[h/t David for the video]

We've discussed so-called "sovereign citizens" -- those newly revivified remnants of the militia/Patriot movement of the 1990s who believe you can declare yourself free of the federal government by filing a bunch of pseudo-legal documents saying so -- quite a bit here, particularly the threat of extreme violence they represent, embodied most recently in the case of Jerry and Joe Kane, the traveling Patriot-scam salesmen who gunned down two police officers in Arkansas.

But it's kinda strange: Even though these cases would attract huge amounts of media attention had they been committed by, say, someone of the Muslim persuasion (you know there would be nonstop coverage on Fox), scarcely anyone has paid attention to these violent crimes, at least in the media.

And there's an important thread here: Not only were Jerry and Joe Kane "sovereign citizens," so were Scott Roeder, the assassin of George Tiller, and James Von Brunn, the Holocaust Museum shooter.

So I was keenly interested when WSB-TV in Atlanta reported on a "sovereign citizen" in Georgia who has been apparently playing with the same Patriot scam that Jerry and Joe Kane were selling: moving into foreclosed homes and claiming them as your own.

If you watch the video, and the others Kane left behind, you'll see that the scheme he was selling entailed creating "strawman" companies that would enable a "sovereign citizen" to then claim ownership, by virtue of their sovereignty (often defined in divine terms), of whatever properties they set their sights upon. As one account noted:

Seminars of this type usually teach that each person has a real self and a “corporate self” that is a fabrication of the government, and that banks cannot legitimately lend money that belongs to their depositors.

“It’s mumbo jumbo; it’s magic words; it’s abracadabra,” Ms. MacNab said.

We're seeing, as I mentioned, this scam showing up in places like Seattle and Montana and California, too.

But what's remarkable about this "sovereign citizen" is that he's African-American. This is at first remarkable because "sovereign citizenship" is typically a product of racist-right organizations that preach racial separation -- 99 percent of the sovereign citizens in America are white.

But there are in fact some black-supremacist organizations such as the Black Nuwaubians who similarly truck in these kinds of conspiracy theories (which, like the white supremacists', ultimately blame Jews for all their ills). And all you have to do is listen to this fellow ramble on for a little while to realize that he's very much of this vein.

Now, if anything will get the attention of mainstream media -- and particularly the folks at Fox (Megyn Kelly, I'm looking at you) -- it's a black man indulging in this kind of rhetoric and behavior.

One can only imagine the horrified faces of the Fox anchors as they describe how this fellow has been moving into foreclosed homes and claiming they're all his! Why, hasn't he heard about white people's work ethic?

And you know the names of any of the white extremists who created and sold this Bizarro World belief system will never cross their lips.

I swear on all that is sacred to any of you that what I'm about to write is true. I have to say that up front because even in the bizarro world that is politics, this story is still right out of outer space.

Let's say there was a district in Michigan where a Republican (Mike Rogers) barely won his seat in a special election back in 2000 when Senator Debbie Stabenow won her seat. Like, he won by 111 votes or so. And let's say that the same Republican has won every election since largely because no candidate has really stepped up to challenge in a meaningful way.

In this story, said district (MI-08) is an interesting mix of progressive and militia types, but overall, the district went 2-1 for Obama in 2008.

In 2010, you'd think it might be worth trying to target said district and Mike Rogers for a Democratic win. Here's how it plays, via Swing State Project:

Earlier this year, a young guy named Kande Ngalamulume (he was born in Zaire, now known as the Congo) decided to take a shot. No political experience, he'd lived outside of Michigan since 2002. His biggest claim to fame was having been a track star at Michigan State.

Then it turns weird:

Unfortunately, after finding a lack of financial support (he had only raised a total of around $25,000 or so, I believe), he dropped out of the race on June 2--and not only did so in a very public manner (via email press release), but did so several weeks after the filing deadline...and then left the state.

