Liar
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I see you're using the pre 9/11 edition of the dictionary.
Why can't the MSM admit RW terrorism exists?
- Thread starter KingOrfeo
- Start date
I see you're using the pre 9/11 edition of the dictionary.
about_average
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~shrug~ What can I say? I also don't label the infamous people who flew the planes then, "cowards".
From The New Republic:
June 9, 2014
Why Is the American Far Right More Violent Than the American Far Left?
By Brian Beutler
Between September 11, 2001 and March 2014, right-wing extremists killed 34 people in America. If you count the three Jewish community members Frazier Glenn Cross killed in Kansas City before screaming "Heil Hitler" as police arrested him this past April, the tally jumps to 37. And it hits 40 when you add the two policemen and lone civilian who died this weekend when Jerad and Amanda Miller launched their Las Vegas revolution. The officers were eating lunch at a pizza restaurant, treading on no one, when they were shot dead and draped in a Gadsden flag. The civilian at the nearby Wal-Mart, Joseph Wilcox, was armed and ready to put an end to Jerad's rampage, but didn't know Amanda was armed as well. Turns out a good guy with a gun is the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun, unless the bad guy's wife happens to have a gun, too.
The above figures are based on a tally maintained by experts at the New America Foundation. They array their analysis in a way that makes the implicit point that, for all our fretting about jihadi extremism, it's been less deadly in the U.S. since 9/11 than domestic terrorism, but that neither problem is particularly dangerous.
And it's true. There are 320-or-so million people in the United States, over 30 million more than lived here on September 11, 2001. Forty people isn't very many. Among causes of death in the U.S., right-wing violence must rank near the bottom.
But 40 people is more than zero people, which is the number that have been killed by left-wing extremists over the same stretch. As NAF's Peter Bergen wrote recently, "although a variety of left wing militants and environmental extremists have carried out violent attacks for political reasons against property and individuals since 9/11, none have been linked to a lethal attack."
Something must account for the difference. The violent right in America might not be a huge threat to public safety, but it still has a body count.
I'm inclined to believe the answer is written into the DNA of conservative extremism—that deeply conservative people are more politically tribal than others, and more inclined to confront cognitive dissonance by entertaining conspiracy theories and cocooning themselves in communities with like-minded true believers. I'm peddling an incredibly amateur sociology. But if I'm right, it implies that the reactionary nature of the American far right is the cause, not the consequence, of the observable differences in tone and substance between conservative and liberal rhetoric in the U.S.. Or of the vast differences between liberal and conservative American media.
And if that's the case, it probably wouldn't change much if Republican politicians became a bit more measured in their attacks on Democrats, Democratic policies, liberalism and so on. If anything, it's probably more accurate to say that Republicans engage in overheated, apocalyptic rhetoric to remain in good standing with these fixed elements of their political coalition than that they actively engender the underlying beliefs.
But to the extent that they have any control at all over the temperature on the right, the responsible thing to do is turn it down. That we can't accurately attribute any particular hurricane to the warming of the planet likewise doesn't absolve us of our responsibility to emit fewer heat-trapping gases.
And here's where I expect conservatives will respond by pointing out that Democrats have said totally outrageous stuff, too! But I don't think it's bathing the left in glory to say that the basic narrative Democrats propound about the right is far less provocative than the fire-stoking that Republicans engage in.
The basic story Democrats tell voters about Republicans and their donors is that they're plutocrats who don't really care about poor and middle class people, and are deeply beholden to an increasingly aged, increasingly resentful white base.
The GOP's story about Democrats is a bit more diffuse, but it tends toward invocations of tyranny. They'll take your (money/guns/freedoms/lives). Pick your poison.
When Democrats tried to pass an extremely modest gun law in the aftermath of the Newtown massacre, Ted Cruz said the real goal was "a federal list of every gun owner in America." When Democrats more recently proposed a constitutional amendment to effectively reverse the consequences of the Citizens United ruling, he said they were trying to "repeal the First Amendment."
Paul Waldman cited Senator Ron Johnson, who lamented last year that the survival of the Affordable Care Act had denied the country its "last shred of freedom." But you could just as easily cite the "death panel" smear from the beginning of Obama's presidency or the martyrization of Cliven Bundy just a few weeks ago, and a dozen other misbegotten efforts in between. If I bought into all of it, I'd probably take certain paranoid suspicions of the American far right more seriously.
