Human Rights & Civil Liberties
Little Pulaski, Tenn., to Suffer Through Another Racist Event
Although it’s a small town of about 7,800, Pulaski, Tenn. may well be the white supremacist epicenter of the nation — at least if the number of rallies held there by bigoted groups is any indication.
The mayor and other residents aren’t pleased. “There’s never been a local person involved in these marches or rallies,” Mayor Daniel Speer told Hatewatch this week. But they’re resigned to being a favorite locale for the haters on the American radical right. Speer’s town is more than one-quarter black, but it has for decades been a favorite place for white supremacist groups to rally because of one unfortunate historical fact: This was where the Ku Klux Klan was born.
The next such event on tap in Pulaski: the annual European Heritage Festival, scheduled for Oct. 23. The event, despite its name, has the heavy footprint of the Klan all over it. Sponsors include the Christian Revival Center led by long-time Arkansas Klan leader Thom Robb; the Knights Party USA (better known by its original name of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan), which is Robb’s “political” organization; Voice of Reason radio, which features interviews with white nationalist luminaries such as Jamie Kelso and Tomislav Sunic; and Abundant Life Fellowship of Morgantown, Ind.
Abundant Life’s pastor, Jonathan Harness, is apparently a reader of Klan material. Last year, he responded to a blog by Robb’s daughter, who is involved in her father’s racist group, by writing that he was dismayed when black rapper Kanye West rudely interrupted a speech by country singer Taylor Swift at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. Harness wrote that West had “absolutely disrespected this white woman.”
“It’s a great place to come and learn about the heritage of European Americans,” the festival’s website says. The site includes links to racist individuals and groups including David Duke, who founded Robb’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in 1975; the Council of Conservative Citizens, a group that has described black people as a “retrograde species of humanity” and opposes “race mixing”; and The Barnes Review, the leading American journal devoted to denying the Holocaust.
The European Heritage Festival follows by three months a “White Unity Day March and Rally” in Pulaski conducted by the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations. A year earlier, in July 2009, the Fraternal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan staged a birthday march in Pulaski for their hero, Confederate Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest. There have been many other Klan rallies in Pulaski over the decades.
The Klan was organized as a secret fraternity by six Confederate veterans in December 1865 in Pulaski. As the club grew, it evolved from a club for wealthy and bored young veterans into a vigilante terrorist organization. It soon attracted as its first national leader Forrest, who had been a millionaire Memphis slave trader before the Civil War and also presided over the massacre of black Union soldiers attempting to surrender at Fort Pillow, Tenn., in 1864. (It remains unclear whether or not Forrest actively encouraged the massacre, as many Union survivors testified.) Forrest led the Klan through its most violent period, when thousands of acts of terrorism essentially forced black Southerners back into a form of servitude.
Robb’s Klan group has staged events in Pulaski going back to at least 1983, says Speer, who has been mayor nearly 21 years and has lived most of his 60 years in the southern Tennessee town. So many Klan events were held in the 1980s that local businesses, large and small, closed their doors in disgust during a 1989 rally as a way of silently protesting, Speer said. At times, folks in Pulaski hoped that if they ignored the Klan and other white supremacist groups when they came to Pulaski, they would lose interest in the town and permanently leave, Speer says. But they didn’t, and over the years the groups’ events have brought people ranging from satirist Stephen Colbert to reporters from as far away as Russia and Italy.
That’s of no concern to those attending next month’s European Heritage Festival. They’re planning on hearing speeches and eating hot dogs, apple pie and barbecue pork. Entertainment will be provided by Charity and Shelby Pendergraft, singing sisters who call themselves Heritage Connection. Thom Robb is their grandfather. Their mother, Rachel Pendergraft, is spokeswoman for Robb’s Knights Party. And if that’s not excitement enough for those attending the festivities, there’s always the Sam Davis Museum on Sam Davis Avenue. Davis was the “Boy Hero of the Confederacy” who was captured by the Yankees in 1863 and charged and convicted by a court-martial of spying. Davis was hanged by the Union Army on his 21st birthday — in Pulaski, of course.
