Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III: From commanding the war against immigrants to crusading in defense of the travel ban; from sabotaging the deployment of science on behalf of those wrongly accused to giving urban police departments a free hand to murder blacks; by pioneering new lows in criminalizing dissent and waging jihad against even the medical use of marijuana—and, last but not least, by signing away a decade of bipartisan work to reverse America’s failed, racist mass incarceration policies—the attorney general knows how to get things done. He’s the one who knows how to keep his hands (relatively, so far) clean. As the president who hired him reveals himself as an incompetent, it is no surprise to learn that Sessions was Steve Bannon’s first choice, long before Donald J. Trump was a gleam in the alt-right’s eye. The attorney general is the true white nationalist messiah and the wheelhouse of the Trump Revolution.
This article was originally published at The Washington Spectator
So if you’re trying to figure out what makes Jeff Sessions tick, it is worth digging deep. It is Sessions who’ll likely be the one left standing once Bannon, Spicer, Kushner, and all the rest of this Friends and Family administration are gone—probably even after Trump himself oozes into irrelevance. After all, they pretty much work for him, as Sessions made plain in a recent interview with Laura Ingraham. “I’m an admirer of Steve Bannon and the Trump family and they’ve been supportive of what we’re doing. I’ve not felt any pushback against me or anything I’ve done or advocated.”
I began my own excavation by looking back to November 21, 1961, the day the native of tiny Hybart, Alabama, made his first appearance in the newspaper of the big city 85 miles away. At 14, Jeff Sessions had his debut in theMontgomery Advertiseralongside Martha Kay Norman, for being featured in the Wilcox County High School Annual as “Mr. And Miss Junior High.”
I’ve been burrowing into every newspaper database to which I have access and reading up on every time Jeff Sessions was mentioned. You don’t need to get further than his college years for it to prove a useful exercise—even the yearbook stuff. The Dixieland of Jeff Sessions’s youth, the culture that formed him, was first and foremost a world of radical hierarchy—order and domination safeguarded by violence: you know that, just like you know Sessions’s full given name—Jefferson BeauregardSessions III, after the first Confederate president and the Confederate general. But it was also a culture whose cruelty was systematically occluded by a surplus of ritual—obsessively performed public protestations of decency, often subsumed under the banner of “tradition,” or “heritage.” “The lazy, laughing South / With blood on its mouth,” as Langston Hughes once wrote of the land of his birth. Why dive this deep into Jeff Sessions’s past? Because he is working to make it our future.
This was a world where general stores were temples, junior high proms near to religious observances. Which was why a big-city paper would devote six column inches on page 37 to an elaborate cataloging of the contents of a high school yearbook (“Jean Reaves and Douglas Reaves, cutest; Betty Cooper, most feminine…”) from a distant rural county.
Two faces of the cultural coin, the sweet syrup and the sadism, were both on display on that day’s front page, and indeed on every day’s front page. Five of the 11 items were about the coming holidays. “The Christmas sales season in downtown Montgomery will officially begin Thursday night with the lighting of the big tree on the square.” “Give Thanks When Things Seem Darkest, Cleric Asks.” A picture of an adorable three-year-old greedily eyeing turkeys in a store window, captioned “Feast, Prayer, to Highlight Thanksgiving.” (Cute children were a constant on the front pages of Southern newspapers.) A long article on “the 141st annual communication of the Free and Accepted Masons of California.” (Order, hierarchy, “heritage.”)
And the flip side. One article on the bombing of the homes of two Teamster officials in Detroit, unsolved. (Unions: nasty, corrupt monstrosities. The North: a Babylon where law and order was unknown.) Another on the then-notorious case of a Green Bay, Wisconsin, ophthalmologist who murdered his wife and most of his children on the family pleasure boat, the Bluebell; theAdvertiserfeatured the heroic escape of 11-year-old Terri Jo, running a picture of the blond darling being reunited with her favorite, also blond, doll.
And this:
Like millions of others around the nation, Joe Henry Johnson will sit down Tuesday to a Thanksgiving dinner.
But for the 19-year-old Negro slayer, it will be his final holiday meal. … Some 12 hours after dinner, the Negro youth, who raped and killed an elderly white woman, was calm and apparently resigned to his fate, said warden Martin Wiman.
God was in his heaven, and all was right with the world in Montgomery, Alabama, on November 23, 1961.
Another item on that front page feels particularly bizarre; that is, if you didn’t grow up where and when Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III did. It reported, “The head football coaches of Alabama and Auburn say the $10 million the state proposes to spend on a new prison system will be worth every cent of it. If for no other reason, said Coaches Paul (Bear) Bryant of Alabama and Ralph (Shut) Jordan at Auburn, the chance of rehabilitating teen-age prisoners will justify the expense. Bryant and Jordan, along with Auburn Athletic Director Jeff Beard, endorsed the bond issue in letters to state prison director Frank Lee.…”
These tough but fair patriarchs were not just sports icons but cultural and political leaders. Football was the South’s ne plus ultraritualization of order, hierarchy, and violence. Which was why, when 15-year-old Jeff Sessions made the roster as a linebacker in Camden, Alabama (population in the 1960 census: 1,211), that was important enough to make theAdvertiser,too.
On November 22, 1962—shortly before Thanksgiving—the front page featured a picture of a little kid holding up a turkey (for his father, who wielded the ax), and this news from one state over:
OXFORD, Miss. (AP) — Chief U.S. Marshal James D. McShane gave himself up for arrest here Wednesday on charges of inciting to riot and breach of the peace growing out of the University of Mississippi desegregation riots.…The Lafayette County grand jury, following an investigation of the bloody desegregation riot on the Old Miss campus the night of Sept. 30, returned two indictments in the case…. McShane was in charge of a team of about 300 federal marshals accompanying James H. Meredith, a Negro, onto the University campus.
The marshals, after taking Meredith to a dormitory, set up a circle of men, standing shoulder to shoulder, around the Lyceum building, where the registrar’s office is located.
A crowd gathered and violence broke out. During the night of rioting, two persons were killed, and scores more—students, marshals, and others—were injured.
You read that right: when the local grand jury met to hear the local prosecutor’s arguments about how best to preserve law and order in the face of the riot, the person they agreed to indict for causing it was the man the federal government sent to take charge of protecting James Meredith from a bloodthirsty mob. Which is also bizarre, if you didn’t grow up where and when Jeff Sessions did, with a father like his—who once allowed, when his son was up for a federal judgeship in 1986 and defending himself against witnesses who remembered him calling them “nigg*r,” and calling the NAACP and National Council of Churches “un-American” for shoving “civil rights down the throats of people trying to solve problems on their own,” that, yes, he, Jefferson Beauregard Jr., believed in “the separation of the races.”
His dad said that shouldn’t be held against his son, Jefferson Beauregard III. But evidence concerning his upbringing is clarifying. By Jefferson’s next appearance in the papers, it’s 1965, and he’s beginning his apprenticeship in preserving the lazy, laughing South with blood on its mouth just as he experienced it growing up—preparing for a life’s work imposing its perversions nationwide.
Outside, the Sixties were in full swing. Inside his world, the establishment was standing athwart them, yelling “Stop!” On July 14, he was the pallbearer at the funeral of a friend. President Johnson was expanding draft calls—but theAdvertiser’s front page gave more room to a report by its “women’s editor” on the fall fashion lines, with fabrics “more luxurious than ever before,” and gave visual confirmation that the corn in Mrs. Susan Martin’s front-yard patch was so high she couldn’t reach the top with a yardstick.
April 18, 1966, when Sessions was elected vice president of the Young Republicans Club at Huntingdon College, a gubernatorial candidate was also warmly profiled who “wants to convert state government to the methods of a business corporation.” And the U.S. Air Force made its “closest raid yet to the North Vietnamese capital.” For in theAdvertiser,while the Vietnam War might be expanding, it was also going triumphantly.
On May 3, 1967, news that Sessions was among those “tapped for membership in the International Relations Club at Huntingdon College” made page 2. Page 1: “City Negro Population Decreasing,” “Marines Take Hill 881; Planes Blast MIGs,” “Card-Burning Law Going to Top Court”—and a unique dispatch, “Seminarians Turn Table on Pickets,” featuring the Rev. Carl McIntire, a whackadoodle syndicated radio fundamentalist infamous for demanding a first nuclear strike against the Soviet Union, but still a hero to theAdvertiser’s editors for confronting an anti-war demonstration at a conference calling for unity among Christian denominations in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The ecumenists were met with “robust spirituals,” prayers for their eternal souls, and McIntire’s protest sign, which read: THE WORLD CHURCH—A TOWER OF BABBLE.
On August 20, 1967, when Sessions was helping plan a student government retreat as junior class president, the front page featured “Marine Riot-Control Gas Grenade Flushes Out Four Viet Cong Suspects” (what were those skeptics of Vietnam as an “unwinnable” war eventalkingabout?); a photo captioned “U.S. paratrooper carries injured North Vietnamese soldier” (and Martin Luther King called a decent nation like ours “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”!)— and Yankee lawlessness, that reliable evergreen, datelined “SAINT CLOUDY, Minn. (sic)”: “Man Admits Killing Wife, Leaving Youngsters to Die.”
Sessions made the front page for the first time in one of those “all is right with the world” photo features. He starred gallantly helping two identically dressed twin girls with their luggage on the first day of school in 1967. Below that, one read of the “closest strike yet to the center of North Vietnam’s major port” by U.S. jets. Beside that was the day’s lead article, on a proposed “teacher choice” law from Governor Lurleen Wallace (installed in office by her segregationist husband, George Wallace, because Alabama law did not permit a governor to serve two consecutive terms), “which permits parents to choose by majority vote the race of their children’s teachers.” (Below that, a dispatch from the hellholes above the Mason-Dixon Line; “Teacher Strikes Continue in New York and Detroit.”)
In March of 1968, Sessions was elected student government president (“War Deaths Nearly Triple Same Period’s Rate in ’67”); in August, he’s helping lead the student government retreat (“Gov. Lester Maddox of Georgia, claiming growing delegate support and voter appeal throughout the country,”—a fantasy, though one Alabamians seemed eager to maintain—“announced his candidacy Saturday for the Democratic presidential nomination”); in October, the student body president is featured as head of the youth division of the campaign for Alabama’s Republican candidate for Senate, Perry Hooper.
His picture in all three articles is the same.Allthe pictures of young people are the same: closely razored hair and neat suits for the men, tight helmets of hair on the women—it’s 1958 forever. In one sense, however, he was ahead of his time. Republicans were still rare in Alabama. On the front page that day, Richard Nixon’s most prominent Southern supporter, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, the former Democrat who ran a third-party segregationist “Dixiecrat” campaign for president in 1948 and who switched to the Republicans in 1964, claims his support for Nixon has brought him death threats. That fall, Sessions’s candidate, Perry Hooper, won only 22 percent of the vote.
It soon became plain that for a young tribune of the lazy, laughing South with blood on its mouth, the GOP was the place to be.
At the Republican convention in 1968, Thurmond agreed not to break from Nixon for Ronald Reagan, in exchange for Nixon’s pledge to do all he could to keep Southern schools segregated. The following September, Sessions, a newly matriculated student at the University of Alabama Law School (his acceptance there had been reported in July), was groomsman at a wedding on a day theAdvertiser’s front page reported a Nixon official’s fervent defense of the administration’s civil rights record—“anxious to counter criticism that followed his request in a federal court to give 30 Mississippi school districts additional time to implement court-ordered desegregation.”
It is as crystalline an example as I’ve ever seen of what Nixon Attorney General John Mitchell promised at the beginning of the administration: “Watch what we do, not what we say.” Yes, young Jefferson Sessions was in the right place. In 1971, he was elected chairman of the student division of the Alabama Young Republicans. In 1972, he was picked as a presidential elector for Nixon. The September 2, 1972,Advertiserprinted the parties’ presidential ballots. There was the “Democratic Party,” full stop, whose emblem read “For the right.” That was the local version of the party, whose lever you pulled if you were a voter who wished to honor the party of your fathers and grandfathers without defiling your franchise with support for the alien, “national” body that picked the anti-American quisling Yankee George McGovern as its presidential nominee. But there was also the “National Democratic Party of Alabama.”ThatDemocratic formation was a predominantly black organization, whose ticket included McGovern but excluded George C. Wallace.
By 1972, the party of Jefferson was at war with itself in the South, between black and white; future and past; Washington, D.C., and Montgomery; George McGovern and George C. Wallace. The party of Jefferson Sessions, on the other hand, suffered no such confusion; it knew where it stood. Want to vote for Richard Nixon? Just pull the lever with the emblem that simply read:America First: G.O.P.
Our Sessions coverage continues in August’s issue. Coming up: Why “99 percent of [civil rights complaints] are absolutely worthless”—and the dangers of marrying a “Moslem.”
Rick Perlstein isThe Washington Spectator’s national correspondent.
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Gun advocates fear armed Trump supporters as they escalate threats of violence against progressives
A friend writes, “For basically the past six months or so I’ve been trying to tell my lefty friends in so many words, ‘Hey, there are a bunch of people on the Internet who are waiting for someone to tell them it’s okay to start shooting at you.’” He became concerned when a thread at the non-political firearms-enthusiasts website he regularly follows became filled with comments in all caps referring to liberals as enemies who must be shot. Developments both online and off following Donald Trump’s election have caused me to share his concern.
In December, an author at the biggest and most explicitly non-political gun site, the Firearms Blog (its tagline is “Firearms, not politics”), recounted his experience with an outfit that offers tactical training based on the methods of the Israel Defense Forces. The moderator soon had to begin deleting comments. One that remains protested, “as if through the millennia, hundreds of nations, principalities and city-states reached the same conclusions,” and urged the curious to check out Judaism.is/genocide.html where one can watch the film Jewish Ritual Murder Revisited: The Hidden Cult.
Four days after Donald Trump’s inauguration, a community member on a moderate firearms law site, PAGunBlog, a civil redoubt welcoming “active participation by both firearms enthusiasts and people who hate them,” described his shock from that morning’s web-surf when “a long-time commenter who I recognized as right-leaning but mostly moderate commented that ‘The Jews own and control everything in America…’ Not many months ago no one except a flaming neo-Nazi would have dreamed of expressing such an opinion, but today it seems to have become an acceptable element of our discourse. I noticed that no one replied to or castigated the comment.”
Then came February 1 in Berkeley and things really started getting scary.
The saga of what happened when Milo Yiannopoulos came to speak at the flagship campus of the University of California has since become foundational, not just with the alt-right but with quite nearly the entire right. Alt-right provocateur Yiannopoulos was turned back by violent protests, which culminated in the burning of a portable generator. Stuffed down the wingnut memory hole are the events that preceded the mêlée. The violence was, in fact, preceded by peaceful protests by approximately 1,500 Berkeley students, until they were waylaid by a tiny handful of off-campus “Black Bloc” and “antifa,” or anti-fascist, cadres who believe racist speech licenses violent resistance. It was also preceded, less than two weeks earlier, by the shooting of a Milo protester in Seattle, by a gunman who has yet to be charged with any crime.
The Battle of Berkeley accelerated the construction of a body of mythology: the left has escalated its resistance to Trump into literal war, so Trump supporters must be prepared to resort to violence to oppose it.
How afraid of this should you be? The most interesting answers to that question do not come from the left. They come from concerned voices on the right, who’ve been monitoring the chatter with mounting alarm, going public with pleas to liberals to still the antifa renegades before bodies begin piling up. The most convincing evidence that they have a point comes in the ensuing comment threads, where the need to prepare for armed force is taken as gospel.
The proprietor of Being Libertarian, a Facebook community with 438,888 likes, wrote of Berkeley, “This was a riot,” and urged liberals to “BE LOUD” and renounce the rioters: “Conservatives are going to have a field day with this. If you just sit there quietly, you’re essentially letting yourself be associated with campus-pillaging barbarians.” He added, “You should consider yourself lucky nobody shot you.”
Clearly, this man knows his audience. The comment, “When someone has set your car on fire and is chasing you around with a blunt object, you get to make an executive decision regarding your continued existence,” got 1,403 likes. The conviction that this would be acting in self-defense was affirmed by the man who wrote, “these riots that have been occurring are what got my ass in gear to get the final steps of my pistol permit application completed. My unrestricted carry permit can’t come soon enough.” Someone reminded him a gun license “is not a license to kill.” His response: “Yes I’m aware. I just refuse to end up a helpless victim when crazy sh*t like this goes down.”
Oleg Volk is an advertising professional and Second Amendment activist based in Nashville. He wrote on a Facebook wall about the Berkeley events: “Rioting? That’s how you get Freikorps reenacting the demise of the Bavarian Republic with full approval of the majority of the population.” The Freikorps were volunteer paramilitaries set up by German World War I veterans that violently put down Communist uprisings, piling up bodies by the thousands; the movement officially came to a close in 1933 when Freikorps leaders surrendered their battle flags in loyalty to the Nazi command. Volk made it clear that he was opposed to such escalation. Commenters responding to his post were not. “Trying to decide if I will be unhappy or happy to don Freikorps attire. Then what to bring to the party,” said one. Others discussed appropriate armaments—“Ill see your 308 and raise you a 45-70” [sic]—until one Richard Carter trumped them all: “see you all that crap 50 bmg.” He was referring the .50-caliber Browning machine gun, a weapon useful for downing low-flying aircraft. After all, another commenter observed, “The Brownshirts are all liberals now.”
Another commenter offered a “Side note: Ever notice they don’t try that sh*t somewhere like Texas or Florida, where the odds are good that Joe Public will ventilate their asses when assaulted.” As it happened, one month later events provided a natural experiment to prove or disprove his hypothesis.
