The Succubus

There are many kinds of evils, but there is a truly unique and awful quality to the evil produced by naked racial and religious bigotry. People in Red Lake, Minnesota, can tell you all about it.

What the strange saga of Jeff Weise reveals is one of the more remarkable qualities of that evil: Even when consigned to the fringes and shadows, it retains a kind of vampiric half-life that has an ability to not only survive but adapt, finding fresh clawholds wherever it can, and then fester and grow -- almost inevitably exploding in violence.

Many of the attempts at analysis so far have emphasized the peculiarity of a minority -- Weise was Native American -- adopting neo-Nazi beliefs. But for researchers of the far right, it's perhaps not so surprising. After all, it has been known for some time that the Ku Klux Klan has actively attempted to recruit tribal members from the Lakota Sioux and other reservations for years.

Some Indian leaders who have caught wind of these activities have undertaken high-profile efforts to combat recruitment by extremist organizations within the tribes, partly because the far right's virulent anti-government beliefs struck a chord with some Indians. Some adherents of the white-supremacist Christian Identity movement are known to argue that Indians are Aryans, while others voice admiration for Native Americans who insist on marrying only within their tribal nations. Such notions of "racial purity" obviously were all the common ground a kid like Jeff Weise needed.

There is also a real fascination on the far right with Native American tribal sovereignty and how it might relate to their shopworn theories about "sovereign citizenship, which was a staple of the Posse Comitatus and Montana Freemen, as well as numerous militias. Tribal sovereignty, in essence, offers the far right whole new horizons in kookery. In recent years, this has mutated into such far-right scams as the Little Shell Pembina Band.

At the same time, there is little question that the racist right has been stepping up its recruitment efforts, particularly among young people. I've discussed this phenomenon and its ramifications numerous times over the past year. It should be clear that Weise's rampage is the kind of ramification I've been warning against.

There's no sign of it slowing down, either -- largely because the issue has been getting zero attention from the Fifth Estate. But nature abhors a vacuum, and the succubus loves the shadows.

Just recently, the white supremacists at the National Vanguard [warning: hate site] boasted of their "successful" roadsigns in Florida:

In the distance, another billboard, set apart from the rest, comes slowly into focus. It shows a lovely White woman seated in a field of flowers. She has no Black arm around her. She is part of no multiracial "team." Her fair skin is softly shining in the lights as you get closer. She is the image of natural beauty, innocence, wholesomeness. You notice she bears the symbol of life on her simple White dress. The message, too, is simple: "News. For us. For a change." And then the url of our news site, NationalVanguard.org, in letters thirty feet across. Different enough and intriguing enough to get people to visit -- our kind of people. Our people.

"News. For us. For a change." Seems like a message tailored to an audience conditioned by Fox News and its conception of "balance." [More on that soon.] Which is, of course, exactly what they intend: Make themselves look like normal people. Because, for all intents and purposes, they are.

The Vanguard also boasted of another billboard in Las Vegas demanding, "Stop Immigration." Again, tailored to resonate with mainstream conservatives, at least those of the Michelle Malkin/VDare crowd.

The haters on the far right are also becoming much bolder about operating openly. The same characters at National Vanguard also organized an attack on various supposedly "pro-Jewish" professors:

A few weeks ago, participants on an anti-Semitic Web site became angry when a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles refused to participate in an exchange of e-mail messages.

The professor was Jewish, and the Web site responded by placing photographs of and biographic material about UCLA professors and anti-Semitic diatribes online. In recent days, the Web site ? Vanguard News Network ? has expanded its campaign, which it says is designed to draw attention to the high percentage of Jewish professors on law schools? faculties.

The Web site is now publishing a variety of information ? photographs, results of Google searches, phone numbers ? of faculty members who are Jewish (or have Jewish-sounding names) at leading law schools all over the United States.

Among the institutions who have faculty members discussed by name on the Web site are Georgetown, Harvard, New York, Stanford and Yale Universities; and the Universities of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Most of the comments attack Jewish faculty members at law schools, with a theme being that they make up a larger share of law school faculties than do Jews in the U.S. population, and that this over-representation signifies Jewish control of American society.

The attacks were inspired by the wise refusal of Eugene Volokh to participate in an exchange with them.

All this is happening even as the far right, to all appearances, is at a real low tide in sheer numbers. A recent Judy Thomas piece in the Kansas City Star explored this further:

Despite disarray in the anti-government movement, no one should let their guard down, said Leonard Zeskind, director of the Kansas City-based Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights.

"At the end of the day, this movement never loses the impulse for violence," Zeskind said.

