Arthur Goldwag - The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right

ALSO BY ARTHUR GOLDWAG Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies:
The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones,
Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more Isms & Ologies: All the Movements, Ideologies, & Doctrines
That Have Shaped Our World The Beliefnet Guide to Kabbalah

Copyright 2012 by Arthur Goldwag

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goldwag, Arthur.
The new hate : a history fear and loathing on the populist right / Arthur Goldwag.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN: 978-0-307-90707-3
1. Right-wing extremistsUnited States. 2. Hate groupsPolitical aspectsUnited States. 3. Conspiracy theoriesPolitical aspectsUnited States. 4. Politics and cultureUnited States. I. Title.
HN R G 62 2012 306.2097309051dc23 2011028589

www.pantheonbooks.com

Cover illustration by Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images
Cover design by Emily Mahon

v3.1

This book is for Nathan and Eli The ecumenicism of hatred is a great breaker-down
of precise intellectual discriminations. RICHARD HOFSTADTER,
THE PARANOID STYLE IN AMERICAN POLITICS

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
Birthers, Birchers, and Death Panels

O n February 18, 2010, The New York Times ran a story about a significant undercurrent within the Tea Party movement. Urged on by conservative commentators, it said, waves of newly minted activists are turning to once-obscure books and Web sites and discovering a set of ideas long dismissed as the preserve of conspiracy theorists. In this view, Mr. Obama and many of his predecessors (including George W. Bush) have deliberately undermined the Constitution and free enterprise for the benefit of a shadowy international network of wealthy elites.

It wasnt exactly news to me. In the fall of 2009, I published a book called Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies . I had written it to satisfy my curiosity about, as one of my blurbers put it, the wilder reaches of human beliefand, more particularly, about totalizing systems of thought and faith, a subject I had become interested in while I was researching my previous book, Isms & Ologies . By the time I finished writing it, Id learned all I thought Id ever need to know about the New World Order and its demonic financiers, from the Templars of the twelfth century to the Illuminati, the Elders of Zion, and the Bilderberg elites today.

I delivered Cults to my publisher just after Election Day 2008. When the copyedited manuscript came back to me in January, I couldnt help noticing that the controversy about the president-elects birth certificate wasnt fading; in fact, it was beginning to gain some real traction. I considered adding a paragraph or two to bring the book up to date but after due reflection decided that references to such a transitory political derangement might just as easily date it. Who will remember any of this in six months? I thought.

Had I ventured to define birtherism back then, I would have called it the wishful notion, cherished by a hard core of Obama haters, that he is a citizen of Kenya or Indonesia and hence ineligible to be president. Birthers believe that a sinister cabal created a false identity for Obama that would enable him to be elected president despite his foreign birth, one that was sophisticated enough to pass muster at the highest levels yet so shoddy that anyone with a modem and a few minutes to spare could crack it. His Social Security number, for example, had originally been assigned to a Connecticut resident who was born in the 1890 S ,

But citizen or not, whos to say that Obamas not a Communist sleeper, a Manchurian candidate who wasnt just destined for the presidency but literally bred for it? Lisa Schiffrenwho made her name writing speeches for Dan Quayle when he was vice president, most famously the one that attacked televisions Murphy Brown for having a child out of wedlockplayed with these notions in a piece she wrote for National Review Online in February 2008. I dont know how Barack Obamas parents met, she noted, before going on to pointedly assert that mixed-race children of Obamas age tend to be the product of very culturally specific unions For a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics. It was, of course, an explicit tactic of the Communist party to stir up discontent among American blacks, with an eye toward using them as the leading edge of the revolution.

By the time my book hit the stores, Id seen the words Wheres the Birth Certificate? printed in ten-foot-tall letters on a billboard beside Interstate 78, not far from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Not just birthers but Tea Partiers were ubiquitous on talk radio, cable TV, and conservative Web sites like Newsmax, Townhall , and WorldNetDaily . Rumors of one world government, creeping Socialism, and Latin American plots to conquer and annex the southwestern states, once the stuff of cheaply printed samizdat publications and shortwave radio broadcasts from backwoods compounds with biblical names, were being trumpeted by big-name pundits and even some elected officials. The Five Thousand Year Leap: 28 Great Ideas That Changed the World , a thirty-year-old book by the late anti-Communist conspiracy theorist W. Cleon Skousen, was perched atop the Amazon best-seller list with a new foreword by cable TV and talk radios Glenn Beck.

Now best remembered in far-right-wing Mormon circles, Skousen drew a straight line from the biblical patriarchs through Americas founding fathers and found them equally inspired, but in general he took a more dire view of things; most of the time he seemed convinced that he was living in the Republics last days. There is an extremely high-powered, well-financed campaign afoot to abolish the United States Constitution, he wrote in 1971 in Law & Order (a trade magazine for policemen that he edited), sounding uncommonly then as Glenn Beck does now. Oddly enough, Fox Newss headquarters is also located in Rockefeller Center, albeit in a newer, more reliably capitalistic precinct of the vast complex. Walled off from its neighbors insidious influences, 1221 Avenue of the Americas, one can only presume, is the West Berlin of television news.

But it wasnt just conspiracies that people were talking about as my book went out into the world; secret societies and cults were enjoying a renaissance too. Stewart Rhodess Oath Keepers,

On the wider cultural front, the novelist Dan Brown, whose mega-best-selling Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code had revived some of the most egregious anti-Catholic stereotypes of the Know-Nothing era, was getting ready to launch his next blockbuster. Instead of scheming cardinals and Opus Dei hit men, The Lost Symbol focused on Freemasons in Washington, D.C., with all of their esoteric secrets and hidden histories. In Browns telling, the awesomely powerful Masonsbillionaires, politicians, and paradigm-changing scientistsnot only quaff rare vintages from human skulls but are on the brink of discovering the secret of eternal life.

Ingenious deconstructions of videos by rappers like Jay-Z, Rihanna, and the cult star Lady Gaga were popping up all over the Internet, exposing their cultic and conspiratorial content. The 2009 MTV Music Awards, the Web site the Vigilant Citizen reported, We were living in strange times.

In his seminal essay of the same name, written in 1964, the historian Richard Hofstadter defined the paranoid style of political thought as the belief in the existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character. In the months after Cults, Conspiracies , and Secret Societies came out, I was able to observe this paranoid style for myself, up close and personal.

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