Calling the premeditated-murder of three people a "hate crime" by a loser who thought they were of the Jewish religion, a religion he hates, whitewashes the fact that it was MURDER - end of story.
In an epic standoff that Infowars reporter David Knight described as being like "something out of a movie," supporters of Nevada cattle rancher Cliven Bundy advanced on a position held by BLM agents despite threats that they would be shot at, eventually forcing BLM feds to release 100 cattle that had been stolen from Bundy as part of a land grab dispute that threatened to escalate into a Waco-style confrontation. [ http://www.infowars.com/historic-feds-forced-to-surrender-to-american-citizens/ ]
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Since the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, the number of right-wing so called "Patriot" militia groups has increased ten-fold, and the number of right-wing terrorist plots has skyrocketed. According the West Point Counter-Terrorism Agency, there have been more right-wing terror plots since 9/11 than Islamic terror plots.
Reich-Wing Watch: "Fighting Despotism, Saving Democracy" Reich-Winger (adj.): an individual who's views are so far-right that they are ideologically aligned with the Third Reich. A Reich-Winger typically is opposed to democratic institutions such as workers unions, support Social-Darwinism (survival of the finically fittest, usually disguised as 'individualism'), are anti-semites, hate gays, hate immigrants, hate Marxists, support strong border security and national sovereignty, oppose separation of church and state, support voter suppression (voter ID laws + cutting early voting + cutting voting places), and believe in legislating morality (religious freedom laws + gay marriage + abortion).
AMAZING! Right-wingers in the 'American Liberty League', a Paleoconservative movement involving executives from JP Morgan, Goodyear Tire, and Prescott Bush (George W's grandfather), plotted to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt after he implemented a massive overhaul of 'free' market capitalism, regulating banks and taking the nation off the gold standard. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTdx6vEUtIA
Reich-Wing Movements: -Neo-Nazis -Sovereign Citizens -Neo-Confederates -Klu Klux Klan -White Nationalists -Tea Party Patriots -The Militia Movement
Modern Versions of Fascism: -Unregulated Capitalism -Paleoconservativism -Corporatism/Corporatocracy -Minarchism -Objectivism -Neoconservatism -Anarcho-Capitalism -Right-Libertarianism -Monarchism -Plutocracy -Social-Darwinism (Free-Market)
Some prominent Reich-Wingers include: -Ayn Rand -Alex Jones -Andrew Breitbart -David Duke -Michele Bachmann -Matt Drudge -Louie Gohmert -Ted Cruz -Rick Perry -Mike Huckabee -Ron Paul -Rand Paul -Lew Rockwell -Tucker Carlson -Rep. Steve King -Ludwig Von Mises -Don Black -Sarah Palin -Sean Hannity -Michael Savage -Joe Sobran -Thomas D. Lorenzo
On the anniversary of the Boston Marathon Bombings, Rachel Maddow discusses how right-wing extremists have carried out more domestic terror attacks than jihadists since September 11th.
Rachel Maddow talks to Michael Leiter, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, about how jihadist violence dominates the media in a way that home-grown, right-wing terror does not.
EVANSTON, Ill. — WHEN Frazier Glenn Miller shot and killed three people [ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/14/us/3-killed-in-shootings-at-jewish-center-and-retirement-home-in-kansas.html ] in Overland Park, Kan., on Sunday, he did so as a soldier of the white power movement: a groundswell that united Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other fringe elements after the Vietnam War, crested with the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, and remains a diminished but potent threat today.
Mr. Miller, the 73-year-old man charged in the killings, had been outspoken [ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/15/us/prosecutors-to-charge-suspect-with-hate-crime-in-kansas-shooting.html ] about his hatred of Jews, blacks, Communists and immigrants, but it would be a mistake to dismiss him as a crazed outlier. The shootings were consistent with his three decades of participation in organized hate groups. His violence was framed by a clear worldview.
You can’t predict whether any one person will commit violence, but it would be hard to think of someone more befitting of law enforcement scrutiny than Mr. Miller (who also goes by the name Frazier Glenn Cross). I’ve been studying the white radical right since 2006. In my review of tens of thousands of pages of once classified federal records, as well as newly available archives of Klan and neo-Nazi publications, Mr. Miller appears as a central figure of the white power movement.
The number of Vietnam veterans in that movement was small — a tiny proportion of those who served — but Vietnam veterans forged the first links between Klansmen and Nazis since World War II. They were central in leading Klan and neo-Nazi groups past the anti-civil rights backlash of the 1960s and toward paramilitary violence. The white power movement they forged had strongholds not only in the South, but also in the Pacific Northwest, Colorado, California and Pennsylvania. Its members carried weapons like those they had used in Vietnam, and used boot-camp rhetoric to frame their pursuit of domestic enemies. They condoned violence against innocent people and, eventually, the state itself.
Before his 1979 discharge for distributing racist literature, Mr. Miller served for 20 years in the Army, including two tours in Vietnam and service as a Green Beret. Later that year he took part (but was not charged) in a deadly shooting of Communist protesters in Greensboro, N.C.
In 1980, Mr. Miller formed a Klan-affiliated organization in North Carolina that eventually was known as the White Patriot Party. He outfitted members in camouflage fatigues. He paraded his neo-Nazis, in uniform and bearing arms, up and down streets. They patrolled schools and polling places, supposedly to protect whites from harassment. F.B.I. documents show that they also burned crosses. By 1986, Mr. Miller’s group claimed 2,500 members in five southern states.
The archives also show that Mr. Miller received large sums of money from The Order, a white power group in the Pacific Northwest, to buy land and weapons to put his followers through paramilitary training. Mr. Miller’s group paid $50,000 for weapons and matériel stolen from the armory at Fort Bragg, N.C., including anti-tank rockets, mines and plastic explosives. He targeted active-duty troops for recruitment and hired them to conduct training exercises.
Mr. Miller’s downfall came after the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit on behalf of black North Carolinians; as part of a settlement in 1985, he agreed to stop operating a paramilitary organization. In 1987, a federal judge found that Mr. Miller had violated the agreement, and barred him from contacting others in the white power movement. Outraged, and anticipating criminal charges regarding the stolen military weapons, Mr. Miller briefly went underground. He would write in a self-published autobiography, “Since they wouldn’t allow me to fight them legally above ground, then I’d resort to the only means left, armed revolution.” He was later caught with a small arsenal, but he began cooperating with prosecutors, testifying against other white supremacists in exchange for a reduced sentence. He was released in 1990, after serving three years.
In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security issued [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/18/opinion/18blow.html ] a nine-page report detailing the threat of domestic terrorism by the white power movement. This short document outlined no specific threats, but rather a set of historical factors that had predicted white-supremacist activity in the past — like economic pressure, opposition to immigration and gun-control legislation — and a new factor, the election of a black president.
The report singled out one factor that has fueled every surge in Ku Klux Klan membership in American history, from the 1860s to the present: war. The return of veterans from combat appears to correlate more closely with Klan membership than any other historical factor. “Military veterans facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities could lead to the potential emergence of terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists carrying out violent attacks,” the report warned. The agency was “concerned that right-wing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to boost their violent capabilities.”
The report raised intense blowback from the American Legion, Fox News and conservative members of Congress. They demanded an apology [ http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/extremist-report-draws-criticism-prompts-apology/ ] and denounced the idea that any veteran could commit an act of domestic terrorism. The department shelved the report, removing it from its website. The threat, however, proved real.
Mr. Miller obviously represents an extreme, both in his politics and in his violence. A vast majority of veterans are neither violent nor mentally ill. When they turn violent, they often harm themselves, by committing suicide. But it would be irresponsible to overlook the high rates of combat trauma among the 2.4 million Americans who have served in our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the full impact of which has not yet materialized. Veterans of those conflicts represent just 10 percent of those getting mental health services through the Department of Veterans Affairs, where the overwhelming majority of those in treatment are still Vietnam veterans.
During Mr. Miller’s long membership in the white power movement, its leaders have robbed armored cars, engaged in counterfeiting and the large-scale theft of military weapons, and carried out or planned killings. The bombing by Timothy J. McVeigh [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/timothy_james_mcveigh/ ], an Army veteran, of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, which killed 168 people, was only the most dramatic of these crimes. When we interpret shootings like the one on Sunday as acts of mad, lone-wolf gunmen, we fail to see white power as an organized — and deadly — social movement.
That Mr. Miller was able to carry out an act of domestic terror at two locations despite his history of violent behavior should alarm anyone concerned about public safety. Would he have received greater scrutiny had he been a Muslim, a foreigner, not white, not a veteran? The answer is clear, and alarming.
"What Would You Do?" by ABC is a hidden camera series where people are put into ethical dilemmas, given the choice between passively accepting injustice and standing up for what they believe is right.
This soldier didn't hesitate to speak up when a young man started harassing a Muslim cashier, refusing to be served by him because "he's a Muslim."
The uniformed man defended freedom of religion for all, stating, "We live in America, he can have whatever religion he wants."
"That's the reason I wear the uniform -- so anyone can live free in this country."
When the producer arrived on the scene to explain that the heckler and the cashier were both actors, the soldier downplayed his "heroic" response by saying, "If you're an American, you're an American. Period."
Rachel Maddow discusses the media hype over the land dispute between Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and the Bureau of Land Management despite the recent standstill in the conflict.
SPLC report: Users of leading white supremacist web forum responsible for many deadly hate crimes, mass killings
Wade Michael Page (Contributed)
A young Don Black (seen here in Klan robe) has known most key racist leaders in his life, including David Duke (in tie); Jerry Ray, the brother of Martin Luther King assassin James Earl Ray; and Joseph Paul Franklin, a racist serial killer who was executed last year. (The Tennessean/Jimmy Ellis)
04/17/2014
Nearly 100 people in the last five years have been murdered by active users of the leading racist website, Stormfront, according to a report released today by the SPLC’s Intelligence Project.
Registered Stormfront users have been disproportionately responsible for some of the most lethal hate crimes and mass killings since the web forum became the first hate site on the Internet in 1995, a month before the Oklahoma City bombing. The report found that hate killings by Stormfront members began to accelerate rapidly in early 2009, when Barack Obama took office as the nation’s first black president.
A similar racist web forum, Vanguard News Network (VNN), was used by neo-Nazi and former Klan leader Frazier Glenn Miller, who has been charged with the Sunday murder of three people he mistakenly believed were Jews in Overland Park, Kan. Miller, who apparently changed his last name in recent years to Cross, logged more than 12,000 posts on VNN, whose slogan is, “No Jews, Just Right.”
“Stormfront is the murder capital of the racist Internet,” said Heidi Beirich, report author and Intelligence Project director. “It has been a magnet for the deadly and deranged. And VNN is almost as bad.”
Stormfront users have included Wade Michael Page, who shot to death six people before killing himself at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012; Richard Andrew Poplawski, who murdered three Pittsburgh police officers in 2009; and Anders Behring Breivik, who bombed a government building in Norway, killing eight people, and then massacred 69 people, most of them teenagers, at a summer camp in 2011.
Stormfront’s homicidal trend began just four years after the site went up. On Aug. 10, 1999, Buford O’Neil Furrow, a known Stormfront user, left his parents’ home in Tacoma, Wash., and drove to Los Angeles, where he shot and wounded three children, a teenage girl and an elderly woman at a Jewish day care center. Furrow then shot and killed a Filipino-American postal worker. But the trend took off after Obama’s inauguration in January 2009.
Racist online forums serve as a birthing den for self-described “lone wolves” by feeding their rage. Investigators find that most offenders openly advocate their ideology online, often obsessively posting on racist forums and blogs for hours every day, while absorbing the hatred around them. The typical visitor attracted to Stormfront is a frustrated, unemployed, white adult male living with his mother or an estranged spouse or girlfriend. She is the sole provider in the household.
Stormfront generates thousands of dollars a month in advertising revenue and donations, but its founder, former Klan leader Don Black, shrugs off any responsibility for what his website has wrought.
Black, 60, has been involved in the racist movement since he was 15. The first person he met in the white nationalist movement was James Clayton Vaughn. Vaughn, who later changed his name to Joseph Paul Franklin, became probably the most prolific racist serial killer in U.S. history, targeting interracial couples and killing as many as 20 people in several states between 1977 and 1980. Franklin, who was convicted of eight murders, was executed last year.
The hatemaker: Don Black, the former Alabama Klan leader who founded and still runs Stormfront, provides an electronic home and breeding ground for racists who have murdered almost 100 people in the last five years. To this day, he remains fiercely unapologetic, even as he rakes in donations from his forum members.
By Heidi Beirich, Intelligence Project Director 04/17/2014
A typical murderer drawn to the racist forum Stormfront.org is a frustrated, unemployed, white adult male living with his mother or an estranged spouse or girlfriend. She is the sole provider in the household. Forensic psychologists call him a “wound collector.” Instead of building his resume, seeking employment or further education, he projects his grievances on society and searches the Internet for an excuse or an explanation unrelated to his behavior or the choices he has made in life.
His escalation follows a predictable trajectory. From right-wing antigovernment websites and conspiracy hatcheries, he migrates to militant hate sites that blame society’s ills on ethnicity and shifting demographics. He soon learns his race is endangered — a target of “white genocide.” After reading and lurking for a while, he needs to talk to someone about it, signing up as a registered user on a racist forum where he commiserates in an echo chamber of angry fellow failures where Jews, gays, minorities and multiculturalism are blamed for everything.
Assured of the supremacy of his race and frustrated by the inferiority of his achievements, he binges online for hours every day, self-medicating, slowly sipping a cocktail of rage. He gradually gains acceptance in this online birthing den of self-described “lone wolves,” but he gets no relief, no practical remedies, no suggestions to improve his circumstances. He just gets angrier.
And then he gets a gun.
