I figured I had the right place when I saw the bumper sticker for David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader who nearly became Louisiana’s governor. I knew I had the right place when I saw a Confederate battle flag flapping in the breeze outside a white wooden-frame house.
As I stepped down the gravel driveway, a wiry 5-foot-8 man hailed me. I shook the hand of the 69-year-old, surprised by his steady grip. As I let go, I realized it was the same hand that squeezed the trigger of the .30-06 rifle that killed Medgar Evers in 1963.
Byron De La Beckwith waved me inside his home in Signal Mountain, Tennessee, and guided me into a back room, where he sat in a floral chair, holding court. An orphan by age 12, he had fought in the Pacific during World War II and returned to Mississippi with a Purple Heart. Eager to belong, he joined the Sons of the American Revolution, where he told me members began telling him “the horrible, insidiously evil things that went on in local, county, state, federal and worldwide government.”
Beckwith and his wife belonged to the far-right Liberty Lobby. Through its newspaper, The Spotlight, the organization claimed that fraud enabled “illegal aliens” to stay in the U.S. and that 6 million Jews didn’t die in the Holocaust because only 74,000 died at Auschwitz. (Historians put the actual Auschwitz figure at 1.1 million deaths, nearly all of them Jews.)
Spotlight, whose readership reached up to 1 million, pushed the agenda that secret sinister forces controlled the government, seeking to harm Americans through drinking water, prescription drugs and conventional medical treatment, including vaccines, despite the role vaccines have played in the global eradication of smallpox and the near eradication of polio. A recent study concluded that immunizations had saved more than 150 million lives.
Now, decades since my 1990 interview with Beckwith, what was once fringe thinking has become fashionable. Anti-science, anti-vaccine, anti-immigrant and anti-federal government rhetoric have made their way into the mainstream.
Read the rest here
As I stepped down the gravel driveway, a wiry 5-foot-8 man hailed me. I shook the hand of the 69-year-old, surprised by his steady grip. As I let go, I realized it was the same hand that squeezed the trigger of the .30-06 rifle that killed Medgar Evers in 1963.
Byron De La Beckwith waved me inside his home in Signal Mountain, Tennessee, and guided me into a back room, where he sat in a floral chair, holding court. An orphan by age 12, he had fought in the Pacific during World War II and returned to Mississippi with a Purple Heart. Eager to belong, he joined the Sons of the American Revolution, where he told me members began telling him “the horrible, insidiously evil things that went on in local, county, state, federal and worldwide government.”
Beckwith and his wife belonged to the far-right Liberty Lobby. Through its newspaper, The Spotlight, the organization claimed that fraud enabled “illegal aliens” to stay in the U.S. and that 6 million Jews didn’t die in the Holocaust because only 74,000 died at Auschwitz. (Historians put the actual Auschwitz figure at 1.1 million deaths, nearly all of them Jews.)
Spotlight, whose readership reached up to 1 million, pushed the agenda that secret sinister forces controlled the government, seeking to harm Americans through drinking water, prescription drugs and conventional medical treatment, including vaccines, despite the role vaccines have played in the global eradication of smallpox and the near eradication of polio. A recent study concluded that immunizations had saved more than 150 million lives.
Now, decades since my 1990 interview with Beckwith, what was once fringe thinking has become fashionable. Anti-science, anti-vaccine, anti-immigrant and anti-federal government rhetoric have made their way into the mainstream.
Read the rest here
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