Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
A WINGNUT GLOSSARY
Epigraph
INTRODUCING THE WINGNUTS
OF TEA PARTIES AND TOWN HALLS
Right-Wing Rules for Radicals
The 9/12 March on Washington
OBAMA DERANGEMENT SYNDROME
Praying for the President’s Death
How Obama Became Hitler, a Communist and the Antichrist
THE BIRTH OF WHITE MINORITY POLITICS
The Party of Lincoln in Name Only
Young Republicans and Racist E-mails
POLARIZING FOR PROFIT
Beckology
Olbermania
Wingnuts on the Web
Escaping the Echo Chamber
SARAH PALIN AND THE LIMBAUGH BRIGADES
The Limbaugh Brigades
HUNTING FOR HERETICS
Burning Down the Big Tent
From RINO Hunting to DINO Hunting
THE BIG LIE: BIRTHERS AND TRUTHERS
The Birthers
The 9/11 Truthers
THE HATRIOTS: ARMED AND DANGEROUS
The Far Right Flirts with Secession
Hatriot History, Media and Murder
CONCLUSION: HOW TO TAKE AMERICA BACK FROM THE LUNATIC FRINGE
Acknowledgements
NOTES
INDEX
Copyright Page
For Margaret
FOREWORD
by Tina Brown, Editor-in-Chief of The Daily Beast
Wingnuts is the first book bearing the imprint of Beast Books. Twelve months into our online operations at The Daily Beast, we felt it was time to take advantage of digital technology and provide a new outlet for writers who have something relevant to say that cannot wait for the snail’s pace of traditional publishing schedules.
Beast Books will be longer than conventional long-form magazine articles but shorter than conventional nonfiction books. They will be published digitally and distributed on multiple platforms, and will soon thereafter be available as handy paperbacks. They’ll provide megabyte edification—and high-voltage provocation—with the ambition of enlarging our understanding of the complexities we chronicle every day at the fast and furious pace of breaking news on The Daily Beast.
Our political commentator John Avlon was a clear choice to kick off Beast Books. His assiduous reporting and his smart, passionate commentary have impressed colleagues and readers alike. All along, he has been keeping detailed track of America’s descent into bitter partisanship despite the advent of a president who fervently hoped for a politics that would be the very opposite.
It was Avlon who broke the story of the thirty-eight-year-old Young Republican leader Audra Shay, who had laughed at a supporter’s racist comments on Facebook. Shay littered her own Web site with charges that the president was “anti-American,” one of the new buzz-words of what Avlon, in this book, labels the “fright wing” of the political spectrum.
“Finding her offensive reaction online was a window into the way the Internet can help trace the rise of extremism in politics,” Avlon tells me. “It was almost surreal, almost funny, the way Shay was caught red-handed. Yet despite that, the Young Republicans elected her as their president! It made me realize how deep the rot had gotten.” The explosion of traffic on his Shay story suggested that the incident had galvanized opinion left and right.
Avlon knows politics inside and out. Now thirty-seven, he was the youngest but longest-serving speechwriter in the administration of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani. After 9/11, he wrote the official eulogies for the many New York City firefighters, New York City police officers, Port Authority officers and other emergency workers who died that day. Though he crafted all those speeches for a Republican mayor—and was deputy policy director for Giuliani’s 2008 campaign—he has a passion for what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., called “the vital center.” In a year of writing for The Daily Beast, he has punched left and (especially) right at the extremes of angry, partisan incivility that have hijacked American politics and thwarted progress.
Avlon adopted the term Wingnuts to describe the growing number of wreckers of our national debate. Discourse? That’s too civilized a term for what we hear when we watch cable TV or log on to any one of the innumerable, foaming partisan Web sites—a hectoring cacophony of mistrust and ill will, usually uninformed, always vehement.
Who are the Wingnuts and what do they represent for American politics? One of Avlon’s purposes in writing his book is to identify the leaders. Another is to describe the origins of randomly formed convictions that strike most of us as crazy but often have a core of justified grievance, a legitimate if lurid fear of where the country they love is headed.
To discount the Wingnuts as entirely delusional is too easy. And it’s a mistake: When we are so repelled by the language that we deny a genuine point, we merely aggravate the paranoia that agitates many of the Wingnuts. Many of the miseries that have beset Americans in recent years have been too complex to easily explain. The near collapse of our economic system, caused by so few but afflicting so many, and the confusion and distortion surrounding the raucous, bitter health-care debate have been exploited by talk show hosts and partisan politics to fan a rabid ignorance that looks for simpler things to blame.
