If A Pseudonymous Protaganist Pulls Off His Mask In The Middle of The Woods, Does It Make a Sound?

I wrote this column pseudonymously for the only real college paper at alma mater in Montreal. At the time of writing and publication I was in consideration (I hope) for a fellowship at NPR. Needless to say, I didn’t want my name on the thing at that point. My editor gave me the name Adam Sobchak, taking his inspiration from this man, who incidentally provided my quote in my high school senior yearbook.

Without further ado, I am proud to finally be able to come out of the closet and admit that I, Ayatollah Chowmeini, am a lazy blogger who can’t come up with original posts all of the time. And I’m Adam Sobchek. Someone came close to outing me once. Actually I think it was caught on tape…

So now really, without further ado…

The race to buy American government

(originally published by The McGill Daily)

Wisconsonite Adam Sobchak on the Tea Party, institutional corruption, and the war on America’s unions

Adam Sobchak*
Published on March 17, 2011

It doesn’t take a political scientist to figure out that politics in America have become seriously diseased. The new Republican majority in the House is intent on either gutting America’s social safety net or forcing a government shutdown. Here in Wisconsin, our Republican governor and his majorities in both chambers of the Capitol have declared war on public sector unions, the last true stronghold of trade unionism in the United States. His “budget repair” bill outlaws essentially all collective bargaining and forces unions to recertify each year by getting the support of 51 per cent of total workers. (Bear in mind that this governor was elected with 52 per cent of all those in Wisconsin who voted, which was a little less than 52 per cent of the state’s eligible voting population.)

Quite simply, this bill is meant to kill unions, and it probably was motivated more by the effect it could have on electoral politics than anything else. In an interview with Fox News recently, the Republican State Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald let slip that “If we win this battle, and the money is not there under the auspices of the unions, certainly what you’re going to find is President Obama is going to have a much more difficult time getting elected and winning the state of Wisconsin.”

Money talks, and unions make up three of the top ten fundraisers in American politics. Most notably, they are the only three in the top ten who gave the majority of their money to Democratic candidates and causes. There’s no secret to it. Republicans are trying to kill that counterweight, once and for all. The stakes are high, especially in a state with such a proud progressive history that it was the first to grant public sector bargaining rights at all. So how has it all come to this?

On the night of the 2010 midterm elections, I’d managed to hold out hope for our side until I was told by one of my colleagues on Russ Feingold’s re-election campaign that we were going to concede the race. Feingold, one of the most principled Senators of the past few decades, a man whose courage had gotten him through challenge after challenge, had come up short. We had come up short. I don’t remember much of the speech, except for a choice Bob Dylan reference that got even the most hardened campaign vets to start bawling. Then the drinking started.

I woke up sprawled on a carpeted beach of a hotel floor, marooned by the metaphorical “tidal wave” that had hit the elections. (The pundits were characteristically addicted to that phrase.) My captain had been washed away and the landscape seemed unrecognizable. Wisconsin had lost a Democratic governorship, both chambers of the legislature, and two long-serving legislative leaders of the American Left in the Senate and House. In their place came Scott Walker, who couldn’t graduate college; Rebecca Kleefisch, a former anchorwoman who has spent her time cold-calling businesses in Illinois and asking them to relocate to Wisconsin; Ron Johnson, a man whose only qualification for Senate seemed to be that he was completely unqualified; and Sean Duffy, a handsome lawyer and lumberjack champion who had been on the Boston season of MTV’s The Real World.

These people and others across the country made a perfect ensemble cast for our political zeitgeist – some made-for-TV pseudo-reality wobbling on that fine line between funny and sad. But this is apparently what happened when voters stopped being polite and started getting real. At least they definitely stopped being polite. But were they getting real? Any answer depends on your opinion of the Tea Party.

A lot has been written on the Tea Party: its language, its members, and its impact on the 2010 elections. We need to talk about the first two to understand the third. As far as its discourse goes, the Tea Party has done its utmost to delegitimize the federal government by using a collage of misinterpretations masquerading as history, xenophobic, and often violent rhetoric, and nostalgia for a nonsensical neverpast. The Tea Party are masters of allusion – drawing their speeches from a lexicon of metaphor, myth, and nostalgia. They use constant references to an imaginary group of pious, anti-intellectual “Founding Fathers” who loved guns and hated federalism mixed with nostalgia for the “simpler” times of the 1950s, when unionization was at its highest, a Republican president warned of the military-industrial complex, and the Supreme Court was just beginning to get active on matters of race. Wait, that’s not right. They were nostalgic for those other fifties, when Joe McCarthy had America on Red Alert and a black man couldn’t eat a sandwich in certain restaurants, much less be elected President.

The Tea Party’s effectiveness relies on reducing matters of great complexity – political philosophy, American history, and public policy – to a simplistic crusade of catch phrases rife with contradiction. It declared itself a movement of “Constitutional Conservatives,” simple purists rooted in a historical tradition of the Founding Fathers. They read the First Amendment as promoting public prayer but decidedly against any sort of mosque in lower Manhattan, and they intuited that the Founding Fathers had presciently wanted true Americans to be armed with semi-automatic assault rifles at all times.

