Breivik

5 22 Buffalo mass shoot

no merri

name on gun; prototypical (okla bomb?)

manifesto?

social media?

CONFIRM his cite

an 2 24

florida public school students start learning about communism in 7th grade. That’s too late for some Republicans in the Florida House, who want teachers to instruct students as young as kindergarteners on concepts such as “cultural Marxism.” But what is it?

The House bill moving in the Legislature doesn’t provide a definition for the term, raising questions about how little kids could understand cultural Marxism.

The Senate version of the bill doesn’t include cultural Marxism in its legislation.

Nevertheless, HB 1349, passed in a House committee on Feb. 1. The bill analysis says that starting in the 2026-27 school year, the history of communism must be included in instruction in grades K-12 in Florida’s public schools. (Currently, there are no standards for the history of communism from kindergarten to 6th grade.) The legislation would include “the philosophy and lineages of Communist thought, including cultural Marxism.”

The bill involves a task force — the governor would appoint the members — to come up with age-appropriate curriculum and academic standards for K-12 instruction of the history of communism and its dangers. The task force would report its findings no later than July 1, 2025, and it “must also make recommendations to the Legislature regarding the creation of a Florida Museum of Communist History,” according to the legislative staff analysis.

The House proposal, from Republican Reps. Chuck Brannan and James Buchanan, gained enough support last week to move forward in the Legislature. But Democrats criticized the inclusion of cultural Marxism as one of the things students will learn about. Brannan represents North Florida counties and a part of Alachua, and Buchanan represents part of Sarasota.

From terrorist manifesto to K-12 curricula

Democratic lawmakers pointed to far-right groups’ usage of cultural Marxism in relation to antisemitic beliefs.

“If you look up the term cultural Marxism, what comes up is the term cultural Marxism refers to a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory, so that’s also concerning to me,” Palm Beach Democratic Rep. Katherine Waldron said during the Choice and Innovation subcommittee meeting last week. “I’m all for kids learning about government and political systems. But I would be against this very specific terminology in training or in trying to educate them on this.”

Marilyn Mayo, a senior research fellow with ADL’s Center on Extremism, said in a statement to Florida Phoenix that antisemites also use the term to reinforce their longstanding antisemitic trope that communism is “Jewish.”

“‘Cultural Marxism’ is a term, typically used by right-wing ideologues, to attack an array of ideas and concepts they oppose, including multiculturalism, globalism, feminism, and LGBTQ+ rights, among others. The term often functions as an antisemitic dog whistle or codeword,” Mayo wrote in the statement.

“Promoters of the term often invoke a conspiracy theory that falsely claims such progressive ideas originated with the so-called Frankfurt School, a leftist intellectual collective active in Germany between the two World Wars. Exploiting the fact that a number of the Frankfurt School intellectuals were Jewish, antisemitic versions of this conspiracy theory link the Frankfurt School, and thus ‘cultural Marxism’ itself, to Jews, claiming that Jews seek to subvert and weaken Western (and Christian) society by imposing their left-wing and politically correct (or ‘woke’) views.”

Over the years, cultural Marxism has gone from being linked with the far-right through terrorists’ manifestos to seeping into the vocabulary of mainstream politicians, including Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has said he views wokeness as a form of cultural Marxism.

“Most of the most violent, the deadliest acts of hate, perpetrated against Jewish people especially in the United States in the last 10 to 15 years have been by far-right extremists. We don’t have cultural Marxists shooting up synagogues. If it were the case, then we should talk about it, but it isn’t,” said Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. “You have white supremacists, anti-government extremists who are embracing antisemitism. Of course, antisemitism is on the far-left as well. There has been a rapid, marked increase in antisemitic rhetoric coming out of the far-left as well.”

The terrorist who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011 and another who killed a woman in the attack at the California Chabad of Poway synagogue in 2019 left manifestos denouncing cultural Marxism’s effect on Europe and blaming Jews for coming up with it, respectively.

Groups like the Proud Boys have also used cultural Marxism as a catch-all term for anyone they view as an enemy, Lewis said.

“What we’ve seen in recent years has been an intentional effort, by far-right extremists to launder antisemitism, launder white supremacy, launder anti-LGBTQ narratives and hate speech against everyone who’s not effectively in this in-group, which is largely white, largely Christian,” he said.

Dangers of communism

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, published a 45-page report in 2022 about how cultural Marxism threatens the U.S. In it, the think tank states cultural Marxists have infiltrated the country through college campuses and public schools. They also credit DeSantis for showing a path to dismantle cultural Marxism.

“Today’s cultural Marxists believe that the reason economic, social, cultural, academic, and health outcomes (to name just a few) show persistent racial disparities is because of a pervasive, systemic racism that can only be eliminated by smashing the system itself,” the report states.

Subcommittee chair Republican Rep. Alex Rizo of Miami-Dade, last week defended the bill, stating that students don’t learn enough about communism.

“When we talk about antisemitism I equate antisemitism a lot with communism. … I love that this bill will come up with some sort of curriculum to start teaching what communism really does other than an economic theory that was brought up by Marx and Engels, two philosophers, and I use that term very loosely, in the 19th century. Because we do have curriculum in almost every single grade level K through 12 that talks about the sins of slavery, that talks about the horrors of the Holocaust, but does not yet really address the over 100 million people who were victimized, murdered, displaced in about 100 years worth of communism in our society,” he said.

The Florida Department of Education standards related to communism include the evaluation of economic systems in seventh grade and the identification of political ideologies (communism and totalitarianism) that conflict with the principles of freedom and democracy in high school.

Lawmakers also discussed last week how the material would be taught in an age-appropriate manner to younger students. Republican Rep. Thad Altman of Brevard said his wife, a first-grade teacher at a Catholic school, teaches kids through hands-on simulations.

“I think these kids understand capitalism and communism more than a lot of college students, especially if they go to an Ivy League,” he said.

Other things students would learn about through the House bill or analysis include atrocities committed in foreign countries under the guidance of communism, the Cultural Revolution in the People’s Republic of China, the communist policies of Cuba, and the spread of communist ideologies throughout Latin America.

history

madIson grant

https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-5129

919 modi US visit TX

https://theintercept.com/2019/09/21/howdy-modi-trump-anders-brevik/

QUESTION: WHAT IS the connection between controversial Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi — who is visiting Houston this Sunday for the “Howdy, Modi” summit, as well as a meeting with President Donald Trump — and a spate of white nationalist terrorist attacks across the West?

Answer: Anders Breivik.

You remember Breivik, right? The homicidal Islamophobe who massacred 77 people in Norway in 2011? Brevik, who was sentenced to 21 years in prison, is now viewed as a “saint” by far-right activists. Christopher Hasson, the Coast Guard lieutenant and self-proclaimed white nationalist accused of plotting the assassination of prominent Democrats and journalists, has cited Breivik as an influence. The Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant described the Norwegian mass murderer as his “true inspiration” and even suggested that they had been in contact, while the El Paso shooter Patrick Crusius, in turn, expressed support for the “Christchurch shooter and his manifesto,” as did the San Diego synagogue shooter.

But where did Breivik himself draw inspiration from? It probably won’t shock you to hear that he name-checked a range of conservative and far-right commentators from the U.S. and the U.K. in his rambling and racist manifesto. But it might surprise you to discover that this modern icon of white nationalist terrorism also mentioned India, and in particular Hindu nationalism, on a “remarkable 102 pages” of his 1,518-page screed.

BREIVIK CALLS ON his “Hindu Nationalist brothers” to “rise up” against the Muslim conquerors of India, and extols Hindu nationalist groups because “they dominate the streets” and “do not tolerate the current injustice and often riot and attack Muslims when things get out of control.” However, he complains, “this behaviour is nonetheless counterproductive.”

“Instead of attacking the Muslims,” he continues, “they should target the category A and B traitors in India and consolidate military cells and actively seek theoverthrow of the cultural Marxist government.”

For Breivik, it is essential that far-right, Islamophobic movements in Europe and India “learn from each other and cooperate as much as possible” because “our goals are more or less identical.” He even provides a list of online resources for his readers — and it includes the website of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh among them.

The RSS is a far-right, male-only paramilitary volunteer organization, founded in India in 1925. Breivik may have been lauding the RSS in 2011; but back in the 1920s and 1930s, the founders of the RSS were heaping praise on Europe’s far-right, totalitarian regimes — from Mussolini’s fascists in Italy to Hitler’s Nazis in Germany.

M.S. Golwalkar, the second leader of the RSS, wrote about how he was inspired by Nazi Germany, which he said displayed “race pride at its highest” and was “a good lesson for use” in India. V.D. Savarkar, who coined the term “Hindutva” to refer to the RSS’s vision of India as a Hindu state, claimed that “Germany had every right to resort to Nazism, and Italy to Fascism.” He even compared India’s Muslims to “Jews in Germany.” A former member of the RSS — and acolyte of Savarkar — would later assassinate Mahatma Gandhi, in protest of the latter’s pro-Muslim views.

SO WHERE DOES Modi fit in here? The Indian prime minister is the leader of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, which is accurately described by Breivik in his manifesto as “the political arm of the RSS.” Modi himself began training with the RSS when he was 8 years old; by the age of 22, he was a full-time “pracharak,” or missionary, for the group. As chief minister of the state of Gujarat — the scene of brutal anti-Muslim pogroms in 2002 — Modi oversaw the distribution of high school textbooks that described Hitler as a leader who “lent dignity and prestige to the German government.”

Today, as prime minister, Modi continues to bestow praise on the likes of Golwalkar and Savarkar. He considers the former to be his ideological mentor and “Pujniya Shri Guruji” — a guru worthy of worship — and the latter to be an epitome of “courage, patriotism, and unflinching commitment to a strong India.”

Meanwhile, on Modi’s watch, the secretive RSS has seen a spike in membership — to around 6 million members — and an unprecedented level of political influence in the nation’s capital, despite the fact that a former inspector general of police once described the group as “the country’s No. 1 terror organisation.”

The rise of Modi, the RSS, and Hindu nationalism has led to an explosion of hate crimes in India. “Today, under Modi’s iron-fisted regime, Christians, Dalits, Muslims, Sikhs, and every Hindu who disagrees with the hate, violence, and supremacy of the RSS lives in fear of their lives,” South Asia affairs analyst Pieter Friedrich explained to Houston City Council on Tuesday, as part of a last-ditch attempt by anti-Modi activists to prevent the prime minister’s high-profile summit in the city. Mobs have beaten and murdered Muslims for allegedly slaughtering or even transporting cows; churches have been burned and vandalized.

“Fascism,” as Yale University scholar Jason Stanley told me earlier this year, “always involves something like white nationalism, but it doesn’t need to be white nationalism.” Is it any wonder that the Hindu nationalist from India has formed such a close friendship with the white nationalist in the White House? They have fascism in common. Modi, though, is much more dangerous than Trump — unlike the latter, the former is a true believer, a proud ideologue.

It is therefore difficult to disagree with Friedrich. “Rather than ‘Howdy, Modi,’” he told council members on Tuesday, “the City of Houston ought to be saying, ‘Adios, Modi.’”

https://yyy.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/16/the-myth-of-eurabia-how-a-far-right-conspiracy-theory-went-mainstream

guk no lnx

The long read

The myth of Eurabia: how a far-right conspiracy theory went mainstream

Once an obscure idea confined to the darker corners of the internet, the anti-Islam ideology is now visible in the everyday politics of the west. How did this happen? By Andrew Brown

Fri 16 Aug 2019 01.00 EDT Last modified on Fri 16 Aug 2019 07.48 EDT

In July 2011, a quiet European capital was shaken by a terrorist car bomb, followed by confused reports suggesting many deaths. When the first news of the murders came through, one small group of online commentators reacted immediately, even though the media had cautiously declined to identify the attackers. They knew at once what had happened – and who was to blame.

“This was inevitable,” explained one of the anonymous commenters. And it was just the beginning: “Only a matter of time before other European nations get a taste of their multicultural tolerance that they’ve been cooking for decades.”

“Europe has been infested with venomous parasitic vermin,” explained another. “Anything and everything is fine as long as they rape the natives and destroy the country, which they do,” said a third.

As the news grew worse, the group became more joyful and confident. The car bomb had been followed by reports of a mass shooting at a nearby camp for teenagers. One commenter was “almost crying of happiness” to be proved right about the dangers of Islam. “The massacre at the children’s camp,” another noted, “is a sickening reminder of just how evil and satanic the cult of Islam is.”

A couple of hours after the first reports of the bomb explosion in central Oslo, a few doubts emerged to cloud the picture: “Because the targets in the shooting were all good little leftists, won’t the shooter be played up as a rightwing extremist, whatever his actual motives?” one person asked.

When information emerged to suggest that the attacker might be a “tall Nordic guy”, one of the commenters, who called himself “Fjordman”, realised the true nature of the disaster: “Judging from some of the recent information, it must be treated as a serious possibility that this is actually some Timothy McVeigh, not a Muslim. It is too early to tell. If that is indeed the case … it would practically destroy my country, and make the working conditions for people like myself incredibly difficult for a long time to come, I’m afraid.”

The truth turned out to be worse than Fjordman feared. The massacre in Oslo had not been committed by Muslims. It was the work of a white supremacist, Anders Behring Breivik, who had detonated a bomb in Oslo, killing eight people, and then shot dead 69 others, many of them teenagers, at a youth camp run by Norway’s Labour party. And, according to the manifesto he published online, Breivik had been directly inspired by Gates of Vienna – the blog where all these comments appeared on the day of his massacre. Breivik called the ideology that justified his murders “The Vienna school”, after the blog.

Fjordman, whose real name isPeder Are Nøstvold Jensen, now lives in obscurity in provincial Norway. He outed himself as the man behind the pseudonym to a Norwegian tabloid in the weeks following the massacre – but managed to avoid testifying at Breivik’s trial, thanks to the intervention of high-powered lawyers paid for by the Middle East Forum, a rightwing American group that would later sponsor Tommy Robinson – real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – in Britain. Nonetheless, Jensen’s influence on Breivik, however indirect, had been considerable.

Breivik borrowed part of the title of his manifesto, A European Declaration of Independence, from one of Fjordman’s blog posts, and many of the chapters in it were simply reprintings of Fjordman’s postings on various blogs, mostlyGates of Vienna,but also a far-right and passionately anti-EU site called the Brussels Journal.

