Larry Flynt's Blog, page 12

Pope Francis

With the mainstream media hailing the new pope as a cuddly, squeaky-clean messiah for the shamed and shit-stained Catholic Church, it looks like it’s up to HUSTLER—and a few diligent historians—to do the journalistic dirty work. Formerly known as Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio from Argentina, the new human hotline to heaven may have dropped his old moniker, but he still has some serious historical baggage. The closer you look, the more this papal savior resembles Pontius Pilate.

During his country’s military dictatorship and its “Dirty War” of the 1970s, when scores of resisters were killed or disappeared, Bergoglio honed his reputation as a guy who would gladly bend over for any junta that came along. After all, complying with dictatorships and fascism is a deep-seated tradition in the Catholic Church.

As local head of the Jesuit order at the time, Bergoglio stripped two priests— Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics—of their official functions, withdrawing the protections provided by the church. The priests were involved in helping the poor, an activity that smelled to the junta’s jackboots a lot like Peron ism. Anything Juan Perón and his wife Eva fought for—like democracy, trade unions and care for the underprivileged—was a scourge to the new regime. How dare Jesuit priests follow their vow of charity when they should be rimjobbing the new Butchers of Buenos Aires?

No sooner had Bergoglio made the priests unfair game than they were grabbed by paramilitary thugs and delivered to the torture chambers of the notorious detention camp Escuela Mecánica de la Armada, or ESMA. Later, when people started asking questions, the priests turned up drugged and naked in a field outside Buenos Aires. Yorio later testified that “Bergoglio never warned us. It was him who provided our names to the military.” The future pontiff, they charged, even lied to the priests’ families about their fate.

As if that weren’t disturbing enough, Bergoglio dutifully looked the other way while newborn babies were stolen from detainees and given to regime-friendly families. He claimed he didn’t know it was going on, but witnesses under oath swore otherwise.

Bergoglio has consistently invoked privilege and dodged questions about his complicity with the deadly regime that ruled Argentina until 1983. The Catholic Church, of course, denigrates the accusations as the usual anticlerical attacks. Anybody see a pattern here? People accuse the Catholic Church of disgusting deeds; the church denies everything; then it all turns out to be true.

The unsurprising revelations that the Catholic Church turns out to be rife with proven pedophile perverts is by far the Vatican’s biggest bummer these days. It tends to put a damper on parents handing their sons over for altar-boy duty when the job likely involves sucking off Father O’Diddley.

Witness the Grassi affair. Father Julio César Grassi was a priest in Buenos Aires who founded a charity called Happy Children. Creepy already, right? Turns out, the charity was his personal groping pen. Bergoglio and Grassi were bosom buddies, so the future pope vouched for him even though Grassi was a convicted child molester!

Pope Francis, whose name supposedly comes from St. Francis of Assisi (we suspect it was actually borrowed from Francis the Talking Mule) is obviously the clean-up guy whose job is to sweep the whole nasty childrape chapter under the chapel carpet. In full bury-the-bodies mode, the Vatican is loudly proclaiming that “what is important is what the Holy Father does now.”

What Bergoglio promptly did upon nailing the papacy was to get in some prayer time at the basilica where Cardinal Bernard Law happens to reside. Law is the arch – bishop emeritus of Boston, who fled to Rome ten years ago when his shitty practice of protecting child molesting priests hit the big fan. The archdiocese left behind by Dirty Uncle Bernie has since paid out over $100 million in settlements to victims.

Francis, of course, gave the old prick a big papal hug, something advocates for survivors of priestly abuse called “extraordinarily hurtful.” Sure, but ain’t that a Catholic Church specialty? First Grassi, now Law. Makes you wonder just how many pervert pals the freshman pope has.

Despite the humanitarian hype around Francis, his cultural attitudes are still stuck in the days of the Inquisition. When Argentina’s president pushed for a gay-marriage bill, Francis bayed that it was “a destructive attack on God’s plan” and “the devil’s work.” As for the pro-choice movement, it’s an insidious “culture of death.” Let’s be honest. Francis the Mule would never have become pope if he had any intention of rattling the church’s entrenched dogma about women, gays or anything involving penises entering anything (other than children).

Some pope-watchers do, however, speculate that Francis could soften up one bit of traditionally Viagra-hard dogma, namely the church’s old condom phobia—probably under pressure from the mass of fornicating padres. He’s even said the celibacy rule isn’t a matter of faith and “can change.” Time to bust out the blessed ultra-thins!

Ultimately, whatever good Francis might do, he is still the head of the world’s most relentlessly evil institution. The Catholic Church’s extended, Satanic history of corruption, torture, greed and perversity has caused so much misery and harm, it’s going to take more than one old coot in slippers to turn it around. The only pope we’d hail would be the last one. So our appeal to Pope Francis is this: Admit to the world that catholicism was a sick prank that’s gone on way too long and just shut the whole thing down. Sure, you’ll go to hell, but admit it: You were on your way there anyway.

