Sara Robinson has worked as an editor or columnist for several national magazines, on beats as varied as sports, travel, and the Olympics; and has contributed to over 80 computer games for EA, Lucasfilm, Disney, and many other companies. A native of California's High Sierra, she spent 20 years in Silicon Valley before moving to Vancouver, BC in 2004. She currently is pursuing an MS in Futures Studies at the University of Houston. You can reach her at srobinson@enginesofmischief.com.
An Augusta, Ga., group, The National Policy Institute, has meshed the figures on fertility rates with the continents and races on Planet Earth -- to visualize what the world will look like in 2060.
In 1950, whites were 28 percent of world population and Africans 9 percent, a ratio of three-to-one. In 2060, the ratio will remain the same. But the colors will be reversed. People of African ancestry will be 25 percent of the world's population. People of European descent will have fallen to 9.8 percent.
More arresting is that the white population is shrinking not only in relative but in real terms. Two hundred million white people, one in every six on earth -- a number equal to the entire population of France, Britain, Holland and Germany -- will vanish by 2060.
The Caucasian race is going the way of the Mohicans.
It's revealing, of course, that Buchanan's thesis hinges on a report from an "academic racism" institute that's been designated a bona fide hate group by the SPLC:
After a year of soliciting funds for a "new think tank" in Washington, D.C., the National Policy Institute was established with a staff of four in September 2005 by far-right publisher William Regnery. The institute's mission statement says it aims "to elevate the consciousness of whites, ensure our biological and cultural continuity, and protect our civil rights. The institute ... will study the consequences of the ongoing influx that non-Western populations pose to our national identity." In an August 2005 speech to the Chicagoland Friends of American Renaissance (see group profile below), Regnery warned that "within the first or secondhand memories of people in this room, the white race may go from master of the universe to an anthropological curiosity." The institute has published two studies: a critique of affirmative action, which the institute opposes; and "Mass Deportation is a Viable Solution to America's Illegal Immigration Crisis," written by Edwin Rubenstein. (Rubenstein, a frequent contributor to the V-Dare hate site, is president of ESR Research Economic Consultants of Indianapolis and has served as research director for the conservative Hudson Institute, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, an economics editor at the National Review, and a contributing editor at Forbes magazine.) The institute's senior fellow is Wayne Lutton, an extreme-right writer, and its spokesman is Kevin Lamb. Its board includes Louis R. Andrews, American Renaissance Editor Jared Taylor, and James B. Taylor, who is also on the board of directors of the Reagan Ranch Program. Its advisory committee includes Kevin MacDonald.
But even more remarkable -- and obvious, really, to anyone with a knowledge of the history of racism -- is that this piece doesn't just echo old racists who have been uttering the same -impending-doom warnings for the, as so much of his previous work does. It practically plagiarizes them -- and one in particular.
"We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals which have controlled our social development during the past century, and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America 'an asylum for the oppressed,' are sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss. If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control, and we continue to follow our national motto and deliberately blind ourselves to all 'distinctions of race, creed, or color,' the type of native American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles, and the Viking of the days of Rollo."
It received a large boost during the '30s under Nazis patronage. Seeking a holistic artist, scientific, and philosophic basis for their political program based on race especially the blond, blue-eyed Aryan ideal, Grant's book and the genre in general received significant support. Hitler had read Grant's book and wrote a letter to him stating that it was "his Bible". The Nazis used Grant's ideas about eugenics to justify compulsory sterilization, and used his ideas about Nordic superiority to justify programs such as Heinrich Himmler's Lebensborn Society, which existed to preserve typical Nordic genes, such as blond hair and blue eyes, by sheltering blond, blue-eyed women and subjecting them to breeding programs. All this was related to Grant's claim that the Nordic Race is in danger of being out-bred by inferior racial stocks.
Just so we're all clear on where this kind of stuff inevitably heads. The "white race," meanwhile, seems to continue to be doing just fine, and probably will continue to do so for many generations to come. But no doubt, ninety years from now, and a hundred and ninety, there will be some fresh new Buchanan or Grant to warn them of their imminent doom.
8:26 PMSpotlight
Things Americans don't like to talk about Tuesday, April 29, 2008
-- by Dave
One of the oddities of the emerging media meta-narrative about Jeremiah Wright is the way it is now readily assumed by the broad range of talking heads that Wright's recent comments have only proven the charge that he is deeply "anti-American," embodied in the endlessly repeated "God damn America" sound bite.
