Bigotry for broadcast

What's it like meeting hatemongers such as Pamela Geller and the folks from Westboro Baptist Church? I tell you in my latest piece for Al Jazeera.

God hates Russell Brand

Before the show, Steve Drain of the Westboro Baptist Church asked me just how long I'd been working on BrandX with Russell Brand as I led him from his car to the bare-bones green room we were sticking him in until the taping started.

"Since the beginning," I replied.

"Oh, cool man," Drain said, appearing completely genuine. "That's cool."

And then he went on TV:

 

Pam Geller vs. her own words

Pamela Geller doesn't much care for Islam (or, after being interviewed by Russell, BrandX). On her blog, Atlas Shrugs, she daily reports on crimes allegedly committed by Muslims – and only Muslims – wherever in the world they might be, painting a picture for her largely white and scared suburban audience of a world where swarthy Others are hell bent on the global imposition of Sharia law. Fathers, watch your daughters: Muhammed's coming to town and he wants her to wear a burka.

The odd, weird, curious thing about Pamela's Islamophobia, though, is that while she'll own it in front of a bunch of flag-waving Tea Partiers protesting a mosque, she'll back away from it in front of a crowd of young Hollywood liberals. Indeed, the way she spoke during her appearance on BrandX, you'd almost think she didn't want to turn the Middle East to glass.

Here are a few examples of how Hollywood Pamela differed from the attention-seeking jingo we've all come to know and love:

Russell: “Do you believe America would be better off without any Muslims?”
Pamela: “No.”
ACTUALLY. In her book, Stop the Islamization of America – a-fucking-hem – Pamela argues that the threat facing America is posed “not just [by] immigrant Muslims, the problem is the doctrine of jihad and the ideology of Islamic supremacism, which any Muslim anywhere can hold.”

Russell: “Pamela, should we have a war . . . with Iran? Should we do a war right at them?”
Pamela: “No.”
ACTUALLY. On her blog, Pamela has written, “Iran should be attacked today and their people liberated from their misery.”

Russell: “Do you believe President Obama supports jihad against America?”
Pamela: “Only in Libya. . . . [He's] not pro-jihad.”
ACTUALLY. On her blog, Pamela has written that “one thing is for sure: [Barack] Hussein [Obama] is a muhammadan. He's not insane ...........he wants jihad to win.”

SPECIAL BONUS FEATURE: When asked about Anders Breivik – “that bloke in Norway who was a bit mental and he killed children to express himself,” as Russell put it – Pamela, one of Breivik's favorite bloggers, called him a “madman.” However, on her blog Pamela described the summer camp targeted by Breivik as an "Antisemitic Indoctrination Training Center” with a “pro-Islamic agenda,” arguing that the 77 people murdered there were not entirely innocent:

“Breivik was targeting the future leaders of the party responsible for flooding Norway with Muslims who refuse to assimilate, who commit major violence against Norwegian natives, including violent gang rapes, with impunity, and who live on the dole... all done without the consent of the Norwegians.”

Nice lady.

Liar, liar

"Early this week I got a request from Charlie Davis, Russell Brand's booker for his new show (and soon to be old show) Brand X," writes Pamela Geller, a professional anti-Muslim bigot who sees jihad under every hijab. To make a long story short: "Charlie is a liar."

Behind the headlines

Each week, we at BrandX pore over all the weird, horrifying and occasionally sexy stories the world has to offer in a quest to make weird, horrifying and occasionally sexy observations about the world in which we live. Often these stories involve butts or some form of penetration – the jackpot is both – and very often they are silly. But often enough, they're only silly in a superficial way; once you dig a little bit, you find there's actually something serious going on.

Take this story out of New Hampshire:



According to the report, a “woman who described herself as an exotic dancer” called police “when a resident ordered a dance, but refused to answer his door when she arrived.” The hilarious thing is that, instead of helping the working woman in question, police mocked her.

“She never danced, so I would be hard pressed to say it was theft of services,” said very funny local police chief Mike Schwartz, who presumably has a podcast. “Now if she was a professional doorbell ringer . . . .”

Wipe the tear from your eye and, just for a moment, imagine you're the woman in question. Maybe the rent's due in a week and you're coming up short. Maybe you have some student loans to pay off. Maybe you have a kid. Maybe you're just like millions of other Americans: working a shitty job so you can pay the utilities on time. But thanks to a client who ordered your services but gets cold feet, instead of getting some extra cash in your g-string, you've just wasted two hours and a gallon of gas. Distressed, you do something stupid: you call the police, thinking they might help.
Instead: “I guess there are some people who would have a better dance than others,” the local sheriff tells the press. “Maybe you were expecting Mikhail Baryshnikov and you got someone looking like Mike Schwartz. I wouldn't answer the door either.”

