Freedom Hating Gutless Traitors & Terrorists - The Story of the 21st Century American Right

[Kurt Schlichter]

http://www.newsweek.com/2016/02/12/right-wing-extremists-militants-bigger-threat-america-isis-jihadists-422743.html


Right-Wing Extremists Are a Bigger Threat to America Than ISIS

Inside a storefront Chinese restaurant in upstate New York, neon light from a
multicolored window sign glowed on the face of an extremist plotting mass
murder. He had been seeking backing for his attack and, at this small
establishment in Scotia, was meeting with a man who had agreed to take part in
his scheme to build a radiation device, a weapon of mass destruction that
would slowly and painfully kill anyone who walked near it.

“Everything with respiration would be dead by morning,’’ the man who devised
the attack told his confederate in tortured English. “How much sweeter could
there be than a big stack of smelly bodies?”


But there would be no attack. The purported accomplice at Ming’s Flavor
restaurant in June 2012 was an FBI informant, and the discussion had been
recorded. In the months that followed, another man joined the plot. Finally,
in June 2013, with the conspirators hard at work on their ghastly weapon,
armed FBI agents swooped in, storming a warehouse in Schaghticoke and
arresting them.

Their names were Glen and Eric.

Crawford, left, and Feight, are accused of plotting to build a radiation
device that would kill Muslims, as well as government officials in Albany, New
York, and Washington, D.C. Skip Dickstein/The Albany Times Union/AP

Clearly, these were not the typical “Islamic terrorists” described in the
boogeyman stories of American politicians who exploit fear for votes. Glendon
Crawford, the industrial mechanic who conceived the plan, has all the panache
of a Macy’s shoe salesman; Eric Feight, a software engineer who helped build
the device, looks like a less impish version of Kurt Vonnegut. But their
harmless appearance belies their beliefs—Crawford was a member of the Ku Klux
Klan, and the plot he hatched with Feight involved killing scores of Muslims,
as well as officials at the governor’s mansion in Albany, New York and at the
White House.

They and untold thousands like them are the extremists who hide among us, the
right-wing militants who, since 2002, have killed more people in the United
States than jihadis have. In that time, according to New America, a Washington
think tank, Islamists launched nine attacks that murdered 45, while the
right-wing extremists struck 18 times, leaving 48 dead. These Americans thrive
on hate and conspiracy theories, many fed to them by politicians and
commentators who blithely blather about government concentration camps and
impending martial law and plans to seize guns and other dystopian gibberish,
apparently unaware there are people listening who don’t know it’s all lies.
These extremists turn to violence—against minorities, non-Christians, abortion
providers, government officials—in what they believe is a fight to save
America. And that potential for violence is escalating every day.

“Law enforcement agencies in the United States consider anti-government
violent extremists, not radicalized Muslims, to be the most severe threat of
political violence that they face,” the Triangle Center on Terrorism and
Homeland Security reported this past June, based on surveys of 382 law
enforcement groups.

The problem is getting worse, although few outside of law enforcement know it.
Multiple confidential sources notified the FBI last year that militia members
have been conducting surveillance on Muslim schools, community centers and
mosques in nine states for what one informant described as “operational
purposes.” Informants also notified federal law enforcement that Mississippi
militia extremists discussed kidnapping and beheading a Muslim, then posting a
video of the decapitation on the Internet. The FBI also learned that
right-wing extremists have created bogus law enforcement and diplomatic
identifications, not because these radicals want to pretend to be police and
ambassadors, but because they believe they hold those positions in a
government they have created within the United States.

The unusual—and often daffy—world view of some right-wing extremists was on
daily display during the January armed takeover of federal facilities at the
Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. Expressing dismay that two
ranchers convicted of arson were ordered to serve out the remainder of their
mandatory minimum prison sentences, members of various militia groups occupied
a building at the wildlife refuge, declaring their willingness to fight the
government and, if necessary, die for their cause. They proclaimed that the
federal government was tyrannical, that the Constitution is under siege.

The Malheur occupiers were belittled on late night talk shows and social media
as “y’all-Qaeda” and “yee-haw-dists,” but what was unfolding in Oregon wasn’t
funny—it was frightening. These people speak of martyrdom, bloodbaths and
killings, sentiments that can be heard on any Islamist recruitment video. And
when law enforcement finally took action on January 26 in a mass arrest, one
of the militia members, Robert “LaVoy” Finicum—who had proclaimed he would
rather die than go to jail—was shot dead.

