Sunset at the Park

A family of barn swallows has built a nest in the peak of the roof at the front of the rangers' cabin at San Juan County Park. You can hear them chirping away when you sit on the bench there, taking in the view of Smallpox Bay. Every now and then one of the adults swoops out, gracefully, over the bay and back.

It's still early evening and the bay is glassy calm when Fiona and I come down from our campsite to use the phone. We talk to her mom (who is still back at home, getting ready to join us the next day) a little while, and then Fiona spots the baby swallow.

It is huddled on the ground in the space between the soda machine and the rangers' cabin, chirping, answering the calls from above but clearly unable to become airborne and return to its nest. Fiona wants to pick it up and pet it and comfort it, but I explain to her that if we do, it will smell like humans and its mother will reject it and it will die. If we can find a ranger, I tell her, maybe he can find a way to get it back up there without a human scent.

Just then the chief ranger, a kindly, middle-aged man named Joe Luma, comes down from the campsites and Fiona runs up to implore his help with all the urgency a five-year-old can muster. "Joe! Joe! Come quick and see the baby bird! It needs our help!" She leads him around to the soda machine and he bends down to examine it.

"Okay," he reassures her. "I'll get out the ladder and we'll see if we can't return it to its nest." He stands up and smiles, somewhat winsomely, because he has done this before and knows what the eventual outcome will almost certainly be, regardless.

He beckons his longtime assistant, Ron Abbott, and they go about fetching the ladder and a box to put the bird into on its return trip to the nest. Not far away, I see Ron's cat, a friendly black-and-white fellow named Vinny, playing in the rushes near the bay. Cats will be cats, and cats eat birds. But Vinny evidently hasn't clued in to the presence of the fallen swallow.

Fiona is happy now that Joe and Ron have gone to work on her behalf, and we go back to our campsite, where she regales her little troupe of friends with the tale of how we rescued a baby swallow. They are all appropriately impressed.

The next morning Fiona insists we go back to the ranger station to check on the baby swallow. We can hear the family chirping away in its nest, and the nestling is nowhere on the ground, so she is satisfied that it has been saved: "See?" she says. "It's back home in its nest now," pointing up at the chirping nest.

A little while later I see Joe and Ron inside the station and poke my head in. Joe smiles ruefully and checks to make sure Fiona is out of earshot, then tells me: "We put that bird back up in its nest, and it was back down on the ground in twenty minutes. It was still there when I went home." Of course, it was gone in the morning; whether it was Vinny or one of the wild animals that populates the park -- most notably a family of black foxes -- that finished the job, we'll never know.

But of course, we don't tell Fiona or the kids this. The nestling's fate is one of those adult realities: that in nature, beauty is intertwined with death, love with cruelty. Those charming black foxes survive by eating, among other things, fallen nestlings.

Children will learn this in their own good time; death and life and its cruel ways will intrude on their lives eventually, and so we do what we can to shield them from it when they are young and the world is still sweet and beautiful.

Death, however, is not always so kind to those of us doing the shielding.

****

Joe Luma and Ron Abbott are the kinds of fellows you like to have as park rangers, especially in a place that draws as many children as San Juan County Park. They're older men who like people, and they love the park and having people use it. Especially children, for whom its twelve acres on the western shore of San Juan Island are an open chest of nature's treasures.

I have been camping here every year for the past fifteen, sometimes on multiple visits over a summer, as I will be this year. Many of the rangers the county had hired in previous years had been young men who seemed not very interested in the people using the park, so I had never gotten to know many of them. I've only gotten to know Joe the past couple of years, though he has been here four, but camping here has become remarkably better in his tenure as park manager, and most of the credit belongs to him.

Some of it, though, also belongs to Ron Abbott, who I've gotten to know rather well over the six years he's been a ranger here. I first met him back in the spring of 2000 when I got a wild hair and decided to bike out to the island during one of our periodic "surprise" warm spells in April. The day I rode out was sunny and warm, and I was the only camper there that day. But that evening a wind kicked up across Haro Strait and right through my open campsite, and suddenly the view was too cold to take in. Rather than huddle in my tent, I wandered down to the ranger station to chat with the new ranger.

I don't remember what all we talked about, but I liked Abbott right away. He was in his early fifties, curly red hair and a beard, medium height, with square wire-rim glasses, straightforward countenance, and a ready smile. I never asked too much, but he seemed like someone who had been through his share of rough patches and was out here piecing his life back together. His job doesn't pay especially well, and it's isolated back here. But he always seemed happy.

Certainly, he worked hard. Every time I saw Ron he was cutting brush or fixing a piece of equipment or chopping wood, or just patrolling the grounds and checking to make sure everyone was fine. He saw himself as a real steward of the park, I think, and the park showed it.

Just this spring, Ron and Joe together built an eighty-foot staircase from the upper bench of the park down to its lower second beach, following a plan that Ron had devised. Previously, you had to shimmy down an increasingly slick set of rocks at one end of the beach to reach the pebbly beach, and doing so with children could be risky. Now, you can just walk your kid down a freshly built set of Trex stairs.

This is great news for us, because we brought a whole load of youngsters -- mostly five- and six-year-olds from my daughter's school, along with their parents and siblings -- to the park last week, just in time for one of those marvelous sunny weekends you dream about when you make plans in the spring. We use this second beach a lot, since it is ideal for beaching and storing kayaks, and heading out onto the water quickly, especially if killer whales should appear.

The park's main feature is a massive open grass field that faces out over Haro Strait, and it is visible from most of the campsites in the park. So parents can simply let their children go run and play and still keep an eye on them, though many of us are content to simply sit out on the edge of the field and watch kids play while we watch for whales too. At the open end of the field lays a giant fallen Madrona, trimmed and aging, transformed into a gigantic wooden jungle gym for kids of a broad range of ages.

[Movie trivia note: This park was the site of the exterior shots for the Nicole Kidman/Sandra Bullock popcorn chick flick Practical Magic. The ancient Madrona was still standing in those shots. Proceeds from the shoot paid for the park's brand-new bathroom.]

As far as many of the kids are concerned, though, the chief draw is out there in the water: the whales. The endangered southern resident population of orcas prowls these waters frequently in the summertime, and your chances of seeing them here are better than most places in the United States. Lime Kiln State Park, about a mile and a half south, is actually the best place to see them up-close from land, because they like to come in right next to the rocks there sometimes; when they come by County Park, they usually pass farther out, beyond the rocky little island that serves as a home to peeping oystercatchers about 200 yards offshore.

This all changes, of course, if you have kayaks, which we do, including a couple that are designed to accommodate children. Over the years I've learned how to spot the whales' approach from a ways off (on weekend, the activity of whale-watching boats is a dead giveaway), and so we often set out from the beach in time to watch them. We get close enough for a good look, but we try never to get too close or interfere with them.

On Saturday, they started showing up around noon, and they kept coming by periodically for much of the afternoon. We took most of the kids who wanted to go -- which was all of them -- out to sample the water and for some to see the whales.

At one point, we observed a behavior I'd only heard about previously: logging. A female named Slick -- designated J16 -- was lolling for long stretches at the surface, in some cases three minutes or longer; most of the time, orcas are constantly submerging themselves after they surface. Accompanying her was her fast-growing calf, a seven-year-old named Alki, or J36.



Alki (whose sex is still unknown) was playing with its mother, lolling upside down, its pectoral fins in the air; sometimes as it came up behind her it bumped its nose playfully into her side, at others it swam out ahead by a few feet and spyhopped, checking out its surroundings and spouting mist over the glassy surface of the water.

What they were doing was what we all like to do on hot summer days: lazing. There was a powerful northern current that the rest of the pods were taking, and these two were just enjoying the sun and letting the tide do the work.

Riding with them, we were more or less doing the same thing. The current pulled us steadily north, and the only time we dipped our paddles in the water was to pull back if it looked like we might come too close to our companions. Fiona's friend Felix was seated before me, and his father sat in the front; I had out my hydrophone, and the speaker sat in Felix's lap as we drifted along. The orcas were vocalizing a lot; it wasn't as chorale-like as my last listening, but it was magical nonetheless. The beatific, awestruck look on Felix's face said it all.

At last, after drifting for what seemed like a dream's worth of time, we found ourselves about a quarter-mile south of Smuggler's Cove, so I pulled us out of the current and close to shore. We promptly caught the backcurrent there, and it pulled us back south almost as eagerly as the main-channel current had taken us north. It made for an easy day's paddle, and while we didn't exactly drift back, we scooted back to camp with such ease that it still seemed like a dream as we pulled up to the beach.

Days like that, for me, make life worth living. There is something immensely rewarding about connecting kids with nature, letting them taste and smell and feel the real world, the one that they can never get from a video or computer program. When you do that, you pass on to them values that words cannot communicate. These values were passed on to me the same way, and I believe that some of these children will one day pass them on to theirs. So I am participating in something timeless, and that is inexpressibly satisfying.

This is how nature, the stuff of life in its raw form, so often appears to children. Beautiful, dreamlike, the source of so much awe. And for most of the day, I was swept up in it, drifting in it, soaking in it like Slick.

And then the evening came, and with it the other side of nature.

****

A couple of bicycling campers, who had initially set up their tents in the hiker-biker campsites, decided they didn't like the noise in the adjoining open field that evening and moved their tents and bikes down to a grassy knoll outside of the camping area near one of the overlook benches. Stuff like this rankles old-timers like myself, who know that the park's resources are carefully managed because they are used so much and can be easily run down.

More to the point, I knew that they really rankle Ron Abbott, who was relentless in keeping campers relegated to their designated sites. But he hadn't been around for awhile and I knew he would want to know about this development, so I moseyed down to the ranger station to give him a heads-up.

Ron's living quarters comprised the back half of the ranger station, and the door to them was to the right behind a gate next to the community woodpile. I could see there was a light on inside the home, and I leaned my head over the gate and called out his name.

"Ron?" No answer. I looked to the left of the gate and into the yard and froze.

Ron was lying there on his back. One arm was slightly raised in the air, and one leg was slightly askew. At his feet was a wheel with a crowbar jammed into a half-peeled tire. Vinny the cat sat next to him, his feet together, as if he were guarding him.

I said something -- "Oh shit!" or "Oh God!" or maybe both, I can't remember -- and ran into the yard and knelt next to him. The skin on his arms and legs was a pale gray, his face was purple, and his eyes stared blankly into space. I felt his wrist for a pulse, but there was none. Still, his body seemed warm.

