Category Archives: Extremism

The Effects of the Powell Memo

Extremism, Polarization, Right-wing Extremism

 

The Powell memorandum impacted law, media, business, politics and education, in many ways.

The groups had meetings where issues of all kinds that were important to those on the right could be discussed. The issues ranged from fur trade commission, restricting rights of gays and lesbians and their ilk, de-regulation of businesses, gun deregulation, anti-tax, anti-immigrants, pro-lifers, evangelicals and many more.  Many of those issues are still important issues, except perhaps the fur trade. The genius of the meetings was that they provided a broad tent where all kinds of people appeared who often did not agree with each other on much, but they learned to like each and spread their respective gospels. These meetings benefited many right-wing groups.

 

Conservative think tanks exploded around the country. The Heritage Foundation was established in 1973, 2 years after the Powell memorandum was created.

One thing these groups established was balance in the media.  In other words, media need no longer be objective, as had always been the goal, now instead, media would be balanced. For example, if a newspaper wanted to cover the issue of climate change it must give an opportunity to both sides of the debate to be heard. This sounds pretty good, but it had flaws. For example, even if 99% of scientists agreed that climate change was real and was caused by activities of humans, if a media outlet wanted to report on the issue it had to give a platform for both sides. This gave far too much weight to crackpot ideas often funded by industries affected, such as the oil and gas sector. They managed to have their minority views get equal time with independent science. As a result these views received much more attention than they should have received. “Balance” really did not work well in practice.

In fact, this helped to establish the age of extremism and polarization in which we now live.

There was a large group of meetings led by Grover Norquist who founded Americans for Tax Reform and The Americans for Tax Reform Foundation to lobby governments to reduced taxes on wealthy business people and provided education opportunities for people with the right views.

When Hillary Clinton complained about “a vast right-wing conspiracy” she actually had a point. When you look at the vast number of right-wing organizations from legal foundations to media organizations, to think tanks, to advocacy groups, and many others, the network was indeed vast. Some called the Norquist Meetings the headquarters of the right-wing conspiracy. Personally, I don’t like to call this movement a conspiracy, but it was clearly a growing movement, well-funded and supported by American business interests.

The Birth of Fox News and the Dividing of America

Death of Truth, Extremism, Right-wing Extremism

 

One of the things I found fascinating about the film The Brain Washing of My Dad was the importance of Fox News to the American right-wing extremist movement.

 

The John Birch society was a cauldron of right-wing extremism in America. As Claire Conner, author of a book called, Wrapped in the Flag: What I learned growing up in America’s Radical Right, How I Escaped and Why My Story Matters, said, “the John Birch Society was built on the theory that Communism was right around the corner.”

 

The Society believed that the bad communists were not just in Russia, or China, or Cuba, they were right here in America and in particular in our government. The John Birchers were considered nutty and extreme, which they were, so they resisted these attacks. In the election of 1964 where Barry Goldwater got hammered by Lyndon Johnson, partly because he had so many supporters in the John Birch Society, that many thought he must be as nutty as the Birchers. At the time, the American right was considered nutty or worse.

 

David Brock wrote a book called The Conservative Noise Machine in which he explained  how one of the first things conservatives did after the humbling defeat in 1964 was to attack the media on the basis of liberal media bias. As he said in the film, “the campaign to discredit the media would lay the groundwork for the vast alternative media that would come later.”

 

A central player in the media take down was Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News. Gabriel Sherman wrote a book about him, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the brilliant bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News and Divided the Country. As Sherman said, “Roger Ailes understood one thing about television. He understood that television is about emotion. And you need to communicate to the audience and hook into them on an emotional level.” Fox News embodied this insight and it did that with heart and soul.

 

Added that, Fox found that in America bombast engages. You can still see that on Fox today. Many Fox commentators are brimming with bombast. They don’t like namby-pamby. They like the extreme.

 

Richard Nixon exemplified how this worked. In the 1960s he debated John F. Kennedy and in the debates he looked slick with sweat and was acknowledged to be very smart and tough but he came off looking badly compared to Kennedy. He lost in a very close election.

 

As we all know Nixon came back. He picked himself off the ground and later became President of the United States. In 1968 when he ran again in a campaign for the presidency with Eugene McCarthy, Nixon knew he needed a media guy in his campaign. Roger Ailes was that man. And Ailes taught Nixon how to play the media.