Speer says that his town can’t constitutionally stop these groups from staging events as long as they comply with terms of their rally permits. At one point, the town passed a parade ordinance banning participants from wearing anything covering their heads — say, a hood. But a federal judge tossed the measure, which Speer says could have barred Boy Scouts from wearing their full uniforms in a parade.
“It’s frustrating,” the mayor says. “[We’re associated with] the Klan. It’s a stigma. Unfortunately, I just don’t see it going away.”
Slovak government urged to end segregation for Romani children
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Apparent Eco-Terrorist Holding Hostages at TV Building
The gunman holding hostages in the Silver Spring, Md., headquarters of the Discovery Channel has been tentatively identified as James Jay Lee, an apparent eco-fascist who thinks that immigrants are breeding “filthy human children” and helping to wreck the planet. Lee, 43, had been arrested in February 2008 at a rally he organized outside the same building to demand the channel help find solutions to the global population explosion and the extinction of many animal species.
Authorities said the man — who they said they had not positively identified yet —walked into the building early this afternoon with a gun and what appeared to be explosive canisters attached to his body. At about 3:15 p.m. Eastern, police said they were negotiating with the man, who was holding “a small number of hostages.” They said they knew of no injuries, despite an early unconfirmed report that at least one shot was fired during the incident.
In a list of demands he apparently posted before invading the Discovery building, Lee, whose MySpace page identifies him as a Silver Springs resident, repeatedly spoke of “parasitic human infants” and “unwanted pollution babies” and furiously argued that humans were destroying the planet with pollution, war and over-population. But unlike earlier eco-terrorists like Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Lee zeroed in on immigrants as a primary evil. He spoke of “anchor baby filth,” a reference to babies born in the United States to undocumented immigrants.
“NO MORE BABIES!” he wrote in his list of demands. “Population growth is a real crisis. Even one child born in the US will use 30 to a thousand times more resources than a Third World child. It’s like a couple are having 30 babies even though it’s just one. If the US goes in this direction maybe other countries will too!”
The argument that immigration fuels environmental degradation has become increasingly popular in nativist circles. In late July, in fact, the Southern Poverty Law Center released a special report — “Greenwash: Nativists, Environmentalism & the Hypocrisy of Hate” — that detailed how right-wing immigration restrictionists were attempting to appeal to environmentalists to join their battle. The report suggested that most of those making such appeals were disingenuous about their interest in the environment, and were merely cynically seeking allies.
That doesn’t seem to be the case with Lee, who seems to have started out as an environmentalist, but one who became more and more extreme. On his MySpace page, he calls for “REVOLUTION!” and describes himself as an atheist. In his set of demands, he says: “Nothing is more important than saving … Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, Squirrels. The humans? The planet does not need humans.”
According to his set of demands, Lee invaded the Discovery building in an attempt to force the network to introduce programming pushing for population control and against warfare that is destructive to the planet.
Charges Against We Are Change Leader Belie Group’s Pacifist Image
We Are Change (WAC) is an organization that likes to quote Martin Luther King Jr., Einstein, Gandhi and others talking about the evils of war. It describes itself as a nonviolent “citizens based grassroots peace and social justice movement” and reacted angrily this year when the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) described it as part of the antigovernment “Patriot” movement, which is obsessed with alleged government conspiracies. Its leader, Luke Rudkowski, complained at the time that the SPLC said nothing of WAC’s alleged “raising money for 9/11 first responders, toy drives during the holidays, clothing drives and feeding the homeless.”
