MAX BLUMENTHAL

How an Accused Child Sex Predator Covered Up Racism, Sexual Harassment at the Washington Times

"The Washington Times is the only newspaper where the moral issues of family and faith are proudly reported on the front page on a regular basis. From 1992 to 2002, The Washington Times' focus was on keeping the moral standard in America and on reviving the American family."
--Washington Times President Douglas Joo, speaking at the Times' 21st anniversary celebration

On September 26, Washington Times Human Resources Chief Randall Casseday was nabbed in a sting by Washington Metro Police. Casseday is accused of soliciting sex over the internet with an undercover police officer who he believed was a 13-year-old girl. He sent several graphic photographs of himself and in return, received pictures of a young girl in a bathing suit, according to an affidavit filed in US District Court. When Casseday appeared to rendezvous with someone he reportedly thought would be his young prey, he was immediately cuffed by DC cops.

The revelation of Casseday's alleged solicitation of sex with a child is emblematic of the culture of lawlessness and arrogance fostered at the Washington Times by its president, Douglas Joo, editor-in-chief Wes Pruden and managing editor Fran Coombs, which I detailed in my recent article for The Nation, "Hell of a Times." According to two sources who have dealt directly with Casseday, the accused sex criminal has played a central role in stonewalling internal investigations into the racist and sexually predatory behavior of Times managing editor Fran Coombs, and did so on orders from Joo and Pruden.

"Whatever Joo, Pruden and Coombs wanted, Casseday did," a senior staffer in the Times newsroom told me today. "Casseday literally was their hatchet man, the hit man for Pruden, Coombs and Joo. Now the whole story is exploding that they had a ticking time bomb all these years and they did nothing. There was no background check or anything."

Times former media relations staffer Melissa Hopkins complained to Casseday in 2004 that Coombs had sexually harassed her then attempted to undermine her career. Hopkins said Casseday accused her of lying, then sabotaged a subsequent investigation into her charges. Today, Hopkins expressed outrage at the news of Cassadey's secret life. "Randall Casseday, the Washington Times' director of Human Resources who was arrested Tuesday for attempting to entice a minor on the internet with sexually explicit communications, is the same man who said to me that my claims of sexual harassment and hostile environment against Fran Coombs at The Times were baseless," Hopkins told me.

She continued, "Was it that Casseday was trying to discredit me because he had a vested interest in not bringing any attention to sexual misconduct happening at The Washington Times? I'll let people draw their own conclusions. In one year from the time of my incident, I went from being offered an expanded role at the paper to being stripped of duties that I performed for over 7 years, to losing my long-term contract with them with zero explanation. As the mother of three children I am outraged that someone like this was out there allegedly preying on children while at the same time overseeing employee protocol at The Washington Times. It is beyond hypocrisy."

I described Hopkins' disturbing episode with Coombs and Casseday in my Nation article:

In 2004 Coombs was accused of sexual harassment. The accusation stemmed from a series of incidents involving then-Times media relations staffer Melissa Hopkins during the Republican National Convention. In a letter written by her lawyer, Lynne Bernabei, that was delivered to then-Times senior counsel Allen Farber and made available to The Nation, Hopkins alleged that over cocktails one night at the convention Coombs grew belligerent and called her work "lame," and then suggested she go to his room for a "nightcap." When Hopkins refused, she claimed, the harassment increased. According to the letter, the next evening, while sharing a cab back to their hotel, Coombs pulled her toward him and attempted to kiss her. "Ms. Hopkins, who as Mr. Coombs is aware, is married and the mother of three children," the letter states, "resisted and tried to pull away, but Mr. Coombs succeeded in forcibly kissing her."

...Hopkins claimed that Coombs, meanwhile, initiated a sabotage campaign against her, removing videos she had shot at the convention from the Times website, and "directed reporters and editors not to communicate with her."

...Three weeks after Hopkins formally complained to the Times's human resources department and a subsequent investigation by Farber, the paper's lawyer, went nowhere, she demanded a settlement, which Bernabei's letter made the case for. Instead, a year later, in October 2005, after the statute of limitations in which she could have filed a criminal complaint against Coombs expired, the Times terminated her contract without explanation.

As director of Times human relations, Casseday was in charge of recording Hopkins' complaint against Coombs and recapitulating it during a subsequent internal investigation. But as Hopkins told me, Casseday insinuated that Hopkins had fabricated her story, telling her, "I'm sorry, but nothing you say can be corroborated."

(Nevermind that the incident between Hopkins and Coombs occured in a taxi cab with no witnesses present. At Douglas Joo's Washington Times, a paper that publicly supports conservative "victims' rights" crusades, the victim is always wrong.)

