Dave Weigel on Megyn Kelly‘s trumpeting of the New Black Panther Party case as evidence the Justice Department under Obama is racist:

So why obsess over the Panthers? Is it turnabout for the way that liberals elevate the craziest tea party activists, or the way they call them racist? Because it’s obviously not a search for justice or a muckraking effort to discover reverse racism in the DOJ. If this is an effort to make sure that King Samir Shabazz is prosecuted for intimidating voters, why not try to find some voters he intimidated? Why, instead, as Kelly and Glenn Beck have opted to do, show video of the Shabazz yelling about “crackers” at a street fair before the election? No one disputes that he hates white people — just watch one of the tapes from the times Fox News invited his colleagues on to discuss how they hate white people.

One of the more jarring passages in Rick Perlstein‘s “Nixonland” is his recounting of a popular myth that went around Iowa in 1966, the year of the conservative backlash against the Great Society. The myth was that black gang members on motorcycles were going to head from Chicago to ransack Des Moines. Reading this in 2008, it sounded preposterous, the kind of thing that no one could believe in the country that was about to elect Barack Obama. But Kelly, under the guise of journalism, is working to create a rumor like this in 2010. Watch her broadcasts and you become convinced that the New Black Panthers are a powerful group that hate white people and operate under the protection of Eric Holder‘s DOJ.

Kelly’s comments aren’t the first or second time Fox has highlighted the NBPP. According to Media Matters, Fox hosted members of the NBPP on its prime-time shows more than 50 times between 1998 and 2008. This is a fringe group that doesn’t represent anything close to mainstream black opinion, a group that rarely does anything newsworthy or even interesting. Fox brings the NBPP on to scare the shit out of their white conservative audience, to remind them that black people are out to get them. This isn’t just “race-baiting” — it’s Fox trying to pretend that this is what (liberal) black people are really like, in order to stoke or justify whatever lingering racial resentment, paranoia, or hostility remains in their audience. This primes the audience for a racialized attack on any given liberal policy
initiative. The Affordable Care Act is “reparations,” a refundable tax credit is “welfare” and so on and so forth. When Fox anchors start talking about “wealth distribution,” ACORN or the NBPP is who they’d like you to think of your money being redistributed to.

The implication that Holder and Obama are sympathetic to, even protective of, the NBPP in the absence of any evidence beyond second-hand hearsay suggests that, no matter how integrated they are into mainstream society, black people without the conservative stamp of approval are secretly plotting against them. This really isn’t all that different from the controversy over the Islamic Center near Ground Zero. The point is you can never trust those people, no matter how they talk, dress, or act, because deep down, they’re all King Samir Shabazz or Faisal Shahzad.

To a certain extent this really isn’t just a conservative thing. We all like to point at the worst exemplars of people who hold opposing beliefs in order to confirm and justify our beliefs and hatreds–liberals like to nut-bait conservative figures with extreme views as proof positive of the pathology of American conservatives. But there’s something different about what Fox is doing, not only because the NBPP can’t be said to have any influence or cache within the Democratic Party, but because it’s not simply demonizing an opposing political faction, it’s reinforcing stereotypes about an entire ethnic group for political gain. There’s something particularly ugly and ultimately harmful about that.