But WAC’s Los Angeles chieftain, at least, may not be quite the pacifistic type that Rudkowski likes to showcase. This past May, Bruno Ernst Bruhwiler was charged with four criminal counts related to making threats, according to the Los Angeles Superior Court’s website. Three of the counts were for making threats (Rudkowski himself says that he was charged with making “terroristic” threats), including against an “executive officer” (apparently a law enforcement or court official) carrying out his duties. The fourth count is for “willful disobedience” of a court order.
Bruhwiler’s website says that the charges stem from an incident when he was attending a civil case involving a WAC-LA member. “The Judge literally did not like Bruno’s involuntary facial expressions, and ordered him out of the courtroom,” reads the website posting. Hatewatch’s repeated E-mail and phone requests for comment from Bruhwiler were not answered. WAC also declined to respond to Hatewatch’s repeated requests for comment on Bruhwiler’s activities.
But on its website, WAC-LA has described the charges as baseless. “The truth is that any one of us could easily face what Bruno is facing because it’s all about the rulers keeping the masses and our uppity attitudes about our ‘Rights’ in check,” the group wrote in a July 20 post asking for defense fund donations. “’How dare you make a face in my court room!!! How dare you ask for my identification, SLAVE!!!!’”
That’s not all. Bruhwiler, it turns out, is part of the extreme-right “sovereign citizens” movement — people who believe that the government has no authority to impose laws and regulations on most Americans. He has engaged in some of the practices preached by “redemption” scammers, most of whom are seeking to wrest millions of dollars from the government for their personal use. He has allegedly harassed former co-workers with “sovereign” letters demanding money. And he is a member of the Oath Keepers, a conspiracy-oriented Patriot group. All in all, it seems clear that Bruhwiler, despite Ludkowski’s claims of running a relatively moderate group, is part and parcel of the most radical wing of the Patriot movement.
Two workers at a California marketing company where Bruhwiler was laid off three years ago told Hatewatch that the WAC-LA leader was so enraged that he wrote a series of threatening letters to the company demanding massive sums of money. They said Bruhwiler, who had worked in a graphic design section that the firm decided to outsource, claimed that he had been subjected to wrongful termination, conspiracy and abuse of power. The letters were brimming with the virtually incomprehensible legalistic gobbledygook that is typical of such sovereign-citizen filings. Starting this spring, some of them were directed at the two workers, who had nothing to do with Bruhwiler’s termination (the workers asked not to be named for fear of retaliation from Bruhwiler). In one letter, Bruhwiler claims he was libeled and discriminated against by the recipient. His major beef seems to be that the firm supposedly took away his “God given freedom of speech when speaking out about the treasonous acts of 9-11 against the people of the United States” and the “treasonous cover up by the mainstream media.” Bruhwiler also complains of having been slandered with respect to his professional skills “by imputing to me general disqualification.” The letter demands payment of $100,000 within 21 days, with an additional $1 million per month for every month payment is not received. And it orders the recipient to surrender to the “authorities for criminal prosecution.” Next to Bruhwiler’s signature is a fingerprint in red ink, which in the redemptionist world symbolizes the blood of a sovereign citizen. It also says that the person signing the letter is a “Natural Man Divine creation, and a Private, Sentient Sovereign.”
Needless to say, the recipients were terrified. “These guys need to be watched,” said one woman who only worked with Bruhwiler for a few months but has nevertheless received two letters from him demanding $1 million. “This is crazy and it is scary.”
Bruhwiler also appears to be a participant in so-called redemption practices, which are rife in the world of sovereign citizens. Proponents of this bizarre ideology argue that when the U.S. quit the gold standard in 1933, it pledged its citizens as collateral so it could borrow money based on their future earnings. Then, the theory goes, the government funded a secret “Treasury Direct Account” for each individual that it stocks with millions of dollars. Redemptionists have come up with a series of bizarre maneuvers that are meant to liberate this money from the government and have it paid to them personally. For most redemptionists, this involves, among many other incomprehensible steps, filing a “Uniform Commercial Code-1” document.
