My parents were members of the American Communist Party and I was part of the progressive left which was the communist left and which has grown ominously large toda1y, and has seen its candidate elected to the White House. I was the editor of the largest magazine of the new left, which was organized by the children of communists, so-called 'red diaper babies' like myself. We regarded America as the enemy. We began as an isolated political minority, but the hate America crowd has grown alarmingly in size since then. Today, nobody is embarrassed about slandering their own country even in time of war, and this includes our current President who recently apologized for the actions of his country to Latin American communists, Jew-haters and self-declared enemies, such as Venezuelas Chavez and Nicarauguan jefe Daniel Ortega, a degenerate who molested his own daughter.

In Obamas presence Ortega went into a rant against America claiming that our government conducted a terrorist war against Nicaragua in the 1980s, when in fact American pressure forced an end to the Sandinista dictatorship and the re-institution of a free press and open elections. What was President Obamas response to the Ortega attack?Well, I was only six years old at the time. In other words, an apology for our terrorist acts against the Marxist dictatorship. This is disgraceful and also dangerous.

To answer your question as to how I arrived at the views I now hold, during the early 1979s I was working with the Black Panther Party whose leaders were the heroes of all progressives, who took them to be the victims of American oppression and police brutality. As I soon discovered, the Panthers were, in fact, criminals and murderers and not the victims the left claimed them to be. In 1974, they killed my friend Betty Van Patter, which brought all this home to me. The left protected the Panther murderers and made apologies for their other criminal deeds. Today, campus progressives invite the killers to their schools and give them ten-thousand-dollar speaking fees to denounce America as a racist country and criminal nation, which is what progressives want to hear.

The second principal cause of my change of heart was the Vietnam War. I was one of the leaders of the anti-war movement of the time. Of course, these anti-war movements of the left arent really anti-war movements in any meaningful sense of the word. They are anti-American movements, designed to make America lose whatever war it is engaged in. If there had been a peace movement during the lead up to the war in Iraq, for example, there would have been at least one demonstration in front of the Iraq Embassy calling on Saddam Hussein to obey the U.N. resolutions and the arms control agreements he had signed. But there wasnt. Not one. The so-called anti-war activists were not demonstrating for peace. They were demonstrating against America and its efforts to hold Saddam to the UN peace agreements he had signed.

During the Vietnam years, the goal of the so-called anti-war movement was to cause America to lose the war-- and that includes every leader of the anti-Vietnam left -- John Kerry, Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, and so on. The anti-Vietnam movement wanted America to lose because for the left, for progressives, we are the bad guys: America, the oppressor. America did lose the Vietnam as a result of our protests. The anti-American anti-war movement forced America to give up the fight for freedom in Vietnam, to retreat from the field of battle, to withdraw overnight. It was the same prescription that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reed and the congressional Democrats wanted for Iraq. Fortunately they failed, and consequently Iraq is not ruled by terrorists today

But in Indo-China the ending was different. Once America quit the field of battle, the Communists proceeded to slaughter two-and a-half million poor Vietnamese and Cambodian peasants one of the worst genocides in history. But there wasnt a single demonstration by progressives against this atrocity. Bloodbaths are okay if they are committed by progressives of color in the name of social justice.

From communism to Islamo-fascism, the left in America as elsewhere has had a lifelong love affair with tyranny and terror, which is the title of an important book that my Frontpage editor Jamie Glazov has just published. Its called: United in Hate, the Lefts Love Affair with Tyranny and Terror. That is who they are. Progressives are adept at speaking the language of peace and love and justice; but these words are just a smokescreen for their real agendas which are search and destroy. Anybody who has ever encountered a progressive up close in any kind of political disagreement knows that this is a hate movement. They hate conservatives; they hate Republicans; they hate white males, and increasingly they hate Christians and Jews. They hated George Bush.

How can you hate George Bush? He may have done a lot of things that you wouldnt have done; but how can you hate the man? But they do. They are haters. Their mouths drip with hate. You cant name a single conservative spokesman from Rush Limbaugh to Ann Coulter, to Sarah Palin to, well, George Bush, who hasnt been stigmatized, slandered, demonized, libeled, and trashed as indecent, beneath humanity, contemptible, toxic, and viral. And yet conservatives continue to call such haters liberals!

