Conservatives Analogizing Themselves to Violent Terrorists
Dave Weigel points to a telling op-ed in The Austin American-Statesman by Republican political operative and former Press Secretary to U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) Matt Mackowiak:
The coming revolution is akin to “Fight Club,” the 1999 film that follows the struggles of day to day life for a regular guy who starts an underground fight club as radical and not terribly productive psychotherapy.
As Brad Pitt’s character, Tyler Durden, says in the movie, “Fight Club was the beginning, now it’s moved out of the basement, it’s called Project Mayhem.”
Dave reminds us that Project Mayhem, of course, was the militarization of the Fight Clubs into terrorist cells that blow up banks.
Now I’m not one to begrudge someone a little over-the-top rhetoric. But if you go around analogizing yourself to terrorists, then you don’t get to be shocked and outraged that the Department of Homeland Security might think there will be a problem with fringe members of your organization. I seriously doubt that Mackowiak intends to dynamite any buildings, but that is what he’s saying, and I wouldn’t be terribly shocked if some troubled people wind up taking this kind of talk too literally and hurting themselves or others.
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Law Enforcement Taking a Closer Look at Domestic Extremists
Via Spencer Ackerman, a nice scoop by Eli Lake about the Department of Homeland Security urging state and local law enforcement to be vigilant about the possibility of right-wing extremist violence fueled by the combination of Barack Obama and a grim economic situation:
The nine-page document was sent to police and sheriff’s departments across the United States on April 7 under the headline, “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.” It says the federal government “will be working with its state and local partners over the next several months” to gather information on “rightwing extremist activity in the United States.”
I’ll say two things about this. One is that this seems like an eminently reasonable thing to be doing. If you don’t believe that, you need to see Dave Weigel’s reporting from the machine gun show this militia stuff and Dave Neiwert’s stuff.
At the same time, I think it’d be great if some non-insane conservatives were to be a bit bothered by this. Legitimate concerns about security really can serve as a cover for abuses or misconduct. This was the problem with the surveillance organized by the Bush administration, and it’s a very real problem even with Barack Obama in the White House. As long as Bush was president, folks on the right seemed curiously blasé about this whole thing.
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