Guest editorial by Ernest A. Canning
To what extent has xenophobia greased the wheels of the right-wing smear machine?
For those who follow The BRAD BLOG, the pattern is all too recognizable.
A venal hard-right, operating through a pathological, race-baiting con-artist, like Andrew Breitbart, targets, for one of its deceptive smear campaigns, a group, like ACORN, or an individual, like Van Jones or Shirley Sherrod.
The smear is amplified by the propagandists at Fox “News.” It reverberates throughout the right-wing echo chamber (which has usurped the majority of our public airwaves to bolster their agenda). The smear is then repeated by pliant mainstream corporate media, which will, at best, offer up a belated, chiseling, inaccurate “correction” — too little and too late to undo the damage wrought by a Democratic “opposition” which timidly seeks to distance itself from the smeared as they scurry to hand the hard-right what it seeks (e.g., a bill stripping ACORN or NPR of public funds, or the forced resignation of the targeted individual).
There is no doubt but that some of the corporate media complicity derives from common financial interests. As Bill Moyers observed in Moyers on America, “media giants…exalt commercial values at the expense of democratic value…squeezing out the journalism that tries to get as close as possible to the verifiable truth.”
But there is another issue, magnified by two recent events: (1) The matter-of-fact acceptance of the prompt resignation of two NPR officials over a secretly taped and deceptively-edited video hit piece in which two of convicted federal criminal and Republican con-man James O’Keefe’s flunkies posed as members of a Muslim organization seeking to help fund NPR, and (2) The deafening corporate media silence over an outrageously racist remark by a right-wing Kansas state representative who compared “illegal immigrants” to “feral pigs”…
Revisiting The Lucifer Effect
In The Lucifer Effect, Professor Phillip Zimbardo defined dehumanization as a means “by which certain other people or collectives of them are depicted as less than human.” Zimbardo’s academic analysis was covered at length in my article “Hate Speech and the Process of Dehumanization” where poignant examples were provided both with respect to Nazi Germany and, by way of Leon Litwack’s photographic display and account of lynching in the American Jim Crow South in Without Sanctuary.
Just as Zimbardo traced the sadism of the SS to the Nazi media campaign to dehumanize the Jewish population, so also Litwack traced lynching, which took the lives of more than 4,700 African Americans between 1882 and 1968, to the injection of racism into popular culture by media. Writes Litwack:
The extent of the dehumanization is reflected in a remark by former Georgia governor William J. Northen, quoted by Litwack:
Governor Northen’s observation should be kept in mind when we cover how a Republican Kansas state legislator thinks we should now address the issue of “illegal immigration.”
The process of dehumanization was revisited in a follow-up article I posted to the first hate-speech and dehumanization article, which, relying upon the substantial body of work by Professor Jack Shaheen in Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, demonstrated the extent to which 21st Century American culture is imbued by anti-Arab racism.
O’Keefe’s NPR sting: McCarthy-like guilt by association
Substantively, there was nothing on O’Keefe’s heavily and dishonestly edited version of the NPR videotape which should have warranted so much as criticism of NPR’s former senior vice president for development, Ron Schiller, let alone his resignation.
Meeting with O’Keefe’s stooges who claimed to be a foundation seeking a voice on NPR for Muslims, Schiller appeared in the “edited” O’Keefe video as simply suggesting that Muslims, like women, should have a voice in our schools and on our public airwaves. He went on to describe the Tea Party as “fanatically involved in people’s personal lives and very fundamental Christian…”
In addition to describing the Tea Party as “anti-intellectual,” Ron Schiller said:
The “why” of the O’Keefe “sting” is rather obvious.
The O’Keefe “sting” operation came while Republicans were seeking to strip NPR of public funds, just as O’Keefe’s earlier phony ACORN “pimp” scam was timed to aid the effort to strip that organization of public funds in advance of the 2010 election, sidelining the nation’s largest voter registration effort which tended to benefit Democrats at the polling place.
The more intriguing feature is the use of the supposedly Muslim Brotherhood-connected media operatives.
For years, both the American hard-right and the U.S. government have demonized Muslim-connected groups — a task that is easily accomplished by simply having the government label a group as a “terrorist organization.”
While the essence of responsible journalism operating under the First Amendment is to give voice to unpopular opinions and disfavored individuals and groups, O’Keefe and friends believed they could taint someone who gave voice to such cherished First Amendment principles as a “terrorist sympathizer,” just as Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), in his day, would have smeared anyone in the media as a “Communist sympathizer” for daring to question his motives.
Instead of denouncing the O’Keefe smear campaign, NPR CEO Vivian Schiller (no relation to Ron) condemned Ron Schiller’s remarks. The NPR website described Ron’s remarks as a “gaffe.” Vivian’s effort to appease the hard-right failed. And shortly after Ron resigned, Vivian resigned as well.
NPR’s Dana Rehm — apparently unaware that the Republicans whom she feared would remove NPR’s public funding had intended to do so to begin with — cowered in the face of the right-wing smear machine, announcing “The comments contained in the video released today are contrary to everything we stand for, and we completely disavow the views expressed.”
What is contrary to everything NPR stands for, Dana? The idea that Muslims would be given a voice on the public airwaves? Or does NPR simply object to a journalist who would accurately describe the Tea Party as anti-intellectual and xenophobic?
Virgil Peck’s ‘Feral Hogs’
In The Lucifer Effect, Prof. Zimbardo observed that dehumanization is “one of the central processes in the transformation of ordinary, normal people into indifferent or even wanton perpetrators of evil….a ‘cortical cataract’ that clouds one’s thinking and fosters the perception that other people are less than human…to see…others as enemies deserving of torment, torture, and even annihilation.”
As NPR was scrambling to distance itself from Ron Schiller’s “Tea Party” xenophobia observation, there was Virgil Peck, Jr., the chair of the Republican Majority Caucus of the Kansas state House of Representatives, publicly substantiating that what Schiller said was true.
The occasion was a hearing before the Kansas House Appropriations Committee which addressed the use of “sharpshooters in helicopters” to control herds of feral pigs. Peck, who describes himself as “Pro-2d Amendment,” said: “It looks like to me as if shooting these emigrating feral hogs works, maybe we have found a solution to our illegal immigration problem.”
Barbara Shelly of the Kansas City Star was nearly as troubled by Peck’s subsequent explanation as she was with his initial remark. She wrote:
“I was just speaking like a southeast Kansas person,” he told the Lawrence Journal World, though two other lawmakers from southeast Kansas have hastened to disassociate themselves and their part of the world from Peck’s reprehensible anything-but-funny attempt at a joke.
Unfortunately, the level of Peck’s xenophobia is neither isolated nor limited to southeast Kansas. And, if we cannot depend upon journalists to render accurate assessments of that xenophobia or to give voice to those whose beliefs either the right-wing or the government does not wish us to hear, Peck’s may not be the worst of what is to come.
Ernest A. Canning has been an active member of the California state bar since 1977. Mr. Canning has received both undergraduate and graduate degrees in political science as well as a juris doctor. He is also a Vietnam vet (4th Infantry, Central Highlands 1968).
So whose idea do you believe this was originally? Who envisioned this set up – the narrative, the questions to ask, and literally wrote the FOX teleprompter script for the aftermath?
This is not the brainchild of those who carried it out. Who was the Architect? What broader narrative is this tied to? When was it conceived of, and why was this timing chosen? What other five or ten narratives was it chosen to dovetail with? The word is CONSPIRACY. They are illegal. So is PROPAGANDA.
Behold the forest, from 30,000 feet.
Who do you think might be so twisted and cynical as to design and create the “Dumb, Ultra-Patriotic & Impressionable White People’s Movement” as a political front and propaganda ploy?
Here’s a hint:
“As people do better, they start voting like Republicans – unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing.”
Karl Rove.
Well said Mr. Canning.
James O’Keefe should have a hidden camera shooting him every moment that he is in public. He lives by the deceptively-edited hidden camera video and must die by it.
… Hamranhansenhansen said…
No.
He lives by deceptively-editing hidden camera video and it would be poetic justice if he was brought down by honestly acquired and unedited video.
Otherwise, it’s just not worth it. You can’t win against them by becoming them…
“I guess we just trusted the government that the nuclear plants were safe,†she said. “What else could we do? The nuclear facilities never instructed us that we needed to be ready for something like this.â€
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/asia-pacific/frustration-boils-over-as-nuclear-crisis-reveals-lack-of-preparedness/article1951602/page2/
Pretty much sums up every citizenry and every government.
How does the EPA ensure that radiation levels remain APPARENTLY low in the US? Turn off nearly half of your monitoring devices:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-21/some-radiation-tracking-air-monitors-may-not-be-working-properly-epa-says.html
Chernobyl Cleanup Survivor’s Message for Japan: ‘Run Away as Quickly as Possible’
Manzurova and her colleagues were among the roughly 800,000 “cleaners” or “liquidators” in charge of the removal and burial of all the contamination in what’s still called the dead zone.
One of the relatively few survivors among those directly involved in the cleanup of Chernobyl.
She spent 4 1/2 years helping clean the abandoned town of Pripyat, which was less than two miles from the Chernobyl reactors. The plant workers lived there before they were abruptly evacuated.
Manzurova, now 59 and an advocate for radiation victims worldwide, has the “Chernobyl necklace” — a scar on her throat from the removal of her thyroid — and myriad health problems. But unlike the rest of her team members, who she said have all died from the results of radiation poisoning, and many other liquidators, she’s alive.
http://www.aolnews.com/2011/03/22/chernobyl-cleanup-survivors-message-for-japan-run-away-as-qui/
YOW!!! Some uncompromising language here, Ern. Xlnt. As we both know, xenophobia and religion walk hand in hand – are basically the same thing. The ‘chosen ones’ fevered mindset so inherent in every religion on Earth – hell, even soto and rinzai zen!, where one states that the Western mind is incapable of enlightenment and the other remains mostly silent on the contention – and even just the very germinal idea of chosen-ness have been and are bigotry incarnate, no two ways about it. They need to die. Now. This is why a reversion to fundamentalism is so necessary to America, Israel, and other theo-fascist countries whenever evil is desired to run amok.
The standard arithmetic for fascism has traditionally been: state + business = fascism. That’s flawed. The true formula is: state + business + religion = fascism…if, that is, you want a truly superior fascist state. Religion has always been about governance, never about spirituality (that, after all, is why they’re not synonyms except to nimrods) and ever eager to promote xenophobia. Without it, there’s no Us and Them and thus no treason for religion. Hence, Fox’s, O’Reilly’s, Hannity’s, and all Righties’ wallowing in crap. Care to bet on whether O’Keefe and Breitbart cling to one or another of the moldy oldies (Xianity, Judaism, Mormonism, etc.)? And as the Christian Nazis vilified the Jews, so Begin, Peres, and the legion of Jewish terrorists have typified brother and sister Semites. Nothing is new under the sun. As you write, blacks know of this mentality all too well – they caught it from both, as Jews and Christians engaged in the selling of human beings through the ages.
There’s an interesting question above all this, though, one that NO ONE is asking, one I’m surprised made no blip on anyone’s radar: Schiller knows he’s innocent, knew all along, so why did he *really* quit? Is he a Dem coward (a redundancy, I know) or was he fleeing something revelatory he preferred not emerge? The former does not satisfactorily resolve the matter; therefore, the latter seems the answer. What, I wonder, was that something?
Thanks, Mark, for your always astute observations.
I believe the appropriate context is to see religion as an ideological means for masking the contradictions of class while reinforcing xenophobia.
Consider this passage from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave–actually from the Appendix Douglass added to his autobiographical narrative, which focused on “slaveholding religion.” (Emphasis in orig. text).
In many respects, the right-wing Christian fundamentalists who make up the core of the “Tea Party” movement are the ideological (and no doubt in many instances the biological) descendants of that “slaveholding religion.”
Okay, Uncle Ernie, I sit at your feet and ask you this question: why don’t we LEARN this lesson? Our country’s history is an ebb and flow of peace to war and back, xenophobia to melting pot/multiculturalism and back, bigotry to tolerance and back. Is there a cycle here? And when, oh when, will we as a people stand together, quit fighting & killing each other (to the apparent amusement of the Powers-That-Be, blood-thirsty, voyeuristic vampires that they are!?), and start standing together? We keep fighting the same battles! From the beginning, the Founders KNEW this would happen. We are only a bit more than 200 years old, and yet, we are failing. We’ve inspired the world with the ideals of democracy, and yet we sink regularly into a pit of ugly murderous self-destruction. we who read this blog know whereof you speak. WHITHER? (And as for me, I must hie meself off to Canada with my husband-we cannot maintain ourselves anymore in this country due to his illness. He is a dual ciizen, so we’ll go where we can afford ourselves. I am HEARTBROKEN to leave my friends & colleagues & cohorts here in the Bay Area, but we have no CHOICE. Economic refugees, grateful for a place to land. We are the lucky ones. I grieve for all who are not so fortunate.) I do not have answers, but strategies: MOVE your money, CLEAN, publicly funded elections, and PAPER BALLOTS! Those are the fixes to grab back the power from the monsters who seek to destroy this wonderful country full of such good folk. Thanks again, Uncle Ernie-you are a national treasure. Blessings all!
Getting Started with the 1988-2008 State and National True Vote Model
Richard Charnin (TruthIsAll)
March 20, 2011
The 1988-2008 State and National True Vote Model (TVM) calculates the True Vote for all state and national presidential elections since 1988. The model instantly returns total votes cast, recorded vote and unadjusted exit polls. The TVM has a built-in feature to automatically determine the vote shares of new and previous election voters required to force a match to the state’s recorded vote. This capability provides a simple forensic tool to determine the likelihood of vote miscounting. It is analogous to the impossible mix of returning Bush voters required in the Final National Exit Poll to match the recorded vote in 1988, 1992, 2004 and 2008.
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=tQxCdo0TYpgMmzHdxU7ia7Q#gid=0
The True Vote
It is incontrovertible that the Final National Exit Poll (NEP) never reflects the True Vote. The Final is always forced to match the recorded vote even though millions of votes are uncounted in every election. It stands to reason that if the Final is forced to match an impossible recorded vote, then the Final must also be impossible – and therefore all the demographic cross-tabs reported in the media must be invalid.
Simple arithmetic shows that in 1972, 1988, 1992, 2004 and 2008 the number of returning Nixon and Bush voters were not only implausible, but also physically impossible. In 2004 preliminary state and national exit polls were downloaded from the Internet after midnight. They all showed Kerry leading by substantial margins. But final exit polls show that impossible adjustments were made to the number of returning voters (“the mixâ€) as well as to the corresponding vote shares. The reason is obvious, but goes unreported in the mainstream media: It is standard operating procedure to force all exit polls to match the recorded vote – regardless of whether or not the votes were miscounted.
Therefore, to obtain a good approximation of the True Vote, the Final NEP returning voter mix must be replaced by a feasible, plausible set based on voter mortality and the best estimated turnout percentage of living previous election voters.
A feasible mix produces a True Vote that is quite close to the unadjusted state and national exit polls. Yet the average Democratic True Vote share usually exceeds the unadjusted exit polls by 1-2%. Why the discrepancy? One reason is that the exit poll sample is based on prior election recorded votes (and other demographics). But as we know, the recorded vote always differs from the True Vote.
In the eleven presidential elections since 1968, over 80 million votes were cast but never counted. The Republicans led the average recorded vote by 49-45%. The Democrats led the True Vote by exactly the reverse: 49-45%.
Using the Model
Required Data Input (entered in yellow background cells only)
There are just three essential inputs.
1, Election year: 1988-2008
2. State abbreviation code (use NA for national)
3. The calculation method determines the number of returning voters from the previous state or national election:
1- Recorded vote, 2- total votes cast, 3- unadjusted exit poll, 4- True Vote, 5- match to the current election recorded vote.