50 Shots: The Sean Bell Demonstrations

This blog is still temporarily on ice as I finish up my forthcoming book (due out next March), but I wanted to feature a new video report I have just completed. Check out the video and a quick run-down:

On April 25, the three NYPD detectives who killed bridegroom Sean Bell the night before his wedding and wounded his two friends were acquitted of all charges. The undercover officers, who had riddled Bell’s car with 50 shots, claimed in court that they were scared by Bell and his friends, even though the men were unarmed and on their way home from a club. Detective Michael Oliver must have been especially frightened. He alone fired 31 shots, even stopping to reload on his way to killing Bell. Arthur Cooperman, a 78-year-old judge scheduled to retire next year (the cops were spared a jury of their peers), essentially ruled that the officers’ supposed fear justified their indiscriminate firing of 50 shots at Bell and his unarmed friends.

The crowd that gathered outside the courtroom was stunned when the verdict was announced. Hours later, in the streets of Jamaica, Queens, where Sean Bell lived and died, marchers gathered almost spontaneously to vent their rage against the verdict and the epidemic of police brutality that has touched communities across New York City. As night descended, and the march detoured first to the site of Bell’s killing, then to a housing project in South Jamaica, Queens, the crowd grew in size and in the intensity of its anger. Calls for violent retaliation against the police nearly became reality, as marchers surrounded vans filled with NYPD officers, forcing the police to withdraw from the streets and rely on aerial surveillance instead.

I attended the march with a cameraman by my side, and stayed until the end, well after the media had left, to report on the frustration that animated the march, and capture the drama that unfolded. Though the city has remained peaceful in the wake of last weekend’s demonstrations, my video suggests that the heightened tension between residents of inner-city communities and cops may cross a dangerous threshold unless justice is done. With bold visual evidence, my coverage clearly contradicts the New York Times’ careless contention that “the acquittals in the Bell case have so far been largely met with a muted response. Thousands of protesters did not fill the streets, no unrest ensued.”

In my video, I also probed the Sean Bell verdict’s impact on the presidential campaign. As my friend Roberto Lovato wrote last week, Barack Obama’s “Failure to use his rhetorical gifts to speak forcefully to and about real black and non-black anger about the Sean Bell verdict may re-animate doubts about commitment to that part of his base that is not white middle- and working-class.”

Sure enough, after Obama responded to an African-American reporter’s question about the verdict with a boilerplate call for “com[ing] together,” and stressed the need to respect Cooperman’s decision, he received an angry phone call from Al Sharpton. Sharpton, who has pressed for a federal investigation into Bell’s killing, reportedly accused Obama of seeking to “grandstand in front of white people.” Though Sharpton has since denied attacking Obama, their alleged tiff highlights the quandary Obama faces as he looks to cultivate support among blue collar white voters while maintain his credibility in the black community.

I was proud to feature new music in my video by my friends for over a decade, the legendary live hip-hop band, Dujeous. Their song, “Eyewitness,” which was inspired by Sean Bell’s killing, features one of hip-hop’s most incisive political rappers, Immortal Technique. Check it out.

I will be offering my analysis of the Super Tuesday results on Al Jazeera English tonight from 9:30-10 PM ET. Since this excellent network has been shut out of the US market for absolutely craven reasons, you have to click here to watch me.

Mike Huckabee’s White Supremacist Links

As South Carolina’s Republican primary election draws nearer, Mike Huckabee has ratched up his appeals to the racial nationalism of white evangelicals. “You don’t like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag,” the former Arkansas governor told a Myrtle Beach crowd on January 17, referring to the Confederate flag. “If somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we’d tell them what to do with the pole. That’s what we’d do.”

Making coded appeals to white racism is nothing new for Huckabee. Indeed, well before he was a nationally known political star, Huckabee nurtured a relationship with America’s largest white supremacist group, the Council of Conservative Citizens. The extent of Huckabee’s interaction with the racist group is unclear, but this much is known: he accepted an invitation to speak at the group’s annual conference in 1993 and ultimately delivered a videotaped address that was “extremely well received by the audience.”

Descended from the White Citizens Councils that battled integration in the Jim Crow South, including at Arkansas’ Little Rock High School, the Council (or CofCC) has been designated a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

In its “Statement of Principles,” the CofCC declares, “We also oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called “affirmative action” and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races.”

The CofCC has hosted several conservative Republican legislators at its conferences, including former Representative Bob Barr of Georgia and Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi. But mostly it has been a source of embarrassment to Republicans hoping to move their party beyond its race-baiting image. Former Reagan speechwriter and conservative pundit Peggy Noonan pithily declared that anyone involved with the CofCC “does not deserve to be in a leadership position in America.”

During a lengthy phone conversation in 2006, CofCC founder and former White Citizens Council organizer Gordon Lee Baum detailed for me Huckabee’s dalliances with his group. Baum told me that Huckabee eagerly accepted his invitation to speak at the CofCC’s 1993 national convention in Memphis, Tennessee.

Huckabee’s plan was complicated, however, when Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker journeyed out of state and appointed a state senator to preside over the governorship. The Arkansas state legislature passed a resolution forbidding the lieutenant governor from leaving Arkansas until Tucker returned, thus preventing Huckabee from attending the CofCC’s conference.

In lieu of his appearance, according to Baum, Huckabee “sent an audio/video presentation saying ‘I can’t be with you but I’d like to be speaker next time.’” (The CofCC promptly replaced Huckabee with Michael Ramirez, a right-wing cartoonist whose work is currently syndicated to 400 newspapers by the Copley News Service.)

Baum’s account of Huckabee’s videotaped message was confirmed by a CofCC newsletter obtained by Edward Sebesta, a veteran observer of the neo-Confederate movement. “Ark. Lt. Governor Mike Huckabee, unable to leave Arkansas by law because the Governor was absent from the state, sent a terrific videotape speech, which was viewed and extremely well received by the audience,” the 1993 newsletter (Vol. 24, No. 3) reported.

The following year, in 1994, the CofCC held its national conference in Little Rock, Arkansas to accommodate Huckabee. According to Baum, Huckabee initially agreed to speak before his group, but became apprehensive when the Arkansas media reported that he would be joined on the CofCC’s podium by Kirk Lyons, a white nationalist legal activist who has hailed Hitler as “probably the most misunderstood man in German history.”

“He didn’t know anything about Kirk Lyons or anyone else,” Baum said of Huckabee. “He said he would show up if we took Lyons off.”

But Baum refused to remove his friend Lyons from the bill. Huckabee, who was more concerned about receiving bad publicity than by the racist underpinnings of the CofCC, withdrew his promise to speak. The CofCC replaced him this time with former Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Jim Johnson, a White Citizens Council founder who organized the mob that rioted against the integration of Little Rock High School and later served as the star narrator of Rev. Jerry Falwell’s discredited film, “The Clinton Chronicles.”

