Eve Conant: Right Wing Terrorists Are Still “Ho Hum”
Newsweek’s Eve Conant, in the guise of writing about progressive media, reviews several descriptions that consider the Hutaree militia a disturbing case of right wing domestic terrorism. She links to a Blue Texan post, quotes Rachel Maddow describing them as “a ‘strange combination of absurd and scary’ with names ‘out of a Calvin and Hobbes strip’,” includes a judgment from Ed Brayton (who knows his right wing MI violence) that they are dangerous but fringe even for right wing militia groups, quotes from Eugene Robinson’s op-ed calling out apologists trying to draw false equivalence between right wing violence and left wing activists, and finally cites stats from the Southern Poverty Law Center showing that militia activity has exploded recently.
But she still, ultimately, clings to the kind of “on the one side, on the other side” cowardice that fuels beltway media.
The question of who is worse, right-wing or left-wing radicals, and how to label radicals cropped up again most recently when pundits raced to describe recent Pentagon shooter John Patrick Bedell as right wing and conservatives lashed back that he was left wing.
[snip]
Whether [the 363 new Patriot groups that have sprung up this year] are right wing or left wing will continue to be debated, but Robinson argues that such a debate is a nonstarter.
But there’s a reason why Conant probably insists there is a debate about this right wing violence. She believes anti-government violence–even people like Joseph Stack, who flew a plane into a federal building and killed a man–is literally “ho hum.”
Isn’t the ho-hum reaction in part the simple psychology behind the fact that a) no one likes the IRS and b) he’s an American (so closest he might get is “domestic terrorist” in terms of labels) who doesn’t hate Americans but hates an institution. The act is horrible, but somehow the motivation is perceived as less offensive. As one conservative at the CPAC conference told me, Stack simply “made a poor life choice.” There’s no way anyone would say that about the underwear bomber.
So sure, Conant can review a bunch of stats showing that this kind of violence is exploding, she can review Ed Brayton’s knowledgeable statements about the danger of groups like the Hutaree, but because someone at CPAC told her Stack’s murder-suicide constituted a “poor life choice,” she’s going to consider the danger of rising right wing terrorism open for debate.
Eve Conant, I guess, can dismiss the reality of rising right wing terrorism with platitudes about “less offensive” motivations and “poor life choices.” As if that will somehow make up for the number of people that have already died as a result of this terrorism.
Stack gets a pass because he “doesn’t hate Americans but hates an institution”. Couldn’t the same be said of non-American terrorists?
My god, is she Jake Tapper in a Maidenform? How much more toolish can a single person be without turning into Ross Douthat?
Toolish? She’s got a tattoo that says “CRAFTSMAN” on her butt!
Boxturtle (Perhaps someone could exercise the return policy, as that ratchet seems to only turn right)
So if I hate the IRS or Obama and I attack either of them, I’m NOT a terrorist. But if I attack any thing military or republican, I AM a terrorist. Seems simple enough.
Lets get rid of a lot of “terrorist” specific laws and charge them the old ways. Murder. Kidnapping. Hell, BATF violations! Too much politics in defining terrorist, but even Kansas juries can convict someone of murder for shooting a Dr.
It’s a sorry state for American terrorism, nobody since McVie has managed to detonate a decent bomb and just about every one has been caught except for the Anthrax mailer. It’s to the point where if I read the plot succeeds, I suspect AQ or the like and if it fails I expect to see tea partiers.
Boxturtle (I’m sure arab terrorists laugh at our feeble attempts at chaos)
Yes.
Along with the Post and Slate, Newsweek is firmly in
the “friends don’t let friends read” category.
It continues to exist solely because of the subsidies from Kaplan,
and there will be great rejoicing when it slips beneath the waves.
Right Wing Terrorists? Don’t these people prefer the term Christian Warriors? CNN put Christian Warriors on the screen when they talked about these people the other day.
WTF? Hating institutions and wanting to kill people who represent those institutions is ok now? Not terrorism?
I take it Newsweek’s Eve Conant did not read the comments on BTs thread:)
http://firedoglake.com/2010/03/31/early-morning-swim-240/#Respond
Some editing was done on this comment
Here’s the point. In the 1960s and early 70’s the DFH’s wrecked the United States and caused it to lose the Vietnam War. Especially true of those awful students at Kent State who provoked the National Guard into shooting at them before they could get the guns out of their holsters. This sort of crap is so deeply embedded in the Village Conventional Wisdom — now well into its third generation — that no one hardly thinks it is there anymore. It’s like the notion that we are no longer (never were?) a racist nation.
An adequate understanding of anti-war and other sixties movements on the left is that once they began to be effective they were infiltrated and delegitimized by government agencies. The SDS and other anti-war organizations, the Black Panthers, even the women’s movement was seen as ripe for infiltration. By whom? The FBI, the CIA, various military intelligence agencies, local police intelligence units. Having been active in the anti-war movement then I would not doubt that many of the people who called for violent actions were in fact working for the government to discredit the peace movement. (I think the ultimate psyop was the Symbionese Liberation Army, such a bogus operation “led” by a “former” police informant whose sole purpose seemed to be to scare white people and discredit the Left. I also have questions about people like Bill Ayers, whose actions discredited the Left in the 60s and 70s and then resurfaced a few years ago to discredit Obama after working for years on a foundation set up by the Annenbergs.)
My point is that even “the right’s wrongdoing” versus “the left’s wrongdoing” is an incorrect dichotomy when such comparisons invoke false-flag psyops. WaPo, Slate and Newsweek should recognize these things because of the Graham Family’s long and storied relationship with the CIA.
Very good points. You stated what was in my thoughts (old dfh that I am).
I think Newsweek, Eve Conant, whatever whomever is just yet another piece ye olde system that discredits the left. Aren’t the corporations working hand in glove with the likes of the fibbies and the CIA??? Aren’t they all kind of just inter-locking departments (to put it very simplistically)??
Interesting that you had some of the same thoughts about Bill Ayers that I did (going off on a tangent)… are we just paranoid? or do we have a reason to be paranoid? Hard to tell, but the whole Bill Ayers “thing” during the BHO campaign was, uh, “interesting.”
One of Dylan’s old lines before the motorcylce accident was “don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters.” One of the easiest things to do to disrupt a social movement is for the status quo to insert someone into a leadership position to derail it. When General Torres in Panama, a CIA asset, began making egalitarian noises, his helicopter went down and Noriega took his place. When Noriega got to be a liability, he was replaced.
The same process seems to take place domestically. I noticed that whenever a Democrat or liberal leader was assassinated, discredited, arrested for something, a new “leader”, less progressive and less effective, would take his place. Who anointed Jesse Jackson as heir to MLK, for ex? I think it was Time or Newsweek. When Gloria Steinem makes an inane or divisive statement, like her NYT Op-Ed on the eve of the New Hampshire primary in 2008, why doesn’t someone at least consider her history as a CIA propagandist prior to her blossoming into a feminist?
So, yes, when Bill Ayers is resurrected for one more go-round, I have suspicions. I also suspect that sometime in the 70s or 80s the process of choosing Democratic candidates for President had been completely taken over by the permanent government to the detriment of actual democracy. Just how I see it. I guess this will make PLovering nervous.
You gotta problem with Jesse? I used to consider myself a Jesse Jackson Democrat. No one “anointed” him. Actually, if anyone has been anointed as MLK’s successor, its probably been Al Sharpton since his presidential run made Jesse “old hat.” Jesse got more votes than Sharpton ever did in his run for the presidency.
BTW, if you’re really concerned about MLK’s legacy (even though I suspect you’re not), watch Tavis Smiley’s great show that aired last night:
MLK Jr. still speaks for MLK Jr. This is a fantastic show, and I recommend this episode highly.
Bob in AZ
Yeah Right! hates an institution, compartmentalize much Eve? Suppose the next nut goes after the liberal media? No I don’t think the media is liberal but the Right does think that. Tell me Eve must a murderer literally come to your door before you start to worry?
Any country that calls its military “warriors” will eventually pay a price.
Words matter.
???
Don’t these idiots realize that the muslim terrorists are a “fringe group” as well?
Stats and Expert testimony is now equal to gossip from someone at CPAC? Can we get a name Eve so we can google your source’s expertise in this area?
Or are you like David Broder there is always *cough* someone to validate your opinion? Mike Royko’s Slats Grobnic Character was imaginary Eve and everyone knew it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Royko
I can understand a source being secret but a regular Real Guy with an opinion nope heck I would love it if Newsweek quoted me I’d buy 10 copies and send them to my relatives.
I think the media has an imaginary Real Guy problem. First they don’t mention or make it obvious the regular guy they quote is imaginary.
Second unlike Mike the Media today is not regular guys, but they and their imaginary friends think they are.
re: radical (US) left wing groups:
name one… then, name one that’s been accused of violence in the past 10, no 20 years…
A…..The Democratic Party.
B…..The Republican Party.
What do I win?
Earth Liberation Force, sometimes refered to as ELF, would qualify. They are a violent offshoot of PETA. They have bombed labs in Cleveland and booby trapped trees in the Northwest, among other acts.
Boxturtle (But they’re doing it in the name of the environment, so it’s okay. *hrrumph*)
But they’re a fringe group, so they don’t count.
ELF already IS considered to be a domestic terrorist organization.
Yup. I probably should have stated that specifically.
Selise @51 – PETA disavows them now (and means it), but they were founded by PETA folks who felt that PETA wasn’t activist enough. IIR, first came ALF, then ELF. But I’ve slept since then.
Boxturtle (Can’t tell these groups apart without a program)
me too, thanks *g*
(although the over the top “official” terrorism alerts and fear mongering have, on occasion, given me pause – all that firepower combined with all that stupidity)
don’t think elf has anything to do with peta. maybe you are thinking of alf or confusing the two? before you accuse them of terrorism, could you do some reading on the shac case and the terror mongering by senator inhofe? please?
as for elf (as well as alf), to my knowledge i know of no one involved in either and have no desire to defend or condemn something i know so little about. what i do know about, however, through direct experience, is both the bogus fear mongering and lies (using shac as justification) and police state tactics (using elf as justification) by delusional cowards.
Thanks for this reminder. Are they still active? When was the last incident?
Bob in AZ
She uses the same sound bites Karl Rove used the other day.
Maybe that was her CPAC source? Karl has so much Cred his “Math ” skills rock/s
these right wingers are head in the mud ostriches, it’s like they put their fingers in their ears, hands over their eyes and make believe nothing is happening, they make believe they don’t see it, they don’t hear it, they are certainly not responsible for it
they need to be ostriches since if they admit the problem they are left with the reasons for the problem, that would be their vitriol
we need to get an image of an ostrich with head in the sand, butt exposed to the world and display said image whenever we face another right wing denial
Will we ever fly a drone into a militia gathering and wipe them out?
We complain when the pakistanis refuse to kill their own terrorists and call them terorrist sympathizers when they refuse to kill their own people who turned into anti government religious radicals.
If we killed the Hutaree with a drone strike like we use in afghanistan what would the right wings reaction be? HOW DARE YOU DO THIS TO
AMERICANS…
Which would probably make the news after a story of how proud our military is of killing a guy who worked in the taliban as a middle managers chef……and the 50 “collateral damage points” the drone operator scored.
Maybe we can get the Pakistanis to do it for us.
Would this fool be saying the samething if the Hutarees had been able to carryout their plans and kill dozens of police officers and members of their families? Nobody would be ho-humming it then.
This fool would probably contribute to the Hutarees legal defense fund a big check then. Same as the Righties did when Scooter outed Valerie Palme.
Of course not! They’d be blaming Obama and his policies for driving decent, God-fearing, Americans to these acts of desperation!
Boxturtle (Why am I not writing scripts for Fox?)
No one on the right has said anythinng about the gun buying frenzy of the gun lovers since Obama got elected. They have not questioned th foolishness of this.
They are counting on it they hope *cough* popular pressure from the 20%ers can influence or get rid of Obama just like Nazi thugs hassling Jews before Hitler took over silenced the opposition.
We do anything we must be put down the Right however gets a free pass.
Don’t worry about the gun nuts increasing their collections. They can still fire at most two guns at a time and even with a banana clip they gotta stop to reload sometime.
I mean, really, after a certain number of guns adding more guns does not make you more dangerous.
Boxturtle (Considers responsable gun ownership a good thing)
I have a confession to make. I’ve never understood why people want to shoot each other with bananas.
Imagine if Obama took the leader on national tv and shot him in the back of the head?
There would be riots in the streets at his tyranny.
If he took an al qaeda squad leader, announced who he was on tv, and shot him in the head, the right wing would cheer and might actually like him.
This whole ‘two sides to every story’ thing is getting so old. Next we’ll see it in sports reporting. “The final is 38 to 10. So who won? Experts will debate that question after these messages.”
Well the fans of the losing team have been cheering really loudly and have threatened to go to the home of the leagues owner, sexually assault his wife and children in front of him and blow up his home….so the championship ends with the losers winning because they had a clear minority of the points.