Continue reading »

Using racist code words is built into the psyche of all conservative pols so when Mrs. Crazy spouts off that the USA could become "Zimbabwe," they understand that what she's really saying is Obama is not a citizen, but an African/Muslin hiding out in the White House and undermining our values like so many Russian cold war spies did in the 70's and 80's. That's according to many movement conservatives like the Abramoff run College Republicans of days gone bye.

Laura Ingraham says that Bachmann is not afraid to take on President Obama. What a stud, girl. Here come the black helicopters everybody. Phony 'One world' conspiracy theories have populated the Militia and Patriot movements for decades and have proven to be quite profitable actually for those that transmit these seriously unbalanced views.

Bachmann: Do we really want to tie our fortunes to Venezuela or Zimbabwe?

Ingraham: We're tied to China.

Bachmann: That's right, we are because they've been buying our debt.

Ingraham: We are in a global economy.

Bachmann: Of course, of course, but we don't want to become MORE dependent. That's really the point.

She could have said Greece or Iceland or Spain, but no...it's Zimbabwe. You get the imagery.

Matt Yglesias writes:

The reassuring thing about a lot of the nonsense you hear from the right is to think to yourself “well, these guys are liars.” Other times you see something like this transcript of Rep Michele Bachmann talking to radio host Scott Hennen and you come face to face with the realization that some key figures in the movement are dumber than Jonah Goldberg.

Bachmann: Well, President Obama is trying to bind the United States into a global economy where all of our nations come together in a global economy. I don’t want the United States to be in a global economy where, where our economic future is bound to that of Zimbabwe.

Of course the existence of a global economy in which events outside our borders impact us is not something Barack Obama dreamed up, and the idea that having world leaders gather for occasional meetings constitutes a “one world government” is insane. Is her idea that the President should never meet with anyone? Does that undermine our sovereignty?

Gawker writes:

A few thoughts:

• Zimbabwe isn't in the G20. It would take about G200 before Zimbabwe gets an invite.
• The entire post-Cold War economic landscape has been one of a "global economy."
• Everything else she said is stupid.
• That's all.

The MNProgerssive Project: Michele Bachmann's latest conspiracy theory: G20 Summit is to talk about a one world government

Blue America's Tarryl Clark is a great choice to take Michele on so please support her if you can. If you live in the district I'm sure they are looking for help. It won't be easy, but at least we have a good candidate in Bachmann-land.

Coming on the heels of last weekend's arrests of a group of a militiamen in the Midwest for plotting to kill law-enforcement officers, you'd think people in positions of responsibility would take seriously some of the rising threats from right-wing extremists. And, judging from the story in the Washington Post, it would seem at least the FBI is:

The FBI is warning police across the country that an anti-government group's call to remove governors from office could provoke violence.

The group called the Guardians of the free Republics wants to "restore America" by peacefully dismantling parts of the government, according to its Web site. It sent letters to governors demanding they leave office or be removed.

Investigators do not see threats of violence in the group's message, but fear the broad call for removal of top state officials could lead others to act out violently. At least two states beefed up security in response.

But over in the FoxNewsiverse -- which operates on separate plane in which everything up is down -- it's not really a big deal. Just about the only discussion of the story on Fox yesterday came in the "All Star Panel" section of Special Report with Bret Baier, and it mostly elicited a big yawn.

Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard didn't really know what to make of it, but at least there seemed to be some agreement that even if these were just "kooky people," sometimes "kooky people" can inflict serious harm. Except for Charles Krauthammer, who thought it was all a non-story -- because, of course, activity by right-wing extremists is always a non-story to conservatives:

Krauthammer: Oh, come on. I get e-mails like that every week, and I don't even hold any office. And they don't always include the legally remove you, either.

... And lastly, loony anarchists aren't new in America. We've had 'em since Sacco and Vanzetti. It didn't start with health care reform.

Except, Charles, that these aren't anarchists. These people call themselves "constitutionalists". Just like your Fox colleague, Glenn Beck.

And yes, they've been known to blow stuff up, too.