March 4 was national “March 4 Trump Day.” It was also Confederate Flag Day—though whether coincidence or not is always a difficult question to answer in Trumpland, where what the president’s “respectable” partisans would prefer to keep hidden in the basem*nt is only a dogwhistle away.
A prelude to the March 4 Trump events played out on February 19, when a complement from the “III% Security Force” armed with rifles stood guard over a pro-Trump rally in Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park. The next day, National Rifle Association president Wayne LaPierre went online with a video advertising his appearance at the following week’s Conservative Political Action Conference. The video opened with the words “THEY COULDN’T HANDLE IT,” interposed with clips of Michael Moore calling Donald Trump a fascist and Nancy Pelosi intoning “white supremacist,” then the words, “SO THEY STARTED A WAR,” “AGITATION,” “INSURRECTION,” and “ANARCHY.” All this was interspersed with chaotic images of fire, vandalism, and Madonna at the Women’s March explaining, “I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House.” Thereupon LaPierre pledged the NRA would be the spearhead of the counter-resistance: “On Friday, February 24, we fight back.”
Then in Austin on March 4, a blogger who calls himself Morgoth, after the J.R.R. Tolkien character often interpreted as a stand-in for Satan, filed a dispatch from the pro-Trump rally at Wooldridge Park, sprinkled with pictures of dudes with signs like the one featuring the alt-right iconic image of Pepe in a pilot outfit with the legend “FREE HELICOPTER RIDES” and the silhouette of a woman falling from the sky. “The only contribution we received from the Republican Party was some Trump Pence and MAGA signs,” he boasted. “Quite unlike the AstroTurf leftist protests where professional agitators are organized, bused in and often paid by shadowy group funded for George Soros or the Democratic Party.” [sic] Morgoth was impressed with organizers doing “everything possible to dispel the notion that Trump or his supporters are in any way racist. After all, speakers at the event included a black woman . . . and a Mexican woman who had just obtained U.S. citizenship. Amusingly, the Mexican lady’s speech was largely drowned out by long and raucous chants of ‘build the wall, build the wall!’”
Morgoth estimated the alt-right contingent at 10 to 20 percent of the crowd. He celebrated their chants, including “Free helicopter rides for commies” and “One people, one nation, one leader.” He reported, “The Alt Right were well turned out, many wearing shirts and ties, well groomed, well informed, physically fit, and well versed in their arguments. They stood in stark contrast to the weak degenerates of Antifa . . .” He said the whole thing made him feel as glorious as when he participated in an Orange Walk—those marches where Ulster unionists would parade menacingly through Catholic neighborhoods to celebrate the 1690 defeat of Irish Catholics. He thrilled to what he claimed was evidence that “even mainstream conservatives” were moving “toward us.”
He also confirmed the accounts of about a dozen anti-Trump protesters that one of them, Austin radical journalist Kit O’Connell, received a concussion when he was smashed against a post by a former Marine after touching his flag.
O’Connell was arrested and charged with a crime. The attacker was not. O’Connell’s assailant, wearing an American-flag windbreaker, carrying an American flag, and sporting two small American flags in his MAGA cap, can be heard in a video boasting, “He was so light, I thought he was a girl. But I hit him against the pole, and I felt sorry for him so I stopped. . . How do you justify attacking somebody with an American flag? . . .They went after my flag.”
Morgoth’s blog post in praise of this fine patriot featured a screen grab of O’Connell’s Facebook message. Morgoth’s comment: “Here is a post of the glass jawed communist made on Facebook the next day showing him still in this hospital bed whining about his treatment at the hands of the fascist police state. You’d need a heart of stone not to laugh. . . . Antifa puss*, straight from central casting.” The screen grab contained the name of the hospital, should any local neo-Nazi—like the fellow who recently charged into an Austin anarchist bookstore and threatened to burn them out—wish to visit him. When I reached O’Connell by phone, he told me, “There’s a real feel in the Austin left, especially the far-left, that this counter-resistance is becoming frighteningly organized.”
And why not? They believe they’re only fighting back.
A Morgoth commenter who calls himself Gentleman Jim Crow praised the “virile young Alt-Rights clashing with clapped out retrograde commies. The future belongs to us.” Another commenter responded to that, “They will still escalate.” Morgoth himself wrote, “While looking for footage of the Austin march to accompany this post I came across this footage of the violence at the March 4 Trump in Berkeley, California. . . the Trump supporters seem to be more physically capable, but the weaker leftists are prepared to up the ante by introducing cowardly devices like tasers and pepper spray.”
Students of fascism will recognize the fantastical confusion of tropes: the enemy as a terrifying horde, raising the stakes ruthlessly beyond all civil bounds; but also the enemy as pitiful (“glass jawed”) weaklings—sometimes both within the same utterance. Such language is how students of fascism know that they are in its presence.
I’ve seen the Berkeley footage Morgoth is referring to. That’s how I made the acquaintance of Stick Man.
Berkeley’s March 4 Trump was organized by a man named Richard Black, who announced that members of the alt-right, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists were banned. Among those who did not get the memo were Moshe Daniel, who goes by the nickname “Kilt Man.” Daniel depicts himself on Facebook with a giant serrated knife and a T-shirt featuring the face of the late Chilean fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet, the legend “PHYSICAL REMOVAL,” and another of those silhouettes of people being dropped from helicopters—a Pinochet-favored method for dealing with dissenters.
The march turned into a “small riot,” as gun-rights blogger Bob Owens, one of the most widely read on the web, and a cool and clear-thinking moderate, described it after reviewing the available documentation. “Both sides came to this incident prepared for a fight,” he wrote, concluding it was impossible to see “who threw the first punch.” In my mind, however, there were at least two moments where the person who threw the first punch was starkly evident. In both cases it was an individual who wore all black, from boots to baseball cap, and carried a distinctive black shield emblazoned with a “V” for victory, and an American flag. The man in black also wore a gas mask, surely in response to a widely disseminated urban legend that antifas are routinely attacking protesters with pepper spray. In one video he whacks a downed anti-Trump protester with the long wooden stick he carries (with two tiny American flags attached, thus he can call it a flagpole). In another, he can be seen smashing his stick down so hard on an unarmed protester’s head that the stick breaks in half.
He’s since become a right-wing folk hero, and, after Berkeley police arrested him on several felony charges, naturally, a right-wing martyr.
Morgoth declared an image of Stick Man in his getup to be his “picture of the week.” Wrote the proprietor of a blog called Ride the Bomb!, who calls his hero Captain America: “For those who are not aware, the Antifa jerks have been bringing flags to violent protests so that they can use the flag poles to beat Trump supporters over the head. This gentleman’s ‘flagpole’ was a great FU to all of them. My personal favorite video . . . shows Captain America breaking his ‘flagpole’ over the head of an Antifa member. . . . Let us hope now he understands that it was foolish to think that a beta male Liberal wussy boy like him who has never been in a fair fight in his life could brawl with men. I believe that going forward Captain America will serve as in [sic] inspiration for us all. More than anyone else he will be remembered as the symbol of the turning point represented by the Berkeley ‘March 4 Trump.’”
Stick Man’s real name is Kyle Chapman of Daly City, California. On Facebook, he can be seen dipping bullets into bacon, apparently for use against Muslims. His favorite books include March of the Titans: A History of the White Race. He likes the Nordic-Germanic Front, Nordic Beauty, Soldiers of Odin USA, and RT. He also has a long criminal history, including felony convictions for charges that include robbery and grand theft. Following a crowdfunding campaign to aid with his bail and defense, he wrote, “The out pouring of support has nearly brought me to tears. I do not consider myself a hero. I’m a patriot that loves freedom and my fellow countrymen. I have long embraced my inner warrior as many of the warrior patriots that have fought along side me. Could not have done it without them. The decadence of the West has made us soft. We must reverse this if our republic is to survive. Let 3.4.17 be the beginning of a new revolution.” Among those who have joined the crowdfunding crusade is Richard Black, the organizer of March 4 Trump, who had banned white nationalists and the alt-right.
Bob Owens’s post about the March 4 Trump in Berkeley is entitled “Can Trump Supporters Legally Shoot Left-wing ‘Antifa’ Attackers?” He wrote it in response to a Tweet directed to him, noting a moment where three antifas got in three light kicks at a downed Trump supporter, asking, “Looks like lethal self-defense could be justified. Opinions?” Owens assured his readers this was indubitably not so. He reviewed California’s statute on the use of deadly force, which requires a shooter to “reasonably believe” he or she “was in imminent danger of being killed or suffering great bodily injury,” then to use “no more force than was reasonably necessary to defend against that danger,” and that “belief in future harm is not sufficient, no matter how greatly or how likely the harm is believed to be.” He concluded, “Both sides acted childishly and violently, but there was no violence that came close to justifying the use of firearms to stop a deadly force attack,” Introducing firearms, he wrote, would have been “frankly stupid, as you’re much more likely to hit innocent bystanders downrange than you are likely to hit the person you’re shooting at in such dense crowds.”
To which his commenters replied: to hell with that, we’re shooting anyway. They’re not ashamed. They use their real names, and sometimes list their hometown; and, in one case (a firefighter in a small Florida town), their employment, which I confirmed. Then, they say things like this:
“[W]hen the law says you must die why would you care about the law.”
“It’s far better to be judged by 12, then carried by 6.”
“If you physically attack someone you can legally be shot. Doesn’t matter what Kool Aid you drink.”
“[I]f a person, or persons, are a threat to you or someone else . . . Act accordingly to protect life. Everything else, including the target’s well being, is a by product that is not my concern.”
“If deadly force isn’t reasonable then why do the cops show up armed???”
And last but not least: “But let’s face it legalities put aside, killing these ANTIFA douches would probably make America a better place.”
Just chest-thumping boasts? My friend, a liberal and a Second Amendment advocate, isn’t sure what to think. He hopes “they have jobs and mortgages and kids and so on . . . They have way too much to lose to start shooting at anybody.”
“But then there’s another part of me that knows how men (and they’re mostly men) of this type are. When you have that much invested in some hardware, and they do have a lot invested as a percentage of income, then you want to use it.”
Maybe it’s all just idle Internet chatter. But didn’t they used to say that about Munich beer halls once, too?
Rick Perlstein is The Washington Spectator’s national correspondent and a student of right-wing movements.
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With so many garish spectacles to feast your eyes on at the 33-ring Trump circus, some clowns are easy to miss. Especially the ones performing in proximity to Sean Spicer. Pry your eyes away from the Pagliacci of the Pressroom for a moment, however, and look hard at some of his supporting buffoons. They may not have attracted the notice of Saturday Night Live yet. But now that the White House is blocking outlets like The New York Times, BBC, and Politico from some press briefings, the ones who are still there are becoming an increasingly important part of the story.
Meet “Trey,” for instance—Trey Yingst, Washington correspondent of the “One America News Network,” a cable channel begun in partnership with the Unification Church’s Washington Times, which has since gone independent. One America owner Charles Herring explained why he started the venture: “There’s nothing wrong with Fox. The problem is that if you take the [standard cable] channel lineup, the sources of national news tend to lean to the left . . . and all we have is Fox.” One America’s Foxier-than-Fox programming includes “Jihad: The Grand Deception,” “Escape from Iran,” “Target America,” and an interview show, “On Point,” once hosted by Sarah Palin. One America was included in the press briefing from which The New York Times and BBC were banned.
And Spicer sure likes One America’s man in Washington. During Trump’s first month in the White House, Spicer called on Trey four times. The third time, after he answered Trey’s stumper—“What is the President willing to do to investigate further to determine where these leaks are coming from?”— and the press gaggle started shouting out their own questions, Spicer sounded for all the world like a wounded first-grader. “Hold On! Trey gets a follow up! Everyone else got one!”
Lars Larson is a better-known figure. He’s the top conservative talk radio host in Portland, Oregon, and an occasional fill-in for Rush Limbaugh. Larson was the second person called upon via webcam the day the White House Press Room’s “Skype seat” was inaugurated. Lars first thanked “Commander Spicer” for taking his questions (Spicer has never served in the active-duty[*]military, but he has a commander rank in the Navy reserves), then said, “Thanks for your service to America.” Next came the probing questions. “Does President Trump want to start returning the people’s land to the people? . . . Can he tell the Forest Service to start logging our forests aggressively again to provide jobs for Americans, wealth for the Treasury, and not spend $3.5 billion a year fighting forest fires?” These stinging queries surely came as welcome relief for Spicer, who had just got through dodging dagger thrusts from Kristen Welker of NBC, about what the White House meant when it claimed to have put Iran “on notice.”
And on February 14—Valentine’s Day—when Spicer found himself in a sweat keeping his stories straight about the firing of General Flynn, he went to the Skype seat for a save from “Jason Stevens of the Federalist Paper in Ashland, Ohio.” It turns out to be nearly impossible to identify this particular media juggernaut via Google, but your humble correspondent’s embarrassingly boundless knowledge of right-wing institutions is helpful. I recalled that there is a small right-wing college in Ashland, Ohio, which is how I learned that Professor Stevens’s “Federalist Papers Project” fulfills its mission of purveying “The History & Civics Schools Don’t Teach”—not only by giving away free e-books about the Founding Fathers but via articles like “WATCH: Maxine Waters UNHINGED; Goes Insane on Live TV” and “BREAKING: Feds Stop Nightmare Scenario ISIS Style Attack,” all underwritten by pop-up ads for survivalist meal plans with “25-Year Shelf Life, ‘Disaster-Proof’ Packaging.”
Another Spicer favorite is Katie Pavlich. Don’t know Katie? She’s the extremely blond Fox News regular and Townhall.com correspondent who authored such timeless classics as Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and Its Shameless Cover-Up and Assault and Flattery: The Truth About the Left and Their War on Women. Pavlich was called on three times within a fortnight to confront Spicer with riddles like: “Is President Trump planning to ask the Senate to expedite legislation allowing for the swift firing of bad VA employees?” And, concerning “a declared genocide by ISIS against Christians and other minority and religious groups . . . what specifically is the administration planning to do to comply with the legal obligations of protecting these groups under the U.N. 1948 treaty?”
Returned Spicer: “That’s a great question!” They always are, when Sean’s valentines are doing the asking.
When a former male escort named Jeff Gannon (né James Dale Guckert) began popping up in George W. Bush’s White House press room during the Iraq War, representing a not-quite-legitimate news organization called “Talon News,” which turned out to be operated by the Republican National Committee, and asking questions that sounded suspiciously like plants —“How are you going to work with [Senate Democrats] who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?”—it was a minor scandal. Regarding most matters Republican and scandalous, our concerns from a dozen years ago almost seem quaint.
Now the ones routinely asking the questions are “news organizations” like The Daily Signal, published by the Heritage Foundation; Breitbart News, which White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon used to run; and the London Daily Mail, which was banned as a source by Wikipedia for its “reputation for poor fact-checking and sensationalism.” Now, we have a Gannon-league loon as press secretary.
When Sean Spicer’s college newspaper printed his letter to the editor complaining about campus smoking regulations over the name “Sean Sphincter,” he complained, “The First Amendment does uphold the right to free speech, however, this situation goes beyond the bounds of free speech.” Then he more or less sued the paper, attempting to bring it up on charges before college authorities.
Today, Spicer has opened the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room to “journalists” who have made their reputations “beyond the bounds of free speech.” The now-disgraced alt-right poster boy Milo Yiannopoulos, whose defense of pedophilia cost him a book contract and a speaking gig at CPAC, once got credentials to attend a White House press briefing. The aggressively incorrect hate site Gateway Pundit has a permanent seat, which is occupied by serial doxxer Lucian Wintrich. He has no previous journalistic experience, though he curated a “Twinks4Trump” art exhibit that included hom*oerotic photos of shirtless men wearing “Make America Great” caps. The Twinks exhibit included works by Yiannopoulos, James O’Keefe,[*] and indicted “Pharma bro” Martin Shkreli, I kid you not.
But we should focus on more than just the personalities, because there is method behind this madness. The “Skype seat,” for example. The people representing major news organizations in the White House press room, whatever their faults, are at least seasoned media veterans whose professional amour propre depends on their willingness to follow up when the answer is evasive. Spicer often finds the questions asked by these White House reporters challenging.
On February 2, for example, in the wake of the massacre at a Quebec City mosque, Spicer was asked what Trump would do to make sure “homegrown violence doesn’t happen within our country.” His loopy response began, “Well, there’s a lot of things. Number one, he’s talked cyber — I mean, he’s looking at it from every angle. I think the first thing is to make sure that we look at our borders.”
He continued, “I mean, so there is a holistic approach to both immigration and there’s a direct nexus between immigration and national security and personal security that he has to look at.” Then he promised the administration would be “working with the NSA and FBI to be ahead of the curve”—either ignorant or indifferent to the fact that the National Security Agency is (for now) legally enjoined from spying on Americans.
“If I may,” came the follow-up, “these are homegrown—Oklahoma was an American kid.”
Non-sequitured Spicer, “That’s what I’m saying. . .”
Quicksand like that is why it’s handy to have on tap the cream of the nation’s crop of blow-dried Ron Burgundies. The Skype seat opens White House press briefings to representatives of local network affiliate news organizations, whose business model is fundamentally compromised and corrupt. As John Nichols and Robert McChesney document in Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex Is Destroying America, the rapidly dwindling number of conglomerates that own network affiliates earn staggering windfall profits selling ads to political campaigns, as much as 35 percent of their revenue in election years. Senator Bill Bradley once described election campaigns as “collections agencies for broadcasters. You simply transfer money from contributors to television stations.” In 2012, for example, Fox’s Washington, D.C., affiliate added a half hour to its newscast—not to report more campaign news, but to accommodate more campaign advertising.
It’s worth noting, too, that local broadcast outlets receive their licenses to use the public airwaves (and to print money) from the Federal Communications Commission. If they fall too far afoul of the Trump administration, they may be putting their licenses at risk.
