I think Jim Naureckas' Erick Erickson/David Duke equation (FAIR Blog, 7/14/10) is overdrawn. Erickson was playing off remarks by King Samir Shabazz, the New Black Panther Party (NBPP)  member who stood in front of the largely African-American polling place in Philadelphia with a night stick in his hand. Shabazz is on record in another context saying that black men should kill white people, including children: "You want freedom, you're going to have to kill some crackers. You're going to have to kill their babies." So Erickson is not, as Jim says, "hallucinating" this kind of language--just exploiting it.

Erickson and the rest of the right-wing media establishment are trying to create a major scare by painting the NBPP as a black version of the Ku Klux Klan. But while there are certain rhetorical similarities, and these should not be lightly dismissed, the Klan actually killed black children. And while the NBPP is notorious for its hateful rhetoric--which deserves condemnation, to the extent that this marginal group warrants notice at all--there's scant evidence that its race-baiting language has ever been acted upon. The group seems to exist only to attract attention through its vile, racist rants.

So Erickson's suggestion that this creepy, powerless group  is actually likely to start "killing our kids"--and that the Obama administration is abetting this slaughter of white children--is simply politics. By linking Obama to violent black rhetoric, Erickson and his talk radio and Fox News allies are trying to turn this weak episode into a summer Swift Boat for the November elections. In other words, Erickson and his colleagues are engaging in racial rabble-rousing, much like the NBPP--but with a much more prominent platform and to much greater effect.

David Duke would not disapprove.

When he got a gig doing political commentary for CNN, hate-blogger Erick Erickson assured Howard Kurtz that he had realized that "I had to grow up in how I write." And Erickson convinced the New York Times that he had become a kinder, gentler pundit.

But hating is what Erickson does.  That's why it's unsurprising to find him on his blog (7/13/10) whipping up racial animus in the crudest possible terms, using the sort of rhetoric associated with actual brownshirts like David Duke. In the post, Erickson urged the Republicans to turn the New Black Panther "scandal" into the "21st century Willie Horton"--the ginned-up controversy being that the Obama administration failed to prosecute two members of a fringe Afrocentrist group for hanging around a polling place in a black neighborhood last November.

Look at the language Erickson uses to describe this:

The Democrats will scream racism. Let them. Republicans are not going to pick up significant black support anyway. But here's the thing: everyone but the Democrats will understand this is not racism. This isn't even about race. This is about the judgment of an administration that would rather prosecute Arizona for doing what the feds won't do than prosecuting violent thugs who would deny you and me the right to vote while killing our kids.

Is there anything more incendiary, more irresponsible than publicly hallucinating about "violent thugs...killing our kids"?

It's obvious from the context of his statement that by "you and me" he means "white people," and "our kids" are "white kids."

Yet it's not about race--and certainly not about racism.  It never is.

At the top of his show last night (7/7/10), Bill O'Reilly notified viewers that the Factor had "investigated" how much crime in Arizona is committed by undocumented immigrants, explaining:  "What we found may surprise you."

"Telling the truth in the illegal immigration controversy, that is the subject of this evening's Talking Points Memo," O'Reilly began his commentary.

Now that would be a surprise, given that O'Reilly spent weeks drumming up hysteria about Arizona's soaring crime rate (crime has been dropping for years) and attributing this to the surge in immigrants (which would run contrary to the research documenting lower crime rates in areas with higher immigration populations).

O'Reilly played a clip of Arizona Rep. Trent Franks saying on another Fox News show, "About half of all of the violent crime in Maricopa County is committed by illegal immigrants."

So O'Reilly decided to check this out, and according to Maricopa County authorities,  they are "holding about 1,100 illegal aliens charged with committing violent crimes.... If the violent illegal aliens comprise about 15 percent of the total prison population in the county, they couldn't possibly commit 50 percent of the violent crime."

He concluded:

But the overall point here is that the truth must be told in the illegal immigration debate. And the congressman had it wrong. Overall, crime has dropped in many border counties because the recession has inhibited some illegal immigration. Fewer jobs, fewer illegal crossings.

Again, this flies in the face of what O'Reilly had been saying before. His support for the new Arizona anti-immigrant law was based on the alarming "crime wave" facing the state. Now he's saying there isn't one. But his explanation is still wrong-headed; crime has been declining for years in Arizona (along with many other big cities), so a recent drop in immigration due to the recession wouldn't explain anything.