Bold Move

LOOKING AHEAD TO 2016, MAVERICK REPUBLICAN RAND PAUL AMPS UP HIS DEFENSE OF THE BILL OF RIGHTS.

by Nat Hentoff

Impressed by his insistent, often-solitary championing of civil liberties in the U.S. Senate, I twice wrote that Rand Paul should be our next President. But at that time I knew it was just a pipe dream because the Republican’s national name recognition was so low. Now, thanks to his filibuster during the Senate’s ultimate confirmation of John Brennan as CIA director, Paul has become a viable 2016 candidate. Even more surprising, Kentucky’s junior senator barely uttered a word about Brennan throughout the electric 13 hours he spent addressing his fellow lawmakers on March 6, 2013.

Two days later this new media phenomenon made his goal much clearer in a Washington Post op-ed titled “My filibuster was just the beginning.”

For years I’ve been complaining in HUSTLER about the apathy of Congress and much of the country with regard to how the Bush-Cheney regime and then Obama’s formulated their own rules of law against terrorism. That’s why Rand Paul “wanted to sound an alarm bell from coast to coast. I wanted everybody to know that our Constitution is precious and that”—dig this, fellow citizens—“ no American should be killed by a drone without first being charged with a crime. As Americans, we have fought long and hard for the Bill of Rights. The idea that no person shall be held without due process, and that no person shall be held for a capital offense without being indicted, is a founding American principle and a basic right.”

I’ve been writing again and again that, as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison warned, only We the People can protect our individual liberties under the Bill of Rights. Rand Paul began to do it nationally overnight.

Undoubtedly stung by the enthusiastic approval of Paul’s filibuster on Capitol Hill and around the country, Attorney General Eric Holder sent Paul a terse letter that made the libertarian senator believe his hoisting of the Bill of Rights had been successful up to a point: “Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil? The answer to that question is no.”

But Paul is far from silenced. In his op-ed, he added that “my filibuster was the beginning of the fight to restore a healthy balance of powers. …The Constitution’s Fifth Amendment [granting due process and other protections] applies to all Americans; there are no exceptions.”

Besides celebrating that “millions have followed this debate on TV, Twitter and Facebook,” Paul went on to say that “I hope my efforts help spur a national debate about the limits of executive power and the scope of every American’s natural right to be free. … I believe the support I received this past week shows that Americans are looking for someone to really stand up and fight for them. And I’m prepared to do just that.”

The longer-range significance of Senator Paul’s 13-hour fire alarm is that more of us who do not call ourselves libertarians—or even know what the term means—have been jolted out of the conditioning of Bush- Cheney and Obama’s “new normal” that has increasingly abolished personal privacy. Nevertheless, Americans reelected a President who insists he can order the military to imprison Americans right here in the Land of the Free without habeas-corpus rights for supposedly being “involved” or vaguely “supportive” of terrorism.

After years and years of what Justice William Brennan once told me—“The Bill of Rights never gets off the page and into the lives of most Americans”—Rand Paul has spurred numerous citizens to openly criticize the government’s attacks on our basic liberties.

Exemplifying Americans’ anger is Rita Lasar, whose letter was printed in the New York Times on March 11, 2013: “The idea that any President can kill an American citizen without a trial is abhorrent and frankly scares me more than any act of any ‘terrorist.’”

Although Attorney General Holder assures us this is no longer possible on U.S. soil, smashing the “new normal” hinges on knowing that the assurances of recent Presidents and their minions have been plain crap. So Rand Paul’s Presidential aspirations, while buoyed by his filibuster, will be fruitless if his fellow Americans don’t reeducate themselves on what’s guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. It’s up to us.

Kiss Your Privacy Goodbye

THE FOURTH AMENDMENT IS BEING RIPPED TO SHREDS BY WALL STREET MERGERS, UNCLE SAM’S WAR ON TERROR AND THE HIGHEST COURT IN THE LAND.

by Robert Scheer

Ever read the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution? Probably not, or you—like most Americans—would not be so accepting of its demise as a pillar of the freedoms guaranteed to us by the Bill of Rights. The Fourth is the one that guarantees “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures. …”

As the wording of the amendment clearly states, it’s not just your home that is your castle. Dating back to the late 12th century, when English common law was first taking shape, this principle granted a person sovereignty over his space even if a tyrannical monarch was sitting on the throne. The Fourth Amendment goes further than that, extending your sovereignty over “houses, papers, and effects.” So even when you are traveling beyond the confines of your domicile, your fundamental right to a private space is protected.

That space can only be invaded by agents of the state under the Fourth Amendment’s narrowly prescribed parameters: “no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

How much clearer could the framers of our Constitution have made it? They knew exactly the dangers they were describing: agents, acting on behalf of King George III, who would conduct general sweeps through the homes of rebellious colonists as a means of enforcing blind obedience and squelching any rumblings of revolution. Privacy of home and thought was not some perk of leisure to the founders but rather the bedrock on which free citizens could stand.

