Republican Gomorrah: The Shattered GOP, Taken Over by Authoritarian Radicals, Is Incapable of Compromise

The following is the transcript of NPR's Fresh Air Host Terry Gross's interview with author Max Blumenthal about his new book, Republican Gomorrah (Nation Books, 2009).

Terry Gross: ... The right is trying to de-legitimize the Obama presidency, according to my guest, journalist Max Blumenthal. There's the movement of people who claim Obama isn't even an American citizen, and others who accuse him of being a Hitler or a Stalin. In Blumenthal's new book, "Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party," he writes that the Republican Party has gone from a big-tent philosophy to being fully in the grip of its right wing. Blumenthal has been covering the Christian right for six years, attending dozens of its rallies and conferences, listening to its radio programs, and sitting in movement-oriented houses of worship.

In his book "Republican Gomorrah," he writes about the people who created the blueprint for the Christian right and the people who have funded it. Blumenthal is a senior writer for the Daily Beast, and has written for the Nation and the Huffington Post.

Max Blumenthal, welcome back to Fresh Air. Your book ends with a scene of Republican congressman Paul Brown of Georgia and two of his friends who are very highly placed in the anti-abortion movement, praying over a door that Obama was about to walk through to take the oath of office. What were they praying about? Set that scene for us.

Max Blumenthal: Well, Paul Brown, who is a congressman from Georgia -he's a born-again congressman who said that he was inspired to become an vangelical Christian by the guy who used to hold "John 3:16" signs in sports games, who wore a multicolored wig, who's actually in prison now for kidnapping and stink-bomb attacks - that this image of this character at sports games inspired him to become a born-again Christian.

And he gave special access to two characters, Paul Mahoney and Rob Schenck, who were involved in Operation Rescue during the 1990s, which is the militant wing of the anti-abortion movement, which was at least indirectly connected to several assassinations of abortion providers and attacks on abortion clinics, most recently the assassination of Dr. George Tiller in Kansas.

What they were doing there in the Capitol was, they were planning to anoint the door that Obama would walk through, as he prepared to give his inaugural address, with oil crosses. And the reason that I described this scene and thought that it was important was that it was emblematic of where the movement was going to go, that they were consecrating their planned opposition to the Obama administration at a time when the media and probably the Obama administration believed that they had the good will of even elements that had opposed Bill Clinton in the 1990s, and that this was a new, post-partisan era. And I think that this anointing of the door was symbolic of what was to come. And I think it's bearing out right now in the health-care debate.

Gross: One of the things Paul Brown has done is to compare Obama to Hitler and Stalin, and he said on his Web site that he was concerned that Obama has a vision that is fundamentally different from the system of limited federal government that our founders established, that he will attempt to destroy the free-enterprise, free-market economic system which has made us the wealthiest nation in the history of the world.

We're hearing a lot about comparisons between Obama and Hitler and Stalin lately. What do you think is behind that?

Blumenthal: Well, Paul Brown was referring to Obama's plan to implement a civilian force that could help during natural disasters. George W. Bush actually introduced this plan, and Paul Brown and his Republican allies said nothing. But the grassroots right is determined to de-legitimize President Obama, to prove that he was either not born here, that he's not one of us, or that he has totalitarian intentions. And so Paul Brown has compared Obama simultaneously to Hitler and Stalin, two leaders who were opposed to each other.

It seems like a bizarre comparison, but if you tune in to right-wing radio, especially fringe right-wing radio hosts like Alex Jones, you're going to hear warnings that Barack Obama plans to create concentration camps for right-wing dissidents, that he's going to implement mass gun seizures. And this fear is designed to mobilize opposition at a grassroots level to Barack Obama, to the Democratic Congress, and to the progressive agenda in general in order to win more followers to the Republican grassroots and to the right wing, to raise funds. And it's working.

You know, during the Bush years, the right-wing groups lost a lot of money because they function better throwing stones from the outside than they do from the inside, calling shots. Now, their coffers are filling up. So a lot of this rhetoric is designed just to ramp up the debate, and to mobilize forces and elements that have been dormant for eight years because the Republicans were in power.

Gross: You describe someone named Anton Chaitkin as launching the opening volley of an orchestrated campaign designed to link Obama and his health-care reform proposal to the mass euthanasia of Hitler. Who is Anton Chaitkin, and what was his role in launching that opening volley?