After recording Hopkins' complaint, Cassadey detailed her account to the Times' legal counsel, Alan Farber. But Casseday had already tacitly rejected her allegations as false. Unsurprisingly, Farber's "investigation" into the incident between Coombs and Hopkins fizzled out in short order. It may be more accurate to call Casseday and Farber's actions a cover-up. Ultimately, Casseday's dismissive attitude toward Hopkins opened the door for Coombs to intensify his ultimately successful campaign to destroy Hopkins' career at the Times.

This year, Casseday was instrumental in sidelining an investigation into a longstanding pattern of racist behavior by Coombs. I described Coombs' racist attitude in the Nation. Here is a very small excerpt of what I reported:

[Former veteran Times correspondent] George Archibald told me that when he showed Coombs a photo of his nephew's African-American girlfriend, Coombs "went off like a rocket about interracial marriage and how terrible it was. He actually used the phrase 'the niggerfication of America.' He said, 'Not in my lifetime. If my daughter went out with a black, I would cut her throat.'"

Archibald recounted a discussion in 1992 among several Times reporters and editors: "We were having a conversation about abortion. We were all pro-life, anti-abortion, and we were trying to explain how we would discuss this in the paper. All of a sudden Fran blurts out that he is pro-abortion. I argued with him and he said, 'How do you think we're going to stop the population growth of the minorities and all the welfare people?'" Another Times senior staffer recounted similar statements about abortion and race by Coombs at a party, where Coombs called himself a "racial nationalist." A former staffer alleged that Coombs used racial slurs including "spic" and "towel-head" inside the Times.

And there is more. Much more.

Today, I spoke by phone to a mother of children attending the same school as Coombs' daughters, South River High in Maryland's Ann Arundel County. Last year at the overwhelmingly white school, five students were arrested and charged with hate crimes for spray-painting pro-Klan graffitti on school stairwells and distributing fliers for neo-Nazi groups.

The mother, who requested anonymity, told me that she encountered Coombs outside South River High recently. "I heard your daughter is starting South River this year," the mother said to Coombs.

"Yeah, it's perfect," Coombs allegedly replied. "It has a really low clientele rate."

The mother said she asked Coombs to clarify what he meant. She said he told her, "The rate is 3 percent. You know what I mean."

The current enrollment rate of African-American students at South River High happens to be 3%.

This summer, when Times President Joo learned staffers inside the Times newsroom were talking to me about Coombs' racist behavior, he ordered an investigation which swiftly morphed into a cover-up, thanks largely to the handiwork of Casseday and Pruden. (Pruden is himself an ardent neo-Confederate activist with many of the same reactionary racial attitudes at Coombs.)

According to a Times senior staffer, Joo attempted to hire the Washinton-based law firm Covington and Burling to investigate the racism allegations. Covington and Burling has worked on behalf of a parade of morally dubious clients, including Phillip Morris and the chronically polluting Southern Peru Copper Company. But the staffer said Covington and Burling judged the claims against Coombs to be so serious, they refused to take on the job. Reached by phone, Judge Sarah Wilson, who was allegedly to have headed up the investigation of the Times for C&B, refused to confirm or deny whether her firm rejected the job.

In the wake of Covington and Burling's reported rejection, Joo ordered Pruden to conduct his own investigation. The senior staffer said Pruden's investigation lasted "about two hours" and reached its pre-determined conclusion: Coombs had been vindicated.

Casseday moved in for clean-up duty. "Cassadey just basically winked at Pruden's sham investigation and said, 'As human resources director, I agree with everything,'" the senior staffer recalled. "[Casseday] began talking randomly to editors in newsroom, and what he told them was, 'I'm coming on the orders of Douglas Joo. I'm not very happy with this, we don't want this story to come out. And I don't care if Fran [Coombs] is a racist or white supremacist, I care if the story gets out.'"

The staffer went on: "So the crime is not his [Coombs'] racism, it's whether the outside world is told about it. And Casseday basically intimidated everyone and said, based on the employee handbook, talking to a reporter is a firing offense."

The Washington Times metro section has reported on Casseday's arrest. But according to the senior staffer, that article was ordered by Pruden and Coombs as a means of "washing their hands" of Casseday.

Joo, meanwhile, is reportedly urging his underlings to remain loyal to his former axe man. Casseday, according to the staffer, is a former devotee of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, and his wife is still an active member. "Joo thinks, like an old godfather, that this guy [Casseday] has buried a lot of bodies for us, so let's get him a good lawyer and not savage him on paper," the staffer said.