In February, Bruhwiler filed just such a form with California Secretary of State. His UCC-1 filing says that his “one hundred billion United States silver dollars” have now been transferred to “Bruno Ernst Bruhwiler, a living man, secured party.”
Bruhwiler is also a member of another antigovernment group, the Oath Keepers, which is made up of law enforcement officers, military personnel and veterans. The group, which like WAC is part of the Patriot movement, vows to resist government efforts to “disarm the American people” or impose martial law or turn cities into “giant concentration camps” — all core Patriot conspiracy theories. (Several Oath Keepers have lately been implicated in criminal violence, including a Georgia member accused in May of plotting to take over a Tennessee courthouse and place two dozen officials under “citizen’s arrest.” Also, in Cleveland, Ohio, a member is awaiting trial on 54 criminal counts related to his alleged storing of a live napalm bomb at home, as well as keeping explosives at a friend’s home.)
In addition, Bruhwiler regularly makes pleas for support on popular antigovernment media sites, most notably that of leading movement conspiracy-monger Alex Jones’ Internet radio show. On June 17, Jones interviewed Bruhwiler in a segment that bashed law enforcement. “A lot of these cops don’t see us as human,” Jones said of the threat case against Bruhwiler. “They enjoy throwing milk cows in prison. We are seen as slaves, and when a slave gets uppity, they got to be put in their place.” Jones went on to describe the officials in question as “out of control,” “ruthless” and “tyrannical.” Jones asked Bruhwiler to share his E-mail address with Jones’ on-air listeners to solicit funds. (Ironically, Bruhwiler had earlier devised a WAC-LA outreach program called “Talk to a Cop Wednesdays.” It was meant to “befriend and educate law enforcement.”)
Earlier this year, WAC leader Rudkowski told the SPLC that he started the group to showcase “patriot journalists.” (Today, the group is by far the largest Patriot group in the country, with 102 chapters in 33 states.) WAC’s original obsession was with 9/11 conspiracy theories — still the group’s bread and butter — that originated both on the political right and the political left. (WAC says it rejects the “fear-based politics and state mandated propaganda being disseminated by the Corporate Media which has facilitated the cover-up of 9-11.”) But over time, WAC has taken up several additional conspiracies specific to the radical right. Today, the group’s website frets about a looming “one world order” and says it seeks “to uncover the truth behind the private banking cartel of the military industrial complex” that wants to “eliminate national sovereignty.” Rudkowski now seems particularly worried about the alleged role in the supposedly imminent “New World Order” of organizations such as the Bilderberger group and the Trilateral Commission. These institutions have been targeted for decades as major global evildoers by Patriot groups and other far-right organizations, including several that are racist and virulently anti-Semitic.
The roster for WAC’s upcoming Sept. 9-12 9/11 conference in New York City reflects its continuing ability to attract A-list conspiracy theorists, while still bridging right and left. Speakers at the event are to include Bob Schulz, head of We The People, the second largest Patriot group in the U.S. Schulz specializes in far-right conspiracies about the Federal Reserve and the income tax. Gary Franchi, the purveyor of the film “Camp FEMA: American Lockdown” that alleges the government agency is planning to round up Americans into concentration camps run by the agency, will be on hand. So, too, will Paul Craig Roberts, a right-wing columnist who writes for the racist VDARE.com website (named after the first English child born in America).
At the same time, the conference will hear from former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.), a woman once seen as being on the political left who has lately flirted with Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites. Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan also will be featured, as will Danny Schechter, a human rights activist and television producer. So will a number of Democratic politicians, including former Alaska senator Mike Gravel and Don Siegelman, the former governor of Alabama who is free while appealing a prison sentence for corruption.
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SCV Plans to ‘Celebrate’ Racist Confederate Government
The American Civil War was the costliest, most devastating conflict in the history of our country. At least 620,000 soldiers died, as did some 400,000 civilians who fell to disease, suicide, murder and similar causes. Hundreds of thousands of others suffered horrible wood-saw amputations and terrible wounds. In the four years the war lasted, it cost $2.5 million daily — an incredible amount at the time. In the end, the South was laid waste, its industries, its grand homes, its roads and its farms largely destroyed. It would be a century before the region fully recovered.
