| The Unitarian Universalist Pastor Responds
The report continues:
RICK KARR: Why did Adkisson hate "the liberal movement"? Police said that he told them "that all liberals should be killed ... because they were ... ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country's hands in the war on terror and ... ruined every institution in America...." Police said that Adkisson had targeted the Unitarian Universalist Church "because of its liberal teachings." The church advocates social justice and tolerance, and it openly welcomes gay, lesbian, and transgendered members. According to police, Adkisson said that, "Because he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement that he would target those that had voted them in to office."In the weeks following the tragedy, the congregation and its pastor, Reverend Chris Buice struggled with what they were learning about Adkisson.
REVEREND CHRIS BUICE: Some have suggested that his spiritual attitudes, his hatred of liberals and gays, was reinforced by the right wing media figures. And it is beyond dispute that there are a plethora of books which have labeled liberals as evil, unpatriotic, godless and treasonous.
RICK KARR: During that recent sermon Buice told his congregation, some of who had risked their own lives to stop the shooting, that he has been reading some of those books.
REVEREND CHRIS BUICE: One of the books has the title "Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism". If that author was here in this room right now I would introduce him to some good liberals who acted decisively on that Sunday, acted quickly and courageously to stop the terror that came into our church building. I would introduce him to some good liberals who know how to fight terror with more than just their mouths.
At that point, members of the congregation rose up and gave a standing ovation. This is what we need to see much more of in America today--liberals standing up and applauding their own for standing up to the hatred and violence mobilized against them.
Of course, it goes without saying that a liberal pastor would want to understand the source of the evil that entered his church and took the lives of his congregents. After all, that is what makes us liberals and leftists--we want to know the truth, however dark that truth may be. But for far too long we have not fought back against purveyors of evil and untruth nearly as hard and consistently we need to.
Michael Savage Talks Like Hitler
The report continues by taking a look at Michael Savage, author of one of the books police found in the shooter's apartment:
RICK KARR: Buice says even with the outpouring of sympathy from around Knoxville and across the country, Adkisson's lethal anger has left him angry and full of questions.
REVEREND CHRIS BUICE:People were killed in my sanctuary of my church which should be the holy place, a safe place. People were injured. A man came in here totally dehumanized us. Members of our church were not human to him. Where did he get that? Where did he get that sense that we were not human?
RICK KARR: Buice admits that no one knows for sure and says that Adkisson alone, is responsible for the shootings. But he keeps thinking about some books that police found in Adkisson's apartment, books by popular right-wing talk-radio personalities who berate and denigrate liberals. One of the books police found in Adkisson's apartment was Michael Savage's "Liberalism is a Mental Disorder". In it, Savage calls liberals "the enemy within our country;" "an enemy more dangerous than Hitler"; "traitors" who are "dangerous to your survival" and who "should be placed in a straightjacket". Like Adkisson, Savage accuses liberals of "[tying] the hands of our military".
Savage isn't just a bestselling author: he also hosts a syndicated radio show.
ANNOUNCER:"And now American's most exciting radio talk show...THE SAVAGE NATION...THE MICHAEL SAVAGE SHOW."
RICK KARR: Savage reaches more than eight and a quarter million listeners a week. And when it comes to demonizing liberals, he's the same on the air as he is in print.
MICHAEL SAVAGE:"Liberalism is, in essence, the HIV virus, and it weakens the defense cells of a nation. What are the defense cells of a nation? Well, the church. They've attacked particularly the Catholic Church for 30 straight years. The police, attacked for the last 50 straight years by the ACLU viruses. And the military, attacked for the last 50 years by the Barbara Boxer viruses on our planet."
Here is where we can see two important points that deserve intense scrutiny which Karr and Moyers did not follow up. The first is that Savage uses the same extreme dehumanizing language that Hitler used, portraying his enemies as germs. The only difference is that Savage updates it a bit, substituting "virus" instead. When dehumanization becomes this extreme, it passes on to a qualitatively different realm--that of eliminationism. After all, what else does one do with a disease? One wipes it out. This is the inexorable logic of such talk, and there are countless examples of it from rightwing media figures over the past two decades.
The second important point is that Savage, who uses Hitlerian language, projects his own Hitlerian proclivities onto liberals, calling them "an enemy more dangerous than Hitler." Projection is a virtually all-pervasive feature of rightwing political discourse. Sometimes it is in the forefront, sometimes in the background, but it is virtually always there somehow. People are rightwingers because they cannot find effective means to cope with the problems they face, and so they create or latch onto elaborate narratives that shift the darkness within onto others. Of course it doesn't work, and so the darkness only grows, and with it grows the hatred of the others who are blamed.
The report went on to briefly show Savage's attacks on gays, immigrants and children with autism as well. Then it turned to other hate radio examples.
