Tag Archives: Hate groups

Mass Resistance Missouri: Bringing hate into St. Louis schools

03 Monday Apr 2017

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Mass Resistance Missouri is actively working to influence curriculum in St. Louis Schools. This group is the Missouri chapter of a extensive national group that has been identified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit group that monitors hate group activity in the U.S. Normally, I wouldn’t want to drive traffic to the Web page of such a site, but description or excerpts from its content don’t do justice to the hysteria and misinformation that this group is attempting to impose on our local school districts – so go and take a look for yourself.

These folks have convinced themselves that liberals are the tools of the devil, out to seduce their children into Gayitude, promiscuity culminating in abortion after abortion. They “know” beyond any possibility of doubt that they are doing God’s work by fighting the liberal blight. Mass Resistance has been especially concerned with LGBT issues – Gay Straight Alliances in schools are often the focus of their angry attentions, but the Missouri group is also active in promoting a preferred version of sex education, heavy on the abstinence-only, religiously-slanted, and “slut-shaming” rhetoric that is exemplified in its enthusiastic endorsement of and even identification with the Thrive Program, which is prevalent in St. Louis and which I wrote about in an earlier post.

The Mass Resistance Website also urges parents to examine the teaching of English and History in their children’s schools and to ask whether the school library has copies of books that Mass Resistance considers especially insidious, such as, for example, It’s Perfectly Normal , a sex education text book that the American Library Association has identified as a regular contender on its list of frequently banned books. Hint as to why: the book has anatomically correct, naked pictures. And it talks about contraception. And it recognizes that LGBT people exist. All of which gives Mass Resistance types the vapors.

Mass Resistance Missouri, in particular, has a solution to the problem of all this pernicious gay-loving, abortion-promoting evil influence in the schools: Parents who find evidence of any of the foregoing are urged to write or call Attorney General Constitutional Nutjob Josh Hawlely and complain. Tells you a lot about the man we’ve elected to act as the lawyer for the state.

Questioning the influence of this kind of group is particularly important right now – school boards will be replenishing their membership on April 4th when many localities are holding local elections. And school boards hold the keys to what happens in your school district with your children. Even those of us who don’t have children have a stake in this game – poorly educated children become sad, ignorant – and bigoted – adults. Bad information about human sexuality is responsible for much misery and suffering among children and the adults that they eventually become.

As I’m sure you realize, it’s often difficult to learn anything about school board candidates over and above the canned phrases and sentiments they usually include in their profiles – when such profiles are even available. In the St Louis County Parkway district where I live, and which seems to be a special focus of the Missouri chapter of Mass Resistance, I’ve been able to collect four “safe” recommendations for the three empty seats to choose from: vote, I’m told for Kristy Klein Davis, B. Sophia Ford-Glanton, Zach Goldford and Matt Eckerle. Word is that these four candidates respect proven facts and the right to full,unbiased information – which is not, as Mass Resistance Missouri would have it, a strategy for liberal brainwashing. And when I look at their profiles, the goals they describe for their potential tenure is reassuring.

However, I don’t know anything about other districts. I hope concerned parents who don’t want their children subjected to atrocities like the Thrive Program have ways to get information, and I am heartened by discussions I have noticed on Social Media and elsewhere about just these issues. People are waking up to what is at stake and may no longer be willing to hand our children over to hysterical fanatics.

But I’m also worried. We horned, cloven-hoofed liberal devils just don’t seem to be as organized as the Mass Resistance folks. Nor do we have an acolyte in Attorney General’s office. Where’s the Website that warns St. Louisians, for example, about the excesses that organizations like Mass Resistance want to perpetrate in our schools? Where can we get organized information about the issues and the candidates for our school boards, information that goes beyond the usual canned cliches.

Don’t get me wrong. Conservatives have a right to be heard when it comes to the curriculum in the schools our children share just as progressives do. But while school boards have to respect their concerns, they must also be able to keep an open mind and insure that the curriculum is objectively factual and comprehensive and that it is not colored by the religious or political views of any faction. They also have to ensure that our schools are inclusive and that minorities, including LGBT children, are treated with the same respect and concern as other children.

It is a sad fact that such a fair and open curriculum is anathema to groups like Mass Resistance Missouri. It is even sadder that they are actively engaged asserting control in our public schools.

Parents, be vigilant.

Does Steve Bannon’s appointment mean it’s finally time to hit the road?

14 Monday Nov 2016

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Even folks who have tried to restrain themselves from the use of fascist and Nazi labels have begun to run scared after the announcement today that racist, Jew-baiting Steve Bannon has just become one of the most powerful men in America. At The Political Animal Martin Longman writes:

One of the shocking things I’ve felt compelled to do since Donald Trump’s unexpected election to be the next president of the United States is to bone up on my history by reading Joseph Goebbels Wikipedia page. I did that last night, and I noted many disturbing parallels between Goebbels early career and the career of Trump’s new chief White House strategist Steve Bannon. Still, I was feeling vaguely guilty about even doing this research, as if I’m bordering on the paranoid and letting my fears get the better of me.

The problem is, I am hardly alone in thinking along these lines ….

After George Bush was elected, my family toyed with the possibility of leaving the country – a move that would have been facilitated by the nature of my husband’s work at that time. Now we are both retired and the truth is that few desirable countries welcome older folks who don’t have money to invest in job creating ventures, and who, in countries with progressive social programs, may put a strain on their resources. We also have companion animals that we are obligated to keep and protect and might not be able to bring them with us to places that would otherwise welcome us.