Back in Korea, the Times' paymasters in the Unification Church are fuming. "The Koreans are furious watching this go down," said the senior staffer. "They're asking Joo, "Are you running a newspaper, or a bordello?' Because the Times has literally become a bordello."

And somehow, even with Casseday's dismissal, that "bordello" on New York Avenue remains open for business.

With the Party of Dobson
At the Unofficial Mid-Term Republican National Convention, so-called “value voters” heard jeremiads against liberals, “faggots,” and Fallujans before receiving possibly illegal marching orders for November. I covered this event, "Washington Briefing: Value Voters Summit 2006," for the Nation. My story was brief enough that I could repost it in its entirety. So here it is:


The day before Rosh Hashanah, Sen. George Allen of Virginia addressed the “Washington Briefing: Value Voters Summit 2006,” a gathering of 1,700 Christian right devotees designed to rally the Republican base ahead of November’s midterm congressional elections and preview potential Republican presidential candidates for 2008. Earlier in the week, Allen had called a report of his Jewish lineage were “aspersions” before acknowledging it was true. Immediately after his speech, as he stomped down a hallway of Washington’s Omni Shoreham hotel, I approached Allen and asked him how he was planning to do celebrate the upcoming Jewish holiday. Allen scowled, his face turning beet red. Pausing for a moment to regain his composure, he blurted, “I’ll be with my family!” He rushed away at a quickened pace.

Further down the hallway, Allen was surrounded by a media gaggle and bombarded with further questions about his Jewish lineage. He responded by mentioning an award he once received from the Greater Washington Jewish Council and said, “As far as the Jewish faith, I suspect I have a lot to learn.” Finally, Allen was plucked out of harm’s way and escorted into a waiting car by his self-described “A-Teamâ” of grim thirty-something aides. (This “A-Team” did not appear to be wearing the distinctive “lighting-bolt lapel pins” the Washington Post reports its members proudly displayed when Allen was governor, a universal symbol of white supremacy mimicking the insignia of the Nazi SS.)

Battling for his political life against his Democratic challenger, former Reagan-era Secretary of the Navy Jim Webb, Allen did his best to endear himself to Dobson’s followers, entertaining them with the football metaphors that have become staples of his stump speeches. (Allen’s father, George Allen, Sr., of course, was the coach of the Washington Redskins.) “Count on me to be an ally, a teammate,” Allen pledged. Then he praised Dobson, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, American United to Preserve Marriage president Gary Bauer and the American Family Association’s Don Wildmon, as “The Four Horsemen,” a reference to Notre Dame’s legendary 1924 backfield.

But as Allen sought to dampen the public controversy over his mishandling of his Jewish heritage, his association with his “Four Horsemen” simply called attention to Dobson’s and Perkins’ problematic utterances. Dobson’s Focus on the Family, for example, published an article in its Citizen Magazine last March attacking the parents of federal judge Stephen Reinhardt (his step-grandfather was a Holocaust survivor) for telling him “tales of” the Holocaust’s “horrific violence that lacked the redemptive power of Christ’s atonement.” The Anti-Defamation League has repeatedly condemned Wildmon for his conspiratorial diatribes against “secular Jews.” And Perkins, for his part, paid $82,500 to former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke for his phone banking list, and then spoke at a 2001 fundraiser for the Council of Conservative Citizens, America’s largest white supremacist organization. (When I asked Perkins about his links to Duke and the CCC, he replied tersely, “There are no links.”)

After his speech, Allen huddled in a corner with Perkins and one of the Summit’s few African-American participants, right-wing pastor and former NFL linebacker Ken “Hutch” Hutcherson. Without prompting, Hutchinson offered Allen a briefing on abortion, race and civil rights. “Too many black babies in the last few years have been aborted,” Hutchinson told Allen. “So you wonder why we have a slow population growth.”

“So what you’re saying is it’s [the black abortion rate] twice as high as other races?” Allen asked with a look of astonishment.

Hutchinson nodded, then went on: “Jesse Jackson and others were against these things early on but because of where they get their money from, they’re for it now.” Allen, who would later be confronted with a story by Salon.com’s Michael Scherer citing his former high school football teammates claiming he used to use the word “nigger,” politely smiled.

Another speaker at Dobson’s convention, William Bennett, has been equally outspoken on abortion and race, declaring last year on his radio show that “[Y]ou could abort every black baby in America, and your crime rate will go down.” But Bennett stuck to the script at the Summit, casting aside eugenics in favor of the more politically salient shock-and-awe themes of “national security” and “terrorism.” Discussing the gruesome murder of American private mercenaries in Fallujah in 2004, Bennett stated matter-of-factly, “When four Americans are hanged… you take out Fallujah. You flatten the city! You have to teach them that American life is not cheap.”

