If you ask the typical hyper-political gun owner (and I have … at Thanksgiving dinner), why it’s important to own a gun, they’ll bark about the Constitution. Yes, the Second Amendment: “The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed!”

This of course is the slogan the National Rifle Association adopted in the 1970’s. It was then that owning a gun became an absolute right endowed by God and the Constitution. A blessing passed down by our forefathers to obliterate game and protect our property. The NRA was founded in 1870 and for its first hundred years it was for gun control and didn’t mention the Second Amendment as their cause.

Adam Winkler points out in his delicious book, “Gun Fight,” what we call the “wild west” had some of the strictest gun control laws we’ve seen as a nation. The shoot out at the OK Corral took place, after all, because Wyatt Earp was trying to disarm the outlaw Cowboys in accordance with a Tombstone ordinance. The KKK was among other things, a gun control organization. They were trying to keep guns out of the hands of newly freed slaves … but still gun control.

The part of the Second Amendment omitted from the NRA’s slogan is: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State…” Yes, well regulated—it’s in the Constitution!

Now, to some, guns are as sacred as scripture. If you ask, again, this typical hyper-political gun owner why they need to stockpile assault rifles, you will get an answer much like Pat Flynn’s, a recent candidate for a Senate seat in Nebraska. "Really, we have our guns to protect ourselves against the government, number one," Flynn said in a debate right before the primary. "Hunting's number two. But protecting us against our government is number one." Remember Flynn was trying to land a job in the government (he didn’t win his party’s nomination, by the way).

The idea is that we have to be just as armed as our government in order to be safer or have more liberty (or something). The U.S. government has unmanned drones armed with supersonic laser-guided anti-armor Hellfire missiles, “bunker busters,” and nuclear weapons. Are far-right politicians saying we need civilians to have shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles “for protection?” Of course they’re not. They actually do want limits on ownership.

And if you ask the most vehement gun rights advocate why Everyman Gun Owner shouldn’t have nuclear weapons, I’d bet you’d get the same answer as to why we don’t want every country to have the capability: “Because they could get into the wrong hands.”

So weapons-grade plutonium should be limited. But the ever-handy semi-auto Glock pistol with a 30-round high-capacity magazine is an absolute right?

A recent gun buyback drive in Los Angeles resulted in someone turning in a rocket launcher. Comforting.

So we’re not actually talking about limited vs. unlimited. We are talking about degrees of weapon ownership.

Guns fall into the wrong hands all the time. More guns and fewer requirements for ownership doesn’t curb this. George Zimmerman was the wrong hands. Zimmerman, a Florida man now infamous for shooting an unarmed black teenager at close range after a 911 operator told him not to engage the alleged suspect and wait for police to arrive, is now being defended by said hyper-political gun owners. There’s no reason a Neighborhood Watch captain should be patrolling his block with a criminal record and a pistol. Zimmerman was a catastrophe realized. Even in the wake of new evidence about this case, the fact remains if Zimmerman didn’t have a gun, 16-year-old Trayvon Martin would be alive.

The United States is number one in the world in civilian gun ownership. And since we’re not last in gun violence (we’re the 14th highest in deaths—way higher in just injuries) it’s safe to assume that increasing the number of guns doesn’t decrease the number of gun deaths. Just like cutting taxes doesn’t increase revenue—making gun ownership unlimited doesn’t make us safer. It’s a lie. A fairy tale of the gun lobby. Completely unsupported by data or logic. A falsehood.

So unless you think all Americans should get Daisy Cutters this Christmas—you believe in regulations as to who gets a weapon, what kind and where they can have it.

Gun control laws are not tyranny—as the family of Trayvon Martin can testify to—a de-regulated militia is.

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Bill O'Reilly has been sneering all week at the notion that the threat of terrorism from the American radical right is, in terms of domestic terrorism, of greater significance than that from homegrown Islamic radicals -- even after the most recent case of domestic terrorism to hit the news this week involved the arrest of a neo-Nazi for the attempted Martin Luther King Day parade bombing in Spokane.