As Lee Fang at Think Progress explains, the group making the threats is in fact a classic right-wing extremist organization:

Continue reading »

Frank Schaeffer: The Evangelical "mainstream" insanity behind the Michigan "End Times" militia

The Baseline Scenario: Barney Frank does the right thing

Progressive Fix: Exploding a Stimulus "Study"

Brad DeLong: Is this an April Fool's joke?

Blogcritics Politics: Latest wingy war cry, "I am not a child!" Um hum...how can I tell?

Newstalgia: What would George say? George Wallace in 1964

Well, the facts are now being made public in this weekend's militia bust in the Midwest, and it isn't pretty:

Six Michigan residents, two Ohio residents and an Indiana resident have been indicted on charges of attempted use of weapons of mass destruction in connection with their membership in a Lenawee County Christian militia group.

Members of the Hutaree -- including a Michigan couple and their two sons -- conspired to oppose by force the authority of the U.S. government, according to a release by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit.

The indictment unsealed in U.S. District Court today claims that the Hutaree planned to kill an unidentified member of local law enforcement and then attack the law enforcement officers who gather in Michigan for the funeral. According to the plan, the Hutaree would attack law enforcement vehicles during the funeral procession with improvised explosive devices rigged with projectiles, which constitute weapons of mass destruction, according to the announcement by U.S. Attorney Barbara L. McQuade.

You can read the indictment as a PDF here. Of particular note is this:

The general concept of of operations provided that the Hutaree would commit some violent act to draw the attention of law enforcement or government officials and which would draw a response by law enforcement. Possible such acts were discussed including killing a member of law enforcement after a traffic stop, killing a member of law enforcement and his or her family at home, ambushing a member of law enforcement in rural communities, luring a member of law enforcement with a false 911 emergency call and then killing him or her, and killing a member of law enforcement and then attacking a funeral procession motorcade with weapons of mass destruction. These acts would intimidate and demoralize law enforcement, diminishing their ranks and rendering them ineffective.

The general concept of operations further provided that, once such action was taken, Hutaree members would then retreat to one of several "rally points" where the Hutaree would wage war against the government and be prepared to defend in-depth with trip-wired and command detonated anti-personnel Improvised Explosive Devices (IED), ambushes, and prepared fighting positions. It is believed by the Hutaree that this engagement would serve as a catalyst for a more wide-spread uprising against the Government.

CNN explains further:

According to the plan, the indictment said, the Hutaree wanted to use improvised explosive devices to attack law enforcement vehicles during the funeral procession. The indictment said those explosive devices, commonly called IEDs, constitute weapons of mass destruction.

Subsequently, the indictment said, Hutaree leader David Brian Stone obtained information about IEDs over the Internet and e-mailed diagrams to a person he believed could manufacture them.

He then had his one of his sons, Joshua Matthew Stone, and others gather materials necessary to manufacture IEDs, the indictment alleges.

According to the indictment, David Brian Stone and David Brian Stone Jr. taught other Hutaree members in June how to make and use explosive devices.

The only funny aspect of all this: As Blue Texan at FDL observes, the right-wing blogosphere is falling all over itself to dream up excuses for these guys.

Meanwhile, Ed Brayton reports that Mike Vanderboegh, the ex-militiaman who called for bricks to be thrown through Democratic office windows, has simultaneously denounced the Hutaree and then suggested that the arrests could still spark "civil war" from the militias.

Hmmm. I can remember when I was being called an "alarmist" for pointing out that we were heading down this road.

The Washington Monthly: RNC raises money for Hannity

Emptywheel: Can't spell militia without "MI" (and IN & OH)

Laura Rozen: A fierce debate on Israel is underway inside the Obama administration

A Tiny Revolution: Democracy Whiskey Sexy Etc.

We are respectable negroes: Cognitive Dissonance

The Reality-Based Community: Harder than impossible?