It also relied on the appearance of ordinariness, a “real”-ness of the Tea Party. It represented “real” Americans: almost exclusively white, suburban, exurban, or rural folk with an indefatigable Christian fervor.

This emphasis on realness served two purposes. First, it leant an air of legitimacy to the movement necessary for the resonance of its aims and message. Its pursuit of legitimacy also yielded a second benefit. Implicit in determining the “real” America was identifying the foil of a non-real America. Immigrants are not “real” America. Muslim-Americans are not “real” America. Even the President of the United States isn’t “real” America.

All this loaded language, misplaced nostalgia, and emphasis on “authenticity” convinced me that the Tea Party is no more than a well-crafted brand. And like any good brand it evokes a wealth of emotions, memories, and desires. The Tea Party brand and all of its code words – the veiled threats, the victimized “taxpayer,” the nostalgia for a simpler time that never really existed, the populism – was one hell of a brand.

And it took a hell of a brand to convince the people who had once clamoured for the profligate Bush administration that they were now fiscal spendthrifts. The Tea Party was just the latest repackaging from the best brain trust in political branding – the natural outcome of that one Morning in America™ when the Straight Talk Express™ stopped on Main Street USA™ to pick up all the Joe Six-Packs™ before following the Road Map for America’s Future™ all the way to Washington. And it wouldn’t be a brand if it didn’t convince people to buy a product.

That product was a slate of candidates that were either ridiculously under-qualified or so drastically re-invented that they were hardly recognizable as the traditional American politicians who, for better or worse, reeked of the proverbial sausage factory. I shed no tears for the decline of the old guard of the GOP, but the new breed didn’t even seem to understand the contours of the playing field. Flip on the TV in mid-October and you’d see Christine “I’m Not a Witch” O’Donnell in a heated debate against her Democratic opponent, demanding, “Where in the Constitution is separation of church and state?” You would see Ron “Global Warming is Caused by Sunspots” Johnson lamenting gerrymandered Senate districts before summing up his sophistic ideology by referring to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as his foundational book. Johnson and O’Donnell were just a taste of the zany cast of Real World: America, now being broadcast live 24 hours a day by CNN, NBC, CBS, Fox News, and every other media outlet you can think of.

But these characters were not only real; they were threatening to win with the best campaign machines that money could buy. All around the country, Tea Party candidates hired former Bush administration officials and all manner of other elitists in the name of their campaigns for “real” America. You can learn a lot about a candidate from who they hire. Look at it this way. Everyone in Washington wears pretty nice clothes, so it’s the staff that makes the man. Any commenter being honest with themselves should know that the vast majority of Tea Party candidates weren’t drawing their staff from the supposedly “real” America. Those around them came from the good ole boys of the Grand Ole Party: lobbyists, strategists, and consultants. Make no mistake: a Tea Party candidate is your run-of-the-mill Republican, just packaged in the 2010 Tea Party brand.

So the real Republicans were putting up fake candidates aimed at appealing to a somewhat fake populist movement. But these fakes needed money. Money to mobilize people behind the Tea Party, money to swamp the airwaves with attack ads, and money to support candidates who had a lot of trouble garnering actual financial support from the citizens supporting them. Then in January 2010 came the Supreme Court ruling on the Citizens United case, which reversed a century’s worth of legislation in its ruling that corporate entities could essentially spend as much money as they could raise on getting candidates elected. In the words of the non-partisan Sunlight Foundation, “Citizens United created an environment in which it is perfectly legal for a shell non-profit corporation to engage in election-related spending on behalf of a hidden interest.”

There were two groups who seem to have benefitted the most from the decision. The first were traditional corporations and lobbies like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who could now spend at will on relatively unregulated political communications. If they manage to survive the next few years, unions will be included in this group as well. They are the only real counterweight to corporate Republican financiers. Then there were non-profit groups with banal, inoffensive names like Americans for Prosperity or Citizens United. But these two groups weren’t as separate as they appeared.

Americans for Prosperity is a political front group for Koch Industries, a huge conglomerate run by an arch-conservative family with extensive interests in rolling back environmental protections, costs of labour, and corporate taxation. The seemingly innocuous political group has spent ridiculous amounts of money to draw susceptible Tea Partiers into faux-grassroots shows of force in order to create the illusion of middle-class populism, thus legitimizing corporatist legislation.

The impact of all the Citizens United cash on the 2010 election cannot possibly be overstated. Feingold’s first re-election campaign ran on a budget of around $4 million, and he did his best to avoid running attack ads. In 2010, our campaign was spending around $13 million, just to keep up with Ron Johnson, the self-financing Republican candidate who spent $14 million, of which about $9 million came from his own fortune. Johnson additionally raised far more corporate donations than Feingold.

On top of this, outside parties were running so many attack ads that my girlfriend and I couldn’t have a simple, apolitical YouTube chill out without being told that my boss loved the national debt and thus hated America.

