“An Emboldened Mob”: To Right-Wing Nutjobs, Ordinary Voters Are The Enemy
“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
–Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues.
So the Bonnie and Clyde of the great Bundy ranch standoff thought they could start a national uprising by murdering two cops in a Las Vegas pizza joint. After executing Officers Alyn Beck and Igor Soldo in the most cowardly way possible, would-be freedom fighters cc draped the officers’ bodies with a Nazi flag and the “Don’t Tread on Me” banner flown at Tea Party rallies, and left a note proclaiming a new American Revolution.
The duo then proceeded to Walmart, where they also died in the most cowardly way possible — a murder-suicide, saving the slain officers’ colleagues the unpleasant necessity of shooting them dead.
Along the way the pair encountered the proverbial “good guy with a gun,” Joseph Robert Wilcox. They killed him too. Wilcox’s mistake was to pull his own concealed handgun without firing. It’s something combat instructors say one should never do, although it’s a decent human being’s first instinct — one good reason ordinary citizens shouldn’t carry.
You can’t learn combat shooting skills in a few hours with a retired deputy. It’s a potentially fatal mistake to try.
But I digress. Can anybody say they didn’t see this coming? The day before the Las Vegas tragedy I’d told a friend that between now and Labor Day, I expect to see a large scale firefight between crackpot right-wing militia types and police and/or federal authorities somewhere in America — Ruby Ridge, Waco, possibly even Oklahoma City all over again.
We’d been talking about those “open carry” geeks parading around in Fort Worth restaurants; also the self-appointed Texas posse that vowed to forcibly prevent Bowe Bergdhal’s Idaho hometown from throwing a welcome-home celebration for the recently released POW.
What the truth is behind the murky circumstances of Bergdhal’s capture by the Taliban, nobody really knows. However, Fox News and CNN succeeded in raising an electronic lynch mob. In essence, these jokers pronounced themselves willing to kill or die to prevent President Obama from getting a bump in opinion polls — the proximate cause of the sickening right-wing media freakout over Bergdhal’s release.
But back to Bonnie and Clyde. Supposedly, the Millers were asked to leave the Bundy ranch because of the male half’s criminal record. But definitely not because the duo was any crazier than the “Mountain Men” and other armed zealots eager to fight it out with the Bureau of Land Management over Cliven Bundy’s God-given constitutional right to graze free government grass.
“I was out there but they told me and my wife to leave because I am a felon,” Miller wrote on his Facebook page. “They don’t seem to understand that they are all felons now for intimidating law enforcement with deadly weapons. We sold everything we had to buy supplies and quit our jobs to be there 24/7. How dare you ask for help and shun us dedicated patriots!”
Posing as a rancher, Miller did a TV interview sounding no crazier than Bundy. “I feel sorry for any federal agents that want to come in here and try to push us around or anything like that,” he said. “I really don’t want violence toward them, but if they’re gonna come bring violence to us, if that’s the language they want to speak, we’ll learn it.”
Sounds like something Kevin Costner might say in a movie, right?
Miller was right about the law, though. Pointing a gun at a federal agent is a serious felony, and you wouldn’t want to live in a country where it’s not. No doubt the BLM was right not to risk a firefight over a couple of hundred scrawny cows. But it definitely emboldened the mob.
Of course there are also deeper long-term issues at play.
“In our recent history,” writes Paul Waldman in the Washington Post, “every election of a Democratic president is followed by a rise in conspiracy-obsessed right-wing populism. In the 1960s it was the John Birch Society; in the 1990s it was the militia movement shouting about black UN helicopters, and during the Obama presidency it was the Tea Party.”
It’s also clear that President Obama’s race has a lot to do with far-right hysteria. Indeed, the most striking thing about Miller’s Facebook page is its sheer banality: Benghazi, Hillary, Nancy Pelosi, the global warming conspiracy, the tyranny of Obamacare, Agenda 21, fluoridated water, gun confiscation, etc.
I get chain emails about this nonsense every day. Along with veiled, and sometimes not so veiled, threats.
To the nutball right, ordinary Democratic voters have become the main enemy. Their apocalyptic theology requires a Satanic enemy, and it’s the majority. Some won’t rest until they get the violent confrontation they think they want. Then look for the professionals to take down the amateurs, with prejudice.
It’s the American way.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, June 11, 2014
“Troubling Questions”: How Much Does Right-Wing Rhetoric Contribute To Right-Wing Terrorism?
Yesterday, a man and a woman shot two police officers in a Las Vegas restaurant after saying, “this is a revolution.” Then they draped their bodies in a Gadsden flag. According to reports now coming in, the couple (who later killed themselves) appear to have been white supremacists and told neighbors they had gone to join the protests in support of anti-government rancher Cliven Bundy. It was one more incident of right-wing terrorism that, while not exactly an epidemic, has become enough of a trend to raise some troubling questions.
What I’m about to say will raise some hackles, but we need to talk about it. It’s long past time for prominent conservatives and Republicans to do some introspection and ask whether they’re contributing to outbreaks of right-wing violence.
Before I go on, let me be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying that Republican members of Congress bear direct responsibility for everything some disturbed person from the same side of the political spectrum as them might do. I’m not saying that they are explicitly encouraging violence. Nor am I saying that you can’t find examples of liberals using hyperbolic, irresponsible words.
But what I am saying is this: there are some particular features of conservative political rhetoric today that help create an atmosphere in which violence and terrorism can germinate.
The most obvious component is the fetishization of firearms and the constant warnings that government will soon be coming to take your guns. But that’s only part of it. Just as meaningful is the conspiracy theorizing that became utterly mainstream once Barack Obama took office. If you tuned into one of many national television and radio programs on the right, you heard over and over that Obama was imposing a totalitarian state upon us. You might hear that FEMA was building secret concentration camps (Glenn Beck, the propagator of that theory, later recanted it, though he has a long history of violent rhetoric), or that Obama is seeding the government with agents of the Muslim Brotherhood. You grandfather probably got an email offering proof that Obama is literally the antichrist.
Meanwhile, conservatives have become prone to taking the political disagreements of the moment and couching them in apocalyptic terms, encouraging people to think that if Democrats have their way on any given debate, that our country, or at the very least our liberty, might literally be destroyed.
To take just one of an innumerable number of examples, when GOP Senator Ron Johnson says that the Affordable Care Act is “the greatest assault on freedom in our lifetime,” and hopes that the Supreme Court will intervene to preserve our “last shred of freedom,” is it at all surprising that some people might be tempted to take up arms? After all, if he’s right, and the ACA really means that freedom is being destroyed, then violent revolution seems justified. Johnson might respond by saying, “Well, of course I didn’t mean that literally.” And I’m sure he didn’t — Johnson may be no rocket scientist, but he knows that despite the individual mandate going into effect, there are a few shreds of freedom remaining in America.
But the argument that no sane person could actually believe many of the things conservatives say shouldn’t absolve them of responsibility. When you broadcast every day that the government of the world’s oldest democracy is a totalitarian beast bent on turning America into a prison of oppression and fear, when you glorify lawbreakers like Cliven Bundy, when you say that your opponents would literally destroy the country if they could, you can’t profess surprise when some people decide that violence is the only means of forestalling the disaster you have warned them about.
To my conservative friends tempted to find outrageous things liberals have said in order to argue that both sides are equally to blame, I’d respond this way: Find me all the examples of people who shot up a church after reading books by Rachel Maddow and Paul Krugman, and then you’ll have a case.
In our recent history, every election of a Democratic president is followed by a rise in conspiracy-obsessed right-wing populism. In the 1960s it was the John Birch Society; in the 1990s it was the militia movement shouting about black UN helicopters, and during the Obama presidency it was the Tea Party. Some of those movements are ultimately harmless, but alongside and around them are people who take their rhetoric seriously and lash out in response. After these killings in Nevada, and the murders at a Jewish community center in Kansas, and the murders at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, and multiple murders by members of the “sovereign citizens” movement in the last few years, it’s worth remembering that since 9/11, right-wing terrorism has killed many more Americans than al Qaeda terrorism.
And I promise you, these murders in Nevada will not be the last. It may be going too far to say that conservative politicians and media figures whose rhetoric has fed the deranged fantasies of terrorists and killers have blood on their hands. But they shouldn’t have a clear conscience, either.
By: Paul Waldman, The Plum Line; The Washington Post, June 9, 2014
“Joni Ernst Fights For Dirty Water In Iowa”: Shows How Far Republican Candidates Have Drifted From The Party’s Old Moorings
Joni Ernst, the winner of the Iowa Senate Republican primary on Tuesday, has a briefcase full of the usual shopworn, hard-right policies: no same-sex marriage, no reform of immigration, no federal minimum wage, no Education Department, no progressive tax code. She still clings to the idea of private accounts for Social Security.
But one of her positions, expressed at a recent debate, demonstrates a particularly pernicious and little-known crusade of the modern Republican Party: she opposes the Clean Water Act. She called it one of the most damaging laws for business.
That a Senate nominee could take this position, even more than the others, shows how far Republican candidates have drifted from the party’s old moorings. In 1972, the Clean Water Act passed with full bipartisan support, and is widely regarded as one of the most successful environmental acts ever passed. It doubled the number of rivers, streams and lakes suitable for fishing and swimming. It drastically reduced the amount of chemicals in drinking water, and substantially increased the size of protected wetlands. Rivers no longer catch fire.
The law’s value is so obvious that it shouldn’t even be necessary to defend it. But in Iowa, it remains a divisive issue, and Ms. Ernst’s offhand remark was a clear signal to the state’s big agricultural interests of which side she is on.
Iowa’s waterways are notoriously dirty, the result of runoffs from vast livestock operations and crop fertilizer. The problem has become worse in recent years with a sharp increase in the global demand for pork, leading to enormous hog farms that pack tens of thousands of pigs into small spaces. Last year, the Des Moines water utility had to turn on, for the first time, the world’s largest nitrate-removal plant to get the chemical — the result of manure and fertilizer pollution — out of people’s taps. (Excessive nitrates can cause cancer and miscarriages, and are linked to “blue baby syndrome,” in which infants suffocate.)
“The issue is the quality of the water in the Raccoon and the Des Moines” rivers, Bill Stowe, the waterworks manager, told the Des Moines Register last year. “This trend is absolutely off the scale. It’s like having serial tornadoes. You can deal with one, you can deal with two, but you can’t deal with them every day.”
For years, the state’s Department of Natural Resources, which is in the pocket of big agriculture, didn’t deal with the runoff problems. And two years ago, the Environmental Protection Agency told the state that it was violating the Clean Water Act and must immediately do a better job. State farm operations and politicians have bridled at the moderate increase in regulation that resulted, and last year House Republicans passed a bill that would undermine enforcement of the Clean Water Act, giving the states much more power to set their own rules. (Fortunately the bill was never taken up in the Senate.)
Ms. Ernst wants to take the seat of Senator Tom Harkin, who is retiring after compiling a strong liberal and pro-environmental record. For Iowans who worry about what’s coming out of their faucets, she has a great deal of explaining to do.
By: David Firestone, Editors Blog, The New York Times, June 4, 2014
“The Extreme Left Is Harmless”: Government Treating Peaceful Left Activists Like Terrorists, Again
Both liberals and conservatives spend time arguing that the other side contains people who are nutty, highlighting extreme statements in an attempt to convince people that there’s something fundamentally troubling about their opponents. There are many differences between the extreme right and the extreme left, perhaps most importantly that the extreme right has a much closer relationship with powerful Republicans than the extreme left has with powerful Democrats. When you find a crazy thing a liberal said, chances are it’s an obscure professor somewhere, or a blogger with twelve readers, or a random person at a protest. The crazy people on the right, in contrast, are often influential media figures or even members of Congress, people with real influence and power.
There’s another critical difference that doesn’t get as much attention: the extreme left is, generally speaking, harmless. That’s their nature. They’re more likely to meditate and form committees than hurt anyone. It’s been almost half a century since there were any leftists plotting bombings, and other than the occasional eco-vandal keying an SUV, the left isn’t going to be creating much in the way of crime and mayhem.
Extreme conservatives, on the other hand, are much more likely to be armed and dangerous. And we have plenty of examples of right-wing terrorism in our recent history, from the Oklahoma City bombing, to the Atlanta Olympic bombing, to the neo-Nazi who murdered six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012, to the murders this April in Kansas at a Jewish community center and retirement home, and dozens more. So you would think that law enforcement authorities would be particularly concerned about violent extremism on the right, while not wasting precious resources monitoring, infiltrating, and harassing leftists who are doing things like protesting U.S. foreign policy or opposing income inequality.
