Beck has used his TV show and his celebrity at least 29 times over 18 months to disparage this foundation with inflammatory rhetoric — rhetoric which recently inspired one of his California viewers to start a “revolution” against Tides’ leaders by attempting to kill them.
As a lawyer who has practiced and taught First Amendment law, I appreciate Beck’s right to speak his mind on any issue. But as a former First Amendment lawyer and instructor, I also know that with this freedom comes responsibility, and just as important, consequences.
Williams (pictured above) pulled the trigger on those two officers, but Beck’s harsh rhetoric against Tides and other leaders of progressive groups, whom he identifies as “enemies,” have helped stoke the fires of outrage in a sector of the American public that is armed and eager to do battle with foes that they believe — or have been led to believe – are in some way destroying our country.
Beck acknowledges that he has viewers who are capable of responding violently to his hyperbolic accusations. He has warned, “it is only a matter of time before an actual crazy person really does something stupid.”
But this recognition of the power and consequences of his words have not dampened his enthusiasm for injecting them with violence to hammer home his perspective. According to Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, some of Beck’s favorite phrases include: “The war is just beginning . . .. Shoot me in the head if you try to change our government . . .. There is a coup going on . . .. Grab a torch! . . . Drive a stake through the heart of the bloodsuckers . . .. They are taking you to a place to be slaughtered . . .. They are putting a gun to America’s head . . .. Hold these people responsible.”
Beck wants us to believe that his rally is blessed by “divine providence”, and is part of a transition to his picking up the mantle of King’s dream, which he claims has been “lost and distorted.”
I heard Dr. King speak back in the 1960’s and this Nobel Prize for Peace-winner’s dream looked nothing like the hate and blood–soaked imagery Beck conjures with his TV show rhetoric. When King used his preacher’s pulpit and international celebrity to speak to the “enemies” of social justice, he imagined an America where black and white children would play together, and where Jews, Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics would join hands in a fight for social justice. His dream, ultimately, was supported by “faith” that would “transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”
In his biography, Strength to Love, King tells us that, “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.” Not incendiary language or armor-piercing bullets. Love. He further argued that, “Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon,” – one “which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it.” Non-violence is the just and ennobling weapon, not a 9 mm gun.
In his plea for a more just society through non-violent means, King urged us to remember the qualities that make us human and that allow us to exercise all of the privileges and rights that have accrued to us as Americans.
Man is “distinguished from animals by his freedom to do evil or to do good,” King said, “and to walk the high road of beauty or tread the low road of ugly degeneracy.”
Glenn Beck has a way with words. So did Martin Luther King, Jr. You decide whose words are most fitting for us, as Americans, to follow.
Dr. King and the “Guys With the Guns” at the NRA
» by Dennis Henigan on July 29th, 2010
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We now know that the National Rifle Association will be joining Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin for Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally at the Lincoln Memorial on the 47th Anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Is it possible to imagine a greater offense to the legacy of Dr. King?
The NRA, the leading purveyor of the noxious notion that guns are legitimate tools of political dissent, will be standing in the historic shadow of Dr. King, the apostle of non-violent protest. Dr. King resisted calls to violence from within the civil rights movement with these words: “There is more power in socially organized masses on the march than there is in guns in the hands of a few desperate men. Our enemies would prefer to deal with a small armed group rather than with a huge, unarmed but resolute mass of people….” As history shows, the civil rights movement touched the moral conscience of our Nation, and ended the Jim Crow era, by pursuing Dr. King’s path of peaceful sit-ins and marches, rather than resisting Bull Connor’s water hoses with bullets.
What would Dr. King have thought of the wild cheers that greeted the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, when he said this at last year’s Conservative Political Action Conference: “Freedom is nothing but dust in the wind till it’s guarded by the blue steel and dry powder of a free and armed people . . . Our founding fathers understood that the guys with the guns make the rules.” The noxious idea, long promoted by the NRA, that the Second Amendment is really about ensuring the threat of violence against the government as a legitimate strategy to achieve political change, is now an anthem of the Far Right. As Sharran Angle, the Tea Party candidate nominated by the Republicans to run for Harry Reid’s Nevada Senate seat, put it recently, “If Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies.” In other words, if the Right cannot change the direction of the country through peaceful discussion and dissent, it will be time for the “guys with the guns” to “make the rules.” We have seen the words of political intimidation translate into action, as guns have been openly brandished at Tea Party events and town hall meetings.
