Senator Joseph Lieberman is scheduled to headline Pastor John Hagee’s 2008 Christians United For Israel Washington-Israel Summit this July 22. In accepting Hagee’s invitation, Lieberman became the most senior elected representative confirmed to appear at the annual gala. Last year, when Lieberman spoke at Hagee’s summit, he compared the Texas televangelist to the biblical prophet Moses, dubbing him “an Ish Elochim,” or “a man of God.” Unless he rescinds his pledge to appear at this year’s summit, Lieberman can be expected to deliver another soul-stirring tribute.
Hagee’s vitriolic condemnation of Catholicism, his jeremiad declaring Hurricane Katrina divine punishment for New Orleans’ hosting of a “homosexual rally,” and his generally disturbing apocalyptic theology became national news last February when John McCain accepted his endorsement in a widely publicized ceremony. …..Click here to read more
During a press conference at the 2007 Christians United for Israel Washington-Israel Summit, I asked CUFI Executive Director Pastor John Hagee about passages in his book “Jerusalem Countdown” in which he appeared to blame Jews for their own persecution. Hagee was visibly piqued by my question, insisting that his statements were directly inspired by the Book of Deuteronomy. When I attempted to ask Hagee a follow-up question, a former intern for AIPAC, Kara Silverman, the former assistant communications director for AIPAC, cut me off.
Moments later, a team of off-duty DC police officers hired by CUFI surrounded my co-producer and I and demanded that we immediately leave the conference, threatening us with arrest if refused to comply. You can view my exchange with Hagee and the ensuing fracas at 7:45 of my video report on CUFI’s summit, “Rapture Ready:”
Last weekend, I traveled to Mississippi’s first congressional district, a bastion of Republican power that has been home to William Faulkner, Elvis Presley, and the scene of massive riots on the night James Meredith attempted to integrate the University of Mississippi. With the district in the midst of a hotly contested special election campaign, I probed the impact of a million-dollar Republican strategy to attack the insurgent Democratic candidate, Travis Childers, by linking him to Barack Obama and Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
I just returned from Northern Mississippi, where I probed the impact of GOP attack ads linking insurgent Democratic candidate Travis Childers with Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright. My piece, which I produced for Al Jazeera English, aired the day after Childers’ stunning victory:
This Sunday, Frank Rich reported some of the most exciting news that has appeared on the pages of the New York Times in a very long time. According to Rich, Americans are on the verge of transcending the racial and cultural rifts that divided them for centuries. There simply aren’t “enough racists of any class in America, let alone in swing states, to determine the results come fall,” the former theater critic insisted. This statement is so true that Rich did not even need to bolster it with actual statistical evidence.
Rich went on to announce that the rancorous street fights of the 1960s over militarism and civil rights have been neatly transmuted into “quieter social activism and grand-scale social networking.” “The millennials’ bottom-up digital superstructure,” he wrote, has enabled economically marginalized ghetto dwellers and indignant campus radicals to air their grievances with the simple click of a button. So sit back in your Aeron chair, relax and blithely tend to your Facebook page.
This blog is still temporarily on ice as I finish up my forthcoming book (due out next March), but I wanted to feature a new video report I have just completed. Check out the video and a quick run-down:
On April 25, the three NYPD detectives who killed bridegroom Sean Bell the night before his wedding and wounded his two friends were acquitted of all charges. The undercover officers, who had riddled Bell’s car with 50 shots, claimed in court that they were scared by Bell and his friends, even though the men were unarmed and on their way home from a club. Detective Michael Oliver must have been especially frightened. He alone fired 31 shots, even stopping to reload on his way to killing Bell. Arthur Cooperman, a 78-year-old judge scheduled to retire next year (the cops were spared a jury of their peers), essentially ruled that the officers’ supposed fear justified their indiscriminate firing of 50 shots at Bell and his unarmed friends.
I will be offering my analysis of the Super Tuesday results on Al Jazeera English tonight from 9:30-10 PM ET. Since this excellent network has been shut out of the US market for absolutely craven reasons, you have to click here to watch me.
As South Carolina’s Republican primary election draws nearer, Mike Huckabee has ratched up his appeals to the racial nationalism of white evangelicals. “You don’t like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag,” the former Arkansas governor told a Myrtle Beach crowd on January 17, referring to the Confederate flag. “If somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we’d tell them what to do with the pole. That’s what we’d do.”
