ThinkProgress: Joe The Plumber Says Immigrants Should Get “The Hell Out Of Our Damn Country”
While protesting government spending at Houston’s Independence Day Tea Party, Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher stated that American taxpayer dollars would be best spent on the mass deportation of 12 million undocumented immigrants:
WURZELBACHER: I believe in making sure our country is safe first. I believe we need to spend a little more on illegal immigrants. Get them the hell out of our damn country and close the borders down. We can do it. We’ve got the greatest military in the world and you’re telling me we can’t close our borders? ? That’s just ridiculous.
When you mix RACISM + REPUBLICANISM + IDIOCY — You Get Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher. [ READ MORE ]
Hannity: Obama “never got asked tough questions about his radical friends and associates, except by me and others”
Laughable! For starters lets look here first, then scour the rest of the blog for numerous instances when President Obama was labeled and smeared with almost everything right-wing racist ding-bats would lay their hands on.
With an African-American president and the economy in bad shape, extremist groups are trying to enter the mainstream–and they’re having some success. Experts are calling it the perfect storm for white supremacist recruitment: the sinking economy, the election of Barack Obama, and the increased attention to the spillover of immigrants and violence from Mexico. The Southern Poverty Law Center counts 926 active hate groups operating in the U.S., a 54 percent increase since 2000. Exact membership numbers are difficult to gauge, but experts who track hate groups say they are worried by their growing influence, especially on the Internet. Newsweek reporter Eve Conant and photographer Bruce Gilden traveled with two groups on the SPLC’s hate group list: the Knights Party, USA (a Ku Klux Klan association based in Arkansas, during a cosponsored event with the Christian Revival Center) and the National Socialist Movement (based in Detroit, now one of the largest neo-Nazi groups in the U.S. with nearly 70 chapters nationwide). One group consists of proud Klanspeople, the other reveres Hitler. Both reject the title “hate group.”
Rebranding Hate in the Age of Obama — How some extremist groups are making moves to enter the mainstream, and how the horrible economy may be helping them
By: Eve Conant It’s not about hate, it’s about love. Love of white people. That’s the message in songs, speeches and casual conversation during a weekend retreat in Zinc, Ark., sponsored by the Christian Revival Center and the Knights Party, an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan. There’s no overt threat of violence here. No cross burnings (or “lightings,” as the KKK prefers to call them). The only fire at the grassy compound, located at the end of a long, rocky road circled by turkey vultures, is a bonfire for the Knights youth corps to roast their s’mores. The kids draw pictures of white-hooded Klanspeople and sing songs about the oppressed Aryan race; rousing sermons are read from Bibles decorated with Confederate flags. Aryan souvenirs are for sale, including baseball caps proclaiming IT’S LOVE, NOT HATE and advertising THE ORIGINAL BOYZ IN THE HOOD.
This would all be funny (Jon Stewart, where are you?) if it weren’t so disturbing. “Do you know why people are so afraid of us?” asks Thomas Robb, the soft-spoken national director–don’t call him grand wizard!–of the Knights. “Because we’re so normal.” In his speeches, Robb is more likely to make a joke about his short stature than he is about minorities. His Web site includes careful statements about nonviolence, green energy and women’s rights. But among his ideological kin, Robb equates minorities to fleas and favors a program for “voluntary resettlement” to home countries. Illegal immigrants, as well as blacks serving time in prison, should be deported, he says. “Why is it that when a black man wants to preserve his culture and heritage it’s a good thing, and when a white person wants the same thing, we’re called haters?” he says.
Some of the roughly 50 attendees at the Arkansas lovefest wear Knights uniforms with Confederate flags and, along with their children, raise their arms “Heil, Hitler“-STYLE to shouts of “white power!” Robb sometimes dons his white robe and hood and doesn’t see why that carries any baggage: “Why do judges wear robes? It’s tradition.” The Klan’s past is misunderstood, he insists–no history of brutal lynchings, torture and intimidation; it’s gotten a bad name from, for example, federal provocateurs who instigated violence. While Robb questions the authority of other Klan groups, he happily notes that “a rising tide lifts all ships.”
It’s hard to conduct accurate surveys of racists, who tend to exaggerate their strength and importance. But it’s fair to say that in the Age of Obama, there’s growing concern. This spring, the Southern Poverty Law Center released its annual “Year in Hate” report, which outlines that in 2008 the number of hate groups rose to 926, up 4 percent from 2007, and 54 percent since 2000. (The SPLC doesn’t measure the number of members in the groups.) An April Homeland Security intelligence report states that “the economic downturn and the election of the first African-American president present unique drivers for right-wing radicalization and recruitment.” Home foreclosures, unemployment and an inability to obtain credit “could create a fertile recruiting environment,” the briefing adds, and extremist groups are aiming to “broaden their scope and appeal through propaganda.” The haters are doing their best, in other words, to move out from the fringe and toward the mainstream–and they’re boasting some success.
Indoctrination often starts on the Internet. Some crazies posting on MySpace, for instance, have called for armed revolution; at least one has referred to Barack Obama as “a dead man.” But many leaders of white-supremacist groups and Web forums are toning down their rhetoric. The aim is to attract the kind of person Robb describes as “the guy down the road who until now had his plasma TV and car in the garage, but just lost his job and won’t find a new one because some illegal already has it.”
Don Black, a 56-year-old former KKK grand wizard, says he no longer has any formal affiliation with the Klan because “it just got so demonized and attracted the wrong people; it just got to be impossible.” But that doesn’t mean he’s given up the struggle. As the founder of Stormfront.org, he has the white-supremacist world at his fingertips, all from the comfort of his West Palm Beach, Fla., home. Last spring Black made it a policy for the site to “have no swastikas and Third Reich symbols to turn off first-time visitors.”
Black had to upgrade his server after it crashed Nov. 5 along with another white-supremacist site, the Council of Conservative Citizens, according to the SPLC. “I knew we’d get a surge in interest [after the election], but I didn’t expect so much; we couldn’t handle it,” says Black. In the 24 hours following Obama’s victory, he says, 2,800 new users signed up. He claims 150,000 registered users and says he gets about 50,000 unique visits a day. (It’s impossible to confirm the figures independently; the SPLC thinks the numbers are slightly higher, but civil-rights groups may also have an interest in exaggerating the phenomenon.) Stormfront has some 50 active forums, including venues for dating, financial advice, gardening and homemaking. Black has 65 volunteer moderators and three administrators.
One moderator, who goes by the alias Truck Roy, is a clean-cut 32-year-old who wouldn’t give his real name for fear of losing his job. During the Knights weekend in Arkansas, Roy, a guest speaker, advised white recruiters to “keep it subtle. Don’t hit ‘em with anything too hard right off the bat or you will shock them. Find a chink in their armor and make friends. If you are too radical, they won’t listen.”
The Nationalist Coalition, a small outfit based in St. Petersburg, Fla., claims it has seen a jump in new members in just the past few months. In March, the Arizona chapter held a family “spaghetti night” meet and greet. Members also blanketed a Phoenix suburb with fliers depicting a white toddler and the word MISSING–an attempt to show that the future of the white race is in trouble. One of its national chiefs, Todd Weingart, says the group does not condone violence and is composed of doctors and lawyers as well as blue-collar workers. “If it was only immigration or the economy or a nonwhite running the country, there wouldn’t be this interest. We know that,” he says. “It’s the combination that is getting people to stand up and get interested.” Winston Smith, a host of the white-supremacist radio show “The Political Cesspool” in Millington, Tenn., says, “The emphasis is different now. We don’t talk as much about what blacks have done to us; we’re more focused on ourselves and our own culture.”
At least one group has become more fashion-conscious. The National Socialist Movement–a descendent of the American Nazi Party–tweaked its uniform last year, switching from Nazi brown shirts to a more Italian Fascist look. “The uniforms we wore before were even more out there, more extreme,” says “commander” Jeff Schoep, who, like the Knights’ Robb, hails from Detroit. “Last April we adopted the black [uniforms]; it’s part of our modernization project. We don’t want to look like throwbacks to 1935. But we are not trying to trick people; there are enough white groups now trying to soft-pedal people into joining.”
At one recent meeting in Springfield, Mo., a dozen NSM members wore black from chin to steel-toed boot. Some sported swastikas and tattoos and wore bomber jackets with cloth patches: NO HABLA ESPAÑOL, A–HOLE and a Jewish star being dumped in the trash. Their local leader, Cynthia Keene, has a half-shaved head and multiple piercings. She started the meeting with a 14-word pledge to secure the future of the white race. There was discussion of the “Holohoax” and the warrior nature of Aryans.
They know they’re being monitored. It probably makes them feel important. Keene warns her followers, “We have to be careful what we do and say and stay out of their line of sight,” referring to groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the SPLC. One recent recruit, 31-year-old Melissa Cipcic, says she’s upset about Americans losing jobs to illegal immigrants. She used to think of white-power groups as scary, she says, “but no one here advocates violence. So much more can be done with conversation.”
The ADL’s Mark Pitcavage says it is very difficult to track hate-group numbers because the organizations often splinter. What he tries to track is anger levels, and those, he warns, are rising–despite any superficial sweet talk: “The white-supremacist movement has been at red-hot anger levels for a long time. When I get concerned is when they get to white hot, where you see large bomb plots or talk about race wars. Right now we’re at very red hot, and are concerned we might reach white hot again.” He points to the MySpace account of “88Charles88” as an example of what he’s seeing (88 is code for “Heil, Hitler” in the white-power world). “Charles” attacks Obama and says, “Now it’s time to fight.” “There is a lot of anger out there,” says Pitcavage, “and these groups are trying to stoke it, to get someone like 88Charles88 to take the next step. What we’re seeing is not a softening, but a hardening of attitude.”
Pitcavage says current rhetoric resembles that of the early ’90s (including conspiracy theories about FEMA concentration camps and gun confiscations), just before the outbreak of the white-militia movements. While some leaders of extremist groups may use softer recruiting tactics, “their membership is not toning down at all,” says Pitcavage. For every NSM member, there is a nonaffiliated skinhead posting entries to hate blogs. If Stormfront has tried to tone down, that has only inspired a competing site–Vanguard–to showcase violent alternatives.
Some civil-rights activists are more worried about the racists they can’t see than the showboaters trying to draw attention to themselves. “We’re not going back to the ’50s,” says Mark Potok of the SPLC. “The country has moved forward in remarkable ways. But with that breakthrough comes something of a backlash.” It’s the loners, he says, who are most worrisome: “The lone-wolf idea is much scarier than the big-plot idea. Big plots don’t succeed because these guys cannot keep their mouths shut.”
As local law enforcement tells it, Cynthia Lynch was an Internet loner who tried to become a white activist and failed. She was recruited online to travel from Oklahoma last November to join a reputed Klan group in Bogalusa, La. The group called itself the Sons of Dixie. But after meeting the members, the 43-year-old Lynch had second thoughts and tried to back out during an extended initiation ceremony. She was shot dead and buried in the backwoods of St. Tammany Parish.
The Sons of Dixie were rounded up after two of them asked a Circle K clerk how to remove blood stains from clothing, authorities said. Their alleged leader, Raymond (Chuck) Foster, had a history of Klan involvement and was in the SPLC database, but no one had previously heard of the Sons of Dixie. As it turned out, Foster, who has been indicted for second degree murder, lived just more than a mile away from Bogalusa’s mayor, James McGehee. “I thought I knew everyone here, but I guess I didn’t,” says the mayor. “I think these were Klan wannabes.”
The mayor and local law-enforcement officers have spent the past few months working with the FBI to rule out further Klan activities in the area and meeting with local black churches to discuss the problem. As a child, McGehee grew up hearing about the Klan and watching civil-rights marches, he recalls. “The Klan was obviously here then. But I hadn’t really heard that word in 25 years,” he says. Cynthia Lynch might also have thought the old racists had softened with time; on Foster’s MySpace page, according to the SPLC, he listed Jesus Christ as his hero and said he’d like to meet “honest loyal people who are devoted to things and take them seriously.” She might have thought the Sons of Dixie would provide something–a sense of community or pride –that her life was missing. She didn’t learn otherwise until it was too late.
About The Author: EVE CONANT, is a staff writer for Newsweek, covering the evangelical movement, politics, social issues, and health. She is the co-author of: Faith Under Fire — An Army Chaplains Memoir, with — Roger Benimoff
“In this moving and elegantly written book, Roger Benimoff provides penetrating insights into the human, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of war as well as how combat experiences affect those who fight. Faith Under Fire will be one of the classic memoirs of the Iraq war. It is brilliant.” — H. R. McMaster,71st Colonel, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment and author ofDereliction of Duty.
“Faith Under Fire is a highly significant book. I gained more knowledge about the Army chaplaincy while reading it than I had in all my forty years of experience. This is an emotional and challenging book that will grab readers and pull them into Roger’s fight for faith and intellectual honesty.” — Richard Dayringer, Th.D.,chaplain supervisor and author of six books, includingThe Heart of Pastoral Counseling.
Other Reviews:
By Rebecca Oglesby (Clifton, KS United States) – What is war really like for those on the front lines? How does the stress affect one’s faith? These are topics I’ve always wondered about, never having seen combat or military service. This is a heart-felt, agonizingly honest story of one chaplain as he struggles with day-to-day issues of war first-hand. A compelling story that I highly recommend.
By mothergoose (Northern California) – I found this to be a powerful book, clearly bringing to light the price of war on those who must look it in the eye, and therefore, on all of us as human beings. While helping us to experience the darkness, at the same time, it is a testimony to light we carry within as human beings…light which does not let hope, love, courage, service, and faith die in the face of the unthinkable. I thank Chaplain Benimoff and his wife for sharing their very personal story with us. I am sure that their journals were one of the things they were called to do..to become our eyes and ears into an experience that should not be ignored. And for helping us to see the burdens carried by our healers and counselors who are, in the end, human beings like ourselves in need of healing and counseling. Highly recommend.
Right-Wing media NutBAGS have baselessly blamed Mexican immigrants for spreading swine flu across the border, despite the fact that several reports have indicated that U.S. swine flu patients had recently traveled to Mexico.
Standing out in this crowd of Cattle-Callers is Michelle “Aunt Thomasina” Malkin, a Filipino American in the mode of Micheal Steele, the Head Nigger in Charge at the RNC or James T. Harris — A ReTHUGliTOM Suffering From Acute “Negro-Negrophobia.”
Though, she constantly refers to herself as a “Great American,” she first, as far as I am concerned, IS a child of Filipino immigrants, and that makes her call to round up all Mexicans in the United States, and lately — that Mexican immigrants are disease carriers (leprosy carriersper Lou Dobbs), more despicable than the preachings of Sick Media Toilets like Micheal Savage, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh.
Note — “… Malkin was born on October 20, 1970 in Philadelphia to Filipino parents, Rafaela and Dr. Apolo Maglalang, while they were in the United States onSudent Visas. She grew up in Absecon, New Jersey. Malkin graduated from Oberlin College…. In 1993 she married Jesse Malkin, a Rhodes Scholar and former economist for the RAND Corporation. As of 2004, Jesse was a stay-at-home dad raising their two children. …”
Like other bigoted right-wing dumbNUTS, Malkin is just another xenophobic, right-wing racist anti-immigrant propagandist, armed with lies, bogus statistics and fallacies of logic.
She naturally attempts to associate all immigrants with terrorism and all that is evil — to justify ending immigration. In countless articles written for racist organizations like — The National Review, VDARE and Townhall, Michelle typically bashes and encourages racism against Muslims, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and especially immigrants.
She is a quintessential UNTIE-TOM — Marry a white racist and then worship everything white, including white trash.
I thought they would stop after Barack Obama won the election. Nope they haven’t, and going by today’s Tea-Bagging nonsense, they will not.
As I indicated in a previous post, Republicans will NEVER accept the fact the a black man is occupying “THEIR White-House.” They are in LYNCHING mode — desperate, deranged [Glenn Beck] and sick to the bone, … the Republican Party has lost its mind.
Exactly, as Obama once correctly indicated, they feel cornered and the EVIL GOP BASTARDS are clinging to GOD, GUNS and are sucking on the TITS of AK-47’s and repeater rifles.
A chain email letter packed with monstrous falsehoods is circulating the Internet. Reads as follows:
– START OF CHAIN LETTER –
WHY ARE WE BANKRUPT?
Informative, and mind boggling!
You think the war in Iraq is costing us too much? Read this:
Boy am I confused. I have been hammered with the propaganda that it is the Iraq war and the war on terror that is bankrupting us. I now find that to be RIDICULOUS.
I hope the following 14 reasons are forwarded over and over again until they are read so many times that the reader gets sick of reading them. I have included the URL’s for verification of all the following facts.
1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year. Verify at: http://tinyurl.com/zob77
2. $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens. Verify at: http://www.cis..org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html
NOTE: The next seven items refer to transcripts of the LOU DOBBS SHOW — Lou Dobbs is the King of Xenophobia: An Anti-Immigrant Bigot. A Racist, Xenophobic Extortionist.
10. The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that’s two and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens. In particular, their children, are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US. Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/12/ldt.01.html
11. During the year of 2005 there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern Border also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroin and marijuana, crossed into the U. S from the Southern border. Verify at: Homeland Security Report: http://tinyurl.com/t9sht
12. The National Policy Institute, ‘estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an average cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period.’ Verify at: http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/pdf/deportation.pdf
14. ‘The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One Million Sex Crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States.’ Verify at: http://www.drdsk.com/articleshtml
The total cost is a whopping $ 338.3 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR AND IF YOU’RE LIKE ME HAVING TROUBLE UNDERSTANDING THIS AMOUNT OF MONEY; IT IS $338,300,000,000.00 WHICH WOULD BE ENOUGH TO STIMULATE THE ECONOMY FOR THE CITIZENS OF THIS COUNTRY.
Are we THAT stupid? YES, FOR LETTING THOSE IN THE U.S. CONGRESS GET AWAY WITH LETTING THIS HAPPEN YEAR AFTER YEAR!!!!!
If this doesn’t bother you then just delete the message. If, on the other hand, if it does raise the hair on the back of your neck, I hope you forward it to every legal resident in the country including every representative in Washington, D.C. – five times a week for as long as it takes to restore some semblance of intelligence in our policies and enforcement thereof.
– END OF CHAIN LETTER –
These monstrous Fear-Mongering Falsehoods are debunked by HERE
During last nights Hannity Show, Juan correctly rebuked Sean Hannity’s Xenophobic Anti-Immigrant statements, while he[Hannity] was challenging comments made by Speaker Nancy Pelosi:
Said Williams: “[I]t’s her responsibility to challenge unjust laws, and when you’re taking little babies away from their mothers, I say that’s an unjust law.”
As is customary, the racist, syphilitic, anti-immigrant bigot, Sean Hannity — sought to hide behind THE LAW, to demonize immigrants, who are being incarcerated in large numbers, and herded into American Gulags and “For Profit” Concentration Camps.
It’s The Law!!…It’s The Law!!….We Are A Nation of Laws!! ….Screamed Sean KLANNITY.
Yeah, asshole — the same kind of UNJUST law(s) that you used to shackle, lynch and rape Indians, Blacks, the Japanese, and everybody else who stood in your way, while you were stealing America and huge chunks of Mexico.
You Sean Hannity, are no different than the “Straight-Talk” Neo-KLAN Lynch Mobs, that you, Palin and McCain call the BASE. A breed of ANIMALS ….sick to the bone!
Most of these RACIST LAWS have since been repealed, and so will the UNJUST immigration laws in the books, that provide cover for people like YOU, Sean Hannity. You are not interested in anything JUST for immigrants. If given the opportunity, you would gleefully roast every single person of color in a NAZI Oven.
You are a despicable racist who uses the LAW as a “vehicle” with which to transport and proliferate RACISM in this country, ….a dying breed — hopefully!
ThinkProgress: Joe The Plumber Says Immigrants Should Get “The Hell Out Of Our Damn Country” 
It’s not about hate, it’s about love. Love of white people. That’s the message in songs, speeches and casual conversation during a weekend retreat in Zinc, Ark., sponsored by the Christian Revival Center and the Knights Party, an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan. There’s no overt threat of violence here. No cross burnings (or “lightings,” as the KKK prefers to call them). The only fire at the grassy compound, located at the end of a long, rocky road circled by turkey vultures, is a bonfire for the Knights youth corps to roast their s’mores. The kids draw pictures of white-hooded Klanspeople and sing songs about the oppressed Aryan race; rousing sermons are read from Bibles decorated with Confederate flags. Aryan souvenirs are for sale, including baseball caps proclaiming IT’S LOVE, NOT HATE and advertising THE ORIGINAL BOYZ IN THE HOOD.