George Allen was only one of many Republican presidential hopefuls to present himself as a warrior in the kulturkampf before the “values voters” summit. Others included Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA), Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR), Newt Gingrich and Senators Rick Santorum (R-PA) and Sam Brownback (R-KS) (Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), despised despite his recent prostration before Jerry Falwell, and Rudy Giuliani, the pro-abortion, pro-gay rights, cross-dressing former mayor of New York City, were pointedly uninvited). Huckabee, a former Baptist preacher, was alone in challenging the audience’ backlash sensibility, calling for “an evangelical version of shock and awe that will show Americans that we are not just angry people.” His call for moderation drew no response.

The speakers contested with each other in throwing red meat to the crowd. Sam Brownback hailed the Summit’s sponsor, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, as “a gift to this country.” Mitt Romney delivered a speech peppered with derisive references to his home state of Massachusetts, as a predicate for his announcement of the “number one threat facing America:” gay marriage. Romney’s warning of the pink menace within was also echoed by a close Dobson ally, Rev. Wellington Boone, who exclaimed to hosannas from the assembled, “Back in the days when I was a kid, and we see guys that don’t stand strong on principle, we call them “faggots.”

The spectacle of the Republican presidential prospects competing for Dobson’s affection underscored the surprising remarks that the former Republican House Majority Dick Armey made to journalist Ryan Sager a year ago in the wake of the Terri Schiavo affair. Asked for his assessment of the 109th Republican Congress, Armey singled out the special bill it had introduced to preserve the brain-dead Schiavo. “That was pure, blatant pandering to James Dobson,” Armey said. “Nobody serious about the Constitution would do that. But the question was, “Will this energize our Christian conservative base for the next election?” Armey added, “Dobson and his gang of thugs are real nasty bullies.”

Now Dobson was perched on the Washington stage, Republican hopefuls parading before him, and his political protégé, Tony Perkins, the former Baton Rouge policeman suspended from service for joining a violent abortion protest while on duty, sitting at his right hand. Dobson recounted before his rapt audience a canned hunt in which he and his son Ryan, a “youth speaker” and author of a book entitled, “Be Intolerant: Because Some Things Are Just Stupid,” recently participated, during which Dobson killed a herded bear at close range. “It was a liberal bear,” Perkins interjected. “It’s a dead one now,” said Dobson. The crowd hooted with approval.

Dobson’s tone shifted swiftly from self-satisfaction to agitation when he reminded himself that his self-declared nemesis, Rev. Barry Lynn of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, was in attendance, and he spent the last ten minutes of his speech blasting Lynn for his plan to send over 100,000 letters to pastors warning that using church resources for electioneering is illegal.

I encountered Lynn in the hallway outside the ballroom where Dobson spoke. He was somewhat astonished at the amount of free promotion Dobson had afforded him. “Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed used to have a rule never to mention me,” he told me. “I can’t believe Dobson would say my name so many times.”

“This conference has all the feel of a Republican convention,” he continued. “It’s so bewildering to hear someone say, “I’m non-partisan, but if the GOP doesn’t hold the House or Senate there will be a disaster.”

A day before appearing at the Summit in Washington, Dobson held a stadium-sized get-out-the-vote jamboree in Pittsburgh on behalf of one of his staunchest backers, Sen. Rick Santorum, who trails his Democratic opponent, State Treasurer Bob Casey Jr. disguised as a supposedly non-partisan “Stand for the Family Rally.” There, Dobson took to the podium to warn wavering “value voters,” “Whether or not the Republicans deserve the power they were given, the alternatives are downright frightening."

Without any immediately scheduled congressional debates on social issue legislation to energize its base, the Christian right has adopted President Bush’s messianic “struggle for civilization” as a central feature of its culture war rhetoric going into the midterm elections. Perkins framed the issue by linking liberal evildoers with Islamic extremists, warning that “we are facing threats from within and from without.” Bauer described how the passengers of Flight 93 heroically ran toward the cockpit on 9/11, reminding the audience, “All you have to do is run to the voting booth.”

Having been instructed on their motivation, Summit attendees headed to a series of breakout sessions for their marching orders. At one session, “Getting Church Voters To The Polls,” veteran Christian right operative Connie Marshner distributed an 18-page pamphlet to participants she said was originally prepared for Santorum’s 2000 senatorial campaign. The pamphlet advises church members to use their church directory to organize calls to fellow parishioners from a phony company called “ABC Polls” in order to create a data bank of “pro-family” voters. Only those voters should be reminded to vote on Election Day, Marshner said. She added, “Even if you have a pastor like that who doesn’t want to do politics, you can use this plan.”

