behind the news

Some People Are Racist

October 21, 2005

The lead story of ABC News’ “Primetime” last night was an expose of what it calls “the Olsen twins of the white supremacist movement,” 13-year-old entertainers Lamb and Lynx Gaede of Bakersfield, Calif.

Unlike the faces of intolerance or hate that most of us are familiar with — the group of neo-Nazis who marched and sparked a riot in Toledo last weekend, for instance — “tonight we’ll show you another example that is much more deceptive — and maybe even more frightening,” began host Chris Cuomo.

The two teenage girls allowed “Primetime” “to follow them and their budding singing career” over the past six months, we were told. “They look like pop stars — but some people say their music is filled with hate,” Cuomo says. (Emphasis added.) “Why are such disturbing messages coming from the least likely of messengers?”

Cut to two fresh-faced girls singing amidst pastoral beauty. Like Mary Kate and Ashley, notes reporter Cynthia McFadden, Lamb and Lynx “seem as if they’re innocence personified,” but alas they are “Twins united for a cause — a cause with a terrifying and secret language all its own. The language of hate.” McFadden followed up with a Q&A with the girls:

“What does ’88’ mean?” she asks. (The girls respond that it stands for ‘Heil Hitler’ — “a comradic thing,” says Lamb.)

“What does ’14 words’ mean?” (“We must secure the existence of our people and our future for white children,” says Lamb.)

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“So the term ‘mud,’ what does that refer to?” (Lamb: “A non-white.”)

“What does it imply?” McFadden follows up, her eyes narrowing. (Lamb: “Instead of saying, you know, saying a racial slur, it’s just like oh, ‘mud.’ They call us ‘cracker,’ we call them ‘mud.’)

The girls have been performing before all-white crowds since age nine, we learn, and “may be one of the most effective recruiting tools in the white nationalist movement today,” McFadden says. Even David Duke uses them to draw a crowd.

We then learn the girls have been spoon-fed racist beliefs since birth by their mother, April. (The name of April’s new baby? Dresden.) “And April was raised the same way.” Her father, Bill Gaede, has plastered the swastika wherever he can — on his belt buckle, his pickup, even his cattle.

After L and L are shown dancing around a swastika on their kitchen floor, McFadden presses on:

McFADDEN: And what’s your opinion on Hitler?

LAMB: I think that he had … he wanted to preserve his base.

McFADDEN: He had 6 million Jews executed.

LAMB: I think that’s an exaggeration.

McFADDEN: You do.

LAMB: Yes.

LYNX: I hardly believe there are even that many Jews alive back then.

McFADDEN: Is Hitler someone you admire or someone you don’t admire? … You think he was a great man?

LYNX: Yeah, I think he did a lot — he had a lot of good ideas.

“It really breaks my heart to see those two young girls spewing out that kind of garbage,” follows Ted Shaw, president of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund.

Then both Shaw and white-power rock star Shawn Sugg, an ally of the twins, suggest that the girls are too young to think for themselves.

Exactly. Which raises this question: Is there no one at “Primetime” who concluded it didn’t make much sense to give such extensive airtime to adolescent robots parroting racist beliefs? Or who at least felt that the story could be ended after one segment? Apparently not, because it stretched into a second, at the end of which “Primetime” came to this shocking conclusion:

“[T]he more time we spent with Sugg and the girls, the more it seemed most Americans don’t accept their racist messages.” (Emphasis added.)

We don’t expect much from TV newsmagazines these days, but we do expect more than this sensationalistic drivel — so formulaic, so predictable, so bordering on unintentional parody.

And we certainly expect more from ABC’s newly named co-anchor of “Nightline.”

Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.