It is a myth that racist killers hide in the shadows. Investigators find that most offenders openly advocated their ideology online, often obsessively posting on racist forums and blogs for hours every day. Over the past two decades, the largest hate site in the world, Stormfront.org, has been a magnet and breeding ground for the deadly and the deranged.
There is safety in the anonymity of the Web, and comfort in the endorsement others offer for extreme racist ideas, argues former FBI agent Joe Navarro, who coined the term “wound collector.” “Isolation permits the free expression of ideas, especially those which are extreme and which foster passionate hatred,” Navarro, who helped found the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Division, wrote in 2011 in Psychology Today. “In this cocoon of isolation the terrorist can indulge his ideology” without the restrictions of the routines of daily life.
Then there is a trajectory from idea to action.
Though on any given day, fewer than 1,800 registered members log on to Stormfront, and less than half of the site’s visitors even reside in the United States, a two-year study by the Intelligence Report shows that registered Stormfront users have been disproportionately responsible for some of the most lethal hate crimes and mass killings since the site was put up in 1995. In the past five years alone, Stormfront members have murdered close to 100 people. The Report’s research shows that Stormfront’s bias-related murder rate began to accelerate rapidly in early 2009, after Barack Obama became the nation’s first black president.
For domestic Islamic terrorists, the breeding ground for violence is often the Al Qaeda magazine Inspire and its affiliated websites. For the racist, it is Stormfront.
Making Excuses
Investigators find that most offenders openly advocated their ideology online for lengthy periods while sucking up the hatred around them. Yet Stormfront’s founder, former Alabama Klan leader Stephen Donald “Don” Black, shrugs off responsibility for what he has wrought.
The homicidal trend began just four years after the site went up. On Aug. 10, 1999, Buford O’Neil Furrow, a known user of Stormfront, left his parents’ home in Tacoma, Wash., and drove to Los Angeles, where he shot and wounded three children, a teenage girl and an elderly woman at a Jewish day care center. Furrow then shot and killed a Filipino-American postal worker.
Buford Furrow (AP Images/Laura Rauch)
Eight months later, on April 28, 2000, just days after exchanging E-mails and a phone call with a woman he met on the Stormfront “Singles” page, Richard Scott Baumhammers shot and killed his next-door neighbor, a 63-year-old Jewish woman. Next, he drove to the victim’s synagogue, shot out the windows and painted two large red swastikas on the front of the building. And then Baumhammers went on a shooting rampage, specifically targeting minorities and murdering five people. A sixth victim would die of his injuries several months later.
When Baumhammers’ connection to Stormfront was pointed out in media reports, Black denied any responsibility. He claimed Baumhammers “had been previously diagnosed as something worse than schizophrenic.” But Black did note that attention to the killings had more than doubled the number of “hits” to his website.
Richard Baumhammers (AP Images/Keith Srakocic)
Furrow, 37, and Baumhammers, 34, were both unemployed and still living with their parents at the time of the killings. The next Stormfront user to commit murder was also living with his parents. This one was in the ninth grade.
On April 19, 2002, Ian Andrew Bishop, a 14-year-old so-called “Stormfront Youth” killed his brother by striking him repeatedly in the head with a claw hammer, allegedly because he thought 18-year-old Adam Bishop was gay. “He said his brother was a faggot,” said a 15-year-old witness. “He said he wanted to kill his parents, too.”
Bishop’s activity on Stormfront included downloading and distributing Third Reich images while promoting his racist views in the neighborhood. Described as a “racist bully with neo-Nazi views,” Bishop’s attorney cited his activities on Stormfront as evidence Ian was “troubled” and “drawn to the skinhead philosophy.”
Again, Black denied any responsibility in the Bishop case, claiming “Bishop killed his older brother because he thought his parents liked him better. But we’re ‘responsible’ for that too,” he added sarcastically, “since he was a ‘good kid’ before visiting SF.”
Ian Andrew Bishop (Tribune-Review/AP Images/Scott Spangler)
The Body Count Skyrockets
The murders would keep on coming, their frequency accelerating. On Feb. 19, 2008, James “Yankee Jim” Leshkevich, who had posted more than 5,000 times to Stormfront in the preceding four years, beat and strangled his wife to death in the living room of the home they shared in West Hurley, N.Y. Then he hung himself.
Similarly, a little over two years later, on April 21, 2010, Curtis Boone Maynard shot and killed his ex-wife outside her Lake Jackson, Texas, home. He then shot his 16-year-old stepdaughter in the face, severely wounding her, before killing himself during a subsequent police chase. Maynard had posted almost 900 times on Stormfront before he was banned for publishing personal information about a black woman who had voted as a juror to acquit a black murder suspect.
Richard Poplawski (AP Images/Jason Minick)
In April 2009, a few months after Obama’s inauguration and less than four hours after logging on to his Stormfront account, Richard Andrew Poplawski ambushed, shot and killed three Pittsburgh, Pa., police officers, and wounded a fourth.
Poplawski, 22, was unemployed and living with his mother when an early morning argument escalated between the two and resulted in her calling 911. Poplawski waited just behind the front door with his AK-47 assault rifle and shot and killed the first three police officers who responded. Another officer was injured before a SWAT team shot and wounded Poplawski and then took him into custody.
Fifteen weeks before the murders, Poplawski, who went by the name “Braced for Fate” on Stormfront, wrote that he kept his AK-47 “in a case within arms reach.” He’d been a registered Stormfront member for 20 months prior to the murders, but with a Web footprint going back to at least 2001. He started on pro-Second Amendment forums, moved to conspiracy pages and finally landed at Stormfront, where he had at least two user names, “Braced for Fate” and “p0p633.” An aspiring skinhead, Poplawski posted his “Iron Eagle” Nazi tattoo under his p0p633 user name in 2007, about 16 months before the killings.
The worst mass murder was still to come.
On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik set off a truck bomb in front of a government building in downtown Oslo, Norway. The blast killed eight and injured hundreds more. Dressed as a police officer and armed with a Ruger Mini-14 assault rifle and a Glock pistol, Breivik then boarded a ferry to Utoya Island, where a Workers Youth League summer camp was being held. There, Breivik shot and killed 69 people, most of them teenagers.
Anders Breivik (AP Images/Frank Augstein)
When he was taken into custody by a SWAT team without incident, Breivik calmly told authorities that he blamed the government for allowing Norway to be “invaded” by Muslims.
At the time of the killings, Breivik had been a registered member on Stormfront for almost three years. Under the username “year2183,” Breivik introduced himself in October 2008. In one post he wrote, “Feminism, corrupt treacherous politicians, a corrupt treacherous media, pro-immigration Jewry and a corrupt academia is the hole in the ‘dike,’ while Muslims are the water flooding in.” After a rant about Islamic enemies, Breivik was warmly welcomed by close Black confidant Freeland Roy Dunscombe, or “TruckRoy”: “glad to have you here.”
Hours before he began his terror campaign, Breivik E-mailed a copy of his racist manifesto to two other influential Stormfront members, Billy Joe Roper (see related story, p. XX) and Timothy Gallaher Murdock, who runs the racist WhiteRabbitRadio.net. In his manifesto, Breivik claimed he was banned from Stormfront, though a search shows no suspension. Breivik later admitted he was not removed as a registered member.
“I was never kicked out of Stormfront,” he said last September. “Instead, I attacked them in the compendium in order to protect them … [as] an army of leftist journalists otherwise would strike hard.”
Breivik’s large purchases of chemicals before the attack had been reported to the authorities, who took no heed because he claimed he was a farmer. If they had looked at Breivik’s posts on Stormfront, they might have felt differently. His racist vitriol and posts suggesting overthrowing his government almost certainly violated Norway’s laws against hate speech. Following the pattern for so-called “lone wolves,” he had broadcast his violent intentions ahead of time on Stormfront.
A year later, in August 2012, after Breivik was convicted and sentenced to 21 years in prison, a Stormfront thread announced the sentence and included a photograph of Breivik defiantly raising his fist in the air. Some posters lauded Breivik as a “hero” and a “P.O.W.”
Black provided his own commentary on Breivik. “Unfortunately, I happened upon this thread this morning, just before our radio show. This makes me want to pull the plug on this place and never look back,” Black wrote, before laying out a stark assessment of those on his site: “We attract too many sociopaths.”
Monetizing Murder
Although Stormfront posters eventually grew critical of Breivik’s actions, the public interest the attack generated on the site resulted in the highest number of registered users ever on the forum. In the 24 hours after the killings, 4,481 members were online, a record that stands to this day. Alexa, which monitors Web traffic, shows that Stormfront visits spiked globally on the day of the Oslo attacks. This means money to Black, whose banner ads pay him by the click.
A year after the Oslo terrorist attacks, in mid-summer 2012, more media came Black’s way from two more mass killings and a bizarre mutilation murder attributable to registered members.
J.T. Ready (Corbis/Natalie Keyssar)
On May 2, 2012, less than six hours after logging in and posting on Stormfront, Jason Todd Ready shot and killed four people, including an infant, before killing himself. Ready, 39, was unemployed and living with his estranged girlfriend, Lisa Mederos. He shot and killed her, her daughter Amber and her 15-month-old granddaughter, Lily. Ready then shot and killed Amber’s 24-year-old fiancée, Jim Hiott, before turning his gun on himself. Ready had made 678 posts on Stormfront in the two years prior to his death, often raising funds for his armed anti-immigrant militia group, U.S. Border Guard.
Luka Rocco Magnotta (FEREX/AP Images/Rex Features)
Also in May, Black was taking media heat over a Canadian murder suspect known as Luka Rocco Magnotta, 29, who had posted on Stormfront under two usernames in the 12 months prior to the torture and dismemberment killing of a Chinese immigrant. In September 2011, eight months before the murder, Magnotta complained: “It was unfare [sic] that every country in the world was able to have their heritage protected, blacks get their own countries, chinese [sic] get their own countries ... if white people want their own countries then we are denied that right.” Magnotta, whose real name is Eric Clinton Kirk Newman, also followed Black on Twitter.
Three months after the Magnotta murder, on Aug. 5, 2012, Wade Michael Page shot and killed six people at a Sikh temple, including an 84-year-old woman, and wounded four others before killing himself during a shootout with police. Page, a longtime racist skinhead, had been a registered user on Stormfront, under various user names, for more than 10 years.
Wade Michael Page (Contributed)
Motivational Culpability
A haggard-looking Don Black appeared on a CBS News affiliate’s newscast three days after the Sikh Temple killings. While attempting to minimize Page’s activities on Stormfront, Black said Page’s actions were “counterproductive” but then added, “We think the Sikhs should be back in Punjab.”
As Alexa Internet Inc. shows, though Stormfront’s online popularity had been in a gradual decline over the previous two years, the August 2012 Sikh temple killings resulted in one of the highest and most significant spikes of the year for the online forum (there also was a notable and rapid decline following the Sikh temple killings). And Stormfront appears to have benefited financially from the publicity that summer. Monthly donations to the site rose from $6,545 in August 2012, to $8,028 in September to $10,032 in October of that year.
A strong argument could be made that Stormfront is, in effect, monetizing murder. And Black’s personal history undermines the argument that he had no reasonable way to know how his website and the hatred he hawks was attracting and motivating a new breed of unstable, sociopathic killers. That ugly reality has been a recurring theme in Don Black’s life for almost half a century.
A Lifetime of Hate
In many respects, Don Black resembles the prototypical killers that seem to be drawn to Stormfront. Black, 60, is a frustrated, unemployed white adult male living with an ideologically estranged wife, Chloe Hardin Black, who has publicly denounced the racist movement. She is the sole provider in the household.
Black spends hours every day online, utterly convinced of the supremacy of his race while expressing frustration with the inferiority of his outcomes. He occasionally complains about the sociopaths Stormfront seems to attract or laments that his only son, Derek, recently publicly denounced white supremacy.
Black’s 46-plus years of involvement with the racist movement started at the age of 15, when, like the fratricidal Ian Andrew Bishop, he began distributing racist fliers around his high school. That he was involved with a subculture of sociopaths would become quite obvious, given who Black met while on his very first “movement” road trip at the age of 16.
A young Don Black (seen here in Klan robe) has known most key racist leaders in his life, including David Duke (in tie); Jerry Ray, the brother of Martin Luther King assassin James Earl Ray; and Joseph Paul Franklin, a racist serial killer who was executed last year. (The Tennessean/Jimmy Ellis)
In the summer of 1969, Black traveled to a World Union of National Socialists meeting in Arlington, Va., in the back seat of a beat-up Chevy Chevelle, sitting next to a 19-year-old James Clayton Vaughn for more than 12 hours. Neo-Nazi and soon-to-be Klan leader David Duke was driving. As Black recollects, Vaughn was the very first person he met in the “white nationalist” movement to which he would devote his life.
Vaughn, who would change his name to Joseph Paul Franklin, later became probably the most prolific racist serial killer in U.S. history, targeting interracial couples and killing as many as 20 people in several states between 1977 and 1980 (he was convicted of eight murders). Franklin was executed last year.
Black’s exposure to the worst of the racist movement continued the following year. He spent his 17th birthday in the hospital with a bullet wound in his chest after being caught trying to steal the mailing list of the racist National States Rights Party. The shooter, Jerry Ray, was the brother of Martin Luther King Jr. assassin James Earl Ray. Jerry Ray was prosecuted for attempted murder but acquitted after claiming self-defense. Black pleaded guilty and received one year of probation.
By 1975, Black was a rising leader in the Alabama wing of David Duke’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a position he kept for the next 12 years. But his ambitions went beyond the robe and hood. On April 27, 1981, Black was arrested with nine other white supremacists as they prepared to board a yacht to invade the tiny Caribbean island of Dominica, oust its black-run government, and transform it into a “white state.”