There's no doubt that a lot of Wright's views are indeed deeply critical of America, even pugnaciously (and thus disconcertingly) so, and some -- particularly his apparent absorption of racial theories regarding the spread of HIV -- are dubious at best. Considering Wright's contentious performance yesterday at the National Press Club, one really can't blame Obama for washing his hands of the man.
But it's also apparent that the larger context in which Wright condemns American behavior -- the reason he shouts "God damn America" -- in fact reflects hard historical realities that Americans, and the American media especially, really don't want to talk about, let alone confront the present-day consequences thereof.
And doing so, evidently, is now proof of being "anti-American."
Among the things, evidently, that we're not supposed to bring up because it interrupts Peggy Noonan's fantasy vision of an American history populated mostly by noble 49ers and industrious Henry Fords, are the following:
It's human, of course, to want to think of yourself as a good person, and your country as a good country. Which is why it's human of white Americans -- the descendants and beneficiaries of the people who perpetrated these atrocities -- to want to forget that these things happened. And they want to believe that because these events were in the past, and they took some initial steps toward reconciliation 40 years ago, the issues should have gone away, and if they haven't, well, it's the victims' fault.
The victims and their descendants, however, cannot forget that these things happened, because they continue to live with the legacy of them every day. And white Americans should not delude themselves into thinking that they could or should have forgotten, either. Ask any Native American living on a reservation, or any descendant of Japanese camp internees, or any African American, whether they can forget these things.
Perhaps when young black men no longer face persistent job discrimination or lowered life expectancies, when racial residential segregation is no longer a persistent reality, when hate crimes are a distant memory, when our response to great national war-inducing traumas is no longer imbued with xenophobic hysteria -- perhaps when white Americans take actual steps beyond those four-decade-old baby steps to confront the legacy of their very real history of shameful behavior toward nonwhites, then perhaps we can ask for that forgetting.
Assuming that they should -- and indeed insisting that the fact that they haven't is proof that they "hate America" -- is simply childish. But then, that's what we've come to expect both of the American right and the American media.
These historical realities in fact were what provided the context of Wright's "God damn America" snippet. Here's the key passage from the sermon:
Where governments change, God does not change. God is the same yesterday, today and forever more. That’s what his name I Am means. He does not change.
God was against slavery on yesterday, and God, who does not change, is still against slavery today. God was a God of love yesterday, and God who does not change, is still a God of love today. God was a God of justice on yesterday, and God who does not change, is still a God of justice today. God does not change.
And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on the reservations.
When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps.
When it came to treating the citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them on slave quarters. Put them on auction blocks. Put them in cotton fields. Put them in inferior schools. Put them in substandard housing. Put them in scientific experiments. Put them in the lowest paying jobs. Put them outside the equal protection of the law. Kept them out of the racist bastions of higher education, and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness.
The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three strike law and then wants us to sing God Bless America. Naw, naw, naw. Not God Bless America. God Damn America! That’s in the Bible. For killing innocent people. God Damn America for treating its citizens as less than human. God Damn America as long as she tries to act like she is God and she is Supreme.
What's obvious, in fact, is that the longtime right-wing "America, love it or leave it" style of patriotism has become part of the media's standard narrative in the post-9/11 world. I think Al Franken had it right:
If you listen to a lot of conservatives, they'll tell you that the difference between them and us is that conservatives love America and liberals hate America.... They don't get it. We love America just as much as they do. But in a different Way. You see, they love America the way a 4-year-old loves her Mommy. Liberals love America like grown-ups.
To a 4-year-old, everything Mommy does is wonderful and anyone who criticizes Mommy is bad. Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad, and helping your loved one grow. Love takes attention and work and is the best thing in the world.
In the new media universe, Mommy America would never ever hurt those poor black people. And if maybe she did once upon a time, well, she made up for it a long time ago and now things are all better. Bringing up evidence to the contrary just means you hate Mommy.
Which might explain why people like Wright get all contemptuous on their asses.
Tuesday Bloggage -- by Sara This week's post at Blog For Our Future is about Jeremiah Wright, who (as it turns out) has a long history of being one of liberal Christianity's most stubborn and durable bulwarks against a variety of conservative efforts to corrupt the Christian message. That fact, it turns out, has everything to do with why the Wright story won't die -- and why the right wing will stop at nothing to take him down.
