At a rally inspired by Glenn Beck, protesters say they're the real America, and are ready to take the country back
A crowd of people, some carrying signs, are shown during a rally at Freedom Plaza in Washington on Saturday, Sept. 12, 2009.
AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana
A crowd of people, some carrying signs, are shown during a rally at Freedom Plaza in Washington on Saturday, Sept. 12, 2009.
WASHINGTON — “You have redefined gridlock in Washington, D.C.,” Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., told the crowd gathered in front of the Capitol on Saturday for a rally that was part Tea Party and part Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project. The reference was to the highways around the nation’s capital, which Blackburn said she’d heard had been closed due to the 1.5 million people who’d come out for the demonstration.
Crowd size estimates like the one Blackburn gave were flying around all day on Saturday. Some said they heard 1.2 million, others 1.6 million; conservative blogger Michelle Malkin said in one post that ABC News had estimated the attendance at 2 million.
Malkin was wrong — ABC had never reported anything like that. In her own way, Blackburn was wrong, too. So were all the others. They weren’t even in the ballpark, which most news outlets estimated in the tens of thousands and D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Services said, unofficially, was somewhere between 60,000 and 75,000 people.
Still, that size crowd is a pretty impressive accomplishment. It’s certainly not as large as plenty of the protests Washington has seen over the years, including some of the more recent anti-war rallies, but considering how unfamiliar these kinds of demonstrations are to the right and the distance many of the attendees traveled to be here, it can’t be dismissed out of hand.
But the crowd numbers, and the confusion over them, were symptomatic of a larger phenomenon that was taking place on the Mall Saturday. Stepping in to the crowd there felt, at some times, like stepping into an alternate reality. It was a reality in which provisions establishing “death panels” really can be found in healthcare reform legislation, where President Obama is a Marxist and a Fascist, where the majority was represented by these protesters rather than the voters who elected a Democrat president and gave him an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress less than a year ago — it was a reality where the D.C. Beltway had been shut down due to an influx of 1.5 million people, almost three times more than the entire population of Washington.
It was, also, a reality that would brook no interference from the one outside it. In one incident that’s quickly become famous on the Internet, a CNN correspondent doing a live appearance on television was drowned out by the shouts of protesters behind her. The network was a frequent target, especially the bus it had parked on 3rd Street, which formed the border of the primary protest area. The vehicle became a gathering place for those angry about the mainstream media and what they perceive as its liberal bias. (By contrast, when most of the protesters went to a Fox News truck parked nearby, it was to express their appreciation.) One man stood out on the street in front of it, holding a large sign headlined “Today’s state-controlled media.” Below, he’d added the logos of various networks, and his own takes on their acronyms. There was NBC, or “Nothing But Crap,” ABC — “All Barrack (sic) Channel” — and CBS, which he’d dubbed “Controlled by State.”
At one point in the afternoon, a CNN employee stood on the sidewalk in front of the bus, a bemused look on his face despite the crowd of about 20 people that had gathered to hurl various insults at him and his company. One woman was there dressed as the Grim Reaper; she carried a sign that declared “Journalism died: 2008.”
Of course, since I was dressed for work and standing there holding a pad on which I was taking notes, the crowd made me for a reporter too, and there was some ire directed my way as well — some in good humor, some not so much. Then a young woman who declined to give her name pulled me aside.
“I just wanted to let you know there are some normal people here to protest government spending,” she said. Identifying herself as part of a local chapter of the College Republicans, she added, “We’re not all nuts. I just wanted to let you know that.”
She was right, too. Not everyone at the protest was “nuts,” not by a long shot.
There was Linda Raileanu, for instance, who carried a sign reading “Nurses against Obamacare.” A registered nurse who told Salon she had more than 20 years of experience working, in part, in Philadelphia hospitals, Raileanu said she was there because she worked with physicians and nurses who were against the Democratic proposals for healthcare reform and were “very upset Obama’s giving the perception we’re for it.” She wanted to represent them, she said. But she did participate in that alternate reality a bit. Though she’d worked to provide end-of-life counseling, she told Salon she was against the provisions in the bills going through Congress that would provide coverage for people who choose to receive such counseling because she believed it should be done by professionals, not bureaucrats. (No bureaucrats would be involved in the actual consultation.)