O'Reilly seems to be saying that he was wrong (without, you know, saying so), but he's still hanging on to the idea that crime is down is because immigration has declined--which he has no way of proving. Perhaps because it isn't true.

Univision anchor Jose Ramos was the next guest on the show, and he poured more cold water on O'Reilly's theory:

RAMOS: Well, the problem is we keep on repeating misinformation. People are going to believe it.

O'REILLY: But I just gave you, actually, the latest factual information.

RAMOS: And I can give you three indisputable facts. First, crime is down in all the country.

O'REILLY: No, just the one I just told you.

RAMOS: Yes, according to -- I'll get to Arizona. According to the Department of Justice.

O'REILLY: And that's what I said.

RAMOS: Despite the fact that immigrant population has more than doubled in all the country. Second, American Majority Foundation found that in the states, including Arizona, with the largest immigrant population, crime has declined more than in other states.

And finally, this is important, according to the FBI--

O'REILLY: Yes.

RAMOS: --crime has gone down in Arizona. So are you going to argue with the FBI?

O'REILLY: I'm going to tell you this. I gave right in the Talking Points Memo the most accurate information available. And we got 1,100 people sitting in Maricopa County jail charged with violent felonies. 1,100. That's a catastrophe.

A pretty straightforward explanation, despite O'Reilly's interruptions and non sequiturs.

After Ramos left, O'Reilly complained to another guest  about Ramos' "theoretical nuttiness." He was apparently being serious.

Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker (umm, PULITZER Prize-winning columnist) got a lot of feedback about her recent column ("Obama: Our First Female President," 6/30/10) suggesting that Barack Obama is kind of girly. She carefully pointed out that she was "not calling Obama a girlie president. But . . . he may be suffering a rhetorical-testosterone deficit when it comes to dealing with crises."

So he's girly-sounding, I guess. Parker elaborated by suggesting that Obama "displays many tropes of femaleness. I say this in the nicest possible way."

According to Parker's update column (7/4/10), many readers--including many black readers--did not think her assessment was particularly nice. Some pointed to the long history of emasculating black males; others commented on the problems Obama would face as a black politician if he were too appear too "angry."

Parker stands by her argument, though, and part of her response stressed one of the advantages of being white:

 But I also recognize that my life experience is different from that of most African-Americans. And that experience allows me both the luxury of seeing people without the lens of race, but also (sometimes) to fail to imagine how people of other backgrounds might interpret my words.

The failure to imagine how "people of other backgrounds" read your work is obvious enough. But the idea that being white means that you enjoy a unique ability to judge events "without the lens of race" is bizarre, unless you're trying to echo Stephen Colbert's long-running gag about white people who cannot possibly see race. As he explained once to Al Sharpton, Colbert was going to take Sharpton at his word when he said he was black, because Colbert was beyond race.   

Well, Parker is apparently doing precisely that: 

You'll have to take me at my word when I say that I don't view Obama exclusively as a black man--no matter what he said on his census form. Not only is he half-white, but also he has managed to transcend skin color, at least from where I sit.

Parker will soon co-host a show on CNN--not Comedy Central--by the way.

We've  rather amply documented Bill O'Reilly's record of misinformation on Arizona, immigration and crime. It's not surprising--but nonetheless worth documenting--that O'Reilly would bend reality in order to bash immigrants and defend the new Arizona law.

But the way the New York Times handled the matter is worth a look. The paper's June 19 piece, "On Border Violence, Truth Pales Compared to Ideas," should have told a simple story: Supporters of the law claimed that Arizona was seeing a dramatic increase in crime, and immigrants were to blame for this. This is simply not true. But in the name of journalistic balance, the Times opted for a "both sides are doing it" framing.

Times reporter Randal Archibald went to an academic who talked about this:

What social psychologists call self-serving perception bias seemed to be at play. Both sides in the immigration debate accept information that confirms their biases, she said, and discard, ignore or rationalize information that does not. There is no better example than the role of crime in Arizona's tumultuous immigration debate.

So what is reality, then? Turns out it's complicated:

Crime figures, in fact, present a more mixed picture, with the likes of Russell Pearce, the Republican state senator behind the immigration enforcement law, playing up the darkest side while immigrant advocacy groups like Coalicion de Derechos Humanos (Human Rights Coalition), based in Tucson, circulate news reports and studies showing that crime is not as bad as it may seem.