So the Skype seat is not exactly a formula for hard-hitting accountability journalism. It’s more likely a clever ruse to crowd it out.
To be fair, some of the local folks have given it the old college try. Kim Kalunian of WPRI in Providence, Rhode Island, and Courtis Fuller of WLWT in Cincinnati asked tough questions about what Trump’s promise to withhold federal funds from “sanctuary cities” will mean for their cities. John Huck, of what Spicer called “WKVVU,” asked how rolling back financial regulations would not expose Las Vegas homeowners once screwed by lending practices that led to the 2007 crash “to the risky behaviors that tanked our economy last time.” Joyce Kaufman of WFTL-West Palm Beach (home to Mar-a-Lago) zeroed in on Trump’s lax security at dinner there with the Japanese prime minister.
And if the outlet is a station like WMUR of Manchester, New Hampshire, well, no worries there. Can you imagine what a license to blast campaign commercials day and night in election years is worth to its owner, the Hearst Corporation? “Hey, Sean, thanks for taking the question,” opened a friendly February 3 colloquy with WMUR’s Josh McElveen. “I know you’re looking forward to the Patriots coming down in a couple of months. . .”
And don’t expect Skype seaters from Sinclair Media regional outlets to challenge Spicer. The second largest owner of television stations in the United States, Sinclair’s consistent history of attempts to sabotage Democratic (and democratic) campaigns goes back at least to October 2004, when it was announced that all 62 Sinclair stations (it now owns 154) would preempt primetime programming to air Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’s anti-John Kerry propaganda documentary Stolen Honor. The Democratic National Committee sued, and the show never ran. Sinclair’s CEO David Smith, in an article on how his company was tripling investor expectations in 2012, gushed, “the political business . . . is an ever-expanding business . . . I don’t see any evidence that it’s ever going to go away.”
Not, certainly, with Smith laundering influence directly through the president. As I wrote here in January, a fact not reported anywhere else, Smith’s yeoman work on behalf of the Trump campaign was rewarded with a guest of honor slot in the inaugural parade, which the network CEO used to promote a new Sinclair-financed cable station. Less than a month later, Trump called Scott Thuman, of Sinclair’s Washington, D.C., ABC affiliate by name for the first question in his press briefing with Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada. That was the one where Trump suspiciously did not entertain a single question regarding the resignation General Mike Flynn. (Jonathan Karl of ABC shouted one out. “He sure seemed to hear the question but did not answer,” he tweeted later.) Reported AdWeek’s “TVSpy” column, “It’s rare that a local TV news reporter would be called on during such an event. In fact, other White House reporters wanted to know if Thuman had been told he was going to be called on. He says he wasn’t, but that he was advised to attend.”
Next it was Kaitlan Collins, of the right-wing site the Daily Caller, who brought the heat: “What do you see as the most important national security matter facing us?” Kaitlan’s been another Spicer valentine, though possibly not for long. After the White House blocked the New York Times, CNN, and Politico from a press gaggle in Sean Spicer’s office, but allowed in Breitbart News, she publicly posted everything Spicer had said in the closed-door briefing.
Love sours sometimes, Mr. Spicer. Nobody loves a lying sad clown. When you’ve lost Kaitlan Collins, Mr. Spicer, what’s next: Breitbart News?
Rick Perlstein is the Washington Spectator’s National Correspondent.
[*]Correction:An earlier version of this story erroneously said “Spicer has never served in the military.” In fact, Spicer claims 17 years of experience as a public affairs officer in the Navy reserves.
[*]Correction:This article has been revised to remove an inaccurate description of legal charges brought in 2010 against James O’Keefe. In an earlier published version, a parenthetical phrase entered by the editor mischaracterized a crime to which O’Keefe pled guilty after he entered U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu’s office in January 2010. O’Keefe was not, as we reported, “convicted of breaking into a U.S. Senator’s office to gather news.” He, in fact, pled guilty to a misdemeanor.
As the Associated Press reported at the time of sentencing in May 2010:
“O’Keefe, Stan Dai, Joseph Basel and Robert Flanagan were arrested on January 25, 2010, in the offices of Senator Mary Landrieu on felony charges, but federal prosecutors later reduced the charges.”
“O’Keefe, 25, and the others pleaded guilty on Wednesday to misdemeanor charges of entering federal property under false pretenses…They were sentenced to probation, community service and fines. O’Keefe received the heaviest sentence, three years probation, 100 hours of community service and a $1,500 fine.”
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Unmasking Trump’s minister of propaganda Steve Bannon and his ‘Occupy’ film
Everyone has been asking me how Donald Trump can possibly thrive politically once his voters discover that what he said on the campaign trail was categorical bullsh*t. I respond by pointing out that people only know what they know, and what they know about Trump will be determined by a campaign of White House disinformation to rival Joseph Goebbels, abetted by a political media willing to serve uncomplainingly as its transmission belt. For instance, when the CIA reported its conclusion that the Russian government intervened to try to seal Trump’s victory, his transition team responded with a statement that said: “The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history.” The Washington Post quoted it verbatim, like it was precipitation data from the National Weather Service—though in actual fact Trump’s Electoral College margin was in history’s bottom quartile.
Our media gatekeepers act like they’re unaware that our president has chosen as his chief strategist a fellow who’s made disinformation his political vocation, whom no less an authority than the late Andrew Breitbart once labeled the “Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party.” Though maybe I shouldn’t be so self-righteous. Until not too long ago, I’d forgotten that I’d seen Steve Bannon’s Triumph of the Will. Then I remembered, and watched it again—and my respect for anyone who’d take this White House on good faith plummeted below Dante’s ninth circle of Hell.
It happened this way. Covering the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, I decided to test my theory that at any Republican convention, the true face of the party is revealed outside camera range. After braving a security gauntlet far tighter than the conventions, I visited a gleaming white air-conditioned tent devoted to showing movies produced by Citizens United, the organization made famous by the 2010 Supreme Court decision that green-lighted the laundering of unlimited corporate funds to finance propaganda like I was about to witness: a film called Occupy Unmasked, written and directed by one Stephen K. Bannon.
The name meant nothing to me then. The experience, however, was indelible. I tried to record the soundtrack on my phone. An undercover security operative swooped down and made me erase it. That might have been for the best, I wrote at the time, because “the distinguishing feature of Occupy Unmasked’s soundtrack was an unceasing, loud, dull, dissonant . . . well, you couldn’t call it music. It was more like a deep rumble, the aural equivalent of a laxative to loosen one’s critical faculties.” Upon reflection, I couldn’t be sure that the similarity with the cinematic technique described by George Orwell in 1984 (about the Two Minutes Hate) was intended or accidental: “The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room.” What I do know is that if I knew then that the man responsible for this sickening Orwellian conflagration would 29 months later be running the White House, I might have considered doing what I never dreamed of during George W. Bush’s reign: getting my emigration papers in order. Which maybe we should all be doing right now.
The film begins silently, an innocuous epigraph filling the screen—
July 2011
Following the historic tea party victory in 2010
The nation is in a heated debate
On raising the debt ceiling.
President Obama’s approval rating
Sinks to an all-time low:
39%
—then comes a windshield’s eye view of a gorgeous California coastline. An unpromising overture for a political thriller.
Until—a car plunges over a cliff, followed by a frenzy of images: worried politicians, newsmen narrating the looming fiscal crisis, a bank machine sorting bills, blindfolded children boxing (and then Senator Barbara Boxer, her voice horrifically distorted); sheets of hundred dollar bills rolling off a printing press, then piling to the sky—the car arcs downward—a racing clock, hundred dollar bills behind a beeping EKG, a man on his hospital deathbed, a little girl batting a piñata, Where is the leadership of this White House to guide the country out of the debt mess we’re in?—Then piles more money and a cardiologist’s paddles on a heaving chest, a racing “debt clock” and credit cards, and a braying Chris Matthews and panic and panic and more panic. The American people are going to pay the price and the EKG flatlines and the car hits the rocks and bursts into flames and Anderson Cooper announces the downgrading of the nation’s credit.
Which resolves into an image of Barack Hussein Obama in the Oval Office to render plain the reason for the frenzy: “An organizer,” words begins spooling “must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent. . .”—and then the letters S-A-U-L and A-L-I-N-S-K-Y emerge, with the “A” in the villain’s last name filled in when the familiar red anarchist-A in a circle stamps itself onto the screen.
Andrew Breitbart appears, explaining, “The battle for the soul of America took an interesting turn in September of 2011, when out of the blue, according to the mainstream media, one finds a group called ‘Occupy’ occupying town squares, city halls, and Zuccotti Park. Who were these people?” [The screen shows a foul dreadlocked, doo-ragged white guy with an “Occupy” fist pinned to his coat.] “Are they just college students that matter-of-factly just show up in Zuccotti Park?” [A ragged tent city, pocked by garbage bags, from which a woman pulls out a shoe.]
“Are these just mom and pa, coming like they did at the Tea Parties?”
“No, no. No, no. This is the organized left.” [The camera lingers on a sign reading “Workers World Party.”] “The Occupy movement is the organized left.”
The plot that follows defies summation. We learn how in August and September, 2011, thanks to the Republicans, the nation was finally verging toward fiscal sanity until the Occupiers appeared just in time to sabotage the whole thing. We learn how the conspiracy was planned in a 2011 email chain that included an MSNBC personality and the political editor of Rolling Stone, where “kids learned how they could orchestrate a movement from scratch,” tutored to be “as amorphous as humanly possible,” the better to “draw in as many naïve people as humanly possible.” But also that it was orchestrated a year earlier “by the SEIU.”
But also that the conspiracy was planned in 2008, at the Republican National Convention.
And, yet more diabolically, in the ruins of New Orleans in 2005: “To most people Hurricane Katrina was a natural disaster,” one of the film’s stars explains. “But to the far left, Hurricane Katrina was about the occupation of the Ninth Ward. It was the first time all of these different groups came together under one banner to work together. You had the eco-terrorism group under Scott Crow; the Animal and Earth Liberation Fronts. . . . You had Code Pink; you had the Black Panther Party. . . . You had different movements from around the world coming in. They saw it as a means to work together, finally, for the revolution. . . because people were mad at the U.S. government.”
“And from that, those same people, those same dollars, those same funders, those same leaders—they started the Occupy Movement.”
The insults to linear logic only enhance the film’s effect: this is sense-rape, meant to disarm critical faculties. But if the storyline is, well, as amorphous as humanly possible, the characters are etched sharply. For that is what this game is all about.
There are bad guys, like a man in a bank in a suit. “He’s texting,” one of the story’s narrators explains footage of a scene where filthy marauders invade a Bank of America. “I say, ‘Do you work for the bank?’ And he says, ‘No, I work for the United Autoworkers.’ So the unions are choreographing things, and they’re obviously texting back and making sure it’s going right. But who ends up getting arrested are the students.”
The students: those useful idiots. A fellow holds a sign reading “THROW ME A BONE, PAY MY TUITION.” He’s asked by a Breitbartian why he believes himself to be exploited by elites. “We get taxed more than they do,” he answers. “That’s not true,” the interviewer comes back, matter of factly. The kids responds, incredulous: “That’s not true?”
The faceless, pillaging marauders—some in Guy Fawkes masks, the movie’s main visual motif, others wearing black hoodies, or bandanas over their faces, staving in windows, assaulting cops, dancing by the light of the flames.
The media, some of whom are Occupy puppet masters in disguise—like a writer named Natasha Lennard, who covered the movement freelance for The New York Times, then got radicalized and noisily quit the straight media, but whom under Steve Bannon’s directorial gaze is rendered both a walking, talking embodiment of the Gray Lady herself, sent out to pull the strings of the media’s useful-idiot contingent, like Bill Maher, shown enthusing “Everyone was extraordinarily well-behaved” over an image of a man sh*tting on a car.
President Obama, that most useful of idiots. (He delivers what the film calls his “Occupy State of the Union” in 2012, his voice distorted like a zombie: “No American company should be able to avoid paying its fair share of taxes. . . . Restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot.” You thought these words were innocent. You are so, so naïve.)
The good guys are the film’s narrators: former members in good standing of the left, who’ve seen the conspiracy from the inside and have emerged to tell the tale.
There is a young man named Lee Stranahan, identified as “Former Writer, Huffington Post, Daily Kos.” He explains, “I actually trace some of the roots of Occupy back to Saul Alinsky and the 1930s . . . his mentor was Frank Nitty, the enforcer of the Capone gang. . . What had happened was, Prohibition had ended, so the mob needed a new way of making money. So what they did was, they moved into—labor. They moved into the unions. So the BSEU was one of the unions they were involved with, and that became the SEIU.” [Cue picket sign: “HEALTHCARE WORKERS / WE’RE PART OF THE 99%”] “The thing that ties in the anarchist movement, and the Obama administration, are the unions.”
A woman named Pam Key, who has been to hell and back: “I was there with them, getting fed some poached salmon, when I was with some anarchists doing ’shrooms discussing whether they were going to assassinate people and when that might happen.” She explains that “They are holding back violence until it is going to work at its maximum capacity,” and that—onscreen, Oakland occupiers take over a vacant warehouse: coming soon to a suburb near you—“that’s the next step, to occupy properties, and homes.”
Brandon Darby, who infiltrated the 2008 RNC protests for the FBI: “. . . the same old far left players who are part of what happened in New Orleans, the same old far-left players who are part of what happened in Seattle . . . arson . . . terroristic acts . . . Gaza flotillas . . . the convergence of all these disparate groups, let’s attack the United States strength through environmental policies, let’s attack the United States law enforcement, let’s attack the criminal justice system—everything came together for Occupy.”
Anita MonCrief, an African American woman who used to work for ACORN, explains why this list does not, yet, include any black people: “Because they’re being readied for part two. And that is race warfare.”
Now you, my dear fellow member of the Reality Based Community, remember what Occupy actually was: a lightning strike, a miracle, and a tragedy—the kind of uprising the left had been dreaming about for years after the banking system crashed itself then got the government to rescue it (that was why Bannon was able to collect so much footage of left-wing leaders saying Occupy-like things before the event); but which soon spent its promise by fetishizing the absence of organization and the controlling of public space as a perverse end in itself. Which was what allowed some of the encampments to become crime-riddled sh*t piles, a process hastened, in New York’s Zuccotti Park, when police began directing homeless people to camp there.
Ah, but that’s what they wanted you to believe. Here’s David Horowitz, the New Left leader turned right-winger. The left, he explains, “wants to create chaos. Because out of chaos, they can get power.”
Thus does the film palpitate toward its frenetic conclusion: Epileptic cross-cuts between the chaos of the late-stage Occupy marches and encampments and the violence in cities like Oakland, alternating with images of Stalin, Che, Fidel, and Mao; riots in, perhaps, South America; and the Black Panthers braying that it is “time to pick up the gun,” followed by a screaming 1960s SDSer: “We gotta build a strong base, and some day we’re gonna knock those motherf*ckers who control this thing right on their ass.”
Then comes Horowitz again to explain how it is all going exactly according to plan. “The left learned one thing from the 1960s—from its failures in the ‘60s. And that is: don’t telegraph your goals. Don’t tell people that you want to overthrow the government, that you have been working to overthrow American civilization for 40 years. You pretend to be interested in issues. . . . Your goal has always been the same: to destroy a society that you’re alienated from, that you basically hate.”
The film ends with the testimony of a small businessman, “barely making ends meet,” who had the bad luck to get in the revolution’s way. You’re next.
To read it on the page in front of you, it can only seem perfectly ridiculous. You have to fill in the violent chaos of images in a way that—well, as Orwell did when he described the televised “Two Minutes Hate” in 1984.
The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had become an actual sheep’s bleat, and for an instant the face changed into that of a sheep. Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier. Who seems to be advancing, huge and terrible, his submachine gun roaring, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen . . .
That movie ended with the words:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
This one ended with Andrew Breitbart crying with heroic earnestness to the riffraff all around him, “Stop the raping! Stop the raping!”
Andrew Breitbart is dead now: long live Andrew Breitbart. Donald Trump is Lord, and Steve Bannon is his prophet—with the U.S. Treasury at his disposal to tell fairy tales like this about anyone who dares cross him.
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I was curious, so I did a bit of research on theories about why great civilizations fall. Some scholars point to the danger of overextended militaries, others on overwhelmed bureaucracies. Sometimes the key factor is declines in public health, often caused by agricultural crises. Political corruption is another contender, as are inflated currencies, technological inferiority, court intrigue, rivals taking control of key transportation routes, or an overreliance on slave labor. Others point to changes in climate, geographic advantages won and lost, or the ever-popular invasion by barbarian hordes.
None I could find, however, mentioned what may become future historians’ most convincing explanation for America’s fall, should Donald Trump end up her author and finisher: bad journalism.
America’s media establishment endlessly repeated Republican claims that Hillary Clinton was a threat to the security and good order of the republic, because she stored official emails on her own server, and erased about 33,000 of them she said were private. TheNew York Times ran three front-page stories about FBI director James Comey’s surprise review of another set of emails found on the computer of Anthony Weiner’s wife, Clinton aide Huma Abedin. This second review, however, like the first, ended up showing no wrongdoing.
This article was originally published at The Washington Spectator
The elite gatekeepers of our public discourse never bothered with context: that every Secretary of State since the invention of the internet had done the same thing, because the State Department’s computer systems have always been awful; that at the end of the administration of the nation’s 41st president a corrupt national archivist appointed by Ronald Reagan upon the recommendation of Dick Cheney signed a secret document giving George H.W. Bush personal, physical custody of the White House’s email backup tapes so they would never enter the public record. (A federal judge voided the document as “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and contrary to law.”) The White House of his son George W. Bush erased 22 million of its official emails, including those under subpoena from Congress. Newspapers archived by the Lexis-Nexis database mentioned Hillary R. Clinton’s 33,000 erased private emails 785 times in 2016. I found six references to George W. Bush’s 22 million erased public ones: four in letters to the editor, one in a London Independent op-ed, another in a guide to the U.S. election for Australians, and one a quotation from a citizen in the Springfield (Ohio) News-Sun.
