April 8, 2013 could be a day to welcome immigrants and people from other nations. My colleague and friend Dr. Mohammad Mahallati, at Oberlin College, wants Congress to declare April 8 International Friendship Day. Mahallati, from a family with generations of Imams, says "difference is a blessing." He has his...

The Newtown, Connecticut school shooting may be part of a sinister Israeli intelligence operation according to retired professor James Fetzer. The Duluth News Tribune reported this week week that Fetzer claimed "Israeli Mossad death squads and the U.S. government might have been behind the school shootings." Fetzer

No one ever lost money by betting against the apocalypse happening on a particular day. That's a joke among scholars of apocalypticism, and it was a considered a hoot at meetings of the Center for Millennial Studies (CMS).

I was on the advisory board of CMS and wrote the entry...

It became clear in 2011 that there was a broad attack on working people, especially those in unions. Ultraconservative members of the House of Representatives, including members of the Tea Party Caucus, relentlessly introduce legislation that would benefit the rich and powerful and slice up the economic safety net most...

Every time the government uses the term "extremist" it helps justify political repression against political opponents.

Every time the term "extremist" is used to describe a political opponent, it marginalizes political dissent across the political spectrum.

Every time liberals and leftists use the term "extremist" it undermines the...

Why has Obama's Justice Department failed to take action to stop the training of counterterrorism agents by anti-Muslim bigots?

One website in particular has carried over 25 articles mentioning one of the most outlandish bigots, Walid Shobat. These online articles date back to 2008.

Over at the website Talk to...

Tea Party enthusiasts in Massachusetts are falling off the right side of the wharf.   A recent event featured a bevy of well-known aggressive right-wingers and conspiracy mongers. Meeting in Boston's Faneuil Hall, near where the first Tea Party protest took place in 1773, some 200 people gathered Sunday,...

This essay first appeared as "Abstaining from Bad Sects: Understanding Sects, Cadres, and Mass Movement Organizations," Resist Newsletter, Somerville, MA: Resist, Vol. 8, No. 10, December 1999. It has fallen off the website of Resist, so I re-publish it here due to several recent requests.

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A small group of fanatics plan to hijack a memorial event on Sunday ostensibly dedicated to the memory of soldiers who died in an attack last year at Fort Hood, Texas. The event will feature speakers with a long history of vicious anti-Islamic bigotry and rhetoric that targets not the...

Fred V. Malek, is a key political strategist for the American Action Network which just spent some $7 million to unseat Congressional Democrats with votes from the Tea Partiers. Malek is in the midst of a renewed controversy stemming from an incident in 1988. Malek resigned his post at the...

The story surfaces nationally with a surreal Glenn Beck segment and two ludicrous Fox News discussions highlighting the false claim that Brandeis University was hosting an international conference linking the Tea Party movement to Nazis in Europe. The conference, which took place yesterday, revealed the entire propaganda campaign was a...

That armed militias in the midwest were preparing for an actual battle with agents of the Antichrist is not a surprise. Fear mongering has become epidemic on the political right. Why now? Since the millennium comes at the end of the Tribulations, its approach is constantly expected, and not necessarily...

Is it a surprise that an angry citizen, John Patrick Bedell, attacked the entrance to the Pentagon? Was it a surprise that an angry taxpayer flew his small plane into an IRS office? These and other acts of violence are linked to a form of apocalyptic conspiracism rampant in the...

Eric Ward is nervous. He's seen it before -- the angry right-wing populist crowds, the strident calls to "Restore America" and "Take it Back." In the mid 1990s Ward was a community organizer for a human rights group in the Pacific Northwest. As a burly young black man with a...

The Senate committee hearing on Islamic terrorism staged today by Sen. Joseph Lieberman is an example of flawed, biased, or discredited scholarship being used in a zealous propaganda campaign that will do little to enhance public safety and much to expand bigotry against Muslims in the United States.

The U.S....

Yesterday Republican Congressman Steve King of Iowa said Gay Marriage was part of socialist plan. Why does this make sense in a Christian Right worldview?

How did the post WWII Christian Right shift from a focus on the military defeat of godless global communism to a policing of our...

There is a seismic shift occurring in the political Right as established organizations scramble to respond to the new wave of right-wing populism.

The Republican Party and its largest single voting bloc, the Christian Right, are split in how to respond to the rapid emergence of a right-wing populist movement...

Listening to the rhetoric and reading the placards at recent right-wing events has led many progressive observers to conclude that "these folks are nuts!" Well, they are no more crazy or ignorant than most Americans (stifle that giggle), but they do live inside a bubble.

We all live inside our...

A lot of mileage has been made about the confrontations between two TV reporters at the 2009 Christian Right Values Voter Summit in Washington, DC this weekend.

I was there. Let me offer a different version of events. The two reporters were rude and lazy and disruptive. Other video standups...

Even before Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States, the Internet was seething with lurid conspiracy theories exposing his alleged subversion and treachery.

Among the many false claims: Obama was a secret Muslim; he was not a native U.S. citizen and his election as...