Yes, it was a splendid little war — that is, if you believe the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the Southern heritage society that in the last decade has seen a large number of racial extremists in influential and sometimes top positions.
“CELEBRATE THE BEGINNING OF THE CONFEDERACY IN MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA,” the SCV wrote its members in a breathless announcement on its E-mail list Monday. The event, scheduled for Feb. 19, 2011, will feature a parade up Dexter Avenue to the Alabama State Capitol — the end of the very same route taken by Martin Luther King Jr. and thousands of others who participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march in 1963. It is to be followed by other events around the South commemorating the sesquicentennial of each year of what some Southerners still call the War of Northern Aggression.
But the SCV isn’t interested in commemorating King or the civil rights march. And it’s certainly not interested in the end of slavery, or the Fourteenth Amendment that gave freedmen citizenship. Instead, it plans to reenact the swearing-in of Jefferson Davis as the president of the Confederate States of America and fire off a few cannons to ensure that “the Heritage of the Confederacy … is remembered and portrayed in the right way.”
The right way. Whatever can they mean?
Well, if you take a look at the essays — and essayists — on the SCV’s “150 Years: History, Heritage & Honor” website, it isn’t too hard to figure out. There’s the Rev. John H. Killian – he used to be a member of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a hate group that has described blacks as a “retrograde species of humanity” — complaining about how “liberals, Yankees, scalawags and the generally misguided” have been unfairly making white Southerners feel guilty about slavery and racism. Killian still backs the “righteousness of our cause” and concludes in an essay on the page that “the South was right!” Then there’s Chuck Rand, who once belonged to the racist League of the South, which opposes racial intermarriage, defends slavery and argues that the war had nothing to do with “the peculiar institution.” Rand writes on the SCV page that “there is no difference between the invasion of France by Hitler and the invasion of the Southern States by Lincoln.” He argues that Lincoln’s purpose was never to free the slaves.
That may not have been Lincoln’s original intent, but it certainly became a major war aim — as anyone who has read any serious Civil War history knows. The years leading up to the war were marked by endless battles over the extension of slavery to the new territories, a move that Southern rulers, fearful of losing control of the nation to an abolitionist Congressional majority, backed virtually without exception. And, contrary to the revisionist history offered by the SCV, the authorities of the South at the time were perfectly clear on what secession was aimed at. The Texas Declaration of Causes of Secession, for example, explained plainly that the free states were “proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality for all men, irrespective of race or color,” adding that blacks were “rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race.” Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, put it like this in his infamous “Cornerstone” speech of 1862: “Our new Government is founded on exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and moral condition.” As definitively shown by scholar Charles Dew in his Apostles of Disunion, states throughout the South adduced the same reasons for secession — a defense of “white supremacy” and an attempt to spread the institution of slavery to more states. At around the same time, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, hugely popular in the North, was critically important in building Yankee abolitionist sentiment.
Of course, the SCV honchos behind the upcoming sesquicentennial commemoration of the South’s bloody defense of slavery don’t see it that way. Just listen to the Rev. Steve Wilkins, who complains on the SCV page that the war was really about replacing a federal republic with a centralized federal government. “Slavery,” he writes, “so far from being the cause of the war, was merely the pretext for revolution.” And that, if you read some others of Wilkins’ writings, was a pretty pathetic pretext. Together with a far-right Idaho pastor named Douglas Wilson, Wilkins offered this highly unusual take on antebellum slavery in the book Southern Slavery, As It Was: “Slavery as it existed in the South … was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence,” the two men wrote in their 1996 tome. “There has never been a multiracial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world.”