Of course, O'Reilly is in deep denial about this reality, as is Rep. Peter King, whose "Muslim radicalization" hearings have been the talk of Fox all week. Indeed, when Geraldo Rivera pointed it out to O'Reilly on his Fox show Friday, O'Reilly acted as though it was the first he'd heard of the matter. That's some knowledgeable insight on domestic terrorism, eh?

RIVERA: He's got a point. You know, I understand his point. His larger point, which I totally endorse, is that it is unfair, as you mention in your lead-in, to single out this one group.

O'REILLY: OK. Now, I didn't say it was unfair. I said some people, like you, crazy left wingers, think it is.

(CROSSTALK)

RIVERA: Can I tell -- it's not 126. That's Eric Holder's number of the people prosecuted for terrorism. But your audience has to know that of the 126, we're talking about 50 American citizens. The vast majority of the 50 American citizens are like the knuckleheads from Newberg, entrapped into doing terror with co-conspirators who are really FBI agents leading them down the primrose path.

O'REILLY: If you look -- if you look at the totality of the problem, in the world, not the United States, it is Muslim-jihad generated. Congressman Green has the nerve to foist upon the American public that the KKK should be equally looked at when the KKK hasn't had any -- any kind of impact on this country for decades. So you're saying to yourself...

RIVERA: I don't think so that's true. I think the KKK --

O'REILLY: Do you think the KKK has any influence in this country right now?

RIVERA: Let me -- let me tell you and your audience that January 17, the last act of attempted terror in the United States, that was a neo-Nazi, that guy in Spokane, Washington, who planted a weapon of mass destruction on the route of the Martin Luther King Day parade march. And that was terrorism. This was a neo-Nazi. And why wouldn't a hearing on domestic terror include a heinous act like that?

O'REILLY: Was he associated with a group?

RIVERA: Yes. He was a neo-Nazi, I forget -- which -- which of the...

O'REILLY: According to the Spokane police, he was a lone crazy nut.

RIVERA: That's not true. He is definitely a neo-Nazi. The National Alliance. I have a note. The National Alliance.

O'REILLY: The National Alliance.

Look, I'm not opposed to having hearings about these people, but to raise...

RIVERA: Peter King is a great guy.

O'REILLY: ... them to the equivalency of the jihad is insane.

Wanna know what's insane? The fact that we have 23 identifiable instances of serious right-wing domestic terrorism of the past two and a half years, and guys like O'Reilly can just whitewash it away:

Know what else is insane? That guys like O'Reilly can keep citing utterly discredited misinformation such as Frank Gaffney's utterly nonsensical claim that "85 percent of mosques" in America are radicalized -- and can simply get away with it -- because they're too big to care.

Yep, there's plenty of "insane" to go around on Fox.

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Our favorite would-be Republican presidential nominee, Haley Barbour, got a wide-eyed adulatory write-up in the Weekly Standard yesterday that included this nugget:

Both Mr. Mott and Mr. Kelly had told me that Yazoo City was perhaps the only municipality in Mississippi that managed to integrate the schools without violence. I asked Haley Barbour why he thought that was so.

“Because the business community wouldn’t stand for it,” he said. “You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.”

In interviews Barbour doesn’t have much to say about growing up in the midst of the civil rights revolution. “I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” he said. “I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in ’62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white.”

Just to stipulate: In reality, the Ku Klux Klan in the South, both immediately after the Civil War and in its post-1915 reincarnation, in fact always was an organization of town leaders -- but secretly. The White Citizens Councils were merely their public face. As the Wikipedia entry puts it:

Members of the Citizens' Council were sometimes Klansmen, and the more influential the Citizens' Council member, the more influence he had with the Klan. In fact, the WCC was even referred to during the civil rights era as "an uptown Klan," "a white collar Klan," "a button-down Klan," and "a country club Klan." The rationale for these nicknames was that it appeared that sheets and hoods had been discarded and replaced by suits and ties. Much like the Klan, WCC members held documented white supremacist views and involved themselves in racist activities. They more often held leadership in civic and political organizations, however, which enabled them to legitimize discriminatory practices aimed at non-whites.

