by Juan Batista
Chapter 3:
Another Resolution Passes
For all of its existence, Fox News has been notorious as an extremely efficient propaganda machine. Never are reporters allowed much in the way of independent thought or personal judgment. Always the top management spells out exactly what their intended targets are, how to go after them, the terms to be used, methods to be employed, and points of view to be pushed.
From Fox News headquarters, company President Roger Ailes sent out a very typical memo to all “news” executives, editors, and producers of each program.
From: Ailes, Roger
Sent: 9-11-09
To: 054-FNSunday; 169-SPECIAL REPORT; 069-Politics-Root (FoxNews.com); 036-FOX.WHU; 050-Senior Producers
Subject: Friendly Reminder: Let’s Keep Pushing on Texas
1) Secession as an issue is a winner for our purposes, but a loser when the public hears it called that. Most Americans vaguely know it’s an act of treason, they remember from Civil War documentaries. Refer to secession ONLY using the terms “independence movement,” “freedom from federal domination,” or best of all “freedom from federal tyranny” or “freedom from Obama’s tyranny.”
2) We must always stress how imminent the independence movement is and how many Texans want it, no matter the facts or numbers. If we can’t find numbers that support us, focus on prominent figures. Governor Perry is a good one. He may one day soon be prime material for our other purposes.
3) Secession/independence is very effective as a ploy to threaten Obama over healthcare reform. (Recall earlier memos. Healthcare reform must be referred to as “government takeover of healthcare” or Obamacare. Avoid any mention of how most of Obamacare was formerly proposed by GOP going all the way back to Nixon and Teddy Roosevelt, or enacted in Massachusetts by Romney the RINO.)
4) Be certain to play up the angle that Obamacare is so offensive to American ideals it may bring civil war and could break apart this great nation.
5) Legal has advised that claims secession is legal for Texas are in fact false. No evidence for it anywhere, and the laws are pretty clear. This is a moot point for us. Act AS IF it is true, or defer the matter saying there are different sides to the issue. Fact is there are many angry rubes who believe it is true and we must take advantage of that.
6) Look for other independence movements. Look at neo Confederates, but take care not to mention ties to KKK, Nazis. Don’t look at Vermont Republic, we want no mentions of lefties.
Fox News’s blitz would continue. Every commentator repeated the talking points as ordered. A network committed to hard line conservatism would promote nothing less than treason and the threat of breaking up the United States, simply because they disagreed with most Americans about public healthcare for poor people.
Back in Texas, the ROT militia gathered together to meet with TNM and the Tenthers Movement. One leader jokingly proposed they call themselves Texas Independence Movement or TIM since it sounded so inoffensive. But they quickly took to more serious matters. They had an opportunity they might never have again. Perry, as one professor had put it, had sparked the most talk of secession than had been seen since Reconstruction.
Back in Austin, Perry’s campaign worried they had gone too far. To have a nonbinding resolution was one thing. But actual independence, none of them truly wanted.
But for some Republican state congressmen, there were still voters to be placated. Playing up calls for independence was a good way to sound angry about Washington.
For some US congressmen, the resolution supporting a vote on independence was a golden opportunity. The most notorious was the crank from District 14, Ron Paul, a Libertarian turned Republican. Paul brought in a revisionist “scholar,” Thomas DiLorenzo, to give congressional testimony. DiLorenzo, however, is a leading member of a white supremacist group, the League of the South, that wants a returned Confederacy and a “society dominated by European Americans.”
League leaders include Jack Kershaw, formerly of the White Citizens Councils (often described as “the Klan without the hoods.”) Kershaw’s most notorious statement was, “Somebody needs to say a good word for slavery. Where in the world are the Negroes better off today than in America?”
The next best known leader of the League of the South is Michael Hill. His philosophy in his own words:
“If the scenario of the South (and the rest of America) being overrun by hordes of non-white immigrants does not appeal to you, then how is this disaster to be averted? By the people who oppose it rising up against their traitorous elite masters and their misanthropic rule. But to do this we must first rid ourselves of the fear of being called ‘racists’ and the other meaningless epithets they use against us….I am not ashamed to say that I prefer my own kind...”