Gates of Vienna was, and still is, run by Edward “Ned” May, an American computer programmer from Washington DC. It was among the first in a wave of blogs that urged the US to war after the shock of 9/11, and almost certainly the most fanatically anti-Muslim. It takes its name from the siege of Vienna in 1683, when an Ottoman Turkish army was defeated by a Polish-led one. Its essential thesis is that this was only one battle in a long war and that Europe and its civilisation are constantly threatened by a Muslim invasion.

On these varied online forums, the narrative was always the same: a liberal cabal was conspiring with hostile Muslim powers to hand over the decent working people to Islam. This was the animating myth of the bloggers, calling themselves the “counter-jihad”, who congregated at Gates of Vienna and other like-minded sites – and inspired both the violence of Breivik and the message of the racist far-right parties that have transformed European politics in the past decade.

But all of these later conspiracy theories took inspiration from a founding myth of contemporary Islamophobia: an invented plot, known as “Eurabia”, to destroy European civilisation. This is the doctrine that Jensen promoted and Breivik acted on, a hidden underpinning of a movement that has changed the world.

Once an ideology confined to the kookier corners of the internet, the idea of Eurabia is now visible in the everyday politics of the US, Australia and most of Europe: when Trump tweets about stabbings in London and falsely claims that crime in Germany is “way up”, he is invoking the Eurabian myth, taken as fact on Fox News, that European liberals have surrendered their cities to Muslim criminals.

The spread of the belief that elites conspired to push Muslim immigration on their native populations is also the story of a conspiracy theory that was nourished on some of the very first blogs and message boards, started appearing in mainstream discourse after 9/11, and thentook on a life of its own, even while the supposed facts behind it were exposed as ridiculous. It is a lesson in the danger of half-truths, which are not only more powerful than truths but often more powerful than lies.

Eurabia is a term coined in the 70s that was resurfaced byGisèle Littman, an Egyptian-born Jewish woman who fled Cairo for Britain after the Suez crisis, and then moved to Switzerland in 1960 with her English husband. She wrote under the name of Bat Ye’or (Hebrew for “Daughter of the Nile”). In a series of books, originally written in French and published from the 1990s onward, she developed a grand conspiracy theory in which the EU, led by French elites, implemented a secret plan to sell out Europe to the Muslims in exchange for oil.

The original villain of Littman’s story was General Charles de Gaulle. It is difficult for an outsider to understand how De Gaulle, who led the French resistance to the Nazis and was probably the greatest conservative statesman in French history, could be reinvented as the man who betrayed western civilisation for money. But Littman had lived many years in France, and the French far right hated De Gaulle, and indeed tried several times to assassinate him. Not only had De Gaulle fought the Vichy government, he had also admitted defeat in the long and hideously bloody war of Algerian independence – granting an Arab Muslim country its freedom at the expense of the French-Christian settler population, who had to retreat to France (and whose descendants formed the backbone of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front).

Agreeing to Algerian independence was understood by the French far right as a betrayal. De Gaulle had been brought out of retirement and restored to power in 1958 because he was believed to be on the side of the settlers in their war, which was opposed by much of the left. And so, to the far right, the Mediterranean came to seem like the frontline in a long, shifting struggle between rival colonialisms, Christian and Muslim, in which the Muslims had won a great victory in Algeria. Where would their new advance stop?

Littman’s argument, framed by her experience in Egypt (which a French force had invaded, along with the British and Israelis, in 1956), was that Islam imposed a second-class status on all non-Muslims, whom they ruled. This status of “dhimmitude” – a coinage of Littman’s, meaning subjection to Islamic rule on pain of “forced conversion, slavery or death” – was now to be extended to Europe.

According to Littman, her books describe “Europe’s evolution from a Judeo-Christian civilisation, with important post-Enlightenment secular elements, into a post-Judeo-Christian civilisation that is subservient to the ideology of jihad and the Islamic powers that propagate it.”

She saw tentacles of the great conspiracy in committees of blameless tedium and obscurity, such as the Euro-Arab Dialogue, an institution set up by the European Economic Community and the Arab League in the 70s to promote greater discussion between the regions. Her conspiracy theory was dismissed in 2006 by the Israeli historian Robert Wistrich as “the protocols of the elders of Brussels”, but what mattered more was the place he chose to challenge her ideas: a conference in Jerusalem on antisemitism to which she had been invited despite her lack of academic status. September 11 had changed everything for Littman, she told Haaretz after the conference: “In the United States, I am certain that the September 11 attacks woke people up, including the Jewish community that had previously ignored me, because it belongs more to the left.”

She explained to Haaretz the future she saw for Europe. “We are now heading towards a total change in Europe, which will be more and more Islamicised and will become a political satellite of the Arab and Muslim world.”

This was the idea that the Norwegian Jensen was enchanted by, and which, as Fjordman, he transmitted to Anders Breivik.

[Marine Le Pen, president of France’s far-right National Rally (formerly National Front) party, applauds the former US presidential adviser Steve Bannon after his speech at the party’s annual congress in March 2018.]

Jensen is unusual among Eurabia believers in that he has actually had some experience of the Muslim world and even speaks Arabic. He is the son of a socialist politician in Norway and studied Arabic in Cairo – his earlier university studies in Bergen had included English (which he writes fluently), Russian, Arabic and Middle Eastern history. In 2000, he had been interviewed by the local paper back in Norway, and spoke enthusiastically about his hosts in Egypt: “Outside the tourist areas, you meet friendly, hospitable, curious and open people who want to get to know you. I have been part of their daily lives. We’ve been invited to their homes, and talked and smoked shisha together.”

That was Jensen’s first encounter with Islam, and he was still in Cairo at the time of the 9/11 attacks. He says he saw then that there were some Muslims who celebrated the slaughter, and he also saw that this wasn’t reported in the Norwegian papers. The next year, he worked for the Norwegian Refugee Council in the disputed city of Hebron in the occupied West Bank.Unusually among Scandinavians who have worked with Palestinians in Israel, he identified with the Israelis.He narrowly escaped a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, at a bar where two of his colleagues had been killed in another attack the previous year. The experience cemented his growing fear and loathing of Islam.

The fact that the Norwegian press took a generally pro-Palestinian line while he and his friends had been the victims of Palestinian terrorism helped to convince Jensen that Islam was an existential threat to European civilisation which the politically correct establishment was wilfully ignoring. Like Littman, he seems not to acknowledge any element of nationalism in Palestinian consciousness: it is all either Arab or Muslim. In fact, the belief that Islam is hostile to national consciousness is quite widely held on the right: the philosopher Roger Scruton brought it up in a controversial speech on nationality in Hungary in 2013, in which he contrasted European Christian nations with Islamic empires.

In 2003, Jensen returned to Norway, where he attempted to make a name for himself as a public intellectual. At first, he was hostile to feminism, accusing feminists of destroying Norwegian manhood. But the focus of his concerns soon switched to Islam. He started writing under the pseudonym “Norwegian Kafir” on an American blog calledLittle Green Footballs, which loudly and fervently supported the invasion of Iraq. From then on, his writing appeared in English, on American-hosted blogs. There, he hammered into shape the narrative of elites, specially identified with the EU, who are destroying and betraying Europe by the deliberate encouragement of mass immigration.

At this point in time, the Eurabian conspiracy appealed largely to those who had long perceived a conflict between Islam and the Judeo-Christian west – with Israel as a beleaguered and persecuted outpost of western values. These people, largely on the American right, were among the earliest exponents of Eurabia – but as they never ceased to complain, theirs was not an attitude very widely shared in Europe. What would soon supply the emotional force of the fantasy was another set of ideas about global migration, less conspiratorial in their essence, but much more widely accepted among generally apolitical Europeans. These, also, originated in France, where they were known as the“great replacement”.

The idea of the great replacement had its origin in a blatantly racist French novel of the 1970s, The Camp of the Saints, in which France is overthrown by an unarmed invasion of starving, sex-crazed Indian refugees when the French army is not prepared to fire on them. Themoral of the book is that western civilisation can only be saved by a willingness to slaughter poor brown people. Steve Bannon, among the founders of the rightwing news site Breitbart and a former adviser to President Trump, has referred to it repeatedly.

Throughout the 80s and 90s, the naked racism of The Camp of the Saints kept it largely out of public debate. But the rise of Islam as a global force allowed the question to be recast. If the threatening masses were defined by religion rather than by skin colour, then hating them could be presented as an intellectual commitment rather than a racist one.

And the paranoid did have a large, shadowy half-truth to fall back on. The demographic shrinkagefacing Europe is real and undeniable, and it was obvious in the early years of this century, too. So are the much greater birth rates in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia. In 2002, Russia and Pakistan both had populations of about 145 million; by 2017, Russia’s population was 144 million while Pakistan’s was 200 million.

The next stage in the development of a xenophobic populist worldview was for the two narratives to merge, so that Islam and Muslims became both a conspiracy and a demographic threat.

The 9/11 attacks changed attitudes to Islam in much of Europe and the US. Israel and the US now shared a sense of being under attack from Muslims. Without 9/11, Littman would have remained an obscure crank, and Jensen more obscure still. But the assault on the twin towers unleashed an immense backlash of wounded American pride and nationalism that led to the devastation of two whole countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, and countless deaths. It also fuelled a demand for explanations. Theories about the unique malevolence and danger of Islam answered a popular hunger. George W Bush declared at the time that the US had no quarrel with Islam, but many of his compatriots disagreed.

One of the many bad fruits of 9/11 was the new atheist movement, a phenomenon marked by mutual self-praise and undeviating hostility to Islam. Even if the ostensible target of much of the hostility was Christianity, the new atheists tend to consider Islam far worse and more “religious” a religion. The American writer Sam Harris’s breakthrough book The End of Faith from 2004 now reads like Bat Ye’or without the inconvenient scaffolding of easily disproved facts. “We are at war with Islam,” he writes. “It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so. It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been ‘hijacked’ by extremists … Armed conflict ‘in the defence of Islam’ is a religious obligation for every Muslim man ... Islam, more than any religion humans have ever devised, has the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death.”

In the run-up to the Iraq war, and after the invasion, coverage in American newspapers and on television was, to a European eye, jingoistic in the extreme. The possibility of defeat was unthinkable. Nonetheless, a new wave of bloggers began using the term “MSM” for “mainstream media” as a disparaging reference to the large media organisations’ pretended neutrality. One of the earliest and most influential of these was Little Green Footballs, founded and run by Charles Johnson, a Los Angeles-based former session guitarist with an interest in web design. It was typical of the moment that he was an opinionated amateur with no credentials, whose real advantage was that he could build websites at a time when this required some programming skill.

Jensen, commenting on Little Green Footballs as Norwegian Kafir, made it a distribution point for Eurabian ideas. Another was Gates of Vienna itself, run by Ned May under the moniker Baron Bodissey after a sage in the sci-fi novels of Jack Vance. Then there was Jihad Watch, run by the American author Robert Spencer. Both Spencer and his frequent collaborator Pam Geller were banned from the UK in 2013 for making statements likely to foster hatred and violence between communities.

The only European blog of note in this constellation was the fanatically anti-EU site the Brussels Journal, where the Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan was a contributor. The Brussels Journal was run by Paul Beliën, a far-right Belgian journalist and author. Jensen was active on all these sites, taking part in discussions in which the Eurabian beliefs gave rise to something that called itself the counter-jihad movement.

Nowadays, when Facebook effortlessly spreads disinformation around the world, it is difficult to recapture the sense of revelation, and of belonging, that once accompanied the discovery of a new blog. The cramped but, to its adherents, strangely comforting thought world of the counter-jihad blogs turned politics into a gigantic online game. Anyone could play and everyone could find in it their inner child: “Some people think I’m weird; some think I am exceptionally intelligent,” Jensen had told a reporter when he was still a student in Cairo.

The boundaries between these blogs and the “MSM” they affected to despise were porous. Some writers aimed for a high-minded tone about the dangers of Muslim immigration: the former Financial Times columnist Christopher Caldwell published in 2009 a book, Reflections on a Revolution in Europe, that recapitulates the idea of a slow-moving Muslim barbarian invasion from a position of Olympian disdain: “Immigrants also bring a lot of disorder, penury and crime … Muslim culture is unusually full of messages laying out the practical advantages of procreation … If you walk north across the Piazza Della Repubblica in Turin, you see, mutatis mutandis, what the Romans saw. To the east, two well-preserved Roman towers remain, and so do the walls built to separate citizens from barbarians. Today, in the space of about 60 seconds on foot, you pass from chic shops and wine bars through a lively multiethnic market into one of Europe’s more menacing north African slums.”

Some were less highbrow. In 2004, the Daily Telegraph gave a column to the Canadian prophet of American greatness Mark Steyn, who had originally made his name as a witty critic of musical theatre. Doom and horror was all he saw in Europe’s future. As early as 2002, he said: “I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark” – a remark he was still proudly quoting for Telegraph readers in 2005, when Iraq had become a slaughterhouse.

In terms that anticipated Jensen, Breivik and the alleged manifesto of the man charged with the Christchurch massacre, Steyn wrote (and the Telegraph published) this prophecy: “In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography – except through civil war. The Yugoslavs figured that out. In the 30 years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43% to 31% of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26% to 44%.”

[painting naked white? woman sucks finger, others gawk; ‘Europeans, vote for AfD, so that Europe will never become ‘Eurabia’!’ reads a campaign poster in Berlin for the far-right party during this year’s European elections.

Compare Steyn in 2005 with the manifesto of Patrick Crusius, who confessed to murdering 22 people in El Paso earlier this month: “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion ... America is rotting from the inside out, and peaceful means to stop this seem to be nearly impossible.”

In 2007, the believers in a counter-jihad began to meet up in the real world. After a preliminary meeting of bloggers, commentators and Danish and Norwegian sympathisers in Copenhagen, attended by Jensen, a conference was arranged by May and the far-right Flemish party Vlaams Belang, in Brussels in 2007. This brought together most of the ideologues of Eurabia, as they attempted to transform it from an idea into a movement. Littman was the keynote speaker. Others present wereGeller and Robert Spencer from the US, and Gerard Batten, later briefly the leader of Ukip in Britain. Ted Ekeroth, of the nationalist, rightwing Sweden Democrats, also attended.