Oftentimes the ads would contradict each other, but boy were they effective. A day before the election, I ended up on the phone with an older woman who had called the office to ask about an ad she’d seen that claimed Feingold had voted for $500 billion worth of cuts to America’s federally funded health coverage for senior citizens. It took me less than two minutes to explain the fallacy to the voter, whose vote changed in that two minutes. But we didn’t have two minutes with every voter. Only in Real World: America could Ron Johnson’s TV ads claim that Feingold was “the only Great Lakes senator” to vote against banning drilling in the Great Lakes. The bill in question was the 2005 Energy Policy Act, also known as the Cheney Energy Act. Primarily known for its massive environmental deregulation, the bill also included a minor provision putting a moratorium on new drilling in the Great Lakes. Feingold voted against the bill, the outcomes of which were last seen gushing out of a blown out well in the Gulf of Mexico. We just couldn’t win.

So we lost. And Real World: America has stayed true to its tragicomic formula into its second season. Johnson was so concerned with “real” Americans that he didn’t bother making a website for his first two months in office, and my phone calls to him didn’t even catch a voicemail machine. He hired a veteran lobbyist as his chief of staff a few days after winning as a “citizen legislator” and has yet to sponsor a single bill in the Senate. This wasn’t really surprising. Like many Tea Party candidates, the man seemed to have no idea what the job actually consisted of. He memorized a few talking points and spoke in convincing generalities. When asked about the plight of homeless veterans, he famously responded that “the election wasn’t about the details.”

Not to worry, though. The new Tea Partiers will inevitably come to rely on those who truly got them there: corporations, lobbyists, and members of the traditional Republican establishment. They won’t bring any new perspective to Washington – they’re just new spokespeople for the same old policies. They are unable to make real change, even if they want to, because they don’t know how. So while the vast majority of the people of real America – the people who get poorer and poorer, whose healthcare costs get higher and higher, who work more and more for less pay – struggle to pay their bills, corporations expand their influence over government more and more.

I’m sitting against a marble column in my state’s beautiful Capitol rotunda. Our college dropout governor, Scott Walker, has thrust Wisconsin into an all-out class war, and this is ground zero. His campaign, like all successful Republican campaigns, received hundreds of thousands of dollars from corporations and Political Action Committees and now he’s making good on his quid pro quos. It’s Sunday, February 27, the day that the Republican-controlled administrative committee has determined that they will clear out the encampment of peaceful protesters that have lived in the Capitol non-stop for almost two weeks. It is an organic, beautiful thing. Protest signs cover the walls, and a group of dedicated volunteers organize support for the demonstrators, including food and medical services. Wisconsin’s lifeblood of thousands of workers, students, and professionals now double as the state’s class consciousness.

While the national media has dropped the ball in reporting this story in a number of ways, the one story line that really gets me pissed is the false equivalency some commentators have tried to draw between this and the Tea Party. What’s going on here is not a corporatist snow job trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. This is not astroturf. Though the media has sometimes tried to paint it as mass mobilization by the big, bad unions, or president Obama’s Organizing for America organization, I can say that this is a genuine, organic, grassroots movement the likes of which I have never seen before. Unlike the re-branded Republican Party, this is not a facelift or a marketing scheme for the Democrats. At one point, a couple thousand Tea Partiers showed up, listened to a speech by Joe the Plumber™, then left in the buses that Americans for Prosperity provided for them.

Twenty minutes before the 4 p.m. deadline that the police have set for clearing the building, an Assembly Democrat who has tried the hardest to hitch his wagon to this movement gets on “the people’s microphone” (I know, I know) to tell us that we should leave with him at 4 o’clock. Most listen respectfully. Some shout “shame!” Six-hundred or so people listen before ignoring his pleas. This movement doesn’t have clear leaders and it doesn’t have the cults of personality.

More than 100,000 of our ranks remained and returned, day after day. It’s easy for us because we live here and we’re the ones with everything to lose. And it takes more than the Democratic lawmaker who’s been yelling the loudest to convince us to leave. This may actually be the real America I’ve been waiting for.

Tags: congratulations you're a meathead son, don't you ever put your hands on my underwear

Lessons in Republican Math: 78 > 157,117

When the 14 Democratic State Senators left the state to prevent a vote on Scott Walker’s “budget repair” bill, the 19 Republicans who remained had to find some way to spend their time. They spent a lot of this time trying to out-do each others’ vindictive ideas to punish the insolent Dems, whining to Glenn Beck about how victimized they were by non-violent protesters (or inanimate objects), or getting a taxpayer-funded raise for the young women they were screwing.

But the Republicans also took some “votes”, although the word’s connotation of republicanism is somewhat misleading. The State Senate became more of a performance art piece where observers could watch as 19 people contorted themselves into a giant rubber stamp for right-wing agenda items with little debate, consideration, or opposition.

One of these votes is about to be signed into law, after clearing the Assembly. The law nullifies the results of a Milwaukee County referendum which mandated that employers provide their employees at least 40 hours a year of paid sick leave. The county-wide referendum passed in a landslide victory in 2008, winning with 69% of the vote.

The referendum was binding and supposed to have gone into effect within 60 days after it was approved by the county’s residents. The Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce had other ideas, and dragged the people of Milwaukee County before a judge. A Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge blocked the legislation from going into effect, a decision which was then appealed to the Wisconsin Court of Appeals, which in turn kicked it up to the ladder to the Supreme Court. The 7 judge high court, deprived of the usual 4-3 conservative majority by the recusal of Justice Annette Ziegler, was left predictably split in a 3-3 deadlock. The case was sent back to the Appeals court, which ruled to uphold the legislation.