If you want to see for yourself, check out the archives of the old WCC newsletters. You get the flavor pretty quickly.

Matt Yglesias runs a sample from the archives and observes:

The Citizens’ Councils were, right in the state of Mississippi where Barbour is from, the respectable face of white supremacist political activism. Here’s an example from the Association of Citizens’ Councils pamphlet: “Why Does Your Community Need a Citizens’ Council?”

Continue reading »

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My latest post is up at SPLC's Hatewatch. It's all about everyone's favorite white supremacist and how he's becoming concerned about our morality these days -- hahahahaha ....

Now that he's gaining in years, longtime white-supremacy advocate David Duke, who in his youth gained a notorious reputation as a womanizing playboy, is apparently now shifting to a more traditional role of moralizing geezer. Witness his most recent video "lecture," wherein he lectures his audience (such as it is) on the historical roots of the "sexual revolution" – which, in Duke's view, is the product of Sigmund Freud's theories of psychoanalysis, and therefore is yet another civilization-destroying product of product of conniving Jews:

Duke: Wherever the globalist media reaches on this planet, there is an ongoing sexual revolution. It should be called sexual dehumanization. In traditional Western culture, sex is idealized and embedded with the idea of family and children and the deep and sacred respect for the love between a man and a woman, and marriage as a beautiful, even holy, institution.
A perfect example of the veneration of womanhood, fidelity and purity, as expressed in countless artworks, is the Virgin Mary. The Madonna is also venerated in the Muslim Koran, which defends Mary from the Jewish Talmudic slanders that claim Mary was a whore and Jesus a bastard. I hate to quote those words.
Today the name Madonna fits the Talmudic slander. It's the image of a degenerate superstar whore, engaging in gang sex and mocking the crucifixion. The latest media-promoted female phenom is Lady Gaga, and this teen idol is also depicted engaging in gang sex, sadism, masochism, and other forms of degeneracy, along with her trendy music. Now this is the hottest new star promoted by the Jewish controlled globalist media, including MTV – Sumner Redstone. Real name: Rothstein.
The media of the Western world, and thus of the whole globe, has become a weapon of mass destruction of the highest in human values. The human cost has been enormous. Hundreds of millions of families have been destroyed. Children now commonly grow up without fathers. Sexually rooted epidemics, including STDs, hepatitis and HPV are now soaring. AIDS, a disease primarily of promiscuity, will cost hundreds of millions of lives. Millions of people have suffered sterility, and will never know the joy of children. Child rape, molestation, and abuse has grown exponentially.

Nevermind the hypocrisy of the nation's foremost practitioner of racial and ethnic dehumanization lecturing us about "sexual dehumanization." What's agonizingly hilarious about this diatribe is how starkly Duke's new moral ethos contrasts with his own personal behavior over the years.

Read the rest here.

I recently was added to the team over at the Southern Poverty Law Center's Hatewatch blog, and my first post is up -- this one concerning an "Internet yob" (as they called him in one Aussie headline) from Ohio creating an international incident Down Under:

Violent IKA Activist Lashes Out Again

Jarred Hensley is a white supremacist who likes to hurt people. He did prison time for it. And now he's figured out a way to hurt people and even break a country's laws without having to do jail time. Along the way, he's also caused something of an international uproar on the Internet.

Hensley is a Cincinnati-based activist in the Imperial Klans of America, one who already brought serious trouble to the organization. In 2006, he and fellow IKA member Andrew R. Watkins brutally assaulted a 16-year-old in rural Kentucky because they thought he was Latino; the pair spent three years in prison for the attack, and the SPLC brought a lawsuit against the IKA that resulted in a $2.5 million judgment against the hate group.

Now Hensley – out of prison and evidently with a lot of time on his hands – has joined the ranks of Internet "trolls" who haunt the Web and harass people for various reasons, including leaving ugly messages for bereaved family members and friends of the deceased. (A recent New York Times Magazine piece explored their weird world in depth.)
This kind of activity, as it happens, is illegal in many nations, including Great Britain (where one "troll" was recently jailed for polluting a tribute site for a former reality-TV star) and Australia. Which is where Jarred Hensley came in.