As it happens, Jerad Miller was one of Bundy's avengers, until he was booted for being a convicted felon. A bunch of people have pored through his Facebook page already, to learn more about his political leanings. For whatever reason, I was most interested in seeing what he'd posted just before and after the 2012 election. I learned, among other things, that he was a Ron Paul-ite, who supported libertarian Gary Johnson over Republican Mitt Romney. He bought in to all of the familiar conspiracy theories—the really fringe stuff, but also things like Benghazi, which Republican politicians continue to inflame to this day. He likewise believed that, "[O]bama is forcing hobby lobby to pay for abortions." His wife once worked there. He worried she "may not have a job soon. thanks all who voted for him. idiots, i cant wait for your food stamps to get taken away in major austerity programs that will be affecting you soon."
If you believe that law enforcement and IRS officers are agents of a fascist takeover of the country, then your misapprehensions about Benghazi, or the Affordable Care Act, welfare, and various forms of contraception probably aren't your biggest concern. But your paranoia has been well fed anyhow. And needlessly so.
June 9, 2014
Why Is the American Far Right More Violent Than the American Far Left?
By Brian Beutler
Between September 11, 2001 and March 2014, right-wing extremists killed 34 people in America. If you count the three Jewish community members Frazier Glenn Cross killed in Kansas City before screaming "Heil Hitler" as police arrested him this past April, the tally jumps to 37. And it hits 40 when you add the two policemen and lone civilian who died this weekend when Jerad and Amanda Miller launched their Las Vegas revolution. The officers were eating lunch at a pizza restaurant, treading on no one, when they were shot dead and draped in a Gadsden flag. The civilian at the nearby Wal-Mart, Joseph Wilcox, was armed and ready to put an end to Jerad's rampage, but didn't know Amanda was armed as well. Turns out a good guy with a gun is the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun, unless the bad guy's wife happens to have a gun, too.
The above figures are based on a tally maintained by experts at the New America Foundation. They array their analysis in a way that makes the implicit point that, for all our fretting about jihadi extremism, it's been less deadly in the U.S. since 9/11 than domestic terrorism, but that neither problem is particularly dangerous.
And it's true. There are 320-or-so million people in the United States, over 30 million more than lived here on September 11, 2001. Forty people isn't very many. Among causes of death in the U.S., right-wing violence must rank near the bottom.
But 40 people is more than zero people, which is the number that have been killed by left-wing extremists over the same stretch. As NAF's Peter Bergen wrote recently, "although a variety of left wing militants and environmental extremists have carried out violent attacks for political reasons against property and individuals since 9/11, none have been linked to a lethal attack."
Something must account for the difference. The violent right in America might not be a huge threat to public safety, but it still has a body count.
I'm inclined to believe the answer is written into the DNA of conservative extremism—that deeply conservative people are more politically tribal than others, and more inclined to confront cognitive dissonance by entertaining conspiracy theories and cocooning themselves in communities with like-minded true believers. I'm peddling an incredibly amateur sociology. But if I'm right, it implies that the reactionary nature of the American far right is the cause, not the consequence, of the observable differences in tone and substance between conservative and liberal rhetoric in the U.S.. Or of the vast differences between liberal and conservative American media.
And if that's the case, it probably wouldn't change much if Republican politicians became a bit more measured in their attacks on Democrats, Democratic policies, liberalism and so on. If anything, it's probably more accurate to say that Republicans engage in overheated, apocalyptic rhetoric to remain in good standing with these fixed elements of their political coalition than that they actively engender the underlying beliefs.
But to the extent that they have any control at all over the temperature on the right, the responsible thing to do is turn it down. That we can't accurately attribute any particular hurricane to the warming of the planet likewise doesn't absolve us of our responsibility to emit fewer heat-trapping gases.
And here's where I expect conservatives will respond by pointing out that Democrats have said totally outrageous stuff, too! But I don't think it's bathing the left in glory to say that the basic narrative Democrats propound about the right is far less provocative than the fire-stoking that Republicans engage in.
The basic story Democrats tell voters about Republicans and their donors is that they're plutocrats who don't really care about poor and middle class people, and are deeply beholden to an increasingly aged, increasingly resentful white base.