I talk about how this battle has been fought on a couple of fronts. There's a lot about Obama and Wright (and, for that matter, John Hagee and Rod Parsley) that doesn't really come into focus until you know the whole backstory. If you want some context the media's not giving you, check it out. As usual, ratings love is always appreciated.
And yes, I know I'm on deck to write another post or two on the FLDS. Now that this is done, that's coming up next. Stand by.
4:56 PMSpotlight
Just another viewpoint Friday, April 25, 2008
-- by Dave
In the age of Drudge and "Fair and Balanced" news, we all know that facts and falsehoods are just two sides of the same coin, right? So I guess it's inevitable that some Republican somewhere would find it acceptable to speak before neo-Nazis because they're just another interest group, after all.
Sure enough. Jason Miller at the New-Dispatch in Michigan City, Indiana, reports that a bright republican attorney named Tony Zirkle, vying for the GOP nomination in his local congressional district, decided to do just such a thing:
U.S. Congressional candidate Tony Zirkle is facing criticism from one of his primary opponents, and a host of people on the Internet, for speaking at an event over the weekend that celebrated Adolf Hitler's birthday.
Zirkle confirmed to The News-Dispatch on Monday he spoke Sunday in Chicago at a meeting of the Nationalist Socialist Workers Party, whose symbol is a swastika.
When asked if he was a Nazi or sympathized with Nazis or white supremacists, Zirkle replied he didn't know enough about the group to either favor it or oppose it.
"This is just a great opportunity for me to witness," he said, referring to his message and his Christian belief.
He also told WIMS radio in Michigan City that he didn't believe the event he attended included people necessarily of the Nazi mindset, pointing out the name isn't Nazi, but Nationalist Socialist Workers Party.
The Crown Point Republican spoke in front of about 56 "white activists" at an event honoring the birth of Hitler. The German leader was responsible for the genocide of millions of Jews and others during World War II.
Zirkle said the group asked him to speak to discuss the effect of pornography and prostitution on young, white women and girls.
Actually, it does matter who you speak to if you aspire to publicly elected office: Your presence before any organization lends them legitimacy; and when it comes to neo-Nazis and white supremacists, that's simply irresponsible. That's why it was a problem when folks like Ron Paul and Trent Lott and Haley Barbour spoke before the Council of Conservative Citizens. If nothing else, it speaks of incredibly poor judgment on the part of that official.
But when you read the report of the event from the South Bend Tribune, it's clear that Zirkle's problems go beyond just a lack of judgment:
An account of the gathering on www.Overthrow.com says "Zirkle spoke on his history as a state's attorney in Indiana, prosecuting Jewish and Zionist criminal gangs involved in trafficking prostitutes and pornography from Russia and the Zionist entity.''
... Zirkle said he feels he was misunderstood. His real mission, he said, is to rid the country of pornography, and that's what he was saying at the ANSWP gathering. So how did his comment about Jews fit in?
"Most of the male porn stars were Jewish at the beginning," Zirkle explained.
The Floyd Brown schtick strikes again Thursday, April 24, 2008
-- by Dave
In a way, you have to admire the Rovean evilness of Floyd Brown's schtick, now playing in North Carolina.
The new ad recounts the deaths of three Chicago residents in 2001 at the hands of criminal gangs. "That same year, a Chicago state senator named Barack Obama voted against expanding the death penalty for gang-related murders," an ominous female narrator intones. "So the question is, can a man so weak in the war on gangs be trusted in the war on terror?"
What's clever about the schtick is that it lets John McCain look noble and "moderate" by officially denouncing it -- to, of course, no effect, because that's how these things work -- while the ad gets national play and permeates not just North Carolina voters' consciousnesses but that of Americans generally. It's how the right runs these kinds of appeals up the flagpole to see how it flies -- and the way it's flying so far, I'd guess it's just a preview of what we'll see this fall.
And so it's been playing on my cable TV all day, over and over -- CNN, MSNBC, Fox, they're all playing it. Atrios has it exactly right, as usual:
Some Republican or conservative group runs a dumb ad.
John McCain nobly distances himself from it.
Cable news spends all day talking about it and showing it for free.