Making coded appeals to white racism is nothing new for Huckabee. Indeed, well before he was a nationally known political star, Huckabee nurtured a relationship with America’s largest white supremacist group, the Council of Conservative Citizens. The extent of Huckabee’s interaction with the racist group is unclear, but this much is known: he accepted an invitation to speak at the group’s annual conference in 1993 and ultimately delivered a videotaped address that was “extremely well received by the audience.”
Descended from the White Citizens Councils that battled integration in the Jim Crow South, including at Arkansas’ Little Rock High School, the Council (or CofCC) has been designated a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
In its “Statement of Principles,” the CofCC declares, “We also oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called “affirmative action” and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races.”
The CofCC has hosted several conservative Republican legislators at its conferences, including former Representative Bob Barr of Georgia and Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi. But mostly it has been a source of embarrassment to Republicans hoping to move their party beyond its race-baiting image. Former Reagan speechwriter and conservative pundit Peggy Noonan pithily declared that anyone involved with the CofCC “does not deserve to be in a leadership position in America.”
During a lengthy phone conversation in 2006, CofCC founder and former White Citizens Council organizer Gordon Lee Baum detailed for me Huckabee’s dalliances with his group. Baum told me that Huckabee eagerly accepted his invitation to speak at the CofCC’s 1993 national convention in Memphis, Tennessee.
Huckabee’s plan was complicated, however, when Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker journeyed out of state and appointed a state senator to preside over the governorship. The Arkansas state legislature passed a resolution forbidding the lieutenant governor from leaving Arkansas until Tucker returned, thus preventing Huckabee from attending the CofCC’s conference.
In lieu of his appearance, according to Baum, Huckabee “sent an audio/video presentation saying ‘I can’t be with you but I’d like to be speaker next time.’” (The CofCC promptly replaced Huckabee with Michael Ramirez, a right-wing cartoonist whose work is currently syndicated to 400 newspapers by the Copley News Service.)
Baum’s account of Huckabee’s videotaped message was confirmed by a CofCC newsletter obtained by Edward Sebesta, a veteran observer of the neo-Confederate movement. “Ark. Lt. Governor Mike Huckabee, unable to leave Arkansas by law because the Governor was absent from the state, sent a terrific videotape speech, which was viewed and extremely well received by the audience,” the 1993 newsletter (Vol. 24, No. 3) reported.
The following year, in 1994, the CofCC held its national conference in Little Rock, Arkansas to accommodate Huckabee. According to Baum, Huckabee initially agreed to speak before his group, but became apprehensive when the Arkansas media reported that he would be joined on the CofCC’s podium by Kirk Lyons, a white nationalist legal activist who has hailed Hitler as “probably the most misunderstood man in German history.”
“He didn’t know anything about Kirk Lyons or anyone else,” Baum said of Huckabee. “He said he would show up if we took Lyons off.”
But Baum refused to remove his friend Lyons from the bill. Huckabee, who was more concerned about receiving bad publicity than by the racist underpinnings of the CofCC, withdrew his promise to speak. The CofCC replaced him this time with former Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Jim Johnson, a White Citizens Council founder who organized the mob that rioted against the integration of Little Rock High School and later served as the star narrator of Rev. Jerry Falwell’s discredited film, “The Clinton Chronicles.”
In the end, Huckabee’s aborted relationship with the CofCC benefited the group. “We had the biggest crowd in our history because of the publicity” surrounding Huckabee’s planned appearance, Baum said of his 1994 conference.
The CofCC has since rebuked Huckabee for his insuffiently intolerant political behavior. Unfortunately, Huckabee has never rebuked the CofCC. Instead he embraced the group, ignoring its well known legacy of promoting racism and only severing ties when his political ambitions were threatened by bad publicity.
Now here is a question for the Huckabee campaign: Will you release the full transcript of Huckabee’s “extremely well received” videotaped address to the CofCC?