I ran to the phone and dialed 911. After hearing me out, they said EMTs would be arriving shortly. It's about a 15-minute drive from Friday Harbor for even the fastest vehicle, though, and after I hung up I knew I had to do what I could for him.

I quickly checked on him again, tried some chest compressions, but I could see it was useless. I cursed the fact that I had never taken a CPR course, got up and ran out to get help.

I was lucky. I had barely made it across the parking lot before finding someone -- a middle-aged woman coming up to the group camp from the bay below. Her name was Anna Stern, and she was there with a group of 4-H kids. I told her, breathlessly I'm sure, what I had found, and asked if she could help.

"I'm a nurse," she said, and we took off running back to Ron's yard together. Her husband and son, having heard the story, took off to find more help.

Anna and I began working on Ron, repositioning his body, turning him on his side to drain the esophageal fluids, and then on his back so Anna could apply mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. But she couldn't get a seal on his mouth, so I got a quick hands-on lesson in how to do it and began trying to breathe life back into my friend, while Anna went to work giving him chest compressions.

I think I gave him about ten breaths, and each wheezed back out effectlessly. Then two of Anna's friends, both nurses themselves, showed up, and the one who had been a nurse in Vietnam took over. I stood up and backed away, looking helplessly at those blank eyes.

It struck me then, as it often does at funerals, how little the body that is left behind actually looks like the person we knew. Life, the thing that animates us, gives our bodies, our faces, a character that vanishes when it does. I knew that Ron was dead because he was not there anymore; his spark had disappeared as tracelessly as a baby barn swallow.

I realized that my wife would be wondering where I had gotten off to, so I told Anna I'd be back as soon as possible and ran back to my campsite. I called Lisa over to me -- loudly, I'm sorry to say -- and then told her as quietly as I could what had happened, and to keep it quiet. I didn't want a word of it to reach the children.

The other parents heard it all as well, and quietly took over watching Fiona while Lisa and one of the other fathers, Adam Peck, ran back to the ranger station with me.

By the time we got there, the nurses had wrapped Ron in a blanket, and one was telling the EMTs on the radio that this was a coroner's case. The EMTs arrived soon afterward; Lisa went back to put Fiona to bed, and I stayed to write out my statement for the sheriff's deputy.

****

The EMTs told me later that evening that they figured Ron had been dead about an hour when I found him. This was small consolation, really; and I've since come to ponder how it is that EMTs get by emotionally when they lose someone they've been trying to save. No matter how one rationalizes it, there is still some guilt there, and it will haunt me. For how long, I don't know.

I do know it was a good thing I had gone down and found him. If I hadn't, he'd have laid there overnight, and no amount of guarding from Vinny could have kept all the various wild animals in the park away. As it was, his body was tucked safely away by the sheriff's deputies before nightfall.

They're not sure whether it was a heart attack or an aneurysm that laid him low. It seems likely that whatever it was hit him quickly. My friend Bob Leamer was felled a couple of years ago by an aneurysm that took him like a Mack truck. Sudden deaths like that are terrible because we don't get to say goodbye; but then, lingering deaths in which we can give our farewells are in reality much more likely to be source of enormous suffering. There are certain advantages to going out quickly like that.

Still, it is a tremendous jolt for those left behind. I'm not nearly as affected by it all as Joe Luma, and the rest of the county parks crew, who all knew and loved Ron far better than I. And I was equipped, perhaps, better than others to handle finding him, since I have years of experience covering death in all its grim countenances, including several far more horrible than this. Still, I've never been the first on the scene, and it's never involved a friend.

The children in our group, as far as I know, never caught wind that anything bad happened that weekend. If they had been older, perhaps we might have said something; but five-year-olds have enough on their plate without having to deal with something like death.

So the rest of the weekend went in similar fashion; balmy days, visits from whales, kids playing in the grass and on the beaches. I think everyone knew I was hurting, but burying myself in the innocent world of five-year-olds, in those circumstances, was a good recipe for sanity.

I'm told that Ron's family back East is having the body returned to their care. The American Legion post in Friday Harbor, where Ron liked to hang out, is planning a memorial service, though it hasn't been set yet.

I was down talking with Joe Luma, who was terribly shaken, the day afterward at the ranger station. He talked about how tough it was going to be running the park because he and Ron were almost a symbiotic team -- they fed off each other, and picked up where the other left off. Mostly, he missed his friend.

I suggested he lower the park's American flag to half-mast in honor of his friend. He looked at it and said: "I thought about that. But then I wondered if someone would object because it might not be exactly proper."

"Joe," I said, "there isn't a soul on Earth who would object. And if there were, he wouldn't be worth listening to."

So he did.

****

One of the peculiar ironies about the evening that Ron Abbott died was that, not only was it at the end of one of the most beautiful days of the year, it was capped by one of the most spectacular sunsets I've seen on the island this summer.

You have to understand: San Juan sunsets are a staple of travel magazines about the place, because they are so brilliant and gaudy. The photo atop this post was taken four years ago, but it is only one of many I have in my collection from this place.

The sunsets across Haro Strait, when the light and cloud conditions are right, are like grand performances from Mother Nature. They often begin with a golden glow spreading across bands of pink and blue, then deepen in intensity as the sun lowers itself on the horizon, creating intense bands of color and light that gradually phase downward into an intense array of beams as the sun drops behind Vancouver Island. A long-lasting glow then caresses the glassy seas for the next hour or so as a kind of denouement, finally subsiding in a soft azure as night descends and the stars come out.

So it was this night, and after sitting for a little while at our campfire, I wandered out to watch the final embers from the sun settle under the bands of clouds. I knew that Ron never lost his appreciation for these displays -- it was much of the reason why he did what he did -- and would have reveled in this one.

I am almost always overcome by a sense of peacefulness here, and that night, listening to the waves and watching the night descend, it washed over me like a soothing balm. There was an edge to it: I knew that even the soothing sea, like all of the natural world, could be as cruel as death when circumstances suited it. Here amid all this beauty there was death too. It was in everything as surely as there was life in it.

Life, and its beauty, are precious to us because they are so fragile and fleeting. We cherish living because we know that it can disappear in the wink of an eye. This is troubling to all of us -- but it strikes paralyzing fear into the heart of a parent. Because, unlike the innocents we protect, we know too well that death can come in a heartbeat, and it can come even for those innocents. Almost as deep is the fear of our own deaths -- not for our own sakes, but for our children's.

One of the mothers in our group is a former extreme climber and adventurist who has climbed spires around the world and participated in multiple high-risk deep-sea dives. But the last time she tried a free dive, she panicked -- because she began thinking about her children and what would become of them if she died. She hasn't gone back and no longer climbs, either.

A couple of months ago, this same mother had held her youngest son in her arms at a city park and breathed life back into him after he had suddenly, and mysteriously, stopped breathing. He runs about with my daughter now at this park and we all bask in the glow of life he exudes. Yes, we know just how fragile life can be. And still sometimes, the baby swallow makes it back to its mother's nest. Sometimes we are lucky, and sometimes we are not.

As the night settled in and the stars dotted the sky, I finally made my way back to our tent and got ready for bed. I went to my daughter's bed, where she lay curled under her Disney Princess sleeping bag, and caressed her face for a little while, feeling the strands of her hair and the smooth skin of her cheeks, the delicacy of her little fingers. Then I climbed into bed with my loving wife, and I held her close as she slept for the next few hours as the scenes from the day -- all of them, good and bad -- played through my head.

Finally, at about 4 in the morning, I dropped off to sleep.

Nazis and the military

Shawn Stuart is an Iraq War veteran from Montana who spent a fair amount of time last week before the podium at the pathetic National Socialist Movement rally in Olympia. He liked to especially rant about immigration issues and talk about how when he came back to America, he found that we had let the enemy in through the back door. How we had let the Jews open it. That sort of thing.

I have no idea what Stuart's story is. He may well have been attracted to the neo-Nazi cause, and joined the NSM, well after his return home. But what we do know is that today, the American military -- including our forces in Iraq -- are increasingly seeing people like Stuart filling their ranks. Right now.

According to a devastating Southern Poverty Law Center report (echoed in the New York Times), it's happening at an alarming rate. And it's happening because of the way the military is being handled at the very top:

Ten years after Pentagon leaders toughened policies on extremist activities by active duty personnel -- a move that came in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing by decorated Gulf War combat veteran Timothy McVeigh and the murder of a black couple by members of a skinhead gang in the elite 82nd Airborne Division -- large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists continue to infiltrate the ranks of the world's best-trained, best-equipped fighting force. Military recruiters and base commanders, under intense pressure from the war in Iraq to fill the ranks, often look the other way.

Neo-Nazis "stretch across all branches of service, they are linking up across the branches once they're inside, and they are hard-core," Department of Defense gang detective Scott Barfield told the Intelligence Report. "We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad," he added. "That's a problem."

The armed forces are supposed to be a model of racial equality. American soldiers are supposed to be defenders of democracy. Neo-Nazis represent the opposite of these ideals. They dream of race war and revolution, and their motivations for enlisting are often quite different than serving their country.

"Join only for the training, and to better defend yourself, our people, and our culture," Fain said. "We must have people to open doors from the inside when the time comes."

The problem, as the report explains, is the extreme pressure military recruiters are now under to fill their recruitment quotas:

Now, with the country at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the military under increasingly intense pressure to maintain enlistment numbers, weeding out extremists is less of a priority. "Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don't remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members," said Department of Defense investigator Barfield.

"Last year, for the first time, they didn't make their recruiting goals. They don't want to start making a big deal again about neo-Nazis in the military, because then parents who are already worried about their kids signing up and dying in Iraq are going to be even more reluctant about their kids enlisting if they feel they'll be exposed to gangs and white supremacists."

Barfield, who is based at Fort Lewis, said he has identified and submitted evidence on 320 extremists there in the past year. "Only two have been discharged," he said. Barfield and other Department of Defense investigators said they recently uncovered an online network of 57 neo-Nazis who are active duty Army and Marines personnel spread across five military installations in five states -- Fort Lewis; Fort Bragg, N.C.; Fort Hood, Texas; Fort Stewart, Ga.; and Camp Pendleton, Calif. "They're communicating with each other about weapons, about recruiting, about keeping their identities secret, about organizing within the military," Barfield said. "Several of these individuals have since been deployed to combat missions in Iraq."

One of the noteworthy aspects of this phenomenon is the way this meshes with the increasingly military style of the far right in recent years, particularly the militias in the 1990s, who openly recruited veterans and current military members. The cultures have become increasingly enmeshed, as embodied by Steven Barry's recruitment plan for neo-Nazis considering a military career as a way to sharpen their "warrior" skills.

