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July 24, 2015 06:20 PM UTC

Bigots, Birchers, and Islamophobes in Colorado Mainstream Now

  • 16 Comments
  • by: kwtree

(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Groups promoting hatred and fear of Muslims, gays, immigrants, unionized workers, and people of color are openly meeting in Colorado. These meetings are being promoted by mainstream Republican activists, and are aimed at influencing policy by informing local law enforcement and legislators of the  “threats” these groups pose. The John Birch Society had an Executive Dinner in Denver July 24.  RMGO is promoting an anti-Muslim training session for law enforcement, community and the public Aug. 13-15.

John Birch Society- the Founding Bigots

The John Birch Society met July 24, at the Doubletree Hilton Hotel in North Denver.  Many mainstream GOP activists planned to attend, according to their Facebook pages. The John Birch Society (JBS) has a long history of racism and religious bigotry in the United States, and was where the Koch Brothers learned how to prey upon the fears of the ignorant.

In the JBS world view, communists are everywhere.

The JBS had its origins in the McCarthy era, as an anti-Communist group.  “Birchers” preached that all Civil Rights Movement leaders and actions were Communist-inspired. My father, an editorial writer for the Post, used to rail about the “Goddamn Birchers” who would oppose every piece of civil rights or anti-poverty legislation in Denver, and tried to suppress his editorials in the 1960s.

Although JBS leadership now wears three-piece suits, and meets at $50 a plate fundraising dinners in nice hotel ballrooms, their messaging has changed very little: “Those people” (leftists, feminists, unionists, environmentalists, gays, Muslims, the UN, Democrats, people of color promoting Obama’s “race war”) are conspiring to take away your American way of life,  and they must be stopped, preferably with a hefty donation to the JBS. 

The JBS contributes heavily to “Right to Work” and other ALEC- generated legislation.  Colorado legislators are rated  on the JBS “Freedom Index”. Rated at 70% or higher: Mike Coffman, Doug Lamborn, Scott Tipton,  Cory Gardner, and Ken Buck . It will be interesting to see which of these Republican politicians attended the JBS dinner.

 John Guandalo: RMGO sponsored workshops August 13-15 on “Understanding the Threat” of the Global Islamic Movement

Publicity for previous Guandolo presentation
Publicity for Guandalo’s “Understanding the Threat” presentation in Culpeper, VA. This event, like many of Guandolo’s “trainings” was canceled due to public pressure.

 

“American Muslims do not have a First Amendment right to do anything.” – John Guandolo, from his Understanding the Threat trainings, quoted by the Southern Poverty Law Center

 

 

Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, known in Colorado circles for opposing gun-limiting legislation, is sponsoring John Guandalo, disgraced former FBI agent and current anti-Muslim speaker, at the Centennial Gun Club August 13-15, 2015. Guandolo plans to present the “Threat of the Global Islamic Movement” to an audience of law enforcement professionals, legislators, church security, and the public. 

Flyer for August 13-15 event at Centennial Gun Club in Colorado.

Although Guandalo stands firmly on his FBI /counterterrorism past experience, he does not talk about how he was fired from the FBI for having a sexual relationship with a witness; nor does he talk about how the FBI is now backing away from some of the inflammatory anti-Muslim propaganda he helped to inspire at the agency. Guandalo’s latest extremist rant was his insistence that John Brennan, Obama’s CIA Director, is a secret convert to the Muslim Brotherhood.  And you know what that makes Obama.

I forced myself to watch 20 minutes of Guandolo’s 2014 presentation at Colorado Christian University. Although the “facts” he presents are not facts but paranoid fears and opinions, he doesn’t come off as crazy. He is well-spoken, clean-shaven, humorous, a competent communicator. He lectures on this same anti-Islamic theme all over the country, although his presentations have been canceled in Virginia, Kansas, Texas and Arizona, as public pressure from churches, community organizations, and citizens was brought to bear. Many people of good will believe that this anti-Muslim bigotry poisons our political discourse, inside and outside the United States.