"They reconfigure it, and they think about whether they need small cells, big cells, underground armies, lone-wolf killers. But the fact of the matter is the pulse of violence just never goes out on this thing. And that's really the ugly truth."

Those left in the white-supremacist movement agree that the turmoil in their organizations could lead to increased violence.

"What's changed is that because of the way the country's going, it's basically sent the luke-warmers and the fence-sitters running for cover,? said August B. Kreis III, national director of the Aryan Nations, a white-supremacist group. "And the only people that will really stay are the hard-core people."

But Kreis said he preferred it that way.

"I want the hardest of the hard," he said. "When enough white people say that we've had enough, we're not going to take it any more and we realize now that blood is going to have to be spilled, then it's going to get bad. I really believe that, and I'm really hoping I'm here to see that."

A former Kansas City Ku Klux Klan leader also says the movement today is not for "wimps."

"After the bomb went off in Oklahoma City, the White Knights completely collapsed," said Dennis Mahon, who now lives in Tulsa, Okla. "They shut down the post-office box, they shut down the hot line. They were scared to death. They just went down the hidey hole."

The militia movement also went into hiding after the bombing, Mahon said. He said now a different strategy is needed.

"There'll be a time when we can go ahead and go with leadership movements," he said. "But right now, I think it's just we all want to overthrow the government and get a state of our own. There's many ways to do that. It's called small cells and lone wolfism."

The apparent downturn is deceptive in another important way: It lulls the rest of society into thinking the problem has been licked. But what we have known historically of the far right is that it is cyclical in nature -- and the low tides are almost inevitably followed by a waxing and finally a high tide. What's more, the remaining "true believers" who are active during the low periods inevitably seem more radicalized, more likely to spiral crazily into violence.

As Lenny Zeskind says, these haters never really go away. They're like demonic versions of the Energizer Bunny: Combined, they become part of the Succubus, which just keeps on going and going and sucking the life and souls of whatever hapless victims it encounters.

And chief among these are people like Jeff Weise: vulnerable, angry, unstable. Ready to explode.

People who study the far right have known many of these people over the years: Gordon Kahl. Robert Matthews. Tim McVeigh.

One of the most memorable of these, for me, was a man named David Lewis Rice.

On Christmas Eve 1985, Charles and Annie Goldmark were at home with their sons Derek, 12, and Colin, 10, preparing for a holiday dinner when the doorbell rang. It was Rice, a 27-year-old unemployed transient, posing as a taxicab driver delivering a package. He brandished a toy gun and forced his way into their home, then set about using chloroform to render all four Goldmarks unconscious. He then proceeded to kill them slowly, using a steam iron and a knife that he used to insert into at least one of the victim's brains. Annie was pronounced dead on the spot, Colin pronounced dead on arrival, while Charles died there a short while later; Derek finally succumbed 37 days later.

But Rice wasn't just a deranged loony -- though he probably fit that description too. He also was a deranged loony who had been set into action by the malicious lies of a group of right-wing haters, whose venom became his inspiration, as the HistoryLink piece explains:

David Rice, a former steel worker from Colorado, joined an extremist group in Washington called the Duck Club. Although the Duck Club was almost defunct, the Seattle chapter still functioned. The group convinced Rice that Charles Goldmark was Jewish and a Communist. (Charles Goldmark's parents, John and Sally Goldmark, had won a highly publicized libel case in 1964 when they were accused of being Communists.)

The Goldmark case is a centerpiece of James Aho's study of the far right, This Thing of Darkness: A Sociology of the Enemy (which I've discussed previously). Aho goes into more detail about what drove Rice, as well as the circumstances surrounding his decision to kill:

Conversion (resocialization) ... occurs not through brainwashing of passive victims or through obsessive self-conversion. It takes place through active efforts of the disciple, sometimes indifferent to ideology or theology as such, to solidify and preserve social ties with his mentors.

... Ed Fasel [fictitious name] was head of the local Duck Club chapter. It was from Ed that Rice received the tragic misinformation that Charles and Annie Goldmark were leading Seattle Communists. In the course of discussions concerning local subversives and crooks who were presumably frustrating Rice's efforts to secure a job, Fasel, mistaking Charles for his father John, related to Rice that the Goldmarks had been investigated and that Charles was "regional director of the American Communist Party." Rice took this to mean that Charles was the "highest obtainable target I could reach, the greatest value informationally." After handcuffing the Goldmarks, Rice intended to interrogate them about the next person in the conspiratorial hierarchy, possibly to preempt at the last moment the impending invasion of alien troops [a conspiracy theory to which Rice subscribed].