One of the real issues in attacking this problem is in recognizing, first of all, that it does not identify our people serving in the armed forces with white supremacists. Moreover, as Jo Fish observes, recruiters probably aren;t seeking out this element; rather, it is coming to them, and circumstances are forcing them to turn a blind eye to it.

And as Atrios notes, the SPLC raises immediate questions about the kind of men we're sending over to Iraq. To what extent, really, does the spread of white-supremacist attitudes in the military bring about atrocities like the recent murder of a 14-year-old girl and her family, or the Haditha massacre? It isn't hard to see, after all, attitudes about the disposability of nonwhite races rearing their ugly head in those incidents.

The larger political question, however, is a matter of accountability -- the avoidance of which has proven to be the Bush administration's most remarkable skill. Yet at some point, both the public and the military are going to have to ask: What is this administration doing to our armed forces?

On core matters of respect for the law and basic norms of human decency, it has at every turn taken an ends-justify-the-means approach: whether we're talking about torture of military prisoners -- brought to flaming light by the Abu Ghraib abuses -- as well as the warping and twisting soldiers in the field by failing to provide them with adequate mental-health care and screening.

All of these things -- respecting the laws on torture and the Geneva conventions, providing soldiers with care, weeding out hard-core racists -- are aspects of military policy that have been instituted, after all, to protect and benefit the people serving in the armed forces. Degrading them harms people in uniform in material ways.

There was talk, after Haditha, that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -- on whose watch this has all occurred -- should finally be forced to resign; talk that has quieted down in the weeks since. The SPLC report, however, should revive it, since it lays bare just how harmful this administration's conduct of not just the war but the deployment and recruitment of our armed forces has been.

Finally, there is an aspect of all this that has largely gone unremarked, but is the real problem we all will eventually have to confront about this: Shawn Stuart is just the first of these faces to be returning home from the Iraq War. If the SPLC report is any indication, there will be many more.

Some will have joined the neo-Nazi cause in the military. Some will have developed attitudes sympathetic to theirs and join later. But we can certainly expect to see more Shawn Stuarts, and they won't all be up on podiums.

If we look five years down the road, a disturbing picture begins to take shape: After the war ends in general failure, as seems almost inevitable now, there will be a raft of angry returned veterans back in country. They will have been told, as they are being told now, that the cause of the failure is all those liberals and terrorist sympathizers roaming the landscape. That they were "stabbed in the back" by the "enemy at home."

Sound familiar?

Already, right-wingers are developing "Targets of Opportunity." Already, they're justifying Radio Rwanda tactics for anyone who dares dissent. Just how much better is it going to get in five years' time?

This, folks, is the very real threat of fascism I've been warning about for some time, rearing its truly monstrous head. You know it when you see it -- and seeing it, perhaps, some of my readers (who keep wondering when I'm going to declare the American right truly fascist) will understand why I'm insisting we're not there yet -- that what we are currently coping with is a kind of pseudo-fascism whose chief threat is that it will give birth to the real thing.

What pseudo-fascism is all about, really, is the end justifying the means. And when the end justifies the means, there are always a thousand untold consequences. We are beginning to glimpse them now.

Gone whaling

I'm off to the islands with a pack of 5-year-olds this weekend. I may actually have a breaking-news post this weekend, so look for it, though I can't promise anything. Otherwise, we'll be communing with the orcas.

The Lyons roars

Gene Lyons takes on the eliminationist wingnuts in his latest column [link not yet available; will publish it as soon as it is]. As Gene points out, the notion that the New York Times has a liberal bias runs directly counter to his own experience:

The New York Times arrogant? Goodness, yes. Condescending too. During the decade the newspaper devoted to its farcical coverage of the Whitewater hoax, feeding out of Kenneth Starr's soft little hand like a Shetland pony, I experienced that condescension first hand. Even confronted with dispositive documentary evidence its Whitewater stories were bunk, its basic response never varied: "We're the New York Times and you're not."

But left wing? Well, the Times, along with the Washington Post, led the 2000 "War on Gore" that basically gave Bush the presidency. Then-columnist, now executive editor Bill Keller actually quoted his 3 year-old daughter's opinion that the Democratic nominee was a stiff.

After 9/11, the Times, along with the rest of the newspaper consortium, buried its finding that had all the legal votes in Florida been counted in 2000, Al Gore would have been president.

Lest we forget, it was reporter Judith Miller's series of leaked, single-source "exclusives" touting Saddam Hussein's imaginary nuclear weapons, accompanied by TV appearances by Condoleeza Rice and Dick Cheney carefully coordinated with Times publication dates, that helped stampede the nation to war. Columnist Keller thought invading Iraq was a terrific idea.

Now the Times has its reward. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll thinks he knows why. "Many members of the president's base consider 'New York' to be a nifty code word for 'Jewish.' It is very nice for the president to be able to campaign against the Jews without (a) actually saying the word 'Jew' and (b) without irritating the Israelis."

Actually, that's wishful thinking. Anti-Semitism, as such, is old hat among True Believers on the extreme right. For years, the idea's been percolating through the right's well-organized propaganda apparatus that Democrats aren't loyal Americans. Regarding Ann Coulter’s ludicrous book "Slander," I once wrote that "the 'liberal' sins [she] caricatures -- atheism, cosmopolitanism, sexual license, moral relativism, communism, disloyalty and treason -- are basically identical to the crimes of the Jews as Hitler saw them."

Michael Savage, Michael Reagan, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, Limbaugh and others peddle the same sterilized American update of an ancient slur. Limbaugh recently called 80 percent of Times subscribers "jihadists."

Now the Bush White House, desperate to prevail in 2006 congressional elections, has taken up the cry. Reasonable people never want to believe extremists believe their own rhetoric. But quit kidding yourselves. We're witnessing mass psychosis. The next terrorist strike, should it happen, will be blamed on the enemy within: treasonous "liberals" who dissent from the glorious reign of George W. Bush.

Unless confronted, it's through such strategems that democracies fail and constitutional republics become dictatorships.

Gene, as always, says it all.

A nice day for Nazis

The summer in Puget Sound -- clear skies, temperatures in the mid-80s, a light breeze -- was in full bloom yesterday in Olympia. As I walked away from the media area near the podium set up on the Capitol steps where a feeble clutch of neo-Nazis held forth to a crowd intent on mocking and ignoring them, I smiled at two of the 275 Washington State Patrol officers called out to duty that day.

It was clear that there was nothing much cooking that day except for sweating neo-Nazis standing on some granite steps in the hot sun in long sleeved-brownshirt outfits and black boots. The patrolmen, well away from the action, were in short sleeves and standing near a balcony where nothing was happening, chatting and relaxed.

"Nice day for overtime, eh?" I said with a grin. They grinned back.

The whole scene, really, was a bit of theater of the absurd: Here, on the Capitol steps, screaming racial invective into the public-address system, was a total of 12 neo-Nazis, ten of them decked out in crisp brownshirt outfits with neat little patches on the shoulders. Occasionally, as a speaker would wrap up his schtick, they'd all stand in line and do the "Sieg Heil" thing.


Meanwhile, fifty yards away -- separated by a fence and large open space -- was a crowd estimated at over 300 people, nearly all of them there to mock, deride, and toss insults at the Nazis.

The 275 officers -- a number of them in full riot gear -- were ostensibly there to keep the two sides separate. There were police planes flying overhead as well, and snipers on the rooftops. It was an overwhelming police presence, and a tremendous expenditure of public dollars.

And for what, exactly? For the sake of 12 social misfits who think that getting up on the Capitol steps and ranting about Jews and dirty immigrants is the way to spark a social revolution.

The neo-Nazis in question -- the Northwest chapter of the National Socialist Movement, whose activities regionally we've reported previously (you may also recall they were the group that designated me a "race traitor") -- were not exactly threatening. For that matter, they were completely unimpressive in nearly every regard: disorganized, lackluster speakers with nothing interesting to say, and physically unimposing. Even their new brownshirt outfits came off more like insipid geek fantasy role-playing.

The speakers -- like Nigel Fovargue, the Los Angeles Nazi whose image graces the top of the post, or Shawn Stewart, a skinny Iraq War veteran from Billings, Montana -- really had little to say, other than spewing racial invective: "There's a little cockroach that has crawled into every nation and they have been kicked out everywhere. Who am I talking about? The Jew. The Jew hates you all," Stewart said.

This meant they all ran out of steam after about ten minutes; by 2:30 p.m., a half-hour into the rally, they all began talking among themselves about who would speak next. After awhile the speakers began returning to the podium to rant a little longer.


The rally's chief organizer, "Jim Ramm" -- whose real name is Matthew Ramsey, a former Snohomish County militia promoter whose earlier activities I documented recently -- spent much of the rally walking about the steps, videotaping the speakers (as well as those of us in the press area) and checking the sound system. But he also took the podium on occasion, delivering his invective with a guttural snarl.

Ramm and his NSM crew had been predicting a large turnout of fellow neo-Nazis, but all they really demonstrated was just how pathetic a response their recruitment efforts have been over the past year. This can only be a good sign for folks in the Northwest, who have suffered the presence of neo-Nazis for many years now, because nationally speaking, in contrast, the NSM has become a significant presence on the far-right scene.

This is especially the case in light of the violence the NSM was responsible for inducing in Toledo, Ohio, last year, and attempted to spark earlier this year in Orlando, Florida.

In stark contrast, the crowd in Olympia was largely good-natured -- their main purpose was to mock and laugh at the Nazis. Following up on the previous day's community gathering that celebrated the city's diversity, the crowd of protesters that showed up was intent on making a positive response to the Nazi preesence.


Especially noteworthy was the troupe of protesters dressed as clowns -- Nazi clowns, who actually goosestepped together better than the inchoate cluster up on the Capitol steps. They pranced and laughed and danced in the front of the crowd, setting the light-hearted mocking tone that prevailed throughout the afternoon.

The idea for this was hatched by local organizers, including Rick at Olyblog, who approached me last January with the idea, and which sounded at the time like an excellent response I endorsed.

Mind you, this runs directly counter to the advice given by my friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, who consistently urge people to stay away and defang the Nazi rallies by denying them an audience.

Having covered Aryan Nations events in Coeur d'Alene, I can attest that this is generally good advice. Though community organizers in northern Idaho would often hold counter-rallies elsewhere as an alternative celebration (to good effect, I might add), nonetheless, the parade routes there would still be lined with counter-protesters who just turned ugly, spewing hate right back at the Nazis; this always seemed to me to be counter-productive, a matter of feeding the beast. The Nazis always took sustenance from it.

