Reason Magazine - Topics > Far Right

At Home He Feels Like a Jurist

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 13:14:00 EDT

From an interesting true-crime tale in The Washington Monthly:

In the previous year, nearly twenty defendants in other Baltimore cases had begun adopting what lawyers in the federal courthouse came to call "the flesh-and-blood defense." The defense, such as it is, boils down to this: As officers of the court, all defense lawyers are really on the government's side, having sworn an oath to uphold a vast, century-old conspiracy to conceal the fact that most aspects of the federal government are illegitimate, including the courts, which have no constitutional authority to bring people to trial. The defendants also believed that a legal distinction could be drawn between their name as written on their indictment and their true identity as a "flesh and blood man."

Judge Davis and his law clerk pored over the case files, which led them to a series of strange Web sites. The flesh and blood defense, they discovered, came from a place far from Baltimore, from people as different from [black defendant] Willie Mitchell as people could possibly be. Its antecedents stretched back decades, involving religious zealots, gun nuts, tax protestors, and violent separatists driven by theories that had fueled delusions of Aryan supremacy and race war in gun-loaded compounds in the wilds of Montana and Idaho.

How were such ideas transmitted from the radical right to the black underclass? The Monthly's writer, Kevin Carey, points to the prison system:

Some collected the documents [the Montana-based separatists] the Freemen filed during their trial and began offering them for sale via advertisements in "America's Bulletin," a newsletter espousing Posse-style anti-government theories that is widely distributed throughout the prison system by white supremacists.

In October 2004, a prisoner named Michael Burpee arrived at the Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center in downtown Baltimore. Burpee had recently been convicted in Florida of trafficking PCP to Maryland. Hoping for leniency, he pled guilty, only to receive a twenty seven-year prison sentence dictated by harsh federal sentencing guidelines. Desperate for a way out, he began listening to someone--presumably a fellow prisoner--who explained how the charges were all part of a secret government conspiracy against him. Then Burpee was brought up on new federal drug charges in Maryland, and shipped north. He carried with him a pile of documents that were remarkably similar to those that had been filed by the Montana Freemen....

Like the Midwestern farmers before them, the Baltimore inmates were susceptible to the notion that the federal government was engaged in a massive, historic plot to deprive them of life, liberty, and property. Such suspicions are prevalent in certain pockets of the black community--that year, a study from the Rand Corporation found that over 25 percent of African Americans surveyed believed the AIDS virus was developed by the government, and 12 percent thought it was released into the population by the CIA. And black separatist groups like the Nation of Islam--also fond of conspiracy theories--have long cultivated members through the prison system; some of these groups have explicitly adopted the language of constitutional fundamentalists. Given these developments, Levitas told me, "I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner."

That's a fascinating conveyer belt. I'm not sure it was the only one. This is not the first time conspiracy theories identified with far-right groups, including white supremacists, have found their way into black America. I've heard similar ideas, for example, from some offshoots of the Moorish Science Temple. And while that was recent enough to have possibly been influenced by Burpee, it isn't my only enounter of that kind.

In the late '90s, when I was writing a lot about pirate radio, I met several black radicals who defended their right to operate unlicensed stations using "sovereign citizen" arguments that I had seen, in almost identical form, in the right-wing fringes of the libertarian movement. Still earlier in the '90s, I stumbled on the curious cultural zone where black militants intersected with the militia milieu, which I then described in an article for Chronicles. (Unfortunately, the only copy of that story that I can find online is a garbled version someone posted to a UFO list, with all the paragraph breaks missing, the last line removed, and who knows how many other screwups in the transcription.) I've seen evidence suggesting that similar ideas were traveling from white populists to black populists -- or, if you prefer, being adapted and reconfigured by black populists -- even earlier.

The really interesting thing about the Monthly story is that when Mitchell tried to use those ludicrous homebrewed legal theories, they may have...worked. Sort of.

None of these arguments had a prayer of overturning the charges. But they had an impact nonetheless. They made a long, complex trial longer and more complex still. Seeking the death penalty is rightfully arduous--it requires legal justifications for the penalty itself, enhanced scrutiny over jury selection, an additional penalty phase after a conviction, and so on. Conspiracy charges create further legal burdens. And the way Mitchell et al chose to deal with their attorneys--not dismissing them outright, but asking them to sign a peculiar "contract" that would essentially prohibit them from mounting a defense--created more problems. If the defendants weren't dealt with carefully, they might be able to appeal by claiming that they had been inadequately represented....

By mid-2007, the federal prosecutors were starting to run low on a vital resource: time. As years go by, memories fade, police officers retire or transfer, informants change their mind, and juries wonder why, if the case is so straightforward, it took so long to make. On September 6, 2007, prosecutors withdrew the death penalty for all four defendants.

[Via Matt Kaune.]

Dead on the Fourth of July

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:00:00 EDT

The first time I met Jesse Helms was in 1981. My fifth grade class had risen early, boarded a bus in North Carolina, and taken a five-hour trek to Washington, where we tried to pack a week's worth of civic tourism into a single day. Zipping through the U.S. Senate, we filed in for a photograph with our state's senior senator.

"So these children are from Raleigh?" Helms said to a staffer.

"No," came the reply. "Chapel Hill."

A hint of a scowl crossed the Republican legislator's face. Or maybe it just seemed that way to me, knowing as I did that he hated my hometown and the liberal-leaning university it contained. When the state was mulling a plan to build a zoo, Helms had cracked that it should just put a fence around Chapel Hill.

That would not be an appropriate comment for this occasion, so our host changed the subject. His eyes scanned the crowd of kids, and apparently they fell on my nametag. Before I understood what was happening, he was shaking my hand. "My name's Jesse, too," he drawled. "Maybe we're related!" I stood there dumbly, surprised and paralyzed; before I knew it, my namesake was gone and we were marching to the next stop on the tour.

One of the class chaperones fell into step beside me. "Thanks," he said, "for not spitting in his face." I got the impression from his tone that a part of him would have liked it if I had spat at the senator. If Jesse Helms hated Chapel Hill, then virtually everyone I knew from Chapel Hill hated Helms right back.

By the '90s that contempt had spread far beyond our city and state. If you asked the average liberal about Helms in 1995, there were two things he was likely to tell you: that the senator was a racist and that the senator was a censor. The evidence for the first charge, if you cared to ask, would be a TV ad he ran in his 1990 campaign, in which a white man crumples a job application after a racial quota keeps him from finding work. The evidence for the second charge would be Helms' crusade against the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal program that funded material he considered obscene.

In other words, the typical Helms-bashers were actually prettifying the picture. The man was a Jim Crow nostalgist who wanted to obliterate the line between church and state, and they were whining about his run-of-the-mill conservative stances on affirmative action and Robert Mapplethorpe. You'd think Helms was just another Republican, notable only for his accent and his ties to the tobacco industry. But he was much more than that. You needn't favor racial preferences or federal art subsidies to find Jesse Helms objectionable.

Helms was, almost literally, a child of the segregationist order. His father was a cop in Monroe, North Carolina; in his recent book Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism, the historian William Link writes that the senior Helms "was expected to maintain the racial hierarchy through intimidation and, if necessary, brute force." (Link quotes a black Monroe woman who said the officer used "his power to the fullest, in the wrong way.") The constable's son came to prominence as a defender of that racist regime, but he made those old arguments in a new medium, reading virulent editorials on WRAL-TV in the '60s. "Are civil rights only for Negroes?" he said in one 1963 broadcast. "White women in Washington who have been raped and mugged on the streets in broad daylight have experienced the most revolting sort of violation of their civil rights. The hundreds of others who had their purses snatched last year by Negro hoodlums may understandably insist that their right to walk the street unmolested was violated."

In the 1950s, an alliance emerged between free-marketeers and segregationists. It was not an inevitable union: Jim Crow laws were, in addition to all their other injustices, an intrusive array of restrictions on freedom of contract and freedom of commerce. But the alternatives suggested by the civil rights movement often restrained those freedoms from the other direction, opening space for a coalition that would have seemed much stranger a generation earlier. Thus, in 1964, the Deep South voted for Barry Goldwater, a man who had taken the lead in desegregating his family's department store, the Arizona Air National Guard, and the Phoenix public schools years before the law required any of those institutions to be integrated. He had also voted for federal civil rights bills in 1957 and 1960. But he shared the segregationists' hostility to two provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and that mutual interest allowed conservative activists to create a political realignment.

