j***@news.net
2009-06-12 12:18:05 UTC
The Terrorist Threat: Right-Wing Radicals and the Eliminationist
Mindset
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted June 12, 2009.
Understanding the dangerous worldview that led to the murder of an
innocent doctor and an attack at the Holocaust Museum.
In April, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report (PDF)
warning that the shifting political climate and tanking economy was
spurring a resurgence of violent right-wing extremism (known as
"terrorism" when applied to those holding other political views) in
the United States.
At the time, a number of right-wing commentators lambasted the report
as a politically motivated attack on mainstream conservatism rather
than what it was: an early warning on the dangers posed by a violent,
fringe minority within their movement. Under pressure from GOP
lawmakers, Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano apologized for the
report.
But in the short weeks since, the department's warnings have proved
prescient. An abortion provider who had been a frequent target of Fox
News' bloviator Bill O'Reilly was gunned down during a church service
in Kansas; a mentally disturbed man who believed the "tea-bagging"
movement's contention that the Obama administration is destroying the
American economy -- and who reportedly owned a number of firearms --
withdrew $85,000 from his bank account, said he was part of a plot to
assassinate the president and disappeared (he was later captured in
Las Vegas); and this week, a white supremacist who was deeply steeped
in far-right conspiracism entered the U.S. Holocaust Museum and opened
fire, killing a guard before being shot and wounded by security
personnel.
The three incidents share a common feature: All of these men thought
they were serving a higher moral purpose, that is, defending their
country from an insidious "enemy within" as defined by the far right
-- a "baby-killer," the Jews who secretly control the world and a
president who's been accused of being a Manchurian Candidate-style
foreign agent bent on nothing less than the destruction of the
American Way.
David Neiwert, a veteran journalist who has covered violent right-wing
groups for years, calls the worldview that informs this twisted sense
of moral purpose "eliminationism." It's the belief that one's
political opponents are not just wrongheaded, misinformed or even
acting in bad faith. Eliminationism holds that they are a cancer on
the body politic that must be excised -- either by separation from the
public at large, through censorship or by outright extermination -- in
order to protect the purity of the nation.
As eliminationist rhetoric becomes increasingly mainstream within the
American right -- fueled in large part by the wildly overheated
discourse found on conservative blogs and talk radio -- Neiwert's new
book, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American
Right, could not have come at a more important time. In it, Neiwert
painstakingly details how the rise in eliminationism is a very real
threat and points to the dangers of dismissing extreme rhetoric as
merely a form of "entertainment."
AlterNet recently caught up with Neiwert in Washington to discuss this
troubling trend.
Joshua Holland: There is a lot of ugly discourse in this country, and
there always has been. What makes eliminationist rhetoric different
from the kind of run-of-the-mill nasty stuff that we see on all sides
of the political spectrum?
David Neiwert: Right -- there is a lot of hateful rhetoric that floats
around on both sides. What's unique about eliminationist rhetoric is
that it talks about eliminating whole blocs of people from the body
politic, whereas most of the hateful rhetoric, in the case of people
on the left, is directed at an individual -- George Bush or Dick
Cheney and various characters on the right. That's one of the key
differences -- when right-wing people talk hatefully, it often is
directed at entire groups of people: Latinos, African Americans, gays
and lesbians or liberals.
JH: People they deem to be inferior.
DN: Deemed inferior, or not even human. That is a critical aspect of
eliminationist rhetoric. It often depicts the opposition as subhuman
-- comparing them with vermin, diseases or carriers of diseases. I
think for me the classic historical expression of eliminationism in
America was Col. [John] Chivington's remarks prior to the Sand Creek
Massacre, where he urged the white Colorado militiamen to kill all the
Indians they encountered, including women and children. He said, "nits
make lice." That to me is pretty much a classic eliminationist
statement.
We certainly saw it through the lynching era in America, because the
same sort of rhetoric was aimed at African Americans. We saw it
between 1900-1942 directed at Asian Americans, particularly Japanese.
Then more recently, we have had eliminationist rhetoric and behavior
directed towards gays and lesbians and other minorities. This often
expresses itself in the form of hate crimes.
JH: In the book, you discuss the connection between eliminationism and
fascism. Can you dig into that a little bit for me?