Better tell that to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has defended the increasingly widespread use of drones to spy on every second of our most personal activity. Easy for Bloomberg. As one of the country’s richest men, he can no doubt find heavily guarded sanctuaries to provide him with virtually impenetrable privacy. His advice to the rest of us on his weekly radio show was that privacy is doomed: “You can’t keep the tides from coming in. We’re gonna have more visibility and less privacy. I don’t see how you stop that.”

What a cop-out to liken calculated assaults by state and private snoopers on our most intimate affairs to the natural rise and fall of sea levels dictated by the gravitational pull of the moon and sun along with Earth’s rotation. Snooping is dictated by the eagerness of snoopers, official or private, and their unconstitutional antics can be banned as a matter of law. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

For example, back in 1999, Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, permitting insurance companies, investment houses and commercial banks to merge. At the time, privacy advocates pointed out that this would permit the consolidation of massive medical and financial databases. They called for a statutory requirement that an individual’s records could not be shared without their express consent. Under pressure from the banking lobbyists eager to exploit this new trove of personal information, Congress rejected that safeguard. What should be confidential is now public.

Unfortunately, in 2001 that assault on our privacy rights was followed by the so-called War on Terror in response to the 9/11 attacks. The pretext of fighting foreign enemies has led to a massive expansion of warrantless surveillance of our phone calls and emails without any of the safeguards enshrined in our Constitution.

Earlier this year the Supreme Court threw out a challenge to this surveillance on the grounds that since it is secret, we citizens have no basis for claiming we are being spied on even though the government concedes it is doing just that.

So much for the Fourth Amendment and your privacy rights.

The First Casualty

There’s been a lot of talk about the death of true journalism. I couldn’t agree more that the trend away from firsthand, on-the-ground reporting is regrettable. But even more alarming is that journalism is now, literally, more deadly than ever. According to multiple sources, including Reporters Without Borders, 2012 was the deadliest year on record for journalists throughout the world. In addition to the at least 88 killed, many more were beaten, intimidated or imprisoned. This year is on track to be just as hazardous for both professional reporters and the growing number of citizen journalists we rely on to fill the information gaps left by mainstream corporate media.

This trend represents the most brutal form of censorship. Reporting should not be a suicide mission. But regimes and individuals with things to hide know that killing the messenger has a powerful, chilling effect. As journalism gets more dangerous, fewer people will be willing to engage in the tough work of accurate investigative reporting.

It’s no accident that the framers of our Constitution included freedom of the press as an integral part of the First Amendment. A country without a free press is no longer free. History has proven that a functioning journalistic sector is vital to a civilized, progressive society. We need to know the whole truth so we can fix what’s broken. Truth is not only the first casualty of war; it’s also the first one of a dying democracy.

As a publisher who has fought in the trenches against censorship, I call on all governments to loudly condemn the growing attacks on journalists and aggressively pursue anyone responsible for trying to silence the free press. This deadly trend must be reversed.

Ted Cruz

In the proud tradition of our very own Graffilthy, let’s kick off this crapfest with a verse cribbed from a shithouse stall: “Here I sit, my buns a flexin’. Just gave birth to another Texan!” The Lone Star Stater this time is the Tea Party pile we like to call Turd Cruz.

Now brace yourselves for a shock: We’re actually going to give crusty ol’ loser John McCain some props for nailing Cruz and his fellow Tea Party thugs Rand Paul and Justin Amash in a TV interview as “wacko birds.” That’s the great thing about dementia: Sometimes it lets the truth come out. What McCain should have added is that Cruz is a wacko by design—a cold, calculating opportunist spoonfeeding fanatical dogma to the GOP’s hardline fringe.

Just about everything about this guy is a lie. He likes to play the good ol’ boy gone up to War-shin-tin to kick some ass around, but Texas is only where he got his Ph.D. in douchebaggery. Like droolin’ Dubya Bush, Cruz is actually an Ivy League one-percenter. Born in Canada, he was groomed for power at Princeton and Harvard. He honed his forked tongue as a college debater, learning to say anything—even outright falsifications—to win no matter which side he was on.

Logically, Cruz was drawn to the lawyer profession like a blowfly to roadkill. He was one of the legal goons Bush sent to Florida during the 2000 recount fiasco that led to the worst American presidency of all time. For that reason alone, Cruz should be considered for Asshole of the Decade. Sidenote: Cruz’s wife, Heidi, is a Goldman Sachs banker. So much for Cruz’s outsider myth.

During his legal career, Turd specialized in defending morally reprehensible causes: He made sure Texas could execute foreign nationals who weren’t even allowed to contact their consulate before being charged with capital crimes. He defended cutthroat companies that had no qualms about ripping off patented inventions and firing whistleblowers. Through it all, he never tired of spouting about the land of opportunity and success at all costs being what “freedom” is all about.

But, despite Cruz’s being the son of a Cuban immigrant, his idea of freedom and opportunity doesn’t include the Dream Act, which would give immigrant children a path to citizenship. Cruz is against it. Maybe he wants immigrants to prove they can be as heartless a dreamcrusher as he is before they be allowed to share his twisted idea of the American Dream. Need we even mention that Cruz, like most residents of the distant past, is scared stiff of gays, to the point of hating on gay-pride paraders? Maybe Heidi should speculate on what that obsession might mean.

