I’ve never favored trying to shut people up. I’ve always taken the view that the First Amendment means what it says in that famous line "Congress shall make no law ..." Even Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s "clear and present danger" restriction on free speech I always want interpreted quite narrowly. One person’s "clear and present" rates as another’s "you’ve got to be kidding me." The last thing we need in this country are loyalty oaths or calls for arresting people for voicing their opinions on whatever subject. That includes talk of secession, sleeper cells, and revolution being spouted by the ignoramus Foxagandist Glenn Beck and the aging shill for Total Gym, Chuck Norris.
Whether they’re just armchair warriors a little more amped up than Bill O’Reilly and Bernie Goldberg (who openly chat about beating up editorialists with baseball bats) makes no difference. They’ve a right to say what they think in whatever venue that is stupid enough to play megaphone to their views. In Texas or on the airwaves. Let ‘em talk and show their true colors.
But let’s not pretend, as some commenters in progressive wwwLand have done, that such talk is ultimately harmless blather. As Winter Rabbit and others have pointed out, this kind of talk can turn lethal. The violence-spouters and would-be secessionists should be well watched. Because the next thing you know it won’t be the sleeper cells of Chuck’s fevered imagination but the real thing. It won't be camo-wearing guys hanging around the how-to-make-a-silencer booth at a confab in Texas but plotters of real assassinations and bombings taking their cue from mouthy likes of Chuck and Glenn. If they make actual threats, then legal action must be taken.
I have experience with some of their kind, white supremacist assassins who threatened my life and forced me to carry a pistol everywhere I went for more than a year.
It was 1984. Until three years previously, I had lived in a large, ramshackle rental in Denver on Adams Street. That year, my then-wife and I, and our roommates there, were booted out because the owner wanted to convert to condos. When he finished, he sold one of those condos to Alan Berg.
Berg was an acerbic, pugilistic talk-radio host years before the boom in such shows. Unlike many of those who would soon add their voices to that arena, he was fairly liberal. And known for doing battle with callers he considered dumbasses. Among them were white supremacists whose anti-semitic droolings Berg laid waste to several nights a month. He ridiculed them, provoked them, called them names quite properly attached to men of their views. They in turn threatened him, sometimes right on the radio. More than once a caller informed Berg he was a "kike" who deserved what Hitler did to Jews. Berg laughed them off.
In mid-June 1984, he was gunned down in front of his condo.
By then, I was the publisher and editor of an alternative newspaper and wouldn’t normally have gone out to cover the story. But the crime scene had been my house for three years. So, the morning after Berg was shot, I was there to view the blood on what used to be my driveway. I wrote about the crime and subsequently penned a series of editorials about the white supremacist movement and the heavily armed rightwing militias that were then widespread in the western United States. I didn’t temper my language. I also questioned the progress of the investigation, first by the Denver Police, who did a terrible job, and later the FBI.
In September, I received the first of several we’re-going-to-kill-you messages. Just like in the movies. Letters cut out of magazines and pasted together to form death threats. Two or three of these and dozens of late-night phone calls. The police laughed at me when I brought my first complaints. They shrugged when I showed them the letters. After my third try, I got to hear at least part of the reason for their treating me as paranoid.
The assistant chief in charge of the initial high-profile investigation wasn’t pleased with my criticism of how his team had handled things. Or how they had claimed it could have been anybody since Berg had a lot of enemies because of the way he treated people on the air. This was the case in spite of the fact that he had taunted David Lane and other members of white supremacist groups such as the Aryan Nations and its brother, The Order.
The death threats continued for several months. In addition to the letters and phone calls, my car was repeatedly vandalized, including being covered with spray-painted white-power symbols with the word "Die!" on the hood and doors. Finally, one day, I was confronted after dark by two guys on the street. There was nobody else around. "We know where you live," I was told. One of them smiled a one-sided smile, turned and walked away.
After one more failed attempt to get the police to investigate, I gave up any thought of official help in the matter. Since I couldn’t afford a bodyguard, I armed myself. In those days, it was legally risky carrying a hidden pistol because less-restrictive concealed-carry laws hadn’t yet come to pass, and it was still difficult in most states, including Colorado, to obtain a permit. I ignored the law. If the threats were serious, and I had every reason to believe they were, I wanted at least the chance to defend myself.