Marshner’s plan is an essential element of the Republican ground game for November. It might be deceptive, sleazy and possibly illegal. But that doesn’t matter to the “value voters.” As White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, who officially blessing the gathering, said in his speech, “What matters most are the victories we forge together.”

Mixed Reaction to "Hell of a Times"
I'm getting mixed reactions to my piece on the Washington Times. The Coombs duo has sent hysterical letters to the Nation, which should be published in two weeks (Poynter has F. Coombs' letter here along with Wes Pruden's unintentionally self-satirical memo), neither of which refute any of the charges made by their current and former employees. Basically, they claim the whole piece was orchestrated by former Times reporter George Archibald, and have tried to push back by personally attacking Archibald, rather than responding to my piece. Nevermind that I had a dozen sources, or that one of them, Marlene Johnson, an African-American former Times editor, described Coombs to me on the record as "a racist." And nevermind Melissa Hopkins' letter to the Times, which I quoted in my story, and which pegged Coombs as a sexual predator.

I'm not exactly getting rave reviews from the droves of Times staffers who loathe Coombs and who spoke to me about the demoralized atmosphere he has fostered inside the newsroom, either. They say that as strong as the piece was, it didn't come close to capturing just how much of a cancer Coombs and his benefactor, Wes Pruden, have been on the Times. Well, I only had so much space and I'm only as good as my sources. Even with a dozen of them, there were many more who told me they wanted to talk, but were too chickenshit. Here is one letter from former Times staffer Amanda Hurley that came in to the Nation today. I think it is emblematic of the response from inside the Times newsroom to my story:

As a former (albeit short-lived) staffer at the Washington Times, I
was eager to read Max Blumenthal's expose. What I found was largely a
rehash of revelations about Fran Coombs' hateful, but well-known,
views on race, along with a fair summary of the struggle for the
Times' soul. What's missing is a larger indictment of a newsroom
culture that quashes real journalistic talent for the sake of an
extremist ideology.


Readers may get the impression that editors like Coombs and Stacy
McCain have handpicked a staff of right-wing crazies to support their
agenda--but that's simply not the case. Coombs and especially McCain,
a virulent misogynist, are reviled by most Times staffers, who would
like nothing more than to turn the crass propaganda sheet into a
respectable newspaper.


One detail did give me a jolt: Blumenthal writes that on August 22,
Coombs devoted page 1 to a positive review of Pat Buchanan's anti-
immigrant screed. How typical. In my brief tenure at the Times'
Sunday books section, I remember being preempted again and again by
McCain (presumably with Coombs' all-clear) placing fawning "news"
stories about right- wing books in the main section, despite the
fact that said books had already been assigned to experts for
objective review.

I'll be writing more about this in the coming days.

Exposing the Washington Times (and A Weekend With James Dobson)
The Nation is set to publish a major expose by me about the implosion of the Washington Times. I won't reveal anything now, but I will say that the UK's Prospect Magazine has it mostly -- but not completely -- right:

The Republican right may be losing its most devoted media ally. The Washington Times editor-in-chief Wes Pruden and managing editor Fran Coombs, who have yanked the Reverend Moon-owned paper to the far right, are in trouble. Word is out that the leftist Nation is preparing an exposé on racism and sexism at the paper. The Times has published pieces by Coombs's wife Marian Kester quoting BNP chief Nick Griffin as an expert on Muslim culture. And Pruden is the son of the chaplain of the Citizens' Council in Little Rock, Arkansas, a segregationist group. When Eisenhower sent troops to protect nine black teenagers attempting to enrol at the local high school in 1957, the Reverend Pruden told the mob, "That's what we gotta fight: niggers, communists and cops." The Moonies, who have spent over $1.1bn on the loss-making Times in the 25 years they have owned it, have been fretting about the newspaper's attacks on the UN (which they like) and on North Korea, where the South Korea-based Moonies have big investments. They have now quietly set up a search committee to seek replacements. A strong contender is said to be Maggie Thatcher's former aide John O'Sullivan.

My piece on the Washington Times will appear on the Nation's website on Wednesday evening and will hit newsstands on Thursday.

This weekend, I'll be at the "Values Voter Summit" in Washington to cover the Christian right's attempt to get its agenda back on the radar of its terror-obsessed Republican party host body. The conference was organized by Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council and the American Family Association, among others. Everyone from Ann Coulter to Alberto Gonzales to that paragon of virtue, Newt Gingrich, who has had more wives than the average Afghani warlord, is scheduled to appear. It should be surreal to say the least.