The FBI says Finicum, who had said he’d rather die than go to jail for his
role in the occupation of a wildlife refuge in Oregon, was killed as he
reached for a weapon during a traffic stop. Jarod Opperman/The New York
Times/Redux

And while those right-wing militia members were occupying federal land, other
extremists around the country were hard at work. Fliers seeking recruits for
the KKK appeared on lawns and doors in Alabama, California, Georgia, New
Jersey and Oklahoma. In Johannesburg, California, police discovered bombs and
booby traps in the home of a man who threatened to blow up the Bureau of Land
Management (BLM) and other federal buildings. In Colorado Springs, a white
supremacist suspected of being connected to the 2013 murder of Colorado’s
prison chief was shot and wounded in a firefight with police. In Lafayette,
Louisiana, officials released the diary of the man who killed two people at a
movie theater this past summer—it was filled with rage against the federal
government and praise for a racist killer. In Oakdale, California, two honey
farmers were charged with fraud involving a scheme by extremists who declare
they are not bound by the laws of any government. And the day after the first
arrests of the Malheur occupiers, a New Hampshire man who told an FBI
informant he was part of a group that wanted to bring back “the original
Constitution,” and had as much as $200,000 on hand for explosives and rockets,
was taken into custody after he illegally purchased hand grenades.

Who are these right-wing militants? And what makes them believe Americans have
to engage in armed combat with their own government rather than vote, kill
their fellow citizens rather than tolerate differences, blow up buildings
rather than just get a job? Billions of words have been written and spoken on
violent Islamic extremists. The time has come to do the same for the good
old-fashioned Americans who may pose the greatest threat to us all.

A Fairy Tale of Violence

They aren’t all like Timothy McVeigh.

McVeigh, the infamous anti-government extremist, murdered 168 people in 1995
when he detonated a truck bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal
Building in Oklahoma City. But not all of these violent right-wing radicals
agree with McVeigh’s beliefs or have the capability to execute such a
devastating attack. In fact, these militants are a surprisingly diverse lot.
Experts say there are three distinct groups, including some factions that
despise one another.

Persian Gulf War vet McVeigh was executed in 2001 for the bomb he planted in
front of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 that killed 168 people
and injured more than 600. Jim Argo/The Daily Oklahoman/AP

According to Arie Perliger, director of terrorism studies at the Combating
Terrorism Center at West Point, the three ideologies within the violent
American far-right are racist, anti-federalist and fundamentalist. Each has
subgroups—the racists include white supremacy groups such as the KKK,
neo-Nazis and skinheads, which can differ in subtle ways. The anti-federalists
include militias, self-defined “patriot” groups and what are so-called
“sovereign citizens,’’ who hold that they are legally bound only by their
personal interpretation of common law and are otherwise not subject to
federal, state or local laws. The fundamentalists are primarily Christian
identity groups that believe the biblical war of good vs. evil is between
descendants of Anglo-Saxon nations and all other ethnic groups. Tangential to
the fundamentalists are the anti-abortion attackers, who also invoke religion
as a foundational motive for their violence. These disparate groups of
people—violent and nonviolent—pine for different versions of a highly
idealized past.

The granddaddy of the three in the United States is the racist movement, the
modern iteration of which is usually traced to the formation of the KKK in
1865. The Christian Identity movement began a few decades later, with the
emergence of believers who subscribed to the theology of John Wilson, a
British man who argued that the lost tribes of Israel had settled in northern
Europe. The anti-federalists are much younger, exploding onto the scene in the
early 1990s with prominent groups such as the Militia of Montana and the
Michigan Militia; many experts maintain that the movement was a product of the
financial crisis for farms in the 1980s, rapid economic and cultural change,
and the adoption of gun control and environmental protection laws. In recent
years, an explosion in the number of militias has been linked by experts to
the beginning of the Great Recession in December 2007 and the election of
Barack Obama months later. In 2008, according to the Southern Poverty Law
Center, there were 42 militia groups; today, there are 276.

And although they are frequently dismissed as people with crazy beliefs,
right-wing extremists often seem like the guy next door. While experts say
many of these individuals are paranoid and narcissistic, with strong
anti-democratic tendencies, “the most common trait among terrorists is
normalcy,” says Perliger of West Point.

What drives them, according to studies, is not so much ideology as their
social network. When friends and associates all proclaim that the government
is destroying freedom, or that all Muslims are terrorists, or that minorities
are dragging down the country, the social pressure to conform with that
opinion is intense.

