“When it turns out that there are no death panels, that there is no bureaucrat between you and your doctor, when the ways that your health care changes seem like a pretty good deal to you and a smart idea — when the American public sees the discrepancy between what really is and what they were told by the Republicans, there will be a reckoning. There will come a day of judgment about who was telling the truth.” — Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, (D-RI)
“….Far from appealing to the better angels of our nature, too many colleagues are embarked on a desperate, no-holds-barred mission of propaganda, falsehood, obstruction and fear. A well-regarded Philadelphia columnist wrote of the ‘conservative paranoia‘ and ‘lunacy‘ on the Republican right. The respected Maureen Dowd, in her eulogy for her friend, William Safire, lamented ‘the vile and vitriol of today’s howling pack of conservative pundits.‘ — Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, (D-RI)
“….And why? Why all this discord and discourtesy, all this unprecedented destructive action? They are desperate to break this president. They have ardent supporters who are nearly hysterical at the very election of President Barack Obama. The birthers, the fanatics, the people running around in right-wing militia and Aryan support groups, it is unbearable to them that President Barack Obama should exist. That is one powerful reason. It is not the only one.” — Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, (D-RI)
“….But when the bill passes, and this program actually comes to life and it is friendly — when it shelters 33 million Americans, regular American people in the new security of health insurance, when it growls down the most disgraceful abuses of the insurance industry, when it offers better care, electronic health records, new community health centers, new opportunities to negotiate fair and square in a public market, and when it brings down the deficit and steers Medicare toward safe harbor, all of which it does, Americans will then know, beyond any capacity of spin or propaganda to dissuade them, that they were lied to. And they will remember.” — Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, (D-RI)
[ LISTEN TO THE BRILLIANT SPEECH BELOW ]
THUG-LIAR Republican Reactions To Last Night’s Vote
Tantaros on WH stance on health care bill: “[T]hey have a gun in the mouths of the U.S. Senate right now“
MediaMatters: FoxNews.com falsely claimed CBO said “Senate health bill won’t reduce deficits” — A headline posted on FoxNews.com falsely claimed, “CBO: Senate Health Bill Won’t Reduce Deficits.” In fact, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) concluded that the bill would reduce federal deficits by $132 billion over 2010-2019 and would continue to reduce deficits in subsequent decades. [ READ MORE ]
By: Ken Bode Sometime next week, Sonia Sotomayor will be confirmed as the first person of Hispanic descent ever to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Over the past 219 years, there have been two women and two African-Americans on the court along with 106 white males.
Sotomayor will be confirmed because the Senate Judiciary Committee could find nothing disqualifying in her 17 years experience on the federal bench. Still, suspicious Republicans on the panel turned to her personal views, especially as related to ethnicity. Has ever a single sentence been so blown out of proportion as when Sotomayor suggested that because of her life’s experiences a wise Latina might reach a better conclusion than a white male?
Especially for the ranking white male on the Republican inquisition forces on the committee, Sotomayor’s comment was deeply troubling. In the mind of Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, Sotomayor’s comment revealed excessive racial sensitivity, and Sessions sought to turn it into a mountain blocking Senate approval.
Sessions knows about racial insensitivity. Now the lead Republican interrogator, Sessions was at the Judiciary Committee witness table 23 years ago, nominated for a federal judgeship by President Ronald Reagan. Then, too, the issue was excessive racial insensitivity. Sessions was serving as a U.S. attorney in Alabama, and some of the things he’d been doing and saying were brought to the attention of the committee.
For example, Sessions called a white civil rights attorney who litigated voting rights cases “a disgrace to his race.” He addressed an assistant U.S. attorney as “boy” and warned him, “Be careful what you say to white folks.” He admitted he thought the Ku Klux Klan was an “OK” organization until he learned that some of them smoked pot. Also, Sessions condemned the NAACP and ACLU as “un-American” and “Communist inspired,” because they “forced civil rights down the throats of people.”
Jeff Sessions [ Enlarge ] But it was what he did that mattered most. Sessions served as U.S. attorney at a time when black voter registration drives were threatening white control of county courthouses in rural Alabama. Who wins elections for governor or senator is of minor importance to the locals compared to who wins the job of county sheriff, prosecutor, judge, clerk, treasurer and assessor.
In the 1980s, Perry County, Ala., retained its old plantation roots of unremitting distrust between its black majority and white minority. With black voter registration surging in Perry County, control of country government was dangerously close to shifting. So U.S. Attorney Sessions used the power of his office to back charges by the white courthouse crowd that a black civil rights group was tampering with absentee ballots.
An investigation was ordered and federal officials were waiting at the post office when the Perry County Civic League mailed 504 absentee ballots for the 1984 Democratic primary. The ballots were opened, marked, numbered and searched for erasures or new markings.
Searching for evidence of tampering, FBI investigators contacted 1,500 black families in Perry County, terrifying many first-time voters in their 70s and 80s. Among those charged with 29 counts of altering ballots and mail fraud was Albert Turner, an adviser to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Turner helped plan the Selma march and was later chosen to guide the mule train that carried King to his gravesite. He and his two Perry County co-defendants faced 115 years in prison.
The investigation is estimated to have cost the government $500,000, and it produced evidence so thin that it took the jury less than four hours to throw out the case.
Sessions was so obviously guilty of racism and overreaching his prosecutorial authority that the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 8-to-6 to derail his nomination. The majority against him included two Republicans and his home state senator, Howell Heflin.
I covered those events for NBC News, and during the Sotomayor hearings I wondered what Jeff Sessions had learned about racial insensitivity and impartiality. Evidently, not much.
About The Author(s): Ken Bode — is the Pulliam Professor of Journalism at DePauw University and a Hudson adjunct fellow. His academic career includes being the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Journalism as well as the Dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University from 1998 to 2002; a John L. Hughes University Professor and Director of the Center for Contemporary Media at DePauw University from 1989 1997; and an assistant professor of political science at Michigan State University from 1965 to 1969 and at SUNY Binghamton from 1969 to 1970.
Bode is a 1961 graduate of the University of South Dakota, where he was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate in philosophy and government. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina in 1963 and 1966, respectively. He has taught at Michigan State University and the State University of New York at Binghamton. Bode was a post-doctoral fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University in 1978 and a Poynter Fellow in journalism at Yale University in 1989. He also was a senior adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute in Indianapolis.
What is more disturbing about this topic is that the president has actually been complicit in greatly expanding programs that legalize and authorize racial profiling and other abuses nationwide. The primary program is the Bush-era federal 287G program that authorizes local police departments to carry out immigration enforcement duties.
By: Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez In Cambridge, Mass., a prominent African American professor gets arrested in his own home, and many conservatives — of all colors — are befuddled because they can’t seem to comprehend the outrage. More outraged is the fanatical right wing, which bristles at the thought that the president actually suggested that racism might still exist in the United States.
Ironically, in Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio is proof that racial profiling still takes place and that President Obama himself officially sanctions it. After the spectacle of the Sonia Sotomayor hearings in which southern senators questioned her integrity, we again have been treated to national theater where persons of color are supposed to apologize to unrepentant bigots.
Leading this charge are wealthy talk show hosts and wealthy talking heads that have little in common with the listeners that they herd around daily. They are the same ones that hold sacrosanct the Second Amendment and the idea that one’s home is one’s castle and that the Constitution permits homeowners to defend themselves and their home with lethal force, against anyone and everyone.
In regards to the particulars involving Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and Sergeant James M. Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department, it is true that no one should have rendered judgment before all the facts were known. However, because the president commented on the situation, this incident has helped to bring the topic of racial profiling to the fore.
Seemingly most conservative whites speak [on talk radio and the internet] with venom in regards to this topic, not simply denying the phenomenon, but also condoning it or redefining it when impossible to deny. Minimally, it has to be acknowledged that racial profiling has always been a problem in this country. Driving while black or brown is one thing, but to be arrested in one’s home — one’s sanctuary — touches a sensitive chord.
It has been surprising to hear the president speak up on the topic. On virtually everything else — such as illegal spying, transparent government, illegal wars, signing statements, etc, he has actually continued the Bush polices of the past eight years. However, in regards to racial profiling, he has actually weighed in, albeit clumsily. However, it has not been improper for him to point out that in general, anyone getting arrested in their own home, after identifying him or herself, is disturbing. Talking back or defending one’s dignity (as opposed to meekly complying) is not a punishable offense.
What is more disturbing about this topic is that the president has actually been complicit in greatly expanding programs that legalize and authorize racial profiling and other abuses nationwide. The primary program is the Bush-era federal 287G program that authorizes local police departments to carry out immigration enforcement duties.
Arizona’s Sheriff Arpaio — who believes it is an honor to be associated with the KKK (Nov 2007, on CNN’s Lou Dobb’s Program) and who actually pals around with racial extremists — is the face of this program. His well-publicized dragnet raids and checkpoints in Mexican/Latino neighborhoods have garnered national attention. His antics and practices have also been regularly denounced by Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon and by human rights organizations nationwide. The 287G program itself has been denounced by many of the nation’s police chiefs as an impediment to good law enforcement. Nationwide, this is but one program that permits practices unheard of anywhere else in the world; such as mass show trials (Operation Streamline in Tucson, Arizona) that last but one hour, trials in which migrants are charged with smuggling themselves and detention centers for children, run by private corporations (Corrections Corporation of America).
It is truly a mystery as to why the president has not denounced these Bush-era programs or Arpaio — the Bull Conner of this generation. While it is true that Arpaio is under federal investigation, it is also true that the Obama administration has greatly expanded, rather than suspended the 287G program nationwide.
This nation’s dirty little secret is that racial profiling has always been a major component of federal immigration enforcement; Cesar Chavez used to refer to the migra as the “Gestapo of the Mexican people.” It is only logical that as the 287G program expands to local jurisdictions nationwide, so too will racial profiling expand.
It is uncertain how the Gates-Crowley-Obama drama will end. Yet, systemic racial profiling policies — authorized by the president himself — can end, not by sharing a beer on the White House lawn, but through an immediate executive order. An end to apartheid practices can’t wait for the much-promised comprehensive immigration reform.
————————————————————————————————————————————————- Rodriguez columns appear at New America Media approximately the 1st and 15th of the month.
Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona, can be reached at: XColumn@gmail.com
Senate Republicans – who espouse virtually the same views as that of their influential talk show brethren — minus the most incendiary language – have failed to denounce their hate and ultra-nationalist demagoguery. Implicit in their arguments is that the decisions by white male Supreme Court Justices have always been fair and infallible, while the continued attempts to right the nation’s wrongs – by activists or judges – constitute bias and even racism. By opposing her these past two months with inflammatory rhetoric, they have gravely poisoned relations with this expanding demographic group, ironically ensuring that the GOP will be remanded to the status of minority party for at least the next generation. Regardless of what obstacles are put in her way, Sonia Sotomayor will be the next Supreme Court Justice. If there are to be any casualties, it will be the GOP, not her.
By: Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez Nine years into the new millennium and conservatives and Republicans — with straight faces – insist that it is they that should define the nation’s racial debate and that it is their views that are fair and objective and part of the U.S. mainstream. Nowhere is this fallacy more evident than in their incomprehensible opposition to Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In their upside-down world, extreme conservatives, including the entire right wing talk show universe, have gone from defending racial supremacy – from opposing integration and the precepts of “equality and justice for all” to abrogating for themselves the right to give meaning to the very words and terms of this debate. Interestingly, Senate Republicans – who espouse virtually the same views as that of their influential talk show brethren — minus the most incendiary language – have failed to denounce their hate and ultra-nationalist demagoguery.
For instance, Sen. Jeff Sessions’ questioning of Sotomayor regarding her supposed biases, and the Republican demand that she be neutral, is mind-boggling. Lest we forget (aside from his own documented extreme racial views), it is “objectivity” that permitted the U.S. Supreme Court for nearly 200 years to uphold legal segregation and discrimination. Implicit in their arguments is that the decisions by white male Supreme Court Justices have always been fair and infallible, while the continued attempts to right the nation’s wrongs – by activists or judges – constitute bias and even racism.
In addition to a history refresher course, many of these Republicans and conservatives are in need of an English dictionary. They also need to pay a visit to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website to learn who the racists are and what kinds of supremacist ideologies they espouse and carry out.
None of those that have denounced Sotomayor as a “racist” – such as Newt Gingrich – are in line to win a Nobel Peace Prize for their work on race relations any time soon. And yet, more incredible is that the mainstream media continually turn to extremist talking heads for their opinions on the topic, virtually granting them an imprimatur of impartiality and fairness.
The Republican conservative effort to keep Sotomayor off the bench seems like a bizarre murder-suicide plot. Regardless of what obstacles are put in her way, she will be the next Supreme Court Justice. If there are to be any casualties, it will be the GOP, not her. She is a twice-Senate-confirmed moderate judge with 17 years of judicial experience, not the flaming radical they project her to be. She is Boricua or Puerto Rican – part of a demographic (Latino/Latina) that is both growing and has the potential to lean either Democratic or Republican.
What GOP leaders haven’t figured out is that, symbolically, Sotomayor represents this generation’s Jackie Robinson. If they had wanted to broaden their political tent, they could have celebrated her nomination, thereby projecting a welcoming party. Instead, they have questioned her impartiality and more importantly, her integrity. By opposing her these past two months with inflammatory rhetoric, they have gravely poisoned relations with this expanding demographic group, ironically ensuring that the GOP will be remanded to the status of minority party for at least the next generation.
GOP leaders have the right to oppose her; the problem is that they have failed to do so respectfully and have failed to denounce the dehumanizing views of their extreme right wing brethren. Many Republicans/conservatives have not simply defamed her, they have also unjustifiably denigrated both the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) – respected civil rights organizations she has associated with as a professional.
In the case of the NCLR, the anti-immigrant ex-Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo has likened it to the KKK. This is both bizarre and beyond intellectually dishonest.
This attempt by extreme conservatives to redefine the meaning of terms such as “racists” either reveals an Orwellian strategy to upend the meaning of words, or it reveals complete political illiteracy and/or lunacy. The consequence is that the GOP continues to send off the message that it is the party of the past, the party of greed, permanent war, hate, intolerance and racial supremacy. Also, because many conservatives equate illegal alien with Mexican (or Latino) and who view both as vermin and subhuman – the GOP already has a huge [recruitment] problem among these groups.
The failure of its leaders to disassociate from those extreme views means that this is the way the GOP will be perceived, long after Sotomayor dons her new Supreme Court robes.
————————————————————————————————————————————————- Rodriguez columns appear at New America Media approximately the 1st and 15th of the month.
Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona, can be reached at: XColumn@gmail.com
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.
Sometime next week, Sonia Sotomayor will be confirmed as the first person of Hispanic descent ever to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Over the past 219 years, there have been two women and two African-Americans on the court along with 106 white males.
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.