Glenn Beck was really unhappy on his show today about that New York Times piece on the Tea Parties because it portrayed a movement in the thrall of 1990s militiamen -- accurately, we might add.

Though Beck didn't think so:

It's painting the Tea Party movement as a bunch of racist, militia-loving, Birther-supporting, Branch-Davidian-sympathizing, civil-war-starting whack jobs, you know what I mean?

Beck set out to demonstrate that the far more serious problem when it came to violence was the "anger" being stirred up by President Obama.

How does he prove this? By blaming the recent shooting rampage by a University of Alabama-Huntsville professor on her "far left" political beliefs:

The intellectual curiosity of the New York Times is boundless, except when they wander too far over to the left. Then they seem to get -- 'I don't want to face that, I'm getting sleepy over here on the left'.

Maybe I missed it, but I haven't seen the New York Times connect the dots from the actual violence from the left! Like the latest nutjob -- a professor from Alabama who killed three colleagues. Yes, there she is.

The Boston Herald reports that "A family source said Amy Bishop, a mother of four children - the youngest a third-grade boy, was a far-left political extremist who was 'obsessed' with President Obama to the point of being off-putting."

It's weird. When it's a nut on the left -- isolated incident, we're still looking, we have no idea what that was. Nut on the right? Hah! 'I have no evidence that they're connected at all, but the violence is troubling parallels here to the old white teabagging hatemongers.' You know, with their walkers.

Well, it's true that Amy Bishop was a liberal Obama fan. But then, so were her victims. All three of the slain colleagues were nonwhite, and one of them had decorated his office door with Obama signs.

Beck is claiming a causal connection between Amy Bishop's "far-left" political beliefs and the shooting rampage that simply doesn't exist.

Perhaps we can leave the question of motive to eyewitnesses:

We were 12 all together (including the shooter) sitting around an oval table in a modest size conference room . There were only one door to enter/exit. The shooter was a disgruntled faculty member who didn’t get tenured after several appeals and a law suit. About 30min into the meeting, she got up suddenly, took out a gun and started shooting at each one of us. She started with the one closest to her and went down the row shooting her targets in the head. Our chairman got it the worst as he was right next to her along with two others who died almost instantly. Six people sitting in the rows perpendicular were all shot fatally or seriously wounded. The remaining 5 including myself were on the other side of the table immediately dropped to the floor. During a reload, the shooter was rushed, and we pushed her out the hall way and closed the door. Thereafter we barricaded the door and called 911.

Indeed, there's no indication whatsoever that the shootings were politically motivated. All signs indicate this was about Bishop's disgruntlement with having been refused tenure.

That's in stark contrast to the right-wing extremist violence -- especially when the angry propagandists at Fox have a hand in it.

For instance, when Scott Roeder walked into a Kansas church and shot Dr. George Tiller -- a man who had been viciously demonized by Bill O'Reilly for the better part of the three years preceding -- there was no question that he did so as a political statement, as well as for political reasons: He believes abortion is murder, and he was willing to murder to stop it.

Similarly, when Richard Poplawski shot three Pittsburgh police officers this spring, it was because he believed President Obama was conspiring to take Americans' guns away. It was a classic violent law-enforcement encounter with right-wing extremists, of which there have been no shortage for the past decade and more. Of course, it didn't hurt that Poplawski had been whipped up into this violently paranoid state by Glenn Beck, among others.

Oh, and how did Glenn Beck respond then? Why, these guys (like James Von Brunn were just plain vanilla nutjobs!

Disgusting hypocrisy, thy name is Glenn Beck.

[Richard Mack at a Bellevue, WA, militia organizing meeting in February 1995. Photo by David Neiwert.]

The more we learn about the Tea Party movement as it evolves, the more disturbing a portrait emerges: One of a right-wing populist movement animated by cultural resentments and paranoia that previously were the domain of fringe conspiracy theorists and militiamen.