Black’s resulting three-year federal prison sentence was time well spent taking classes in computer programming. He eventually set up a dial-up bulletin board service for the radical right and, in March 1995, that service evolved into Stormfront.org, the Web’s first and best-known hate site. Black saw clearly that with this new technology, white supremacists might finally bypass the mainstream media and political apparatus he felt had long restricted the racists’ message.
“The potential of the Net for organizations and movements such as ours is enormous,” Black told a reporter in 1996. “We’re reaching tens of thousands of people who never before had access to our point of view.”
He was right.
Joseph Paul Franklin (AP Images/Al Behrman)
In January 2002, Stormfront had a mere 5,000 members. But only a year later, membership had more than doubled to 11,000; and a year after that, in early 2004, it had reached 23,000. By this year, membership had hit about 286,000 registered users, though most were inactive. These numbers didn’t include the many people who simply read Stormfront postings without actually joining up (becoming a member allows one to post messages and also to view personal information.) Stormfront also became home to other hate sites that shared its servers and advertised their wares.
After a life basically monetizing ethnic hatred and death, Don Black, who walks with a cane from a 2008 stroke, has become increasingly philosophical. On the Stormfront page eulogizing serial killer Franklin, he wrote: “I may be the only person here who actually knew Franklin. I’ve been contemplating how my life would have been different had he remained the only ‘White Nationalist’ I’d ever met. I’d have quit in disgust. I had just turned sixteen, and maybe I could have then led a ‘normal’ life.”
With nearly 100 bias-related homicides attributable to registered members of his site since 2009, a great many “normal lives” are no longer being led.
Still, Black remains defiant. The theme song for his daily radio program on the Rense Radio Network is a remake of Johnny Cash’s “I Won’t Back Down.”
His wife, his son, and those who cared for the victims of racist killers connected to Stormfront probably wish he would.
In a two-year study of almost 100 murders by racist extremists, the Intelligence Report identified 10 unique characteristics of killers who were active online:
1) Unemployment: All offenders were unemployed at the time of the killings.
2) Public Activism: By protesting, leafleting, or attending racist skinhead concerts or gatherings, all offenders publicly participated in racist activity or outreach (though most remained anonymous prior to the killings.)
3) Home Crime Scene: Triggering events are personal. More than half of offenders began killing in or around their homes, with family members often the first victims.
4) Multiple Platforms: Almost all offenders posted on more than one racist blog or Web forum.
5) Sustained Activity: Almost all offenders had been active on racist forums or blogs for more than 18 months at the time of the killings.
6) Oppositional Behavior: Almost all offenders were seen to be argumentative or antagonistic with others on the racist forums. Some were eventually banned in the months leading up to the killings.
7) Posting Variation: Most offenders exhibited a notable change in their posting frequency in the days and weeks leading up to the killings — either a significant increase or decline in posts. Several were active on the racist Stormfront forum in the hours leading up to the killings.
8) Discussion of Violence: Most offenders discussed violence as an acceptable means of conflict resolution in their postings.
9) Weapons: Most offenders discussed firearms online.
10) Identification of an “Enemy”: Most offenders specifically identified an enemy in their writings. Though many named minorities, most identified the U.S. government, or “ZOG” (for Zionist Occupation Government), as their primary opposition.
By KENNETH P. VOGEL and MACKENZIE WEINGER | 4/17/14 5:08 AM EDT Updated: 4/20/14 2:00 PM EDT
Glenn Beck worked the crowd like a preacher at a rally this month in Louisville, Ky., declaring that God had responded to conservatives’ prayers by sending a slate of tea party candidates to wrest control of the Republican Party from Mitch McConnell.
But there was a more earthly benefit to the arrangement that brought Beck to the rally. It was organized by the tea party nonprofit group FreedomWorks, which had endorsed the candidates — and which has paid more than $6 million in recent years to have Beck promote the group, its initiatives and events.
A POLITICO review of filings with the Internal Revenue Service and Federal Election Commission, as well as interviews and reviews of radio shows, found that conservative groups spent nearly $22 million to broker and pay for involved advertising relationships known as sponsorships with a handful of influential talkers including Beck, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh between the first talk radio deals in 2008 and the end of 2012. Since then, the sponsorship deals have grown more lucrative and tea party-oriented, with legacy groups like The Heritage Foundation ending their sponsorships and groups like the Tea Party Patriots placing big ad buys.
The hosts’ stances on candidates and issues usually align naturally with those of the groups. While their positioning occasionally seems to evolve with their sponsors, there is no evidence of hosts revising their views for paid advertising.
Critics, though, say the deals mislead grass-roots conservative activists, while undermining the credibility of the hosts and the groups.
“People like Beck and Hannity and Rush are nothing without the people who faithfully hang on their every word — I consider that a constituency trust that should be respected,” said former House Majority Leader Dick Armey. He was ousted from FreedomWorks in a bitter feud [ http://www.politico.com/story/2012/12/dick-armey-freedomworks-president-clashed-over-book-deal-84599.html ], but had been chairman when the group signed its contracts with Beck and Limbaugh. “For them to basically sell their influence and say whatever the contract asks of them, it compromises the integrity of the pundit-guru, as it were, and it’s an undignified expenditure on the part of the outfit that’s mining the attention.”
The talkers: From Rush to Rusty
In addition to Beck, at least four other hosts have entered into advertising arrangements of various sorts with tea party groups aiming to upend the 2014 primaries:
• Rush Limbaugh: The Heritage Foundation at the end of January ended its five-year sponsorship of El Rushbo’s show, for which it had paid more than $2 million in some years and more than $9.5 million overall. In 2012, FreedomWorks paid at least $1.4 million to make him an endorser, though it’s not clear that the sponsorship is ongoing.
Beck, through a spokesman, declined to comment, as did Premiere Radio Networks, which syndicates Beck’s show as well as Hannity’s and Limbaugh’s. FreedomWorks, Hannity, Levin and Limbaugh either could not be reached or would not respond to requests for comment.
Defenders of the contracts cast them as a happy blend of common cause and shrewd advertising, which was on display during Levin’s show on Tuesday.
“I’ll never give up on the American dream and neither will my friends at the Tea Party Patriots,” Levin told his listeners. “Pursue your American dream, join the Tea Party Patriots at TeaPartyPatriots.org.”
A spokesman for the Tea Party Patriots declined to discuss the cost or strategy behind the advertising campaign, which began running last summer, and downplayed its significance.
“We’re just advertisers on a radio show,” said Scott Hogenson. “It’s like people buying advertising space on POLITICO. It’s the same thing.”
But Genevieve Wood, an official at Heritage, said her group’s talk radio sponsorships provided a huge benefit.
“A lot of folks around the country learned about Heritage and that you could become a member because of Rush and Sean,” she said, explaining the group ended its contracts because they had run their course. “Even McDonald’s doesn’t advertise consistently, year after year, week after week.”
There’s little analogue for the phenomenon on the left. Liberal talk radio lacks major audience and financial support [ http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0110/Air_America_declaring_bankruptcy.html ]. And there’s currently relative ideological uniformity on the left, where no robust protest movement is seeking a mass channel to circumvent more established liberal or Democratic communications organs.
“That kind of internecine warfare isn’t happening on the left. I haven’t seen any evidence of it. Or, if it is, it’s not well funded,” said Thom Hartmann, the leading light of progressive talk radio. His advertising roster includes outfits targeting wealthy liberals, like an organic winemaker, as well as some of the same commercial companies that advertise on conservative talk radio — computer security firms and gold coin sellers [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/30231.html ] — but no advocacy groups or candidates. “Progressive candidates, progressive groups — they don’t traditionally buy advertising on progressive shows, and I think the reason why is they know we’re singing their song anyway.”
The money: A gold mine
Talk radio is seen on the right as a fundraising gold mine that can steer hundreds of thousands of loyal listeners and would-be donors to the websites of the advertising groups and those of their endorsed candidates, credit cards at the ready.
In the days before FreedomWorks’ FreePAC rally in Louisville, Beck urged his listeners to go to FreedomWorks website to buy general admission tickets for $15 or VIP passes for $50, explaining, “I will be there along with everybody else. Make sure you join us. This is the kickoff now for FreedomWorks for the fall campaign.”
The groups provide their sponsored hosts with scripts for on-air plugs, known in the industry as live-reads. Deals differ from host to host, but most provide the sponsoring group a certain number of live-reads, which usually steer listeners to its website and encourage donations, as well as ads for the sponsoring groups on the hosts’ websites, and sometimes a certain number of signed fundraising emails and appearances.
A source with knowledge of FreedomWorks’ contract with Beck, though, said it does not require him to appear at events. He agreed to speak in Louisville and at other FreePAC rallies, as well as at a 2011 FreedomWorks major donor event on South Carolina’s Kiawah Island, because he cares about the group’s mission, the source said. “The important thing is not whether the company is a nonprofit involved in politics, selling flowers or protecting hard drives, it is whether Glenn believes in them, and he believes the listener benefits from FreedomWorks and his radio show’s other clients,” the source said, adding Beck dropped General Motors as a sponsor when it accepted money from a federal bailout he opposed.
Still, Armey opposed FreedomWorks’ contracts with Beck and Limbaugh as too costly and far afield from the organization’s mission of electing conservative politicians and reducing government spending and regulation. But he was forced out as chairman [ http://www.politico.com/story/2012/12/report-armey-quits-freedomworks-84545.html ] of FreedomWorks weeks before the 2012 election. His argument, he said was “and still is — is that, if you get earned media, then it’s going to be because it’s earned and that will be a reflection of what it is you did that earned the attention of somebody in the media,” Armey said. “If you have paid media, then basically you’re paying somebody to tell your story the way that you want it told.”
Nonprofit groups’ tax documents typically aren’t filed until nearly a year after the relevant year, and any sponsorship payments they list are usually to a syndication service or a broker rather than the hosts or their production companies. The broker typically gets a commission and the syndication service gets a big cut, industry sources told POLITICO.
Conservative groups “that advertise on conservative talk shows are openly promoting their causes, activities, and services to millions of listeners,” Levin wrote. “Furthermore, most national hosts have a say about what advertisers are appropriate for their networks to run during their programs.”
The candidates: Bevin, McDaniel and Brannon
Beck, in particular, was an early force behind the tea party movement [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1109/29794.html ], encouraging listeners to rally against President Barack Obama’s ambitious first-term agenda, and even organizing rallies of his own. Limbaugh, Levin and Hannity weren’t far behind.
They, their adoring audiences and tea party groups supplied early support that helped lift Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Ted Cruz of Texas to primary election victories over establishment favorites in 2010 and 2012, respectively.
They’re trying for a repeat in 2014, pushing hard against establishment Senate favorites challenged by tea partiers like Bevin (whom Beck said was “called of God”), McDaniel (whom Levin said was “solid as a rock”) and Greg Brannon of North Carolina (whom Beck called “one of the more well-spoken, well-thought-out constitutional candidates”).
The tea partiers have been endorsed by FreedomWorks and the Tea Party Patriots and have gotten ample on-air support from the hosts with whom the groups advertise, which they’ll need to offset opposition from deep-pocketed GOP establishment [ http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/04/01/3749413/american-crossroads-tv-ad-backs.html ] groups, including Karl Rove’s American Crossroads super PAC.
Beck responded by urging his listeners, “If you have money, donate. If you have time, donate. GregBrannon.com.” But he also added a bit of shtick betraying his radio roots in the early 1980s as a Top 40 disc jockey [ http://www.salon.com/2009/09/21/glenn_beck/ ] in the then-emerging “morning zoo” genre. “I could tongue-kiss you and I’m not a guy who does that,” said Beck, who has become increasingly engaged in primary politics since the early days of the tea party [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/25646.html ] and his partnership with FreedomWorks.
Beck’s contract doesn’t call for him to give airtime to either FreedomWorks’ officials or its endorsed candidates, according to the source familiar with it, who suggested Beck has spent more time boosting candidates this cycle because there are more candidates he likes.
Some FreedomWorks staffers grumbled that Levin was motivated at least partly by the fact that FreedomWorks, after inquiring about sponsoring Levin’s show, ultimately decided that it would get more bang for its buck by going with his then-rival, Beck. “There were posters at the march on Washington saying, ‘thank you, Glenn Beck,’” FreedomWorks executive Adam Brandon said at the time, referring to a seminal tea party rally [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0909/27058.html ] in September 2009. “There weren’t signs saying, ‘thank you, Mark Levin.’” (The hosts say they’ve since patched things up [ http://www.politico.com/story/2014/01/glenn-beck-sean-hannity-mark-levin-102919.html ].)
The evolutions: An apology
After Levin signed on last year with the more anti-establishment Tea Party Patriots, he apologized for endorsing Hatch [ http://therightscoop.com/mark-levin-reads-gop-amnesty-votes-apologizes-for-endorsing-orrin-hatch/ ] after the veteran lawmaker expressed support for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Levin has since endorsed a number of challengers to incumbent senators, including Milton Wolf’s primary against Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts. Driving home his anti-establishment posture, Levin accused Roberts [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eChIGYiADJ4 ] of “going through the strategy hatched by Orrin Hatch. He has lurched to the right in the primary process and to get reelected, but he is a well-known establishment Republican.”
Many deep-pocketed conservative groups are looking for hosts who adhere to an ideological orthodoxy, asserted Michael Medved, a nationally syndicated conservative talker. Such groups have shied away from sponsoring his show, he suggested, because of his less-confrontational approach to the tea party-vs.-establishment power struggle and his support for immigration reform.
Tea party groups and their sponsorees peddle the idea that “you have to replace mushy moderates and establishment people with true conservatives, and the tea party. That’s a narrative that I would be very uncomfortable with, because I don’t agree with it,” explained Medved, whose show nonetheless has accepted advertising from the American Conservative Union and other outfits. “There are a lot of the potential sponsors who are involved with various conservative organizations for whom my ‘heresy’ — in quotes — on immigration creates a problem,” said Medved.
