Military Veterans and White Supremacy

Most military veterans return to civilian life and fit in with normal society and move on with their lives in a normal fashion.  The shooter in Kansas over the past weekend was not such a veteran, however.  More frighteningly, he is not alone in his attraction to extreme white supremacy groups.  The questions become (i) why does a veteran turn to the dark side if you will and (ii) why, given Miller's history, something wasn't done to stop him long before now.  The latter question seems to stem from the reluctance of government and law enforcement officials to admit that extreme white supremacy groups and neo-Nazi groups are a serious problem.  As noted before, the outcry from Republicans killed a 2009 report on the danger that groups like those with which Miller was involved pose to the country.  A column in the New York Times looks at these questions.  Here are excerpts:

WHEN Frazier Glenn Miller shot and killed three people in Overland Park, Kan., on Sunday, he did so as a soldier of the white power movement: a groundswell that united Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other fringe elements after the Vietnam War, crested with the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, and remains a diminished but potent threat today.

Mr. Miller, the 73-year-old man charged in the killings, had been outspoken about his hatred of Jews, blacks, Communists and immigrants, but it would be a mistake to dismiss him as a crazed outlier. The shootings were consistent with his three decades of participation in organized hate groups. His violence was framed by a clear worldview.

You can’t predict whether any one person will commit violence, but it would be hard to think of someone more befitting of law enforcement scrutiny than Mr. Miller (who also goes by the name Frazier Glenn Cross). I’ve been studying the white radical right since 2006. In my review of tens of thousands of pages of once classified federal records, as well as newly available archives of Klan and neo-Nazi publications, Mr. Miller appears as a central figure of the white power movement.

The number of Vietnam veterans in that movement was small — a tiny proportion of those who served — but Vietnam veterans forged the first links between Klansmen and Nazis since World War II. They were central in leading Klan and neo-Nazi groups past the anti-civil rights backlash of the 1960s and toward paramilitary violence. The white power movement they forged had strongholds not only in the South, but also in the Pacific Northwest, Colorado, California and Pennsylvania. Its members carried weapons like those they had used in Vietnam, and used boot-camp rhetoric to frame their pursuit of domestic enemies. They condoned violence against innocent people and, eventually, the state itself.

Before his 1979 discharge for distributing racist literature, Mr. Miller served for 20 years in the Army, including two tours in Vietnam and service as a Green Beret. Later that year he took part (but was not charged) in a deadly shooting of Communist protesters in Greensboro, N.C.

In 1980, Mr. Miller formed a Klan-affiliated organization in North Carolina that eventually was known as the White Patriot Party.

The archives also show that Mr. Miller received large sums of money from The Order, a white power group in the Pacific Northwest, to buy land and weapons to put his followers through paramilitary training. Mr. Miller’s group paid $50,000 for weapons and matériel stolen from the armory at Fort Bragg, N.C., including anti-tank rockets, mines and plastic explosives. He targeted active-duty troops for recruitment and hired them to conduct training exercises.

Mr. Miller’s downfall came after the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit on behalf of black North Carolinians; as part of a settlement in 1985, he agreed to stop operating a paramilitary organization. In 1987, a federal judge found that Mr. Miller had violated the agreement, and barred him from contacting others in the white power movement. Outraged, and anticipating criminal charges regarding the stolen military weapons, Mr. Miller briefly went underground. 

In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security issued a nine-page report detailing the threat of domestic terrorism by the white power movement.  . . . The report singled out one factor that has fueled every surge in Ku Klux Klan membership in American history, from the 1860s to the present: war. The return of veterans from combat appears to correlate more closely with Klan membership than any other historical factor. “Military veterans facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities could lead to the potential emergence of terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists carrying out violent attacks,” the report warned. The agency was “concerned that right-wing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to boost their violent capabilities.”

The report raised intense blowback from the American Legion, Fox News and conservative members of Congress.   . . . The department shelved the report, removing it from its website. The threat, however, proved real. 