In the end, Huckabee’s aborted relationship with the CofCC benefited the group. “We had the biggest crowd in our history because of the publicity” surrounding Huckabee’s planned appearance, Baum said of his 1994 conference.

The CofCC has since rebuked Huckabee for his insuffiently intolerant political behavior. Unfortunately, Huckabee has never rebuked the CofCC. Instead he embraced the group, ignoring its well known legacy of promoting racism and only severing ties when his political ambitions were threatened by bad publicity.

Now here is a question for the Huckabee campaign: Will you release the full transcript of Huckabee’s “extremely well received” videotaped address to the CofCC?

The Real Mike Huckabee

Of all the right-wing figures who have promoted Mike Huckabee’s extraordinary political rise from a backwater church to the national pulpit of a presidential campaign–and there are many–perhaps none know the former Arkansas governor and current Republican presidential front-runner better than Jay Cole. A Baptist minister based in Fayetteville, Arkansas, with a right-wing radio talk show of his own, Cole has been instrumental in inspiring Huckabee’s rise over more than two decades. Indeed, when Huckabee was the governor of Arkansas, it was Cole who persuaded him to arrange the release from prison of a convicted rapist, Wayne Dumond, who had become a born-again evangelical in prison–the most controversial act of Huckabee’s career, which still dogs him on the campaign trail.

(above, Jay Cole with Mike Huckabee beside the governor’s private jet in 1997)

I reported for The Nation on a lengthy telephone conversation I had with Cole a week before Huckabee’s surprise victory in the Iowa caucuses on January 3. Cole was supremely confident that his saintly friend would prevail over the hosts of darkness. “Mike is one of the finest and most gracious individuals God has ever placed on Earth,” Cole told me in his thick Southern drawl. “Not only does he have speaking ability, he has the Lord looking over him.”

Some mainstream media pundits have attributed Huckabee’s rising fortunes to his likable demeanor. New York Times political correspondent Adam Nagourney has praised Huckabee’s “easy-going, self-effacing, jaunty style” as his chief political asset. The Times’s liberal commentator Frank Rich explained Huckabee’s ascent in similar terms, comparing the sudden swell of support for his campaign to the phenomenon surrounding Democratic senator and presidential front-runner Barack Obama. “Both men [Obama and Huckabee] have a history of speaking across party and racial lines,” Rich wrote. “Both men possess that rarest of commodities in American public life: wit. Most important, both men aspire (not always successfully) to avoid the hyper-partisanship of the Clinton-Bush era.” Rich, who only weeks earlier had predicted the imminent self-destruction of the religious right, now viewed Huckabee as a welcome departure from the divisive Republican candidates of the past.

But the Huckabee Cole has known and loved for decades contrasts sharply with the sunny figure the media’s leading lights have conjured up. According to Cole, Huckabee has connected with voters–specifically, evangelical voters–not simply because he is a charismatic speaker, but also because he shares their apocalyptic world view. As Cole told me, “To date there’s well over 139 prophecies that have come to pass exactly as the Lord says. Mike believes those things. Anyone with any Bible knowledge would have to say that this looks like the time. We’re so close to the Lord’s return.”

During the period when Huckabee rose through the ranks of the Arkansas Republican Party to the governor’s mansion, Cole became one of the state’s most popular right-wing radio personalities. Cole volunteered to me the sectarian views that made his radio show a favorite of Arkansas’s far-right fringe. Taking a potshot at Mitt Romney, who is a Mormon, Cole compared the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to the Ku Klux Klan. “As you know from history, their original intent–[Mormon founding fathers Joseph] Smith and Brigham Young–was to take over the United States of America,” he said. “They weren’t just far behind the KKK in their efforts.”

Cole was no more kind to Muslims. “If you think communism’s bad, just think what the Islamics are doing,” Cole warned. “Those people have no–they’re just not human. They’re just not human.”

On the campaign trail, Huckabee has ventured some opinions that dovetail at least loosely with Cole’s. Discussing Romney’s Mormon faith with a reporter while stumping through Iowa, Huckabee asked darkly, “Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus is Satan’s brother?”

Huckabee routinely warns of the threat of “Islamofascism” at campaign rallies and is perhaps the first major presidential candidate in American history to essentially call for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Huckabee declared during a New Hampshire fundraiser in October that a Palestinian state should only be established outside of biblical Israel, possibly in Egypt or Saudi Arabia, according to the Jewish Russian Telegraph. He reiterated this position during an appearance on Face the Nation in November.

For more on Huckabee’s dark side, see my latest video, “Radical Cleric”

Israel and the Apocalypse

Huckabee’s advocacy of forcibly transferring the Palestinians to other Arab nations reflects his close association with some of America’s most prominent End Times theological proponents. Among Huckabee’s leading evangelical backers is Pastor John Hagee, head of a Pentecostal congregation in San Antonio, Texas, with 18,000 members, and the executive director of Christians United for Israel, a national lobbying group that organizes against a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine crisis and in favor of a military strike on Iran.

Hagee’s zealous support for Israel is kindled by his belief that Jesus will one day return to “biblical Israel” to usher in a kingdom of Heaven on Earth. “As soon as Jesus sits on his throne he’s gonna rule the world with a rod of iron,” Hagee told his congregation in a sermon this December. “That means he’s gonna make the ACLU do what he wants them to. That means you’re not gonna have to ask if you can pray in public school…. We will live by the law of God and no other law.”

Huckabee made a pilgrimage to Hagee’s Cornerstone Church just one week after the pastor’s anti-ACLU jeremiad. During the first of two sermons Huckabee delivered there, he was greeted with a thunderous standing ovation. The candidate returned the sentiment, hailing his gracious host, Hagee, as “one of the great Christian leaders of our nation.”

Huckabee has also welcomed the endorsement of Tim LaHaye, the co-author of the bestselling Left Behind pulp fiction series, which tells of the coming apocalyptic battle between followers of Jesus and forces of Satan. Paige Patterson, president of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, where Huckabee once studied (he dropped out to work for a televangelist), is an outspoken believer in End Times theology as well. Patterson is one of the chief organizers of the right-wing takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Just as his surge in the polls began, Huckabee addressed the student body of the late Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in November. There, he assured his enraptured audience that his sudden rise had nothing to do with his “easy-going” style. “There’s only one explanation for [my surge] and it’s not a human one,” Huckabee insisted, inspiring gales of applause from the overflow crowd. “It’s the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of five thousand people.”

Huckabee made his remarkable statement in response to a question from a student–not a reporter. Political reporters with access to the candidate have so far shied away from asking him pointed questions about his theological beliefs. They have been especially reluctant to ask Huckabee how he thinks the world will end or how his Messiah will return. Consequently, the image of Huckabee as a transcendent, post-partisan politician has prevailed. He remains the affable, bass-playing Republican counterpart to Barack Obama, not the sectarian ideologue who sought the counsel of fringe characters like Cole.