Hitching his wagon to the brain-dead Tea Party because who the fuck else would want him, Cruz is a nasty cocktail of hard-right fanaticism and utter lack of charm that’s turning into a huge gift for the Democrats. They’re quickly realizing that all they have to do is give this throwback enough rope to hang himself with.

Apparently blanking on how badly Romney shot himself in the foot with his propaganda that “47%” of the population is “dependent on government” and “believe they are victims,” Cruz resurrected his own party’s worst nightmare— months after the election—by equating the 47% of people who pay no federal income tax with the much smaller number who actually get government checks.

Cruz even elaborated—something a shitty liar should never try to do—by implying that his “dependent” group was all single moms, blacks and Hispanics. At this point, only Tea Partiers holding racist, misspelled signs still swallow that crap. You gotta feel for the GOP functionaries trying to put the wheels back on their party. In marketing speak, Cruz is an epic rebranding fail.

There may well be a genetic component to Cruz’s anti-intellectual fervor. His dad went from being a bombthrower for Cuba’s Communist icon Fidel Castro to rampant pro-capitalist entrepreneur to fire-and-brimstone preacher. Turd obviously inherited Pop’s fanatical fundamentalist DNA. Maybe that’s why he keeps fighting yesterday’s battles. He can’t let go of the “47%” dogma; he still harps on about repealing “Obamacare,” which even most Obama haters know ain’t gonna happen; and extols just about every one of his obstructionist antics as “a stand for principle.”

Cruz’s most nauseating spectacle may have been his public humiliation of secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel. If you want to go back in time, watch the YouTube video. It’s vintage Joe McCarthy, the bully who led the Red Scare witch-hunt of the ’50s that made a mockery of American freedom. Cruz’s baseless suggestion that Hagel took payoffs from North Korea has become a classic in the annals of WTF politics.

Freshman Senator Cruz’s self-righteousness has already made him one of the most hated members among fellow lawmakers. During a debate about guns, he flashed back to his schoolboy days as an amateur Constitutional debater and smugly lectured longtime senators on the Bill of Rights according to his absolutist interpretation. Senator Dianne Feinstein shot back, “I’m not a sixth-grader.”

Like McCarthy, Cruz is more than a hypocrite and a dangerous ideologue. He’s the kind of regressive roadblock that takes two steps back every time our country takes one step forward. He just doesn’t get today’s America. And he doesn’t get that the Constitution is a living document, not a dead Bible.

“2014 has the potential to be a very, very good year at the ballot box,” the oblivious Turd recently told a gaggle of archconservatives. “The number-one way we can screw it up is if Republicans fail to stand on principle.”

Our appeal to the Republican Party is this: Please listen to Turd Cruz and choose him as your Presidential candidate for 2016, eligible or not. We can’t wait to see Hillary Clinton have wacko bird for breakfast.

Humanizing All of America’s Murder Victims?

IN THE WAKE OF THE NEWTOWN MASSACRE, A JOURNALISM ORG SEEKS TO NAME EACH CIVILIAN KILLED BY U.S. DRONES.



by Nat Hentoff

Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, was a nonviolent, direct-action enabler of social justice whom I was privileged to know. In New York City she organized the first civil-disobedience protest against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, and I was there protesting.

Carrying on the late activist’s unflinching spirit is the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, which publishes the Catholic Agitator. The publication’s February 2013 edition featured a thought provoking article titled “Guns and Drones,” in which author Theo Kayser took a stand I have not seen in all the coverage of a gunman’s rampage at Newtown, Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School.

He framed his argument with a report, which I have cited elsewhere, from the London- based Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Its records disclose “at least 176 children killed in drone strikes carried out in Pakistan, with another 27 to 35 killed in Yemen, and hundreds more adult civilian casualties.”

Turning to the murdered children in Connecticut, Kayser noted that “a new emphasis has been placed on gun control and background checks in this country.” So “perhaps we would be forced into a serious debate as to the morality and legality of this country’s military practices if photos of every person killed by a Hellfire missile were broadcast for a week in the national media after their death.”

And dig this, one and all: “Maybe,” Kayser continued, “we could begin to feel the same sense of outrage at the deaths of Pakistani children if, as with the children in Newtown, we were told about their favorite sports teams or their artistic prowess. And maybe we would demand an end to their killing if we were so reminded of their full humanity.

“When those doing the killing see only figures on a screen, how much more removed are we who hear only whispers of such murders in the media?”

By contrast, in this nation, Kayser reminded us, “repeatedly you heard about the 20 children and six adults killed in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012. You saw the names of those killed, and you heard their stories. You were told of the quality of their character, and you were informed of when their funerals took place.”

Therefore, many Americans agreed “it was a tragedy that so many lives were prematurely lost and so, millions of [us] grieved.”

However, even those who might be disturbed to learn more about the kids blown away in Pakistan and elsewhere would likely not object if the festering details were never publicized. I have what may well be unpleasant news for them: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) recently announced that it is “launching an ambitious new investigation which will seek to identify as many as possible of those killed in U.S. covert drone strikes in Pakistan, whether civilian or militant.”