The response in Olympia, however, was one of the most effective I've seen yet. For one thing, by making mockery the theme of the day, it transformed the mood of the crowd from an angry one -- and who wouldn't get angry if they actually listened to what these Nazis were saying? -- into a celebratory one. They played music, they danced, and made so much noise having fun that, if you were in the crowd, you couldn't hear a word the Nazis were spewing.

Rick at Olyblog has more, as does the Olympian.

It also seemed to disorient and dishearten the Nazis. Of course, they recognized that their entire audience that day was constituted of people who opposed them -- and it was clear from their taunts ("The only reason we are able to be up here today is because you people don't have the guts to do what it takes to silence us," Gary Nemeth told the crowd) that they hoped to spark violence from them, a la Toledo. But after awhile it became clear that their audience was, for the most part, studiously ignoring anything they had to say, and was more intent on dancing and playing music than taking after their sorry asses. And this clearly deflated them.

Finally, it provided an opportunity for the various diversity-oriented interest groups drawn out by the Nazis to get together, network, and actually form working coalitions that likely will prove effective in organizing the Olympia community against the lapping waves of right-wing extremism. Those organizers deserve a hearty round of applause for how well they responded to Monday's event.

It's especially important because groups like the NSM flourish in environments where people try to ignore them in the hopes they'll just go away. As we've seen in the past couple of decades, they don't.

And, in an environment where rising mainstream eliminationism demonstrates the broad influence of far-right hate groups well beyond their pathetic membership numbers, and there is no shortage of mainstream right-wing transmitters duplicating their tactics, hate groups can no longer be simply ignored.

And the crowd in Olympia may have finally found exactly the right way to respond to them.

The drums of elimination

Documenting the mounting drumbeat of eliminationist rhetoric from the American right has long been a staple of this blog. But even I have to shake my head in wonder at the turn of events this past week -- most of it in the wake of the New York Times' publication of stories detailing the Bush administration's use of banking data in its search for terrorists.

The upshot has been a significant escalation in this rhetoric, coming not just from the usual rabid quarters but coming over the national airwaves from figures who supposedly represent mainstream conservatism -- and it is aimed not just at the usual "liberal" targets, but at the entire institution of the free press.

And perhaps most remarkably, the press itself -- continuing its chief trend so far this century -- has been remarkably timid about confronting it.

Fortunately, there have been a few voices that have not, including Paul Waldman at Media Matters:

The right has kept the media under constant assault for decades, and the response from the media has been to bend over backward to prove they aren't biased -- by being harder on Democrats. They should have learned long ago that the "liberal bias" charge has absolutely nothing to do with the content of the news. It is a political strategy, a way of "working the ref" and providing easy excuses for public rejection of the right's goals. But what we have seen this week is something qualitatively different.

Given the constant drumbeat of criticism directed at the media from conservatives, it might be easy to dismiss this latest expulsion of bile as just more of the same. But it's worth stepping back to take a look at exactly what has occurred over the past week. Members of Congress have suggested revoking the Capitol Hill credentials of journalists, so that only news organizations that do not displease the ruling party may be permitted to report from Congress. Other members have accused members of the media of "treason" and advocated their prosecution. A conservative television and radio personality suggested that the government establish an Office of Censorship to screen the news. Another said, "I would have no problem with [New York Times editor Bill Keller] being sent to the gas chamber." The House of Representatives passed a resolution saying it "expects the cooperation of all news media organizations."

In short, the right assembled a posse this week -- vigilantes stalking television studios, radio airwaves, print, and the Internet, their apparent goal to revoke the First Amendment.

That, as it turns out, was only the beginning. Glenn Greenwald this weekend examined the lunacy that arose in the right-wing blogosphere, particularly from the Michelle Malkin and David Horowitz quarters, where they claimed that the Times Travel Section committed treasonous behavior by printing a story detailing the accommodations -- and locations -- of Bush and Cheney's vacation retreats, all of which is already easily accessed public information.

But that wasn't enough. This was about beating the drum to eliminate the enemy. Horowitz set the rhythm:

Make no mistake about it, there is a war going on in this country. The aggressors in this war are Democrats, liberals and leftists who began a scorched earth campaign against President Bush before the initiation of hostilities in Iraq.

And pretty soon everyone else joined in, including commenters like this:

since we've so civilized ourselves that it's highly unlikely that an angry mob with torches will show up on the NYT's doorstep.

Pity, that.

Greenwald's updates detail how the drumbeat started reaching a fever pitch:

UPDATE II: The outright derangement generated by this madness has now led one of the imbeciles who likely read Malkin and Powerline's blog to post the home address and telephone number of the Times photographers on his website. NOTE: After leaving the photographer's home address up for roughly 24 hours, he has deleted the page (a screen shot before its deletion is here) and now warns:

The post has served its purpose--we got your attention over the NY Times' lack of consideration for everyday Americans, (who its principals have utter contempt for), our soldiers (who they despise) and our President (who they have a seething hatred of). Subsequent posts will concentrate on the Times's reporters, editors and executives.

He then -- with more unintended irony than I thought possible -- pouted that the comments he received were "getting pretty nasty" and decried the "common ploy of the Left: destroy the messenger when he or she hits home with a good point, instead of discussing or arguing the merits of that point."

UPDATE III: Another upstanding, patriotic blogger -- after linking to the blog which posted the address of the Times photographer -- has now posted this:

So, in the school of what's good for the goose is good for the gander, we are providing this link so YOU may help the blogosphere in locating the homes (perhaps with photos?) of the editors and reporters of the New York Times.

Let's start with the following New York Times reporters and editors: Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr. , Bill Keller, Eric Lichtblau, and James Risen. Do you have an idea where they live?

Go hunt them down and do America a favor. Get their photo, street address, where their kids go to school, anything you can dig up, and send it to the link above. This is your chance to be famous -- grab for the golden ring.

He's urging people to find the names and addresses of New York Times editors and reporters in order to "hunt them down and do America a favor." And he said that right after he posted the link to the address of the Times photographer. And this is just the beginning of this syndrome, not the end.

This syndrome has a specific name: eliminationism. And it's important to identify it, because it has become not only a distinguishing but a dominating feature of right-wing rhetoric.

As I described it before:

What, really, is eliminationism?

It's a fairly self-explanatory term: it describes a kind of politics and culture that shuns dialogue and the democratic exchange of ideas for the pursuit of outright elimination of the opposing side, either through complete suppression, exile and ejection, or extermination.

... Rhetorically, it takes on some distinctive shapes. It always depicts its opposition as simply beyond the pale, and in the end the embodiment of evil itself -- unfit for participation in their vision of society, and thus in need of elimination. It often depicts its designated "enemy" as vermin (especially rats and cockroaches) or diseases, and loves to incessantly suggest that its targets are themselves disease carriers. A close corollary -- but not as nakedly eliminationist -- are claims that the opponents are traitors or criminals, or gross liabilities for our national security, and thus inherently fit for elimination or at least incarceration.

And yes, it's often voiced as crude "jokes", the humor of which, when analyzed, is inevitably predicated on a venomous hatred.

But what we also know about this rhetoric is that, as surely as night follows day, this kind of talk eventually begets action, with inevitably tragic results.

Of course, we all know that this isn't the first time that Malkin has pulled a Radio Rwanda stunt, nor, it's quite clear, is it likely to be the last. She's actually quite proud of the ugliness she's unleashing.

In that regard, she's really just following in the footsteps of the Eliminationist Diva herself, Ann Coulter, who wants to inspire mobs of skinheads to perform their manly duties and beat the crap out of Muslims and liberals.

What is perhaps most disturbing about this current outbreak is that it's occurring in a context in which the drums have been getting louder all around, especially in recent months. Perhaps the most important front for this has been the immigration debate, which has opened the floodgates for all kinds of right-wing extremism to gain adoption from mainstream conservatives.

The talk has also become a staple for local and national radio talk show hosts, and it has generally become imbedded in the media discourse to the point that it now seems almost unremarkable.

The rising question in all this, as Michelle Goldberg explored at Huffblog, is the extent to which this eliminationism signals a trend toward real fascism.

After all, eliminationism is the calling card, the signature project, of fascism. The natural outcome of "palingenetic ultranationalist populism" -- Oxford scholar Roger Griffin's definition of the core of fascism -- is always eliminationism; in order to revive the national spirit, the nation has to be purged of the elements that have caused its despoilment. The fascist always casts himself as the true representative of the national spirit, and always casts himself in a heroic light. But heroes always need enemies, and eventually, the fascist gets around to naming them.

When we hear the drumbeat of eliminationism, we know where it always ends up. Those who join in may not conceive of themselves as fascists, but they join in anyway.

After all, the drumbeat feels good. It's about scapegoating, telling people that their problems, and the problems of the world, are not their fault -- it's someone else's.

Boom ba boom.

It keeps drumming, and the louder it gets, the more people join in.

Boom ba boom boom boom.

And when they name their enemies, they're just getting started. First it's "illegals." Then it's "homosexuals." Then it's "Muslim radicals." Then it's "liberals." Then it's "the liberal media."

Boom ba boom boom Boom ba boom boom

And it just gets louder and louder. And pretty soon no one knows how to make it stop.

Did Gonzales lie to Congress?

Jonathan Singer at MyDD and John Aravosis at AmericaBlog are both pointing to the significance of Andrew Harris' story at Bloomberg News regarding the initiation of President Bush's authorization of the NSA domestic surveillance program, which says:

The U.S. National Security Agency asked AT&T; Inc. to help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in court papers filed in New York federal court.

The allegation is part of a court filing adding AT&T;, the nation's largest telephone company, as a defendant in a breach of privacy case filed earlier this month on behalf of Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. customers. The suit alleges that the three carriers, the NSA and President George W. Bush violated the Telecommunications Act of 1934 and the U.S. Constitution, and seeks money damages.

"The Bush Administration asserted this became necessary after 9/11," plaintiff's lawyer Carl Mayer said in a telephone interview. "This undermines that assertion."

The lawsuit is related to an alleged NSA program to record and store data on calls placed by subscribers. More than 30 suits have been filed over claims that the carriers, the three biggest U.S. telephone companies, violated the privacy rights of their customers by cooperating with the NSA in an effort to track alleged terrorists.

The story goes on to detail how the NSA went about setting up the operation:

The NSA initiative, code-named "Pioneer Groundbreaker," asked AT&T; unit AT&T; Solutions to build exclusively for NSA use a network operations center which duplicated AT&T;'s Bedminster, New Jersey facility, the court papers claimed. That plan was abandoned in favor of the NSA acquiring the monitoring technology itself, plaintiffs' lawyers Bruce Afran said.