The hosts aren’t necessarily just following their sponsors’ leads, though.
His sponsorship with FreedomWorks in 2013 was set to pay for ads on his radio show, his independent TV show and a partnership with the “action center” affiliated with his news website The Blaze, which was set to sublease 1,400 square feet of space in FreedomWorks’ sleek Capitol Hill office suite, according to the 2012 board memo. The source with knowledge of Beck’s contract said it was unrelated to the rented space, and pointed out that other media companies also lease space in the building.
And, by Beck’s own account, he played a pivotal role in steering FreedomWorks through the split with Armey, empowering Beck’s allies at the group, who were the primary advocates for the sponsorship contract, after Armey temporarily ousted them from power. Beck called the major donors who compose the FreedomWorks board and said “if you allow this coup to sit, we’re done and we’ll expose it,” according to an account he shared with his listeners [ http://www.glennbeck.com/2013/10/09/hostile-takeover-did-the-gop-cronies-infiltrate-freedomworks-in-the-lead-up-to-the-2012-election/ ] several months later. “Well, it wasn’t even a week later, the board took a vote to reinstate” his allies and “escorted the leader of this coup and his cronies out the door for good,” Beck recalled triumphantly of his dealings with Armey, whom he continues to assail on his shows, last month calling him “the fat guy [ http://www.glennbeck.com/2014/03/28/freedomworks-pac-endorses-ben-sasse-in-nebraska-senate-race/ ].”
“I take a look at these races in Mississippi with Cochran and especially the one in Kentucky with McConnell, and I would call it a fool’s errand and therefore tailor-made for Glenn Beck, and you can quote me on that.”
Cliven Bundy, scofflaw. Photographer: George Frey/Getty Images
By James Greiff Apr 18, 2014 8:31 AM EDT
The tale of Cliven Bundy, a Nevada cattle rancher, had all the elements of a certain type of political theater, making it inevitable that he would become a hero in the conservative blogosphere [ http://www.infowars.com/historic-feds-forced-to-surrender-to-american-citizens/ (first item this post)] and a fixture on Fox News.
The story line, as told in those forums, went something like this: Heavy-handed federal bureaucrats, having seized Bundy's cattle, were forced to back down after being confronted by cowboys on horseback toting nothing more than their side arms and an unshakable faith in the U.S. Constitution. (A little-told detail: A sniper [ http://www.businessinsider.com/bundy-ranch-standoff-nevada-jerry-delemus-2014-4 ] or two were concurrently taking aim at the federal agents.)
Let's dispense with niceties: Bundy is a freeloading scofflaw, a welfare queen in a Stetson [ http://www.michelelewis.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/stetson_cowboy_hats.jpg ] who claimed what wasn't his. He took subsidies from U.S. taxpayers and refused to pay the $1.2 million he owed for using federal -- make that our -- land.
That the people inhabiting said territory do agree and declare, that they forever disclaim all right and title to the unappropriated public lands lying within said territory, and that the same shall be and remain at the sole and entire disposition of the United States.
Bundy no doubt is pining for the days, which he never actually experienced, when cattlemen could let their herds roam at will on public lands. That changed in 1934 when federal control of grazing was formalized under a law designed to prevent overuse and degradation of the range. The legislation was backed by ranchers (it was drafted by a rancher turned congressman), in part because it made it that much harder [ http://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.ag.071 ] for newcomers to get into the business.
The law, the Taylor Grazing Act, gave existing ranchers permits allowing them to run their herds on federal land. In turn, ranchers paid user fees, which were lower than what most private landowners would have charged. Because those fees capture only a bit of the costs of the grazing program [ http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/swcbd/PROGRAMS/grazing/assessing_the_full_cost.pdf ], it amounts to a taxpayer subsidy to ranchers of as much as $1 billion a year. Subsequent court rulings clearly established that the law didn’t grant ownership rights to ranchers who used federal land.
Bundy's specific complaint dates to 1993, when regulators began a program to protect the endangered desert tortoise. They placed certain grasslands off-limits for grazing, and the government bought out the permits of some ranchers. Among others, Bundy refused to sell and kept grazing his cattle on restricted federal land without a permit.
The fees and fines kept mounting, and Bundy kept losing in court. In 1998, a federal judge permanently barred him from letting his cattle graze on protected federal land.
Finally, agents of the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees grazing rights, began rounding up Bundy's cattle to remove them from federal property a few weeks ago. Things got hot when Bundy's family and other ranchers confronted the agents. Wary of the standoff escalating into another Ruby Ridge [ http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/incident-at-ruby-ridge ] or Waco -- totemic events for some Americans -- federal officials backed down and released Bundy's cattle.
Where it goes from here is unclear. But what shouldn't be in dispute is the nature of the conflict. This wasn't a matter of capricious enforcement [ http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-04-16/you-have-the-right-to-comply-with-the-law ] on the part of the federal government but the steady ratcheting up of pressure on a defiant lawbreaker. There is no grand principle here, just the ill-judgment of a man who has helped himself at the public trough while believing he has a right to pick and choose which laws to obey.
To contact the author of this article: James Greiff at jgreiff@bloomberg.net. To contact the editor responsible for this article: Lisa Beyer at lbeyer3@bloomberg.net.
A black man allowing his head to be touched by a stranger. But not just any stranger. A child seeking a familiar link between himself and the black man, who also happens to be the leader of the free world.
That's why the timing of Cillizza's piece is curious.
Could it have anything to do with the recent activities of President Obama and upcoming elections?
Frankly, it's no coincidence that just after he speaks at the LBJ Civil Rights Summit, followed by his address to the National Action Network we get his not-blackness dragged up again. Markos just wrote African Americans hold key to Senate [ http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/04/15/1292020/-African-Americans-hold-key-to-Senate ], and he's right. The black community is and has been for a long time a key part of the base of the Democratic Party. I'll be damned if I'm gonna sit here and go through the "we don't really have a black man in the White House" meme, again, and stay silent.
"You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me, 35 years ago," he said somberly.
The president knows that if he were just a guy walking down the street, in a hoodie and sneaks, he certainly wouldn't get stopped and frisked, or murdered for bein' "half-white," as some folks put it. In his remarks about Trayvon, he was explicit:
"There are very few African-American men in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me," he said.
He said he sometimes heard the clicks of car doors locking when he walked across the street in his younger days.
"There are very few African-Americans who haven't had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often," he said.
Melissa Harris-Perry, a professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University, was raised in a racially charged South. Her mother was white and her father was black.
"I was born fewer than 10 years after the 1965 Voting Rights Act," she said. "My mother was from the West and when she first came, she said, 'Why are there two pools?' My father said, 'Jim Crow, Diana, Jim Crow.'"
The term biracial was unheard of then. Today, Americans come in all colors and ethnicities. But the word "biracial" is "meaningless because race and culture and language and identity are all a social construct," said Harris-Perry.
The "most contested" biracial construct is being black and white," she said. "This sounds nuts, but it's impossible to achieve whiteness."
"When people passed at the turn of century, it was because there were real and violent and political consequences to being a person of color," she said. "They passed with great danger and fear and cost. You risked everything—marriage, job and economic security. You can't just tick off white as an identity that has been protected and policed and legislated for hundreds of years. It carries with it a package of privileges and opportunities."
In fact, for as long as black people have been around, "mixed race" people have called themselves—and have been called—black. Whether you love or hate the legacy of racism and the "one-drop rule" that likely perpetuated this way of thinking, and whether you wish we could all stop talking about color altogether, this is the world we live in. And it's not new at all.
Cue the racial auditors: How can black parent + white parent = mixed-race child = black child? The numbers don't check out.
Because race is a concept created by humans that is not mathematical and not scientific. As a result, the slippery, nonsensical and totally-up-to-the-individual-interpretation nature of it will continue to drive people crazy. But we'll continue to talk about it—in our personal lives, in politics and, apparently, in Pew polls—because the messy categories we use continue to have social significance.
So, although some people with President Obama's same background might adamantly choose "biracial" or "mixed race" or "just human," for many others (this writer included), being mixed race is simply the specific way in which they're black. That's not inside information, and examples from history and popular culture are abundant. If you want to know more, Google "biracial African Americans" or "mixed-race African Americans" and have at it.
I don't take issue with anyone who decides to identify themselves as biracial or mixed race. But frankly, if they look at all phenotypically black—even if light-skinned—they are going to find out that racists ain't gonna embrace their white half.
Flip it this way: What would your response be if Barack Obama had decided to check the box on the census for white? What if I tell you I'm Norwegian? (I have some in my family tree.) Y'all would holla "get the therapist! Chile is in de-nial."
No way can Obama even "pass for white [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_%28racial_identity%29#Examples_in_the_United_States ]." He knows he is black, he self-identifies as black, and if 500 years from now we have eliminated the concept of race with its accompanying systemic racism, he will still be listed in the history books as our first black president.
I realize that there are critics of President Obama, of all colors and from both ends of the political spectrum, who have carped about the fact that he doesn't talk about race enough and he hasn't been paying attention to black folks. Of course, wingnuts think that that is all he does.
His address on voter-suppression efforts is one of the most significant and morally grounded speeches of his presidency....
I think we will eventually regard this current effort to suppress the vote through voter-ID laws, ending early voting, restricting voting hours, etc., in the same way we regard literacy tests and poll taxes. (It's worth recalling this piece for the magazine by Mariah Blake which helps historicize voter suppression.)
I believe in judging Barack Obama's rhetoric and policies not as though he were the president of black America, but of the United States of America. On that count his speech soared. There aren't many topics more important than the security of our democracy. The president did not attack that topic gingerly, but forcefully, directly and without hedge.
It's an important speech.
As an aside, I'll add that I still can't get over seeing a black dude, who is the president, standing in front of Garvey's red, black, and green. Strange days, I tell you. Strange days, indeed. No one knows where this is going.
Now, if some of this sounds familiar, it’s because today we remain locked in this same great debate about equality and opportunity, and the role of government in ensuring each. As was true 50 years ago, there are those who dismiss the Great Society as a failed experiment and an encroachment on liberty; who argue that government has become the true source of all that ails us, and that poverty is due to the moral failings of those who suffer from it. There are also those who argue, John, that nothing has changed; that racism is so embedded in our DNA that there is no use trying politics -- the game is rigged.
But such theories ignore history. Yes, it’s true that, despite laws like the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act and Medicare, our society is still racked with division and poverty. Yes, race still colors our political debates, and there have been government programs that have fallen short. In a time when cynicism is too often passed off as wisdom, it’s perhaps easy to conclude that there are limits to change; that we are trapped by our own history; and politics is a fool’s errand, and we’d be better off if we roll back big chunks of LBJ’s legacy, or at least if we don’t put too much of our hope, invest too much of our hope in our government.
I reject such thinking. (Applause.) Not just because Medicare and Medicaid have lifted millions from suffering; not just because the poverty rate in this nation would be far worse without food stamps and Head Start and all the Great Society programs that survive to this day. I reject such cynicism because I have lived out the promise of LBJ’s efforts. Because Michelle has lived out the legacy of those efforts. Because my daughters have lived out the legacy of those efforts. Because I and millions of my generation were in a position to take the baton that he handed to us. (Applause.)
Because of the Civil Rights movement, because of the laws President Johnson signed, new doors of opportunity and education swung open for everybody -- not all at once, but they swung open. Not just blacks and whites, but also women and Latinos; and Asians and Native Americans; and gay Americans and Americans with a disability. They swung open for you, and they swung open for me. And that’s why I’m standing here today -- because of those efforts, because of that legacy. (Applause.)
The nation’s attention has for the past few weeks been riveted by a standoff in Nevada between armed federal agents and the Bundys, a ranching family who believe the federal government is exceeding its authority by assessing “fees” against ranchers who graze cattle on government lands. Outrage over the government's use of armed agents to forcibly remove the Bundys’ cattle led many Americans to travel to Nevada to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience in support of the family.
The protests seem to have worked, at least for now, as the government appears to have backed off from direct confrontation. Sadly, some elected officials have inflamed the situation by labeling the Bundys and their supporters “domestic terrorists,” thus justifying any future use of force by the government. That means there is always the possibility of another deadly Waco-style raid on the Bundys or a similar group in the future.
In a state like Nevada, where 84 percent of the land is owned by the federal government, these types of conflicts are inevitable. Government ownership of land means that land is in theory owned by everyone, but in practice owned by no one. Thus, those who use the land lack the incentives to preserve it for the long term. As a result, land-use rules are set by politicians and bureaucrats. Oftentimes, the so-called “public” land is used in ways that benefit politically-powerful special interests.
Politicians and bureaucrats can, and will, arbitrarily change the rules governing the land. In the 19th century, some Americans moved to Nevada because the government promised them that they, and their descendants, would always be able to use the federally-owned land. The Nevada ranchers believed they had an implied contract with the government allowing them to use the land for grazing. When government bureaucrats decided they needed to restrict grazing to protect the desert tortoise, they used force to drive most ranchers away.
By contrast, if the Nevada land in question was privately owned, the dispute over whether to allow the ranchers to continue to use the land would have likely been resolved without sending in federal armed agents to remove the Bundys’ cattle from the land. This is one more reason why the federal government should rid itself of all federal land holdings. Selling federal lands would also help reduce the federal deficit.
It is unlikely that Congress will divest the federal government’s land holdings, as most in government are more interested in increasing government power than in protecting and restoring private property rights.
A government that continually violates our rights of property and contract can fairly be descried as authoritarian. Of course, the politicians and bureaucrats take offense at this term, but how else do you describe a government that forbids Americans from grazing cattle on land they have used for over a century, from buying health insurance that does not meet Obamacare’s standards, from trading with Cuba, or even from drinking raw milk? That so many in DC support the NSA spying and the TSA assaults on our privacy shows the low regard that too many in government have for our rights.
