Thom Hartmann: Greetings my friends, patriots, lovers of democracy, truth and justice, believers in peace, freedom and the American way. Thom Hartmann here with you.

The President is coming back and doing some town halls. We’ll see if the Deathers show up. There’s the Birthers, the ones who don’t believe that he has a birth certificate, there’s the Deathers, the followers of Sarah Palin who believe that somehow everyone’s going to have to face euthanasia if they go with the President’s health insurance program, or the health care program, the health care reform that we’re talking about.

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But here we have now Sarah Palin coming out and saying that her baby with Downs Syndrome is going to have to face a death panel. This is very powerful meme, it’s a simple narrative, it’s a simple story, it’s one that is very, very believable because of it’s simplicity and it is an absolute and utter lie. It’s also following, and what she’s doing is following, and what these Deathers at these town halls, and with uh a particular irony by the way, one of them, and we’ll tell you more about that a little after the break, but one of them was injured in a scuffle at one of these town halls. He injured his knee, he is sitting at the local VA office now with a can accepting donations for his knee surgery because he doesn’t have health insurance. This is a guy who was protesting against government health insurance. More about that in a little bit.

Frank Schaeffer, however, is with us, FrankSchaeffer.net is the website. He’s the author of "Crazy for God: How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take It All (Or Almost All) Of It Back". And Frank, first of all, welcome to the program.

Frank Schaeffer: Hey, thanks for having me on.

Thom Hartmann: By way of introducing you to our listeners, you are arguably the guy who, or certainly one of the guys, you and your father by and large, who founded, back in the day, the aggressive, in your face abortion clinic tactics that have now, many of the same people and the same mailing list that you guys developed, are now being used for what I refer to as the Deathers, as the guys who are showing up at these town hall council, these town hall meetings and shouting down members of Congress. Do I have that right?

Frank Schaeffer: You have it absolutely right. You mentioned the book ‘Crazy for God’ and in that book I tell a story about growing up as the son of this fundamentalist missionary, Francis Schaeffer, who when I was a kid was living in Switzerland. And as a trajectory from there until he is really the founder of the Religious Right along with me and Doctor C. Everett Koop, who then becomes the Surgeon General for the Reagan Administration. And in that story, essentially wrapped in with our own family is the story of the rise of the religious right, the melding of the religious right and the Republican Party.

And then you know, if you want to fast forward to the present, the story that really is behind, and makes understandable this insane movement to link reform in healthcare of all things to a widespread mandatory euthanasia program and/or killing of children in infanticides, the kind of thing Sarah Palin is fantasizing about and lying about. And really all this has roots in the pro-life movement that my dad and doctor Koop and I started, in terms of the evangelical part of it in the early 1970’s with our film series, ‘Whatever happened to the human race’ that we took around the country. And by the time we had launched that project we were involved with people like Dick Armey, Jack Kemp, Ronald Reagan, the Bush family and others, all of which I talk about in the book. And the upshot was that the religious right, Christianity as it became known in this country after that period, in the widest sense of the use of the word, and the Republican Party all became synonymous.

And so, you know, whether it’s gay bashing or whether it’s saying that Obama doesn’t have a birth certificate or whether it’s saying that Sarah Palin’s child will be killed because of the healthcare reform, all of this is one piece of a pattern of a reaction to what the evangelical movement regarded as the secularization of the country, tied in with heavy racist overtones of white people about my age, I’m 57, who just can’t see how we can have a black President, let alone a progressive black President.

You mix all this together and essentially what people like Dick Armey and these other lobbyists are doing is using the machinery we built to close abortion clinics and techniques we used to close abortion clinics and now they’re turning it against the healthcare reform and of course, you know, from my point of view, it’s all déjà vu, because we did this before. And, you know, the cautionary note I would sound here is that having been down this path once and regretted it, as I talk about in the book, you know, what we launched wound up with four abortion providers being murdered, the latest being Dr. Tiller. And if you want to extend that further, three policemen in Pittsburgh being gunned down by some looney-tune who thought they were going to take away his guns which is what the NRA has been telling people would happen after Obama was elected. You know, touch it where you will, I’m quite worried actually. I think we’re coming into a time of extreme reaction to the Obama Administration and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Thom Hartmann: We’re talking with Frank Schaeffer, one of the founders of the in your face pro-life movement, and whose own shock troops, his own techniques are being used. You write, Frank Schaeffer, about how you knew Dick Armey quite well. And Dick Armey’s Freedom Works has got several front groups who are basically behind, they were behind starting the teabag thing, which in my opinion, I mean everybody says ‘Oh, it was a failure’ and they were ridiculed, I don’t think so at all. I think that was a dress rehearsal for this.