Mr. Miller obviously represents an extreme, both in his politics and in his violence. A vast majority of veterans are neither violent nor mentally ill. When they turn violent, they often harm themselves, by committing suicide. But it would be irresponsible to overlook the high rates of combat trauma among the 2.4 million Americans who have served in our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the full impact of which has not yet materialized.

When we interpret shootings like the one on Sunday as acts of mad, lone-wolf gunmen, we fail to see white power as an organized — and deadly — social movement.

That Mr. Miller was able to carry out an act of domestic terror at two locations despite his history of violent behavior should alarm anyone concerned about public safety. Would he have received greater scrutiny had he been a Muslim, a foreigner, not white, not a veteran? The answer is clear, and alarming.

I would go on and argue that the separation of the white supremacy groups and far right Christian organizations - Family Research Council is a perfect example given Tony Perkins' past white supremacist ties - is far less than people want to believe.  Both types of groups preach hate - the only difference is the degree to which they have so far been willing to use violence. 

 

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Are Umarried Women the Key to 2014 Midterm Elections?

Despite protests to the contrary, the Republican Party is maintaining its war on women when not temporarily distracted by the GOP's war on the poor.  The GOP opposes equal pay legislation that would protect women and seeks to oversee every intimate aspect of women's bodies, and in some states are pushing for laws that would make it harder for women to escape abusive marriages.   Thus, the claim that the GOP is not anti-woman - other than perhaps those who opt to stay home barefoot and pregnant - simply do not match up with objective reality.  A piece in Politico looks at the role unmarried women may play in deciding the outcome of the 2014 midterm elections.  Here are excerpts:

[M]arital status is one of the strongest predictors of whether a person will vote and for which party, which is why so many progressives and Democrats are paying attention now.

A majority of American households are now unmarried, and nearly a quarter of the presidential-year electorate were unmarried women. But marriage is now politicized too. Nearly 60 percent of those who call themselves Republicans are married and three-quarters of the conservative Republican base are married. By contrast, two-thirds of unmarried women voted for Barack Obama and Democrats for Congress in 2012; two-thirds voted for Terry McAuliffe for Virginia governor in 2013.

But if you want to know why unmarried women are now the focus, it is not because they are assuredly Democrats, or even assuredly voters. In an off-year election, and when so many are struggling economically, unmarried women are no guarantee at the polls.

In our most recent national survey, just two-thirds of unmarried women who voted in 2012 said they were almost certain to vote in November, and 10.5 million unmarried women who voted in 2012 are project to stay home in November.

And in our latest poll done for NPR – conducted jointly by Democracy Corps and Resurgent Republic – the Democrats were ahead by 1 point in the generic congressional ballot (44 to 43 percent), but unmarried women gave Democrats 58 percent of their votes. That sounds high, but it is nearly 10 points below what we would see in a presidential-year election, suggesting that Democrats have some work to do.So, if you are a Democrat and want to change your electoral fortunes in November, unmarried women are the biggest and best opportunity. Right now, these are votes on the table

What unmarried women (widows, never-marrieds and divorcées) share—and what makes them lean so heavily for Democrats—is being on their own, vulnerable economically, at a time when jobs that pay enough to live on are very scarce. That is the main finding of the research we have conducted over the last couple of years. For most Americans, the economy is a challenge every day.

[O]ur research shows that what motivates them to vote are economic issues, particularly those that affect working women and mothers. In Virginia, much of the Democrats’ advertising was focused on abortion and contraception and no doubt increased Democratic support, but it did not raise turnout among unmarried women.

The take away for Democrats is that they must not only stress the issues of equal pay and contraception/abortion, but they must also stress that the Democrats are better for economic prosperity for all and that it is GOP obstructionism/policies that have  deliberately held America;s economy back as the GOP sought to destroy Barack Obama - and millions of Americans along with him.