Enter the Walker-Fitzgerald-Fitzgerald troika in January of 2011. Almost every worker-friendly hint of the progressive trajectory that this state has followed over more than a century was put under the gun, and the sick-pay ordinance was quickly in the crosshairs of the new Republican regime.

While the media and the protesters were focused on the ‘budget repair’ bill, Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald had his caucus pass a law prohibiting any future municipal sick-pay laws and voiding Milwaukee’s ordinance ex post facto. Yesterday Fitzgerald the Younger whipped his caucus to pass the law 59-35. Now Governor Scott Walker eagerly awaits the opportunity to sign the legislation, saying “I said all along that’s something I’m interested in correcting.”

you don't need a sick day. the governor will knock the sick right out of single mothers across the state.

So Governor Walker, who lost Milwaukee County about 40-60, is interested in “correcting” the explicit will of Milwaukee County’s residents. I really hoped that this wouldn’t be as easy as it sounds. The referendum is likely the most democratic institution in America, the clearest manifestation of the will of the people. The Republicans should know that: the re-branded TEA Party edition of the GOP built its appeal around populist sensibilities, babbling mindlessly on about “we the people” and “citizen legislators.” In an amazingly mixed metaphor, Wisconsin Republicans have vowed repeatedly “to listen to the ‘silent majority’ that elected them.”

So there are some heavy doses of populist pandering in the legislative agenda of the Wisconsin GOP. Just look at the “budget repair” bill. Scott Walker loves majorities so much that he wrote the bill to require unions to win a majority (not plurality) of workers during the mandated annual certification votes. And he loves referenda so much that the same bill would legally require a state-wide referendum to give public workers any wage increase above the rate of inflation.

But Scott Walker also hates the working people of Milwaukee County. Hell-bent on keeping certain areas trapped in poverty, he has consistently cut funds to the transit system that carries thousands of people to their jobs. His budget hits Milwaukee’s reeling public schools the hardest, with cuts to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Ominous proclamations point towards an assault on the state’s most effective health programs like Badgercare, a popular Medicaid plan that ensures insurance to every child in Wisconsin.

So Scotty finds himself in a conundrum. What happens when the party of the silent majority finds itself at odds with the results of a referendum helping the people they hate? Simple. They finagle themselves a new majority.

No Democrats in the Senate? Vote without them. That way the representatives of a majority of Milwaukee County’s don’t have a say in the matter. 4 of Milwaukee County’s 7 State Senators (Chris Larsen, Tim Carpenter, Lena Taylor, and Spencer Coggs), were not in the chamber to represent their constituents. But it was obviously more important to have Milwaukee’s voice silenced by La Crosse’s Dan Kapanke or Sheila Harsdorf of River Falls.

pleather in a portrait? srsly d00d?

In the Assembly, where only 7 of the County’s 22 representatives voted for the bill, sheer numbers overwhelmed Milwaukee’s representatives. Republicans from around the state argued that they were saving Milwaukee from losing businesses. This argument quickly falls apart under even basic scrutiny, as following this tack would lead one to conclude that those representatives from outside Milwaukee County would welcome these businesses in their own district.

The Republicans’ behavior is at best paternalistic and at worst anti-democratic. Having the explicit will of 157,119 citizens of Milwaukee County- the state’s most diverse – drowned out by an entirely white chorus of 76 Republican (and 2 Democratic) lawmakers is just another poke in the eye from the state GOP to Wisconsin’s working families. Perhaps I should be arguing against republican rather than Republican math. But in a time where working families in Wisconsin feel completely disenfranchised, vilified, bullied and ignored, the manner in which this law was passed disgusts me.

“It allows them to run their business, not government,” argued one of the bill’s sponsors.

No. Here in Milwaukee County, it allows business to run our government instead of our people.

Tags: fitzjackass, no sick leave for you, walker

The Relentless Pursuit of Criminal Masterminds

Two men were brought to justice today.

One is this guy:

He’s a railroad executive who is being charged with illegally funneling about $60,000 dollars to the campaign of our Governor Walker.

The other is this man.

He’s the guy who shot out his TV when he saw Bristol Palin on “Dancing with the Stars.”

I’m so glad I can “Believe in Wisconsin Again.”

Tags: planes, shotguns, trains

Living in America (in January of 2011)

In the wake of the shooting that spurned the creation of this blog, everyone in America has been told to calm down and take a long, hard look at themselves. Or that the media has created a new (and particularly specific?) blood libel.

But in the spirit of our new sense of national unity, I’m attempting to break bread with my ideological adversaries. Imagine my pleasure to find that just like me, they fear being shot at! Just take a look at this recent proposal by Peter King.

Probably thinks 'the terrorists' care enough about his Islamaphobic witch hunts to attempt to assassinate him.

King proposes to make it a federal crime to carry a firearm within 1,000 feet of a elected federal politicians and/or their families. And kind of like the overall idea of health care reform, I think he’s on the right track.

This is, in a lot of ways, great legislation. But only if it includes me.

