Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America

by John P. Avlon

  By the summer of 2009, the Soviet hammer and sickle was being slapped on e-mails and T-shirts, advertised by smiling girls on conservative Web sites, purchasable on bumper stickers, tote bags and mugs. Search online for “Obama” and “communist” or “hammer and sickle” and hundreds of Internet images pop up. The proliferation of Obama-as-communist gear is presumably supposed to be sarcastic opposition or ironic commentary—the online retailer Noisebot.com actually labeled one of its wares as a “funny Obama communist T-shirt.”

  Twenty years after the end of the Cold War, I can appreciate how easy it is to treat communism as a curiosity, like the last Japanese soldier found wanting to fight for the Emperor on a Pacific island in 1974. But any ideology that managed to murder 100 million people in less than a century is not a joke. It’s a conduit for evil.

  At the 9/12 march on Washington, there were posters of Obama as Che Guevara over the slogan “Obamunism.” There were signs telling America to “Wake Up” with pictures of Obama alongside Lenin and Castro, while another featured Obama’s face morphing into Stalin’s. Obama was painted as the Joker in white face and lipstick over the slogan “I lied” and “Communism isn’t funny.” One veteran held a sign that read, “I didn’t serve in the military to live in a socialist country” and “Obama’s America looks a lot like the Soviet Union.” Another proclaimed “Red Dawn 2009: The Enemy is Within.”

  A glossy poster of Joe McCarthy holding a photo of Obama caught my eye. “Vindicated,” it read. Its creator was a twenty-four-year-old from Pennsylvania named Brad. “When I was younger, I always heard right-wing speech from my grandfather about Joseph McCarthy and the communists,” he said. “But now you come to realize that there are a lot of socialists not only in Hollywood but in the public school systems, and they’ve taken over the media and sort of hijacked democracy, so I figured this was good.”

  I went up to one woman dressed as a cross between Betsy Ross and Mrs. Claus and asked her what message she was trying to send.

  “I was in Cuba at the age of twelve when Castro took over,” she said. “He promised a change just like this president is promising us, and right after that he began to do certain things that I see very familiar now, the same steps toward total control. So I had no choice but to leave my country as a child without my parents. . . . I never saw them again, and here I am fifty years later with concern that our children here might run into the same problems that we had.”

  So do you really think there are parallels between Castro and Obama? I asked. “Yes,” she said. “Do some reading and you’ll see. Go to the Communist Party U.S.A.”

  So I did.

  “Obama is certainly no communist,” Communist Party U.S.A. national board member Dan Margolis told me. “There’s no way that you could say that he’s gone anywhere close to being a communist. The only similarity I can see is that Fidel Castro said the word ‘change’ and Obama uses the word ‘change.’ . . . The idea that Obama is somehow leading a socialist revolution in this country is just patently ridiculous. Actually, I don’t even see any parallels.”

  “His policies aren’t socialist,” Comrade Margolis insisted. “You know, with the economic crisis, they wanted to prop up big finance. What we would have said is simply: ‘We need to nationalize these banks.’ . . . We’re not happy with the idea of escalating troops in Afghanistan. We don’t see a military victory there as really possible. . . . And health care, of course, if it were up to us we’d have socialized medicine.”

  But wait, isn’t the whole debate over whether Obama’s health-care plan constitutes socialized medicine? “It’s clearly not socialized medicine,” said Margolis. “An example of socialized medicine would be Cuba, where all doctors are employees of the government. . . . We consider that a better system but that’s not what Obama’s proposing.” It turns out that Obama wasn’t even the Democratic candidate communists saw as the closest thing to a fellow traveler in the ’08 campaign. The Communists liked Dennis Kucinich.

  Obama as Antichrist

  Twenty-five percent of Americans have heard the rumor that Obama is the Antichrist (the biblically predicted false messiah who will rule the world until the second coming of Christ), according to a Scripps-Howard poll.45 This is courtesy of a widely circulated e-mail chain that began to hit critical mass in March 2008, when Obama was on the verge of clinching the nomination:According to The Book of Revelations [sic] . . . the AntiChrist will be a man, in his 40s, of MUSLIM descent, who will deceive the nations with persuasive language, and have a MASSIVE Christ-like appeal. . . . the prophecy says that people will flock to him and he will promise false hope and world peace, and when he is in power, he will destroy everything.

  And Now: For the award winning Act of Stupidity Of all times the People of America want to elect, to the most Powerful position on the face of the Planet—The Presidency of the United States of America . . . A Muslim Male Extremist Between the ages of 17 and 40.

  Have the American People completely lost their Minds, or just their Power of Reason ???

  I’m sorry but I refuse to take a chance on the “unknown” candidate Obama.

  The e-mail was a small classic in paranoid politics and character assassination, bringing together war-on-terror anxiety, the moral authority of religious imagery and McCain campaign talking points about “the unknown Obama.”

  Among the folks who forwarded the e-mail was Mayor Danny Funderburk of Fort Mill, South Carolina, who explained to an inquiring reporter, “I was just curious if there was any validity to it. . . . I was trying to get documentation if there was any Scripture to back it up.”46

  Former Saturday Night Live comedienne turned conservative blogger Victoria Jackson also jumped in, writing that Obama “bears traits that resemble the anti-Christ.”47

  I met more believers in this theory in the summer of 2009, when Shirley Phelps-Roper decided to take her two young daughters on a field trip from Topeka, Kansas to Manhattan. They were coming to celebrate—yes, celebrate—the death of Walter Cronkite outside his memorial service.

  You might have heard of the Phelps-Roper family from the Westboro Baptist Church because of their practice of protesting at soldiers’ funerals—where signs range from “God Hates Fags” to “God Hates America”—apparently because we don’t hate quite enough for their taste. I ran into them on a bright Tuesday morning on the Upper West Side, where they were killing time in a pre-game protest outside a Jewish community center, stomping on American and Israeli flags. The daughters Megan and Grace were carrying signs that read “Barack Obama is the anti-Christ” and “America is Doomed.”

  I asked what Megan thought of President Obama. Her eyes lit up. “Oh, he’s the Antichrist,” she said. I ask for a little more explanation. “Well, he’s against Christ,” she said.

  Liberty University Law School Dean Matthew Staver felt he had to offer a word of caution to those who wanted to go the full crazy: While he did not personally believe Obama is the Antichrist, he could see how others might. “They are expressing a concern and a fear that is widely shared.”48 Depressingly, the journalistic accuracy site Snopes found it necessary to burst these hot-air balloons, pointing out that “nothing in the Bible—in Revelation or elsewhere—describes the antiChrist as being ‘a man, in his 40s, of Muslim descent.’ In fact, since the book of Revelation was complete by the end of the second century, but the religion of Islam wasn’t founded until about 400 years later, the notion that Revelation would have mentioned the word ‘Muslim’ at all is rather far-fetched.”49

  Despite the chronological absurdity, the McCain campaign put out a Web ad that seemed to play on Obama-as-Antichrist fears. Titled “The One,” it began with the sarcastic humor that distinguished the campaign’s communication style, mocking Obama supporters’ adulation of their candidate, interspersed with clips of Charlton Heston as Moses from Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments.

  The ad careened off into scriptural wording—“And the world will receive his blessings”—and used i
magery that recalled the cover of the 70-million-copies-selling Left Behind series which chronicles the rise of the Anti - christ in politics. The Rev. Tim LaHaye, co-author of Left Behind, said he recognized allusions to his work in the ad.50

  It was the creation of McCain media advisor Fred Davis, a man familiar with evangelical code as the friend of former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed and the nephew of conservative Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe. Time magazine editorialized, “It’s not easy to make the infamous Willie Horton ad from the 1988 presidential campaign seem benign. But suggesting that Barack Obama is the Antichrist might just do it.”51

  The caricatures kept popping up, furthered by the mock humor/hysteria of partisan sites. WorldNetDaily repeatedly weighed in on the affirmative, while the conservative Web site RedState.com started selling T-shirts and mugs sporting a large “O” with horns and the words “The Anti-Christ” underneath.52 Glenn Beck felt compelled to ask conservative evangelical leader Rev. John Hagee what were the “odds that Obama is the Antichrist?” Hagee said simply and clearly, “No Chance.”53

  The weekend before the election, the Salt Lake Tribune published an article addressing the fears: “For eons, Christians have believed the world is hurling toward oblivion. But with the current economic downturn, the war in Iraq and the likely election of Barack Obama, many think it has picked up speed.”54

  The so-called Rapture Index—an evangelical Web site that keeps tabs on signs that the end of the world may be at hand—reached 50,000 hits a day in the run-up to Election Day and the index hit new highs after Obama’s election.55

  And the Obama-as-Antichrist rumors didn’t dissipate after the election; evangelicals were buzzing that the winning lottery numbers in Illinois the day after the election were 666, considered the biblical “mark of the beast.” And in September 2009, Public Policy Polling found that 14 percent of New Jersey Republicans thought that Obama was the Antichrist, while 15 percent weren’t sure.56

  Look over all these disparate threads of Obama Derangement Syndrome—from comparisons to Hitler to communists to the Antichrist—and you’ll see some common themes.

  There is a recipe that keeps being repeated—a Wingnut claim that riffs on foundational fears is posted on a fringe Web site (usual suspects include WorldNetDaily or FreeRepublic) and then gets passed around. These dispatches from the outer limits get repeated on talk radio. They trickle down to the grassroots and appear on signs at protests. Eventually some elected official parrots the paranoia, playing to the base while venting their spleen. It makes news not only because the statements are outrageous but because they crystallize the crazy in our politics.

  THE BIRTH OF WHITE MINORITY POLITICS

  There’s one thing I can’t help but notice every time I go to a Tea Party or a town hall, let alone the Republican national convention.

  A lot of white people.

  The crowds are weirdly monochromatic. Even in the heart of Washington, D.C., a city that is 55 percent African-American, I didn’t see a single black person among the tens of thousands in the crowd at the 9/12 rally on the Washington Mall—it was a columnist’s version of “Where’s Waldo?”

  Some liberals look at the opposition to Obama, and they can’t wait to cry racism. Actress and activist Janeane Garofalo vented her spleen on behalf of many when she said, “This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up. That is nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks.”1 Reflexively playing the race card may be emotionally satisfying for the left, but after covering the Tea Party protests and town halls up close, I don’t believe simple racism is driving the opposition to President Obama. Yes, there is the drip drop of racist e-mails from small-town conservative officials and racially overtoned netroot nicknames for Obama like “Ogabe” (a riff off Zimbabwe’s dictator Robert Mugabe). Yes, American voting is still largely split on racial lines, and race has been a fundamental fault line in U.S. politics since the original sin of slavery. But as Barack Obama once pointed out, he was black before the election. His breakthrough caucus victory occurred in 96 percent white Iowa. America has come a long way from the brutal bigotry of the Bull Connor era.

  Something more complex is going on.

  We are witnessing the birth of white minority politics.

  In some ways, it looks like the ethnic politics of past groups—like the millions of Irish or Italian immigrants who arrived annually at the turn of the last century—complete with the competing emotions of pride and victimization. There was a focus on preserving ancestral heritage against the onslaught of change in the new world. But this time the economic struggle isn’t about climbing the ladder of success; it’s about not falling further behind. With an increase of more than 2.2 million white males unemployed in the year since Obama’s election, 2 they feel they are getting squeezed by a changing America—a bad economy combined with a slow-moving demographic tsunami.

  They feel like a minority because they fear they are going to be a minority. The year 2050 has special resonance—that’s the year that the U.S. census estimates whites will no longer be a majority in America.3 In their eyes, Obama’s election represents a new urban onslaught of educated minorities and immigrants who are pushing the rural whites who used to define what it meant to be an American down the economic food chain.

  White minority politics is a politics of resistance to social change propelled by resentment. It resonates with people who feel like members of an oppressed minority, under siege by a modern multicultural America that is being imposed on them and disrespecting traditional American values in the process. It is an echo of what Richard Hofstadter described as a core characteristic of the paranoid style a half century ago: “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.”4

  The signature rallying cry is “Take Our Country Back”—a slogan that surfaces at Tea Parties and town halls (“I want my country back, I don’t want my flag to change!”). It is used on Wingnut Web sites, serves as a signature line on talk shows and provides the title for a conservative conference. (Coincidentally but perhaps not incidentally, the whites-only British National Party uses a similar slogan: “We Want Our Country Back.”) It accompanies talk about the assault on American values and the undermining of our constitutional republic, of slavery via socialism, tyranny and totalitarianism. Rush Limbaugh tells his audience, “We’re living in occupied territory. . . . We, the people of this country, need to be liberated. We are oppressed now.”5

  This desire to take the country back is combined with an idealized vision of America’s past, a more pastoral time of small-town values and small government. It is unspoken that this was a largely white America. It’s consistent with the way Confederate flags that occasionally wave in protest crowds are explained away by saying they represent “heritage, not hate.” The appeal is so emotional that one sign I saw read simply, “Preserve Mom, Apple Pie and the American Way.” In their eyes, the ideal of America is under assault.

  Right-wing radio show host Michael Savage has been beating the drum of resistance and resentment hard. “In the past people would come over and become Americans. Now they come over and they want you to become them. They want you to speak Spanish, they want you to act Muslim, they want you to give up going to the church and go into a mosque,” Savage said on August 20, 2009, as the town hall protests were erupting into occasional fistfights.

  “We’re gonna have a revolution in this country if this keeps up,” Savage continued; “the rage has reached a boil. If they keep pushing us around and if we keep having these schmucks running for office catering to the multicultural people who are destroying the culture of this country, the white male—the one without connections, the one without money—has nothing to lose. . . . He is still the majority, no one speaks for him, everyone craps on him, people use him for cannon fodder, and he has no voice whatsoever. You’re gonna find out that if you keep pushing this
country around, there is an ugly side to the white male that has been suppressed for probably 30 years right now but it really has never gone away.”6

  It’s not just the complaint of a few isolated shock jocks strutting their psychoses and doing the latest version of the angry white guy rant.

  Conservative pundit and former Reagan communications director Pat Buchanan has been a prophet of white minority politics for decades, building a successful career on the concept from President Richard Nixon’s southern strategy to his own pitchfork populist campaigns for the presidency. (While earning a reputation as a personally genial conservative voice on political talk shows, Pat Buchanan is not just an incidental advocate for these forces. His 2006 book, State of Emergency, was subtitled The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. Buchanan has appeared twice on the avowedly white supremacist radio show Political Cesspool, most recently in July 2008. The host of Political Cesspool, James Edwards, attributes volunteering on Buchanan’s 2000 presidential campaign to his political awakening.) Since Obama’s election, Buchanan has been particularly prolific on the subject, writing about the plight of white voters: “America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.”7