On the weekend of Avlon’s pre-wedding bachelor party in Las Vegas in October 2009, he took some time out to attend a meeting at the Texas Station Hotel and Casino of the Oath Keepers, a group of gun-toting law enforcement officers, military men and hangers-on who had gathered in the desert to reaffirm their oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies—a category some of them apparently believe include President Barack Obama. Avlon assured me, “These people are not stupid. They actually think they are fighting for freedom. They have wrapped up their extremism in George Washington. In a sense that’s the hopeful part. The bad part is that people like this are being used in the larger hyper-partisan devilment. As long as they’re willing to rile the opposition, some political leaders think that’s just fine. But they’re creating conditions that can get out of control. There’s no understanding that the entire country has an investment in Barack Obama’s future.”
Reading Avlon’s analysis, I was reminded of my time living in Britain when the extremes of nationalism and religion took Northern Ireland into thirty years of violence from which it is only now recovering. And, of course, it was the Irish poet William Butler Yeats who so memorably captured the eternal predicament of oppositional politics:The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Yeats’s words convey the menace that can explode into bloodshed and violence when that intensity gathers unchecked force. And Avlon does see something menacing in today’s Wingnut phenomenon.
Yes, we’ve had rabid radio shouters and dangerous demagogues before. We had Father Coughlin and the Kingfish, Huey Long, railing against Franklin Roosevelt. We had Joe McCarthy’s incitements in the time of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who would become a great president but yet, in the clamor of the 1952 campaign, on one sad day felt unable to defend the honor of one of his benefactors, General George Marshall, an American patriot and a brilliant secretary of state, whom McCarthy had foully denounced as “steeped in falsehood.”
What is new is the multiplying reach and volume of the Internet, concentrating the toxicity of destructive emotions and circulating them in the political bloodstream with unparalleled velocity. That, and the fact that our contemporary Father Coughlins are now in control of the megaphone of 24/7
cable and radio talk shows. In a conversation with Avlon about his manuscript, he pointed out that political extremism is not the way America was built. “Most of the great Americans who have led our country to better times in peace and in war have not been polarizers, pitting left against right. They have been centrists who had moved the country forward, not sideways or backwards—in the White House, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, but also in the Senate, with centrist figures like Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York and Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, the first popularly elected female senator, a Republican who stood up against Joe McCarthy.”
Avlon is an Independent who describes himself as “fiscally conservative but socially progressive.” But he believes that the old labels don’t fit anymore, that they fail to illuminate our unprecedented polarization—not just in politics but in the media, too. “We are self-segregating in our news habits, going to either Fox or MSNBC, with CNN, which I admire, sticking to a middle course that is too neutral for our times. I’ve written Wingnuts, against both left and right extremes, because I believe we should see the extremes for what they are and attack them—the Wingnuts of the left as much as the Wingnuts of the right. Nobody can even agree on a common reality anymore, and it leaves the rest of the American public totally confused. My conviction from observing the disintegration of our politics for some years now is that an attempt at a bland bipartisanship is just not enough.”
CBS’s Ed Murrow may have been over-celebrated as the principled observer for the masses, fair yet unafraid to take on the bullies. But Avlon’s beef is that no one even aspires to be Ed Murrow anymore. “The media we have today is a crucial element in the polarization. It’s not at all interested in discerning the good and bad points of a policy so much as drumming up dissent and feeding an extremist audience with the raw meat it needs to sustain its paranoia. Because audiences have been built that way, because that’s where the profits lie, they have a vested interest creating niche audiences of the like-minded. It may be entertaining, but it is certainly not enlightening.”
Fortunately, John Avlon’s Wingnuts is both.
A WINGNUT GLOSSARY
9/11 Truthers: Conspiracy theorists from both the far right and far left who believe that the terrorist attacks of September II, 2001, were an inside job.
Birthers: The term used to describe people who believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya and therefore is not constitutionally eligible to serve as president of the United States.
Bush Derangement Syndrome: Defined by columnist Charles Krauthammer as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency—nay—the very existence of George W. Bush.”
Code Pink: A left-wing women’s group formed to protest the invasion of Iraq. Code Pink specializes in performance art protests against the federal government and military recruiting stations, with a fondness for screaming during congressional hearings.
Fright Wing: The paranoid politics of fear-mongering and conspiracy theories that occurs on the outer limits, where the far right and the far left start to resemble each other.
Hatriots: Obama-era resurgence of the militia movements of the 1990s, motivated by anti-government conspiracies and Revolutionary War imagery. These self-styled patriots fear the government and hate the president.
John Birch Society: Anti-communist, paleo-conservative group founded in 1958. The group’s founder famously labeled President Dwight David Eisenhower a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” Despite drawing the rebuke of William F. Buckley, Jr., founder of the National Review, and other prominent conservatives, the group persists in “End the Fed” and “U.S. out of U.N.” efforts.