Know why that's funny? Because the woman in question isn't an opera singer or a plumber or a wedding DJ, in which case ordering her services and then failing to pay for them would indeed be viewed as a crime without controversy. No, she works a job that makes people smirk. She's just a stripper; just a woman who “described herself as an exotic dancer.” And there's no need to show much respect to a person like that, the subtext goes.

What the headline ought to be:

Police dogs as divining rods

(This piece was originally posted at the BrandX blog.)

A local couple has been murdered in their own home. You, a respected officer of the law, are responsible for tracking down their killer. But leads are short and public pressure to solve the case is building by the day. Your career’s on the line here. What do you do?

If you were a cop in 17th century France, the answer would have been: find a guy with a magic stick. Indeed, in 1692 French police enlisted a peasant named Jacques Aymar-Vernay in the search for the perpetrator of a double homicide. And it paid off. Aymar-Vernay, who had gained a national reputation for his claimed ability to use a y-shaped stick, a “divining rod,” to locate sources of water, claimed his divine branch had fingered a 19-year-old man with a hunchback as the killer. The man was tortured to death.

A few years later, not surprisingly, Aymar-Vernay was outed as a fraud.

Today, we laugh at our primitive ancestors and their naive belief that a divining rod -- shown by study after study to be no more reliable than chance -- could actually be used to track down criminals. But the joke’s on us: we’re still using those magic sticks, except now they have four legs and are covered in fur.

In last week’s episode, we highlighted one case out of Virginia where the reliability of a drug-sniffing dog named “Bono” was called into question after it was found that, of the 85 times the dog had signaled there were drugs in a vehicle, drugs were only found 22 times. What we soon figured out, though, is that it wasn’t the fault of poor Bono but his human handlers, just as it wasn’t the stick that was at fault for sending a French hunchback to his death.

As researchers at UC Davis observed, police dogs will often signal that there are drugs in a car not because there are, but because that’s what they think their handlers want. And that leads to a lot of false positives. In Australia, one analysis found drug-sniffing dogs (or rather, their handlers) got it wrong 80 percent of the time. And the Chicago Tribune found that police dogs were wrong in 56 percent of the cases it analyzed -- and in 73 percent of cases involving Hispanic drivers, indicating that the dogs are being used to rationalize racial profiling in the war on drugs.

But that hasn’t stopped the police from relying on dogs for a simple reason: like the divining rod of old, the dogs lend a pseudo-scientific rationale to whatever it is one wants to do, be it finding a suspect to pin a murder upon or allowing one probable cause to search a vehicle. Indeed, in the “Bono” case a judge ruled that it didn’t matter the dog was wrong 74 percent of the time, according to one news account, because of “other factors, including the dog’s training and flawless performance during re-certification sessions” -- and, presumably, because ruling the other way would mean throwing out a whole lot of other cases. And we wouldn’t want something as silly as scientific evidence to get in the way of a conviction, no matter the century.

The myth of America

(Originally posted on the BrandX blog)

Like any organized religion, America comes with its own creation story, a beautiful, inspiring myth used to lend legitimacy to our modern priestly class in Washington. But there's another story worth considering: the actual one of how the founders of the United States saw their new government as a protection against democracy -- as a means of safeguarding privilege and elevating the right to property over the rights of the people.

During the debate on the US constitution, the founders were pretty explicit about this, making it abundantly clear that protecting property – the large estates gifted to them by the British crown, the men and women sold to them by slave traders – was a driving force behind their push for a more powerful central government. James Madison, for instance, who would serve as the young republic's fourth president, warned his fellow founders of the perils of democracy, saying too much of it would jeopardize the property of the landed aristocracy. “In England,” he observed, “if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure.” Land would be redistributed to the landless, he cautioned. Without the rich exercising monopoly privileges over the commons, the masses would be less dependent on elites like them.

The Santa-ization of MLK's legacy

By Matt Stoller and Charles Davis

“The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around.”

– Martin Luther King’s final speech, I’ve Been to the Mountaintop

In the first episode of BrandX, Russell Brand talked about meeting the Dalai Lama. Why did we choose him as the subject for our first show? Because the Dalai Lama’s preaching of peace, anti-consumerism, spirituality and nonviolence is radical, a stark contrast to the message of war and consumption one usually hears on television.

In the writer’s room, as we were talking about who the Dalai Lama is, we hit upon a question that none of us could answer: who is the American Dalai Lama? And we realized, there isn’t one. The last great spiritual figure in American history was Martin Luther King Jr.

Today, though, King has been turned into a Santa Clause figure. There’s a holiday commemorating his life and works and his likeness appears in ads for Apple Computer, Alcatel, and McDonald’s. King’s legacy, if commercial interests had their way, would be the nonthreatening “Think Different” campaign, an encouragement to purchase luxury electronic goods made by exploited foreign workers.

Where's Waldo?

Blink and you'll miss it. Don't blink.