But there were certainly a lot of people there who seemed like they’d fall under the “nuts” category, at least by the College Republican’s standards. There was one with a sign that asked, “Whose spirit is in the White House?” and included photos of Adolf Hitler, Karl Marx, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and Obama. Another sign borrowed the Joker Obama poster that’s gotten a few minutes of fame recently, adding a Hitler mustache to the president’s face; underneath the image were the words “Obamacare is Eugenics.” One man held a sign reading, “Transparent? I see through your socialist lies, fool.” Each o in “fool” had been formed by the Obama logo.
And there was the other woman who pulled me aside. She had come down from Germantown, Pa., she told me, but she, too, declined to give her name — for fear of Obama’s “snitches,” she explained.
“I studied Nazi Germany, I read the story of how they took over,” she told me. “From the very beginning I heard it with Obama … I’ve studied the camps. That’s why people are here, because they’re afraid of the death camps that are coming.” The woman also said she believed liberals had “voted for a hijacker … voted for al-Qaida,” but said she understood, because they hadn’t known, and she was ready to forgive them if they woke up to the situation.
The atmosphere and the slogans were, in places, extreme enough that four liberals who’d come to parody the protesters were having no trouble slipping in unnoticed, even cheered. This despite the four — Jack Neville, Julian Brunner, Tushara Ekanayake and Marina France — carrying signs like one that read “A whole lot of white people here today” and another that asked “Where’s the proof?” and showed an image of Obama’s certification of live birth. Ekanayake’s sign warned of gay Marxism — it should have been a tip-off, except that he was also carrying a photo of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a rising star in the Republican Party, and telling people he was Jindal’s nephew. That, he said, had allayed suspicion.
“It’s such an example of group think,” France said of the crowd at the rally. She made a good case, too, pointing out yet another way in which the reality on the Mall Saturday differed from the one beyond it. One of the more popular themes in protesters’ signs was a theme Beck has been harping on lately, the alleged proliferation of so-called “czars” like the drug czar in the Obama administration. Many of those signs linked the presence of those czars to Communism — it was unclear if any of the protesters holding them were aware of the real history of Russia, in which the Communists overthrew and replaced the czars.
The fake “War on Christmas” outrage
It's become as integral to the season as caroling and Black Friday -- but the sentiment is completely manufactured
One of the defining qualities of late December is the predictable and ritualized nature of America’s holiday season. Other than discovering what’s inside the wrapped gift boxes, there’s no mystery or suspense to it anymore. The Christmas music starts right before Thanksgiving. Then come the flickering lights, the red-and-green decor, Hollywood’s vacation movie blitz, and finally, with media charlatans turning the key, the fake outrage machine rumbles back to life.
Like a narcissist’s souped-up 4-by-4, this turbocharged colossus of self-righteous indignation makes a lot of noise and leaves a mess in its wake — but ultimately says a lot more about its drivers’ pitiable insecurities than anything else.
This year has been particularly illustrative, as the fake outrage machine has caricatured itself like a Bigfoot-esque monster truck in a desperate bid for attention. In just the last few weeks, the Heritage Foundation billed an Agriculture Department initiative to raise revenue for tree farmers as a “Christmas Tree Tax”; Fox News said that standard federal safety warnings were proof that the government wants to “tell you how to decorate your Christmas tree”; and conservative activists criticized Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee, an Independent, for daring to consecrate a “holiday tree” — rather than a “Christmas Tree” — at the statehouse.
Meanwhile, under the headline “‘Modern Grinches Step Up Anti-Christmas Efforts,” the Christian Broadcasting Network lashed out at cities for trying to respect the separation of church and state at holiday time, and the American Family Association continued its annual effort to denigrate companies that substitute “Happy Holidays” for “Merry Christmas.”