DN: Well, eliminationism is of course longstanding thing. It's not
just something new. We have a history of it in the United States, and
not just here -- it's a global phenomenon. It's rooted in tribalism,
and it goes way back.
The connection to fascism is fairly obvious. I got the term
"eliminationism" from Daniel Goldhagen, whose book, Hitler's Willing
Executioners, is an examination of how ordinary people facilitated the
Holocaust. A pretty good book -- there are some problems with his
thesis, but the concept of eliminationism was an important one that I
pulled out of the work.
It's fundamental to the fascist world view, because fascism's core
project is what Roger Griffin calls palingenesis, which is the
phoenixlike rebirth from the ashes of the great national heritage. In
order to achieve that rebirth, they have to eliminate and destroy --
they have to burn down what exists, and that includes eliminating
those who are the cause of their problems. So for the German fascists
that was Jews and communists and socialists. They did indeed proceed
to eliminate them.
But as I mentioned in the book, I was reading Goldhagen's book at the
time that I was doing research on my book about the Japanese American
internment, and I was really struck by the similarities of what he was
talking about -- with the sort of rhetoric directed at Japanese
Americans that I was studying and pulling out of archives during the
same time.
Incidentally, it's really striking how similar the kinds of things
that the jingoes and nativists were saying about Japanese back in
1920, with what they are saying about Latinos today -- that they bring
disease, that they don't want to speak English, that they will never
fit in, that they will never be real Americans, and most of all, that
they are secretly planning to invade the country and take it over and
kill all the white people ... or something like that.
JH: Now, there tends to be a counternarrative on the right. You talk
in the book about Michelle Malkin and her thesis about deranged
liberals.
DN: "Unhinged" is her word.
JH: Right, unhinged liberals. The argument is that their discourse is
just as bad or dangerous, only it comes from a different ideological
perspective. How would you respond to that?
DN: Well, the main difference is that when it happens on the left, it
tends to be minor characters -- fringe actors -- not people in
leadership positions. People on the left in leadership positions tend
to try to be pretty responsible in their rhetoric, mainly because they
know they will be viciously attacked if they don't. On the right, it's
pandemic for people in leadership -- leading pundits, leading
politicians, leading religious figures -- all kinds of folks are doing
this. It ranges from Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter
-- who all claim audiences of millions of people -- as opposed to the
kind of people that Malkin cites who are fringe commentators on blog
sites.
JH: So she's cherry-picking comments on blog posts and attributing
them to the authors of the blogs.
DN: That is correct. Oddly enough, that just happened to her, and she
got a taste of her own medicine.
JH: Who did that?
DN: Bill O'Reilly.
JH: Odd -- strange days we live in.
DN: A little bit of irony, yeah. She was on the next morning on Fox &
Friends complaining about it. So O'Reilly responded that evening and
said, "We probably shouldn't have just pulled blog comments, but
people have to control these things." Of course, on his own site they
don't control them. On his own Web site, he has hateful comments
popping up, and they have never taken them down.
JH: When things like that happen -- like food-fights between Malkin
and O'Reilly -- do you pop some popcorn?
DN: Oh yeah. Pop a bowl, and then just watch.
JH: As you note, eliminationism is not a new phenomenon, but in the
book you argue that it's been on the rise since the mid-1990s -- over
the last 10 or 15 years. What factors do you think account for that?
DN: Well, one of the great achievements of FDR in the 1930s was that
he really formed a longstanding ruling coalition between liberals and
conservatives. It lasted for many years -- there was an agreement that
they would rule within that framework and that political extremists on
either side would be excluded from governing.
I think part of the story is that in the 1990s -- led by people like
Rush Limbaugh -- conservatives decided that they didn't want to share
power with liberals anymore. They basically decided that they wanted
all the power for themselves.
In order to obtain political power once they cut off that
relationship, I think that they needed to form a new coalition, and
that meant that they became much more closely aligned with the
extremists on the right. Particularly, we saw in the 1990s a lot of
cross-hatching, as it were, between mainstream conservatives and the
patriot militia movement, true far-right extremists.
And over the years, people like Limbaugh and Coulter and many others
have transmitted these ideas and themes from the extreme right,
repackaged them for mainstream consumption, and broadcast them into
the popular culture.