Of all the right-wing figures who have promoted Mike Huckabee’s extraordinary political rise from a backwater church to the national pulpit of a presidential campaign–and there are many–perhaps none know the former Arkansas governor and current Republican presidential front-runner better than Jay Cole. A Baptist minister based in Fayetteville, Arkansas, with a right-wing radio talk show of his own, Cole has been instrumental in inspiring Huckabee’s rise over more than two decades. Indeed, when Huckabee was the governor of Arkansas, it was Cole who persuaded him to arrange the release from prison of a convicted rapist, Wayne Dumond, who had become a born-again evangelical in prison–the most controversial act of Huckabee’s career, which still dogs him on the campaign trail.
(above, Jay Cole with Mike Huckabee beside the governor’s private jet in 1997)
I reported for The Nation on a lengthy telephone conversation I had with Cole a week before Huckabee’s surprise victory in the Iowa caucuses on January 3. Cole was supremely confident that his saintly friend would prevail over the hosts of darkness. “Mike is one of the finest and most gracious individuals God has ever placed on Earth,” Cole told me in his thick Southern drawl. “Not only does he have speaking ability, he has the Lord looking over him.”
Some mainstream media pundits have attributed Huckabee’s rising fortunes to his likable demeanor. New York Times political correspondent Adam Nagourney has praised Huckabee’s “easy-going, self-effacing, jaunty style” as his chief political asset. The Times’s liberal commentator Frank Rich explained Huckabee’s ascent in similar terms, comparing the sudden swell of support for his campaign to the phenomenon surrounding Democratic senator and presidential front-runner Barack Obama. “Both men [Obama and Huckabee] have a history of speaking across party and racial lines,” Rich wrote. “Both men possess that rarest of commodities in American public life: wit. Most important, both men aspire (not always successfully) to avoid the hyper-partisanship of the Clinton-Bush era.” Rich, who only weeks earlier had predicted the imminent self-destruction of the religious right, now viewed Huckabee as a welcome departure from the divisive Republican candidates of the past.
But the Huckabee Cole has known and loved for decades contrasts sharply with the sunny figure the media’s leading lights have conjured up. According to Cole, Huckabee has connected with voters–specifically, evangelical voters–not simply because he is a charismatic speaker, but also because he shares their apocalyptic world view. As Cole told me, “To date there’s well over 139 prophecies that have come to pass exactly as the Lord says. Mike believes those things. Anyone with any Bible knowledge would have to say that this looks like the time. We’re so close to the Lord’s return.”
During the period when Huckabee rose through the ranks of the Arkansas Republican Party to the governor’s mansion, Cole became one of the state’s most popular right-wing radio personalities. Cole volunteered to me the sectarian views that made his radio show a favorite of Arkansas’s far-right fringe. Taking a potshot at Mitt Romney, who is a Mormon, Cole compared the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to the Ku Klux Klan. “As you know from history, their original intent–[Mormon founding fathers Joseph] Smith and Brigham Young–was to take over the United States of America,” he said. “They weren’t just far behind the KKK in their efforts.”
Cole was no more kind to Muslims. “If you think communism’s bad, just think what the Islamics are doing,” Cole warned. “Those people have no–they’re just not human. They’re just not human.”
On the campaign trail, Huckabee has ventured some opinions that dovetail at least loosely with Cole’s. Discussing Romney’s Mormon faith with a reporter while stumping through Iowa, Huckabee asked darkly, “Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus is Satan’s brother?”
Huckabee routinely warns of the threat of “Islamofascism” at campaign rallies and is perhaps the first major presidential candidate in American history to essentially call for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Huckabee declared during a New Hampshire fundraiser in October that a Palestinian state should only be established outside of biblical Israel, possibly in Egypt or Saudi Arabia, according to the Jewish Russian Telegraph. He reiterated this position during an appearance on Face the Nation in November.
For more on Huckabee’s dark side, see my latest video, “Radical Cleric”
Israel and the Apocalypse
Huckabee’s advocacy of forcibly transferring the Palestinians to other Arab nations reflects his close association with some of America’s most prominent End Times theological proponents. Among Huckabee’s leading evangelical backers is Pastor John Hagee, head of a Pentecostal congregation in San Antonio, Texas, with 18,000 members, and the executive director of Christians United for Israel, a national lobbying group that organizes against a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine crisis and in favor of a military strike on Iran.