 

Ailes was the power behind the sound bite. He taught Nixon to keep his sentences short with real bites. Short snappy one-liners that can stick in the audience’s mind. According to Sherman, Ailes told Nixon that America was dumb and would not understand him unless he kept his message simple. He should boil down his message and they would get it.  As a result, Nixon learned to master TV which had become a mass medium in the late 1960s.  And that made all the difference.

 

Years later Donald Trump learned the same message.  Keep it simple stupid. Or perhaps, ‘Stupid, keep it simple, would be more like it.

 

According to Sherman in a memo in 1970, Ailes said “Television had become such an important instrument, because people are lazy and want someone to do their thinking for them. It became the blueprint for Fox News.”  Later Roger Ailes said, “There are simple things the American people believe in. It is the reason that John Wayne is still one of the top 5 actors of all time 40 years after he died. You knew all about him: Don’t touch my woman; don’t draw a gun on me; don’t take my horse.”

When nuance becomes nonsense, truth flies out the door.

 

Reese Schonfeld, the founding President and CEO of CNN said this about TVN the news network for which Ailes worked at the time.  He said they wanted to be like a tiny tugboat pulling the Queen Mary a little farther right, and again further right to get the good ship to move as far right as he could.  He said this about Ailes: “He didn’t know much about news then and I’m not even sure he knows much about news now, but he sure does know television. He knows as much about television in the country as anyone and by the way he’s a great propagandist.”

 

When Ailes moved to Fox News it exploded in popularity and with it the interest in right-wing extremism. It engaged. Like nothing else on cable TV.

 

Politics as Blood Sport

Extremism, Right-wing Extremism

 

Justin Ling in his podcast on CBC, The Flamethrowers, pointed out that many pundits wondered how Donald Trump got elected and how he led the country to a riot on Capitol Hill? Hillary Clinton wrote a book called What Happened?

 

Ling reached this conclusion:

“What happened? Well Right-wing radio happened. I know it sounds a bit quaint to talk about the power of radio in 2021. By now most of us have a multi-media broadcast platform sitting in our pockets. But there is something special about the direct intimate connection between the human voice over the airwaves. At its most effective, it is an arrow straight to listeners hearts. For nearly a 100 years, broadcasters have harnessed that power to keep politics in America at a steady boil. Before there was Fox News, before there was The Drudge Report, there was decades of rage and loathing blasting out of 50,000 watt flame thrower towers.  All that heat would radically transform the character of radical right-wing politics in America. By the time Donald Trump was elected president, American conservatism was barely recognizable from even a decade prior. This was politics as blood sport. For broadcasters like Michael Savage, Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh ideas were almost beside the point. And when you are in a war for hearts and minds and when winning is the only thing that matters, truth is the first casualty of the conflict.”

 

Ling is right. Right-wing radio was immensely important. But so was right-wing television. So was the Christian nationalist movement. So was the long history of credulity in the US going back to the Puritans that created a country filled with people who want nothing more than to be true believers. There are many forces that brought about the election of Donald Trump and the attempted insurrection he led. All of these currents met and flowed into each other to create this monstrous murky river of democratic decay, resentment, hate, racism, extremism and tortured reality.

Charlie Sykes, the Wisconsin broadcaster who stepped down from Right-wing radio after Trump arrived and he realized he had played a shameful role in fracturing American politics and that there was no place for him any longer, and his kind in this new conservative movement. He said,

“I was a part of this media ecosystem that contributed to the alternative reality media that we created. That we had succeeded in delegitimizing the mainstream media…There came a point we realized we had delegitimized all news.”

 

 

Justin Ling described it this way:

 “Instead of just being the other side of the story we had created this hermetically sealed bubble, echo chamber, whatever term you want to use that became impenetrable.’

 

Now of course, as Ling pointed out,  nothing was never hermetically sealed. He said,

“Some nasty stuff was leaking in and festering. Whatever right-wing radicalism takes, American talk radio played a central role in shaping the modern movement. And everywhere that the right-wing movement succeeded, it did so by following the talk radio playbook. And even as technology changes the simple power of radio is connecting with huge audiences …It comes by fibre optic cable now, but all the voices are there: a voice in the darkness, striking the matches, and stoking the fire. ”

 

What else can you say when Alex Jones, so admired a president of the United States, and millions of listeners, says, “This is what we are dealing with ladies and gentlemen, a Secretary of State having sex in a giant vat of feces?” Or other radios hosts say things like this: “That is what black fathers do, they simply leave?” Or “We are living in a Zionist matrix in this country.” Or “We have defacto vaccination quarantine camps already.” Or “What we need in this country is a good old fashioned American revolution.” Yeah, what else can you say?