History shows us that authoritarian systems, whether fascist, communist, or Keynesian, will inevitably fail. I believe incidents such as that in Nevada show we may be witnessing the failure of the American authoritarian warfare-welfare state -- and that of course would be good. This is why it is so important that those of us who understand the freedom philosophy spread the truth about how statism caused our problems and why liberty is the only solution.
Copyright 2014 The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
The Bureau of Land Management says Bundy was allowing his cattle to graze illegally which triggered a round-up of about 400 head of cattle last week.
Bundy claims his family’s cattle have grazed on the land since 1870 without interference from the government.
However, the Bureau of Land Management says Bundy hadn’t paid his grazing fees since 1993.
Over time, officials say those fees have amounted to more than $1 million.
As authorities herded the cattle, a standoff was sparked with members of the militia.
Organizers with the Oklahoma Militia say they have members in Nevada who claim Bundy’s cattle were unlawfully herded by the bureau.
The Oklahoma Militia says it is made up of nearly 50,000 volunteers.
Members say they are taking Bundy’s side and fear this practice could spread to the Sooner State.
Scott Shaw said, “Evidently in America we don’t actually own the property anymore if you ever did.”
Shaw says Oklahoma Militia members are ready to take up arms against the federal government if needed.
He said, “It’s up to the feds. The ball’s in their court! You can do this legally or if you want to try to do a land grab violently, you can do that. We’re going to resist you!”
Shaw says the militia has not had to defend Oklahoma from the government yet but members are becoming concerned.
Shaw said, “Just look around the country, they are doing it everywhere. If they can do it in Nevada, they can do it in Colorado, Texas. I mean, what’s to stop them from coming to Oklahoma? The only thing to stop them is ‘We the People’.”
However, not everyone agrees.
Sen. Jim Inhofe said, “You’ve got a bunch of people there trying to take the law into their own hands and they shouldn’t be doing that. And the Bureau of Land Management is not government-owned, it’s publicly owned. There’s a big difference there. I blame both sides.”
The Bureau of Land Management released the cattle after confiscating them.
Montana man talks about militia experience in Nevada
by David Jay - MTN News Apr 20, 2014 11:30 PM
BILLINGS - Nevada Rancher Clive Bundy received overwhelming support last week after the Bureau of Land Management rounded up cattle and denied grazing to the land.
That help also came from a Montana man who joined the protest when Jim Lardy of the West Mountain Rangers traveled from Anaconda to Nevada.
BLM officials say that Bundy has not paid grazing rights and was trespassing, but Bundy counters by stating that the federal government does not own the land and he was working with the county.
Lardy says he and hundreds of militia protected Bundy and adds that the BLM aimed sniper rifles aimed at them.
"I was there basically alone for quite a while," Lardy said. "It's pretty scary knowing I had a sniper scope on me nearly the entire time. That's horrible feeling that no one should have to go through.
"You never saw such a polite bunch of people as were down there and armed. There was no fighting. There was no discord. Everyone was respectful. You never seen such a patriotic bunch of people," he added.
Lardy says the militia were peaceful.
BLM Director Neil Kornze stated in a news release that a safe and peaceful operation was the priority.
Kornze also says Clive Bundy owes $1 million and the BLM will continue to work to resolve the matter administratively and judicially.
A Nevada senator calls Bundy supporters “patriots”—while another calls them “terrorists.” Attorney Rory Reid joins to discuss this stark difference in descriptors.
In a large, diverse country where political conflict runs rampant, Chris Hayes makes the case for listening to each other - even when we don't agree with each other.
Desperate for Ratings, MSNBC Attacks Alex Jones. Again.
Published on Apr 23, 2014 [broadcast (. . .) April 22, 2014] by TheAlexJonesChannel
Once Again Alex Jones finds himself the topic of an MSNBC hitpiece. This time host Chris Hayes has smeared Cliven Bundy supporters as insurgents, lamenting the threat posed to the establishment by an Alex Jones-Drudge-Fox News-Rand Paul "axis" that threatens to rock the 2016 presidential race. http://www.infowars.com/msnbc-smears-bundy-supporters-as-insurgents-attacks-infowars-drudge/
Visit http://www.InfowarsLife.com to get the products Alex Jones and his family trust, while supporting the growth of our expanding media operation.
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The only difference is that for the past twenty years or so, Bundy has refused to pay grazing fees for grazing his cattle herds on public Bureau of Land Management land. (You know, that land that belongs to every person [ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/opinion/egan-deadbeat-on-the-range.html ] in the United States.) He's taking a stand against those invasive government regulations that charge him a whopping $1.35 a month per cow (and calves) if they use public lands.
Now Bundy and his pals are calling the anti-government militia types [ http://mediamatters.org/research/2014/04/18/fox-champions-bundy-supporters-who-threatened-v/198947 ] to his side to keep him from having to pay past due grazing fees, not to mention stop grazing his cattle on protected land. (Say hello, desert tortoise.) There are so many issues rolled into this, it seems only fitting to set it to "Home on the Range." Enjoy the cartoon [the video cartoon embedded; should be available in a coupla weeks via https://www.youtube.com/user/markfiore/videos ], and enjoy our public lands!
[Cliven Bundy, to "Home on the Range"]
Oh give me a home, Where mah' cattle can roam. Fer free, while others must pay. Where now all that's heard, Are encouraging words-- For militias arriving today.
Home, home on the range, Where FoxNews and Hannity play. Where the right-wing is heard, And the gun nuts are stirred, Getting crazier each broadcast day.
Now thanks to the right, Public land is a blight, You can really just take it by force. We're loaded and locked, I'm a rancher half-cocked, My rights they exceed those of yours.
Now sometimes at night, When the cable glows bright, I think 'bout the wild creatures, too. But that's gone in a burst, Private sector is first. Take your laws and your rules and screw you.
Home, home on the range, Where FoxNews and Hannity play. Where the right-wing is heard, And the gun nuts are stirred, Getting crazier each broadcast day.
Ex-KKK Leader Was Given a New Identity Years Before Shooting
Accused Kansas JCC Shooter Appears in Court (David Eulitt/The Kansas City Star/AP Photo)
A 1987 United States Marshals Service "wanted" poster shows Frazier Glenn Miller. (United States Marshals Service)
By James Hill Apr 24, 2014 4:44am
Frazier Glenn Cross, the man accused of murder in the shootings of three people outside Jewish facilities in Kansas last week was, for all practical purposes, born at the age of 49.
The federal government gave him that name when he was released from prison in 1990, along with a new social security number and a new place to live, not far from the Missouri River in western Iowa.
The idea was to erase any connection to the man he had been before: Frazier Glenn Miller. White Nationalist leader. Spewer of hate. Federal informant.
“I joined the family in Sioux City, Iowa,” Miller wrote later in his self-published autobiography. “I enrolled in truck driving school…and I’ve been trucking ever since. And I love it. After prison, the freedom of the open road is gloriously exhilarating.”
THE KKK’S 1994 FIGHT TO GET ON CABLE TV
Less than three years earlier Miller had been a fugitive from justice, the subject of a nationwide manhunt after he had declared war on blacks and Jews, exhorting his thousands of followers to violently overthrow the very government that would soon become his protector.
“Let the blood of our enemies flood the streets, rivers and fields of the nation,” Miller wrote. “[R]ise up and throw off the chains which bind us to the satanic, Jewish controlled and ruled federal government. Let the battle axes swing smoothly and the bullets wiss [sic] true.”
DECLARATION OF WAR
In the early morning hours of April 30, 1987, more than three dozen federal and state law enforcement agents surrounded a mobile home in Ozark, Missouri. A van recently purchased by Miller in Louisiana had been spotted outside by an agent the day before.
A volley of tear gas was fired and then, just after 7 a.m, four men emerged and gave themselves up.
Among them was Miller, the founder of Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the paramilitary White Patriot Party in North Carolina. The United States Marshals Service had issued a nationwide bulletin seeking Miller’s arrest after he disappeared while appealing his conviction for criminal contempt.
Agents recovered hand grenades, automatic rifles, pistols and flak jackets inside the trailer, according to FBI statements at the time. Explosives experts from nearby Fort Leonard Wood were called in to detonate a box containing about twenty pipe bombs.
The authorities also found a Xerox machine and about a thousand copies of Miller’s “Declaration of War.” During his 10 days on the run, Miller had mailed his typewritten call to arms to thousands of white nationalists, as well as members of Congress and dozens of media outlets.
“I realize fully that I will be caught quickly,” Miller had written in his letter. “[B]ut I will die with contempt on my lips and with sword in my hand. My fate will either be assassination or the death penalty.”
But faced with an array of charges that could have put him behind bars for 20 years or more, Miller’s bombast was quickly reduced to a squeal. Within days of his arrest, he was signalling his willingness to make a deal.
“He stated that it was ‘all a bluff that got out of hand,’” according to an FBI agent’s notes, obtained by ABC News, of an interview with Miller a few weeks after his arrest. “[H]aving spent eight days in jail and having the opportunity to dry out from excessive alcohol consumption, he has learned to develop tolerance. He stated emphatically that he would never hurt anybody,” the agent wrote in recounting Miller’s statements.
Among those present for the initial interviews with Miller was then-federal prosecutor J. Douglas McCullough, now a judge on the North Carolina state court of appeals.
Steve Daniels, an anchor for ABC affiliate WTVD, interviewed McCullough this week in Raleigh.
“He tried to be a little bit self-serving,” McCullough said of Miller during the interview. “Every defendant in those situations usually is at first. But he did open up about a lot of things about the White Patriot Party. He detailed a number of people that were involved in illegal activities that were his associates. And that’s what we were looking for. ”
In a series of ensuing interviews with federal and North Carolina investigators, Miller never denied his racist and anti-Semitic views, but claimed he had always denounced violence and illegal activity.
“Miller wanted nothing more to do with the movement,” according to an FBI account of an interview in June of 1987. He was “willing to turn his back on it in order to return to his family. His problem in the past had been intolerance linked with excessive drinking.”
A month later, in an interview with the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, during which he accused two of his former comrades of murder, he described his time on the run from the law as little more than a lark.
“I was on vacation, flirting with girls and drinking beer and going red-necking,” Miller told the agents. “I love to go out and drink a beer with rednecks…do the Texas Two-Step. I’m a pretty good dancer by the way,” he said.
SHOCKING ALLEGATIONS
In the course of their investigation, authorities also learned the stunning details of Miller’s arrest a year earlier. Raleigh police officers had caught Miller in the back seat of a vehicle, in mid-act with a black male prostitute masquerading as a woman.
“It was pretty shocking,” says McCullough, “because of his personal stances that he had taken and what he was now accused on engaging in.”
McCullough says he has read the police report of the incident but declined to comment on the specifics. “I would rather not go into the details,” he said. “They’re rather salacious. I think the facts speak for themselves and people can draw their own conclusions about how incongruous that is.”
Miller was not charged in connection with the prostitution arrest and no public record of the incident could be located. But in a recorded phone call with the Southern Poverty Law Center last fall, Miller claimed that he had lured the prostitute to the meeting with the intention of beating him.
Eventually, McCullough, the federal prosecutor, would approve a plea deal with Miller recommending a five-year prison sentence in exchange for his cooperation and testimony against his former compatriots. He would serve less than three years of that sentence at a prison in western New York.
“I am not certain that we got 100 percent of what we wanted,” McCullough told WTVD. “He did testify in a couple of cases here in the eastern part of the state, or agreed to testify where the people plead guilty knowing he was going to testify.”
In 1998, Miller was a key witness in a high-profile federal trial that charged more than a dozen white nationalists in an alleged conspiracy to levy war against the United States government. The Department of Justice had called it Operation Clean Sweep. Miller testified that he had received two payments totaling $200,000 from a leader of the alleged conspiracy, but in the end all of those accused were acquitted and, incredibly, one of the jurors later married one of the defendants.
“His testimony was extremely weak,” says Leonard Zeskind, who tracked Miller’s activities in the 1980's as research director for the Center for the Democratic Renewal, a civil rights group fighting Klan activities.
“I believe that Miller was essentially playing a game with the feds. And I don’t think he had any intention of becoming a good witness. The guy was a stone-to-the-bone Nazi,” Zeskind says. “He never gave that up. I am on the record as saying the man should have died in prison.”
But McCullough says that nothing would have changed what happened last week in Kansas. Even if he had refused to deal with Miller back in 1987, he would have spent no more than fifteen years in prison.
“We made the deal that we could make at the time and whether it’s right or wrong, it’s really kind of immaterial at this point,” McCullough says. “Human beings are unpredictable. I don’t think there is anybody who could know what he was capable of doing,” he said of the shootings in Kansas. “I certainly never saw that in his personality. He was a blowhard who liked to be in front of a crowd. He liked to whip the crowd up and get the emotions running high.”
Very little is known of the years Miller spent in Iowa and Nebraska living as Frazier Glenn Cross.
“He asked for protection from both the White Patriot Party people and blacks in prison because he had alienated both groups,” says McCullough. ”Obviously once he served his sentence he couldn’t go back to where his old compatriots were because he would be at risk. So we had to put him somewhere safe.”
It’s clear that Cross eventually discarded his assumed identity provided by the federal government and resumed his life as the belligerent, unapologetic white supremacist, Frazier Glenn Miller.
And no one, it seems, could predict the tragic consequences that would follow.
“F**k that,” he said. “I’m telling you that if that happens, it’s going to spark a civil war, and I’ll be glad to fire the first shot. I’m not putting up with it, you shouldn’t put up with it, and I need all you patriots to start thinking about what you’re going to do. Load your damn mags, make sure your rifle’s clean, pack a backpack with some food in it, and get ready to fight.
“I’m not f**king putting up with this, I am not letting my country be ruled by a dictator, I am not letting anybody take my guns,” he said, his voice rising. “If this goes one inch further, I’m going to start killing people.”
