How much does right-wing rhetoric contribute to right-wing terrorism?
In the pages of the Washington Post, Paul Waldman, attempting to deflect blame from the two murderers in Las Vegas the other day onto the political Right in the country makes some very stupid points, as you might already have figured out.
Of course because the two murderers complained on their Google+ accounts that they tried to get into, but weren’t allowed into, the protests at the Bundy Ranch they are automatically right wing terrorists. Because they spread Gadsden flags over the corpses of two of their victims, well that makes them right wing terrorists.
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.
Well, that’s good, because it saves me a lot of time Googling the mountain of idiot inflammatory things that Liberals tell the low-information voters. You know, things like “the war on women”, “starving our children”, “starving old people”, “Republicans want you to die”, “Bush will rescind the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments”, “Black churches will burn if Bush is reelected”, you know stuff like that.
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.
So, if Mr. Waldman wants to blame the actions of every crackpot who happens to want to be left alone by the government (so they can continue their criminal behavior), I’m going to call every two-bit thief, every pickpocket, every armed robber, every home invader a left wing terrorist, because obviously, they bought into the wealth-redistribution rhetoric they hear and read in the media every day. And the occupy movement is the worst – they terrorize entire cities and even their own members. So let’s call them left wing terrorists, too. Let’s make them extremists while we’re at it, because they even mouth the left wing words, even though they don’t understand the words.
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.
First, we’re not a democracy, thank God. If you want people to stop calling this republic a “totalitarian beast” tell the folks in government to stop acting like one. Read the Code of Federal Regulations sometime and count the number of times that you broke the law without realizing that you broke the law. Among my friends, it’d be hard to find someone who supported Clive Bundy, but that doesn’t matter – the Bundy bunch according to the two murderers in Vegas, wouldn’t allow them into the little activity they had at the Bundy Ranch because they were too racist and too extremist for that bunch – and a felon. So what’s you’re point?
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.
Well, maybe not, but I can name a terrorist who shot up the offices of the Family Research Council because he read the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hate Watch website. Huh?
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.
Yeah, I already covered conspiracy theories from the Left during Republican administrations. So are you saying that we should shut up while your side gets to propagate their own lies unanswered? Nice strategy if you could get it.
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.
Probably not – there are unbalanced people everywhere on both sides of every single issue. But my side of the political spectrum aren’t trying to get your side to shut up like you’re doing to my side. Admittedly, it’s possible to shame us into silence, while your side has no shame…at all. In fact I question if any of you have souls the way you’ve lied this country into a bunch of shiftless, hopeless, uneducated morons with no hope for a productive future. Now that’s f’n terrorism right there.
But, if you’re trying to make me feel guilty because you’re conflating my politics with those two meth-heads in Las Vegas, well, you failed. I’m pretty sure that you’ll find not much that I had in common with them. I’ve never advocated killing the police, or anyone else who wasn’t a declared enemy of this country, for that matter. I have guns but those guns are to defend myself and my family from people like those two killed in Las Vegas. If you want to tone down our rhetoric, you need to tone down your own and stop using every little tragedy as an excuse to take the things I’ve worked for all of my life from me.
Oh, you forgot to call us racists, too.
Category: Liberals suck
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…
The John Birch Society started in 1958; in fact, Robert Welch’s most infamous book (The Politician) was an attack on President Eisenhower.
Also, as far as I know, the number of terrorist incidents attributable to the John Birch Society is exactly “zero.”
(The Weather Underground, which really did arise during a Democratic administration, was not from the right.)
Alberich: true. And there are bona-fide terrorist acts attributable to the Weather Underground. Ask Robert Fogerty and Brian McDonnell’s survivors.
The same is true of the Black Panther Party, which also sprang from the US Left. If anything, they were more brutal and ruthless than the Weather Underground.
The two shooters in this case were absolute nutbags, politics was not a factor, it was insanity. Just as that idiot who shot Giffords was insane, and his insanity drove him to believe and create his own twisted reality.
No, they were not conservatives. They were nucking futs.
This is what is lost on most of the left and right. These types are just plain crazy and as such they may appear to be a right wing zealot or a left wing zealot. Their insanity/mental illness drives their extreme politics. From what I understand this guy was pissed because he lost his right to won a gun due to his felony conviction for distributing a controlled substance. His failure to accept responsibility for his own actions and their blending of Nazism/ White Supremacists ideology with Libertarianism shows a good too many paradoxes to be anything more than the ranting’s of the insane.