Hagee’s zealous support for Israel is kindled by his belief that Jesus will one day return to “biblical Israel” to usher in a kingdom of Heaven on Earth. “As soon as Jesus sits on his throne he’s gonna rule the world with a rod of iron,” Hagee told his congregation in a sermon this December. “That means he’s gonna make the ACLU do what he wants them to. That means you’re not gonna have to ask if you can pray in public school…. We will live by the law of God and no other law.”
Huckabee made a pilgrimage to Hagee’s Cornerstone Church just one week after the pastor’s anti-ACLU jeremiad. During the first of two sermons Huckabee delivered there, he was greeted with a thunderous standing ovation. The candidate returned the sentiment, hailing his gracious host, Hagee, as “one of the great Christian leaders of our nation.”
Huckabee has also welcomed the endorsement of Tim LaHaye, the co-author of the bestselling Left Behind pulp fiction series, which tells of the coming apocalyptic battle between followers of Jesus and forces of Satan. Paige Patterson, president of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, where Huckabee once studied (he dropped out to work for a televangelist), is an outspoken believer in End Times theology as well. Patterson is one of the chief organizers of the right-wing takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Just as his surge in the polls began, Huckabee addressed the student body of the late Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in November. There, he assured his enraptured audience that his sudden rise had nothing to do with his “easy-going” style. “There’s only one explanation for [my surge] and it’s not a human one,” Huckabee insisted, inspiring gales of applause from the overflow crowd. “It’s the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of five thousand people.”
Huckabee made his remarkable statement in response to a question from a student–not a reporter. Political reporters with access to the candidate have so far shied away from asking him pointed questions about his theological beliefs. They have been especially reluctant to ask Huckabee how he thinks the world will end or how his Messiah will return. Consequently, the image of Huckabee as a transcendent, post-partisan politician has prevailed. He remains the affable, bass-playing Republican counterpart to Barack Obama, not the sectarian ideologue who sought the counsel of fringe characters like Cole.
Huckabee has burnished his likable sheen by replacing the ornery clergymen who propelled his early ascendancy in Arkansas politics with a cast of telegenic evangelical celebrities. His new boosters include Chuck Norris, a B-level action movie star who has converted to evangelical Christianity and become a fixture at Huckabee’s side on the campaign trail.
Cole, for his part, told me he has not spoken to his old friend “Mike” in six months. “He’s so busy it’s an impossibility to get to him,” Cole said. “I’ve been meaning to call him.” Now 78 years old and afflicted with terminal heart disease, Cole has been left behind.
Yet back when Huckabee launched his preaching career in 1980, he went straight to Cole for assistance. “He’s actually known me longer than I’ve known him,” Cole said of Huckabee. Cole, who had operated a missionary supply organization that established Christian television and radio stations in the Third World, said he helped the young Huckabee when he started his own television show in Arkansas. Huckabee’s show, Positive Alternatives, which first aired in the cities Pine Bluff and Texarkana in 1980, became his vehicle for statewide recognition. By 1989, with Cole’s support, Huckabee had become the youngest-ever president of the 500,000-member Arkansas Baptist State Convention.
A Rapist’s Release
When Huckabee leveraged his popularity in the Baptist community into a political career, declaring a run for lieutenant governor in 1993, Cole urged his listeners to vote for him, helping deliver him a narrow victory in the heavily Democratic state. Huckabee then replaced Jim Guy Tucker as Arkansas governor in 1996 after the Democrat announced he would resign while appealing his federal conviction in the Whitewater scandal. With Huckabee in the governor’s mansion, Cole pressured his pal to act on a cause he had championed for almost a decade–the release of Wayne Dumond, accused of raping a 17-year-old cheerleader who happened to be Bill Clinton’s distant cousin.
Dumond, a father of six and a Vietnam veteran, had been arrested twice during the 1970s for sexual assault and another time for attacking a man with a claw hammer. While awaiting trial in 1985 for raping Clinton’s cousin, Dumond was allegedly attacked by two masked men who forced him to perform oral sex on them before they castrated him. The doctor who examined Dumond after the incident raised the possibility that his castration was self-inflicted. A half-gallon bottle of Jim Beam whiskey was found two-thirds empty at the scene of the crime. Meanwhile, according to investigators, no signs of a struggle were present.
