, Backholm’s focus is entirely about passing I-1552, dubbed once again the “Just Want Privacy” initiative, though the rhetoric is once again charged and bigoted. While campaigning for the bill in 2016, Backholm compared trans people to the story of "The Emperor's New Clothes."

"I once thought that story was useful as an illustration but patently absurd," Backholm said. "No parade would gather to celebrate the new clothes of a naked emperor—until Bruce Jenner. And we now have a nation celebrating the fiction that a man is now a woman."

The FPIW's "Gender Revolution" seminars were held in eight locations around the state, including Bothell, Bellingham, Sequim, Spokane and Pasco. The Tacoma seminar featured a discursion on a component of FPIW’s campaign against transgender acceptance in the state’s schools, attacking the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction over new learning standardssaying that kindergarten students should "understand there are many ways to express gender," third graders should learn that "gender roles can vary considerably" and "understand [the] importance of treating others with respect regarding gender identity," and fourth graders will learn the definition of sexual orientation.

As Backholm made clear, the FPIW believes that this constitutes an attack on conservative students: "It is frightening to think that students who hold traditional beliefs about gender and sexual identity may have to choose between accepting politically correct talking points or failing assignments and being ostracized by school administrators."

FPIW promoted the seminars with provocative taglines: “We celebrate ‘Women’s Day’, but no one can define what a woman—or a man—actually is anymore” and “[W]hy is my child’s school working so hard to convince them there are 56 genders and you can be any gender you want?”

During the seminar, Backholm suggested a common conspiratorial explanation of the progression of LGBT rights to feature transgender concerns. He described how, once same-sex marriage became the law of the land with the Supreme Court’s 2014 Obergfell v. Hodges ruling, LGBT organizers immediately began moving toward “comprehensive federal LGBT non-discrimination protections,” and the cause of transgender rights became a central player in their agenda. “They needed a new victim class,” Backholm said.

All this, he argued, was simply the product of a long moral slide: “The thing that binds this all together is the desire to create an environment in which there are no rules,” he told the audiuence.

Backholm also proffered his views on the nature of transgender identification, claiming that LGBT people have simply slapped a trendy new label on something mundane: “All of this begins to make sense when you realize that when they use the word gender, what they really mean is personality,” he said. “The discussion about gender is really a conversation about personality.”

He urged seminar-goers to get involved on three levels—interpersonally, at their churches, and politically. He described the churches as being “at war, for sure,” and urged everyone at the seminar to help organize support for the drive to gather signatures for I-1552.

“Our kids are just flat-out being lied to, about stuff that’s going to destroy their mind, spirit, soul and body,” he warned. “We should be a place equipped to patch that up when it happens, but we should also be a place that’s involved on the front end of that, so that we can prevent the harm from happening in the first place.”

The larger enemy, as Backholm acknowledged, was the “LGBT agenda,” but added: “That’s not our primary objective right now. There’s hotter irons in the fire. It’s not the root, it’s the fruit of the tree.”

Far Right Descends On Berkeley For 'Free Speech' And Planned Violence

2017-04-17T10:00:00.000-07:00

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

BERKELEY, Calif. – The American far right – alt-right figures, antigovernment movement leaders, and a conglomeration of conspiracists and extremists ranging from anti-feminists to nativists, all angrily voicing their support for Donald Trump – came here Saturday itching for a fight. They found it.

On social media, the organizers and supporters called it “the Next Battle of Berkeley,” a chance to gain revenge for an earlier event on the University of California campus that they believed had infringed on conservatives’ free speech rights: In February, a scheduled appearance by alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was shut down by rock-throwing “antifascist” protesters.

So when several hundred of them gathered at a downtown park for a “Free Speech” event Saturday – most from out of town, many from all around the country – they came prepared to do battle with the same black-clad protesters, many of them wearing helmets, pads, and face masks of their own. The result was an inevitable free-for-all, with organized phalanxes on both sides lining up, occasionally erupting into fistfights, and then breaking down in a series of running melees that ran up Center Street into the heart of downtown.

By the day’s end, 11 people were injured and six hospitalized. Police arrested 21 people on a variety of charges.

The rally had drawn wide attention among various right-wing factions leading up to the event. Perhaps the most noteworthy of them were the Oath Keepers, the antigovernment “Patriot” movement group closely associated with the Bundy standoff and various far-right conspiracist activities.

Stewart Rhodes speaks at the rally.

“We’re going [to Berkeley] because people are having their rights violated,” Oath Keepers president Steward Rhodes told a North Carolina gathering the week before. “So it could be argued that with the full support of the local politicians, thugs in the streets are beating people up and suppressing their rights to free speech and assembly. It could be argued that California is in a state of insurrection.”

Various alt-right figures also became involved. Kyle Chapman, an Alameda County man who has gained recent notoriety as “Based Stickman,” the stick-and-shield-wielding defender of right-wing speech, came and was reportedly arrested. Canadian Lauren Southern, an alt-right pundit who came to notoriety by denying the existence of rape culture and by demonizing minorities, arrived wearing a helmet boasting a “MAGA” (Make America Great Again) sticker.

Nathan Damigo taunts protesters

Nathan Damigo, one of the key figures in the student-oriented white-nationalist “Identity Evropa” organization, was not only present, but acted as a provocateur throughout much of the day, egging on protesters and leading a group of young white men with “fascy” haircuts in confrontations on the street. Damigo was videotaped sucker-punching a young woman in black who was embroiled in the street brawls.

The rally was scheduled to begin at noon, but by 11 a.m. both sides were out in force, and the right-wing speakers, including Southern and Rhodes, began addressing the crowd from a tree-covered portion of the park. Meanwhile, hundreds of protesters gathered, separated from the “Patriots” by orange police cordons, enforced by some 250 officers. By around noon, the protesters began to march around the park.

Groups of right-wing activists formed lines to prevent black-clad antifascists from entering their space, even as the protest moved around the east end of the park and then congealed on Center Street, on its west side. It was there that the police cordons finally started breaking down, the two sides were milling as a mob, and fights began to break out. Objects ranging from plastic bottles to large rock to bagels were flying through the air. A trash bin was rolled down the street, and several bins of garbage were set afire.

The Pepe banners come out

Banners came out, including some featuring Pepe the Frog, the notorious alt-right mascot. One sign featured the anti-Semitic meme, “Goyim Know.” Eventually, the mass of people moved a half-block to the intersection of Center and Milvia streets, where the two sides again faced off for the better part of an hour.

Insults were shouted and chanted, threats were made, skirmishes erupted. Both sides appeared to be evenly matched. That mob broke up when someone lit a large smoke bomb that obscured everyone’s vision for several minutes. In the fog, melees began breaking out, several of them running east up Center. Eventually the mob moved up the block to the intersection of Center with Shattuck, the main downtown boulevard.

The right-wing militants appeared to be attempting to head toward the Cal-Berkeley campus a few blocks further east, but the protesters stiffened their resistance and prevented them from getting much further beyond Shattuck. As participants began drifting away, the combatants remained mostly within a small half-block on Shattuck. Eventually, an organized phalanx of police moved in and broke up the crowd, and most participants went home.

Afterward, the alt-right was exultant, claiming “victory”: Chapman claimed that “Berkeley got sacked,” while the rally’s original organizers, a far-right group called the Proud Boys, boasted: “Today was an enormous victory! I could not be more proud or grateful for every one who attended the event! This was the turning point!”

Post-election pro-Trump rallies in late February held around the country similarly provoked scenes of mob violence.

More photos from the rally below.

A Trump supporter is arrested by police.

Anti-Semitic and racist themes were common.

Protesters traded insults with the rallygoers.

Another Pepe sign.

Oath Keepers leader Gerald DeLemus, a Bundy Ranch figure.

When this rallygoer wasn't wearing his Spartan helmet, he was showing off
his 'white pride' tattoos.

There were a number of injuries on both sides.

A Trump supporter screams at the protesters.

The 'Identity Evropa' crowd in action.

Nathan Damigo, center, and his pals threaten protesters.

A couple of rallygoers recover from the effects of pepper spray.

