All the News We Figure’s Good for You [UPDATED]

7Mar/105

All the News We Figure’s Good for You [UPDATED]

The AP writes an article on "sectarian violence" in Nigeria, without ever mentioning which sects might be involved. Another minor oversight here.

And the Christian Science Monitor, having earlier decided that the Pentagon shooter was a right-wing extremist, has now decided that it's very difficult to pigeonhole people like John Bedell or Joe Stack, except to say that they are extremist. I'm sure that that's true in some sense, but in Bedell's case, it appears that he was a guy who hadn't gotten his medication for awhile.

What's most interesting in the latter article, though, is that all of its allusions to extremism come from "the right".

The Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations, Christian Identity adherents, skinheads and neo-Nazis, state and local “militias” and “freemen” here and there. It’s hard to pin them down along today’s conservative-liberal political spectrum. Like many in today’s “tea party” movement, they are nonpartisan. Or maybe “post-partisan” in a way President Obama never intended.

Well, let's see. What's missing here? The Nation of Islam, New Black Panthers, ELF, and a variety of other "leftist" organizations. As for the Tea Parties, it's really astounding how little of the violence and property damage that regularly accompanies anti-G8 and other similar protests you find there.

“We’ve always had individuals who strike out at the giant ‘system’ when they’re feeling a sense of powerlessness and insignificance,” Jerrold Post, a professor of political psychology at George Washington University and author of “Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitics of Hatred,” told the Washington Post. “Now we see an alarming tendency in which these same individuals can find substantiation online for almost any point of view.”

Oh, yeah: The System. The Man. And the problem is the internet, right Cass Sunstein? Not that there's any concerted effort to create sympathy for internet censorship by licking such memes into shape, oh, no.

But aside from the hyperventilated rhetoric, has there been an increase in politically-rooted violent extremism?

Yes, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., which has been tracking (and successfully suing) groups like the Klan and Aryan Nations for years.

“Hate groups stayed at record levels – almost 1,000 – despite the total collapse of the second largest neo-Nazi group in America,” SPLC reported recently. “Furious anti-immigrant vigilante groups soared by nearly 80 percent, adding some 136 new groups during 2009. And, most remarkably of all, so-called ‘Patriot’ groups – militias and other organizations that see the federal government as part of a plot to impose ‘one-world government’ on liberty-loving Americans – came roaring back after years out of the limelight.”

Gee, just how did our unelected arbiters of what constitutes hate arrive at this astronomical increase in hate organizations? Stacy's got some ideas. But in point of fact there are advisers and appointees in the Obama administration who think that it's important that we move in the direction of One-World Government, by their own expressed testimony (such as Harold Koh, never mind that even to express an equivalent thought under sharia might well cost one's life). And honestly, wasn't that what Copenhagen was about? Isn't that what the International Court of Justice at the Hague is about?

Let's give the final word to . . . well, let's give it to someone with the same sympathies expressed throughout the article:

Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates in Somerville, Mass., has been tracking extremism for nearly 30 years. Today, he reports “one of the most significant right-wing populist rebellions in United States history.”

“We see around us a series of overlapping social and political movements populated by people [who are] angry, resentful, and full of anxiety,” he writes. “They are raging against the machinery of the federal bureaucracy and liberal government programs and policies including healthcare, reform of immigration and labor laws, abortion, and gay marriage.”

This is the context in which the suicidal pilot in Texas and the Pentagon shooter need to be seen, though they don’t fit neatly. Because nothing in this realm is easily categorized.

So, you see, they're not easily pigeonholed beyond the evident fact that they're all epiphenomena of right-wing populist rebellion. The raaaaacists.

UPDATE: Oh, look! Melanie Phillips even says what it is!

Dan Collins

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JD's OhSoGay McDad
March 8th, 2010 - 18:38

Well, let’s see. What’s missing here? The Nation of Islam, New Black Panthers, ELF, and a variety of other “leftist” organizations. As for the Tea Parties, it’s really astounding how little of the violence and property damage that regularly accompanies anti-G8 and other similar protests you find there.

Pinky, the Nation of Islam is obviously a Muslim group. Religion is a right-wingy thingy, and it’s for religion’s metanarratives that you are pointed to and laughed at for being a Christian Taliban Fascist. Historically speaking, your religion is a global horror, a pox on humanity, a criminal enterprise, and I think a resurrected Jesus of today would punch you in the balls and stomp on your bowels and bones. Yes, the Son of God would smite thee into a pulp, swing those money changers’ tables at your teeth! Your standing in the uppity Jesus tribe, IMHO – hahaha, ready? – is that of Taliban Imp! A confused twaddling goonie, at best, but ignorant of your identity nonetheless, simply free as a bird and guilty as hell.