Frank Schaeffer: Right.

Thom Hartmann: I think that they’re lining up who is reliable and who’s not. What are our mailing lists, how do we get in touch with these people, let’s get cell phone numbers, let’s get clean email addresses, things like that. Do a reality check with me on this and tell me what you know about Dick Armey.

Frank Schaeffer: Well, you know, Dick Armey is your typical low taxes, anti-government Congressman who was in Congress for 18 years. His big concern was to put forward Jack Kemp’s idea about economics and Reaganomics and so forth and so on. But you know, I think he’s typical of one of these white Republicans, slightly older leaders, Newt Gingrich is another. And you know, to paraphrase Bart Simpson, I just think the election broke their brains. I really believe it. I mean, they've gone off...

Thom Hartmann: The election of Obama, you mean.

Frank Schaeffer: Yes, the election of Obama just broke their brains. They can’t see it. They’ve gone off. Look, you can disagree with Dick Armey or Newt Gingrich on economics, you can disagree about a lot of things, but the sort of thing they’re saying now, for instance that Judge Sotomayor is a racist or that Obama wants healthcare to turn into a euthanasia program. Or lending their good name to the kind of insanity that Sarah Palin is parroting. Which, you know, Dick Armey or Newt Gingrich, 20 years ago, never would have talked that way, they weren’t insane. You might have disagreed with them, but they weren’t crazy.

I think when you mix the white reaction to Obama in with these aging Republican leaders who are fabricating this, these whole cloth lies, you know. Whether it’s Obama not being an American, or it’s Sotomayor being a racist, or whether its death squads going out looking for Downs Syndrome kids. You know, we’re out in the Twilight Zone now. And this would all be a joke except for one factor. There are, it’s like playing Russian Roulette. There are a certain number of fruit-loops out there. What these leaders are doing, either by omission, because they’re not telling the truth when they hear these crazy lies, or by commission because they’re part of the problem, is essentially leaving a loaded gun on the table, metaphorically speaking, for whoever comes along to take a shot at either the President or one of our congressmen or somebody who’s in a leadership position in this Administration.

Thom Hartmann: Well in many ways this is the kind of rhetoric we were hearing out of George Wallace and his followers, back in the day, that lead, I believe, in many ways, lead to the assassination of Bobby and Martin Luther King.

Frank Schaeffer: Yes. Absolutely. I mean look, we are a country awash in guns. We have no more or no less crazy people than any other country. So a little percentage of our population is unhinged, that’s the case no matter where you go in the human race. We have got some very irresponsible leaders on the right, unleashing a series of lies and completely loony rhetoric that is going to resonate with the most dangerous people in our society.

Thom Hartmann: It will. We are talking with Frank Schaeffer. Frank, can you stick around over the break? I wanted to get into some of your background on this and your current thoughts about the pro-life movement.

Frank Schaeffer: Sure.

Thom Hartmann: I’m very curious. Frank Schaeffer is with us, FrankSchaeffer.net is his website. Stick around, we’ll be right back.

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Thom Hartmann: We’re talking about the Deathers at the town hall meetings, the teabaggers, I, sometimes they’re referred to, how this came about. Frank Schaeffer, some have described him as the right wing turncoat, the fellow who gave the inside scoop on why conservatives are rampaging town halls. Why? Because he and his father founded this movement back 3, 4 decades ago. And Frank Schaeffer, welcome back to the show.

Frank Schaeffer: Thanks.

Thom Hartmann: I’m curious, I’m assuming when you started pulling people together for this thing, in what we now refer to as the pro-life movement, or is broadly referred to as, you know that you were sincere in your beliefs and that you probably still hold similar beliefs that abortion, at the very least, should be minimized to medically necessary or as little as possible. Um, what caused you, what causes you to say that you now regret what you did?

Frank Schaeffer: Well, look, you know. The story that I tell in this book is one that I began with a couple of novels called ‘Portofino’ and then ‘Zermatt’ and then ‘Saving Grandma’ which are kind of semi-biographical stories about a little boy coming of age, and realizing he just doesn’t believe what his parents believed. So, this process for me, really, was almost like being de-conditioned. I mean I’m someone, look, let me give you an analogy. Let’s say you’re a little kid growing up in Sarah Palin’s household today. What are you hearing? Then you go off to college and you get a life of your own and you rethink your position, it’s as simple as that. I mean, the America that was described to me in my youth, of this decadent place, sliding towards, you know, either communism or socialism, and homosexuals trying to take over the world. All that stuff is just BS. And when you compare it to reality, and you actually wake up and smell the coffee, you begin to change your mind.