The effect of that has been this powerful gravitational pull on
mainstream conservatism so that it's become increasingly right wing,
and part of the consummation of that was these tea parties that we
just saw, which were classic right-wing populist gatherings. I went to
the one in Seattle, and it was all the usual right-wing populism.
Let's get rid of the Fed, end the income tax, all of these things,
these ideas that we saw originating with the Posse Comitatus movement
back in the 1980s. They have gradually worked their way into the
mainstream. But it's still a very radical approach to governance, and
ultimately is very extreme.
JH: In the book you tie -- you detail wonderfully -- a lot of
examples of eliminationist rhetoric coming from sources that are
considered credible by many. Limbaugh and Coulter are certainly
examples of that. And we have seen time and time again, how incredibly
overheated it becomes and can lead to a spike in hate crimes. When you
call out the right on this, their answer is that they can't be held
accountable for people who are unhinged, who have ... whatever, mental
disorders.
DN: Yeah.
JH: I just wonder how you respond to that defense.
DN: Well, in a real simple way I would say that it's just nonsense.
There is a very clear causal connection between hateful rhetoric that
thoroughly demonizes other people to a point that they are objects fit
for elimination, and the violent action that follows. As I explain the
book with example after example -- historical examples.
Eliminationist rhetoric has the effect of creating permission for
people to act. We can't turn away from that. We can't simply say,
"well, the only person responsible for [Kansas abortion provider]
George Tiller's death was [alleged gunman] Scott Roeder." I'm sorry,
Scott Roeder got a lot of his ideas -- got a lot of his hate -- from
listening to people like Bill O'Reilly. Yes, he was clearly a radical.
He was a Freeman and was also associated with the Army of God. But you
have to understand that people like that actually see people like
Limbaugh and O'Reilly as liberals.
And compared to themselves they are relatively liberal. So when a guy
like O'Reilly broadcasts their beliefs and says what they are thinking
is right, it not only validates them, not only validates their
beliefs, but it also spurs them to action, because their thinking is
that if even the liberal media is saying it, it's even worse than we
thought. That is a spark to action.
I use an anecdote to illustrate this point very clearly. A key case
for me relatively early on in my work on this kind of phenomenon was
in 1986. We had a case in Seattle where this drifter named David Lewis
Rice walked up to the home of a family in a Seattle neighborhood one
Christmas Eve. He was pretending to be a taxicab deliveryman --
delivering a Christmas package to them. He pulled a toy gun, tied
them up, and over the next eight to 12 hours proceeded to kill them
brutally and horribly with all kinds of torturous means -- this man
David Goldmark, his wife and their two children, who were both under
the age of 10 -- using an iron and ice pick, and it was really an
awful case.
Why did he do this? Because he believed that the Goldmarks were the
leading Communists in Washington state, and maybe even some of the
leading Communists in the country. Why did he believe that? Because he
had been hanging out with a group of Bircherites who met regularly
down at a little local tavern in Seattle. They had sat around for the
previous month and talked about how David Goldmark and his wife were
prominent communists.
This had come up because Goldmark's father had been one of the leading
legislators in Washington state during the McCarthyite Red scare in
the state. Some of the local [John] Birchers out in the Spokane area
had accused them of being members of the communist party -- secret
communists. It was actually a famous case at the time, because the
Goldmarks sued the crap out of these people and won. And it had long
stuck in these people's craws that they had lost this case.
It had come up in the news two months before the killings. There had
been some reminder of it, and this is what had got this group -- they
called themselves the "Duck Club" -- all worked up. They were talking
about the Goldmarks all the time. They filled David Lewis Rice's head
with all these ideas, and he decided to act on it.
Now, were they criminally culpable or even legally culpable in a civil
suit? Probably not. But are they ethically and morally culpable?
Absolutely. This is the same thing with Bill O'Reilly and Dr. George
Tiller. He didn't pull the trigger. He didn't do anything to this guy,
but he helped fill some other guy's head with all kinds of hateful
beliefs about Dr. Tiller, and filled his head with the idea that we
needed to act to stop him -- to stop him from murdering all these
babies.
Inevitably, somebody is going to act on that. What a guy like O'Reilly
does is he gives permission for guys like Scott Roeder to act.
JH: Inevitably, when we criticize the right for this kind of rhetoric
-- and we do so with some frequency at AlterNet -- a response that we
hear is: "are you advocating censorship?" So let me ask you if you are
in fact saying these people should be censored?