Two sides? The last time we had violent Lefties were the Weathermen in the 60’s and 70’s there are people who voted for Obama who were not even alive when America last had Lefty Terrorists.
What two sides is she talking about?
new post up top…
Eve Conant’s article betrayed so much ignorance about domestic right wing extremists that I cannot help but dismiss Newsweek as yet another co-opted news magazine transformed into a shallow epic snore.
Her bedeviled mind thrills to the image of a sweating hairy white guy shrink-wrapped in ammo belts and whistling Onward Christian Soldiers as he pins one end of a common elementary schoolyard teeter-totter to the ground with his ass and aims an AK47 at . . . what?
Empty sky at the other end is . . . well, so incomplete and unsophisticated. No one will ever believe he isn’t opposing a white and equally menacing left wing force spewing incoherent slogans. Voila! Balance.
Well, boys will be boys, right? Now, if they would just stop fighting each other and learn to play well together, maybe we could get them to focus on killing the brown people who live on the other side of the world, speak languages we don’t understand, and hate us because of our freedoms.
She is beyond clueless.
Discussing the hate militias in Michigan. These arrest the trial
http://thedianerehmshow.org/
Well, they are white, you know…..
When did we stop saying “fight ’em there so we don’t have to fight ’em here”???
If you take out God-fearing, I could qualify as one of the desparate Americans. The off-shore drilling announcement is the final fucking straw.
I’m really angry. No one will sell me a left-handed gun, damnit!
The Southern Poverty Law Center worries me more than Hutaree raptures.
They are both clans of conspiracy crazies.
Because, as we all know, there are no conspiracies and all people who suspect conspiracies are dangerous.
Can someone explain to me when this thread of illogic became acceptable in reasonable discourse? If PLovering has a problem with something that the Southern Poverty Law Center has written then discuss that. As long as it doesn’t go against the laws of time and space I’m willing to hear about it. Since the SPLC keeps tabs on racist groups, and racist groups have been known to, you know, kill people for illogical reasons, I’m less worried about the SPLC than the groups they look into.
Thanks for your thoughtful response. Unless the Plovering can provide reasonable information with links, a broad-side attack on the SPLC is completely unmerited and unfounded. SPLC has done a lot of good and next to no harm, and I, for one, am glad that they keep tabs on these groups. They also do a lot of good by reaching out and teaching tolerance.
Please provide a reasoned and informed post, rather than unsubstantiated attacks.
Perhaps you can stop by the strip mall today and pick up a clue.
WTF have you been smokin’, boy?
Can someone explain to me why this has suddenly become an issue? Didn’t the “militia crazies” blow up a building in Oklahoma City in the 1990s? None of this is new. This is merely the media trying to get the left to refocus from the sellout of the Left (HCR reform) to something else. This is fear mongering to get us to rally together and “fear” those right wing morons.
Stay focused on what’s important. Be it morons in the Middle East once a decade affecting the West or some moron in a depressed area of the country lashing out once a decade because the government is threatening them is irrelevant.
My God people, grow the hell up. Stop buying into the fear mongering. Be it internal or foreign, you are more likely to die in an airplane crash than be affected by either sets of morons. How many TRILLIONS need to be spent to make you feel better? Grow the hell up.
Exactly who is this suggestion directed to?
I agree with you to an extent, but discussing this type of media b.s. is not wholly and totally taking anyone’s focus (here) away from the sell-out that is called “health care reform.” I think it’s merited to call out b.s. when it occurs. Turning our heads and ignoring it doesn’t really make it “go away” either. Just my opinion.
One thing to be kept in mind about this Hutaree case relative to some of the other alarms we’ve had in recent years is the relationship between the plan to be executed and the [alleged] plotters who would do so.
In many of the other cases, the gap between the two was so great as to make the amount of scare-mongering, and often the degree of legal jeopardy of the accused, seem all out of bounds.
But the Hutarees seem to have been planning something —they supposedly would have just used automatic rifles, pipe bombs, and such as can be handled by any private soldier, no fancy chemical experiments or skyscraper-shifting truckbombs needed (indictment in PDF)— that they could well have executed, or where even a fairly bad botch could have lead to loss of innocent lives.
It is charged, that even the Hutarees’ recon exercise would have exposed random folks in the area to situations that they had no way of diagnosing, but that nevertheless could result in harm to them. And all using means that, to repeat, one can readily believe the Hutarees know how to deploy.