Because Peter King has probably never seen a gun, except maybe at a colleague’s fundraiser. I, on the other hand, have seen people waving handguns around- once after a street fight involving some friends of mine, once at a bus stop outside of my high school. And that’s just me personally, and around here I’ve been lucky. Most of my friends have been mugged with firearms, and people have been murdered with handguns in front of my closest friends. Quite honestly, I seem to be at much greater risk. So is it so outlandish that I, an American citizen just like Rep. King and the other members of Congress, ask to be included along with my family in his legislation?

So I called my recently elected Senator (I’d link to him, but he doesn’t seem to have a website yet) who’d spent the whole campaign running around telling that the campaign trail was a job interview. After the collective management of my state decided to hire him despite my vocal objections, whether he or I like it or not, he now “works” for me. So I give him a call. I want to be included in this legislation, like Nebraska got a special rider in the health care bill, and the NFL gets exempted from anti-trust legislation. And he doesn’t even pick up the phone! It just rings and rings. That’s his first strike. Can you imagine hiring somebody and he doesn’t seem to have shown up to work on the first day? Too bad he’s got a six year contract with a no-trade clause. Otherwise we might be able to convince Ohio to trade us Sherrod Brown and a couple of picks for him.

In closing, don’t tread on me. Don’t even tread near me if you’ve got a gun. Because in a few days, that will be a federal crime.

Tags: Participatory Democracy

Puppet Masters and American Political Violence

I wrote this a few months back and never really did anything with it. With today’s events, it appears to be unfortunately vindicated…

“Puppet Master”: Glenn Beck, George Soros, and the Triangulation of Hate

This year’s Veterans’ Day was, as usual, a somber one for progressives. A president pushed to victory by promises to draw down America’s foreign military engagements chose rather to draw down forces in one theater while “surging” in another. Surely Glenn Beck and his ilk in the right wing propaganda organs would see an opportunity to attack the candidate of “hope and change” who had reneged on his campaign insinuations.

But Beck’s tactics eschew frontal assaults and the American right is nothing if not sycophantically supportive of any manifestation of American military power. As for Beck, his victimization narrative would quickly evaporate if he came off as an aggressor; his spiel creates an impression that he is some sort of freedom fighter providing lessons to the masses as some sort of dystopian hero. He is Guy Montag, he is Winston Smith; sharing the truth that is so dastardly covered up by progressives, socialists, and the creeping horror of political correctness.

The history of the true American left is indeed horrifying, but because it is a history of jailing and deportation, a history of getting machine-gunned, burnt alive, and electrocuted after trials that would make Kafka squirm. But history is nothing but a hindrance to the professional right. In their world, a man who wins the Medal of Honor must be a cheat if he might depose their president, who received special consideration during the draft years of Vietnam.

So this Veterans’ Day, Beck brought new charges against an old target, George Soros. Soros, the multi-billionaire behind the left-leaning MoveOn organization, has been in the professional right’s crosshairs for quite some time. Beck spent two episodes exposing Soros as a “puppet master” of the left before culminating with a new aspersion-laden history lesson airing on Veterans’ Day. In Part Three of his unholy trilogy, Beck argues that Soros, a Holocaust survivor, is an unrepentant anti-Semite.

He begins by psycho-analyzing Soros based on snippets of interviews in which Soros states that his mother was a Jewish anti-Semite. According to Beck:

Again, for anybody who is crying, you know, is this some sort of anti- Semitic attack on George Soros? No, it’s not. I’m not calling his mother an anti-Semite. George Soros did. Those are his words, not mine.
Quote, ‘My mother quite anti-Semitic and ashamed of being Jewish. Given the culture in which we lived, being Jewish was a clear-cut stigma, a disadvantage, a handicap. And therefore, she always had the desire to transcend it, to escape it.’
That is pretty powerful in a child’s life.

Notice a classic trope of right-wing sophistry- guilt by association. Recall candidate Obama and Bill Ayers. Interestingly, Beck feels it necessary to point out that his “expose” of Soros is not anti-Semetic, but chooses to voice that concern before a statement about his mother. But Beck’s addition to Soros’s quote changes the semantics of the snippet. “That is pretty powerful in a child’s life,” seems on the surface to be sympathetic. But Beck follows with the statement, “Both of his parents were non-practicing Jews,” before moving on. Rather than absolving Soros of his mother’s pathos, Beck casts aspersion through association, inferring that anti-Semitism was transmitted to young George through nature and nurture. Pre-empting potential critics calling “anti-Semitism” on Beck’s larger point of a genetically Jewish man serving as a shadowy “puppet master”, he subtly transfers the title of anti-Semite to Soros. The burden of proof in Beck’s inquisition is now for Soros to prove that he, rather than Beck, is not an anti-Semite.

As if to drive the point home, he points to the fact that Soros’s father changed the family name in 1936 from the Jewish Schwartz to the Esperanto Soros. Again Beck feigns sympathy. Beck asks, “But what would you do if you lived in Hungary in the 1930s and ’40s? Would you keep the name Schwartz?”