Other Examples: Glenn Beck, Michael Reagan, Neal Boortz
RICK KARR: Michael Savage isn't the only right-wing talk-radio host who launches blistering, even violent, verbal attacks on people and groups he doesn't like. Glenn Beck, for instance, fantasized about murdering a liberal filmmaker.
GLENN BECK:"I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out of him. Is this wrong?"
RICK KARR: Michael Reagan, son of the former president, suggested that people who claim that "nine-eleven was an inside job," a U.S. government conspiracy, deserve to die.
MICHAEL REAGAN: "Take them out and shoot them. They are traitors to this country, and shoot them. But anybody who would do that doesn't deserve to live. You shoot them. You call them traitors, that's what they are, and you shoot them dead. I'll pay for the bullet."
RICK KARR: Neal Boortz went after victims of Hurricane Katrina.
NEAL BOORTZ:"That wasn't the cries of the downtrodden. That's the cries of the useless, the worthless. New Orleans was a welfare city, a city of parasites, a city of people who could not, and had no desire to fend for themselves. You have a hurricane descending on them and they sit on their fat asses and wait for somebody else to come rescue them."
RICK KARR: Muslims are some of Boortz's favorite targets.
NEAL BOORTZ:"It's Ramadan and Muslims in your workplace might be offended if they see you eating at your desk. Why? I guess it's because Muslims don't eat during the day during Ramadan. They fast during the day and eat at night. Sorta like cockroaches."
Boortz is using Hitlerean language as well. Bugs and germs. Bugs and germs. Wipe them all out. The Nazis, too, spoke of cockroaches.
With Beck and Reagan, the eliminationist fantasy is right out there, front and center. The desire to kill liberals could not be more clear. But this is not simply an expression of desire, it is clearly an incitement. These are wealthy, successful public figures telling anyone who will listen, "Look, this is an acceptable thing to think about, acceptable to talk about to an audience of millions. There's nothing wrong with it. Nothing wrong with it at all."
Talk Radio And Genocide
While Hitler remains the classic example, you don't have to look back as far as Hitler to see how dangerous such language can be, as the program went on to note:
RICK KARR: Reverend Chris Buice says he's heard that kind of language before.
REVEREND CHRIS BUICE: If you look at the history of like situations like in Rwanda in 1994, the talk radio was a big part of leading to the conditions that created a genocide. The Hutu radio disc jockeys would call the Tutsi cockroaches. There's the sense that these aren't human beings. You know, they're not human beings with children or grandchildren. These are cockroaches. And when you hear in talk radio that liberals are evil, that they are traitors, that they are godless, that they are on the side of the terrorist. That's hate language. You don't negotiate with evil people. You don't live in community with people you consider to be traitors.
RICK KARR: Millions of Americans tune in to right-wing talk radio every day. Rory O'Connor is a media critic and a liberal himself who's written a book on shock-talkers. He says not all of these broadcasters use violent language. But they do all share a predilection for outrage and, he says, they're all practically addicted to constantly cranking up that outrage.
RORY O'CONNOR: Here's the real problem. When you shock somebody, if you come back the next time and you apply the same stimulus, it's not shocking any longer. It's already happened. So you have to ratchet it up a little bit. So how do you cut through? How do you really shock? I think that in order to continue to outrage, you have to constantly be jacking up the pressure. And ultimately, there's gonna be some deranged person out there in that audience who's gonna say, "You know what? That's a good idea. Let me act on that."
Indeed, one could argue that the violence carried out by Jim David Adkisson was a foreseeable consequence of the overt eliminationist talk of the most extreme hate radio jocks. As such, they could be held liable for manslaughter, for acting with a depraved indifference to human life. That's not the course of action I would advise. But I do think it's important to note that there is a credible violation of criminal law involved here, which only sereves to strengthen that argument that sensible government regulation--of the sort we used to have--is fully warranted.
Two Further Wrinkles
RICK KARR: Right-wing talk radio hosts usually reserve their ad hominem attacks for liberal figures. Jim Quinn has his own name for the National Organization for Women.
JIM QUINN: "The National Organization for Whores, they're whores for liberal politics in general, and they were whores for Bill Clinton in particular."
RICK KARR: Glenn Beck tried to connect former Vice President Al Gore's efforts against global warming with Nazism.
GLENN BECK: "What was the first thing they did to get people to exterminate the Jews? Now, I'm not saying that anybody's going to, you know, Al Gore's not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however[...]you got to have an enemy to fight. And when you have an enemy to fight, then you can unite the entire world behind you, and you seize power. That was Hitler's plan. His enemy: the Jew. Al Gore's enemy, the U.N.'s enemy: global warming."
Two comments. First, about Quinn: Demeaning women is second nature to rightwingers. They've been doing it since the dawn of time. Whoever is not completely obedient to male authority is automatically "a whore" or a lesbian, or both. It may be hard to believe that an entire political movement is based on deep feelings of personal inadequacy, but when it comes right down to it, that's simply the way it is.