What irony could be more cruel than the NRA’s presence on the steps of the Memorial to President Lincoln, on the Anniversary of Dr. King’s speech, a stark reminder that both these American icons were struck down by gunfire in acts of political violence? John Wilkes Booth and James Earl Ray were “guys with the guns” who sought to change the direction of our country through armed force. We need no more powerful demonstration of the horror that can be too easily justified by the insurrectionist ideas of the NRA and its Tea Party friends. And what could be uglier than the planned appearance of guitarist Ted Nugent, an NRA Board Member, who once said that “apartheid isn’t that cut and dry,” because “all men are not created equal”?
The “Restoring Honor” rally is being sold as an entirely “non-political” event that simply will pay tribute “to America’s service personnel and other upstanding citizens who embody our nation’s founding principles of integrity, truth and honor.” But the ideological agenda is barely concealed. “Help us restore the values that founded this great nation,” says Beck’s promotional material. What values have been lost that must be restored? Who lost them? How should we restore them? The theme of “lost values that must be restored” is indistinguishable from the Tea Party demand, “We want our country back!” The NRA’s presence is an implicit statement that if our values cannot be restored throughout peaceful dissent, the “guys with the guns” will be there to restore them through other means.
In his “I Have a Dream” speech, Dr. King said this: “We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.” The appearance of the NRA at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28 shows a shameful contempt for Dr. King’s memory and the principles of non-violent protest for which he lived, and died.
We must have faith that Dr. King’s legacy will remain strong enough to ensure that the guys with the guns do not make the rules.
It’s being held at the Lincoln Memorial — a place that honors America’s most revered president – the one who saved our union, freed African slaves, and breathed the healing balm “of malice toward none,” at the conclusion of our bitter Civil War – and who was killed by a gun.
It’s also being held on the 47th anniversary of the “March on Washington.” The march where the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke so eloquently of his dream that one day his children would live in a nation where “they will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character;”
Where the transformative power of non-violent protest and forgiveness traveled deeply into the racially scarred American consciousness, and prodded political leaders to pass laws that struck down decades of discriminatory practices that had relegated a group of people to the desert of second-class citizenship.
Now picture the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, on the anniversary of I Have a Dream, with Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre at the podium, and our National Mall teeming with their followers to, in Beck’s words, “pick up Martin Luther King’s dream…”
Calling the date of his rally “Divine providence,” (as noted ironically by the Colbert Report) this is the same Glenn Beck, a life-member of the NRA, who has insulted the Anti-Defamation League; challenged Keith Ellison, a Muslim who had just been elected to Congress to “prove to me you are not working with our enemies;” repeatedly called President Obama “a racist” and accused him of having “a deep-seated hatred for white people.” This same Beck recently urged Christians to leave their churches if their ministers ever spoke about “social justice” – the very foundation of King’s leadership during the 1950’s and 1960’s – because he considers the term code for “communism and Nazism.”
This is the same Wayne LaPierre, who insists that “…it’s the guys with the guns make the rules.” Not Jefferson’s ‘We, the people,’ the American voters, or their representatives. No, “the guys with the guns” – a statement that bears eerie similarity to the one John Wilkes Booth authored in a letter on April 14, 1865, the morning before he assassinated Lincoln, that “Might makes right.”
The same LaPierre who just weeks ago debated me on PBS’s News Hour and argued that laws, such as requiring criminal background checks on all gun sales at gun shows are the equivalent of a “poll tax.”
Yes, you read that correctly. LaPierre equates laws restricting access to guns by dangerous people with a tax designed to keep African-Americans from exercising their 15th Amendment right to vote, which had been blocked for a century after the Civil War. A tax that ultimately was consigned to the dustbin of history by the groundswell of support for the 24th Amendment, which became law on the heels of the 1963 March on Washington. Somehow a proposal designed to slow the mind-numbing gun violence touching so many in this country equals – in LaPierre’s mind — the century-long disenfranchisement of former slaves and their descendants.
On that podium also will be Ted Nugent, a guitarist and NRA board member, who has insulted women and gays, and who told the Detroit Free Press Magazine that, “Apartheid isn’t that cut and dry. All men are not created equal. The preponderance of South Africa is a different breed….”
A large part of the audience likely will be those who identify themselves as members of the Tea Party, some of whom at past public events have openly carried guns and used tactics of intimidation; brandished racially offensive posters depicting President Obama; and shouted racial and anti-gay slurs at congressional leaders outside of a rally to allegedly protest health care legislation. One of the spokespersons for the Tea Partiers even wrote a facetious letter “from the Colored people” to Abraham Lincoln praising slavery, to challenge the NAACP’s claims that the party harbors racist elements.