Hill often defends slavery as “God-ordained” and calls for a society of “superiors, equals and inferiors,” and attacks equality as a “fatal heresy.” Only white Christians could live in the new Confederacy. Any others must accept “the cultural dominance of the Anglo-Celtic people.” After September 11, Hill claimed the attacks were “the natural fruits of a regime committed to multiculturalism and diversity.”
The League’s leadership includes outright terrorists such as Michael Tubbs. Tubbs was a League leader in Florida. In the military, Tubbs was found with arms and explosives caches. Tubbs had lists of targets; newspapers, television stations, and businesses owned by Jews and Blacks.
The League of the South was hardly Paul’s first alliance with white supremacists. In the 1990s his Freedom Report newsletters had frequently published articles from white racists. One claimed, “Only about 5% of blacks have sensible political opinions.” Another ranted , “If you have ever been robbed by a black teenaged male you know how unbelievably fleet footed they can be…. I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city (Washington DC) are semi-criminal or entirely criminal." Legendary Black congresswoman Barbara Jordan was attacked as a “half educated victimologist” and that her “race and sex protect her from criticism.”
This was a conscious policy Paul and the Libertarians in Texas had followed throughout the 1980s and 90s. “Go right” as they put it, and try to co opt and bring those on the far right into the Libertarian movement, which up to that point mostly attracted leftists who agreed with its antiwar and drug legalization beliefs. Paul had as his chief of staff a leading Neo Confederate, Lew Rockwell. Rockwell is the most likely candidate to have written the racist screeds in Paul’s newsletter, something he denies. Rockwell’s mentor was Murray Rothbard, an anarchist, racist, and self-hating Jew who ranted about Jewish control of business and government.
Paul, from working with Neo Confederates, has long preached the central tenet of Neo Confederate belief, hatred of the federal government. He has long associated with racists even while denying being one, and been endorsed by a wide collection of not just Neo Confederates, but anti Semites, Holocaust deniers, and Nazi skinheads such as Stormfront. In Tennessee, Paul’s chief online organizer was “White Will,” also an organizer for the Neo Nazi group the National Alliance, the same group which published the Turner Diaries, the book that inspired Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
With the rise of the secessionist treason movement in Texas, Paul went further:
“I think people should discuss [secession]. Because right now the American people are sick and tired of it all. And I think the time will come when people will consider it much more seriously, is when the federal government can no longer deliver."
While Paul’s frequent support of secession helped the movement get national exposure, within Texas it was mostly Perry’s support that insured the nonbinding vote for independence would get on the ballot. Perry’s stubborn streak would not let him admit he had gotten himself into a bind. On top of that, some of his secession supporters were expressing new concerns. Perry had attended the famous Bilderberg conference in 2007.
The conference is basically a gathering of
influential leaders where ideas can be informally floated without public scrutiny. But to conspiracy theorists, anti-Semites, and assorted cranks, they are where world leaders plan to further dominate the world, secretly pulling the strings. Perry’s single attendance (he either chose not to attend or was not asked to return) looms large in the imaginations of the paranoid.
But the only actual long term consequence of his going turned out to favor the secessionists, not harm them. Partly as a way to reassure this fringe group, and partly to hold onto the loyalties of the 30% of Texans and the almost 50% of white Republican conservatives in Texas who favor secession, Perry chose to back putting the resolution on the ballot. And he used his bully pulpit to push Republicans to vote for the resolution.
It was a foregone conclusion. Now Texans had a chance to tell the world, officially, what they thought of the federal government, that some of them despised it so much they favored treason.
Headlines across the US the next day read:
“Texans Will Vote on Independence”
“Will Texas Secede? They Get a Chance to Vote On It Soon”
“Texas Republic Again?”
TIM secessionist leaders were elated, if still suspicious of Perry. What none of them expected was that a certain outspoken Mexican further south would throw a monkey wrench in their plans.