Glenn Beck, Chuck Norris, John Galt, and the Sussex County Organized Regiment

I shouldn't have to begin this post by establishing my bona fides, but my friends over at Delawareliberal are really freaked out by the latest incarnation of the survivalist and militia movements:

jason330: I’d laugh this stuff off if these guys were not so into guns.

a. price: lets hope not. we cant quiet down about the republican White Right Wing hate groups in this country…. we may have to defend our country against them.... i think some of these people are serious. Glen Beck is one of them, and he has a public forum. I am all about free speech and freedom of the press, but i consider Beck a danger to the safety of millions of Americans because he makes the nut-jobs feel ok and powerful. HE not Rush is the problem.

delawaredem: Look, we have always said over the last 8 years and even before that that the radical right had a lot in common with the Taliban. But the similarities we were talking about was their cultural backwardness and religious fanaticism. But then the leading Republican Congressman, Pete Sessions, said back in January that the Republicans must model their opposition on the insurgent tactics of the Taliban. And I suppose some of the fanatical followers in wingnuttia took that to mean they should form sleeper cells and begin military training for an eventual confrontation with that which they oppose.

At this point, anyone and everyone partaking in these sleeper cells are traitors to America. They are advocating and preparing for a violent overthrow of the federal government. They have already taken actions in furtherance of this conspiracy, and should be arrested and treated to the consequences of treason....

Indeed, when the right wing was last out of power in Washington, the more fanatical among them resorted to treason and terrorism. Timothy McVeigh and the OKC Bombing. Eric Rudolph and the Olympic Park Bombing and the numerous abortion clinic bombings. Ruby Ridge. David Koresh and Waco.

anonone: Funny how when America was spying on its own citizens, torturing people, and silencing dissent these people said nothing. But when a black liberal Democratic American is elected President by a landslide… Let’s see how many of Delaware’s wingnuts denounce these tactics.

So since we've already got folks crying Treason! and advocating mass arrests (although, I suppose, dd, that's an improvement on your previous position of standing them up against the wall to be shot), I'd like Mr. Peabody to first set the wayback machine for 29 November 2008, so that you can read what I wrote 3 1/2 months ago in There Will Not Be A Second American Civil War. I'm not going to excerpt it: go read the whole damn thing before you continue--and among other things realize that all of you are pretty late coming to this story.

Now, in the interests of national sanity, let's put together five strands and see if we can't either tie or untie this particular Gordian Knot:

Strand One: The Glenn Beck "We Surround You" campaign, which has been building on his talk show for at least a couple of months, for those of you who don't pay attention. What this amounts to is the new century's version of Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, an attempt to conflate together a bunch of different social conservative groupings into something with major influence in the Old Confederacy and Buffalo Commons (Waldo's striking new name for the GOP). These are the people that Rsmitty left. And Falwell is the appropriate starting point for what Beck wants to do with the new Mormon Media Majority. In fact, there may be something to the old separated at birth idea:





Freaky, huh?

But the reality here is that Beck's Mormon Media Majority is pretty much a pathetic attempt boost ratings and make money (shit: it's more like Falwell's Moral Majority than I thought) rather than a real political movement. And all these people in the sleeper cells that my liberal friends are worried about are far more interested in the sleeper part of the designation than lockin' and loadin' to head out shoutin' Wolverines! to kill magical Commies.

Primarily, Beck is just jealous that Rush has mind-numbed robots and he doesn't..

Strand Two: Chuck Norris for President of Texas. You're taking this seriously? Yes, the man is delusional: he's thought for twenty-thirty years that he could act. Missing in Action should have been called Missing in Acting Class. Walker, Texas Ranger reruns could not garner a ratings point even if USA decided to go up against it with a David Hasselhoff marathon. Chuck is trying desperately, like most aging B-listers with a chain of struggling karate schools, to keep his image of the wild Texas desperado alive until he goes on life support. What he really wants to be is Ted Nugent, but Ted can actually sing. What he ends up being is Sonny Landham with a monotone and no verifiable history of working in porn movies.

Yeah, Chuck says inflammatory things, but who's listening? Does anybody who didn't get his driver's permit in the seventh grade actually read World Net Daily? People gotta have hobbies, and most of them are about as seriously into survivalist, secessionist violence as Cooter in Dukes of Hazzard. In fact, if you actually read the damn post carefully, almost all the inflammatory language about potential armed resistance comes from Beck being quoted by Norris, not Norris himself. You want to know what Norris really wants to happen? Then read the very last line of the post:

(Note: Speaking of showdowns, Chuck is also inviting anyone near the Houston area this weekend to see a good example of the raw Texas fighting spirit by joining him and others for the national martial arts event, "Showdown in H-Town.")

Yep: another good huckster out there selling faux badass rugged Texian in order to sell tickets to his damn karate tournament.

Strand Three: Going Galt--the obvious reference to Ayn Rand's heroic John Galt, who managed to bring the incompetent rulers of a future socialist America to their knees by refusing to be the productive man who supported all the drones. As you can see in the link, doing a John Galt is the new viral theme sweeping through parts of the blogosphere thanks primarily to Michelle Malkin and a lot of the usual suspects. Here's what the compiler [Steve Gordon, former Bob Barr right-hand man] said:

There’s a new craze hitting the conservative tubes on the Internets these days: “Going Galt!” While it’s difficult to identify an exact date of reference or to provide any unique person with credit for the general meme, Michelle Malkin and Helen Smith certainly deserve honorable mention for recently popularizing the phrase.

This movement seems to have manifested itself in two distinct, but related, forms: those who say, more-or-less, that “I ain’t gonna produce more that 249,999 dollars and 99 cents of taxable income” as well as those more accustomed to singing “Amazing Grace” than Twisted Sister taking to the streets across America chanting “we’re not gonna take it anymore.”

Well, fine. You want to go Galt, go ahead. But don't threaten, just do it. And since it is a completely non-violent strategy (which, frankly, either Gandhi or King might have adopted under certain circumstances), I think you can feel fairly safe that delawaredem won't want to lock you up for treason, and a. price won't feel obligated to defend the country from you.

Most of us fantasize that we contribute far more to society than we actually do. It's a variation on the old hysterical pseudo-suicide cry of, They'll miss me when I'm gone. The reality is that nobody of consequence is going to go Galt, certainly not enough to hide out in an unknown valley out west and bring the country to its knees. What people in the $250K and up tax brackets are going to do is send their money Galt by helping out the job situation among accountants, tax lawyers, and bankers in the Cayman Islands. The projections of how much revenue will be raised by taxing the wealthiest 2% of Americans will fall drastically short, because 6,000,000 people will ultimately come up with far more effective strategies for sheltering their wealth than the government will contrive to pursue it.

Strand Four: The Sussex County Community Organized Regiment. You're worried about this? These are the same folks who make really good scrapple and gin up cannons to fire overripe pumpkins as far as possible. They fix your plumbing, sell you cars, and want desperately to avoid the sinking feeling that the America they think they know is not disappearing. They are actually a part of the cultural diversity that my liberal friends say they value, but don't, not really. They aren't Timothy McVeigh, but they are, deep down, wondering if the FBI is not going to surround their own little Ruby Ridge and shoot up their children. The problem is that most of you would rather lampoon them, or fear them, or demonize them, than deal with them as American citizens with different political ideas.

Which brings us to....

Strand Five: Our friends who really, really need for the people who disagree with them not to be American citizens with different ideas that have to be won over, but wingnuts who have to be defeated. Oddly enough, they got this Manichean view of the political universe from ... Rush Limbaugh, and then adopted it as their own. Rush doesn't want compromise: he wants victory. The current party in power doesn't want compromise: it wants its agenda enacted (victory). Ironically, our liberal and progressive friends demonstrate their tin ear for what Americans are really saying, seeing, and hearing when they think that repeatedly posting about Mike Castle's Betrayal of Delaware is somehow going to have a political impact beyond the sound of their own heavy anticipatory breathing.

Get a grip, folks. America has always been an armed society; it's going to continue to be one. America has always been a potentially violent society--didn't you ever ask yourself where good old Sam Adams found the Sons of Liberty? He recruited them from the street gangs that already infested Boston in the mid-1700s. American will continue to be a potentially violent society--and I don't think the people killing each other in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Camden on a weekly basis are all GOP survivalists or militia wannabes. Just like I don't think the violent, misogynist lyrics of rap are the product of the Heritage Foundation.

Knock-out: USA vs Militia may make good escapist reading. Hell, I enjoyed Lucifer's Hammer and Farnham's Freehold [especially that last chapter with the big sign].

But like it says at the disclaimer entrance to most adult viewing sites on the Net: I can distinguish fantasy from reality, and so can 99.9% of my fellow Americans.

The ones who can't are a tiny minority of folks who are going to crack and kill some people every now and again (bluntly put), and discredit themselves and their ideology in the actions.

I am far more worried about the people who take Chuck Norris style bloviating for profit and attempt to stereotype everybody who disagrees with them as a danger to society.

[The final irony: this post will by and large manage to piss off all my friends: liberal, libertarian, and conservative alike. And I don't really give a damn.]