Second, about Beck: This is a truly remarkable passage. Not only does Beck project his own Hitlerean mindset onto Gore, he equates demonization and the recognition of large-scale problems.
Think about it. Hitler taking the Jews as a problem required expulsion at the least, and ultimately extermination. Al Gore, the UN and the world's climate scientists taking global warming as a problem requires shifting to new mix of carbon-neutral energy sources. No bloodshed. No one rounded up in the middle of night. Just windmills, photovoltaic cells, double insulation, more mass transit, and the like. How are these two in any way similar?
Simple: They aren't. This is just the reductio ad absurdum of the rightwing attempt to eliminate opposing viewpoints as well as opposing people. You can't even talk about a major problem, because then you're acting just like Hitler!
An Inconclusive Conclusion
The end of this powerful report was provided by Bill Moyers himself, in a curiously subdued conclusion:
BILL MOYERS:We may never know what finally triggered the killer's rage, unless he chooses at his trial or later to tell us. But not for a moment do I think any of the talk show hosts mentioned by the police would have wished it to happen.
Excuse me! After all your report has just exposed, you think these guys are what? Just joking around? Hell-o-oh! Roll the tape again, Bill. The part about Rwanda:
REVEREND CHRIS BUICE: If you look at the history of like situations like in Rwanda in 1994, the talk radio was a big part of leading to the conditions that created a genocide. The Hutu radio disc jockeys would call the Tutsi cockroaches. There's the sense that these aren't human beings. You know, they're not human beings with children or grandchildren. These are cockroaches. And when you hear in talk radio that liberals are evil, that they are traitors, that they are godless, that they are on the side of the terrorist. That's hate language. You don't negotiate with evil people. You don't live in community with people you consider to be traitors.
That's what Moyers himself has just aired, and here in his conclusion he's telling us, essentially, that he doesn't believe his own warning! This is simply incredible.
His conclusion continues:
We asked several radio hosts to come on this broadcast and talk about the story; they either declined or didn't return our calls.
Gosh, the bullies are cowards! Who knew?
The issue of course is not their right to say anything they want on the air. The First Amendment guarantees their free speech as it does mine. Government shouldn't be the arbiter of what the Bill of Rights leaves to one's own sense of fair play.
Um, excuse me Bill, but why the hell not? Not in terms of what purely private people do, of course. But we're talking about people using the public airwaves to spew eliminationist rhetoric, which history shows can lead to actual genocide. The news hook for your story was a vivid, bloody example of what this looks like on a microcosmic scale.
We used to have a clear public policy against allowing this sort of thing. The airwaves were to be used in the public interest--this was built into the foundation of our telecommunications law. In fact, it's still there, in principle. On top of that, for decades we had the Fairness Doctrine, which required that views on matters of public controversy be balanced--a common-sense requirement if the public airwaves are to further the ideals of self-governance in a democratic republic.
What's more, we used to have ownership limits and at least the formal apparatus for reviewing whether stations really did serve the public interest. All that is gone now, and so it is very easy for broadcasters and/or syndicators to do darned near whatever they like. This is why even "market forces" have ceased to be an effective check. Even in the liberal Bay Area, rightwing talk radio radio took over the airwaves, despite a potential audience that was diametrically opposed.
On a national level, Jim Hightower was on a strong upward trajectory, with over a million regular listeners, when Disney bought ABC, and quickly kicked him off the air. These are not market-driven business decisions, any more than MSNBC's firing of Phil Donohue when he was their top-rated program before the Iraq War.
These are the result of a long-term rightwing Gramscian "culture war"--a struggle to control the cultural institutions that define our shared reality for us. That culture war intersects with corporate strategies involving much larger sums of money, currying favor with rightwing politicians in order to secure yet more anti-competitive advantages worth billions of dollars over the long term.
There is nothing "free market" or "free speech" about any of this. And it's time for good liberals like Bill Moyers to wake up and smell the coffee. Ths funny thing is that Moyers knows all this. He even talks like this himself sometimes. But he all too often wimps out like this at the end.
And speaking of the end, this is how he concluded this segment:
Watching that report, however, I was reminded of a story from folk lore about the tribal elder telling his grandson about the battle the old man was waging within himself. He said, "My son it is between two wolves. One is an evil wolf: anger, envy, sorrow, greed, self-pity, guilt, resentment, lies, false pride, superiority and ego. The other is the good wolf: joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, generosity, truth, compassion and faith." The boy took this in for a few minutes and then asked, "Which wolf won?" His grandfather answered, "The one I feed." So, too, America's public life. The wolf that wins is the wolf we feed. Media provides the fodder.
Although invidual choice still matters, it matters more when forged into collective aciton. And ultimately, the way we decide which wolf is fed is through public policy. Do we empower monopolies of hate? Or do we empower a true democratic dialogue? |