Sadly, Clarence E. Manion got it absolutely right when as an early right-wing extremist he bellowed over the air waves, “This is not a political war, this is not an economic war, this is not even a military war, this is a religious war at bottom.”  That is what is was. And that is what it is. This new crusade is not over yet. Not by a long-shot.

After talk radio, right-wing television helped, to bring in a religious war to America.

 

 

Rage Farming

Democracy, Extremism, Political Violence, politics

 

Every day, it seems, Canada is looking more like America. This is particularly true of the American right wing which seems to find endless support among Canada’s extreme right.

 

On April 17, 2025 the Canadian election Debates Commission, a non-partisan independent organization that organized and made all the rules for the English language debate in Montreal that night made the decision to cancel the customary news conference after the debate. We did not get the details but the Michel Cormier spokesperson for the Commission said the reason was because it could guarantee a “proper and safe environment” for the media [and presumably political leaders].

According to Rosemary Barton of the CBC who was present, that was because the Commission had allowed in people who were not actually part of the media and were “right wing activists” to come into the room and act as if they are media. She said, “it made for a very fraught environment… and there were a number of conflicts.”

These expressions “left wing” and “right wing” are really becoming increasingly irrelevant. The same goes for “liberal” and “conservative,” or even “progressive” and “unprogressive.”  The issues are too diverse to be covered by such rough blocks. We need much more nuance than such expressions allow for.  I am as guilty as everyone in this respect, but they do at best signify a direction of views.

CBC host and commentator David Cochran made an important comment:

“Democracy is fragile. It’s not guaranteed and it has to be fought for a protected.  Not just at the big moments like leadership debates but on all the small moments in between. The rage farming that is gone into politics is corrosive, destructive, and toxic and it is disrupting the norms and the values civic virtue in this country. And it boiled over tonight. The temperature needs to come down.”

 

This is a lesson our neighbours to the south have forgotten and Canada seems to be headed in the same direction. More and more we see this rage farming everywhere. At protest rallies, political events, and really everywhere people engage in politics, the extremists are doing their best to prevent others from engaging in civic debate and discussion which are vitally necessary to maintain democracy. Extremists on the right and the left must be stopped. Cooler heads must be given their right to speak as well as the hotheads. Everywhere.

We still have a democracy. It’s not perfect, but it is our democracy. We need to protect it. Everyone of us must do our part.

 

Immigrants: the traditional scapegoat of the Fascist

American Fascism, Extremism, Hate, Populism, Right-wing Extremism, Trump, Tyranny and Fascism

 

 

Just like Hitler, Orban, and so many other fascists, Donald Trump has been scapegoating immigrants, both legal and illegal. I was shocked to see how popular such language was in the 2024 Republican Convention where Trump was endorsed as their candidate. I shuddered when I saw posters held high and proud which specifically demanded “Mass Deportation Now.” This reminded me of the fervour of ordinary Germans in the 1930 calling for abuse of Jews.

 

Very similar words were heard demonizing immigrants in Madison Square Gardens in the 1930s at a rally that could only be called a Nazi rally. That’s what it looked and sounded like.  The rally in Madison Square Garden again in 2024 was eerily similar.

As Anne Applebaum the author and journalist for The Atlantic said this about Trump (near the end of the campaign):

 “His talk of mass deportation is equally calculating. When he suggests that he would target both legal and illegal immigrants, or use the military arbitrarily against U.S. citizens, he does so knowing that past dictatorships have used public displays of violence to build popular support. By calling for mass violence, he hints at his admiration for these dictatorships but also demonstrates disdain for the rule of law and prepares his followers to accept the idea that his regime could, like its predecessors, break the law with impunity.

 

These are not jokes, and Trump is not laughing. Nor are the people around him. Delegates at the Republican National Convention held prefabricated sign: Mass Deportation Now. Just this week, when Trump was swaying to music at a surreal rally, he did so in front of a huge slogan: Trump Was Right About Everything. This is language borrowed directly from Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist. Soon after the rally, the scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat posted a photograph of a building in Mussolini’s Italy displaying his slogan: Mussolini Is Always Right.”