To know that this machine’s outrage is indeed fake is to appreciate some telling facts about the alleged transgressions. For instance, the government’s recent revenue and regulatory moves were entirely routine and nonreligious, while Gov. Chafee was just preserving a long-standing tradition in a state founded as a haven for religious pluralism. Similarly, many cities are still including Christmas in their winter festivities — they are just including other celebrations as well. And if saying “Happy Holidays” somehow represents a “War on Christmas,” then none other than Christian icon Tim Tebow must be one of the aggressors’ lead field generals, what with the NFL quarterback now appearing in a television ad wishing Coloradans “Happy Holidays” — not “Merry Christmas.”
These facts, of course, are no deterrent to the fake outrage machine, because the machine’s operators aren’t really interested in preventing religious bigotry. In a majority-Christian nation whose politics and culture are steeped in Christianity, these zealots are interested in pretending their fellow Christians are somehow oppressed, contradictory facts be damned.
In propagating such an illusion, they’re not earnestly embodying their religion’s missionary spirit. Instead, they’re manufacturing victimhood, all to gin up sympathy and create a rationale to continue ramrodding their theology down everyone else’s throats.
That some feel this need to push their faith with such craven tactics speaks volumes about the nature of spiritual self-doubt today. Sure, our tumultuous world of bombast and chaos leads us to assume that the loudest are the most devout. But in practice, those who are truly comfortable in their faith are often the most humble about their orthodoxies because they have nothing to prove. By contrast, those who are the most insecure in their beliefs can sometimes be the most in-your-face about their dogma.
In that sense, there’s a “doth protest too much” tenor to the roar of the fake outrage machine. That self-indicting message may be difficult to detect amid all the exploding ordnance in the War on Christmas, but it’s there — and the more the machine revs its engines every December, the more that message comes through.
David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. More David Sirota
13. Megyn Kelly
Fox's perpetually outraged anchor will sell any dubious talking point with a sneer
Megyn Kelly is one of Fox News chief Roger Ailes’ favorites, and it’s easy to see why: She’s equal parts gorgeous and belligerent. She’s smart and quick enough to hold her own in any interview, and she has no qualms about beating the drum for whatever crackpot right-wing story line the network’s lead propagandists are currently pushing, no matter how dubious. Hence, we get a year’s worth of terrifying stories on the awesome political power of the New Black Panther Party, complete with unlikely Justice Department conspiracy theories and b-roll footage designed to unnerve old white viewers. When the story has outlived its usefulness, it’s summarily forgotten, and we move on to the next tale.
There’s really no one who better represents the insidious nature of the Fox project than Kelly. Hannity and O’Reilly are packaged and sold as right-wing shouters. Kelly’s an “anchor” who professes to have no partisan bias of her own. And she could very well be telling the truth! She doesn’t need to personally believe the things she says, after all. When she casually refers to the tax burden on “the so-called rich” (so called because they are, generally), she’s just doing her job. When Kelly, in the midst of excoriating a Democrat, claims that Fox personalities don’t regularly compare liberals and Democrats to Nazis, everyone (besides some unknown non-savvy portion of her audience) knows we’re not supposed to take her seriously.
I imagine that perma-sneer, that disgusted look of disbelieving contempt that remains plastered on Kelly’s face during the entirety of “America Live,” disappears the minute the red light on top of the camera goes off, because Megyn Kelly doesn’t actually give a shit about the National Day of Prayer or seriously believe the New Black Panther Party represents a threat to democracy. She’s just happy to have a job doing something she loves: being a reliable bile-delivery system for a massive political messaging organization.
Recently, in an argument with some repulsive talk radio hack, Kelly defended not just her own paid maternity leave — the sort of professional perk that a high-powered attorney like herself would (justifiably!) feel totally entitled to — but went on to seemingly endorse European-style government-mandated paid leave for all, including fathers. The fact that a pre-leave Kelly had savagely mocked the idea of paternity leave is amusing but unsurprising. She’s a former attorney. Her primarily professional skill is convincingly making whatever argument you pay her to make. (She said as much to Rebecca Dana, in fact.) Which is so much worse and hackier than being a simple ideologue.
HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
Her offhand claim that police pepper spray is “a food product, essentially,” which seems like a very rough first draft of a right-wing talking point that was not quite ready for standard use by the noise machine.
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(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene
17. John Stossel
The cable news clown is a poor ambassador for libertarianism
I’d say it’s nice to have a libertarian presence on television regularly, but there are I believe more libertarians on television regularly in 2011 than there are morally ambiguous antiheroes on premium cable dramas. (What we really need are more socialists — Americans are sick of capitalism!) And Stossel is not a great brand ambassador for the “free minds, free markets” crowd, because he’s a silly clown.
Stossel’s a ridiculous local-news “consumer watchdog” reporter who discovered Milton Friedman. He’s the worst of simple-minded sensationalist television news masquerading as a maverick because he’s “politically incorrect” (a term that when self-applied invariably means “an asshole”).
If I were a libertarian, I’d be embarrassed by Stossel’s prominence. Sneering contempt for supposed liberal shibboleths is not actually a well-considered political philosophy. There’s nothing “libertarian,” for example, about not believing in climate change. That’s just tribal corporatism, totally disconnected from any economics-based belief about the superiority of market forces over government industrial policy.
Stossel rehashes received wisdom without truly understanding, let alone questioning, any of it, which is basically what conservatives think every leftist college student is doing. The limits of his conclusion-first mode of advocacy journalism are exposed when he’s forced to apologize for reporting his predetermined conclusions even when the evidence doesn’t bear them out, like when he attempted to report that organic produce (which hippies and liberals like) is more dangerous than conventional produce (which is grown and picked by the great free market god, who bestows his grace on giant agribusiness conglomerates), only for it to be revealed that his own tests showed no such thing.
Of course, it’s perfectly libertarian to profess not to see what exactly is unfair or exploitative about the widespread practice of unpaid internships, a system that provides profitable organizations with free labor while offering work experience only to college students privileged enough to devote significant amounts of time to unpaid internships. “I built my career on unpaid interns,” Mr. Stossel says, which does at least explain the quality of research that goes into his specials.
HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
In which Stossel plays a clip from the film “Gasland,” a documentary exposing the dangers of natural gas extraction for people living near the extraction sites, and then announces that it is perfectly normal for your tap water to contain highly flammable amounts of methane. “Weird stuff happens,” Stossel says. The fact that a peer-reviewed study showed that water wells close to natural gas mines had 17 times the levels of methane in the water than wells farther away from fracturing sites is just one of those nutty coincidences.
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(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene
Who’s winning the Fox primary?
The conservative cable channel treads carefully in Gingrich-Romney race
Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney (Credit: AP)
The Republican primary campaign has become a two-man race, with unloved ostensible front-runner Mitt Romney currently suffering the indignity of trailing in the polls to self-satisfied serial adulterer Newt Gingrich. Where does the unofficial communications arm of the conservative movement stand on the race? They’re noncommittal, thus far.
We all know the basic facts: A lot of conservatives see Romney as completely unacceptable. The more pragmatic ones see Gingrich as wholly unelectable. Fox News is run by consummate conservative elite Roger Ailes. Ailes has two objectives: Generate ratings and elect Republicans. The Gingriches of the world excite Fox viewers, because of their shamelessness. Romney excites no one, but he’ll need Fox’s support if he ends up the beneficiary of a Gingrich collapse.
Fox has indulged its audience’s brief surges of affection for unelectable fringe candidates, from Trump through Cain, but the channel’s always been careful to remind the base that they may eventually have to hold their noses and vote for Romney. Karl Rove, who’s already running a shadow campaign against Obama, has made this point explicitly during his Fox appearances.
Romney went from trailing in the Fox News appearances list to getting more uninterrupted airtime over the last week than any other candidate. But Gingrich beat him in minutes the week before. And Newt was just on Hannity last night, where he seemed much more comfortable than Romney did in his earlier sit-down with Bret Baier, a tougher interviewer by any standard.
