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| MSNBC's Matthews: Fear Mongering Over "New Right" | | Print | |
| Written by William F. Jasper | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Saturday, 19 June 2010 13:15 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The great unveiling of "Rise of the New Right," came on a special presentation of Hardball on June 16. For all of the hand wringing and hyperventilating by Matthews, Maddow, and company about the supposedly scary, violent, angry, hateful, extremist, racist nature of the growing opposition to Big Government in general and President Obama in particular, the hour-long program was amazingly threadbare. Unable to produce any genuine evidence to back up the ongoing liberal meme of a dangerous threat to the Republic posed by conservatives and Tea Party activists, Matthews and his MSNBC crew resorted to the usual media tricks: heavy on quick-cut images of Tea Party rallies and activists interspersed with anti-Obama signs, lots of images of people with guns, and snippets of interviews with and statements by conservatives carefully cropped to fit a menacing narrative boosted by ominous music and Matthews' angst-ridden commentary. Matthews' mission is two-fold. He wants to suggest that there's little daylight between people who figure in Washington polite company, like fellow commentator Pat Buchanan or Dick Armey, the leader of the activist outfit FreedomWorks, and those who are positioned closer to the fringe, like Beck or online radio host Alex Jones. Placing Buchanan and Armey, as well as Palin and Paul, in the same space as Jones, who warns of a forthcoming "police state" designed "to carry out an orderly extermination of at least 80 percent" of Americans, is a neat trick. It will come in handy for those on the left looking for a compelling storyline heading into this fall's election. A "neat trick"? Perhaps, but nothing new. Actually, it's rather old hat: the media cooking up something "handy for those on the left" going into the election cycle. Jacobs continues: Matthews' second aim is to show that the hate and fear on the right is nothing new. It existed before the stock analyst's rant and before [Glenn] Beck's chalkboard displays of paranoia. Matthews gathers the whole gang of conservative prophets, who bemoaned the coming totalitarianism of the American state during the last century, for a brief reunion. Father Coughlin, Strom Thurmond, Joseph McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, a young Ronald Reagan, Phyllis Schlafly, and Buchanan, once again, are all invited to take credit for the right's current hysteria. Matthews' point is clear: The tea partier, spouting off about her Muslim president who wants to steal her liberties, may be shallow, but her connection to American history is deep. Hate, fear, paranoia, hysteria — the default emotive lexicon of the liberal-left when they can't honestly debate the issues. Jacobs culminates with the following comments: At last, Matthews offers his own bit of prophecy, pointing to the violence of the recent past in Oklahoma City as one possible path for the American future. When the words of Barry Goldwater — "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" — turn up on a brick thrown through the window of a local Democratic committee, the pundit's history lesson doesn't seem so farfetched. That, of course, is precisely what Matthews is aiming at. In "Rise of the New Right" Matthews attempts to sharpen and concentrate the message he has been harping on for months: that the angry rhetoric of Tea Partiers and other voters ticked off about unresponsive Big Government and destructive, out-of-control spending, is somehow seditious and portends violent insurrection. In his "documentary," as on his past Hardball episodes, Matthews feigns serious alarm over the adoption by the Tea Party movement and other patriot groups of the Gadsden flag — the historic Revolutionary War flag with a yellow field and the coiled rattlesnake, with the legend "DON'T TREAD ON ME." For some reason Matthews insists on seeing in this patriotic invocation of a symbol of our heritage (which was also one of the earliest symbols of the United States Marine Corps) some sort of threat of violent armed rebellion. We are not aware of any similar anxiety from Matthews regarding the ubiquitous Che Guevarra images adorning the t-shirts, caps, and posters of his fellow left-wing anti-war demonstrators. Of course, in the circles which he associates, the Gadsden symbol of defiance against tyranny is probably more threatening than a silk screen of Che, who helped institute murderous Communist tyranny in Cuba and endorsed and supported it elsewhere. The villains he has lined up for his Rogues Gallery of the Right — Senator Joe McCarthy, Senator Barry Goldwater, John Birch Society founder Robert Welch, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rep. Michele Bachman, Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, Rev. Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly, Alan Keyes, former Rep. Dick Armey, Tea Party activists — really just don't look or sound that scary or crazy. They are expressing concern about the ever-growing power, reach, and cost of government, and the concomitant steady destruction of the constitutional restraints on that government. Their appeals are for rolling back government to its proper constitutional bounds, not for overthrowing or destroying it, as Matthews implies. Even the militia members, who were interviewed while conducting armed exercises in the snow-covered Michigan woods, probably wouldn't come across to most Americans as the menacing threat Matthews had hoped; those interviewed seemed pretty calm, rational, thoughtful, and level-headed. Matthews feigns that this is dangerous talk, but the "take our country back" slogan has been around forever — and employed by both parties. As Matthews' own documentary shows, MSNBC's Pat Buchanan used the line back in 1992. But Matthews fails to note that Howard Dean even wrote a book titled You Have the Power: How to Take Back Our Country and Restore Democracy in America. Matthews has welcomed Howard Dean as a guest on Hardball without ever suggesting that Dean's rhetoric had put him in league with Timothy McVeigh or other terrorists. The implication is that Palin was suggesting to her followers that those members of Congress should be gunned down. But, as Jim Hoft of GatewayPundit and others have pointed out, the Democratic Leadership Council used a similar map with similarly "violent" targeting in 2004 (still on the DLC website here). Matthews began making a major issue of this back in April. "I've never seen language like this in the American press," Matthews said on Hardball, "referring to an elected representative government, elected in a totally fair, democratic, American election.... We know that word, 'regime.' ... You go to war with regimes. Regimes are tyrannies. They're juntas. They're military coups. The use of the word 'regime' in American political parlance is unacceptable, and someone should tell the walrus [Rush Limbaugh] to stop using it." [O]n June 14, 2002, Chris Matthews himself introduced a panel discussion about a letter signed by many prominent leftists condemning the Bush administration's conduct of the war on terror. "Let's go to the Reverend Al Sharpton," Matthews said. "Reverend Sharpton, what do you make of this letter and this panoply of the left condemning the Bush regime?" (Full disclosure: This writer and others at The New American have applied the word "regime" to both the Bush and Obama administrations. We are completely nonpartisan in this respect and condemn authoritarian and unconstitutional usurpations of power regardless of the party label worn by the usurper.) • Mark Potok, Southern Poverty Law Center: Potok, a darling of the liberal-left media, has established himself as the "go to" guy for defamatory charges against conservatives and hit pieces masquerading as "research" and "intelligence reports" that smear opponents by bracketing them with neo-Nazis or other miscreants guaranteed to taint by association — even if there is no genuine association. Potok tells Matthews: "We've gone from numbers like, you know, 170 militias, to well over 500. There is a huge amount of anger out there. What we're really lacking at this moment is a kind of spark." • Eric Burns, president of Media Matters for America: Media Matters is a far-left organization funded by homosexual activist James Hormel (of the Hormel Foods empire), George Soros, Peter Lewis of Progressive Insurance, the Ford Foundation, the Furman Foundation, the Tides Foundation, and Hollywood producer/activist Stephen Leo Bing. Media Matters regularly issues reports claiming to show that the major media — not just talk radio and Fox News, but virtually all the major media — are actually conduits of right-wing propaganda. According to these folks, claims of a liberal-left bias in the media are completely baseless. • Allan Lichtman, political historian at American University: Although I am not familiar with Prof. Lichtman, according to the entry for him on Wikipedia, "Lichtman has testified as an expert witness ... for civil rights groups such as the NAACP, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund and Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the Southern Poverty Law Center. He also consulted for Vice President Al Gore and Senator Edward Kennedy." Lichtman's appearance was used to provide the documentary with the obligatory academic imprimatur and a Lichtman statement tying conservatives to anti-Semitism. But perhaps the best illustration of the utter vacuity and hypocrisy of Matthews' claim to concern over supposed "extremism" in America and its possibly leading to violence and terrorism is his Hardball interview with "former" (but still unrepentant) Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. Matthews the hard-knuckled hardballer was all softballs and solicitude, and oh-so willing to help the terrorist-turned-teacher (and Obama neighbor, colleague, and early prominent supporter) avoid having to answer any tough questions. (Because