A.J. Weberman on Ron Paul

Ed.--This is a pretty good set of personal observations by a Jewish activist on Ron Paul and the people he surrounds himself with. I too stumbled upon Spotlight (a defunct anti-Semitic/right wing extremist paper), speaking for myself in the early 90s, and agree with his conclusion: Ron Paul is an authoritarian fascist and a race baiter, a demagogue, a liar. Paul is a sad reminder of the failings of American Populism just over a century ago too, the fixation on the gold standard-and-all...as well as the baggage of anti-Semitism.

Make no mistake: This man, and more specifically, the people who are his base, are an incredibly dangerous political phenomenon on the American landscape. Worst of all are his Christian Identity connections. His son Rand (named after Ayn Rand) has been put on the SPLC's watch list not long ago, and for good reason. These people are scarier than you think. The scariest part is that there are numbskulls on the left (really arch-conservative flakes) who are being swayed by him out of desperation and a desire for expediency, for immediate change. Yeah, we'd get change alright--an even greater acceleration of the move towards corporate tyranny and a more openly racialist state.

"Ron Paul - The Most Dangerous Nazi in America": http://www.slideshare.net/AJWeberman/ron-paul-the-most-dangerous-nazi-in-america?from=new_upload_email

Postscript: Again, I don't agree with all of Weberman's contentions, historical or otherwise, but the raw data is there. I do agree that Paul is a demagogue, a Christian Identity freak and a corporatist, a bad populist.

Why we should be happy that the racists are out of the closet

WWW--There's a theme I keep coming across with some of my compatriots on the progressive left, and I think that it's unnecessary: the fear of traditional American racism coming out of the closet. These people are literally the lunatic fringe now, but they're white and they're loud, if not proud (OK, they're that too, just without any basis). The problem--mainly--is our reaction to them, and reaction in itself is the problem, there's too much of it. We need to be more proactive about these people rather than reactive, and that's not an endorsement of Scientology. That's why I support the legal actions of the SPLC and its director, Morris Dees. His targets seem to understand intuitively, as some of the mentally ill do, that he's got their number and that he's using the proper cure. This provokes very dramatic responses.

Just looking at the words behind the anagram tells you where they're coming from at the SPLC: The Southern Poverty Legal Center. I have had great admiration for Mr. Dees and his work for ages, and the key to his work and that of his great staff has been in tracking these groups and bringing them to the attention of the public while going after the very worst, the most dangerous of them, in the courts rather than in the streets where they're only going to be emboldened by physical attacks. Hate movements thrive on the victim mentality, but we should also remember that these folks are victims in their own right, frequently victims of poverty that breeds this form of mental dysfunction. Dees knows that this isn't simply a Southern problem, but an American one, and while it is a bit alarming that these groups have grown in numbers since the election of a black president, it's also a reason to be thankful for the fact that we have one. They're out of hiding and easy targets again, just as they became so in the 1960s. They were always out there, their number haven't really grown.

The Civil Rights movement of that decade (really beginning in the mid-1950s and cresting roughly ten years later) brought the flat-heads out of the woodwork. The ranks of the KKK swelled as they had with the great influx of European immigration during the 1920s and "White Citizens Council" offices sprang-up everywhere...and they lost, badly, to the civil rights workers and activists because history and moral authority weren't on their side. Crucially, the federal government was pressured into action and the FBI unwillingly had to conduct a barely submerged war on the Klan and other hate groups. Indeed, non-violence proved to be a vital tactic, but so too did African-American groups like the Deacons for Justice and the original Black Panthers in the South with their militancy and their rifle clubs, meant to protect black communities from terror tactics. But the real fight was won in the legislative arena and the courts and the laws are still on the books to this day and aren't likely to be rolled-back anytime soon. That's not to say we shouldn't be vigilant, however.

