Vilifying the Right
by William Norman Grigg

The mainstream media have discovered a new threat to civilization. Apparently there are conspiracy theorists lurking beneath every bed, plotting to make people believe that the federal government sometimes acts with premeditated indifference toward individual rights. The threat was exposed in "Patriots and Profits," the October 29th segment of the news program CNN Presents, which bemoaned the existence of "an increasingly sophisticated network feeding on anti-government feelings. They call themselves patriots -- but are they profiting from a message that incites others to violence?"

Strangely, none of the right-wing "extremists" profiled in the program has ever planted a bomb or fired a shot. Furthermore, the "Unabomber" -- a certifiably murderous left-wing extremist who has shed blood and urges others to do likewise -- was neglected entirely. Although "Patriots and Profits" dealt at length with the supposed danger presented by "right-wing" publications and talk radio, the program offered not a syllable of criticism for the decision by the New York Times to print the Unabomber's manifesto. From the Establishment's perspective, the threat to "democracy" comes exclusively from the "right."

Exploiting Oklahoma City

The framing device for "Patriots and Profits," predictably, was the Oklahoma City bombing, an event which has yet to be definitively connected in any way with "right-wing extremism." After all, Timothy McVeigh, the chief suspect in the bombing, is apparently an alienated former federal employee and advocate of socialized medicine whose enthusiasm for violence made him unwelcome in the militia movement. But the CNN program simply invited the public to conclude that the accused bomber is representative of those who are "excessively" critical of the federal government.

McVeigh's hostility toward the federal government, according to CNN, was inflamed by The Turner Diaries, an apocalyptic political novel written by white supremacist William Pierce. In Pierce's novel, a neo-Nazi secret society called "The Order" undertakes a campaign of terror which includes the bombing of a federal building and the summary executions of politicians, journalists, and citizens who are found guilty of "treason" against the white race. McVeigh reportedly read the novel while he was in the Army and pestered his Army buddies to read it as well.

CNN correspondent Bernard Shaw insisted that although The Turner Diaries "is a work of fiction ... it foreshadows an ugly fact: The bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City." Morris Dees, a left-wing attorney who has fattened his bank account by pursuing "hate groups," asserted that there is "little doubt" that McVeigh, who supposedly saw himself cast in the role of the "true patriot" depicted in The Turner Diaries, "was simply copycatting" the tactics described in the novel. Pierce's book was also described as the blueprint for The Order, a terrorist group led by neo-Nazi thug Robert Matthews which was responsible for armed robberies, bombings, and the murder of Denver hate-radio celebrity Alan Berg during the 1980s. In an on-camera interview with CNN's Kathy Slobogin, Pierce spoke very warmly of Matthews and refused to criticize his terrorist acts.

Pierce was described by CNN as having "celebrity status in extremist circles." Of course, this description neglects the crucial element in Pierce's political worldview: racial collectivism. Slobogin reports that Pierce "joined the ranks of extremists" by enlisting in George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi party in the 1960s. As a member of the American national socialist party, Pierce was aligned with the collectivist left, not with the individualist right. His criticism of the federal government is hardly inspired by a desire to reduce its powers and restore its constitutional restraints; rather, it is the result of a frustrated desire to use federal power in the service of a particular racial ideology.

Pierce's novel is a prominent text among white supremacist groups, and it may indeed provide tactical inspiration for subversives. However, CNN ignored the greater influence of a much more subversive novel-cum-political manifesto -- Phillip Dru: Administrator, written by Edward Mandell House. Where Pierce is a marginalized figure, House was the "alter ego" of President Woodrow Wilson, the author of the League of Nations Covenant, an architect of the Treaty of Versailles, and a founder of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Phillip Dru, the "true patriot" hero of House's novel, leads a military putsch to recreate the United States along Marxist lines. The novel was not a work of idle fantasy, according to Franklin Lane, the Wilson Administration's Secretary of the Interior: "All that book has said should come about .... The President comes to Phillip Dru in the end." The unconstitutional policies imposed on America through Wilson's "New Freedom" and FDR's "New Deal" are all foreshadowed in House's novel, which he referred to as "my ethical and political faith." Obviously, by the standards employed in "Patriots and Profits," Phillip Dru: Administrator must be defined as a conspiratorial blueprint -- one which has had much greater impact than The Turner Diaries.

Words as "Weapons"

However, only Establishment-approved conspiracy theories are admissible in the public debate -- a point which was illustrated in the segment of "Patriots and Profits" which dealt with lingering questions about a federal cover-up in Oklahoma City.