That threat of violence was provoked by a fever camp rumor. A rumor that Joe Biden told President Obama he should use executive orders to ban assault weapons.
James Yeager is calling from Cliven Bundy’s front yard, where he’s one of several (he won’t say how many) providing 24-hour security to the Bundy family. He and his friend packed up “a full medical kit and a camera” and drove 26 ½ hours from their home in Camden, Tennessee last week to document what he calls “a tremendous overreach of federal power.” He’s been posting daily videos to his YouTube site.
When asked if he also packed weapons, Yeager said, “of course. I’m always armed. This is not any different than any other day for me.”
You see, in today's up-is-down, black-is-white political discourse, Yeager's personal security work for the Bundys is all because the government Yeager hates and Bundy refuses to recognize has orchestrated "a tremendous overreach of federal power."
This should be good news for citizens who are going through foreclosure of their homes, for just one example. I wonder if Bundy or Yeager would rush, with all that fire power, to a scene where a homeowner and his neighbors were in a stand off against the local sheriff for trying to evict a foreclosed-upon family? If Bundy shouldn't have to pay his debts because....freedom, then why should a homeowner who is about to be evicted from his home for defaulting on his mortgage?
Both Bundy and the hypothetical homeowner refuse to pay what they were obligated by law to pay, so why shouldn't an armed-to-the-teeth homeowner in default have the full support of the mighty militia members and patriots....like Yeager?
In fact, based on this new brand of patriotism, why should any American citizen ever pay another debt that they feel is "a tremendous overreach of federal power?"
I keep hearing from the extremist right that the Bureau of Land Management, and of course, Obama, made a very bad decision when they sent federal agents to secure, well, cow-collateral, on an unpaid million dollar plus debt Bundy has owed the federal government. I guess twenty years of governmental patience over Bundy's non-payment was not quite enough time.
But I want to offer a contrast that should make the obvious point concerning the Bundy standoff. Let's say that the Occupy Wall Street "revolutionaries and commies" invited a few "patriots" to bring their AR-15's to New York or Dallas to defend their "protest" from threats from law enforcement officials who were wanting to break up the protest. Further, let's suggest that....as in the Bundy standoff.....several "patriots", say, like James Yeager, positioned themselves and honed their gun sights on the heads of law enforcement officers.....ready to strike a blow for, you know, freedom.
How would conservative media have responded? Would people like Sean Hannity have celebrated such behavior....defended it? Why would it be a sign of great courage, patriotism and love of freedom to place law enforcement personnel in your semi-automatic weapon's sight over a 20-year-running deadbeat who refuses to pay what he owes.....but not if you protest against third world income inequality here in the U.S. compliments of Wall Street barons?
Yet, conservative media only referred to Occupiers as dirty, ignorant, public-fornicators who urinated and defecated in public parks while protesting to get more free stuff from Uncle Sugar.
What gives?
The New Confederacy movement.
The overarching dispute we've been embroiled in since we elected our first black president is over the federal government, just like it was before the Civil War began. The new "patriots" and "real Americans", aware that demographic changes in the U.S. are inevitable, are responding by challenging the power and reach of the federal government itself.
Cliven Bundy, Sean Hannity et.al. swear that they are patriotic Americans who passionately love their country. Bundy, however, does not recognize the federal government as having any authority whatsoever......and his followers and defenders?
Bundy’s supporters are also adamant that they love America — they just don’t agree with (or in many cases, even recognize as legitimate) its government or the laws it passes.
Cliven Bundy questioned whether black Americans were "better off as slaves" or "better off under government subsidy." His remarks initially appeared in a New York Times article on April 23.
Several comments here point out earlier remarks made by Bundy and claim these [his widely-noted comments, included] are taken out of context. In the interest of fairness, the above [which I guess replaces an earlier, shorter video of just the widely-noted remarks?] is a followup [more complete] video of those remarks [that include some of his preceding and following remarks].
Full version of race remarks made by Bundy that have generated some controversy. If you're looking for a more hacked-up soundbite version that makes him look more like a racist, you might want to check out what CNN did to him at the link above.
Assuming that Adam Nagourney [ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/us/politics/rancher-proudly-breaks-the-law-becoming-a-hero-in-the-west.html ] doesn't have mad wiretapping skillz of which I was not aware, or that he is not capable of the average Vulcan Mind Meld, ol' Cliven Bundy, the Paul Revere of the Hoveround militia, beloved grandpappy of the Traffic On The Three's First Vicarious Division, knew full well he was talking to a New York Times reporter when he decided to gleefully set the kitty free from the burlap.
"I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro," he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, "and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids - and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch - they didn't have nothing to do. They didn't have nothing for their kids to do. They didn't have nothing for their young girls to do. "And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?" he asked. "They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I've often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn't get no more freedom. They got less freedom."
If anything were ever About Race, I might say that ol' Cliven was engaging is some racism right here, but since nothing is ever About Race in this country, I must be mistaken, because Cliven is all about freedom and liberty and the ancestral rights his family has to The Land that date back to shortly after the Truman Administration. How do you like your blue-eyed boy now, Mr. Hannity?
Let us leave the dusty plains of Camp Moocher for a moment and check back in with Jayson Veley [ http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Morning_Butthurt ], the shy and retiring Coldplay avatar from Eastern Connecticut State who was so crushed by his creative writing professor's suggestion that people like Cliven Bundy, and his enablers in conservative politics far and wide, might be stopping by the Nathan Bedford Forrest Rest Area on Liberty Highway that he felt compelled to tape the professor surreptitiously. Jayson, you may recall, was said to be so upset that he "wished to remain anonymous" while finking on his teacher. This lasted until Megyn Kelly batted her eyes at him and dragged young Jayson gleefully into the spotlight. What are we to make of our reluctant freedom fighter?
Well, it turns out there's more to Jayson than meets the eye. Oh, he's quite the aspiring little wingnut [ http://juniorfactornation.com/about/ ], our Jayson is.
For years, we have seen a decline in small government republicanism among the youth. Junior Factor Nation believes that this is primarily due to liberal indoctrination in high school and college classrooms, as well as over-exposure to liberal philosophies from television and the media. As a result, we are seeing an increasing trend towards liberalism, atheism, and big government ideologies. The problem with this is that liberal policies are not in line with our founding principles. Therefore, if we allow this trend to continue, future generations may not even know the true meaning of the words "we the people." That is our battle - to ensure that our children grow up with just as much, if not more, freedom than we have in America today. It is time for a revolution of the heart and mind, and Junior Factor Nation is prepared to bring that revolution to light, one broadcast at a time.
Here are the rest of the Teen Titans [ http://juniorfactornation.com/columnist/ ]. (I don't know which is my favorite. The one who "rights article", or the one who am very opinionated.) Wait a second, here's our boy.
Jayson Veley started his broadcasting career in July of 2009 with The Junior Factor, a local access television show that he co-hosted with his friend, Connor Mullin. The goal of The Junior Factor was to spread the conservative message to as many members as the youth as possible and aired for a total of three years, ending in the summer of 2012. Shortly after, Veley took on an even bigger project - a network called Junior Factor Nation which he co-founded with Caiden Cowger. The network consists of several different conservative radio programs, all hosted by kids in their teens and early twenties. Veley's show, Factor Talk Radio, started on April 26th, 2012 and currently airs from 7-8 PM on Monday and Thursday nights. Each broadcast features in depth conservative commentary, political analysis, humor, and of course, sarcasm, In the past, Veley has been criticized for being too aggressive on the air, but what some call anger he likes to call passion. The future of America is at stake, and if it's a war the liberals want, it's a war they're going to get.
Not actual war, of course. That's for suckers without their own cable-access programs. Anyway, Jayson seems to have a rather elastic concept of "anonymity."
The point of it all is to point out (again) that there is a very sophisticated propaganda operation being conducted on one side of the political debate. Once you wander into that world, you notice that almost everything is a shuck. It's a completely artificial universe that has unfortunate real-world consequences for the rest of us. Nothing there is ever truly what it seems and P.T. Barnum was born a couple centuries too early.
Cliven Bundy muses that black people may have been better off as slaves - and Bundy’s Republican supporters are running for cover. Karen Finney, host of “Disrupt”, discusses.
Rachel Maddow points out that Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy's racist remarks are unsurprising in the context of his apparent adherence to the philosophy of the Posse Comitatus and Sovereign Citizen movements, rooted in post-Civil War reconstruction.
Nevada Congressman Steven Horsford, who represents rancher Cliven Bundy’s district, talks with Rachel Maddow about how the citizens of his district, Bundy's neighbors, feel about Bundy and his armed militia supporters.
A Day in the Life of The Negro (according to Cliven Bundy)
by GenXangster Fri Apr 25, 2014 at 06:17 AM PDT
"I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.
“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”
"That’s exactly what I said. I said I’m wondering if they’re better off under government subsidy, and their young women are having the abortions and their young men are in jail, and their older women and their children are standing, sitting out on the cement porch without nothing to do, you know, I’m wondering: Are they happier now under this government subsidy system than they were when they were slaves, and they was able to have their family structure together, and the chickens and garden, and the people had something to do? And so, in my mind I’m wondering, are they better off being slaves, in that sense, or better off being slaves to the United States government, in the sense of the subsidies. I’m wondering. That’s what. And the statement was right. I am wondering.”
Just this morning while I was sitting on the government house porch, my son came and sat down next to me. Since we both had nothing to do, a long tense silence passed between us. I knew he had something to say so I patiently waited for him to speak his mind. You have a lot of time to do that when you have nothing to do but sit on a government house porch. After a while, he finally spoke:
"I know I survived the abortion and everything and I'm lucky to be alive but can you not put me in jail this summer? I'd rather just pick some cotton for free for white people if it's alright."
I must have looked confused because he continued,
"Look, mother, I don't know how black mothers got the power to control the justice system and put their sons in jail but this has to stop! All I want is backbreaking labor to do and I want to do it for free! Why can't you understand?"
I shook my head and turned to him,
"We already talked about this. You're not picking cotton. You're going to jail and I don't wanna hear another word about it. Your cousin Leo is expecting you."
My son dropped his shoulders and sulked.
"Never have nothing to do but be put in jail by my own mother and sit on a porch..." he mumbled.
Before I had a chance to answer, my do-nothing daughter walked out of the open door and sat with us. I knew what she was on before she even started.
"Look, young girl, I already told you, I don't have nothing for you to do. Stop bugging me and sit on this porch!"
I try not to look at her too much because it freaks me out. She's actually a ghost because she was aborted. She doesn't even exist. Why should it matter that she has nothing to do? Crazy kids.
I turned my thoughts back to my government subsidy check. Where's that damn mailman? He's always late. I won't be able to send my son to jail on time or pay for my next abortion. Goddammit.
There has to be a better way.
I thought about what my son said and I thought back to the old days when my ancestors had all the cotton in the world to pick. Fields and fields of fluffy white salvation. How lucky they were to have calloused hands, broken backs and chicken gardens and a family that never had to be split up because of abortion and jail. Instead, their kids were sold away to the deep south and given glorious unpaid, hardcore, life-shortening labor to do. I imagined them all happily boarding mule wagons and cages pulled by horses, waving goodbye to their proud parents for the last time, on their way to the land of cotton. Look away, Dixie, look away!
Oh how I wish I was in the land of cotton. Maybe my son is right. It certainly seemed a better option than me sending him off to jail all the time. And perhaps my daughter would have a real body instead of being an aborted ghost. And to confirm her living body, she would have lovely raised scars on her back in the shape of an oak tree from being whipped for not working hard enough. Lazy ass ghost daughter. That would teach her some manners!
And she would have something to do! She could wear a flour sack and scrub white women's floors for free. Perhaps she could even bear some children at the tender age of 14 instead of haunting me all day. She wouldn't be able to abort any of her children and they'd all be happily singing together in the cotton fields and chicken gardens.
And both my children would be happily illiterate. They hate going to school and learning things anyway. Going to school is the very definition of having nothing to do. Completely useless. No opportunities to wear out their bodies working for the benefit of white people. Just sitting there at a desk. Like this porch. Nothing to do. Ever.
Who needs food stamps! My ancestors were fine chefs. They were thrown scraps of meat that a dog wouldn't even eat by generous white people who were in no way mindful that a working person with so much to do needed better food. My people turned inedible offal into culinary masterpieces full of salt, fat and cholesterol because they had no choices. Food stamps that pay for fresh produce and all that crap are a waste when The Negro is better of sharpening his skills cultivating a diet that would be handed down to the next generations as a legacy of WTF-why-are-we-dying-from-heart-attacks-at-age-42. Now we can just go to the store and substitute ham hocks for turkey wings or eat salads like lazy people. Where's the skill in that? That's not enough to do! Who are we kidding?
And did you even know that only The Negro is getting these cushy subsidies? Not one white person has ever been on government assistance of any sort. There are jobs flowing like milk and honey around here but white liberals would rather give The Negro food stamps and checks from mysterious sources. They just like giving shit away. Nobody's ever hungry in America! Not even poor white folks.
Ah, but back in the day food never went to waste. Eyeballs, intestines and hog testicles! Yummy!
What about The Negro who has a job and no porch to sit on, you say? Those are urban legends. Not one Negro ever had a job since slavery. All their muscles are in various states of atrophy from sitting on porches all day for the past 150 years. They literally can't move their own arms anymore. I'm writing this by pounding my face on the keyboard. Without cotton picking to do, my body is useless. How sad. Everyday I cry and hope some white person will come along and give me something to do and not pay me for it. I could have had six-pack abs by now instead of being this Wall-E styled blob of a human with no muscle mass to speak of.
Oh well, it's a nice dream. In the meantime, I'll just sit here and wait on my white guilt subsidy check from some mysterious liberal source (maybe George Soros?) and wait for white people to drive past here and shake their heads disapprovingly at me having nothing to do.
