[Bret L]

((Turner was figured for a plant years ago by the real WNs. Bret.))

Hal Turner Charged With Advocating Violence—But Who Was He Really
Working For?

By Alexander Hart

""Hard Cases make Bad Law". So goes the old legal adage (which dates back much farther than Oliver Wendell Holmes, who is often given credit for it). Any attempt to reconcile banning political speech with the First Amendment is bad law. So the best way to push Hate Crimes/Hate Speech totalitarianism is with a "hard case".

Accordingly, without one readily available, the Federal Government
created their own "hard case" in the shape of Hal Turner—the White
Supremacist blogger/web radio show host /FBI Informant.

Turner was arrested on state charges on June 3 for making threats
against two Connecticut lawmakers who were investigating whether the
Roman Catholic Diocese of Bridgeport needed to register as a lobbyist
because of its efforts to block proposed legislation that would have
given lay members more control over church finances.

Perhaps more notably, Turner was rearrested on federal charges June 24
for advocating violence against Federal judges Richard Posner, William
Bauer, and Frank Easterbrook. After these three judges upheld a
handgun ban, Turner wrote:

"Let me be the first to say this plainly: These judges deserve to be
killed. Their blood will replenish the tree of liberty. A small price
to pay to assure freedom for millions,"

Turner then helpfully provided information on where to find the
judges.

Turner is virtually unique among those on the "far right" for his
promotion of violence. While La Raza, the Southern Poverty Law Center,
and the Anti Defamation League, and the rest of the usual suspects
claim that patriotic immigration reform leads to violence against
immigrants, they never can find any actual examples, outside of maybe
a lone message board post.

But there was always Hal Turner. Thus the ADL was able to quote him
saying: "Slowly but surely we are headed toward the solution that I
have been advocating for years: KILL ILLEGAL ALIENS AS THEY CROSS INTO
THE U.S. When the stench of rotting corpses gets bad enough, the rest
will stay away."

No one that Turner threatened was actually harmed. The husband and
father of Judge Joan Lefkow, who ruled against the "World Church of
the Creator" in a trademark infringement case, were murdered by a
disgruntled former plaintiff whose malpractice suit Lefkow dismissed—
completely unrelated to Turner or the World Church of the Creator.
Nonetheless, Turner took credit for inciting the murder, and plenty of
the professional anti-racist watchdog groups made note of it as well.

But because of his extreme and violent rhetoric, Turner is the perfect
target for those wanting to criminalize right wing speech in the
United States. Thus the Washington Post ran a featured article on
Turner: Blogger's Case Could Test the Limits of Political Speech. [by
Peter Slevin, August 16, 2009]

After mentioning the details of the case, the Post’s Slevin put it in
the broader context of the supposed rash of politically incorrect
speech:

"Turner's case is likely to test the limits of political speech at a
time when incendiary talk is proliferating on broadcast outlets and
the Internet, from the microphones of well-known commentators to the
keyboards of anonymous netizens. President Obama has been depicted as
a Nazi and slain Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller as ‘Tiller the
killer.’ On guns and abortion, war and torture, taxes and now health
care, the commentary feeds off pools of anger that ebb and flow with
the zeitgeist."

Slevin then dutifully quoted Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law
Center—$PLC to VDARE.COM—piously describing it as a group that "tracks
extremists and hate speech". And he noted that the "line between free
speech and criminality is a fine one".

Twenty paragraphs into the story, Slevin mentioned—almost as an
irrelevant sidenote—that

"Turner…worked at times as an FBI informant. Although [Federal
Prosecutor Patrick] Fitzgerald's office says he provided occasional
information on right-wing extremists, [defense attorney Michael]
Orozco said he was recruited as an ‘agent provocateur to get leftists
to act in public against him and reveal themselves to the FBI.’"

There has been curiously little interest in the news that Turner was
an FBI informant. Thus when the Los Angeles Times editorialized in
defense of Turner’s right to free speech (August 22), his career as an
FBI informant was completely omitted.

And this was not the first revelation that Turner was an FBI
informant. In 2008, anonymous hackers broke into his computer and
published e-mails between Turner and his federal handlers. On July 1,
2007, Turner told his handlers: "I wrote an opinion piece on my site
today in which I opine about 46 US Senators [who just voted for
amnesty] who I believe should be removed from office [violently] on
July 4 for betraying their constituents and this nation." After
somebody responded by saying he would kill Russ Feingold in response
to the piece, he gloated to his handlers: "Once again, my fierce
rhetoric has served to flush out a possible crazy."

After the e-mails were posted, Turner immediately shut down his "Hal
Turner Show" website. The FBI refused to comment, so there’s a very
good likelihood that this is true—as even the $PLC acknowledged. We
will no doubt find out as the trials move forward.

If Turner is an agent provocateur, he did a very bad job of it. No one
has actually taken up his many calls to arms.

Call me paranoid, but I don’t think that was his actual function.

I had the misfortune of meeting Turner briefly in 2006, at an American
Renaissance conference. I had not heard of him before, and when he
started talking about a race war, I quickly left. I doubt he provoked
anyone to violence, but the SPLC and Searchlight Magazine gleefully
reported that he had attended the conference (which was open to the
public), thus smearing American Renaissance editor Jared Taylor.

This can be called "guilt by audience association".

Turner also seems to have been particularly fond of advocating
violence against federal judges—the same ones responsible for
interpreting the First Amendment. But when the judges’ own lives and
the lives of their families are potentially at stake, these "hard
cases" become even harder.

Turner’s outlandish statements were perfect for the campaign to create
"bad laws" that criminalize opposition to immigration and other
patriotic causes. Now it appears that many were made at the behest of
the Federal Government. And who else?"

Alexander Hart (email him) is a conservative journalist.


http://www.vdare.com/hart/090824_turner.htm