Ron Paul and Right Wing Extremists: It’s Complicated
Lew Rockwell. Photo: Mises Institute
Now that Ron Paul’s presidential candidacy is undeniably viable, no stone can go unturned in the effort to paint him as an extremist. Jim Rutenberg and Serge F. Kovalesky for the New York Times:
The American Free Press, which markets books like “The Invention of the Jewish People” and “March of the Titans: A History of the White Race,” is urging its subscribers to help it send hundreds of copies of Ron Paul’s collected speeches to voters in New Hampshire. The book, it promises, will “Help Dr. Ron Paul Win the G.O.P. Nomination in 2012!”
Don Black, director of the white nationalist Web site Stormfront, said in an interview that several dozen of his members were volunteering for Mr. Paul’s presidential campaign, and a site forum titled “Why is Ron Paul such a favorite here?” has no fewer than 24 pages of comments. “I understand he wins many…
Strategic Level Spiritual Warfare … But It Could Never Happen Here
A very disturbing bit of reading from from Al Jazeera during the current American election season. Paul Rosenberg writes in Al Jazeera:
Prior to 9/11, the Taliban government in Afghanistan did not register very much on American radar screens, with one notable exception: when it blew up two colossal images of the Buddha in Bamiyan province in early 2001. But destruction of treasured artifacts isn’t just limited to the Taliban.
There’s a right-wing politico-religious presence centred in the US, but with a global reach, engaging in similar practises, destroying religious and cultural artifacts as a key aspect of its ideology of “strategic level spiritual warfare” (SLSW).
Until recently a fringe evangelical movement, warned against as deviant, “spiritual warfare” is rapidly positioning itself within America’s mainstream political right. It’s well past time for political journalists to start covering what this movement is up to.
Is Anders Behring Breivik A Dominionist?
Leah L. Burton writes on PoliticusUSA:
In regards to Dominionist linkages to the bloody slaughter in Norway, here are our findings so far:
a) In particular, with a video manifesto (which has been linked on YouTube until it was pulled there, and which has since shown up on LiveLeak) the shooter makes some very specific references that show he has familiarity with, and probably shares terminology with (if not overtly sharing intel with) “Christian patriot” militia groups in the US (including material that has been posted on racist and far right-wing forums in the US, use of particular catch phrases associated with the “Christian Patriot” movement in the US, and others). I’ve just spent nine hours typing up an extensive analysis of the video; he is clearly connected with religious-nationalist groups in Europe and in the US. The degree of references to material originating in the US, in fact, indicate he has…
Birthers Sue Mag For $120 Million
Just another stunt to sell books, one suspects. From Jeff Bercovici’s blog at Forbes:
Joseph Farah and Jerome Corsi have some pretty interesting beliefs. They believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya, not there’s no proof Barack Obama was born in Hawaii.* They also believe Hearst Corp. and a writer it employs ought to pay them hundreds of millions of dollars for making fun of them for believing that first part.
Farah, the CEO of WorldNetDaily.com, and Corsi, author of “Where’s the Birth Certificate?: The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President,” have filed suit against Hearst, Esquire magazine and writer Mark Warren over a satirical article that they say defamed them and damaged their business interests. They’re seeking compensatory damages of $100 million and punitive damages of $20 million, plus legal costs. [Update: As a commenter points out, that’s only for one of the five counts; the full amount sought…
The Koch Brothers Echo Chamber Attacks Social Security
Senator Sanders connects the dots between the Koch brothers and the attacks on Social Security. This video, part of the Brave New Films‘ Koch Brothers Exposed campaign, investigates the millions of dollars that the Koch brothers spend to create an echo chamber to take away our Social Security. Read more about the right wing echo chamber at Alternet.
Help spread the word so we can expose the Koch brothers and protect our Social Security.
Newark’s Prayer-Based Crime Fighting Effort Isn’t Working (Video)
Expanding the effort to the state of California? Well in the words of Brian Wilson: I wish they all could be California/I wish they all could be California/I wish they all could be California … Bruce Wilson writes on Talk To Action:
A radical notion: who needs cops? Just pray down crime. But in Newark, where the murder rate has risen over 70% from 2010 to 2011, the approach doesn’t seem to be working very well.
Privatizing government services has long been a key goal of the American religious right, and as a 2-part new Talk To Action report details (here and here), the push for education vouchers has been orchestrated by right wing funders dedicated to eradicating public schools altogether. But voucher initiatives are presented as secular. Then, there’s prayer-based crime fighting, an even more radical privatization scheme:
Living Inside The Westboro Baptist Church
Wondering what it would be like to live in a cult? British documentarian Louis Theroux spent several days in the Kansas homes of members of the Westboro Baptist Church and filmed the experience for the BBC — basically opening a giant can of crazy.
