Like Alex Jones, Billy believes that 9/11 was an inside job. He says the planes hitting the towers were “remote controlled.” What happened to the people on the planes, I ask. “What they do in black operations is incredible,” Billy said. “I couldn’t tell you what happened to the people on the planes.” It wasn’t bin Laden—“Al-Qaeda was formed by the CIA under the Carter Administration,” he says.
Billy’s bought into a topsy-turvy worldview where “the new definition for freedom is gonna be servitude.” Obama’s “job is to continue to destroy America for a world government. I mean it’s so—it’s so easy to understand. . . . It’s sick. It’s demented. But it’s true.”
But while Alex Jones is on the fright-wing fringe, Michael Savage reaches an audience of nine million people with his Hatriot-reinforcing predictions. “Martial law,” he announced in 2009, “will be declared in this country over a pretext. I think the likelihood is very high that the gang that has taken over this country will declare . . . a pretext . . . the equivalent of the Reichstag fire [which helped the Nazis take over the German government] . . . to put in a form of martial law.”36
Influential figures like Rush Limbaugh unwittingly add fuel to the Hatriot fire with his hyper-partisan exhortations: “If we just sit idly by and let Obama get all this stuff done, we’re cooked. Because this is not just standard, left-wing politics. This is radical, left-wing Marxist socialism—fascism, whatever you want to call it. This is designed to forever remake the United States and to destroy the prosperity-generating capitalist system and private sector.”
When Glenn Beck declares, “There is a coup going on. There is a stealing of America . . . done through the guise of an election,”37 he is reaffirming Hatriot fears. And when Beck announces that “the government under Bush and under Obama . . . [is] slowly but surely moving us away from our republic and into a system of fascism,” he is singing straight from the Hatriot hymnal without knowing it.
All this apocalyptic fearmongering has an impact on netroot “news” as well. In September, the conservative ’09 magazine Newsmax.com had to pull down an online column from a regular contributor that imagined a “civilized” military coup “as a last resort to resolve the ‘Obama problem.’” It was a rationale that echoed all the Hatriot themes and fears from the Oath Keepers on down:Officers swear to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Unlike enlisted personnel, they do not swear to obey the orders of the president of the United States.
They can see that Americans are increasingly alarmed that this nation, under President Barack Obama, may not even be recognizable as America by the 2012 election . . .
Will the day come when patriotic general and flag officers sit down with the president, or with those who control him, and work out the national equivalent of a “family intervention,” with some form of limited, shared responsibility?
Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars.
Military intervention is what Obama’s exponentially accelerating agenda for “fundamental change” toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama’s radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.38
In October, the idea of a coup was replaced by an online Hatriot call for revolution. A video anonymously posted on YouTube warned President Obama to “leave now and give us our country back.” “If you stay,” the message continued, “‘We, The People’ will systematically dismantle you, destroy you and reclaim what is rightfully ours. . . . We are angry and we are ready to take back the rights of the people. We will fight and we will win. . . . Dead line [sic] for your national response: October 15, 2009. Thank you to all patriots who support our cause. . . . Be prepared for when the fateful day of the declaration of war is nationally announced.”39
There is an understandable tendency to dismiss the danger of the lone Wingnut whose posts dot Hatriot Web sites. Extreme rhetoric and talk about armed resistance is not the same thing as action. But history shows us that it is most often the lone gunman who takes hate-filled teachings to their ultimate extension of outright violence.
Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, for example, was not a dedicated member of any one militia group. He was a wannabe, an outcast who felt rejected even by the militia men themselves. Likewise, the anarchist assassin of William McKinley, Leon Czolgosz, was not acting on the orders of an anarchist group. His fanaticism was so intense that he was thought to be a government agent and not welcomed into the anarchist circles of Chicago—not a generally discerning lot. The figure of the lone gunman was defined by the paranoid Marxist U.S. marine who moved to Moscow and then re-defected, Lee Harvey Oswald. Even Eric Rudolph, the Atlanta Olympic bomber driven by anti-abortion and anti-gay beliefs, was influenced by indoctrination but acted alone. These figures were darkly inspired by the velocity of rhetoric around them.
The line between political fantasy and reality can blur for the unhinged. Hatriot fears can have deadly consequences, with a body count evident in the first six months of 2009 alone.