The Times explains that overall crime has been dropping in Arizona, as it has in most big cities. But there's the other side:

But the rate for property crime, the kind that people may experience most often, increased in the state, to 4,082 per 100,000 residents in 2008 from 3,682 in 2000. Preliminary data for 2009 suggests that this rate may also be falling in the state's biggest cities.

So the lesson apparently is that local officials who tell scare stories about immigrant crime aren't to be believed. But don't believe the pro-immigration crowd, either; they're being selective as well.

Turn to the Times yesterday, though, and you read this:

Correction: June 27, 2010

An article last Sunday about the debate over immigration reform and how people's perceptions sometimes run counter to crime statistics misstated the change in property crimes in Arizona between 2000 and 2008. The number of property crimes went down, not up.

Now, if you read that in passing, you'd think it was about as important as they made it sound-- i.e., not at all. But this was literally the only data that helped create the false balance in the article. Without this fact, the story is something entirely different: immigrant-bashers versus reality. But for some reason, that wasn't the story the New York Times wanted to tell.

Fox News host Bill O'Reilly has endorsed the draconian Arizona immigration law on the grounds that immigration has caused the state's crime to skyrocket--a claim that founders on the fact that crime in the state has actually gone down (FAIR Action Alert, 5/17/10).  Of late, he hasn't talked much about the immigration/crime angle, leading us to wonder whether he had figured out that he was all wet on the subject (FAIR Activism Update, 6/4/10).

But last Thursday (6/17/10), interviewing pro-immigration schoolteacher Jose Lara, O'Reilly returned to the topic with a fresh set of nonsense:

LARA: The fact is, Bill, and you can't deny this, that in cities that have large amounts of immigrants, crime is actually lower.

O'REILLY: It's lower because it's compared to before the recession. And that's why it's lower, because there aren't as many illegals here now--

LARA: No, it's not.

O'REILLY: --as there were because the economy's terrible. If you go back 10 years, every city is up big. And the intrusion on Arizona and California, as you know, is enormous in dollars and blood.

Once again, O'Reilly is just making things up. It's not true that crime in "every city is up big" compared to 10 years ago; looking at the FBI's violent crime reports for 2000 and 2009 in the 10 largest cities, the figures are down substantially in New York (down 44 percent), Los Angeles (57 percent), Phoenix (28 percent), Philadelphia (21 percent), San Antonio (14 percent), Dallas (45 percent) and San Diego (21 percent). Chicago doesn't release figures on rapes, so it doesn't have a comparable violent crime rate, but its murder rate declined 27 percent from 2000 to 2009. Violent crime in Houston rose 0.5 percent over the same time period; Las Vegas had a 52 percent jump, making it the one major city where crime actually was "up big."

What about Arizona and California--was the "intrusion...enormous in dollars and blood" in those states? Not so much blood, it turns out--violent crime in those states was down 16 percent and 19 percent, respectively, from 2000 to 2008 (the most recent year available).

It's worth saying again that the entire premise of O'Reilly's argument is wrong--there is no connection between immigration and crime, so it's unsurprising that the rise in unauthorized immigration to the United States has coincided with a dramatic fall in violent crime rates.

UPDATE: O'Reilly seems to be desperately seeking some way that he's somehow right on this stuff. Here he is last night (6/22/10):

Crime has gone down in all the border states. In El Paso, we did a big extensive study, the Factor did, of this. You can't break out illegal alien crime. You can't break it out because they don't keep stats that way. It's down. And a lot of people think it's because of the economy that fewer people are coming here to the United States because of jobs are harder to get.

Who thinks that, exactly?  The people who did the big extensive study at the Factor? If they had done such a study, they would have noticed that the fall in crime in El Paso is not a short-term phenomenon; violent crime in that heavily immigrant city is down 34 percent since 2000.

And that is consistent with national trends. As the Immigration Policy Center pointed out in a report, "Immigrants and Crime: Are They Connected?":

Although the undocumented immigrant population doubled to about 12 million from 1994 to 2005, the violent crime rate in the United States declined by 34.2 percent and the property crime rate fell by 26.4 percent. This decline in crime rates was not just national, it also occurred in border cities and other cities with large immigrant populations--such as San Diego, El Paso, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Miami.