The GOP's story about Democrats is a bit more diffuse, but it tends toward invocations of tyranny. They'll take your (money/guns/freedoms/lives). Pick your poison.
When Democrats tried to pass an extremely modest gun law in the aftermath of the Newtown massacre, Ted Cruz said the real goal was "a federal list of every gun owner in America." When Democrats more recently proposed a constitutional amendment to effectively reverse the consequences of the Citizens United ruling, he said they were trying to "repeal the First Amendment."
Paul Waldman cited Senator Ron Johnson, who lamented last year that the survival of the Affordable Care Act had denied the country its "last shred of freedom." But you could just as easily cite the "death panel" smear from the beginning of Obama's presidency or the martyrization of Cliven Bundy just a few weeks ago, and a dozen other misbegotten efforts in between. If I bought into all of it, I'd probably take certain paranoid suspicions of the American far right more seriously.
As it happens, Jerad Miller was one of Bundy's avengers, until he was booted for being a convicted felon. A bunch of people have pored through his Facebook page already, to learn more about his political leanings. For whatever reason, I was most interested in seeing what he'd posted just before and after the 2012 election. I learned, among other things, that he was a Ron Paul-ite, who supported libertarian Gary Johnson over Republican Mitt Romney. He bought in to all of the familiar conspiracy theories—the really fringe stuff, but also things like Benghazi, which Republican politicians continue to inflame to this day. He likewise believed that, "[O]bama is forcing hobby lobby to pay for abortions." His wife once worked there. He worried she "may not have a job soon. thanks all who voted for him. idiots, i cant wait for your food stamps to get taken away in major austerity programs that will be affecting you soon."
If you believe that law enforcement and IRS officers are agents of a fascist takeover of the country, then your misapprehensions about Benghazi, or the Affordable Care Act, welfare, and various forms of contraception probably aren't your biggest concern. But your paranoia has been well fed anyhow. And needlessly so.
I think any politically-motivated violence qualifies, and the Vegas shootings clearly were that.
Busybody
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Again, however, since 09/11/01:
BTW, I don't think John Hinckley Jr. was any kind of "leftist," or political at all. His only agenda was to impress Jodie Foster.
Lee Harvey Oswald definitely was a leftist, but, well, you know . . .
dan_c00000
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Yeah not even close to reality. Bundy's buddies were on his property trying to fight the racist fight.
Occupiers were fighting for economic equality.
Let me show you the difference.
Racist Bundy
http://newsbusters.org/sites/default/files/2013/2014-04-24-ABC-WN-Bundy.JPG
Occupier
http://duvet-dayz.com/assets/post_img/y2011/20111003/imgWe-are-the-99pct_15.jpg
See the difference?
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Who were they trying to coerce or intimidate?
Why would their particular killings be more intimidating than any other murder of an LEO?
Boxlicker101
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I think of terrorists as persons or groups who commit acts of terrorism. I define those acts as acts of violence committed by non-governmental groups designed to compel governments to change certain policies or to take revenge against that government. When Bill Ayers et al blew up buildings in hopes of forcing the US to abandon the Vietnam Ware, those were acts of terrorism. When Timothy McVeigh blew up the gov. building in Ok. City, that was an act of terrorism.
Violence perpetrated by one government against another is an act of war, even though the motivation might be the same.
I would not describe the Las Vegas killings as terrorism because the killers were not trying to impose any agenda. They were right wing extremists but the killings were not designed to force anybody to do anything.
For the most part, the Occupy Movement was not terrorism because there was no violence. However, some of them, particularly in Oakland, were violent and destructive.
Violence perpetrated by one government against another is an act of war, even though the motivation might be the same.
I would not describe the Las Vegas killings as terrorism because the killers were not trying to impose any agenda. They were right wing extremists but the killings were not designed to force anybody to do anything.
For the most part, the Occupy Movement was not terrorism because there was no violence. However, some of them, particularly in Oakland, were violent and destructive.
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Skiddles2014
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One of them pay taxes.
richard_daily
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What would you call randomly targeting police and shoppers, quite exactly in the same way that most terrorists do?
julybaby04
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Most conservatives like police officers, or at least the ones I know do.
Not sure why killing them would be a right wing agenda item.
Not sure why killing them would be a right wing agenda item.
