{pic by Big Dubya}

Now, I don’t know much about what you might call “knowledge.” In fact, it’s probably safe to say that I know less than nothing when it comes to history, politics, economics, science, and all those other fancy subjects that liberal university-type people think are so important. But one thing I do know is that this Obama administration and this Democrat Congress are socialist. It’s not that I really know what the word “socialism” means, mind you. I mean, I know it’s like what they have in China and Russia and Cuba and places like that. It’s kind of like when a Big Government takes your money and spreads it around to everyone—sort of like the Feds do with Medicare and Social Security, except that I like my Medicare and Social Security, so don’t mess with them. But I don’t want anything else like Medicare and Social Security because that would just be too socialistical. I’d be against Medicare and Social Security, too, if we didn’t already have them and I didn’t already like having them…

But that’s not the point. The point is that people on the T.V. and the radio like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Ann Coulter tell me that Obama and the Democrats are socialist, and I believe them. It’s kind of like accepting that my 1978 edition of the New International Version of the English translation of the Bible is the Word of God. It’s something you just have to take on faith, and asking for proof kind of ruins the whole thing. I mean, demanding “proof” that the Bible is the Word of God is pretty much proof that you’re an atheist, right? So demanding proof that Rush and Glenn and Ann are telling the truth about Obama being a socialist is pretty much proof that you’re a socialist.

I just know what I know, you know?

I am brimming over with ill-defined pride and faux patriotism—and nothing you say could ever change my mind.

I am an All-American Fool.

{pic by Burns!}

It is by no means clear when a word becomes violent. Murkier still is the question of when a word becomes so violent that the person who stands behind it deserves imprisonment or some lesser form of legal censure. And trying to decide what degree of responsibility is borne by a speaker of violent words for the violence committed by others who were inspired by those words tends to be a circular exercise in ethical futility.

The many gradations of meaning and intent that transform Free Speech into Hate Speech into Verbal Violence have been on prominent display over the past month or so as the Radical Right—already apoplectic over the ascendancy of dark-hued liberalism in the nation’s Capitol—has cloaked itself in health-care drag and infested the Town Hall Meetings that congressional representatives feel inexplicably obliged to conduct during their August recess. Much of the Right Wing’s theatrics in this regard have been farcically delusional in nature. Drones who receive their marching orders from intellectual luminaries such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck parrot patently absurd talking points about Fascism, Socialism, and “death panels” while parading around with pictures of Barack Obama sporting a Hitler-esque mustache. During a recent Town Hall Meeting in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, Representative Barney Frank (D-4th/Mass.), Chairman of the House Committee on Financial Services, illustrated quite brilliantly just how seriously these kinds of histrionics should not be taken based on their merits (or lack thereof).

Unfortunately, Hate Speech is not all fun and games in which the intellectual deficiencies or mental instabilities of Right Wingers can be mocked for sport. Hate Speech can be deadly in its consequences, unintended or otherwise. For instance, Washington Monthly notes that Pittsburgh cop-killer Richard Poplawski suckled at the ideological teats of Fox News and the National Rifle Association in feeding his fantasies that the Obama administration was about to seize his beloved weapons. And the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights points out that the anti-immigrant rhetoric spouted by “high profile national media personalities” such as Lou Dobbs and Michael Savage “correlates closely with the increase in hate crimes against Hispanics.” Of course, correlation does not prove causality—and blaming the demagoguery of Dobbs and Savage for anti-Latino hate crimes is akin to blaming Marilyn Manson for the Columbine massacre because shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris liked his songs.

