Earlier this month, lunatic fringe Christian pastor and Skeletor stunt double Kevin Swanson hosted an event called the “Freedom 2015: National Religious Liberties Conference,” where he told a bunch of people that he wants to kill all of the gays. And no, I don't mean that metaphorically; according to Swanson, unless they repent and find Jesus, all gay people should be sentenced to death, and he said as much in his closing remarks at the conference, complaining that it would be 'completely wiped out by…the homosexual forces' now that gay marriage is legal. In accordance with the Southern Strategy playbook, three GOP Presidential hopefuls – Bobby Jindal, Mike Huckabee, and Ted Cruz – just so happened to both attend and speak at said conference, pandering for their piece of the electoral pie. Media watchdog group Right Wing Watch got the whole
thing on tape, and put the juicier bits on their YouTube channel, including a great deal of Swanson's kill-the-gays rhetoric.
Rachel Maddow, no slouch by any stretch of the imagination, grabs all of this low hanging fruit by the boo-boo and exposes it on her nationally syndicated, primetime news program, much to Swanson's dismay and that of the GOP candidates who were in attendance. Since the dirty lesbian news lady on the commie liberal TV network decided to call his bluff, Swanson now had a pretty severe crisis on his hands. However, rather than going after Maddow, he blasted YouTube and a host of other sites with a barrage of copyright infringement complaints regarding the use of the Right Wing Watch clips, claiming a violation of Fair Use laws. YouTube, in an act of bureaucratic cowardice, shut down RWW's YouTube channel for the foreseeable future, and apparently the ripple effect has even reached The Maddow Show's website, for I cannot view her segment on the conference there or anywhere else it's linked to as of this writing.
Thankfully for Right Wing Watch, this ain't their first rodeo; they've been shut down by right-wing nutters a number of times, but the cases never hold water. Their reporting of his verbal diarrhea is clearly and diligently outlined as Fair Usage in the public interest, and as soon as YouTube realizes this for the millionth time, RWW will no longer be forced to rely on their backup YouTube channel to continue exposing the GOP’s ever-growing derangement.
Swanson knows he's playing a losing game on borrowed time with YouTube; he may be crazy, but he's not stupid. But shutting down Right Wing Watch isn’t the point. Gumming up their operation is, so that they can't operate at full capacity. It's an intimidation tactic; a threat. Swanson's saying don't fuck with me, I have the money and the resources to keep you tied up in the same red tape I'll beat you to death with. Doing this also gives him time to manage his own crisis, softening the edges of his rhetoric while the connection between his right-wing freak show and the candidates who condoned it sinks into the GOP's memory hole. It's an effective tactic, yet hardly an original one; just ask The Church Of Scientology.
Gawker v. The Church of Scientology
In 2008, when Gawker dropped the leaked Scientology video of Tom Cruise acting like a deranged rhesus monkey while receiving a high-ranking award from the church, Scientology's huckster-in-chief David Miscavige had a full blown shitstorm on his hands. The video had gone viral within hours of its release, blowing the doors wide open on just how insidiously wacky Scientology actually is, with Cruise's million-dollar rictus grin floating right in the center of the whole thing. Church officials wasted no time, instructing their lawyers to blanket the media landscape with demands to pull the video 'or else.' YouTube, not known for their testicular fortitude back then either, pulled the video from their site immediately, as did a number of others who had shared it. Gawker refused, citing Fair Use standards and claiming, like Right Wing Watch did with Swanson, that keeping the video up serves the public interest. As an additional 'fuck you,' Gawker published the letter the church's lawyers sent them, as well as their respondent letter, and the Internet swelled with applause.
Their bluff called, Scientology was forced to backpedal, with spokeswoman Karin Pouw issuing a statement that going after Gawker was never “contemplated, let alone decided,” and that threats of a lawsuit were nothing more than “unsubstantiated rumors” coming from “those wishing to create further controversy and media attention.” Gawker corroborated the statement on their website, and the whole thing seems to have fizzled out after that.