Hitler was more your Christian man on earth, and make no mistake it was the Commies who defeated Hitler prior to burning his Holy book and crucifying his fascist fatal indictment of the Obama-colored non-Christiany peeps. You’re a Lindbergist, you smell of it! A Confederate runaway! Haha!

You are not a anti-fascist nor do you “abjure fascism,” you merely wish to be a kinder, gentler, newly minted and masked dictatorial fascist in Jesus’s name. Won’t happen.

FMLN! Salvador! Romero!

God Save the Queen! The Fascist Regime! She ain’t no human being!

Maybe it’s not Progressivism you entirely disagree with, rather it’s the near defeat of Racialized Fascism that so upsets your suburban-Whitey tea-bagging ass.

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- Bob Reed
  March 8th, 2010 - 19:05
  
  “Historically speaking, your religion is a global horror, a pox on humanity, a criminal enterprise…”
  
  Historically speaking communists, especially Russians and Chinese, and other assorted statist tyrants are responsible for more deaths than any religion, especially Catholicism, throughout recorded history; the guys that our President and his allies on the “progressive” left lurves so much…
  
  Just as radical Islamists comprise much of the Taliban, so too are radical fringe Christians who have perpetrated violence, and encourage intolerance, among those that violate the tenets of the faith.
  
  Christ himself never advocated forcing people to believe, nor to follow him. And while could easily have “forced” the faith upon all, it is about love and using the free will that God gave us to choose to do the right thing; following and emulating Christ.
  
  You seem to know little about Christianity or Jesus. May I suggest that lent and the coming Easter celebration would be a good time to change that?
  
  Hitler was a man of the far left, of the National Socialist bent; the only difference between he and Stalin, the man who he made a pact with to split Poland, were in mustache style choices and the magnitude by which they murdered their own citizens…
  
  Romero didn’t deserve to die a violent death, that is sure. But who are we to question God’s will? Ultimately, I have to believe that some good will come out of it, just as it will ultimately come from any natural disaster such as Katrina of the earthquake in Haiti…
  
  Embracing Christ and his way of life is a choice of free will, not to be imposed on any. Here’s an idea, try reading the bible. It’s a great book that contains more wisdom per page than any other I know of…
  
  Less insults, more content; try it, you’ll like it!
  
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  - JD's OhSoGay McDad
    March 8th, 2010 - 20:07
    
    No, rubber duckie, them Commies didn’t kill more than your beloved Christian heathens, moreover Commies were educated just enough, unlike you, to friggin’ count.
    
    The problem with your brand of false Christianity is it’s nothing but a useful cover for your inane ignorance. If I may quote Celine:
    
    “People in heat for atrocities are the only Communists there ever were! The ‘All Believing,’ mirages, blood, bowels and bones, they swallow it all. Communion, not bread, all hot and meaty! There you are! Long Live Jesus! Two thousand years!”
    
    You don’t even have the balls to make it as a Commie, floatin’ Bob, because Commies and their subjects are required to earn their food and shelter provisions through honest labor. Lower than a Commie! Not even a honest Christian! A filigree of daintiness! A true subversive to the American ideal! The enemy personified!
    
    You sure have set the bar low for your betters, in a nutshell, imbecilic Bob, you racist nutbag on the downward slope. And who are we to question God’s design for you once you croak? You’ll plop like a toad and keel after one last kick! Ribbet no more, toad! The last gas from your buttocks, a final cold wind! PPPPPpppptttt!
    
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    - Bob Reed
      March 8th, 2010 - 23:01
      
      Evidently your colonial education was bereft of history lessons; either that or you simply enjoy making it up as you go, regardless of how ridiculous the error, just like object of your worship Mr. Obama.
      
      What false Christianity do you allege I practice? What understanding do you have of my personal faith and practices, or of the tenets of Christianity in general?
      
      I earned, and continue to earn, my keep-you can rest assured of that. You don’t consider my Navy time honest labor? I’ll admit, I too used to wonder why they paid me to drive Tomcats; heck it should have been the other way around. I guess it had something to do with time spent in harms way being the mechanism by which the ledger was balanced…
      
      What do you know of honest labor, either?
      
      But you are right about one thing. One day, in the future, this earthly vessel for my soul will give out, but that day is still far off. And while it may provide you a delightful fantasy, I can assure you that you will not be providing me any dramatic last kick!
      
      So much blather and blah! C’mon playah, less insults and more content; enough of the schoolyard and streetcorner taunts…
      
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General Tso's Chicken
March 8th, 2010 - 22:49

Why is this diseased asshole thor still allowed to comment here?

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