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Boxlicker101
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Most shooting sprees are not acts of terrorism. I believe the Las Vegas killings were not, nor were most of the school shootings. They were probably just people seeking notoriety.
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Liar
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They were just angry-hulk-smash riots. That's not terrorism. More like hooliganism.
IrezumiKiss
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How does people killing themselves at the end of a shooting spree = "seek publicity?"
There was an agenda.
Clear cut.
Case closed.
Own your farm-raised bullshit, RWCJ.
There was an agenda.
Clear cut.
Case closed.
Own your farm-raised bullshit, RWCJ.
And that's bullshit. In 1865, Democrat != lefty (the Pubs were much the leftier party back then; Lincoln appointed Marxists to high offices and generalships); in all times and places, proslavery != lefty.
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Wrong Element
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Yeah, I think a thesis that falls apart with your very first example might have a few problems,
sigh
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Reasonable points, but I suspect that if everything else were the same, but the perps were Muslim, the RW on this board would be all over them as terrorists, and CNN would have (at least) mentioned it.
edited to underline the part that the real dumbass chose to ignore.
Last edited:
Busybody
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When Muslims do it, it's cause of a wider ideology, jihad, and supported by others, and even if stopped there are hundreds more behind em, not so with criminals, do t be a dumbass
Wrong Element
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Individual criminals can't really impose an agenda; that's the job of armies. By that standard, the 9/11 hijackers weren't terrorists either, since they didn't impose anything at all.
These characters in Vegas apparently didn't speak for anyone other than themselves, and their belief that they were sparking a revolution was pathetic. But that does seem to be what they believed, and judging from his Facebook page -- the highlight of which is a sick-in-retrospect post angry at Eric Holder for speaking out against domestic terrorism -- Miller had a whole range of far-right political beliefs. Maybe the Bundy folks did kick him off their [sic] land, but what attracted him to Bundy in the first place?
The difference between his rhetoric and what I read here every day/what is spread on talk radio and the FNC is imperceptible.
From Salon:
Tuesday, Jun 10, 2014 01:04 PM EDT
Fox News foments another violent outbreak: From Cliven Bundy to Jerad Miller, words matter
Five years after I clashed with O’Reilly about his network’s dangerous rhetoric, it's still promoting extremism
Joan Walsh
Cord Jefferson has a wonderful piece about how hard it is to keep writing about the latest outbreak of virulent racism — he calls it “the racism beat” — whether it’s the Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, police official who called President Obama a “fucking n****r,” or Donald Sterling, or Cliven Bundy, or Justin Bieber, or Janelle Ambrosia, the stripper who’s apparently as comfortable with the N-word as with a G-string. Instead of taking on another assignment to explain that the latest outrage is outrageous, Jefferson longs to submit a simple line of text: “Black people are normal people deserving of the same respect afforded to anyone else, but they often aren’t given that respect due to the machinations of white supremacy.”
I sympathize with Jefferson. Today, I’m feeling similarly about the latest gun violence by right-wing maniacs, white supremacists and Cliven Bundy supporters Jerad and Amber Miller, who shot two police officers and an armed civilian and wrapped the officers in the Gadsden flag, which has become the ugly yellow emblem of the anti-Obama resistance, flown at countless Tea Party rallies.
I’m coming to believe we need another bit of boilerplate language to react to these kinds of killings: “Not all Republicans are racist or violent, but increasingly eliminationist rhetoric against President Obama and Democrats is fomenting extremism – and Fox News is making things worse.”
On Thursday it will be five years since my showdown with Bill O’Reilly, after I suggested O’Reilly might consider toning down his extreme rhetoric in the wake of the murder of Dr. George Tiller, the man he famously called “Tiller the baby killer” many times. Our sit-down came after I expressed more general concern, on Salon and MSNBC, about the extremism of right-wing rhetoric in the wake of Obama’s election.
My O’Reilly anniversary may have something to do with the combination of fear and exhaustion I feel reading about the Millers. Wrangling with O’Reilly was bad enough; worse still was the torrent of online abuse from his fans — thousands of tweets, comments on Salon and personal emails wishing all manner of misfortune on me and my family, along with two personal letters to the Salon office that we shared with our lawyers. I learned then that a “death threat” requires someone to say they have plans to kill you, not merely that they wish to see you dead.