But the history of changing Jewish names in Hungary is far more nuanced than Beck would have his audience believe. For example, my surname is an Americanized version of a Magyari name. My great-grandfather changed his name sometime in the early 20th century from Unger, the surname of an adoptive family. He was born with the very Jewish surname Freedman. But my family immigrated to the United States in 1921, more than a decade before the rise of Nazism in Germany, much less Nazi-backed fascism in Hungary.

Ezra Mendelsohn’s The Jews of East Central Europe Between the World Wars offers insight to the common practice of “magyarizing” Jewish names. He writes, “In Hungary, many Jews not only spoke Hungarian but also regarded themselves and were regarded by others as ‘Magyaris of the Mosaic persuasion’… One of the most dramatic demonstrations of their impact was the Jews’ readiness to magyarize their names.” Hungary had a growing and integral Jewish middle class by the outbreak of World War I, much of which had already changed their names in the course of this necessary assimilation. In fact, Bela Kun’s (né: Cohen) Bolshevik government was arguably the most genetically Jewish in European history- it is estimated that up to twenty of twenty-six ministers and deputies had Jewish origins. But of course Beck would rather not to talk about the rampant anti-Semitism that followed imperialist France’s overthrow of the Bolshevik government in Hungary- a wave of anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Bolshevism that chased my etymologically magyarized ancestors to America’s Budapest, Cleveland. I digress.

Obviously, the Soros case is different. His father changed the surname in 1936, and he changed it to an Esperanto name rather than a Magyari one. But Beck, as always, uses it as circumstantial evidence for his prosecution. Beck continues:

So when George Soros was 14, his father basically bribed a government official to take his son in and let him pretend to be a Christian. His father was just trying to keep him alive. He even had to go around confiscating property of Jewish people… This is where George — I think this is important — this is where George Soros first learned to pretend to be something other than who he was. He had to.

I am not blaming or questioning a 14-year-old or his parents for trying to keep him alive, trying to keep the family alive. I don’t think anyone can understand what it must have been like to be Jewish in that scenario. Can you? Especially 14.

I don’t want to question the 14-year-old. I would have, however, like to question the 80-year-old man who has never once said he regretted it. But more than that, he views it as the happiest year of his life — again, not my words, his words. Listen:

SOROS IN VIDEO CLIP: It was actually probably the happiest year of my life, that year of German occupation. For me, it was a very positive experience. It’s a strange thing because you see incredible suffering around you and the fact you are in considerable danger yourself. But you’re 14 years old and you don’t believe that it can actually touch you. You have a belief in yourself. You have a belief in your father. It’s a very happy-making exhilarating experience.

BECK: I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody describe the Holocaust years like that. Maybe he’s the most healthy man you’ve ever met. Maybe somehow or another he just got through it.
But he also has spoken how his experience in Hungary has effected his psyche. Listen to this.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Did anybody tell you in Hungary why they didn’t like Jews at the time?
SOROS: Oh, yes. And that, of course, is something again very, very much part of my psyche, anti-Semitism, and, you know, hatred of Jews. It was quite widespread within Hungary.

BECK: Even to his own home. I mean, I would love to spend an hour — he’s not going to come on this program and spend an hour with me. And we’d have bigger fish to fry than this, but I would love to understand how it affected his psyche having his mother basically agree apparently — I don’t mean to judge — with the Germans on the hatred of Jews being anti-Semitic in his own home. How has he navigated that?

Beck uses Soros answering a question on personal experience to draw a contrast with the suffering of European Jewry. Is Beck insinuating that Soros is not a “real” Jew because he did not suffer enough while surviving the Holocaust? To Beck, George Soros stating that surviving the Holocaust can be self-affirming seems to indicate some sort of evil that transcends even that of the mis-historicized Judenräte.

Beck’s last lines here are even more telling. “I would love to understand how it affected his psyche having his mother basically agree apparently- I don’t mean to judge- with the Germans on the hatred of Jews being anti-Semitic in his own home.” Beck is again willfully ignorant of the realities of the extermination of European Jewry. Nazi anti-Semitism was a modern, pseudo-scientific, genocidal racism- not Europe’s traditional anti-Semitic hatred of Jews on religious and cultural grounds. The Nazis did not care if the Soros family had changed their name or were non-practicing, they cared that they had Jewish bloodlines. Hitler’s rhetoric and writing saw the Jews as a genetic subspecies of humanity- it did not matter if a genetic Jew was religious or not. Jewish communists and socialists who had clearly renounced Judaism as a religion were as much (or more) of Hitler’s targets as an orthodox rabbi with no political ambitions. So for Beck to claim that his mother (and by extension Soros, with the new “evidence” brought to light by the clip in which Soros says that anti-Semitism was all around him in Hungary) “agreed… with the Germans” would mean that she would have marched right up to the first SS officer she saw and asked for her and her family to be murdered regardless of the fact that they ostensibly did not conceive of themselves as religiously Jewish.

After sufficiently separating Soros from the “old Jew” of the European ghetto, he is careful to establish that Soros is no “new Jew” of the Zionist mold either. “It sure would be interesting to explore how this affected his feelings on Israel, which he does not support. He donates so much money to organizations that speak out against Israel,” Beck proclaims. This is another attempt to insulate himself from claims of anti-Semitism because while Soros is “against” Jews based on some criticism of Israeli policy, Beck could not possibly be the anti-Semite in all of this because he unquestionably supports the State of Israel.