DN: No. Simply no. What we are advocating -- what I'm advocating -- is
standing up, using our own free speech. Hate speech is protected
speech in this country, and it should be. I wouldn't have it any other
way. But it's grossly irresponsible speech.
We, as citizens, have an obligation: If we are going to enjoy freedom
of speech, we need to live up to the responsibility that comes with
it. This is of course a common theme on the right -- that with your
freedoms come responsibility. We say yes. With your freedom of speech
comes a responsibility to speak responsibly, not in a way that harms
other people, particularly when you have these huge media megaphones
that give individuals the power to propagandize to millions of people.
It's incredibly irresponsible to start demonizing and dehumanizing
other people, because that opens all of those people up to hate crimes
and various acts of vicious retaliation that disturbed individuals
have gotten permission for from eliminationist rhetoric.
Remember, censorship is government action against individuals. What we
want to talk about is ... nobody wants to take Bill O'Reilly's free
speech away, but we need to question whether he deserves to have that
big megaphone. So I always advocate going to their advertisers and
doing whatever you need to do to stand up.
One of the things that I learned while studying hate crimes is that
the vast majority of hate crimes are committed by ordinary people, not
by members of hate groups. Yet it's also the case that the vast
majority of hate crimes are accompanied by hate-group rhetoric. So in
a lot of ways hate crimes are a manifestation of the way right-wing
extremism has permeated the broader culture. But more than that, these
ordinary people also believe -- and I might add this includes the
white supremacists -- that what they are doing reflects the secret
desires, the unspoken wishes of the community that they believe they
are defending.
When you stand up to them, when you engage in the act of standing up
to them, that knocks that plank right out from under them, because
when the community stands up and says, "No, these are not our values,
this is not what we believe in, what you are doing is wrong," that
takes that belief away.
JH: The silent majority ...
DN: Right. It's really important that the "silent majority" stop being
silent and let them know that this is not acceptable. There are
various ways of letting them know that. A guy like O'Reilly is never
going to stop. So eventually what you have to do is go after his
advertisers, get him off the air, because he is not going to change
his ways.
That is not an attempt to silence him. That is an attempt to make sure
that these massive megaphones aren't being used to create permission
for people to act out violently. That is our own free speech. They
talk about how we want to take away their speech ... well, they want
to take away our speech. We just don't think they should have these
media megaphones. There is no God-given right to have a media
megaphone. That is not a right. That is a privilege. Why should we
extend that privilege to them?
JH: My last question is the same for every interview I do: If I were
smarter, what would I have asked you that I didn't today?
DN: Hmmm. If you had asked me how effective standing up might be and
how we should go about it, my answer would be that it's really
important to understand that people on the right believe that they are
doing the right thing. They believe that they are being good people
and that they are standing up for what is right, even when they are
being just so obviously evil.
But this is part of the dynamic. They see themselves are heroic. The
dynamic of being a hero is what creates this phenomenon. It's part of
the dualism of the mind-set that underlies the psychology of these
problems. When you want to be the hero, you have to have an enemy.
So people on the right are constantly in the act of creating enemies.
When the Soviet Union fell, they didn't have their classic enemy
anymore. So they went about creating new ones. Suddenly, it was the
government. It was our own people who were the enemy. We internalized
in the 1990s -- at least the right really internalized it -- this idea
of who the enemy is.
People on the left do it, too. People on the left want to think of
themselves as heroic and engaging in this sort of heroic battle
against the evil forces of the right. In the process, we help -- we
just keep that dragon chasing its own tail. We become part of this
self-perpetuating dynamic of creating enemies, and I think it is
really fundamentally important to understand when we talk to and
engage the people who are susceptible to this.
I want to add that you are probably never going to convince people
like Limbaugh and Coulter and the real hard-core ideologues. You are
just never going to successfully engage them and change their minds.
But a lot of ordinary people -- the people who are influenced by them
-- well, we have a great deal of hope for actually being able to
change their minds.
So when we engage them, I think it is fundamentally important that we
try not to see ourselves as heroes, that we don't turn them into the
enemy but rather people like us, human beings who have frailties and
have flaws and engage them in a real way, because that is how we are
going to pull them over.
We are not going to change people's minds by pointing at them and
calling them bad people. We are going to change people's minds by
taking care to honestly engage them as one human being to another.
