DHS sez recession fueling right wing extremists

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Re: DHS sez recession fueling right wing extremists

Postby Jäeger » Wed Apr 22, 2009 8:50 pm

Q:
With the exception of street gangs, I would say that the lefties (but really, what do they have to complain about these days anyway??), and to an extent the greens don't deserve the rap either.


I'm right with you on that bud. Government tries to tar all these kinds of groups with way too broad a brush and make it into a bigger threat than it actually is. I don't spend any time worrying about being attacked by "right-wing goofs" or some "animal liberation" nuts, but the government devotes whole departments to it. Therefore it just doesn't seem very suprising to me that they would make a memo dedicated to fringe nutjobs of all stripes. It's what they do.

But, c'mon. You don't have to be a neo-Nazi tinfoil hat wearer to read between the lines when it comes to the DHS report as far as "right wing" groups are concerned. Third parties? Anti-illegal immigration folks? And on and on and on...


It's another group they're going to keep an eye on. Who cares really? If you're not on some kind of watch-list it means that you aren't doing anything worth a shit politically. They've had everyone from the Black Panthers to Jack Kennedy on a watch-list at some point. Embrace it and welcome to the club.
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Re: DHS sez recession fueling right wing extremists

Postby Q » Wed Apr 22, 2009 8:57 pm

Jäeger wrote:
It's another group they're going to keep an eye on. Who cares really? If you're not on some kind of watch-list it means that you aren't doing anything worth a shit politically. They've had everyone from the Black Panthers to Jack Kennedy on a watch-list at some point. Embrace it and welcome to the club.


I care. It's un-American and anti-liberty. I wouldn't have lived in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, and I won't see it happen here without atleast bitching about it.

I didn't like the DHS, Patriot Act, et al under Bush, and I still don't like it.
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Re: DHS sez recession fueling right wing extremists

Postby Jäeger » Wed Apr 22, 2009 9:13 pm

Q:
I care. It's un-American and anti-liberty.


If you have cops and security guards, they're going to spend their time looking out for threats. That kind of comes with the job description. There's nothing inherently un-American or anti-liberty about cops making memos about potential threats, it's what they do. Unless you want to do away with law enforcement or any coordination between law enforcement agencies, that's just the way it goes. When they overstep their job description and start tapping phones and the like, fuck 'em, but turning a memo about potential threats doesn't equal a crack-down on political dissidents.

I didn't like the DHS, Patriot Act, et al under Bush, and I still don't like it.


You're preaching to the choir on this one.
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Re: DHS sez recession fueling right wing extremists

Postby Q » Thu Apr 23, 2009 1:26 pm

Jäeger wrote:If you have cops and security guards, they're going to spend their time looking out for threats. That kind of comes with the job description. There's nothing inherently un-American or anti-liberty about cops making memos about potential threats, it's what they do. ... When they overstep their job description and start tapping phones and the like, fuck 'em, but turning a memo about potential threats doesn't equal a crack-down on political dissidents.



Classifing people's thought as potential threats is wholy anti-American. If group X's charter states that their mission is to distribute drugs, kill x,y and z types of people and other dastardly deeds, then you and I are in agreement. If group X's charter is vocal and electoral opposition to issues x,y and z, and they get put on a terrorist watch list because of it, that is dead fucking wrong.



Jäeger wrote:Unless you want to do away with law enforcement or any coordination between law enforcement agencies, that's just the way it goes..


C'mon, you know us Paultards want it to be like Somalia!
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Re: DHS sez recession fueling right wing extremists

Postby coldharvest » Thu Apr 23, 2009 2:04 pm

Q wrote:C'mon, you know us Paultards want it to be like Somalia!

Yeah, get your khat on Daddy-o.
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Re: DHS sez recession fueling right wing extremists

Postby Jäeger » Thu Apr 23, 2009 4:11 pm

Q:
Classifing people's thought as potential threats is wholy anti-American. If group X's charter states that their mission is to distribute drugs, kill x,y and z types of people and other dastardly deeds, then you and I are in agreement.


