Quantum Windbag
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Right-Wing Militias Are Thriving ? and the Media Won?t Talk About It | Alternet
More at the link.July 22, 2014 |
Three months after the standoff at the Cliven Bundy ranch, the Southern Poverty Law Center has issued a report War in the West: The Bundy Ranch Standoff and the American Radical Rightstating what should have been obvious at the time, but which most media coverage utterly obscured: The standoff was not some quirky, standalone event that spontaneously just happened out of the blue. Rather, it was a highly coordinated event reflecting the threat of a larger militia movement, which in turn has drawn together multiple threads of far-right ideology over the course of the last 40 years.
On the purely tactical level, the report notes that Bundys armed supporters had overwhelming tactical superiority due to their pre-positioning on the high ground above the confrontationunder the direction of a Montana militia member and Iraq War veteranwhich is a primary reason why the Bureau of Land Management wisely withdrew. On a somewhat broader level, the report warns of the events ripple effect. Just in the months since the Bundy victory, tense standoffs between the BLM and antigovernment activists have taken place across the West in Idaho, New Mexico, Texas and Utah.
Thats in addition to the violent Las Vegas rampage of Bundy supporters Jerad and Amanda Miller, which left three innocents dead along with the two shooters. And it places these events in a larger context. First in the Obama eraSince 2009, there have been 17 shooting incidents between antigovernment extremists and law enforcementbut also beyond. It stretches as far back as the Whiskey Rebellion in the 1790s, but gaining much more organizational coherence with the confluence of the racist, anti-Semitic Posse Comitatus, starting in the 1970s, and two more mainstream movements, the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s and 1980s and the Wise Use movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The Bundy ranch standoff wasnt a spontaneous response to Cliven Bundys predicament but rather a well-organized, military-type action that reflects the potential for violence from a much larger and more dangerous movement, said Mark Potok, senior fellow in the SPLCs Intelligence Project, and lead author of the report, in a statement accompanying the report. This incident may have faded from public view, but if our government doesnt pay attention, we will be caught off guard as much as the Bureau of Land Management was that day.
Maybe because the same idiots that label militia groups a terrorist organization think that fans of Insane Clown Posse are members of a criminal gang.
FBI Reveals Gang Files For Insane Clown Posse's Fans, Juggalos
But thanks for displaying your ability to believe the stupidest things the government says.