Back then, I thought it might be worth asking whether Fox’s increasingly shrill attacks on Obama could be contributing to a spike in violent rhetoric, and actual violence. For context, my conversation with O’Reilly wasn’t just about Tiller: an African-American security guard at Washington’s Holocaust museum, Stephen Tyrone Johns, had just been murdered by a white supremacist birther. That came months after a fan of Glenn Beck (then at Fox) murdered four police officers in Pittsburgh. We were heading into a summer of hate that would soon spawn “town hells” trashing Democrats (and moderate Republicans) over healthcare reform, and gun-carrying “patriots” waving Gadsden flags at Obama rallies. I thought Fox might want to take a look at its role in fomenting an unhinged opposition that was starting to move from rhetoric to violence. Of course, I was wrong.
Five years later, just as Fox promoted anti-Obama extremism in the first months of his presidency, so did it try to turn Cliven Bundy and his armed supporters into the second coming of the American Revolution, rising against the “tyrant” in the White House. Over 12 days in April, Fox spent almost five hours covering the ranch standoff, led by Sean Hannity. (To be fair to O’Reilly, he actually challenged one Bundy backer he interviewed. Some Republican lawmakers joined in: Nevada Sen. Dean Heller called the Bundy Ranch defenders “patriots,” and 2016 contenders like Rand Paul and Texas Gov. Rick Perry also jumped on the Bundy bandwagon – only to disembark when their hero made predictably racist statements about “the Negro.” They never explained – and they never were forced to explain – why they endorsed an armed militia threatening federal agents with violence, merely because those agents were threatening to enforce the law.
And now we have the Millers, who were, to be fair, too extreme for even the Bundy encampment; apparently Jerad Miller was turned away because he had a felony record. But it’s not just the Millers; they were almost upstaged in the past week by “sovereign citizen” Dennis Marx, who shot a sheriff’s deputy and planned to take over the courthouse in Forsyth County, Georgia, before he was killed by police. The sovereign citizen “movement” doesn’t acknowledge the legitimacy of the U.S. government. (Oh, and by the way, Forsyth County was the site of an early 20th century race riot that resulted in 98 percent of its black population moving away. Fun fact.) Meanwhile, the parents of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl are facing what the FBI considers credible death threats for the crime of trying to get their son out of captivity by the Taliban. The beat goes on.
I’m getting tired of writing patient explainers like this one – thanks, Paul Waldman, for taking one for the team this time. I just want to say what Digby said: She quotes Waldman, and earlier pieces by Rick Perlstein and David Neiwert, showing how the election of Democratic presidents so often leads to spikes in violent rhetoric and violence itself. John F. Kennedy’s election was followed by rising hate from the John Birch Society and armed anti-Communist “Minutemen”; Bill Clinton coped with a rising militia movement and the Oklahoma City terrorist attack (along with the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre demonizing federal agents as “jack-booted thugs”); Barack Obama begat the paranoid and often racist anti-government Tea Party, abetted by Fox News and, of course, the NRA’s LaPierre.
What’s different is that under Obama, the rhetoric from elected Republicans and mainstream conservative pundits has gotten more extreme. One-term congressman and Fox News contributor Allen West has declared, “We have a tyrant in the White House.” As Congress and the White House debated common-sense gun regulation in the wake of the Newtown massacre, Fox’s guests and hosts were warning that Obama was planning massive gun confiscation and comparing him to Hitler. At CPAC this year Sen. Ted Cruz suggested that Obama’s use of executive orders means “you have a president picking and choosing which laws to follow and which laws to ignore,” and therefore “you no longer have a president.”
Which means you have a dictator, or, again, a tyrant; someone whose blood might need to water the “tree of liberty,” to quote from the T-shirt that gun-toting liberty lover William Kostric wore to a 2009 Obama rally in New Hampshire.
Like Digby and Waldman and Perlstein and Neiwert, I’ve written about all of it time and time again. When you have the impulse to simply quote long blocks of your own earlier writings, maybe it’s time to turn your attention elsewhere. And I would, if these killings didn’t keep happening.