It is conservatives who are actually liberal. We believe that there should be two sides to a question and that when people disagree with us they are often mistaken, and not necessarily evil. I have written a book with Jacob Laksin about universities called One Party Classroom. Among other things, the title highlights the fact that so-called liberals have purged American faculties of conservative voices. It has been the most successful witch-hunt in American history. Conservatives are as rare as unicorns on the faculties of American universities and there isnt a liberal in sight who has expressed concern about this deplorable fact or the mentality that makes it possible.

So-called liberal professors will assign books on one side of controversial issues the leftwing side -- and then ram down students throats the idea that America is a racist, sexist, homophobic, imperialist country, which therefore deserves to be attacked by freedom fighters who are mis-labeled terrorists. If these terrorists happen to commit an unspeakable act every now then, its only because they are forced to do it by Jews and crusaders who have left them no alternative. What despicable rot. People have been oppressed for thousands of years without resorting to the evil tactics of Islamic martyrs. Until the Palestinians there has never been a people so in thrall to a death cult -- so culturally and morally sick -- as to murder their own children by strapping bombs to them and telling them to blow up other little children and, if they are lucky enough to be male, they will be rewarded by Allah with seventy-two virgins. How depraved is that? And yet there is not a single Muslim state that denounces the evil behavior of the Palestinians and their Hamas leaders, while the American left supports them.

The avatars of the next Holocaust Ahmadinejad, Nasrallah and the terrorists of Hamas -- are far more open than the Nazis in their determination to kill the Jews. Hitler hid the final solution from the German people. He hid the fact that he wanted to exterminate the Jews because he believed the Germans were too civilized a people to support it. But the Iranians and Hamas and Hizbullah -- they shout it from the rooftops to the cheers of the Palestinians and the Muslim world and Daniel Ortega, and American leftists like Noam Chomsky and Ward Churchill and their academic progressive friends.

Conservatives need to understand this about progressives. They hate you; their malevolence will destroy you if you give them the chance. Look at the performance of the Democratic Party leadership during the Iraq War. Americas armed forces were in the field facing enemy fire. The Democrats had authorized the war that sent them into harms way. But the minute trouble started three months after hostilities began -- the Democrats pulled out and went into full attack mode against their own country, against their elected commander-in-chief, accusing America of being the aggressor in the war, a criminal nation, an occupier, and torturer.

And how did they explain their about-face? What reason did they give for first authorizing the war and then conducting a propaganda campaign against it for first supporting their country and then condemning it, for indicting their own country as an aggressor nation conducting an unnecessary war against a country that posed no threat. (These were the precise terms that Al Gore used to attack his president and his country in his book The Assault on Reason, which was an apt description of the book itself.)

The Democratic leaders explained their betrayal of a war they had authorized by saying that they were lied to, that the President manipulated the intelligence to fool them into supporting the use of force against Saddam Hussein. But this was in itself the most obvious and biggest lie of the war. Democrats sit on all the intelligence committees and have access to every intelligence secret America possesses. How could Bush manipulate the intelligence data that John Kerry had on his desk? The answer is: he couldnt.

The Democrats needed this particular lie, however, because they could not admit the real reason for their betrayal. The real reason that Kerry and his colleagues changed their views on the war had nothing to do with the intelligence data or Iraq. It was because a candidate named Howard Dean, who was running on a platform opposing the war, was about to win the Democratic presidential primary as the war moved into its third month. That was the real and only reason why John Kerry turned against the war and for the second time in his wretched career stabbed Americas fighting men and women in the field in the back. For five years while American troops were fighting the terrorists in Iraq, the Democratic leadership conducted a propaganda war against them, showing that they were perfectly willing to risk the lives and safety of our troops for political gains for their party. Shame on them.

You cant conduct a campaign saying that America is the aggressor in a war without encouraging the enemy and increasing his strength. You cant destroy national security programs by leaking them to the New York Times and defending the leaks, without endangering American lives. You cant conduct an open-ended campaign to define America as a criminal nation without sapping Americans ability to defend themselves in a dangerous world with enemies who believe that murdering Americans is a fast-track to the kingdom of heaven. But that is what progressives and the Democratic leadership have done and they are same individuals who are running our nation today.

http://townhall.com/columnists/DavidHorowitz/2009/05/04/the_threat_at_home

********************************************
"Better to do something imperfectly than to do nothing flawlessly." --Robert Schuller

If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?

Conservatives need to understand this about progressives. They hate you; their malevolence will destroy you if you give them the chance.