Beck reveals a new layer of Soros’s background. “The next formulative step in Soros’ life was college. Now, this is where he attended the London School of Economics. Now, this is the same school that Hayek was from. He wrote ‘Road to Serfdom.’ This is a freedom fighter.” Beck appears to have moved on from the Holocaust. Or has he? Invoking Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist whose anti-statist writings have led a number of prominent American right wingers to pay tribute to his writings (particularly the aforementioned Road to Serfdom) as a foil to Soros has interesting connotations.

Notice how Beck describes Hayek as a freedom fighter. Hayek was an Austrian citizen teaching at the London School of Economics when the Anschluss occurred in 1938. He chose then to take British citizenship and retained this status his entire life. While Soros was busy surviving fascist Hungary, Hayek was hard at work on The Road to Serfdom- a condemnation of centralized planning critical of both fascism and socialism. Apparently the criteria for having your wartime experience validated by Glenn Beck is to have written a book he pretends to have read while your countrymen were running amok across Europe.

Perhaps that’s unfair. Economic criticism of the Nazi regime serves a purpose. However specifics of Hayek’s critiques of Nazism bear a strange fruit when held against Beck’s. Like Beck, Hayek seems to have trouble deciding if “socialists” or “fascists” are worse. Also like Beck and the professional right, Hayek inextricably links the two. The Road to Serfdom, the product of Hayek’s “freedom fighting” equates the erosion of individual rights under Nazism, fascism, and Stalinism as the inevitable products of a centralized economic planning. Obviously this has turned out to be a bit of an exaggeration, although you’d never have known had you asked Hayek years later. When he was asked by a Chilean “journalist” from a pro-government newspaper what he thought of Pinochet’s Chile, he responded: “Mi preferencia personal se inclina a una dictadura liberal y no a un gobierno democrático donde todo liberalismo esté ausente.” Translation: My personal preference is inclined towards a liberal dictatorship, and not a democratic government where all liberalism is absent. Hayek’s preference for liberty seems to apply only for market principles and obviously not Victor Jara’s hands.

But it’s a specific line of The Road to Serfdom that catches my eye in this case. Hayek writes:

Ideas very similar to these were current in the offices of the German raw material dictator, Walter Rathenau, who, although he would have shuddered had he realized the consequences of his totalitarian economics, yet deserves a considerable place in any fuller history of the growth of Nazi ideas. Through his writings he has probably, more than any other man, determined the economic views of the generation which grew up in Germany and immediately after the last war; and some of his closest collaborators were later to form the backbone of the staff of Goring’s Five Year Plan administration.

In Hayek’s view, Rathenau’s centralized economic operations during the First World War were the economic (and therefore in Hayek’s equation, political) predecessor to Nazism. Walter Rathenau was a prominent German nationalist, a Jewish industrialist serving as the Foreign Minister of Weimer whose murder at the hands of far-right, anti-Semitic Nazi predecessors was one of the critical opening blows struck at Jewish emancipation in the post-war years. Despite his anti-Communist sentiments, Rathenau was vilified by the German reactionary right for his role as part of the same “Jewish-Communist” conspiracy that later spurred Hitler and Germany onto world war and industrialized genocide. Some might even view Rathenau as one of the first victims of the Holocaust. But not Hayek. Hayek feels that Rathenau was an early cog in the Nazi genocide machine. Just like Beck, Hayek intentionally understates the severity of Nazi pseudo-scientific hatred, writing that Rathenau would “shudder” if he saw what the Nazis eventually did. But Rathenau would not “shudder.” His fate would be unchanged- he would be unceremoniously killed by far-right, anti-Semitic murderers who could care less of his political or economic views.

We now have two cases of mis-historicizing Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Beck painting Soros as an anti-Semitic Nazi collaborator and Hayek blaming Nazi economics (and by extension Nazism itself) on Rathenau. But Beck doesn’t mention this questionable historical inference by Hayek, probably because I doubt that he’s actually read anything by him. I am not a Hayek scholar, or even a reader, and most of what I know of him stems from my unease with those who promote his writings. I will not try to ascertain his personal prejudices. But it is an interesting parallel, of blaming a Jew for the Nazism he is a victim of. But Beck uses Hayek to slur Soros by a new line of argument.

After describing LSE as the school of Hayek, he says:

“It’s also the school where the Fabian socialists hung out, a Fabian socialist university. You remember — the Fabian window we told you about. This is the famous English Fabian society. We took this picture — actually, Blair was standing here with it.
Fabian socialist — what are they doing? They’re heating the world up in the fire that they, themselves are stoking. Why are they heating it up? Because they are about to hammer it and remold it nearer to the heart’s desire.
Fabian socialists are the American progressives. It’s the same thing. Heat the world up, cause the problems so the world heats up so you can remold it.”

Now Beck’s attacks come into focus a little more. He’s pushing the old “Jews sowing global disorder to reap economic benefit and promote Marxism” line most famously pushed by Hitler before the German Reichstag in 1939:

“If the international finance-Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations into a world war yet again, then the outcome will not be the victory of Jewry, but rather the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!”

