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America’s Self-Appointed Vigilantes

By Jim Taylor

16 January, 2011
Countercurrents.org

Don’t expect this column to be balanced and impartial.
I tried that last week, when I suggested that violent metaphors in our speech encourage real violence in our society. By some tragic coincidence, that column was published the day after 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner fired 30 rounds from a Glock semi-automatic pistol, killing six people and injuring 20 others.
The United States is still reeling from last Saturday’s assassination attempt on U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona.
Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnick made my point for me, referring to “the vitriol that we hear inflaming the American public....”
“It is true,” wrote Paul Krugman in the New York Times, “that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event, having nothing to do with the national climate.”

Right wing violence

And the national climate reveals a rash of recent politically inspired attacks. Within just the last year, Clay Duke attacked a Florida school board. Byron Williams opened fire on a police station. Joe Stack flew his light plane into a federal building in Texas.
Such attacks are eerily reminiscent of Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
McVeigh later wrote of his motives, “I reached the decision to go on the offensive – to put a check on government abuse of power.”
His words identify the mindset of right wing extremists – a massive distrust of governments and agencies, an absolute assurance of their own rightness, and a willingness to act as self-appointed vigilantes.
The threat to America today does not come from left wing radicals or foreign terrorists. It comes from its own fanatical right-wing .
The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence – admittedly, hardly an impartial body – has documented “more than two dozen” politically motivated killings or attacks by right wing extremists, in just the last two years.
During the Barry Goldwater years, author John Hofstadter defined what he called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” The extreme right, he argued, is characterized by anger, heated exaggeration, suspicion, and conspiratorial fantasy.
Little has changed.
Jared Loughner was not, as far as anyone knows, a card-carrying member of the Tea Party. But his writings revealed that he despised governments. He condemned abortion. He hated Giffords’ political objectives: immigration reform, health care, stem cell research, and alternative energy.
And he was willing to act as a one-man lynch mob.
All of which puts him clearly in the far right wing camp.

Measurable changes

Let’s ignore, at least for the moment, speculation about factors that might have influenced Loughner -- Sarah Palin’s website with its crosshair targets, Glenn Beck’s incendiary encouragement for violent action, Jesse Kelly’s invitation to “remove Gabrielle Giffords from office” with “a fully automatic M16...”
Let’s look instead at some empirical facts.
Since the 2008 election, when Democrats regained power in Washington, death threats against members of Congress have soared 300 per cent.
All presidents receive death threats. But death threats against Democrat Barrack Obama have run 400 per cent higher than those against Republican George W. Bush. A comparable imbalance applied to Bill Clinton vs his Republican predecessors.
Right-wing militia groups declined during Bush’s regime. But their numbers have surged again, rising from around 200 in the 1990s to over 500 today.
“Where’s the toxic rhetoric coming from?” Paul Krugman asked in the New York Times. “Let’s not make a false pretence of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right.”
Fifteen years ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center warned Janet Reno, then U.S. Attorney General, about extremists in the militia movement. They called “the mixture of armed groups and those who hate... a recipe for disaster.”

Misplaced emphasis

But America’s security agencies still cling to their obsession with a subversive left. If it was ever true – even in the McCarthy era – it isn’t any longer.
So they build dossiers on university professors, peace activists, social animators, and labour leaders. They ignore the reality that such groups talk. That’s what they’re best at. They’d rather debate philosophical differences to death than put a person to death.
Unlike the right, leftists rarely take matters into their own hands. They expect government to act for them. That’s what makes them leftists.
The really dangerous people are those who dislike talking, who scorn negotiation and compromise.
Look at any list of recent mass murderers in the U.S., from Columbine to Virginia Tech, from Fort Hood to Tucson. I defy you to find anyone considered gregarious. They’re loners, people who nurse grudges, who avoid situations that might encourage them to talk out their anger.
When that anger focuses on political issues, leaning even slightly further left than them makes you fair game for getting straightened out with a bullet.
Actions speak louder than words. When will America wake up and realize that its greatest threats to freedom are its own right wing extremists?
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Copyright © 2010 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; all other rights reserved.
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