Dumb and Dumber: From Ann Coulter to Little Green Skinheads

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Part I

In Thomas Frank's article "Shrill and Shriller" published in Issue 16 of The Baffler, he examines the far-right-wing writer and pinup girl Ann Coulter's refusal to face the economic realities of the post tech bubble recession and her obsessive attempts to shift the debate from unemployment, corporate corruption and a growing deficit onto the cultural sins of an imaginary liberal elite.

Joe Lunchpail's major grip, Coulter seems to argue, is not that he's out of a job, his gas costs over $2.00 a gallon, or that the bank is about to foreclose on his mortgage. No, his major gripe is that some unnamed Columbia grad student on the upper West side of Manhattan with his subscription to the Nation and his girlfriend with dyed black hair and body piercings might just be laughing at him. Who cares if your kids can't get their teeth fixed because you don't have enough money when there are snobs on Central Park West and in Hollywood who look down on shotguns and Nascar? And who cares if that big pompous dude John Kerry might just raise the minimum wage and make it a bit more difficult for your employer to hide the fact that your pregnant wife is working with dangerous chemicals. Doesn't matter. He looks French and his wife has a funny accent, so you vote for Bush.

Frank rightfully points out that, according to Ann Coulter, Americans aren't motivated by economics, but by culture, and he rightfully pauses to reflect on just how delusional this idea really is.

Frank confines his analysis almost exclusively to the print media but, perhaps more important than the popularity of right-wing celebrities like Coulter, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly is the increasing number of virulently right-wing web sites and chat boards, most of which have their origins in the attacks on Bill Clinton. Indeed, there is a large, right-wing internet-based movement that is approaching the influence of talk-radio, the direct mail campaigns of the 1980s and the success Christian Fundamentalists have had using television. As fundrace.org notes, George Bush is second only to Howard Dean in the amount of money raised from small contributors. "Activists" from the site FreeRepublic regularly disrupt anti-war demonstrations. Whacked-out hate sites like Massada 2000 publish lists of "self-hating Jews" and their personal information (presumably to target them for harassment). And "watchdog sites" like Campus Watch (which are in fact fronts for the far-right) collective information about liberal academics.

One of the more chilling moments for me was looking at an old professor of mine from Rutgers on the Massada 2000 hit list of "self-hating Jews." It's one thing for the right to publish rants about celebrities like Tim Robbins or Jeanine Garofalo (who one would presume people have heard of), quite another to be tracking down obscure liberal college professors and putting them on a hit list because they're Jewish and liberal. That takes research and a genuine grassroots movement behind it. That frustrated looking little geek in the back of your class who never talks to girls and carries around a copy of "Atlas Shrugged." Yes, he might just be taking notes in your class and sending them to people quite possibly capable of getting violent so you'd better not put Noam Chomsky on your syllabus.

Part II

One of the more popular of these right-wing sites is called Little Green Footballs. Little Green Footballs is the spiritual child of FreeRepublic. It serves as a kind of virtual community for the extreme right. And it's the cousin of Massada2000. It's obsessed with liberal Jews and liberals in general who might just be "traitors" to the Likud Party and the Bush administration.

Its readers wade through anti-war demonstrations with digital cameras and take pictures of pro-Palestinian activists. They "monitor" the New York Times and the AP and explode in anger every time a Hamas or PLO member is called an "activist" or a "militant" or a "guerilla" instead of a "terrorist." They go on for pages and pages about how the BBC and Reuters are really the political arm of Islamic fundamentalism.

More importantly, they have their own vocabulary.