Research assistance: Alyssa Figueroa

Fox host Bill O'Reilly continued his efforts to link Arizona's harsh immigration law to the non-existent immigrant crime wave. Last night (5/18/10), with Cathy Areu of Catalina magazine:

O'REILLY: OK, so you would just sit there and just status quo it? Status quo?

AREU: Immigration is down, actually, in Arizona. Status quo's working beautifully.

O'REILLY: Down everywhere.

AREU: Well, crime is down and immigration is down. So, actually, things are better.

O'REILLY: Crime in Arizona is up. Immigration's down because of the economy.

As we pointed in our Action Alert-- and has been pointed out elsewhere by actual journalists--crime is down in Arizona.

Later in the segment:

AREU: El Paso is one of the safest cities in the United States.

O'REILLY: That's a bunch of baloney.

If by "bunch of baloney" O'Reilly means "true," then he's got a point. El Paso has long been one of the country's safest big cities, a point made recently in the L.A. Times (5/13/10):

The Mexican border metropolis of Ciudad Juarez now has a higher murder rate than Baghdad as drug cartels battle for turf. Its neighbor on the U.S. side, El Paso, has long been one of the nation's safest big cities, with more than 600,000 people. Last year it was ranked second-safest behind Honolulu.

"Life in El Paso is good," said police spokesman Michael Baranyay, citing the one homicide the city has logged this year.

If you want to help push O'Reilly to stop these slurs, sign FAIR's petition to Fox.

Newsweek has another installment in the don't-blame-Arizonans coverage of the state's new immigration law (FAIR Blog, 4/28/10, 5/3/10, 5/4/10). Under the charming headline "Mexican Standoff," reporter Eve Conant writes:

Some accuse lawmakers and the 70 percent of Arizonans who support the bill of acting like Nazis, or of turning Arizona into an apartheid state. But spend some time in Arizona, and you may come to see why so many Arizonans want this.

The bulk of what follows is Conant's account of a month worth of ride-alongs with Arizona law enforcement officials, who showed her a number of ostensibly immigrant-related crimes. "It's terrifying to live next door to homes filled with human traffickers, drug smugglers, AK-47s, pit bulls, and desperate laborers stuffed 30 to a room, shoes removed to hinder escape," Conant writes.

No doubt it is, but how many Arizonans actually do live next door to such places? As we've pointed out before, there's nothing particularly remarkable about the state's crime rate; it had 483 violent crimes reported per 100,000 people in 2007, according to the Statistical Abstract, just slightly more than the national average of 467--and well below the rate of such well-known crime hubs as Delaware and Maryland, where the police are not yet mandated to demand the papers of brown-skinned citizens. And there's no reason to think that immigrants are responsible for more violent crime than their native-born counterparts; research suggests the opposite.

If a state passed a law that had the effect of discriminating against African-Americans, and a newsweekly argued that the law was understandable by recounting anecdotes of blacks in that state who were involved in crimes, one would have to say that the magazine was being remarkably racist.  I don't see why you'd say anything different about Newsweek's article.

Correspondent Pete Williams last night on NBC Nightly News (5/10/10) gave viewers the scoop on Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan's record as dean of Harvard law school: "She diversified the faculty, hiring prominent conservatives."

Kagan also hired almost no people of color and very few women, in a historically white and male faculty. It's an interesting definition of "diversify."

According to a Washington Post article (5/10/10) on the front page of its metro section, the traditional image of the U.S. suburb is being spoiled as they become less wealthy, white and native-born. No, really.

Carol Morello's story began:

Ozzie and Harriet, R.I.P.

The idealized vision of suburbia as a homogeneous landscape of prosperity built around the nuclear family took another hit over the past decade, as suburbs became home to more poor people, immigrants, minorities, senior citizens and households with no children, according to a Brookings Institution report to be released Sunday.

As Atrios asked, "Nobody noticed what's wrong with this paragraph?"

You just never know what will set Bill O'Reilly off. Last night, it was a perfectly reasonable remark by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who, following the arrest of a Pakistani suspect in the Times Square car bomb plot, cautioned against turning  Pakistanis or followers of Islam into scapegoats:

I want to make clear that we will not tolerate any bias or backlash against Pakistani or Muslim New Yorkers. All of us live in this city. And among any group, there's always a few bad apples.