Does any of this sound familiar? It should.
The benefit of sending out a flurry of cease and desist orders like the Church of Scientology did to Gawker et al, or like Kevin Swanson did to YouTube and Right Wing Watch, is twofold: not only will you bully a bunch of the little guys (and maybe a few of the big guys) into doing what you want, but the ones who refuse can be used to misdirect the conversation away from what you said and on how and where what you said is disseminated. The benefits of this are also twofold: it mollifies the rank-and-file members of cults like Scientology for their thought leaders to pose as victims of media exploitation, and makes the story about the people that 'exploited' their content rather than the content itself. Scientology has perfected the strategy, having used it for years to shut down any public discussions over what a crackpot sham their organization is. The conservative movement has recently taken notice, and begun to put into practice the same tactics to shield themselves from public scrutiny. And who do we have to thank for that? None other than the author of the “The Bell Curve,” one of the most racist tracts to have been published in the last quarter century: Charles Murray.
Where Scientology’s Rubber Meets The GOP’s Road
For those of you who aren’t familiar with “The Bell Curve” (I know I wasn’t at the outset of my research for this article), the book alleges that, among other ridiculous things, there’s a genetic correlation between race and intelligence; according to Murray, intelligence skews favorably towards certain races over others. In other words, black people can’t succeed because they’re genetically inferior, not because of a political system that can’t seem to stop bludgeoning them to bits, metaphorically and literally. Needless to say, the book was and still is incredibly controversial, has sold millions of copies since its release, and has had a profoundly negative impact on both federal policy and public perception regarding communities of color. I mention all of this only to make it clear that Charles Murray is a very bad person with very bad ideas, and with the help of right-wing think tank the American Enterprise Institute, a very loud megaphone with which to shout them out. Now he's back with another one, and the conservative intelligentsia are gobbling it up.
In “By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission,” Murray outlines in great detail precisely the tactics used by the Church Of Scientology and Kevin Swanson to harass YouTube and other sites, but with the much loftier goal of using them to harangue three-letter regulatory agencies like the EPA and the IRS. Clearly, the concept of 'trickle-down' is better applied to ideas rather than economics, and it appears Swanson definitely received Murray’s message. How far he plans on taking his campaign against Right Wing Watch is anybody's guess, but Murray's strategy has only one goal: total submission.
“At least Scientology officials had just one goal – official recognition — and backed off once they won that battle. In contrast, Murray envisions an ongoing, wide-ranging, black-hole-creating campaign that he openly admits is an end-run around the democratic process, which has failed to produce the radical restrictions in government that libertarians are looking for.”
In fact, Murray is remarkably down on the democratic process. “You are not going to roll back the reach of government through the political process,” he declares. “It can’t be done.”
- "Charles Murray Wants Right Wing To Use Scientology Strategy In Legal War On U.S. Government,” Right Wing Watch, 05/11/15
If Swanson follows Murray's playbook to its logical conclusion, then he will not stop throwing frivolous allegations at Right Wing Watch and those associated with them until they are either shut down, or dead in the water. While the odds of this don't seem likely – Swanson is in crisis management mode, not on the warpath – there's ample precedent to support the possibility, along with a lot of wealthy anti-government types whom I'm sure would be happy to lend their considerable resources to what they would consider to be a 'noble purpose' such as this.
Of course, it's hard not to see this as an admission by conservative demagogues like Swanson and Murray that they are in fact losing the war of ideas. Heather 'Digby' Parton, writing for Salon, had this to say on the matter when the story first broke:
“So now we see the conservative movement — which, not for nothing, has historically regarded the profession of “trial lawyer” as something only slightly above “mafia hitman” in terms of social disapprobation — considering the idea of flooding the courts with frivolous suits...The fact that they are contemplating this assault through the legal system is an admission that they don’t really believe they’ll have the political power to do this any time soon.”
If you can't beat them, bury them under Bullshit Mountain, amirite? It's the American way.