That is the only way I think that we really can succeed.
Mindset
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted June 12, 2009.
Understanding the dangerous worldview that led to the murder of an
innocent doctor and an attack at the Holocaust Museum.
In April, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report (PDF)
warning that the shifting political climate and tanking economy was
spurring a resurgence of violent right-wing extremism (known as
"terrorism" when applied to those holding other political views) in
the United States.
At the time, a number of right-wing commentators lambasted the report
as a politically motivated attack on mainstream conservatism rather
than what it was: an early warning on the dangers posed by a violent,
fringe minority within their movement. Under pressure from GOP
lawmakers, Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano apologized for the
report.
But in the short weeks since, the department's warnings have proved
prescient. An abortion provider who had been a frequent target of Fox
News' bloviator Bill O'Reilly was gunned down during a church service
in Kansas; a mentally disturbed man who believed the "tea-bagging"
movement's contention that the Obama administration is destroying the
American economy -- and who reportedly owned a number of firearms --
withdrew $85,000 from his bank account, said he was part of a plot to
assassinate the president and disappeared (he was later captured in
Las Vegas); and this week, a white supremacist who was deeply steeped
in far-right conspiracism entered the U.S. Holocaust Museum and opened
fire, killing a guard before being shot and wounded by security
personnel.
The three incidents share a common feature: All of these men thought
they were serving a higher moral purpose, that is, defending their
country from an insidious "enemy within" as defined by the far right
-- a "baby-killer," the Jews who secretly control the world and a
president who's been accused of being a Manchurian Candidate-style
foreign agent bent on nothing less than the destruction of the
American Way.
David Neiwert, a veteran journalist who has covered violent right-wing
groups for years, calls the worldview that informs this twisted sense
of moral purpose "eliminationism." It's the belief that one's
political opponents are not just wrongheaded, misinformed or even
acting in bad faith. Eliminationism holds that they are a cancer on
the body politic that must be excised -- either by separation from the
public at large, through censorship or by outright extermination -- in
order to protect the purity of the nation.
As eliminationist rhetoric becomes increasingly mainstream within the
American right -- fueled in large part by the wildly overheated
discourse found on conservative blogs and talk radio -- Neiwert's new
book, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American
Right, could not have come at a more important time. In it, Neiwert
painstakingly details how the rise in eliminationism is a very real
threat and points to the dangers of dismissing extreme rhetoric as
merely a form of "entertainment."
AlterNet recently caught up with Neiwert in Washington to discuss this
troubling trend.
Joshua Holland: There is a lot of ugly discourse in this country, and
there always has been. What makes eliminationist rhetoric different
from the kind of run-of-the-mill nasty stuff that we see on all sides
of the political spectrum?
David Neiwert: Right -- there is a lot of hateful rhetoric that floats
around on both sides. What's unique about eliminationist rhetoric is
that it talks about eliminating whole blocs of people from the body
politic, whereas most of the hateful rhetoric, in the case of people
on the left, is directed at an individual -- George Bush or Dick
Cheney and various characters on the right. That's one of the key
differences -- when right-wing people talk hatefully, it often is
directed at entire groups of people: Latinos, African Americans, gays
and lesbians or liberals.
JH: People they deem to be inferior.
DN: Deemed inferior, or not even human. That is a critical aspect of
eliminationist rhetoric. It often depicts the opposition as subhuman
-- comparing them with vermin, diseases or carriers of diseases. I
think for me the classic historical expression of eliminationism in
America was Col. [John] Chivington's remarks prior to the Sand Creek
Massacre, where he urged the white Colorado militiamen to kill all the
Indians they encountered, including women and children. He said, "nits
make lice." That to me is pretty much a classic eliminationist
statement.
We certainly saw it through the lynching era in America, because the
same sort of rhetoric was aimed at African Americans. We saw it
between 1900-1942 directed at Asian Americans, particularly Japanese.
Then more recently, we have had eliminationist rhetoric and behavior
directed towards gays and lesbians and other minorities. This often
expresses itself in the form of hate crimes.
JH: In the book, you discuss the connection between eliminationism and
fascism. Can you dig into that a little bit for me?
DN: Well, eliminationism is of course longstanding thing. It's not
just something new. We have a history of it in the United States, and
not just here -- it's a global phenomenon. It's rooted in tribalism,
and it goes way back.