Go read the rest here.

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One of white racists' favorite lines -- especially when they whine about the supposed racism of ethnic groups like the NAACP or La Raza -- is that they're really only about the same thing: pride in their racial heritage.

Which, of course, they primarily display by demonizing, dehumanizing, terrorizing, belittling and degrading people of other races.

Like this white-heritage proponent down in Missouri:

At the request of sheriff Rick Walter, Scott County homeowner Rick Hoskins removed a Halloween display in front of his home Wednesday that's the subject of much controversy in the Sikeston area.

The display, which featured a Ku Klux Klan figure alongside an effigy of a black man hanging from a noose, could be seen by drivers on Interstate 55.

Walter said his office had received several complaints about the display, so he contacted the office of prosecuting attorney Paul Boyd to see if it was within the sheriff's department's rights to remove it due to the problems it could cause.

Boyd encouraged Walter to discuss the matter with Hoskins and to ask Hoskins to take it down. Hoskins complied, but indicated he would contact his attorney with the intent of putting the decorations back up.

"There's been a bunch of people that's stopped by since I put them up," said Hoskins. "Said they want to shake my hand. They said they're glad to see a little white pride is still left in this country."

Hoskins also flies a Confederate flag in his front yard, and says he has for years.

"They're my Halloween decorations," Hoskins said. "I think they speak for themselves."

The most striking aspect of this is just how bold these people are becoming. It used to be they hid their Klan robes in the closet. Now they're coming out. Gee, wonder how that could be happening.

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As part of its campaign to promote their phony story claiming that Obama's Justice Department is shunning cases of voter intimidation by nonwhites, Fox News yesterday devoted a great deal of attention to the New Black Panthers Party, a couple of whose members are at the center of the hue and cry over GOP operative Christian Adams' absurd claims about the DOJ.

At one point, they actually ran an incredibly incendiary video showing one of the two men in question ranting at length about how much he hates white people. Mind you, to most folks in mainstream media, this is normally considered an irresponsible sort of clip to run because it is needlessly incendiary and racially divisive and, moreover, gives these otherwise fringe figures far more attention than they deserve -- not to mention that some of the people who absorb these rants will be persuaded by them.

But when it helps underscore the long-running Fox theme that Obama is a black radical racist who secretly hates white people, they'll run anything, apparently.

Now, it's worth understanding something that only Trace Gallagher briefly mentions here: The New Black Panther Party has long been recognized as a real anti-white hate group, both by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center. (Read these reports in full to understand just how ugly and vicious they are.)

And indeed, Glenn Beck later in the afternoon compared the NBPP characters hanging outside a voting station to the Ku Klux Klan -- a fair comparison, but one that is more revealing than Beck thinks.

Because while the Klan of the Civil Rights era indeed indulged in voter intimidation tactics -- one of the main reasons the DOJ's voter-rights section exists in the first place, in fact -- it did so on a massive, and horrifically violent, scale. From Wikipedia:

In states such as Alabama and Mississippi, Klan members forged alliances with governors' administrations. In Birmingham and elsewhere, the KKK groups bombed the houses of civil rights activists. In some cases they used physical violence, intimidation and assassination directly against individuals. Many murders went unreported and were not prosecuted by local and state authorities. Continuing disfranchisement of blacks across the South meant that most could not serve on juries, which were all white.

The site goes on to detail some of the notorious murders committed by the Klan in their campaign of terror against black voting rights, including Medgar Evers and Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman.

Meanwhile, what have the New Black Panther actually done? Sent a couple of shady-looking dudes to stand outside a mostly black precinct and where no one reported that they were intimidated by their presence. That's it.

So a little perspective is perhaps helpful here: There are indeed black racist hate groups (the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors is another). However, they are dwarfed both in size and in sheer numbers by white racist hate groups. Check the SPLC's compendium of hate groups and you'll see what I mean: they outnumber anti-white racists by about 99 to 1.

