Mainstreaming hate

I noted this in an update to my previous post about Jerome Corsi having been scheduled to appear on a white supremacist radio program which is syndicated at the white nationalist web forum Stormfront, but Corsi failed to appear on the radio show, supposedly because of a change in travel plans.

A LA Times review of Corsi's book that Digby spotted demonstrates why Corsi's message would be so well received by such bigots.

You can pretty well sum the whole thing up this way: The Democratic candidate is a deceitful jihadist drug addict who, if elected, plans to impose a black supremacist, socialist regime.

That's the same sort of thing that the racists at Stormfront say on a regular basis. When they say it, we know its bigotry. Yet Corsi gets to go on Fox News and say it and get published by a major book publisher and pretend its not the extremist cant that it is.

At least one Stormfronter know white nationalism when he sees it

Lovely, far right wing White books like The Obama Nation are beoming number one according to the New York Times. And the so called White Hate group writings are becomng respectable in America.

The jews and blacks must be having convulsions over this.

Digby points out that Dave Neiwert has written extensively about the way that media transmitters within the conservative movement help to inject extremist views into the mainstream.

Not only do they inject the extremist meme into mainstream conservatism, they also condition the mainstream to think of extremists in a generous and even collegial light. Simultaneously, they persuade extremists who might otherwise align themselves with marginal and powerless fringe groups to instead perceive that mainstream conservatives are capable of addressing their issues, thereby drawing them into the political ranks of mainstream conservatism.

Jerome Corsi is a perfect example of that.

One day he's appearing on a white supremacist radio show. Another day he's on Fox News promoting a book he had published by a publishing imprint run by a Republican political operative.* Corsi walks in both worlds, making the extreme, as the quoted Stormfronter puts it, "respectable."

Digby makes this same point, and observes the asymmetry in the nature of the way what is "extreme" is defined in mainstream American political discourse.

Dave Neiwert has, as you all undoubtedly know, written reams about how the right mainstreams its extremists. And this is one case where I think it's come fully to fruition, right out in the open. Corsi is not just a right wing ideologue. He's a full fledged nutcase, and yet he was hired by a major publisher, "edited" by a star GOP villager, to write an incendiary book of lies about the Democratic presidential candidate. They aren't even trying to keep their fingerprints off this thing.

In fact, the default position among Democrats, Republicans and the media is that the only kooks in the country with whom it is unacceptable to be professionally or financially involved are on the left. And "the left" is defined so broadly that it includes groups like MoveOn and Vote Vets. The right, in contrast, has fully integrated even their extremist fringe into the mainstream and everyone accepts it.

*More on that in a future post.