Oh, but you’d be wrong. The latest, from the New York Times, describes how law enforcement officials around the country went on high alert when the Occupy protests began in 2011, passing information between agencies with an urgency suggesting that at least some people thought that people gathering to oppose Wall Street were about to try to overthrow the U.S. government. And we remember how many of those protests ended, with police moving in with force.
The activities the Times article describes are relatively low-level compared to how many agencies approached left activism in the years after September 11, essentially treating any gathering of liberals like it was an al Qaeda cell days away from launching an attack. Anti-war groups were infiltrated with undercover officers posing as protesters, the most innocuous groups imaginable were spied on (you can rest easy knowing the threat from Quaker peace activists was closely monitored by anti-terrorism officials), and wherever a bunch of liberals got together to raise their voices, mass arrests often followed.
If you can’t recall any Tea Party protests in 2009 and 2010 being broken up by baton-wielding, pepper-spraying cops in riot gear, that’s because it didn’t happen. Just like the anti-war protesters of the Bush years, the Tea Partiers were unhappy with the government, and saying so loudly. But for some reason, law enforcement didn’t view them as a threat.
Or even more recently, recall how gingerly law enforcement officials treated Cliven Bundy and his allies. Here was a guy stealing public resources, and his supporters were literally pointing guns at government officials, and the response of the government was, “Let’s everybody stay calm here.” Eventually the authorities just backed off. I guess it’s lucky for the Bundy folks that they never tried forming a drum circle or passing out veggie burritos, because then the hammer would have really come down on them.
This isn’t anything new, of course; the government has a long history of treating liberal groups like a dire threat to the republic. But when we see yet another story like this one, it’s a reminder that the people and agencies charged with public safety have bizarre notions of where terrorism might come from. And that makes all of us less safe.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 23, 2014
“Only One Of Many”: Missouri Keeps Tumbling Rightward
The Missouri legislature had no trouble passing a big tax cut today over the veto of Gov. Jay Nixon. As a Missouri native, I’m probably more irritated by this than most Times readers are, but my state is only one of many that have been sharply pulled to the right in the last few years. What’s happening in Jefferson City is already familiar to residents of Wisconsin, Michigan, Kansas, North Carolina, and many others.
The main difference is that Mr. Nixon is a Democrat, a relic of the days when his party dominated the state. But Republican leaders are working on that. Last month, they had a serious debate in the House on whether the governor should be impeached for allowing same-sex married couples to file joint tax returns. Gay and lesbian people can’t get married to each other in Missouri, which has a constitutional amendment prohibiting it, but Mr. Nixon had the temerity to allow the joint returns for couples married elsewhere.
“This is such a blatant and serious violation of Missouri’s constitution and Missouri law that the governor should be removed from office,” said Nick Marshall, a state representative from Parkville.
In case that didn’t work, there was another impeachment resolution filed that would have ousted Mr. Nixon for failing to properly discipline state workers who released a list of concealed gun permits to the federal government. The resolution began, “Whereas, the people of the State of Missouri cherish their right to bear arms…” and went downhill from there.
A few weeks ago, the legislature approved a measure that would nullify all federal gun laws and allow residents to sue federal agents for enforcing them. It carries no legal weight, and Mr. Nixon vetoed something similar last year, but the true believers apparently feel the need to re-establish their credentials repeatedly.
Although the impeachment efforts were dropped today, Republicans have managed to push through their agenda. As a Kansas City Star editorial noted, today’s tax cut doesn’t even benefit the people who could use the money the most. A family making $44,000 a year will get a $32 break, while one making $1 million will get $7,800. Most of the benefits, in fact, go to one special-interest group.
“It is a gift to businesses whose owners declare their business incomes on their personal tax forms,” the Star wrote. “Up to one-fourth of their income could eventually be tax-free if the bill becomes law, whether or not they create jobs.”
Naturally, Missouri isn’t coming close to fully funding its public school and university system, and is one of 20 states that refuses to expand Medicaid, turning down $2.2 billion from the federal government because that would mean accepting the reality of the Affordable Care Act. But when businesses raise their voices for a tax cut, they are answered.
It’s not the state I grew up in, which is exactly the way a new generation of leaders like it.
By: David Firestone, Editors Blog, The New York Times, May 6, 2014
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