Rinse. Repeat.
That's the Brown formula: Create an incendiary ad, typically reverberant with far-right (often racist) themes repackaged for more mainstream consumption; spend a little bit of money in a few precincts, let the Republicans involved look good with the soccer-mom contingent turned off by racially incendiary campaigns, by officially denouncing; but still reaching the closet-racist bloc with the ad itself -- which of course gets national play in the mainstream media as it discusses the outrage that ensues. This, of course, expands the audience exponentially, and for no added expense. Diabolical, really, but clever as hell.
It's important to understand that the media are being deliberately gamed here, but they have no excuse whatsoever, ethically speaking, for allowing this to happen. After all, this is Floyd Brown we're talking about here. He's played this game before -- many, many times -- and has boasted afterward about how easy the media were to manipulate. But they never learn. Or perhaps they don't want to learn, because it makes for an easy narrative, and there's nothing they love like easy narratives.
It's also been striking how often the narrative veers into a discussion of Rev. Wright and Obama's judgment, which is ostensibly the ad's chief storyline. But anyone watching it can see that there's a larger, underlying theme: the ad is all about associating Obama with black criminality and supposedly lax liberal policies to "blame" for it. It's all about scaring white suburbanites while giving them the cover of hand-wringing about his "judgment."
Well, that's Floyd Brown for you. It is simply the Willie Horton campaign updated with the special edge of targeting a black candidate. And stirring the racial pot and widening the cultural divide is what Brown is all about.
Everyone, in fact, mentions the Horton ad as a classic example of Brown's tactics. But it's also important to remember that he's been a major player in nearly every right-wing smear of leading Democratic figures in the ensuing years, including the Clinton impeachment fiasco and the Swift Boating of John Kerry.
At Citizens United, the boisterous Brown and his sidekick Bossie are raising money to air their latest video creation, which blasts Kerry for his expensive haircuts and his wife's wealth, tagging him as a "rich elitist liberal from Massachusetts who says he's a man of the people."
... If the names of Brown and Bossie sound more familiar, they attained notoriety together during the Clinton era as indefatigable promoters of the bogus "Whitewater" scandal. They served as publicity agents for David Hale, the crooked and discredited former Little Rock municipal judge whose allegations against the Clintons forced the appointment of an independent counsel. Among mainstream journalists panting for a career-making Watergate-style scandal, Brown and Bossie found many a gullible mark. For nearly a decade they churned out junk night and day. For a while, Bossie went on the payroll of the Senate Whitewater Committee; later he worked for Rep. Dan Burton's House Committee on Government Operations investigating Clinton and Al Gore -- until he was caught distributing doctored tapes to the media.
Their scorched-earth campaign tactics were epitomized by Brown and Bossie's 1992 paperback broadside "Slick Willie: Why America Can't Trust Bill Clinton." Among the ugliest features of this little pamphlet was a chapter of unsupported and anonymous insinuations about Clinton's role in a female student's suicide. Their "investigation" was later called "an unusually brazen dirty tricks operation" in a report on "CBS Evening News." (In light of recent discussion of the president's National Guard service, the authors may nowregret at least one of "Slick Willie's" chapter titles -- "Brave Men Died in Vietnam: Where Was Bill Clinton?")
The Horton ad appeared not as part of the Bush-Quayle campaign, whose strategists shied away from such obvious racism, but under the auspices of a shadowy organization called "Americans for Bush." According to testimony filed with the Federal Election Commission, which investigated the financing and planning of the Horton ad in 1990, the ad's actual creators included Brown and Shirley. Others involved included Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio, and a young producer named Jesse Raiford who was simultaneously working on TV commercials for Roger Ailes, then his boss at the official Bush-Quayle campaign. (FEC commissioners and investigators strongly suspected unlawful collusion between Bush-Quayle and Americans for Bush, but Republican members of the commission quickly killed the probe.)
The rather primitive commercial featured the scary mug shot of Horton -- a sullen, scruffy-looking, African-American murderer who got weekend passes from prison while Dukakis was governor. Its provocative appeal to white fear was so blatant that even the Bush campaign was embarrassed, but Brown gleefully described it as the "silver bullet" that ruined the Democratic nominee.