Most jarring is the sad irony of all of these people at the podium, with their supporters spread across our National Mall, celebrating, in part, their worship of guns, while invoking, quite blatantly, the legacies of two great Americans whose magnificent lives were cruelly cut short by bullets.
And as you hold that image in your mind, consider the words of Dr. King, who, while mourning with all Americans the loss of President John F. Kennedy to gun violence, suggested: “While the question ‘Who killed President Kennedy?’ is important, the question ‘What killed him?’ is more important. Our late President was assassinated by a morally inclement climate. It is a climate filled with heavy torrents of false accusation, jostling winds of hatred and raging storms of violence. It is climate where men cannot disagree without being disagreeable, and where they express dissent through violence and murder.”
Are Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, and Ted Nugent, at this place and time, the new keepers of King’s dream and of Lincoln’s legacy? Or do they, with this event at this place and time, in one of the boldest and most public ways imaginable, mock, and indeed, slander, everything for which these men so nobly stood, and for which they died?
How Many Non Sequiturs Does it Take to Arm Terrorists?
» by Dennis Henigan on May 7th, 2010
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I have often thought that you could teach an entire Introductory Logic course by demonstrating the repeated fallacies of “gun rights” advocates as they struggle to oppose common sense restrictions on firearms.
One of my favorite “gun rights” fallacies was on display at this week’s hearing on guns and terrorists before the Senate’s Homeland Security Committee, chaired by Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.). The hearing featured testimony by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly decrying two indefensible loopholes in our gun laws that make a mockery of our war on terror.
First, although we can block those on the terrorist watch list from getting on airplanes, suspected terrorist activity is not itself a sufficient reason under current law to prevent them from buying guns from licensed dealers (the “terror gap”). Second, even if we could block suspected terrorists (and other violent people) from buying guns from licensed dealers, they could evade Brady Law background checks entirely by resorting to private sellers at gun shows (the “gun show loophole”). The subject acquires new urgency following the revelation that the Times Square car bomb suspect had a Kel-Tec assault rifle in the car he drove to the airport, no doubt ready for use if he had been intercepted in transit.
“Senator Lieberman, Joe, we’re talking about a Second Amendment right. And some of the people pushing this idea [closing the terror gap] are also pushing the idea of banning handguns. And I don’t think banning handguns makes me safer, because every criminal who wants a gun seems to be able to get one.”
So, as I understand it, Senator Graham’s argument goes like this:
Some people who support closing the terror gap also support banning handguns.
I don’t support banning handguns.
Therefore, I don’t support closing the terror gap.
Does this argument make sense to anyone but Senator Graham? Even if it is true that some who support preventing terrorists from buying guns also would like to ban handguns, it is certainly logically possible to support the former without supporting the latter. In fact, a recent survey by Republican messaging maven Frank Luntz shows that 82% of self-identified NRA members support “prohibiting persons on the terrorist watch lists from purchasing guns” even though it would be surprising to find much support in that group for banning handguns. In short, the fact that “some people are pushing the idea of banning handguns” will never be a good reason to oppose barring suspected terrorists from buying guns.
As Senator Lieberman all-too-patiently pointed out in the hearing, no one was talking about banning handguns. The exchange between the two Senators illustrates a longtime reality of the gun debate: opponents of stricter gun laws need the debate to be about banning guns. Since gun owners –and even NRA members – support proposals like closing the terror gap, they must be convinced that the debate is not really about closing the terror gap or other reasonable reforms, but about banning guns generally. If someone proposes modest changes like closing the terror gap and the gun show loophole, the prescribed response is clear - change the subject.
Yesterday’s hearing also illustrates that the “banning guns” misdirection strategy is so important to the opponents of gun control that it continues to be used even after the Supreme Court’s 2008 ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller establishing that it would violate the Second Amendment for Congress to ban handguns. Senator Graham mentioned the Supreme Court’s ruling, yet didn’t seem to understand that the Heller ruling makes handgun bans even more irrelevant to issues like the terror gap. In the words of Justice Scalia’s majority opinion, handgun bans are now “off the table” as a policy option. Ironically, the same Supreme Court ruling that gave the gun lobby the reading of the Second Amendment it had long sought also promises to weaken its ability to use the fear of a general gun ban to whip its members into a frenzy against gun regulation generally. Senator Graham also showed no awareness of the language in Heller extending the right to have guns only to “law-abiding, responsible” individuals, leaving ample constitutional room for policies to deny guns to those planning terrorist attacks on our citizens.