I’d say that the “right-wing terrorism” he describes has a lot more to do with Asshole Rhetoric and Tinfoil-Hat Rhetoric than it does with any actual Conservative Rhetoric. Hell, the columnist even makes a backhanded admission of that very fact.
He doesn’t seem to notice that tinfoil-hat assholes are always out there and have just as many of their batshit-crazy theories about conservative leaders as they do about liberal ones. Not does he take the time to notice that liberals not only feed the batshit-craziness of the tinfoil-hat crowd, but many of the things they say seem to lend the crazies some credibility in the eyes of some low-info types.
But of course, it’s all conservatives’ fault and guns are bad, blah blah blah.
I could go on, but it’s early yet. I need caffeine.
There is a crapload of conspiracy driven nonsense out there. All of which the left uses to make the “Right” look crazy… they(the left) do a damned good job of ignoring the barking moonbats of the left though. (Especially when they too commit acts of violence, like shooting up a Anti-Abortion groups headquarters)
Thing is we do have to police our own, there is far too much of the “I saw it on the internet so it must be true syndrome” going on. I look at my newsfeed and on a daily basis there are at least 2-4 exaggerated or outright false memes/stories posted. All of them coming from the far right and even some from the not so far right.
When I see assholes justifying the shootings because of the “militarization of the police”, or because of how they “declared Martial Law in Boston” after the Marathon Bombing(they didn’t) and exaggerate the searches in Watertown to justify the shooting of those two cops, I wonder at the insanity level of our society as a whole. I know I should not pay much heed to the vocal minority, but they are the ones who get the most attention from the Left to paint us all with that same brush.
“One more incident of right wing terrorism”
Such as? I’m drawing a blank here. And no, McVeigh wasn’t right wing. Nice try though.
I actually agree with some of what this guy is saying, but he loses me when he puts this on the shoulders of “conservative” commenters.
Alex Jones is a fucking snake oil salesman who sells paranoid conspiracy theories to his audience. You keep telling people like that their president is secretly a Muslim who wants to commit genocide against Americans, and sooner or later someone is going to lash out. I’m not sure where I’d place Jones on the political spectrum; I certainly wouldn’t call him a liberal, conservative, or moderate, but I am pretty damn sure that his rhetoric feeds incidents like this and he bears culpability in this shit.
IMO, we should call Jones a CMF.
One translation of the acronym could be “Conspiracy-Mongering Fellow”. An alternate translation could be “Crazy Male or Female”.
There are other translations, of course. (smile)
So those retirees on the mall in DC are now the same as the John Birchers or the liberal terrorist groups of the late 60s?
So does that mean that Chuck Shumer and Lizzy Warren are responsible for the OWS violence that occurred during those protests? Their anti-corporate rhetoric could be construed as a call to action by those stank ass hippies in the Occupy Wall Street movement and we saw how that played out.
If someone talking about how they feel the feds are overtaxing us and infringing upon our bill of rights protections were to cause unbalanced loons to kill people then every non conservative killer would have to be a product of liberal hyperbole.
The current problem with the dialogue regarding mass murder is simple, it’s not an accurate depiction of anything. It’s not an increasing epidemic, it’s not a symptom of the decline of our society.
All the murders and murderers represent a .0000371 % of population. They are all tragic but it needs to be in perspective.
The difference is a 24 hour news cycle and a preponderance of pundits who pontificate by the hour on the crisis du jour. 35.6 a day are murdered in the US, but 2700 a day die from cancer and heart disease. If the liberal media wants to actually save lives a 24 hour news cycle to discourage being a fat ass and to make sure you have a colonoscopy and prostate/breast exam would actually save more lives than banning guns or discussing the safety implications of 2 psychos who killed a couple of cops.
But I guess the liberal media has never bothered to worry about saving lives, they just want to advance their political agenda on whatever victims of tragedy are currently making headlines.
When I saw the word fetishization in Waldman’s piece, I said, “Huh? Fetishization? That’s not a word.” So I googled “Paul Waldman fetishization fetishize’ and, damn, he really likes those non-words going to sexual oddities. I wonder why. Here’s a sampling from Waldman’s past writings:
“The most obvious component is the fetishization of firearms….”
“But this [Bergdahl 5 for 1 swap] messy episode reminds us of how little the people who fetishize toughness….”
“Even before Woodstock…rebellion was being fetishized….”
“So it’s easy for those whose Founding Father fetishism is recently acquired to carry the Tea Party banner.”
“But to Southerners who say, as some inevitably do, that the Confederate flag in particular, and Confederate fetishism more generally….”
One could say that Waldman has a fetish for fetishizing things? Bet this goes back to how he was potty-trained, or his first date with a real female.
Well, considering that environmental terrorist groups such as ALF and ELF are the most active and prolific terrorist groups in the United States, we can correctly state that left-wing rhetoric causes left-wing terrorism, right?
Tiresomely predictible. And predictibly blind.
There was at least as much conspiracy nuttery during Bush’s 8 years in office as well.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say this: There always have been, and always will be, conspiracy-minded fringers. I think they’re actually the same people, but their orientation switches depending on which political party is in power. They gravitate towards whichever mainstream political group is OUT of power, and it’s a symbiotic relationship: The out-of-power party, licking its wounds from its loss and trying to stir up its base, gains numbers and the energy that only a truly dedicated person can bring, which benefits the out-of-power party (at least temporarily) and the conspiracy nutters gain the “legitimacy” of a mainstream political party.
Democrats were happy to stoke the fires of 9/11 “truthers” or the other nutjobs who were sure that Bush was going to appoint himself president-for-life and throw all the lefties into Gitmo (if only!) because it benefited them to stoke those fires. They also kindled the nascent isolationism that runs through the American psyche, as a way of opposing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Of course, once the out-of-power party becomes the in-power party, they kick the nutters to the curb because now they are a liability. Obama’s sucking up to the isolationists came back to bite him in the ass when he tried to initiate a conflict with Syria, only to find that it was his own isolationist backers who were his most vociferous opponents.
By the way, Waldman is a proud progressive, a former academic, and a guy who would drag his nose across a glass and gravel road just to smell the tire tracks of the truck that hauled away Obama’s garbage. With progressives, it’s all about the playbook. He is a true believer and an advocate for all things progressive. Whatever the issue, the answer is always the same.
BTW, Waldman was on the Journolist. Remember that? It was an email group of lefties who reportedly conspired to favor Obama and attack Palin and other conservatives before the ListServ group was discovered and extingusihed in 2010.
The Journolist may have been extinguished, but the idea behind it is alive and well. Now they do it with group calls/texts and email blasts to the followers. Usually originating in the White House.
So we have right wing rhetoric contributing to right wing terrorism?
But left wing rhetoric that contributed to left wing terrorism (SDS, Weatherman, Black Panthers et al) is/was okay because their heirs are now the ones in charge?
IF all of these scary conservatives with their ‘fetishized’ firearms actually got organized and decided to do something THEN progressives/liberals/democrats would have reason to be afraid. Instead we’ll continue to have morons like Paul Waldman trying to connect the dots with a crayon and a complete lack of facts
The two murderers were just taking the conservative platform to its logical conclusion.
Joe! Where you been, guy? We’ve missed you!
And thank you for calling all of us doped up cop killers. ‘preciate the shit out of that, we really do.
Get ready for the dog-pile! 🙂
Joe the rock climbing hero is back, eh? Well, at least he can form a complete sentence with correct punctuation, unlike VWPutz.
Having thus given the devil his due, I must ask: Joe, how exactly does that make any sense at all? Your statement is nothing but chickenshit vitriol based entirely on your own prejudices. You disagree with conservatives, ergo we must all be crazy-eyed murderers waiting to snap. How very logical and open-minded.
These two shitbirds weren’t conservatives. They weren’t liberals either, for that matter. They were assholes, specifically dumb self-contradicting neo-nazi assholes with delusions of grandeur. Their claims and beliefs made no sense to anybody. Their misuse of a Gadsden Flag was as meaningful as the KKK and nazis displaying the Stars and Stripes. It contradicts everything that flag stands for, which speaks volumes about the delusional nature of these two retards.
Now, you could try to participate in an honest and civil discussion, or you can just continue to be a self-righteous asshole.
Chicken shit vitriol is all that Joe has. And Joe will certainly “continue to be a self-righteous asshole.”, it’s who he is.
Damn, still haven’t face planted off a rock. Nice to see you still haven’t scraped together enough change and pocket lint to buy the other half of that wit yet.
Then I guess it’s safe to say that the leftist platform, taken to it’s logical conclusion results in the Occupy movement, the Black Panthers, Weather Underground and other murderous left wing groups. Nice try chucklehead. Don’t let the door hit you in your partisan ass.
President Obama’s political career began in the living room of a bona fide left wing terrorist.
Where’s that George Carlin clip when you need it?
Jesus, this is becoming almost libel. Right Wing *terrorists*? I have yet to hear of a real, honest to God terrorist organization with Conservative ideals.
Why? Because Conservatives believe *in the rule of law*. That makes us a helluva lot more likely *not* to break the law then a liberal.
I cannot wait for them to be on the outside looking in when we sweep them out in November!