I want to second Eyeball's assessment. The Republican party adopted the Southern strategy in the sixties--essentially a paen to bigotry from the party formally most associated with priveleged elites as a way of dividing the electorate and skimming off the fat. The other in those times were blacks foremost--Latinos, Asians, homosexuals and Jews, as the in-reserve boogymen. The success of that strategy is manifest--I think every Republican presidential candidate since has carried the South. Where animosity towards blacks and Jews and others primarily existed as the representative of the economic impotence of poor and working class whites, it is not surprising that Arabs (muslims) , with their position at the mouth of US oil sources , can easily pass for surrogates. I see a lot of the same structures used against both African Americans and Muslims/Arabs on the Fox pundit shows. Hannity's favorite trick is to stock his program with conservative blacks and Arabs who are often no more than paid shills. Walid Shoebat, who many suspect was never a muslim or a member of the PLO, stands out in this regard. In the black context, Hannity often hosts black ministers or preachers or Republicans who will bolster his view--essentially, that black people who continue to lobby for equality and an end to the legacy of slavery and Jim Crowe--are n******'s.

And with that, Happy Easter you crazy Kristians!

The entire point of most of their racial skits is to make fun of individuals that buy into the worst stereotypes of the group and base their behavior/expectations on that.

"You know the worst thing about niggas? Niggas always want credit for some shit they supposed to do. A nigga'll brag about some shit a normal man just does. A nigga'll say some shit like 'I take care of my kids.' You supposed to you dumb mutha f****r! What kind of ignorant shit is that! 'I ain't never been to jail!'What do you want, a cookie?! You're not supposed to go to jail you low expectation-having motherf****r!"

What Glenn refers to is the EXACT opposite. It is cherry picking the worst stereotypes by picking individuals -- ironically none of the Insta examples are anywhere close to what he's talking about, they are just random black people he doesn't like -- and projecting that onto the group.

Is this comic strip

http://xkcd.com/385/

http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2008/01/11/neo-nazi-threatmaker-accused-of-working-for-fbi/

Over the years of covering cases involving the far right and federal law enforcement's use of informants, I've certainly seen them indulging the use of some of the most questionable characters for this work. But I don't think I've ever seen anything this irresponsible before.

As Mark Potok of the SPLC put it when I talked to him about this case: "These people were playing Russian Roulette with the lives of the people Hal Turner was targeting."

Potok also spoke with Mike German, a former undercover FBI agent whose work I once covered. "This certainly raises a whole lot of questions that need to be answered in a public forum," he said. "There are strict rules about what an informant is allowed to do, and certainly encouraging or instigating others to commit acts of violence is far beyond what FBI agents should have their informants doing. Aside from the fact that you're possibly encouraging someone to commit an act of violence, there¹s also the danger that you're actually entrapping that person, which means he would get off."

This deserves to be a significant scandal. We'll see if the press can divert its attention long enough from Britney Spears to bring it to the public's attention.

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2008/01/your-taxpayer-dollars-at-work.html

If the FBI can give our tax dollars to neo-nazis, Ron Paul should be allowed to take it from them.

We were among Hoover's conduits to the American people,

-- Pat Buchanan, who was caught publishing FBI anti-Martin Luther King Jr. propaganda as his own editorials in the St Louis Globe Democrat in the mid-1960s, in Right from the Beginning, Buchanan's 1988 autobiography

To wax philosophically for a moment here. I think that there is something essentially thanatos about young men (and perhaps young women, but having never been one, I can't really say). I have no firm studies on this, except the alarming rate of car accidents of that age (a statistic I did my part for), and the sadly high rate of enlistment for men in their late teens and early twenties. To the extent it has somthing to do with poverty or class is merely how high the ante is-or in other words what the alternatives are to life-risking behavior.

Pat the bat:Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.

Someone above complained about the N word. Not a problem compared to this kind of thinking. How can anyone over the age of five actually think that the degree of thankfulness one must have as a citizen of the USA depends on skin color? How could anyone think that it is OK to write that down for people to read as valid and useful comment? How could a national media organization hire such a person? Even if that person has worked for some of the most powerful people in the USA? Or is that the whole point?

Hume's Ghost:

And don't kid yourself ... [Pat Buchanan's blog post] is the exact sort of sentiment you will find at Stormfront if you have the stomach to wade through that site.

At the same time, the white supremacy movement is becoming more image- and media-savvy, learning to employ less blatant racist language and softer arguments publicly in support of "European heritage" and "Scots-Irish ethnic pride." These groups also emphasize self-improvement, opposition to illegal immigration, and vigilantism against "crime" - which is really just shorthand for minorities to them. They themselves admit to this newer, groomed image, and it can be found on most of their websites.

[S]ome people linked to the skinhead culture are calling for a fundamental shift in tactics. Tom Metzger is credited by some as the grandfather of the American skinhead movement. Today he is calling for skinheads to throw off the traditional symbols of the culture, grow their hair out, cover up their tattoos and assimilate into mainstream society and wait for the right time to strike. It appears that skinhead groups around the country are embracing Metzger’s strategy. We spent time with two crews, The Keystone State Skinheads based in Pennsylvania and the Maryland Skinheads based in Baltimore, who both profess they are turning their backs on violence, and reinventing their clubs as political organizations. They have their sights squarely set on reaching the mainstream and are using every tool at their disposal to do so. They have toned down the rhetoric and shaped the message to appeal to a larger audience. It seems to be working, using tools like the Internet, and a growing music scene, they are reaching record numbers with their message.

(Link at signature.)

So what is interesting is that these hate groups are moving closer and closer to the rhetorical characteristics that people like Pat Buchanan and other (what I call) racists-in-reading-glasses share. It is almost getting to the point where the hate groups' public message is indistinguishable from folks like Pat Buchanan, with both waxing pseudo-academic about "America's traditional European culture" being overrun by a horde of Mexicans who want to "take over the Southwest."

Take heed - hate groups will become the next great domestic threat if Obama becomes president. They are already seeing their membership swell, first in response to illegal immigration, but no doubt soon also in response to a black president. To them, "their country" is literally being taken over by black and brown folks who want to destroy their identity and culture.

They are going to positively flip out if Obama becomes president - it's their worst nightmare. He not only embodies black institutional success, but also racial mixing, a cardinal sin of the blood. Expect anything kind he has to say about Israel or the Jewish community to be writ large in their panicked minds.