Clearly, there's a lot of anger in America right now.
Much of it justified, as some can afford shower curtain rings that would dwarf others' weekly wages (and the latter are the ones who are lucky enough to have jobs). When you take this fact, combine it with the Orwellian "Newspeak" so pervasive in our media (which David Neiwert has written so articulately about), and multiply that by the NRA's mission to fight for the rights of criminals, the mentally ill and even terrorists to have access to guns, you have a toxic stew, ready to erupt.
Scene: Panama City, Florida. A school board meeting is interrupted by a man with a criminal record of assault (with a gun) waving a gun, and furious that his wife lost her job, his benefits have run out and the board members were unwilling to raise sales taxes so she and others like her wouldn't be fired (it should be noted that reports are still sketchy, so not all of what he says about his wife and himself during the 5 minutes when the board members try and talk him down can be confirmed yet).
Back in April, conservatives were all up in arms over a report from the Department of Homeland Security warning of the possible rise of rightwing violence in the wake of a worsening recession and the election of the nation's first black President. The word "conservative" never appeared in the report, but conservatives were certain it was aimed at them.
Suddenly, now that the shooting has begun to grab major mindshare, they've changed their minds. The murderer of Dr. George Tiller was a lone nut, not one of them. And Bill O'Reilly's incessant haranguing of "Tiller the baby-killer" had nothing to do with Tiller's murder. What's more, James W. Von Brunn, the Holocaust Museum killer, why, he's a leftist!
Gosh, it seems that the DHS report wasn't about conservatives after all! But are the conservatives now apologizing to Janet Napolitano? Don't hold your breath.
Perhaps the best place to turn to understand what's happening--not just the outbreak of violence, but the intimate relationship it has to the actually existing rightwing movement in America, is David Neiwert's new book, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right. One way or another, David's been on this beat since the 1990s, covering the "Patriot" movement in the Northwest first as journalist, then as author, and writing a number of seminal diary series, including the 2003 Koufax winner, Rush, Newspeak and Fascism: An Exegesis (pdf) and the 2004 Koufax winner, "The Rise of Pseudo Fascism" (pdf), both of which contribute substantially to the content of The Eliminationists.
David's the founder of the blog Orcinus, and is currently managing editor at Crooks and Liars, where he had an excellent post yesterday, "How on-target was Homeland Security's right-wing extremism bulletin? Very", which covers a lot of ground (typically for him), including an extensive quotation from The Eliminationistts (mostly finished by last October), from which the following is but a tiny snippet:
First, two weeks ago, there was David Frum's take on the survey of young Americans, and his blaming Bush for letting in a lot of immigrants:
"This has imported a large new community of people who are both economically struggling (and thus open to Democratic arguments) but who lack deep attachment to the American nation (and who are thus immune to the most potent of Republican appeals)."
The nativist racism here is striking, though hardly surprising. Then, in response to Rove's resignation, Frum wrote a piece for the New York Times that was remarkably frank about Rove's failed legacy, but that revealed another facet of rightwing populism with strong roots in the 19th Century, a facet known as producerism. Together, they tell us a lot about how the right might try to regroup.