Gee more fear and smear from the wacky right. More divide and conquer. More propaganda to feed their party base. I'm not surprised, it really is their favorite tool. BTW Although I do not consider myself to be a member of the progressive party or any other party exclusively, I admit to hating people but none of my hate is based on something as petty as politics. How about you?

-------------------------------------------------------------

hate [ hayt ]

verb  (past and past participle hat·ed, present participle hat·ing, 3rd person present singular hates)

Definition:

1. transitive verb dislike somebody or something intensely: to dislike somebody or something intensely, often in a way that evokes feelings of anger, hostility, or animosity

Conservatives need to understand this about progressives. They hate you; their malevolence will destroy you if you give them the chance.

Gee more fear and smear from the wacky right.

    Why don't you ask Sarah Palin?  Rush Limbaugh?  Ann Coulter?  Is a laugh-packed discussion on rape and murder on a bat-blog considered "fear and smear" in your world?  How about a 300+ post thread right here on who the real mother of Palin's baby son is?  Who on the right has ever written a book who's *title* is "So and So is a Big Fat Idiot"?  Sorry, but the Right has no need to be fearing and smearing the progressives.  They do an excellent job of hating themselves, and fearing anyone who disagrees with them, without any help from anybody.

gus.

 

LOL Gus ...

Your argument would have a little more force if it weren't posted in a thread that started with a rant about liberals as crypto-communists who have "had a lifelong love affair with tyranny and terror" ...


As for book titles, how about "Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism" as just one example of many that comes immediately to mind?

Your argument would have a little more force if it weren't posted in a thread that started with a rant about liberals as crypto-communists who have "had a lifelong love affair with tyranny and terror" ...

  I was responding to the wisdom(?) of CJ's response, not the article.  Still, I wouldn't want to be the one to have to refute the claim in front of a really good prosecutor.


As for book titles, how about "Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism" as just one example of many that comes immediately to mind?

   If you see that as a moral, or intellectual equivalent to "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot", then I suppose we have nothing to discuss here.

gus.

 

If you see that as a moral, or intellectual equivalent to "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot", then I suppose we have nothing to discuss here.

Actually, I see calling me and everyone who is politically aligned with me a traitor is far worse morally.

But if you're looking for intellectual equivalence, I'll offer you "If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans" by the same author.

I'LL SEE YOUR PARANOID FANTASY / BOLD FACE MCCARTHYITE LIE AND GIVE YOU THE REAL THREAT.



The Far Right's First 100 Days: Getting More Extreme by the Day
By Sara Robinson, Campaign for America's Future
Posted on May 6, 2009, Printed on May 6, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/139825/

Sometime back in February, about three weeks into Barack Obama's administration, everybody on the left suddenly noticed that there was something different going on with the conservatives.

The outrageous screeds and paranoid delusions sounded pretty much as they always had -- but there was a new fury behind them, a strident urgency that hadn't been there before, and a very audible shift of the gears in right-wing behavior and rhetoric.

None of this came as a surprise to veteran right-wing watchers -- we'd been predicting a bad backlash since the 2006 election -- but more than three months into the new administration, it's increasingly hard to ignore the fact that this ominous new trend is taking on a momentum of its own.

On April 7, the Department of Homeland Security ratified some of those observations. Fueled by bone-deep racism, an unnatural terror of liberal government, frustration over the economic downturn, and fears about America's loss of world standing, they said, the militant right wing is indeed rising again.

Its numbers are up, its talk is turning ugly, and it's not unthinkable that we could be in for a wave of domestic terrorism unseen since the mid-1990s.

I've been meaning for a while to talk about what changed after the inauguration, and why, and what it means to the country going forward. Our observance of the end of the first 100 days seems to be a good time to do that.

The DHS report laid out the history and the current drivers in straight factual terms and made some safe predictions about what might make the situation worse. But the report stopped short of taking the next step.

(Interestingly, the nightmare scenario for most right-wing watchers -- a white-hot backlash in the wake of another major terrorist attack -- appears nowhere in the DHS assessment. Perhaps they didn't want to put ideas into paranoid right-wing heads.)

We need to look at what long experience has taught us about the past escalation patterns of right-wing rhetoric and violence and figure out where we currently stand within those patterns.

We actually know quite a bit about this. Most national agencies tasked with keeping tabs on political and religious extremist groups look for specific signs that help them sort out who's just talking the talk and who's actually getting ready to walk the walk.