And now we have Donald Trump, elected in part because of his alleged tender concern for the secure handling of intelligence, making calls to world leaders from Trump Tower’s unsecured telephones.
Trump boogied his way to Pennsylvania Avenue to the tune of the extraordinary finding by a Washington Post-ABC News poll that “corruption in government” was listed by 17 percent of voters as the most important issue in the presidential election, second only to the economy, and ahead of terrorism and health care—and that voters trusted Trump over Clinton to be better on the issue by a margin of 48 to 39 percent, her worst deficit on any issue. This is the part of my article where rhetorical conventions demand I provide a thumbnail sketch of all the reasons why it’s factually absurd that anyone would believe that Donald Trump is less corrupt than Hillary Clinton. I have better things to do with my time than belabor the obvious.
Yet somehow, the great mass of Americans believed Clinton was the crook. Might it have something to do with the myriad articles like, say, “Smoke Surrounds the Clinton Foundation,” by TheLos Angeles Times’s top pundit Doyle McManus? This piece, all too typically, despite endeavoring to debunk Trump claims of Clinton corruption, repeated charges like “Doug Band, who helped create the Clinton Global Initiative, sought access to State Department officials for Clinton Foundation donors”—even though donors did not get that access). And that donors harbored the “assumption” that they would “move to the head of the line”—even though they never did.
And what were pundits like McManus smoking? The vapors from a cunning long-term disinformation campaign run by the man Donald Trump appointed as his chief White House political strategist. Steve Bannon chartered a nonprofit “Government Accountability Institute,” whose president, Peter Schweizer, hacked out an insinuation-laden tome, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, then offered its “findings” on an exclusive pre-publication basis to the Times, which shamefully accepted the deal—with, predictably, the public’s perceptions of Clinton’s trustworthiness cratering in tandem with our national Newspaper of Record’s serial laundering of Steve Bannon’s filth.
Now we have a president-elect who boasts of his immunity from prosecution for leveraging his office for personal gain (“The President can’t have a conflict of interest”). This after having telegraphed, in 2000, his intent to use a presidential run to “make money on it,” for all America’s journalists to see—and ignore. At the Republican convention, Michael Mukasey, the former United States attorney general under George W. Bush, drew appreciative applause for the line that Hillary Clinton would be the “first president in history to take the oath of office after violating it.” No reporter I’m aware of had the initiative to track down Mr. Mukasey to follow up: what do you make of accusations that Donald Trump is laying the groundwork for a day-one violation of Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution (the “Emoluments Clause”), which proscribes any elected official of the United States government from accepting any present, emolument, title, etc. from any foreign state or foreign leader? Trump has already done so several times that we are aware of. These include reports that the government of Georgia has since the election green-lighted a new Trump property there, a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in which Trump promoted his Turkish business partners, and all the foreign dignitaries renting rooms at Trump’s new hotel in Washington at $850 a night.
It was a steely Fox News correspondent who earned a reputation as Donald Trump’s most fearless media adversary: “You’ve called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals,” Megyn Kelly said to him in an August 2015 debate. “Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president . . . ? Camp Trump savaged her in response, but she continued, apparently undaunted—so much so that by January, Bill Maher said she was doing such a good job keeping Trump on his toes that she should be one of the Republican candidates. In October, she brought Newt Gingrich to the verge of apoplexy by pointing out that Donald Trump was by his own admission a sexual predator. “You’re fascinated with sex and you don’t care about public policy,” Gingrich shrieked in return. Kelly, with astonishing sangfroid, responded that she was in fact “fascinated by the protection of women, and understanding what we’re getting in the Oval Office,” and coolly suggested Gingrich should work on his “anger issues.”
And there, finally, it was: hiding in plain sight, a media superstar who actually understood her vocation. That the job of the Fourth Estate in the run-up to an election is to inform the citizenry about what they need to know about the choices before them, without fear or favor, even at risk of their own careers. Which appeared a serious risk indeed, given that this brave truth-teller was an employee of the Trump-fluffing Fox News.
Except, no. Next came what to my mind was the most bone-chilling revelations of the entire campaign season: that Kelly’s personal safety had grown so precarious that a Fox news executive had to caution Donald Trump’s personal lawyer about emitting further who-will-rid-me-of-this-meddlesome-priest–style messages—before the Fox anchor got capped by some fevered Trump fanatic. (“Let me put it to you in terms you can understand: If Megyn Kelly gets killed, it’s not going to help your candidate.”) Kelly also reported that Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski “specifically threatened me if I showed up at the second debate hosted by Fox News.” She also pointed out that Trump’s social-media manager had tweeted, “Watch what happens to her after this election is over.” Problem being, Kelly revealed all this after the election was over. In coordination with the PR campaign for her brand new book. Until those interests aligned, apparently, America did not need to know that the minions of one of the candidates for president were flirting with loosing vigilante assassins upon a journalist.
For the likes of Megyn Kelly, it’s just a business opportunity. Same with CBS chairman Les Moonves, who observed, back in February: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” Or, yet worse, a game. Moonves again: “Man, who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now? . . . The money’s rolling in and this is fun.”
For CNN, Trumpland’s been an entire off-the-shelf business model. Their president, Jeff Zucker, was the executive who green-lighted “The Apprentice” while head of NBC Entertainment. He’s a co*cktail-party pal with Donald, and has been accused by Huffington Post and BuzzFeed founder Ken Lerer, who knows the media business inside and out, of turning the Trump campaign into the very backbone of their 2016 brand as “a strategy, a programming strategy.”
It’s certainly not, for the Cable News Network, a news story in any recognizable sense, which would imply some sort of responsibility to inform. How could CNN possibly do that after hiring Corey Lewandowski to comment upon a man, Donald Trump, whose emoluments he still received, and who was under a binding legal agreement never to inform the public of anything disparaging about him?
So where are we now? At the razor’s edge. The Trump transition has put in stark relief the very foundations of the profession of journalism in modern America—whose fundamental canon is that there are two legitimate sides to every story, occasionally more, but never less. In a political campaign, they are structured on an iron axis. The Democratic side. The Republican side. Any critical attempt to weigh the utterances of one as more dangerous than the other is, by definition, the worst conceivable professional sin.
Then, the picture that results is presumed to map social reality on a one-to-one basis.
Thus, the crisis. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” as Upton Sinclair once observed. But by now, the conventional operation has been yielding distortions so palpable that even some mainstream professional journalists and editors are starting to understand it.
But sometimes, they have not.
It’s been a 50-50 sort of thing—and this is the hinge moment I suspect historians will bore down upon with particular intensity some decades hence.
They will study, from the evening of November 17 on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” a searingly courageous and astringent interview with white supremacist Richard Spencer, no punches pulled. He wanted to talk about how school kids naturally sort themselves into races in the cafeteria, and how New Yorkers eye each other warily on the subway: nothing more. Then, for any listener who might find temptation to locate this within the warm bounds of civic reason, reporter Kelly McEvers very effectively and patiently relocated him to the chilliest corners of a civic Antarctica. The edit of the interview led with him pronouncing, “What I would ultimately want is this ideal of a space effectively for Europeans.” Her probing then revealed his affection for the swastika—“an ancient symbol”—and his approval of “people who want to get in touch with their identity as a European”—just not via “physical threats or anything like that.”
This was journalism. This told the truth.
Then came NPR’s “Morning Edition” on November 18—where Steve Inskeep interviewed reporter Scott Horsley on three major Trump appointments, Jeff Sessions for attorney general, and Mike Pompeo for head of the CIA, and Michael Flynn as national security advisor, a series of lies of omission.
Inskeep blandly introduced them as “Trump loyalists,” who “mirror some of the positions that the president-elect himself took during the campaign.” Flynn sharing Trump’s “concerns about radical Islam,” Sessions “a real hard-liner when it comes to illegal immigration.” Flynn—“a Democrat”—“took some flak for taking payments from Russian state television,” and believes “we must be able to deal with Russia.” But, we were reassured, “still describes Russia as a grave threat.” Pompeo, Inskeep observed, “is going to be wading into quite a challenge,” because “Trump has said that he wants the United States to get back into the torture business.”
But Senator Mark Warner was brought in to reassure us: “Hopefully, that hypothetical will—we won’t have to address.” Added Horsley, “the CIA director is a post that is subject to Senate confirmation, as is the attorney general’s post.”
The National Security Advisor, however, is not.
NPR’s producers brought in a former colleague of General Flynn’s, named Sarah Chayes.
Inskeep: “How closely did you work with General Flynn?”
Chayes: “We shared an office. Our desks faced each other.”
“Well, what is he like as an office mate?”
“Fun, for starters . . .”
You see, she explained, he reminded her of the character in “Peanuts,” Pig Pen.
Inskeep almost giggled: “O.K., the kid who was a little dirty, O.K. So you’re saying that things were a little chaotic around General Flynn. But you found this guy to be extraordinarily enthusiastic . . . .”
They kibbitzed like that for a little while longer. Inskeep seemed pleased to learn she had never heard anything prejudiced from him. He asked how she felt when she heard about his selection. She answered, “My heart sank.”
Inskeep sounded surprised: “Really? Why?”
“Everything I just said”—meaning, she hadn’t been joking. Inskeep had plainly thought it all was a jape. She put it bluntly: “The NSA is an institution that, first of all, has to keep the trains running. That’s the first job of the National Security Advisor—is to make the National Security Advisor run.”
Inskeep, impatiently: “O.K.”
Chayes, starkly: “Flynn can’t make anything run.”
Which, considering that she was saying he was objectively unsuited for the job he was to fill—the NSA’s job is to organize, and Flynn is staggeringly disorganized—sounded like something they could have dwelt upon at greater length than what “Peanuts” character he most resembled. But no: “O.K., Sarah, got to stop you there because of the clock.”
Hard break. The show was over. No time to squeeze a word in about Flynn leading the cheers to “Lock Her Up” at the Republican convention, concerning Hillary Clinton’s dodgy email server, though Flynn himself routinely broke security rules he considered “stupid,” including having a forbidden internet connection installed in his Pentagon offices. Nor what security reporter Dana Priest described as his reposts of “the vitriol of anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim commentators.” And in another instance a tweet concerning Clintonite “Sex Crimes w/Children, etc.” Nothing mentioned about the book Flynn co-authored with conspiracy theorist Michael Ledeen, which spread the insane far-right conviction that Islam is not a religion but a conspiracy aimed at destroying Judeo-Christian civilization. (Priest: “I’ve asked Flynn directly about this claim; he has told me that he doesn’t have proof—it’s just something he feels as true.”) Nor his business ties to Turkey, on whose behalf, without disclosure, he has written op-eds advising extradition of an enemy of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s regime. Nor that he not merely “appeared” on Russia’s state-sponsored English-language station RT but was a paid speaker at their anniversary gala in Moscow. Nor that he has stated, “I’ve been at war with Islam”—he corrected himself, for political correctness’s sake: “or a component of Islam”—“for the last decade.”
He’s General Jack D. Ripper from Dr. Strangelove. Yet listening to NPR, you’d think he was a disheveled version of Lawrence Eagleburger.
Media on the razor’s edge between truth and acquiescence. Consider two more case studies: TheWashington Post and Time magazine.
TheWashington Post: it had some great investigations on Trump, for instance the stunning, meticulous reporting of David Fahrenthold demonstrating how the Trump Foundation operates as an elaborate self-enriching scam. The editors loved it. But when columnist Richard Cohen reported that Trump said to someone Cohen knew, about then-13-year-old Ivanka, “Is it wrong to be more sexually attracted to your own daughter than your wife?”, the words, which appeared in an advance draft circulated for publication, were excised in the published version.
It’s almost like they keep score in editorial offices. Only a certain number of horrifying—which is to say, truthful—things can be allowed in a major publication about our president-elect every day, which then must be balanced by something reassuring. Which is to say, something not true. Like the headline the Post circulated for its daily promotional email on November 24: “Trump Looks to Diversify His Cabinet With Latest Picks.” Which, remarkably, was precisely the same angle TheNew York Times played: “Trump Diversifies Cabinet.” Both were referring to the same individuals, Nikki Haley, and Betsy DeVos. You’d think the lead about Trump’s appointment of Haley would instead be the extraordinary irresponsibility of picking someone without a day’s foreign policy experience in her life as America’s ambassador to the United Nations. Or, concerning Education Secretary-designate DeVos, the fact that she married into a family that built an empire on industrial-scale fraud (the family business, Amway, paid $150 million in 2011 to settle one class action suit), that the company founded by her brother Erik Prince was responsible for the most lawless American massacre of the Iraq war (and then, when contracting with a country with a functioning rule of law got to be too much, turned to building a mercenary air force for rent to Third World nations, in cahoots with China’s largest state-owned investment firm).
Or, you know, that she has no education experience, except if you count writing checks to advocate its privatization.
Time magazine: they just ran a very illuminating piece by historian David Kaiser exposing Steve Bannon’s alarming interpretation of a theory advanced by amateur historians Neil Howe and William Strauss in books like The Fourth Turning: An American Prophesy, that every 80 years or so the United States endures a nation-transforming crisis: “More than once during our interview,” Kaiser wrote of an earlier interview with Bannon, where “he pointed out that each of the three preceding crises had involved a great war, and those conflicts had increased in scope from the American Revolution through the Civil War to the Second World War. He expected a new and even bigger war as part of the current crisis, and he did not seem at all fazed by the prospect.”
That the president elect’s closest adviser both welcomes apocalyptic conflagrations, and will soon be well-positioned to bring one about, is the kind of news you’d think a more responsible national press would be pursuing. I haven’t seen much mention of the fact, beyond my Bolshevik friends on Facebook, however. From the warm and fuzzy confines of Time’s editorial offices, however, I received the following reassuringmissive by way of balance:
“5 Potential Quick Victories for President Donald Trump: Few have high expectations for the President-elect’s foreign policy. But he could make some big improvements.”
Click the link. Print it out. Seal between two six-inch thick plates of Lexan glass and bury it 50 feet deep in a lead-lined bunker. Future archaeologists are going to need it. It will help them explain how a once-great civilization fell.
Rick Perlstein is The Washington Spectator’s national correspondent.
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Republican 'vote fraud' goon squads are nothing new
Some scenes from the madness as we enter the final days before the 2016 presidential elections:
- In Des Moines on October 27, a 55-year old woman named Terri Lynn Rote was charged with first-degree election misconduct after deliberately casting a second vote for Donald Trump. She said she was worried that her first would be changed to a vote for Hillary Clinton. “The polls are rigged,” she explained to Iowa Public Radio, echoing the constant refrain of her pumpkin-faced hero.
- Early in October in Mike Pence’s Indiana, state police raided and shut down a voter registration office. The raid occurred shortly after Hoosier Secretary of State Connie Lawson announced that “nefarious actors are operating here in Indiana,” claiming that “thousands of dates of birth and first names” had been changed in the online voter database. Responded the shuttered organization: “Hundreds of thousands of Indiana Voter File records are inaccurate, duplicative, outdated, erroneous, invalid, inconsistent, and/or clearly the product of poor data management by Republican Secretary of State Connie Lawson”—who has donated $2,250 to Pence’s gubernatorial campaign. Lawson then admitted the alleged irregularities could have been legitimate corrections made by voters.
- In Beaufort County, North Carolina, this week a 100-year-old black woman named Grace Bell Hardison is in danger of losing her right to vote after her registration was challenged by a local Republican who complained that a 2015 political mailing to the house where she has lived her entire life was returned as undeliverable—a technique known as “voter caging.” Mrs. Hardison points out that she never got the letter because for her entire century on earth her family received their mail at the post office. North Carolina is the state where Republican Party Executive Director Dallas Woodhouse sent a memotelling local election boards that “Republicans can and should make party line changes to early voting.” He added, “We are under no obligation to offer more opportunities for voter fraud.” In all, 138 registered voters were challenged in the same caging operation that snared Hardison; 92 were black and registered Democrats.
- In Wisconsin, Department of Motor Vehicle workers have been providing erroneous information to residents of the state who lack birth certificates, sabotaging their ability to obtain IDs they are entitled to that would qualify them to vote.
- In Pennsylvania, Republicans filed a last-minute suit on First and Fourteenth Amendment grounds to allow out-of-county poll watchers in cities like Philadelphia.
- In Florida, a federal judge convened a hearing to examine why the processing of voter registration applications has “slowed dramatically.” As of October 28, Republican Governor Rick Scott’s state employees had not verified the applications of 25,000 Floridians awaiting the completion of the registration process.
- On Wednesday, October 26, the group known as “Oath Keepers” announced “Operation Sabot 2016.” Law enforcement officers join this seven-year-old organization, which also calls itself “Police and Military Against the New World Order,” by pledging to disobey unconstitutional orders such as “forcing American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext.” Now, Oath Keepers is calling upon “retired police officers, our military intelligence veterans, and our Special Warfare veterans” to “apply their considerable training in investigation, intelligence gathering, and field-craft” to fight the Democrats’ alleged “well-orchestrated campaign of criminal vote fraud on an industrial scale.”