Sen. John Cornyn Meets The Racist Right
On Tuesday, September 18, inside the Dirksen Senate Office building, Republican Texas Senator and Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Citizenship Chairman John Cornyn headlined a conference entitled, "Defending the Homeland: America's Immigration Crisis." The conference was organized by the Rockford Institute, publisher of Chronicles Magazine, and was moderated by its president, Thomas Fleming.

Even though the Rockford Institute has been dubbed "xenophobic, racist, and nativist," by its former New York branch director, Richard John Neuhaus; even though Rockford's current director, Thomas Fleming, is a leading anti-Semite and Holocaust revisionist; even though Rockford's flagship publication, Chronicles, has served as a nest for white nationalists like Sam Francis; despite all that, the presence of Cornyn -- a moving force behind Republican immigration policy -- at this conference has flown under the media's radar.

That's not much of a surprise. Though it was once considered influential within the conservative movement, Rockford has been in steep decline since 1989, when Neuhaus wrote an internal memo warning that some institute publications contained attacks on "rootless, deracinated and cosmopolitan elites" that reflected "the classic language of anti-Semitism." In response, Fleming sacked Neuhaus, throwing him and his staff (and their belongings) out in the street and changing the locks on his Manhattan office. The incident was reported in the New York Times and is described in detail in neocon pundit David Frum's provocative essay about paleoconservatism, "Unpatriotic Conservatives." Since then, Chronicles has suffered under the direction of the draconian Fleming, whose racist diatribes have helped reduce the magazine's subscription base to a piddling 5000.

An example of Fleming's extremism came in the form of a defense of Mel Gibson after the drunk-driving actor unleashed a barrage of anti-Semitic insults on his arresting officers:

"...Still, putting the two facts together—the drunk defense and his conspiracy theory—Gibson is clearly what the Abe Foxman and Norm Podhoretz would call an anti-Semite. However, we Christians do not have to accept their opinion, which is deliberately crafted to suggest that most Christians throughout history are classic anti-Semites on par with Heinrich Himmler. Liking or disliking the Jews one meets—or even liking or disliking them generally—is a matter of taste, preference, and upbringing. Most serious Christians, as a matter of preference and conviction, would rather spend time with other Christians. There would be something wrong with them if they did not—much as there is something with a husband who prefers to spend time with women other than his wife. It is hard enough for Baptists to tolerate Lutherans and a bit too much to insist that they become matey with Jews who often despise their religion and their way of life

Theories of history are matters of fact and reason. The fact that so many troublemakers of the past 150 years have been of Jewish extraction—Marx, Freud, the Neoconservatives—is certainly no argument in their favor. Jewish “intellectuals” continue to be in the forefront of the movements that aim to destroy our religion and culture."

Not surprisingly, Fleming has supplemented his anti-Semitism with a revisionist view of the Holocaust that would make even Holocaust-denier-enabler Christopher Hitchens blush. As he wrote in the comments section on Chronicles' website:

"Personally, I am tired of the whole pro-Jewish/anti-Jewish thing. It is as tedious as the Holocaust myth and the anti-holocaust myth. Millions of Jews died in German camps. It is hardly defense of the Nazis to say that many or most of them might have died of natural causes. The architects of the killing of Jews, Catholics, and Slavs were evil because what they did was evil. On the other hand, there is so much evil to deplore, I do not see why Nazi evil is more serious than Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist evil, just as I do not see why it is OK for Americans and Israelis to target civilians but not for Muslim terrorists. I think it might be useful to quit taking sides, with or against Hitler or Stalin or Israel, and to stand for something."

To be sure, Rockford's conference on immigration ostensibly had nothing to do with "the Jewish question." So Cornyn's office could argue that the senator only lent his good name to it to advance the his crusade against the liberalization of immigration laws. Many people oppose a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and most of them claim their opposition is not rooted in racial animus. Fleming, the conference's moderator, is a notable exception, however, complaining in a column about immigration in Chronicles:

"...the plain fact is that we have reinvented America as an abstract nation 'dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.' Every time a new group stepped up to demand its share of rights—and our money—we Americans have given them everything the asked for: blacks, Jews, women, homosexuals. We are programmed to see ourselves in a drama of good and evil, in which traditional Americans are evil, aliens and outsiders are good. The only way to redeem ourselves for our skin color, religion, and traditions is to sacrifice the interests of our children to the morally privileged minorities. Of such people and such a mentality, no counter-revolution can be made."