Brown hasn't entirely lost his taste for stoking racial animosities. He currently works for the Young America's Foundation, where he oversees the indoctrination of youthful conservatives at the former Reagan Ranch. The YAF recently honored Rhode Island student Jason Mattera as the "top conservative student activist in the country," apparently because he sponsored a "whites only" scholarship at his school in protest of affirmative action.
I also wrote about Brown that year, discussing his long connections to far-right extremists in the "Patriot"/militia movement, citing a Chip Berlet piece on Brown's career:
Brown remains proud of the 1988 Willie Horton ad, widely denounced as racist pandering. In 1992, he attempted to place ads for a $4.99 paid phone call that would play tapes of Gennifer Flowers in a telephone conversation with then-governor Clinton. The hook was a promise that the conversation probed sexual matters. The incident was so tasteless that the Bush/Quayle campaign was again forced to condemn Brown and his tactics. Brown also arranged a screening for a reporter of Militia leader Linda Thompson's video, "Waco: The Big Lie," a potage of conspiracy theories linking Clinton to premeditated murder.
Two of Brown's senior staff are veterans of the ultra-conservative subculture with its conspiracist worldview of communism as a vast left wing conspiracy-a worldview that originated in the Old Right. Cliff Kincaid is director of Citizens United Foundation's American Sovereignty Action Project. He the author of two conspiracist books on the United Nations, Global Bondage: The U.N. Plan to Rule the World and Global Taxes for World Government, both published by Huntington House. Kincaid's claims about the U.N. are promoted within the patriot movement. Kincaid also works for Accuracy in Media, and writes columns for Human Events and the American Legion Magazine, with a circulation of 3 million. In a 1991 article for Human Events, Kincaid red-baited groups protesting the Gulf War and quoted right-wing undercover operative Sheila Louise Rees, claiming antiwar demonstrations were concocted "by the traditional hard-line peace activist organizations that have always worked with the Communist Party U.S.A." Human Events is now published by Eagle/Phillips Publishing. Regnery Publishing is primarily owned by Phillips Publishing and the Regnery family.
It's important to understand the role that people like Brown play. Not only does he enable the right to feed red meat to their more extremist elements while giving them a certain "plausible deniablity" (thus the official distancing, which Brown explicitly welcomes), he plays an even greater part in transmitting ideas from the extremist right into the mainstream, thanks largely to a complaisant media willing to lend him the mantle of credibility he doesn't deserve. For instance, I've discussed how the Wall Street Journal lapped up Brown's bill of goods on Clinton in the 1990s:
Likewise, the WSJ indulged all kinds of extremist propaganda in its pursuit of Clinton. One of its chief sources was Floyd Brown, a longtime enemy of Bill from Arkansas days. Brown was responsible for the circulation of much of the early Whitewater dirt on Bill Clinton, mostly through Citizens United's top investigator, David Bossie (who later gained notoriety as the erstwhile chief investigator for Rep. Dan Burton's campaign-finance probe). Brown's credibility was already of questionable value; by 1998, this had become unmistakable. For instance, at Brown's Citizens United Web site -- in addition, naturally, to a bevy of Monica-related impeachment screeds -- you could find screaming exposes of the Clintons’ alleged involvement in the United Nations one-world-government plot. A streaming banner on the site shouted: "Secret United Nations Agenda Exposed In Explosive New Video!" (The video in question prominently featured an appearance by then-Sen. John Ashcroft.) A little further down, the site explains: "This timely new video reveals how the liberal regime of Bill Clinton is actively conspiring to aid and abet the United Nations in its drive for global supremacy." For those who follow the militia movement, these tales have more than a familiar ring.
Yet in 1994, members of the WSJ's editorial board sat down with Brown and examined his anti-Clinton information -- which in nature was not appreciably different from what he was flogging four years later -- and shortly thereafter, nearly half of the Journal's editorial page was devoted one day to reprinting materials obtained from Brown. Moreover, the WSJ continued to recycle the allegations from that material for much of the following six years.
More recently, Brown played similar games in the 2004 election in Martin Frost's congressional race against Pete Sessions: Came in with an "independent" group that ran racially incendiary attack ads against Frost. Sessions, of course, won.
Every time out, the media have played along with Brown. And it's clear that won't change anytime soon.