Regardless of the precise relationship between Hate Speech by one person and violent acts committed by another, the question remains of what one can actually do about it. In Europe and Canada, for instance, certain forms of public hate speech are simply illegal—although these laws have not exactly succeeded in eradicating either hate crimes or Right Wing hate groups. In the United States, on the other hand, freedom of speech as encoded in the First Amendment to the Constitution is generally held in high regard; and for good reason. As the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) succinctly notes: “History teaches that the first target of government repression is never the last.” In other words, let the government ban the speech of your enemy and it may ban your speech next. It is for that reason that the ACLU sometimes finds itself in the uncomfortable position of defending the free-speech rights of utterly vile hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan—and opposing progressive students who seek to ban Right Wing hate speech on campus. As the ACLU argues rather persuasively: “Where racist, sexist and homophobic speech is concerned, the ACLU believes that more speech—not less—is the best revenge.…when hate is out in the open, people can see the problem.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean one must sit back and do nothing when mainstream media “commentators” who are bankrolled by major corporations spew forth hate rhetoric day after day. For instance, the Color of Change campaign seems to be having some success in persuading advertisers to pull their ads from Glenn Beck’s show. Ultimately, however, peddlers of hate like Beck will fade away only when they no longer have a mass audience dumb enough to believe their lies. Darkness flourishes where the bulbs are dimmest. Conservative ideology tends to be a refuge for the ignorant… it is people who don’t know what “socialism” actually is who are the most likely to believe that the centrist Obama administration is “socialist.” For better or worse, an educated populace is the only viable, long-term solution to the social problems and quandaries posed by Hate Speech and Verbal Violence.

{pic by stallio}

People who are accustomed to thinking for themselves often experience confusion upon visiting the virtual salons in which Arch-Conservatives share their erudite observations concerning history, science, and current affairs. This confusion stems in large part from the vastly different evidentiary standards by which Far-Right Wingers tend to evaluate different beliefs. Some beliefs require no supporting evidence at all to be accepted as Truth in the Uber-Conservative Consciousness. But there are other beliefs for which no amount of evidence can ever suffice. For instance, no evidence is necessary to support the belief that Barack Obama is an illegal Kenyan immigrant born in Mombasa. But no amount of evidence is sufficient to support the belief that Obama is a U.S. citizen born in Honolulu.

There are no hard and fast rules among Super Conservatives as to when a belief requires evidence and when it doesn’t. Such knowledge is more of an art than a science and requires experience to master. For those readers unfamiliar with the unpredictable empirical twists and turns of the Paleoconservative Worldview, here is a handy topical guide for distinguishing Fact-Free Truth from Evidence-Based Heresy:

Cosmology

Fact-Free Truth: A magical and invisible Supreme Being created the universe about 6,000 years ago.

Evidence-Based Heresy: The universe as we know it came into being 12-14 billion years ago with an event called the “Big Bang.”

Biology

Fact-Free Truth: The magical and invisible Supreme Being created all forms of Life just as they exist today.

Evidence-Based Heresy: All forms of life change over time through the interplay of genetic mutation and natural selection; a process known as “evolution.”

History

Fact-Free Truth: The stories of The Bible tell the literal truth about the history of Humankind.

Evidence-Based Heresy: The stories of The Bible are parables created before the existence of a clearly defined “non-fiction” genre in literature.

Climatology

Fact-Free Truth: “Global warming” is a hoax perpetrated by a vast international conspiracy designed to undermine U.S. sovereignty in order to create Word Government.

Evidence-Based Heresy: Emissions of carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” from industrial processes are causing the average temperature of the earth to rise over time.

Politics

Fact-Free Truth: The Obama administration is “socialist.”

Evidence-Based Heresy: The Obama administration is “centrist Democrat” by U.S. political standards (which qualifies as “moderate conservative” by global political standards) and does not come close to fitting the actual definition of “socialism.”

Patriotism

Fact-Free Truth: The United States of America is the greatest nation that has ever existed or ever will exist and is uniquely favored by the magical and invisible Supreme Being.

Evidence-Based Heresy: The United States of America is number 15 on the Human Development Index of nations as ranked by average health, knowledge, and standard of living—right after Iceland, Norway, Canada, Australia, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Japan, Luxembourg, Switzerland, France, Finland, Denmark, and Austria.

Sexuality

Fact-Free Truth: Homosexuals choose a deviant and hedonistic “life style” that is frowned up by the magical and invisible Supreme Being.

Evidence-Based Heresy: Homosexuals are attracted to members of the same sex.

Sex

Fact-Free Truth: Sex outside of marriage is wrong.

Evidence-Based Heresy: Sex outside of marriage is fun.