Experts say the grandaddy of all modern racist violent extremist factions in
the U.S. is the Ku Klux Klan, which was created in 1865. Johnny Milano/Reuters

Making it worse is that many of these extremists base their views on
falsehoods. At a 2009 speech in Hamilton, Montana, a militia leader told an
assembled crowd, “You know how the Oxford English Dictionary defines
terrorism? ‘Government by intimidation.’ That is profound.” Not really,
because it’s not true. Oxford defines terrorism as all other dictionaries do:
“the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.”
People setting off bombs to trigger a revolution meet this definition, while
the government that clears the area after a blast does not. But those zealots
in Hamilton were told a fairy tale and believed it.

The rationales and “facts” cited by the sovereign citizens are often so
convoluted that they would be funny if they didn’t get people killed. The
radicals base their beliefs on variations of this conspiracy theory: Many
years ago, some outside force infiltrated the federal government and replaced
it with an illegitimate and tyrannical one. Then, that “illegitimate
government” enslaved all Americans by using the 14th Amendment to create
“citizens of the United States” who had no rights. The sovereign citizens
believe Americans are tricked into accepting their designation as citizens of
the United States by carrying driver’s licenses and Social Security cards,
which are hidden contracts surrendering personal sovereignty to the
government. Some of these sovereign citizens won’t use ZIP codes, because they
think that might constitute a contract with the illegitimate federal
government. Others insert punctuation, like commas or periods, to separate
their first and middle names from their last name, which they consider to be
their government-given name.

And they can expound on the topic for hours on end, spinning words into a
convoluted kaleidoscope of claptrap. “By metaphysical refinement, in examining
one form of government, it might be correctly said that there is no such thing
as a citizen of the United States,’’ wrote Richard MacDonald, one of the
prominent ideologues of the movement. “But constant usage—arising from
convenience, and perhaps necessity, and dating from the formation of the
Confederacy—has given substantial existence to the idea which the term
conveys. A citizen of any one of the States of the Union, is held to be, and
called a citizen of the United States, although technically and abstractly
there is no such thing.”

Some gullible people listen to the endless flow of arguments, peppered with
“freedom” and “tyranny,” and come away believing they do not have to pay
taxes, or have money to cover the checks they write or otherwise obey the law.
As a result, lots of sovereign citizens end up under criminal investigation,
leading to trials in which judges rub their temples while listening to droning
about some grand conspiracy. But in the worst cases, all that simpleminded
gibberish drives believers to violence, particularly against law enforcement
during traffic stops. The most famous of those cases: the two Arkansas police
officers killed by sovereign citizen Joseph Kane in 2010 after they pulled him
over. Kane mowed them down with a variant of an AK-47.

Then there are the militia groups, whose pronounced fealty to the Constitution
is exceeded only by their apparent refusal to read it. They too throw out a
lot of sentences with “freedom” and “tyranny” (in fact, a decent portion of
sovereign citizens are also militia members), then wave around their pocket
version of the Constitution, but the Founding Fathers would be stunned to hear
the mumbo jumbo mouthed by militia members about their greatest creation.
Start with the obvious: The Constitution is not some philosophical tract
composed with soaring words about freedom; it is the blueprint dictating how
the American government is supposed to function, while the amendments are the
enumeration of citizens’ rights. The recent flurries of militia madness, with
camo-clad warriors spewing angrily about constitutional freedoms, run directly
counter to the words of the document those people claim to cherish.

Consider the Bundy standoff in 2014. It began when the government decided to
finally take action against Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher who had grazed his
cattle on federal lands for two decades while refusing to pay the required
fees—racking up a bill in excess of $1 million. When Bundy sent his cattle
back onto protected lands for a snack, officials with the BLM began to round
them up. Bundy spoke publicly about this “outrage” using the words of the
sovereign citizen movement, which led anti-federalist groups such as the Oath
Keepers, the White Mountain Militia and the Praetorian Guard to come running,
guns drawn. In no time, Bundy the scofflaw was a hero of the militia movement,
as he declared he did not recognize federal authority over the land. The
Constitution and freedom were at stake, he averred.

Except they weren’t. In fact, the issue beneath this battle of wills, with
Bundy’s supporters proclaiming their willingness to murder federal agents if
need be, is directly addressed in the Constitution. In Article 4, Section 3,
Clause 2, the Constitution grants Congress full authority to make all rules
and regulations for the management of federal lands. In the early 20th
century, Congress used that power to direct the executive branch to handle the
operations and planning for those lands. The Legislature, of course, still
retains the constitutional authority to stop the president from playing any
role in federal land management, but it has not. In other words, Bundy and his
supporters, by proclaiming the federal government had no authority over
federal land, were spitting on the Constitution.