Friday Fun-- You Think We Have Dangerous Extremists In Congress Today? Meet John G. Schmitz (R-CA)

John G. Schmitz, formerly a Nazi congressman from Orange County

"I didn't care that Nixon went to China, I was only upset that he came back."

                     -Congressman John G. Schmitz (R-CA)

The above quote, given as an answer by Congress' then most extreme right member, to a question about President Nixon's 1972 trip to China, is the only time I recall ever agreeing with Schmitz about anything. You may not remember him but he was kind of the Paul Broun of his day-- only with some clout-- a fanatical leader of the John Birch Society and a deranged tool of the anti-communist plutocrats who felt they owned America. [In fact, I've embedded a video of the worst of that breed, Texas Republican oil man-- possibly the man who bankrolled the assassination of JFK-- H.L. Hunt, which typifies the spirit of the day in domestic right-wing circles and shows how just a little ahead of their time these dangerous sociopaths were-- the teabaggers of the mid-20th Century.]



We'll come back to the colorful Congressman Schmitz, who raised his family in a home owned by his idol, Joe McCarthy, in a moment. First let me ask you if you recall a school teacher in Washington state, a Mary Kay Letourneau, who was convicted of child rape for having a sexual relationship with one of her 12 year old students? It was a pretty notorious case. After serving 6 years in prison she married the kid-- by whom she had two babies in prison-- and took his name, Mary Kay Fualaau. Although she was born, in 1962, Mary Katherine Schmitz. Yeah, she was one of a large brood of children fathered by Congressman Schmitz in at least two simultaneous marriages, one with-- what else-- a teenage student of his while he taught at Santa Ana College. (Weird, yes, but he wasn't a Mormon; he was-- I kid you not-- a self-described "strict" Catholic.) Mary Katherine was a "strict" Catholic too but because she came from-- and ascribed to-- far right Republican values, she had no trouble reconciling that with her life as a "party animal," all through high school and college. She got knocked up in college and her parents forced her to marry the poor guy, who she says she never loved, Steve Letourneau. They had 4 children and he beat her frequently and eventually turned her over to the police for raping her then-13 year old student. Both she and Steve had extramarital affairs all during their "strict" Catholic marriage. Currently she and Fualaau host "Hot for Teacher Night" promotions at a Seattle night club-- Fualaau serving as the disc jockey and Letourneau as hostess.



Not to be overly judgmental, but her siblings-- the ones who can be tracked down-- turned out even worse. Two of them, John, Jr, and Joseph-- named for guess who-- have been Republican Party apparachiks for many years, although Joseph, who served in the German Navy (for old times sake, I guess) also worked for the far right mercenary firm Blackwater as a top executive, probably indicating that he's a war criminal. He also worked as a special assistant for Attorney General Edwin Meese III and as Inspector General for the Pentagon (until forced to resign for a pattern of extreme corruption that was exposed by Chuck Grassley) and for one of Washington's most notoriously shady lobbying operations, Patton Boggs. John, Jr worked as a deputy counsel for George H.W. Bush.



OK, another family values fanatic with the most fucked up family ever? First of all, you haven't heard the half-- and second of all... you haven't heard a half of the half. Remember I mentioned that Congressman Schmitz fathered two children with one of his college students, Carla Stuckle. (His legal wife, a right-wing TV commentator, Mary Schmitz, was widely known as the West Coast Phyllis Schlafly.") When the other woman died, Schmitz gave the kids to another German fascist-- crackpot astrologer Jeanne Dixon (born, like him, into a fascist home in Wisconsin)-- who had made a name for herself "predicting" JFK would be assassinated, although she traveled in the fascist circles of the people who were always talking about having him killed. She's also famous for being an advisor to both Nixon and Reagan and for writing a completely insane book on dog horoscopes. She died soon after taking the kids and both of them wound up in an orphanage, since their father (Congressman Schmitz) and his other family refused to have anything to do with them or give them a dime.



So, how crazy was Schmitz? How about this? A complete kiss-ass to wealthy Orange County wingnuts, he was a longtime national leader of the John Birch Society. His extremism was so off the cliff that they kicked him out of the organization! He ran against Nixon on the ticket of a domestic Nazi party, the American Independent Party, and got over a million votes, mostly in the same kinds of low information centers where Republicans still dominate, Idaho, rural Louisiana, Alaska, Utah...