Canadian alt-right pundit Lauren Southern was there with a contingent.

Alex Jones' Defense of Trump Unleashes Obscene, Homophobic Attack on Congressman

2017-04-06T10:14:00.000-07:00

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Alex Jones keeps saying he has nothing against gay people and thinks they’re wonderful. But then he keeps saying hateful and ultimately insane things about LGBT folk.

The most recent outburst came Wednesday, when Jones posted a video featuring the latest of his wildly obscene and homophobic rants directed at Rep. Adam Schiff—this time with a bug-eyed outburst worthy of Dr. Strangelove, urging President Trump to hit China with nuclear weapons pre-emptively and claiming: “The United States is preparing to nuke China!”

The video, posted to Jones’ YouTube channel, features an increasingly unhinged disquisition warning that China planned to engage the U.S. in a nuclear showdown—and then blaming liberals in Congress, particularly Rep. Schiff, for causing the problems:

JONES: This is what Communism delivers. This is what Venezuela delivers. This what all you people that want collectivism, and hate prosperity. Because you’re socially envious, and hate the prosperity because it makes you feel bad. And now you nihilistically want to start World War III, you assholes. If I wasn’t totally committed to stopping this, I would be getting out of the country with my family and getting to the Southern Hemisphere two years ago.

The world’s in the greatest danger ever, and the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are lined up, showing weakness in the face of all this garbage. And that’s why the Communist Chinese, the biggest mass murderers in history, don’t respect us. Because the Democratic Party and snot-nosed people like the intel deputy head, Adam Schiff over there, are scumbags.

You think having all those fairies and pansies up there, little chicken-necks, running around attacking our president all day, makes us strong? It makes us look weak. It doesn’t matter we’ve got ten to one nuclear weapons against China. Those crazy people have proven they’ll go to war. They’re completely psycho, like Kim Jong Un on power trips.

So if China keeps pushing, the only option is full commitment to hit China pre-emptively. That’s the only way to survive this nuclear and Trump knows it. And Russia has already been told they better stand down. The United States is preparing to nuke China! So get ready, assholes! You wanted it, you’re gonna get it! Turn that off! Goddamn it!

Jones is no stranger to hysterical vitriol; during the 2016 campaign, he worked himself up into a red-faced frenzy making the bizarre claim that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were literally possessed by demons. But if recent broadcasts are anything to judge by, nothing gets Jones quite as agitated as potential political threats to President Trump, the object of Jones’ furiously ardent admiration.

Jones has been on a mission attacking Schiff, D-CA, recently, fueled primarily by the congressman’s work as the Democrats’ leader on the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation of Donald Trump’s campaign ties to Russia. In a March 29 interview with Trump adviser/operative Roger Stone, he unleashed a tide of vitriol unusual even by Jones’ standards, particularly for its unapologetic obscenity:

STONE: What we’re hearing from the Democrats both in the House and Senate is red-baiting --

ALEX JONES: That’s on Drudge.

STONE: -- fear-mongering -- It is well beyond the point of recklessness, whether it is Adam Schiff who has maligned me or whether it is Senator Mark Warner or whether it is Senator John McCain. But let me tell you something, Alex, these guys are pussies. They talk a tough game. “We’re going to get Roger Stone in front of the committee.” Gentlemen, ladies, I am ready, I am more than ready --

JONES: In fact, let me say this right now. Let me tell -- I’m not against gay people. OK. I love them, they’re great folks. But Schiff looks like the archetypal cocksucker with those little deer-in-the-headlight eyes and all his stuff. And there’s something about this fairy, hopping around, bossing everybody around, trying to intimidate people like me and you, I want to tell Congressman Schiff and all the rest of them, “Hey listen asshole, quit saying Roger and I” -- and I’ve never used cussing in 22 years but the gloves are off -- “listen you son of a bitch, what the fuck’s your problem? You want to sit here and say that I’m a goddamn, fucking Russian. You get in my face with that I’ll beat your goddamn ass, you son of a bitch. You piece of shit. You fucking goddamn fucker. Listen fuckhead, you have fucking crossed a line. Get that through your goddamn fucking head. Stop pushing your shit. You’re the people that have fucked this country over and gangraped the shit out of it and lost an election. So stop shooting your mouth off claiming I’m the enemy. You got that you goddamn son of a bitch? Fill your hand.”

I’m sorry, but I’m done. You start calling me a foreign agent, those are fucking fighting words. Excuse me.

STONE: Yeah, I don’t think I have ever been in a campaign in which we disparage the patriotism of our opponents. Now, I’m not going to go there. But I think Adam Schiff has acted irresponsibly and I think he needs to be confronted with his exact words.

JONES: He’s sucking globalist dick.

Newsweek noted that some legal experts viewed Jones’ threat against Schiff as a potential violation of federal law prohibiting direct threats to elected federal officials. Rep. Schiff is married and has two daughters.

As with Jones’s declaimer at the outset of his rant saying he “loves” gay people, he has frequently claimed that, because he is a “libertarian,” he is ardently neutral on the issue of whether or not homosexuality is acceptable.

Meanwhile, out the other side of his mouth, Jones has blamed the gay community for the Orlando Pulse massacre in which 49 people, most of them LGBT, were killed and 53 wounded. (He first claimed the murders were “a false flag” event.) He has claimed the United Nations is ‘space cult’ plotting to make our children gay, or more precisely, “an asexual humanoid.” He claims that toxins introduced to Americans’ diets have been responsible for turning children gay.

Jones, the nation’s most prolific conspiracy theorist, has been an ardent Trump supporter since the spring of 2016. One of his favorite theories before and after the election has revolved around his claims that liberals and the intelligence community are plotting to assassinate Trump.

Pro-Trump Rallies Attract Opposition, anPro-Trump Rallies Attract Opposition, and Violence Again Ensuesd Violence Again Ensues

2017-03-28T14:22:00.000-07:00

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Hundreds of Donald Trump supporters in dozens of cities around the nation held local pro-Trump rallies this weekend, but not all were peaceful.

The rallies—originally organized to celebrate an anticipated repeal of the American Care Act that did not come about when the House canceled its vote on repeal legislation—went ahead anyway “as a show of support for the administration’s fast-moving agenda,” as Breitbart News put it.

Most of the rallies—in places such as New York, Philadelphia, Washington, San Diego, Nashville, and Lansing, Michigan—drew only medium-sized crowds. Opponents showed up to counter-protest, and in some locales such as Philadelphia, outnumbered pro-Trump protesters.

And there was the inevitable friction, especially where members of the anarchist “Black Bloc” became involved. The masked, black-clad “anti-fascists” led chants to interrupt the rallies and began scuffling with the red-hatted objects of their protest.

At rallies in Huntington Beach, California, Seaside Heights, New Jersey, and Salem, Oregon, fights broke out, though police quickly intervened in each case and prevented the violence from spreading. The scene at Huntington Beach very nearly descended into a running melee, with one of its organizers getting hit with pepper spray.

Four counter-protesters were arrested, three for illegal use of pepper spray and one for assault and battery, according to a spokesman for the California State Parks Police.

Some of the self-described “Patriots” who showed up to support Trump also were seen wearing masks of their own, notably at the rally in Salem led by antigovernment organizations such as the militia-oriented “3 Percenters.”

One of these “Patriots” approached and surrounded a black man from Portland named Cameron Whitten, who had come to the rally, he said, to ask people questions. Some of the pro-Trump bloc apparently misidentified Whitten as Micah Rhodes, a Portland black man arrested as a sex offender for sex with underage girls.

They wound up haranguing and threatening Whitten. “I suggest you get back over on that side right now,” a masked man told him, “before I fucking kick your ass for fucking raping little kids, you son of a bitch.” He claimed “we have done a shit-ton of research on you.”

Whitten kept asking the man to identify him, if in fact he knew who he was. The man, joined by several of his friends, continued to threaten him until they were distracted by reports of a flag burning.

One man, Matthew Heagy of Terrebonne, was arrested for pepper-spraying a police officer. Another pro-Trump supporter was briefly detained for having a gun at the rally, but was released, police said.