O'Reilly angrily lashed out at Bloomberg:

Well, maybe somebody should remind the mayor that Muslim fanatics have been threatening New York City and the entire country for almost 20 years. That's a lot of apples out there, sir.

If there is a way to read O'Reilly's response to Bloomberg as anything but a call for "bias and backlash," it eludes us.

Fox host Bill O'Reilly searched around for a reason to support Arizona's harsh new immigration law, and seemed to settle on the fact that there is a crime wave in Phoenix (5/3/10):

Arizona had to do something. In the capital city Phoenix, crime is totally out of control. For example, last year New York City-- with six times as many residents as Phoenix--had just 16,000 more reported crimes. San Diego is the same size as Phoenix. It has 60 percent less crime.

There are only three small problems with this explanation.

For one, there's no evidence that immigrants are liable to commit more crimes than anyone else; in fact, most research suggests it's exactly the opposite. So the link between a law to arrest more undocumented immigrants and crime is hard to fathom.

The crime rate in Phoenix has been dropping-- so it's not "out of control" at all.

And O'Reilly's statistical sleight of hand is the other problem. New York City has 16,000 more crimes than Phoenix, but is six times larger. Well, what does that prove?  If O'Reilly were trying to make any sense at all, he'd be talking about per capita crime rates. But making comparisons between cities based on the FBI's crime data is something they explicitly warn people not to do:

Individuals using these tabulations are cautioned against drawing conclusions by making direct comparisons between cities. Comparisons lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting communities and their residents.

And it might be worth mentioning that one of O'Reilly's points here was to attack the "flat-out dishonest" media coverage of the Arizona law.

George Will, defending Arizona's draconian new immigration law, concludes his column (Washington Post, 4/28/10) with this today:

Arizonans should not be judged disdainfully and from a distance by people whose closest contacts with Hispanics are with fine men and women who trim their lawns and put plates in front of them at restaurants, not with illegal immigrants passing through their back yards at 3 a.m.

There are 47 million Latinos in the United States.  Will's assumption that the only ones known to the readers he's addressing are likely to be waiting tables or mowing lawns is quite bizarre--and a testament to how homogeneous his world must be.

Equally strange is the contrast he draws between the "fine" individuals his readers know and the presumably more sinister types found in Arizona backyards.  Arizona is not the only state with many Latino residents, nor with numerous unauthorized immigrants. At the beginning of his column, Will mocks House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for representing San Francisco, but California has more undocumented workers per capita and eight times as many in total; shouldn't he stop judging her disdainfully from a distance?

Victor Davis Hanson notes that one reason for American exceptionalism may be that we did not inherit from England "a large underclass of only quasi-free people attached to barons as serfs." Sadly, a worse institution took root here, but never became part of the national psyche.

--Rich Lowry & Ramesh Ponnuru (National Review Online, 3/8/10, via Crooked Timber, 3/9/10)

So, David Paterson will become the massa who gets to appoint whoever gets to take [Rep. Eric] Massa's place. So, for the first time in his life, Paterson's gonna be a massa. Interesting, interesting.

--Rush Limbaugh (Rush Limbaugh Show, 3/9/10, via Media Matters, 3/9/10)

On the January 15 edition of his show, while chatting with Ray Stevens, who recorded the song "Ahab the Arab" nearly 50 years ago, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly seemed to become nostalgic for a time when making fun of Arabs was acceptable:

Forty-eight years ago in this country we could make fun of Arabs. We could make fun of people in a general gentle way, and certainly, "Ahab Was the Arab" [sic] was a general gentle parody. But now we can't. What has changed in America?

As American Prospect blogger Adam Serwer put it, O'Reilly is really

mourning the demise of what he refers to as the "white Christian male power structure." It's not really that you "can't" make racist jokes anymore; it's that when you make them, you can't expect everyone to remain silent as you assert your cultural or racial superiority through humor.”

Serwer adds that we are apparently still a country where it’s not entirely "taboo to whine about no longer being able to make fun of Arabs." However, while jokes about Arabs may be frowned upon, it should be noted that full-throated calls for their profiling, detention and bombing are practically required by certain media outlets, Fox News among them.

For more on O'Reilly's record of bigotry, see "O'Reilly's Racist Slurs--in Context" (Extra! Update, 6/03).