Most of these fevered efforts are aimed at preventing people from pretending to be someone else at the polls, in order to vote more than once, or to cast a vote in the name of some dead or otherwise debilitated individual. As are the laws, passed in profusion in more than 30 states like Wisconsin and North Carolina, requiring voters to present identification at the polls, laws that have had the effect of disproportionately disenfranchising black voters like Mrs. Hardison. But an extensive canvass conducted by Assistant U.S. Attorney General Justin Levitt (while he was a law professor at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles) found only 31 instances of in-person voter fraud out of more than 1 billion votes cast nationally between 2000-2014.
The Republican elephant never forgets.
Smoking-gun evidence like the email from the North Carolina Republican Party official has piled up to prove the partisan intent of the “vote fraud” scares. At the same time, there is plenty of evidence that ordinary Republicans are sincere in their belief that scouring polling places to spot Democratic perfidy is a patriotic act: they think they’re preserving democracy. Add these two phenomena together and what you get is a racket—one guaranteed to disenfranchise many times more (mostly Democratic) voters that could ever conceivably be attempting any fraud.
Like so many stories that seem novel in this strange election year, there’s nothing particularly new about the voter fraud scare. This particular myth dates back to 1960, where it all started in my very own hometown of Chicago, borne of the legend that John F. Kennedy only won the presidency because of the chicanery of Mayor Richard J. Daley. The Republican elephant never forgets.
The Chicago Vote Hustle
The legend was borne out of some truth.
“Once we got beyond the old days of paper ballots, which had numerous ways of cheating, and we got to the old-fashioned machines where you pulled down the lever, the bottom line was that they could steal by my calculations about 100,000 votes in the city. The cheating did affect one or two major races.”
The speaker is my friend Don Rose, the legendary liberal Chicago campaign consultant. If anyone knows how election cheating really worked in Chicago, it’s Don, who had a hand in just about every campaign fighting Daley’s corrupt Cook County Democratic machine since the 1940s. He was kind enough to run down for me how the old tricks operated. The most prevalent, he said, was illegal assistance, where an election judge pulled the lever for hordes of supposedly debilitated, but actually able-bodied, voters. The rule that was supposed to prevent this particular practice required the presence of both Republican and Democratic election judges at each polling station. But “you have to remember that in a tremendous number of precincts, usually in the black neighborhoods, the alleged Republican judges were really Democrats.”
There was mechanical tampering: “Many’s the time,” says Don, working as a poll watcher on the morning of an election, “that I opened up a machine and there were votes already registered.” And a trick using rubber bands: when a voter tried to pull down one of the smaller levers to register Republican exceptions to a straight Democratic ticket, “the lever bounded up.” There was vote buying, with “everything from turkeys to nylon hose.” Also threats to throw dissident voters out of their apartments: “Everyone who’s in public housing is violating some rule.” And this simple expedient: “the false count, where the so-called Republican judges and Democratic judges, they just called in the wrong totals downtown.” In one instance he’s aware of, that call downtown happened at gunpoint.
It was then, and only then, that Don came to the rarest scam: voter impersonation, including the infamous “cemetery vote.” That’s the stuff Republicans are most terrified of now—practically the only one you hear about. Don says it never was all that common—“10 or 15 percent of the total steal.”
So in Cook County, Illinois, back in the day, crooked elections were not just a Republican fantasy: they were real. Just not, Don thinks, a factor in the 1960 presidential election. “It was my understanding that when the Republicans finally put their count in, Daley gave them a legitimate count. I would say, personally, I can’t prove it, that Kennedy actually won Illinois narrowly.”
And if you know Chicago politics, and the 1960 elections, that’s not surprising. Kennedy won the black vote overwhelmingly, thanks to his last-minute intervention decrying the incarceration of Martin Luther King Jr. for an Atlanta department store sit-in, advertised via millions of flyers distributed in black churches the Sunday before the election. So there wouldn’t have been many Republican votes in the suspect precincts to steal. Any that were would likely have been canceled out anyway, according to an ancient formula in Illinois statewide politics: for every dead person who votes Democrat in Chicago, a cow votes Republican downstate.
“But there’s always that question, because nobody really knows,” Don allows.
There was no such doubt within the Republican National Committee, which, convinced the election was stolen, in 1961 launched a “ballot security program” strikingly like the ones flourishing now. A pamphlet that year published by the RNC’s Women’s Division, full of unsourced scare stories, advised: “Place poll watchers, armed with cameras, outside polls.” Or, conceivably, armed with arms: “Extra Security. In areas where there is an unusual amount of fraud, it is not enough to have polling officials on duty in the usual numbers. They must be augmented by an extra staff trained to give the added security and protection necessary to combat the fraud history of the area. Hire trained investigators, if necessary.”
By the 1962 congressional elections, the operation had a catchy name, “Operation Eagle Eye,” and a fire-breathing right-wing go-getter to run it: Charles Barr, the assistant to the president of Standard Oil of Illinois and an activist in the cabal working to draft Barry Goldwater for the Republican nomination. The national effort was, naturally, headquartered in downtown Chicago. Its recruiters were especially active in Chicago’s Republican suburbs where volunteers—including, according to the Arlington Heights Herald, “some 25 northwest suburban physicians,” who “preferred to remain unnamed,” and the campaign manager of a suburban Congressional candidate named Donald Rumsfeld—flocked to Republican offices to be trained in single two-hour evening sessions. The effort relied, according to the right-leaning Chicago Tribune which covered Eagle Eye heavily and with hearty approval, “on the cooperation of business and industry in giving a day off with pay to employees who want to combat vote frauds.”
The volunteers from the suburbs turned their attention to the city’s Democratic precincts. On Election Day, Congressman Roman Pucinski asked a doctor why he wasn’t out watching polls out in his own area instead of harassing the Congressman’s Polish-born constituents. None were needed, came the answer. “Our people are honest.” Barr later reported that “2,500 workers discouraged or successfully challenged 50,000 illegally registered voters”—or, in other interviews, less circ*mspectly, “a conservative estimate showed we saved 50,000 votes that otherwise would have been stolen.”
Vote Fraud Racket in Arizona
Stolen how? Precisely what Republicans were afraid of became more evident in 1971. That was the year when a certain distinguished jurist from Phoenix, Arizona, was nominated to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court, and America learned that for at least some Republicans “stolen” was the functional equivalent of “the wrong people voted.”
Arizonans had pioneered the “vote fraud” racket as far back as 1954, when Republicans exploited a literacy requirement in state election law. (Such literacy tests were outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1966.) Poll watchers forced black and Latino voters to read aloud a passage of the Constitution printed on a notecard. In 1958 they also sent out 18,000 caging letters. Then came 1962. In a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman James Eastland regarding William Rehnquist’s pending confirmation hearings, a federal judge named Charles Hardy described what he witnessed that year, when Rehnquist was in charge of Operation Eagle Eye for Maricopa County:
The Republicans had challengers in all the precincts in this county which had overwhelming Democratic registration. At that time, among the statutory grounds for challenging a person offering to vote [was] . . . that he was unable to read the Constitution of the United States in the English language. In each precinct every black or Mexican voter was challenged on this latter ground, and it was quite clear that this type of challenging was a deliberate effort to slow down the voting. . . . In the black and brown areas, handbills were distributed warning persons that if they were not properly qualified to vote, they would be prosecuted. There were squads of people taking photographs of voters standing in line to vote and asking for their names.
Another Eagle Eye principal that year was Arizona Republican chairman Richard G. Kleindienst. Under Richard Nixon, he would become Attorney General of the United States.
In 1963 a Republican official complained that the first Operation Eagle Eye “was not organized well enough. We need 15,000 trained watchers as Republican judges who will not be intimidated.” So Charlie Barr got the band back together, bigger than ever before. “The volunteers work for the cause of good government by promoting the voting obligations of all citizens,” he said in a June 1964 recruitment message. Another recruiter—Ronald Reagan—explained, “Its fundamental purpose is to restore public confidence in this country’s voting processes.” An organizer in New Jersey asserted there to be “an average manipulation of 3 million ballots in the 1960 presidential election.” An organizer for Eagle Eye in the suburban Lake, Boone, and McHenry Counties of Illinois implored, “How would you feel right now if you knew that your vote in November would be taken away by vote fraud?”
When it comes to “ballot security,” Republicans were on a war footing. And truth is the first casualty of war.
Rehnquist needed no such persuading. He was just coming off a campaign for a local ordinance allowing segregation in public accommodations in Phoenix—an issue mooted that July by passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which he had successfully lobbied his friend Barry Goldwater to vote against. Now Goldwater was the Republican nominee. In 1986, when Rehnquist was up for chief justice, a lawyer and civil rights activist named Lito Peña told a story to The New York Times, which was confirmed in its exact particulars by several witnesses. When Rehnquist forced blacks to read those note cards printed with a snatch of the Constitution (“containing a lot of big and difficult words,” another witness said)—and then to interpret it—Peña warned him that examining voters was the sole authority of election officials. Rehnquist “raised a fist as if he was fixing to throw a punch.” (You can read all about Rehnquist’s denials of these charges in both his 1971 hearings to become associate justice and his 1986 confirmation hearings to become chief justice, and a presentation of convincing evidence he lied, in this definitive 2004 report on Republican ballot security programs from the Center for Voting Rights and Protections.)
Democrats had seen it all coming as the voter-suppression plan unfolded across the country. In an October 27 press conference DNC chairman John Bailey cited the evidence: documents from Minnesota explaining, “Your job is partisan,” and specifically directing workers to stall lines in Democratic precincts while keeping them moving for Republicans; a booklet explaining that “all sheriffs in the state of Louisiana, except one, are sympathetic with Senator Goldwater’s election. We should take full advantage of this situation.” In the week before Election Day, press reports documented smoking gun after smoking gun. An official in an unidentified Southern state told TheWall Street Journal that Eagle Eyes were advised to bring cameras to the polls: “even if the poll watchers don’t know how to use the cameras, potential Democratic wrongdoers might be frightened off.”
In Philadelphia, efforts were led by a former president of the Jaycees who ignored pleas by local officials that the city already had a widely respected bipartisan ballot-security group. In New Mexico, a former FBI agent ran the show. In Southern California, Eagle Eyes promised a presence at all 12,600 Los Angeles County precincts—no matter that under California law citizen voting challenges were illegal. The District of Columbia’s GOP chairman, announcing “we will not have a Cook County election here,” hired 40 private detectives to help out in Baltimore, and told a meeting that well-dressed people would not be challenged, only “the kind of guys you can buy for a buck or a bottle of booze,” or “people who look like they don’t belong in the community or are not the kind of people who would register and vote.” He said special focus would be placed on those voting for the first time—of which, as in the current election, there were many. Barry Goldwater, after all, was the Donald Trump of 1964.
Vice Presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey gave a press conference denouncing what he dubbed “Operation Evil Eye.” RNC chair Dean Burch, undeterred, countered, “Contrary to [DNC Chairman] Bailey’s unfounded and desperate charge, the diligent Republican effort to prevent a repeat of Democratic vote fraud is designed to help and encourage all voters, especially those of the nationality groups.” Which was a dog whistle, 1964-style: “nationality groups,” also known as white ethnics, was the term of art for the largely Catholic Eastern European immigrants at the cutting edge of the anti-civil rights backlash.
All told, the RNC sent out about 1.8 million caging letters nationwide—to the entire registration lists in 15 cities including Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and St. Louis. On election eve, reports came in from California of anonymous phone calls to blacks and Mexicans warning voters who moved since they had registered. From Texas, handbills in black neighborhoods from the “Harris County Negro Protective Association” (there was no such organization) warning of categories liable to arrest for voting, such as those “Questioned by police for any offense,” and “Voters who have not appeared as witnesses or defendants in criminal or civil matters.”
In New Jersey, where the Essex County Superintendent of Elections found evidence that Republicans intended to challenge literally every voter in Newark, a Democratic spokesman complained, “the advance publicity is scaring hell out of a lot of people who are not certain of their rights.” Eagle Eye even stationed what TheIndianapolis Stardescribed as “a pert Republican housewife” in a certain precinct in Austin, who “looked on silent and unsmiling” as Lyndon Baines and Lady Bird Johnson dropped their ballots in the box.
The outcome, naturally, was a fiasco. The GOP county chairman in Houston had alleged more than a thousand “fictitious” or ineligible registrations. The Austin Americanchecked it out—finding only “simple clerical errors in either the writing of the original tax receipt or in transferring the address to the poll list.” A black college instructor from Long Beach learned he was on an Eagle Eye list of eight allegedly ineligible voters. He called the police to complain. “Seven of the eight on the list were just as eligible as can be,” a newspaper reported, “including the instructor.” A circuit court judge in Miami enjoined Citizens for Goldwater for “Illegal mass challenging without cause, conducted in such manner as to obstruct the orderly conduct of this election.” Said a Dade County supervisor, “Poll watchers seem to be vying with each other to see who can create the most disturbances.”
In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the Eagle Eyes proved so obnoxious people called out the police. And in St. George, South Carolina, voting officials wearing Goldwater buttons were systematically challenging every third black voter in line.
And back in Cook County, Illinois, voting for Lyndon Johnson in certain precincts was about as easy as cracking Fort Knox. One black newspaper reported, “A man on the far side of 60, accompanied by his wife, marched into Edward Moore’s 30th ward Republican headquarters, 4715 Madison to complain of being refused his right to vote.” The old man’s walk across the West Side was over a mile. “‘I’ve lived in the ward for four years,’ said John Pilat, 4052 West End. ‘I’ve voted in every election and I re-registered back in 1961 when we all had to. Now they tell me my name isn’t on the list or in the binder.’”
In fact, in Chicago, the corruption claims Goldwaterites used to justify the creation of Eagle Eye had already been mooted. Weeks before the election, the Illinois election board had sent challenge notices to 141,000 registrants, striking 139,000 voters from the lists. Eagle Eye stationed a staggering 5,000 poll watchers in the city anyway—by whom, Charlie Barr lied, “no challenges will be made to anyone who is legally entitled to vote.” In the end, Republicans were able to claim a mere 500 irregularities—compared to God knows how many LBJ votes that were not cast because of the voter-suppression program. In Cleveland, the Cuyahoga County Democratic chairman was convinced Operation Eagle Eye cost them as many as 10,000.
Which, in the topsy-turvy world of wingnut electioneering, could only be counted as a smashing victory for democracy. When it comes to “ballot security,” Republicans were on a war footing. And truth is the first casualty of war.
The vote-fraud myth had long since floated up into the Empyrean realms of fact-free Republican lunacy, alongside death panels and the grass hut in darkest Africa where Barack Obama was born, right down the way from Saddam Hussein’s WMD.
The following year, the California Legislature, weighing a post-campaign Republican bulletin describing the mass challenges in Los Angeles as a masterful bluff to scare off Democratic voters whether they were eligible or not, outlawed voter caging. (If only lawmakers were so responsive now.) Illinois Republicans revived Eagle Eye for the 1966 Congressional elections. Then in 1968, it again went national, this time under the supervision of John Mitchell, Richard Nixon’s campaign manager and the future felonious attorney general of the United States. “They aren’t going to steal Cook County,” Nixon told a journalist aboard his campaign plane a few days before the election. “We have Operation Eagle Eye watching them this time.”
How did that work? The story that Chicago insurance millionaire W. Clement Stone paid the Blackstone Rangers street gang a million dollars to graffiti the ghetto with messages like “A Vote for Humphrey Is a Vote for the Man” may be apocryphal—though Rangers chieftain Jeff Fort wasinvited to Nixon’s inaugural. And we do know that 10,000 caging letters were mailed free of charge using Senator Everett Dirksen’s franking privileges, with his Capitol Hill office as return address, returned envelopes ferried to Eagle Eye HQ in Chicago. The national program was run by the retired former number two man in the FBI, Louis B. Nichols, whom touts were predicting as Nixon’s choice to replace J. Edgar Hoover. That was until a 1969 Associated Press articleinvestigation alleged that Nichols was laundering money on Hoover’s behalf, but not before Nichols published an article in Reader’s Digest describing his 1968 work in defense of the sanctity of the ballot as a “powerful ‘psychological warfare’ campaign.”
Eagle Eye continued into 1970, when the tarnished name was retired after a black Republican leader pointed out its “disastrous effects” on the party’s efforts to recruit minority voters. The racket, however, endured, with even more vaulting ambitions. “By 1972,” the Center for Voting Rights and Protections documented, “Republicans were pushing for much more: one poll-watcher for each machine and for each ballot box.” Efforts were stymied, however, by a certain inconvenience. As the polite law professors who wrote the 2004 ballot security report put it, “Many volunteers needed encouragement because they were assigned to precincts outside their home district,” in “core city areas where Republicans did not have a core constituency.” With crime rates skyrocketing, pert Republican housewives and bright-eyed young business executives now feared, according to an October 12, 1972 RNC memo, being “deserted in a strange place.”
It hardly mattered, at least in Chicago, that old-school election fraud had gone the way of the Whigs. In 1968 reporters from the Chicago Daily News (a Democratic paper) and investigators from the city’s Better Government Association documented machine pols registering residents at a flop house for $1 each “as fast as they could write.” By 1972, a joint effort of Republicans and reform Democrats called Project LEAP (“Legal Elections in All Precincts”) ended practices like paying phony Republican election judges, and a series of judicial decrees outlawed political activity by city workers. The reforms marked the effective end of the Daley machine. “By 1974,” Don Rose remembers, “the whole thing had been pretty much quashed.” And now we know from the work of Loyola’s Justin Levitt, the same has been true nationwide since 2000.
As if Republicans could care. The vote-fraud myth had long since floated up into the Empyrean realms of fact-free Republican lunacy, alongside death panels and the grass hut in darkest Africa where Barack Obama was born, right down the way from Saddam Hussein’s WMD. As the half-witted conservative pundit Hugh Hewitt wrote in a 2004 book If It’s Not Close, They Can’t Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends on It, “Democrats will want to cheat in 2004, 2006, and beyond. It’s in their blood. It’s in their genes.”