We can only hope that the fatal fallacies of the gun lobby and its allies in Congress will become so apparent that reason will start to light the darkness in the gun debate. Who among us is willing to die for a non sequitur?
A Kinder, Gentler Militia?
» by Dennis Henigan on April 26th, 2010
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In its recent report “Rage on the Right,” the Southern Poverty Law Center documented an alarming increase in the number of rightwing paramilitary groups – calling themselves “militias” – many of them engaged in active military training with high-firepower weaponry. According to the SPLC, in 2009 the number of militia groups almost tripled. The FBI recently arrested nine members of the Michigan-based Hutaree militia, who allegedly were plotting violent attacks on police officers.
These developments, set against a rise in acts of politically motivated violence, threats of violence and other inflammatory rhetoric directed against the Obama Administration and the government in general, are sobering reminders of a similar incendiary environment prior to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. The early 1990s saw the emergence of a similar militia movement, with a virulently anti-government ideology.
Recently National Public Radio ran a story, called “America’s New Kinder, Gentler Militia,” revealing the determined efforts by some current militia groups to distance themselves from the violent image of the militia groups of the 1990s, as well as newly-emergent groups like the Hutarees. The story was about the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia and an NPR reporter, Dina Temple Raston, accompanied the militiamen on one of their training exercises. If you believe the militia spin, they are the adult version of the Boy Scouts, learning how to start a fire without matches (they actually showed Ms. Raston how it is done), helping the local sheriff find missing people, collecting coats for needy kids, and adopting a local highway. They denied they were motivated by racism and paranoia. They contrasted themselves with the Hutaree militia, saying “they were the old-style militia, bent on violence,” whereas “the new helpful militia” is one that “no one needs to be scared of.”
The Michigan militiamen must have regarded the NPR story as a spectacular success. According to NPR’s introduction to the story, the militia movement has “grown less violent in recent years.” Ms. Raston described the Southeast Michigan militia as “benign”.
This judgment seems to have lost the forest for the trees. To point out the obvious, it is possible to help the local sheriff find missing people, collect coats for needy kids, and adopt a local highway, without engaging in military training in the woods with assault weapons. One of the militiamen described his “battle gear” to Ms. Raston as including a rifle with four 30-round magazines, as well as a 9mm sidearm. These people may or may not be racist or paranoid as individuals, but what brings them together is an ideology that should be very troubling to most Americans. The militiamen believe that it is entirely legitimate to form a private army to prepare for armed conflict with our government.
Even a short visit to the website of the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia reveals how difficult it is for groups like this to disguise themselves as purely service organizations. The anti-government rhetoric appears in abundance. In a document entitled “In Defense of Liberty II,” (presented in FAQ form), after proclaiming that “the militia is not anti-government,” the militiamen say they “fully support the restoration of the constitutionally limited government that was intended for this nation.” Thus, the government they support is not the government we have: “Where we do have problems, is with the on-going violations of our inalienable rights, as should you.” They warn that “your duly elected local, state and federal representatives will day after day, year after year, continue to pass unconstitutional laws, raise your taxes, beyond the point of serfdom, claim authority over your children, take your property, jail you for pretended offenses, send our military to fight foreign wars, protect you from yourself, etc. unless you get involved.”
NPR was impressed that, after inveighing against the people’s “loss of their liberties,” one militiaman said they want people to “get out to the ballot box” and vote for those who would restore their liberties. For the militia, he emphasized, “violence is a very last resort.” And therein lies the problem. The militias are engaged in military training in case their resort to the ballot box fails to produce the government they want and violence becomes necessary. And who decides when the time for violence has come? According to the Michigan Militia website, the command structure of the militia does not have the authority to order any member to “shoot at someone.” “That decision is left solely to the individual citizen.”
What seems to distinguish the various militias may simply be a matter of timing. Some, like the Hutarees, believe that the government has already become so tyrannical that violence is justified. Others don’t think it’s quite bad enough, at least right now. But all are united behind the pernicious idea that violence against our government is a legitimate “last resort.”
If militiamen want simply to serve their communities, I suggest joining the Kiwanis Club. No amount of “community service” spin can hide their mission to ready themselves for acts of violence against government officials. In a democratic society governed by the rule of law, that is not a “kinder, gentler” idea.
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How Many Non Sequiturs Does it Take to Arm Terrorists?