CNN correspondent Brian Barger assailed alternative media and publications -- including THE NEW AMERICAN -- for publishing "allegations of sinister forces [at work] in the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City." (Does CNN's brain trust believe that "benevolent forces" were responsible for an attack which killed 169 people?) Without elaborating upon the evidence which calls into question the federal government's single-blast theory, Barger smugly pronounced that such evidence has been "rejected by federal investigators and dismissed by the mainstream media." Significantly, Barger did not claim that they have been dismissed by demolition experts, seismological analysts, and other professionally qualified and personally disinterested observers; he simply ruled such suspicions to be inadmissible because the federal government and the "mainstream media" find them unacceptable.

Furthermore, according to Barger, those who persist in challenging the federal government's account of the Oklahoma City atrocity are guilty of "merchandising fear -- fear of the government, fear of other governments, and fear of other Americans." As footage of the demolition of the Murrah Federal Building filled the screen, Barger denounced "information [which is] fueling fear" -- thereby indelibly associating fear or suspicion of government with terrorist acts. Barger concluded his report by allowing that while fear of government is a time-honored American trait, "what is new here is a fear too often based on conspiracy theories that have no grounding in fact. In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, it is fair to ask if the merchandising of such fear does anything more than encourage further hatred and violence."

Isolate, Exterminate?

"Patriots and Profits" merely insinuated that the crusade against terrorism will require the suppression of right-wing dissent. However, Jeffrey Herf of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton has been more candid. According to Herr, the marketplace of ideas must be strictly and vigorously policed by government in order "to protect liberal democracy against the undemocratic extremes that hover at or just beyond its fringes." In an August 13th Washington Post op-ed column, Herf called upon leaders of the Republican Party to draw a "clear and firm boundary between the democratic and the undemocratic paranoid right," to create a social climate in which the "radical right" is "subjected to regular moral and political criticism and denunciation," and "to censure, criticize, ridicule and, yes, exclude advocates of paranoid, conspiratorial and antisemitic views...." In other words, only by isolating, excluding, and persecuting those deemed to be "undemocratic" can supporters of "democracy" prevail.

Furthermore, according to Herf, "right-wing extremists" are not only irrational, but latently murderous:

The Oklahoma City bombing and the world of armed militias that has belatedly come to public attention reminds us that people who believe all our problems are caused by a small but powerful group that supposedly runs the world are driven, sooner or later, to political murder in order to eliminate the source of all evil.

It apparently has not occurred to Herf that his political prescription -- the systematic political exclusion and isolation of "extremists" -- would make the sentence quoted above a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In his recent book Ambush at Ruby Ridge, Alan Bock demonstrates that the Randy Weaver tragedy was, in large measure, a result of conspiracist beliefs held by federal law enforcement officials. As Bock observes, the terms of the federal indictment against the Weavers illustrate that the feds viewed "a family trying to live life independently as a group of co-conspirators." In his opening statement at the trial of Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris, federal prosecutor Kim Lindquist accused the Weaver family of "plotting" to provoke the federal government into attacking them, and insisted that "as Kevin Harris joined the family and became a son, he joined the conspiracy." So devious was the Weaver "conspiracy," according to Lindquist, that "when the conflict finally came ... it was not the government's doing .... [It came] because of Randy Weaver's resolve to defy a government he viewed as satanic."

The Weaver case prompted this observation from Tony Cooper, a law enforcement consultant who teaches terrorism negotiation skills at the University of Texas-Dallas: "I see the formation of a curious crusading mentality among certain law enforcement agencies to stamp out what they see as a threat to government generally. It's an exaggerated concern that they are facing a nationwide conspiracy and that somehow this will get out of control unless it is stamped out at a very early stage." That is, the feds described by Cooper are (in Herf's words) trying to "eliminate the source of all evil" by prosecuting a low-intensity war against "fringe groups."

Two Theories

A conspiracy, by strict definition, involves two or more people who consciously and covertly agree to commit an illicit act. However, the collectivist concept of "conspiracy" promoted in "Patriots and Profits" and followed by federal authorities in the Waco and Weaver tragedies is much more elastic. One need not consciously and deliberately undertake to subvert the government to be designated a "conspirator"; all that is necessary to qualify is an "excessive" suspicion of government. That suspicion may be expressed by withdrawing from society, as the Weaver family did, by subscribing to an unpopular theology, as the Branch Davidians did, or by expressing suspicions of a federal cover-up in the Oklahoma City bombing case.

Conspiracy theories of the "right" begin with the understanding that government -- the instrument of coercion -- can fall into the hands of those who seek unlawful and immoral power; accordingly, government must be restrained by law and the people must be protected from the untempered power of the government. Such was the "conspiracy theory" which animated America's Founders. However, the Establishment's conspiracy theory is one which is common to all absolutist tyrannies: It holds that the people are always striving to impede the state's benevolent designs, and that the government must be protected from the people.