As both Ukip and the Sweden Democrats rose to become powerful political forces, anxieties about terrorism were subsumed into much wider anxieties about demography, and about status within the old order. The American anthropologist Scott Atran has carried out extensive research into the mindset of the young men who become Islamic terrorists: the combination of wounded pride with the delight of belonging to a movement which has both global, apocalyptic significance and a living presence in a friendship group is tremendously important in recruiting jihadis. The same dynamic operates among their enemies: Breivik was remarkable chiefly in that he was so solipsistic that he could radicalise himself without the aid of any friends in real life, only those he imagined on the internet. He had at one stage approached his intellectual idol, Jensen, via email, who brushed him off as “boring as a vacuum cleaner salesman”.

You do not have to be a jihadi to feel the tug of these compulsions. The counter-jihadis, just as much as their enemies, believed they were entering an apocalyptic battle between good and evil. This is a century of wounded pride and anxieties about status for almost everyone.

Despite all this, there were some signs, even before the Breivik killings, that the original Eurabian front would break up. Those who were opposed to immigrants in general began to separate from those who hated Muslims in particular.Johnson, the founder of Little Green Footballs, excommunicated most of his followers in 2010 because of their increasing closeness to parties of western Europe that he regarded as being descended from fascists – the Vlaams Belang in Belgium and the Sweden Democrats, although he also denounced the English Defence League. Johnson was a genuine philosemite, who could not forgive the taint of antisemitism.

The anti-immigrant right had good reasons for separating itself from the anti-Muslim right. If the logic of the “Vienna school” – Jensen, Spencer and Geller, May and Littman – led inexorably to civil war and the righteous slaughter of Muslims and their leftie enablers, then most of the right shrank back from it. Commenters such as Douglas Murray and Caldwell quite genuinely believed that Breivik was insane, and that his actions had no relation to the ideas that he espoused. There may in this have been an element of self-deception, but it is also a testimony to the sort of instinctive, unthinking decency we all need sometimes to rescue us from the consequences of our ideas. It seemed that some kind of pragmatism would prevail.

The hope now seems deceptive. What changed this was above all the election of the US president, Donald Trump, whose then adviser Bannon was a believer in a “brutal, bloody ... global war” against “Islamic fascism”. They showed that there was a huge constituency for racialised hatred and despair and – for them – no real negative consequences, electoral or otherwise, in pandering to it.

Since Breivik’s massacre, his own beliefs have only become more widespread.They have spread into the politics of all European countries. In the campaign for the European elections this May, the German far-right party AfD ran posters showing a naked white woman being pawed by dark-skinned men in Arab headgear. One had stuck his fingers in her unresisting mouth. “Europeans, vote for AfD, so that Europe will never become ‘Eurabia’,” said the caption. Millions of people who have never heard of Bat Ye’or, of Fjordman, or even of Breivik and Bannon, now understand that poster at a glance, and no amount of evidence will shake their certainty. They now believe all politics comes down to the words of one of Trump’s more recent tweets: “The losers all want what you have, don’t give it to them … Be strong & prosper, be weak & die!”

But who, in this situation, are the losers, and who are the strong? Last week, in an apparent attempt to emulate Breivik, a rich, disaffected young Norwegian, Philip Manshaus, shot his way through the entrance gates to a mosque in the upmarket suburb of Oslo where he lived and started firing at the congregation. He was wrestled to the ground by an unarmed 65-year-old Muslim, Mohammed Rafiq, who then held him down, with the help of another man, until the police arrived. On the Gates of Vienna blog, this episode was not deemed worthy of mention. Instead, its devoted readers were told that Muslims had been responsible for a recent outbreak of animal cruelty in Sweden.

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https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/religion/reports/2011/08/26/10165/fear-inc/

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Video: Ask the Expert: Faiz Shakir on the Group Behind Islamophobia

On July 22, a man planted a bomb in an Oslo government building that killed eight people. A few hours after the explosion, he shot and killed 68 people, mostly teenagers, at a Labor Party youth camp on Norway’s Utoya Island.

By midday, pundits were speculating as to who had perpetrated the greatest massacre in Norwegian history since World War II. Numerous mainstream media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic, speculated about an Al Qaeda connection and a “jihadist” motivation behind the attacks. But by the next morning it was clear that the attacker was a 32-year-old, white, blond-haired and blue-eyed Norwegian named Anders Breivik. He was not a Muslim, but rather a self-described Christian conservative.

According to his attorney, Breivik claimed responsibility for his self-described “gruesome but necessary” actions. On July 26, Breivik told the court that violence was “necessary” to save Europe from Marxism and “Muslimization.” In his 1,500-page manifesto, which meticulously details his attack methods and aims to inspire others to extremist violence, Breivik vows “brutal and breathtaking operations which will result in casualties” to fight the alleged “ongoing Islamic Colonization of Europe.”

Breivik’s manifesto contains numerous footnotes and in-text citations to American bloggers and pundits, quoting them as experts on Islam’s “war against the West.” This small group of anti-Muslim organizations and individuals in our nation is obscure to most Americans but wields great influence in shaping the national and international political debate. Their names are heralded within communities that are actively organizing against Islam and targeting Muslims in the United States.

Breivik, for example, cited Robert Spencer, one of the anti-Muslim misinformation scholars we profile in this report, and his blog, Jihad Watch, 162 times in his manifesto. Spencer’s website, which “tracks the attempts of radical Islam to subvert Western culture,” boasts another member of this Islamophobia network in America, David Horowitz, on his Freedom Center website. Pamela Geller, Spencer’s frequent collaborator, and her blog, Atlas Shrugs, was mentioned 12 times.

Geller and Spencer co-founded the organization Stop Islamization of America, a group whose actions and rhetoric the Anti-Defamation League concluded “promotes a conspiratorial anti-Muslim agenda under the guise of fighting radical Islam. The group seeks to rouse public fears by consistently vilifying the Islamic faith and asserting the existence of an Islamic conspiracy to destroy “American values.” Based on Breivik’s sheer number of citations and references to the writings of these individuals, it is clear that he read and relied on the hateful, anti-Muslim ideology of a number of men and women detailed in this report&a select handful of scholars and activists who work together to create and promote misinformation about Muslims.

While these bloggers and pundits were not responsible for Breivik’s deadly attacks, their writings on Islam and multiculturalism appear to have helped create a world view, held by this lone Norwegian gunman, that sees Islam as at war with the West and the West needing to be defended. According to former CIA officer and terrorism consultant Marc Sageman, just as religious extremism “is the infrastructure from which Al Qaeda emerged,” the writings of these anti-Muslim misinformation experts are “the infrastructure from which Breivik emerged.” Sageman adds that their rhetoric “is not cost-free.”

These pundits and bloggers, however, are not the only members of the Islamophobia infrastructure. Breivik’s manifesto also cites think tanks, such as the Center for Security Policy, the Middle East Forum, and the Investigative Project on Terrorism—three other organizations we profile in this report. Together, this core group of deeply intertwined individuals and organizations manufacture and exaggerate threats of “creeping Sharia,” Islamic domination of the West, and purported obligatory calls to violence against all non-Muslims by the Quran.

This network of hate is not a new presence in the United States. Indeed, its ability to organize, coordinate, and disseminate its ideology through grassroots organizations increased dramatically over the past 10 years. Furthermore, its ability to influence politicians’ talking points and wedge issues for the upcoming 2012 elections has mainstreamed what was once considered fringe, extremist rhetoric.

wiki

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik

Anders Behring Breivik (Norwegian pronunciation: [ˈɑnːəʂ ˈbeːriŋ ˈbræiviːk] ( listen);^[6] born 13 February 1979), known as Fjotolf Hansen from 2017, is a Norwegian far-right terrorist^[7] who committed the2011 Norway attacks. On 22 July 2011 he killed eight people by detonating a van bomb amid Regjeringskvartalet in Oslo, then shot dead 69 participants of a Workers' Youth League (AUF) summer camp on the island of Utøya.^[8][9] In August 2012 he was convicted of mass murder, causing a fatal explosion, and terrorism.^[10][11]

On the day of the attacks, Breivik electronically distributed a compendium of texts entitled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, describing his militant ideology.^{[12][13][14][15]} In them, he lays out a worldview encompassing opposition to Islam and blaming feminism for creating a European "cultural suicide".^[16][17] The texts call Islam and "cultural Marxism" the enemy and advocate the deportation of all Muslims from Europe based on the model of the Beneš decrees, while also claiming that feminism exists to destroy European culture.^[18][19] Breivik wrote that his main motive for the atrocities was to market his manifesto.^[20]

Two teams of court-appointed forensic psychiatrists examined Breivik before his trial. The first report diagnosed Breivik as having paranoid schizophrenia.^[21] A second psychiatric evaluation was commissioned following widespread criticism of the first.^[22] The second evaluation was published a week before the trial; it concluded that Breivik was not psychotic during the attacks nor during the evaluation.^[23] He was instead diagnosed as having narcissistic personality disorder.^[24]

His trial began on 16 April 2012, with closing arguments made on 22 June 2012.^[25] On 24 August 2012, Oslo District Court delivered its verdict, finding Breivik sane and guilty of murdering 77 people. He was sentenced to 21 years in prison, in a form of preventive detention that required a minimum of 10 years incarceration and the possibility of one or more extensions for as long as he is deemed a danger to society. This is the maximum penalty in Norway.^[26] Breivik announced that he did not recognize the legitimacy of the court, and therefore did not accept its decision; he claims he "cannot" appeal because this would legitimize the authority of the Oslo District Court.^[27][28]

While imprisoned, Breivik has identified himself as a fascist^[29] and a national socialist,^[30] saying he previously exploited counterjihadist rhetoric in order to protect ethno-nationalists.^[31] In 2015, he said that he has never personally identified as a Christian, and called his religion Odinism.^[30][32] In 2016, in a four-day civil trial Breivik sued Norwegian Correctional Service, over his solitary confinement and the general conditions of imprisonment. Breivik claimed that his solitary confinement violated his human rights and asserted that he had been subjected to degrading treatment. The verdict, in which the government was found to have breached Article 3 of the Human Rights Convention, was appealed;^[33][34] a trial in Court of Appeal started on 10 January 2017.^[35][36] On 1 March 2017, the Court of Appeals ruled that solitary confinement did not violate Breivik's rights.^[37]

...

On 22 July 2011, Breivik detonated a fertilizer bomb outside the tower block housing the office of Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg in Oslo, resulting in eight deaths.^[79]

Within a few hours of the explosion he traveled to Utøya island, the site of a camp for Worker's Youth League, posing as a police officer in order to take the ferry to the island, and then fired intermittently for more than one hour, killing 69^[80][81][82] with one murder victim as young as 14 years old.^[83][84][85]

Arrest[

When the public force counter-terrorism unit (based in Oslo) arrived on the island and confronted him, he surrendered without resistance.^[86] After his arrest, he was held by armed police on the island, and interrogated throughout the night, before being moved to a holding cell in Oslo.

Breivik confessed and said the purpose of the attack was to save Norway and Western Europe from a Muslim takeover, and that the Labour Party had to "pay the price" for "letting down Norway and the Norwegian people."^[87]

After his arrest Breivik referred to himself as "the greatest monster since Quisling."^[88]

...

On 24 August 2012 Breivik was adjudged sane and sentenced to containment—a special form of a prison sentence that can be extended indefinitely again and again—with an approximate time frame of 21 years and a minimum time of 10 years, the maximum penalty in Norway.^[123] Breivik did not appeal and on September 8 media announced that the verdict was final.^[28][124]

The court said "many people share Breivik's conspiracy theory, including the Eurabia theory. The court finds that very few people, however, share Breivik's idea that the alleged 'Islamisation' should be fought with terror."^[125]

...

Since August 2011 Breivik has been imprisoned in a SHS section (a prison section with "particularly high security"—særlig høy sikkerhet).^[126][127] Since the inception of SHS in 2002 - until 2016, Norway has only imprisoned ten or eleven^[128] prisoners under SHS conditions, of which Breivik's term has been the longest.^[129]

He is imprisoned at Telemark Prison's affiliate in Skien. His previous prison transfers are: On 23 July 2012 he transferred from Ila Prison & Detention Center^[130] to Telemark Prison's affiliate in Skien (100 kilometres (62 mi) southwest of Oslo);^[131] on 28 September 2012 he transferred back; since September 2013 he has been back at Telemark Prison.^[126]

As of 2015, Breivik has visits from a prison visitor —a military chaplain (ranked major) — every two weeks.^[132][133] His mother visited him five times before her death in 2013.^[134] Researcher Mattias Gardell interviewed Breivik in 2014.^[135] No other visitors requested by Breivik have been granted access.^[134]

He enrolled as a full student in the bachelor degree program in political science at the University of Oslo.^[136][137]

Breivik has converted to Nazism while in prison, according to his lawyer Øystein Storrvik (no).^[138]

De facto isolation from all other prisoners[

He is isolated from the other inmates, and only has contact with health care workers and guards.^[139]

The type of isolation that Breivik has experienced in prison, is what the ECtHR calls relative social isolation, according to a verdict of 2016 in Oslo District Court.^[134]

In Europe it is not uncommon to grant compensatory measures to prisoners that are being held in isolation for several years. As of 2016 he has an electric typewriter and an Xbox (without internet connection) in his cell.^[140] Previously, when the 2012 verdict was upheld in September 2012, permission for access to a computer (without internet) in his prison cell, ended. In November 2012, he received an electric typewriter.^[134]

Political activity and attempts at correspondence[

In 2012 Breivik planned to set up an organisation he called the Conservative Revolutionary Movement which he envisioned consisting of around 50 right-wing activists in Europe, as well as an organization for imprisoned right-wing activists; Breivik has written to, among others, Peter Mangs and Beate Zschäpe;^[141] media claimed in 2014 that Mangs had received letters.^[135]

In 2012 he spent 8–10 hours per day writing. He has said that he wants to write three books: the first being his own account of the events on the day of the attacks, the second discussing the ideology underlying his actions, and a third on his visions for the future.^[142][143]

Politicians from several Norwegian parties have protested Breivik's activities in prison, which they see as him continuing to espouse his ideology and possibly encouraging further criminal acts.^{[142][143][144]}

Obstruction of postal letters

...

from thor:

Produced by the New York-based Human Rights Foundation (humanrightsfoundation.org), the event is sponsored by, among others, Norway’s Labor Party government (in the form of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), the City of Oslo, and Amnesty International Norway. Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide is scheduled to deliver prepared remarks at the forum.

