Tag: Wayne LaPierre

Chris Wallace to LaPierre: You’re “ridiculous” (updated with video)

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Fox News, Gun Laws, Guns, NRA

Chris Wallace to LaPierre: You’re “ridiculous” (updated with video)

Posted by coolelegans

Just to show how much LaPierre has been boxed into the fringe, Fox News host Chris Wallace destroys him on his show, watch the whole thing, it’s great!

Wallace pointed out that the president’s children face a larger threat than most.”Tell that to the people at Newtown,” LaPierre replied, referring to the town where an armed shooter killed 20 young children at an elementary school in December.

“Do you really think that the president’s children are the same kind of target as every schoolchild in America?” Wallace asked. “It’s ridiculous, and you know it, sir.”

For LaPierre to justify his abhorrent political ad by bringing up the children of Newtown is just despicable, and Chris Wallace rightly put him in his place.LaPierre also lies about gun registry and Chris Wallace smacks him down:

He predicted a universal gun registry is next — a measure that, as Wallace reminded him, has not been proposed.”Forgive me, sir, but you take something that is here and you say it’s going to go all the way over there,” Wallace said. “There’s no indication — I mean, I can understand your saying that’s the threat, but there’s nothing that anyone in the administration has said that indicates they’re going to have a universal registry.”

“And Obamacare wasn’t a tax until they needed it to be a tax,” he said.

The argument that Obamacare is a tax was made, primarily, by the conservative Justice John Roberts, so LaPierre is using a conservative argument to show that Obama is a liar. My mind is officially blown at this man’s insane logic. Many Kossacks have also pointed out that Obamacare has nothing to do with guns, so now he is just reduced to parroting Tea Party talking points. And look at how fast Wallace points out

“well it was the supreme court that said that [Obamacare is a tax]”.

Chris Wallace is not having this nonsense on his show! And all LaPierre can do, is ignore that statement, since he doesn’t have a retort, and say  “I don’t think you can trust these people.” He then tries to pivot to his talking points, but Wallace says “forgive me sir, I’m going to conduct this interview”. Wow. Brilliant stuff!When, Chris Wallace says that Obama “is not taking away shotguns”, LaPierre, lies and says that the Feinstein bill does include such a clause. NO ONE is taking away shot guns or hand guns. This man is LYING.

And finally, offered without comment, since it’s been beaten into the ground:

“If you limit the American public’s access to semi-automatic technology, you limit their ability to survive,” LaPierre said.

But I would also like to point out that with main stream conservatives like Chris Wallace distancing themselves from this nonsense, we may be winning the debate.

Related articles

The Hitler Gun Control Lie

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Gun Laws, Gun Nuts, Hitler, Right Wing

The Hitler gun control lie

Gun rights nuts who cite the dictator as a reason against gun control have their history dangerously wrong

By Alex Seitz-Wald

The Hitler gun control lie
This week, people were shocked when the Drudge Report posted a giant picture of Hitler over a headline speculating that the White House will proceed with executive orders to limit access to firearms. The proposed orders are exceedingly tame, but Drudge’s reaction is actually a common conservative response to any invocation of gun control.

The NRA, Fox News, Fox News (again), Alex Jones, email chains, Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher, Gun Owners of America, etc., all agree that gun control was critical to Hitler’s rise to power. Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (“America’s most aggressive defender of firearms ownership”) is built almost exclusively around this notion, popularizing posters of Hitler giving the Nazi salute next to the text: “All in favor of ‘gun control’ raise your right hand.”

In his 1994 book, NRA head Wayne LaPierre dwelled on the Hitler meme at length, writing: “In Germany, Jewish extermination began with the Nazi Weapon Law of 1938, signed by Adolf Hitler.”

And it makes a certain amount of intuitive sense: If you’re going to impose a brutal authoritarian regime on your populace, better to disarm them first so they can’t fight back.

Unfortunately for LaPierre et al., the notion that Hitler confiscated everyone’s guns is mostly bogus. And the ancillary claim that Jews could have stopped the Holocaust with more guns doesn’t make any sense at all if you think about it for more than a minute.