The connection to fascism is fairly obvious. I got the term
"eliminationism" from Daniel Goldhagen, whose book, Hitler's Willing
Executioners, is an examination of how ordinary people facilitated the
Holocaust. A pretty good book -- there are some problems with his
thesis, but the concept of eliminationism was an important one that I
pulled out of the work.
It's fundamental to the fascist world view, because fascism's core
project is what Roger Griffin calls palingenesis, which is the
phoenixlike rebirth from the ashes of the great national heritage. In
order to achieve that rebirth, they have to eliminate and destroy --
they have to burn down what exists, and that includes eliminating
those who are the cause of their problems. So for the German fascists
that was Jews and communists and socialists. They did indeed proceed
to eliminate them.
But as I mentioned in the book, I was reading Goldhagen's book at the
time that I was doing research on my book about the Japanese American
internment, and I was really struck by the similarities of what he was
talking about -- with the sort of rhetoric directed at Japanese
Americans that I was studying and pulling out of archives during the
same time.
Incidentally, it's really striking how similar the kinds of things
that the jingoes and nativists were saying about Japanese back in
1920, with what they are saying about Latinos today -- that they bring
disease, that they don't want to speak English, that they will never
fit in, that they will never be real Americans, and most of all, that
they are secretly planning to invade the country and take it over and
kill all the white people ... or something like that.
JH: Now, there tends to be a counternarrative on the right. You talk
in the book about Michelle Malkin and her thesis about deranged
liberals.
DN: "Unhinged" is her word.
JH: Right, unhinged liberals. The argument is that their discourse is
just as bad or dangerous, only it comes from a different ideological
perspective. How would you respond to that?
DN: Well, the main difference is that when it happens on the left, it
tends to be minor characters -- fringe actors -- not people in
leadership positions. People on the left in leadership positions tend
to try to be pretty responsible in their rhetoric, mainly because they
know they will be viciously attacked if they don't. On the right, it's
pandemic for people in leadership -- leading pundits, leading
politicians, leading religious figures -- all kinds of folks are doing
this. It ranges from Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter
-- who all claim audiences of millions of people -- as opposed to the
kind of people that Malkin cites who are fringe commentators on blog
sites.
JH: So she's cherry-picking comments on blog posts and attributing
them to the authors of the blogs.
DN: That is correct. Oddly enough, that just happened to her, and she
got a taste of her own medicine.
JH: Who did that?
DN: Bill O'Reilly.
JH: Odd -- strange days we live in.
DN: A little bit of irony, yeah. She was on the next morning on Fox &
Friends complaining about it. So O'Reilly responded that evening and
said, "We probably shouldn't have just pulled blog comments, but
people have to control these things." Of course, on his own site they
don't control them. On his own Web site, he has hateful comments
popping up, and they have never taken them down.
JH: When things like that happen -- like food-fights between Malkin
and O'Reilly -- do you pop some popcorn?
DN: Oh yeah. Pop a bowl, and then just watch.
JH: As you note, eliminationism is not a new phenomenon, but in the
book you argue that it's been on the rise since the mid-1990s -- over
the last 10 or 15 years. What factors do you think account for that?
DN: Well, one of the great achievements of FDR in the 1930s was that
he really formed a longstanding ruling coalition between liberals and
conservatives. It lasted for many years -- there was an agreement that
they would rule within that framework and that political extremists on
either side would be excluded from governing.
I think part of the story is that in the 1990s -- led by people like
Rush Limbaugh -- conservatives decided that they didn't want to share
power with liberals anymore. They basically decided that they wanted
all the power for themselves.
In order to obtain political power once they cut off that
relationship, I think that they needed to form a new coalition, and
that meant that they became much more closely aligned with the
extremists on the right. Particularly, we saw in the 1990s a lot of
cross-hatching, as it were, between mainstream conservatives and the
patriot militia movement, true far-right extremists.
And over the years, people like Limbaugh and Coulter and many others
have transmitted these ideas and themes from the extreme right,
repackaged them for mainstream consumption, and broadcast them into
the popular culture.
The effect of that has been this powerful gravitational pull on
mainstream conservatism so that it's become increasingly right wing,
and part of the consummation of that was these tea parties that we
just saw, which were classic right-wing populist gatherings. I went to
the one in Seattle, and it was all the usual right-wing populism.