The criteria vary from agency to agency; and our collective insights into these patterns changes and deepens every year. But there are some generally accepted principles -- and applying them to the current state of conservatism gives a clearer view what's changed in the past 100 days, what the shift really means and what could be coming next if the right keeps going down this road.

I want to make it clear: The DHS report emphasizes that there's no specific evidence that any particular group is planning any particular action.

At the same time, what's equally clear from the pattern analysis is that the upshift we heard was the right wing going into overdrive -- the speed at which talk about revolution (which has been going on for years, but intensified after 2006) accelerates into concrete preparation for action.

Here's why:

Ready ...

The far right wing has been laying the groundwork for violent action for decades. Long before they turn dangerous, political and religious groups take their first steps down that road by adopting a worldview that justifies eventual violent action.------REMEMBER SKIPPY JUST LAST NIGHT WITH HIS READ THE DECLARATION READ IT TWICE POST----

The particulars of the narrative vary, but the basic themes are always the same:

First: Their story is apocalyptic, insisting that the end of the world as we've known it is near.

Second: It divides the world into a Good-versus-Evil/Us-versus-Them dualism that encourages the group to interpret even small personal, social or political events as major battles in a Great Cosmic Struggle -- a habit of mind that leads the group to demonize anyone who disagrees with them.

This struggle also encourages members to invest everyday events with huge existential meaning, and as a result sometimes overreact wildly to very mundane stuff.

Third: This split allows for a major retreat from consensus reality and the mainstream culture. The group rejects the idea that it shares a common future with the rest of society, and curls up into its own insular worldview that's impervious to the outside culture's reasoning or facts.

Fourth: Insiders feel like they're a persecuted, prophetic elite who are being opposed by wicked, tyrannical forces. Left to fester, this paranoia will eventually drive the group to make concrete preparations for self-defense -- and perhaps go on the offense against their perceived persecutors.

Fifth: Communities following this logic will also advocate the elimination of their enemies by any means necessary in order to purify the world for their ideology.

All these ideas have been part of the discourse on the right for decades. You can trace their genesis all the way back to the 1950s, starting with the overheated apocalypticism of the anti-communist movement.

Over time, it came to include the dualism of the John Birch Society and assorted white supremacist groups; the persecution complex of Richard Nixon and his Silent Majority followers; the anti-liberal eliminationism that's been gathering force for the past decade; and the war on evidence-based science and reason that's always been at the heart of conservative arguments.

As J. Peter Scoblic argues in Us vs. Them, narratives that justify violence have always been deeply ingrained in the right-wing belief system.

Since the inauguration, all of these themes are being played far more loudly and openly. And somewhere between Nov. 4 and the 100th day, the right wing has also begun to act on these beliefs in ways that push the whole process to the next level -- the level where thoughts and beliefs begin to crystallize into action.

Set ...
What's different now?

Plenty of things -- all of which, taken together, strongly suggest a group that's just about done talking and is beginning to organize itself to act.

First: There's been a shift in rhetoric. Over at Orcinus, Dave Neiwert and I have argued for years (with plenty of expert support from social psychologists) that strong words are often a thought rehearsal, a premonition of possible strong action to come.

It's not that people always act on the rhetoric -- they don't. It's that when the actions do come, you find that there's usually been plenty of very hot rhetoric tossed around in the run-up, as people psych themselves up for battle.

That's why agencies watching worrisome groups keep their ears open and listen carefully for a specific shift in tone. A lot of groups seeking change establish the lines of conflict by constantly naming and accusing their enemies and insisting on their essential evilness.

This isn't great politics, but it's not usually a problem -- unless it moves to the next stage, where the group starts expressing a clear intention to eradicate those perceived enemies. This can be a signal that they've accepted the need for violent action in their own minds, and may be actively planning something. It's a shift that should never be ignored.

When Sean Hannity runs a poll asking whether his viewers prefer a military coup, secession or armed rebellion -- and armed rebellion wins -- that's evidence of this kind of shift. Right-wing talkers have built careers out of demonizing liberals; but when they start talking about what specific steps should be taken against them, that's not something we should ignore.
-----AND YOU WONDER WHY ITS CALLED HATE MEDIA, ITS AUDIENCE HATES AMERICA AND WANTS TO RISE IN REBELLION -----
Second: There's been a quantum leap in the sheer down-the-rabbit-hole surreality of their beliefs about the world. Bloggers have been pointing out for years that conservatives have zero compunction about making shit up; but in the past, their prevarications were almost always built around a kernel of fact, wrapped in thick layers of distortion, mis-attribution or lies of omission.