No, it’s in their genes. A final coda to the ignoble reign of Operation Eagle Eye: in 1975: its author, Charlie Barr, was caught padding contracts for public relations work for the Illinois Board of Elections with $189,237 in phony fees and reimbursem*nts, in cahoots with an old buddy on the board who had served as Operation Eagle Eye’s lawyer.
Now, at long last, the Republican National Committee is terrified that out-of-control ballot security vigilantes will cause problems for the party. On October 19, an RNC lawyer sent a panicked letter to committee members imploring them not to encourage or engage in the “ballot security” techniques that led to a 1982 consent decree stemming from a New Jersey election where the GOP sent out off-duty cops in “National Ballot Security Task Force” arm bands, wearing their guns openly, and systematically challenging black voters who were sent postcards returned as undeliverable.
Since 1982, that is to say, parties associated with the official Republican Party have been forbidden to undertake “any ballot security activities in polling places or election districts where the racial or ethnic composition of such districts is a factorin the decision to conduct, or the actual conduct of, such activities there and where a purpose or significant effect of such activities is to deter qualified voters from voting; and the conduct of such activities disproportionately in or directed toward districts that have a substantial proportion of racial or ethnic populationsshall be considered relevant evidence of the existence of such a factor and purpose.”
It never really stopped, of course. Only now, just like this year’s transformation of the old racist Republican dog whistle into a bullhorn, it took Donald Trump to turn the old racket up to eleven, again putting the party at risk.
“You are encouraged not to engage in ‘ballot security’ activities even in your personal, state party, or campaign capacity,” a letter to RNC members read. “If you elect to do so, please be aware that the RNC in no way sanctions your activity.” That’s because the consent degree is set to expire on December 17—but can be renewed through 2025 if the RNC is found to be in violation.
But the RNC ain’t the Oath Keepers. “Watchdog Alleges Virginia Prepping to Accommodate Mass Voter Fraud,” their website announced the Tuesday before the election. On the Saturday before that they advised volunteers to conduct their own exit polls on Election Day, to “prove” that the steal by a “rouge [sic] political party” is on. Wrote one Oath Keeper “life member”: “I seriously doubt any of us are devious enough to even think of the methods that these demon infested parasites can come up with. What is important to remember is that they are animals; predators; wolves, intent on devouring the sheep and hunting down the sheepdogs. It is also important to remember that cornered animals are the most dangerous.”
Cornered animals, dangerous indeed. Keep your eagle eyes peeled. And remember: if it’s not close, they can’t cheat. Or so we can hope.
Rick Perlstein is The Washington Spectator’s national correspondent.
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Donald Trump keeps on upping the ante. Consider what he said at a rally last week in Fresno, on the subject of California’s apocalyptic drought.
Make that “drought,” for according to Donald J. Trump, there isn’t one. Never mind that the years between late 2001 and 2014 have been the driest in California history since record-keeping began; nor the 12 million trees that have died from “drought” in Southern California; nor predictions that the 2015 El Nino would bring relief, though the amount of rainfall actually decreased.
In Fresno, Donald approached the podium. He led off with a customary boast. (“What a crowd . . . I saw on television this morning, five o’clock in the morning, people were lining up. This is crazy, crazy!”) He referred to some real estate transaction he was working “probably 10 or 12 years ago” in their fair city: “They had a problem. You remember the problem, right? They had a problem, I think it was Running Horse, and I was going to take it over and do a beautiful job.” Then, in mid-thought, he pivoted incoherently into the subject on everyone’s minds in that parched agricultural region: “Fortunately, I didn’t do it, because there isn’t any water, because they send all the water out to the ocean, right?”
“I made a fortune by not doing it,” he said. The crowd cheered. Only in Trumplandia do the citizens cheer when they’re not afforded the benefactions of their orange-haired overlord. (I looked it up. His proposal to take over the foundering Running Horse golf course development apparently fell apart because the city refused his demand to dispossess homeowners over a nine-square-mile area through eminent domain.)
He commented that it was too bad he didn’t go through with the deal. Because: “I would have changed the water. . . . You have a water problem that is so insane, that is so ridiculous. Where they’re taking the water and shoving it out to sea.” Loud cheers.
He continued. “It’s not the drought. They have plenty of water. No, they shove it out to sea. Now, why? Because they’re trying to protect a certain kind of three-inch fish.”
“If I win, believe me, we’re going to start opening up the water so that you can have your farmers survive.” Then he moved on.
It made the news: “Donald Trump Tells Californians There Is No Drought.”
Then, however, reporters moved on to the next story, with no time to Google from whence Trump derived this crackpot notion about water taken from farmers and “shoved out to the sea.” The answer, apparently: InfoWars, the website of lunatic conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Who believes, for instance, that the school shooting in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, was staged by the government, using actors, in order to force gun control down the American people’s throats.
The theory that California’s water shortage is all the fault of the Environmental Protection Agency is, like most conspiracy theories, grounded in an actual fact. The EPA has, in fact, caused 800,000 acre-feet of water annually to be flushed into San Francisco Bay to maintain its marine ecosystem. The program, however, dates to the early 1990s, and California’s water system, all told, manages over 40 million acre-feet a year. The practice that Trump describes so darkly involves 2 percent of that—and an economically vital 2 percent at that. California fisheries produce jobs in the hundreds of thousands. But not in Fresno.
The notion that rules governing 800,000 acre-feet of water are the cause of the much larger problem, and that business about the “three-inch fish,” dates—word for word—to an April, 2015, InfoWars article entitled “Environmentalists Caused California Drought to Protect This Fish.”
Since last year, Rachel Maddow has been on the case of Donald Trump’s deep ties to Alex Jones. On the morning of December 2, she wrote in a syndicated column, Jones hosted Trump for an extended live interview. “After about 30 minutes of mutual compliments, and Jones telling Trump that ‘about 90 percent’ of his listeners support him, the presidential candidate wrapped things up by telling Jones: ‘Your reputation is amazing.’”
Maddow continued, “That same day, after that interview, 14 people were killed and 21 others were injured in the mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif. Within hours of that news breaking, Jones and his website—predictably—were hosting discussions of how San Bernardino, like Newtown, like the Boston Marathon bombing, and of course like 9/11, was a hoax. Either it didn’t happen, or if it did it was perpetuated by the government.”
In mid-March, Jones took up the cudgels for Trump in a rant that began: “Everyone’s having their water poisoned, everyone’s having deadly vaccines pushed on them, everyone is having weaponized television aimed at them. . . . It is a metric, scientific, mathematic algorithm of tyranny, that is extremely sophisticated, that can even predict the future.”
“A few thousand people are in on the whole deal. And through compartmentalization, they’re rolling it out.”
Jones explained that shooting “all two million police in the country” in the back of the head wouldn’t help, because “there would just be anarchy and all sorts of problems and they would just bring in foreign troops.”
“The globalists are building a world, in their own words, where normal human life is over. . . . It’s the devil. And the churches are not going to tell you. It’s an alien force, not of this world, attacking humanity, like the Bible and every other ancient text says.”
He screamed at the top of his lungs: “IT’S NOT HUMAN INTELLIGENCE WE’RE FACING! . . . WE’RE UNDER ATTACK! EVERYONE’S UNDER ATTACK!”
And even shooting two million cops could not beat them back.
He proposed, however, something that could. “The elite hate Trump, let me tell you. And if he is a psy-op, let me tell you, he’s the most sophisticated one I ever saw. And even if he is, he’s a revelation of the awakening . . . Humanity’s gotta get off-world, we’ve got to get access to the life-extension technologies . . . I want the advanced life extension! I want to go to space! I want to see inter-dimensional travel! I WANT WHAT GOD PROMISED US! AND I’M NOT GOING TO SIT HERE AND LET SATAN STEAL IT!
Donald Trump appreciates this man’s amazing reputation, has appeared on his program, and is leveraging InfoWar’s insights to feed his symbiosis with his mob. The bigfoot political press missed that story, and will likely continue to miss it, because their entire business model and worldview is predicated upon the idea of two equivalent sides fighting for national power.
That’s not what our nation’s founders promised us. And I’m not going to sit here and let the orange-haired monster steal it.
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Where did Trump come from? Tracing the political lineage of the orange-haired monster
I've been studying the history of American conservatism full time since 1997—almost 20 years now. I’ve read almost every major book on the subject. I thought I knew what I was talking about. Then along comes Donald Trump to scramble the whole goddamned script.
This article was originally published at The Washington Spectator
Now, historians must begin to consider alternate genealogies of the American right: lineages for the orange-haired monster that no one saw coming. Our received narrative of the movement encompassed by Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley and Strom Thurmond and Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan just doesn’t cut it any longer. I’ve done my best to begin the work—thinking through, for instance, Trumpism’s connection to fascism, a political tradition not heretofore considered all that relevant in the American context. Other bodies, however, are buried closer to home.
No history of modern conservatism I’m aware of finds much significance in the 22,000 Nazi sympathizers who rallied for Hitler at Madison Square Garden in February 1939, presided over by a giant banner of General George Washington that stretched almost all the way to the second deck, capped off by a menacing eagle insignia. Nor the now-infamous Ku Klux Klan march through the streets of Queens in 1927, when TheNew York Times reported “1,000 Klansmen and 100 policemen staged a free-for-all,” in which according to one contemporary news report all the individuals arrested were wearing Klan attire, and that one of those arrestees was Donald Trump’s own father.
In the specter of the son’s likely ascension as Republican nominee, however, such events gather significance. Consider the subsequent history of Fred Trump’s career as a developer of middle-class housing in the outer boroughs of New York City. We now know Fred Trump was notorious enough a racist to draw the attention of Woody Guthrie, who wrote a song about him in the 1950s: “I suppose/ Old Man Trump knows/ Just how much/ Racial Hate/ he stirred up/ In the bloodpot of human hearts/ When he drawed/ That color line/ Here at his/ Eighteen hundred family project.”
Twenty years later—by which time he had brought his son in as his apprentice—the hate Old Man Trump stirred in the bloodpot of human hearts became a matter of legal record, when the United States Justice Department sued Trumppère etfils for violating the Fair Housing Act of 1968 in operating 39 buildings they owned. Testifying in his own defense, young Donald (who would soon be seen around town in a chauffeured limousine with a license plate reading “DJT”), testified that he was “unfamiliar” with the landmark law. As the evidence in the federal case against the Trump organization became close to incontrovertible, he told the press the suit was a conspiracy to force them “to rent to welfare recipients,” a form of “reverse discrimination.” This proud and open refusal to rent to welfare recipients—whom he said contribute to “the detriment of tenants who have, for many years, lived in these buildings, raised families in them, and who plan to live there”—was Donald Trump’s defense against racism.
It is in this saga that we locate the formation of Donald Trump’s mature political vision of the world, in continuity with America’s racist and nativist heyday of the 1920s, and within the context of a cultural world much more familiar to us: New York in the 1970s, that raging cauldron of skyrocketing violent crime, subway trains slathered with graffiti, and a fiscal crisis so dire that even police were laid off in mass—then the laid off cops blocked the Brooklyn Bridge, deflating car tires, and yanking keys from car ignitions.
Think of Trump coming of age in the New York of the 1977 blackout, the search for the Son of Sam, and Howard Cosell barking out “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning” during game two of the World Series at Yankee stadium as a helicopter hovered over a five-alarm fire at an abandoned elementary school (40 percent of buildings in the Bronx were destroyed by the end of the 1970s, mostly via arson—often torched by landlords seeking insurance windfalls).
Think of Trump learning about the ins and outs of public life in this New York, a city of a frightened white outer-borough middle-class poised between fight or flight, in which real estate was everywhere and always a battleground, when the politics of race and crime bore all the intensity of civil war.
In The Invisible Bridge I wrote about what it was like in this New York in 1974, the summer when the federal lawsuit against the Trumps was approaching its climax, the summer when a controversial new movie began packing theaters across the five boroughs.
Death Wish starred a then-obscure Charles Bronson as a New York City architect who used to be liberal, until his daughter was raped and his wife murdered. His son-in-law pronounces defeat: “There’s nothing we can do to stop it. Nothing but cut and run.” The architect, by contrast, learns to shoot a gun—in an Old West ghost town—so he can start mowing down muggers at point-blank range. He soon cuts the city’s murder rate in half, and wins a spot on the cover of Time.
Liberal reviewers registered their disgust: The Times’s Vincent Canby called it “a bird-brained movie to cheer the hearts of the far-right wing,” then, 10 days later, branded Bronson a “circus bear.” Time called it “meretricious,” “brazen,” and “hysterical.” Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times labeled it “fascist.” But in the real-life New York City, where the murder rate had doubled in 10 years, and where a psychiatrist published a Times op-ed bragging about the violence he had prevented by leveling a pistol that he kept “never far from my reach while I attend to patients in my mid-Manhattan office,” each onscreen vigilante act won ovations from grateful fans—sometimes standing ovations.
Two years later came an even darker, and considerably more critical, portrait of New York City’s escalating culture of vigilantism. In Taxi Driver, a deranged Vietnam veteran speaks what must have been the unspoken inner monologue of any number of real-life New Yorkers who felt trapped in an urban sewer: “Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” Pistol in hand, he rehearses his revenge in the mirror: “Listen, you f*ckers, you screwheads. Here is a man who would not take it any more. A man who stood up against the scum, the c*nts, the dogs, the filth, the sh*t. Here is a man who stood up.”
When, around that time, Wall Street Journal columnist Irving Kristol coined the phrase “a neoconservative is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality”—a bowdlerization of the older adage “a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged”—he probably didn’t have Charles Bronson in mind, let alone taxi driver Travis Bickle. Nonetheless the politics is all of a piece. Charles Bronson conservatism, Travis Bickle conservatism, the conservatism of avenging angels protecting white innocence in a “liberal” metropolis gone mad: this is New York City’s unique contribution to the history of conservatism in America, an ideological tradition heretofore unrecognized in the historical literature. But without it, we cannot understand the rise of Donald Trump.
Trump’s political debut, after all, came in response to a mugging. Following the infamous attack on a female jogger in Central Park, Trump purchased full pages in four New York newspapers demanding, “Bring Back the Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police!” All the hallmarks of his present crusade against “political correctness” were in evidence, such as the harkening to that bygone day when men were men, cops were cops, and punks were punks. He concluded: “I miss the feeling of security New York’s finest once gave the citizens of this City.” As I previously reported, these same police straight-jacketed by liberal timorousness had already coerced the rape suspects into confessions later proven to be false.
That’s N.Y.C.’s avenging-angel conservatism in a nutshell. And now that Trump is gliding toward an expected landslidein the New York primary on Tuesday, April 19, we must begin the work of excavating its history.
We might start with William F. Buckley—though other scholars can surely date it back further. The National Revieweditor’s quixotic campaign for New York mayor in 1965 is best remembered for a self-effacing quip. (“What will you do if you win?” he was asked. “Demand a recount.”) Buckley himself is now celebrated as the genteel warrior of the conservatism of a more civilized age: The New York Times, upon his death in 2008, averred of that 1965 race, “He injected a rare degree of lofty oratory into city politics.”
What he also injected was an unprecedented reactionary thuggishness. Like his idea to “undertake to quarantine all addicts, even as smallpox carriers would be quarantined during a plague.” Or “relocating chronic welfare cases outside the city limits”—in what his critics described as concentration camps for the poor. The campaign might have begun as a lark. He received hardly more than 10 percent of the vote. But in a harbinger of things to come, he finished second in some Catholic neighborhoods in Queens. Cops wore “Buckley For Mayor” buttons. When the election’s winner, the very liberal John Lindsay, campaigned in those same neighborhoods, young white men waved “Support your Local Police” placards in his face.
The stage was set, in 1966, for the next New York City law-and-order melodrama. Lindsay, now mayor, fulfilled a campaign pledge by establishing a Civilian Complaint Review Board to protect citizens from abusive cops, the better to restore trust in a police force whose utter rot was the subject that year of a bestselling book about a cop named Frank Serpico, whose reward for refusing to break the law was an attempt by fellow cops on his life.
The president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association responded to Mayor Lindsay’s new board: “I am sick and tired of giving in to minority groups and their gripes and their shouting.” After a Brooklyn riot in which cops had been ordered not to use their nightsticks, the PBA got 96,888 signatures to put a referendum on the November ballot to dissolve the review board (they only needed 25,000). Their TV commercials brayed, Trump-like, Bronson-like, “The addict, the criminal, the hoodlum: only the policeman stands between you and him.” Buckley—who had orated on the campaign trail, “We need a much larger police force, enjoined to lust after the apprehension of criminals,” unencumbered by “any such political irons as civilian review boards”—might only have received 10 percent of the vote. But 12 months later, the anti-CCRB referendum won 63 percent of the popular vote. Even Jews, who were supposed to be liberal, opposed it 55 percent to 40 percent.
Two years later, George Wallace brought his independent presidential bid to Madison Square Garden. “We need somemeanness,” Wallace brayed. And he got it: police had to rescue black protesters from a mob that surrounded them and chanted, “Kill ‘em!” The New Republic observed, “Never again will you read about Berlin in the ’30s without remembering this wild confrontation of two irrational forces.”
The confrontation is the key: one of the things that makes New York’s conservatism of avenging angels so feral is its proximity to so many damned left-wingers. Left-wingers like Mayor Lindsay—who only won reelection in 1969 because the white ethnic backlash vote was split between two candidates, one of whom, Mario Procaccino, helped popularize the phrase “limousine liberal” in describing Lindsay.
In 1971, Lindsay elected to build publicly subsidized housing in the Queens neighborhood of Forest Hills, partly upon the presumption that its largely Jewish population, only two and half decades on from the Holocaust, would be relatively free from racism of the Fred Trump sort. Apparently hizzoner wasn’t paying attention to the growing following behind Rabbi Meir Kahane, the domestic terrorist who was another of New York City’s sui generis contributions to the history of the American right.