Let's get rid of the Fed, end the income tax, all of these things,
these ideas that we saw originating with the Posse Comitatus movement
back in the 1980s. They have gradually worked their way into the
mainstream. But it's still a very radical approach to governance, and
ultimately is very extreme.
JH: In the book you tie -- you detail wonderfully -- a lot of
examples of eliminationist rhetoric coming from sources that are
considered credible by many. Limbaugh and Coulter are certainly
examples of that. And we have seen time and time again, how incredibly
overheated it becomes and can lead to a spike in hate crimes. When you
call out the right on this, their answer is that they can't be held
accountable for people who are unhinged, who have ... whatever, mental
disorders.
DN: Yeah.
JH: I just wonder how you respond to that defense.
DN: Well, in a real simple way I would say that it's just nonsense.
There is a very clear causal connection between hateful rhetoric that
thoroughly demonizes other people to a point that they are objects fit
for elimination, and the violent action that follows. As I explain the
book with example after example -- historical examples.
Eliminationist rhetoric has the effect of creating permission for
people to act. We can't turn away from that. We can't simply say,
"well, the only person responsible for [Kansas abortion provider]
George Tiller's death was [alleged gunman] Scott Roeder." I'm sorry,
Scott Roeder got a lot of his ideas -- got a lot of his hate -- from
listening to people like Bill O'Reilly. Yes, he was clearly a radical.
He was a Freeman and was also associated with the Army of God. But you
have to understand that people like that actually see people like
Limbaugh and O'Reilly as liberals.
And compared to themselves they are relatively liberal. So when a guy
like O'Reilly broadcasts their beliefs and says what they are thinking
is right, it not only validates them, not only validates their
beliefs, but it also spurs them to action, because their thinking is
that if even the liberal media is saying it, it's even worse than we
thought. That is a spark to action.
I use an anecdote to illustrate this point very clearly. A key case
for me relatively early on in my work on this kind of phenomenon was
in 1986. We had a case in Seattle where this drifter named David Lewis
Rice walked up to the home of a family in a Seattle neighborhood one
Christmas Eve. He was pretending to be a taxicab deliveryman --
delivering a Christmas package to them. He pulled a toy gun, tied
them up, and over the next eight to 12 hours proceeded to kill them
brutally and horribly with all kinds of torturous means -- this man
David Goldmark, his wife and their two children, who were both under
the age of 10 -- using an iron and ice pick, and it was really an
awful case.
Why did he do this? Because he believed that the Goldmarks were the
leading Communists in Washington state, and maybe even some of the
leading Communists in the country. Why did he believe that? Because he
had been hanging out with a group of Bircherites who met regularly
down at a little local tavern in Seattle. They had sat around for the
previous month and talked about how David Goldmark and his wife were
prominent communists.
This had come up because Goldmark's father had been one of the leading
legislators in Washington state during the McCarthyite Red scare in
the state. Some of the local [John] Birchers out in the Spokane area
had accused them of being members of the communist party -- secret
communists. It was actually a famous case at the time, because the
Goldmarks sued the crap out of these people and won. And it had long
stuck in these people's craws that they had lost this case.
It had come up in the news two months before the killings. There had
been some reminder of it, and this is what had got this group -- they
called themselves the "Duck Club" -- all worked up. They were talking
about the Goldmarks all the time. They filled David Lewis Rice's head
with all these ideas, and he decided to act on it.
Now, were they criminally culpable or even legally culpable in a civil
suit? Probably not. But are they ethically and morally culpable?
Absolutely. This is the same thing with Bill O'Reilly and Dr. George
Tiller. He didn't pull the trigger. He didn't do anything to this guy,
but he helped fill some other guy's head with all kinds of hateful
beliefs about Dr. Tiller, and filled his head with the idea that we
needed to act to stop him -- to stop him from murdering all these
babies.
Inevitably, somebody is going to act on that. What a guy like O'Reilly
does is he gives permission for guys like Scott Roeder to act.
JH: Inevitably, when we criticize the right for this kind of rhetoric
-- and we do so with some frequency at AlterNet -- a response that we
hear is: "are you advocating censorship?" So let me ask you if you are
in fact saying these people should be censored?