Know-Nothings: A Nativist political movement in the 1850s that opposed Irish Catholic immigration, it subsequently morphed into the short-lived American Party. Some later anti-immigrant movements have been dubbed the “new Know-Nothings.”
League of the South: Founded in 1994, the League of the South advocates for the “independence of the Southern people” from the “American empire.”
Lyndon LaRouche: A conspiracy theorist, quasi-cult leader and several-time presidential candidate, whose followers pushed Obama-as-Hitler posters and pamphlets during 2009’s health-care debate.
Oath Keepers: An alliance of current and former military personnel and law enforcement officers who pledge to abide by their oath to defend the Constitution. The group stands armed and ready should another American revolution arise.
Obama Derangement Syndrome: Pathological hatred of President Obama, posing as patriotism.
RINO: Republican in Name Only, a label applied by absolutist conservative activists against any Republican who does not fit their fiscal and social conservative litmus test.
Rules for Radicals: A book by Chicago community organizer Saul Alinsky, which laid out a strategy for creating the conditions to achieve revolutionary social change. Its confrontational tactics have recently been adopted by conservative protesters.
Tenthers: 10th Amendment advocates who believe that the federal government has exceeded its constitutional jurisdiction and that therefore states have a right to secede from the Union. Supporters have recently passed “sovereignty” resolutions in eight states.
Three Percenters: A militia-inspired group that takes its name from the questionable statistic that only 3 percent of the American colonists actively fought for independence. It embraces the philosophy of the American Resistance Movement—a survivalist network that teaches its followers how to train for the fight against U.S. Government-led tyranny.
WorldNetDaily: A right-wing Web site founded in 1997 that mixes reporting and opinion and reaches eight million people a month. It is often cited by conspiracy theorists as a prime news source.
I didn’t vote for him, but he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.
—John Wayne after the election of John F. Kennedy, 1960
I hope he fails.
—Rush Limbaugh after the election of Barack Obama, 2008
INTRODUCING THE WINGNUTS
A bad craziness snaked through America in the first year of the Obama administration.
“Obama is raping America. Obama is raping our values. Obama is raping our democracy.”1 That’s the judgment of Michael Savage, and it’s the kind of talk that draws in 9 million listeners, making him one of the top conservative radio hosts in the country.
On the left, MSNBC’s Ed Schultz declares: “The Republicans lie. They want to see you dead. They’d rather make money off your dead corpse. They kind of like it when that woman has cancer and they don’t have anything for us.”2
Billy Glassberg believes President Obama is “a traitor and a tyrant.” He doesn’t have a talk show, but he is affiliated with the Oath Keepers, a group of armed law enforcement officers, military men, and hangers-on who meet to reaffirm their oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic—a category that some of them believe includes President Barack Obama.
“The whole point of the Oath Keepers is to stop a dictatorship from ever happening here,” says its founder, Stewart Rhodes, a Yale Law School graduate, former army paratrooper, and former aide to Congressman Ron Paul. “My focus is on the guys with the guns, because they can’t do it without them. . . . We say if the American people decide it’s time for a revolution, we’ll fight with you.”3
Welcome to life on the freak beat. For the past year, I’ve been reporting on the outbreak of hyper-partisanship in what was supposed to be the post-partisan Obama era. From the spring’s Revolutionary War- inspired Tea Party protests to the summer’s health-care town hall hijackings, reasoned policy opposition is being overshadowed by apocalyptic accusations. The president is called both Hitler and a communist. Hope has turned into hate. The Wingnuts are on the attack.
What’s a Wingnut? It’s someone on the far-right wing or far-left wing of the political spectrum. They are the professional partisans and the unhinged acti
vists, the hard-core haters and the paranoid conspiracy theorists. And they are on the rise.
Pumped up by the self-segregated echo chamber of talk radio, cable news and the Internet, Wingnuts see politics as ideological bloodsport, an all-or-nothing struggle for the nation’s soul. They find purpose by dividing America into “us against them.” And for those with a vested interest in stirring the crazy-pot, all this is good for business. Hate is a cheap and easy recruiting tool. But it can be murder on a democracy.
The Wingnuts are taking flight amid the anxieties of an economy in manic recession, double-digit unemployment, deep deficits and a decade of war. Demagogues always rise when the economy goes south, offering a narcotic for the nervous and dispossessed, with occasionally violent side effects. During the Great Depression, populist anger was directed at big business. When conservative populism reared its head in the late 1960s, anger shifted toward big government. But now we’ve got both—anger at big business and big government. It’s a perfect political storm, primed for a return to pitchfork politics.