Sowing chaos and disorder; “plunging nations”- Beck’s evidence for Soros being a “Fabian socialist” sounds eerily similar.

“Now, he’s got the wealth. But what did he do with the wealth? He decided to collapse regimes and currencies. He did it in England, in Russia, Malaysia, Georgia. Soros lit the fuse to get it done.”

This is a remarkable smorgasbord of late-20th century history compressed into one completely illogical sentence that manages to get each cited case nearly completely backwards.

1. Soros was a promoter of “shock therapy” capitalism for the former Soviet Union. Apparently, Glenn Beck thinks dramatic (and unintentionally destructive) deregulation is a bad thing.

2. As a currency speculator, Soros profited from the dramatic devaluation of the Malaysian Ringgit. He did not “spend” his capital crashing Malaysia’s economy; rather he “earned” a fair amount of it during the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

3. Soros was a financial backer of the 2004 Rose Revolution in Georgia, which removed former USSR Foreign Minister Edouard Shevernadze from power and installed the pro-West Mikhail Saakashvili through reforms culminating in a decided shift towards democracy and away from the post-Soviet oligarchic rule of many former Soviet republics. This is the same Soros-backed Georgian regime Glenn Beck championed during its 2008 war against Russia, saying:

“You have to know who these people are. Right now you’ll see in the papers the Georgians saying where’s America, why is America not helping us. They have streets named after George W. Bush. They understand our founding fathers. They understand democracy. They want to be free. They try to model themselves after us in the good old days when we had sense and had values.”

In conclusion, one can only say, “What?” Beck warns that Soros helped bring Saakashvili to power in Georgia, but loves Saakashvili and the Western-orientation of his regime? Beck is mad that Soros pushed for the imposition of “shock therapy” capitalism on the former Eastern bloc? Color me confused. But while clearly illogical, but it does offer another piece of Beck’s off-putting puzzle.

Soros’s perceived role in the 1997 Asian financial crisis led Malaysia’s Prime Minister, Mahatir Mohamad to say of Soros: “We do not want to say that this is a plot by the Jews, but in reality it is a Jew who triggered the currency plunge, and coincidentally Soros is a Jew. It is also a coincidence that the Malaysians are mostly Muslim.”

So Beck reiterates an attack on Soros clearly driven by anti-Semitism, and more importantly, proven false when Mohamad later conceded that Soros did not play a role in the collapse of his country’s currency.

So what are we left with? Taken as a whole, Beck’s takedown of Soros reads like a laundry list of anti-Semitic clichés echoing the worst anti-Semitism of the modern era. To recap:

Soros is a “puppet master” working behind the scenes in a shadowy conspiracy. He may seem benign but he is not what he appears to be. He manipulates governments at the expense of citizenry to reap economic gain. He is a Marxist/Socialist/revolutionary plotting to throw the world into chaos to reap said economic gain.

Where Beck appears to have overreached is in portraying Soros as an anti-Semite or Nazi collaborator. These parts of the episodes have been roundly criticized by Jewish organizations across the political spectrum, many of which have no love for Mr. Soros. But what would Beck’s attack read like without attempting to establish Soros’s anti-Semitic credentials? By arguing that it is Soros, not him, who is the anti-Semite, Beck triangulates the anti-Semitism of his hateful propaganda. Recall Beck’s careful disclaimer: “Again, for anybody who is crying, you know, is this some sort of anti-Semitic attack on George Soros? No, it’s not. I’m not calling his mother an anti-Semite. George Soros did. Those are his words, not mine.” His assertions of collaboration may have drawn criticism, but the ultimately served a purpose: none of these organizations have criticized Beck’s larger anti-Semitic arguments. They’ve only found Beck’s portrayal of Soros’s Holocaust experience distasteful.

The end result is that Soros, a victim of the Holocaust, is again the target of an anti-Semitic attack driven largely by the same myths and conspiracies. In Beck’s world, Soros plays the role of Hayek’s perpetrator Rathenau- a Jewish citizen with the temerity to succeed as a capitalist and attempt to influence his country’s politics. And Beck’s rhetoric may well lead the real Soros to the same fate as the real Rathenau- a man murdered by far-right reactionaries waging a vengeful terrorism campaign on perceived enemies of the state’s decayed grandeur.

But Beck is no traditional anti-Semite. There are few poisons more lethal to a public figure’s career than a popular perception that he or she is anti-Semitic. The recent cases of Helen Thomas and Rick Sanchez can attest to that. It is that triangulation that allows for Beck to make such a ludicrous argument without coming off as the anti-Semite that he seems to be. But make no mistake. Glenn Beck is a very, very ominous sign of things to come. Not in that Glenn Beck will soon be advocating the persecution of all Jews, he won’t. But he continues to degrade the public discourse through ceaselessly attacking and misrepresenting an already acrimonious political sphere, not-quite-openly advocating violence against a non-existent shadow conspiracy. It is not outlandish to imagine America’s Muslim communities bearing the brunt of this tilt towards fascism when it mutates into something worse than merely persecuting people for their political beliefs. In the meantime, specific terrorist actions against certain figures on the American “left” seem increasingly likely.

Tags: beck, giffords, political violence, soros