 

These similarities are deeply disturbing. The support of ordinary Americans for such words and policies is shocking. It is so much like the support of ordinary Germans for Hitler, or ordinary Italians for Mussolini. In both highly advanced countries there was stunning support for the fascist policies. It seems to me this is exactly what is now happening in the United States.  I hope I am wrong; I fear I am right.

It is really shocking to me that Americans continue to support Trump’s fascist policies. This is the really scary part.  Trump is Trump. We all know that. He does not hide his fascist tendencies. Why then do so many Americans support him?  I think the answer is also deeply disturbing.

This is what Anne Applebaum had to say:

“These phrases have not been put on posters and banners at random in the final weeks of an American election season. With less than three weeks left to go, most candidates would be fighting for the middle ground, for the swing voters. Trump is doing the exact opposite. Why? There can be only one answer: because he and his campaign team believe that by using the tactics of the 1930s, they can win. The deliberate dehumanization of whole groups of people; the references to police, to violence, to the “bloodbath” that Trump has said will unfold if he doesn’t win; the cultivation of hatred not only against immigrants but also against political opponents—none of this has been used successfully in modern American politics.

 

But neither has this rhetoric been tried in modern American politics. Several generations of American politicians have assumed that American voters, most of whom learned to pledge allegiance to the flag in school, grew up with the rule of law, and have never experienced occupation or invasion, would be resistant to this kind of language and imagery. Trump is gambling—knowingly and cynically—that we are not.”

 

Trump was clearly betting that he knows the American people will support him.  He hears a lot of applause at his rallies. It turns out he was right. More than half the Americans who voted in the recent election of president voted for him.   Were they voting for fascism?

 

 

Is it extremism to call Trump a fascist?

2017 Trip to Southwest USA, American Fascism, Evolution, Extremism, Populism, Right-wing Extremism, Trump, Tyranny and Fascism

 

Sometimes the truth is extreme. In Rwanda when Hutus launched genocidal attacks against the Tuttis minority in rhw  1990’s people were right to call it genocide. When Mussolini and Hitler launched their attacks on Jews it was right to call this fascism. These were extreme charges, but they were justified. They were fascists.

Yesterday, Donald Trump got angry at Liz Cheney. He sees her as a traitor. This is what Trump said at a rally in Wisconsin,

“She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

 

Trump is saying a political opponent who disagrees with him which of course she has the right to do, should be put in front of a firing squad. Is that not fascism clear and simple?  It is admittedly an extreme thing to say that Trump is a fascist.  But is he not nailed by his own words? He is a fascist.

This what CNN reported,

“Trump’s suggestion that Cheney be fired upon represents an escalation of the violent language he has used to target his political foes. And it comes days before an election in which the former president — who never accepted his 2020 loss — has already undermined public confidence. In recent weeks, he has also suggested a military crackdown on political opponents he has described as “the enemy within.”

 

Trump has suggested the military be used against his political foes. Trump’s rhetoric has increasingly become so unhinged that it is very difficult to deny that Trump is a fascist. Eventually, if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck it must be a duck.

I think Trump must be a fascist. That is extreme, but I think it is true.

 

A License to Kill

American Fascism, Extremism, Political Violence, Trump, Tyranny and Fascism

 

The problem—the serious problem—with words that contain dehumanizing designations is that such words license the foulest actions. They can license murder and even genocide. This was made clear in the era of authoritarian dictators in the 1930s and again in Rwanda and many other violent places. We should not go there again.

Language that dehumanizes the other is acutely dangerous.  When we come to believe—often unconsciously—that the other is not human that gives us a license to kill.  We need no Double 00 formal appointment. We are allowed to kill. That is what happened in Nazi Germany. That is what happened in Rwanda. That is what could happen in modern America, or Hungary, or the United States or Canada.

Dehumanizing ideas or words can push people to exclude the dehumanized groups because as Jason Stanley said in his book How Fascism Works.

“the process of dehumanization limits the capacity empathy among citizens leading to the justification of inhumane treatment, from repression of freedom, mass imprisonment, and expulsion to, in extreme circumstances, mass extermination.”

