What all of these people have in common is a set of ideas that have been pumped into society for quite some time now, from every direction imaginable. When I was living in Los Angeles 30 years ago, gang violence had largely simmered down, until “The Godfather,” a masterpiece, arrived in movie houses and did for street gangs the same thing that “Birth of a Nation” did for the Ku Klux Klan five-and-a-half decades earlier. (One of the street gangs that came into existence after the film was called “The Family.”) That was far from what Francis Ford Coppola had in mind, but such are the odd twists of a society in which the idea of the metaphor seems to have no weight. Too, too much is taken literally.

This and the many other gangster films that formed a trend helped create the ethos out of which rose the Crips and the Bloods and the many, many drive-by murders that eventually became a national crisis. Kids started joining gangs and parents started trying to move them out of that gang environment if they could. The blaxploitation films that kicked off with “Sweet Sweetback’s Badass Song” in 1971 were also important because they glamorized Negro criminal types and elevated the idea that violence was fine and dandy because the rules of the system didn’t apply to people who weren’t white.

On the other side of the lane, as with the Oklahoma City bomber and the Unabomber, there was consensus. It didn’t matter if one got a right- or left-wing reading: The police, the FBI, the CIA and local and federal government were all too corrupt to depend on. In the South, during the civil rights movement years, underground tapes were circulated with titles like “For Segregationists Only”; they depicted those who attempted to bring constitutional rights below the Mason Dixon Line as invaders who had to be dealt with very, very firmly. That firmness took three dimensions in the form of assassinations, bombings, beatings, hosings and the killing, mutilating and bruising of men, women and children. In the North, Malcolm X, always a heckler of the nonviolent movement, was calling for rifle clubs and “busting them redneck crackers in the head.”

In the wake of the Negro riots that moved along, almost summer to summer, from 1964 to 1968, the Black Panther Party and the Weather Underground picked up on all of that Malcolm X rhetoric. During the anti-war years they put those ideas about self-defense and revolution into some thin Marxist wrappers and went to market calling for “offing the pig” and “bringing the war home.” There were plenty of shootouts between the Panthers and the police, as well as between them and rival cultural nationalists who thought African cultural retention and reassertion were more sturdy than alliances with white people and using texts by Europeans like Karl Marx. The Weather Underground attacked people in the street, bombed police stations and robbed banks. The Wild West, Bonnie and Clyde and dreams of overthrowing the government came together.

In retrospect, there wasn’t much actual difference between the violence of those reactionaries in the South and those purported revolutionaries in the North. Because violence was the common reaction of greatest intensity, a new level of it became popular in the mass medium of film. Violence was a seat that could fit every rump. Once Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde” and Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” cranked up the scale and realistic depiction of violence higher than ever, two kinds of things began to happen. From the right, there were the lone vigilante types, such as Charles Bronson’s “Death Wish” character and Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry. They had to break the rules because the system neither could nor would protect society from the demons who were rising from below. These men took the law into their own hands and blew away the riffraff. It had to be done. They had no choice. This made them heroes in rebellion against the system.

From the left end of the spectrum came all of the movies, culminating in “JFK,” that said, over and over and over, that the federal government and the army were corrupt, that most problems could be traced back to the CIA and that anyone who had faith in the system was, at best, a naif. The only thing one could have faith in was the fact that these institutions would forever play dirty tricks, try to cover them up and, when discovered, murder those who came across the muddy tracks that led to the powers that be.

The grand irony, however, is that Southern segregation was not brought to an end, nor redneck violence dramatically reduced, by violence. They were taken care of by the passage of civil rights laws, the election of local black mayors and other officials and the imprisoning of whites for violent crimes against black people that were once ignored by the local police. Richard Nixon was not felled by bullets or mail bombs but by the freedom of the press and Senate hearings. Big business, for all its lobbying, is often put in line by investigative reporting, public scandals and multi-million-dollar judgments in court against those who put products on the market that are dangerous to their buyers.

But the myth of violent solutions as the ultimate solutions maintains itself in much of popular media.

