Into the Belly of the Beast

Breaking down the comments on a right-wing website.  

If you can stomach a dose of the far-right weltanschauung, check out the comments below “Obama: ‘Islam has Always Been a Part of America’s History,’” from a website called Patriot Update. The article itself is trash, cherry-picking events from history to “prove” wrong a statement Obama made on a trip to Egypt. 

My comment, still the newest in the thread:

There is no controversy here. Obama's statement is simply correct. He does not say Islam was an important force in American history, just that it was a part of American history. There is extensive documentary evidence that Muslim slaves have been in North America since the 1700s. George Washington many not have known any Muslims, but John Quincy Adams did. He freed a West African prince, Abdul Rahman, from captivity in 1828. One can find many other anecdotes involving Muslims throughout our history. So maybe everyone should just calm down and accept this for what it is: a true statement made diplomatically by a president to a Middle Eastern nation who we consider a friend in the region.

Below this (not in response to mine), you have all kind of vitriol. I would put the comments into three groups: The Know Nothings, The Crazies, and The Racists. 

The Know-Nothings

The Know Nothings, whose views are similar to their namesake brethren of the 1850s, are the least awful, relatively speaking. They tend to be the best informed and most articulate on the extreme right, having (to borrow the words of one historian in reference to anti-Lincolnites) read deeply, but not widely. Their views are monolithic and show little appreciation for complexity or context; Islam, a religion of over 1.5 billion followers, is always equated with the words and actions of a radical few. They represent a longstanding American tradition of Nativism and reactionary politics inspired by immigration and peppered with conspiracy theories. In the 1850s, the movement was anti-Rome. Today, it combines anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment. 

Some examples from the comments:

• Islam is not a religion, it is a totalitarian system. Its goal is “Islamize” America, revive the Caliphate, and avenge the Crusades
• Islam is inherently incompatible with American/Western values (aspects of Islam that contradict this, such as secularist movements or the existence of Turkey, are ignored)
• Immigration policy turns a blind eye to foreign threats and infiltration
• Certain groups are legitimately “us” (including, unlike in earlier times, Jews) and others are not
• Islam was not part of any significant American event
• Islam does play a role in American history, but it is all negative, and it is all offshore (e.g. the Barbary Pirates, the slave trade)

The Crazies

This is typical stuff:

• We know nothing about Obama’s life—all his records are concealed
• Obama is a secret Muslim, advancing a secret Muslim agenda
• Obama is a traitor, or, more accurately, a “domestic enemy”  (because “only a citizen can be a traitor”)
• Obama has been brainwashed by the left
• Muslims are taking over demographically
• Obama was sent to America to orchestrate a coup/martial law/dictatorship, supported by socialist dupes
• Obama/The Left is satanic
• Obama is a terrorist and “like Hitler”
• My favorite: Obama was schooled at 8 years old by Bill Ayers, his true lifetime mentor 

The Racists

• Obama is crazy, stupid, ignorant
• Muslims are dirty, child-rapers, like insects
• Black culture has corrupted America
• Yes, whites are racist, but blacks hate whites more than whites hate blacks

And then there is NotYourUsualPolitics—good on you, whoever you are! Trolls hate it when somebody cuts through their crap like a butter knife. 

The Abortion Debate: Purity vs Reality

Remember Jon Kyl's abortion fantasy? In 2011, Kyl (R-Arizona) famously said on the floor of the Senate that Planned Parenthood spends "well over 90 percent" of its time performing abortions. When it was pointed out that the actual number was around 3 percent, Kyl's spokesman responded by saying the comment was "not intended to be a factual statement, but rather to illustrate that Planned Parenthood, an organization that receives millions of dollars in taxpayer funding, does subsidize abortions."

Kyl was widely mocked for this, but it did not hurt his standing among pro-lifers. Being right (as in, factual) matters less to them than being in the right—Planned Parenthood is the enemy; providing abortions might as well be all they do. Never mind that it is very little of what they do. The devil is not in the details.

Details, in fact, only get in the way. Cuts to state funding for Planned Parenthood in Texas in 2011 caused 56 clinics to close and over 130,000 women to lose access to health services in a state that already ranks near the bottom in quality of health care. A 2012 Susan J. Komen Foundation plan to cut grants for breast cancer screening at Planned Parenthood would have denied thousands of low-income women access to this life-saving procedure. In subsequent coverage of this issue in the conservative media, the outrage over denying poor women breast screenings is largely edited out; the controversy is framed as an attempt by pro-abortion activists to sabotage Komen for trying to defund an abortion-providing operation.

Why The Lies?

The focus on a pure ideal—abortion is murder—makes it less important to be accurate about what things are than about what they represent. Ideological purity is a great motivator. It strips away doubt and nuance, leaving a clear narrative and focused, single-minded goal. But this is also its greatest weakness, because the real world is full of nuance and complexity, which is why conservatives feel undermined at every turn. Hence the hatred of "mainstream media," "big science" and other culture-war bogeymen, including large swaths of government and academia.

More Impure Thoughts

If abortion is murder, pure and simple, then killing a fetus is equivalent to killing Jews in the Holocaust—a comparison made often by pro-life activists. In reality, this comparison is nonsense. The death of a fetus, however traumatic, is nothing to the death of a sentient, cognizant person. No one, not even the staunchest pro-life supporter, believes a mother should mourn a miscarriage the same way she mourns the death of a child.

In actual practice, purity breaks down.

According to the Old Testament, Exodus 21:22-25, if a woman is killed in the course of a brawl between two people, the one who killed her must be killed. If she is pregnant, and the brawl injures her and causes her to miscarry, the guilty party must pay a fine. Fetuses, in other words, are not equivalent to born people. In this case, for pro-lifers, the purity of an idea must be given precedence over the reality of the Bible.

Given these complications, you would think pro-lifers would have some sympathy for other viewpoints. But purity brooks no quarter for differing positions. It does not allow for heterodoxy, and judges the legitimacy of differing belief systems on their relative similarity to its own. Purity is threatened by change and difference—it's not enough that True Believers are not themselves compelled to support or practice abortion; these practices cannot be tolerated among others, because doing so would taint an inviolable ideal.

Protecting Women From Sharia Law, Here and Abroad

The news today about the protests in Saudi Arabia over the ban on female driving remind me of a response I wrote a few months ago to an e-mail, attributed to Nonie Darwish, about the threat Islam poses to the West. The e-mail read, in part:

In 20 years there will be enough Muslim voters in Canada, the U.S. and Britain To elect the president by themselves! Rest assured they will do so. You can look at how they have taken over several towns in the USA -- Dearborne Mich., is one, and there are others. Britain has several cities now totally controlled by Muslims. Everyone in Canada. the U.S. and Great Britain should be required to read this, but with the ACLU, there is no way this will be widely publicized, unless each of us sends it on! 

My response, in full:

I've seen many things in the media in recent months that attempt to use concerns for women's rights as a cover for far-right positions and propaganda. If you strip away the stories of terrible treatment of women by strict adherents of Sharia law—none of which have been, or will ever be, tolerated in this country—you are left with this: Growing numbers of Muslims in the U.S.—"boogie men"—are part of a secret conspiracy to take over the government, abolish Democracy and establish their own religious law. They have already taken over whole towns and, unchecked, will run roughshod over Christianity if we do not do something now. (What exactly should be done is left unsaid.) They are a moral and physical threat to women and especially young children, who are exposed to the risk of pedophilia as a result of their presence in our land.

Come on, folks, this is Nazi stuff, pure and simple. Substitute Jews for Muslims and you've got Bavaria 1936. Perhaps it would be helpful if "real Americans" made the business owners of Dearborn aware of our displeasure by forming a mob and smashing the windows of all their stores in the downtown business district. This would send a strong message: we aren't going to take it anymore!

Nasty, vituperative nonsense.

I would like to pose some solutions and positive actions that we can all take to safeguard democracy and human rights for all in this great country of ours.