Village Voice columnist Jack Newfield reported from one of the mayor’s damage-control sessions at the Forest Hills Jewish Community Center, where Jews called “Lindsay redneck names under the shadow of the Torah.” The Voice’s Paul Cowan heard a picketer boast, “If Lindsay ever gets to be president, I’ll kill him. I’ll do just what Oswald did to John Kennedy.” His companion replied, “You won’t get the chance. Lindsay is going to get shot right here in New York.”
Donald Trump, 25 years old, was just then beginning his apprenticeship in his father’s real estate organization.
He made the acquaintance of Roy Cohn, who represented the family against the federal racial bias lawsuit, devising the defense that Fred Trump had no intention of excluding black tenants, just welfare recipients. Trump became a student of the legendarily reptilian thug who came to prominence as Joseph McCarthy’s lawyer. Long-time Trump-watcher Michael D’Antonio has explained: “Both were members of Le Club, a private hot spot where the rich and famous and social climbers could meet without suffering the presence of ordinary people.” Writes D’Antonio, “Cohn modeled a style for Trump that was one part friendly gossip and one part menace. . . . Trump kept a photo of the glowering Cohn so he could show it to those who might be chilled by the idea that this man was his lawyer.”
It was Cohn, indeed, who introduced Trump to the nearly-as-reptilian Roger Stone, the professional dirty trickster and sexual adventurer with the giant tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back—and who, even though Trump has called him a “stone-cold loser,” has managed to hang on to a position of influence in the Trump presidential campaign. He certainly maintains an influence on Donald Trump’s view of the world. “When somebody screws you,” Stone told a reporter, “Screw ’em back—but a lot harder.” Figures like Cohn and Stone represent another branch in the New York conservative tradition: flashy, hedonistic right-wing operatives who gargle with razor blades and wear their shiny silver three-piece suits like armor.
Next comes an avenging angel named Ed Koch.
A former liberal, Koch won his underdog mayoral victory in 1977 in a madcap electoral free-for-all whose tenor was set on the night of July 13, when a series of lightning strikes shut down transmissions lines, the city shuddered to black, and so much crime ensued that buses filled with men in chains shuttled from jailhouse to jailhouse in search of available cells.
Neoconservative Midge Decter wrote in Commentary that it was like “having been given a sudden glimpse into the foundations of one’s house and seen, with horror, that it was utterly infested and rotting away.” The supposedly liberal readership of The New York Times wrote letters to the editor like this one: “The Puerto Ricans can go back to Puerto Rico. They belong there anyway, and if the blacks do not shape up they can go to the South.”
Ed Koch was virtually unknown outside his Greenwich Village neighborhood, but with a pledge to restore the death penalty, his campaign took off like a rocket. Never mind that the New York mayor had no power over capital punishment. The people had spoken: a mere 25 percent opposed bringing back what New York Daily News called “little hot squat.”
Meanwhile Koch berated the “poverty pimps” and “povertitians” holding a broke city hostage, demanded the abolition of the Board of Education (a “lard barrel of waste”), denounced alleged welfare fraud, decried “the nuts on the left who dump on middle class values.” He promised, too, to unwind New York’s experiments with free college, generous welfare, and subsidized housing, which its cheerleaders on the left called “socialism in one city.”
One of those cheerleaders was the one-time front-runner in the race, the very liberal Congresswoman Bella Abzug. After the blackout riots, her campaign went into a tailspin; she didn’t even make it into the runoff.
An underdog did instead: the young Mario Cuomo. He said, “the death penalty cannot provide jobs for the poor. The electric chair cannot balance the budget. The electric chair cannot educate our children. The electric chair cannot give us a sound economy or save us from bankruptcy or even save my seventy-seven-year-old mother.” And besides, he would add, America was better than that. Or was it? One time when he tried to make that same point, an old lady in Brooklyn spat in his face. Another time, someone stood up and cried, “Kill them!”
Koch won, of course, and then served as New York’s mayor for the next dozen years. Although to outer-borough reactionaries like state Senator Chris Mega of Brooklyn, he was just another liberal sellout on gun control. At a December 1984 press conference, Mega demanded to know: “When will Mayor Koch provide the same level of protection to the citizens who ride the subways and pay their taxes that he enjoys surrounded by a phalanx of New York’s finest, guns at the ready?”
That particular press conference was called by the National Rifle Association in support of Bernhard Goetz, an electronics salesman from Kew Gardens, Queens, who shot five young men on a graffiti-encrusted subway car who, depending on whom you believed, were either preparing to mug him or aggressively panhandling for $5. Like the character played by Charles Bronson, Goetz made the cover of Time magazine. Celebratory bumper stickers bloomed: “Ride With Bernie—He Goetz Them.” In a later interview he reflected, Travis Bickle-like, “The guys I shot represented the failure of society. . . . Forget about their ever making a positive contribution to society. It’s only a question of how much a price they’re going to cost. The solution is their mothers should have had an abortion.”
One of Goetz’s biggest backers was Bob Grant, who beginning on WMCA in 1970, and then on WOR (until he was fired in 1979 for saying the only reason a black woman got her job was that “she passed the gynecological and pigmentation test”), virtually invented right-wing talk radio—and when you think about it, it hardly could have been invented anywhere else but New York. Grant won the first live radio interview with Goetz, in 1986, lamenting that he had not “finished the job by killing them all.”
Three years later, after the assault in Central Park, Donald Trump offered his memorable argument to bring back little hot squat.“What has happened is the complete breakdown of life as we know it. . . . How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits? Criminals must be told that their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS.”
In 2011, Bob Grant, impressed with Donald Trump’s campaign to force President Obama to produce his birth certificate, announced he had found his presidential candidate for 2012. Grant died in 2014, but two years later, his brand of vigilante conservatism has gone fully national. The wall Fred Trump sought to build in Queens in the early 1970s has been relocated 2,000 miles south. On Tuesday, Donald Trump will win a landslide in his home state. And somewhere, Bob Grant will be smiling.
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This article was originally published at The Washington Spectator
This past June, pulp novelist Brad Meltzer revealed that, while he was touring Secret Service headquarters forresearch on a White House thriller, agents shared with him what Meltzer called a “secret.” President Ronald Reagan packed heat. “It’s true,” they said.“A .38. Reagan used to hide it in his briefcase and take it on Air Force One.”
Not a secret, actually. Edmund Morris said the same thing in Dutch. And Ronald Kessler’s In the President’s Secret Service reported that “Reagan confided to one agent that on his first presidential trip to the Soviet Union in May 1988, he had carried a gun in his briefcase.” Kessler also wrote that an agent protecting Reagan during his 1976 presidential run asked why he was wearing a pistol. Reagan replied, “Well, just in case you guys can’t do the job, I can help out.”
It wasn’t news then, but Meltzer’s retelling of the story got legs. Reagan loyalists and apologists came out of the woodwork, howling. David C. Fischer, a special assistant during Reagan’s first term, told TIME magazine, “I never saw a gun in his briefcase.” Kenneth Duberstein, Reagan’s last White House chief of staff and a consummate K Street insider, said he had “no reason to believe it’s true.” Lou Cannon, whose Reagan chronicles evolved over 50 years from astringent to sycophantic, averred, “It’s so off the wall that I don’t know what to say. I think it’s fantasy, at best.” Historian H.W. Brands, whose recent biography was distinguished by the curious methodological decision of taking Reagan’s own accounts of his past at face value, offered, “I’ll believe the evidence when I see it.”
Then, we saw that evidence. Reagan’s longtime body man Jim Kuhn reported seeing the gun in Reagan’s briefcase (but only once). Biographer Craig Shirley, on the other hand—a conservative movement activist who has established an identity defyingWashington insiders who’d seek to clean up what history might judge as Reagan’s extremism—said he’d already confirmed it with the head of Reagan’s post-presidential Secret Service detail. Shirley also reports that Reagan had begun the practice after John Hinckley’s 1981 assassination attempt, that he “routinely” brought the gun aboard flights on Air Force One and Marine One, that he’d defied both Nancy and the Secret Service to do so (“Who’s going to say no to the President?”), and that,though Alzheimer’s-ridden, he continued the practice until the Secret Service finally took the gun from him in 1994.
The United States Secret Service is among the most highly trained and tactically sophisticated police agencies on the planet.Just to qualify for the job requires hitting a 10-inchtarget with a handgun four of five times in 10 seconds. A memoir by Dan Emmett, veteran of three “presidential protection details,” describes other aspects of the two-month initial training: a surprise simulation of a full-scale motorcade ambush, 20 seconds of chaos in which distinguishing civilians from attackers was rendered nearly impossible; firing so many practice rounds he could barelyhold a rifle on his swollen shoulder; fighting lessons from an instructor who had so many broken bones “three digits still pointed at odd angles”; and “one hundred hours of control tactics, raid training, hand-to-hand combat, and reacting to attacks on protectees.” All this, incidentally, was just to qualify for a desk job.
It takes many more years of dues-paying to get on a protective detail, let alone a presidential protective detail, where the intricacies of tactical choreography are timed to the split second.
Assignment to a protective detail can lead to situations like Emmett encountered when President Clinton and Syria’s Hafez al-Assad met privately in a room and Emmett was instructed that if for any reason the Syrian bodyguards drew their Skorpion fully-automatic pistols with magazines holding between 10 and 20 rounds, “I would per my training shoot each of them twice with my Sig Sauer pistol until the threat was neutralized, I had expended all ammunition, or I was out of the game. I repositioned myself a bit in order to ensure that President Clinton and Assad would not be in my line of fire. . . . It would be catastrophic beyond imagination if a Secret Service bullet from my pistol struck either POTUS or Assad.”
Think about it. It was in a situation like this that a 78-year-old president thought he just might click open his briefcase, in order to “help out.”
Reality has never had much to do with the conservative cult that extols superior firepower as the answer to all of life’s little problems. For your conservative camouflage-wearing neighbor next door, the fantasy of bursting through a door, guns blazing, mowing down bad guys and saving the day is considered more realistic than the prospect of receiving a Social Security check 20 years from now.
Consider the word “tactical,” which is everywhere now on the Internet and means, in this context, “military-style.” I recently plugged in the phrase “tactical training” into Google Maps. I discovered that there were no less than seven places I could do it within 40 miles of my yuppie Chicago neighborhood. Think camouflage gear, an AR-15with a sniper sight, and fat middle-aged men in a martial crouch.
Did I mention bursting through a door, guns blazing? At the Spartan Tactical Training Group, in the suburb of Lisle, you can take a “Two-Day Dynamic Room Entry Course.” The course will cover “strategies on how to deal with closed and opened doorways, moving through doorway openings, controlled room entry and room domination.”
Also “two person team room entry techniques while engaging single threats and multiple threats during shoot/no-shoot decision making drills. Students will also learn Close Quarter Battle (CQB) techniques and advanced combat gun-handling skills that are necessary to engage threats from contact distance out to 10 yards.”
The company promises: “Dominate your domicile—bring a rifle to a handgun fight.” In 2009, Lisle ranked 17th onMoney magazine’s “Best Places for the Rich and Single” list, so that training must come in awful handy.
Northwest Suburban Tactical Training Center’s marketing slogans are “Risk Management Through Stressed Tactical Training” and (a nod to Dick Cheney’s “One Percent Doctrine?”) “Be Prepared for the 1% Day.” A “1% Day” is “when serious and random events may put us and/or our loved one’s [sic] in harms [sic] way . . . Our sole purpose is training for survival . . . the skills and knowledge our dedicated and well-versed instructors impart to our customers are designed to make sure they effectively and successfully survive a1% day.” They advise, “When it comes to survival, winning is the only option. . . . After all, your life is in the balance.”
I’m not good at math, but are they really implying that situations in which one’s life hangs in the balance transpire approximately 365 days of every year? Yes, it seems they are.
Fear—constant, enveloping dread—is what the tactical training industry is selling. Northwest’s chief instructor, a Marine veteran and former operative in the military’s Joint Task Force Six, which supports law enforcement agencies in operations against terrorism, narco-trafficking, alien smuggling, and weapons of mass destruction in the continental United States, is certified in disciplines including “Sudden Assault Response Systems,” “Tactical Response to Lethal Threats,” and “Combat Physio-Kinetics.” He is also certified in something called the “Refuse to Be a Victim” program. A registered trademark of the National Rifle Association, RTBAV, a promotional video informs us, is “not a firearm or self-defense course.” No, it is a paranoia course. Aimed ateveryday women, it began in 1993 at the behest of “NRA members, NRA board members, and even NRA staffers who became more concerned with the increase in violent attacks, especially on women, in America.” Although actually, there has not been an increase in violent attacks: according to FBI statistics, there were about six violent crimes per 1,000 Americans in 1981, five in 1993 when the program began, and about 3.8 in 2013, when the video was made.
Crime went down; fear went up. What else happened? Ronald Reagan was elected, for one thing, and taught everyone to be more afraid.
In the tactical mindset there are good guys andthere are bad guys, and they are always perfectlyeasy to tell apart. Who are the good guys? Thesemiotics of tactical websites make it pretty plain.Eagles and American flags. Invocations of 9/11.The pictures featured on the Northwest SuburbanTactical Training Center website include a self-assured business- man. And women: a teacher, a mom, and an apparent college student. All the females are blond. The proverbial good guys with guns, said to be the only thing that can defeat a bad guy with a gun. The bad guy is represented on the NRA’s “Don’t Be a Victim” site as a black silhouette looming at the corner of the screen. I always want to ask these tactical instructors: how do you know you’re not training him?
I would have liked to ask Ronald Reagan, too—practically the author of the “good guy with a gun” doctrine. Shortly after World War II, he became convinced that a complex jurisdictional strike pitting a democratic and left-wing union against a mobbed-up company union was really a Communist conspiracy to take over Hollywood. Things got rough at the studio: “I was fitted with a shoulder holster and a loaded .32 Smith & Wesson,” ready to ward off the Commies if they came at him. (I wonder if that’s what he was thinking of when he took his .38 with him to Russia in 1988.)
Nor was this his first gun. As he told the editors of Sports Afield in 1984, years earlier when he was a radio announcer in Iowa he had used a .45 automatic he kept on his mantel to rescuea damsel in distress outside his apartment. Back then, he was a Roosevelt-loving liberal; but the wingnut butterfly was making ready to burst forth from the chrysalis, fully formed.
I’ve written about how Reagan was instrumental, in the 1970s, in promoting the ideology of the newly emergent hard-right faction in the NRA. “Guns don’t make criminals,” he said on his radio show in 1975. “It’s criminals who make use of guns. They’re the ones who should be punished––not the law-abiding citizen who seeks to defend himself.” (In 1980, the hard-right faction having taken over, the NRA endorsed Reagan for president, the first time it had endorsed a candidate for the presidency.)
The fact that everyone’s a law-abiding citizen until they break a law, that good guys become bad guys and vice-versa with regularity, or that one person’s good guy might be somebody else’s bad guy (say, the abusive husband of one of those blond women featured on that Tactical Training Center website) seems neverto occur to any of them. It’s as if they’ve only seen the species hom*o sapiens at the zoo, and are not quite sure how the beast actually behaves.
Wingnuts, naturally, ate up Meltzer’s revelation with a spoon.Because this is their fantasy, too. One tweeter: “Reagan carried agun in his briefcase? Awesome. #GangstaGipper.” Spencer Irvine of Accuracy in Media pined, “We miss you, Ronnie.” The Washington Free Beacon ran: “Reagan Bigger Badass than PreviouslyKnown.” Conservatives had to believe this story: itsaid that Reagan was just like them––completelyout of their minds on the subject.
And it’s not just the Reaganites and militia types who celebrate the gun craze.
An equity research report from BB&T CapitalMarkets investment bank recently opined: “Webelieve trends are improving for the Firearms and Ammunition Industry following the drop in demand in 2014. We are initiating coverage on the following companies with a buy rating: Sturm, Ruger (RGR) and Vista Outdoor (VSTO).”
“The surge in demand was the largest in military style rifles(MSRs), sometimes referred to as black rifles. . . . It is our opinion that a major driver of commercial gun and ammunition sales is fear of regulations or the banning/restricting/registering of firearms. . . . before and following the 2012 presidential election, gun sales spoke [sic] nearly 40%. These recent spikes havebeen called ‘panic buying’ by the trade and by consumers. . . . We expect more debates on gun ownership restrictions duringthe presidential election cycle. Any proposals for bans or talks ofchanges to the regulatory environment can be expected to leadto market growth as consumers react through purchasing morefirearms and ammunition.”
It’s quite something to see the rhetoric of paranoid websites translated into the cold jargon of the securities analyst. Thereare no serious “proposals for bans” in any legislature. And as for “changes to the regulatory environment,” President Obama’s new executive order merely enhances the ability to make sure, well, bad guys don’t get guns: that the same background checksrequired of buyers in gun stores extend to gun shows, too. (WhenNRA types say we don’t need new gun laws, we just have to enforce the ones already on the books, they’re lying.) A vote to extend criminal and mental illness background checks, whichincludes a specific ban on a national registry, failed for the second time in two years only days after the mass shootings in San Bernardino, with no prospects of passing any time soon. Indeed, asthe sober-sided bankers at BB&T elsewhere explain, one actualrecent change in the regulatory environment has been “the liberalization of laws governing the carrying of loaded handguns onone’s person for personal protection.”
It’s all a fantasy. GangstaGipper’s fantasy. That’s what is driving our gun policies now. You don’t have to pine for the departed Ronnie, Spencer Irvine. His absurdities are all around.