What's new in the past 100 days is that we're now seeing stories that are just flat-out fabulation, without even so much as a nod to reality. They're not even bothering to try to attach these claims to any kind of truth. Their fantasies are so much truthier to them.

Up is down. Black is white. Obama's not a citizen, he's going to take our guns, Congress is about to legalize incest ... this we believe, and there is no expert and no amount of real-world evidence that can ever convince us otherwise.

The right wing's retreat from consensus reality has finally left it living in an Orwellian alternative universe all its own.

Third: They've been humiliated by their election losses. And that's hugely dangerous, because authoritarian leaders react uniquely badly to being humiliated.

Experts tell us that their huge egos and insatiable need for control make them very brittle -- and that the shattering point is often a specific event that publicly repudiates their authority, or makes it obvious to the world and their followers that they are no longer in control. Decisively losing both the White House and the Congress has been all that and then some.

This overweening humiliation is growing every day that the Democrats and their new president stay in power. It's a pain that will not go away, and it's likely to curdle into something far more venomous in time.

The result, unfortunately, is probably going to be more violent attacks on government authority like the one in Pittsburgh last month.

Fourth: There's that new sense of urgency. Groups heading for violent confrontation are often pushed past the brink by the belief that the apocalypse is unfolding before their very eyes and that they have no choice but to seize the moment and act.

For many on the right, Jan. 20 was the day the trumpet sounded. Obama is going to turn the country over to the commies. He's going to take away your guns. He's going to open the borders, turn the country into a welfare state and give all our tax money to lazy minorities.

And it's no idle threat -- they're quite convinced that he's going to do all this any day now. This panic is new, and it's palpable. It's also worrisome, because these would-be revolutionaries have been preparing themselves for years for just this moment.

Fifth: The demagogues have seized conservatism's center stage. Violent groups typically organize around a leader who promotes the apocalyptic visions, the dualism, the persecution complex, the eliminationist fantasies -- and the sense that True Patriots can no longer wait another minute to act.

In some groups, this leader exerts total control over every aspect of their followers' lives, like David Koresh and Jim Jones did. In others, the leader is simply a figurehead who puts the ideology out there, leaving the followers to figure out how to implement things on their own. (The followers also bear full responsibility for the results, leaving the leader relatively unscathed.) Osama bin Ladin runs his show this way.

Either way, these leaders are invariably amoral, ego-driven, high-social-dominance men who gain power by hijacking their followers' moral systems.

When they succeed -- which is to say, when they finally override the ethical ballast provided by tradition, customs, laws and conscience to become the dominant moral authority in their followers' lives -- they can gain a stunning degree of influence and lead people into doing things they'd never have considered on their own.

The right wing has never been short of these guys. Still, in the past, the paranoid stylings of media ideologues like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck were simply background ranting to the more reality-based lead vocal of the party's actual politicians.

But now the election is over. The candidates have all gone home. And the GOP's party structure is in tatters. There are no credible political leaders left to drive the conservative conversation. That leaves a power vacuum on the front line that the right-wing hate talkers are now rushing forward to fill.

When Limbaugh is considered the GOP's spiritual leader, and Beck is its leading prophet, the conservative movement's entire discourse is now driven by whatever outrageous rhetoric seems most likely to boost Fox News' ratings. The moral hijacking of the movement has begun, and nobody should be surprised when these folks finally end up in the same moral abyss these kinds of leaders always bring their followers to.

Sixth: They're putting themselves in direct opposition to state power -- and identifying that power as their primary enemy.

All groups headed for a violent confrontation eventually come to believe that their enemies are somehow aligned with the government -- and the government is out to get them. Conservatives are coming up hard against this one now that they no longer control the government themselves. Back when they were gleefully dismantling the Constitution and building a surveillance state, it never occurred to them that they might someday be out of power.

Now, of course, they're terrified to find all that unleashed, unaccountable power in the hands of Libruls and That Black Guy.

Weirdly, they seem to have almost total amnesia about their role in all this. To hear them tell it, Barack Obama seized all this power for himself in just the past three months. Given that epic memory failure, there's not much hope that they'll draw the right lessons from this reversal.

It's far more likely that their newfound terror of government power will lead them to resent -- and eventually overreact to -- even casual encounters with government authority.