University of Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt explored this myth in depth in a 2004 article published in the Fordham Law Review. As it turns out, the Weimar Republic, the German government that immediately preceded Hitler’s, actually had tougher gun laws than the Nazi regime. After its defeat in World War I, and agreeing to the harsh surrender terms laid out in the Treaty of Versailles, the German legislature in 1919 passed a law that effectively banned all private firearm possession, leading the government to confiscate guns already in circulation. In 1928, the Reichstag relaxed the regulation a bit, but put in place a strict registration regime that required citizens to acquire separate permits to own guns, sell them or carry them.

The 1938 law signed by Hitler that LaPierre mentions in his book basically does the opposite of what he says it did. “The 1938 revisions completely deregulated the acquisition and transfer of rifles and shotguns, as well as ammunition,” Harcourt wrote. Meanwhile, many more categories of people, including Nazi party members, were exempted from gun ownership regulations altogether, while the legal age of purchase was lowered from 20 to 18, and permit lengths were extended from one year to three years.

The law did prohibit Jews and other persecuted classes from owning guns, but this should not be an indictment of gun control in general. Does the fact that Nazis forced Jews into horrendous ghettos indict urban planning? Should we eliminate all police officers because the Nazis used police officers to oppress and kill the Jews? What about public works — Hitler loved public works projects? Of course not. These are merely implements that can be used for good or ill, much as gun advocates like to argue about guns themselves. If guns don’t kill people, then neither does gun control cause genocide (genocidal regimes cause genocide).

Besides, Omer Bartov, a historian at Brown University who studies the Third Reich, notes that the Jews probably wouldn’t have had much success fighting back. “Just imagine the Jews of Germany exercising the right to bear arms and fighting the SA, SS and the Wehrmacht. The [Russian] Red Army lost 7 million men fighting the Wehrmacht, despite its tanks and planes and artillery. The Jews with pistols and shotguns would have done better?” he told Salon.

Proponents of the theory sometimes point to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as evidence that, as Fox News’ Judge Andrew Napolitano put it, “those able to hold onto their arms and their basic right to self-defense were much more successful in resisting the Nazi genocide.” But as the Tablet’s Michael Moynihan points out, Napolitano’s history (curiously based on a citation of work by French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson) is a bit off. In reality, only about 20 Germans were killed, while some 13,000 Jews were massacred. The remaining 50,000 who survived were promptly sent off to concentration camps.

Robert Spitzer, a political scientist who studies gun politics and chairs the political science department at SUNY Cortland, told Mother Jones’ Gavin Aronsen that the prohibition on Jewish gun ownership was merely a symptom, not the problem itself. “[It] wasn’t the defining moment that marked the beginning of the end for Jewish people in Germany. It was because they were persecuted, were deprived of all of their rights, and they were a minority group,” he explained.

Meanwhile, much of the Hitler myth is based on an infamous quote falsely attributed to the Fuhrer, which extols the virtue of gun control:

This year will go down in history! For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!

The quote has been widely reproduced in blog posts and opinion columns about gun control, but it’s “probably a fraud and was likely never uttered,” according to Harcourt. “This quotation, often seen without any date or citation at all, suffers from several credibility problems, the most significant of which is that the date often given [1935] has no correlation with any legislative effort by the Nazis for gun registration, nor would there have been any need for the Nazis to pass such a law, since gun registration laws passed by the Weimar government were already in effect,” researchers at the useful website GunCite note.

“As for Stalin,” Bartov continued, “the very idea of either gun control or the freedom to bear arms would have been absurd to him. His regime used violence on a vast scale, provided arms to thugs of all descriptions, and stripped not guns but any human image from those it declared to be its enemies. And then, when it needed them, as in WWII, it took millions of men out of the Gulags, trained and armed them and sent them to fight Hitler, only to send back the few survivors into the camps if they uttered any criticism of the regime.”

Bartov added that this misreading of history is not only intellectually dishonest, but also dangerous.  “I happen to have been a combat soldier and officer in the Israeli Defense Forces and I know what these assault rifles can do,” he said in an email.

He continued: “Their assertion that they need these guns to protect themselves from the government — as supposedly the Jews would have done against the Hitler regime — means not only that they are innocent of any knowledge and understanding of the past, but also that they are consciously or not imbued with the type of fascist or Bolshevik thinking that they can turn against a democratically elected government, indeed turn their guns on it, just because they don’t like its policies, its ideology, or the color, race and origin of its leaders.”

