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WSWS : News & Analysis : North America : Clinton Impeachment
Networks fail to report Republican ties to racist groups
A curious silence
By David Walsh
20 January 1999
A significant aspect of the ongoing drive to oust Bill Clinton has been the
virtual silence of the American mass media, particularly the major
networks, on the links between leading Republicans in the House and Senate
and extreme right-wing and racist organizations.
More than a month has passed since the Washington Post first revealed that
Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.), a member of the House Judiciary Committee and one of
the prosecutors in the Senate impeachment trial, was a keynote speaker at a
convention of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a white
supremacist group with ties to Ku Klux Klan and neo-fascist elements.
Subsequently the even more intimate and long-standing CCC ties of Senate
Majority Leader Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, have been exposed.
Governor Kirk Fordice of Mississippi, a considerable number of Mississippi
state legislators, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina and a number of
other, primarily Southern, politicians have been linked to the
organization.
This has received scant attention in the media, aside from a number of
valuable articles written by Thomas Edsall in the Washington Post. The New
York Times finally wrote on the subject on January 14, disingenuously
describing the CCC as a "Pro-White" group. CNN has run a brief item on the
connections.
The major television networks, from which most of the population gets its
news, have been conspicuously silent. ABC News recently provided Barr the
opportunity to refute the charges about his private life made by Hustler
publisher Larry Flynt, while remaining silent on the far more serious
matter of the Georgia Republican's ties to a fascist organization.
This decision to conceal these political connections from the American
people is even more bizarre and telling in light of the effort by
Republican House prosecutors to posture as defenders of civil rights and
women's rights. Central to this effort is the attempt, first made last
Thursday by Rep. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, to cast the Paula Jones
sexual harassment suit as a civil rights case. In reality, the suit was
politically motivated and funded by right-wing organizations. Last spring a
federal judge dismissed Jones's claims as groundless.
Sensenbrenner went on to declare: "When an American citizen claims his or
her rights have been violated, we must take those claims seriously. Our
civil rights laws have remade our society for the better." He later called
on the Senate to "follow the legacy of those who achieved equal rights for
all Americans during the 1960s in Congress, in the courts, and on the
streets and in the buses and at the lunch counters."
Republican Congressman Stephen Buyer of Indiana asserted that an acquittal
of Clinton would represent a danger to existing civil rights legislation.
He asked, "Are sexual harassment lawsuits ... now somewhat less important
than our other civil rights laws? Which of our civil rights laws will fall
next?" The other House prosecutors sounded similar themes.
No one in the mass media pointed out the absurdity of these
dyed-in-the-wool right-wingers, political descendants of the Dixiecrats and
segregationists, pledging their allegiance to "civil rights." Going along
with this charade is part and parcel of the media's efforts to portray the
Senate trial as a legitimate political undertaking. No commentators thought
to bring up the connections of Barr, who was one of the Republican House
members presenting the case against Clinton, and Lott, who is spearheading
the effort in the Senate to remove him from office, to the Council of
Conservative Citizens.
This group considers interracial marriage "white genocide" and prints
anti-Semitic diatribes in its publication, The Citizen Informer. "Western
civilization with all its might and glory would never have achieved its
greatness without the directing hand of God and the creative genius of the
white race," wrote Robert Patterson, a CCC columnist last autumn. "Any
effort to destroy the race by a mixture of black blood is an effort to
destroy Western civilization itself." "There is still time," wrote
Patterson in another piece. "The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting
Rights Act of 1965 should be repealed!"
Founded in 1985, the CCC is the successor to the racist Citizens Council of
America (CCA)--commonly known as the White Citizens Councils--which was
founded to oppose school desegregation in the 1950s and was called the
"white-collar Ku Klux Klan." One of the CCA's members, Byron de la
Beckwith, was the assassin of civil rights leader Medgar Evers.
In a report issued in December the Southern Poverty Law Center was able to
link 17 of the publicly known CCC members to various white supremacist and
fascist organizations, including the Invisible Empire Knights of the Ku
Klux Klan, the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the National
Association for the Advancement of White People, the America First Party,
and the National Alliance. A delegation from the CCC attended a rally held
by the French neo-fascist National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen in September
1998. The CCC also has ties to the British National Front and its
successor, the British National Party.
In 1995 CCC leader Gordon Baum attempted to recruit a man known as the head
of security for the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations organization, Vince Reed, into
his outfit. Reed, in fact, was an undercover agent specializing in work in
terrorist organizations. According to Reed, Baum told him, "The power is
not out there in the gun, it's inside Congress. You can battle for the rest
of your life with guns and explosives, and you aren't going anywhere. We've
got to do it from the inside."
This is a significant remark in the light of the current crisis in
Washington. What the media are concealing from the American people is the
fact that the Republican leadership in both houses of Congress is composed
of extreme right-wing politicians who promote the policies of organizations
like the CCC, policies that represent a grave danger to democratic rights.
See Also:
US media downplays links between congressional Republicans and fascists
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott praised white supremacist group
[23 December 1998]
Judiciary Committee Republican Bob Barr spoke at white supremacist
convention
[12 December 1998]
Why is the New York Times supporting Kenneth Starr?
[16 October 1998]
The American media and the Clinton scandal
Ringmasters of political pornography
[25 August 1998]
American newspapers, networks suppress exposé by British Observer
Why is the US media silent on the conspiracy behind the Starr
investigation?
[7 August 1998]
The media and the Clinton scandal
On their moral high horse
10 February 1998]
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