Huckabee has burnished his likable sheen by replacing the ornery clergymen who propelled his early ascendancy in Arkansas politics with a cast of telegenic evangelical celebrities. His new boosters include Chuck Norris, a B-level action movie star who has converted to evangelical Christianity and become a fixture at Huckabee’s side on the campaign trail.

Cole, for his part, told me he has not spoken to his old friend “Mike” in six months. “He’s so busy it’s an impossibility to get to him,” Cole said. “I’ve been meaning to call him.” Now 78 years old and afflicted with terminal heart disease, Cole has been left behind.

Yet back when Huckabee launched his preaching career in 1980, he went straight to Cole for assistance. “He’s actually known me longer than I’ve known him,” Cole said of Huckabee. Cole, who had operated a missionary supply organization that established Christian television and radio stations in the Third World, said he helped the young Huckabee when he started his own television show in Arkansas. Huckabee’s show, Positive Alternatives, which first aired in the cities Pine Bluff and Texarkana in 1980, became his vehicle for statewide recognition. By 1989, with Cole’s support, Huckabee had become the youngest-ever president of the 500,000-member Arkansas Baptist State Convention.

A Rapist’s Release

When Huckabee leveraged his popularity in the Baptist community into a political career, declaring a run for lieutenant governor in 1993, Cole urged his listeners to vote for him, helping deliver him a narrow victory in the heavily Democratic state. Huckabee then replaced Jim Guy Tucker as Arkansas governor in 1996 after the Democrat announced he would resign while appealing his federal conviction in the Whitewater scandal. With Huckabee in the governor’s mansion, Cole pressured his pal to act on a cause he had championed for almost a decade–the release of Wayne Dumond, accused of raping a 17-year-old cheerleader who happened to be Bill Clinton’s distant cousin.

Dumond, a father of six and a Vietnam veteran, had been arrested twice during the 1970s for sexual assault and another time for attacking a man with a claw hammer. While awaiting trial in 1985 for raping Clinton’s cousin, Dumond was allegedly attacked by two masked men who forced him to perform oral sex on them before they castrated him. The doctor who examined Dumond after the incident raised the possibility that his castration was self-inflicted. A half-gallon bottle of Jim Beam whiskey was found two-thirds empty at the scene of the crime. Meanwhile, according to investigators, no signs of a struggle were present.

Cole, a vitriolic Clinton critic who calls the former president “trash” and says he helped produce the infamous anti-Clinton propaganda video The Clinton Chronicles, immediately embraced Dumond’s cause, taking to the airwaves to paint him as the victim of a dark conspiracy. Cole claimed without evidence that a vindictive Clinton and his surrogates had framed Dumond and had possibly orchestrated his castration as well.

Besides antipathy toward Clinton, Cole’s support for Dumond’s freedom was influenced by religious motives. Cole pronounced Dumond a born-again Christian and frequently visited the rapist in prison as his “spiritual adviser.” He claimed that Dumond and his wife had had a notable history in the Baptist community, heading the youth department of a church in Forrest City, Arkansas. “I talked to [Dumond’s] pastor and the high school principal of the school — not a single one of them said anything bad about him,” Cole said.

As Dumond’s 1996 date with the state parole board approached, Cole and Dumond’s wife lobbied Huckabee on the rapist’s behalf. Cole said he organized several “get-together parties,” where he impressed on the governor his case for freeing Dumond. According to a state official who advised Huckabee on the Dumond case, Cole quickly convinced the governor to pressure the parole board for Dumond’s release. “I don’t believe that he had access to, or read, the law enforcement records or parole commission’s files–even by then,” the official told journalist Murray Waas. “He already seemed to have made up his mind, and his knowledge of the case appeared to be limited to a large degree as to what people had told him, what Jay Cole had told him….”

After persuading the parole board to commute Dumond’s sentence, Huckabee congratulated the rapist upon receiving his liberty.”Dear Wayne,” Huckabee wrote in a letter to Dumond. “My desire is that you be released from prison. I feel that parole is the best way for your reintroduction to society to take place.”

After Dumond relocated to Missouri upon his release in 1999, he was linked through DNA evidence to the rape and strangulation of a new victim, Carol Sue Shields. In 2005, months after being sentenced to life in prison for the killing, Dumond died in his cell. At the time state prosecutors were preparing to charge him with raping and murdering yet another woman. Despite the overwhelming evidence connecting Dumond to a spate of killings, Cole maintained that his friend was once again the target of a frame-up.

“What possibly could have happened,” Cole mused, “is, as you know, the law enforcement people are under real pressure from the public to solve these crimes. In all probability they needed a victim real quick. They said, well, we got one here in our county, he fits the profile.” And though Dumond’s death was by all accounts a suicide, Cole insisted that “it’s possible” he was killed by unknown parties who wanted revenge.

Huckabee’s role in engineering Dumond’s release became an issue in the weeks leading up to this year’s Iowa caucuses. In December, the mother of Dumond’s last confirmed victim, Shields, surfaced in a highly circulated YouTube video with a pointed message: “If not for Mike Huckabee, Wayne Dumond would’ve been in prison, and Carol Sue would’ve been with us this year for Christmas.” Now Huckabee has gone from denying any part in securing Dumond’s release to confessing his regret. “There’s nothing you can say, but my gosh, it’s the thing you pray never happens. And it did,” he explained to Byron York, a columnist for the conservative National Review.

The mounting evidence that Huckabee orchestrated the release of a serial rapist and killer at the urging of a preacher has proven inconsequential to the evangelical ranks who vaulted him into the front of the Republican presidential pack. To Huckabee’s swelling flock, he has emerged as the perfect candidate, blessed by “God’s anointing and calling,” Pentecostal televangelist Kenneth Copeland declared. Cole sees Huckabee in similarly wondrous terms, but questions whether a spiritually bankrupt nation like the United States deserves such a godly leader.

“We’re living right on the edge of the Lord’s return, I believe, and it may be that the Lord will give this country something that it really deserves,” Cole remarked to me. “And that is a Hillary [Clinton] as president.” The old minister went on: “We have turned our backs on the Lord. We’ve thrown the Ten Commandments out of every place that we could. Every effort in the world is being made right now to eliminate any mention of the name Jesus, and the Lord who’s made such a sacrifice for his children is not going to tolerate it.”

Huckabee would undoubtedly disagree with his old preacher friend that America “deserves” a Hillary Clinton presidency. He would not be running for president if he believed that. But when I asked Cole if Huckabee would agree with the rest of his statement–that the world is “on the edge of” suffering God’s wrath–he gravely responded, “Our belief in what the word of the Lord says will match very closely.”

The Human Sham

My latest is up at the Nation. I’m still working on my book so blogging will continue to be very slow.