The NSA says on its Web site that in June 2000, the agency was seeking bids for a project to "modernize and improve its information technology infrastructure." The plan, which included the privatization of its "non-mission related" systems support, was said to be part of Project Groundbreaker.

Mayer said the Pioneer project is "a different component" of that initiative.

Mayer and Afran said an unnamed former employee of the AT&T; unit provided them with evidence that the NSA approached the carrier with the proposed plan. Afran said he has seen the worker's log book and independently confirmed the source's participation in the project. He declined to identify the employee.

If the information in the lawsuit is correct, this means that the Bush administration authorized the NSA surveillance well in advance of Sept. 11 -- perhaps as early as February 2001, scarcely after Bush had been sworn in. As Singer points out, this severely undercuts its claim that the government could have prevented 9/11 with such a program in place.

Matt O. at The Great Society digs up two prime examples of these claims: one from Dick Cheney ("Cheney said if the administration had the power 'before 9/11, we might have been able to pick up on two of the hijackers who flew a jet into the Pentagon.'") and then-NSA chief (and now CIA chief) Michael Hayden ("Had this program been in effect prior to 9/11, it is my professional judgment that we would have detected some of the 9/11 al Qaeda operatives in the United States, and we would have identified them as such," said Hayden).

But perhaps just as importantly, it also raises questions about the administration's official response to questioning about the program. Because, as I pointed out at the time, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified before Congress that in fact the program was initiated after 9/11 and the Sept. 18 authorization of force by Congress:

LEAHY: Let me just ask you a few questions that could easily be answered yes or no.

I'm not asking about operational details, I'm trying to understand when the administration came to the conclusion that the congressional resolution authorizing military force again Al Qaida, where we had hoped that we would actually catch Osama bin Laden, the man who hit us -- but where you came to the conclusion that it authorized warrantless wiretapping of Americans inside the United States.

Did you reach that conclusion before the Senate passed the resolution on September 14th, 2001?

GONZALES: Senator, what I can say is that the program was initiated subsequent to the authorization to use military force.

LEAHY: Well, then, let me...

GONZALES: And our legal analysis was completed prior to the authorization of that program.

LEAHY: So your answer is you did not come to that conclusion before the Senate passed the resolution on September 14th, 2001?

GONZALES: Sir, I certainly had not come to that conclusion. There may be others in the administration who did.

LEAHY: Were you aware of anybody in the administration that came to that conclusion before September 14th, 2001?

GONZALES: Senator, sitting here right now I don't have any knowledge of that.

LEAHY: Were you aware of anybody coming to that conclusion before the president signed the resolution on September 18th, 2001?

GONZALES: No, sir.

The only thing that I can recall is that we had just been attacked and that we had been attacked by an enemy from within our own borders and that...

LEAHY: Mr. Attorney General, I understand. I was here when that attack happened. And I joined with Republicans and Democrats and virtually every member of this Congress to try to give you the tools that you said you needed for us to go after Al Qaida, and especially to go after Osama bin Laden, the man that we all understood masterminded the attacks, the man who's still at large.

LEAHY: Now, back to my question: Did you come to the conclusion that you had to have this warrantless wiretapping of Americans inside the United States to protect us before the president signed the resolution on September 18th, 2001? You were the White House counsel at the time.

GONZALES: What I can say is that we came to a conclusion that the president had the authority to authorize this kind of activity before he actually authorized the activity.

LEAHY: When was that?

GONZALES: It was subsequent to the authorization to use military force.

Of course, as I also pointed out at the time, Gonzales was not sworn in when he testified, so technically this may not constitute perjury.

But it certainly constitutes lying to Congress.

It's not hard to understand why Gonzales would mislead the committee. After all, as I said then:

If indeed Bush took these steps before 9/11, then it should be plain it has little to do with fighting terrorism, and everything to do with expanding presidential powers.

And anyone who points that out, of course, is a traitor to be hunted down.

UPDATE: Gary Farber at Amygdala points out that the Groundbreaker program was a separate matter from the NSA domestic-surveillance program about which Gonzales was testifying. My bad. Be sure to read all of Gary's piece, and check out his links to his previous work on the NSA matter.

All about 'Americanism'

The immigration debate, as I recently noted, has provided an opening for all kinds of hoary old white-supremacist appeals to "traditional values." Howie Klein notes that one of the hoariest comes transmitted to us from the likes of Arizona Republican congressman J.D. Hayworth, whose new anti-immigration tome, Whatever It Takes, includes the following enconium to none other than Henry Ford, and his campaign for "Americanism" in the 1920s:

Henry Ford, a leader in [the Americanization] movement, said, "These men of many nations must be taught American ways, the English language, and the right way to live." Talk like that today and our liberal elites will brand you a cultural imperialist, or worse. But if you ask me, Ford had a better idea. Sadly, Americanization has given way to an insidious multiculturalism, the noxious idea that all cultures are equally valid and worthy... Henry Ford must be spinning in his grave.

And this:

Over three decades ago, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan asked, "To what does one assimilate in modern America?" In Henry Ford's day, we had a great big list of things. But if multiculturalism and diversity are valued above all else, the answer is you can assimilate however you want, or not at all.

Of course, as we've pointed out previously, multiculturalism arose as a direct reaction against white supremacism and eventually overthrew it as the dominant American worldview. Most critics are coy about what they would replace it with, but not Hayworth: He wants us to return to the "Americanism" practiced in the 1920s.

Klein directs us to Ford's own definition of the term:

To "Americanize" means, in our ordinary speech, to bring into sympathy with the traditions and institutions of the United States, but the Jews do not mean only the United States when they say "America." They mean also South and Central America-- where so many revolutions have occurred. There are large numbers of Jews in Argentina, and many are found in other countries. It would probably give a wrong slant to the fact to say that the Jewish leaders are wholly anti-America, but it is true to say that they are against the "Americanization" of the Jewish immigrant stream. That is, that the trend of "Americanism" is so different from the trend of "Judaism" that the two are in conflict. This does not indicate treason toward American nationalisms perhaps, so much as it indicates loyalty toward Jewish nationalism.

Indeed, as we've explained earlier:

Maybe they have simply bought the timeworn image of Ford as the clever industrialist who brought the automobile to the masses.

Maybe they simply have forgotten -- or were never aware of -- the rest of the Henry Ford story.

That would be the Henry Ford who in 1920 began publishing The International Jew -- one of the most infamous anti-Semitic screeds in history. This text first raised to national prominence the notorious Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion hoax -- and indeed may have been responsible for its subsequent wide distribution in Hitler's Germany as well.

Speaking of Hitler, here's what he had to say about the speculation in 1923 that Ford might run for president:

I wish I could send some of my shock troops to Chicago and other big American cities to help in the elections ... We look to Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing fascist movement in America ... We have just had his anti-Jewish articles translated and published. The book is being circulated in millions throughout Germany."

As the ADL notes:

Though Ford apologized for The International Jew and closed the Dearborn Independent, he later accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from Hitler's Nazi government in July, 1938.

This award, incidentally, is the highest honor Germany can offer to a non-German.

Ford also probably did more than any American to help build the Nazi war machine in the 1930s.

Ford's version was obviously a serious distortion of Theodore Roosevelt's original call for "Americanism," which explicitly eschewed racism, though perhaps it was also its logical outcome. Certainly, the attitudes he promoted also wound up playing a large role in the subsequent anti-Japanese immigration campaigns.

But Ford wasn't the only one out there thumping the drum for "Americanism." Indeed, as I've detailed previously, one of the main slogans of the Ku Klux Klan then (and later) was that its program was all about "pure Americanism" or "100 percent Americanism." (The same was true of William Dudley Pelley's openly fascist Silver Shirts organization.) One of its best-known pamphlets was entitled "The Klan's Fight for Americanism," which

... makes no apologies for its members' attempts to impose their views upon "liberals," immigrants, Catholics, Jews, or peoples of color. Instead it sounds a clarion call for the Klan's "progressive conservatism" and celebrates its influence in American public life.

Yes, the Klan saw themselves as "progressive conservatives" of the time.

Want to bet J.D. Hayworth calls himself a "compassionate conservative" too?

Malkin and the conspiracy theorists

Aiiieeee!!! The New World Order is on the loose again! Run for your lives!

You see, old far-right conspiracies aren't just being trotted out in defense of global warming. They're also playing a big role in the immigration debate -- though, of course, we already knew this.

The latest iteration, unsurprisingly, is coming from the Malkin corner of the Bizarro Universe -- specifically, Juan Mann at Malkin's immigration blog recently had this to say:

The root of the evil: our apparent forced march toward a "comprehensive" New World Order of regional and ultimately global government, where nation-busting mass immigration is just one part of the process.

Though hardly a recent development, the excellent recent work by Jerome R. Corsi exposing the North American Union, the Amero currency, the NAFTA Superhighway—and its Texas highway segment which is already underway—leaves little doubt that the collectivist, internationalist agenda of America's ruling elite continues full steam ahead whether the public likes it or not.

He then goes on to glowingly cite the late Sam Francis as a prophet of the problem -- because, you see, Francis understood that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were actually caused by mass immigration.

Ahem.

Yes, that Sam Francis:

The 1990s saw Francis radicalized to the point where he is today the chief editor for a leading white supremacist hate group, the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC)*. That tie was initiated in 1993, when Francis published his first column in the CCC's tabloid, Citizens Informer, complaining that the media ignored whites murdered by blacks while police brutality victim Rodney King, characterized as a black criminal, was celebrated.

The next year, Francis made his first appearance at a conference of American Renaissance*, a magazine devoted to eugenics (the "science" of breeding better human beings) and allegedly race-based characteristics (such as IQ levels, sexual aggressiveness and propensity to criminality). In June 1994, Francis praised the CCC in a Times column for "planting seeds that may eventually bear greater fruit" than the Republican Party (the "Stupid Party," in Francis' phrase).

Ultimately, Francis was fired from the Times in 1995 after conservative author Dinesh D'Souza quoted Francis' 1994 speech at the American Renaissance conference and described him as embodying the "new spirit of white bigotry." Since then, Francis has appeared at every biannual American Renaissance conference and written for the magazine.

In 1999, Francis joined the CCC's Citizens Informer as co-editor with Chris Temple, an adherent of the anti-Semitic Christian Identity theology who has since left the job. In that post, he has stacked the publication with immigrant-bashers and refocused the increasingly strident CCC on opposition to non-white immigration. [Ed. note: Temple first came to public notice as a spokesman for Identity churches in northern Idaho.]