Seventh: They're arming up. Back in 2006, right-wing watchers warned that white-supremacist groups were encouraging their members to join the military in order to get the weapons training they'll need to execute their racial holy war. And for the first time ever, the recruit-starved military wasn't doing much to cull them out.

The DHS' concern about returning veterans was no doubt partly based on this recent history, which has given racist groups unprecedented access to propagandize troops at the front.

At the same time, the past 100 days have seen record gun sales and nationwide ammo shortages as terrified conservatives buy up guns in anticipation of a total weapons ban.

This seems like just another curious, only-in-America news story -- until you realize that the far right is already sporting most of the earmarks of a group that's gearing up for violent action. Given the rest of the pattern, we should take this trend very, very seriously.

Eighth: They're flexing their muscles. Groups who are flirting with terrorist action will usually start by experimenting with threats and petty violence. Learning that they can successfully intimidate others adds to the group's sense of invincibility and teaches them the dangerous lesson that violence works. Both these discoveries increase the chances that they'll resort to violence more quickly, and in greater magnitude, in the future.

The Southern Poverty Law Center carefully tracks hate incidents around the country, and it has seen a significant uptick in violence and threats since the inauguration.

While we can hope this will die down in time as people make their peace with the new status quo, we also need to be aware that there's a pattern where things go the other way -- that these events will embolden the right to commit bigger acts of thuggery and organize on a broader scale for actual domestic terrorism.

If our national terrorism watchers were tracking a religious or political group that had suddenly escalated on all eight of these fronts in a matter of three short months, they'd be seriously concerned. They'd be asking the question we need to ask: Now that we're here, what comes next?

... Go?
Let me start this last piece of the discussion with a warning. This isn't a prediction. It's just a description of how things typically play out when any authoritarian group arrives at the place where the American right now stands.

If they keep going this way, this is where the road leads -- but the people now in that movement still have a choice about whether they're actually going to make the trip. If they do, here's what lies ahead:

Further separation: One of the watershed moments in the development of a religious or political radical group is the day they decide to go upcountry, building some sort of secluded retreat or community away from the prying eyes of the authorities.

The Aryan nations, the fundamentalist Mormons, Jim Jones ... the list is long, because this is such a universal moment in the radicalization process. It's also the next place the gears shift.

The American right is too big to just all go off into the woods together -- but its obviously trying hard to retreat from the rest of us in other ways. The complete break with factual reality is one part of this. The growing talk of secession is another overt sign that it's desperately looking for someplace to escape to.

Given that impulse, it's very likely that land is already being quietly bought up and that some people are beginning to plan their moves to various locations around the country where they believe they'll be safer.

It's not unreasonable to expect that over the next year or two, we'll start to hear about a new round of separatist compounds, and that a few states will become right-wing havens where secessionist talk will turn more serious.

This is a dangerous development. Groups that try to separate always claim that they're retreating to "live in peace" -- but too often, peace is about the last thing that results from this.

Goin' up to the country is an overt declaration that the group believes that the mainstream culture is "out to get us," and is now asserting its right to live outside the law. There's an unquestioned conviction that the outside world means them harm -- and that they must organize and arm themselves for the coming showdown.

The isolation also allows high-dominance leaders to concentrate their power over group members without any pesky social or legal recourse to fairness. Suspicion and dependency flourish. People learn that might makes right and come to accept violence as a natural and proper way to deal with conflict.

This is why law-enforcement groups consider the moment of physical retreat as sort of Rubicon beyond which the likelihood of violence increases dramatically. We should be very concerned that the right wing seems determined to go there.

Overt lawlessness: A group that is separated from society, living in its own world, telling itself stories that justify violence, gripped with paranoia, perfectly willing to engage in petty thuggery and intimidation and is armed to the teeth has pretty much everything required to turn into a first-rate criminal cartel.

Members come to believe that they answer to a "higher law," and express that newfound "freedom" by overtly and deliberately defying laws passed by a government they don't respect as legitimate.

At this point, it's common to see people who've never been in trouble with the law before suddenly coming into contact (and confrontation) with the authorities. Lawlessness is a sign of an increasingly open contempt for and defiance of the larger society -- and a hint that that the group is moving into the openly oppositional stance that precedes a large-scale attack or confrontation.

Furthermore, once they get to where they're brazenly breaking laws, you can bet they're especially breaking weapons laws. Gathering guns and bomb-making materials is seen as necessary to either defend their home turf from their perceived enemies or for make offensive plans to eradicate those enemies.