With President George W. Bush only a year away from departing the White House and the Republican succession in turmoil some of the most prominent conservative intellectuals and activists have gathered together for one last great crusade. Movement icons from Robby George of Princeton to Harvey Mansfield of Harvard, from David Horowitz to Brit Hume, raised howls of persecution when they learned that two masked men allegedly attacked a conservative Princeton University student. They insisted that the right-wing acolyte was beaten up “for his conservative views,” as Horowitz put it. And they accused Princeton of failing to protect conservatives and upholding a hypocritical liberal double standard. Unfortunately, the trumpeted cause collapsed when the victim turned out to be a hoaxer.

The embarrassing episode for the conservative leaders began last week when Francisco Nava, a junior at Princeton University, appeared at the hospital with cuts and bruises covering his face. He claimed that two unidentified men repeatedly bashed his head against a brick wall, shouting to “shut the fuck up.”

Nava is a member of a student group called the Anscombe Society. Named for G.E.M. Anscombe, a British philospher who opposed her country’s involvement in World War Two, the group was founded to promote “a chaste lifestyle which respects and appreciates human sexuality, relationships, and dignity.” The Anscombe Society explained its abstinence advocacy on its website: “The nature of this sexual act is itself unitive—two become one flesh. Sex is thus the actualization of the marital union, concretizing the mutual gift of self between the partners.”

Nava, a conservative Mormon, claimed his troubles began when he wrote a column for the student newspaper, The Princetonian, called “Princeton’s latex lies.” He warned “the infectious threat posed by Princeton’s hookup culture” would spread if the school continued its policy of free condom distribution. “What Princeton’s condom campaign amounts to is a tacit sponsorship of hookup sex,” Nava declared.

Nava claimed in the wake of his column that he and other Anscombe members were bombarded by a deluge of death threats from liberal students enraged by their brave stand against promiscuity on campus. Princeton jurisprudence Professor Robert George, a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, conservative star and occasional White House advisor, also reported receiving death threats as the faculty adviser to his student, Francisco Nava.

On December 13, the Princetonian published a column by an Anscombe member demanding justice for Nava’s persecution. “There is an intolerable double standard here — one that the University must erase if it is to be true to its own core values,” Princeton sophomore Brandon McGinley insisted.

Nava earnestly described his plight. “For several days I lived in fear of saying, writing or even thinking anything controversial in class or informally among my friends,” he told the Princetonian on December 14.

The following day, Nava placed an emergency call to the campus police, claiming he had just been brutally attacked by two men wearing black stocking caps. They slammed him into a wall, he said, and beat him with a bottle of Orangina. While being escorted to the campus health center by the police, Nava reportedly spotted a student wearing a black stocking cap. “Get that guy’s name,” Nava shouted to a security guard, pointing at the student. He began hyperventilating and was administered a large dose of sedatives. Almost at once, as soon as Robby George heard about the alleged attack, he rushed to Nava’s side and launched the campaign to defend him.

Who is Robby George? As the leading light at Princeton for the conservative movement, George founded the James Madison Program, an academic center within the university that serves as a testing ground for the right’s effort to politicize college campuses. As I reported for the Nation in 2006, George’s program is funded by a stable of right-wing foundations and a shadowy web of front groups for the Catholic cult known as Opus Dei. An article in Crisis, a conservative Catholic magazine then published by George’s ally Deal Hudson, highlighted George’s machinations, stating, “If there really is a vast, right-wing conspiracy, its leaders probably meet in George’s basement.”

For years, George has complained that Princeton actively discriminated against conservative students. “If they find out he’s pro-life or against same-sex marriage, he might be cut off, or not be able to get through graduate school,” he told me, describing the school’s purported unfairness.

But before George triumphantly pointed to Nava’s beating as proof of anti-conservative bias on campus, he had been presented with evidence that Nava, while at the Groton boarding school, had fabricated a threat against himself and his roommate, head of the Gay-Straight Alliance, in the form of a letter reading “die fags.” The letter may have raised doubts in George’s mind, but not strongly enough to deter him from attacking Princeton’s administration.

In the wake of Nava’s latest story about being assaulted, George immediately went to the neoconservative daily, the New York Sun, and exclaimed, “Are there double standards and reforms that need to be made? Absolutely.”

George insisted that Nava, in all likelihood, was telling the truth. “Those of us who saw him at the emergency room find it difficult to believe he could have done this himself. The physical manifestations were too evident, too severe,” he told the Sun.

George was promptly joined by a chorus of conservative culture warriors infuriated by the lack of outrage. Harvey Mansfield, the most important conservative figure at Harvard, mentor to leading neoconservatives, who has written a book-length ode to machismo called ”Manliness” called for a manly response to Nava’s supposed beating. “I hope Princeton comes down on them like a ton of bricks, and by Princeton I mean either the university or the township or both,” Mansfield proclaimed. “It should be easy for liberals to identify a case of intolerance; they’re good at that.”

David Horowitz, a neoconservative activist, who has devoted much of his career to combating the supposed scourge of anti-conservative bias on campus, instantly weighed in on the Nava affair. “It’s a terrible incident but it doesn’t surprise me,” Horowitz told the Sun. “The left has now become the hate group.”

On December 17, Horowitz reposted the Sun’s account of Nava’s alleged beating on his website of his magazine, Frontpagemag. Beneath a link to the prominently displayed article, a caption read, “Student beaten unconscious for conservative views.”

Fox News anchor Brit Hume also leapt into the fracas. The headline of his report on the Nava affair on Fox’s website read, “Little Outrage Over Student Beating At Princeton University.”

A host of right-wing bloggers joined the outcry. “I wonder if this will get the attention that politically-reversed assaults would get?” mused Glenn Reynolds, the author of the blog, Instapundit. A blogger at Redstate.com mocked author and expert on hate crimes, David Neiwert over the Nava incident, challenging him to report on what could be a “fairly serious hate crime.”

For several hours, on December 17, conservatives announced that their darkest fears of persecution had been realized. A pious student had been beaten by liberal brownshirts simply for speaking out in favor of traditional morality. If the student were gay or black, conservatives reasoned, the entire student body would have erupted in massive protests. Instead, the administration stood silently to the side. Princeton graduate and conservative writer Michael Fragoso told the Sun, “There would rightly be outrage had the student been part of some other minority on campus.”

At last, an incident surfaced that proved what movement figures had long maintained: campus conservatives are a minority that suffers far harsher oppression than the blacks, Latinos and gays who form the “politically correct” vanguard of liberal identity politics.

But on the night of December 17, as the conservative firestorm was being whipped to a frenzy, there was another development. Nava confessed to Princeton Township Police that he had invented the entire incident. They had suspected the veracity of his tale all along. Signs of an elaborate hoax had been present from the beginning, from Nava’s history of fabricating death threats to his cinematic description of his latest victimization.

Nava’s hoax fit neatly into an epidemic of faked hate crimes on college campuses across America. But in their eagerness to stage-manage the unfolding political drama, leaders of the conservative movement grazed over these inconvenient details.