It's common knowledge that Cornyn used to be a moderate, at least by the standards of Texas' radical GOP, and that he has shifted to the right to support George W. Bush's reactionary agenda. But has Cornyn lurched so far to the right that he now supports the views of Fleming and his confederates? Someone should ask him.

(By the way, on Thursday, The Nation will be running a lengthy article by me exposing the influence of white nationalists like Fleming on the Washington Times, and how the paper is imploding as a result.)

What Liberal Hegemony?
University of Akron professors John Zipp and Rudy Fenwick have just released a study that is sure to make David Horowitz crazy -- or at least, crazier than he already is. The study contains four major findings:

(1) although liberal faculty outnumber conservatives (2.3 to 2.6 to 1 in the most recent data), between 1989 and 1997, there was increased movement to the center among faculty;

(2) there are considerable differences in the relative liberalism of faculty across disciplines and institutional types, with conservatives being the plurality in some fields (e.g., business, vocational fields) and in two-year colleges;

(3) younger cohorts of faculty tend to be more centrist and conservative than older cohorts, while women tend to be more liberal than men, trends that could have countervailing impacts over time;

(4) there are significant differences in educational values between liberal and conservative faculty, with conservatives being more interested in preparing students for careers and in shaping their values and less interested in teaching creative thinking or an appreciation of literature and the arts, and less supportive of tenure and the free exchange of ideas in the classroom.

The fourth finding of Zipp and Fenwick is the most important because it undermines the notion constantly advanced by Horowitz that liberal professors are pre-disposed to indoctrinating their students. Zipp and Fenwick discussed their study in an interview with Free Excange on Campus, which you can read here.

Discover the Secret Right-Wing Network Behind ABC's 9/11 Deception
Less than 72 hours before ABC's "The Path to 9/11" is scheduled to air, the network is suddenly under siege. On Tuesday, ABC was forced to concede that "The Path to 9/11" is "a dramatization, not a documentary." The film deceptively invents scenes to depict former President Bill Clinton's handling of the Al Qaeda threat.

Now, ABC claims to be is editing those false sequences to satisfy critics so the show can go on -- even if it still remains a gross distortion of history. And as it does so, ABC advances the illusion that the deceptive nature of "The Path to 9/11" is an honest mistake committed by a hardworking but admittedly fumbling team of well-intentioned Hollywood professionals who wanted nothing less than to entertain America. But this is another Big Lie.

In fact, "The Path to 9/11" is produced and promoted by a well-honed propaganda operation consisting of a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, he is working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by The Path to 9/11's director David Cunningham that proclaims its goal to "transform Hollywood" in line with its messianic vision.

Before The Path to 9/11 entered the production stage, Disney/ABC contracted David Cunningham as the film's director. Cunningham is no ordinary Hollywood journeyman. He is in fact the son of Loren Cunningham, founder of the right-wing evangelical group Youth With A Mission (YWAM). The young Cunningham helped found an auxiliary of his father's group called The Film Institute (TFI), which, according to its mission statement, is "dedicated to a Godly transformation and revolution TO and THROUGH the Film and Televisionindustry." As part of TFI's long-term strategy, Cunningham helped place interns from Youth With A Mission's "global training network" in film industry jobs "so that they can begin to impact and transform Hollywood from the inside out," according to a YWAM report.

Last June, Cunningham's TFI announced it was producing its first film, mysteriously titled "Untitled History Project." "TFI's first project is a doozy," a newsletter to YWAM members read. "Simply being referred to as: The Untitled History Project, it is already being called the television event of the decade and not one second has been put to film yet. Talk about great expectations!" (A web edition of the newsletter was mysteriously deleted yesterday but has been cached on Google at the link above).

The following month, on July 28, the New York Post reported that ABC was filming a mini-series "under a shroud of secrecy" about the 9/11 attacks. "At the moment, ABC officials are calling the miniseries 'Untitled Commission Report' and producers refer to it as the 'Untitled History Project,'" the Post noted.

Early on, Cunningham had recruited a young Iranian-American screenwriter named Cyrus Nowrasteh to
write the script of his secretive "Untitled" film. Not only is Nowrasteh an outspoken conservative, he is also a fervent member of the emerging network of right-wing people burrowing into the film industry with ulterior sectarian political and religious agendas, like Cunningham.

Nowrasteh's conservatism was on display when he appeared as a featured speaker at the Liberty Film Festival (LFF), an annual event founded in 2004 to premier and promote conservative-themed films supposedly too "politically incorrect" to gain acceptance at mainstream film festivals. This June, while The Path to 9/11 was being filmed, LFF founders Govindini Murty and Jason Apuzzo -- both friends of Nowrasteh -- announced they were "partnering" with right-wing activist David Horowitz. Indeed, the 2006 LFF is listed as "A Program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center."