And then, in my case, it was more particular than that. I’m a writer. There’s no room in the evangelical right wing for the arts, I mean these people are just into propaganda, brow beating, evangelism and so forth. So it was not my life. It was not my calling. And then, you know, when I saw the religious right really become the enemy of the American people, literally, in the sense that they hate America, they don’t love America. They wrap themselves in the flag but they hate the actual America. They hate multi-cultural diverse America. They hate their gay neighbors. They don’t want a black man in the White House. They are bitter people. When you realize that you were really just part of a kind of an extended white power movement in the name of Jesus, I decided to just get out and that was in the mid ‘80s. I watched my income, by the way, drop by 2/3 in one year. It was a nightmare on a personal level. But in terms of a life spent serving something, you just can’t do that in good conscience. And I got out, I became a writer. I’ve written a number of novels and I’ve gone from there. So, this latest episode from me, with Sarah Palin and the healthcare debate is just one in a long string of evidences that there is a disingenuousness, essentially a lie, at the heart of the right wing machine, and it continues. And whether it’s in the name of Christianity, or in the name of the Republican Party, essentially it’s all the same sect.

Thom Hartmann: Why the lie, Frank Schaeffer?

Frank Schaeffer: Because these are desperate people who have nothing left. The Republican Party, on its right wing in particular, the evangelical movement, certainly the fundamentalist part of that movement, you know, these are people who bought into so many myths that one loses count. And essentially reality is catching up with that.

Thom Hartmann: You write about how they’re going to pursue a scorched earth policy. Destroy the Obama Administration, destroy America, even destroy the Republican Party if necessary.

Frank Schaeffer: Yeah, absolutely. And essentially, these are people who think in theological terms. They would rather be right, and when Jesus comes back, gets translated to Heaven if they believe that or they would rather be right as Rush Limbaugh believes and go down in flames, kind of like the last days of the third Reich, if you like, you know the scorched earth policy that wanted to deprive the German people even of food and sustenance. You know, these guys would rather see Obama fail and the country go down than him succeed.

Thom Hartmann: Frank Schaeffer, we just have a minute or so left. Of the people who are showing up, the teabaggers or Deathers or whatever you want to call them, and I probably shouldn’t try to be so derogatory. Because I think a lot of the average people who are showing up are just confused, they know things are going badly, and they don’t know who to blame, and they’re being told by right wing talk radio, in particular by Fox News on TV that the person to blame is the Democrats.

Frank Schaeffer: Right.

Thom Hartmann: But they’re showing up, I think many of them out of the right motive, which is they want their country to work. They just don’t understand, you know, they’re not, you know. 2/3 of Americans can’t name one of the three branches of government. That’s how bad it is here ever since the Reagan wars on education. Um, how many of these people are the people that you and your father and the organization, and when you were back working with Dick Armey, your son was an intern for him, that you guys were recruiting for the anti-abortion movement and the anti-homosexuality, you know all those basic right wing fundamentalist movements…

Frank Schaeffer: Right, it’s exactly the same people. It’s exactly the same. Look at the TV images. Sure there are some young people, or younger people in there, you know, 20’s and 30’s. But look at who’s in there. It’s a bunch of grey haired guys, my age or older. It’s a bunch of women who are probably in their 50’s and 60’s. The backbone of this thing is essentially the veterans of the pro-life movement. These are the same people who, in a different time and place were out with signs saying ‘God brought the killer’ after doctor Tiller was killed and they were rejoicing because he had been shot down. There’s a small group of people in this country who are angry, embittered, mostly white, and complete reactionaries and they have been living on a diet of misinformation and lies for so long that literally the truth is no use. You can tell them until you are blue in the

Thom Hartmann: It won’t matter. Frank Schaeffer, he’s the author of ‘Crazy for God’ and other things, ‘Crazy for God, how I grew up as one of the elect, helped found the religious right, and lived to take all or almost all of it back.’ His website, FrankSchaeffer.net is the website. Frank, thanks for being with us today.

Frank Schaeffer: You’re welcome, thanks a lot. Bye bye.

Thom Hartmann: Good speaking with you.