SPLC’s Potok: You’re all racists

Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mark Potok, who dropped by here once to deny that SPLC had called the American Legion a hate group, was on Fox News today to tell us that militia groups are on the rise. And you’re not helping;

The “ideas” of the militia are fomented by your quotations from Jefferson and your unhelpful protests. Oh, and the charges that he’s a “professional fearmonger” are “hogwash”. Well, you judge. From the SPLC report;

Fifteen years ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote then-Attorney General Janet Reno to warn about extremists in the militia movement, saying that the “mixture of armed groups and those who hate” was “a recipe for disaster.” Just six months later, Oklahoma City’s federal building was bombed.

Yup, they foresaw one guy with a truck bomb six months before that one guy even thought about it. Oh, one guy who happened to have been in the military, by the way.

…the entity that almost the entire radical right views as its primary enemy — is headed by a black man. That, coupled with high levels of non-white immigration and a decline in the percentage of whites overall in America, has helped to racialize the Patriot movement, which in the past was not primarily motivated by race hate. One result has been a remarkable rash of domestic terror incidents since the presidential campaign, most of them related to anger over the election of Barack Obama.

You buncha racists.

And on the site in Lexington, Mass., where the opening shots of the Revolutionary War were fired in 1775, members of Oath Keepers, a newly formed group of law enforcement officers, military men and veterans, “muster” on April 19 to reaffirm their pledge to defend the U.S. Constitution. “We’re in perilous times … perhaps far more perilous than in 1775,” says the man administering the oath. April 19 is the anniversary not only of the battle of Lexington Green, but also of the 1993 conflagration at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, and the lethal bombing two years later of the Oklahoma City federal building — seminal events in the lore of the extreme right, in particular the antigovernment Patriot movement.

They always come back to Timothy McVeigh – and an organization of “law enforcement officers, military men and veterans” meets on the anniversary of his accidental success. The only reason I mention this SPLC report is because, apparently, the Federal government depends on them as a major source for their own advisories on center right organizations.

ADDED: As proof of their discovery of a resurgence of radical right wing thuggery;

Oath Keepers…may be a particularly worrisome example of the Patriot revival. Members vow to fulfill the oaths to the Constitution that they swore while in the military or law enforcement. “Our oath is to the Constitution, not to the politicians, and we will not obey unconstitutional (and thus illegal) and immoral orders,” the group says. Oath Keepers lists 10 orders its members won’t obey, including two that reference U.S. concentration camps.

Oh, that’s scary! Members who vow to fulfill their oaths! Radical Right Wing nutjobs!

That same pugnacious attitude was on display after conservatives attacked an April report from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that suggested a resurgence of radical right-wing activity was under way.

Yeah, the report that SPLC wrote for the administration. Pugnacious. Vowing to fulfill our oaths to the Constitution is pugnacious now.

Category: Liberals suck, Military issues