Day: March 15, 2009

Pandora wrote a great post on Friday, looking at Steve Newton’s efforts to minimize concerns that liberals (especially those on this blog) might have about the Hannitys and Becks and whoever of the US airwaves who use their broad reach to try to legitimatize (and manipulate) their listeners’ fears and anxieties and resentments by invoking the business of revolution and civil war and various bits of violence targeted to liberals.

His only response was to my comment back to Liz, who made a claim (that Steve does too) that Missouri Law Enforcement was targeting 3rd party members as terrorists.

I can’t speak for the other individual who Steve addresses, but a decent close reading of the report referenced certainly fulfills none of the hyperbolic claims made for it either by Steve or the guy who wrote the article Steve links to. But observe this — Steve represents my claim as follows:

… both of whom challenged me for suggesting that the MIAC report on the modern militia movement encouraged Missouri LEOs to focus on supporters of third-party candidates.

Actually, the “challenge” was to Liz, but after I had read that entire paper, I couldn’t find anything there that serves as explicit “encouragement” or “targeting as terrorists” 3rd party members.

And he concludes his long post thus:

The grim reality here, Tom and cassandra, is that this strategic alert does present political party preference and government criticism as significant identification markers for dangerous right-wing extremists.

Anyone see the problem here? Steve starts out claim that this paper makes 3rd party members into targets and terrorists, and ends up changing that claim to “significant identification markers”. While this paper does include a reference to the tendencies of political preference of militia members, it also discusses the militia insignia they wear, the books they read and the movies they admire as identification markers too. So that what worries Steve is the references to 3rd party membership — not the books and movies. And let’s remember when AG Ashcroft had fantasies of home contractors calling in to report people with Korans or other Arabic reading materials on their shelves.