But we’re still worried that getting out of Dodge might really be the right thing to do. So the second thought to cross our minds is that if we don’t leave the country, we ought to leave Missouri.

Missouri’s a poor state, and its almost uniformly corrupt lawmakers don’t seem to care if it gets poorer as long as they can get rich doing what’s best for their even richer friends, and, in the process, free up businesses to discriminate along with putting uppity, promiscuous sluts in their places (nearly barefoot, pregnant and working for minimum wage in McDonalds’ kitchens).* In the Missouri boondocks they call it religious freedom.

Missouri’s also awash with guns and militias. Beginning this year there’s almost no regulation of firearms. Any type of firearm. You can shoot folks because they scare you. Stop and think about how many uptight, paranoid people there are, and then consider that in Missouri lots of the scariest of them have guns. And speaking of scary people, the Southern Poverty Law Center identifies 22 hate groups located in Missouri – more than in just a handful of other states.

The state’s a veritable petri dish for growing Trumpian authoritarianism. It’s got more than its share of those white people who are angry because the world rejects their version of reality, their anger both exploited and enabled by Trump’s election. When the fecal matter finally hits the fan, Missouri may be an especially bad place for an couple of older progressives. In the past, we braced up, got on with our lives because, as with most things, we knew that this too would pass. But it threatens to be much worse this time.

At our ages it’s not easy to upend our lives by moving. There are lots of things to consider and I don’t know what we’ll do in the end. However, given the appointment of Bannon along with the police-state and torture rhetoric that is emanating from Trump’s circle of domestic policy advisors, we are beginning to think that, at the very least, maybe we should get out of the heart of Trump’s own country.

*Edited slightly for clarity.

Missouri's hate groups and the political status quo

12 Monday Mar 2012

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The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which monitors hate groups in the U.S., has issued a new report. It focuses on the “stunning” growth in the “Patriot” movement, defined as “conspiracy-minded groups that see the federal government as their primary enemy.” Members of the groups are prone to fantasies of government persecution and grandiose visions of heroic, armed resistance. Sound familiar? Some echoes from the Tea Party summer of 2010, perhaps?

Patriot groups documented by the SPLC have grown from a low of 149 known groups in 2008 to 1,274 currently active groups. In Missouri the SPLC names 28 groups that it considers to be part of the movement. They range from full-fledged militias to fringe political parties and various off-shoots of the Tea-Party. Some, such as the Oathkeepers, are part of larger, national groups.

There are those, such as sociologist James William Gibson, who argue that patriot militias and similar groups function as a safety valve for individuals who find themselves in a world that is changing in ways that they find frightening and incomprehensible. While the SPLC report cautions that inclusion in the list “does not imply that the groups themselves advocate or engage in violence or other criminal activities, or are racist,” it, nevertheless, views the growth of these poorly informed and easily inflamed groups with alarm. The SPLC report contends that:

… If the primaries generate more attacks on the nation’s first black president based on complete falsehoods – that he is a secret Muslim, a Kenyan, a radical leftist bent on destroying America – it’s likely that the poison will spread. And if he wins reelection next fall, the reaction of the extreme right, already angry and on the defensive as the white population diminishes, could be truly frightening.

It’s hard to be sanguine about folks who, in Gibson’s own words, “are focusing on the idea that America’s problems can be resolved into something that can be shot.”

I was struck, though, as I read through the list of patriot groups, to note that former State Representative Cynthia Davis has gone to roost in the shelter of one, the Constitution Party. She is running for Lieutenant Governor as the representative of that party. Davis was always on the fringe, but she, nevertheless, managed to get elected to a state office and even served as Chair of the Franklin County Republican Party.

I also remember the right-wing hullabaloo that ensued when an internal Missouri law-enforcement report on domestic terrorism was leaked in 2009. The report “profiled” what it characterized as potentially dangerous militia members. Among the traits that were cited as red flags were many that are in themselves innocent – Ron Paul supporters, for instance, were flagged. The report presented an overall portrait, however, of a domestic terrorist that is very similar to the paranoid, anti-government, conspiracy theorist that the SPLC report spotlights. That the report enraged many members of Missouri’s GOP political class was telling.  Several contended that they themselves were at risk of government persecution based on the document’s description of risk indicators.

Does this suggest that an important segment of the Missouri Republican Party occupies the same territory that the SPLC explores in their report on radical, potentially dangerous hate-groups? I don’ really think that any faction of the state’s GOP pols are necessarily violent or condone violence – but it is interesting that many of Missouri’s GOP political functionaries seem to share an intellectual terrain where the crazies are also in residence.

Certainly, such a supposition would go a long way toward explaining lots of things – such as a GOP Speaker of the House who wants to bestow state honors on America’s foremost spewer of right-wing invective and hate-talk. It would also help explain the failure of the Missouri legislature to function effectively over the past ten years. As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted in a recent editorial, Missouri seems to be falling way, way behind in almost every measure of citizen well-being, and the legislature seems to be hell-bent on accelerating the decline with policies that “keep so many of its residents in poor health, poverty or prison.” But then, fear-crazed, anti-government zealots shouldn’t be expected to do a good job of running government.

* Fifth and last paragraphs slightly edited for clarity.