Are Ron Paul Supporters Terrorists?
Of course not, but bureaucrats in my home state of Missouri evidently think otherwise. Or maybe they’re just hungry for attention.
As it happens, the new, March 23 issue of TAC carries an important essay by Philip Jenkins on the regularity with which hysteria about “far Right” movements recurs during Democratic presidential administrations. It’s like clockwork. With FDR, we got the “Brown Scare” of the 1930s. In the Kennedy-Johnson era, there was much angst about the Minutemen and John Birch Society. And under Clinton there was the Great Militia Panic of the 1990s, which saw a budding Timothy McVeigh in every gunowner. Obama has been in power barely three months, and already the Left (and law enforcement, which has a financial stake in whipping up hysteria) is conforming to the pattern.
You can read the Jenkins piece on-line right now if you’re a subscriber to TAC by logging in here. (And if you’re not a subscriber, you can sign up now and get instant access to our current issue and full archives in PDF form.)
I’m not convinced it’ll play out along those lines, the liberals seem to have found a more effective scapegoat in Rush Limbaugh. Though frankly, if they succeed in conflating Ron Paul supporters with wingnuts like Glen Beck and Alan Keyes, it’ll be in large part because so many of them allowed it to happen.
To be fair the far right is pretty scary. So is the far left.
I’m pretty sure we’ll be hearing from the militia movement again sometime soon. They’ve been quiet for 8 years, I guess because they weren’t so pissed about the gov’t during that time.
‘if they succeed’
There is no ‘they’. The left is not an organised entity like the right. There is no common message.
If anyone is trying to associate Ron Paul with Glen Beck it’s the neocons. If Ron Paul is the crazy right then they become the moderate right.
rawshark wrote:
“I’m pretty sure we’ll be hearing from the militia movement again sometime soon….”
Sure, except it might well be the same way we used to “hear about” all the zillions of homeless under Reagan and Bush I, with them somehow all finding homes the instant Clinton got in and was responsible, but then starting getting evicted in ever larger numbers under Bush II until other things caught the media’s attention.
The old boy-who-cried-wolf problem, isn’t it? Even if we *did* have some surge of a dangerous militia movement who the hell would believe it coming from, say, the New York Times or the Washington Post or the networks?
Cheers,
Yep, we’ll be hearing from the militia alright. Rham Emanuel and Obama’s mandatory civil service program will whip ‘em right up.
http://rattube.com/2009/03/17/googleyoutube-filters-the-give-act-mandatory-volunteerism/
Wow, when did following basic Constitutional concepts become far right, left, the stuff of terrorists or even scary?
I think those who gobble the hand-fed slop unquestionably are far more scarier… you don’t need a dramatic conspiracy theory to see the red and blue team are driving this nation to a fiery end in a handbasket.
Read our Constitution, then explain where these two undeclared wars, the corporate bailouts, and even the Federal Reserve are allowed to exist.
Anyway, got to go…. sounds like helicopters over my house and someone is banging on my front door…..
Two critical updates to this story with information very difficult to find anywhere else
http://delawarelibertarian.blogspot.com/2009/03/that-miac-report-on-militias-background.html
http://delawarelibertarian.blogspot.com/2009/03/privacy-abuses-continue-to-raise.html
TomB, that might be how you heard of it or maybe you’re just trying to stir a liberal media discussion I don’t kow. I heard about them because of Waco, Ruby Ridge, OK City, early internet bulleting board postings and email chain letters warning about black helicopters and dual use road signs. I’m a lifelong republican so don’t bother trying to put me on the other side during the 90′s just because I hate the neocons who took over under W. The miltia movement is purely right wing. Now that a dem is in the White House all their old greivances will be huge country wide problems again.
Why do people always think “the Left” is behind this? Liberals did not make Rush Limbaugh a scapegoat… Rush Limbaugh only emerged as a very prominent figure lately because of his speech at the CPAC – he brought attention to himself. Liberals had NOTHING to do with that.
And some people are commenting liberals are trying to associate Ron Paul with violence or militia uprising… liberals didn’t do that either! That was done by retards in Missouri.
And I will tell you this truth… liberals actually like Ron Paul, and they wish Republicans would recognize him as an honorable candidate with constructive ideas. Instead, republicans today totally marginalize/ignore Ron Paul, and instead push candidates with a very non-Republican agenda of supporting massive government and a very involved foreign policies of total interventionism. Do I even need to name names?
Ron Paul is the only True Republican still standing.
Steve Newton, on March 18th, 2009 at 8:16 am Said:
Those are both terrific pieces, Steve Newton. Thank you for your analyses.
They are “must read.”
C’mon people,calling Ron Paul far right is complete nonsense, he drew more support from the middle than any other candidate R or D, please don’t listen to how the mainstream media portrays him, study his philosophy wih an open mind and then you will understand. most politicians are liars, take Obama for instance, point by point he has did the exact opposite from everything he campaigned on, see (O bama deception movie) and so did GWB, Ron Paul may say things you son’t like to hear, but he tells the truth, don’t condemn him for that.
Rawshark, you’re a lifelong Republican?
I agree wtih Matt Miller above. The way Ron Paul spoke so authentically was the catch. He won the debate polls because Dems watch GOP debates and liked his anti war, almost GOP lines.
Even Pauls stance on abortion is far from hard right. He would allow states to legalize it, along with gay marriage being a state and local issue.
He is his own breed of politician the hard right has basically branded as their own. He is very religion nuetral, but seems to get labeled otherwise.
The far left could be won over by Pauls policy if Obama did not come along and give lip service to some of their issues.
Rawshark, I wasn’t denying that a militia movement exists, and indeed my sense is that a number of such movements exist. Nor even that for whatever reason—not least Mr. Obama—they might suddenly start or already be rising up now. My point was that to an extent the mainstream media is still liberal/left oriented and as such just as in the past with the homelessness issue it’s tough to know when an issue really is an issue or is blowing up into a big problem, and when one really isn’t an issue or was always there and is just being flogged at a given time due to that bias.
I.e., a tired, obvious, Rush Limbaughish point that I’m now embarrassed to have made, even though I still think it has some validity. (See, e.g. the story going around about this secretive, exclusive ListServe that apparently so many prominent liberal/lefty media people belong to and which is apparently run by Ezra Klein, which to me just demonstrates the kind of pathetic, insecure elitism and faux independent-mindedness that has brought that media into such deserved disrespect.)
Cheers,
One point that needs to be made is that whether or not there ever is a serious conspiracy on the Right, the left simply must believe there is one. This is because of their history and because many of their hero’s did in fact conspire out of sight of the public.
Every left of center person that I know believes that there is still a Red Squad in the local or State Police departments. Most of them revere the Weather Underground and similar organizations. It’s part of the romanticized vision of their History. So of course they believe that we of the Right are drilling somewhere and plotting to round them up. They need this to feel alive and important. They believe that we are conspiring because it is what they would like to thing they would do.