Meanwhile, TBIJ reported that it “has already recorded the names of hundreds of people killed in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. At the end of January 2013 the Bureau was able to identify by name 213 people killed by drones in Pakistan who were reported to be middle- or senior-ranking militants. A further 331 civilians have also now been named,87 of them children.” [Emphasis added.]

TBIJ acknowledges that “part of the justification for the U.S. carrying out drone strikes without consent [of host governments] is their reported success. And naming those militants killed is key to that process. Al-Qaeda bomber Fahd al-Quso’s death was widely celebrated. Yet how many [American] newspapers also registered the death of Mohamed Saleh Al-Suna, a civilian caught up and killed in a U.S. strike in Yemen on March 30, 2012? By showing only one side of the coin, we risk presenting a distorted picture of this new form of warfare. There is an obligation to identify all of those killed—not just the bad guys.”

As the Obama Administration zealously maintains its drone strikes in far-off lands, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism is actively seeking additional funding for its Naming the Dead Project. So I was pleased to learn that the Freedom of the Press Foundation is now a key backer.

You are invited to join the debate at TBIJ’s website, TheBureauInvestigates.com, and Twitter.com/TBIJ.

Orwellian Decision

THE HIGHEST COURT IN THE LAND SANCTIFIES SECRECY AND THE UNCHECKED INVASION OF OUR PRIVACY.

by Robert Scheer

Why did we go so crazy after 9/11? The idea that somehow our freedoms could be easily sacrificed, including those that our Constitution declared most fundamental to the survival of our republic, became the norm.

This past February, more than a decade after attacks that would seem relatively minor in the histories of most war-torn nations, the so-called conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court—in cahoots with President Barack Obama—put the final nail in the coffin of one of the Constitution’s most sacred protections: the right to the privacy of one’s home and thoughts.

Enshrined in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, it was perhaps the most important right of all in the eyes of the founders of this nation. They had risked much as colonists in objecting to the warrantless intrusion into people’s homes conducted by the king of England. That is why they guaranteed “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Surely, the right to be secure in one’s person and papers would extend in the modern era to telephone conversations, as candidate Obama stated when he first ran for President and condemned the warrantless electronic surveillance of the Bush Administration. He specifically denounced Bush’s exploitation of the 9/11 attacks as “an excuse for unchecked Presidential power. A tragedy that united us was turned into a political wedge issue used to divide us.”

Obama specifically denounced Bush’s use of warrantless wiretapping as “a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand.” He promised that “I will provide our intelligence and law-enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom. That means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens.”

But Obama didn’t mean it. The unconstitutional wiretapping initiated under Bush that ensnares the communications of millions of Americans has been defended even more energetically by his successor. The Obama Administration filed the critical brief affirming the constitutionality of the eavesdropping by the National Security Agency that Amnesty International and the ACLU had challenged before the Supreme Court.

It was the reasoning of the Obama Justice Department that the court’s right-wing majority embraced in slamming the door shut on protecting the basic privacy rights of Americans. In a 5-4 decision, the court held that the plaintiffs had no judicial standing to bring their challenge to the administration’s policy because they couldn’t prove they had been victimized by its wiretap procedures.

Of course they couldn’t because the wiretapping procedures are so highly secret. But the Constitutional point, as former Constitutional law professor Obama well knows, is that the government has no more right to break into your phone conversations than it does to physically enter your home without a warrant. It is the warrant that serves notice to the victim that he or she may be being victimized.

Instead of honoring the sanctity of the right to privacy, Obama and the Supreme Court— as they’ve done with drone strikes and the rendition- torture program—substitute stealth for transparency to make official criminal behavior invisible. Prophetic writer George Orwell would have appreciated the Obama argument. Rejected by the court’s pro-civil liberties minority, it insisted that since the NSA’s surveillance operation is so highly secret, those who fear that the public is being victimized can’t prove it. By that reasoning, any nefarious action of the government—say assassinations of its critics— could be deemed exempt from judicial challenge as long as the facts of the killing are concealed behind the veil of official secrecy.

The Supreme Court majority ruling spells the end of government accountability and with it the end of the Bill of Rights protection of individual freedom. That is the template of the post-9/11 America into which this country has morphed.

The Pathway Is Clear

It’s hard to believe, but even after having their asses handed to them in the last election, Republicans still haven’t gotten the memo on the issue closest to the hearts of America’s fastest-growing group of voters: immigration. With Tea Party extremists still throttling conservative common sense, it’s time for President Obama and the Democrats to seize the issue and own it. A clear and just pathway to citizenship must be at the center of the push for immigration reform.

Progressive immigration policy is not only politically wise; it is just. Undocumented immigrants and their children contribute to our economy and have earned the rights of all Americans. A reform plan without citizenship would create a new Jim Crow reality: They’d have the right to live here—but only as second class citizens. That would be wrong and completely at odds with American values.