On April 4, three Pittsburgh police officers were shot and killed by Richard Andrew Poplawski, wearing body armor and wielding a semi-automatic weapon. Poplawski was a frequent visitor to Alex Jones’s Web sites and a poster on the white supremacist Stormfront.org, expressing fears that America is controlled by a cabal of Jews, that U.S. soldiers would be used against American citizens and a ban on guns be imposed.40
On April 25, Joshua Cartwright, a Florida national guardsman, shot and killed two Florida sheriff’s deputies as the officers attempted to arrest Cartwright on domestic violence charges. In the police report Cartwright’s wife said he “believed that the U.S. Government was conspiring against him. She said he had been severely disturbed that Barack Obama had been elected President.”41
On May 31, Scott Roeder walked into a Wichita, Kansas, church and shot and killed Dr. George Tiller, who as part of his practice performed late-term abortions. Roeder was a member of the Posse Comitatus-descended Freemen movement in the 1990s, which asserted its members were “sovereign citizens” not subject to federal law while African-Americans were “14th amendment citizens.” In 1996, Roeder had been pulled over and found to have a pound of gunpowder attached to a nine-volt battery and a switch as well as blasting caps and bullets. The prosecutor in the case described him—accurately, as it turned out—as a “substantial threat to public safety.”42
On June 10, James von Brunn, an eighty-eight-year-old neo-Nazi walked into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., killed a forty-year-old African-American security guard, Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns, and wounded several others. Von Brunn had previously served six years in prison for attempting to kidnap members of the Federal Reserve at gunpoint. A note left in his car read, “You want my weapons, this is how you’ll get them . . . the Holocaust is a lie . . . Obama was created by Jews. Obama does what his Jew owners tell him to. Jews captured America’s money. Jews control the mass media.”43
The common Hatriot strains behind all these killings are more chilling when you consider that President Obama received more death threats in the months after his election than any president on record44—and he received Secret Service protection earlier than any presidential candidate because of repeated threats to his life. Some of the plots have been serious, others half-baked, while chat room comments about Obama’s assassination are made almost offhand, such as an exchange on the draft-Palin site TeamSarah.com where one poster named Heather described Election Day as the “most terrible” in history and then asks “how long until obama is shot??????” To which a poster named Josie responded: “There are plenty of people that would like to see Obama end that way.”45
So when you see militia groups recruiting at Tea
Parties with signs that say “AK-47: Today’s Pitchfork” or when a Washington, D.C., man is found to have an M-16 gun and two pistols which had been inscribed by a local gunsmith with the words “Christian Warrior” and “NoBama,”46 it’s worth being concerned.
There is a cost to the constant drumbeat that turns political opponents into personal enemies. All that’s left is an unhinged soul who takes the hate as a call to heroism—the small but decisive step from being ready to die for a cause and being willing to kill for it. As one federal law enforcement agent, speaking anonymously of the Hatriots’ rise, said: “All it’s lacking is a spark. I think it’s only a matter of time before you see threats and violence.” 47
CONCLUSION: HOW TO TAKE AMERICA BACK FROM THE LUNATIC FRINGE
We are allowing the Wingnuts to hijack our politics. It doesn’t have to be this way.
At a time when the common sense center is under attack, we can take America back from the lunatic fringe. They may have networks and netroots, but we have the numbers. I’m talking about the non-screamers and the non-shouters, everyday Americans who care more about solving common problems than obsessively attacking political opponents. We can re-center our civic debate by declaring our independence from the far right and far left.
Wingnuts offer their fellow travelers the false comfort of rigid certainty in a changing world—dividing our country into good versus evil, us against them. Fundamentalism has a powerful appeal for people who feel powerless, especially when it gets dressed up as an ideology or attaches itself to a party label.
But when you pull the curtain back on Wingnut politics, behind the all-or-nothing demands, apocalyptic warnings and the addiction to self-righteous anger, you’ll see that fear is the motivating factor: fear of the other; fear wrapped up in the American flag; fear calling itself freedom.
The Wingnuts are recycling scripts that are decades old. But it is not the language of the Founding Fathers, as they like to believe. The Founding Fathers warned about the dangers of faction—Wingnuts enflame it. The Founding Fathers were focused on uniting the nation—Wingnuts try to divide it.
They are selling the same old snake oil that merchants of political paranoia have been selling for most of American history.
The federal government has been accused of tyranny and trying to restrict states’ rights since the debate to ratify the Constitution. It was the South’s battle cry at the start of the Civil War, and it was the logic behind white resistance to Reconstruction and desegregation. It was the anxiety festering beneath militia explosions from Waco to the Oklahoma City bombing.
The specter of a sinister plot to create a one-world government goes back almost a century to fights over the League of Nations against the backdrop of the Bolshevik revolution. It was carried forward by the John Birch Society, which drew recruits with its talk of U.N. troops invading the United States through the southern border with the approval of alleged Manchurian candidate and Soviet spy Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Days before John F. Kennedy’s assassination, 5,000 flyers were distributed in downtown Dallas, featuring side-by-side photos of Kennedy in profile and face forward, like a mug shot. Below it read “WANTED FOR TREASON” with this list of charges:1 • Betraying the Constitution (which he swore to uphold): He is turning sovereignty of the U.S. over to the communist controlled United Nations: He is betraying our friends . . . and befriending our enemies.