Tuesday Bloggage at Blog For Our Future Tuesday, April 22, 2008 -- by Sara
It's that time again. This is rapidly turning "FLDS 'Till Your Eyes Bleed" theme week. I'm planning to spend another couple days working through my current pile 'o facts, and then (unless something really unique happens) I'm done with the subject for a while.
This week's Our Future piece riffs off of my "Crazy Dangerous" series of a couple months back. It's basically a threat assessment: Does the FLDS have what it takes to become truly dangerous? Several perspicacious commenters have already invoked those pieces and drawn some parallels, so I went ahead and did damn near 5,000 words on the subject today. (The short answer is: Yes. And No.)
I'm a long-form blogger, but that's excessive even for me. If you've got time this evening, go take a look. Be warned, though: this one's chewy, and it takes a while.
9:16 PMSpotlight
Another compassionate conservative
-- by Dave
I'd really like all those nativists and border watchers who claim that their activism is only about illegal immigration to explain this:
Disparaging remarks aimed at migrant workers got resident House rabble-rouser Douglas Bruce banned from speaking on a temporary-worker bill today.
"We don't need 5,000 more illiterate peasants in the state of Colorado," Bruce, R-Colorado Springs, told the chamber to an audible gasp.
Rep. Kathleen Curry, leading the House at the time, immediately barred Bruce from speaking at the podium, an uncommon maneuver.
"How dare you?" she asked Bruce, before House members moved back to discussion of a bill aimed at helping seasonal farm workers from other countries enter the state legally on a temporary basis.
The pilot program, which sets up liaisons in Mexico to assist foreign workers, would allow up to 5,000 laborers into Colorado over five years.
The next day, Bruce was unrepentant, even going so far as to explain that he brought it up because he wanted to raise the issue of, yep, illegal immigration:
Bruce stood by his statement afterward, saying his colleagues are "offended by the truth" and contending the term was technically accurate. He said he'd been planning the bill-related speech — at least two pages, single-spaced — for about a week.
"I was trying to make illegal immigration an issue for the House," Bruce said. "They just don't want anybody to disagree with a bill that they like."
The legislation in question, of course, was all about bringing in legal immigrants. Not that the nativists actually make that distinction.
What We're Not Talking About, Part I: Other Issues With the FLDS Monday, April 21, 2008
FLDS founding patriarch Rulon Jeffs with his last two wives -- sisters Edna and Mary Fischer -- on their wedding day. He received the pair as a 90th birthday present.
-- by Sara
So far, the wall-to-wall news coverage of the state of Texas's raid on the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints compound in Eldorado, TX has been focused on just a couple of narratives. The first, of course, is the state's dogged and thorough -- and long overdue -- attempt to prove that the church's young women have been systemically sexually abused by the men of the group; and that this abuse is not just rare, but rather an inherent and accepted feature of the group's social order.
The other is the cultural curiosity of the sect's women in general. We see them, looking like they just walked out of the 1890s in their bizarre high hairdos, pastel prairie dresses, and sturdy shoes, and wonder how such a group of fossils (let alone tens of thousands of them) could still exist in modern America. It makes for great TV; but I often look at these women (most of whom have never watched TV in their lives), and feel like they're lambs being dragged out in front of media wolves they've never learned to recognize or fear. In a world when all of us seem to be in permanent rehearsal for our own 15 minutes of fame, these women are so unprepared for all this that they're downright fascinating.
These are the two current storylines the media is focused on -- at least, so far. In time, though, if the reporters and investigators stick around, they might find other things to talk about. A careful reading of Daphne Bramham's excellent The Secret Lives of Saints reveals that there are plenty of other questions we should be asking about the FLDS -- and months worth of stories we're not hearing about right now, but which need to be discussed and generally understood if the country is going to deal with the group appropriately and effectively.
And the country will be dealing with it -- probably for quite some time to come. Throughout its 60-year history, the FLDS has dealt with prosecution (or persecution) by seeding itself into new states, laying down roots for new communities that it can migrate to. (Eldorado itself started out as one of these.) New compounds are coming together now in Idaho and South Dakota; and there are rumors of others being staked out in Colorado and Nevada as well. Hildale/Colorado City may have been effectively taken over by the state of Utah, and Eldorado is in crisis; but with somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 adherents, this is a group that's not going to pass from the American scene any time soon.