After David Lane, Bruce Pierce and other members of The Order - an offshoot of the white supremacist Aryan Nations - were arrested in 1985 for an armored car robbery, I continued to receive death threats for several months. They quit altogether near the end of 1985.
Had Lane and Pierce not been arrested for the robbery with which The Order financed their racist operations, it is quite possible nobody would ever have been convicted of violating Berg’s civil rights. Lane died two years ago in prison.
While neither Norris nor Beck are spewing obviously racist drool, their rhetoric overlaps with those who do. And their calls for people to do their "patriotic" duty is nothing to ignore.
As David Neiwert, an expert on Rush Limbaugh and right-wing violence, observed last Friday:
One of the more disturbing trends we've been observing is the return of far-right "Patriot" rhetoric about government oppression with the election of President Obama. Fueled in no small part by mainstream right-wing talkers proclaiming we're headed into "socialism" -- not to mention a "radical communist" who must be "stopped" or else America will "cease to exist" -- the overheated rhetoric has been gradually getting higher in volume, intensity, and frequency with each passing week.
The initial concern that this raises is the possibility of a new wave of citizen militias, particularly when you have mainstream pundits like Glenn Beck out there helping to promote the concept. As Glenn Greenwald observed, the "Patriots" are back with a vengeance.
At least for the time being, however, there isn't any evidence of new militias forming, though we may see numbers growing within the coming months within existing units, particularly as Fox News and radio pundits start fueling right-wing anxieties.
However, we are starting to see a trend that's even more disturbing: Military veterans voicing Patriot-movement beliefs, including threats of violent resistance to the Obama administration.
Glenn Greenwald wrote three weeks ago:
They're the same people who believed that Bill Clinton's use of the FISA court to obtain warrants to eavesdrop on Americans was a grave threat to liberty, but believed that George Bush's warrantless eavesdropping on Americans in violation of the law was a profound defense of freedom. In sum, they dressed up in warrior clothing to fight against Bill Clinton's supposed tyranny, and then underwent a major costume change on January 20, 2001, thereafter dressing up in cheerleader costumes to glorify George Bush's far more extreme acquisitions of federal power.
In doing so, they revealed themselves as motivated by no ideological principles or political values of any kind. ...
But now, only four weeks into the presidency of Barack Obama, they are back -- angrier and more chest-beating than ever. Actually, the mere threat of an Obama presidency was enough to revitalize them from their eight-year slumber, awaken them from their camouflaged, well-armed suburban caves.
The disturbingly ugly atmosphere that marked virtually every Sarah Palin rally had its roots in this cultural resentment, which is why her fear-mongering cultural warnings about Obama's exotic, threatening otherness -- he's a Muslim-loving, Terrorist-embracing, Rev.-Wright-following Marxist: who is the real Barack Obama? -- resonated so stingingly with the rabid lynch mobs that cheered her on.
With Obama now actually in the Oval Office -- and a financial crisis in full force that is generating the exact type of widespread, intense anxiety that typically inflames these cultural resentments -- their mask is dropping, has dropped, and they've suddenly re-discovered their righteous "principles."
To reiterate, I do not believe in loyalty oaths, preventive detention, or arresting people for saying angry stuff about the government and our leaders. Saying angry stuff about the government without paying a penalty for it is one of our most essential rights. May it ever be so. I don’t want to live in a country where Chuck Norris and Glenn Beck have reason to fear for their liberty because of what they say. Because if they do, we all will.
I will not pretend, however, that what they are saying doesn’t deeply disturb me. I'm not saying we should all start packing pistols. But I hope that citizen watchdogs like Public Research Associates and other free-lancers will keep a close eye on what these individuals and groups say. Most of it will come to nothing. Most of it is faux tough-guy talk we’re all-too-familiar with. But, as we also are familiar, sometimes the talk leads elsewhere. Urging people to pay attention to their message is not fear-mongering. It's common sense.