Some twenty years ago, the website BUZZFEED was kind enough to post a series I wrote called “Dangerous Clowns.” It was about the tenor of RW rhetoric at that time and where it could lead. I stumbled upon it recently in some old Word files. Given the wild stories about stolen elections and non-white immigrants stealing and eating family pets, not from obscure RW posters, but the Republican presidential and vice presidential candidates, I think it’s worth posting again.

This is longer than most of my posts, and much more serious. I apologize for that. But I think these pieces were more prescient than I would have liked them to be.

Just call me Cassandra.

“His blood carries not honor, uprightness, and honesty, rather criminality, fraud, hypocrisy, lies, the lust for defilement, and the lust for murder…a race that has drives toward the unnatural and toward criminality cannot recognize natural moral laws.” Julius Streicher on the Jews.

“..the Democrats — far too many of them — are evil, pure and simple. They have no redeeming social value. They are outright traitors themselves, or apologists for treasonous behavior. They are enemies of the American people and the American way of life.” Joseph Farah, “Baghdad Bonior,” Worldnet Daily 10/8/02

“ Liberalism is a mental disorder that has undermined our families, our society, and our national security…” Michael Savage, Newsmax.com interview 2/1/03

Look up the name “Julius Streicher” in the index of most recent books on the Third Reich and you’re likely to be referred to one or two brief mentions. He was a lout whose anti-Semitic newspaper, Der Sturmer, was so crude that he’s sometimes called “Hitler’s pornographer.” He is usually described as a squat thug with a paltry talent for harnessing the combined power of ignorance and malice, someone whom intelligent people could safely ignore with a contemptuous laugh.

Many of those watched the rise of the Third Reich as it happened weren’t that dismissive. In 1936 Time Magazine referred to him as “One of Nazi Germany’s most dangerous clowns.” Hitler himself considered Streicher’s ability to mobilize the masses to the cause of Nazism invaluable and Himmler was quoted in Streicher’s newspaper Der Sturmer, “In times to come when the story of the reawakening of the German people is written, and when the next generation will be unable to understand how the German people could ever have been friendly with the Jews, it will be said that Julius Streicher and his weekly newspaper were responsible for a good part of the education about the enemy of mankind.”

The tribunal at Nuremburg in 1945 agreed. Part of the indictment against Streicher read:

“In the early days he was preaching persecution. As persecution took place he preached extermination and annihilation and, as millions of Jews were exterminated and annihilated, in the Ghettoes of the East, he cried out for more and more.

The crime of Streicher is that he made these crimes possible, which they never would have been had it not been for him and for those like him.”

For the past twenty years, Streicher’s voice has been most faithfully echoed in the pronouncements of people like Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Ann Coulter and countless other less well-known “clowns” who frequent cable TV, talk radio and the Internet. Like Streicher, they are often dismissed as so obviously ridiculous that they’re barely worth the attention of well-informed citizens.

And while they are not anti-Semites and their rhetoric is unlikely to lead to the mass murder of those they target, it has, like Streicher’s, made mindless hatred not just acceptable in the minds of many people, but downright virtuous.

There’s a saying about the sleep of reason and what it produces. For far too long, thinking Americans have treated the irrationality steadily bubbling up from the far right as if it were a harmless amusement, unlikely to impact ordinary citizens. We have been unwilling to look at the extent to which the mediums of right wing talk radio and the Internet have popularized the agenda of influential people who are not stupid, but who are willing to foster and use stupidity and hatred as a means to an end.

Continued in Part II