This combination of fear and exhaustion, I think, helps explain why I reacted so strongly to Jonathan Chait’s uncharacteristically blinkered piece on racial politics in the age of Obama. I like Chait and generally agree with him, but in his piece he used me as an example of a liberal unfairly maligning Bill O’Reilly as having untoward racial views in his Super Bowl Sunday interview with Obama, when I should have assumed O’Reilly merely has political and policy differences with the president and was criticizing him in good faith.
I don’t see how you can assume O’Reilly does anything in good faith after the last six years. If you doubt that O’Reilly and Fox are playing to the worst impulses of American politics, then I invite you to join O’Reilly and be told you have blood on your hands because you support abortion rights. Oh, and to be a woman, or a person of color, while doing same, because for the far right, our full participation in this society is always conditional on being on their side. To experience that wrath is to know the violence that lurks within the far-right anti-Obama movement – along with perfectly legitimate nonviolent conservatism — and to fear it. And to know that the reflexive “Both Sides Do It” mainstream media fetish is part of the problem.
But instead of quoting from my earlier pieces about all of this, I’ll give the last word to Paul Waldman, something for Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly and Ted Cruz and Rand Paul to think about before the next killings:
Tuesday, Jun 10, 2014 01:04 PM EDT
Fox News foments another violent outbreak: From Cliven Bundy to Jerad Miller, words matter
Five years after I clashed with O’Reilly about his network’s dangerous rhetoric, it's still promoting extremism
Joan Walsh
Cord Jefferson has a wonderful piece about how hard it is to keep writing about the latest outbreak of virulent racism — he calls it “the racism beat” — whether it’s the Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, police official who called President Obama a “fucking n****r,” or Donald Sterling, or Cliven Bundy, or Justin Bieber, or Janelle Ambrosia, the stripper who’s apparently as comfortable with the N-word as with a G-string. Instead of taking on another assignment to explain that the latest outrage is outrageous, Jefferson longs to submit a simple line of text: “Black people are normal people deserving of the same respect afforded to anyone else, but they often aren’t given that respect due to the machinations of white supremacy.”
I sympathize with Jefferson. Today, I’m feeling similarly about the latest gun violence by right-wing maniacs, white supremacists and Cliven Bundy supporters Jerad and Amber Miller, who shot two police officers and an armed civilian and wrapped the officers in the Gadsden flag, which has become the ugly yellow emblem of the anti-Obama resistance, flown at countless Tea Party rallies.
I’m coming to believe we need another bit of boilerplate language to react to these kinds of killings: “Not all Republicans are racist or violent, but increasingly eliminationist rhetoric against President Obama and Democrats is fomenting extremism – and Fox News is making things worse.”
On Thursday it will be five years since my showdown with Bill O’Reilly, after I suggested O’Reilly might consider toning down his extreme rhetoric in the wake of the murder of Dr. George Tiller, the man he famously called “Tiller the baby killer” many times. Our sit-down came after I expressed more general concern, on Salon and MSNBC, about the extremism of right-wing rhetoric in the wake of Obama’s election.
My O’Reilly anniversary may have something to do with the combination of fear and exhaustion I feel reading about the Millers. Wrangling with O’Reilly was bad enough; worse still was the torrent of online abuse from his fans — thousands of tweets, comments on Salon and personal emails wishing all manner of misfortune on me and my family, along with two personal letters to the Salon office that we shared with our lawyers. I learned then that a “death threat” requires someone to say they have plans to kill you, not merely that they wish to see you dead.
Back then, I thought it might be worth asking whether Fox’s increasingly shrill attacks on Obama could be contributing to a spike in violent rhetoric, and actual violence. For context, my conversation with O’Reilly wasn’t just about Tiller: an African-American security guard at Washington’s Holocaust museum, Stephen Tyrone Johns, had just been murdered by a white supremacist birther. That came months after a fan of Glenn Beck (then at Fox) murdered four police officers in Pittsburgh. We were heading into a summer of hate that would soon spawn “town hells” trashing Democrats (and moderate Republicans) over healthcare reform, and gun-carrying “patriots” waving Gadsden flags at Obama rallies. I thought Fox might want to take a look at its role in fomenting an unhinged opposition that was starting to move from rhetoric to violence. Of course, I was wrong.