Are Your Values Right or Left? The Answer Is More Literal Than You Think
M.C. Escher, "Drawing Hands", 1948.
ScienceDaily reports:
Up equals good, happy, optimistic; down the opposite. Right is honest and trustworthy. Left, not so much. That’s what language and culture tell us. “We use mental metaphors to structure our thinking about abstract things,” says psychologist Daniel Casasanto, “One of those metaphors is space.”But we don’t all think right is right, Casasanto has found. Rather, “people associate goodness with the side they can act more fluently on.” Right-handed people prefer the product, job applicant, or extraterrestrial positioned to their right. Lefties march to a left-handed drummer. And those linguistic tropes? They probably “enshrine the preferences of the right-handed majority.”
Casasanto, of The New School for Social Research, and Evangelia G. Chrysikou, of the University of Pennsylvania, wanted to find the causes of these correlations. Does motor experience “give rise to these preferences, or are they hardwired in the brain?” If the former, “how flexible are these…
Corporations Versus Individuals: The End of the Left/Right Paradigm
Nolan chart. Source: Camilo Sanchez (CC)
Looks like the New World Order isn’t going to be a global Big Socialist Government (unless, perhaps, you count corporate socialism). Barry Ritholtz wrote in September of last year:
Every generation or so, a major secular shift takes place that shakes up the existing paradigm. It happens in industry, finance, literature, sports, manufacturing, technology, entertainment, travel, communication, etc.
I would like to discuss the paradigm shift that is occurring in politics.
For a long time, American politics has been defined by a Left/Right dynamic. It was Liberals versus Conservatives on a variety of issues. Pro-Life versus Pro-Choice, Tax Cuts vs. More Spending, Pro-War vs Peaceniks, Environmental Protections vs. Economic Growth, Pro-Union vs. Union-Free, Gay Marriage vs. Family Values, School Choice vs. Public Schools, Regulation vs. Free Markets.
The new dynamic, however, has moved past the old Left Right paradigm. We now live in an era defined by increasing Corporate influence and…
David Brock on Hardball: “Glenn Beck Himself Has Been Responsible For Three Thwarted Assassination Attempts This Year.”
In a segment on Sarah Palin’s continuing profitable martyrdom, Media Matters’ David Brock told Chris Matthews that Glenn Beck has inspired assassination attempts. Here’s the clip:
And here’s the transcript of the exchange:
MATTHEWS: I think we used to say, maybe back in the Churchillian age, your voice was your power, your ability to speak up. That’s certainly Norman Rockwell’s notion, the man, you know — the standing up at a meeting, at a public meeting and saying, “Here’s what I believe.” But, now, it’s standing up with your arms, standing up with your ammo, your gun sites, your bull’s eye…
Sarah Palin Calls Criticism “Blood Libel”
Sarah Palin has posted a video statement about the shootings in Arizona by Jared Loughner, entitled “America’s Enduring Strength,” on her new Vimeo Channel. She accuses journalists of a “Blood Libel” against her, calling it “reprehensible”:
[UPDATE from disinfo ed.: Presumably realizing how awful she sounds, Mrs. Palin has since made the Vimeo stream "private" so we have replaced it with a YouTube stream, but don't be surprised if she has it taken down.]
Is Wisconsin the Epicenter of an American Death Cult?* Part I
Did Jack Torrance stumble upon a truth much deeper and more primal than he knew when he wrote, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”? My girlfriend seemed to say as much a couple of weeks back and subsequent events in Winnebago County, Wisconsin lead me to believe that she just may have a point.
Aviva kicked me out. Said I was “no fucking fun anymore” since I started crusading against the Brylcreem Brigade1 and their weird rhetorical war on the middle class and just plain common sense. “Goddamn it, Liam, it was funny at first, but it’s getting old. Now you’re starting to sound more like my econ professor than the writer I thought I was living with.”
I guess I could see where she was coming from. When we’d met at a mutual friend’s holiday party last December I was riding high on the crest of a fresh wave of creativity. I couldn’t stop blabbing about this novel I’d planned to write. It was a Kabbalistic parody of contemporary American religious culture centering on a cabal of ambitious up-and-coming angels who set up to hit God’s target numbers of human souls by dealing in volume rather than quality….
The Return of Doctor Weird and the “Laugher Curve”
Laffer Curve drawn by Vanessaezekowitz (CC).
With millionaire dilettante Ron Johnson confirmed as Wisconsin’s senator elect to the government his own Tea Party professes to disdain, it’s a sure bet we’re gonna be bombarded with a lot of blather about how tax cuts for corporations and the uber-rich are supposed to magically improve employment and erase deficits. Which is utter batshit lunacy. But don’t take my word for it — run the numbers yourself. All within the linked workbook “Laffer Curve Analysis v1″.