A virulent racist his entire life, Schmitz was a Martin Luther King hater and once said, "I would have voted for a three-tier system-- have one school that the blacks could go to, one school that all the whites could go to, and those who want to mix go to a third school." He was also a bizarre anti-Semite at a time when Republicans were still very associated with Nazis. When Schmitz announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate, he had Yassir Arafat at his side, a way to rally deranged right-wingers at the time.



Before becoming a congressman-- and again after he was defeated in a Republican primary by another psychotic wingnut, Andrew Hinshaw, who eventually went to prison for accepting bribes-- Schmitz was a California state senator. He made a name for himself opposing sex education, ironic when you consider he was basically raping his happily uneducated teenage students. He saw Communists under every bed and accused anyone and everyone he ever disagreed with of being a Communist, including Nixon, who lived in his district. Nixon recruited and helped finance Hinshaw's successful run against him.



Back in the state Senate he became the poster-boy for the anti-Choice movement, which he managed to turn into an anti-Semitic and anti-gay crusade as well. His last campaign was an attempt to gain back his congressional seat in 1984. He ran against B-1 Bob Dornan, the only race Dornan ever ran where he was the more mainstream candidate. Schmitz came in third and got 11% of the primary vote. He fnally died in January, 2001, then a peddler of knickknacks to tourists in Washington, DC.



How, to put this all in context and to see how Schmitz's were the strands that have tied the modern Republican Party together, please watch this video by one of the financiers of the GOP and the rest of the American far right:

How American Is Fascism? Among U.S. Ruling Elites-- Absolutely Prevalent

Kissing and making up with dedicated hereditary traitors never works. For them, historically, it's just an opportunity to try again. Many historians-- including African-Americans ones-- realize that the Southern aristocracy got off way too lightly after the Civil War. Their spawn is back... in a big way, successfully preaching the same racism and anti-democratic obscurantism that tore the country apart in the 1850s and 1860s.

Far more contemporaneous is how the "leading families" of American Business were all able to skip away from their aggressive support of fascism during the 1930s and '40s. I've been following the story in The Nazi Hydra in America of how the American ruling elites, in awe and in love with fascism, tried to sell out the country to Hitler. None were punished-- and their sons prospered and went on fulfilled Huey Long's prediction: "Of course we will have fascism in America, but we will call it democracy." The Bush's, the son and grandson of a big-time fascist and Nazi collaborator are just the most obvious examples. Far more insidious are the ones hiding in the shadows, the millionaires and billionaires who worked to defeat America and whose spawn is still seeking to undermine democracy today.

Yesterday Think Progress' Lee Fang posted about how the Koch family was celebrated this week for the major contribution of founding father, Fred-- the financial godfather of the right-wing hate group, the John Birch Society, whose tenets are infused in everything his two degenerate sons are doing to American politics today. "As a founding board member, Fred helped engineer a hysterical wave of attacks on labor, intellectuals, public education, liberal clergy members, and other pillars of society he viewed as a threat. Birchers decried everyone from former President Eisenhower to water utility administrators as pawns in a global communist conspiracy. In the last two years, as the Koch name has become synonymous with right-wing plutocracy in the United States, the Koch family has played down its relation to the Birchers. However, the New American, the official mouthpiece of the John Birch Society, published a piece this morning celebrating Fred and the Koch family’s pivotal role in developing the group:"

Koch warned that American institutions were honeycombed with communist subversives, from labor unions and tax-free foundations to universities and churches. Art and newsprint, radio and television-- all these media had been transmuted into vehicles of communist propaganda. [...] Fred Koch was no fly-by-night pamphleteer. He spent a generous portion of his later years using his wealth and influence to fight the communism he abhorred. He was an early member of the John Birch Society’s National Council, an advisory group to JBS founder Robert Welch. Koch supported a variety of freedom-related causes, all the while continuing to build the company today known as Koch Industries.