One of the things we need to understand is just how the FLDS managed to stay so far under the radar for so long -- and what twisted consequences were allowed to follow from that lack of oversight. Bramham shows that they did a stunningly effective job of building their own self-sufficient infrastructure of community institutions -- hospitals, police forces, courts, financial trusts, schools, and employers -- that allowed the church to function without interacting with the outside world any more than necessary. Most of the group's institutions were designed to mimic and supplant outside authority well enough to keep the group (and especially its treatment of women and children) hidden from the prying eyes of outsiders. And, for 60 years, those who were responsible for providing higher-level oversight for all these institutions have almost always been somehow induced to look the other way.
In the existing FLDS communities in Utah and Arizona, state authorities have already begun investigations on many of these fronts -- not least because they are the stuff on which further legal battles, and the future of the sect, may turn. However, keeping the FLDS at bay in the years ahead will require county, state, and professional authorities everywhere in North America to stop averting their eyes, stay on their toes, and show a strong willingness to challenge these attempts to build this kind of sheltering infrastructure.
And there are other, less obvious reasons we need to be keeping an eye on them, too. Here's the first half of my motley list -- a few assorted areas of interest I'd be poking at more deeply, along with questions I'd be asking, were I a New York Times front-pager, a TV talking head, or a public official in any county or state where the FLDS has set up camp. The list is long, so I'll discuss a few today, and then follow up with the rest by Wednesday.
For-Prophet Health Care FLDS communities put a priority on providing as much health care inside the community as possible, so they're not dependent on outside medical professionals. (To this end, pregnant mothers have often been sent to Hildale or Bountiful in their last months, so they can be attended by the FLDS midwives there.) Hildale/Colorado City has its own hospital -- built partly with public funds -- that has employed only doctors and nurses who have pledged their first loyalty to the Prophet.
As a result, the group's women and children get much of their primary care from people who feel no accountability to established medical standards of practice, state record-keeping requirements, or any of the existing mandated reporter laws. (Most people in these communities have no idea these laws even exist.) The spotty record-keeping that results is why the state of Texas has made the wise decision to do DNA testing on all the kids: it cannot be taken for granted that their birth certificates are accurate (or, in some places, exist at all).
The FLDs has also co-opted mental health services into another form of wife abuse. In Hildale/Colorado City, FLDS doctors have proven quite willing to declare unhappy women crazy. Daphne Bramham found that up to a third of FLDS women are on anti-depressants; and that women who are express acute dissatisfaction with the life have often been committed to mental hospitals in Arizona by the community's doctors. According to Bramham, the fear of being labeled insane and shut away in an institution is one of the most potent threats the community has used to keep women in their place.
Of course, this misuse of mental health care has turned into one non-obvious but critically important cultural land mine for the Texas authorities who are trying to figure out how to deal with their FLDS wards. Along with everything else, they're trying to work with women who've learned to see mental health evaluations as tantamount to an incarceration threat -- are thus predisposed to regard gentile doctors or social workers as a mortal enemy. It's not making things easier.
Based on this long history, counties and states that find themselves hosting FLDS compounds need to be keeping a close eye on how these communities manage health care. Who provides it? Are they keeping good records? Are they following the law? Do they adhere to accepted standards of care? Are they holding the line as our first line of defense against child abuse -- or are they helping the community hide its abusive secrets? If the state officials in charge of supervising hospitals and doctors had stepped up and asked these questions decades ago, thousands of women and children might have been spared generations of abuse.
Cops and Courts: No Law But God's Law Much of the power of the prophets has been drawn from the fact that they historically controlled both the cops and the courts that served the Hildale/Colorado City area. Though these were officially chartered law enforcement agencies and nominally public courts, they weren't concerned with civil law. Instead, their task was to enforce the law according to the FLDS and its Prophet. The people in these communities had no effective recourse to the laws the rest of us live under. They could be arrested, fined, jailed, and have their property seized by nominally "official" cops and courts, acting under full authority of civil government, for violating church laws.
Like African-Americans in the slavery era, women who tried to run were captured by these police and returned to their husbands for punishment -- or taken to the hospital for the dreaded mental health evaluation. The police force's main job is to be the muscle that enforces the Prophet's control of the entire community. When the Prophet decides that a man no longer deserves his home, these are the cops who enforce the eviction. Appealing to the FLDS judges has been useless: due process as we understand it doesn't even enter into the conversation.
There is progress on this front. The state of Utah began to move against the Hildale police force in 2005, revoking the certification of its polygamous chief. Sam Roundy admitted that he'd investigated over 25 sexual abuse cases in the past decade -- including one that involved the rape of an eight-year-old -- and never reported it to child protection authorities. (He pleaded ignorance of all mandated reporter laws.) However, Roundy was replaced with another polygamous officer who immediately sent Warren Jeffs a letter pledging his loyalty, and I found no word that he's left office since. Later that year, the Utah Supreme Court also disbarred the local polygamous judge, which paved the way for reform of the local courts.
But the Saints are now in many places besides Utah; and officials in these other states shouldn't be surprised if they try to hijack cops and courts and replicate this system wherever they go. In Utah, decades of failure to attend to this effectively deprived tens of thousands of people of their civil rights. It can't be allowed to happen again.
Death Among the FLDS These communities also bury their own dead (and at least one has its own crematorium), which opens the way to record-keeping anomalies with death certificates -- and ensures that no questions will ever be asked, and no autopsies will ever be performed. Given the genetic instability and volatile control issues within this group, it may not be wise for them to have the means to dispose of dead bodies without official oversight. We need to be asking questions about who's in their cemeteries and crematoria, how they got there, and what kinds of records are being kept.
The Fatal Flaw: Inbreeding Takes Its Toll One of the most striking things about the FLDS is that certain surnames -- Jeffs, Blackmore, Fischer, Jessop, Barlow, Steed -- occur over and over again. In a community of over 40,000 people -- many of whom share fathers, grandfathers, or uncles -- the degree of blood relationship between any two people is likely to be very close indeed. In fact, over half the people in Hildale/Colorado City are blood relatives. So it's not surprising that, starting in 1980, the tragic results of three generations of tight inbreeding began to appear.
That was the year the first Colorado City child was diagnosed with fumarase deficiency -- a genetic disease so rare that only a handful of cases had ever been diagnosed worldwide. The disease causes severe mental retardation, seizures, hydroencephaly, growth failure, and physical deformities. Two of the FLDS's old-line families, the Barlows and the Jessops, both carry the recessive gene -- which is now present in several thousand FLDS members who trace their descent to those two founding fathers. By the 1990, Bramham writes, the twin FLDS cities had the highest concentration of children with fumarase deficiency in the world.
There are also signs of widespread hereditary eye problems among the current crop of children, along with evidence that that the community has a higher-than-average infant mortality rate. Arizona coroners recently -- and finally -- got involved in investigating these. But there's plenty more here for public health officials to look at; and it's becoming clear that the custom of close intermarriage needs to end on genetic grounds alone.
In the next post, I'll cover a few more reasons that the FLDS should never again be allowed to operate without close oversight from the outside world.
7:16 PMSpotlight
What to Give the Racist Who Has Everything -- by Sara
The spirit of the Confederacy is alive and well -- and now available for just $99 (in three easy payments!) from The Bradford Exchange:
Also, apparently, doubles as a dog whistle:
Civil War Men's Sterling Silver Ring Shows Your Southern Pride! Exclusive Civil War Gift for History Enthusiasts!
Hold history in your hands with a dramatic jewelry exclusive that pays tribute to an unforgettable time in American history. Introducing the Civil War men's sterling silver ring, available only from The Bradford Exchange. Detailed with striking Civil War era symbols, this fine jewelry design is a handsome presentation that represents Southern pride and memorializes those who fought for the South during this turning point in our country.
Proudly wear this Civil War memorabilia, individually crafted of solid sterling silver for a gleaming finish. At the center, this Civil War men's sterling silver ring bears the Confederate flag and shield in rich red and blue enameling and trimmed in silver to boldly stand out against an inlay of genuine black onyx. C.S.A. (Confederate States of America) and the years of the Confederacy (1861-1865) are emblazoned on the banner below. As a special finishing touch, the inside of the band is engraved with "Pride of the South." What a stunning keepsake for you to treasure every day or give as a unique Civil War gift. Hurry, strong demand is expected. Order now!
However: I'm puzzled that it's missing that all-important secret compartment for your Viagra pill, which strikes me as a very serious oversight considering the audience.
Remember: Just eight shopping weeks till Father's Day!
h/t Andrew Kar, who found this little gem in Parade magazine.
11:38 AMSpotlight