Picking fights with authorities: A decade ago, law enforcement and government officials too often blundered into bloody showdowns with radical groups because they simply didn't understand the central role they played as The Enemy in the group's unfolding eschatological drama.

These days -- following several disastrous confrontations in the 1990s -- government officials are being trained to move slowly, to avoid backing would-be revolutionaries into humiliating corners and to work within their worldview and belief structure wherever possible to defuse a possible confrontation.

That's important, because a group that's gone all the way to the end of the road arrives at a place where it's armed, barricaded, mentally and physically prepared and spoiling for a fight. From that point, any excuse -- a routine business inspection, a traffic stop, a custody hearing that didn't go the right way -- can become the catalyst that leads the group to take out after its government persecutors.

As the group becomes more dug in and angry, these confrontations become harder to avoid. And all too often, they end in disaster.

*
From here, the most likely case is that the vast majority of the folks now drunk on right-wing hate talk will ultimately sober up just soon enough not to follow the movement's emerging leaders down this road. But, if the 1990s were any guide (and the DHS report seems to think that they are), there will also be a small but significant fraction of hard-core right-wingers who will zoom right through the flashing red lights and ride all the way to the bloody end.

Without the moderating influence of the saner voices among them, they'll quickly turn violent -- and we could be in for an interesting few years before it all burns itself out.

And, in the end, it probably will burn itself out. In the 1990s, the violence escalated to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 -- an event so gruesome and dramatic that it discredited the movement even among its own followers. Tim McVeigh's capture and execution also scared tough-talking movement leaders with the threat of real consequences. And so that round ended.

What we've seen the past 100 days strongly suggests that, to at least some degree, we will be going there again. The right wing long ago accepted a foundational narrative that justifies violence.

Now, the leaders of the movement are inciting their followers to take many (if not most) of the intermediate steps that signal a group actively gearing up for violence. From this point, it's only a short slide to further separation, disengagement, and finally, confrontation.

What we've seen so far has been intense and surprising -- but we should also recognize it as the first warning gusts of a rapidly gathering storm.


Sara Robinson is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a consulting partner with the Cognitive Policy Works in Seattle. One of the few trained social futurists in North America, she has blogged on authoritarian and extremist movements at Orcinus since 2006 and is a founding member of Group News Blog.

© 2009 Campaign for America's Future All rights reserved.
View this story online at:http://www.alternet.org/story/139825/


-----THE FINAL WARNING FLAG WILL BE SKIPPY QUITTING HIS LUNATIC POSTS, GOING
"UNDERGROUND" BY TRYING TO SOUND MORE REASONABLE AND MAINSTREAM. HE THINKS IT WILL ADEQUATE COVER, BUT I'VE ALREADY TURNED HIS TRAITOR ASS INTO HOMELAND SECURITY.

----THE IRONY IS THAT RIGHTWING NUT REBELLION AND TERRORISM IS THE ONE THING THAT WOULD ALLOW RIGHTWING ISLAMIC TERRORISM TO WIN

----THE UPSIDE IS THAT WHEN THE CUTTING IS DONE THE RIGHTWING CANCER WILL CUT OUT OF THIS LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." -- Thomas Jefferson

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. - Carl Sagan

I believe that every right implies a responsibility, every opportunity an obligation; every possession, a duty. - John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

I'LL SEE YOUR PARANOID FANTASY / BOLD FACE MCCARTHYITE LIE AND GIVE YOU THE REAL THREAT.

    Damn, general, are you still just conducting Wagner in front of your mirror, or have you moved on to the manual of arms?

gus.

 

yang imperial long form gus.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." -- Thomas Jefferson

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. - Carl Sagan

I believe that every right implies a responsibility, every opportunity an obligation; every possession, a duty. - John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

yang imperial long form gus.

  Well don't get too strident, and injure your yang, long form, or otherwise...

gus.

 

Well don't get too strident, and injure your yang, long form, or otherwise...

*************************************************

Well, whether it is the "yin" or the "yang" ... please let us know when you decide to set up the barricades gus. 

This essay describes you and your ilk pretty accurately.

fair enough?

Jim...

This essay describes you and your ilk pretty accurately.

fair enough?