Fang reminds us that the Bircher paean to ole Fred glosses over his record of bigotry. "In a booklet he authored, Fred railed against civil rights leaders, and claimed the movement against racial segregation was a communist plot to use African Americans to destabilize the country. The Koch-funded Birchers held numerous rallies during the ’60s claiming integration would lead to a 'mongrelization' of the races. Although the present-day Koch brothers try to eschew explicit racism, their top Tea Party front group, Americans for Prosperity, is currently pursuing similar racial segregation goals. In North Carolina, the Americans for Prosperity chapter led a campaign to end a highly successful public school integration system."

Because of their ostentatious financing of the Tea Party "movement," the Kochs are in the spotlight today but they are far from the only offspring of American fascists. In fact, as contemptible and reprehensible as their father was, he wasn't technically a traitor (as far as I know.) The same can't be said about J.P. Morgan, the Dulles Brothers, Prescott Bush, the du Pont family, the Rockefellers, the Hunts, the Mellons... obviously the Fords. Remember, Wall Street and corporate America built Hitler's war machine-- and not just because they wanted to make a quick buck... they believed in the fascist doctrines he was espousing. The "biggest names" in America actively sabotaged the war effort while American boys were dying on the battlefields of Europe and Asia. Yeadon makes it clear in Nazi Hydra that "just as the backers of Hitler's were rich industrialists, so were the backers of fascism in the United States" and that, in fact, many of them were the same backers... as the following quote from the New York Times from the Ambassador to Germany, William Dodd shows:

"A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime. On (the ship) a fellow passenger, who is a prominent executive of one of the largest corporations, told me point blank that he would be ready to take definite action to bring fascism into America if President Roosevelt continued his progressive policies.

Certain American industrialist had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They extended aid to help fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there.

Propagandists for the fascist groups try to dismiss the fascist scare. We should be aware of the symptoms. When industrialists ignore laws designed for social and economic progress they will seek recourse to a fascist state when the institutions of our government compel them to comply with the provisions."

As Yeadon makes clear with his careful research, "Americans have never been told the truth about the extent of corporate America's involvement with the Nazis. The media has spoon-fed Americans into believing that only a handful of companies were involved. In reality, more than 300 American corporations were illegally arming Nazi Germany during the war... They could have severed all links with Nazi Germany, but instead chose to continue to support a regime at war with their own country. In doing so, those corporations became willing accomplices to the Holocaust, traitors to their country and guilty of war crimes. The traitors responsible for such actions and crimes should have received justice at the end of a hangman's noose. Sadly, not one American corporation was charged with aiding the Nazis." They all got away scott free-- to fight another day. And we're talking about household names like General Motors, IBM, duPont, Standard Oil, International Harvester, Ford, General Electric, United Fruit, Alcoa... The heart of fascist ideology of the 1930s in Germany, Italy, Spain and here in the U.S.-- and of the far right today-- was corporate rule.

It is the basis for the visceral level of hate for unions, fueled by the corporate elite and their propaganda organizations. There is no better example to illustrate the power of the pro-fascists in the United States, than to compare the plight of the American worker with his counterpart in the rest of the industrial nations. In every category, the American worker comes up short when compared to the workers in other industrial nations. As an example the American worker earns 44% less than his German counterpart and 15% (1994 figures) less than his Japanese counterpart. ... While the average American worker is lucky to receive a two-week vacation his European counterpart enjoys a five-week vacation-- or more-- and a list of benefits that the American worker can only dream about.

Nor is the plight of the worker seeking to unionize much different today than it was in the 1930-40s. There are a myriad of companies today in the United States that provide security for corporate America. In reality, these companies are nothing more than hired thugs and union busters. While the muggings and factory death squads are not as great a threat today, the American worker is still being spied on. However, corporate America has no qualms about murdering union organizers in other countries. A recent report revealed that Coke Cola had hired right wing death squads to murder union organizers in Columbia. The United Steel workers union has filed suit in Miami alleging that Coca-Cola and Panamerican Beverages, its principal bottler in Latin America, waged what union leaders describe as a campaign of terror, using paramilitaries to kill, torture and kidnap union leaders in Columbia.

Marching for the billionaires who paid for their buses: