January 7, 2012 – MICHAEL W. DEAN

The other day this article called “Drugs, Guns and Madness in the Ron Paul Revolution” came out on the inaccurately named neo-con blog, “Accuracy in Media.” It’s so stunningly stupid, you must read it. An Excerpt:

Ron Paul didn’t do as well as the media thought he would in Iowa, but he is moving on toward New Hampshire, where the candidate has what the media call a good “ground game.” But the “Ron Paul Revolution” in New Hampshire looks a lot like what Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn tried to accomplish with the 1960s generation. Disillusioned young people, brainwashed with illegal mind-altering drugs and armed with weapons in the name of “liberty,” are being taught to hate their government and the police. They believe Ron Paul is their savior.

Remember that communist terrorist Dohrn had said, “We fight in many ways. Dope is one of our weapons. The laws against marijuana mean that millions of us are outlaws long before we actually split. Guns and grass are united in the youth underground.”

The same attitude is apparent in some of the libertarian-anarchist groups backing Paul in New Hampshire.

In order to grasp this phenomenon, consider what happened at the Porcupine Freedom Festival (PorcFest) held in New Hampshire in June of last year.

A film called “Guns and Weed: The Road to Freedom” was screened for the PorcFest participants. The “weed” is marijuana. This very disturbing video, which carries a warning, features many objectionable scenes, including one of a rapper with a gun dancing in front of a huge poster of marijuana leaves. “Today,” says the narrator, “many cops who enforce pot laws do so because it provides them with cushy jobs, good benefits, and a chance to push people around.”……

It goes on with this tone, for many many paragraphs.

Even real conservatives think it’s a stupid article. This user comment is spot on:

Old Right said:

Wow, Cliff. You and AIM have really gone downhill over the years. I used to enjoy your work on the UN and would distribute AIM’s sister group Accuracy in Academia’s material at my political correctness plagued campus. But man…..what happened to you? This tirade just sounds like some drunk yelling at people in a bar. Oh well. Old-school conservatives used to understand that big government in our own country was the biggest threat to our liberty, not the Gay Muslim Mexicans. Thankfully, that idea has come around again. Ron Paul by far wins the youth vote in Republican polls, and now that the primaries have started he won the under-40 vote demographic in the Iowa caucus. Peace, liberty, and sound money are the future of the conservative movement, Cliff. Get with the program or get left behind.

I think the hit piece came from two reasons:
1. Simply IGNORING Ron Paul is no longer working.
2.There’s a lot more MONEY in sounding insane and mean than there is in making sense. Look at the SPLC. I think of Accuracy in Media as the right-wing SPLC.

The Accuracy in Media site is pretty popular, and the guy who wrote the article, Cliff Kincaid, used to be the editor for Oliver North’s newsletter. (As someone said “No wonder he knows so much about guns, drugs and violence.” lol.) And it got re-blogged on several hundred other blogs. (Probably automatically. They were probably syndicating him and haven’t yet noticed his meltdown, like Old Right has.)

And this isn’t just some fly-by-nite blog of one guy in his mother’s basement. They have an office on tony Connecticut Avenue in Washington DC, a staff of nine, and according to their financial statements, they have nearly five million dollars in assets. Who the hell is funding these trolls? (Billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, heir to the Mellon oil fortune, according to this.)

Fortunately, like Mr. Burns, they are old and will one day die off. Their ideas will die with them. The path of America will go in one of two directions: socialism, or liberty. Everyone slammed in that article hates socialism as much, if not more, than the guy who wrote it claims to. The only thing that’s going to keep socialism from prevailing is people like the folks slammed in that article, and their good activism and media work.

As horrible of a bullshit bit of writing it is, I’m honored that our Guns and Weed film was included. And of all the things that are being thrown around these days to try to stop Ron Paul, I never thought I’d be one of those things!

Most of the people mentioned in the article are friends of mine.

While this hit piece in “Accuracy” in Media was way off the mark with the tone, I DO feel like it’s right in one respect: we are the spiritual godchildren of the 60s radicals. Or at least I know I can say *I* feel that way.

The first piece of “alternative literature” I ever got my hands on was Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman (PDF). That was 1975, I was 11. Sure, he was a commie, but that book is all about guns and weed and not trusting the government and cops.

My older sister lived in New Hampshire in the 70s and I used to visit here there. She was involved in the 70s blockades on the Seabrook Nuclear Plant. She’s an Obama lover now, but she was a big influence on me in showing me “the majority isn’t always correct.”

While most people thought that Timothy Leary and the “Tune in, Turn on, Drop out” thing erupted and spread spontaneously, in reality, he and Allen Ginsberg and a few others had frequent conversations about “running it like a business”, and sent out press releases and did a lot of very proactive things like that behind the scenes.

I’m thinking and working like that lately.

The book Steal This Book contains this image, (bad scan from the PDF is here, click to see bigger):

It’s a cartoon of some 60s radicals running a pirate radio/TV station. It’s hard to read all the text in this scan, but I can read two of the word balloons. One is coming from the door, it says “Open up! it’s the police!” “We got some nice LSD for ya! Har har.” The guy in the back right with the pot leaf shirt and the bandoleer and shotgun is looking at the door saying “The mad lackeys are in for a sample of revolutionary justice, folks.”

But the whole idea of pirate radio and TV fascinated me as a kid when I read this. I never did do pirate radio, but I did build legal micro-transmitters as a kid to try to reach the world. So that picture really spoke to me.

Though guns scared me back then. Not these days, I have at least three loaded guns within ten feet of me right now.

But the cool thing is, thanks to the internet, my friends and I reach the world 24/7 with podcasting and satellite radio and community radio. While we’re calmer and not commie, our bedrooms now are the studio in that cartoon above.

–Michael W. Dean

Above: Antigone from Sex, Lies and Anarchy podcasting