Oslo is still scarred by the murderous rampage carried out by the right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian citizen who fashioned himself as a crusading knight on a mission to save Europe from the scourge of Muslim immigration.

His killing spree began on 22 July 2011 with a bombing that killed eight persons and injured 209 others outside Oslo’s main government building. The violence ended some 25 miles to the north at a summer camp for the youth wing of Norway’s ruling Labor Party, where he massacred 69 persons, most of them children and youths.

Breivik insisted the bloodbath was necessary to stop those he saw enabling mass Muslim immigration — those he called “cultural Marxists” and especially the Labor Party — accusing them of “contributing to a process of indirect cultural and demographical genocide.”

Islamophobe inspirations

The killer outlined his views in a 1,500-page manifesto, listing the far-right Americans who helped radicalize him. They included the most notorious purveyors of anti-Muslim resentment, such as Jihad Watch founder Robert Spencer, Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, and Middle East Forum director Daniel Pipes, whose writings Breivik excerpted at length.

Among the suggestions for “Further Study” provided by the killer were links on YouTube to the 2008 propaganda film Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West, which has been promoted as “the single most powerful piece of media over the past five years in persuading average Americans to the Islamist threat” (Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America, Center For American Progress, 26 August 2011, p. 16).

Breivik clearly thought it was powerful too and would help explain and justify his murderous rampage.

It is of public record that the Oslo Freedom Forum receives substantial financial support from the Norwegian government. But only a tiny handful of people know that one of the largest donors to the Human Rights Foundation — the producer of the Oslo Freedom Forum — are Donors Capital Fund and its affiliate Donors Trust, Inc.

Donors Capital Fund is the same right-wing American foundation that spent millions of dollars to fund the distribution of millions of copies of Obsession, and which has lavished hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years on the network of professional Islamophobes that Breivik cited as his inspirations.

Donors Capital Fund is only one of several major funders to the Human Rights Foundation that have been among the principal donors or conduits for funding to the Islamophobic hate groups and ideologues who helped radicalize Breivik.

One person who certainly knew this is Thor Halvorssen.

Oslo Freedom Forum’s right-wing brainchild

Who is Halvorssen? He is best known as the founder and CEO of the Human Rights Foundation, where he is listed as the lone staff member. The Oslo Freedom Forum is his brainchild, a confab he has sought to brand as “a Davos for human rights.” The theme of this year’s conference is “Challenging Power.”

Halvorssen is also a right-wing activist, film producer and scion of Venezuela’s moneyed elite whose years of involvement in ultra-conservative politics enabled him to corral a small coterie of mostly far-right moneymen into bankrolling his Human Rights Foundation.

The Electronic Intifada has obtained Internal Revenue Service (IRS) 990 forms filed by the Human Rights Foundation that include previously undisclosed information about its donors.

The forms show that the Human Rights Foundation received approximately $600,000 in donations from the Donors Capital Fund from 2007 through 2011. Based in Northern Virginia, Donors Capital Fund is essentially a slush fund for the cadre of rightist donors who bankroll the conservative movement.

The Electronic Intifada’s analysis of IRS filings by Donors Capital Fund and Donors Trust shows that the Human Rights Foundation received $764,950 from 2005 through 2011 from Donors Capital Fund and Donors Trust, all but about $5,000 coming through the Donors Capital Fund.

“Since the fund handles money from multiple donors and donors names aren’t disclosed, contributions made through the Donors Capital Fund are difficult to trace,” the Center for American Progress noted in its 2011 landmark report “Fear, Inc.” “Potential donors are required to open a minimum $1 million account to utilize the fund’s services.”

In 2009, Donors Capital Fund channeled $60 million to various conservative causes and from 2009 through 2011 a whopping $21,318,600 “to groups promoting Islamophobia,” according to the Center for American Progress.

Shadowy nonprofit funds Islamophobic film applauded by Breivik

In 2008, Donors Capital donated $17,778,600 to a shadowy nonprofit called the Clarion Fund — later renamed the Clarion Project (“Mystery of who funded right-wing ‘radical Islam’ campaign deepens,” Salon, 16 November 2010).

The donation paid for the Clarion Fund’s distribution of the film Obsession during the height of the 2008 presidential campaign — an apparent attempt to tar Democrats and then-Senator Barack Obama as weak on terror.

In the film, grainy clips of Nazi youth saluting Adolf Hitler blend into footage of Muslim crowds chanting in unison against Western imperialism. With commentary from a who’s who of anti-Muslim activists, including Daniel Pipes, the film implies that political Islam is today’s version of Nazism, and that between 10 and 15 percent of the world’s Muslim population poses an imminent, existential threat to the West.

Thanks to this support, some 28 million DVDs of the film were tucked into the Sunday edition of local newspapers and delivered to Americans in swing states across the country. Eventually, the film reached Breivik as well and is applauded in his manifesto.

Breivik cited Pipes at least 18 times in his manifesto; in one section, he quoted the far-right scholar commenting, “Self-hating Westerners have an out-sized importance due to their prominent role as shapers of opinion in universities, the media, religious institutions and the arts. They serve as the Islamists’ auxiliary mujahideen.”

Pipes’ Middle East Forum has benefited immensely from the generosity of Donors Capital Fund, reaping $2.3 million from the foundation between 2001 to 2009, according to the Center for American Progress.

Halvorssen responds

In 2010, the Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen investigated what it referred to as Thor Halvorssen’s “secret funding,” which it suspected was “associated with the right side of the United States.” Halvorssen told reporter Sarah Sorheim: “I receive money from a variety of different people and environments. But that does not mean I necessarily support their political views.”

Sorheim asked him: “why not disclose who your sponsors are?” He deflected, explaining, “Since I got so much attention here in Norway, I’m still thinking about whether I can disclose our lists.”

Prior to this investigation by The Electronic Intifada, the full extent of Halvorssen’s right-wing funding was unknown. And contrary to the claims he made to Sorheim and to The Electronic Intifada, his political views appear to align neatly with many of his key backers and with those they support.

In an emailed response to The Electronic Intifada, Halvorssen stated that the $600,000 donated to the Human Rights Foundation through Donors Capital Fund from 2007 through 2011 that is disclosed in the Human Rights Foundation’s 2011 IRS filing actually came from his own family.

“The Harry Halvorssen Fund is an account I set up with Donors Capital/Donors Trust and it is the main vehicle through which my mother and I make our contributions to [the Human Rights Foundation] and other charitable pursuits ranging from ecological concerns and scholarships to inner-city children in New York, to equine rescue,” he stated.

None of the money provided through the Donors Capital Fund, he said, went to support the Oslo Freedom Forum, but he and his mother donate separate funds through the Human Rights Foundation to support the Oslo Freedom Forum. “The Harry Halvorssen Fund has never made any contributions to any film called Obsession,” Halvorssen wrote.

To be sure, the kinds of donor-advised services for living donors and legacies that Donors Capital Fund provides to major philanthropists are also offered by many well-established foundations, such as the Chicago Community Trust or the New York Community Trust, as well as other financial institutions.

Tainted reputation

So why did Halvorssen choose to support the Human Rights Foundation and other causes through Donors Capital Fund, which is tainted by itsreputation as a pass-through for anonymous donors to give enormous sums to virulently Islamophobic and anti-gay causes?

“My choice of using Donors Capital Fund/Donors Trust is based on the fact that if I were to pass away unexpectedly I know they will very strictly abide to donor intent,” Halvorssen wrote to The Electronic Intifada.On its website, Donors Trust states that it was established “to ensure the intent of donors who are dedicated to the ideals of limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise” is respected even after they die.

Halvorssen offered an analogy to explain his motives: “People I may disagree with may also open a bank account at Chase Manhattan Bank, where I have a debit card; this doesn’t mean that Chase Manhattan Bank is responsible for their activities or that other customers are to carry some kind of collective responsibility for their banking choices.”

But this analogy might not be exact; on its website, Donors Capital Fund states that only organizations “approved by the Donors Capital Fund board of directors are eligible to receive grants from donor-advised funds administered by Donors Capital Fund.”

Anti-Muslim support

Even if Halvorssen were to be taken at his word about his relationship with Donors Capital Fund, he cannot explain why the Human Rights Foundation relies on other key members of the Islamophobia industry’s financial network.

The Sarah Scaife Foundation, one of the four foundations controlled by conservative financier Richard Mellon Scaife, donated $325,000 to Halvorssen’s Human Rights Foundation between 2007 and 2011, according to IRS filings.

According to the Center for American Progress, Scaife’s foundations contributed a staggering $7,875,000 to the Islamophobia industry between 2001 and 2009.

Among the major recipients of Scaife’s money was the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which received $3.4 million during the eight-year period documented in the “Fear Inc.” report.

The David Horowitz Freedom Center happens to be the main sponsor of Robert Spencer, the Islamophobic pseudo-scholar who claimed in a video interview with the conservative website Politichicks that the Muslim Brotherhood has penetrated deep into President Obama’s White House inner circle. Breivik referenced Spencer’s work no fewer than 162 times in his manifesto.

Then there is the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which contributed $145,000 to the Human Rights Foundation from 2007 through 2011, according to IRS forms. As The Electronic Intifada recently reported, the Bradley Foundation has helped pay the salaries of some of America’s most virulent anti-Muslim agitators. These include David Horowitz, the creator of Pipes and Frank Gaffney, publisher of conspiratorial pamphlets like his 2010 “Shariah: The Threat to America,” in which he warned that American Muslims were engaged in a “stealth jihad” to place the country under the control of “sharia,” or Islamic law.

Breivik cited Gaffney and Horowitz a total of nine times in his manifesto.

False-flag conspiracy theories

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik

Breivik claims that in 2002 (at the age of 23) he started a nine-year-plan to finance the 2011 attacks, founding his own computer programming business while working at the customer service company. He claims that his company grew to six employees and "several offshore bank accounts", and that he made his first million kroner at the age of 24.^[61] The company was later declared bankrupt and Breivik was reported for several breaches of the law.^[62] He then moved back to his mother's home, according to himself to save money. The first set of psychiatrists who evaluated him said in their report his mental health deteriorated at this stage and he went into a state of withdrawal and isolation.^[63] His declared assets in 2007 were about NOK 630,000. (US$116,410^[53]), according to Norwegian tax authority figures.^[55] He claims that by 2008 he had about NOK 2,000,000 (US$369,556^[53]) and nine credit cards giving him access to €26,000 in credit.^[61]

In May 2009 he founded a farming company under the name "Breivik Geofarm",^[64] described as a farming sole proprietorship set up to cultivate vegetables, melons, roots and tubers.^[65]

Also in 2009 he visited Prague in an attempt to buy illegal weapons. He was unable to obtain a weapon there, and decided to get weapons through legal channels in Norway instead.^[66] He bought one semi-automatic 9 mm Glock 17 pistol legally by demonstrating his membership in a pistol club in the police application for a gun license, and the semi-automatic Ruger Mini-14 rifle by possessing a hunting license.^[67] Breivik's manifesto included writings detailing how he played video games such as World of Warcraft to relax, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 for "training-simulation".^[68] He told a court in April 2012 that he trained for shooting using a holographic device while playing Call of Duty. He claimed it helped him gain target acquisition.^[69]

Breivik had no declared income in 2009 and his assets amounted to 390,000 kroner ($72,063^[53]), according to Norwegian tax authority figures.^[55] He states that in January 2010 his funds were "depleting gradually". On 23 June 2011, a month before the attacks, he paid the outstanding amount on his nine credit cards so he could have access to funds during his preparations.^[61]

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/7/23/8287/32273

chip B

am documenting my research on Lind, Weyrich, and the Free Congress Foundation in this article currently being updated and expanded:

Updated: Breivik's Core Thesis is White Christian Nationalism v. Multiculturalism]

Anders Behring Breivik, charged in the terror attacks in Oslo, Norway, compiled a 1,500-page Manifesto under the name "Andrew Berwick" that cites to the U.S. Free Congress Foundation and LaRouchite publications. The manifesto states that "Political Correctness" should be called "Cultural Marxism" and is the reason for political leaders allowing mass Muslim migration into Europe. Breivik's core thesis is borrowed from William S. Lind's antisemitic conspiracy theory about "Cultural Marxism."

Breivik described himself in online posts as a cultural conservative and a Christian conservative who felt that Protestantism had lost its way and that Christianity should recombine under the banner of a reconstituted and traditionalist Catholic Church. These views are almost identical to the views of the late Paul Weyrich, founder of the Christian Right epicenter in the United States, the Free Congress Foundation. Weyrich and his colleague William S. Lind developed an aggressive theory of Cultural Conservatism as a way to save Western Culture. Lind addressed the right-wing group Accuracy in Academia in February 2000. See also: What is Cultural Marxism? by William S. Lind.

See also:

+Norway's Nightmare & The Christian Fundamentalist -Bill Berkowitz

+When is Terrorism 'Christian'? - Frederick Clarkson

+Breivik 2011 Manifesto Echoes Weyrich 1999 Manifesto - Chip Berlet

+[Author Cited by Anders Behring Breivik Regrets Original Essay

+](http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/7/26/161347/099)Breivik cited William S. Lind, Free Congress Foundation, & the LaRouchites+Anders Behring Breivik: Soldier in the Christian Right Culture Wars

The concepts within cultural conservatism are a confluence of traditionalist claims from Europe and the United States. Major US groups send representatives to Europe, and there is a general meet up at the conferences of The World Congress of Families. See background here: "Exporting 'Traditional Values': The World Congress of Families." This vein of culural conservatism warns of a "Demographic Winter" a term which is a coded racist warning that Muslims are outbreeding "white people" in Europe and the United States.