             

            Alex Seitz-Wald is Salon’s political reporter. Email him at aseitz-wald@salon.com, and follow him on Twitter @aseitzwald.

Related articles

The NRA Myth of Arming the Good Guys

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Gun Control, Gun Deaths, Gun Homicides, Gun Suicides, Guns, NRA

The NRA Myth of Arming the Good Guys
Mass shootings in the US are on the rise—and ordinary citizens with guns don’t stop them.

By Mark Follman

The gut-wrenching shock of the attack at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14 wasn’t just due to the 20 unthinkably young victims. It was also due to the realization that this specific, painfully familiar nightmare was unfolding yet again.

As the scope of the massacre in Newtown became clear, some news accounts [1] suggested that mass shootings in the United States have not increased, based on a broad definition of them. But in fact 2012 has been unprecedented for a particular kind of horror that’s been on the rise in recent years, from Virginia Tech to Tucson to Aurora to Oak Creek to Newtown. There have been at least 62 such mass shootings in the last three decades, attacks in which the killer took the lives of four or more people (the FBI’s baseline for mass murder) in a public place—a school, a workplace, a mall, a religious building. Seven of them have occurred this year alone [2].

Along with three other similar though less lethal rampages—at a Portland shopping mall, a Milwaukee spa, and a Cleveland high school—2012 has been the worst year for these events in modern US history, with 151 victims injured and killed [3]. More than a quarter of them were young children and teenagers.

 

 

The National Rifle Association and its allies would have us believe that the solution to this epidemic, itself but a sliver of America’s overall gun violence, is to put firearms in the hands of as many citizens as possible. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” declared the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre in a press conference a week after Newtown, the same day bells tolled at the National Cathedral and the devastated town mourned its 28 dead. (That day a gunman in Pennsylvania also murdered three people and wounded a state trooper shortly before LaPierre gave his remarks.) LaPierre explained that it was a travesty for a school principal to face evil unarmed, and he called for gun-wielding security officers to be deployed in every school in America.

As many commentators noted, it was particularly callous of the NRA to double down on its long-standing proposal to fight gun violence with more guns while parents in Newtown were burying their first graders. But more importantly, the NRA’s argument is bereft of supporting evidence. A closer look reveals that their case for arming Americans against mass shooters is nothing more than a cynical ideological talking point—one dressed up in appeals to heroism and the defense of constitutional freedom, and wholly reliant on misdirection and half truths. If only Sandy Hook’s principal had been packing heat, the argument goes, she could’ve stopped the mass killer. There’s just one little problem with this: Not a single one of the 62 mass shootings we studied in our investigation has been stopped this way—even as the nation has been flooded with millions of additional firearms [5] and a barrage of recent laws has made it easier than ever for ordinary citizens to carry them in public places [10], including bars, parks, and schools.

Gun rights die-hards claim the Portland mall shooter saw an armed good guy—who ran for cover instead of firing—and promptly shot himself dead. Obviously.

Attempts by armed citizens to stop shooters are rare. At least two such attempts in recent years ended badly, with the would-be good guys gravely wounded or killed [5]. Meanwhile, the five cases most commonly cited as instances of regular folks stopping massacres fall apart under scrutiny [6]: Either they didn’t involve ordinary citizens taking action—those who intervened were actually cops, trained security officers, or military personnel—or the citizens took action after the shooting rampages appeared to have already ended. (Or in some cases, both.)

But those facts don’t matter to the gun rights die-hards, who never seem to run out of intellectually dishonest ammo. Most recently [11], they’ve pointed to [12] the Portland shopping mall rampage earlier in December, in which an armed civilian reportedly drew his gun but thought twice about potentially hurting an innocent bystander and ducked for cover instead of firing. The assailant suddenly got scared of this retreating good guy with the gun, they claim, and promptly shot himself dead. Obviously.

Another favorite tactic is to blame so called “gun-free zones” for the carnage—as if a disturbed kid shoots up a school, or a disgruntled employee executes his coworkers, or a neo-Nazi guns down Sikhs at worship simply because he has identified the safest place to go open fire. All we need to do is make sure lots of citizens have guns in these locations, and voilà, problem solved!

For their part, law enforcement officials overwhelmingly hate the idea of armed civilians getting involved. As a senior FBI agent told me [7], it would make their jobs more difficult if they had to figure out which of the shooters at an active crime scene was the bad guy. And while they train rigorously for responding in confined and chaotic situations, the danger to innocent bystanders from ordinary civilians whipping out firearms is obvious. Exhibit A: the gun-wielding citizen who admitted to coming within a split second of shooting an innocent person [13]as the Tucson massacre unfolded, after initially mistaking that person for the killer, Jared Loughner.

The NRA’s LaPierre was also eager to blame violent video games and movies for what happened in Newtown, and to demonize the “unknown number of genuine monsters” walking among us. Never mind that the failure to recognize and treat mental health problems is a crucial factor in this dark equation: Of the 62 mass shootings we examined, 36 of them were murder-suicides, while assailants in seven other cases died in police shootouts, widely considered to have been “suicide by cop.”

Those who are serious about contending with the problem of mass shootings understand that collecting and studying data is crucial. Since we began our investigation after the attack in Aurora in July, we’ve heard from numerous academic researchers, legislative aides, and others wanting access to our full data set.We’ve now published it here [9].

The question now isn’t whether most Americans will take seriously the idea of turning every grammar school in the nation into a citadel. (Here, too, the NRA’s argument falls apart; an armed sheriff’s deputy at Columbine and a robust security force at Virginia Tech didn’t stop those slaughters from occurring.) Now that we’ve just witnessed the worst year for mass shootings in memory, including 20 of the most innocent of lives snuffed out, what remains to be seen is whether real reform is finally on the way on Capitol Hill. Despite years of this kind of carnage, next to nothing has been changed in our legal system with respect to how easy it is for a disturbed young man to get his hands on a military-style assault rifle and a stockpile of highly lethal ammunition.

Sen. Diane Feinstein has vowed to introduce a new ban on assault weapons when Congress reconvenes in January. President Obama has signaled that the gun issue will be a real priority going forward. But once the raw emotion of Newtown dissipates there will be the danger of slipping back into the same inertia and political stalemate so successfully cultivated by the pro-gun ideologues. Soon lawmakers will start eyeing their 2014 reelection campaigns and thinking about how much money the NRA has in its coffers to take aim at them with should they dare to dissent. This time, have we finally had enough?

Links:
[1] http://news.yahoo.com/no-rise-mass-killings-impact-huge-185700637.html
[2] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map
[3] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-victims-2012
[4] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/nra-mass-shootings-myth
[5] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/mass-shootings-investigation
[6] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/armed-civilians-do-not-stop-mass-shootings
[7] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/11/jared-loughner-mass-shootings-mental-illness
[8] http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/12/watch-after-shooting-newtown-calls-tighter-gun-laws
[9] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-mother-jones-full-data
[10] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/map-gun-laws-2009-2012
[11] http://dailycaller.com/2012/12/19/we-know-how-to-stop-school-shootings/
[12] http://www.mrctv.org/videos/media-blackout-oregon-mall-shooting-stopped-licensed-gun-carrier
[13] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2011/01/friendly_firearms.html

 

Related articles

NRA (Nazis Rule America) Gets Excited | Wants More Guns In Schools

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Gun Control, Gun Deaths, Gun Homicides, Gun Lobby, Guns, Mass Killings, NRA

NRA (Nazis Rule America) Gets Excited | Wants More Guns In Schools

The U.S.  National Rifle Association (NRA) defends America’s gun  law that allows citizens to bear firearms amid high public anger over increasing  gun violence in the country.

Speaking at a  news conference in Washington on Friday, NRA executive vice president insisted  that guns protect American children at schools.  

Wayne LaPierre  also accused the media of trying to demonize gun owners. The head of the pro-gun  lobby blamed rampant gun violence across America on violent films and video  games.

LaPierre’s  comments come as the U.S. is still struggling with the aftermath of a deadly  shooting that killed 20 children and eight adults at an elementary school in  Newtown, Connecticut.

LaPierre, whose  remarks were interrupted twice by pro-gun control protesters, disdained the  notion that stricter gun laws could have prevented “monsters” like Adam Lanza  from committing mass shootings, and wondered why schools, unlike banks, don’t  have the protection of armed forces.

Alternately  criticizing politicians, the media, and the entertainment industry, LaPierre  argued that “the press and political class here in Washington [are] so consumed  by fear and hatred of the NRA and America’s gun owners” that they overlook what  he claims is the real solution to the nation’s recent surge in mass shootings —  and what, he said, could have saved lives last week.

