I’ve known about this story for about a week, but it kinda bored me up until now. The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, a blog I just added to my roll yesterday, and one that I read for a few days before, covered it today. From there, I found links to a “report” by a Missouri state agency that I’ve never heard of, the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC), whose thesis is that the right wingers are all out to get us. If you want to read it, follow these links here and here, I’m providing more than one because you might find one more readable than the other.
Needless to say, this report is so full of fatuous and out-of-date bullshit and distortions that it would make Morris Dees blush. I won’t respond to it all, because WordPress only has so many terabytes of disk space. Needless to say, if you have been keeping up on the gossip and the comings and goings of the right wing in America, you’ll be LOL and ROTFLYAO. I can’t tell you who’s more paranoid here, the right wingers and all their “conspiracy theories” (many of which also have the particular problem of being true), or this MIAC reportage about the right wing, and the Paranoia-Industrial Complex mentality on which it is based.
The MIAC is evidently Missouri’s outgrowth of the “can’t we all just get along” kumbaya that everyone sung after 9/11 — perhaps part of the reason why nobody saw 9/11 coming is that various Federal law enforcement agencies all stepped on each other’s toes to preserve their “turf,” thereby precluding the pieces of the puzzle from being fitted together. The MIAC seems to be the state’s liaison between Missouri local and state LEAs and Federal LEAs and the CIA. The purpose is to share information in order to catch the next Mohammed Atta in the works just in case he happens to be up to no good somewhere in the Show-Me State. Other states have them, they’re called “Fusion Centers,” and there are 58 in all.
Here in the early 21st Century, when you’re dealing with terrorism, you’re dealing with Muslims, and mostly Arab Muslims. But also here in the early 21st Century, particularly in the United States of America, racial profiling is wrong, and a mighty equality be our god. So what’s a good anti-terrorist to do when the Arab-Muslim racial lobbies come a’bitchin?
Right — focus on white people with guns, cut and paste the most frightening prose from ADL and SPLC magazine, throw in some random pictures of U.S. Army training, misspell a bunch of words, and plop in a map based on the Vodka-induced delusions of some Russian Gypsy psychic that virtually nobody on the right-wing believes, mention three different 2008 Presidential candidates in passing, one of whom got a million primary votes and the other two were on most states’ November ballots, and Volia!!! There you have any given government’s attempt at CYA when the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) starts throwing around the dreaded R-word, which of course for almost anyone in Missouri government, or the Federal government, is a worse punishment than death by a million knives.
There was a similar report from the equivalent state agency from Alabama at some point last year. I think the motivation (CYA and blame some white people for something) is the same. For a really right-wing state like Alabama to publish something like this is absolutely insane, especially since the state had a Governor that was as close as the American body politic will come to a segregationist ever again, and had this Governor, counting his wife, almost continuously from 1963 to 1987, and the state voted for his independent candidacy for President in 1968, the last Presidential election that a non-Republican non-Democrat candidate won states, again one of the implied segregationist platform. For an Alabama state agency to worry about right wingers in a right wing state like Alabama is like wondering if water is wet.
Governor Jay Nixon’s name is at the top of this report. There is a theory that this is a consequence of a new administration, which I doubt, I just happen to think that the name of any Governor at the time of the writing is going to be on top. But if Jay Nixon’s fingerprints are on this, then it would be so ironic. Don’t forget, during Nixon’s first term as Attorney General, he actively lobbied for the end of court-ordered school desegregation in St. Louis. In that, he was the only Missouri politician of major statewide consequence ever to do something about deseg in a right-wing way. Thereby making Jay Nixon the same “right-wing racist” that this report complains about. In fact, the St. Louis NAACP called him “America’s foremost school segregationist” after he came out against deseg. He rode those fumes to re-election as AG in 1996, 2000 and 2004, and winning Governor in 2008, all by landslide margins. Do you think he’s got kind of a guilty conscience tonight?
Beyond all of this, I should say as a native St. Louisan now living in the People’s Republic of Illinois, Missouri still looks good :)
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The reason I can LOL so much at this report is that between 1994 and 1997, I was tangentially involved in the Missouri Militia scene in the St. Louis area. I never could join because I never had the kind of money they wanted to join, which should have raised a thousand red flags in my mind.
I won’t mention any names, (whiskey under the bridge AFAIC), and you listened to WGNU radio in St. Louis, you might remember a certain host on that station who played the Green Berets theme as his show’s musical intro. Again, I won’t mention his name, but I know a lot of people thought he was a Green Beret, but he flat out told me that he was not and never a Green Beret, which was a wise thing for him to do, because lying about your military service is a Federal felony, and as he was (as I later found out) a Federally Licensed Firearms Dealer, committing a felony would have big time cramped his style.
Beyond all that, he was a racial liberal, constantly denouncing “white racism” and “white racists” (though this didn’t preclude him from laughing at n-word jokes, as I was once in his presence when he did).
One of his trusted lieutenants was a certain someone with an ethnic accent and surname, I’ll say no more than that. And he was so high up in the ranks for a good reason. The reason why I left that scene is that the whole scam and hustle of the affair was that the ethnic lieutenant was constantly going back to his native Czech Republic and buying huge quantities of ex-USSR military raiment on the cheap — Remember, this was a half-decade or less after the collapse of the USSR and their stranglehold over Eastern Europe. They were selling stuff for peanuts. Then the ethnic lieutenant would get the crap over here, the Colonel, being a FLFD, would want to sell you guns, the ethnic being right there to sell you clothes, and Volia!!! A militia.
Not that it ever did anything, or was going to do anything, bad, good or otherwise, other than two overglorified camping trips on some Iron County, Missouri acreage that somebody who knew somebody’s relative just happened to own. To this day, the ADL is STILL using those camping trips as an example of Missouri “extremism” even though it’s been more than a decade since the last one. (Speaking of the ADL, the third in command in the St. Louis militia was a Jewish woman from Chesterfield, so much for anti-Semitism. No Holocaust here.) It was all a money making hustle. This is why the cost of “membership” was so high that I never had enough to begin with. Once I figured out the scam of it all, thanks to a certain someone who knew (RIP Jim), that’s when I made tracks.
If that’s the way it was in St. Louis, that’s probably what most of the other right-wing militias were in the mid to late 1990s, money making hustles, trying to prey on the right-wing sympathies of the time. There is one born every minute, but many many many more born in that same minute.
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UPDATE 3/16: I got a couple of good e-mails about this post.
This one is from name withheld in Washington State:
If, as you think, Missouri is publishing reports about white right-wing militias to show the world that they’re really not racist and not picking on Arabs when they focus on “terrorism,” it’s a shrewd strategy. After all, what right-wing militias are there these days to sue the state for slander and libel? It’s like slandering the dodo bird, no dodo birds around these days to use. The CAIR can and does sue, I remember something about how they sued a bunch of airplane passengers because they spoke up about Arab passengers switching seats often and otherwise behaving suspiciously.
You’re speaking of the “Flying Imams” scandal based on a U.S. Airways flight in Minneapolis.
This one is from “Mary” in St. Louis:
I know who you’re talking about when you said the head of that St. Louis militia. I know his name and like you, I won’t say it. But like you, I know he had a radio show on WGNU. Since you left his orbit in 1997, you probably don’t realize that his show on WGNU continued for several years after that. But the way it ended was hilarious. I noticed this Missouri state reports talks about Y2K — by that they mean how the militia movement pumped up Y2K was a huge coming disaster, and it was really not much of a problem, and this ended the credibility of that movement. He who will not be named did the same thing. For a year and a half on his WGNU show, it was constantly Y2K is going to be a big disaster. Now that I found out what you said on your blog, I now think that he was trying to sell stuff. I don’t know that much about computers and my common sense told me that it wouldn’t be that bad. But when 2000 actually came, it was not as even as “bad” as I thought, and nothing like he who will not be named went on and on in that way. The first show of his after 2000 came, the very first call was from one of WGNU’s famous airheaded blacks that always called Lizz Brown’s show every morning. He really ripped into he who will not be named, accusing him (rightly so) of having “hubris” and being a scam artist and a hustler. Most of the calls to him on his show that day were along those lines. For an airhead black to get the better of you in an argument tells you a lot about yourself. I don’t think he cared that much, because like I said, he was probably selling stuff, he made his money. But the embarrassment from that whole Y2K thing after it turned out to be no big deal drove him off of his show, I think he only did a few more shows in the year 2000.
Mary, thanks for letting me know. And no, I did not know that. If “he who will go unnamed” was driven off of WGNU, it certainly wasn’t at the hands of the station owner, Chuck Norman. He as a stand-up guy who wanted all viewpoints to be heard, and if a host was making a fool out of himself or herself, he would get out of the way. Hence, Lizz Brown.
Speaking of which, he who will go unnamed once told me to (almost exact quote) “keep your ear on that Lizz Brown. She’s one smart cookie.” (Rimshot) He also once said that the Rockefeller establishment is deliberately keeping black people and communities poor because blacks know the truth about the white power elite. As if middle aged black men drinking 40 ouncers and playing dominoes on a Friday summer night outdoors are really talking about the machinations of the Trilateral Commission. As if the same establishment which he mentions isn’t pushing affirmative action and racial pandering and the same kind of opposition to “white racism” that he who shall go unnamed advocated. I’m not for the Rockefeller establishment, white power elite or the Trilateral Commission, in fact I’m opposed to all of them. But to think these things about blacks vis-a-vis the white power elite is nonsense.
After I left the movement, someone informed me that whites in the Army (and he who shall go unnamed was in the Army, though he never was a Green Beret, never rose above the rank of enlisted man) tend to have the delusion that racial equality (i.e. between blacks and whites) is true because the blacks and whites in the U.S. Army tend to be about equal in terms of intelligence. In the days of universal military service in the United States until 1973, a draftee or a volunteer (who “volunteered” before he got drafted) were given intelligence tests. The smartest ones (almost all white) got bumped up to the Navy, and the dumber ones were sent to the Army. The disparate impact is that the Army had the dumber whites and the smarter blacks, who have about the same IQ anyway. It might still be that way today even in the absence of conscription. This is why high schools on Army bases have almost no black-white achievement gap, because they come from parents who were themselves about equal with each other. It’s not, as CBS’s 60 Minutes once bragged, a result of the Army having some magic egalitarian formula, and not a result of Army quasi-mandated parental involvement.
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UPDATE 3/19: I have seen this story treated on a lot of different right wing blogs and websites. What I’m about to say is my own opinion, and I could be all wrong and they could be right, but I think most right-wingers are misinterpreting this report.
I beg you all not to over-analyze it, and I make these comments on almost every blog that covers the story and allows comments (though Blue Collar Republican mysteriously deleted mine to this effect, looks like I have a deletion of my own to make on my blogroll My post has been restored). Chuck Baldwin fell in to what I think is this trap with his commentary on the matter today, though he probably has a right to be paranoid because the report mentions him by name.
But a lot of people are thinking that we’re on the verge of cops pulling cars over that have Gadsden Flags and Ron Paul bumper stickers on their car, beating up the driver and passengers, and taking them all to secret CIA torture chambers. Not only do I not think that cops are going to do that, I don’t think they will as much as pay any close attention to such cars and such persons, because I don’t think the cops are going to take this report seriously, because I think the report isn’t meant to be seriously and literally taken. I think it was “leaked” for a reason, and a lot of right wingers are gloating and pounding their chests as if they have found some equivalent to the Holy Grail. If the government didn’t want you to read this report, you wouldn’t know about it. That you are reading it means they want you to read it, because they want you to know that they’re thinking about white right-wingers when they think about watching “potential terrorists.”
Consider this part from the Kansas City Star’s article on the MIAC report, emphasis mine:
But state law enforcement officials said the report is being misinterpreted.
Lt. John Hotz of the Missouri State Highway Patrol said the report comes from publicly available, trend data on militias. It was compiled by the Missouri Information Analysis Center, a “fusion center” in Jefferson City that combines resources from the federal Department of Homeland Security and other agencies. The center, which opened in 2005, was set up to collect local intelligence to better combat terrorism and other criminal activity, he said.
“All this is an educational thing,” Hotz said of the report. “Troopers have been shot by members of groups, so it’s our job to let law enforcement officers know what the trends are in the modern militia movement.”
Read between the lines. What they’re trying to tell us, but they can’ t tell us, is that they’re pretending to look at some white people so that they can’t be accused of anti-Arab racism and anti-Muslim discrimination. That’s the purpose of this report — and that’s why it was “leaked,” to promulgate that notion.
Everybody: Chill out.
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UPDATE 3/23: Fox News has latched on. They highlight a part of the report that I wouldn’t have responded to ordinarily (as I said I really didn’t feel like going point by point responding to the MIAC report), but the FNC article has piqued my interest. It’s the part about the bad economy stimulating right wing militia activity. The wrong-headed part about that is that the economy was good and getting better in the 1994-1999 time period, when the militia movement was at its peak. Being as that time period, especially the early half, was one of both an improving economy and increasing interest in right wing things thanks to overreaching on the part of the Clinton White House, and being as most right-wing militias were money hustles (as I came to find out), it defies the conventional wisdom if you want to believe that RWMs are a visceral reaction to a bad economy but it makes perfect sense when you realize that RWMs were filled with “leaders” trying to make a quick buck because people had bucks to give and interest in the right wing.
However, the MIAC report is saying this because it’s the old left wing and SPLC/ADL bromide about a bad economy leading to the popularization of “right-wing extremism.” There is recent research by left wing non-Paranoia Industrial Complex sources that bad economies and “right-wing extremism” are not strongly or even weakly correlated, but those individuals and groups have the luxury that the SPLC/ADL doesn’t have of not having to raise money from rich and mostly Jewish liberals. The SPLC/ADL need rich mostly Jewish liberals to give them money so they can survive, so they genuflect to the penultimate example of a bad economy leading to real right-wing extremism and all its consequences, that being the severe depression in post-WWI Weimar Germany followed by Hitler and the Nazi Party, and their attempted genocide of Jews on the European continent. The analogy just doesn’t hold today. And even in the 1920s and 30s, Germany is about the only example — as a generality, depressions turn the body politics of white countries in a leftward direction.
Another source I read today has Governor Nixon defending the report. This doesn’t prove that he had anything to do with the report’s political leanings, but just his defending it is ironic enough. If you don’t know why, scroll up.
UPDATE 3/26: The shit has hit the fan.
DPS is backtracking, apologizing to Ron Paul, Bob Barr and Chuck Baldwin for including them by name in the report. Good, but that still leaves a lot of bullshit to apologize for.
Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder wants an investigation. As the only Republican statewide office holder, I think he wants to find evidence linking Gov. Nixon to the politicized theme of the report. (A politician does something political? Wow!) I don’t think there’s going to be any smoking gun in that regard, as I have already stated my opinion of the raison d’etre of the report in this post. But what Kinder can do, if he does find any evidence, is to call Nixon a hypocrite for opposing deseg in 1992-6 and then opposing deseg opponents in 2009. Not that Kinder would ever come off sounding like he opposes deseg — as Peter Kinder is, to use charitable prose, a black lover, he ought to love this report, because he and it are on the same side of the race issue, the liberal side.
House Republicans have barred DPS from engaging in political profiling using state or federal funds. I don’t know how I feel about this, there is a part of me that is reflexively for this move, because the report slandered right-wingers. But there is a bigger part of me which supports government use of profiling (racial, gender, age and otherwise) because it targets government resources on crime to where it can do the most good. The same mentality that House Republicans used to ban political profiling while they’re in the majority can be used by Democrats to ban racial profiling if they ever get the House back. And let’s be honest with ourselves — even though there hasn’t been one Missouri state peace officer murdered by a right winger for right wing political reasons in a very long time (if ever), and that the chances of a state bear being murdered for political reasons is infinitesimal, it is more likely that it will be at the hands of a person driving a car with “Don’t Tread On Me,” “Abolish the Fed” and “Ron Paul for President” bumper stickers than it will a person driving a car with “Visualize World Peace,” “Stop Welfare Reform NOW!” and “Dennis Kucinich for President.” Again, almost unheard of in either case.
UPDATE 3/27: Nixon: It’s Blunt’s fault. The current Governor is probably trying to CYA, as his name is on the MIAC report (even if it’s only in the context of him being the current Governor), and the MIAC “fusion center” started under Blunt. I don’t absolve Nixon, but it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that the Bluntite DPS was a festering cesspool of racial pandering and CYA to the extent that this MIAC report was conceived. After all, most lamestream conservative Republicans like former Governor Blunt genuflect to the “we’re not racist” line when their egalitarian bonafides are questioned. They aren’t beyond pretending to pick on white people to keep the CAIR dogs at bay.
UPDATE 3/30: LOL — Two can play at that game. Ron Paul’s Kentucky organization (which might send his son Rand to the U.S. Senate next year) responds with this parody. Hell, it might be a parody, and somewhat loaded with invective, but it’s no less ridiculous than the MIAC report.