Guandalo’s presentation in Centennial should be canceled, as it has been in four other states. I’m calling on our Attorney General, Cynthia Coffman, as chief law enforcement officer in Colorado, and all local Sheriff Departments, to boycott Guandalo’s presentation to law enforcement officers, as has been done in Kansas, Texas, Arizona, and Virginia.

Organizations like the ACLU,  the Interfaith Alliance,  the Center for American Islamic Relations,   Right Wing Watch, and concerned individuals and faith groups have stopped Guandolo from spewing his poison in other communities. I’ve written to these and other groups, and will update in these pages on how that’s going. Hopefully, Guandolo and RMGO will find that Colorado, too, is “no state for hate”.

 

–crossposted at Daily Kos

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16 thoughts on “Bigots, Birchers, and Islamophobes in Colorado Mainstream Now”

  1. As a longtime Post editorial writer myself, mamajama, may I ask who your father was?  

    "Writing an editorial is like wetting your pants in a blue surge suit.   You feel warm all over and nobody notices."

  2. Jeez, Mama……the John Birch Society is a name I haven't thought of in years!

    What with the Tea Party, the 1994 Republican Revolution, Americans for Prosperity, Focus on the Family, Moral Majority, Christian Coalition and all the other shit we've had to hear from during the past 20 years, I had spaced out the Birch Society. Because they made a fetish of Communism, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, I figured they went the way of Gorbachev. 

     

    What was their mantra again: Better dead than red?

    1. Better Dead than Red…it kept us in Vietnam for eight years. Americans for Prosperity, as the Koch Brothers PAC, is more or less the grandchild of the John Birch Society. For decades, the JBS, and  Koch Industries, traded funds back and forth. 

      A couple of the lessons the junior Kochs learned Koch, Sr. were:

      Go big or go home.

      Appeal to people's worst fears – that's where the money is.

      JBS seems almost childishly simple in comparison to the funding labyrinth the Koch Brothers built, where the industries fund the foundation, which funds several other groups, which then funnel monies out to candidates and causes, and back to the foundation…it's dizzying.

      Where the JBS was just: You give us money, we make people fear Commies.

  3. Rachel Maddow has been documenting the influence of the Birchers and white supremacist groups on the Republicans.  To the point they are the same.entity today.

    1. The Birchers are trying to distance themselves from overt racists these days. They are even, laughably, trying to recruit gays and people of color into their organization.  Can't find the link right now, but it's gigglesome. And I'm sure that they will find some people willing to be the token faces of tolerance….for a price.

      Anyway, the Birchers morphed into the tea party, but are now trying to reinvent themselves as the libertarian, socially liberal wing of the GOP. While they wait for their old timey bigots to slowly die off.

      1. Years ago my mother-in-law's cousin sent her a subscription to the John Birch Society magazine as a Christmas present. My mother-in-law was in her 80s, lived with us and was not the least interested. When an issue arrived in my mail box with a cover story about how we were tricked into WWII by evil Roosevelt and the whole holocaust thing was way overblown that was it. I took it upon myself to call and cancel the gift subscription. It wasn't mine so I really had no right but I wasn't going to have that garbage arriving at my home in my mailbox. I feel sorry for the poor customer service gal who asked this Chicago Jew and daughter and niece of Jewish WWII vets why we wanted to cancel. She got an earful.

  4. The article would have been more effective if the "mainstream Republican activists" in the 2nd sentence had been identified. Somehow, I don't see Dud Brown as a "mainstream activist."  

    "Birchers morphed into the tea party……"  I think that is an over-simplification; the tea party is more complex than that; lots of branches and separate entities. If anything, I'd think the religious right has a much stronger grip on some of the various tea party groups than the Birchers.

    "Organizations…….have stopped Guandolo from spewing his poison……."  I agree that the guy is a loon, especially where he is quoted about the 1st Amendment not applying to Muslims. Still, the man is also covered by the 1st Amendment and it is far too p.c. in these times to shout down people, or eliminate forums for people who others disagree with.    C.H.B.