Sidebar: Palookas With Bazookas
The lunacy of our modern-day “tactical” movement is not justthe proliferation of guns. It’s the refusal to draw distinctions between the people who use them, be they trained professionals or oafish amateurs. Note two examples that arrived close on each other’s heels this winter.
In November, after the mass shooting at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic, Maricopa County’s Joe Arpaio inducted all 250,000 Arizonans with concealed carry permits into his already-existing volunteer “armed posse” to fight terrorist attacks: “I expect armed citizens to take action in the event a terror attack or other violence occurs until law enforcement arrives.”
Then, in December, after Mark Herring, Virginia’s Democratic Attorney General, announced the state would no longer recognize out-of-state concealed-carry permits, a Republican state senator moved to punish Herring’s boss, Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe: “I have a budget amendment that I’m looking at to take away his executive protection unit. If he’s so afraid of guns, then I’m not going to surround him with armed policemen.”
So there it was: the absolute disintegration of any distinction between trained state police and every last palooka with a bazooka. But remember: Ronald Reagan got there first. – R.P.
Rick Perlstein is the Washington Spectator’s national correspondent.
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This article was originally published at The Washington Spectator
One of the reasons I’ve been writing so much about the Donald Trump phenomenon has little to do with Trump himself. Rather, it concerns a subject of deeper fascination to me: the moeurs of America’s pundit class. That in any given era, the content of their opinioneering says more about them as a class than any particular subject of their maunderings. In these Disunited States, those who rise to rarified heights in the profession of opinion-mongering almost always do so by dint of their success in stretching our messy reality to fit a certain single socially approved conclusion: that America is in fact united. That extremes always revert to the mean, and that radicalism of any stripe always eventually fails, or falls away. They pronounced that Barry Goldwater, because he was on the verge of running for president, was going to quit being conservative, a “fascinating biological process, like watching a polliwog turn into a frog (The New Republic’s TRB, in 1963). “This is probably the end of Reagan’s political career,” they said in 1976 after he lost the Republican nomination to moderate Jerry Ford (the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Drew). And in 2002, they prophesized that the conservative movement was on its deathbed because it was “mired in ideological warfare at a time when the nation demands ideological peace” (Nina Easton of Fortune).
For the past several months, that’s all we’ve being hearing about Trump. Here are two recent jerks of the knee. Here’s why they are wrong.
In The Atlantic, the historian David Greenberg surveys the rubble-strewn record of polling a year out from the election, which predicted the rise of President Ted Kennedy in 1976 and 1980, President Jesse Jackson in 1988, President Jerry Brown in 1992, President Howard Dean in 2004—not to mention that great statesman President Herman Cain, whose numbers “were at times stronger than Trump’s.” History, Greenberg asserts, makes it clear that we shouldn’t care about the fact that Trump’s been ahead for over four straight months. After all, “a year before the general election, most voters aren’t paying attention yet.”
Nate Silver chimes in with a similar message: “It can be easy to forget it if you cover politics for a living, but most people aren’t paying all that much attention to the campaign right now.”
“They’re not paying all that much attention”?
They’re not paying attention. The first Republican debate got 24 million viewers, more than any game in the NBA finals or World Series—three times more than any previous primary debate. The second got as many viewers as an NFL game.
As I’ve been crying in thunder over and over in these pixelated pages these last few months: “with Trump, everything requires revision.” Whether it’s the way the changed rules and norms about money in politics obliterate the way candidate fields used to get “winnowed.” Or the way the politics of personal debtoverturns rejiggers supposedly settled ideological identifications, the once-in-a-generation novelty of a top-rated TV star running for president (TL;DR: the last to do so, Reagan, turned out to be pretty successful), the novelty, too, of a front-runner who doesn’t filter his demagoguery.
But still the band plays on. As Washington Monthly’s Martin Longman usefully points out, “To suggest that Trump will inevitably falter when people start paying attention, you have to have a theory of the case.” Though really, you don’t. Consensus punditry: Feels so right it can never be wrong!
Now, it’s true that in the last few days, the mainstream narrative has changed, from insisting the extremist will go away, but that it’s past time he be made to go away. As Josh Marshall, who tracks these things much closer than me, noted for the record on November 27, the cool kids have suddenly turned on a dime: “Read the editorial and news pages today and you’ll find a mix of hand-wringing and demands about an uncouth and outrageous outsider who is threatening to wrest the Republican Party from its rightful owners”—now that they’ve finally figured out that Trump’s an authoritarian. (The rest of us were premature antifascists.)
Though, of course, that’s still the same story, just a different chapter. It’s part of the historic pattern. In 1964, the mainstream media pushed Pennsylvania’s governor, William Warren Scranton, as the vampire-hunter against Goldwater; in 1980, many fell for Illinois congressman John Anderson’s independent bid to slay Reagan. Now theWashington Post plumps “the meager Republican super PAC efforts aimed at him,” including a 47-second web video that clipped together some of his most provocative comments along with a small airplane training a banner proclaiming, “Ohioans Can’t Trust Trump.” Then, they veritably implored, “Most of the party’s financiers and top strategists are sitting on the sidelines.” (That was the front page. Here’s an apposite recent Posteditorial: “it is time for Republican Party leaders to make clear that they do not approve of Mr. Trump’s politics of denigration. If they do not, their party will be seen as complicit in his hatefulness, and deservedly so.” The fillip is the telling part: acknowledging the obvious, that one of America’s two major political parties is already hateful, falls afoul of consensus decorum.)
It’s comforting to think that the system is working so well. The punditry system, I mean. Trumps, Goldwaters, Gingriches, Wallaces—they come and go. (Knock on wood when you read that sentence.) Pundits, however, are forever. They’ll keep breeding, a biological process: like pollywogs turning into frogs.
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Nate Silver has the Bernie Sanders campaign figured out. Ignore what happens in Iowa and New Hampshire, the “data-driven” prognostication wizard wrote back in July, when Sanders waspolling a healthy 30 percent to Clinton’s 46 percentin both contests. That’s only, Silver says, because “Democratic caucus-goers in Iowa and Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire are liberal and white, and that’s the core of Sanders’ support.”
Silver has a chart. It shows that when you multiply the number of liberals and whites among state electorates, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Iowa rank first, second, and third. Texas is near the bottom—a place where Bernie Sanders should feel about as welcome as a La Raza conventionat the Alamo, right?
I have a new friend who begsto differ.
It’s July 20, and my airplaneseat mate asks what brought me to Texas. He is a construction company sales executive from Houston. He’s watching Fox Newson his cell phone. He tells me he considers himself a conservative. I tell him I’m a political reporter covering the Bernie Sanders campaign. He perks up: “I like what I’ve heard from him. Kind of middle of the road.”
Eleven days later, I’m at a Bernie Sanders house party in the depressed steel town of Griffith, Indiana, in a state that places in the bottom quartile on Silver’s chart. I approach a young man in his twenties wearing a thrift store T-shirt. I ask him what brings him here tonight.
“I’m just helping out my friends because they asked me to help out,” he tells me. He adds that he’s a conservative: “But I approve of some of the stuff that Bernie stands for. Like appealing to more than just the one percent and just trying to give everybody a leg up who’s needing it these days.” Data-driven analysis is only as good as the categories by which you sift the information. If you’ve already decided that “liberals” are the people who preferlocally sourced arugula to eating at McDonald’s, or are the people who don’t watch Fox News, it is a reasonable conclusion that there aren’t enough “liberals” out there to elect Bernie Sanders. Yet political categories shift. One of the things the best politicians do is work to shift them.
Sanders has been extraordinarily clear about the kind of shift he’d like to effect: Republicans “divide people on gay marriage. They divide people on abortion. They divide people on immigration. And what my jobis, and it’s not just in blue states. . . [is] to bring working people together around an economic agenda that works. People are sick and tired of establishment politics; they are sick and tired of a politics in which candidates continue to represent the rich and the powerful.”
The theory that economic populism unites voters is hardly new.Lyndon Johnson, in New Orleans and about to lose the South to Barry Goldwater in 1964, expressed it in one of the most remarkable campaign speeches in history. A Southern Democratic politician was on his deathbed, Johnson said. “He was talking about the economy and what a great future we could have in the South, if we could just meet our economic problems. . . ‘I would like to go back down there and make them one more Democratic speech. I just feel like I have one in me. The poorold state, they haven’t heard a Democratic speechin 30 years. All they ever hear at election time isnigg*r! nigg*r! nigg*r!’”
The theory suggests that when upwards of60 percent of voters consistently agree that richpeople should have their taxes raised, a candidatewho promises to do so might be identified as whathe actually is: middle of the road. That if Democratsgive Democratic speeches on economic issues,voters suckered into Republicanism by refrainslike Jihad! Jihad! Jihad! just might try something else. And that new voters might be attracted into politics if they could just hear a candidate cut to the radical quick of the actual problems that are ruining their lives. My new Republican friends didn’t know they were not “supposed” to like a “liberal” like Bernie Sanders. Then they heard what he was saying, and liked what they heard. How many are there like them? That’s what I’ve been trying to begin to find out.
A populist moment in Dallas
Dallas is Dallas. At Love Field, a middle-aged woman sports a “Mrs.” T-shirt—1970s-style antifeminist trolling. I pass the Dallas Country Club, which made news last year for admitting its first black member after he spent 13 years on a waiting list. The Holocaust Museum features a “Ground Zero 360: Never Forget” exhibit on 9/11. (Jihad! Jihad! Jihad!)
Hillary Clinton had recently been to Texas. She did a fundraiser here in a gated community where guests were told the address only after delivering their $2,700 checks. For nationally prominent Democrats, one of the donors complained, “All Texas is to anyone is a stop to pick up money.”
Not all nationally prominent Democrats. When I talk with a bunch of old hippies after an afternoon Sanders rally at a downtown convention center in Dallas, their minds are blown. Long-haired Zen Biasco is a professional “creativity teacher”; Morris Fried first picketed against apartheid in 1965. The only non-Jew in the group, and the only native Southerner, explains Texas politics: “The states that came up throughout the plantation economy did not really believe” in democracy. “It was the elites running things, and basically the GOP here in the South, especially in Texas, has inherited that basis of understanding. In Texas we are not
necessarily a red state. We are a non-voting state.”
These are the people you’d see at any lefty rally anywhere. But this lefty rally was unlike any they’ve seen in their adopted hometown. “I’m shocked at such a draw on a Sunday afternoon!” one offers. “I’m shocked at all the young people in this crowd!”
Before Sanders began speaking, I had spoken to two of those young people, a married couple, who represent a liberal holy grail: kids who had grown up conservative—Mormons!—and reasoned their way to the left. “Thanks to people like Bernie,” as one put it. They try to spread the gospel to professional circles saturated with Republicans and to their families back home.
The husband unspools a splendid version of the Sanders argument:
“I don’t think the values of those communities are really represented in their politics, family values, the ideology they profess to have. . . doesn’t match up with the words or things [the politicians they align themselves with] actually represent. I don’t think people realize that if they actually were for family values, and were for the working family, that Republican policies are not going to move you closer.”
Sanders on the stump
The speech begins. I’ve rarely heard one more electric. Bernie gets to the part about how America could increase its competitiveness and move toward full employment by spending a trillion dollars rebuilding bridges and roads, and a fashionably dressed young woman next to me with a swallow tattoo on her wrist cries out like a cheerleader.
“INNNNNNNFRASTRUCTURE!!!!”
The senator follows with a disquisition about the Sherman Act.
“ANTI-TRUSSSSTTT!” she shouts.
When he gets to reinstating the Glass-Steagell act, she lets out a “WHOOOOOOOO!”
At the 21-minute mark comes something extraordinary. After a reverberating ovation for a call for pay equity for women, a promise to fight for 12 weeks of paid family leave, and an excoriation of the fact that “the American people work more hours than any other major country on Earth.” Then the senator announces his marquee platform plank.
“To make every public college and university tuition-free.”
The crowd’s response is so ecstatic it overdrives my tape recorder. It continues into a chant: “BERNIE! BERNIE! BERNIE! BERNIE!”
And when the show ends, a crowd in a nearly post-coital mood of sated exhilaration doesn’t want to leave, doesn’t leave, until Bernie returns to to the podium for something I’ve never witnessed at a political event, an encore, and announces that the crowd numbered 6,000.
I followed the campaign that evening to the University of Houston, where he got the same thunderous reception before 5,200 college students. Both events got prominent play in the local media, where hundreds of thousands of Texans heard heretical ideas that they might not have read in their newspapers before: like raising taxes on the rich isn’t crazy, even if 62 percent of Americans agree.
Some things polls have a hard time recording. They may miss kids like these, who only carry cell phones, as pollsters rely mostly on landlines. Or the intensity of support, how many people are willing to knock on doors for a candidate. And, last but very much not least, novel issues and how constituencies respond to them.
In 1965, for instance, when he began running for governor, Ronald Reagan made the focal point of his speeches the student uprising at Berkeley. His consultants told him to knock it off because it wasn’t showing up in their polls as a public concern. Reagan ignored them, reading the response of crowds that didn’t yet think that students tearing up their college campuses was a “political issue” to bring up when pollsters called.
Similarly, in the late 1970s, when the Equal Rights Amendment began failing in state after state though polls showed it had majority support, a sociologist named Ruth Murray Brown polled anti-ERA women activists in North Carolina and found that more than half of them had never participated in politics before. The pundits didn’t know how to count what they didn’t know was out there
Rust belt populism
That’s what I thought of when I met Gypsy and David Milenic, whose front lawn had hosted that house party on July 30. I had read an interview with Sanders in which he said the campaign was hosting these parties around the country, which he would address via a live video feed. I chose one as far afield as possible from the places where “liberals” are supposed to congregate. Ten miles past a creationist museum billboard on I-90, there was no arugula, but there were crackers, pretzels, and store-bought gingersnaps. Griffith, Indiana, population 16,619, has a per capita income of $21,866.
“My history of political volunteering is that this is the first political volunteering I have done,” Gypsy tells me, taking a break from directing traffic and packing her two small children off to grandma’s. “But, to be honest, Bernie is the first person who’s gotten me out of my chair and out doing things.”
From her front porch, she casts her nervous eye over a lawn that keeps filling, and filling, and filling. (In the interview Sanders said the campaign was planning for 30,000 participants across the nation; the final number turned out to be 100,000.)
“This home was paid for by union dues,” Gypsy says. “That matters. Keeping it in the family: that matters. Being able to have a small town like this that was a mix of blue-collar and white-collar matters.”
At 6:30 a political meeting unfolds unlike any I have ever seen. Bernie is to speak on a live feed at 8:00. David, an accountant, welcomes us, and invites people to stand up and introduce themselves.
A young man who has been busily setting up the AV system volunteers to go first.
“Both my parents together made barely over the poverty line, and I can tell you that life sucks,” he begins.
“I have no financial support from my family. I get very little from the government. I am on my own, trying to make it, trying to thrive, just like everybody behind me. And it’s hard. And I am currently about 50 grand in debt between student loans, car loans. . . and I am trying so damned hard. And working so damned hard.”
The crowd responds with an ovation.
“I see all my friends, and all of my friends who suffer the same way I do, and they can’t make ends meet. They work three jobs. . . and they still struggle! And it just burns me. Because it wasn’t like this! Now, you go to college for four years and you’re in debt 20, 30 years. Sometimes for life. . .”
He trails off. Applause encourages him on. “I want to see change. And I believe Bernie Sanders is the one to do it.”
And on it went. For an hour and a half, testimony after testimony after testimony. The issue of student debt dominated. So did the consensus that together they could do something about it.
In Griffith, I met a remarkable black retiree named Martha Harris. Her grandparents were slaves, and she remembers going into hiding at the age of three when her father was run off by the Klan for being “uppity.” She had been following the story of Sanders’s public encounters with Black Life Matters activists at the Netroots Nation gathering in Phoenix. She just wondered why people were still going on about it. “I saw him flub. And like any white man, his staff put him out there without his underwear on. So he ran home and he got his long johns on. And I’m okay with that. He’s learning.”
Harris was one of the Sanders supporters who, following that evening in Griffith, set up a storefront Sanders office in Hammond, Indiana. She had recently been a guest on a radio show in Gary, where the African-American population is 85 percent and one third of the houses are abandoned. She was scheduled for a half hour. The response was so enthusiastic the interview went on for an hour and a half.
Among the political class, the discussion of the supposed reverberations that followed Sanders’s encounter with Black Lives Matter activists in Phoenix was incessant. That kind of conflict is something the political media knows how to talk about. So they talk about it. What happened on the radio in Gary, not so much.
Responsive politics
The question is, what else is happening that they aren’t talking about?
Maybe this. In 2005, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes published some remarkable journalism on his experience canvassing for John Kerry in Wisconsin, where voters didn’t seem to have any idea that their economic distress was something for which voting could make a difference.
“When I would tell them that Kerry had a plan to lower health-care premiums, they would respond in disbelief—not in disbelief that he had a plan, but that the cost of health care was a political issue,” Hayes reported. “It was as if you were telling them that Kerry was promising to extend summer into December.”
Hayes wondered what a more responsive Democratic politics would look like.
“One thing that nearly all Americans share is debt.” His idea? “Building a movement around credit reform—through the formation of local ‘debt clubs’ that would be part of a national campaign, for example—would be one way for progressives to reach out to non-believers.”
Now “debt clubs” are being formed. They’re being formed around the Sanders campaign. I wouldn’t argue that this will add up to a presidential nomination. But I’ve seen enough in places like Dallas, Houston, and on David and Gypsy Milenic’s front lawn in Griffith to know that something is happening here, something that reminds us that our existing models for predicting winners and losers in politics need always be subject to revision.
Rick Perlstein is the Washington Spectator’s national correspondent.
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