"Those who know what's best for us...."

"...must rise and save us from ourselves." So sang Canadian prog-rockers Rush in their 1981 track "Witch Hunt". A quarter century later, the modern-day torch-bearing hysterics haven't gone away.

I'm a little behind-hand on this, as I took a week's blog break and don't regularly read the local Austin paper. So it wasn't until today that I saw the full-page ad that ran on page A14 of the November 9 issue of the Austin American-Statesman. In screamingly huge type it grabbed your attention with the button-mashing headline "The Most Despicable Crime Ever Committed Against America's Children"!

The Catholic pedophilia scandal, you might ask? No, it's all them evil liberals pushing violence and smut in our entertainment, poisoning, in the paranoiac words of Dr. Strangelove's General Jack D. Ripper, our precious bodily fluids. The ad is exactly the same kind of reactionary drivel I thought was a relic of the Reagan years. (And as you read on, you'll find that's exactly its provenance.) To take its claims at face value, you'd think America was a real life version of a Halo 3 deathmatch, with maddened gun-packin' teenagers running around wantonly blasting away at everyone and everything in sight (that is, when they aren't gang-raping each other silly). It's a lunatic Heironymous Bosch view of reality that, more than anything, reflects the utter, paralyzing fear under which religious conservatives live their lives. Or...is it just cynical manipulation run by dishonest, sleazy, exploitive hucksters to raise cash from those among the public susceptible to such easy manipulation?

The ad is a veritable smorgasbord of fallacies and irrationalism. It purports to offer evidence of the alleged brainwashing effects of violent and explicit media in sidebars with the header "The Truth". Whenever wingnuts use the word "truth," and especially when they capitalize it, just remember that immortal line from The Princess Bride: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." The "Truth" presented here takes the form of sensationalist headlines. "Police say 13-year-old molested girl after seeing sex on TV." Egad. Well, what police? Where? Which 13-year-old? When? Oh, you want these claims backed up? Sorry. They don't do that here. None of these headlines is sourced, which one would think would be a bottom-rung criterion for credibility. It'd sure help persuade me to the cause if, say, "Judge says film influenced boy to kill 2-year-old" was followed by "Such-and-Such Gazette, Month, Day, Year." Otherwise, how do I know this is the truth? Oh, I see. It says so in the header.

The ad was placed by some outfit calling itself the Parents and Grandparents Alliance. There is no website URL printed in the ad, which immediately struck me as curious, especially in a day and age when everybody and his hamster and his hamster's mice has, at the very least, a fucking MySpace if not blog or full-on website. Quick Googlage revealed a webpage at outragedcitizens.org, which is little more than an anemic version of the kind of hysteria featured in the newspaper ad. I say anemic because the ad actually featured denser content. But the format, particularly the use of unsourced alleged headlines as "evidence," is no different. The web page, however, does feature a photo of has-been fundie crooner Pat Boone. You know, for street cred.

To find out what the Parents and Grandparents Alliance actually is, I had to check out this page at Sourcewatch, which reveals it's an offshoot of Accuracy in Media, the right-wing media watchdog group run by Reed Irvine until his death in 2004. AIM began running these ads as far back as 2001 in the New York Times. Apparently it's taken them six years to climb down the newspaper food chain to the Austin American-Statesman. Accuracy in Media has been doing its thing since 1969.

Since Google is fun, I thought I'd do a little more digging. But first, it's interesting to note the difference in presentation between the outragedcitizens.org website and AIM's own. The latter looks stately, journalistic and professional, while the former employs bright primary colors and blazing, 48-point headlines full of emotionally overwrought language. (Content-wise, they're equally full of shit.) And while outragedcitizens.org says it's not a fund-raising ad, the newspaper ad itself most definitely is, with a clip-out donations coupon at the bottom extolling all the parents and grandparents they hope they've terrified to "send in the 'Outraged Citizens Petition'... You don't need to send in any money to have your Petition added to the number we report. But we beg you to help. These ads cost up to $20,000 and more each. This is a grass roots campaign."

Horseshit. It's an establishment campaign. AIM's corporate donors include Mobil Oil and Union Carbide, which no doubt reflects the organization's global warming denialism. Neocon gazillionaire Richard Mellon Scaife gave AIM $2 million over a 20 year period, until he was embarrassed by the right's failed attempt to concoct a bogus murder allegation against Bill Clinton in the case of Vince Foster's suicide (a situation in which Irvine and AIM were major players). AIM has been responsible for a number of other vicious and wholly false wingnut smears, such as vilifying Walter Cronkite as a "Soviet dupe," falsely accusing a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter of fabricating a story on a massacre in Kosovo (another source here), and getting another NYT reporter fired for reporting on the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador in 1981.

So far from being a "grass roots" anything, AIM and its bogus sockpuppets like the "Parents and Grandparents Alliance" are really tools of the entrenched neocon plutocracy. (Hey, how's that for agitprop language!?) Since violent and sexy entertainment continues to be released and continues to meet with public approval (this ad hit the Statesman the same week that American Gangster was the #1 movie, with $80 million in ticket sales so far), it seems to me that Irvine's successors at his "watchdog" group aren't really lying awake nights over the thousands upon thousands of imaginary children who are running rampant, raping and pillaging after an all-night World of Warcraft marathon. It's only when they need to get those donations rolling in, the ones they claim amount to 75% of their operating budget, that they sprinkle these fearmongering ads out among Bible Belt newspapers.

Thus it's on the meager, hard-earned paychecks of the great unwashed — cowering in terror over the thought of a meth-hopped, FPS-addicted sk8er off his ritalin crashing through their front doors to chainsaw them into hamburger in an orgy of liberal-media-feuled lust and carnage — that AIM can pay to libel and defame their ideological and political opponents in their own neocon-friendly press.

Now who are the outraged citizens?

(For another detailed AIM critique, go here.)