It is not, therefore, surprising that the Oklahoma City bomber and the Unabomber would find that they have much in common. It is not, therefore, surprising that the marauding street gangs who have made receiving respect a life or death game would listen to rap recordings thick with references to blaxploitation, gangster and horror films in which blood is the sticky unit of exchange. It is not, therefore, surprising that anyone, no matter their color, their station in life, their religion, even their sex, might decide that the time has come to let the world know that things have gone too far, that the insults and indignities must be put to a stop and bullets and bombs alone can make clear just how reprehensible things are.

Does this mean that we have to go after the gun makers and demand more of them? Sure. Does it mean that there should be a ban on violent films? In our world, bans only send things underground, where child pornography is bought and sold. What this society has to do now is recreate an image of civilization that is neither painfully repressed nor maudlin. That’s pretty clear. When a violent minority that crosses color lines comes to believe that killing those you know or do not know is a reasonable solution to problems, we are in need of another vision. Blowing up federal buildings, shooting other school kids because they make you angry and sending out bombs to express your rage against technology are the result of a brutal attitude toward difficulty, one that has been celebrated in our popular culture for far too long.

The piece is largely an attempt to add a patina of respectability to the ancient, brainless comment thread talking point about how Robert Byrd was in the Klan, but lots of Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act, so therefore Democrats are the real racists. (In this respect, the piece is an homage to Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism,” which attempted to expand “Nazi stands for National Socialist” to book length, without pictures.) The only problem is that the “lie” he’s arguing against is 100 percent true, except when he states it in such a way that it no longer resembles what anyone has ever actually claimed.

So: It’s true, and no one denies this, that Republicans used to be very good on civil rights and Democrats used to be super racist. It’s true that Woodrow Wilson was a bigot and (Northern, liberal) Republican senators were better than (Southern, conservative) Democratic senators on civil rights in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Williamson’s argument seems to be that Republicans couldn’t have taken advantage of a Democratic split over civil rights by appealing to racist white Southern voters because Republicans were too uniformly pro-civil rights, themselves. (This great big lie he’s debunking is one that Nixon and Lee Atwater and Ronald Reagan happily signed on to — they were thrilled when the Democrats fractured the New Deal coalition by eventually embracing civil rights!)

Williamson would, I guess, call it revisionist history, but he has revised all of the history out of it.

Even if the Republicans’ rise in the South had happened suddenly in the 1960s (it didn’t) and even if there were no competing explanation (there is), racism — or, more precisely, white southern resentment over the political successes of the civil-rights movement — would be an implausible explanation for the dissolution of the Democratic bloc in the old Confederacy and the emergence of a Republican stronghold there. That is because those southerners who defected from the Democratic party in the 1960s and thereafter did so to join a Republican party that was far more enlightened on racial issues than were the Democrats of the era, and had been for a century.

Oh, did they? It’s dubious to argue that the party that nominated Barry Goldwater for president was “far more enlightened” than the one that nominated Kennedy, but Johnson was a big ol’ Texas racist, so sure, fine, pretend Nelson Rockefeller cancels out Barry. But the segregationists didn’t all wake up and decide to vote for Republicans starting in 1965 — they revolted. George Wallace started a third party. They continued fighting for racism within the party, and they eventually lost. But it wasn’t until the conservative movement had finished fully taking over the Republican Party that the great shift finished.

After devoting a lot of words to LBJ’s very real history of being a loud-mouthed racist, Williamson explains that Johnson’s dumb, loud-mouthed racism was just a reflection of the whole of Democratic Party philosophy and belief since time immemorial.

Johnson did not spring up from the Democratic soil ex nihilo. Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fourteenth Amendment. Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fifteenth Amendment. Not one voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Eisenhower, as a general, began the process of desegregating the military, and Truman, as president, formalized it, but the main reason either had to act was that President Wilson, the personification of Democratic progressivism, had resegregated previously integrated federal facilities. (“If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it,” he declared.) Klansmen from Senator Robert Byrd to Justice Hugo Black held prominent positions in the Democratic Party — and President Wilson chose the Klan epic Birth of a Nation to be the first film ever shown at the White House.

Johnson himself denounced an earlier attempt at civil-rights reform as the “nigger bill.” So what happened in 1964 to change Democrats’ minds? In fact, nothing.

What is the funniest part of this: How it basically makes one brief stop in between 1875 and the mid-20th century in its exhaustive history of Democratic racism? Or how Williamson is clearly annoyed at having to even slightly, obliquely credit Harry Truman (Democrat!) for desegregating the armed forces, a thing (Democrat) Harry Truman did? Like, maybe what happened in 1964 was the eventual result of an intraparty battle that was happening in 1948 when Democrat Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces (and Strom Thurmond, future Republican, threw a big fit about it)?

The 1964 Civil Rights Act, and Lyndon Johnson’s role in ensuring its passage, was one major victory in a years-long effort by the party’s liberals to make the Democratic Party the civil rights party, and it worked so well that the racists were effectively no longer welcome. They responded by changing their positions or changing sides. It wasn’t an overnight change, because politics is slow, but it happened: Robert Byrd and even George Wallace changed their positions on black civil rights and apologized. Those who couldn’t adapt, or those for whom bigotry was more genuine belief than political opportunism, left the party. Strom Thurmond became a Republican. Lester Maddox launched a third-party presidential bid against Jimmy Carter and eventually endorsed Republican Pat Buchanan in 1992. Maddox was also a charter member of the Council of Conservative Citizens, the white supremacist paleoconservative group that once counted Trent Lott, Thurmond and Jesse Helms as members. These guys are the heirs to the conservative white Southern Democrat tradition. I’m not really sure they themselves would consider it a pernicious lie to say as much.

What would have been much, much more entertaining would have been if, instead of writing this piece about “Democrats” and “Republicans,” Williamson had written it about liberals and conservatives. Barry Goldwater and George Wallace both used conservative rhetoric to justify their segregationist beliefs — and so did William F. Buckley. Both parties at the time had liberal and conservative wings, and in each of those parties it was the liberal wing that was right on civil rights.

There was really only one American political party with a solid record on civil rights in the first half of the 20th century, and it was the American Communist Party. But “in praise of the liberal Northeastern Republicans who stood with the communists on civil rights and who were eventually driven from the party by conservatives like the ones who founded this magazine” would not go over well in the National Review, I imagine.

Williamson goes on to argue that the white South didn’t go Republican because of civil rights, it went Republican because of … the New Deal. So while the change happened too slowly and gradually to be ascribed to racism, it can happily be pinned on a series of popular economic programs that had been enacted 30 years prior to 1964. (Programs so popular that Southern racists and blacks joined together in a political coalition that lasted until liberals began … winning civil rights victories.)

But let’s not also forget to blame hippies and welfare:

The Republican ascendancy in Dixie is associated with the rise of the southern middle class, the increasingly trenchant conservative critique of Communism and the welfare state, the Vietnam controversy and the rise of the counterculture, law-and-order concerns rooted in the urban chaos that ran rampant from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and the incorporation of the radical Left into the Democratic Party. Individual events, especially the freak show that was the 1968 Democratic convention, helped solidify conservatives’ affiliation with the Republican Party.

In other words, it was literally everything that was going on in the 1960s besides civil rights issues that made white Southerners eventually fully embrace the Republican Party. (And blacks continue to support the Democrats because Democrats lied about what happened in the 1960s and because Johnson promised them free government money forever, apparently.)

I mean it’s obviously true that the shift didn’t happen purely because of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but it’s just as obviously true that it’s a hilarious and deeply stupid misreading of history to pretend that the Republican Party has always and will always be the champion of civil rights.

[Thanks to, and please also read: Adam Serwer, Jonathan Chait, Mark Schmitt, Clay Risen, and Jonathan Bernstein.]

“While so many have been impatient about the pace of progress, there was Frank, insisting we recognize that, in the last two years, he was regularly invited as a guest of honor by the very government that fired him simply for being gay,” said a statement by Rea Carey, the executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

Joe Solmonese, the president of the Washington-based Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement that Kameny “set a path for the modern LGBT civil rights movement.”