Another source of the conspiracy theory about "Cultural Marxism" is the international network of Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. The LaRouchite Schiller Institute has an early (1992) article outlining the claim of a vast conspiracy of "Cultural Marxism"

Posts decying "Cultural Marxism"(kulturmarxisme in Breivik's posts) can be found all over the Internet. For example, the website http://culturalmarxism.orgpromotes a DVD featuring Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan, G. Edward Griffin, Ted Baehr, and Edwin Vieira.

Breivik thought Cultural Marxists = multiculturalists = Islamization of Europe. This racist right-wing conspiracy theory is tied to the Islamophobic "Demographic Winter" thesis. In his online posts, Breivik considered himself a cultural conservative and condemned "Cultural Marxism."The idea of "Cultural Marxism" on the political right is an antisemitic conspiracy theory cliaming that a small group of Marxist Jews formed the Frankfurt School and set out to destroy Western Culture through a conspiracy to promote multiculturalism and collectivist economic theories.

In 1987, Paul Weyrich of the DC-based Free Congress Foundation commissioned a study, Cultural Conservatism: Toward A New National Agendawhich argued that cultural issues provided antiliberalism with a more unifying concept than economic conservatism. Cultural Conservatism: Theory and Practice followed in 1991. William “Bill” Lind spent years building the Center for Cultural Conservatism at Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation.

Speakers at the WCF warned of a Demographic Winter at the World Congress of Families meeting in Poland in 2007. See for example, John D. Mueller, "A Family-Friendly Fiscal Policy to Weather "Demographic Winter.'" Left unstated but clearly understood, is that it is White people who face a "Demographic Winter" as the population of Muslims, Arabs, and other "non-White" people increases in nations.

According to Breivik:

There must be more focus on multicultural doctrines (multiculturalism = kulturmarxisme) as it is this ideology that allows the political mechanisms that result in continued Islamization (Islamic demographic warfare). People must learn what multiculturalism...doctrines do with Europe:

Systematic breakdown:

European Christianity

European tradition

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Of course, it is known that kulturmarxistene [Cultural Marxists] and humanities in Europe think they are going to reform Islam but they will fail like all before them have done. We, for our part, the cultural conservatives and anti-Marxist liberal, must focus on the basic problem - multiculturalism (kulturmarxisme) and how to combat this...

William Lind promotes a form of “cultural conservatism” that has shifted into antisemitic conspiracism. Lind is an analyst and author at the Free Congress Foundation FCF founded by the late Christian Right strategist Paul Weyrich. FCF is a significant player in Inside-the-Beltway politics [Cite: Berlet, “Into the Mainstream.”]

As Joe Conason reports, "Lind …concocts theories about the Marxist Jews who have infected American culture”

Lind wrote an essay in 1999 suggesting that slavery did not damage race relations in the south as much as the federal government intervention during Reconstruction that followed the Civil War. Furthermore, according to Lind, if the Confederacy had won, "at least part of North America would still stand for Western culture, Christianity and an appreciation of the differences between ladies and gentlemen." Lind claims that the federal government now imposes an "official American state ideology" featuring the "cultural Marxism of Political Correctness" [Cite: Lind, “What If The South Had Won The Civil War?”].

Lind later explained to a Holocaust denial group that cultural Marxism was a conspiracy concocted by a handful of Jews in Germany at the Frankfurt School, according to Bill Berkowitz's article "Reframing the Enemy." on Cultural Marxism] for Intelligence Report from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Weyrich provided office space for the late Laszlo Pasztorwho served as an advisor on Eastern Europe to Weyrich. The aging Pasztor was a member of the fascist Hungarian Arrow Cross Party in the 1940s at a time when it was collaborating with the Nazis to liquidate Jews at the direction of Gestapo administrator, and SS Lieutenant-Colonel Adolf Eichmann [Cite: Russ Bellant, Holly Sklar, Chip Berlet]. As Holly Sklar and I wrote in 1990:

The U.S. government is working with former Arrow Cross official Laszlo Pasztor, a convicted Nazi collaborator. Having lost the battle to impose fascism on Europe, Pasztor immigrated to the U.S. He was following in the footsteps of thousands of Nazis and Nazi collaborators protected and recruited by the C.I.A. to resume the war on communism.

In the 1950's, Pasztor eventually joining the Republican Party's campaign ethnic outreach division. He recruited racists, neofascists and anti-Semites. Pasztor's political career flourished, and by 1987 he, was boasting of his frequent visits to the White House, State Department and Helsinki Commission. [Cite: Holly Sklar and Chip Berlet, “Harbinger of Democracy?: The N.E.D.’s Ex-Nazi Advisor,” The Nation, April 2, 1990.]

The ideological connection here is the idea that Marxism & communism threaten the very survival of Western Culture. Pasztor was a dedicated anti-communist after WWII, and was able to pass himself off as a patriot defending Hungary--and later the United States--from the pernicious plague of Marxism.

The trope of Cultural Marxism combines this view of political economy with a narrow view of Christian superiority and an ethnocentric White Nationalism. In both sectors--Christian superiority and ethnocentric White Nationalism--there is a great fear of Muslim immigration.

"Cultural Marxism," the Hoax Conspiracy Theory

The Frankfort School developed theories of "cultural criticism," and "The Culture Industry," but the term "Cultural Marxism" is a derogatory term developed by antisemitic conspiracy theorists.

There are a handful of Cultural Marxist sociologists around the world who use aspects of the Frankfurt School theories, Flowing out of several strains of sociology are sections that use Race/Gender/Class analysis and include a few Cultural Marxists. So the real Cultural Marxism is an analytical lens used primarily in academia, not a global conspiracy to destroy Western Culture.

So Breivik opposed "Cultural Marxism," the hoax conspiracy theory, but probably knew little of the actual "critical theories" of the Frankfort School, which are still used within sectors of modern sociology. See, for example, the work of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.

Apocalyptic Christian Belief and Islamophobia

Among right-wing Christians who fear Muslims there are some that see Islam as the false religion of the Antichrist in the End Times in their idiosyncratic reading of Biblical prophecy.

This apocalyptic view is widespread in some areas. For example a poll found that 15% of Republicans in New Jersey though President Barack Obama might be the "Antichrist" who is Satan's chief henchman in the End Times. Another 14% were convinced Obama was the Antichrist.

As Robert C. Fuller observed in his classic Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession, the candidates for the starring roles vary over time in fundamentalist eschatological analysis. Some see Islam as the religion of the False Prophet, the theological sidekick to the Antichrist. After the terror attacks on 9/11/2001 there was an increase in the demonization of Muslims in some Christian evangelical circles, especially those in which apocalyptic conspiracy theories flourish.

For example, Hal Lindsey joined in the Islam-bashing in 2002 with The Everlasting Hatred: The Roots of Jihad. Speculation in conspiracy circles that Obama is secretly a Muslim, perhaps born in Kenya, add fuel to this bigoted fire.

Paul S. Boyer, author of When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture, suggests that religious views about Biblical prophecy in the United States have “always had an enormous, if indirect and underrecognized, role [in] shaping public policy.” If the message of apocalyptic demonization is not clear, try reading one of the novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins in their Left Behind series of Christian apocalyptic novels which have sold more than 70 million copies.

Gershom Gorenberg blasts the authors because they:

"promote conspiracy theories; they demonize proponents of arms control, ecumenicalism, abortion rights and everyone else disliked by the Christian right; and they justify assassination as a political tool. Their anti-Jewishness is exceeded by their anti-Catholicism. Most basically, they reject the very idea of open, democratic debate. In the world of Left Behind, there exists a single truth, based on a purportedly literal reading of Scripture; anyone who disagrees with that truth is deceived or evil.”

The main villain of the Left Behind series of books, Gorenberg notes, is “Nicolae Carpathia, the man who turned the United Nations into a one-world government with himself as dictator,” on behalf of Satan. In fact, Carpathia is the dreaded Antichrist. According to Gorenberg:

Perhaps the most striking scene in the Left Behind series is the climax of book six, The Assassins [when] Carpathia is speaking at a mass rally in Jerusalem. Out in the crowd is [underground Christian resistance leader] Rayford Steele, armed with a high-tech handgun. He prays for God’s guidance, and finds himself firing what appears to be a fatal shot at Carpathia. Intentionally or not, this is an eerie rewrite of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination at a Tel Aviv peace rally in 1995—but the authors are on the side of the fanatic killer.”

All of these conspiracy theories and more swirl through the Tea Party movement and beyond. LaHaye, before his novels, wrote a series of books popular in the Christian Right in which he laid out the master plan of the conspiracy of liberal secular humanists. Big government and collectivism was part of the sinister plan.

Whether it is based on religious or secular themes, the idea of a vast longstanding conspiracy of Cultural Marxists to destroy Western Culture creates apocalyptic aggression, in which believers in the conspiracy theory decide to act first against the named enemies.

Important Links, Articles, Updates

Norway Terror Suspect Described as Far-Right Nationalist Islamophobe | Accuracy.Org. Has great links to several articles

@ChipBerlet: Media lost in Norway suspect's posts. Cultural Marxism (Jewish plot)+White Nationalism+Islamophobia+US Christian Right conspiracy theories (Chip's Tweet)

In Europe, Where's the Hate? | The Nation Really compelling article by Gary Younge in 2007. Predictive & sad.

Via IREHR: Norway terror suspect"Breivik appears to be a fan of the Tea Party's favorite Islamophobe, Pamela Geller"

This link will take you to a Google Translation page of Norway suspect Anders Behring Breivik's comments on Document.no

@MaxBlumenthal: Max Blumenthal: Screed blaming Muslims for attack by @jrubinblogger is still up, uncorrected by Washington Post

@MaxBlumenthal: Max BlumenthalPam Geller, who initially blamed the gov of Norway (and Muslims) for oslo attacks, is now insisting that Breivik is not her Fjordman

Bill Berkowitz: : Nightmare in Norway and the Threat of Fundamentalist Christian, Blonde, Blue-eyed Terrorists in Our Midst

David Neiwert: Norway terrorist Breivik was an ardent subscriber to theories of 'Cultural Marxism' | Crooks and Liars

Thanks to several colleagues for sending me tips and links, especially Julie Ingersoll, Devin Burghart, and Bill Berkowitz.

[Note: Some sources questioned whether all the political posts circulated in Norway were by Breivik alone. I need to be cautious here, so I investigated and have not included material that is in dispute.]

https://4thgenwar.wordpress.com/2016/07/03/trump-meets-man-who-inspired-2011-terror-attack-deadlier-than-orlando-shooting/

new

Donald Trump Meets William S. Lind

bruceewilson / July 3, 2016

(July 3, 2016) A photo, attached to an opinion column dated April 16, 2016 that was published on the website Traditionalright.com, showsDonald Trump standing with an even taller, neatly dressed, unsmiling man with a strangely intense gaze: William S. Lind.

In his column, Lind wrote, “At the beginning of this column you will find a photograph of me giving a copy of The Next Conservatism to presidential candidate Donald Trump”.

Lind’s many accomplishments include pioneering a novel theory of warfare that, he suggests, may have inspired al-Qaeda’s grand global strategy ; promoting a conspiracy theory concerning something called “cultural Marxism” — now globally embraced by racist, neo-Nazi, and nationalist right movements — which helped provoke one of Europe’s worst terrorist attacks in decades ; and publishing a 2014 novel that envisions white Christian militias carrying out the ethnic cleansing of North America and restoring slavery.

In the website photo, Trump is smiling, and, according to Bill Lind, he holdsLind’s 2009 book The Next Conservatism, co-written with his friend and close working colleague the late Paul Weyrich– who is generally credited as one of the top three co-architects of the contemporary American religious right.

The Next Conservatism, reported to have been circulated within the Trump for President team, not only anticipated most of the positions Donald Trump campaigned on – it maps out a bold new path for conservatism that bears uncanny resemblance to Trump’s 2016 election campaign platform.

William Lind is widely acknowledged by relevant scholars as by far the most important promoter of the “cultural Marxism“ conspiracy theory concerning the alleged origin of “political correctness” – a plot Lind alleges was launched, nearly a century ago by Jewish Marxist intellectuals from the “Frankfurt School”, to destroy America and Western Christian civilization.

In 2002 Lind told attendees at a Holocaust denial conference, concerning the architects of the alleged cultural Marxism plot against America, that “These guys were all Jewish”

Lind’s writing on the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory helped directly inspire one of Europe’s worst terrorist attacks in decades – the 2011 slaughter of 77, mostly teenagers, and wounding of 319 in Norway. According to the neo-Nazi perpetrator Anders Behring Breivik, he intended his terrorist attack as a “marketing method” to publicize his political manifesto that featured, as it core thesis, the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory.

In addition, Lind has suggested that his ideas on non-traditional “Fourth Generation” warfare (4GW) may have helped inspire the grand strategy behind al-Qaeda’s devastating September 11, 2001 attacks on America. “al-Qaeda understands 4GW and is using it,” concurs one relevant military strategy expert.

In 1999 Lind claimed, “The real damage to race relations in the South came not from slavery, but from Reconstruction, which would not have occurred if the South had won [the Civil War]. Then, in 2014, he published a novel (which he had originally written in the 1990s) that outlined a vision for violently restoring the American slavery regime overthrown in the Civil War.

William Lind’s 2014 novel (written under a pen-name) “Victoria – A Novel of 4th Generation War” favorably depicts white Christian militia groups overthrowing the federal government, helping out a resurgent Southern Dixie regime by vaporizing the black insurgent-controlled center of Atlanta with a tactical nuclear weapon, and carrying out the ethnic cleansing of African-Americans (see chapter 27) and other ethnic groups such as Puerto Ricans.

African-American families are driven out of cities into forced sharecropping on white-owned lands in the country. Towards the end of the novel, the protagonists launch a final crusade against Islam.

According to sociologist, retired Senior U.S. Army Analyst, and authority on the Tea Party and the American militia movement Dr. James Scaminaci, William S. Lind has authored the “blueprint for the development of the patriot militia movement” which hopes to one day overthrow federal authority; and in a key 1989 article that may have inspired al-Qaeda, he forecast that “The next real war we fight is likely to be on American soil.”

In his 2009 book The Next Conservatism, William Lind suggests a new mechanism for domestic counterterrorism – by harnessing the manpower of local anti-government militia groups which “might report to county sheriffs”.