Violence trailed President Trump’s rallies all during the 2016 campaign, encouraged by the then-candidate’s own rhetoric. Trump openly told participants at one rally to “beat the hell out of” protesters, told them he’d like to “punch [a protester] in the face,” and later described for his rally-goers the violent fate that “back in the old days” was expected for such protesters.

Trump's ICE Bulletin Aims To Shame 'Sanctuary Cities,' But Its Numbers Are Skewed

2017-03-23T14:31:00.000-07:00

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

`The bulletin is long, detailed, and intimidating, as it is apparently intended to be: The Trump administration’s first weekly list of suspected crimes by immigrants in “sanctuary cities,” issued by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seemingly details some 206 cases where suspected illegal immigrants were involved in crimes in jurisdictions where local officials have declined to cooperate with ICE’s detainer requests.

There’s a problem, though: The numbers listed in the bulletin are not what they seem.

The bulletin’s stated intent is to call out the sanctuary cities. “In uncooperative jurisdictions like Cook County, Illinois, and the City of Philadelphia, ICE is barred from interviewing arrestees in local custody. Therefore, in these communities a large number of criminals who have yet to be encountered by ICE are arrested by local authorities and released in these communities without any notification to ICE,” the report said.

“When law enforcement agencies fail to honor immigration detainers and release serious criminal offenders, it undermines ICE’s ability to protect the public safety and carry out its mission,” Acting ICE Director Thomas Homan said in a statement.

Conservative sites promptly picked up on the bulletin’s fearmongering context, running headlines like: “ALERT: Trump Releases Terrifying List Of Cities With Extremely Unsafe Illegals… Do You Live Here?”

However, ICE’s numbers are not quite what they appear to be. In the report, titled the "Weekly and Declined Detainer Outcome Report," 206 declined “detainers” are listed: immigrants marked by ICE for possible deportation but who instead were released by law enforcement between January 28, 2017, and February 3, 2017. ICE typically requests that these individuals be detained by local law enforcement for about 48 hours in order “to allow DHS to assume custody for removal purposes.”

More than half the cases listed by ICE, however, involve people who have only been charged with violations but have not been convicted. Out of those 206 on the list, 116 cases involve pending charges.

The detainers, moreover, are only a tiny portion of the total 3,083 detainers issued throughout the country during that same period. That represents about 15 percent.

Finally, not only is it unclear what period the number cited in the report covers, the figure itself is somewhat murky, since it does not represent all the cases in which immigration authorities sought custody of people facing criminal charges. As a result of this, major cities like New York and Los Angeles are underrepresented on the list.

The large majority of the immigrants on the list, nearly 70 percent, are from Mexico. All told more than 95 percent are from Latin American countries.

The most common charges listed are assault, driving under the influence of alcohol, domestic violence, robbery and sexual assault. Some of the immigrants on the list have been charged with drug possession, resisting an officer and prostitution.

Thanks to one county – Travis County, home of the state capital, Austin – Texas is the most frequently listed state. Travis County accounted for nearly 70 percent, with 142 of detainer cases listed.

State politicians promptly made hay with the bulletin. Governor Greg Abbott called the report “deeply disturbing,” saying it highlighted the “urgent need for a statewide sanctuary city ban in Texas.” Abbott pulled state funding for Travis County programs last month after Democratic Sheriff Sally Hernandez said that she would only honor detainer requests from ICE agents on a limited basis.

“Texas will act to put an end to sanctuary policies that put the lives of our citizens at risk,” Abbott wrote response to the bulletin.

President Trump created the weekly list as part of his first executive order, issued Jan. 25 and titled Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States, a section of which instructed the ICE Director to make such a report public.

The executive order represented Trump’s first steps to make good on campaign promises not only to build a “wall” along the U.S.–Mexico border, but also to crack down on sanctuary cities for shielding undocumented immigrants from federal officials. The order included a plan to publish a weekly list of crimes ostensibly committed by undocumented immigrants.

The section, titled “Sanctuary Jurisdictions,” calls for the Homeland Security secretary to “utilize the Declined Detainer Outcome Report or its equivalent and, on a weekly basis, make public a comprehensive list of criminal actions committed by aliens and any jurisdiction that ignored or otherwise failed to honor any detainers with respect to such aliens.”

Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump was fond of citing various crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. He often invited family members of those who were victims of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants to appear onstage with him at campaign events.

Trump’s opening campaign statement in June 2015 had set this tone: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists and some I assume are good people,” Trump said of undocumented Mexican immigrants.

According to the Declined Detainer Outcome Report, the aim of the new order is “to better inform the public regarding the public safety threats associated with sanctuary jurisdictions.” The report also calls for the secretary of state to “make public a comprehensive list of criminal actions committed by aliens.” an Office for Victims of Crimes Committed by Removable Aliens is scheduled to be established, and it will direct the Justice Department to prioritize those immigration prosecutions.

Local officials around the country voiced dismay with the bulletin.

“They cast a very broad net in who they included in this list. We’re all still trying to figure out what is accomplished by this list, and also how it’s going to be used,” said Jorge Elorza, mayor of Providence, R.I., which was included in the list.

Elorza noted that Rhode Island generally does not honor most ICE detainer requests, but the mayor said Providence appeared to have been singled out because of a non-binding resolution passed by city councilors in 2011, which Elorza says wasn’t about detainers.

In Oregon, Washington County Sheriff Pat Garrett said the report does not accurately describe the difficulties or potential legal ramifications associated with honoring ICE detainer requests." He noted that 2014 Oregon federal court ruling determined that law enforcement could be held liable for keeping someone in jail for immigration agents without probable cause.

ICE’s aggressive tactics against sanctuary cities reflects deeper problems with its approach to enforcing immigration laws – namely, that the threat of deportation arising out of any contact with the legal system is undermining the ability of law enforcement to pursue real crime. In some ICE jurisdictions, women who have been victims of domestic abuse have been dropping their cases out of fear they might be picked up by ICE agents merely for showing up at the courthouse.

Their fears are not groundless. An NPR report showed a video, circulated widely among immigrants, of ICE agents standing outside a Denver courthouse as they waited to make arrests. Subsequently, four women dropped cases in which they were victims of “physical and violent assault,” according to Denver City Attorney Kristin Bronson, who said they feared they risked deportation if they showed up for a hearing:

“We had pending cases that we were prosecuting on their behalf and since January 25, the date of the president’s executive order [on immigration], those four women have let our office know they were not willing to proceed with the case for fear that they would be spotted in the courthouse and deported.”

In February, an undocumented immigrant was arrested at a courthouse in El Paso, Texas, by ICE agents moments after a hearing at which she had been granted a protective order against her abusive ex-husband.

Donald Trump, the Authoritarian Master of Alt-America

2017-03-22T21:05:00.000-07:00

Below is an excerpt from the penultimate chapter of my forthcoming book, Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump, due out this summer from Verso Books. It seemed especially relevant right now.

---

From the first day that Trump assumed the presidency, the White House was embroiled in some kind of chaos – some of it internal wrangling, some of it a product of the press responding to his provocations. Longtime Beltway observers were shocked by all the turmoil, believing it signaled an administration already in distress early in its tenure.

But the chaos was by design, something Trump positively cultivated, following the pattern set by dozens of other authoritarian leaders throughout history – using the turmoil to create so much general uncertainty that his rigid, unyielding positions eventually come to define the general consensus. Wielding his Twitter account – which he described as his way of “speaking directly to the people” – like a combat veteran with a grenade launcher, Trump also demonstrated that he was masterful at creating distractions that kept his critics and the press hopping from one “outrage” to another, paying little attention while he quietly enacted his agenda on a broad array of policy fronts.

Trump’s first real foray into asserting an authoritarian style in enacting his agenda came when he followed through on his campaign promises to sign a Muslim immigration ban when he became president. His first attempt at doing this came with one of his first executive orders, issued Jan. 27, banning all travel from seven Muslim-majority nations: Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

When the order came before the courts after several states sued to block it, Trump’s legal team attempted to argue that the order was not a “Muslim ban” – that is, a religious-based ban that would have run afoul of the Constitution on several counts, notably the Establishment Clause – but in short order, ran aground on the shoals of Trump’s own campaign rhetoric. The federal judges who reviewed the case all cited the candidate’s vows to institute a “Muslim ban” as evidence the order was intended to apply a religious test and therefore likely unconstitutional, and ordered it blocked.

The judges’ rulings infuriated the president, who tweeted after the ruling February 4: “The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!”

Yet when the case went before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Trump’s legal arguments again foundered. “Are you arguing,” queried Judge Michelle Friedland, “that the president’s decision is not reviewable?”

After much obfuscation, Department of Justice lawyer August Flentje said: “Uh, yes.” The appellate court upheld the order blocking Trump’s order.

That weekend, the Trump team sent out Stephen Miller, the 31-year-old “senior adviser” who was a onetime Jeff Sessions staffer closely associated with Stephen Bannon, and himself had a background of dalliances with white nationalists, out to act as the administration’s spokesman on the news talk programs. And he made an indelible impression.

“The president’s powers here are beyond question,” he told Fox News Sunday. “We don’t have judicial supremacy in this country. We have three co-equal branches of government.” He also criticized the appellate court. “The 9th Circuit has a long history of being overturned and the 9th Circuit has a long history of overreaching,” he said. “This is a judicial usurpation of power.”

A week later, on Feb. 21, Miller told Fox that any replacement order would follow the same template: “Fundamentally, you’re still going to have the same basic policy outcome for the country, but you’re going to be responsive to a lot of very technical issues that were brought up by the court and those will be addressed. But in terms of protecting the country, those basic policies are still going to be in effect.'"

So when Trump filed a second executive order banning travel from Muslim nations – reduced to six nations, with Iraq dropped from the list – that, in order to bolster its case, claimed erroneously that Islamist terrorists posed the greatest domestic threat to Americans, and that those six nations had a history of producing immigrants who later committed terror crimes. That order, too was struck down by a federal judge, who ruled that Miller’s Feb. 21 comments were evidence that the order’s intent had not changed.

Floundering displays of incompetence amid assertions of authoritarian certainty such as this became part of the daily White House circus. In mid-February, it emerged that National Security Adviser Mike Flynn had lied to Vice President Mike Pence about his contacts with Russian officials during a November meeting, and after a weekend of turmoil, Flynn was fired. Trump eventually replaced him with a vastly more respected national-security figure, retired Gen. H.R. McMaster.

The chaos became ceaseless. Sean Spicer banned outlets from press briefings. Another cabinet pick, would-be Labor Secretary Andrew Pudzer, was forced to withdraw after allegations of abuse by his ex-wife emerged. Thousands of open government jobs went unfilled because, Trump explained, the administration wasn’t even trying to fill them.

Tension with the press became intense, especially as Trump attempted to control the message to the public. He did this by regularly asserting the Alt-America version of reality, making himself the final authority of what was “factual” in that universe. True to that reality, he inverted the concept of “fake news” on its head by labeling the mainstream press “fake.” While the press scrambled to make sense of his seemingly open dissembling, his real audience – his red-capped Alt-America followers – received the message clearly: Don’t believe the lying press. The only person you can believe is Trump.

Thus, Trump’s response to the increasing blizzard of stories detailing his incompetence was to blame the institutions recording it, rather than addressing the chaos and floundering. At his contentious February 16 press conference, he went to open war with the media.

“The press has become so dishonest that if we don't talk about it, we are doing a tremendous disservice to the American people, tremendous disservice,” he said. “We have to talk about it, to find out what's going on, because the press honestly is out of control. The level of dishonesty is out of control.”

The next morning, he tweeted:

The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!

Trump’s Twitter account, indeed, became his chief agent of chaos, whipping up storms of media and diplomatic controversies that became the focus of much of the daily news reportage around the White House. On March 4, he launched what became his most notorious tweetstorm.

Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my "wires tapped" in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!

Is it legal for a sitting President to be "wire tapping" a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!

I'd bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!

How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!

It later emerged that Trump was inspired to send out these tweets after reading a Bretibart News story, based on anonymous sources, alleging that Obama had tapped Trump’s phones during the campaign. Fact-checkers found the story to be utterly groundless.

Obama adamantly denied the allegation, as did everyone in the intelligence community. James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence under Obama, told NBC’s Meet the Press that in the national intelligence activity he oversaw, “there was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president, the president-elect at the time, as a candidate or against his campaign.” FBI director James Comey asked the Justice Department to issue a statement refuting Trump’s claim.

In reality, Trump’s tweets had put his own manifest incompetence on public display: Anyone even remotely acquainted with American surveillance knows that wiretapping is an extremely limited practice legally, permitted only after evidence is presented to a federal surveillance court panel that then approves or disapproves the warrant. If Trump really had been surveilled by the Obama administration, as he claimed, that meant there was enough evidence for a court to approve it. He either was making clueless and reckless allegations, or he was in reality in deep trouble.

Nonetheless, the White House continued to insist that other evidence was going to emerge demonstrating that Trump had been right. Sean Spicer spun Trump’s tweets for reporters, using “air quotes” to claim that he hadn’t been referring to wiretapping specifically: "The President used the word wiretaps in quotes to mean, broadly, surveillance and other activities."

Spicer then berated reporters for not picking up on news reports that vindicated Trump, notably a report the night before from Fox News pundit Andrew Napolitano, who claimed that the surveillance had actually been conducted by the British intelligence agency GHCQ: "Judge Andrew Napolitano made the following statement, quote, 'Three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the chain of command (to spy on Trump). He didn't use the NSA, he didn't use the CIA ... he used GCHQ.’”

Intelligence officials in the UK were outraged, dismissing the allegation as “utterly ridiculous.” Fox News backed away from Napolitano’s claims, and shortly afterward suspended him from appearing on the network. But Trump adamantly refused to apologize, claiming that Spicer had only read the news story to reporters.

As the media tried to make sense of it all, Kellyanne Conway’s delicious turn of phrase, “alternative facts,” was heard often. Pundits and late-night comics had enjoyed a field day with the term, using it to scornfully refer to the administration’s growing record of spinning a spurious version of reality.

Conway herself had grown weary of being the butt of their jokes. “Excuse me, I’ve spoken 1.2 million words on TV, okay?” she told an interviewer. “You wanna focus on two here and two there, it’s on you, you’re a f—ing miserable person, P.S., just whoever you are.”

What Conway’s critics missed was that, despite their derision – and to some extent, because of it – the gambit worked.

Overall, Trump’s travails seemed to hurt him badly in the polls. By mid-March, according to Gallup, only 37 percent of Americans approved of his performance, while 58 percent disapproved. Those were shockingly low numbers, especially compared to other first-term presidents at similar junctures in their tenures, who were generally in high-approval zones: 62 percent for Obama, 58 percent for George W. Bush, 60 percent for Ronald Reagan.

And yet in the places where it really mattered – that is, in the congressional districts of Republican Trump-backing lawmakers – Trump’s ratings remained high, well over 50 percent. Conservative-oriented polls by Rasmussen put his approval rating at 55 percent. Among Republicans over, 81 percent found Trump “honest and trustworthy.”

"I think he's doing good," Gary Pelletier, a Buffalo, N.Y., retiree told a local reporter. "People are complaining that he's not doing enough, but I'm all for whatever he's doing."

"He's doing everything he said he was going to do," said another Buffalo resident named Phil Pantano, 60.

This was always the role that Alt-America has played: a refuge for people who reject factual reality, a place where they can convene and reassure one another in the facticity of their fabricated version of how the world works. From its beginnings in the 1990s as an alternative universe with its own set of “facts,” to its growth during the early part of the new century through the spread of antigovernment conspiracism, through its evolution into the mainstream of conservatism through the Tea Party, and finally its ultimate realization as a political force through the ascension of Donald Trump, Alt-America’s primarily usefulness was as a ready tool for right-wing authoritarianism. The army of followers was already fully prepared by 2015, when Trump picked up their waiting scepter.

It was also the real-life manifestation of Robert Altemeyer’s “lethal union” of right-wing authoritarian followers with a social-dominance-oriented authoritarian leader: that moment, as Altemeyer says, when “the two can then become locked in a cyclonic death spiral that can take a whole nation down with them.”

Other experts on authoritarianism similarly fear the outcome of Trump’s authoritarianism. “You submit to tyranny,” writes Yale historian Timothy Snyder, “when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.”

Accepting untruth, Snyder warns, is a precondition of tyranny. “Post-truth is pre-fascism,” he writes, and “to abandon facts is to abandon freedom.”

Snyder sees Trump’s insistence on setting the terms of reality as a classic ploy: “This whole idea we're dealing with now about the alternative facts and post-factuality is pretty familiar to the 1920s,” he told Vox’s Sean Illing. “It’s a vision that's very similar to the central premise of the fascist vision. It's important because if you don't have the facts, you don't have the rule of law. If you don't have the rule of law, you can't have democracy.

“And people who want to get rid of democracy and the rule of law understand this because they actively propose an alternative vision. The everyday is boring, they say. Forget about the facts. Experts are boring. Let's instead attach ourselves to a much more attractive and basically fictional world.”

The political reality on the ground, however, will depend on how Trump responds to challenges to his authority. His history so far, particularly his manifest incompetence, points to a bleak outcome.

A longtime Democratic presidential adviser warned Ron Klain told Ezra Klein: “If Trump became a full-fledged autocrat, it will not be because he succeeds in running the state. It’s not going to be like Julius Caesar, where we thank him and here’s a crown.

“It’ll be that he fails, and he has to find a narrative for that failure. And it will not be a narrative of self-criticism. It will not be that he let you down. He will figure out who the villains are, and he will focus the public’s anger at them.”

Seattle Synagogue Hit With Hate Graffiti, But Leaves It Up To Spark Discussion

2017-03-14T14:36:00.000-07:00

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

When a neighbor first spotted the hate graffiti spray-painted on the wall of the Temple de Hirsch Sinai synagogue in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, his first impulse was to cover it over, not to give the haters any more attention.

The graffiti – “Holocau$t i$ fake hi$tory!” – was painted in large letters on a wall inside a meditational area on the temple grounds. So “Carlos,” as the neighbor later identified himself, decided to cover it instead with a sheet painted with the words, “Love Wins.”

“Early this morning while I was walking with my dog I saw the words that had been sprayed on the building,” he explained. “I was so deeply overwhelmed with emotion that when I arrived home I immediately began bawling. Once I regained my composure I felt that the best thing that could be done is to show the love that exists in this world rather than let one person’s actions receive attention unnecessarily.”

Rabbi Daniel Weiner, who oversees the synagogue, appreciated the gesture – but took down the sheet and left the graffiti intact for everyone to see. The synagogue erected a small sign in front reading: “Temple de Hirsch Sinai is aware of this graffiti. We are choosing to leave it exposed for the time being.”

The synagogue's rabbis erected a sign explaining
why the graffiti remained uncovered.

“It was a very sweet gesture and touching, but we took it down,” Weiner said. “I think it’s extremely important that people see this.”

The apparent hate crime was only the latest incident in a wave of threats and attacks directed at Jewish communities across the United States, including toppled gravestones and other vandalization, as well as a rash of bomb threats directed at Jewish communities. The most recent such rash led to the evacuations of five Jewish community centers in the U.S. and Canada during the recent Purim holiday.

Weiner called the graffiti “a toxic mix of Holocaust denial, the stereotypical charge that Jews are obsessed with money, and the notion coming from the (President Trump) administration that all facts are fungible … fake facts, fake history.”

On the temple’s Facebook page, Weiner explained the rabbis’ reaction. "We immediately contacted law enforcement, who have responded quickly and efficiently in opening an investigation, for which we are profoundly grateful. Temple continues to take vigilant, substantive security measures to insure the safety and well-being of our community. In light of other recent threats and upcoming celebrations, we have further enhanced these measures," he wrote.

"And as we take all of these precautions, we are also adamant in our conviction that we will not allow the toxicity of intolerance and growing climate of hate to define who we are, how we live, and what our nation can be.”

The rabbi called for action on the tide of anti-Semitism from President Trump, who has generally declined to address the wave of bias incidents that have occurred in the wake of the election, other than making a few vague statements. Trump reportedly is also considering eliminating the budget for the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism.

“A message needs to come from our president, not only decrying anti-Semitism but specifically indicting white supremacists and in particular those who support his candidacy,” Weiner said, adding that he did not blame Trump or his administration directly but regretted “the tone that has been set throughout the campaign.”

Weiner told reporters that he believes people who were “previously marginalized or silenced now feel newly empowered” to express hateful sentiments.

“The majority of us need to push back against that and convey that America is still America … there’s no place for hate or tolerance of toxic expression.”

The community’s response, including a statement denouncing the crime from Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, has been heartening to Weiner. He says the members of the Seattle Jewish community have rallied around the act.

“People are incredibly hurt and upset. But most of the calls I’ve gotten, all of the calls have been supportive, but most have been defiant,” he said.

Trump's Second Travel Ban Once Again Misidentifies Source of Domestic Terrorist Threat

2017-03-13T14:13:00.000-07:00

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

President Trump’s latest attempt at what his critics call a “Muslim ban” – officially known as his executive order on travel – is predicated on the administration’s claim that people from six Muslim-majority nations pose an immediate security threat to Americans by potentially harboring radical Islamist terrorists who might commit acts of violence on American soil.

However, a careful examination of domestic-terrorism data in the United States powerfully indicates that this claim is poorly grounded. The vast majority of so-called “Islamist” inspired terrorism arrests have involved pre-emptive arrests by law-enforcement sting operations in which potential actors were arrested under circumstances where the public was never at risk. None of the listed nations – Somalia, Iran, Libya, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen – produced any terrorist who has successfully committed a violent act against Americans.

Most of all, the vast majority of domestic-terrorism incidents in the U.S. do not involve radical Islamists – rather, for the past several decades, most cases of violent terrorism have involved homegrown right-wing extremists. In a growing number of recent cases, some of these extremists have begun targeting Muslims and refugees themselves.

Sean Spicer's tweet provided the only public view
of Trump's executive order signing.

The president issued the order March 6, marking the administration’s second attempt at banning travel from Muslim nations whose refugees and emigrants pose a terrorism risk, as Trump had promised during the 2016 election campaign season. The first executive order, issued Jan. 27, listed the same six nations as well as Iraq, but was immediately contested in the courts and overturned as unconstitutional.

The administration is hoping that its revised order is able to surmount the legal difficulties encountered in its first attempt, primarily by claiming – the president’s campaign rhetoric notwithstanding – that the previous order, as the White House had argued in court, “did not provide a basis for discriminating for or against members of any particular religion,” nor does the new order.

This order also has faced immediate legal challenge in federal courts by several states; so far, Hawaii and Washington have filed lawsuits that include several other states as co-plaintiffs. The SPLC issued a statement decrying the order, saying it is “still discriminatory, continues to target the Muslim community and will cause ripple effects felt by people perceived to be Muslim.”

In his order, Trump attempts to surmount previous legal arguments about the ban’s appropriateness by claiming that

Recent history shows that some of those who have entered the United States through our immigration system have proved to be threats to our national security. Since 2001, hundreds of persons born abroad have been convicted of terrorism-related crimes in the United States. They have included not just persons who came here legally on visas but also individuals who first entered the country as refugees. For example, in January 2013, two Iraqi nationals admitted to the United States as refugees in 2009 were sentenced to 40 years and to life in prison, respectively, for multiple terrorism-related offenses. And in October 2014, a native of Somalia who had been brought to the United States as a child refugee and later became a naturalized United States citizen was sentenced to 30 years in prison for attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction as part of a plot to detonate a bomb at a crowded Christmas-tree-lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon. The attorney general has reported to me that more than 300 persons who entered the United States as refugees are currently the subjects of counterterrorism investigations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The order calls these cases “recent,” though both of the arrests occurred in 2010. And, as Chip Gibbons of the Bill of Rights Committee/Defending Dissent Foundation recently noted, they both involve cases of pre-emptive arrest: “In each case the ‘terrorism’ in question was concocted by the FBI, as part of a sting operation.”