even many well-informed readers may be somewhat hazy on Bill Ayers' terrorist background and his ongoing extremist ties to anti-American groups and foreign communist regimes, I am providing links here to several previous online articles on Ayers from The New American that provide considerable detail on his notorious recent and past activities: "Terrorist Bill Ayers Misrepresents His Past", "Obama's Terrorist Ties and Radical Roots" and "Obama's Friend Ayers: Kill 25 Million Americans.") Armed with the information in the articles above, it should be pretty difficult for any thinking, moral person to view Matthews' "interview" with Ayers as anything less than a disgusting syrupy valentine for an unreconstructed terrorist who participated in bombings (and with his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, may have actually planted bombs himself) and armored car robberies that resulted in the murder of several police officers. And, after watching William Ayers on Hardball, it should be obvious that it is Chris Matthews and his ilk in the Big Media, Big Government, and Big Academia whose extremism threatens America. Thumbnail photo: Chris Matthews in his "Rise of the New Right" documentary Trackback(0)
Comments (15)
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Henry Brown
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Expose It Great article. Matthews, Maddow, and all their lapdog ilk need to be held accountable for their blatant double standards and agitprop masquerading as "news." The chokehold these hypocrites have had on the flow of information accounts for the suicidal track record of the American electorate. |
Kenny O
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Just a bunch of Sheep. All just a bunch of sheep following the two parties who talk like they are different but more or less do the same thing when in office. Nothing will ever change or get fixed until we get a third party and eliminate the contributions that allow people with money to buy candidates. This new conservative group is kinda scary though. It's funny to hear them cry about the things Obama is doing but they were silent during the Bush years. That is why I don't take them seriously because they have no real message other then being party puppets and/or Racists. |
Letscheck
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BIll Ayers is a jerk I met Bill Ayer in the late 1960's and he was encouraging my friends to think that they were being used and manipulated to keep a war going and they were being used by the University. So my friends went for a march on the University that ended up being an attack on a house with a family inside: father, mother, and a child. I kept asking my friends if they did not realize that they were being manipulated. But within less than a week of meeting Ayers and Terry, they were sold on their ideas. Bill Ayers, his wife and his father are responsible for many deaths, and illegal actions that they have never been held accountable for because they were part of the Chicago Machine. |
LOL55
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... Great piece, thank you Mr. Jasper. I watched Matthew's "documentary" just for the fun of it, and frankly I'd be surprised if he doesn't win a few converts for the liberty movement. Even big government lovers can't be too excited about a big government that just takes money from the little guy to fund unconstitutional wars, bailouts for billionaire bankers, etc etc... Thanks Mr. Matthews! I hope and believe your lame attempt to slander American patriots will backfire. Good job! |
Flu-Bird
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Muttonhead Matheews Chris Matheews is no different then the rest of the left-wing spewers of socialists propeganda in the same line as TOKYO ROSE,LORD HAW HAW, and WALTER KRONKITE Its just that matheews is still alive |
Jim
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... Chris Matthews is not fair and balanced and is so obviously biased that he's been rendered ineffective. He's another guy that favors everything that will destroy the very country that allowed him to be successful. The left has been demonizing conservatives for decades. The day President Kennedy was murdered the left immediately blamed the "extreme right wing" for his assassination. If the Warren Report is to be believed, it was an extreme left wing communist--Lee Harvey Oswald--who killed him. Since the inception of The John Birch Society in 1958 the left wing has been calling them, and other conservative groups and individuals "kooks," "right wing nuts," "extremists," etc., for pointing out the ever increasing size, cost, and scope of our government as it left its constitutional moorings. As it turns out, our two party system with a one party platform were the extremists who have brought our country to this unhappy state of affairs with their anti-Americanist agenda. Nearly everything the conservatives were trying to stop has come to fruition, i.e, the giving away of the Panama Canal, more no-win wars, more power delegated to the world court and UN, the frittering away of US sovereignty, the march toward the New World Order we hear more and more about, massive debt and deficit, government meddling in the whole of our lives, government take over the health care system, the destruction of the greatest educational system in the world, crushing taxation, trade treaties that have sucked all the industrial jobs out of the country, and so forth. The Birch Society and others were only trying to toss water on their burning house in order to save it; that's not an extreme act. |