If Goldwater relied on the votes of racists he despised, then Helms was the other side of the alliance: a segregationist who could speak the language of liberty but never really adopted freedom as a principle. Helms realized early on that it looked better to position yourself as a foe of big government than as a defender of state-created privileges, so he preferred to talk about the new powers the federal government was claiming, not the old powers the state government had exercised for decades. In other words, he learned to talk like Goldwater. But there's little doubt that his sympathies lay with the larger system of legally enforced white supremacy. Helms maintained that the South had no racial problems until the feds "manufactured" them; according to Link, he established quiet ties to the White Citizens' Councils and similar groups.

Helms' anti-statist rhetoric wasn't entirely a pose. As a Raleigh city councilman in the '50s, for example, he led a lonely fight against the federal urban renewal program. But anyone tempted to believe the right-wing direct-mail king Richard Viguerie's eulogy for the senator—sample quote: "It's the free market views, policies, and leadership of President Reagan, Jesse Helms, and Milton Friedman that have led the world to experience the greatest movement out of poverty in history"—should review Helms' record in office. As far as economic policy was concerned, his chief concerns were preserving and extending the trade barriers that protected North Carolina's textile industry and the subsidies that supported North Carolina's tobacco farms.

In social policy, Helms favored anti-porn statutes, "voluntary" school prayer, and—"in the best interest of public health"—sodomy laws. In international affairs, he pushed for U.S. aid to some of the most repellent figures on the world stage, from the Salvadoran death-squad organizer Roberto D'Aubuisson to the Mozambican terror group RENAMO. After the Cold War ended, some critics of American foreign policy hoped that Helms' hatred of the United Nations and nonmilitary foreign aid would transform him into an old-fashioned isolationist who eschewed foreign entanglements. That isn't how it worked out. Over the course of the decade, Helms sponsored bills to tighten the embargo against Cuba and to send $100 million in military aid to Bosnia. After some early dithering, he also came out for expanding NATO into Eastern Europe. By the end of his career, he couldn't even hold the line against the foreign aid he loved to criticize: Under the influence of his buddy Bono, Helms put his weight behind a $200 million assistance package for Africa.

In other words, the man was no more committed to limited government abroad than he was committed to it at home. But he maintained his reputation as a skinflint isolationist. And why not? A good politician knows how to lie, and Helms was an expert politician.

1983: another school, another field trip to Washington, another audience with the man who shares my name. Now a smartassed seventh grader, I set a goal for myself. Tired of receiving mass-produced deceptions via the newspapers and television, I would get a legislator to lie to me personally. I approached the senator. "Excuse me, Mr. Helms," I said in a deferential tone. "My name is Jesse Walker. I don't know if you remember me, but we met a couple years ago on another class trip."

The senator took the bait: "Why, of course I remember you, Jesse." He smiled warmly, looked me straight in the eye, spoke in a confidential tone, and gave me the heartiest handshake I had ever encountered.

It should have been a private moment of triumph. Instead it taught me what a born politician can do. For a second, I forgot the whole plan and believed him.

Jesse Walker is reason's managing editor.

Church Chat

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 11:43:00 EDT

John Lofton, the hardest of the hard-core hard-right Christians, hectors -- sorry, interviews -- Libertarian presidential nominee Bob Barr. Barr displays remarkable patience, though it's clearly fraying by the end.

If you'd like a quick summary of the candidate's answers, here you go: Barr admires Ayn Rand because of her support for individual liberty, not because she's an atheist; Barr is a Methodist; Barr thinks the role of government is defined by the Constitution, not God; Barr supports laws against molesting children; Barr does not think homosexuality is "lewd and depraved"; Barr does not think the government should punish Sabbath-breaking; Barr is pro-life; Barr thinks the individual states should determine the penalties for abortion; Barr does not care to discuss what he believes the penalty for abortion should be in Georgia; Barr supports the death penalty; Barr does not think the federal government should have been involved in the Terri Shiavo case; Barr does not believe Shiavo's death was a murder. And Barr would really, really prefer to be talking about taxes, education, free speech, and government surveillance.

Bonus link: From 20 years ago, Lofton's interview with Allen Ginsburg, which is -- I think I can say this without hyperbole -- the greatest interview in the history of human conversation.

The Latest from LaRoucheland

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 21 May 2008 09:32:00 EDT

Jim Antle writes:

Passing through a Metro station, I was accosted by some LaRouchies handing out fliers about a webcast or some such by their fearless leader. I took the flier, gave them a look that was equal parts amusement and bemusement, and kept walking. One of them shouted after me, "With your support the Washington Nationals will win the Super Bowl this year! Are you with me? Do I need to get you free tickets to be with me?"