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Author Interview: Journalist Probes ‘Backlash’ Under Obama
After Barack Obama’s 2008 election as the nation’s 44th president, the Tea Party movement sprang up, as did increasingly shrill assertions that the president was a socialist, a communist, a Muslim and more. Gun-rights advocates fretted that the new administration would impose draconian gun controls, while others insisted that the president wasn’t born in America and therefore was in office unlawfully.
Philadelphia Daily News senior writer and Media Matters for America senior fellow Will Bunch decided to investigate what gave rise to this vociferous movement. He traveled throughout the country, attending Tea Party and other conservative gatherings and interviewing activists. He talked to people such as right-wing Georgia congressman Paul Broun and Oath Keepers founding member Celia Hyde. He went to the semi-annual Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot in Kentucky and to Phoenix, the epicenter of the nativist anti-immigration movement.
What Bunch learned is the subject of his third book, The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama, which goes on sale on Tuesday. He spoke to Hatewatch on the eve of the book’s release:
Why did you choose this topic for a book? Was there a particular event that was a catalyst?
In the waning days of the 2008 campaign, I was fascinated with the rise of Sarah Palin and the drift of the American conservative movement into a kind of blissful know-nothingness about everything from big issues like climate change to Barack Obama’s religion and where he was born. I thought Obama’s supporters of “change” were really calling out for a return to reason. Thus, it was stunning to see the angry and often irrational forces gain strength and influence in those first months of the Obama presidency. And as a career journalist, I thought this was a kind of a story of a lifetime that I wanted to hit the road and latch onto as this backlash was unfolding.
Have you seen anything in the past comparable to the accusations against President Obama, such as that he wasn’t born in the United States, he’s a socialist, and so on?
The first presidential race I covered was in 1984 as a reporter for The Birmingham News in Alabama, watching Jesse Jackson tilt at the windmills of the Reagan revolution before the first-ever “Super Tuesday.” Clearly, the increasing ideological polarization of the two parties — triggered by the shift of the Deep South to the GOP during the ’80s, when I worked there — has made over-the-top demonizing of the other party more of a reality. The seeds were planted with some of the crazier talk about Bill Clinton, things like accusing him of murdering his aide Vince Foster.
But one thing has changed dramatically since the early 1990s. The more insane Clinton allegations were things like underground VHS videos or pamphlets, while the allegations about Obama not only spread 100 times faster on the Internet, but are amplified by talk radio and a coast-to-coast cable powerhouse, Fox News, that gives these low ideas great power. The other difference with Obama is that he is viewed as a symbol of cultural upheaval and fear, of the projections that whites will become a minority in America by the year 2050. These fears are making partisans grasp at the most outlandish theory, that the president is in some way not American.
Should we be concerned by this rhetoric? Or is it merely democracy in action?
I’m a strong believer in unfettered free speech, and so that would include the ability of citizens to advocate any and all nature of conspiracy theories. What I find appalling is that supposed leaders — major media personalities like [Fox New host] Glenn Beck, of course, but also members of Congress and other top pols who are not only educated but employ large staffs — gladly help spread political claptrap in search of higher ratings or more votes in their heavily gerrymandered districts. While free speech certainly applies to a Beck or congressional extremists like Michele Bachmann [R-Minn.] or Georgia’s Paul Broun [R], they also have a responsibility to act like adults, and to not influence their most unhinged followers who may be drawn to violence.
As you note in your book, the radical right and conspiracy theories are not a new phenomenon. What factors have contributed to the rise of the Tea Party movement and the resurgence of right-wing politics?
Major elements of the Tea Party/9-12/Oath Keeper movements are 50- and 60-somethings who harbor resentments that date back to the Vietnam era and other 1960s upheavals, as well as “the paranoid style” so eloquently described by Richard Hofstadter in the era of the John Birch Society — which, as an aside, is undergoing a resurgence. On the other hand, I sensed that the recruitment pool for this movement is growing — in part because of the size of the boomer age population [cohort], but mainly because of the growing fear in this country both over the cultural changes taking place [and] the rising class of permanently unemployed, middle-class, middle-aged Americans.