Yes, the same Sam Francis who once wrote:

The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.

The same Sam Francis who had a conniption over that Monday Night Football stunt with Terrell Owens and the Desperate Housewife, not because of the nudity but because of the miscegenation:

The point was not just to hurl a pie in the face of morals and good taste but also of white racial and cultural identity. The message of the ad was that white women are eager to have sex with black men, that they should be eager, and that black men should take them up on it.

Of course, we already knew that neither Mann nor Malkin have any compunction about playing footsie with -- indeed, openly admiring -- white supremacists; after all, they both write for the SPLC-designated hate group VDare. Mann's post links directly to "more" on the story at VDare.

Mann even goes on to extoll the virtues of mass deportation:

So not only has there been a quiet rigging of the nationwide expedited removal provisions by successive administrations, but now the much-celebrated H.R. 4437 "enforcement" bill actually destroys the possibility of there ever being nationwide summary removal (outside of border areas).

And without the summary removal of illegal aliens—sending them packing without years of immigration litigation — there will be no real immigration law enforcement in this country . . . because no one will be leaving anytime soon.

Just so everyone understands: there will be no "summary removal" of illegal aliens without, as at least an intermediary step, mass incarceration. This point, however, is one the Malkinites seem eager to evade, as evidenced by Malkin herself in her recent appearance on Bill O'Reilly's Fox News show, when O'Reilly tagged Malkin with this question:

O'Reilly: Michelle, do you think there will be any compromise on the immigration bill, or do you still want to kick down doors and drag little kids out and throw them across the border?

Malkin: I wish you would stop characterizing my position that way. My position, my position, seriously, is that we need to enforce the law, and deport people who are breaking it. And I don't think that there is any compromise on that. ...

What Malkin and the rest seem to want to gloss over is that it will be impossible to deport the 11 million or people who are "breaking the law" without kicking down doors and dragging little kids and throwing them across the border.

Or, perhaps more notably, it won't be possible without creating mass detention facilities capable of processing them all for deportation. After all, even illegal immigrants are given due process under our system of laws -- even though the nativists, of course, would like us to think otherwise.

But the reappearance of the hoary "New World Order" conspiracy theory on Malkin's own blog raises the question, once again, about what Malkin said on another Bill O'Reilly program:

In fact -- again, I think that this is something that the mainstream media does not recognize. It is in fact conservatives who are very outspoken in condemning fringe people, and people who are extremists on the right side of the aisle.

And in her book Unhinged:

And while the Left's knee-jerk response to these stories will doubtlessly be to trot out well-worn examples of unseemly behavior on the right -- Dick Cheney swearing, or mean-spirited conservatives' Internet jibes about Democrats -- the truth is that it's conservatives themselves who blow the whistle on their bad boys and go after the real extremism on their side of the aisle.

And this:

And while conservatives zealously police their own ranks to exclude extremists and conspiracy theories, extremism and conspiracy theories have become the driving force of the Democrat Party.

So, if the right "goes after" its extremists, and excludes the "conspiracy theories," why does Malkin tolerate them on one of her own blogs? Or does the right chase out its racist nutballs by extolling them as heroes?

This couldn't have anything to do with Malkin's well-established fondness for conspiracy theories herself, could it?

[Hat tip to Ryan at Malkin(s)watch.]

Weird science from the far right

It seems that in facing up to the realities of global warming, the right -- taking its cue from Rush Limbaugh, who's perfected this schtick -- is responding by flinging as much shit on the wall as humanly possible, not so much to see what sticks but just to obscure the issues long enough for them to evade them.

And in some cases, they're even stealing entire sections from the old Far Right Playbook. (You can imagine my surprise.)

The most recent example came on Wednesday's Joe Scarborough show on MSNBC, featuring a discussion of global warming from the right-wing ABC News reporter John Stossel. After Scarborough and Stossel ate up a chunk of airspace badmouthing Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, they invited Tyson Slocum of Public Citizen to join in the discussion. Slocum immediately set about putting the record straight regarding the scientific consensus on global warming.

Then Stossel piped up:

STOSSEL: Well, my earpiece fell out so I missed part of what he said, but the National Academy of Sciences report said we can‘t rule out that this is just natural. I wish people would look it up and read the whole thing instead of the summaries of the liberal media.

SLOCUM: They conclusively said it was man-made.

STOSSEL: They said we think man made. Man is contributing to this, but we don‘t know. We can‘t rule out that these are all natural influences.

SCARBOROUGH: And Tyson, isn't that again, you heard the beginning of this conversation with both John and I believe there is global warming, we just think Al Gore and others are being alarmists about it.

SLOCUM: There is no alarmists that the facts that are on the ground here. The fact is that NOAA in the federal government has shown that there is conclusive evidence that the tropical waters are getting warmer as a result of global warming and while that doesn‘t lead to more hurricanes, what it leads to is more intense hurricanes.

SCARBOROUGH: We see these Al Gore shot shots of Manhattan being submerged by water and South Florida being submerged. Should we not book any vacations in South Beach 10 years?

SLOCUM: These things are not going to happen overnight. It‘s going to take time. And there is still time at the federal level to start changing our policies and the fact I is that a year ago.

STOSSEL: What would those be? Those changed policies—Gas should cost maybe $10 a gallon?

SLOCUM: Absolutely not. We need to stop subsidizing fossil fuels.

STOSSEL: You are right. That's corporate welfare and it's disgusting.

SCARBOROUGH: And we all agree with you on that.

STOSSEL: That's a tiny amount of money.

SLOCUM: Absolutely. So what we need to end the subsidies to the oil and coal industry and start investing in renewable energy and mass transit.

STOSSEL: That's going to make any difference?

SLOCUM: Of course it's going to make a difference.

SCARBOROUGH: I think we already—isn't the problem in the end, though, Tyson, even if America does that, even if Great Britain and the western powers do that, you have China and India and these developing country that is don't have any environmental regulation regulations and the polluting coming from that region is going to dwarf what the United States puts out.

SLOCUM: Actually, China just implemented stronger full economy standards than the United States. So China is starting to understand it. They are starting to understand the ravages that their heavy reliance on coal is.

I am not holding up China as a model of environmental activism, but what the reality is that the United States with less than five percent of the world's population contributes to 25 percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. China, with a billion and a half people contributes 14 percent. So what we clearly need international cooperation and we cannot deny.

STOSSEL: Sounds like socialism to me.

SCARBOROUGH: All right. John, I will give you the final word to clear up the myths, the lies, the downright stupidity that Al Gore and others may be giving Americans.

STOSSEL: That took me 300 pages in the book in the book. Let me just say that this, at bottom is a hatred of capitalism and a hatred of industrial production. Yes, it's true, we produce more carbon dioxide, but we are also the cleanest country in the world.

As we get wealthier, the air gets cleaner and we can afford to do things that maybe some day if the globe is warming we have to make adjustments, it's our wealth that will allow us to save the world. If we let these socialists control our lives, we will be worse off.

SCARBOROUGH: All right. We will have to leave it there. Every time Tyson comes on he gets called a Marxist.

STOSSEL: Jim Kramer called him that.

Media Matters dissects Stossel's factual falsehoods (and Crooks and Liars has the video), but what you really stood out was how readily Stossel reverted to the classic right-wing retort: when all else fails, call 'em a pinko.

But Stossel really means it. Because it's becoming increasingly clear that he's adopted a view of the environmental movement that springs directly from the far-right Patriot movement: that it actually is a cult-like "religion" that has been whipped up as a front for a cabal of socialists intent on ruling the world.

At least, that appears to be the direction he's heading, given the accusations of "socialism" and Stossel's recent column attacking environmentalists, which concluded:

Science-fiction author Robert A. Heinlein once wrote, "In declaring his love for a beaver dam (erected by beavers for beavers' purposes) and his hatred for dams erected by men (for the purposes of men) the 'Naturist' reveals his hatred for his own race — i.e., his own self-hatred." The "Naturist" religion, which today we call "environmentalism," elevates every other form of life above human life. The Constitution was written to protect human beings' rights to life, liberty and property, but environmentalism says those rights must be subordinated to the protection of other species. And men and women who count on their land to support them must live at the mercy of the regulators.

How would environmental fanatics capture a government agency? Well, who is more likely to volunteer to take a job in a bureaucracy that has little to recommend it except that it gives you the power to use government force to control the lives of others? A dispassionate scientist or a zealot?

In government, the zealots eventually take over.

[Stossel's methodology in this column is laid bare, incidentally, in the chief example he uses: the lynx study in Washington state in which scientists planted hair samples among those tested, which Stossel claims demonstrated that they were "rigging the test." But in truth, both investigations by the Forest Service and the Interior Department found that the scientists weren't "rigging" the experiment at all, but rather attempting to test the reliability of the lab that was checking the samples. They were chastised for their obtuseness, but the claims that they represented environmental ideologues run amok were completely baseless and bogus.]

Now, it's clear that Stossel is springboarding to an extent from his interview last year with Michael Crichton in which he remarked that "people's feelings about the environment are very close to religion."

But Stossel has elevated this to a whole new level. Though of course, it's actually an old one. He's essentially adopted the militia theory of the environmental movement.

The first militia meeting I ever attended was at a small meeting hall in Maltby, Wash., and the subject was environmentalists' plans for western Washington. Bob Fletcher of the Militia of Montana got up and told the crowd -- with the help of some pie charts and maps -- that a proposal for an internation ecospheric wilderness was actually part of a U.N. front for a plan to start herding Americans into concentration camps that they were secretly building even then. He referred to environmentalism as a "cult" and a "religion," and suggested that "ordinary citizens" had become expendable in the view of the "cultists."

MOM also used to hawk books about how the Greens were secretly "Red" underneath. And then there was the video they used to sell with Helen Chenoweth.

Chenoweth, you may recall, was the militia-sympathizing congresswoman from northern Idaho who finally disappeared from the political scene amid a scandal over her sexual indiscretions. But before she was elected (in 1994), she recorded the speech that MOM immortalized for their audience.

Here's how it went:

What is some of the programs that the environmentalists are engaging in? Well, some of the programs are programs of fear -- fear that is so broad and so expansive that you and I can do nothing about it.

What about the idea that the earth is warming? You know, we hear that every day -- that the earth is warming. But when we look back, where are temperatures taken? Well, they’re taken from airports. Weather balloons go up from airports, where heat rises from miles and miles of concrete.