Kameny told The Associated Press in 2009 that his contributions to the gay rights struggle had only recently begun to sink in. He said at the time he wanted to be remembered most for coming up with the slogan “Gay is Good” in 1968 to counter an onslaught of negativism aimed at gays and lesbians.

Kameny had been an astronomer for just five months when he was asked to meet with federal investigators. They told him they had information he was gay, and he was dismissed.

Kameny didn’t leave quietly, however. He contested his firing by the U.S. Civil Service Commission by writing letters to the agency, both houses of Congress and eventually the White House.

He sued and lost in lower courts, but pressed on with a lengthy brief in 1961 that is now regarded as the first civil rights claim based on sexual orientation to be brought to the U.S. Supreme Court. Soon after, he co-founded the Mattachine Society of Washington, which advocated for equal rights for gays and lesbians.

In 1965, Kameny and 10 others became the first to stage a gay rights protest in front of the White House and later at the Pentagon and elsewhere. Many of Kameny’s signs as well as buttons and leaflets from that time are now housed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

In the last years of his life, Kameny was increasingly recognized for his work as a gay rights pioneer. He was honored in 2009 during Washington’s annual Capital Pride celebration and that same year received a formal apology for being fired solely based on his sexual orientation. The apology came from the successor to the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. The office is headed by John Berry, who is openly gay, and Kameny attended his swearing-in.

When gay marriage became legal in the nation’s capital in 2010, Kameny was at the first weddings.

“Being gay has become infinitely better than it was,” he said earlier this year when documents from his collection of gay rights history went on display for the first time at the Library of Congress. “The fundamental theme underneath all of that is simply equality.”

Associated Press writer Brett Zongker contributed to this report.

The New Black Panther Party is a cartoonish fringe group of a couple guys who play “’60s radical” dress-up and say mean things about whitey for Fox cameras in order to scare old white people. They have been explicitly rejected by the old Black Panther Party. For some reason, various conservatives have dedicated themselves to proving that this weird, marginal group of Nation of Islam cast-offs is somehow supported by or deeply connected to the Democratic Party and the Obama administration in particular, because, you know, Eric Holder and Barack Obama, those are two guys who very obviously share the values of extremist anti-white proponents of racial separation.

So Breitbart “proves” something or other about the essential anti-white racistness of the Obama campaign by noting that members of the inane New Black Panther Party were spotted by cameras near Obama, at various times, and also NBPP head Malik Zulu Shabazz spoke at the event.

(Brietbart goes on to publish two pictures of the event despite the photographer withholding permission, because “The First Amendment allows photographs of such enormous public importance to see the light of day.” Good luck with that argument in court?)

Andrew C. McCarthy gleefully endorses Breitbart’s story in a breathless post at the National Review’s The Corner:

This is a shocking story, and a breathtaking indictment of the mainstream media which went out of its way to avoid vetting Obama as a candidate — and to make sure anyone who tried to do due diligence got no sunshine. A candidate who chose to appeared in the company of, say, the KKK, would have provoked relentlessly hostile media coverage and, in short order, have been marginalized as disqualified to hold responsible elective office.

If only the media had reported that some fringe weirdos also participated in this event that both Democratic candidates and thousands of other people participated in, and then the fringe weirdos sort of followed Obama around for a while. That would’ve opened America’s eyes! (I mean the media besides NPR, which did report that the NBPP was there.)

Here’s the bit of this sad, desperate reach that is the saddest and most desperate: “Andrew further reminds us that, in March 2008, the Obama campaign website posted an endorsement of Obama by the New Black Panther Party.” Whoa, did they really? Shocking if true! It is, of course, not true. It was a user-generated blog post on the Obama campaign site that the campaign removed as soon as they became aware of its existence. Because websites do not “post” things to themselves, generally, McCarthy’s statement can’t even be charitably described as technically accurate. It’s just a lie.

A random stupid incorrect Breitbart smear is worth paying attention to only to the extent that the smear threatens to bubble up to the more reputable conservative press, or Fox, or Republican elected officials. The McCarthy endorsement means keep an eye on this one!

Here, in no particular order, are some of my “favorite” Politico comments on the story.