Note that I used the term "pro-Palestinian Activists" instead of "terror advocates" and this would put me in the category of "LLL" or "Left Liberal Looney." Howard Dean would be a "Moonbat," a liberal so crazed and out of the loop that he should be howling at the moon. Arabs, blacks, Hispanics, native Americans and non-white people in general are known as "Morlocks" (a term taken from the HG Wells novel "The Time Machine"), a degenerate species of sub-human cannibals, threatening and violent to the white "Eloi" aristocracy. Worst of all is the term "idiotarian." The fact that I attended a memorial for Rachel Corrie would make me an "idiotarian." It would be hard to define exactly what they mean by "idiotarian," but to qualify you would have to be some combination of Ann Coulter's "liberal elite" and some scruffy kid spare-changing in Berkeley. Even that doesn't do the term justice. Let's just say it makes you too nasty and horrible for words. It probably means you sleep with Arabs and eat bean sprouts while reading Noam Chomsky and praying for the destruction of Israel. The only thing worse than a racially inferior "morlock" is an privilaged white and insufficiently conservative "idiotarian." In the world of the Little Green Footballs reader, all of the "idiotarians" will eventually (like the race traitors in the Turner Diaries) wind up paying for their crime of being too sympathetic to the "morlocks" with some sort of horribly violent end.

“When contemplating college liberals, you really regret once again that John Walker is not getting the death penalty,” (Ann) Coulter said in an address to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). “We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too. Otherwise they will turn out to be outright traitors.”

Part III

The proprietary vocabulary of Little Green Footballs allows them both to identify and dehumanize outsiders. Just as the Thor tattoo, references to obscure white supremacist bands and slight variations of common words ("nig" instead of "nigger" or "humanitarian" instead of "liberal") let the neo-nazi skinhead and Stormfront reader distinguish his own kind from ordinary white guys with shaved heads like myself, so terms like "idiotarian, morlock, moonbat and LLL" let the Little Green Footballs reader distinguish himself from the mass of humanity on the web. Go onto Little Green Footballs and ask "what's an LLL" and you're likely to be swarmed by an angry hornets nest hungry for liberal blood. And you'll probably get your IP banned. The proprietary words also allow a systemic hardening of racial attitudes towards Arabs. It's much easer to say "5 morlocks received their just rewards from the righteous fury of the IDF" then it is to say "5 people got killed" or "5 Arabs got killed" or even "5 terrorists got killed."

Little Green Footballs likes to present itself as a serious resource for information about terrorism, the Middle East, and the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, but is it? Indeed, although it's proprietor, a character named "Charles Johnson," (and I have no idea if that's his real name or not) gets talked up by well-known conservatives like James Taranto and Andrew Sullivan, he doesn't seem to be Jewish or a speaker of Hebrew or Arabic. He doesn't seem to have an advanced degree in the history of the region. He isn't associated with a university or major think tank. He doesn't seem to have lived for an extended period of time in Israel or in any Arab country. He doesn't seem to have any connection to the Israeli government or the Republican party. Of course I could be wrong about all of this since he's semi-anonymous but I don't think I am. If you search the archives of his site, you can only come to the conclusion that it's probably best to take him at his word. He's a web-designer and semi-professional musician who "had his eyes opened" to the Arab and Islamic menace after 9/11. Indeed, the early posts aren't about Islam or Arabs or terrorists at all. They remind me of somebody trying to get what used to be known as an "E/N" site off the ground, a mixture of tech/web development advice and general musings about the daily life of the webmaster.

What "Charles Johnson" basically amounts to is this: he's a virtual, grass-roots equivalent of Ann Coulter, a conservative ideologue with no special training or qualifications to write about the Middle East or Israel using the Middle East and Israel as a springboard to attack "the liberal elite." Like Coulter, he's utterly uninterested in economics and obsessed with some sort of leftist aristocracy which might just be looking down its nose at him and his readers. Like Coulter, he's something of a celebrity, although, in his case, its the celebrity that comes with running a popular chat board. Like Coulter, he claims to be defending a class of people persecuted by the liberal elites. In Coulter's case, it's Nascar dads and shotgun owners. In "Charles Johnson's" case it's that lonely pro-Israel college student sitting in a room full of liberals ashamed to defend the Israelis and while leftist idiotarians all around him are heaping abuse on Arial Sharon and sentimentalizing the PLO.

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