Such county sheriff / militia alliances have already begun under the auspices of a national sheriffs group called theConstitutional Sheriffsand Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), and by late 2016 top Trump for President campaign staff and surrogates had established contact with CSPOA leadership.

In the last weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign, an extraordinary pattern emerged that was wholly unnoticed by media or even seasoned watchdog groups tasked with tracking the American far-right – dozens of top Trump campaign advisers and surrogates appeared as guests on a relatively obscure far-right radio show, the Liberty Roundtable.

The Liberty Roundtable radio show frequently features, as a guest, the co-founder and current leader of CSPOA and Liberty Roundtable show host Sam Bushman has himself served on the CSPOA board.

The CSPOA, closely associated with the Christian right, has been advertised by its founder and head Richard Mack as “The Army To Set Our Nation Free” and has promoted anti-Obama “birther” conspiracy theories also promoted by Donald Trump. CSPOA events have featured speakers who advocate for Southern Secession.

The Secret Life of “Political Correctness”

In his campaign speeches, including Trump’s New Hampshire speech following the June 2016 massacre of 49 people at an Orlando, Florida nightclub, DonaldTrump has repeatedly attacked “political correctness”.

“I refuse to be politically correct”, Trump told his New Hampshire audience. “I’m so tired of this politically correct crap,” he complained to South Carolina business leaders back in September 2015. “This country, political correctness is killing us,” Trump charged in a February 2016 interview on NBC’s Today show.

Throughout the primary season Donald Trump has attacked “political correctness” so much, it might have raised the question – was he aware of the dark new conspiracy theory association that the term “political correctness” has taken on, over the past decade and a half, for many on the American right ?

If he wasn’t, he probably is now.

Portrait of Donald Trump as a Paleocon

William S. Lind is an influential arch-conservative ideologue of the Paleoconservative right — a tendency that runs from the nativist populism of Pat Buchanan and the “libertarian” Christian Reconstructonism-tinged politics of Ron Paul over to overtly racist, white nationalist, neo-Nazi, and theocratic Christian groups (both in the small but heavily influential Christian Reconstructionism movement but also in some of the more nativist streams of Christian dominionism within the vastly larger charismatic movement.)

Paleoconservatives like Buchanan, Paul, and Lind tend to oppose U.S. interventionism and “nation building” – which they consider to be typically stupid, ineffective, and costly. They view immigration – especially Muslim and Hispanic immigration – as an existential threat which could destroy the nation.

They decry the deindustrialization of America and oppose globalization and neo-Liberal free trade policies. They regard Wall Street’s financial machinations as parasitic and detrimental to the economic well-being of average Americans. And, they are partial to conspiracy theories in which secret elites, typically Jewish, scheme to rule or conquer the world and enslave humanity.

Despite the extremity of his political and social views, Bill Lind could hardly be called a fringe crank.

From the 1980s, Lind was for three decades a major fixture at what some consider to have been the emerging new conservative movement’s most intellectually and ideologically influential think tank, Paul Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation.

And, Lind has extensive connections in the U.S. military due to his pioneering work as a seminal theorist of something called Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW), a theory of asymmetrical warfare that’s especially attractive to insurgent and terrorist groups, a theory which, he’s suggested, may have given al-Qaeda strategic inspiration prior to 9-11

During their meeting, Lind gave Trump the 2009 book that he co-authored with the late Paul Weyrich, titled The Next Conservatism, which includes extensive discussion of Lind’s “cultural Marxism”/”political correctness” conspiracy theory.

The book also reads as if it had been specifically commissioned as a strategic template for Trump’s presidential campaign :

The Next Conservatism calls for stopping illegal immigration, controlling the U.S.-Mexico border, the ethnic and religious profiling of legal immigrants, making English the official national language (a less noticed Trump suggestion),protective tariffs, rebuilding American industry – to bring back well-paying jobs, investing ininfrastructure(such as roads, bridges, and public transit), and pulling back from interventionist American foreign policies.

Did Donald Trump read The Next Conservatism prior to launching his devastatingly effective campaign for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination ?

We’ll probably never know, but Trump could have derived most of his 2016 primary positions from a two-hour session with Lind’s and Weyrich’s book, by simply dog-earing pages and underlining key bits of text with his signature golden Sharpie.

And that would have been quite smart, on Trump’s part, given the importance of who Lind’s co-author was — the late Paul Weyrich, a key movement architect who coached and brokered the entrance of religious right into national politics, a man known for being typically a few years ahead of his time.

William S. Lind has himself noted the close resonance between Donald Trump’s positions and the ideas laid out in The Next Conservatism. After meeting Trump and giving him the book, Lind wrote,

“Trump’s views on avoidable foreign wars, free trade, political correctness and a number of other subjects have much in common with The Next Conservatism. If he reads it, our book might be helpful to him in fleshing out his agenda.”

The Architects

The book is billed as Paul Weyrich’s “last will and testament”. It was his (and William Lind’s) vision for rebuilding a conservative movement that, near the end of his life, Weyrich thought was running off the rails.

Weyrich, who one longtime observer of the America right has described as “the connective tissue of the modern conservative movement”, played a central role launching much of the movement’s early infrastructure including the Free Congress Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and a succession of conservative evangelical activist groups and coalitions – first Christian Voice (formed from several California anti-gay and anti-pornography groups), then the Moral Majority, then the Christian Coalition.

Weyrich may have been a traditionalist, but he was no classic conservative. In the 1984 book Ominous Politics – The New Conservative Labyrinth, author John Soloma quoted Weyrich as having stated,

“We are no longer working to preserve the status quo. We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure of this country.” (p.49)

Following his death in December 2008, an LA Times story quoted Weyrich as having declared, on fighting the American culture war,

“It may not be with bullets and . . . rockets and missiles, but it’s a war nonetheless… It is a war of ideology, it’s a war of ideas, and it’s a war about our way of life. And it has to be fought with the same intensity, I think, and dedication as you would fight a shooting war.”

In line with those statements, Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation promoted a radical, even revolutionary, form of meta-politics intended to shift the underlying culture and which appeared to incorporate William S. Lind’s concepts of Fourth Generation Warfare. In his seminal 1989 Marines Corps Gazette article on 4GW, Lind and his co-authors had predicted that,

“Television news may become a more powerful operational weapon than armored divisions.”

4GW TV

Countless observers have noted the role of Roger Ailes’ Fox Network – as a conduit for right-wing propaganda, for its ability to generate an alternative reality, and for its attacks on the legitimacy of government and other institutions. As such, Fox can be considered an example of Fourth Generation warfare in practice.

But the success of Fox was paved by two prior, related media ventures. The first iteration of the idea, of an explicitly right-leaning media network, was the Coors family-financed, New York City-based Television News, Inc. (TVN), launched in 1973 – an effort that, as Joseph Coors told a Denver, CO paper, was explicitly aimed at countering “liberal-left” network news. It was a short-lived affair that folded in 1975.

But TVN did bring together two rising stars: Roger Ailes, a who during his time as a Nixon Administration media consultant had proposed a White House-run news network, and Paul Weyrich – who would soon begin to launch key infrastructure of the nascent Christian right.

Next came National Empowerment Television (NET) – a more radical affair than the Coors’ TVN. As described in the research paper “THE FREE CONGRESS FOUNDATION’S POLITICAL-MILITARY STRATEGY DOCUMENTS“, by James Scaminaci,

“In 1992, the Free Congress Foundation launched its National Empowerment Television (NET) broadcast to 11 million homes. According to Media Transparency, the NET carried Borderline for “conservative views on immigration policy,” the Cato Forum, “which provides the Cato Institute with an on-going opportunity to promote its beliefs concerning the illegitimacy of taxes and government regulation,” On Target With the National Rifle Association, and other right-wing policy shows.”

The Cato Forum may have been within established boundaries, the NRA show perhaps a bit less so. But Borderline went further. Launched in 1996, Borderline was produced by The Federation For Immigration Reform and featured, according to a report on FAIR from the Southern Poverty Law Center,

“a number of prominent white nationalists, including Sam Francis and Jared Taylor. “Borderline” often advanced ideas popular in white nationalist circles; particularly popular was the idea that immigrants are destroying American culture or displacing Western civilization with degenerate, Third World ways.”

As described in the SPLC report, Borderline shows in 1996 included discussion of the possibility “that if the U.S. loses its white majority, it will be destroyed” by a civil war. Three years before the Borderline show was launched on NET, FAIR founder John Tanton had mused,

“As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?”

The NET Borderline show is especially significant because it demonstrates a working relationship between the Free Congress Foundation – a central organizational hub for the Christian right – and a decidedly racist national anti-immigration group prior to when the Free Congress Foundation began its concerted effort, roughly at the beginning of the new millennium, to spread the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory that now serves effectively as a coded vehicle for racist sentiment.

The 4GW War on America

The thesis that elements of the American far right, especially on the Christian right, have for decades been both waging (and preparing for) Fourth Generation warfare — to challenge federal and Constitutional authority, reverse gains by the feminist and LGBTQ rights movements, the environmental movement, and other liberal and progressive constituencies, and even one day impose decentralized government based upon biblical law — has been addressed in depth in the writing of Dr. James Scaminaci, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst who specialized first in the former Soviet Union, then the Middle East, and lastly in the Balkans.

Retired in the U.S, Scaminaci became alarmed in early 2009 when Alan Keyes publicly challenged the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency, on grounds that Obama is allegedly not an American citizen, and raised the possibility that members of the U.S. military might, because of questions concerning Obama’s citizenship, refuse to obey orders from the new president. States Scaminaci,

“I began to investigate the Christian Right. The “birther” claim not only delegitimized President Obama, but called into question the citizenship status of tens of millions of people… as a former military intelligence analyst, I utilized the skills that I had acquired, for example, examining the source of their strategy, their organizations, their networks, and their tactics…

…I began to understand that the Christian Right and its armed wing in the Patriot militia were radical revolutionaries. And, that to me is a key finding that progressives need to consider. The Patriot militia of the 1990s and today is the armed wing of the Christian Right. If you read the literature on the Patriot militia, from scholars and journalists, there is no analysis of the social bases of the militia and there is no analysis of the command-control-communications-intelligence (C3I) structure of the militia. Nowhere does a large armed formation exist that is not under political control and pursuing political goals…

I hope my analysis, while entirely supportive, elevates the strategic warning and gives progressive analysts the perspective to see that the movement is much more unified than previously thought and driven by a Fourth Generation Warfare strategy that comes from the central core of the Christian Right.”

For decades the “central core” – both organizational, ideological, and strategic – of the Christian right has been defined, perhaps more than any two individuals, by Paul Weyrich and William S. Lind.

Weyrich’s lasting influence is clear from the attendance at the Annual Paul Weyrich Awards Dinner, held each year before CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Attending this year were heavyweights such as close Weyrich friend Phyllis Schlaffly, who in the 1970s almost singlehandedly blocked the Equal Rights Amendment, billionaire venture capitalist Foster Friess, Fox News’ Megan Kelly, and Carly Fiorina.

Other friends of Weyrich screened tribute videos to the man who helped launch their movement: John Ashcroft, Newt Gingrich, James Dobson, Reince Priebus, and Jim DeMint, now President of the Heritage Foundation.

From his perch as Director of the Free Congress Foundation’s Center for Cultural Conservatism, William Lind has laid key groundwork that has made Trump’s radically unorthodox presidential bid far easier — notably as the most significant, passionate, eloquent, and dedicated promoter the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory that Donald Trump’s constant attacks on “political correctness” invoke (whether Trump means to do so or not.)

However it came about, for the 2009 Lind/Weyrich book with the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory to have arrived in Trump’s hands was probably not accidental :

Few observers have noticed his canny targeting and the extent of Trump’s groundwork, research, and outreach prior to his presidential bid — from making charitable donations to influential evangelical right entities such as the Billy Graham Foundation and speaking at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, to stoking “birther” conspiracy theories that challenged President Obama’s citizenship (which no doubt helped Trump gain entrée to the populist fringe right), to commissioning a team to research popular, conspiracy theory-riddled right-wing Internet sites.

It was the latter effort that might well have led Trump to William S. Lind’s and Paul Weyrich’s conspiracy theory concerning “political correctness” (cultural Marxism), because on many sectors of the far right their theory has become all-but ubiquitous.

“Cultural Marxism” spreads

Since its launch from the Free Congress Foundation, the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory has spread rapidly from the fringes – simultaneously through several vectors including the populist, nativist Paleocon right, the overtly racist right, and through a 1999 open letter to conservatives by Paul Weyrich that was later published in Christianity Today – and towards the conservative mainstream.

The ongoing process was noted over decade ago in a 2003 Southern Poverty Law Center report from journalist and researcher Bill Berkowitz, ‘Cultural Marxism’ Catching On.

By 2000, Reform Party presidential candidate and noted Paleocon Pat Buchanan was attacking “cultural Marxism” in his campaign speeches. Buchanan has become a prominent booster who has seeded the idea in his bestselling books such as his 2002 The Death of The West.

The idea also gained early traction among white supremacists such as former Ku Klux Klan Wizard David Duke.

It was spread on the racist right, most crucially, beginning in the early 2000s when the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (CoC) produced and distributed a video, titled “Political Correctness: The Frankfurt School Story”, which featured a CoC-scripted commentary tacked onto nearly the entire body of another video on cultural Marxism, featuring William S. Lind, produced by the Free Congress Foundation, with the original title “Political Correctness: The Dirty Little Secret” (later changed to “The History of Political Correctness”.)

(The CoC itself has a notable history in regard to terrorism – its inflammatory racist website material has been credited with having inspired Dylann Roof, suspected of having committed the June 7, 2015 mass execution, during a church prayer service, of nine African-American members of the Charleston, South Carolina Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.)

By 2012, the “cultural Marxism” idea had become firmly established on the hard evangelical right, as demonstrated by the presence of a chapter by William Lind in the book The Culture-Wise Family: Upholding Christian Values in a Mass Media World co-edited by Ted Baehr and Pat Boone, with a forward by Janet Parshall.

Lind’s chapter, titled “Who Stole Our Culture”, begins ominously with, “Sometime during the last half-century, someone stole our culture.” The chapter is thematically extremely close to (and essentially a re-writing of) Lind’s first chapter in the 2004 Free Congress Foundation book Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology that was plagiarized in the political manifesto of convicted mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik.

More recently, the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory has been promoted in full-length, professionally produced pseudo-documentary videos, and has begun to diffuse into the mainstream right.

Although the theory is factually challenged and easily debunked, it nonetheless can now be found discussed credulously in mainstream right magazines such as the National Review.

Targeting the enemy in warfare

As noted by Berkowitz in his Southern Poverty Law Center report, cultural Marxism built upon previous right wing tropes. Since the early 1990s, “Political correctness” had emerged as a topic for right-wing scorn, and at the 1992 Republican National Convention, in a televised speech, Pat Buchanan had declared,

“There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.”

The “cultural Marxism” theory added a complex and seemingly plausible back-story to emerging right wing narratives concerning that “culture war” and the rise of “political correctness”; the cultural Marxists had, to a shocking extent, taken control of key societal institutions that shape culture, including academia.

In a February 16, 1999 letter sent out to many prominent conservatives and later published (and validated) by Christianity Today, Paul Weyrich declared,

“The ideology of Political Correctness, which openly calls for the destruction of our traditional culture, has so gripped the body politic, has so gripped our institutions, that it is even affecting the Church. It has completely taken over the academic community. It is now pervasive in the entertainment industry, and it threatens to control literally every aspect of our lives.

[ …]

Cultural Marxism is succeeding in its war against our culture. “

Now deeply embedded in conservative movement culture, the cultural Marxism theory allows those familiar with the concept to very efficiently designate and target a wide range of enemies.

The “cultural Marxists”, the enforcers of “political correctness”, and those who might be unaware of the cultural Marxism plot but who are nonetheless under its evil sway might be Democrats, liberals, or progressives, LGBTQ citizens, feminists, secular humanists or environmentalists. They could be multiculturalists, or citizens of non European-American ethnicity, black nationalists or members of Hispanic organizations. They could be recent legal immigrants or illegal ones.

The list could go on almost endlessly – because of the expansive, totalistic nature of the cultural Marxist conspiracy, no single enemies list could possibly encompass all the various societal groups playing a part, witting or not, in the grand plot.

William F. Buckley spins in his grave

The National Review validation of the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory is especially striking because of the magazine’s pedigree – it was founded in 1955 by conservative icon William F. Buckley, who worked to redefine and rebrand the conservative movement – especially by purging its cranks.

One was Robert Welch, founder of the nationally influential John Birch Society, who maintained that President Dwight Eisenhower was a secret communist and that the flouridation of water supplies was a communist plot to weaken the minds of Americans (a trope featured in the Stanley Kubrick Cold War-era black comedy film Dr. Strangelove.)

As he described in a 2008 Wall Street Journal retrospective, Buckley led the campaign to marginalize the conspiracy theory-addled Welch.

Since its founding, the National Review has sought (much like Christianity Today has tried to do for the conservative evangelical movement) to invest the conservative movement with a degree of respectability and intellectual rigor.

That Buckley’s magazine itself now promotes conspiratorial ideas such as cultural Marxism – whose style traces back to Welch’s hysterical anti-Communism – is a testament to how sharply American conservatism has lurched in recent decades – away from intellectual sobriety, and towards conspiracy realms in which shadowy forces or evil Jews scheme to rule the world and destroy all that’s good and holy.

Not only did William F. Buckley marginalize Welch, but by one account in Jewish World Review Buckley “cleared the way… for a conservative movement where Jews would be welcomed… in which anti-Semitism was confined to the fever swamps of the far right and far left.”

The National Review has launched a ceaseless fusillade of anti-Trump attacks, and in early 2016 devoted an entire issue to attacking Donald Trump’s presidential bid. But the magazine has also given credence to the cultural Marxism theory that animates pro-Trump support.

Only a few months before, in September 2015, the The National Review published a credulous review of a book predicated on the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory – which identifies Jews, German Jews no less, as arch-enemies dedicated to the destruction of Christianity and the West.

Credible critics have identified Lind’s “cultural Marxism” as an “anti-Semitic conspiracy theory”. Cultural Marxism is, arguably, a modern-day American analog to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – the famous forgery, by the Russian Tsar’s secret police, that purported to present a secret Jewish plan to conquer the world. Brought back from Russia to Germany by the man who became Hitler’s chief ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg, the Protocols helped inspire the Holocaust.

Cultural Marxism posits a Jewish communist plot to destroy American and Western Christian civilization by attacking America’s traditional culture, especially by flooding the country with waves of immigrants, notably Muslims and Latinos, who will eventually reduce white European-Americans to a minority and destroy the nation’s cultural cohesion so that the United States eventually breaks apart into warring mini-states.

Trumpism, and The Next Conservatism

The cultural Marxism conspiracy theory is woven into the very fabric of The Next Conservatism.

William Lind and Paul Weyrich explicitly identify illegal immigration as an existential threat to America, as Fourth Generation Warfare, orchestrated by the agents of cultural Marxism, to destroy America’s cultural cohesion and eventually shatter the republic:

‘We are being invaded. In a world of Fourth Generation war, invasion by immigrants who do not assimilate is more dangerous than invasion by a foreign army. At some point, a foreign army will go home. But immigrants stay, and unassimilated immigrants provide an ongoing basis for Fourth Generation war here in America.

[…]

…The cultural Marxists want open borders because one way to destroy our traditional American culture is to bury it under tens of millions of immigrants from alien cultures. Not only do the cultural Marxists welcome the immigrants, by demanding “multiculturalism” they insure that these immigrants do not assimilate.’ (p. 106, The Next Conservatism)

It is a frame that dehumanizes immigrants; they are not human beings, each with unique circumstances and history but are, rather, soldiers in an army with one purpose – to destroy America.

The Lind and Weyrich book The Next Conservatism explicitly and repeatedly references the cultural Marxism theory that influenced Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik and, very early in the book, explains it in the most dire and cosmic terms:

‘Americans’ most fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech and freedom of association, are under threat from the ideology most commonly known as “multiculturalism” or “political correctness”. But what really is “PC”? A tour through a bit of esoteric intellectual history reveals its secret: it is cultural Marxism, Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms by a think tank established in 1923 in Frankfurt, Germany, the infamous Institute for Social Research. Cultural Marxism’s goal from the outset has been nothing less than the destruction of Western culture and the Christian religion, goals toward which it has made frightening progress. The next conservatism must arm Americans against this menace with the weapon it fears most: the revelation of its real nature.’ (p.5, ibid.)

Both major U.S. political parties are complicit, for different reasons:

“The Democrats want open borders because most of them are cultural Marxists. The Republicans agree because Wall Street wants cheap labor.” (p.107, ibid.)

The book offers a possible solution to the depicted domestic security threat that’s arguably even worse than the current militarization of America’s police; citizen militia groups, working with county sheriffs, will ensure security and keep the peace:

“the next conservatism should consider reviving an old American tradition: the militia. Because a militia is organized from individual communities, it too, like neighborhood cops, knows what is going on. Also like local police, a militia does not serve Leviathan, a federal government that seeks to snoop endlessly in ordinary citizens’ lives. This militia would be organized by individual states, as they saw a need for it. (It would not be a private militia, which can be dangerous in a world of Fourth Generation war.) It might report to county sheriffs, local, elected officials who possess substantial common law powers. Under no circumstances should it be controlled by or report to Washington.” (pp.104-105, ibid.)

Sex Offenders with Guns and Badges

There already exist, in America today, precedents for such a vision. One is inMaricopa County, Arizona, where County Sheriff Joe Arpaio commands a semi-private army of thousands of deputized volunteers that constitute his “posse”.

In 2012 a local CBS affiiate’s investigation showed that some of Arpaio’s deputees – who “wear uniforms, have badges, drive county vehicles” and even carry guns – also had criminal records that included,

“arrests for assault, drug possession, domestic violence, sex crimes against children, disorderly conduct, impersonating an officer – and the list goes on.”

Another example, from May 2016, is equally menacing. “Latinos and Democrats hide in safe houses as right-wing sheriff uses mob rule to take over Texas town“, read the title of one liberal media account of alleged political repression under the County Sheriff of Edwards County, Texas – a sheriff who belongs to the Christian right, anti-federal sheriffs group the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA).

One leader associated with CSPOA is Larry Pratt, founder and head of Gun Owners of America (GOA). Before founding CSPOA, former County Sheriff Richard Mack served as a lobbyist for Pratt’s organization.

Pratt was profiled in a July 14, 2014 story in Rolling Stone magazine, by journalist Alexander Zaitchik, that noted Pratt’s enthusiasm for the early 1980s efforts of Guatemala’s “Civil Defense Patrols”. Describes Zaitchik,

“It was during his involvement in Central American policy and supporting counterinsurgencies around the world that Pratt made multiple trips to Guatemala to observe rural “Civil Defense Patrols.” Contemporary human rights observers (and two subsequent Truth Commissions) consider them “death squads” for their role in killing and torturing civilians. But Pratt found much to admire. He combined observations from these visits with similarly impressed notes on the Civilian Home Defense Forces, vigilante patrols in Ferdinand Marcos’ Philippines, for a slim book published by the Gun Owners Foundation in 1990, Armed People Victorious. In it, he praises the leadership of Efrain Rios Montt, the country’s military leader during 1982 and 1983 who greatly expanded the civil defense patrols. Twenty years later, Guatemalan judges would find Montt guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity. One Amnesty International Report from Montt’s tenure detailed massacres in 60 Indian villages over a three-month period, leaving more than 2,500 dead. As late as 2001, Pratt was publically praising Montt as a “powerful Christian leader.”

In his final chapter of Armed People Victorious, Pratt enthused,

“The War on Drugs can be won the same way the guerilla insurgencies were pushed back in Guatemala and the Philippines… The history of the United States for years before and after the founding of the Republic was the history of an armed people with functioning militias involved in civil defense… While the United States has forgotten its successes in this area, other countries have rediscovered them. It is time that the United States return to reliance on an armed people. There is no acceptable alternative.”

Pratt’s vision is mirrored in William Lind’s 2014 novel Victoria, in which crime is vanquished when the triumphant white militia groups institute the summary execution of accused criminals. Lind specifically notes that those executed criminals are black.

In a series of columns he wrote in 2005 following a “symposium on modern war” William Lind attended during which participants sought to answer the question, “what might a state armed service designed for 4GW look like”, Lind expanded on the government-backed militia idea that he and Weyrich would later embed in The Next Conservatism:

The militias, perhaps under guidance of county sheriffs, would be government financed and report to national government at some level. Attendees considered Congress, rather than the chief executive, to be the best form of oversight – because an unscrupulous president might abuse such power. Explained Lind, in an August 24, 2005 column (one of 50 Lind columns in this PDF file),

“the militia we are talking about is a public, not a private militia. It is funded by government, and it reports to government (it is adcon to Congress and, unless mobilized, opcon to the county sheriff). Our working group thought it was important to keep the militia away from the federal executive branch as much as possible, because the executive branch will try either to destroy it or to turn it into a tool for Big Brother. But this militia is not just a bunch of guys running around in the woods. It is a state armed service, just like the four we now have — the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps and the Coast Guard.”

In March 2016, Donald Trump’s son Donald Trump, Jr. made direct contact with one of the leaders of CSPOA, a national organization of potentially renegade U.S. county sheriffs pledged to disregard and even oppose federal laws and authority they deem unconstitutional — which has ties both to militia groups across the nation, other far-right anti-federal national groups such as the Oath Keepers, racist political parties, Southern white nationalist groups, and radical gun owners groups.

Trump the 4GW Street Fighter

While Trump’s various positions track those in Lind’s book with considerable precision, his campaign tactics evoke William Lind’s 4GW, Fourth Generation warfare, tactics as well.

In 2015, Donald Trump entered the Republican primary race as an insurgent, with negligible support from the Republican Party. Elite pundits were nearly unanimous – Trump’s presidential bid was a national joke. One year later no one was laughing.

He gained extensive Internet exposure via big far right Internet venues such as the Drudge Report, and mainstream media dominance by ceaselessly attacking “political correctness” and violating established or unwritten norms of expected presidential behaviors. That, in turn served both to grow Trump’s populist support base and make him ubiquitous on the big TV networks in a way no other candidate was able to match.

And, he engaged in asymmetrical combat by going after his opponent’s weaknesses— and in a wholly unexpected manner that radically violated established Republican etiquette and convention.

The Next Conservatism takes it for granted that big money has almost irreparably corrupted both the Republican and Democratic political parties, and offers some solutions that would appeal widely across the political spectrum.

In a fashion that’s quite counterintuitive, Trump trounced his primary opponents, and gained Republican Party support, in part by attacking both as part of a political system corrupted by big money.

A key part of 4GW strategy involves the need to publicly delegitimize one’s opponents. During the first Republican primary debate, Trump launched a devastating attack on the legitimacy of his Republican opponents by pointing out that as a businessman he had long practiced giving money to politicians, both Democrats and Republicans – including many of Trump’s debate opponents – to buy access and favors.

In a prior interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump said, of such politicians, “When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do.” Asked during the debate about the statement, Trump doubled down with,

“You’d better believe it. If I ask them, if I need them — you know, most of the people on this stage I’ve given to, just so you understand, a lot of money.”

Trump’s Republican primary opponents onstage, prominent current and former governors and sitting U.S. Senators did not dispute that this was how things worked, and did not deny that they were among the politicians whom people like Trump bought and sold. He reiterated the indictment with,

“I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them, and they are there for me.”

Trump concluded, “And that’s a broken system.” In one swift and decisive blow, he had reduced his Republican rivals to supplicants – spineless bought-and-paid for minions and courtiers of a corrupt status quo.

On page 29 of The Next Conservatism, Lind and Weyrich are scathing,

‘Truth be told, most Washington Republicans do not hold any core beliefs… Their only goals are to have a successful career as a professional politician and leave Washington rich. These courtiers’ attitude toward the “little people,” those who are not writing them $1,000 checks, is “I’m all right, Jack, I’ve got mine.” ‘

Economic Populism

In their book, Lind and Weyrich offer platforms to reform the American political system and reorient the entire conservative movement. But they have trenchant advice for the Democratic Party as well – and Donald Trump could easily have plucked some of those suggestions. Democrats should champion,

“A pro-growth economic policy, but one that focuses on jobs rather than on Wall Street’s profits. The quality of jobs, which means whether they pay enough to raise a family on, should be central. This means the Democratic Party should be the party that works to restore America’s industry and manufacturing. If that brings free trade into question, so be it…” (p. 32, ibid.)