Cole, a vitriolic Clinton critic who calls the former president “trash” and says he helped produce the infamous anti-Clinton propaganda video The Clinton Chronicles, immediately embraced Dumond’s cause, taking to the airwaves to paint him as the victim of a dark conspiracy. Cole claimed without evidence that a vindictive Clinton and his surrogates had framed Dumond and had possibly orchestrated his castration as well.
Besides antipathy toward Clinton, Cole’s support for Dumond’s freedom was influenced by religious motives. Cole pronounced Dumond a born-again Christian and frequently visited the rapist in prison as his “spiritual adviser.” He claimed that Dumond and his wife had had a notable history in the Baptist community, heading the youth department of a church in Forrest City, Arkansas. “I talked to [Dumond's] pastor and the high school principal of the school — not a single one of them said anything bad about him,” Cole said.
As Dumond’s 1996 date with the state parole board approached, Cole and Dumond’s wife lobbied Huckabee on the rapist’s behalf. Cole said he organized several “get-together parties,” where he impressed on the governor his case for freeing Dumond. According to a state official who advised Huckabee on the Dumond case, Cole quickly convinced the governor to pressure the parole board for Dumond’s release. “I don’t believe that he had access to, or read, the law enforcement records or parole commission’s files–even by then,” the official told journalist Murray Waas. “He already seemed to have made up his mind, and his knowledge of the case appeared to be limited to a large degree as to what people had told him, what Jay Cole had told him….”
After persuading the parole board to commute Dumond’s sentence, Huckabee congratulated the rapist upon receiving his liberty.”Dear Wayne,” Huckabee wrote in a letter to Dumond. “My desire is that you be released from prison. I feel that parole is the best way for your reintroduction to society to take place.”
After Dumond relocated to Missouri upon his release in 1999, he was linked through DNA evidence to the rape and strangulation of a new victim, Carol Sue Shields. In 2005, months after being sentenced to life in prison for the killing, Dumond died in his cell. At the time state prosecutors were preparing to charge him with raping and murdering yet another woman. Despite the overwhelming evidence connecting Dumond to a spate of killings, Cole maintained that his friend was once again the target of a frame-up.
“What possibly could have happened,” Cole mused, “is, as you know, the law enforcement people are under real pressure from the public to solve these crimes. In all probability they needed a victim real quick. They said, well, we got one here in our county, he fits the profile.” And though Dumond’s death was by all accounts a suicide, Cole insisted that “it’s possible” he was killed by unknown parties who wanted revenge.
Huckabee’s role in engineering Dumond’s release became an issue in the weeks leading up to this year’s Iowa caucuses. In December, the mother of Dumond’s last confirmed victim, Shields, surfaced in a highly circulated YouTube video with a pointed message: “If not for Mike Huckabee, Wayne Dumond would’ve been in prison, and Carol Sue would’ve been with us this year for Christmas.” Now Huckabee has gone from denying any part in securing Dumond’s release to confessing his regret. “There’s nothing you can say, but my gosh, it’s the thing you pray never happens. And it did,” he explained to Byron York, a columnist for the conservative National Review.
The mounting evidence that Huckabee orchestrated the release of a serial rapist and killer at the urging of a preacher has proven inconsequential to the evangelical ranks who vaulted him into the front of the Republican presidential pack. To Huckabee’s swelling flock, he has emerged as the perfect candidate, blessed by “God’s anointing and calling,” Pentecostal televangelist Kenneth Copeland declared. Cole sees Huckabee in similarly wondrous terms, but questions whether a spiritually bankrupt nation like the United States deserves such a godly leader.
“We’re living right on the edge of the Lord’s return, I believe, and it may be that the Lord will give this country something that it really deserves,” Cole remarked to me. “And that is a Hillary [Clinton] as president.” The old minister went on: “We have turned our backs on the Lord. We’ve thrown the Ten Commandments out of every place that we could. Every effort in the world is being made right now to eliminate any mention of the name Jesus, and the Lord who’s made such a sacrifice for his children is not going to tolerate it.”