When Nava was exposed as a fabricator, his defenders disappeared almost as fast as they had mobilized. Rather than issue a correction or update, Horowitz scrubbed all accounts of the bogus attack from his website. (Media Matters has a cached version of Horowitz’s report here).

Robby George, who had been quick to condemn the university, now praised Princeton for its measured response to the Nava affair. “Princeton, all the way from the administrators down, had the good sense to hold their fire, get the facts first, before drawing conclusions,” he told the Princetonian.

George also congratulated himself for his own calmness in the crisis and sharp wittedness in uncovering the fraud. “Within 72 hours,” he said, “we were able to expose this as a hoax.”

But, of course, Nava’s claims were never “exposed” by George or his conservative campus allies. Nava had reportedly confessed to his lying under police questioning. Only hours before George celebrated the “good sense” he and university administrators displayed, he had accused Princeton of upholding a liberal double standard. And while Princeton police investigated dubious details of the alleged assault, George broadcasted his confidence in Nava’s melodramatic account.

Nava, a sad young person with a history of self-injuring behavior, now faces expulsion and possible criminal charges. George and the rest of Nava’s erstwhile defenders have fallen silent. The mentor has left his protégé to law enforcement. The conservatives have forgotten their would-be martyr.

Nativist Tancredo Hired “Criminal Aliens” to Renovate His McMansion

My latest, on the hypocrisy of uber-nativist Tom Tancredo, is up at Alternet. Here it is:

When Republican Representative Tom Tancredo isn’t railing against the “scourge” of illegal immigration on the presidential campaign trail, he relaxes in the 1053 square foot basement recreation room of his Littleton, Colorado McMansion. There, he and his family can rack up a game of billiards on their tournament size pool table, play pinball, or enjoy their favorite movies in the terraced seating area of a home theater system. Tancredo, who dodged the draft during the Vietnam War by producing evidence that he suffered from mentally illnesses, especially likes entertaining his buddies with classic war movies.

“We have friends over and I have now shown Pearl Harbor about six times,” Tancredo boasted to the Rocky Mountain News about his 102-inch television. “But I mainly just show the attack scene because the sound is so good.”

When Tancredo hired a construction crew to transform his drab basement into a high-tech pleasure den in October 2001, however, he did not express concern that only two of its members spoke English. Nor did he bother to check the workers’ documentation to see if they were legal residents of the United States. Had Tancredo done so, he would have learned that most of the crew consisted of undocumented immigrants, or “criminal aliens” as he likes to call them. Instead, Tancredo paid the crew $60,000 for its labor and waited innocently for the completion of his elaborate entertainment complex.

During the renovation process, two illegal workers hired by Tancredo were alerted to his reputation for immigrant bashing. They went straight to the Denver Post to complain. Tancredo “doesn’t want us here, but he’ll take advantage of our sweat and our labor,” one of the workers complained to the Post on September 19, 2002. “It’s just not right.”

The Post report momentarily threw Tancredo on the defensive. In a fiery speech soon after the story’s publication, Tancredo blamed his foibles on the INS. “I haven’t the foggiest idea how many people I may have hired in the past as taxi drivers, as waiters, waitresses, home improvement people,” he boomed from the House floor. “I haven’t the foggiest idea how many of those people may have been here illegally, and it is not my job to ask them.” Then defiance gave way to vitriol as the congressman dubbed undocumented immigrants, “the face of murder.”

Only days before the Post’s story appeared, Tancredo had personally reported an honor student profiled in the Denver Post to the INS because the 14-year-old was not a legal resident of the United States. The stunt forced the boy’s family to go into hiding. Fortunately for Tancredo, the ensuing revelations of his hiring of illegal labor fell below the radar of the national media, allowing his anti-immigrant crusade to proceed unabated.

Tancredo proceeded to organize over 90 anti-immigration House members into an informal but powerful caucus that has effectively prevented any non-enforcement related immigration legislation from reaching the President’s desk. His Team America PAC, which is chaired by right-wing pundit Bay Buchanan, has donated tens of thousands of dollars this election cycle to nativist candidates who hope to fill Tancredo’s caucus with new blood when he retires next year. Down on the border, Tancredo announced his support for the Minutemen, providing the anti-immigrant militia with a veneer of respectability while its pistol-packing members hunt for brown-skinned evildoers.

Tancredo has also played an instrumental role in shaping the way immigration is discussed in the media. Despite his third tier status in the presidential campaign, as of November 19 the congressman has appeared on Fox News more times during 2007 than any other presidential candidate. A former Tancredo staffer speaking on condition of anonymity told me recently that the congressman spends extensive time on the phone with top-rated CNN anchor Lou Dobbs, offering him tips and ideas for his daily “Broken Borders” segments.

Dobbs, in turn, has produced an unending string of specious “reports” painting undocumented immigrants from Latin America as disease-ridden criminals. In May, for example, Dobbs falsely claimed that illegal migrants from Mexico were responsible for 7000 new cases of leprosy in the United States. A wave of negative publicity forced Dobbs to acknowledge his source for the bogus story as Madeleine Cosman, a deceased white supremacist activist who often appeared at anti-immigrant rallies beside her pal Tancredo.

The success of Tancredo’s efforts to project his nativist politics onto the national stage were apparent during CNN’s November 26 Republican Youtube debate. In a heated exchange that highlighted press coverage of the debate, presidential frontrunners Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney competed with one another over who could appear the most draconian towards “illegals.” When Romney accused Giuliani of running a “sanctuary city” for undocumented immigrants while serving as mayor of New York, Giuliani shot back that Romney had run a “sanctuary mansion” when he was governor of Massachusetts. Giuliani pointed to a lengthy Boston Globe report revealing that Romney paid a gardening service that employed illegal workers to tend the lawns of his mansion. Suddenly, the candidates with the most tolerant records on immigration issues sounded like Tancredo.

While the two rivals clashed, Tancredo stood at the far end of the stage smiling contentedly. The cause he championed for years with a band of ornery border vigilantes, white supremacists, and assorted dregs by his side had become a central theme in the race for the White House. Of all the major GOP candidates, only Sen. John McCain has countered Tancredo with big tent appeals to socially conservative Latinos. The other candidates have reliably parroted his talking points, parrying accusations of ideological impurity by accusing one another of being soft on illegal immigration. “All I’ve heard is people trying to out-Tancredo Tancredo,” Tancredo observed during the debate. “It is great.”

But there is one way the Republican candidates can never out-Tancredo Tancredo. The congressman lives in a “sanctuary mansion” built by the kind of people he has made a career out of demonizing. Tom Tancredo may have no hope of winning the Republican nomination, but in the cause of hypocrisy, he is the frontrunner.