I didn't see anything in the memo about classifying everybody on the right-wing politically as a thought criminal. When they mentioned right-wing "extremist groups", I assumed that they meant groups whose mission includes engaging in criminal activity, advocating armed revolution or race war, killing political opponets, etc. That's generally what is meant by "extremist groups" and applies to neo-nazis, militias, criminal gangs and those types. I didn't see anything in the memo that classified the Libertarian Party or Southern Baptists and the like as "extremist groups". If that would've been the case, I'd be as outraged as you are.

If group X's charter is vocal and electoral opposition to issues x,y and z, and they get put on a terrorist watch list because of it, that is dead fucking wrong.


This is what I'm talking about. There was nothing in the memo about putting people (especially non-violent political groups) on terrorist watch-lists, it simply said that there is a potential rise in recruitment for right-wing extremist groups, which is plausible.

C'mon, you know us Paultards want it to be like Somalia!


Works for me. I generally stop short of that and would prefer locally-elected non-professional law enforcement in the vast majority of cases possibly with small professional State Police cadres, and I'm not going to shed any tears if you want to ban the FBI and the like.
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Re: DHS sez recession fueling right wing extremists

Postby Q » Thu Apr 23, 2009 4:18 pm

Jäeger wrote:I didn't see anything in the memo that classified the Libertarian Party or Southern Baptists and the like as "extremist groups". If that would've been the case, I'd be as outraged as you are.


It specifically states "third parties". The LP fits the profile of a third party. So do Nader's folks for that matter.


Jäeger wrote:Works for me. I generally stop short of that and would prefer locally-elected non-professional law enforcement in the vast majority of cases possibly with small professional State Police cadres, and I'm not going to shed any tears if you want to ban the FBI and the like.


In my perfect world, the local Sheriff is about as high as it goes.
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Re: DHS sez recession fueling right wing extremists

Postby Sri Lanky » Thu Apr 23, 2009 10:53 pm

How many real vs. percieved enemies do you think the American government has(regardless of party in power)?

Too bad the Rastafarians shot the Sheriff.....life hasn't been the same since. This totally explains the War on Drugs.
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Re: DHS sez recession fueling right wing extremists

Postby Sri Lanky » Fri Apr 24, 2009 11:09 pm

Ranking of percieved enemies of America:

1]Teletubbies
2]White Rastas
3]Canada(except Alberta)
4]Leonard Peltier
5]African-Americans

Ranking of real enemies of America:

1]Greed
2]National/Racial supremacism
3]Enthusiasm for total war
4]Systemic corruption in government
5]Addiction---to oil/narcotics
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Re: DHS sez recession fueling right wing extremists

Postby LechoZX » Thu Jun 11, 2009 11:01 pm

By Alex Koppelman
Salon.com
Wednesday, June 10, 2009 17:11 EDT

Right: DHS extremist report was "crap." Really?

WASHINGTON — A couple of months ago, the Department of Homeland Security issued a detailed report, in the works for months, warning that right-wing hate groups might find a fertile environment these days. The country's first black president had taken office during an economic downturn that some white supremacists have blamed on a Jewish banking cabal.

At the time, conservatives practically climbed over each other in their rush to denounce it as alarmist and unfair. "There is not one instance they can cite as evidence where any of these right-wing groups have done anything," Rush Limbaugh raged on his radio show on April 14, when news of the report came out a week after it was written.

That was then, before a violent, anti-Semitic white supremacist assaulted the Holocaust Museum with a shotgun, killing a security guard. Which, of course, happened less than two weeks after a radical anti-choice zealot murdered abortion provider Dr. George Tiller in his Kansas church. Suddenly, that DHS report doesn't look so alarmist, after all.

"Despite the inarticulate report that went out, it was based on sound intelligence," an administration official told Salon, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of both the report and the shooting. "DHS will continue to analyze and share information with local law enforcement, whether that information is politically correct or not."

James von Brunn, the suspect arrested in the Holocaust Museum attack, even served in the Army — though Republicans said the Obama administration was slandering the troops by warning that "disgruntled military veterans" might be targets for racist recruiting. And even a brief glance through von Brunn's "book," "Kill the Best Gentiles," shows how on the mark the report was in warning that "anti-Semitic extremists" blamed "a deliberate conspiracy conducted by a cabal of Jewish 'financial elites'" for the economic collapse.

Limbaugh's blustery insistence that right-wing groups had never done anything violent obviously seems even more foolish now than it did then. (Some liberal critics had also noted, before the shooting, that Limbaugh went on a mini-tirade about President Obama's insistence on "ripping Germany for what it did 60 or 65 years ago" while visiting Buchenwald last week, which also sounds even dumber now than before.) But he wasn't the only conservative upset over the report. Rep. Mark Kirk, an Illinois Republican, badgered Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano about it at a budget hearing last month. "Let me just ask specifically, who in the Extremism and Radicalization branch of the Homeland Environment Threat Analysis division have you fired for this report?" he asked. Aides didn't immediately return a phone call asking if Kirk still stands by his criticism.

Conservatives appeared to put far more time and energy into bashing the administration over the report than the administration did writing it. Radio host Michael Savage sued DHS for issuing what the lawsuit disingenuously called a "Rightwing Extremism Policy" — though in retrospect, having a policy like that might not be a bad idea. Bill Kristol called it "juvenile." Michelle Malkin called it "a piece of crap," and implied it had been written only to smear the people who were, at the time, about to gather at anti-tax "Tea Party" protests around the country. (Of course, at the time, Democrats were also happy to denounce the report, which seemed to be a political liability. Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, complained about it even though he had asked DHS to investigate right-wing hate groups four years earlier. The administration backed away from the report as well, with Napolitano apologizing for it.)

None of those GOP critics are likely to back down now; in fact, reminders of how they reacted to the report will probably become a new talking point for Limbaugh and his pals, who love to play the victim. Just look at how Bill O'Reilly turned Tiller's murder into a chance to complain that a lot of people — including Salon — took note of his vicious rhetorical campaign against Tiller in the past. Already this afternoon, some conservatives had seized on von Brunn's belief in 9/11 conspiracy theories, and his hatred of George W. Bush, as proof that he wasn't even remotely one of them. "Many of von Brunn's political views track 'Left' rather than 'Right,'" Kathy Shaidle wrote in the Examiner.

But with two shootings by right-wing extremists in two weeks — as well as the unrelated murder of an Army recruiter in Arkansas by a recent convert to Islam — the government might want to start taking political violence more seriously. Tragic as the Army recruiter's murder was, the evidence so far indicates that focusing some anti-terrorism attention on the lunatic fringe of the conservative movement would make sense.

It may be impolitic to say so, but white supremacist hate groups get a lot more fired up when the president is a half-Kenyan man named Barack Hussein Obama, whose chief of staff is an observant Jew, than they did when the president was a WASP from Connecticut by way of Texas. Do all conservatives feel that way? No, of course not. But are there violent wackos out there, just as the DHS report warned? Sadly, yes, there are. And the government shouldn't pretend they don't exist, no matter how loudly Rush Limbaugh howls.
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Re: DHS sez recession fueling right wing extremists

Postby Kurt » Fri Jul 03, 2009 4:37 pm

The White Supremacist Veteran in the last racist attack was of course, a WWII veteran. The fact is that the nazis that are all around are either aging, isolated somewhere by choice (Idaho)or not by choice (prison).

As sad as the last attack was, I think it is telling that they don't happen too often and the guy was not some young, fanatical nutball but rather an elderly, angry nutball. Therefore I am not worried about them at all.

Terrorism is like Lotto. The chances of winning Lotto are so damn rare, yet morons actually blow a fair portion of their money on it, just because someone actually does win it once and a while. Real morons actually plan their retirement and their life around winning it, but statistically it is rare.

Terrorism is even more rare than Lotto. Sure it happens and is going to happen...all kinds of it will happen, but the chances of getting killed by it is so rare that only a bunch of idiots would devote time, lives and money to fighting it.

It is no coincidence that the GWOT and Lotto are things that are both very popular for governments.
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Re: DHS sez recession fueling right wing extremists

Postby ktrout » Fri Jul 03, 2009 11:03 pm

Hey Mr. Salon Editorial Writer, here comes the link to Bruce Schneier's essay on irrational responses to rare risks again. So the instant national sensationalist news puts two tragic deaths on the front pages within several weeks, so now we need to give up more freedom? I think O'Reilly and Limbaugh have it within their rights to be morons, even if I don't like them.
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