Month: July 2010

by Dave Weigel

I mentioned in my post about Megyn Kelly that Glenn Beck, too, had been running sensationalist stories about the basically irrelevant New Black Panthers. Here's some of his July 7 show on the Panthers to give you an idea of what I'm talking about. He's talking about the Reconstruction period and assaults on black voters from the Ku Klux Klan, comparing the military-garb-wearing NBPP to racists of the past.

Reconstruction. They aimed to intimidate Republican voters of both races. They sought to obstruct radical Republican policies. Please don't just hear the Republican and Democrat in this. Please.

They wanted to restore the rule by native whites. Now the most violent racial clash was the Colfax Riot. Dispute was over the 1872 election, ended with Louisiana having dual governments at all level of politics.

Former slaves feared Democrats would seize power. They tried to take over Colfax. A massacre ensued. Fifty African-Americans were murdered after they already surrendered.

This is a horrific period of our time and our history, but we should know it so we don't repeat it. In 1874, organized white paramilitary groups formed in the Deep South. They intimidated and even killed black voters. Again, listen to this. A paramilitary group. White paramilitary. What does that mean?

That means people who are not in the military, but are dressed up. They were the Knights of the White Camellia, the white league. And they were among the early, really violent hate groups. Awful. Awful people.

The right here is the surrender of the Louisiana State House to the white league. That's the trouble. Whites, many of them Democrats, joined these terrorist organizations when they began losing power to the radical Republicans, both white and black.

Let me show you a cartoon, OK? This is a political cartoon from "Harper's Weekly," October 1874. The artist is showing here – they're mocking the white league and the Klan for making conditions of freed slaves worse than slavery themselves.

Here is the KKK and here is the militant white league. Got it? Now, 100 years later, have we changed? Have we changed? This is what we were trying to stop.

Does Beck actually believe that the New Black Panthers — who have appeared, harmlessly and clownishly on Fox News for a decade — are on the verge of a violent, government-backed war against whites? I doubt it. But how many people hear this and believe him?

by Chris Bodenner

The honey badger is one fearless badass.

by Patrick Appel

Jonathan Bernstein pops Yglesias's dreams of a majoritarian democracy.

by Patrick Appel

Mary Elizabeth Williams compares the celeb-blogger to James Dobson:

Like an overly evangelical politician or priest (Hilton, interestingly, is an alum of the Belen Jesuit School), he spends his time obsessing on the sins of others — but without the mannerly restraint those other guardians of our good behavior are obliged to show. He's closer in spirit to those abortion clinic protesters brandishing posters of fetuses, preferring to stomp around and wave his vivid shows of outrage in our faces. Look at this! Isn't it DISGUSTING? Here, let me get another eyeful. Still HORRIBLE!

This is too-cute-by-half. Hilton – whom I can't stand – may sound like an evangelical pol but he's titillated by debauchery and rather than trying to stamp it out. Williams's argument would benefit from examining how celebrity scolds differ from social conservatives. 

(Hat tip: Eleanor Barkhorn)

by Dave Weigel

I don't really get a chance to watch TV in Unalaska, and the one thing I miss is Megyn Kelly of Fox News. The last week or so of her work — her one woman crusade against the New Black Panther Party — has been truly riveting television. Kelly widens her eyes in a way that bespeaks both horror and anger at the subject she's reporting on. "Shocking new video," she'll say, introducing a clip of the Panthers acting like idiots and yelling about "crackers" at a Philadelphia street festival. "We have a DOJ whistleblower alleging there is a discriminatory policy at the DOJ voting rights section," she'll say, "and no one seems to give a darn." It's the "darn" that ties this together — she's not just a journalist, she's a concerned citizen who has to bring you this story before it's. Too. Late.

The people who grab these videos for the web use the same cliches to title them. "Megyn Kelly DESTROYS Kirsten Powers on New Black Panther Case" says one of them; "Megyn Kelly schools lib pundit over New Black Panthers Party." But why is she doing so many stories on the Panthers? It's because Fox News uses the Panthers the way that Phil Donohue used to use the KKK or G.G. Allin. They're good on TV. The difference between the Panthers and other freakish groups that look good on the air, of course, is that that they threaten white people.

How often does Fox bring on the Panthers, or talk about them? A Lexis-Nexis search finds 68 mentions of "Malik Zulu Shabazz," a leader of the NBPP. The majority are appearances on Fox News, where Shabazz is repeatedly brought on to act as a foolish, anti-Semitic punching bag. Among the segment titles: "Professor's Comments on Whites Stir Controversy" and "Black Panthers Take a Stand on Duke Rape Case." Here's one example of a Shabazz appearance during the Jeremiah Wright controversy. Fox was the only network to book him; Sean Hannity conducted the interview.

HANNITY: Malik Zulu Shabazz joins us right now. Malik, welcome back to the program. Now, we didn't show the one time I think you called me a devil on the air. So I'm going and try to start off and see if we can have a civil dialogue here tonight. You said I have nothing but respect for and his pastor. Is there nothing that the pastor said that you disagree with?