Youtube “Demons” Version Is Up

David Horowitz has not responded as he usually does whenever I report on his shambolic performances. I assume he decided to act as though “Islamofascism Awareness Week” was a big success, and that he didn’t indulge his First Amendment right to publicly embarass himself.

The Demons of David Horowitz, A Video Report From “Islamofascism Awareness Week”

My latest video, “The Demons of David Horowitz,” is up at the Huffington Post. Here is some background:

During the week of October 21, far-right wing operative and former communist agitator David Horowitz deployed his allies to college campuses America to spout crude anti-Muslim invective. He called this event “Islamofascism Awareness Week.” Among Horowitz’s stable of campus speakers were noted Islam experts Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity.

“Islamofascism Awareness Week” was, from the beginning, little more than a marathon fashion show for the paranoid style. But it was not until Horowitz muscled his way onto the campus of his alma mater, Columbia University, on October 26 that his event attained the commanding heights of reactionary hysteria.

Pacing the stage like a drunken circus clown impersonating some bygone demagogue, and standing beneath a massive image of a woman being shot in the head, Horowitz launched into a long, frenetic rant about his own persecution at the hands of a shadowy liberal conspiracy.

Though Horowitz devoted portions of his tirade to attacks on the Muslim Students Association, which he sought to paint as a front for virtually every Islamist group that strikes fear in the heart of his culturally deprived conservative peanut gallery, he seemed more comfortable lashing out at his perceived oppressors — liberal professors, leftists, and the Democratic party — than he did at any so-called “Islamofascists.”

When I asked Horowitz about his weird comparison of his own father to 9/11 mastermind Mohammed Atta in his book, “The End of Time,” his hysteria peaked. My question provoked him to link Jerry Falwell, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and “Jerry Springer and all his guests” together in a plot to bring social justice to the world “at the point of a gun.”

Listening to Horowitz was like being trapped in a subway car with a raving derelict for an hour and a half. But unlike in the subway, where the transit police usually arrive to remove the derelict, the police came to Columbia to protect Horowitz from the non-existent security threat he had invoked in fundraising appeals for days leading up to his speech.

Horowitz’s performance had to be seen to be believed. Luckily, despite being forbidden to film by the president of the Columbia College Republicans, my co-producer, Thomas Shomaker, and I managed to smuggle a camera into Horowitz’s speech and record it all.

Theocracy Now! Searching for Values at the 2007 Value Voters Summit

On October 20 and 21st, my co-producer, Thomas Shomaker, and I attended the Value Voters Summit, a massive gathering hosted by the Colorado-based Christian right mega-ministry, Focus on the Family, and its Washington lobbying arm, the Family Research Council. With the pro-choice Rudy Giuliani leading in the race for the Republican nomination and the threat of another Clinton presidency looming, the stakes for the Christian right were high.

At the Summit, I witnessed all of the major Republican presidential candidates compete for the affection of so-called value voters. Rudy Giuliani, the current frontrunner, sought to assuage movement leaders’ concerns about his multiple marriages, pro-choice politics, and penchant for cross-dressing. Mitt Romney pledged to fight for a Constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, hoping his newfound conservatism would somehow lessen evangelical resentment of his Mormon faith.

Though no candidate emerged from the Summit as a clear Christian right favorite, the badly underfunded former Arkansas governor and Baptist minister Mike Huckabee won over the audience with his insistence that banning abortion would put an end to America’s illegal immigration problem. Huckabee’s comparison of “liberalized abortion” to the Holocaust further endeared him to the “value voters.” Later, during a press conference, I challenged Huckabee to explain the logic behind his rhetoric.

Recently, there has been a lot of mainstream media noise about a new, more socially conscious evangelical movement rising from the angry ashes of the Christian right. Pastors like Rick Warren and “evangelical feminist” Bill Hybels are supposedly bringing issues like the environment and poverty to the forefront of the movement’s social agenda, while pushing anti-abortion and anti-gay activism to the wayside. Yet no one told those evangelicals gathered at the Value Voters Summit about this friendly new initiative.

If anything, the movement seemed more extreme and paranoid than it did four years ago. Rev. Lou Sheldon, dubbed “Lucky Louie” by his former paymaster Jack Abramoff, told me that homosexuality is a “pathological disorder” and “a groove” that is difficult to escape from. He proceeded to passionately defend his friend, Senator Larry Craig, from allegations of homosexuality.

Star Parker, a former welfare cheat who had multiple abortions, claimed to me that abortion is the leading cause of death among African American women between the ages of 25 and 34. Then she described her wish for the forced quarantine of all “sodomites.” Parker was not a lone wacko milling around in the hallway; she was a speaker invited by the Family Research Council.

Neoconservative activist Frank Gaffney appeared at the Summit as well. Before a standing room audience, Gaffney exclaimed that “by not being bigoted and not being racist, [George W.] Bush has embraced Islamofascists on several occasions.” Phyllis Schlaffly echoed Gaffney’s comments, declaring that there are too many mosques in America.

These incidents and many more are captured in my latest video report, “Theocracy Now: In Search of Values at the 2007 Value Voters Summit.” See it for yourself.

Sen. Larry Craig Joins the CCC Honor Roll

Republican Idaho Senator Larry Craig is the latest Conflicted Conservative in Crisis (CCC) to be caught with his pants down. According to Roll Call, Craig was arrested in June at a Minnesota airport by a plainclothes police officer investigating lewd conduct complaints in a men’s public restroom.

I have no idea what Craig’s alleged lewd conduct consisted of, but he has faced pointed pointed rumors of same-sex affairs in the past. Craig responded to these allegations with strident denials. Now, as details of Craig’s recent arrest emerge, he seems increasinly cock-eyed, so to speak.

To be sure, this story would not matter if Craig wasn’t using his position to advance the Republican Party’s officially homophobic agenda. In November, 2006, Craig flamboyantly endorsed Idaho’s successful anti-gay constitutional amendment, HJR 2, which banned gay marriage, civil unions and domestic partnerships in the state.

Craig is up for re-election in 2008. Will his alleged carnality in public restrooms put an end to his career in public life? Idaho conservatives may be willing to reward bigotry, but lying is another matter.

Jamie Kirchick has had a rough debut at the Daily Dish. Now, Scott Horton and Dish co-blogger Steve Clemons have rebuked him for his out-of-the-blue attack on me. Horton and Clemons are leading experts in foreign policy and human rights, and more than that, they are real mensches. I hope Kirchick learns something from them.

Horton has a theory about Kirchick’s motivation:

One other thing really sticks in my mind. Max Blumenthal has been out there busily defending The New Republic from the onslaughts of Bill Kristol and the Weekly Standard over the last two weeks. It looks like Kirchick is giving him repayment in kind. Remind me please: which of these publications is Kirchick actually working for? I think we just found out.