The Neocons Lose It Over Rand Paul's Accusations About Bush/Cheney

In many ways I view Rand Paul as a loose cannon.  But on the positive side, he is saying some things that need to be talked about: Bush/Cheney motivation to invade Iraq, failed GOP foreign policy, and the sinister role that Dick Cheney played in formulating some of the darkest years of America's existence.  Whether or not Paul will be the GOP nominee is anyone's guess, but the entertainment factor is watching the usual far right suspects go absolutely batshit crazy over Paul's refusal to completey and blindly support the failed neocon foreign policy positions and some other aspects of the new orthodoxy demanded by the GOP base.    A column in the Wall Street Journal exemplifies the neocon hysteria.  Here are excerpts:

Republicans, let's get it over with. Fast forward to the finish line. Avoid the long and winding primary road. It can only weaken the nominee. And we know who he—yes, he—has to be.

Not Jeb Bush, who plainly is unsuited to be president. He is insufficiently hostile to Mexicans. He holds heretical views on the Common Core, which, as we well know, is the defining issue of our time. And he's a Bush. Another installment of a political dynasty just isn't going to fly with the American people, who want some fresh blood in their politics.

Unless the dynasty is named Clinton. Or Kennedy. Or Nunn. Or Carter. Or, come to think of it, Paul. In that case, dynasties are just fine, thank you.

No, what we need as the Republican nominee in 2016 is a man of more glaring disqualifications. Someone so nakedly unacceptable to the overwhelming majority of sane Americans that only the GOP could think of nominating him.

This man is Rand Paul, the junior senator from a state with eight electoral votes. The man who, as of this writing, has three years worth of experience in elected office. Barack Obama had more political experience when he ran for president. That's worked out well.

Mr. Paul was in New Hampshire last weekend, speaking to conservative activists at the Freedom Summit, emphasizing the need for Republicans to do a better job of reaching out to Hispanics and African-Americans. 

Let's move on to a YouTube video of Mr. Paul in April 2009, offering his insights to a college group on foreign policy. Channeling Dwight Eisenhower, the future senator warned "we need to be so fearful of companies that get so big that they can actually be directing policy."

"When the Iraq war started, Halliburton got a billion-dollar no-bid contract. Some of the stuff has been so shoddy and so sloppy that our soldiers are over there dying in the shower from electrocution."

Then he gets to his real point: Dick Cheney, who opposed driving all the way to Baghdad when he was defense secretary in the first Bush administration, later went to work for Halliburton. "Makes hundreds of millions of dollars, their CEO. Next thing you know, he's back in government and it's a good thing to go into Iraq."  Mr. Paul's conclusion: "9/11 became an excuse for a war they already wanted in Iraq."

If Mr. Paul wants to accuse the former vice president of engineering a war in Iraq so he could shovel some profits over to his past employer, he should come out and say so explicitly. Ideally at the next Heritage Action powwow. Let's not mince words. This man wants to be the Republican nominee for president.

And so he should be. Because maybe what the GOP needs is another humbling landslide defeat. When moderation on a subject like immigration is ideologically disqualifying, but bark-at-the-moon lunacy about Halliburton is not, then the party has worse problems than merely its choice of nominee.

Andrew Sullivan goes on to note some of Paul's other statements that drive the neocons berserk.  Here are highlights:

[O]n containing Iran’s potential nuclear capacity? Paul is perfectly sane, and in line with US strategy against far more formidable nuclear adversaries during the Cold War. If he is completely out of the mainstream so was George Kennan and every president from Truman to Reagan. To describe the strategy that won the Cold War as somehow extremist is simply bizarre. Here’s Paul’s basic position:

“I’ve repeatedly voted for sanctions against Iran. And I think all options should be on the table to prevent them from having nuclear weapons,” Paul said on “This Week” Sunday. But he said those who oppose the idea of containment — or living with an Iran with nuclear weapons — ignore that such an outcome has been necessary in the past.

“They said containment will never ever, ever be our policy,” Paul said of those who oppose Iran getting nuclear weapons at any cost. “We woke up one day and Pakistan had nuclear weapons. If that would have been our policy toward Pakistan, we would be at war with Pakistan. We woke up one day and China had nuclear weapons. We woke up one day and Russia had them … The people who say ‘by golly, we will never stand for that,’ they are voting for war,” he added.

Well, they are, aren’t they? And you can tell by the failure to address this core point. Stephens doesn’t address it, preferring to mock Paul’s alleged electability and pick the low-hanging fruit of Halliburton. Lowry doesn’t go there, either. And Rubin of course simply flaps her arms up and down. . . .

What do we make of this? I’d say it’s a sign that the neoconservative wing of the GOP is deeply alarmed by the traction Paul has on foreign policy with a base that remembers Iraq and Afghanistan more vividly than Bret Stephens. And the combination of the ferocious attacks with an inability to rebut its core point – isn’t containment preferable to war? – suggests a bit of a bluff. Paul should avoid the conspiracy theories and focus on the argument. And on that ground, he’s winning.

The shrieks and backstabbing will indeed be great sport to watch as the GOP tries to determine which occupant of the clown car will be the 2016 GOP presidential nominee.

 

Barack Obama's Unmet Promise on Discrimination

As I have noted before in posts, securing  workplace non-discrimination protections for LGBT individuals is high on my priority list.  Especially since I experienced first hand what it is like to suddenly find oneself unemployed simply because you're gay.  From my experience, we cannot trust businesses to do the right thing and even where some of the business owners are "friends," too often they turn out to be fair weather friends at best and will stand by silently as careers are ruined due to religious based bigotry or the cowardice of those who could object but fear "rocking the boat." Sadly, despite his promises to address employment discrimination injustices, Barack Obama has done nothing on this front.  Yesterday, the New York Times called on Obama to sign an executive order ENDA.  Here are editorial highlights:

President Obama has made repeated use of executive orders to advance the administration’s goals when Republicans in Congress refused to act. Last week, he signed two orders requiring modest but important steps by federal contractors to narrow the wage gap between female and male employees.

These useful measures made even more glaring his failure to honor a 2008 campaign pledge to ban discrimination by federal contractors based on sexual orientation or gender identity. A long-delayed measure to outlaw such discrimination by all employers, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, cleared the Senate five months ago with Mr. Obama’s support, but House Republican leaders are in no hurry to follow suit. John Boehner, the House speaker, has said that a law against that sort of discrimination would be “frivolous.”

Mr. Obama said in November that workplace discrimination “needs to stop, because, in the United States of America, who you are and who you love should never be a fireable offense.” An executive order barring discrimination by federal contractors would extend badly needed job protections to more than 11 million employees who work in states that lack such protections and whose companies fail to provide them voluntarily, according to the Williams Institute at the U.C.L.A. School of Law.

What Mr. Obama needs to do is act on his principles and issue such an order, without the religious exemption that was put into the Senate bill to lure Republican votes.

[A]s the Human Rights Campaign rightly noted, an “executive order first issued by President Johnson still, today, provides important and unique protections for employees of federal contractors against discrimination based on race, sex, religion — despite the fact that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects against such discrimination in workplaces across the country.” The group argues that even if the Employment Non-Discrimination Act were enacted, an executive order would be needed to provide the same range of remedies currently available to other protected categories of federal workers.

The best way for Mr. Obama to advance the issue and prod the House to do the right thing is to lead by example, not by waiting.

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Feel the Love - "Christian" Pastor Equates Gays with Axe Murder

The first post for today looked at the hate unleashed over the weekend in Kansas.  If one wants to see the type of foul venom that flows from pulpits to inflame hatred, then look no farther than Pastor Kevin Swanson who engaged in an anti-gay tirade and compared acceptance of homosexuality to axe murder and cannibalism.  And we wonder why there are hate crimes in this country?  What set off Swanson spittle flecked rant was the fact that Nabisco had dared depict a gay couple with children in an ad for Honey Maid graham crackers.  Sadly, Swanson is increasingly the face of conservative Christianity - one of the reasons Millennials are fleeing religion in record numbers.  Here are highlights from Huffington Post:

Nabisco's controversial Honey Maid commercial depicting a same-sex couple is continuing to spark the ire of a number of conservative pundits. 

As Right Wing Watch is reporting, Pastor Kevin Swanson of Colorado is the latest to take the company to task over the "Wholesome" graham cracker ad campaign. 

In a Generations Radio broadcast, Swanson went as far as to compare homosexuality to "axe murder" and cannibalism, before predicting that Nabisco was "going to lose business" in the wake of the campaign. 

"When you come down to things like axe murder or homosexuality and you say, ‘We’re really going to promote it and we’re going to encourage everybody in America to engage in this or at least support this thing,’ there will be people on the other side who will take an adamantly opposed position to your support of axe murdering or homosexuality," he said. "They will be intolerant -- they will be very intolerant of that which is evil, like axe murdering." 

Swanson, whose opposition to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights is well-established, didn't stop there, suggesting that the company might follow up the ad with a clip promoting bestiality. 

"Maybe they had another family where a dog is the wife with a human husband," he said, before adding, "Homosexuals love their friends and cannibals love their victims -- they taste good.”

Conservative Christianity is an outright evil and need to be recognized as such by the general populace.  People like Swanson have do place in decent society. 

Bad News for Anti-Obamacare Republicans

The delusional obsession of Republicans towards the Affordable Health Care Act ("AHCA"), a/k/a Obamacare, continues without pause.  Even as more news comes out that cuts against the horror stories that the GOP is so breathless to promote - even if they don't hold up to scrutiny.  Now, a new Congressional Budget Office report brings more bad news for the GOP: the cost of the AHCA is projected to be lower than previously anticipated.  Hence, there is one less reason to believe the Chicken Little routine of Republicans who are engaged in a frenzy to bring back the worst aspects of the Gilded Age.  A piece in Think Progress looks at the new report's findings.  Here are excerpts:

Premiums for health care insurance in the Affordable Care Act are lower than the federal government had anticipated, the Congressional Budget Office reported on Monday when it revised its cost estimate for the health care law. The nonpartisan office now believes that the ACA will cost the government $5 billion less than projected in 2014 and $104 billion less for the 2015-2024 period. It also found “no clear evidence” that premiums will surge in 2015, noting that “enrollees in the future will be healthier, on average, than the smaller number of people who are obtaining such coverage in 2014.” The agency estimated that the national average premium for individual silver policy plans would increase by $100 that year.

The CBO attributes the additional savings to government, relative to the CBO’s last assessment from February 2014, to lower-than expected premiums, which in turn lowered the cost for exchange subsidies, and higher-than expected revenues from the excise tax on high-premium insurance plans.

CBO and JCT project that costs for exchange subsidies and related spending will be $164 billion (or 14 percent) below the previous projection, mainly because of the downward revision to expected exchange premiums.

The office also concluded that the law’s so-called shock absorbers — reinsurance payments that are distributed to insurers that attract high-cost enrollees — “reduced exchange premiums this year by approximately 10 percent” and will “reduce premiums by smaller amounts in 2015 and 2016.” CBO found additional savings in Medicaid, revising downward government spending per adult enrolled in the program.

Ultimately, 12 million more nonelderly people will have health insurance in 2014 as a result of the law. Twenty-six million more “will be insured each year from 2017 through 2024 than would have been the case without the ACA,” the CBO concluded. 

Facts and objective reality continue to be the biggest threat to the GOP.  No doubt Fox News will either distort the findings or not report on them at all.   

The Continued Face of Hatred Based on Race and Religion

I noted yesterday the violent murder of three people in Kansas over the weekend at Jewish facilities.  As it turns out, none of these killed by the virulently anti-Semitic shooter were even Jewish.  All were Christians, thus underscoring the collateral damage that hate can cause.   Like so much of the hate in this country antisemitism ultimately stems from  religion.  For centuries the Catholic Church depicted Jews as Christ killers and all kinds of horrors resulted, including the pogroms mounted at the behest of the Russian Orthodox Church and other religious institutions.  Sadly, this mindset remains as a column in the New York Times notes.  As does hatred toward gays - and even toward blacks in some quarters - based on a few selected passages in the Bible.  More often then not, religion fuels evil rather than good.  Here are column highlights:

Most of the hate crimes in the United States don’t take the fatal form that the shootings in Kansas over the weekend did, and most aren’t perpetrated by villains as bloated with rage and blinded by conspiracy theories as the person accused in this case, Frazier Glenn Miller. He’s an extreme, not an emblem.

This is someone who went on Howard Stern’s radio show four years ago (why, Howard, did you even hand him that megaphone?) and called Adolf Hitler “the greatest man who ever walked the earth.” When Stern asked Miller whether he had more intense antipathy for Jews or for blacks (why that question?), Miller chose the Jews, definitely the Jews, “a thousand times more,” he said.

“Compared to our Jewish problem, all other problems are mere distractions,” he declaimed, and he apparently wasn’t just spouting off. He was gearing up.

On Sunday, according to the police, he drove to a Jewish community center in Overland Park, Kan., and opened fire, then moved on to a nearby Jewish retirement home and did the same. Three people were killed.

They were Christian, as it happens. When hatred is loosed, we’re all in the crossfire.

On Monday, as law enforcement officials formally branded what happened in Kansas a hate crime, I looked at the spectrum of such offenses nationally: assault, intimidation, vandalism.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation keeps statistics, the most recent of which are for 2012. In the United States that year there were 6,573 hate-crime incidents reported to the bureau (a fraction, no doubt, of all that occurred). While most were motivated by race, about 20 percent were motivated by the victims’ perceived religion — roughly the same percentage as those motivated by the victims’ presumed sexual orientation. I didn’t expect a number that high.

Nor did I expect this: Of the religion-prompted hate crimes, 65 percent were aimed at Jews, a share relatively unchanged from five years earlier (69 percent) and another five before that (65 percent). In contrast, 11 percent of religious-bias crimes in 2012 were against Muslims.

[W]hile we don’t have the anti-Semitism in our politics that some European countries do, there’s still bigotry under the surface. There are still caricatures that won’t die.

One of them flared last month on the Christian televangelist Pat Robertson’s TV show. His guest was a rabbi who, shockingly, was himself trafficking in the notion that Jews excel at making money. The rabbi said that a Jew wouldn’t squander a weekend tinkering with his car when he could hire a mechanic and concentrate on something else.  “It’s polishing diamonds, not fixing cars,” Robertson interjected.  Polishing diamonds?

In a 2013 survey of 1,200 American adults for the Anti-Defamation League, 14 percent agreed with the statement that “Jews have too much power” in our country, while 15 percent said Jews are “more willing to use shady practices” and 30 percent said that American Jews are “more loyal to Israel” than to the United States.

A story in The Times last year focused on an upstate New York community in which three Jewish families filed suit against the school district, citing harassment of Jewish students by their peers. The abuse included Nazi salutes and swastikas drawn on desks, on lockers, on a playground slide.

When a parent complained in 2011, the district’s superintendent responded, in an email: “Your expectations for changing inbred prejudice may be a bit unrealistic.”

Well, the only way to breed that prejudice out of the generations to come is never to shrug our shoulders like that — and never to avert our eyes.

With so much hatred in this country ultimate deriving from religion and religious brainwashing, we need to never avert our eyes from the poison that is all too often spewing from the pulpits.

 

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