SHABAZZ: I understand that he comes from the black church tradition. And in the church they study Babylon, Sodom and Gomorrah and Egypt. And they believe that those nations in the church. Both the black church and white evangelicals believe powerful nations in the past that have done evil to their slaves will be condemned by God. So this is not just Jeremiah Wright. It's a regular church teaching. Same teaching that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson do the same teaching.

HANNITY: Do you believe G.D. [God damn] America? Is that your view?

SHABAZZ: I think that's too simplistic of a question.

HANNITY: That's not simplistic, it's the right question because these are the words of Jeremiah Wright.

This isn't journalism. No one cares what the NBPP thinks about anything. This is minstrelsy, with a fringe moron set up like a bowling pin for Hannity to knock down. And that's the role the NBPP plays on Fox, frequently.

Kelly's obsession with the current NBPP controversy is something else, though. No one disputes that two members of the Panthers lurked outside of a heavily black, Democratic polling place in Philadelphia on election day 2008, and no one thinks this was a smart or legal thing for them to do. Police were called to the scene to disperse them, and King Samir Shabazz, who was filmed holding (though not using) a nightstick, lost the right to be a poll-watcher for the next election cycle. It was the only recorded incident like this in the nation; nearly two years later, no voter has come forward and said he or she was prevented from voting by the Panthers. And in his publicity tour to attack the DOJ over the Panther case — a second-rate case against a fifth-rate hate group — J. Christian Adams has been unable to name any case in which the DOJ was presented with a crime committed by black people and chose not to prosecute it.

So why obsess over the Panthers? Is it turnabout for the way that liberals elevate the craziest tea party activists, or the way they call them racist? Because it's obviously not a search for justice or a muckraking effort to discover reverse racism in the DOJ. If this is an effort to make sure that King Samir Shabazz is prosecuted for intimidating voters, why not try to find some voters he intimidated? Why, instead, as Kelly and Glenn Beck have opted to do, show video of the Shabazz yelling about "crackers" at a street fair before the election? No one disputes that he hates white people — just watch one of the tapes from the times Fox News invited his colleagues on to discuss how they hate white people.

One of the more jarring passages in Rick Perlstein's "Nixonland" is his recounting of a popular myth that went around Iowa in 1966, the year of the conservative backlash against the Great Society. The myth was that black gang members on motorcycles were going to head from Chicago to ransack Des Moines. Reading this in 2008, it sounded preposterous, the kind of thing that no one could believe in the country that was about to elect Barack Obama. But Kelly, under the guise of journalism, is working to create a rumor like this in 2010. Watch her broadcasts and you become convinced that the New Black Panthers are a powerful group that hate white people and operate under the protection of Eric Holder's DOJ. That "Megyn Kelly DESTROYS Kirsten Powers" video that I mentioned begins with her introducing a clip of a town hall meeting with Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Ca.) in which he gets an angry question about whether the DOJ has a policy of not prosecuting African-Americans.

"I am extremely sure that we do not have a policy at the Department of Justice of never prosecuting a black defendent."

The crowd rises up. "Yes you do!" shouts one voter. When Sherman says he doesn't know much about the Panther case, the crowd erupts in boos. They've been driven to fear and distrust of their DOJ by round-the-clock videos of one racist idiot brandishing a nightstick for a couple hours in 2008.

Congratulations, Megyn.

by Patrick Appel

From Pew:

Blogs have become an important source for news junkies looking for breaking news and instant analysis, but blogs still look to old media for news stories. In fact, more than 99% of the news stories linked to in blogs come from traditional media sources such as newspapers and broadcast networks. The larger news organizations dominate these links. The BBC (23% of all blog links), CNN (21%), the New York Times (20%) and the Washington Post (16%) combined accounted for fully 80% of all news stories linked to on blogs. Web-only sites, on the other hand, made up less than 1% of the links in the blogosphere.

by Patrick Appel

Michael Kazin tweaks Michelle Cottle's thesis:

Perhaps a clever media strategy has made her into what Cottle calls “the p.r. genius of our time.” But the beliefs which Palin is touting matter far more than her own beaming, resolutely confident self. In two years, she will at least be able to veto any Republican who seeks the nomination and be king, or queen-maker, of whomever gets to run against Obama. That frightening prospect is what talented reporters like Cottle should begin to explain.

by David Frum

In honor of the French national day, a link to Francois Furet's classic essay, "The French Revolution is Over." It opens (my bad typing, please excuse):

Historians engaged in the study of the Merovingian kings or the Hundred Years War are not asked at every turn to present their research permits. So long as they can give proof of having learned the techniques of the trade, society and the profession assume that they possess the virtues of patience and objectivity. The discussion of their findings is a matter for scholars and scholarship only.

The historian of the French Revolution, on the other hand, must produce more than a proof of competence. He must show his colours. He must state from the outset where he comes from, what he thinks, and what he is looking for; what he writes about the French Revolution is assigned a meaning and label even before he starts working: the writing is taken as his opinion … As soon as that historian states that opinion, the matter is settled; he is labeled a royalist, a liberal or Jacobin.

Then this: 

The Revolution does not simply 'explain' our contemporary history; it is our contemporary history. … For the same reasons that the Ancien Regime is thought to have an end but no beginning, the Revolution has a birth but no end.