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.