 

This sounds extreme, because it is extreme, but it has happened in advanced countries such as Germany. Genocides and campaigns of ethnic cleansing are preceded by periods of dehumanization by words. Words are important. Words issue licenses to kill. . We should never ignore them.

As Jason Stanley reminded us in his book ,

“In the cases of Nazi Germany, Rwanda, and contemporary Myanmar, the victims of ethnic cleansing were subjected to vicious rhetorical attacks by leaders and in the press for months or years before the regime turned genocidal. With these precedents it should concern all Americans that as a candidate  and as president, Donald Trump has publicly and explicitly insulted immigrant groups.”

 

And, disturbingly since Stanley wrote these words Trump’s rhetoric has become broader and more vicious. Things are getting more dangerous. It’s time for us to take heed.

The Language of Pestilence

American Fascism, Decline of the west, Extremism, Immigration and Refugees, Political Violence, Populism, Tyranny and Fascism

 

By now people around the world have realized the dangers of dehumanization.  The Republicans in the American election led by Donald Trump are using dehumanizing language to rile up their own supporters against immigrants, woke adults and children, and the political opposition.

I remember when I first heard about dehumanizing language during the genocide in in Rwanda in 1994.  At the time Hutus were a majority in Rwanda even though the Tutsi minority dominated the country for many years thanks to former European colonizers who preferred the Tutsi as their allies when Europeans imposed their will on the country. Naturally, this was resented by the majority Hutus for many years, but they did little about it until the 1990s.

In 1959, the Hutus overthrew the Tutsi monarchy and tens of thousands of Tutsis fled to neighbouring countries such as Uganda. The Tutsi in exile always yearned to come back to power in Rwanda which they thought of as “their country”.  You might say they wanted to make Rwanda great again. A group of Tutsi exiles formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and their purpose was to restore the Tutsi minority to power. This group invaded Rwanda in 1990.

Then on April 6, 1994 an aircraft carrying the President of Rwanda and the president of the neighbouring country of Burundi was shot down. Both presidents were Hutus. This was the spark that turned dehumanzing language into action. Violent action.

As a result, the Hutus of Rwanda used this as an excuse to slaughter the Tutsi and it turned genocidal later that year, in a 100 day reign of terror in which about 800,000 Tutsi were murdered.  As the BBC reported,

“Neighbours killed neighbours and some husbands even killed their Tutsi wives, saying they would be killed if they refused. At the time, ID cards had people’s ethnic group on them, so militias set up roadblocks where Tutsis were slaughtered, often with machetes which most Rwandans kept around the house. Thousands of Tutsi women were taken away and kept as sex slaves.”

 

Even though Tutsi and Hutus had lived together in Rwanda  as neighbours for decades, the slaughter was incredibly vicious. Why was that? The  BBC tried to answer the question, ‘Why was it so vicious’? This is what they said,

“Rwanda has always been a tightly controlled society, organised like a pyramid from each district up to the top of government. The then-governing party, MRND, had a youth wing called the Interahamwe, which was turned into a militia to carry out the slaughter.

Weapons and hit-lists were handed out to local groups, who knew exactly where to find their targets.

The Hutu extremists set up a radio station, RTLM, and newspapers which circulated hate propaganda, urging people to “weed out the cockroaches” meaning kill the Tutsis. The names of prominent people to be killed were read out on radio.

Even priests and nuns have been convicted of killing people, including some who sought shelter in churches.”

 

Such language has been used by Donald Trump during the current presidential election campaign. He has referred to immigration and his political foes as “vermin.” This is the language of dehumanization. And it is incredibly dangerous, as Rwanda demonstrated. No one should assume it is not significant.

 

Hutus were convinced by their own propaganda that the Tutsi were not human. They were cockroaches! And everyone knows cockroaches can be killed at any time with absolute impunity.

The lesson here is that words are important. With language that dehumanizes people into vermin or insects, ordinary people can turn into savage murderers. Dehumanization is the key. If you think your foes are people like you, it is difficult to slaughter them, but not if they are insects or vermin.

This is precisely what Trump has been doing with his rhetoric. He has called them vermin or enemies of the people. He has said he will use the American military to do the job. Hitler did the same thing and we know the result.

This is ugly stuff, but I would submit can lead to worse—namely hate crimes or even worse. This happened in Germany, Rwanda, and other places. Such language can create a slippery slope to atrocities. No country is immune to the problems. Not even the United States.