This is a country of immigrants, and as long as it leads the world in freedom and opportunity, it always will be. It is also a rapidly changing society. The only way to ensure that our hard-won progress toward greater freedom and tolerance is embraced and carried forward by new citizens is to allow them to personally experience its benefits themselves.

Larry Flynt On Free Speech And Smut

Larry Flynt is celebrating dual milestones. Now 70, he heads a business empire that’s larger and more profitable than ever. He’s also celebrating the 25-year anniversary of an unlikely Supreme Court victory. Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, Flynt’s epic legal battle against evangelist Jerry Falwell, started out as a tasteless joke about the preacher losing his virginity with his own mother and ended up as a historical landmark that significantly bolstered our First Amendment right to free speech.

Flynt sat down with longtime friend Robert Scheer, one of the country’s foremost progressive voices, for an honest conversation about the lofty principles of Constitutional rights and the gutter realities of being a multimillionaire smut peddler.

ROBERT SCHEER: You once told me HUSTLER is the best magazine you could read with one hand. In your office you have a book of Helmut Newton’s photographs: classy, beautiful erotica. In the magazine you’ve got cum-shots.

LARRY FLYNT: You know something? Helmut Newton loved HUSTLER; it was his favorite magazine. People that love smut like it hard, and they like it unapologetic. If you’re a connoisseur of pornography, you really don’t like it camouflaged with a lot of aesthetics; you like it in your face. You’re one of the few people I know who define pornography very objectively when it’s really very subjective. It exists in various forms.

We all know that the old masters, Picasso or Rembrandt, had a penchant for doing nudes—for doing porn basically. When writers like James Joyce came along, they were in a league of their own. They made the desire for pornography more acceptable. Eventually there came a time when it was available to the masses. The genie was out of the bottle, and there was no way of putting it back in. It got very unfiltered and very unsophisticated. So, many of the people who appreciated very good pornography were extremely critical of the crudeness in a lot of it. But that’s the marketplace.

When you started out, you just wanted to make a buck, right?

And have fun while I was doing it.

You were the primitive capitalist. You weren’t some great artist painting beautiful naked women.

No. But if I was selling peanut butter, I’d sell it with the same enthusiasm.

You sometimes talk about yourself as just a smut peddler. I remember when people criticized you about being a bottom-feeder, you said, “Yeah, but look what I found at the bottom.” But you’ve had an evolution. You’re a true believer now in the First Amendment argument.

I didn’t have to evolve on the First Amendment. I’ve always believed in it.

But did you understand it? Did you understand its power?

No. I don’t think any of us understands the overwhelming significance of the First Amendment. Without free expression or the right to assemble, we wouldn’t even be a nation. The Second Amendment wouldn’t even be important. All others come after the First Amendment.

So you start HUSTLER in 1974, and your life takes off. Then in 1978 you have this horrendous experience of being shot. One response could be a lower profile. Take the money and run. But you became a crusader.

I never slowed down. All through the ’70s, ’80s and some of the ’90s we were putting out censorship brush fires all over the country. Prosecutors wanted to prosecute me everywhere, and I always showed up to accommodate them. I think I finally just wore them out.

The People vs. Larry Flynt is the popular record of your First Amendment fight. It’s a brilliant piece of moviemaking, but is it accurate?

It’s extremely accurate. Some of it is very embarrassing, but the director, Milos Forman, knew what he had to focus on: the most bizarre, outrageous and controversial parts of my life, because that gets the money. All of that is true, but there was a lot left out of the movie that I would like to have seen in there.

In the beginning you’re just a redneck who wants to make a buck. You’ve got strip clubs, and you need a way of publicizing them. So you put out this magazine. Then you run up against hypocrites like Charles Keating— who landed in the middle of the savings-and loan scandal—and Jerry Falwell. That confrontation took you to our highest court. How important is the legacy of that Supreme Court decision 25 years ago?

Go back to the ’70s and get some tapes from Johnny Carson’s monologue, and you’ll realize how bland and tame they are; no comparison at all to Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. You can see the evolution that took place with my case. I was talking to Rodney Smolla, who wrote Jerry Falwell v. Larry Flynt: The First Amendment on Trial, the book about the Supreme Court case. He says people are not really aware of the full impact that case had because the lawyers for NBC, CBS and all the rest of them are standing behind people like Letterman, Leno and Stewart saying you can do this because of this case. Garry Trudeau, in an interview with Ted Koppel, talked about all the trouble that his comic Doonesbury got into with politicians—Bush the lapdog and things like that. He said he was really worried that he was going to be facing serious litigation. And he said, “Then I got a get-out-of-jail-free card.” And Koppel said, “Who was that from?” And he said, “Larry Flynt.”

That case just stopped it all right there. You can no longer sue someone because they hurt your feelings or your wife’s feelings or your dog’s feelings or whatever; you have to prove libel. If you can’t prove libel, it’s not going to fly. That was a huge thing in that case. The second component that made it so significant was that for the first time in the history of our nation, over 200 years, parody was made protected speech. If it’s not a serious piece of literary work, it cannot be taken as such. It must be treated as a parody.

I remember you once mentioned that you thought the infamous June 1978 meat grinder cover was parody; that you were putting down the idea of women being meat in a meat grinder.

It was a satirical-spoof parody, not done in the best taste, but that’s what it represented as far as I was concerned. I think as a heterosexual male about women. I love women. I adore them. I worship them. They’re my whole life. If there’s anything that brightens up my day, it’s a beautiful woman.

Do you think you empower women by the way they are depicted in HUSTLER?

As long as there’s a woman covered up, a man’s going to want to see her in her birthday suit. That is human nature. That is the attraction. In all of my years of being in business and all the thousands of models that I’ve interviewed, I’ve never had one model ever say to the press or to me personally or to anyone that she felt like she had been coerced or intimidated to be in the magazine. It was always something that she did voluntarily. It was always because they thought they were young, they had great bodies, and they would like to preserve it for posterity’s sake because they realized they would only be young once. That is the general theme of every young woman that’s ever posed for HUSTLER over the years. I know that people, feminists like Gloria Steinem, feel that these women are being exploited. Gloria’s a lot like Reverend Falwell, just selling her take.



One of the arguments about Playboy and magazines like that is they held up an idea of a woman that couldn’t really exist in life—the ultimate objectification. It makes the husband or the boyfriend disappointed with what he has. I remember you telling me that in HUSTLER you aim for the woman-next- door, the woman you would actually see in real life.

She could be short, skinny, whatever. Redheads, blondes, brunettes.



And you were against cosmetic surgery.

Yes, and I still am. But we’ve got a huge problem today. We like to publish women in their natural state, which means their pubes are intact, but 90% of girls that show up today have no pubic hair, and over half of them have had breast implants. So we are really faced with a crisis situation. Either we take what we can get or try to go with something that is not up to our standard.

People used to get arrested for what you do, even just saying or printing the word fuck. Now it’s all out of the bag. Have we gained some freedom? Is this a better way to live? Let it all hang out?

There’s nothing said or written that has not been said or written before. It’s just rearranged. I don’t think it’s that much of a different world. I think there were some true pioneers. It wasn’t Hugh Hefner or Larry Flynt. It was Lenny Bruce. I remember Lenny Bruce saying, “They say that kids are out to repeat what they see imitated, and in that case I’d rather my kids see a porn movie than King of Kings because I don’t want them to kill Christ when he comes back.”

Lenny was scary to the establishment because he was saying things that made the establishment cringe. No one should even utter these words! But we have a First Amendment that guarantees us the right to express ourselves and not have to worry about what kind of words we’re using.

In the case of Falwell and the Moral Majority, he seemed to be riding a wave that was going to get bigger and bigger and sweep aside a lot of progress. Now, after this last election, you even have a Christian conservative like Ralph Reed saying, “We don’t have the people anymore, and we particularly don’t have the young people.” They’re not buying into that Puritanism. They’re not buying into what the Moral Majority wants. So you won at the end of the day. Did Falwell see that coming?

I think that there was one side of him that believed he was going to win; at least he wanted to win. And until the decision was rendered, I thought he was going to. When I sat in that gallery at the Supreme Court and looked over there at him and his family, it looked like a Norman Rockwell painting. The pornographer versus the preacher. I’m dead, and then it wound up being a unanimous decision. In the whole history of our nation there have only been a handful of unanimous decisions to come out of the Supreme Court, and mine was one of them.

After the case was over, I was sitting in my office, and my secretary called me and said, “There’s a Reverend Jerry Falwell in the lobby.” I said, “Send him in.” He comes walking through my office door, and he’s got both hands in the air, and he says, “I surrender.” He comes in and sits down and says, “Look, I know when I’m beaten.” I think he knew he was beaten all along, but he milked it for all he could get.

Did you get the feeling that Falwell was in it as an act, that this was a racket? Or was he a true believer?

I think Reverend Falwell knew what he was selling just like I knew what I was selling. I was selling porn; he was selling religion.

Let me ask you about exposing politicians. At first I thought this was a little weird and contradictory. Here is a guy who wants us to be sexually freer, and yet he’s going after people because they’ve got a mistress. Did you feel that there was something contradictory about your big campaign?

Not at all. I have one vote, only one. But by outing corrupt politicians, I can get rid of some people who shouldn’t be there—not because I’m exposing their sex life but because I’m exposing their hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is the biggest enemy that democracy has. It doesn’t have anything to do with sex or money; it’s the hypocrisy involved.

Take somebody like Bob Livingston. He’s trying to impeach Bill Clinton, and he’s talking about how solid his marriage is, saying he had never strayed from his marriage, never had an affair with a government employee or an intern or a lobbyist. Then we find out he’s doing a lobbyist, a federal judge and an intern in his own office. That guy just reeked of hypocrisy. He was ripe to be exposed.

Like when we exposed Larry Craig, the congressman from Idaho who was doing the footsies in the men’s-room stall. He’d voted against every piece of gay-rights legislation in the last 20 years and was gay himself. He should have been exposed.



What if they’re public citizens, and they’re not being hypocritical?

You have some liberals in both the House and the Senate who don’t profess to be holier-than- thou. They’re not trying to conduct their personal lives differently than the way they conduct their public life. We leave those people alone. I’ve had very compromising information and photographs of some very famous and influential people in this country, and I stopped it from being published because they were private citizens. I could have made a lot of money by publishing the material, but I didn’t do it.

HUSTLER is a pretty tawdry publication. But when people picked it up during the last election, they saw—right next to the smut—statements by Larry Flynt about why we need to vote for Obama, why we need to tax rich people like yourself, why we need to care about people who don’t have so much.

I don’t know how people who are successful can feel that they do not have an obligation to help people who have been less fortunate, especially the young and the elderly or the handicapped. I give a lot of money to charity every year. I don’t do it because it makes me feel better. I do it because I know there’s a need for it. Republicans are mean-spirited. I don’t think they give a damn. At their core they’re racist, and they’re on their way to becoming a minority party because they have no compassion for their fellow people. A nation cannot survive with a bunch of selfish rich people.



What impresses me is that, somehow out of all of this madness, you ended up being a pretty classy guy. The last thing anybody would have expected is that you, smut peddler Larry Flynt, would still be here at 70 years old a respected member of the community, the one who protected our freedoms.

Somebody said to me once, “My problem with you is that you’re offensive.” I said, “Well, freedom of speech is only important if it’s offensive. If you’re not going to offend anybody, you don’t need protection of the First Amendment.”

When they were interviewing me in front of the Supreme Court, I said, “If the First Amendment will protect a scumbag like me, it’ll protect everybody.”

Congress Tunes Its “Instrument of Villainy”

My most exciting memory of growing up in Boston during the Great Depression was learning how our independence was born. A pivotal event occurred in 1761 in a Boston courtroom. Lawyer James Otis Jr. spent nearly five hours arguing against extension of the “writs of assistance,” which British officials drew up themselves—like today’s FBI does—so they could burst into unspecified colonists’ businesses and homes in search of smuggled goods and other items.

As I chronicled in my book Living the Bill of Rights, Otis told the magistrates: “The freedom of one’s house is an essential liberty, and any law which violates that privacy is an instrument of slavery and villainy.”

Otis lost the case, but in the courtroom was a lawyer named John Adams (later our second President), who wrote in his notebook that very night: “Every man of an immense crowded audience appeared to me to go away as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance. Then and there was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the child Independence was born.”

Otis subsequently proclaimed in a pamphlet that those writs violated the British constitution and Magna Carta. Hence, as I have told American schoolchildren over the years, they inspired the Fourth Amendment to our Constitution. This part of the Bill of Rights guards against unreasonable searches and seizures and decrees that any warrant be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause.

Adams later wrote, “Otis was a flame of fire [that night].” But since 9/11 the Bush- Cheney Administration and Barack Obama’s even more harshly have dimmed that flame.

And now our lawmakers practically eviscerated the Fourth Amendment on December 28, 2012. As Robert Pear reported in the New York Times, “Congress gave final approval… to a bill extending the government’s power to intercept electronic communications of spy and terrorism suspects after the Senate voted down proposals from several Democrats and Republicans to increase protections of civil liberties and privacy.” The vote was 73 to 23.

The dissenters worried that electronic surveillance, though directed at suspected non-citizens abroad in contact with Americans, “inevitably swept up communications of Americans as well.”

More pointedly, despite President Obama’s strong support of the bill and its passage in the House of Representatives, Senate Democrat Richard J. Durbin of Illinois reminded those few of us who were paying attention that this extension of the government’s surveillance authority for five more years “does not have adequate checks and balances to protect the Constitutional rights of innocent American citizens.”

How many of us are still regarded by our intelligence agencies as “innocent American citizens”?

Dig this from Pear’s report: Senator Mark Udall (D-Colorado) said he and Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) “were concerned that ‘a loophole’ in the 2008 law [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] ‘could allow the government to effectively conduct warrantless searches for Americans’ communications.’”

Of course, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. told Congress, “There is no loophole in the law.” So how come, fellow Americans, Pear reported that “by a vote of 52 to 43, the Senate…rejected a proposal by Mr. Wyden to require the national intelligence director to tell Congress if the government had collected any domestic e-mail or telephone conversations under the surveillance law”?

In the midst of Republican and Democratic administrations’ reluctance to tell We the People what the hell is going on as the government invades our privacy ever more contemptuously, Senator Wyden told his colleagues that this impervious secrecy from on high “reminded him of the ‘general warrants that so upset the colonists’ more than 200 years ago.” Me too.

Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) noted, “The Fourth Amendment was written in a different time and a different age, but its necessity and its truth are timeless.” He added: “Over the past few decades, our right to privacy has been eroded. We have become lazy and haphazard in our vigilance.”

We’ll long be paying for our laziness in ways we will not even know while those we keep electing continue to pry into our lives.

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Nat Hentoff is a historian of the Constitution, a jazz critic and a columnist for the Village Voice and Free Inquiry. His incisive books include The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America and Living the Bill of Rights.