Huckabee would undoubtedly disagree with his old preacher friend that America “deserves” a Hillary Clinton presidency. He would not be running for president if he believed that. But when I asked Cole if Huckabee would agree with the rest of his statement–that the world is “on the edge of” suffering God’s wrath–he gravely responded, “Our belief in what the word of the Lord says will match very closely.”
My latest is up at the Nation. I’m still working on my book so blogging will continue to be very slow.
With President George W. Bush only a year away from departing the White House and the Republican succession in turmoil some of the most prominent conservative intellectuals and activists have gathered together for one last great crusade. Movement icons from Robby George of Princeton to Harvey Mansfield of Harvard, from David Horowitz to Brit Hume, raised howls of persecution when they learned that two masked men allegedly attacked a conservative Princeton University student. They insisted that the right-wing acolyte was beaten up “for his conservative views,†as Horowitz put it. And they accused Princeton of failing to protect conservatives and upholding a hypocritical liberal double standard. Unfortunately, the trumpeted cause collapsed when the victim turned out to be a hoaxer.
The embarrassing episode for the conservative leaders began last week when Francisco Nava, a junior at Princeton University, appeared at the hospital with cuts and bruises covering his face. He claimed that two unidentified men repeatedly bashed his head against a brick wall, shouting to “shut the fuck up.â€
Nava is a member of a student group called the Anscombe Society. Named for G.E.M. Anscombe, a British philospher who opposed her country’s involvement in World War Two, the group was founded to promote “a chaste lifestyle which respects and appreciates human sexuality, relationships, and dignity.†The Anscombe Society explained its abstinence advocacy on its website: “The nature of this sexual act is itself unitive—two become one flesh. Sex is thus the actualization of the marital union, concretizing the mutual gift of self between the partners.â€
Nava, a conservative Mormon, claimed his troubles began when he wrote a column for the student newspaper, The Princetonian, called “Princeton’s latex lies.†He warned “the infectious threat posed by Princeton’s hookup culture†would spread if the school continued its policy of free condom distribution. “What Princeton’s condom campaign amounts to is a tacit sponsorship of hookup sex,†Nava declared.
Nava claimed in the wake of his column that he and other Anscombe members were bombarded by a deluge of death threats from liberal students enraged by their brave stand against promiscuity on campus. Princeton jurisprudence Professor Robert George, a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, conservative star and occasional White House advisor, also reported receiving death threats as the faculty adviser to his student, Francisco Nava.
On December 13, the Princetonian published a column by an Anscombe member demanding justice for Nava’s persecution. “There is an intolerable double standard here — one that the University must erase if it is to be true to its own core values,†Princeton sophomore Brandon McGinley insisted.
Nava earnestly described his plight. “For several days I lived in fear of saying, writing or even thinking anything controversial in class or informally among my friends,†he told the Princetonian on December 14.
The following day, Nava placed an emergency call to the campus police, claiming he had just been brutally attacked by two men wearing black stocking caps. They slammed him into a wall, he said, and beat him with a bottle of Orangina. While being escorted to the campus health center by the police, Nava reportedly spotted a student wearing a black stocking cap. “Get that guy’s name,†Nava shouted to a security guard, pointing at the student. He began hyperventilating and was administered a large dose of sedatives. Almost at once, as soon as Robby George heard about the alleged attack, he rushed to Nava’s side and launched the campaign to defend him.
Who is Robby George? As the leading light at Princeton for the conservative movement, George founded the James Madison Program, an academic center within the university that serves as a testing ground for the right’s effort to politicize college campuses. As I reported for the Nation in 2006, George’s program is funded by a stable of right-wing foundations and a shadowy web of front groups for the Catholic cult known as Opus Dei. An article in Crisis, a conservative Catholic magazine then published by George’s ally Deal Hudson, highlighted George’s machinations, stating, “If there really is a vast, right-wing conspiracy, its leaders probably meet in George’s basement.â€
For years, George has complained that Princeton actively discriminated against conservative students. “If they find out he’s pro-life or against same-sex marriage, he might be cut off, or not be able to get through graduate school,†he told me, describing the school’s purported unfairness.
But before George triumphantly pointed to Nava’s beating as proof of anti-conservative bias on campus, he had been presented with evidence that Nava, while at the Groton boarding school, had fabricated a threat against himself and his roommate, head of the Gay-Straight Alliance, in the form of a letter reading “die fags.†The letter may have raised doubts in George’s mind, but not strongly enough to deter him from attacking Princeton’s administration.