There were a number of important reports on the Tea Party movement this week that underscored and confirmed something we've been reporting at C&L (similarly confirmed in that report for Newsweek) for some time: That the Tea Party movement has been overtaken by right-wing extremists of the Patriot movement.

The most important of these was David Barstow's report in the New York Times describing the movement's evolution into a revival of the Patriots:

The Tea Party movement has become a platform for conservative populist discontent, a force in Republican politics for revival, as it was in the Massachusetts Senate election, or for division. But it is also about the profound private transformation of people like Mrs. Stout, people who not long ago were not especially interested in politics, yet now say they are bracing for tyranny.

These people are part of a significant undercurrent within the Tea Party movement that has less in common with the Republican Party than with the Patriot movement, a brand of politics historically associated with libertarians, militia groups, anti-immigration advocates and those who argue for the abolition of the Federal Reserve.

Urged on by conservative commentators, waves of newly minted activists are turning to once-obscure books and Web sites and discovering a set of ideas long dismissed as the preserve of conspiracy theorists, interviews conducted across the country over several months show. In this view, Mr. Obama and many of his predecessors (including George W. Bush) have deliberately undermined the Constitution and free enterprise for the benefit of a shadowy international network of wealthy elites.

Loose alliances like Friends for Liberty are popping up in many cities, forming hybrid entities of Tea Parties and groups rooted in the Patriot ethos. These coalitions are not content with simply making the Republican Party more conservative. They have a larger goal — a political reordering that would drastically shrink the federal government and sweep away not just Mr. Obama, but much of the Republican establishment, starting with Senator John McCain.

One of the key figures in this takeover, as this story describes, has been Richard Mack, the '90s militia figure who has become a fixture on the Tea Party circuit, as we reported previously. Indeed, his December appearance in Spokane was one of the signal events in the NYT piece.

Mack, who I photographed in February 1995 while addressing a militia-organizing session in Bellevue, Washington, has been a key figure for the Patriot movement in "transmitting" its talking points and beliefs into the mainstream for a long time. But he is hardly the only Patriot figure heavily involved in the Tea Parties, as the NYT piece describes.

One of the people who sometimes accompanied me in the 1990s when I attended militia gatherings, Devin Burghart, now works for the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, and he was at the National Tea Party Convention and attended its seminar. and speeches. He filed a detailed -- and revealing -- report for IREHR:

Continue reading »

Glenn Beck has had plenty of apocalypticism on his show since he came to Fox -- we all remember the famous "War Room" episode in which guest Gerald Celente plotted out a future in which drug-running motorcycle gangs ran our cities. That was probably the topper.

But yesterday he came pretty close. His entire hourlong show featured a conversation with two guests: Damon Vickers of Nine Points Investment Capital, and Brian Doherty of Reason magazine. It was all about how the government is driving the nation into a "debt implosion" that will be the End of the World As We Know It. That is, after all, what apocalypses are about, right?

At the end of the hour, Beck asked them to describe what advice they'd give to ordinary people to help prepare for this apocalypse. Doherty was thoughtful and reasonable. Then came Vickers:

Vickers: The other side of a debt implosion, which is what we're in the process of realizing right now, is potentially even anarchy. Anarchy in a society. And so individuals and families have to have the foresight -- that's situational awareness -- to perhaps consider, maybe, maybe having a farm, maybe growing your own food, maybe you need to take up arms if you have any to protect your family. The period that's emerging in front of us could be very, very scary --

Beck: He's spookier than I am!

Unsurprisingly, Vickers has previously helped stoke Beck's paranoia, in fact inspiring him to announce that Obama is taking us straight to a New World Order global government. Vickers inspired the rant by appearing on CNBC speculating that the ultimate solution to the economy would be "global government". Vickers is a longtime nutcase who in fact was coming fresh off the Alex Jones show earlier this week, expounding on this same theory.

If you're worried about Vickers' powers of prognostication, take note: A year ago, Vickers predicted Microsoft was "going nowhere but down." That was when its stock price was at 13. Now it's above 30.