The Media and the Far Right: Showcasing the Crude, the Violent and the Aberrant

Last Sunday in the October 10, 2010 New York Times, two very lengthy features appeared on the rancid Ann Coulter and the blogger Pamela Geller—a grotesque anti-Semite against Arabs who flaunts her sweeping bigotry as a badge of pride. Geller even called herself a ‘racist-Islamophobic-anti-Muslim-bigot’. One veteran reporter called the sprawling two page feature, with all of twenty color photos “an advertisement.”

Anyone with such open and flaunted hatred against Jews would either be ignored or slammed paragraph by paragraph with denunciations consigning the sick character into media oblivion.

The latest Coulter feature, one of many in the mainstream media over the years, chronicles her efforts to reinvent her shouts since she is being outflanked “on the right by the Tea Party.”

The Roots of James Lee's Rage against Civilization

Bron Taylor is an Environmental Studies scholar at the University of Florida with whom I once worked to develop an Environmental Studies program when we were both at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. Among other things, his scholarly work has paid close attention to environmental movements around the world, from radical to mainstream manifestations, with special attention to their ethical, spiritual, and political dimensions.

After hearing about the incident in Maryland yesterday where a protester was shot and killed by police after threatening employees at the Discovery Channel's headquarters claiming the channel was not doing enough to save the planet, I thought of Taylor as someone who might help us make sense of the situation. My hunch was quickly confirmed when I learned that Lee had been influenced by the novels written by Daniel Quinn, for I knew Taylor had written about Quinn's influence on environmentalists in his new book, Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future. (More about his book and writings can be found on his website.)