Oddly enough, we never get any reporting about these hate groups from Fox News -- except when they want to attack the Department of Homeland Security's bulletin warning about the rising likelihood of violent terrorism from right-wing extremists. Then, they're all too eager to simply whitewash away the very existence of white supremacists and far-right terrorists.

Well, for our readers' edification, we've compiled some of the haters that Fox News won't show and the things they say:

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Leading off the pack is a fellow named Roy Warden. Roy is a well-known Latino-hating racist who is fond of threatening to kill his critics and anyone who opposes him -- and as you can see from the video, in fact packs a holstered pistol to all public events.

Warden is especially noteworthy because, just like those New Black Panthers, Roy Warden was in fact the subject of a DOJ voter-intimidation investigation -- and they indeed decided not to prosecute him based on a lack of evidence, just as in the NBPP case. Media Matters has more:

Continue reading »

Methinks Levin has been reading Jonah Goldberg. How else can you explain his attempt the other day to claim that "liberal historians" have it all wrong, and that the Ku Klux Klan was never a right-wing organization.

Levin: You see, the left tries to write the history for this nation. And the left does that because it wants to encourage people, incentivize people, to move left. To support some kind of a statist agenda. Not the Klan's agenda, but the radical left's agenda -- which, in the end, are pretty similar, frankly. In the end it's all one big circle that meets at a point. Tyranny is tyranny, however it's dressed up. You have tyrants who wear suit and ties, and you have tyrants who wear goofy white uniforms.

Well, as we explained to Jonah, the 1920s Klan was the very epitome of right-wing politics in America, and it has remained so ever since:

The Klan was about much more than mere racism, which was more an expression of its larger mission -- enforcing, through violence, threats, and intimidation, "traditional values" and what it called "100 percent Americanism." It was essentially populist, certainly, but there was no mistaking it for anything "progressive." The latter, in fact, was its sworn enemy.

... And it is not as if the Klan has gone away since. In the ensuing years, it has remained the implacable enemy not merely of civil rights for blacks, but for any minority, including gays and lesbians. Its activities have remained associated with violence of various kinds, including a broad gamut of hate crimes committed against every kind of non-white, or non-Christian, or for that matter non-conservative.

In the recent past, it has revived its nativist roots by becoming vociferously active in the immigration debate, openly sponsoring anti-immigrant rallies at which the Klan robes have come out ...

Indeed, you can look around the Web at various Klan websites, if you care to give them the traffic, and see that this is still the case. For example at Thom Robb's Knights of the Ku Klux Klan site, a page is dedicated to their agenda.

Here it is. See if this looks like a "radical left" agenda to you:

The recognition that America was founded as a Christian nation.

The recognition that America was founded as a White nation.

["America was born as an extension of White European heritage. Those who formed the very ideals that we cherish such as freedom of speech, trial by jury, innocent until proven guilty, free enterprise, etc. were of White European heritage. All of the early laws of the United States from its very inception restricted citizenship to White people and all of the early charters, laws, compacts, etc were signed into effect by White people."]

Repeal the NAFTA and GATT treaties.

Put America FIRST in all foreign matters

Stop all Foreign Aid Immediately

Abolish ALL discriminatory affirmative action programs

Put American troops on our border to STOP the flood of illegal aliens

Abolish all anti-gun laws and encourage every adult to own a weapon

Actively promote love and appreciation of our unique European (White) culture

Outlaw the purchase of American property and industry by foreign corporations and investors.

Drug testing for welfare recipients

Repeal the Federal Reserve Act.

Balance the budget

Rehabilitate our public school system.

A flat income tax should be introduced to allow for the funding of community, state and federal projects.

Abortion should be outlawed except to save the mother's life or in case of rape or incest.

We support the death penalty for those convicted of molestation and rape

We support a national law against the practice of homosexuality

["This is a Christian nation and the Bible condemns homosexual activity and the perversion of our society which it encourages."]

