Wednesday, August 16, 2006
Broken Record
When my colleague Chip Berlet first wrote his seminal report Right Woos Left , I had yet to encounter the fascist right wing of American politics, but having seen up close and personal since then the virulent madness and ferocity of New Right adherents in the form of gun-toting devotees of Liberty Lobby and rabid anti-semitic Larouchians, I can readily appreciate the value of the sobriety Mr. Berlet brings to the study of the fascist movement in America.
While it may seem like a tiresome broken record observing the vapid nature of liberals lured by the secret knowledge of the Populist Party, it is not an unimportant task to clarify how right wing ideas penetrate the minds of self-declared progressives, thus undermining our movements for civil and human rights. When these confused and misguided people start sending checks to Lyndon LaRouche, we have a problem.
Influenced by uncritical left wing media, such as Pacifica Radio, unschooled liberals are led down a path of titillating unfounded conspiracies that land them on the doorsteps of right wing recruiters, thereby depriving humanist social movements of support and providing fascist social movements with an ideological bulwark against exposure, a lose-lose scenario.
All this started coming back to me the other day listening to our landlady talking on her cell phone to a friend about how Lynn Cheney and Hillary Clinton were both part of the Illuminati. Having started out on this path with the 9/11 conspiracy crowd, this card-carrying member of the ACLU and regular donor to Southern Poverty Law Center was already well on her way. Yesterday I noticed her first issue of LaRouche's magazine.
While I do not expect this politically correct, liberal senior citizen to join one of the LaRouchite fascist street gangs in beating socialists and homosexuals with chains and baseball bats, I am appalled at how easily the weak-minded are led astray by the entertaining intrigues of madness run amok--an epidemic we had better inoculate against with all due diligence.
While it may seem like a tiresome broken record observing the vapid nature of liberals lured by the secret knowledge of the Populist Party, it is not an unimportant task to clarify how right wing ideas penetrate the minds of self-declared progressives, thus undermining our movements for civil and human rights. When these confused and misguided people start sending checks to Lyndon LaRouche, we have a problem.
Influenced by uncritical left wing media, such as Pacifica Radio, unschooled liberals are led down a path of titillating unfounded conspiracies that land them on the doorsteps of right wing recruiters, thereby depriving humanist social movements of support and providing fascist social movements with an ideological bulwark against exposure, a lose-lose scenario.
All this started coming back to me the other day listening to our landlady talking on her cell phone to a friend about how Lynn Cheney and Hillary Clinton were both part of the Illuminati. Having started out on this path with the 9/11 conspiracy crowd, this card-carrying member of the ACLU and regular donor to Southern Poverty Law Center was already well on her way. Yesterday I noticed her first issue of LaRouche's magazine.
While I do not expect this politically correct, liberal senior citizen to join one of the LaRouchite fascist street gangs in beating socialists and homosexuals with chains and baseball bats, I am appalled at how easily the weak-minded are led astray by the entertaining intrigues of madness run amok--an epidemic we had better inoculate against with all due diligence.