Five years later, just as Fox promoted anti-Obama extremism in the first months of his presidency, so did it try to turn Cliven Bundy and his armed supporters into the second coming of the American Revolution, rising against the “tyrant” in the White House. Over 12 days in April, Fox spent almost five hours covering the ranch standoff, led by Sean Hannity. (To be fair to O’Reilly, he actually challenged one Bundy backer he interviewed. Some Republican lawmakers joined in: Nevada Sen. Dean Heller called the Bundy Ranch defenders “patriots,” and 2016 contenders like Rand Paul and Texas Gov. Rick Perry also jumped on the Bundy bandwagon – only to disembark when their hero made predictably racist statements about “the Negro.” They never explained – and they never were forced to explain – why they endorsed an armed militia threatening federal agents with violence, merely because those agents were threatening to enforce the law.
And now we have the Millers, who were, to be fair, too extreme for even the Bundy encampment; apparently Jerad Miller was turned away because he had a felony record. But it’s not just the Millers; they were almost upstaged in the past week by “sovereign citizen” Dennis Marx, who shot a sheriff’s deputy and planned to take over the courthouse in Forsyth County, Georgia, before he was killed by police. The sovereign citizen “movement” doesn’t acknowledge the legitimacy of the U.S. government. (Oh, and by the way, Forsyth County was the site of an early 20th century race riot that resulted in 98 percent of its black population moving away. Fun fact.) Meanwhile, the parents of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl are facing what the FBI considers credible death threats for the crime of trying to get their son out of captivity by the Taliban. The beat goes on.
I’m getting tired of writing patient explainers like this one – thanks, Paul Waldman, for taking one for the team this time. I just want to say what Digby said: She quotes Waldman, and earlier pieces by Rick Perlstein and David Neiwert, showing how the election of Democratic presidents so often leads to spikes in violent rhetoric and violence itself. John F. Kennedy’s election was followed by rising hate from the John Birch Society and armed anti-Communist “Minutemen”; Bill Clinton coped with a rising militia movement and the Oklahoma City terrorist attack (along with the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre demonizing federal agents as “jack-booted thugs”); Barack Obama begat the paranoid and often racist anti-government Tea Party, abetted by Fox News and, of course, the NRA’s LaPierre.
What’s different is that under Obama, the rhetoric from elected Republicans and mainstream conservative pundits has gotten more extreme. One-term congressman and Fox News contributor Allen West has declared, “We have a tyrant in the White House.” As Congress and the White House debated common-sense gun regulation in the wake of the Newtown massacre, Fox’s guests and hosts were warning that Obama was planning massive gun confiscation and comparing him to Hitler. At CPAC this year Sen. Ted Cruz suggested that Obama’s use of executive orders means “you have a president picking and choosing which laws to follow and which laws to ignore,” and therefore “you no longer have a president.”
Which means you have a dictator, or, again, a tyrant; someone whose blood might need to water the “tree of liberty,” to quote from the T-shirt that gun-toting liberty lover William Kostric wore to a 2009 Obama rally in New Hampshire.
Like Digby and Waldman and Perlstein and Neiwert, I’ve written about all of it time and time again. When you have the impulse to simply quote long blocks of your own earlier writings, maybe it’s time to turn your attention elsewhere. And I would, if these killings didn’t keep happening.
This combination of fear and exhaustion, I think, helps explain why I reacted so strongly to Jonathan Chait’s uncharacteristically blinkered piece on racial politics in the age of Obama. I like Chait and generally agree with him, but in his piece he used me as an example of a liberal unfairly maligning Bill O’Reilly as having untoward racial views in his Super Bowl Sunday interview with Obama, when I should have assumed O’Reilly merely has political and policy differences with the president and was criticizing him in good faith.
I don’t see how you can assume O’Reilly does anything in good faith after the last six years. If you doubt that O’Reilly and Fox are playing to the worst impulses of American politics, then I invite you to join O’Reilly and be told you have blood on your hands because you support abortion rights. Oh, and to be a woman, or a person of color, while doing same, because for the far right, our full participation in this society is always conditional on being on their side. To experience that wrath is to know the violence that lurks within the far-right anti-Obama movement – along with perfectly legitimate nonviolent conservatism — and to fear it. And to know that the reflexive “Both Sides Do It” mainstream media fetish is part of the problem.
But instead of quoting from my earlier pieces about all of this, I’ll give the last word to Paul Waldman, something for Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly and Ted Cruz and Rand Paul to think about before the next killings:
