political foo: Beware right-wing extremists!

[alpharaposa]

It seems the DHS has issued a report warning about possibly violent right-wing extremists who might be getting more numerous and/or violent.

The report (pdf)

A round-up of reactions from various right-wing extremists:
Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion
Michelle Malkin
The American Legion
Powerline
Mark Steyn
Jonah Goldberg

Let me repeat this paragraph from the report, defining "right-wing extremists":

Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.

So, how many potentially violent extremists do we have in the audience?

EDIT: Michelle Malkin's point about the timing of this report's release is well-taken, by the way. Tomorrow, thousands of people will be taking part in Tax Day Tea Parties across the country to protest government spending.

Comments

[zeeth_kyrah]

I'm going to read that report, I think, and find out what's really inside.

It would be easier to say who isn't dangerous than to say who is. Small children aren't dangerous, for example, just unpredictable in their movements and likely to do ignorant things (such as pick up a poisonous snake or a live grenade and play with it). Angry people can be dangerous in large groups, where mob instinct might take over (provided there is some stimulus toward action, such as being threatened by authority figures). But angry people acting on their own behalf typically get no further than tantrums and screaming fits without serious physical harm to anyone but themselves.

Still:

Hateful people are dangerous by way of toxicity: they pollute their environments no less than any other toxic substance. And they are more likely to act upon their hatreds, initiating the release of violence which can cause angry crowds to become violent mobs. Hateful people also act alone to violate others, spreading their poison any way they can.

Some people are emotionally loaded to the point of having a hair-trigger on certain issues. These people are dangerous if pushed, and violent outbursts may be sparked by mention of or action regarding their triggering issues.

Some people are just plain sociopathic; anything that doesn't directly benefit them is beneath regard, and may be acted upon in any manner which doesn't provoke threats to the few things they seek to protect (such as themselves; the threat of harm may rebuff them for a while, but they will then plot assiduously to return the threatened harm in actuality to the source of that threat). These people tend to be strongly conservative in the manner of those who view all persons as pawns in their game of power: Anything which changes the game without giving them more power is to be blocked and/or destroyed (which is, by the way, the Authoritarian Leader's model of how life is played, and pretty close to the way that corporations play politics).

"Conservatism" may be the general position of "most Americans"; but it all depends on how you define what is conservative and what is not. Basically, the people targeted in this excerpt are people who are likely to act on their beliefs using violence as their mode of expression, who have been standing under the cover of conservatism, but who are actually trending toward the reactionary. Also, more people are being pushed on issues that touch their lives directly (that is, in the wallet and in their job security) and which have been linked to particular persons, programs, and catch phrases (Obama, Democrats, the two mega-billion recovery-spending programs which are now law, control issues between government and corporations and their "dependents", "spending ourselves out of debt", and so on).

I suspect that most Americans just aren't paying attention outside of their tightly-controlled info feeds, leading to a lack of self-awareness on political issues, and thus are more easily swayed by the attractive scenes of vigorous political exposition provided by the talking heads who call themselves unbiased.