For decades, the Republican Party has been the party of Wall Street, free trade, and unregulated corporate capitalism. There, too, Lind and Weyrich anticipated Trump’s populist positions that have upended party orthodoxy and years of GOP talking points, by asking,

‘Is Globalism something conservatives should welcome, or even accept ? Not unless we wish to see America reduced to a Third World country, we suggest. Conservatives have long recognized the danger of Big Government,but is a “free market” dominated by vast, rootless international corporations truly free ?’ (p.8, ibid.)

That untrammeled capitalism might not be an unmitigated good, or that there might be major domestic areas where government efforts (even costly ones) can increase the public well-being, were – until the coming of Trump – all but banned from Republican discourse. No more.

But there’s a sharp discontinuity between such populist economic critique and the Lind/Weyrich “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory.

“Political Correctness is cultural Marxism, Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms”, Lind pithily sums up in an op-ed for The American Conservative which takes it for granted that cultural Marxism has all-but conquered a once-free nation. But conquered for what ?

The narrative falls apart when one stops to consider how far untrammeled, globalized corporate capitalism has gone in its ceaseless neo-Liberal quest for the economic domination of markets, and how extreme income inequality driven by that process has become.

If “cultural Marxism” really has all-but conquered America, it seems to have utterly missed the point of what Marxism was all about in the first place – concern over economic exploitation and the attendant human suffering.

Straight white males, under the heel of totalitarian PC

In other significant ways, the Lind/Weyrich book foreshadowed the rise of Trumpism :

With remarkable prescience it forecast Donald Trump’s electoral mobilization of aggrieved white males by painting the great civil rights struggles of the 20th and 21st Centuries – on the part of African-Americans, women, and LGBTQ citizens – as having led to a wretched state of affairs in which heterosexual white males are now being ground under the heel of nearly totalitarian state oppression.

One of the chief ways that “cultural Marxism” subverts American culture, per Lind, is through pushing new norms concerning speech and behavior (especially at America’s institutions of higher learning – where what Lind sees as an increasingly repressive regime of “political correctness” has taken root.)

And on Page 20 of The Next Conservatism, we learn that ‘The ideology commonly known as “Political Correctness” or “multiculturalism” now shapes the action of government in countless ways.’ Spelling out the many ways, the authors continue,

‘Under the rubric of “hate crimes”, it sentences American citizens to additional jail time for political thoughts. As “affirmative action,” it “privileges” Feminist women, blacks and homosexuals over normal white males. In some cases, it requires private businesses to give their employees “sensitivity training,” which means psychologically conditioning them to obey the state ideology, including its demand that everyone express approval of homosexuality. Employees who refuse lose their jobs.’

The many books of William S. Lind

Among his many books, William S, Lind is also co-author and editor of a 2004 book, titled “Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology” (commissioned and published by the Free Congress Foundation) which explains that political correctness is really “cultural Marxism”.

That book was plagiarized almost in its entirety in the political manifesto (see pages 11-37, compare to pages 4-51 of Lind book) of neo-Nazi Anders Behring Breivik, who carried out his 2011 Norway massacre with an assault rifle, a pistol, and a truck bomb.

Lind has been by far the most passionate and committed proponent of the conspiracy theory of “cultural Marxism” or “political correctness” which he claims is a vast conspiracy against Western Christian civilization – to destroy America by subverting it from within and destroying its Judeo-Christian culture – that was launched many decades ago by European Jewish communist emigres who had fled Nazi repression and relocated in New York City, at Columbia University.

“These guys were all Jewish”, Lind explained at a Holocaust denial conference in 2002.

Central to the cultural Marxism plot is the promotion of immigration, which will eventually reduce white European-Americans to a minority and destroy America’s ethnic and cultural cohesion. The cult of “political correctness”, enforced by the cultural Marxists, plays a key role in this by giving equal respect to those cultural traditions the immigrants bring with them, and by accepting their refusal to integrate into the majority culture.

As those culturally divisive, centrifugal forces build, eventually the American republic will break apart into warring sub-regions divided along racial, ethnic, and ideological lines.

Victoria – A Novel of Fourth Generation Warfare

The possibility of a new American civil war that shatters the nation is addressed in William Lind’s wildly racist, sexist, xenophobic 2014 novel Victoria: A Novel Of Fourth Generation War, which chases Lind’s hatred of cultural Marxism to its bloody, anarchic, logical conclusion.

William S. Lind published “Victoria” in 2014 under the pen-name “Thomas Hobbes”. In a 2009 op-ed at The American Conservative, Lind clarified that he had originally written the novel in the mid-1990s but had failed to find a publisher.

In Victoria, epidemic rates of HIV/AIDS and hyper-inflation precipitate a second civil war, starting in 2020, that shatters the republic and splits America into warring racial and ethnic enclaves.

Lind portrays a victorious white insurgency toppling the federal government then vanquishing – one by one – competing mini-states and movements led by African-Americans, environmentalists, feminists, and other multiculturalist factions that stand in the way of the restoration of white male Christian dominance, then launching a new Christian crusade against Islam.

Lind seems to favor that scenario, and Victoria – A Novel of Fourth Generation Warfare (link to partial text of book) presents tactics that could do the job: false-flag operations, covert alliances with foreign powers, and the nuking of a major southern U.S. city.

Lind’s novel variously depicts African-Americans as disorganized, murderous rapists, as plotters intent on genocide against whites and Asians, and as well-meaning but gullible simpletons. “Good” blacks in the novel are “a faithful people who suffer without complaint”.

Mexicans are depicted as savage Aztecs who are obsessed with obtaining victims for human sacrifice and who plan the Hispanic reconquest of the American Southwest.

The heroes of the novel, depicted as champions of Western Christian civilization are, with the exception of a few token blacks and Hispanics, mainly white European-American. They ethnically cleanse cities of African-American families, forcing them onto rural farms, and ship Puerto Ricans back to Puerto Rico. They institute the mandatory hanging of accused black criminals and drug users.

They carry out a savage massacre of “cultural Marxist” university professors and, to break the tendency’s hold on the “New South”, put down an attempted black multiculturalist revolt against police and authorities by vaporizing the core of Atlanta with a tactical nuclear weapon. They outlaw the practice of Islam and launch a new Christian crusade to conquer the Muslim lands of the Earth.

4GW Inspires al-Qaeda

William Lind is considered by some to be the leading theorist of an unorthodox form of warfare, Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW). Dr. James Scaminaci squarely identifies Lind as the originator of 4GW:

“John Boyd was arguably the greatest strategist produced by the United States, but his long-time friend and colleague, William S. Lind, took Boyd’s seminal ideas on epistemological warfare and combined them with elements of third generation warfare, terrorism, and a few other concepts related to geographical space and a heavy emphasis upon maneuver warfare to produce his own seminal argument for Fourth Generation Warfare.” (from Scaminaci’s academic paper The Christian Reconstructionist Plan For The Patriot Militias, page 2)

4GW is a style of warfare that blurs distinctionsbetween civilians and combatants, in which non-state actors, for example insurgent militias or terrorist groups, can use a spectrum of unorthodox methods – from direct military force applied in unexpected ways to sophisticated public relations techniques – to defeat government forces that are nominally far more powerful and challenge, or even overthrow, centralized government authority and entire nations.

In the 2004 book The Sling and The Stone, 4GW thinker Thomas X. Hammes presents additional insight:

“Fourth-generation Warfare (4GW) uses all available networks–political, economic, social, and military–to convince the enemy’s political decision makers that their strategic goals are either unachievable or too costly for the perceived benefit. It is an evolved form of insurgency… Unlike previous generations of warfare, it does not attempt to win by defeating the enemy’s military forces.Instead, via the networks, it directly attacks the minds of enemy decision makers to destroy the enemy’s political will. Fourth-generation wars are lengthy–measured in decades rather than months or years.”(p. 2)

While Hammes’ description might indicate 4GW warfare tends to be less violent than traditional warfare, al-Qaeda’s apparent application of it, through its devastating September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, suggests otherwise; William Lind appears to concur.

His fictional 2014 novel Victoria, which describes 4GW in practice, suggests that various forms of extreme violence – as manifested in wholesale ethnic cleansing, summary executions, and even the nuclear destruction of a major American city – are acceptable methods in the 4GW strategist’s toolkit.

In one of his military strategy articles, William S. Lind observes (see second paragraph) that during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001 – in retaliation for al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks,American troops reportedly found copies of his seminal 1989 Marine Corps Gazette article on Fourth Generation warfare “in the caves at Tora Bora, the al-Qaeda hideout in Afghanistan”.

A reported close aid to Osama bin-Laden even authored an article, for an al-Qaeda publication, that specifically referenced Lind’s article.

In his book The Sling and The Stone – On War In The 21st Century another authority on Fourth Generation Warfare, U.S. Marine Corps Colonel Thomas X. Hammes concurs with Lind’s apparent suggestion – “al-Qaeda understands 4GW and is using it”, writes Hammes on page 204.

In the first of his “On War” series of writings (“On War #1 – Can A Government Wage War Without Popular Support”, January 28, 2003), William Lind explicitly took credit for having inspired al-Qaeda’s 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, writing,

“Who am I? At present, I am a center director at the Free Congress Foundation. But in 1976 I began the debate over maneuver warfare that became a central part of the military reform movement of the 1970s and 1980s. The U.S. Marine Corps finally adopted maneuver warfare as doctrine in the late `80s (I wrote most of their new tactics manual).

In 1989, I began the debate over Fourth Generation warfare—war waged by non-state entities—which is what paid us a visit on September 11, 2001. The article I co-authored then for the Marine Corps Gazette was formally cited last year by al Quaeda, who said, “This is our doctrine.” My Maneuver Warfare Handbook, published in 1985, is now used by military academies all over the world, and I lecture internationally on military strategy, doctrine and tactics.”

( note: Lind’s entire 241-part “On War” series is available in its entirety archived at the website of futurist and consultant to the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff John Robb. For “On War # 1”, see this PDF file )

In his “On War #1”, written immediately before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Lind issued a prescient warning about the likely impact – the inspiration of more Islamic extremism :

“Most importantly, the real threat we face is the Fourth Generation, non-state players such as al Quaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc. They can only benefit from an American war against Iraq—regardless of how it turns out. If we win, the state is further discredited in the Islamic world, and more young men give their allegiance to non-state forces.”

Besides possibly having given Osama bin-Laden strategic inspiration for his September 11, 2001 Al Qaeda attack on America – the nation’s worst terrorist attack ever, that leveled Manhattan’s World Trade Center and killed thousands of citizens – Lind’s promotion of the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory has demonstrably helped inspire at least one major act of terrorism in Europe.

While many observers have noted that al-Qaeda’s devastating September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were invaluable towards marketing al-Qaeda as a brandand as afranchise, the idea is not unique to al-Qaeda or Islamic terrorism.

On the same day in 2011 during which he single-handedly blew up and shot to death 77 Norwegian citizens (mostly teenagers) and injured an additional 319 people — with a truck bomb and automatic weapons firing hollow point bullets designed to inflict maximum tissue damage — neo-Nazi terrorist Anders Behring Breivik electronically distributed a 1518 page manifesto titled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence that called for the deportation of Muslims from Europe and identified – as the arch-enemies of Western and Christian civilization – two forces: “cultural Marxism” and Islam.

Anders Breivik, who during a recent court appearance gave a classic, stiff-armed Nazi salute, has explained to press that his terrorist massacre, which Breivik has called a “marketing method”, was meant to publicize his manifesto.

The core thesis of Breivik’s manifesto is William Lind’s “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory, and the terms “cultural Marxism” or “cultural Marxist” appear over 600 times in the manifesto. Analyst and researcher Chip Berlet explains Breivik’s thesis, from Lind, with the following formula:

“Cultural Marxism=Political Correctness=Multiculturalism=Muslim Immigration=Destruction of Judeo-Christian nations”

Anders Breivik was so gripped by William S. Lind’s “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory concerning the origin of “political correctness” that Breivik’s manifesto plagiarized, with minor modifications and additions by Breivik, the entire body of William Lind’s 2004 Free Congress Foundation book “Political Correctness:” A Short History of an Ideology.

From pages 11 to 37, Breivik’s manifesto reproduces the core of the Free Congress Foundation book (pages 4-51) edited by William S. Lind – whose introductory chapter by Lind, “What is Political Correctness”, Breivik lifted almost unchanged.

Breivik’s manifesto also borrowed, on page 13, the exact words of William S. Lind from Lind’s introduction to a 1990s twenty-two minute Free Congress Foundation video, on the origins of “political correctness”:

“Just what is “Political Correctness?” Political Correctness is in fact cultural Marxism (Cultural Communism) – Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms.”

That Free Congress Foundation video also featured Laszlo Pasztor, a close working colleague of FCF founder Paul Weyrich. During World War Two, Pasztor was “a liaison between the Hungarian Nazi party and Berlin” and after the war served a five year prison sentence for crimes against humanity.

In 1988 Pasztor was at the center of a national scandal over the involvement of Eastern European emigres who had collaborated with the Nazis, but had been allowed into the U.S. because of their fierce anti-communist beliefs, in the presidential campaign of George H.W. Bush.

The Lind and Weyrich book The Next Conservatism explicitly and repeatedly references the cultural Marxism theory that influenced Anders Breivik and, very early in the book, explains it in the most dire and cosmic terms:

On page 39 following a several page explanation, in detail, of the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory, The Next Conservatism refers readers to the URL of a free book on the website of the Free Congress Foundation, “Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology” – the very 2004 book plagiarized in Anders Behring Breivik’s political manifesto.

Following Anders Behring Breivik’s 2011 terrorist attack, that 2004 Free Congress Foundation book disappeared from the Free Congress Foundation’s website.

July 3, 2016 in Uncategorized.

Trump,”Cultural Marxism”, 4GW, and Terrorism

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