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Jewish World Review Feb. 24, 2010 / 10 Adar 5770 McVeighing Against the Tea Parties By Robert Tracinski
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
After months of virtually ignoring the biggest new factor in American politics, the New York Times has finally decided to publish a long profile on the Tea Party movement — but only so they can launch a dishonest smear campaign against it.
The whole essence of the article is to portray the Tea Parties as hotbeds of crazy conspiracy theories promoted by anarchist militias connected to racist groups. The message is that the Tea Party movement is not connected to traditional Republican politics — which is quite true — but to something the New York Times calls the "Patriot movement." Now, I thought that we all believed ourselves to be patriots acting out of love for our country and its founding principles. But what the Times reporter means by "Patriots" is a quasi-anarchist, quasi-racist militia movement of survivalists preparing for armed insurrection against the federal government.
The innuendo is laid on particularly thick in the second half of the article, which cites "civil rights activists" — an honorific only given to leftists — who "could not help but wonder why the explosion of conservative anger coincided with a series of violent acts by right wing extremists" and "a puzzling return of racist rhetoric and violence." To give an idea of the intellectual standards at the New York Times these days, the article goes on to admit that "Mr. Stewart said it would be unfair to attribute any of these incidents to the Tea Party movement. 'We don't have any evidence they are connected,' he said. Still, he sees troubling parallels." So this is a self-confessed argument from innuendo and conjecture, backed by no actual evidence.
All of this is allegedly based on "interviews conducted across the country over several months" — but it is mostly based on one Tea Party group in Idaho. This is not the epicenter of the Tea Party movement; the movement's epicenter is in congressional districts that are much more evenly divided between left and right, where the Tea Party groups actually represent a change in the prevailing political culture. So why did the New York Times send its reporter to Sandpoint, Idaho? Because of "a legacy of anti-government activism in northern Idaho. Outside Sandpoint, federal agents laid siege to Randy Weaver's compound on Ruby Ridge in 1992…. To the south, Richard Butler, leader of the Aryan Nations, preached white separatism from a compound near Coeur d'Alene until he was shut down." In other words, they picked the location most likely to give them material for the story they wanted to report.
Others in the mainstream media have picked up this new party line, with less subtlety. At the Washington Post, Jonathan Capehart makes explicit exactly what this smear tactic is meant to achieve.
The left really, really wants this to be 1995 again. They want to be able to portray opponents of vastly expanded government control as if they are opponents of government as such, as if they are wild-eyed anarchists plotting to blow up buildings.
That's how they blunted the force of the last voter rebellion against big government, the "Republican Revolution" in 1994. They tried to associate the Republicans tangentially with a small "militia movement" of anarchist nuts who had pretensions of organizing their own private armies. The militias, in turn, were tangentially associated with a white supremacist, McVeigh, who blew up a government building. By this preposterous chain of guilt by association, the left tried to frame Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich — an establishment Republican who is dismissed by many pro-free-marketers, with some justification, as an advocate of big government — as being somehow responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing.
This is the whole point of the New York Times piece: to resurrect that old slander from fifteen years ago. The idea is to connect the Republicans to the Tea Party movement, and the Tea Party movement to a much smaller group of conspiracy theorists and militia types — and in effect, to make Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck look like political front-men for white supremacists.
The left is working from a very old playbook in which they offer us only two alternatives: communism or fascism. So if you aren't a socialist, then you must be a racist. In its current variant, the false alternative we're offered is socialism versus anarchism. If you are against a government that runs everything — the banks, the automakers, the health-care system — then you must be against government as such.
This is why the left-leaning media is also trying to exploit the story of Joseph Stack, the disgruntled engineer who crashed his single-engine airplane into an IRS office. At the Washington Post, Jonathan Capehart is on the job again, sniping that Stack's "alienation is similar to that we're hearing from the extreme elements of the Tea Party," while a comment at New York magazine declares that "a lot of his rhetoric could have been taken directly from a handwritten sign at a Tea Party rally."
Oh, really? Stack's actual suicide note/manifesto inveighs against the "greed" of capitalism and complains that "the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country's leaders don't see that as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies…. It's clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don't get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in." So Stack was mad that Congress failed to pass ObamaCare — not exactly a Tea Party sentiment. In fact, he sounds a lot more like Alan Grayson than Glenn Beck.
Capehart gives the whole game away with this passage, which contains the essence of the guilt by association he is attempting to set up: "When was Oath Keepers" — a group the Times story associates with the militias — "formed? April 19, 2009. The same day the Revolutionary War began in 1775. The same day the Branch Davidian compound burned to the ground in 1993. The same day as the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995." So if you want to commemorate the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers by celebrating April 19 — then that automatically makes you a racist militia conspiracy theorist.
This smear is so crude that it long ago ceased to be convincing. Forty years ago, Ayn Rand dismissed it as an "old saw of pre-World War II vintage" and named its purpose: to offer us a choice of "a dictatorship of the left or of an alleged right — with the possibility of a free society, of capitalism, dismissed and obliterated, as if it never existed."
And that what all the stuff in the New York Times about conspiracy theories and militias is meant to accomplish. It is meant to divert our attention from other details that the reporter felt he has to include but doesn't want us to notice: the fact that, under the influence of Glenn Beck, Tea Party supporters have "explored the Federalist Papers, exposés on the Federal Reserve, the work of Ayn Rand and George Orwell." And it gets worse: "Some went to constitutional seminars," while others are "studying the Constitution line by line" and like to "recite lines from the Declaration of Independence." How scary!
The left wants to evade this fact in order to avoid facing up to its own ideological bankruptcy. If the Tea Party movement has the Founding Fathers and Ayn Rand to look to as ideological influences, what does the left have? Marxism failed with the fall of the Berlin Wall two decades ago, and Climategate is currently doing to environmentalism what the fall of the wall did to Marxism. This means that the left now has nothing to stand on, ideologically speaking.
In this respect, there is one point in the New York Times report that rings true. What does connect the Tea Party movement with some strains of the militias and conspiracy theorists is "a narrative of impending tyranny." And as one quasi-militia activist tells the Times, "People are more willing, he said, to imagine a government that would lock up political opponents, or ration health care with 'death panels,' or fake global warming. And if global warming is a fraud, is it so crazy to wonder about a president's birth certificate? 'People just do not trust any of this,' Mr. Mack said."
The real story here is not about the Tea Party movement; it's about the left. The ruling political clique in Washington has suffered a catastrophic loss of moral legitimacy — just at the point when they have been seeking a rapid and far-reaching expansion of their power over our lives. This has led a significant portion of the public to conclude that the real essence of the left's agenda is a lust for power and control. And so a whole series of ideological groups — from Bilderberg conspiracy theorists to students of Ayn Rand and the Federalist Papers — have risen up in response to this dangerous vacuum of moral legitimacy.
And so the left has to seize on the existence of one of these groups, the racists and conspiracy theorits, in order to deny the existence of the real intellectual alternative: the Ayn-Rand-Federalist-Papers wing of the Tea Party phenomenon.
They have to do it to avoid acknowledging that it is the left that has run out of valid ideas, while it is the right that is bubbling with a new ideological ferment — and therefore owns the future.
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© 2009, Robert Tracinski |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||||