Midterms are over; here begineth the real shitstorm: the struggle against Right Wing corporatists and faux populists trying to complete their destruction of the United States.
No, that’s not just the Wild Turkey talking. Haven’t touched the stuff for the better part of a week now. And though the night terror visions of President Palin’s Interior Secretary Don Blankenship leasing the floor of the House to BP for fracking natural gas and Treasury Secretary Richard…
Notes Toward a New Political Taxonomy
Noah Millman writes for the American Scene:
It has become clear to me over the years that one of the causes of persistent confusion in our political arguments is the interchangeable use of taxonomic terms that, while they may have a natural affinity, are not actually synonyms.
Three terms that tend to get used interchangeably are:
Left / Liberal / Progressive
Their counterparts on the other side of the political spectrum are treated similarly:
Right / Conservative / Reactionary
The shades of difference among the meanings of the words within the triads, however, are not minor. One can very well be extremely right-wing without being a reactionary in any meaningful sense — think of Ayn Rand. One can be extremely left-wing without being a liberal in any meaningful sense — think of Lenin.
I propose, therefore, to accentuate the differences between the words commonly lumped together, to clear up all ambiguities by assigning technical meanings to commonly-used terms,…
Is There Anyone The Right Doesn’t Hate?
Rex Nutting poses the question for Marketwatch:
Whenever America faces her toughest challenges, you can always count on the right to be there.
Sowing hate, stoking fear.
So it’s no surprise that in the midst of a great economic catastrophe, the right would search for scapegoats instead of answers.
And so we have the fabricated crisis of the “Mosque at Ground Zero.”
Leave aside the fact that it’s not a mosque and it’s not at Ground Zero. This is really about hate and fear, the right’s old friends.
For the last 45 years, at least, no matter who the Republican candidate has been, hate and fear were really at the top of the ticket.
Recall that in 1968, Richard Nixon won the presidency by stoking fear of Negroes and hippies. The vaunted Southern Strategy of the Republican Party was at its core a campaign of fear. What a ride it’s had.
It’s no longer fashionable to be officially…
America’s Ruling Class – And the Perils of Revolution
This 12,000-word essay by Angelo Codevilla, “The Ruling Class–And the Perils of Revolution,” published in the conservative magazine American Spectator, has been so popular that Al Regnery is getting back into publishing to turn it into a full-length book (Regnery founded but no longer runs his eponymous and very successful right wing political imprint).
As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors’ “toxic assets” was the only alternative to the U.S. economy’s “systemic collapse.” In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual…
Right-Wing Blog Watch: Alternative Right
From Nick Pell at Red Star Times
Welcome to a new feature on Red Star Times, right-wing blog watch. I am introducing this feature for the sake of keeping a close eye on right-wing blogs, ranging from hardline conservative to outright fascist. My first subject of study is Alternative Right, a particularly noxious website that brands itself as “radical traditionalist.” For those who aren’t familiar with the term, radical traditionalist is a term used by hipsters, goths and faux-erudite who espouse fascist ideology but want a term with more intellectual cache.
Radical traditionalist favorites include Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola and Alain de Benoist. Associated (allegedly) political movements include Eurasianism, metapolitics, third positionism and national anarchism. Alternative right is an exemplar of radical traditionalism and fascism in as much as it begins with hatred of minorities, women and the working class and proceeds to construct a bizarre mish-mash of gobbledygook as “ideology” after…
The Kids in the Hall Invents “Glenn Beck” Before Glenn Beck (Video)
An eerily (and awesomely) prescient sketch from The Kids in the Hall:
Times Square Bomb: The Right’s Nuttiest Theory
Was the recent incident in Times Square an attempt to demonize the labor and environmental movements? Mother Jones reports:
Photo: T.L. Miles (CC)
This much we know: A US citizen born in Pakistan has been arrested for allegedly parking a Nissan Pathfinder in Times Square Saturday night, loaded with fertilizer that doesn’t combust, a kid’s alarm clock that likely didn’t tick, several gallons of gas, some propane tanks, and a few M80 firecrackers.
Attorney General Eric Holder has released a statement saying Shahzad was “taken into custody at JFK Airport in New York as he attempted to board a flight to Dubai.” There’s a lot we have yet to learn about what this news means, but it probably rules out one favorite conservative theory about the attempted bombing — that left-wing protesters took advantage of May Day (aka International Workers’ Day) to make a big bang in New York’s neon-soaked seat of capitalism.
Even before the…