As NPR’s Middle East editor, Larry Kaplow, explains:

The two Iraqis were convicted in Kentucky of supporting militant groups back in Iraq that were attacking U.S. troops there. They were not charged with planning attacks in the U.S. The Somali man mentioned came to the U.S. as a small child. He was noticed by the FBI after he exchanged hundreds of emails with suspected terrorists and made statements to a jihadist website. He attempted to detonate what he believed was a bomb — actually a fake bomb supplied by FBI undercover agents — at a Portland Christmas tree lighting in 2010.

Moreover, domestic-terrorism statistics collected over the past eight years indicate that over three-quarters of all Islamist-related domestic terrorism arrests in the United States have involved such pre-emptive plots, cases in which no member of the public is ever harmed or even at serious risk. Only a tiny handful of all Islamist plots have been responsible for the vast majority of casualties by Muslim domestic terrorists.*

Four incidents in particular, all with abnormally high numbers of deaths and injuries, account for more than 90 percent of Islamist domestic-terrorism casualties (which total more than 90 deaths and over 400 injuries):

November 6, 2009, Fort Hood, TX: Nidal Hasan, an Army psychiatrist influenced by radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and suffering from mental illness himself, goes on a shooting rampage inside an Army facility, killing 13 and wounding 32, in an effort to strike a blow in defense of the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan and to become a martyr. Hasan was sentenced to die and awaits execution.
March 15, 2013, Boston, MA: Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, two Chechen brothers (ages 19 and 26, respectively) who emigrated from Kyrgyzstan 2002, set off two pressure-cooker bombs at separate locations along the route of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring an estimated 264 others; and then, when spotted by police after being identified as the suspect, killing another police officer and engaging in a gunfight with police in which Tamerlan was killed and another officer wounded; Dzhokar is later captured hiding in a boat without incident. Convicted of 30 counts, including four murder charges and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction, he was sentenced to die and is currently held at a high-security federal prison in Colorado.
December 2, 2015, San Bernardino, CA: Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, a Muslim couple recently married in Pakistan, though the husband had been a longtime resident of California, go on a shooting rampage at a holiday party for Farook’s coworkers in a county department, killing 14 and injuring 22, before being killed themselves in a shootout with police
June 12, 2016, Orlando, Florida: Omar Mateen, an American-born Muslim of Turkish descent, kills 49 and wounds 53 others at a gay nightclub in Orlando. Mateen is killed during the incident.

None of these perpetrators is from any of the nations targeted in the Trump travel ban. All of them, except Tashfeen Malik, were U.S. citizens.

When it comes to assessing the realities of domestic terrorism and the areas where the public is most at risk, these statistics strongly suggest that, regarding Islamist-inspired violence, the greatest area of concern has to be the recent uptick in murderous acts by American-born or –based Muslims, such as those in Orlando and San Bernadino. Recent immigrants, and particularly refugees, not only have been inactive in recent years, some of their communities in fact have been targeted for hate crimes and acts of domestic terrorism by right-wing extremists.

Indeed, both the public generally and law-enforcement officers specifically are most at risk from domestic-terrorist violence when it is committed by fanatics from the radical right. The incidents involving such cases outnumber Islamist terrorism incidents nearly two-to-one.

Likewise, more than 60 percent of all right-wing extremist cases have involved acts of violence in which the public is at risk (compared to only 21 percent of Islamist incidents), and while only about 10 percent of Islamist cases resulted in deaths, over a quarter of right-wing extremist incidents did so.

Consider the steady drumbeat of terrorism over the past eight years from the radical right, including sovereign citizens, white supremacists, militia-movement extremists, and anti-abortion fanatics. Here is just a sampling of the more than 100 such incidents cataloged since 2008:

July 27, 2008, Knoxville, TN: Jim David Adkisson, an angry conservative with a manifesto urging violent war against liberals, opens fire in a Unitarian Church in Knoxville, Tennessee during a youth performance of a musical, killing two and wounding seven. He pleads guilty to murder and sentenced to life in prison.
April 4, 2009, Pittsburgh, PA: Richard Poplawski, a white supremacist from Pittsburgh, Pennslviana, fearful of an Obama plot to take his guns away, kills three police officers and injures two others in a standoff with police at this home. Poplawski is found guilty of murder and sentenced to die.
June 20, 2010, West Memphis, AK: Jerry and Joe Kane, two sovereign citizens, kill two police officers when pulled over in West Memphis, Arkansas, then die in shootout with local and state police.
January 18, 2011, Spokane, WA: Kevin William Harpham, a white supremacist, plants lethal backpack bomb along route of MLK Day Parade in Spokane, Washington, which did not detonate. Harpham pleads guilty to attempting to use a weapon of mass destrustrion, and attempting to cause bodily injury with an explosive device because of the race, color, or national origin of a targeted person, and is sentenced to 32 years in prison.
August 5, 2012, Oak Creek, WI: Wade Michael Page, a white supremacist, kills six and wounds four during a shooting rampage in a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, before eventually killing himself after being wounded by an officer.
February 15, 2014, Rome, GA: Three men in the so called Rome Militia – Brian Edward Cannon, Corey Robert Williamson, and Terry Eugene Peace – attempt to purchase pipe bombs and other explosives to attack a police station, a water treatment center, and other sites in hopes of overthrowing the US government. All pleaded guilty to charges of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction, and all sentenced to 12 years in prison.
April 13, 2014, Overland Park, KS: Frazier Glenn Miller, former grand dragon of the Carolina Knights of the KKK, kills three at shootings at was extremely well known to law-enforcement authorities long before he embarked on a killing rampage at two Jewish community institutions in Kansas. He’s found guilty of guilty of one count of capital murder, three counts of attempted murder and assault and weapons charges, and sentenced to die.
June 8, 2014, Las Vegas, NV: Jerad and Amanda Miller, a married couple and Patriot movement members who had spent weeks involved in the antigovernment standoff at the Cliven Bundy ranch, go on a shooting rampage that killed three people, including two policemen, in Las Vegas. They’re killed by officers during a shootout.
June 17, 2015, Charleston, SC: Dylann Roof, a young white supremacist enters black church in South Carolina, prays with congregants, then opens fire on smaller group, killing nine and wounding another. He was found guilty of all 33 federal hate-crime charges against him in December 2016 and sentenced to death.
July 22, 2015, Lafayette, LA: John Russell Houser, an admirer of Dylann Roof, similarly caught up in ‘lone wolf’ and other far-right ideologies, enters Louisiana theater with gun, kills two, wounds nine, and is killed.
October 27, 2015, Colorado Springs, CO: Robert Lewis Deer kills a police officer and two others, and injures 9 in shootout and standoff at Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He references “no more baby parts” in police interview, is charged with first degree murder, and eventually ruled mentally incompetent to stand trial.
October 14, 2016, Garden City, KS: Three Kansas militia members plot to bomb an apartment complex home to hundreds of Somali immigrants.

This last incident underscores the potentially lethal nature of right-wing extremist terrorism. Curtis Allen, 49, Gavin Wright, 49, of Liberal, Kan., and Patrick Stein, 47, a resident of a nearby Dodge City, Kan., not only had stockpiled a huge cache of semi-automatic weapons and ammunition with the intent of using them against Somalian refugees and immigrants living in an apartment complex in suburban Garden City.

Their primary plan entailed constructing and detonating three Timothy McVeigh-style truck bombs loaded with fertilizer and fuel oil in the center of the complex, and then mowing down survivors as they fled down the complex’s exit streets with their guns.

The scheduled day for the attack: November 9, the day after the 2016 election. The men were motivated, their attorneys said, by their belief that if Donald Trump won the election, then-President Barack Obama would declare martial law to prevent him from attaining the office, requiring the militias to act.

One of the plotters was recorded describing the militiamen’s beliefs:

“The only fucking way this country’s ever going to get turned around is it will be a bloodbath and it will be a nasty, messy motherfucker. Unless a lot more people in this country wake up and smell the fucking coffee and decide they want this country back … we might be too late, if they do wake up … I think we can get it done. But it ain’t going to be nothing nice about it.”