Maybe they'll feel sorry for me and put me back in slavery if I sit here long enough. Surely, those wise white folks know just one more thing about The Negro that white liberals have yet to learn. Until then, I'll pine for the freedom my ancestors used to have as unpaid laborers and be bitter towards white liberals and the Union Army. White liberals need to mind their own business instead of marching into the south with their uppity ideas that I should be "free" and left on a porch to do nothing all day. Who even asked them?
Watch: Cliven Bundy Explains Why Martin Luther King Jr. Would Be on His Side
CNN
Matt Polidoro @Polidorable Apr 25 Cliven Bundy, holding a dead calf & talking about "Rosa Park" this morning on CNN. Seems normal to me! #CNN #NewDay pic.twitter.com/LU7GkvLXGG [ https://twitter.com/Polidorable/status/459677381691985920 ]
Abby Ohlheiser, Philip Bump Apr 25, 2014 9:28AM ET
"I'm not a racist, but I did wonder that," Bundy said in response to a question from Chris Cuomo. That answer is kind of the perfect distillation of what the rancher has been saying to defend himself after the New York Times quoted him waxing nostalgic on slavery. Bundy, it has become clear, believes that there is no harm in "wondering" lots of very offensive things on the record. Here's some of that exchange. We've highlighted the part where Cliven Bundy says that Martin Luther King wouldn't want the media to call him prejudiced:
Chris Cuomo: Are you a racist?
Cliven Bundy: No, I'm not a racist. But I did wonder that. Let me tell you something. I thought about this this morning quite a bit.
CC: Please.
CB: I thought about what Reverend Martin Luther King said. I thought about Rosa Park taking her seat at the front of the bus. Reverend Martin Luther King did not want her to take her seat in the front of the bus. That wasn't what he was talking about. He did not say go to the front of the bus and that's where your seat was. What Reverend King wanted was that she could sit anywhere in the bus and nobody would say anything about it. You and I can sit anywhere in the bus. That's what he wanted. That's what I want. I want her to be able to sit anywhere in the bus and I want to be able to sit by her any where in that bus. That's what he wanted. He didn't want this prejudice thing like the media tried to put on me yesterday. I'm not going to put up with that because that's not what he wanted. That's not what I want. I want to set by her anywhere on that bus and I want anybody to be able to do the same thing. That's what he was after, it's not a prejudice thing, but make us equal.
"I understand that Martin Luther King's message was one of peace and freedom," Cuomo said in reply, adding, "when you suggest that you were wondering if blacks were better off as slaves, that's the opposite of freedom and very offensive to people. I think you probably know that." He probably does not. Bundy continued (once again, emphasis ours):
I took this boot off so I wouldn't put my foot in my mouth with the boot on. Let me see if I can say something. Maybe I sinned and maybe I need to ask forgiveness and maybe I don't know what I actually said. But you know when you talk about prejudice, we're talking about not being able to exercise what we think and our feelings. We're not freedom — we don't have freedom to say what we want. If I call — if I say 'negro' or 'black boy' or 'slave,' I'm — If those people cannot take those kind of words and not be offensive, then Martin Luther King hasn't got his job done yet. They should be able to — I should be able to say those things and they shouldn't offend anybody. I didn't mean to offend them.
The pair went on to argue for most of the remainder of the lengthy interview about race, about Bundy's decision to show a dead calf on air, and about the Constitution. The exchange, to be honest, progresses rather quickly from shockingly offensive to the ramblings of an old man out of his depth. We think this snippet sums things up nicely:
CB: I don't even know how to talk about these ethnic groups.
CC: Then don't.
CB: But I'm going to because I'm interested in those people. I think they should have freedom and liberty.
Dear Cliven Bundy: There's No 'Maybe' About the Sin of Racism
George Frey via Getty Images
by Rev. Dr. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite Professor of Theology, Chicago Theological Seminary Posted: 04/25/2014 12:47 pm EDT Updated: 04/25/2014 12:59 pm EDT
"Maybe I sinned, and maybe I need to ask forgiveness," said Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher who has been lauded by conservatives for his resistance to paying fees for illegally grazing his cattle on government land since 1993, in an interview on CNN [ http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/24/politics/cliven-bundy-interview/ ] on Friday.
There's no "maybe" about it, Mr. Bundy. Yes you sinned, and yes you need to ask for forgiveness. But frankly, your own words show you don't get what the Christian dynamics of confession of sin and asking for forgiveness are all about.
Bundy's remarks reveal a textbook example of how the mind of the sinner works in those who wish to get themselves off the hook of sin by blaming everybody but themselves.
Bundy claimed, in the CNN interview, not to understand all the outrage, across the political spectrum, about his earlier comments that African Americans might have been better off under slavery.
And so, what does a racist do when challenged about such blatant apologetics for a system so vile it is a profound stain on the national conscience? He denies he's a racist.
But Bundy went further, much further, as more of his remarks reveal.
"Maybe I sinned, and maybe I need to ask forgiveness," he said, "and maybe I don't know what I actually said, but when you talk about prejudice, we're talking about not being able to exercise what we think. ... If I say Negro or black boy or slave, if those people cannot take those kind of words and not be (offended), then Martin Luther King hasn't got his job done yet," he told anchor Chris Cuomo on Friday, adding, "We need to get over this prejudice stuff."
Bundy is a nearly perfect example of how the sins of racism build on each other. Bundy has doubled and tripled down on racist comments in his efforts to defend his right (a right that exists basically in his own head) to not pay his grazing fees.
Let's recapitulate.
Slavery was not a social good, it was systemic evil.
Slavery was a massive evil that stole the labor, the lives and the happiness of millions of Africans over centuries. Not only to fail to see how slavery is part of an "original sin" in a land that claims to be the "home of the free," but even to defend it as a system that had some good effects for the very people it targeted with violence and oppression, is wrong.
Pretending not to know what you said is deceptive.
There's a reason Satan or the devil is called "the deceiver." Self-deception, or the attempt to deceive others to avoid confession, is, in a good, old-fashioned phrase, 'wallowing in sin.'
Blaming Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for failing to end your prejudice is compounded prejudice.
Like compound interest in investing, sin can be compounded. It adds up quickly. Once you start down the road of justifying your own racist views, even though it has been clearly pointed out to you that is wrong, you compound the problem and it grows. Dr. King didn't create white supremacist views, white supremacists did (and continue to do so).
There's work to do to get to forgiveness.
In our edited volume, Just Peacemaking: The New Paradigm for the Ethics of Peace and War [ http://www.amazon.com/Just-Peacemaking-Paradigm-Ethics-Peace/dp/082981793X ], contributor Alan Geyer outlines the dynamics of confession, repentance, change, and forgiveness. Honest confession is first, and it's always first. Admit what you said, did, believed. Repent. True repentance requires empathy, the capacity to actually identify with the one whom you have wronged. And then, change. Changing your heart and your actions is indispensible. You can't skip that part.
“They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”
In an attempt to clarify his comments, Bundy was on “The Peter Schiff Show [ http://www.mediaite.com/online/bundy-explains-negro-remarks-im-wondering-if-theyre-better-off-being-slaves/ ],” and he made matters worse: “I’m wondering: Are they happier now under this government subsidy system than they were when they were slaves, when they was able to have their family structure together, and the chickens and a garden, and the people had something to do?”
The Mount Kilimanjaro-size amounts of ignorance and offense packed into those two statements boggles the mind.
Soon after Bundy’s views on slavery and “the Negro” came to light, the conservative supporters he had accrued began to scurry and others pounced.
But I refuse to let Bundy’s fantasies about slavery and projections about “Negroes” be given over to predictable political squabbling. The legacy of slavery must be liberated from political commentary.
Casual, careless and incorrect references to slavery, much like blithe references to Nazi Germany, do violence to the memory of those who endured it, or were lost to it, and to their descendants.
There is no modern-day comparison in this country to the horrors of slavery. None! Leave it alone. Remember, honor and respect. That’s all.
How could slaves have been “happier,” when more than 12 million [ http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces ] were put in shackles, loaded like logs into the bowels of ships and sailed toward shores unknown, away from their world and into their hell?
How could they have been “happier” to be greased up and sold off, mother from child, with no one registering their anguish?
Sojourner Truth, in her “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech [ http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/sojtruth-woman.asp ], delivered in 1851 at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, lamented: “I have borne 13 children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me!”
How could they have been “happier” to meet the lash, to feel the flaying of flesh, to have it heal in dreadful scars only to be ripped open again until one had, as Sethe, the main character in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” put it, a tree on one’s back?
It was not only the lash but also the noose and being chased down and ripped apart by dogs, and all manner of terrors. When the human imagination sets itself on cruelty there are no limits to its designs.
Americans have been trying to justify slavery since its inception, to make the most wrong of wrongs right, to no avail.
Robert E. Lee wrote in 1856: “The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically and socially. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things.”
Others used religion as a justification, quoting verses and patting themselves on the back for saving the souls of the so-called savage.
But as Frederick Douglass pointed out, “The slave auctioneer’s bell and the churchgoing bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heartbroken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master.”
Religion didn’t elevate enslavers; trying to justify slavery reduced religion.
“Happier”? How, Mr. Bundy, could you even utter such absurdity?
The very soil of this country cries out for us to never forget what happened here, for the irreducible record of the horrors of slavery to never be reduced.
Romantic revisionism of this most ghastly enterprise cannot stand. It must be met, vigilantly and unequivocally, with the strongest rebuttal. Slaves dishonored in life must not have their memories disfigured by revisionist history.
America committed this great sin, its original sin, and there will be no absolution by alteration. America must live with the memory of what its forefathers — even its founding fathers — did. It must sit with this history, the unvarnished truth of it, until it has reconciled with it.
NRA CEO & EVP Wayne LaPierre addresses the crowd and talks about American citizens' distrust of government. He also provided a response to Michael Bloomberg's $50 million gun-control initiative. The NRA-ILA Leadership Forum is an event of the 2014 NRA Annual Meetings. Originally aired 4/25/14.
Any group of people wandering around with guns and threatening people is not a militia, so please MSM stop using the word in this context, it gives a false aura of respectability.
Militia 1.a: a part of the organized armed forces of a country liable to call only in emergency 1.b: a body of citizens organized for military service 2: the whole body of able-bodied male citizens declared by law as being subject to call to military service
No matter how much they want to believe that they indeed form a militia, they do not.
These groups of armed thugs wandering around have not been organized by any local, state, or federal part of the government. Normally they would be referred to as armed gangs, indeed one of their central tenets is that the government is out to get them.
Words matter and deeming them to be militia gives the idea that they have some legal standing, and the NRA has been playing this up with respect to the second amendment for a long time.
Conservative legislators and pundits can act all surprised when the racism and violent intent comes to the fore, but it has long been known where their roots lie.
I wonder if these gangs were made up of anyone but right wing white people would the word militia ever be used? If you like me scoff at that thought, then we know the answer to that one.
NRA CEO & EVP Wayne LaPierre addresses the crowd and reminds that no other institution in the world but NRA is so unafraid to take a stand for what is good and right. The NRA is, and has been, the good guys, says LaPierre. As good guys, "we will stand together and fight for all of our values." The NRA Members' Meeting is an event of the NRA Annual Meetings & Exhibits in Indianapolis, Indiana. Originally aired on 4/26/14.
Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin speaks at the NRA Stand and Fight Rally, an event of the 2014 NRA Annual Meetings in Indianapolis, Indiana. Originally aired on 4/26/14.
It is, in a way, too bad that Cliven Bundy [ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/us/politics/rancher-proudly-breaks-the-law-becoming-a-hero-in-the-west.html ] — the rancher who became a right-wing hero after refusing to pay fees for grazing his animals on federal land, and bringing in armed men to support his defiance — has turned out to be a crude racist. Why? Because his ranting has given conservatives an easy out, a way to dissociate themselves from his actions without facing up to the terrible wrong turn their movement has taken.
For at the heart of the standoff was a perversion of the concept of freedom, which for too much of the right has come to mean the freedom of the wealthy to do whatever they want, without regard to the consequences for others.
Start with the narrow issue of land use. For historical reasons, the federal government owns a lot of land in the West; some of that land is open to ranching, mining and so on. Like any landowner, the Bureau of Land Management charges fees for the use of its property. The only difference from private ownership is that by all accounts the government charges too little [ http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-05-869 ] — that is, it doesn’t collect as much money as it could, and in many cases doesn’t even charge enough to cover the costs that these private activities impose. In effect, the government is using its ownership of land to subsidize ranchers and mining companies at taxpayers’ expense.
It’s true that some of the people profiting from implicit taxpayer subsidies manage, all the same, to convince themselves and others that they are rugged individualists. But they’re actually welfare queens of the purple sage.
And this in turn means that treating Mr. Bundy as some kind of libertarian hero is, not to put too fine a point on it, crazy. Suppose he had been grazing his cattle on land belonging to one of his neighbors, and had refused to pay for the privilege. That would clearly have been theft — and brandishing guns when someone tried to stop the theft would have turned it into armed robbery. The fact that in this case the public owns the land shouldn’t make any difference.
So what were people like Sean Hannity [ http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/hannity-bundy-slavery-repugnant ] of Fox News, who went all in on Mr. Bundy’s behalf, thinking? Partly, no doubt, it was the general demonization of government — if someone looks as if he is defying Washington, he’s a hero, never mind the details. Partly, one suspects, it was also about race — not Mr. Bundy’s blatant racism, but the general notion that government takes money from hard-working Americans and gives it to Those People. White people who wear cowboy hats while profiting from government subsidies just don’t fit the stereotype.
Most of all, however — or at least that’s how it seems to me — the Bundy fiasco was a byproduct of the dumbing down that seems ever more central to the way America’s right operates.