1. Join the ACLU. The ACLU works on the front lines to protect the civil liberties of all Americans, including historic efforts to ensure that Jews are not forced to read portions of the New Testament in school, that black people are not subject to discrimination and political disenfranchisement, that religion is not used to discriminate against women, and that people are not forced to "show their papers" to law enforcement.

2. Join Americans United For the Separation of Church and State. This organization protects the free practice of religion and the authority of the U.S. Constitution, the greatest secular document ever conceived, from the threat of efforts to establish any officially sanctioned state religion. Whether Sharia or the tribal law of the ancient Hebrews (which, incidentally, compares women to Oxen and servants among the possessions of a neighbor a man must not covet), we must be sure to protect our nation's system of justice from outmoded theocratic legal decrees.

3. Lobby for a carbon tax and other measures to wean us off Middle Eastern oil. Oil fuels Islamic extremism the world over and enriches the wahhabist regime in Saudi Arabia, where women cannot vote or drive. The human rights records of other petro-dictatorships around the world are hardly better, and often much worse.

The Ghettoization of the Right

I was disappointed to hear that George Will jumped over to Fox News, following his former colleague at ABC, John Stossel, who left for Fox in 2009. While it may seem tidy to group all the conservative and libertarian-leaning voices under the Fox banner, I think this is a bad situation. We need a diversity of viewpoints across media channels if we are to avoid furthering the "echo chamber" effect on the left and the right.

Sadly, it seems people see this sort of ghettoization as the expected norm. In an interview with Will, the Deseret News states, "Some questioned why he hadn't made the move to Fox News in the past, and he had said it was because Roger Ailes hadn't asked." Or as New York magazine put it, "George Will Is Finally Joining Fox News," where he gets to work with "a team more his speed."

Maybe I'm overstating the problem, since other conservatives (e.g. Ann Coulter, Peggy Noonan) do appear regularly on ABC's "This Week," where Will was a mainstay. But losing Will's contribution marks a big change. I doubt we are going to see a liberal with his stature joining the ranks at Fox News anytime soon—and just this week, Sally Kohn, whom the New York Times calls "one of Fox News Channel's most visible liberal pundits," left the network for MSNBC.

Barack Obama, the Moderate Conservative

In a sane political environment, Barack Obama would be considered center-right.

This was first made clear to me by Andrew Sullivan, on the Colbert Report and in his blog, and it's undeniably true. Obama shepherded through Congress a health-care law modeled on Mitt Romney's, which incorporates many elements originally recommended by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Obamacare works with private insurers and other existing health care delivery systems and relies on free-market incentives to reduce health care costs—an element of the law that is already working.

Obama is pro business, and pro tax cuts. He lectures African-Americans on personal responsibility. He has allowed Bush-era surveillance and anti-terrorism methods to stand (earning the ire of libertarians and many on the left), and ramped up the pursuit of Osama bin Laden, leading to his killing. He has agreed to unprecedented cuts to the federal budget in an effort to appease hard-liners in the Republican party. The number of public employees under his administration has shrunk, largely due to cuts in federal money for the states. Federal spending is flat since 2009, and has decreased as a percentage of GDP.

Obama is in every rational sense a centrist, and is best understood as taking a center-right stand on most matters of public policy. He is, as Sullivan states, "America's Tory President." Yet the right hates, fears and distrusts him, seeing him as some kind of closet socialist dictator. How can this be?

I think it's useful to make a comparison with Richard Nixon. Nixon was elected a Republican president in an era when liberalism was at its apex, and calls for radical social and political change came most vehemently from the left. In response, Nixon acted in a way that was essentially center-left, supporting the Clean Air Act and the EPA and pushing myriad big-government policies during his tenure. Had he been president today, he would be seen as more liberal than Obama or Bill Clinton. Yet the left of the late '60s and early '70s did not see it this way. To them, he was a right-wing warmonger, a fraud and a disaster for the nation (all this years before Watergate).

Nixon tacked left in reaction to the winds of his time. Obama has tacked right in reaction to the winds of his. Today's right, like yesterday's left, just doesn't see it. In years to come, when Tea Party hysteria dies down, I am certain this will be accepted fact, and I pledge to point it out to my Republican friends ad nauseum.