Liberalism's Unhelpful Narrative

D--d-did you notice that? No, not the Old Spice. Look, here, snap, snap. I'm talking about how the left, who are sooooo smart, tend to paint everyone they don't like with one brush. It seems the advice they give about not confusing Arab terrorism with Islam (and it's the right advice) they completely ignrore when it comes to right-wing groups - militia and religious - in the United States.

Now, yours truly knew what they spewed was poppycock hysteria (hysteria spewed on mainstream papers and networks. It's ironic they call such groups paranoid when they themselves exhibit similar traits - under the guise of "rational" thought of course) because, well, I actually explore further than the narrative dictated by the press. The more you explore the more things tend to balance out.

Why is it, to find sober articles, I have rto go beyond the Washington Post and NYT? Why? Why is it that Reason online can provide this sort of information about American right-wing groups but in the mainstream media they depict it as if their being invaded? Yet, when a real "invasion" takes place through illegal immigration they remain silent?

It's the same old, predictable narrative we hear. Even with Bore-me Elmo Obama this stance is prevalent with his natural anti-business outlook.

Blah, blah, blah.

Excerpt:

The militia subculture itself is far from united. The University of Hartford historian Robert Churchill—author of an excellent book on the militias, To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face—has identified two distinct though sometimes overlapping elements within the movement: the "constitutionalists" and the "millenarians." While the first group stresses civil liberties and organizes in public, the second segment is more prone to paranoid, violent, and apocalyptic rhetoric and is more likely to form secret cells. The Hutaree hail from the far end of the millenarian side of the spectrum. There doesn't seem to be any love lost between them and the area's dominant militia, the constitutionalist Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia (SMVM), which greeted the March arrests by denouncing the Hutaree as a religious cult. Mike Lackomar of the SMVM even told The Detroit News that the Hutaree had called his militia asking for assistance during the raids and had been rebuffed.

And:

And that leads us to the biggest trouble with the dominant media narrative: It misdirects our attention. The historian Leo Ribuffo coined the term Brown Scare to describe a wave of countersubversive activity in the 1930s and '40s, when an understandable fear of Nazis unleashed some much less defensible calls for, in Ribuffo's words, "restrictions on the right of native 'fascist' agitators to speak, publish, and assemble." In the process the authorities conflated some very different people together, leading to surveillance not just of German sympathizers but of reputable conservatives. Other historians have identified two subsequent Brown Scares, one in the early '60s and one in the 1990s. Like the better-known Red Scares, but pointing rightwards rather than leftwards, a Brown Scare both exaggerates the threats at hand and obscures the distinctions between genuinely violent plotters, radical but peaceful activists, and members of the mainstream.


You can see such a mindset at work in the SPLC's watch list. You can see it in press accounts that blur still more boundaries, so that there seems to be little difference between a terror cell and a Tea Party. You can see it in documents like the Department of Homeland Security's report. You're even beginning to see it in legislation. Late last month the Oklahoma House voted 98-1 to amend a bill that, among other provisions, increased the penalties for recruiting new gang members. Under the revised legislation, the same penalties would befall recruiters for unauthorized militias.

That is where we stand today. We can reenact the Brown and Red Scares of the past, or we can pull back from a mentality that has never been good for either liberty or security; we can plunge further into madness like the Oklahoma bill, or we can adopt the measured skepticism displayed this week by Judge Roberts. Choose wisely.

B..I.N.G.O. And Bingo was his Name-O.