How does the far right today differ from in the past?
[There are t]wo related factors. One is the existence of a media structure that didn’t exist until the late 1990s — the Internet, where conspiracy theories are easily promulgated and validated; social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, which are powerful tools that allow groups like the Oath Keepers to grow quickly; and the conservative bent of coast-to-coast talk radio, finally topped off with the rise of Fox. One thing I discovered about the anti-Obama backlash is that this is a class of people — retirees, middle-aged layoff victims, part-time workers, etc. — with more free time than other people, and many are immersed for hours a day in Beck and [radio host Rush] Limbaugh Land.
But it’s also important to note that as Beck and Limbaugh became the de facto leaders of the Republican Party, they created a new class of political “leaders” who kowtowed to talk radio and even developed sound-bite platforms lacking in constructive solutions or any potential for negotiation or compromise. This has led to gridlock on Capitol Hill for everything from energy and climate change to immigration reform.
What surprised you the most in researching this book?
The rank and file of the Tea Party — with little attention being paid by the rest of us — is actively engaged in a quest for a certain kind of knowledge and education, which in part explains the rise of Glenn Beck, who has been enormously successful in pandering to that by recommending books and devoting entire shows to “history.” It’s good when people are interested in learning, but the problems are: a) many Tea Party types aren’t seeking unbiased American history but tomes that sometimes validate narrow-minded views about America and our traditions; and, b) leaders like Beck are peddling phony ideas about our alleged founding as a Christian nation or [claiming] that the progressive reforms of the 20th Century were really a march to totalitarianism.
What disturbed you the most in researching this book?
The villains of the story are what I call “the high-def hucksters.” These are the kind of people who look out at a fearful populace and instead of promoting calm — remember FDR? — see an opportunity for big bucks. This includes Beck, who made $32 million last year by marketing to America’s worst fears, and Sarah Palin, who ditched her chance to make a difference as a governor to make $12 million as a media celebrity. But there are others — I profile a businessman named Bill Heid who openly brags of the money he earns selling “survival seed banks” and solar generators to fearful Americans.
You single Glenn Beck out for a good deal of attention. How important is he in the emergence of the Tea Party and the far right’s revival?
Glenn Beck is huge, because with his background in entertainment — he is a student of Orson Welles and his fear-epic War of the Worlds — rather than raw politics, [he] has been able to tap into the raw emotions of an anxious middle America. As noted above, he also understands the desire for a kind of “education.” A recent poll showed that Beck is the most liked and most trusted figure in the Tea Party by far, and in my travels I met many who said they were moved to action by his broadcasts.
There has been debate as to whether or not the Tea Party movement is racist or contains racist elements. If voters in 2008 had elected a white man rather than Obama, would there still be a Tea Party?
There would certainly be anger and resentment from those long engaged in “the paranoid style” — one can look at some of the allegations about Bill Clinton and imagine that a President Hillary Clinton would have received, arguably, even worse treatment. That said, I think that Barack Obama — as the first black president, with an unusual life story and heritage and, of course, that infamous middle name — is a symbol for broader anxiety about major cultural change in America. This summer we’ve seen a powerful conflating of xenophobia about Mexican immigrants and Muslims and these notions that Obama is a Muslim or a Kenyan. That has helped to weaken the Obama presidency, and I don’t think it would have played out the same way with a white president.
A common refrain of the Tea Partiers and the far right is that they want to “take back America.” What do they want to take the country back to?
An America where they felt secure that the dominant culture would remain white, Christian and non-urban long after they are gone. Rapid change has overwhelmed many of these people in a way that futurist Alvin Toffler predicted with remarkable prescience in his 1970 book Future Shock. Some scientists even link these ideas to our broader fear of death, [arguing] that the kind of cultural unity and, arguably, purity sought by the “I want my country back” crowd is a form of immortality.