American conservatism used to have room for fairly sophisticated views about the role of government. Its economic patron saint used to be Milton Friedman, who advocated aggressive money-printing [ http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303443904575578202202857136 ], if necessary, to avoid depressions. It used to include environmentalists who took pollution seriously but advocated market-based solutions like cap-and-trade or emissions taxes rather than rigid rules.
But today’s conservative leaders were raised on Ayn Rand’s novels and Ronald Reagan’s speeches (as opposed to his actual governance, which was a lot more flexible than the legend). They insist that the rights of private property are absolute, and that government is always the problem, never the solution.
The trouble is that such beliefs are fundamentally indefensible in the modern world, which is rife with what economists call externalities — costs that private actions impose on others, but which people have no financial incentive to avoid. You might want, for example, to declare that what a farmer does on his own land is entirely his own business; but what if he uses pesticides that contaminate the water supply, or antibiotics that speed the evolution of drug-resistant microbes? You might want to declare that government intervention never helps; but who else can deal with such problems?
Well, one answer is denial — insistence that such problems aren’t real, that they’re invented by elitists who want to take away our freedom. And along with this anti-intellectualism goes a general dumbing-down, an exaltation of supposedly ordinary folks who don’t hold with this kind of stuff. Think of it as the right’s duck-dynastic moment.
You can see how Mr. Bundy, who came across as a straight-talking Marlboro Man, fit right into that mind-set. Unfortunately, he turned out to be a bit more straight-talking than expected.
I’d like to think that the whole Bundy affair will cause at least some of the people who backed him to engage in self-reflection, and ask how they ended up lending support, even briefly, to someone like that. But I don’t expect it to happen.
Belinda Padilla does not pick up unknown calls anymore, not since someone posted her cellphone number on an online forum for gun enthusiasts. A few fuming-mad voice mail messages and heavy breathers were all it took.
Then someone snapped pictures of the address where she has a P.O. box and put those online, too. In a crude, cartoonish scrawl, this person drew an arrow to the blurred image of a woman passing through the photo frame. “Belinda?” the person wrote. “Is that you?”
Her offense? Trying to market and sell a new .22-caliber handgun that uses a radio frequency-enabled stopwatch to identify the authorized user so no one else can fire it.
There was no issue here about government mandates or the like, mind you. Her crime was the supposition that some gun owners might want a safer gun, which is all it took for a wave of outraged "enthusiasts" to come surging toward her house like a tsunami of stupid. Can't have that. If we try to make a gun that your children can't find and play with and accidentally fire into some other child's skull, we will have lost an important piece of America. If we try to make a gun for police departments that only officers can fire and not people who might be attacking them, well now that takes some of the sport out of it, doesn't it? But most specifically, the National Rifle Association crowd is quite certain that someone making a safer gun is the doorway to tyranny, so all the kids and cops and gun owners who want to be just a tiny, tiny bit more responsible than Wayne Effing Batshit Racewar Bunker Boomstick LaPierre can just go to to hell.
The National Rifle Association, in an article published on the blog of its political arm, wrote that “smart guns,” a term it mocks as a misnomer, have the potential “to mesh with the anti-gunner’s agenda, opening the door to a ban on all guns that do not possess the government-required technology.”
Mr. Keane said the industry did not oppose developing the technology. But, he added, “No. 1, the technology is not ready. No. 2, we believe the market ought to work.” Of the Armatix episode in California, he said, “They tried to put the product on the market, and the market reacted.”
Specifically, the market reacted by sending her threats and by making her company a vivid example of what happens to a gun seller who does not toe the increasingly feverish movement line. The NRA exists to promote and worship the sacred firearm, perhaps, but it looks like they finally found a gun they don't like.
Hate crime » Macon Michael Openshaw will serve 60 months in federal prison.
The Salt Lake Tribune First Published Jul 15 2014 05:02 pm • Updated 6 hours ago
A Cottonwood area man was sentenced Tuesday to serve 60 months in federal prison for a hate-motivated attack at a Salt Lake City synagogue and for two unlawful gun possession charges.
Macon Michael Openshaw, 22, also was ordered to pay $1,969 in restitution to the Congregation Kol Ami synagogue for damage he caused in 2012. He must serve three years of supervised release after he completes his prison term.
In April, Openshaw pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to the civil rights violation of damaging the synagogue and to the gun charges.
Judge Tena Campbell on Tuesday sentenced Openshaw to the maximum possible prison time.
As part of his plea, Openshaw admitted to firing three rounds from a .22-caliber handgun at the synagogue. There was no one inside at the time, but the bullets broke windows and damaged the building, according to court documents.
Openshaw said he shot the synagogue because of its religious character, according to a news release from the U.S. Department of Justice.
Openshaw also admitted to possessing a handgun with a destroyed serial number, which was the same handgun he used to shoot the synagogue. He also admitted to possessing several firearms and ammunition while he was subject to a protective order.
"Every person living in Utah has the right to be free from intimidating and threatening conduct," said Acting U.S. Attorney Carlie Christensen for the District of Utah. "The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Utah has a strong history of prosecuting those who violate the civil rights of others in our communities."
White Supremacist Arrested For Shooting Salt Lake City Synagogue
November 1, 2013
On October 30, a federal grand jury indicted white supremacist, Macon Michael Openshaw, 21, on charges related to an early 2012 incident in which he allegedly defaced and damaged the Kol Ami synagogue in Salt Lake City, Utah.
The indictment alleges that Openshaw, of Salt Lake City, was motivated by hate when he fired several rounds at the synagogue, breaking windows and damaging the building. Authorities charged Openshaw with a civil rights violation and several gun possession crimes. He has pleaded not guilty.
On Stormfront, a white supremacist on-line forum, Openshaw claimed membership in a local racist skinhead crew. He also claimed allegiance to the now-defunct Vinland Folk Patriots whose mission, according to their Web site, was to awaken the white race “to the detrimental and ultimately catastrophic reality of racial extinction.”
In his prolific on-line presence, Openshaw uses the numeric symbols 14 and 88. The 14 refers to the “14 words,” a white supremacist mantra about preserving the white race and “88” signifies the eighth letter of the alphabet, “HH,” which stands for “Heil Hitler.” He also uses SWP, a common acronym used by racists to signify “Supreme White Power.” Additionally, Openshaw has subscribed to many white supremacist videos on YouTube.
On the white supremacist social networking Web site Newsaxon, Openshaw praised the Aryan Brotherhood’s use of violence. He also wrote,“this is a war, the goal, death to zog. even if it means getting dirty.” ZOG is a white supremacist acronym for Zionist Occupied Government.
Openshaw has a criminal history, which includes possession of a deadly weapon.
Jury finds Frazier Glenn Cross guilty of capital murder
Frazier Glenn Cross Jr. writes on an easel pad before he gave his closing statement during his capital murder trial on Monday in the Johnson County Courthouse in Olathe. (POOL/The Kansas City Star)
Johnson County District attorney Steve Howe gives his rebuttal during closing arguments in the capital murder trial of Frazier Glenn Cross Jr. on Monday in the Johnson County Courthouse in Olathe. (POOL/The Kansas City Star)
Frazier Glenn Cross Jr. gives jurors the Nazi salute after he was found guilty of killing 3 people at Jewish sites. (Pool/Kansas City Star)
By Chris Oberholtz, Multimedia Producer By Lisa D'Souza, News Reporter By Jeanene Kiesling, Reporter By DeAnn Smith, Digital Content Manager Posted: Aug 31, 2015 7:49 AM CDT Updated: Aug 31, 2015 8:34 PM CDT
OLATHE, KS (KCTV) - A jury took less than two hours to find a white supremacist guilty of killing three people at two Jewish sites in Johnson County.
Frazier Glenn Cross Jr. listened intently and immediately interrupted the judge by speaking and giving the Nazi salute, which was the same salute he gave when arrested immediately after gunning down a teen, his grandfather and a woman visiting her mother at a retirement center.
"I think the fat lady just sang," Cross said. "Sieg Heil."
The jurors found Cross guilty of all charges including firing at others.
After the jurors left the room, Judge Thomas Kelly Ryan admonished Cross, saying his antics could still force a mistrial. Cross said he was disappointed and the verdict ruined his day as he harangued the judge.
The quick verdict came after the trial was interrupted twice on Monday, but the jury got the case at 1:57 p.m. The verdict was reached before 4 p.m.
The jury came back about 3:24 p.m. and asked the judge if they find the defendant guilty of capital murder do they have to fill out the instruction pages for lesser included offenses.
Ryan briefly halted the proceedings Monday morning after Cross made disparaging comments about the court system. Court resumed and Cross then successfully sought to leave the courtroom during closing arguments due to an unspecified medical condition.
Cross, who is representing himself in the case, objected to jury instructions in his murder trial, saying he doesn't respect the process.
"Please show some respect. Respect? I have no respect for you, this court or any damn thing associated with it," he growled. "In fact, I hate every damn one of you because you are whores of the Jews."
He was ejected for a time. Ryan allowed him back in and continued with a continued discussion of jury instructions.
Cross, who is also known as Glenn Miller, made several objections that were overruled, at one point even citing George Washington.
Ryan told Cross that he has been warned twice and removed once.
"I will not tolerate any more of your antics," Ryan told Cross.
During his closing arguments, Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe said there is no question of Cross' guilt and there was a "mountain of evidence that the defendant came to" the sites with the intent of "killing as many people as possible." Howe said special circumstances were met to justify first-degree murder convictions.
"He wants to decide who lives and dies," Howe said.
After the break to deal with Cross' medical issues, he began his closing arguments by writing on a board, "Diversity is a code word for white genocide." He also threatened the jury.
"If you take the easy way out, your conscience will torment you for the rest of your lives," Cross said.
He also described the exhilaration he felt after he pulled the trigger.
"I thought I killed some of my Jewish enemies," he said. "I swear to you on my mother's honor I felt free as I drove away I was floating on a cloud."
It was universally expected that the jury would take little time to convict Cross with whether the jury imposes the death penalty the only question. Arguments will begin Tuesday morning and prosecutors said they would call a single witness.
Cross pleaded not guilty, yet admits to killing 69-year-old William Corporon and Corporon's 14-year-old grandson, Reat Griffin Underwood, outside the Jewish Community Center in Overland Park before shooting 53-year-old Terri LaManno outside the nearby Village Shalom retirement center on April 13, 2014. LaManno was visiting her dying mother while the teen was competing in a singing competition that attracted hundreds.
Cross maintains he was a compassionate killer on a mission to slay Jews.
"I wanted to kill Jews, not people," Cross interrupted Howe's closing argument to say.
The three killed were Christians who were active in their churches. Cross says Jewish people are committing genocide against the white race and it was his duty to stop them.
He is dying of emphysema and that knowledge led to his actions. He wanted to plead guilty in exchange for life in prison, but prosecutors want the state to put him to death for his crimes.
More
Cross recalls picking up black prostitutes just to pummel them Frazier Glenn Cross Jr., the 74-year-old Aurora, MO, man who has admitted to the killings at two Jewish community sites, began and ended his rambling defense on Friday. Cross maintains he was a compassionate killer on a mission to slay Jews. The three killed in April 2014 were Christians who were active in their churches. Continue reading >> http://www.wfsb.com/story/29908918/cross-recalls-picking-up-black-prostitutes-just-to-beat-them
Supremacist vows to 'die a martyr' for Jewish site killings
F. Glenn Miller Jr. reacts after the judge denied his objections for jury instructions during his capital murder trial on Monday, Aug. 31, 2015, in the Johnson County Courthouse in Olathe, Kan.. Miller is charged with killing three people at two Jewish sites in the Kansas City area on April 13, 2014. (Allison Long/The Kansas City Star via AP, Pool)
By HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH August 31, 2015 2:54 pm
OLATHE, Kan. (AP) — The man who admitted killing three people at two suburban Kansas City Jewish sites told jurors Monday that he hoped to "die a martyr" for the shootings, which he said were motivated by "the genocide against white people by Jews."
The jury of seven men and five women began deliberating Monday afternoon, shortly after hearing the rambling closing argument by Frazier Glenn Miller, 74, of Aurora, Missouri, who is representing himself at trial. He could face the death penalty if convicted.
During the prosecution's closing, District Attorney Steve Howe cited a "mountain of evidence" against Miller, who is charged with capital murder in the April 2014 shootings at two Jewish sites in Overland Park, Kansas. Although he has admitted to killing the three people, he has pleaded not guilty, saying it was his duty to stop genocide against the white race. None of the victims was Jewish.
"He wants to be the one who decides who lives and dies," Howe said of Miller.
The Passover eve shootings killed William Corporon, 69, and Corporon's 14-year-old grandson, Reat Griffin Underwood, at the Jewish Community Center in Overland Park, and Terri LaManno, 53, at the nearby Village Shalom retirement center.
During his closing, Miller said he had been "floating on a cloud" since the killings. Earlier, he objected when Howe alleged he wanted to kill as many people as possible. Miller interjected: "I wanted to kill Jews, not people."
Miller urged jurors to "show great courage" and find him not guilty.
"You have the power in your hands to inspire the world," he said. "You can become a man or woman your forefathers will be proud of for your bravery."
The proceedings were marked with frequent outbursts from Miller, who objected repeatedly while jurors were out of the courtroom during discussions about what instructions should guide deliberations. At one point, he said, "I object to everything on the grounds of George Washington, our founding father."
The objections became so heated that Judge Thomas Kelly Ryan temporarily ejected Miller from the courtroom when Miller said he didn't respect the process and used an anti-Semitic comment to criticize the court system. Ryan told Miller that if there were further outbursts, he would permanently eject him or declare a mistrial.
Miller groused before finally agreeing, "I will take it under advisement and try to improve."
Miller's closing argument was briefly delayed when he told the judge he had a medical issue and couldn't continue. He has emphysema, is in a wheelchair and has frequently used an oxygen tank in court.
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