Continue reading »

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This morning, on the 15th Anniversary of the Oklahoma City mass murder, I drove from Washington, D.C. across the 14th Street Bridge to get on the George Washington Memorial Parkway and attend an "open carry" gun rally at Fort Hunt, Virginia.

On my way, I passed the Holocaust Museum, where a deluded Neo-Nazi, in a final act of vengeance for having been born, chose to spray bullets into the flesh and bone of a security guard whose only crime was trying to earn a paycheck. Off in the distance, you could almost see the Pentagon, where John Patrick Bedell wreaked havoc after being declared mentally unfit to possess a firearm by the state of California--because he simply bought one with no questions asked at a Nevada gun show. Bedell took advantage of the gun-show loophole to shoot those serving our country at the Pentagon, because of his hatred for it.

Finally, we arrived at Fort Hunt, to see a bevy of mostly middle-aged white men compare the United States of America to Nazi Germany, the Ku Klux Klan and a slave-state (among other niceties) while carrying assault weapons and dressing like they were auditioning for the remake of Red Dawn. A highlighted speaker was Mike Vanderboegh (seen in the video above), an Alabama militia leader who most infamously encouraged his followers to throw bricks through the windows of local Democratic Parties.

In a very different reality, Tom Mauser, whose son was gunned down in the Columbine massacre, and families of those murdered at Virginia Tech, today called on our leaders to lead on an issue where 86% of gun owners (including 69% of NRA members) agree with the rest of us, according to known liberal Frank Luntz: That we MUST close the gun show loophole. We must do more to stop criminals, terrorists and the mentally unfit from getting their hands on weapons that kill.

To protesters at the Fort Hunt rally, the federal government, a health care bill and their personal interpretation of the Constitution are reasons for everyone to be armed and ready to do battle (although, interestingly, during the Bush Administration's assault on the Constitution with the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretapping, turning Gitmo into, well, Gitmo, rendition, etc., we didn't hear much from this crowd). Losing an election is just another justification for political violence.

To the victims of gun violence, who realize we aren't living in some Wyatt Earp fantasy land, perhaps getting guns out of the hands of those who fetishize violence and commit crimes and terrorist acts is just a tad bit more important. This likely includes some of those paranoid souls listening to the speakers at the Fort Hunt rally, perhaps planning to be the next one to shoot someone at the Pentagon or fly an airplane into an IRS building.

Which world do you live in on the 15th anniversary of an American tragedy? And which one do you want to live in?

Disclosure: I consulted for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV) on this project

They're crawling out from under the rocks everywhere. In Missouri, white supremacist Glenn Miller has declared his candidacy for the United States Senate, vowing to "reach every nook and cranny in the state" in his quest for votes and launching a new campaign web site at the URL whty.org. His opponents include Roy Blunt and Robin Carnahan, and his last try got him around 40 votes or so, but hey, any excuse to spread a little hate among friends, right?

Miller isn't your ordinary run-of-the-mill Klansman either. From Southern Poverty Law Center, 2004:

One of the first white supremacists to use paramilitary tactics with his North Carolina-based hate group — the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which later morphed into the White Patriot Party — Glenn Miller went on the lam in 1986 after mailing a letter to 5,000 people calling for "total war" against the feds, blacks and Jews.

Miller had also violated a court order, stemming from a lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, prohibiting him from continuing to operate a paramilitary organization. After a nationwide manhunt, authorities tear-gassed him out of a mobile home in Ozark, Mo.

But Miller served only three years in prison, largely because he testified against 14 leading white supremacists in a 1988 Arkansas sedition trial. Among other things, Miller told the court that the late Order founder Robert Mathews had given him $200,000 in stolen money to finance the White Patriot Party.

To kick off his campaign, he's running a series of vile anti-Semitic ads hosted on the white supremacist site Vanguard News Network.

This is what happens when the dog whistle sounds among the wingnut contingent. Sure, they're not all racists, but they know how to stir up the ones who are violent, evil and malevolent.

I'm amazed Miller is qualified to be a candidate for the Senate. Doesn't a felony conviction disqualify him?