Do you think the Tea Party movement and the extreme right’s power have peaked, or will it continue to grow?
It’s complicated. In the short run, the Tea Party has been the tail wagging the American dog, exerting enough influence over the 41 [Republican] senators who represent just 37% of the population to block most meaningful legislation that would get the country moving forward. What’s more, the movement’s extreme rhetoric amid frustration over the march of a multicultural [society] raises the most unfortunate potential for more violent incidents like the killing of three Pittsburgh police officers by Beck fan Richard Poplawski, which I chronicle in The Backlash.
However, inexorably, the forces that rallied behind Obama in the 2008 election are still on the rise. While the 2010 election looks like an angry blip, over time America will continue to grow more racially diverse and also become more educated and most likely less religious, more tolerant on social issues like gay marriage. This would seem to not bode well for the Tea Party over time, but it’s still likely that the “last throes” of this movement may play over for a number of years.
Racists Need Funds to Give Terrorist a Viking Funeral
So many causes, so little money. With groups beseeching us for financial help to find cures for diseases, to protect the environment, to help the less fortunate and so forth, it can be tough to decide to whom and what to dole out donations.
And now this: An appeal for money so that a murderous terrorist can have a nice funeral.
That overture came in recent days from the racist skinhead group, Blood & Honour American Division, on behalf of the family of Bruce Pierce. He was a member of The Order, a white supremacist terrorist group, who was responsible for shooting to death Jewish Denver talk radio show host Alan Berg in 1984.
Pierce died last week at 56, while serving a 252-year prison sentence in Pennsylvania. He was one of several surviving members of The Order still in prison. The Order was formed in 1983 by neo-Nazi Robert Jay Mathews. The group went on a crime spree in 1983 and 1984 that included the theft of $3.6 million from an armored car as a means of financing its goal of creating a guerilla army to resist and overthrow the U.S. government.
Pierce was the triggerman that shot Berg in June 1984 13 times outside his home with a MAC-10 machine gun. He was not convicted of murder, but of racketeering, conspiracy and violating Berg’s civil rights. Pierce died Aug. 16 of what a prison spokeswoman said was natural causes. Now Blood & Honour is asking members to help the family of the man it calls “our hero” and a “martyr” with funeral expenses.
The letter appealing for money says “it isn’t going to be a few people giving a large amount, but a whole lot of us giving a little that will allow the Pierce family to bring their daddy away from the dungeon where he died and give him the viking [sic] funeral they desire.”
Contributions are to be sent to Billy Roper in Russellville, Ark. He’s the founder of a racist organization called White Revolution. He previously was an official in the neo-Nazi National Alliance, and a member of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens. The day of the 9/11 terror attacks, Roper emailed the National Alliance membership that “anyone who is willing to drive a plane into a building to kill jews [sic] is alright [sic] by me. I wish our members had half as much testicular fortitude.”
For those racists unsure of how much to give for Pierce’s Viking sendoff, Blood & Honour has helpful suggestions. Those who have had “a fortunate year” may want to give at the Gold level — $100. A $50 donation puts you at the somewhat less elite Silver level, and Bronze is a mere $35.
If that’s too lavish for some racists’ budgets, there is the “Patriot” level for $25 — “the number of years Bruce Pierce was locked up in a ZOG [Zionist Occupation Government] dungeon for our race, while others might prefer to give the ‘Silent Brotherhood’ level for $13, for the number of holes Alan Berg grew in 1984,” the Blood & Honour missive suggests.
With a heart-rending appeal like that, it’s hard to see how tykes with cleft palates in need of surgery and exquisite tigers threatened with extinction have a chance for donors’ hard-earned dollars. And if there is a huge outpouring of cash for the Pierce racist rites, the additional dough “will be used to aid other Order members who still survive in prison.”