Alan Keyes Loses Again

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 13:40:00 EDT

The Permanent Candidate has failed to win the nomination of the paleoconservative Constitution Party. Eric Garris reports:

Last night, CP founder Howard Phillips strongly denounced [Alan] Keyes as a warmonger, neocon, and egomaniac. Phillips was subsequently attacked by Jim Clymer, the CP national chairman.

In spite of Keyes bringing in a lot of delegates, the CP remained true to their anti-interventionist views and rejected Keyes.

The nomination instead went to the antiwar conservative Chuck Baldwin, by a vote of 383.8 to 125.7. It's a small but satisfying victory for two noble though possibly lost causes: the movement to end the occupation of Iraq and the transideological coalition to get Alan Keyes to shut up.

I pointed out a while back that the California affiliate of the Constitution Party is the old American Independent Party, a group formed as a political vehicle for the segregationist George Wallace. Jim Antle of The American Spectator, who has done the best reporting I've seen on the CP race, tells me that the California delegation backed Keyes, a black man -- while the party's two black state chairs were Keyes' leading opponents. It's a complicated world, innit?

The Four Scariest Words in the English Language—and Some of Them May Not Even Be English

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:37:00 EDT

I just received this mass email, with the subject line "Breaking ... Obama 'Swiftboating' Plan Revealed," courtesy of Human Events (all formatting in the original):

Below please find a special message from one of our advertisers, ExposeObama.com. From time to time, we receive opportunities we believe you as a valued customer may want to know about. Please note that the following message does not necessarily reflect the editorial positions of Human Events.

"President Barack Hussein Obama," those have to be the scariest four words in the English language!

I'm no fan of Obama (he can get my vote when he pries a gun from the dead cold hand of Charlton Heston), but I'm not sure that President Barack Hussein Obama is all that much scarier than the other two live options at the moment.

More at Expose Obama.

He-Wolf of the FIA

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 11:27:00 EDT

I do not expect to read a better lede this year:

Max Mosley, one of the most powerful men in world sport, was under pressure to resign as boss of Formula One's governing body last night after he was exposed enjoying a Nazi-style orgy with five prostitutes.

Mosley is the son of Oswald Mosley, founder of the Nazi-era British Union of Fascists. The "Nazi-style orgy" involved...well, let's go back to the story in the London Times:

The Oxford-educated former barrister, who is president of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), reenacted a concentration camp scene in which he played the role of both guard and inmate.

Speaking in German and brandishing a leather whip, he beat the women after allowing himself to be subjected to a humiliating inspection for lice and an interrogation in chains.

That's surprisingly egalitarian for a totalitarian torture fantasy. I don't think Mosley Sr. believed the guards and prisoners should have a chance to trade places. Progress!

The Homosexual Roots of Antiwar Sentiment: Podhoretz Schools the Ignorant

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 12:47:00 EST

Nice piece in the American Prospect from Justin Logan on the silliness of pro-warriors' endless Hitler analogies and all, worth a read, but I really wanted to just single out this one somewhat extraordinary bit, news to me though perhaps not to longterm careful Norman Podhoretz watchers:

Podhoretz penned a meandering essay in Harper's in 1977 titled "The Culture of Appeasement" which likened antiwar sentiment in post-Vietnam America to the wariness of war in Britain after World War I, and then linked the latter to a homosexual yearning for relations with all the young men who perished in the Great War. In Podhoretz's view, "the best people looked to other men for sex and romance," and as a result, didn't much like them being killed by the score on the Continent. "Anyone familiar with homosexual apologetics today will recognize these attitudes."
Tying things back into the 1970s, Podhoretz pointed to the "parallels with England in 1937" and warned that "this revival of the culture of appeasement ought to be troubling our sleep." (A correspondent in a subsequent issue of Harper's would admit that he "had not previously realized that Winston Churchill fought the Battle of Britain almost singlehandedly while England's ubiquitous faggotry sneered and jeered from below.")

I haven't felt more like backing out of a room saying, "Uh, yeah, interesting, gotta go" while reading anything in a long time.

Beware the Leesburg Garden Club!

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 16:24:00 EDT

This is the first presidential election since 1972 in which the fascist crank Lyndon LaRouche is not running for the White House. Writing in The Washington Monthly, Avi Klein reviews LaRouche's political career and the declining fortunes of the cult he created.