And you see, the satellites that are recording data around the globe will tell us that today, the earth is not warming. But you see, what the pseudoscientists -- who have turned into political scientists and lobbying scientists -- are saying is that these issues are so huge that you and I can do nothing about it.

... When we begin to realize what the battle really is, then we begin to focus on what we need to do. Because ladies and gentlemen, the battle isn't a scientific battle. The battle isn’t even a battle for species. The battle isn’t even a battle for certain areas of timber or certain wilderness areas. Only until we're able to understand that this battle is a full-fledged spiritual battle will we begin to understand and have the weapons to deal with it.

You see, always in the past, armies have clashed, and we've had physical lines of battle. We've had armies and armaments battling out back and forth for the conquering of countries. We’ve been able to see over the course of history battle lines drawn and battle lines moved. We've seen countries conquered, we’ve seen countries victorious. But ladies and gentlemen, today as I stand here in front of you, we are in a battle today that is far more insidious and far more dangerous as far as conquering our people, their soul and this great nation than we have ever faced before -- because the battle lines are invisible.

But the battle lines are spiritual in nature. Who are these environmentalists? These environmentalists are a group of people whose members are driven by a certain sect of esoteric concepts, with all the trappings of religious dogma. They believe that nature is God, where we know that the Creator, God Himself, is the one who created nature. And there comes the conflict.

Because you see, for any land management, they believe in their spirit that we are trying to manage and move in and desecrate their sacred ground. Nature is God to them.

You see, this country flourished very well because we understood the role of God in this country....

... A man by the name of Marx developed what he called the Communist Manifesto. And ladies and gentlemen, when we understand that that was where the very depths of the darkness of this spiritual war began. They declared war on private ownership in the Communist Manifesto.

... But you see, of greater significance, and in more frightening detail, that manifesto went on to lay out a series of sequential steps by which this would be accomplished. Among the many goals that the Communist Manifesto predicted was the abolition of property and land and the application of all rents of land to public purposes. Today we call it taxes. The abolition of all rights of inheritance. That's a constant battle that we're waging. ...

You see, what the environmental movement is doing is breaking down state and national boundaries. And so with that one enactment, and the listing of that one species, we encompass northern California, Oregon and Washington. The unfortunate thing is that it breaks down the sovereignty of states -- and you see acid is no respecter of the national boundaries between Canada and America. And that’s part of the way we begin to globalize and break down the sovereignty of this great nation.

And ladies and gentlemen, the bottom line is that if we are forced to place our world resources in the hands of a few who are controlling a world government, that isn't what God planned for us, and it certainly is not in our best interest. We will certainly lose our liberties, and it begins with the breakdown of our state boundaries. And that's what the spotted owl issue did.

Sound familiar?

Right-wingers aren't just channeling Joe McCarthy when they go on TV and smear environmentalists as "socialists" who "hate capitalism." They're tossing Helen Chenoweth in there for good measure.

The rift in the Minutemen

One of the really fortunate aspects of the far right in America is that it is constitutionally predisposed to fracturing: the combination of latent paranoid tendencies, controlling personalities and gigantic egos makes it nearly certain that its various components can never form an effective, long-term coalition.

This is why, for instance, the militia/Patriot movement of the 1990s was ultimately so incoherent and impotent. You couldn't have fit the egos of any two of its leaders -- say, John Trochmann, LeRoy Schweitzer, Bo Gritz, Norm Olson, or Mark Koernke -- into a large meeting hall, let alone get them to work in concert for any longer than a few weeks.

The paranoia was especially apparent between the various factions; I think it's fair to say that, at some point or another, I heard it rumored among the rank and file that each of these militia leaders was, in reality, working for the feds or "the other side." And it's probable that nearly all these rumors were being fed by the various leaders about each other.

Now, rather predictably, the same fate is befalling the Minutemen, probably the most successful immanation of the far right into the mainstream since the heyday of the Klan in the 1920s. A rift between the Minuteman Project's cofounders, Jim Gilchrist and Chris Simcox, has led to a split in the organization, and at the center of it is the Beltway consultancy that brought us the Terri Schiavo controversy -- which, you may recall, was yet another instance of the far right invading the mainstream.

It's already been a bad month for the Minutemen. After their cross-country tour in early May fell flat publicity-wise, so did their fence-building stunt on the Arizona border. On top of that, the fence itself was badly vandalized.

But the bigger problems for the Minutemen are internal, largely because of the apparent rift between Gilchrist and Simcox over their employment of the firm Diener Consulting -- officially based in Lancaster, Pa., but operating mostly within the D.C. area -- for public-relations help.

Though the two men are regularly referred to as "cofounders" of the Minuteman Project, Gilchrist now claims that they only cooperated for a long time. Simcox's group, then called "Civil Homeland Defense," served as support for the larger Minuteman Project, according to this version of events. After their initial public-relations success, though, Simcox and Gilchrist began going off in their own directions; Simcox started up the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps late last year (the Web site appears to have become operational in January of this year); the rift between the two organizations is underscored by the absence of the MMP from the MCDC's links page.

During Gilchrist's ill-fated run for Congress (under the banner, no less, of the far-right Constitution Party) in late 2005, he evidently hired the Diener Consulting team to help run the campaign's public relations. Simcox had reportedly already retained Diener for help as early as spring 2005.

Diener has only a perfunctory Website, but one of its associated operations -- a mailing firm called Response Unlimited -- offers much more. RU is a business that gathers mailing lists of potential "conservative" contributors and distributes them to various right-wing organizations. Its client list is a virtual Who's Who of the American right, including the Republican National Committee.

What this means is that, when someone contributes to the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, their name and contact information is then given to a whole host of right-wing groups, depending on who's buying.

You'll also note that "The Spotlight" is on the list. As the Southern Poverty law Center reported this spring, this is part of the way Response Unlimited taps into the far right -- and as a "mainstream" organization, bridges the gap between movement conservatives and right-wing extremists:

For eight years, a major direct-mail firm "specializing in the Christian and conservative markets" has been selling lists of the readers of America's leading anti-Semitic newspaper and, since about 2001, its successor publication.

Response Unlimited, based in Waynesboro, Va., and headed by Christian Right activist Philip Zodhiates, charges $100 for the rental of every 1,000 names of subscribers to the now-defunct Spotlight newspaper. Founded by veteran anti-Semite Willis Carto, The Spotlight carried anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic and wildly conspiracist articles interspersed with ads for Klan, neo-Nazi and related hate groups.

Zodhiates also peddles lists of subscribers to the American Free Press, which replaced The Spotlight when that tabloid was shut down amid legal and financial troubles surrounding Carto. The Free Press began immediately after The Spotlight fizzled in 2001 and picked up many of its predecessor paper's propagandists. Today, the Free Press carries stories on Zionism, secret "New World Order" conspiracies, American Jews and Israel. Mixed in are advertisements for outfits like Pete Peter's Scriptures for America and Kingdom Identity Ministries -- practitioners of Christian Identity, a theology that claims that Jews are the literal descendants of Satan.

As the piece goes on to explain, RU and Diener played a critical role in the Schiavo matter, with the lead taken by Philip Sheldon, who happens to be the son of the right-wing fundamentalist preacher Rev. Lou Sheldon, head of the Traditional Values Coalition:

In March 2005, The New York Times reported that Response Unlimited had cut a deal with Bob Schindler, the father of Terri Schiavo, a woman in a persistent vegetative state who was dying after a court authorized removal of her feeding tube. In return for the list of people who had donated money to Schindler, Zodhiates' firm agreed to send out an E-mail soliciting further donations for the Schindlers, who had battled Schiavo's husband over whether or not to retain the feeding tube.

Many found the list deal, made even before Schiavo finally died two days after the Times article appeared on March 29, ghoulish. One unpaid Schindler family spokesman, apparently unaware that Bob Schindler had authorized the deal, even told the paper it was "possibly the most distasteful thing I have ever seen."

According to the Times, Schindler cut his deal with Phil Sheldon, who is an officer of Response Unlimited. Sheldon is the son of the Rev. Lou Sheldon, founder of the Traditional Values Coalition, a group that also sent out appeals for support for Schiavo, who many Christian Right groups mistakenly believed was semi-conscious. Phil Sheldon is also partner with Zodhiates in a Web-based firm called Conservative Petitions that specializes in creating electronic petitions for right-wing causes.

The modus operandi with Sheldon's operations -- Response Unlimited, Diener Consultants, and Conservative Petitions -- is consistently the same: pander to far-right interests, obtain their membership lists, and then funnel them to other, mostly mainstream right-wing interests.

It's hard to tell whether Gilchrist had a bad experience with Diener, but he himself makes it clear that he has no association with them now. As Isis reported earlier, Gilchrist and Simcox apparently parted ways in December, when they met at the annual Conservative Political Action Committee gathering.

Objections to the associations with Diener began surfacing as early as February this year, when an anonymous Townhall commenter posted about the connection. The objection seemed to be that Diener was in bed with the "neoconservatives" against whom they were already arrayed to do battle with.

More recently, similar e-mails have been circulating among Minutemen supporters regarding the role of Diener. The chief source of these appears to be a fellow named Joe McCutchen, an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist about whose activities I've reported previously. (More about McCutchen here and here.) He also was was a speaker at the recent gathering of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens event outside Louisville.

Here's the e-mail McCutchen recently circulated:

BUYER BEWARE:
June 20, 2006

While we hate to do anything to rain on the Minuteman parade, we also feel it necessary to tell you the truth and let you make your own decisions. This is in reaction to numerous inquiries from across the country.

As of May, 2005, after learning the names of the consulting firm & individuals in total control of the Minuteman organization -- donations, expenditures, P.R., advertising, press releases, databases, websites, etc. -- we immediately started asking questions. How much money is being donated and where is it going? While we believed totally in the concept, we also knew how vulnerable it was to infiltration. Unfortunately most of the MMP insiders had no clue as to the nature & goals of the neoconservatives in control of the Beltway.

Even after Joe and others warned Simcox & others of the dangers of Beltway Barracudas, MMP was signed over lock, stock, and barrel to ... Diener Consultants consisting of a number of individuals, including Mary Parker Lewis (former campaign manager for Alan Keyes, special assistant to Bill Bennett & William Kristol, fundraiser for the Terry Schiavo campaign), Connie Hair (spokesman for Free Republic, advisor to Alan Keyes, P.R. for Bill Bennett who vehemently opposed Calif. Prop 187, 8 yr veteran of military psychological operations), Phil Sheldon (President of multiple fundraisers such as Rightmarch.com, Conservativepetitions.com, Diener, ad infinitum)... fundraisers & neo-cons deluxe who immediately made the MMP a "project of Declaration Alliance"—One of Alan Keyes numerous fundraisers.