In the wake of Nava’s latest story about being assaulted, George immediately went to the neoconservative daily, the New York Sun, and exclaimed, “Are there double standards and reforms that need to be made? Absolutely.â€
George insisted that Nava, in all likelihood, was telling the truth. “Those of us who saw him at the emergency room find it difficult to believe he could have done this himself. The physical manifestations were too evident, too severe,†he told the Sun.
George was promptly joined by a chorus of conservative culture warriors infuriated by the lack of outrage. Harvey Mansfield, the most important conservative figure at Harvard, mentor to leading neoconservatives, who has written a book-length ode to machismo called â€Manliness†called for a manly response to Nava’s supposed beating. “I hope Princeton comes down on them like a ton of bricks, and by Princeton I mean either the university or the township or both,†Mansfield proclaimed. “It should be easy for liberals to identify a case of intolerance; they’re good at that.â€
David Horowitz, a neoconservative activist, who has devoted much of his career to combating the supposed scourge of anti-conservative bias on campus, instantly weighed in on the Nava affair. “It’s a terrible incident but it doesn’t surprise me,†Horowitz told the Sun. “The left has now become the hate group.â€
On December 17, Horowitz reposted the Sun’s account of Nava’s alleged beating on his website of his magazine, Frontpagemag. Beneath a link to the prominently displayed article, a caption read, “Student beaten unconscious for conservative views.â€
Fox News anchor Brit Hume also leapt into the fracas. The headline of his report on the Nava affair on Fox’s website read, “Little Outrage Over Student Beating At Princeton University.â€
A host of right-wing bloggers joined the outcry. “I wonder if this will get the attention that politically-reversed assaults would get?†mused Glenn Reynolds, the author of the blog, Instapundit. A blogger at Redstate.com mocked author and expert on hate crimes, David Neiwert over the Nava incident, challenging him to report on what could be a “fairly serious hate crime.â€
For several hours, on December 17, conservatives announced that their darkest fears of persecution had been realized. A pious student had been beaten by liberal brownshirts simply for speaking out in favor of traditional morality. If the student were gay or black, conservatives reasoned, the entire student body would have erupted in massive protests. Instead, the administration stood silently to the side. Princeton graduate and conservative writer Michael Fragoso told the Sun, “There would rightly be outrage had the student been part of some other minority on campus.â€
At last, an incident surfaced that proved what movement figures had long maintained: campus conservatives are a minority that suffers far harsher oppression than the blacks, Latinos and gays who form the “politically correct†vanguard of liberal identity politics.
But on the night of December 17, as the conservative firestorm was being whipped to a frenzy, there was another development. Nava confessed to Princeton Township Police that he had invented the entire incident. They had suspected the veracity of his tale all along. Signs of an elaborate hoax had been present from the beginning, from Nava’s history of fabricating death threats to his cinematic description of his latest victimization.
Nava’s hoax fit neatly into an epidemic of faked hate crimes on college campuses across America. But in their eagerness to stage-manage the unfolding political drama, leaders of the conservative movement grazed over these inconvenient details.
When Nava was exposed as a fabricator, his defenders disappeared almost as fast as they had mobilized. Rather than issue a correction or update, Horowitz scrubbed all accounts of the bogus attack from his website. (Media Matters has a cached version of Horowitz’s report here).
Robby George, who had been quick to condemn the university, now praised Princeton for its measured response to the Nava affair. “Princeton, all the way from the administrators down, had the good sense to hold their fire, get the facts first, before drawing conclusions,†he told the Princetonian.
George also congratulated himself for his own calmness in the crisis and sharp wittedness in uncovering the fraud. “Within 72 hours,†he said, “we were able to expose this as a hoax.â€
But, of course, Nava’s claims were never “exposed†by George or his conservative campus allies. Nava had reportedly confessed to his lying under police questioning. Only hours before George celebrated the “good sense†he and university administrators displayed, he had accused Princeton of upholding a liberal double standard. And while Princeton police investigated dubious details of the alleged assault, George broadcasted his confidence in Nava’s melodramatic account.