Red Pill Please
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Hypocrite of the Highest Order Great Article! I can't stomach Chris Matthews. Anyone who could state; "I felt a thrill going up my leg" listening to Obama has a serious neurological disorder. He also "forgot Obama was black" earlier this year. Wasn't Obama's mother white? Matthews' qualifications wouldn't merit a position on Comedy Central. He has zero credibility in my book. His 'Hardball' ratings are so low (less than 100,000/wk), it's obvious he preaches only to the choir of his looney left followers. |
Ron Bedell
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... This is another great article by William Jasper. This is very informative and we really appreciate William Jasper's great work. As far as Chris Matthews is concerned, I hardly ever watch him, because I know he is much too bias. His reporting is not objective at all and is one big smear campaign against the right wing. Seldom is any of his reporting based on any truth. Lastly, I would like to see more articles in the New American on the Disclose Act (HR 5175). This is extremely dangerous legislation. It is expected to be voted on this week by Congress. Thanks for your time. Ron Bedell |
Lee Gonzales
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It needs to dawn upon don... this isn't as you see it,don: one side calling the other names. This is not a case of the carbon-covered pot calling the soot laden kettle black. Don, the real extremists are the leftists who actually are the bomb throwers and the instigators of violence. Someone placed a bomb that killed a policeman. Evidence point to Bill Ayers' wife. Both he and his deranged wife are leftists. Ayers has the "cover" of a professor. And as the "cool dudes" say nowadays, Matthews "has his back." Matthews and others mentioned in this article ignore the left's violent nature and use their polish as talking heads to trick the viewer into believing that violent behavior comes not from the left. Since most violent people come from the ranks of the left wing groups (groups who have an affinity to collectivism)there is little choice for establishment manipulators to recruit other than from the left wing ranks. Despite the rhetoric the KKK is a left wing group. Their actions are those of the left wing despite their seemingly "right-wing" rhetoric. Don, the conservative respects property and loves his country and obeys the golden rule. Only by twisting the truth by talking heads like Matthews is the conservative (right winger) the villan. Most violent-prone people come from the "left" not from the "right." |
Mark
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... Maddow is commentary not news. What did Matthews say that was not true? The right does have a lot more crazies than the left. |
Lee Gonzales
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Mr.Dean we don't need that kind of talk... If you truly are a conservative then you need to stop reacting like the Sandinistas or the Castro brothers. |
Lee Gonzales
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Hold on there Mark.... Commentary still needs to be accurate or it's just propaganda and lies. You tell us that Rachael's afternoon spot is "commentary not news." Ok, fine, but don't commentators have to be accurate? Don't they have to backup their charges with facts? This is the rebuttal to Maddow's smear attack on the JBS:http://www.jbs.org/index.php?option=com_ccboard&view=postlist&forum=1&topic=411 Be specific,Mark.Where is the article incorrect? Point out the errors. Matthews comes unglued when people in the news refer to the Obama administration as a "regime." Matthews used the term "regime" when he organized his "panel of experts" to "analyse" the Bush administration.He showed his douuble standard colors with that one! You say: "The right does have a lot more crazies than the left." Ok, provide the proof and prove that these "crazies" are truly from the "right." Or are you just throwing bricks and telling everyone it was thrown by a right winger? |





For weeks MSNBC's Chris Matthews had been hyping and hawking his new soon-to-be-unveiled "documentary" on the Tea Party movement and the "New Right": On his own MSNBC nightly program, Hardball with Chris Matthews; on his NBC weekend program, The Chris Matthews Show; on the MSNBC Hardblogger post; on MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show; as well as on left-wing blogs and websites — The Daily Beast, The Daily Kos, The Huffington Post, etc.
Good job! 