“J.O.B.S.” writes:

MITT ROMNEY’s father, Governor George Romney of Michigan, marched several times with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. MLK’s history of his being a Christian conservative is carried on today by his brother’s daughter, Dr. Aveda King. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr wanted Gov. George Romney to be the POTUS and not Nixon.

Christian conservative Martin Luther King would definitely have voted for Mitt Romney over Barack Obama. I am positive of this fact.

“velvet steel” says:

“His speech Sunday dedicating a memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. near the National Mall”

Oh you mean the “Monument of Greed”?

No other family of anyone featured on the mall was ever PAID any money for their likeness or words. Only the “King family”. In fact they were paid nearly a million dollars.

Pretty humerous since the “Monument of Greed” was “Made in China” and they ended up making him look slightly Chinese.

What another utter DISGRACE that this administration has set upon America. Couldn’t get the statue right and then to find out that it’s all about GREED and how to make a BUCK.

Pretty humerous indeed.

“TTSSYF” says:

So many blacks love to wallow in the past. It provides an excuse for their on-going failure as a group to advance in our society, and it serves as a tool with which to continuously bludgeon whites. They’re addicted to feelings of outrage and resentment and thus obsess about events and conditions of 50 years ago or more. I’m convinced most of them WISH it were still 1965 so they could have an excuse to riot. It’s apparently much easier (and safer) to sit around and whine and complain about all of the so-called injustice or “institutional” racism that is supposedly holding them back than it is to apply themselves and be confronted with the possibility of failing on their own merits or lack thereof.

Yep, black people definitely still wish it was 1965. Things were great for them in 1965! That’s what the rioting was about, all of the fun they were having pretending to feel oppressed.

“matt22″ has a certain word that he clearly really, really wants to say:

51 years ago. things have changed a lot..

just uttering the word ‘n****r can get a white man fired from his job for creating a “hostile work environment”, along with getting charged with a hate crime.

if you are black, you can scream it from the rooftops and it’s ok.

Pigressives want to keep race issues on everybody’s minds. they want every year to be like 1965. White guilt got Obama elected in 2008, why not try again in 2012?

It’s just not fair, that white people are no longer allowed to use racial slurs at work. (This is why Pigressives, like black people, wish it was still 1965.)

“CatoTheElder” has a great recommendation:

Why not a painting of Rev Wright preaching “God damn America”? That would truly resonate with Barack Hussein Obama.

Yes, I am sure it would, but where would one even get a painting of Reverend Wright preaching “God damn America,” and how would anyone who saw the painting know what Reverend Wright was supposed to be saying? Would there be a little caption, or a word bubble? Because then it sounds more like a “cartoon.”

Of course, it’s mean to pick on barely literate commenters. Sure, they’re representative of a toxic right-wing blogosphere devoted in large part to hatred, pseudohistory, misinformation and paranoia, but the pros are really much better at writing this sort of shit without accidentally wishing out loud that it was still OK to say “nigger.”

Take it away, Rick:

“The question is — and this is what Barack Obama didn’t want to answer — is that human life a person under the Constitution? And Barack Obama says no,” Santorum said in the interview, which was posted online Wednesday. “Well if that person, human life is not a person, then, I find it almost remarkable for a black man to say, ‘we are going to decide who are people and who are not people.’”

If you’re not familiar with antiabortion rhetoric, this is probably all kinds of weird to you. Why can’t a black person have an opinion about the personhood of a fetus? But Rick was just paraphrasing a very common antiabortion argument, so clarity wasn’t really an issue: All the viewers of “OTJ With That Guy” would’ve known what Santorum was talking about.

As Dave Weigel explains, antiabortion activists consider themselves the abolitionists of the 21st century. The fight for fetal personhood is the modern-day equivalent of the fight to free African-Americans from bondage.

That explains his statement, but you are still free to find it incredibly insulting. Santorum, of course, reiterated his point in another interview with some Christian news service.

Today other human beings, the unborn of all races, are also wrongly treated as property and denied the right to life for the same reason; because they are not considered persons under the constitution.

The great thing about this argument, to me, is that it means fetuses have the right to bear arms.