Watching Fox this morning, clips of Gingrich’s Hannity interview were replayed multiple times. Ron Paul’s devastating anti-Gingrich ad was excerpted for a minute, followed by a clip of Romney sounding like he believed in anthropogenic climate change.
The network seems, in other words, undecided at the moment, or at least willing to see if Gingrich can pull this out without humiliating himself like he always does. The Rovians may yet win the day, but for now Fox seems to be joining the GOP base in convincing itself that Gingrich is electable.
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene
Right-wing press demands liberal media repeat “Occupy shooter” smear
How a disturbed would-be presidential assassin became another bizarre conservative meme
Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez
Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez tried to kill President Barack Obama, by firing a gun at the White House, and one would think that that combination of “hating Obama” and “using a gun” would make using him to smear liberals a bit of a stretch, even for Fox and the rest of the right-wing press. You’d think that they’d shy away from even mentioning the guy, as they generally do in prominent cases of decidedly right-wing politically motivated violence. You’d be wrong, though, because they’ve all decided that Ortega-Hernandez is the Occupy Wall Street shooter.
Ortega-Hernandez will soon be a minor historical footnote, like the guy who tried to crash a plane into Nixon’s White House, Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore, the weird guy who may have been a part of a secret plot to kill or scare Jimmy Carter, John Hinkley, the guy who tried to crash an airplane into Bill Clinton’s White House, the guy who fired bullets at Bill Clinton’s White House and the guy who fired bullets at George W. Bush’s White House. What did all of these people have in common? Their motives were … slightly difficult for rational people to comprehend. They tended to be paranoid and disturbed and their stated reasons for wishing the president dead were usually fairly incoherent.
Ortega-Hernandez wanted to kill President Obama because Ortega-Hernandez thought himself the second coming of Jesus Christ and was convinced Barack Obama was the antichrist. It’d hard to make any sort of coherent political point out of that.
But because of a bad bit of reporting — bad but understandable — ABC initially said that police suspected Ortega-Hernandez had spent time at the Occupy DC encampment, before heading out to shoot the White House. Police may have suspected that, but there’s been no evidence whatsoever that it’s the case. (He seems to have more of a connection to Oprah than Occupy, but no one is calling him the “Oprah shooter.”)
The truth has not dissuaded Fox News from repeatedly referencing Ortega-Hernandez’s completely imaginary time spent at the Occupy camp. The NRA’s radio show did the same.
But the fact that it is now known that there has never been any evidence linking Ortega-Hernandez to any Occupy event anywhere has not stopped conservatives from … crying about liberal media bias against conservatives. John Nolte at Big Journalism says: “the MSM is working overtime to make sure no narrative is created from the suspected White House shooter’s connection to #OccupyDC.”
Right, because … there’s no connection. Except that some guy at Occupy San Diego said something stupid and regrettable about feeling sympathy for the crazy guy who shot at the White House. Which is, as “connections” go, a stretch!
So here we have a wholly invented right-wing meme based on fantasy and one out-of-context line from a now out-of-date news story, repeated endlessly in an attempt to unfairly smear a political movement they despise, and the fact that responsible media outlets aren’t repeating the smear is an example of the nefarious leftist media conspiracy. Sorry the New York Times isn’t repeating this particular lie, guys!
I for one wonder why the media ins’t investigating the shooter’s connections to the University of Texas College Republicans.
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene
Page 1 of 80 in Fox News
Bishops' rift with Obama about politics, not religion 
The Presidential Election Quiz 
Republican Racism is an Air Raid Siren, Not a Dog Whistle 
Whose Wisconsin recall is it? 
Can Greece thwart a complete meltdown? 
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s alternative abortion history 
Inside Syria’s whirlwind of war 
Syria’s looming threat of civil war 
Santorum’s well-compensated love of fracking 
The Tea Party’s war on mass transit 
At the CPAC-Occupy beer summit 
Whitney Houston’s lessons in love 
Our non-withdrawal from Afghanistan 