• He has been WRONG on innumerable issues affecting the security of the U.S. (United Nations—Berlin Wall—missile removal—Cuba—weak deals—test ban treaty, etc.).
• He has given support and encouragement to the Communist-inspired racial riots.
• He has illegally invaded a sovereign State with federal troops.
• He has consistently appointed Anti-Christians to Federal office: Upholds the Supreme Court in its Anti-Christian rulings. Aliens and known Communists abound in federal offices.
• He has been caught in fantastic lies to the American people.
These accusations still echo from Wingnuts today. Obama is accused of betraying the Constitution and turning national sovereignty over to the U.N. He is accused of selling out allies in favor of talks with Iran and Russia while making our nation less safe. He is accused of giving support and encouragement to radical leftist groups and is seen by some as being the product of not just the civil rights era but of communist influencers. From the Oath Keepers to the Tenthers, the specter of federal troops illegally invading sovereign states is raised. Obama is seen by some as anti-Christian, even Muslim, and accused of appointing radical secularists and communists to federal office. And the Birthers see a sinister plot by Obama to hide his true identity as an illegal alien Manchurian candidate.
Beneath it all is a fear that America is fragile and that our democracy can be undone in a few easy steps. These professed patriots do not have faith in the strength of the American system they want to preserve. Wingnut fervor is no longer isolated because of the Internet, and formerly fringe figures now have national reach. Political parties are held hostage by their most extreme voices, while the rise of partisan media pumps up political divisions. It’s an old problem—“the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” as the poet William Butler Yeats once wrote—but it’s taken on new urgency.
We cannot hope to change human nature. There will always be cranks and conspiracy theorists among us. But we can try to improve things—we don’t have to accept the debasement of civil discourse or civic decline. We can take steps to ensure that the lunatic fringe remains on the fringe and stops bleeding into the base and then poisoning the mainstream.
First, we have the numbers on our side—more Americans are independents than Democrats or Republicans, and more Americans are centrist than liberal or conservative. Americans are not deeply divided—our political parties, pundits and activists are—and the explosive growth of independent voters is a direct reaction to this disconnect. If more Americans declare their independence from the extremists on both sides and organize across party lines, we can determine who wins elections—and move our nation not left or right, but fo rward.
Second, we need to change the rules of the game—the professional partisans have rigged the system to re-elect incumbents by creating closed-primary safe seats that empower the extremes. If we enact nonpartisan redistricting reform with competitive general elections and open primaries, it will have a calming effect on our contorted civic discourse. It will empower the moderate majority rather than the Wingnut extremes. No single action would do more to heal the harsh but artificial polarization of American politics.
Third, we need to stand up against the extremes, playing offense not defense. And that’s been a big part of the problem to date—the moderate majority of Americans has been bullied into intimidated silence. It’s time to straighten our civic backbone and be the honest brokers in politics, punching both left and right as conscience and common sense dictate.
Taken together, it’s a declaration of independence—a determination to view politics not simply in terms of right versus left, but right versus wrong. It means having a healthy skepticism and a sense of humor when confronted with ideological certainty. It means rejecting the reflexive defense of the indefensible when it comes from someone on your “team.” Ironically, the parties have an interest in this as well—they cannot be held hostage by their most extreme wings and hope to win broad durable mandates.
In the process, we can hold the extremes accountable while restoring a missing sense of perspective and balance to our politics. A lack of perspective is the tell-tale sign of the Wingnut. When we throw around terms like dictatorship and tyranny in American politics to score partisan points we debase ourselves and our history.
There’s a final irony in the Wingnut Wars that also contains a hint of hope—everyone thinks they are fighting for freedom.
Conservatives see the threat of big government’s taxing and spending as an assault not just on economic freedom
but also on individual freedom. Liberals believe they are fighting for individual freedom in their struggle for civil rights and reproductive rights.
Everyone thinks they are the true patriots. Everyone finds a way to convince themselves that they are the inheritors and defenders of the American Revolution. And in an implicit acknowledgement of Americans’ allergy to extremism, each side tries to paint their opponents as the real extremists. In this sense, we are not all that far apart.
And so maybe a final word from the original Founding Father can help get us back on the same page. Wingnuts often try to pretend that there is nothing more American than high-pitched, no-holds-barred ideological battle. But in his Farewell Address, George Washington made it clear that he perceived no greater threat to the American experiment than a partisan demagogue who “agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another.”2
Washington was the original independent. He belonged to no political party as a matter of principle and warned against those who “serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party.” And while Washington was enough of a realist to recognize that the rise of political parties was inevitable, he tried to tell future generations that “the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.” After all, as Washington wrote, “the alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.”
Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America Page 20