These people specialize in patriotic, religious sounding organizations with sound bites they know real Americans want to hear. Masters of Deceit.

What happened? Simcox left the border (his stated goal) and went on the cocktail speaking circuit. Gilchrist left the interior protest movement against employers of illegals (his stated goal) and ran for office….both sidetracked from their original goals.

In our opinion it was a wonderful concept and the last best chance we had to survive as a sovereign nation. We also knew that if April 2005 was a roaring success the enemies would be descending with vigor to cash in and diffuse. That is exactly what happened.

The purpose of this missive is to inform. It is your business who you want to support but at the same time you should know who controls that money and what their disclosure is ... so far none from Diener. We doubt that Simcox or Gilchrist know. We understand that they now have completely separate organizations and that Simcox is still with Diener.

It is with heavy heart that we disclose our findings since we were so 100% behind the concept ... but truth is truth, and so be it. Are we to believe that 1/4 mile or 100 miles of fencing will affect the illegal flow?

Your decision is your own to make ... but don't say you were not warned.

This in no way impugns the real hardworking patriot individuals and independent groups which have given so much of their time, sweat, tears, money, and efforts to stop the illegal invasion, with no compensation ... and there are many…some still working within infiltrated organizations without their knowledge.

Hats off to them and our deepest appreciation!

Kindest regards,

Joe & Barb

In short order, Gilchrist fired off a couple of missives. One was a disclaimer making clear that he was no longer associated with Simcox:

Sometimes You Stand Alone

From time to time the media has confused The Minuteman Project, Inc. with the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. This confusion has lead to hard feelings and misrepresentations. Therefore we would like to set the record straight.

Over a year ago Mr. Jim Gilchrist led almost 1,000 volunteers to the U.S. and Mexico border in southeast Arizona and successfully conducted the largest minuteman campaign since the Revolutionary War. The Minuteman Project also proved beyond a doubt that U.S. borders can be protected if our political leaders merely have the will to do so. Jim Gilchrist's Minuteman Project brought national awareness to the illegal alien invasion of the United States and embarrassed both the U.S. Congress and the White House. When asked by the media about The Minuteman Project, the president went on record as saying Mr. Jim Gilchrist and the volunteers of The Minuteman Project were "vigilantes".

Jim Gilchrist is the 21st century Minuteman. On October 1, 2004 he founded The Minuteman Project, Inc. as a stand alone organization that is in no part related to, or has any business dealing with, the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, whose President is Chris Simcox.

While The Minuteman Project, Inc. and Mr. Jim Gilchrist recognize the work of Chris Simcox and his Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, there is no business relationship with either Chris Simcox or his organization. The Minuteman Project, Inc., and Mr. Jim Gilchrist will always applaud the work of any patriot who believes in the sovereignty and security of the United States of America. The Minuteman Project, Inc. is directed solely by Mr. Jim Gilchrist and his board of Directors, and no one else.

This message, incidentally, was widely forwarded by "white separatist" Virginia Abernethy, who attached this note:

This is an important message from Jim Gilchrist of the Minuteman Project, definitely to be distinguished from the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps [MCDC] under the direction of Chris Simcox.

THe MCDC is associated with fund-raising in connection with the Diener Group, a Washington D.C. enterprise that is said to have virtually no history with the grassroots or interest in reducing mass immigration.

Gilchrist also sent out the following direct response to McCutchen's accusations:

From: "Century21Minuteman"
To:
Date sent: Thu, 22 Jun 2006 07:59:52 -0700

Dear Americans,

The Minuteman Project board of directors and volunteers have never received any compensation for their services during the past two years of The Minuteman Project's existence.

Joe and Barbara McCutcheon, and a couple other individuals, are determined to bring hell and havoc to any attempt by The Minuteman Project, or any other immigration law enforcement advocacy group, in our efforts to stop the chaotic lack of enforcement of US immigration laws.

If this movement fails, ladies and gentlemen, it will be because of the likes of people like Joe McCutcheon...and a handful of others, who continue sending out these ugly emails around the world.

The Minuteman Project has no affiliation with Deiner Consultants or Phil Sheldon, etc. That relationship was terminated right after the Gilchrist for Congress campaign was over. The consultants were paid to manage that campaign. No one else stepped up to accept that challenge. I did not feel it appropriate to hire paid consultants to carry out The Minuteman Project, and there was no money available to pay them from the MMProject. By the way, that political race was part of the MM movement, and it worked exceptionally well in waking up the US House of Representatives.

My run in that election literally turned the US House of Reps around and got their attention. Since that election, the House has introduced bill after bill defeating President Bush's "no border, no sovereignty" agenda. Please bear with us, folks. This effort takes a lot of time and there is much more to do. It cannot be done with the waving of a magic wand. Thanks for your understanding.

I invite Joe and Barbara McCutcheon to spend several years of their lives, without pay, and with absolutely no appreciation or help from federal, state, and city bureaucrats, in a tireless attempt to bring the USA back under the rule of law so that the illegal alien invasion can be "stopped" and "reversed".

The McCutcheon's continue to set the Minuteman/Woman movement back every time they broadcast their "hate the minutemen and women" tirades.

Hey, folks, I am not perfect...I am just trying to do the best I can to resolve this national calamity with the limited resources available to me. I invite all Americans to follow my lead...especially before engaging in merciless, destructive criticism, slander and libel, or any other jealous attempts to disrupt the MM movement.

Cheers,
Jim Gilchrist, Founder - The Minuteman Project (Laguna Hills, Ca.)

Barbara Coe, another far-right anti-immigration extremist who heads the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, was in on the thread and offered her own comments:

From: barb@ccir.net [mailto:barb@ccir.net ]
Sent: Thursday, June 22, 2006 12:45 AM
To: Subscribers Only
Subject: (Fwd) buyER BEWARE

For purposes of clarification, below are CCIR comments on the below message by the McCutchens:

JIM GILCHRIST is the founder of the MINUTEMAN PROJECT (MMP). He is nationally and and internationally recognized as the 21st Century "Minuteman" and he did NOT abandon either his border security nor his employer sanctions efforts. CCIR can attest to the fact that MMP is an independent organization, all donations fund the needs of the MMP volunteers physically on the border (food, equipment, etc.), interior enforcement efforts and both his and MMP's expenses (printing, travel, etc.) Neither Jim nor MMP volunteers receive any salary.

CHRIS SIMCOX is the founder of the CIVIL HOMELAND DEFENSE CORPS. He is now with Diener Consultants, representing the MINUTEMAN CIVIL DEFENSE CORPS (MCDC). It is unknown to CCIR if donations to MCDC are used to fund border security efforts or disseminated to chosen candidates, projects, etc. as Diener Consultants see fit.

Again, to avoid confusion, be aware that MMP and MCDC are two separate organizations.

One follower named "Liz DeMarco" offered something of a counterpoint:

It is with heavy heart that I jump into this fray, which probably should have remained private communication. However a "partial post" has been circulating on our sites, and, from appearances, it originates with someone in close contact with Barbara Coe. I will paste the "public information" under this email. This concerns communication between Jim Gilchrist and Joe and Barb McCutcheon, with comments from Barbara.

The McCutcheons were at the border for the month of April, and Simcox became disenchanted with them because they warned him, prior to his signing the marketing contract, about Diener Consultants. Simcox then "banned" or "fired" them because of their efforts to help him stayed informed and make appropriate decisions. As you know, this is what happens to anyone who asks Simcox a question he does not like, or cannot answer. They also warned Jim Gilchrist about Diener. This effort was to protect the movement.

Joe and Barb are unafraid to reveal the results of their research, and repercussions be damned. They recognized Diener for the neoconservative marketing group that they are, and have done their best to thwart the diversion of money donated by activists to reduce/stop illegal immigration.

As you know, this is not a popular effort because most people cannot handle the truth. Many people think they can throw money at the problem and it will go away - they can just write a check, and keep watching television.

The McCutcheons have been fighting this battle for 25 - 30 years already - before we even knew it was a battle. They are not afraid to call a spade a spade, and if you will re-read the email from Joe and Barb, and proceed onto Gilchrist's response, and so on, you will clearly see that no aspersions were cast on Jim Gilchrist at all. There was only an expression of disappointment regarding the period in which Jim's focus was diverted from the Minuteman Project while he was running for office.

Jim chose to respond in an unprofessional, unfounded accusational tone, which he has partially amended in additional emails (not yet made public), but a sincere apology would probably be appreciated.

... If this movement fails, and it has been severely weakened, it will be because of the Simcox involvement with Diener Consultants, and the resulting diversion of funds to the various groups, (for example RightMarch), with which Diener is affiliated. Your money is not necessarily being used in an appropriate manner -- to directly benefit the cause of immigration reduction. Many activists have requested an accounting of expenditures on the part of MCDC and Diener Consultants; no information is forthcoming.

This is separate and apart from Jim Gilchrist's activities to the best of my knowledge.

The original information provided to Chris Simcox and Jim Gilchrist regarding Diener Consultants was factual and timely, and, as you know, in the recent "Fencegate," Diener was traced even farther - right into the bowels of Mexico. They are a company working both sides of this, and other issues - that's what marketing companies do.

I suspect Jim Gilchrist learned that during or after his campaign. It is rumored that Jim did not benefit from his association with Diener, but that he ended up owing them money. I do not know this for a fact, but I believe Jim has severed relations with Diener Consultants, as he writes.

And the McCutchens fired back as well:

Jim,

If I read one more instance you impugning my and Barbara's character I will have no choice but to institute legal action. You know very well that no one has defended the MMP more than us and you know our objections have always been toward the use & abuse of the MMP by Washington fundraisers.

We've never had anything but the utmost respect for the volunteers, hence our efforts, and you know it. Stop blaming us for your mistakes.

We have said time and again the MMP was the best chance the country has had in our lifetimes.

Jim it was only yesterday that I again congratulated you for your MM idea which was America's finest hour re our sovereignty and you emailed back asking us to join you in Texas in Sept.

I stand by all my positions and statements and offer again the opportunity to discuss them with you by any device objectively.

We stated in our last missive that it was our understanding that you were no longer affiliated with Simcox or Diener. What is going on here?

No need to worry, Joe. It's just the usual right-wing paranoid control freaks stomping out their turf and ensuring their purity of essence through better conspiracy theories. Right?

At least it will keep them distracted, for the nonce, from whatever else it is they might be up to.

I'll have more on this rift -- which may actually be breaking down along some interesting lines -- in the coming days.