Since the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1992, Horowitz has labored to create a network of politically active conservatives in Hollywood. His Hollywood nest centers around his Wednesday Morning Club, a
weekly meet-and-greet session for Left Coast conservatives that has been graced with speeches by
the likes of Newt Gingrich, Victor Davis Hanson and Christopher Hitchens. The group's headquarters are at the offices of Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a "think tank" bankrolled for years with millions by right-wing sugardaddies like eccentric far right billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. (Scaife
financed the Arkansas Project, a $2.3 million dirty tricks operation that included paying sources for
negative stories about Bill Clinton that turned out to be false.)

With the LFF now under Horowitz's control, his political machine began drumming up support for Cunningham and Nowrasteh's "Untitled" project, which finally was revealed in late summer as "The Path to 9/11." Horowitz's PR blitz began with an August 16 interview with Nowrasteh on his FrontPageMag webzine. In the interview, Nowrasteh foreshadowed the film's assault on Clinton's record on fighting terror. "The 9/11 report details the Clinton's administration's response -- or lack of response -- to Al Qaeda and how this emboldened Bin Laden to keep attacking American interests," Nowrasteh told FrontPageMag's Jamie Glazov. "There simply was no response. Nothing."

A week later, ABC hosted LFF co-founder Murty and several other conservative operatives at an advance
screening of The Path to 9/11. (While ABC provided 900 DVDs of the film to conservatives, Clinton administration officials and objective reviewers from mainstream outlets were denied them.) Murty returned with a glowing review for FrontPageMag that emphasized the film's partisan nature. "'The Path to 9/11' is one of the best, most intelligent, most pro-American miniseries I've ever seen on TV, and conservatives should support
it and promote it as vigorously as possible," Murty wrote. As a result of the special access granted by ABC, Murty's article was the first published review of The Path to 9/11, preceding those by the New York Times and LA Times by more than a week.

Murty followed her review with a blast email to conservative websites such as Liberty Post and Free Republic on September 1 urging their readers to throw their weight behind ABC's mini-series. "Please do everything you can to spread the word about this excellent miniseries," Murty wrote, "so that 'The Path to 9/11' gets the highest ratings possible when it airs on September 10 & 11! If this show gets huge ratings, then ABC will be more likely to produce pro-American movies and TV shows in the future!"

Murty's efforts were supported by Appuzo, who handles LFF's heavily-trafficked blog, Libertas. Appuzo was instrumental in marketing The Path to 9/11 to conservatives, writing in a blog post on September 2, "Make no mistake about what this film does, among other things: it places the question of the Clinton Administration's culpability for the 9/11 attacks front and center... Bravo to Cyrus Nowrasteh and David
Cunningham for creating this gritty, stylish and gripping piece of entertainment."

When a group of leading Senate Democrats sent a letter to ABC CEO Robert Iger urging him to cancel The Path to 9/11 because of its glaring factual errors and distortions, Apuzzo launched a retaliatory campaign to paint the Democrats as foes of free speech. "Here at LIBERTAS we urge the public to make noise over this, and to demand that Democrats back down," he wrote on September 7th. "What is at stake is nothing short of the 1st Amendment."

At FrontPageMag, Horowitz singled out Nowrasteh as the victim. "The attacks by former president Bill Clinton, former Clinton Administration officials and Democratic US senators on Cyrus Nowrasteh's ABC
mini-series "The Path to 9/11" are easily the gravest and most brazen and damaging governmental attacks on the civil liberties of ordinary Americans since 9/11," Horowitz declared.

Now, as discussion grows over the false character of The Path to 9/11, the right-wing network that brought it to fruition is ratcheting up its PR efforts. Murty will appear tonight on CNN's Glenn Beck
show and The Situation Room, according to Libertas in order to respond to "the major disinformation campaign now being run by Democrats to block the truth about what actually happened during the Clinton years."

While this network claims its success and postures as the true victims, the ABC network suffers a PR catastrophe. It's almost as though it was complacent about an attack on its reputation by a band of political terrorists.

For anyone wondering why I haven't been blogging recently, I have just returned from a two week long trip through the West. I don't even have time to write about what I saw there, but I'm hoping to in the coming days. In the meantime, I'm going down to the wire on a long investigative piece about the Washington Times that is scheduled to appear in the Nation during the third week of this month. And if you haven't seen my recent piece on George Allen's ties to the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, you can check it out here.