   The only thing more hilarious than Liberal self-appointed scribes ruminating amongst their own, is when they venture off into areas they are completely ignorant of.  Arrogance, of course, blinds them of *any* self-awareness, or introspection, which results in these kinds of articles, which are then, of course, lapped up like kittens to milk by their "peers", to which, no more accurate a definition has ever been applied to the word.

gus.

 

 

 

The only thing more hilarious than Liberal self-appointed scribes ruminating amongst their own, is when they venture off into areas they are completely ignorant of.  Arrogance, of course, blinds them of *any* self-awareness, or introspection, which results in these kinds of articles, which are then, of course, lapped up like kittens to milk by their "peers", to which, no more accurate a definition has ever been applied to the word.

*******************************************

Unlike, of course, the absolute paragons of intellectual heights as proposed by you via the conservative media.. oh yes,

They are the epitome of peer reviewed science and rectitude.

Please.  You are pumping your ass up at the expense of your mouth.

Of course, you don't know anything about "arrogance" or "lapping up like kittens to milk" ..  you are an intellectual giant, caught in a time warp that you don't know how to get out of.

We can predict what you conservative assholes will post by the effluvia emanting from the conservative websites... just like your, oh so predictable post about Michelle's sneakers...  We know where you got that shit.. 

It ain't because you are a slave to fashion either.

Jim..

Nice guess, gus, but it wasn't yang and yin. It was Yang family form. sucks to be you kid. Do try and google before you respond. It will keep some of the egg off your face.

edited to add: I did a quick google to see what you might find and I found an old sifu of mine now teaching in Taiwan.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." -- Thomas Jefferson

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. - Carl Sagan

I believe that every right implies a responsibility, every opportunity an obligation; every possession, a duty. - John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

Nice guess, gus, but it wasn't yang and yin.

   I didn't say it was.  Sorry... 

edited to add: I did a quick google to see what you might find and I found an old sifu of mine now teaching in Taiwan.

   Well of course, I would have expected absolutely nothing less, and you never disappoint.

gus.

 

 

Unlike, of course, the absolute paragons of intellectual heights as proposed by you via the conservative media.. oh yes,

   That's your straw-man.  I made no mention of them at all.

gus.

 

Oddly enough gus, I would not have expected Sifu Stier to end up on Taiwan. I would have thought he would go back to New York where his teacher W.W. Lee had been based. There was quite some tension between the two schools. T.T. Liang having been a corrupt customs official before the Chinese Commies drove him out. He and Cheng Man-Ch'ing went to New York from Taiwan but were not welcomed. When Stier was teaching on the Lac Courte Oreilles and TT was over in ST Cloud neither would acknowledge the other. I know that the extent of your life experience was some stupid cowboy epic, I however, walked down every road that interested me. I could if you wished some form of proof, photo copy my inscribed copy of TT's senior American Students collection of TT's teachings on the Chinese spear. (now there is an arm to bear eh?) and I could email the picture to you. Or you could just try to find a copy of THE WIND SWEEPS AWAY THE PLUM BLOSSOMS. Just say word gus, I'll send you the picture.


If I say I did something gus, I did it.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." -- Thomas Jefferson

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. - Carl Sagan

I believe that every right implies a responsibility, every opportunity an obligation; every possession, a duty. - John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

If I say I did something gus, I did it.

   It would obviously have to take someone other than yourself to understand the skepticism, or there wouldn't be any skepticism.  It's a lot like being a Liberal, it's a self-indicting ideology.  One field you clearly overlooked in all your vast resume-building.  Humility.

gus.

 

In other words you are afraid to call my cards because yours just don't stack up. I might buy the humility retort if and only if you expressed any. What Limbaugh pretends to I actually am. Highly intelligent, very well read, educated and with a broad range of experience able to give you perspective you were afraid or unable to gather for yourself.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." -- Thomas Jefferson

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. - Carl Sagan

I believe that every right implies a responsibility, every opportunity an obligation; every possession, a duty. - John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

In other words you are afraid to call my cards because yours just don't stack up. I might buy the humility retort if and only if you expressed any. What Limbaugh pretends to I actually am. Highly intelligent, very well read, educated and with a broad range of experience able to give you perspective you were afraid or unable to gather for yourself.

   You call your own cards, general.  To wit:

In other words you are afraid to call my cards because yours just don't stack up. I might buy the humility retort if and only if you expressed any. What Limbaugh pretends to I actually am. Highly intelligent, very well read, educated and with a broad range of experience able to give you perspective you were afraid or unable to gather for yourself.    gus.