    1. Like it or not (I don't), Dudley Brown is a mainstream Republican activist. He has bought off more Republican legislators than your average high school football team. His fixation on one issue (gun rights) has made him more effective on that one issue than most other conservatives.

      As evidence, I offer that after the Columbine and Aurora, and New Life massacres  in Colorado, we only have background checks and a magazine limit to show for it, and we sacrificed three good senators (Morse, Giron, Hudak) paying for that.

      The other people promoting the JBS dinner on Facebook were your mainstream GOP operatives – on the committees, recruiting volunteers, staffing offices, recording the minutes. And no, I can’t put their names here.

      You're probably right that I'm oversimplifying the Tea Party. But John Birch's own daughter thinks so.

      Do you disagree that Guandolo's message is poison? I think hating Muslims for their religion is every bit as toxic as any other religious bigotry over the millenia. You know: the pogroms, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, the witch burnings, the Irish Troubles,  the Crusades, back to throwing Christians to the lions in Roman times. We're all sophisticated enough politically to know that religious differences were mostly just a mask for power and land grabs, but effective for all that.

      As far as Guandolo's first amendment rights, he has them. RMGO can pay him to spew his bigotry on private property, the Centennial Gun Club in this case, and the paranoid public can fork over their hard-earned bucks to hear him on Saturday and Sunday.

      Where I will fight, and I am fighting this one, is that our police and legislators should also get publicly sanctioned leave to  put prejudice into policy. We don't need police thinking that any man with a Middle Eastern or African accent and a beard, or any woman in a hijab, is a terrorist. We don't need legislators believing that there are ISIS camps camped along the Mexican border.  (I know -Buck and Woods already think that). So we don't need to reinforce those beliefs, because they will ultimately translate into bad policy.

      As a teacher last year in Greeley, I had many Muslim students, mostly from Somalia, but some from Asian countries. Refugees, mind you, who had to flee their homes in fear of ISIS or Al Qaeda, or Al Shabab, or Boko Haram, or another gangster with a religious excuse for terrorizing people. 

      In learning English, I had them learning to research on the Internet. I remember one time, when an especially bright young Somali man came across an entry on "Islamic Science", which showed a goofy looking guy in a turban, and "humorously" implied that all Muslims thought that the earth was flat.  This was a kid who got As in science, even though he was still learning English. I remember the anguish and rage in his eyes, that no matter how smart he was, how patriotic, (he loved him some Obama), the world still thought he was stupid and ignorant because of his religion. And I thought, this is how ISIS recruits. They have only to wait until our own bigotry enforces the belief that it doesn't matter how westernized they become, what good patriots they are, we will never be able to see beyond the skin and the accent and the prayers to Allah.  I still think that.

      For example, in Florida, Guandolo was able to speak to private citizens, but police had to go on their own days off and received no promotion credits for attending his "education". So in CO, Guandolo's special Friday session for law enforcement should be cancelled – period. I want cops on the beat, not listening to a kook misinform them.

      Legislators should also go on their own time, which I guess is the weekend.

      If you agree, write to Attorney General Coffman about it. She's the top law enforcement officer in the state. Get your church/congregation/mosque/temple to write, too.

      Here's her contact info:

      Attorney General Cynthia Coffman

      Ralph L. Carr Colorado Judicial Center
      1300 Broadway, 10th Floor
      Denver, Colorado 80203
      P: 720-508-6000
      F: 720-508-6030
      Attorney.General@state.co.us

      Twitter: @CynthiaHCoffman

       

      1. Your story about your student breaks my heart. I can't imagine what it must be like to move to the US as a refugee and be told by a group of loud, stupid people that you'll never be considered a "True American" because you're an A-Rab. That pisses me off!

  5. "Do you disagree that Guandolo's message is poison?"   Like I said; and this is my first exposure to the gentleman; he's a loon  (no offense intended to the bird that may become Canada's national bird).  

    1. Well there's a big fat nothing response to mama's thoughtful, fact filled post.  You're usually not quite this dickish. Guess it must be because you've got nothing.

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