“There has been an incredible increase in anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment over the past few years. Anti-Muslim groups have exploited terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino,” observed the SPLC’s Heidi Beirich after the men were arrested. “The presidential campaign has also produced some of the rawest nativist appeals in recent memory.

“Significantly, this anti-Muslim and anti-refugee sentiment is increasing within the ranks of the anti-government movement. We’ve seen it in the spate of armed protests outside of mosques in Phoenix and other places last year. The U.S. attorney bringing these charges said the three suspects were members of a militia called the ‘Crusaders.’

“As the Department of Justice announced, the defendants are innocent until proven guilty. The details of the plot, however, are disturbing and should serve as a warning to those who traffic in the politics of fear and bigotry.”

Particularly given the surge in hate incidents since the election, manifest especially in the surge of anti-Semitic threats and attacks over the past month, as well as a growing tide of anti-Muslim hate crimes, the concerns about right-wing domestic terrorism should be more acute than ever.

However, President Trump – who has only made vague gestures at addressing the problem – appears determined instead, with this most recent executive order, to worsen the situation for everyone involved.

___

*The above statistics are a preliminary summary of domestic-terrorism data that have been compiled as part of a multi-year project by the author in conjunction with the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute. Its full findings will be published in April by Reveal Radio and the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Some days ...

2017-03-09T12:16:00.001-08:00

Is Kansas’ ‘Climate of Racial Intolerance’ Fueled by Anti-Muslim Political Rhetoric?

2017-03-02T11:50:00.000-08:00

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Shocking hate crimes like the recent shootings of two Indian men in a restaurant in Olathe, Kansas, often seem to come out of nowhere. But in reality, they emerge not from a vacuum, but always from an environment that encourages and fosters this kind of violence.

Wednesday’s shooting in the Kansas City suburb by a white man who had been shouting racial slurs at the victims and later told a bartender he had shot “two Iranians,” left Srinivas Kuchibhotla, 32, a Garmin engineer from Overland Park, dead and his co-worker, Alok Madasani, 32, as well as Ian Grillot, 24, who attempted to intervene, critically wounded.

The shooter, a former air traffic controller named Adam Purinton, 51, shouted at his victims: “Get out of my country!” The FBI is investigating the case as a hate crime, though Kansas has no hate crime statute.

The shootings set off shock waves in India, where many families have members working and living in the United States under similar circumstances.

Kuchibhotla’s brother-in-law, Venumadhav Gajula, told the Los Angeles Times that he blamed the shooting on “a growing climate of racial intolerance in the United States.”

Certainly, the climate in Kansas, as well as in neighboring Missouri, where Purinton was arrested, reflected just such a growing intolerance. In the months leading up to the election, the Kansas City region’s political scene became ratcheted up into high rhetorical gear for the November vote, and produced campaign appeals notable for their violence-drenched Islamophobic fearmongering.

The most noteworthy of these was a series of mailers from the state Republican Party that went out to voters in the final weeks of the campaign making undisguised appeals to people’s fears that radical Islamist terrorism might overwhelm Kansas.

“Have You Met the New Neighbors?” read the bold letters on the envelope of one mailer, next to an image of an apparent Muslim terrorist. “ISIS is not going away anytime soon,” read the envelope’s script.

This GOP mailer promoted the candidacy of Joseph Scarpa with the promise to keep terrorists out of Kansas.

Another mailer featured a script promoting candidate Joseph Scapa for a state House seat, saying he “wants to keep Kansans safe.” Next to an image of a young girl waving an American flag, it explained: “The first step to keeping Kansans safe is to recognize who the enemy is. Joseph Scapa understands the threats we face right here in Kansas. He will fund new training for our Kansas Law Enforcement officers to ensure they are properly equipped to recognize and deal with foreign and domestic threats in our state, from those who support ideologies that are in conflict with the United States Constitution and our Kansas values.”

It concluded: “Let’s keep terrorists out of Kansas!”

The 'ISIS Hunting License' offered as a campaign stunt by Missouri's newly elected governor, Eric Greitens, during the 2016 campaign.

Another mailer featured an envelope with a similar scared-child script: “What is ISIS? Will they hurt me?” And one of the GOP mailers was an attack on a Democratic opponent, suggesting that “Democrats support moving terrorists to Kansas!”

Meanwhile, in Missouri, another campaign appeal – by the man ultimately elected the state’s new governor, Eric Greitens – featured an even more violent suggestiveness.

In July, Greiten began issuing “ISIS Hunting Permits” marked to expire “when we defeat this evil” as a campaign fund-raising item. A former Navy SEAL officer, Greitens sold the stickers for $10 donations, while for $100, donors would get a sticker signed by another former SEAL who claimed he killed Osama bin Laden.

"All of these people who are out there, they want to join our mission," Greitens told reporters. "They want to become part of the team- part of the campaign- and we thought this would be a fun way to let people know about my biography and that we all need to stand together against terrorism.”

At the time, Faizan Syed, the Counsel on American Islamic Relations in Missouri’s executive director, warned that Greitens’ message could be easily twisted into violence. "The problem is with his target audience. Amongst them are radicals in this country who don't know the difference between the two [Muslims and radical Islamists]," said Syed.

"Those are the people who we have to be worried about when they get a bumper sticker saying 'here's your permit to attack ISIS'. When they see a woman at Walmart with her children and they say, 'this looks like ISIS, I'm going to attack ISIS,' that is when the real trouble begins," he added.

In October, the Islamophobic paranoia bubbled up into the real world in Kansas when three men from Dodge City were arrested and charged with plotting to murder hundreds of Muslims on the day after the election by setting off truck bombs in a Somalian community in Garden City. The men were part of a militia group that regularly traded in Islamphobic paranoia, reflected in their own words, as captured by the FBI on tape:

“The only fucking way this country’s ever going to get turned around is it will be a bloodbath and it will be a nasty, messy motherfucker. Unless a lot more people in this country wake up and smell the fucking coffee and decide they want this country back … we might be too late, if they do wake up … I think we can get it done. But it ain’t going to be nothing nice about it.”

Afterwards, local officials worked hard to restore a sense of normalcy with their Somalian refugee neighbors.

“The only answer I can give you about why this happened is that they wanted to attack your religious beliefs,” Garden City Police Chief Michael Utz told community leaders. “But you need to know that whether you are an immigrant or not, you are all Garden Citians.

“Some of you have said you can’t go to your mosque to pray or that you can’t go to your homes because you are afraid,” Utz said. “But we and the sheriff and the FBI are here to say that you are safe in Garden City and safe in the United States of America.”

In the Kansas City area, both Indian and Muslim minorities are struggling with fears about their safety in the United States. "Everybody's going to be extremely cautious," said the Indian owner of a local jewelry store. "I think it's going to take time for this to settle in."

Meanwhile, in India, students are reportedly rethinking their plans to come to work in the U.S. "I used to think of America as a place where there is greater racial equality than exists in India," 26-year-old Dhriti Ahluwalia told the Washington Post. "Now people are afraid. There is inequality. There is racism."

Trump Still Refusing to Address Post-Election Wave of Anti-Semitism, Hate Incidents

2017-02-17T15:56:00.003-08:00

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

One of the truly disconcerting aspects of the wave of post-election hate incidents that followed Donald Trump’s ascension to the presidency in November has been Trump’s near-complete silence on the matter – particularly given that many of the incidents appear to have been inspired by him and feature references to his name.

At Thursday’s press conference in Washington, the president was pressed once again – twice – on the subject, including direct question about the recent spate of phoned-in bomb threats at Jewish community centers. And both times, he failed to give anything resembling a coherent answer, let alone a clear statement opposing hate crimes committed in his name.

Late in the event, Trump called on reporter Jake Turx, who asked him:

So, first of all, my name is Jake Turx of Ami magazine and, I, despite what so many colleagues might be reporting, I haven't seen anybody in my community accuse either yourself or anyone on your staff of being anti-Semitic. However, what we are concerned about and what we haven't really heard you address is an uptick in anti-Semitism and how in this climate you're going to take care of it. There have been reports out that 48 bomb threats have been made against Jewish centers all across the country in the last couple of weeks. There are people who are committing anti-semitic acts or threatening to --

Trump cut him off:

You know he's said that he's going to ask a very simple, easy question. And it's not. It's not a fair question. Sit down. I understand the rest of your question. So here's the story, folks.

