The Public Eye - Spring 2008- Vol. 23, No. 1
(Photo: Chroniclesmagazine.org)
Right-wing Populist Conspiracism Rebounds
By Chip Berlet
The same right-wing populist fears of a collectivist one-world government and new world order that fueled Cold War anticommunism, mobilized opposition to the Civil Rights Movement, and spawned the armed citizens militia movement in the 1990s, have resurfaced as an elaborate conspiracy theory about the alleged impending creation of a North American Union that would merge the United States, Canada, and Mexico.1
No such merger is seriously being contemplated by any of the three governments. Yet a conspiracy theory about the North American Union (NAU) simmered in right-wing “Patriot Movement” alternative media for several years before bubbling up to reach larger audiences in mass media when callers to talk radio and cable television news programs began asking about the alleged plans for the North American Union, and what was dubbed the “NAFTA Superhighway” linking Mexico to Canada through the American heartland. 2
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By Laura Carlsen
By Frederick Clarkson
One of the most remarkable, and least remarked upon, features of the contemporary discussion of faith in public life is that a defining feature of the religious right worldview has filtered deeply into mainstream and even progressive thought. This defining feature is the idea that somehow God, and/or Christianity, and/or “people of faith” are being driven from “the public square.” It is a powerfully animating idea for many Americans; yet it is rarely factually supported and even more rarely challenged.
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Web Only: One Raid at a Time: How Immigrant Crackdowns Build the National Security State
By Roberto Lovato
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The Right-Wing Roots of Marriage Promotion
By Jean V. Hardisty
After the 2000 presidential campaign, I felt a shock of recognition when I read that the George W. Bush Administration planned to use its “faith-based” funding to support organizations to encourage women, especially welfare recipients, to marry. The rationale was that marriage would cure their poverty. Wade Horn, appointed by Bush to be in charge of welfare programs at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), had been the titular head of “fatherhood movement.” Now inside the government, he morphed his fatherhood campaign of the 1990s — which promoted men as the God-given leader of families and obedient wives — into a government program to promote heterosexual marriage and fatherhood as a solution to the poverty of those who remained as welfare recipients.
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