“What if, when  Adam Lanza started shooting his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School last  Friday, he had been confronted by qualified, armed security?” he asked. “Will  you at least admit it’s possible that 26 innocent lives might have been spared?  Is that so abhorrent to you that you would rather continue to risk the  alternative?”

LaPierre called  on Congress to put a police officer in every school in America, which according  to a Slate analysis would cost the nation at least $5.4 billion. LaPierre  recognized that local budgets are “strained,” but urged lawmakers “to act  immediately, to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers  in every school.”

He offered up  the NRA’s unique “knowledge, dedication, and resources” to assist in efforts to  train those forces, but made no mention of a fiscal contribution. 

FACTS & FIGURES

Efforts to limit  the sale and possession of assault rifles and multi-round ammunition clips, or  to require background checks and waiting periods for the purchase of guns, have  been halted for years by fears that the powerful National Rifle Association  would defeat any politician who proposed such measures. NY Times 

Since 1998, the  National Rifle Association has spent $28.2 million on lobbying in Washington and  employed between 16 and 35 lobbyists in any given year. The group has doled out  more than $3.3 million in campaign contributions and $44 million on independent  efforts to support its favored candidates in the last three federal elections.  The Huffington Post

Unlike in the  cases of previous mass murders, new evidence suggests Americans increasingly  support tougher gun control in the wake of the Newtown massacres.  CBS

According to a  recent CBS News poll, support for stricter gun laws is the highest it’s been in  a decade, surging 18 points since the spring of this year. CBS  News

The U.S.  averages 87 gun deaths each day as a function of gun violence, with an average  of 183 injured, according to the University of Chicago Crime Lab and the Centers  for Disease Control. The crime lab’s research estimates the annual cost of gun  violence to society at $100 billion. The Daily Beast

AHT/DT

https://theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com/2012/12/18/serious-think-piece-on-guns-and-pro-gun-nutjobs/

Related articles

Will Right Wing Conspiracy Theories Unleash More Right Wing Domestic Terrorism?

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Conspiracism, Conspiracy Crackpots, Conspiracy Crazies, Conspiracy Loons, Conspiracy Theories, Right Wing, Right Wing Assassinations, Right Wing Brain Is Dysfunctional, Right Wing Crackpots, Right Wing Crazies, Right Wing Culture Wars, Right Wing Extremism, Right Wing False Flag, Right Wing Fascists, Right Wing Nuts, Right Wing Terrorism, Right Wing Terrorists

How The Right’s Latest Conspiracy Theory Might Unleash a Wave of Domestic Terrorism if Obama Wins
Some types of spin are more dangerous than others.
September 25, 2012  |

Two of the Fort Stewart soldiers charged with murder and conspiracy to assassinate Obama.

In a somewhat desperate attempt to maintain morale among a Republican base that disdains its standard-bearer, a number of conservative media outlets are pushing an alternate reality in which Mitt Romney is leading in the polls by wide margins and American voters have a decidedly negative view not of the challenger, but of Barack Obama.

It’s an exceptionally dangerous game that the right-wing media are playing. If Obama wins – and according to polling guru Nate Silver, he’d have a 95 percent chance of doing so if the vote were held today – there’s a very real danger that this spin — combined with other campaign narratives that are popular among the far-right — could create a post-election environment so toxic that it yields an outburst of politically motivated violence.

A strategy that began with a series of rather silly columns comparing 2012 with 1980, and assuring jittery conservatives that a huge mass of independents was sure to break for Romney late and deliver Obama the crushing defeat he so richly deserves, entered new territory with the bizarre belief that all the polls are wrong. And not only wrong, but intentionally rigged by “biased pollsters” – including those at Fox News – in the tank for Obama. (See Alex Pareene’s piece for more on the right’s new theory that the polls are being systematically “skewed.”)

Consider how a loosely-hinged member of the right-wing fringe – an unstable individual among the third of conservative Republicans who believe Obama’s a Muslim or the almost two-thirds who think he was born in another country – expecting a landslide victory for the Republican might process an Obama victory. This is a group that has also been told, again and again, that Democrats engage in widespread voter fraud – that there are legions of undocumented immigrants, dead people and ineligible felons voting in this election (with the help of zombie ACORN). They’ve been told that Democrats are buying the election with promises of “free stuff” offered to the slothful and unproductive half of the population that pays no federal income taxes and refuses to “take responsibility for their lives” – Romney’s 47 percent.