DN: No. Simply no. What we are advocating -- what I'm advocating -- is
standing up, using our own free speech. Hate speech is protected
speech in this country, and it should be. I wouldn't have it any other
way. But it's grossly irresponsible speech.
We, as citizens, have an obligation: If we are going to enjoy freedom
of speech, we need to live up to the responsibility that comes with
it. This is of course a common theme on the right -- that with your
freedoms come responsibility. We say yes. With your freedom of speech
comes a responsibility to speak responsibly, not in a way that harms
other people, particularly when you have these huge media megaphones
that give individuals the power to propagandize to millions of people.
It's incredibly irresponsible to start demonizing and dehumanizing
other people, because that opens all of those people up to hate crimes
and various acts of vicious retaliation that disturbed individuals
have gotten permission for from eliminationist rhetoric.
Remember, censorship is government action against individuals. What we
want to talk about is ... nobody wants to take Bill O'Reilly's free
speech away, but we need to question whether he deserves to have that
big megaphone. So I always advocate going to their advertisers and
doing whatever you need to do to stand up.
One of the things that I learned while studying hate crimes is that
the vast majority of hate crimes are committed by ordinary people, not
by members of hate groups. Yet it's also the case that the vast
majority of hate crimes are accompanied by hate-group rhetoric. So in
a lot of ways hate crimes are a manifestation of the way right-wing
extremism has permeated the broader culture. But more than that, these
ordinary people also believe -- and I might add this includes the
white supremacists -- that what they are doing reflects the secret
desires, the unspoken wishes of the community that they believe they
are defending.
When you stand up to them, when you engage in the act of standing up
to them, that knocks that plank right out from under them, because
when the community stands up and says, "No, these are not our values,
this is not what we believe in, what you are doing is wrong," that
takes that belief away.
JH: The silent majority ...
DN: Right. It's really important that the "silent majority" stop being
silent and let them know that this is not acceptable. There are
various ways of letting them know that. A guy like O'Reilly is never
going to stop. So eventually what you have to do is go after his
advertisers, get him off the air, because he is not going to change
his ways.
That is not an attempt to silence him. That is an attempt to make sure
that these massive megaphones aren't being used to create permission
for people to act out violently. That is our own free speech. They
talk about how we want to take away their speech ... well, they want
to take away our speech. We just don't think they should have these
media megaphones. There is no God-given right to have a media
megaphone. That is not a right. That is a privilege. Why should we
extend that privilege to them?
JH: My last question is the same for every interview I do: If I were
smarter, what would I have asked you that I didn't today?
DN: Hmmm. If you had asked me how effective standing up might be and
how we should go about it, my answer would be that it's really
important to understand that people on the right believe that they are
doing the right thing. They believe that they are being good people
and that they are standing up for what is right, even when they are
being just so obviously evil.
But this is part of the dynamic. They see themselves are heroic. The
dynamic of being a hero is what creates this phenomenon. It's part of
the dualism of the mind-set that underlies the psychology of these
problems. When you want to be the hero, you have to have an enemy.
So people on the right are constantly in the act of creating enemies.
When the Soviet Union fell, they didn't have their classic enemy
anymore. So they went about creating new ones. Suddenly, it was the
government. It was our own people who were the enemy. We internalized
in the 1990s -- at least the right really internalized it -- this idea
of who the enemy is.
People on the left do it, too. People on the left want to think of
themselves as heroic and engaging in this sort of heroic battle
against the evil forces of the right. In the process, we help -- we
just keep that dragon chasing its own tail. We become part of this
self-perpetuating dynamic of creating enemies, and I think it is
really fundamentally important to understand when we talk to and
engage the people who are susceptible to this.
I want to add that you are probably never going to convince people
like Limbaugh and Coulter and the real hard-core ideologues. You are
just never going to successfully engage them and change their minds.
But a lot of ordinary people -- the people who are influenced by them
-- well, we have a great deal of hope for actually being able to
change their minds.
So when we engage them, I think it is fundamentally important that we
try not to see ourselves as heroes, that we don't turn them into the
enemy but rather people like us, human beings who have frailties and
have flaws and engage them in a real way, because that is how we are
going to pull them over.
We are not going to change people's minds by pointing at them and
calling them bad people. We are going to change people's minds by
taking care to honestly engage them as one human being to another.
That is the only way I think that we really can succeed.