Hateration

I hung out with Andrew Sullivan this year’s CPAC and he has posted my videos on several occasions. He is presently on vacation. One of the people keeping The Daily Dish warm in Sullivan’s absence is Jamie Kirchick, a self-described “homocon” who serves at the pleasure of Marty Peretz. I hear from a TNR source that Kirchick has rewarded his employer by helping web weirdo “Throbert McGee” leak inside information to the Weekly Standard to assist the neocon rag’s swiftboating of “Baghdad Diarist” Scott Thomas Beauchamp.

Now, Kirchick has decided to go after to me for daring to say in my Q&A with the Forward that my videos have been viewed by an audience outside what I described as the “liberal intellectual bubble.” He calls that assertion “laughable.”

But what did I do to earn Kirchick’s wrath? Perhaps Kirchick is angry that Sidney Blumenthal is my father (Kirchick inexplicably quotes Sullivan’s negative review of my father’s book, “The Clinton Wars,” to buttress his attack on me). Maybe he is jealous that my interpretive dance moves so perfectly evoked the brilliance of Jose Limon. Or maybe it’s this. Who knows? For now, all I will say in response to Kerchick — I actually pity him for some reason — is that while I welcome his promotion of my interview, he needs to stop sipping that haterade.

Matt Yglesias was also baffled by Kerchick’s weird post, and takes him to task for poor reading comprehension.

Why My Blogging Will Slow Down Until Next Year

I have made a verbal agreement with Nation Books to author a book for them that will (hopefully) appear next summer, during the height of election season. Our contract has not yet been finalized, but it should be completed shortly.

My book will encapsulate much of the work I have done about the right during the past four or five years. I plan to focus my narrative on the political psychology and underlying culture of the right by revealing how a cult of personal crisis animates the movement’s politics of resentment. Over the years I have encountered countless high-profile right-wing activists whose extreme political behavior was galvanized by the existential crises they suffered. In their attempts to purify the land of sin, they hope to purify their souls as well. For them, conservatism is more than ideology — it is a unique form of self-medication. It is no wonder that the most influential figure in the Christian right, James Dobson, is not a preacher or theologian, but a child psychologist. Dobson understands the cult of personal crisis and has exploited it to his advantage.

I have a short period of time to write this book. This will make it hard for me to keep blogging on a regular basis. It has already been difficult for me to maintain a regular blogging schedule given all the other projects I have taken on. So until next year, this blog will mainly serve as a bulletin board for updates about my work. I won’t be blogging on the news or taking on other projects, so don’t look for any new videos or lengthy articles, though I do plan to continue researching for Media Matters. For those of you who have trafficked my blog since the beginning, back in 2004, or kept up on my reporting and videos, I hope we’ll meet next year at a book event in your town. Until then, check in here for updates.

Federal Funding for GOP S&M

Looks like the White House’s Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives has been sending your tax dollars to Love Demonstrated Ministries, the evangelical S&M youth camp where a counselor dragged an allegedly lackadaisical teenage girl from a truck. This is from the 2003 White House budget for HHS:

Partnering with Faith-based and Community Organizations

The San Antonio Weed & Seed Coalition consists of 120 community, neighborhood, and law enforcement organizations whose mission is to reduce drug-related crime and victimization. The coalition has helped to reduce crime in San Antonio by 43.5 percent from 1992–2000. One of the coalition partners, Love Demonstrated Ministries (LDMI), is a faith-based organization which focuses on youth offenders, gang members, and high risk youth. Over the past three years, 135 of 165 young offenders entering its Life Skills and Parenting Camp have graduated from LDMI, a success rate of 82 percent.

More GOP S&M

Call me old fashioned, but I thought camp was supposed to be fun:

A San Antonio pastor and an employee of his Christian boot camp were arrested today on aggravated assault charges, accusing them of dragging a girl behind a van after failing to keep up with others during a running exercise.

Investigators with the Nueces County Sheriff’s Office arrested Charles E. Flowers shortly before noon at the Faith Outreach Center in northwest San Antonio, said Brad E. Bailey, a spokesman for the Schertz Police Department.

The department assisted Nueces County authorities in the arrests because some of the camp’s training exercises occur in Schertz.

S&M, OSU Style

A shirt on sale at Operation Straight Up’s website, courtesy of Jonathan Hutson, the man who exposed the Left Behind videogame.

Hutson writes:

And given the Pentagon’s policy of discrimination against gays in the military, it is ironic that the Christian missionary group that they promote sells T-shirts that display what can only be described as homoerotic art. In short, the Pentagon seems to have adopted a new missionary position for the Operation Straight Up Tour and its “Tough-Men Meetings.” Basically, the OSU Tour is promoting a holy war against the alleged enemies of Christ — not unlike, say, a jihad. But there’s a difference: jihad does not come with a homoerotic T-shirt.

Learn more about college Republican values here.

Common Sense 101

From: “Miles L Fisher” Add to Address BookAdd to Address Book Add Mobile Alert
Yahoo! DomainKeys has confirmed that this message was sent by mindspring.com. Learn more
To: maxblumenthal3000@yahoo.com
Subject: U R A Traitor Jew
Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2007 16:35:22 -0400

Max Blumenthal,

You are a moron. The Christian Right is the only people in the world supporting the Jews living in Israel . You and the rest of the idiotic leftist blind Jews have the wrong enemy. Why don’t you focus on the real enemy, (THE ISLAMIC JIHADISTS)? You can’t be this stupid can you, or are you another self-hating Jew. Remember, the Islamic Jihadists who want to slit your Jewish throat are the enemy, not Christians like John Hagee who wants to love you.

Billy Bob, the 7th grade drop-out from the rural south understands who the enemy is, why don’t you? Perhaps I should send Billy Bob over to you and teach you, his class is called Common Sense 101.

Miles Fisher

My Q&A With The Forward

Last week I was interviewed by Daniel Treiman of America’s oldest Yiddish-language daily, the Forward. The interview is now up:

How did you wind up starting to make these political videos? What was the impetus behind it?

I’ve been covering the conservative movement, the religious right, the anti-immigration movement for well over four years, and I wanted to show people what it was like doing the work that I do, because so many people had sort of expressed fascination with the idea of just hanging out with people they consider to be intolerable, I guess. These are sort of progressive fans and friends. And so I just wanted to show them what it was like and how interesting and intellectually stimulating it can be, and also how funny it can be to hang around these kinds of conferences.

You said you find covering this beat to be intellectually stimulating, but in the videos people come across, oftentimes, as laughable or ridiculous. Do you find hanging out with the conservatives to be something you enjoy, or do you find it intolerable? Do you find that they make points that make you think?

I suppose when I initially delved into covering the right, it was because I found it so fascinating. I realized that there were so many unacknowledged components of this movement that I could explain to people and try to investigate for myself. It propelled me to go further into the movement. And on my videos I think that there are some subjects who are unintentionally self-satirical and hilarious, and stupid also, brain-dead even. But there are also people who are part of something that fascinates me. For instance, the people on the Christians United for Israel video explaining their eschatology — that’s really interesting, a whole movement that supports Israel because of end-times theology. Also, I find the spectacles that the right produces to be really fascinating. As far as how I feel about it personally, covering this movement and being among people who I deeply disagree with, I guess it doesn’t have that much of a lasting effect on me. I have a pretty short emotional memory.

Have you gotten more response from your videos than you have from your articles on the same topic?

I wrote in 2005 a piece on the College Republican National Convention, and I asked participants the same question. While the reaction was immense, it wasn’t the same. I think for so many people, reading is just such a rigorous mental exercise; they just can’t handle it. They respond much more to my videos. That’s partly why I produced it, to break out of the liberal intellectual bubble that I’ve been working in and that audience that I’ve been writing for. And I think I’ve really broken through. Also, young people have responded more to my videos because they’re like the YouTube generation. And I think it’s difficult to capture the aesthetic of these rallies and conservative conferences in print, and my videos, I think, have captured it perfectly, especially in the case of Christians United for Israel. I’m not comparing this organization or its agenda to fascism, but I think if you read Susan Sontag’s essay on the “fascist aesthetic,” there clearly is a fascist aesthetic to their Night to Honor Israel, which I portrayed in this video.

So I take it from this video that you don’t think that American Jews should ally themselves with these Christian Zionists?

Whatever you think about Israel, whether you’re a Zionist or not, whether you’re a Likudnik or you support Labor or even a more left-wing party, you have to recognize that Israel’s survival depends on a permanent settlement with the Palestinians. And this organization opposes and lobbies against any sort of negotiation with the Palestinians or Israel’s Arab neighbors, and that’s extraordinarily dangerous to Israel’s short-term security and long-term survival. If you look deeper in a moral sense, it’s absolutely immoral for Jews to align themselves with this organization and cynical, because of their theology, which his openly antisemitic and culminates in a battle between what one participant in the conference described as a war between the Christians and the anti-Christians — the anti-Christians encompass Jews, Muslims, Hindus, atheists, anyone who isn’t a born-again Christian, including mainline Christians and Palestinian Christians who’ve lived in Nazareth and Bethlehem since the days of the Apostles. So absolutely, I think it’s cynical and dangerous for Jews to align themselves with this organization and with Christian Zionists. And those who have reflect a level of desperation that I think is really troubling.

In part, this is because American Jews feel spurned by some groups that they had seen — particularly liberal Jews had seen — as their natural allies. For instance, the more liberal mainline churches are seen as unfairly placing the onus on Israel for its conflict with the Palestinians. The Presbyterians had moved forward on a divestment measure, an effort that we’ve seen echoes of in other mainline denominations. And many Jews view the intellectual left or the activist left — including The Nation magazine — as hostile to Israel. So people say, “Well, Jews and Israel should take their friends where they can get them, irrespective of what these friends think is going to happen in the afterlife.” How would you respond to people who say that, who feel because they perceive those on the left as being unfriendly to Israel, they can’t really turn away these people who are coming to them as allies, and as supporters of Israel?

“Being friendly to Israel” is sort of a loaded phrase. It’s a very subjective phrase. And I don’t know how you would define that, “Being friendly to Israel.” But if anyone thinks “being friendly to Israel” means encouraging Israel to take more land, encouraging Israel to expand its illegal settlements in the West Bank, encouraging Israel to ramp up hostilities with its neighbors, then I think those people need to look in the mirror and assess the consequences of their priorities, because these sort of initiatives have very dangerous consequences for Israel’s long-term survival. If they want to be in a permanent state of war, I think Christians United for Israel, those are great allies for Israel, and Christian Zionists in general.

What’s your Jewish background like? Are you involved at all in communal activities or communal activism?

I’m not in the army of God, I’m more in the secret service, which means I go to shul on the High Holy Days, or when I feel like it, sometimes on a Friday, I’ll go. I haven’t gone in quite awhile, because I just haven’t been connected to any element of the Jewish community because I’ve been so transient as a reporter living in so many different cities. But recently I took Hebrew lessons with a Lubavitcher rabbi. I’ve traveled to Israel. I went to Hebrew school, so I have sort of a traditional Reform Jewish background. My faith right now is pretty much dormant — not in the army of God.

Was this video a way of weighing in on an issue that you feel is of import to you specifically as a Jew, the Christians United for Israel video?

It’s a very personal issue. The Christian right and Israel are both issues that are really personal to me. No. 1 because I think the Christian right wants to relegate American Jews to second-class status by removing the Establishment Clause, eroding the First Amendment and smashing the wall of separation. They’ve openly intimidated and attacked Jews who’ve tried to combat their efforts. For instance, Mikey Weinstein, who heads the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, told me he gets dozens of death threats every week for what he’s trying to do — to protect, for instance, his son, a Jewish cadet in the Air Force Academy, from Evangelical proselytization. And the fact that they’ve allied themselves with Israel is just extremely dangerous, because I care about what happens with Israel, and I care deeply about the Palestinians. And I think our history as Jews now, because of Zionism, is inextricably linked with that of the Palestinians. I really want to see a settlement. So this organization and this movement of Christian Zionism personally troubles me a lot, and I think it should trouble not only Jews, but anyone who wants to see some sort of a peaceful resolution to what’s happening across the Middle East.

Are the videos going to be your new focus? Are you still going to be doing journalism? Or, given the great response the videos have received, do you think you’re going to be moving more in that direction in the future?

I’m actually going to be writing a book that’s either going to appear during or after the election about the culture and political psychology of the right, and that’s where I’m going to be putting my energy this year. And if there’s any room to do videos, I’m going to continue to do them. But I have nothing planned, and I think because people recognize me so much, I might have to wear, like, a John Edwards wig and a Geraldo mustache to get into the next conference.

You grew up in the thick of things politically. How has that affected your outlook?

I grew up in Washington and saw things from the inside. It’s had a profound effect on me. No. 1, I don’t have any reverence for powerful people or influential people. I just see them as my equal. I can even see through the veneer they put up. At the same time, there was a period in my life when I wanted to divorce myself from politics and from Washington. But when Bush was elected, a lot of the things that my father had written and that he had told me about the conservative movement started to ring true, and I started to understand why he had pursued this career and also who the forces were that tried to destroy him. During the Clinton scandals, I just saw it as a dirty business that I wanted no part of. I just wanted to stay away from the personal destruction of it. But when these forces that tried to destroy Clinton came into power, it was really illuminating for me. That’s partly what propelled me into journalism. But not all of what propelled me into it. I just love reporting. I love the craft and the process of it. So that’s the main reason why I do this

Kill or Convert, Brought to You By The Pentagon

My latest, about the Pentagon’s endorsement of an evangelical End Times entertainment troupe, is up at the The Nation. I would post it here but I’m having formatting problems. I’ll post it as soon as I figure out what the problem is.