from OurFuture.org:
The Politics of the Personal: The Urge to PurgeSubmitted by David Neiwert on November 19, 2007 - 12:59pm.
Part 4 of a five-part series. Parts 1, 2, and 3.The transformation of mainstream movement conservatives into something closer resembling far-right extremists didn’t happen overnight. It came in bits and pieces, drips and drabs, piling up in small events that seemed innocuous enough at the time. Beginning in the mid-1990s, and increasingly so in the years after 9/11, figures on the mainstream right began picking up ideas, talking points, issues, and agendas from its extremist fringes: the xenophobic, conspiracist, fanatical religious right. These ostensibly “mainstream” figures would then repackage these ideas and talking points for general consumption, usually by stripping out the overt references to racism and xenophobic hatred.
These “transmitters” were often leading right-wing media luminaries, all reliably viewed as mainstream conservatives: Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, Lou Dobbs, Michelle Malkin, Michael Savage. Some were public officials, like Sen. Trent Lott (whose ties to the segregationist neo-Confederate movement came floating to public attention in 2002), Rep. Tom Tancredo, and Rep. Ron Paul (the latter a 2008 Republican presidential candidate, despite his longtime proclivity for “New World Order” conspiracy theories). And sometimes the transmissions came from people with one foot firmly in the fringe camp who manage for a time to disguise their agendas: for instance, Jared Taylor of the white-supremacist American Renaissance, who is skilled at posing as an academic expert on race relations and is presented on TV as such; or John Tanton, the mastermind of various “immigration reform” groups whose work tends to specialize in demonizing Latinos, who is himself financed by white supremacists.
Initially, much of the trafficking in exchanged ideas and themes -- “memes,” if you will -- in the 1990s revolved around bashing Bill Clinton, the loathing of whom was a shared pastime among both the mainstream and extremist right. So it was that charges laid against Clinton -- that he and his wife Hillary had conspired to murder White House Counsel Vince Foster, that Clinton had a hidden black “love child,” that he was conspiring with the “New World Order” at the United Nations to give away American sovereignty -- that originally circulated in the militia meeting halls and the gatherings of Montana Freemen were being circulated for broad public consumption a few years (or sometimes mere days) later, pushed there by leading mouthpieces of the ostensibly mainstream conservative movement. It culminated in the Clinton impeachment fiasco, which demonstrated the power of an increasingly fanatical movement to foist its political agenda on an unwilling public, which polls consistently showed disapproved far more of the effort to impeach Clinton than it did Clinton’s behavior.
But it did not end there, not even once Clinton left office (though a cottage industry did spring up on the right pinning the blame for everything that went wrong subsequently -- particularly the 9/11 attacks -- on Clinton). Indeed, if anything, the exchange accelerated in the ensuing years, driven particularly by three major issues: the 9/11 attacks and the “war on terror,” the invasion of Iraq, and immigration. In all three cases, the demonization of liberals grew sharper and louder, as did the reflexive reliance on conspiracy theories and apocalyptic fearmongering. .....(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/politics_personal_urge_purge?tx=3
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