Number one, I'm the least anti-Semitic person you've seen in your entire life. Number two, racism, the least racist person. In fact, we can very well relative to other people running as a Republican —

Quiet, quiet, he lied about getting up asking a straight, simple question, so, you know, welcome to the world of the media.

Let me just tell you something, that I hate the charge. I find it repulsive. I hate even the question because people that know me, and you heard the Prime Minister. You heard Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday. Did you hear him? Bebe, he said, "I've known Donald Trump for a long time. Then he said, forget it." So you should take that instead of having to get up and ask a very insulting question.

However, a short while later, as the conference was wrapping up, Sirius XM reporter Jared Rizzi asked the president: "I'll follow up on my colleague's question about anti-Semitism. It's not about your personality or your beliefs. We're talking about a rise in anti-Semitism around the country. Some of it by supporters in your name. What can you do to deter that?"

Trump blamed it on “the other side”:

And some of it — and can I be honest with you? And this has to do with racism and horrible things that are put up, some of it written by our opponents. You do know that? Do you understand that? You don't think that anybody would do a thing like that.

Some of the signs you'll see are not put up by the people that love or like Donald Trump. They're put up by the other side. And you think it's, like, playing it straight? No. You have some of those signs and anger that is caused by the other side. They'll do signs and they'll do drawings that are inappropriate. It won't be my people. It will be the people on the other side to anger people like you.

Earlier in the week, at a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump was asked a similar question:

Mr. President, since your election campaign and even after your victory, we've seen a sharp rise in the anti-Semitic incidents across the United States, and I wonder, what do you say to those among the Jewish community in the states and Israel, and maybe around the world, who believe and feel that your administration is playing with xenophobia and maybe racist tones?

Trump replied with a rambling discourse on his Electoral College victory.

"Well, I just want to say that we are very honored by the victory that we had, 306 electoral college votes," he said. "We were not supposed to crack 220, you know that, right? There was no way to 221, but then they said there's no way to 270. And there's tremendous enthusiasm out there."

Trump proceeded to call for an end to racism and "every other thing that's going on."

"I will say that we are going to have peace in this country," he continued. "We are going to stop crime in this country. We are going to do everything within our power to stop long-simmering racism and every other thing that's going on. A lot of bad things have been taking place over a long period of time."

The SPLC has been tracking the wave of hate incidents that, one month after the election, totaled 1,094 cases. Of those, over 440 were directly connected to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign – either through the invocation of his name, as when violent perpetrators chant his name to intimidate minorities or leave it as a graffiti-styled threat, or through invocation of his campaign slogans, such as people shouting at immigrants: “Make America white again!”

“Mr. Trump claims he’s surprised his election has unleashed a barrage of hate across the country,” said SPLC President Richard Cohen in November. “But he shouldn’t be. It’s the predictable result of the campaign he waged. Rather than feign surprise, Mr. Trump should take responsibility for what’s occurring, forcefully reject hate and bigotry, reach out to the communities he’s injured, and follow his words with actions to heal the wounds his words have opened.”

Gaffney Proposes a Smashing Replacement for Flynn in NSA Seat: 'Jerry' Boykin

2017-02-16T15:49:00.000-08:00

[Cross-posted at Hatewatch.]

Frank Gaffney, one of the unofficial advisers behind President Trump’s Muslim travel ban and a key right-wing voice on national security issues, has a nominee in mind to replace former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn – a bold choice, someone he thinks can help the new chief executive overcome the Flynn debacle.

Ret. Lt. Gen. William G. “Jerry” Boykin.

On Tuesday, Gaffney tweeted his advice to Trump: “Retired Lieutenant General William 'Jerry' Boykin is that man. He can help Trump make America great again.”

Gaffney expanded the idea further in a column for the right-wing webzine Newsmax titled “Trump Must Channel Reagan on National Security Post.” He referenced Reagan’s 1986 selection of William Clark as national security advisory.

“Like Ronald Reagan, [Trump] needs a top hand who has the judgment and ability to staff up and guide a national security team to achieve victory over Jihad,” he wrote. “Retired Lieutenant General William "Jerry" Boykin is that man.”

Gaffney also appeared on the Breitbart News Daily XM Radio program and promoted Boykin further. “We need a similar guy. I have a candidate. I’m sure that’s the kiss of death, but I believe the guy who should replace General Mike Flynn is another retired Army lieutenant general by the name of William ‘Jerry’ Boykin,” Gaffney told host Alex Marlow.

He said Boykin has “that kind of clarity and courage under fire, most especially, of an extraordinary leader of men, one of our most decorated special operators.”

“This is the guy for this time, I think, and I hope that Donald Trump will think about bringing him in. He knows him, he worked with him in the course of the campaign, and he would, I believe, help him execute a strategy for victory over jihad, which is what we need at the moment,” he said.

However, if Trump is seeking to avoid controversy, Boykin might not fit the bill.

Boykin came to national prominence while still in the Army during the Iraq war, when he gave a speech about hunting down strongman Osman Atto in Mogadishu. "He went on CNN and he laughed at us, and he said, 'They'll never get me because Allah will protect me. Allah will protect me.' Well, you know what? I knew that my God was bigger than his," Boykin told the Los Angeles Times. "I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol." He also told a religious group in Oregon that Islamic extremists hate the United States “because we’re a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian.”

Alongside a history of many other controversial remarks, Boykin has said that “Americans need to have more babies” to counteract the world’s growing Muslim population, called President Obama a “Communist dictator” who is using psychological operations on Americans, claimed that the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” doctrine has led to the “absolute destruction” of the military, warned that Obama is “creating a Marxist nation” with an agenda “straight out of the Communist Manifesto," and even theorized that Obamacare is part of a conspiracy to create a “Brownshirt army.”

In 2014, Boykin was caught on a hot mic making an awkward attempt at humor by telling a reporter from Israel that “Jews are the problem” and the “cause of all the problems in the world.”

In 2015, he told a gathering of the extremist anti-LGBT organization Watchmen on the Walls that Christians in America were being persecuted, and that it was time for them to rise up “like an Army.”

“This SOGI [sexual orientation and gender identity] nonsense is an example of exactly what they’re trying to do us,” Boykin said. “They’re trying to put us in a situation where we’re going to lose our businesses, where we’re going to be forced to accept what Adolf Hitler forced the church to accept in Germany in 1937.”

“We’re at war,” Boykin said, as he declared that the push for gay rights is “evil” and cannot be compared to the fight for civil rights: “This is not about civil rights, this is about the evil that has come into our society and is trying to destroy our ability and our freedom to be able to worship our god as we choose.”

“We’re not rising up against evil,” he warned. “When we rise up against evil, we’ve got to rise up like an army. We’ve got to act like we’re in the military because, in fact, we are God’s army.”

Since 2012, Boykin has been executive vice president of the Family Research Council, an anti-LGBT hate group.

Gaffney himself is no stranger to extremism. His Center for Security Policy regularly demonizes of Muslims both abroad and in the United States. He travels around the country and holds daylong conferences devoted to promoting those smears, along with a heavy dose of conspiracy theories and crackpot claims. He is also credited with having helped foment a significant wave of Islamophobia in the U.S. that crested in 2016.

Nonetheless, Gaffney’s CSP has played a critical role in shaping the Trump administration's foreign policy regarding Muslims. Trump made headlines during the campaign when he cited dubious statistics generated by Gaffney’s group to defend his proposal for a ban on all immigration by Muslims into the United States.

Trump reportedly received advice on “national security issues” from Gaffney during his transition, but Gaffney said he did not have a formal position with the new administration.

Even with Gaffney's support, however, Boykin is unlikely to be chosen. According to White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, Trump has narrowed down the choice to replace Flynn to three candidates: Ret. Admiral Robert Harward, Ret. Gen. David Petraeus, and Ret. Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg.