That's the title of on online piece by Judith Warner in today's NYT. Some passages:
Like Scott Roeder, the man charged in the shooting of the Wichita,
Kan., doctor George Tiller nearly two weeks ago, James von Brunn, the
white supremacist charged with killing a guard in an attempted shooting
rampage at the Holocaust museum in Washington on Wednesday, doesn’t
have any current, overt links to extremist groups. Yet his violent
hatred — of Jews, blacks, the government — echoes throughout the
universe of right-wing extremists, who just a few years ago hailed and
revered him as a “White Racialist Treasure.”
And though he’s an outlier — disturbed, deranged, disavowed now by
many who share his core views — his actions really can’t be viewed in
isolation. As was the case with Tiller’s murder, which followed months
of escalating harassment and intimidation at abortion clinics, von
Brunn’s attack on the Holocaust museum has to be viewed as an extreme
manifestation of a moment when racist, anti-Semitic agitation is
rapidly percolating. White supremacist groups are vastly expanding. And
right-wing TV rhetoric, thoughtless in its cruelty and ratings-hungry
demagoguery, is helping feed the paranoia and rage that for some
Americans now bubbles just beneath the surface....
I wrote last week about the rising threats to and vandalism at
abortion clinics that followed the election of our first pro-choice
president in eight years. A similar increase in intimidating activism
has been observed over the past seven months among hate groups — and
simply hateful individuals. In November, a predominantly black church
under construction in Springfield, Mass. was burned to the ground by
three men who bragged of doing so in protest of the election. A cross
was burned outside the home of a family of Obama supporters in
Hardwick, N.J.
As was the case with increasing clinic vandalism and verbally
violent protest, it was only a matter of time before this racially
motivated destruction and intimidation turned to physical violence. And
there’s one additional, highly disturbing parallel between von Brunn’s
intended white supremacist shooting rampage and Scott Roeder’s
“pro-life” killing of George Tiller: In both cases, at least some of
the core beliefs of extremists were echoed, albeit in more socially
acceptable language, by right wing news commentators.
Bill O’Reilly had routinely talked in recent years about “Tiller the baby killer.”
Other right-wing talk show hosts like Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs and Rush
Limbaugh have similarly tapped into — in somewhat coded form — some of
the key concerns of extremist hate groups: that the economy has been
destroyed by government-proffered “bad” loans to illegal immigrants, for example, or that FEMA may or may not — Beck equivocated for an awfully long time
— be running “concentration camps” for U.S. citizens, or that the Obama
administration is declaring war on decent Americans by labeling them as
“extremists.” ..
You can’t accuse Beck or Limbaugh of inciting violence.
But they almost certainly do stoke the flames. They may give people who
are just about to go over the edge — the sort of “guy that could not
take it anymore” as one poster on the white supremacist forum
Stormfront.org, described von Brunn — some sort of validation for their
rage.
“The pot in America is boiling,” Beck said this week, in the wake of
the Holocaust museum killing. “And this is just yet another warning to
all Americans of things to come.”
That creepy schadenfreude just about says it all.
And then there's this morning's column, titled "The Big Hate", by Nobel laureate (economics) Paul Krugman. Some passages:
Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to
an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically
fed by the conservative media and political establishment.
Now, for the most part, the likes of Fox News and the R.N.C. haven’t
directly incited violence, despite Bill O’Reilly’s declarations that
“some” called Dr. Tiller “Tiller the Baby Killer,” that he had “blood
on his hands,” and that he was a “guy operating a death mill.” But they
have gone out of their way to provide a platform for conspiracy
theories and apocalyptic rhetoric, just as they did the last time a
Democrat held the White House.
And at this point, whatever dividing line there was between
mainstream conservatism and the black-helicopter crowd seems to have
been virtually erased....
In the Bush years, The
Washington Times became an important media player because it was widely
regarded as the Bush administration’s house organ. Earlier this week,
the newspaper saw fit to run an opinion piece declaring that President
Obama “not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one
himself,” and that in any case he has “aligned himself” with the
radical Muslim Brotherhood.
And then there’s Rush Limbaugh. His rants today aren’t very
different from his rants in 1993. But he occupies a different position
in the scheme of things. Remember, during the Bush years Mr. Limbaugh
became very much a political insider. Indeed, according to a recent
Gallup survey, 10 percent of Republicans now consider him the “main
person who speaks for the Republican Party today,” putting him in a
three-way tie with Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich. So when Mr. Limbaugh
peddles conspiracy theories — suggesting, for example, that fears over
swine flu were being hyped “to get people to respond to government
orders” — that’s a case of the conservative media establishment joining
hands with the lunatic fringe...
What will the consequences be? Nobody knows, of course, although the
analysts at Homeland Security fretted that things may turn out even
worse than in the 1990s — that thanks, in part, to the election of an
African-American president, “the threat posed by lone wolves and small
terrorist cells is more pronounced than in past years.”
And that’s a threat to take seriously. Yes, the worst terrorist
attack in our history was perpetrated by a foreign conspiracy. But the
second worst, the Oklahoma City bombing, was perpetrated by an
all-American lunatic. Politicians and media organizations wind up such
people at their, and our, peril.