In the 1990s, the late Stokely Carmichael, one of the founders of SNCC and one of the central players in the rise of black nationalism said that the problem had become deeper, that racism had "gone into hiding" and was therefore harder to combat, and he was right. Racism became institutionalized and very much a phantasm, a free-floating force that was almost impossible to pinpoint, let alone to fight with traditional methods. That has changed now that the loons have come out of the woodwork and are now shooting their mouths off, not to mention committing some very heinous acts of violence again. But that's what people do when they're desperate and feel they have no other options. They'd better enjoy the fun while it lasts, because it's not going to for very long.

In other words, they feel very threatened in their racist beliefs and identities, and that's a good thing since those culturally pathogenic personalities can ultimately be isolated and marginalized out of existence. These small, reactive faux-personalities--once again--intuit this and that's when the fear comes, when the ego externalizes its innermost and darkest tendencies. The shadow side externalizing itself can be dealt with by civil society more easily. Now they're visible targets, even their goons they've embedded within the military. But we tend to take these revelations the wrong way, we react, and we become part of the fear. This is a mistake. We know who they are now, we have their number, and it's time to go round-'em-up when they misbehave. We can also make sure that they never come into being by fighting for social and economic justice. Poverty is a breeding ground for this kind of faux-personality.

A recent cross-burning in my community has had some alarmed, but I'm not especially worried. As much as I have a problem with the FBI on other issues, they're good at criminal investigations like this and they're likely to find out who was behind it. When-and-if they do, the perpetrators are going to be dragged into court and could face real jail time if not civil penalties, meaning heavy fines that have shut them down in the past. We should also keep in mind that not all rabid racists are poor and that this is a pathogenic cultural stream predicated on keeping things as they've been in America since the beginning: oligarchical and unequal. The name Tony Zirkle should come as a good example of the privileged racist flake.

Economic elites must become racists by-definition in order to hold onto that power, something that they're more-than-willing to do. The reality is that they're more frightened of the rest of us, these groups, and while it makes them dangerous, they're still marginal. Nonetheless, vigilance and awareness is the key, and now we have the added advantage of visible targets.

Some observations on them thar' "FEMA internement camps" (that'll learn ya'!)

WWW--Let me make this crystal clear: if you believe this meme, you're probably either gullible, crazy, or both, but you're assuredly rocketing towards crankdom, even with the mess we're in right now, and it's a big mess brought to us from many of the same people making these claims. The first time I ever heard of this stupid meme was in a poorly produced and heavily-slanted videotape from the nefarious and long ago discredited Linda Thompson, a former Indianapolis attorney who cranked-out a few documentaries on Waco that were--to put it politely--conflated alarmist crap.

There was an earlier example during Iran-Contra: "leftist" anti-intervention activists were running around with their heads cut-off when it was revealed that Oliver North had considered arresting and detaining some of them in the event of an invasion of Nicaragua. It never amounted to anything, and never would have, it was North being G. Gordon Liddy, meaning batshit crazy. The overreaction was equally nuts and added to the hyped post-Watergate paranoia infecting the body politic, and it has continued into today. Thompson continued this meme in a way that could only be of benefit to Republicans, and didn't invent it, but popularized it in a way unlike ever before, and when the Internet was primarily the domain (pun intended) of geeks and IT wackos (like elements of the Legion of Doom) who thought like herself.

According to the SPLC, Thompson is currently living in North Carolina right now, where she must feel right at home. After calling for a militia attack on the nation's capital in 1995, she was thoroughly discredited, even among her "allies"on the right and throughout the militia movement in the Midwest. Her time was up at the mic. If you live in N.C., tell her hello, photograph her, and post it online. She deserves further scrutiny for the mess she left behind, now spreading like syphilis all over the Internet, but again, she didn't invent this meme, but she exploited it and popularized it further. It never surprised me that Thompson was working out of Indianapolis at the time, and she was good for a time, very clever. But it got out of hand as it tends to. For a few minutes, she had me fooled, but I was in college at the time and young (naive). But unlike the people who still cling to this pathetic belief, I grew out of it quickly.

Working out of a strip mall next to a Dominoe's Pizza (shades of the wacko Jack T. Chick who's been making similar claims for decades along with the John Birch Society), she had created her garbage anti-government propaganda, garnering as much as $300,000 from over-credulous meth-addicts and down-on-their-luck farmers. Thompson truly was a darling of the Libertarian/militia right. In some ways she still is a kind of a "shade" or "phantasm" since her part of the meme has outlived her time in the spotlight. Just today, someone on Facebook told me with a sense of utmost certainty about (I'm paraphrasing), "FEMA camps being set-up to incarcerate American dissidents throughout the nation in time of a national emergency." Sound familiar? They might want to quit smoking dope and pull their head out of their ass, it's pointing rightwards.

Yes, there was something called CABLE SPLICER, GARDEN PLOT, COINTELPRO, and several other programs of the same kind during the chaos of the 1960s-70s, they were unconstitutional, and at least as far as we know, they were shuttered. Is this a good excuse to disengage from the political process? Who generally benefits from that? It tends to be the GOP. A takeover doesn't work as these people describe it, it comes in increments, and with them running around chasing ghosts they certainly aren't any threat to one. Great, they know hot to cut-and-paste, maybe even read.

What's interesting is that unless it fits their anti-government meme, Libertarians are generally unmotivated or silent on similar threats found in specific provisions of the Patriot Act and have yet to put up an even remotely workable or sustained fight against it at all, just more of their conspiracy theory yammering that would never stand up in a court of law or lead to the creation of any investigative commissions. When you believe this garbage, the very notion of political participation is out the window, and it's pathetic. Never mind that Libertarians (including Alex Jones in their nexus) and the militias were/are part of the far right. Never mind that they're not fighting the actual "good fight" against all of these post-9/11 attacks on our rights as groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), CREW, or the ACLU are; they just talk, write, and bloviate like the ineffectual children that they always were and are. None of what they do is ever going to reach a court of law unless it's them who has misbehaved, just look at Jones--just not if you've eaten recently.

Thompson did quite a job on some very ignorant and immature people throughout the Midwest and even the former Confederacy, and she chose her marks well. She was calculated. This kind of dysfunctional behavior is part of "the pedagogy of the oppressed," to borrow a phrase. One of the biggest problems now is that they're trying to infiltrate the antiwar movement and the progressive movement, and they're making some inroads. Additionally, they have some ties to the white hate movement, albeit indirectly in most cases. Frankly, that's good enough for me. There is a real threat, but it's not from the government, it's from the politicians who are leading us all over the cliff. There is no substitute for political participation.

Most of the politicians in Washington have strings coming out of their backs leading to Wall Street and its environs, and they're laughing all the way to the bank at the fringe populist minority, a group of oxymorons if ever there was one. The fact is, they're the minority and they're not part of the progressive movement in any real sense, but they are problematic and should be countered at every juncture and removed if necessary from these groups in a polite and legal fashion, as befits a truly progressive movement. No one said struggle was easy or that you weren't going to get your hands dirty, and these people are dragging us down a bit and muddying the waters. That's how it goes and how it's always been, and how it's always going to be. Accept that it's a part of your entire life--the struggle against unaccountable power--and you've made a very serious step towards adulthood.

A good summation of Thompson from the SPLC:
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?pid=367

Alex Jones & Kurt Nimmo (et. al.?) threatening progressive news sites?

"My mind hasn't been made up on AJ [Alex Jones] 100 percent."--Richard Poplawski, the Pittsburgh shooter.

WWW--The smoke on this one has yet to clear, and this writer wagers that it won't for some time. So far, Rawstory and DailyKos have enigmatically offered retractions that Pittsburgh shooter Richard Poplawski was influenced by the writings and musings of Alex Jones and his affiliated websites Inforwars and PrisonPlanet.

The Rawstory retraction is still puzzling this writer as the original source--The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette--which hasn't backed down, even going so far as to print an exchange between them and Alex Jones that not only doesn't let the conspiracy guru off-the-hook in being one of the shooter's influences, but actually confirming it with his rhetoric that sounds almost exactly like the terms used by Poplawski and his questionable acquaintances:

Mr. Jones, in a telephone interview with the Post-Gazette, denied any extremist views and described himself as "more of a libertarian" than member of the right wing.

He also denounced the violence that took place in Stanton Heights and suggested it reflected growing worries about gun confiscation.

"When the police and the military attempt to come for the guns, which they're going to do, it's not going to go well." [Ed.--My emphasis.]

He also complained that his views were being conflated with extremists that recruit people with legitimate concerns reflected on his own site and program.

"It's almost like I wake people up and they just get handed over to the nuts," he said. ("Poplawski was 'Braced for Fate' in days leading to attack," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 04.07.2009)

And maybe they were already nuts, Mr. Jones? And what about you? Why else would cowering skinheads feel an affinity with you and your paranoiac publications, media appearances and documentaries? Because if you insert the word "Jew" in your pronouncements, writings, and documentaries, you have the same ideology.

One word, that's it, the same.

Like all demagogues, Jones and his curious cadre are appealing to real social and economic problems--there are very real concerns regarding our most cherished liberties thanks to the damage done by the Bush II years to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But is running around yelling and intimidating progressives--as Jones is doing--going to fix anything? No, but his output and that of his kind has the potential of pushing another Richard Poplawski towards mindless violent action again, and there are many like him out there right now.

Jones has some intelligence: he knows that there is a slack-jawed segment of the left and progressive streams that might mistake him as one of theirs. That's part of the plan, as it is with Ron Paul, but also a tactic of the white hate underground to cloak yourself in the rhetoric of the progressive left to appear more "palatable." Is Jones a racist? Does it really matter when he appeals to them, ideologically?

A couple days ago, his PrisonPlanet was gloating (since that's what they frequently do) over the fact that Rawstory and DailyKos offered their retractions., but not everyone's falling for it.

...Other notable blogs such as Little Green Footballs and Media Matters should also follow the example set by Raw Story and Daily Kos in issuing retractions.

As we announced in our previous article, we will consider taking further action should full and frank retractions not be forthcoming. ...Unfortunately that does not constitute journalism and in sensitive cases like this one it very often leads to slander and libel. ("Daily Kos Issues Retraction of Infowars/Poplawski Smear," Infowars.com, 04.07.2009)

Yet today, I received an email from SPLC (The Southern Poverty Law Center) with a link to the original Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article noting Jones's presence in the ideological-lexicon of one Richard Poplawski.

Neither the ADL or the Post-Gazette are offering any retractions, which could be very telling. This could be because they're not as disabled by the economic crisis and don't take threats like those from PrisonPlanet and Infowars as seriously as the sites that have offered-up their retractions--retractions that they've probably yielded to far too easily.

The straw man issue that Jones and his acolytes are putting out there is that these sites claimed his nexus of sites working as an "outlet for 'hate speech,' " which isn't what this writer or many others were claiming, but that there's a very real ideological-thread connecting all of them together. The white hate underground doesn't have a problem acknowledging these commonalities, but if you're trying to cater to everybody with a message of anti-government paranoia, you have to accept the dross as well--and that's leaving-out Jones's snake oil advertisers that include himself.

A message to Alex Jones: Libertarianism is a right-wing ideology, with connections and affinities to the farthest-reaches of the extremist right. That the moths are attracted to his light just speaks volumes that he's arch-conservative. This writer believes he's well aware of this fact. Tune into Fox News for his next appearance, it should be good for a laugh...until you realize what he's about. One of Jones's main methods of attack is to claim that the rest of us "don't get it." I think many of us get it. Fascism comes from below, and no, it's not just about little old Alex Jones.

"Suspect in officers' shooting was into conspiracy theories," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 04.05.2009: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09095/960750-53.stm

"Daily Kos Issues Retraction of Infowars/Poplawski Smear," Infowars.com, 04.07.2009: http://www.infowars.com/daily-kos-issues-retraction-of-infowarspoplawski-smear/

"Poplawski was 'Braced for Fate' in days leading to attack," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 04.07.2009: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09096/960938-100.stm