Eugene Robinson’s fear — or should I say, hope? — of a “serious threat of domestic terrorism . . . from the far right” turns out to be far-fetched:
There’s a lot of anger out there. But the alleged plot by Midwestern militants and violent outbursts by scattered individuals don’t signal any coming wave of extremist violence, federal investigators say. . . .
Militia extremist statements “primarily have served as an expression of anger after a particular event,” according to an FBI intelligence bulletin obtained by The Associated Press. “The FBI assesses the likelihood of violent conflict from the remaining group members or other militia extremists as low.”
Professor William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection:
Of course, reality will not change anything for those intellectually dishonest columnists and bloggers who wake up every morning hoping that there will have been an act of violence they can pin on the “right wing.”
However much of a “threat of domestic terrorism” actually exists from the “far right,” (a) it is miniscule in comparison to the incessant media chatter about the subject, and (b) it is clearly disconnected from mainstream conservative politics.
These “Hutaree” people were a bunch of clowns, malcontented losers enthralled by impractical revolutionary fantasies. Hutaree clown-in-chief David Stone was turned in by a member of the Michigan Militia, and it appears they were so clueless that they wouldn’t have been able to make a functioning bomb without the help of an undercover FBI agent.
There are, however, opportunistic propagandists who specialize in exaggerating the “far right” threat and suggesting to sympathetic reporters that we are on the teetering on the brink of a putsch inspired by Sarah Palin or Ron Paul or Rush Limbaugh. The object of such propaganda about the “far right” is to stigmatize legitimate political activism, to associate it in the public mind with criminal violence, as if every Tea Party rally included bomb-making lessons.
Such fear-mongering results from a profound misunderstanding of who American conservatives are and what they believe. American conservatism is a movement dominated by and culturally attuned to the respectable, responsible, taxpaying middle class. To employ a fancy French intellectual word, American conservatism is bourgeois. These are people with a near-religious devotion to the democratic process and who are therefore far removed from the pipebomb pipe dreams of the “Hutaree” and other such kooks.
The same media voices who relentlessly promote misleading propaganda about the “far right” (hello, Frank Rich) simultaneously ignore far more real dangers to public safety, including the growing violence along the Mexican border. There is reason to believe that Mexico is in danger of sliding into anarchy — e.g., gunmen attacking Mexican military bases and 79 U.S. citizens killed in Mexico in 2009 — and yet you have not seen the border issue addressed in columns by Frank Rich and Eugene Robinson. They are suspiciously selective in their fear-mongering, exaggerating the “far right” danger, and ignoring everything else.