{pic by Sorcyress}

I am the wet dream of conservative nightmares…

Like our foreign-born President, Barack Obama bin Laden, I am a radical militant of both the Islamic and Socialist varieties. This means that I hate anyone who doesn’t believe in Allah because I’m a devout Muslim, and I hate Muslims because I’m an atheist who doesn’t believe in any god or religion. Presumably, this means I hate myself, which I suppose would explain my fondness for suicide bombings.

I am also a dark-hued racial militant governed by the vagaries of “identity politics,” unless I’m white—in which case I assuage my white guilt by supporting anti-white racial militants and opposing the justifiably white identity politics of pro-white racial militants. It’s all rather complicated, especially since “race” doesn’t really exist.

I am a traitor to my country who wants the U.S. economy to collapse into chaos. But I don’t want it to collapse into too much chaos, because I also want to nationalize it. Let’s say that I want the economy to collapse into just enough chaos to do away with free enterprise and private property rights, but then to stop collapsing just before it becomes so chaotic that there’s nothing left for the government to commandeer. It’s a very tricky balancing act.

I am an emasculating, lesbian, Femi-Nazi who hates anything with a penis. But I’m also a faggot who positively loves penises, especially for the purpose of sodomy. So I have a rather conflicted sexual identity. No doubt this explains my fondness for transvestitism, transsexualism, and hermaphroditism.

I am a farcical caricature of a delusional stereotype.

{pic by hoveringdog}

Of the many reasons that conservatives hate Barack Obama and his incoming posse, perhaps the dumbest is that, well, they aren’t dumb enough. As the Washington Post’s Alec MacGillis notes, conservatives are apparently outraged that Obama will populate the White House and federal agencies with too many people who not only went to universities like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, but actually had the audacity to excel in their studies. This is, of course, anathema to conservative ideologues, who insist that, if you must attend prestigious universities, you can at least have the decency to earn poor marks—like soon-to-be ex-President George W. Bush.

From the conservative perspective, performing too well in the classroom, especially on an Ivy League campus, is proof of near-treasonous sycophantic snobbery. The Weekly Standard’s Joseph Epstein, for instance, claims that people who get good grades in Ivy League schools do so only by regurgitating whatever their liberal, feminist, socialist, communist professors want—in slavish devotion to empty personal ambition. He juxtaposes this with the example of a truly “great” president such as Ronald Reagan, who attended Eureka College in Illinois and went on to famously proclaim that “trees cause more pollution than automobiles do” and “facts are stupid things.”

In conservative circles, ignorance is a virtue and a source of “regular guy” street cred. This is to be expected since conservatism is based on the notion of unquestioned truths: the One True God blessed the United States (but not France), the soul enters a human zygote exactly at the moment of conception, the earth is flat and located at the center of the universe, etc. People who always ask questions and look for evidence (intellectuals, academics, heretics) are not only tiresome, they are morally suspect. That’s why the Bush administration relied so much on ideological purity rather than competence in filling so many crucial posts—and then completely bungled the reconstruction of Iraq and the response to Hurricane Katrina, among several hundred other self-inflicted disasters…

…And that’s why former presidential candidate John McCain chose a base-mobilizing fool as his vice-presidential running mate.

…And it’s why a second-rate actor with the intelligence of a house plant was transformed by adoring conservatives into a “visionary” president who single-handedly brought down a Soviet Empire he probably could not have located on a map.

{pic from mueredecine}

Now that Barack Obama has become the President-elect of the United States, we all know that the End of Days—or at least the fall of western civilization—is close at hand. Soon after he takes the oath of office, with his hand resting on a copy of the Koran and a turban harshly wrapped around his head, Obama will begin to transform our nation into a socialist republic of Islamic black militancy and sexual permissiveness. Condoms will flow freely in kindergarten classrooms, the guns of God-fearing Americans will be confiscated, and the hard-earned inherited wealth of our millionaires and billionaires will be seized and redistributed to masses of dark-skinned, unemployed welfare recipients. Pregnant evangelical teenagers will be forced to have abortions as part of a government plot to depopulate the abstinence-only movement. The U.S. military, newly led by Black Panthers and former members of the Weather Underground, will surrender unconditionally to al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Run for your lives, white people. He’s not like all those Republican politicians you’ve known and loved. He can write his own books and speak in complete and coherent sentences. He’s one of those elitists who actually did well in school. And he’s darker than you. So be afraid…very, very afraid.