They’ve also been told – by everyone from NRA president Wayne LaPierre to Mitt Romney himself – that Obama plans to ban gun ownership in his second term. (Two elaborate conspiracy theories have blossomed around this point. One holds that Fast and Furious – which, in reality, is much ado about very little – was designed to elevate gun violence to a point where seizing Americans’ firearms would become politically popular. The second holds that a United Nations treaty on small arms transfers (from which the United States has withdrawn) is in fact a stealthy workaround for the Second Amendment.)

And they’ve been warned in grim, often apocalyptic terms of what’s to come in a second term. The film, “2016: Obama’s America,” offers a dystopian vision of a third-world America gutted by Obama’s supposed obsession with global wealth redistribution. His re-election would bring something far worse than mere socialism – it would be marked by Kenyan anti-colonialism, in which America’s wealth is bled off as a form of reparations for centuries of inequities between the global North and South.

These kinds of fringe views aren’t relegated to the fever swamps of the right-wing blogosphere – they’re often reinforced by elected Republicans. Reps Steve King, R-Iowa, Michele Bachmann, R-Minnesota, Louie Gohmert, R-Texas and others warn that the Obama administration has been infiltrated by Islamic Extremists. An elected judge in Texas advocated a tax increase – yes, a tax increase! – in order to better arm local sheriff’s deputies whom he claimed would serve on the front-lines of the civil war likely to come should Obama be re-elected. “I’m talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms, get rid of the dictator,” he said.

They’ve been hammered with the idea that while these facts are obvious for those whose eyes are open, the media is covering it all up. Rather than a Democrat with whom people tend to connect running a good campaign against a flawed Republican candidate, many on the far-right will see an illegitimate president colluding with an array of perfidious forces, both foreign and domestic, to deny them the right to finally ‘take their country back.’

Obviously, there’s no need to fear a massive rebellion from millions of engraged Glenn Beck fans in their Hoverounds; rather, the danger is that in the aftermath of such an election, a small number of dangerously unstable anti-government extremists will take matters into their own hands — and even a small number can do significant damage.

After the 2008 election, there was a run on weapons and ammunition, and gun sellers are expecting another bonanza if Obama wins a second term. We’ve seen a dramatic wave of right-wing domestic terrorism since Barack Obama’s election. Recently, four active-duty soldiers – and five others – based at Fort Stewart, Georgia, were arrested after murdering two compatriots they suspected of betraying their plot to assassinate Obama. The group had been “stockpiling weapons and bomb parts to overthrow the U.S. government.” With $87,000 in weapons and explosives — and combat training courtesy of Uncle Sam — this was a potentially devastating plot. Just think about the havoc that a few heavily-armed men with military discipline were able to wreak in Mumbai in 2008.

It’s a real threat, but political correctness keeps it in the shadows. At a senate hearing last week, a former Department of Homeland Security official named Daryl Johnson testified that “the threat of domestic terrorism motivated by extremist ideologies is often dismissed and overlooked in the national media and within the U.S. government.” He continued:

Yet we are currently seeing an upsurge in domestic non-Islamic extremist activity, specifically from violent right-wing extremists. While violent left-wing attacks were more prevalent in the 1970s, today the bulk of violent domestic activity emanates from the right wing…. Since the 2008 presidential election, domestic non-Islamic extremists have shot 27 law enforcement officers, killing 16 of them.

That the “unskewed” polls show Romney heading towards a blow-out win is likely to lead more disturbed people to see themselves as victims of a dark plot to undermine America’s “traditional values.” It’s not the only iteration of the alternate universe that the right has conjured up in recent years – just ponder, for a moment, that the creator of “Conservapedia” – a hilariously inaccurate right-wing version of Wikipedia – has undertaken to write a distinctly conservative version of the Bible (one in which Jesus presumably inveighs against taxes and regulation dragging down job creators, and doesn’t constantly blather about the poor).

But while those efforts are often laughable, the unintended consequences of offering the hard-right a Bizarro World analysis of the 2012 election may prove deadly serious if Obama pulls out a win.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He’s the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy. Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

Related articles