What occasioned Fasel to dredge up a name associated with an event that had occurred two decades previously in another part of the state? In a Seattle Port Commission election during the summer of 1985, one of the candidates was Jim Wright, a Republican. Wright's campaign manager was none other than Ashley Holden, a defendant in the Goldmark trial. [Holden had been a leading torchbearer in the McCarthyite "Red fever" that swept Washington state in the late 1940s and '50s, and had been one of the people who falsely accused the Goldmarks in print of being part of the Communist Party.] Upon discovering this unusual link, the Seattle media jumped on it, and the name "Goldmark," with its unfortunate connotations, "got out again," to use one informant's phrase.

In my interview with him, Holden convincingly insisted that he knew nothing of the Duck Club nor any of its members. "I deplored the murder," he said. "There is no question," he went on, parroting local wisdom, "Rice was demented."

I have met some of the old leaders of the Duck Club, including "Fasel" -- whose real name was Homer Brand. They reminded me of Richard Butler: they had a moral stench about them like rotting corpses. Of course, they never faced legal liability for their role in the murders. But they had blood on their hands, just as surely as does the "Libertarian National Socialist Green Party" and whoever else gave Jeff Weise his inspiration.

Much of the conventional wisdom coming out of the Red Lake massacre was that Jeff Weise was "deeply troubled." No doubt in coming days and weeks we'll hear how this was an "isolated incident." How "the only person responsible" for what happened was Weise himself. Heaven forfend that anyone should suggest that the kind of hatred of multiculturalism so common on the mainstream right nowadays -- and so significant a factor in Weise's beliefs -- might have played a role in fueling this rampage.

That's how the Succubus lives. It dwells in the shadows -- unseen by those who purposely deflect their vision from it, because it serves their own interests to do so -- until it becomes strong enough to venture out into daylight. And then it kills.

Every time.

The fruits of hate

Don't you think it's kind of funny that when the rabid right goes a-hunting for people with "a unique hostility toward Western traditional and commonsense attitudes," people whose "true raison d'etre is in practice nothing other than to destroy to destroy utterly whatever allegiance a young person might have to traditional conceptions in morality, religion, politics and culture," they only seem to cobble up relatively insignificant figures on the left?

Because it's also kind of funny how many times the most horrifying cases involving young people whose senses of morality, religion, politics and culture have been monstrously warped by outside forces with a hostility to basic decency turn out, in fact, to involve young people whose beliefs emanate from the far right, like Minnesota teenager Jeff Weise, who just shot up his reservation high school:

Alternately using the online pennames Todesengel_German for "angel of death"_and "NativeNazi," Weise wrote several posts in which he said he believed Hitler and the National Socialist movement that embroiled the world in war and caused millions of deaths got a bad rap.

"When I was growing up, I was taught (like others) that Nazi's were evil and that Hitler was a very evil man ect," he wrote in one posting replete with misspellings. "Of course, not for a second did I believe this. Upon reading up on his actions, the ideals and issues the German Third Reich addressed, I began to see how much of a like had been painted about them. They truly were doing it for the better."

In other posts, he wrote that he believed a National Socialist movement could work on his reservation and planned on trying to recruit some members at school when it started up last fall.

"The only ones who oppose my views are the teachers at the high school, and a large portion of the student body who think a Nazi is a Klansman, or a White Supremacist thug. Most of the Natives I know have been poisoned by what they were taught in school."

This is an unusual case in that it involves a minority, but that only illustrates the larger point: Hateful far-right philosophies poison many wells, and are clearly capable of crossing boundaries. (Another prime example of this is the African-American hate cult calling itself the United Nuwabian Nation of Moors.)

Weise's hostility to multiculturalism was well fed by what he could find on the Internet, the bulk of which was produced by white supremacists, including an outfit called Nazi.org, the National Alliance, and Don Black's neo-Nazi Stormfront organization. You remember: the same folks who broke up Jesse Jackson's Florida appearance in support of George W. Bush in 2000.

Here's a reality check for the mainstream right: right-wing extremism has always been, and always will be, the most vicious proponent of beliefs that destroy the basic fabric of civilization. They worship violence and bigotry and racial and religious hatred. That's as true in the United States as it is in the Middle East.

When you go looking for threats -- and the people who both associate with and benefit from them -- a good place to start might be the American right's own bloody back yard.

Bo to the rescue

[James "Bo" Gritz at a Preparedness Expo in Puyallup, Washington, in 1998.]

Good gawd, if the Terry Schiavo drama -- and especially the atrocious role played in it by Jeb Bush -- weren't enough of a three-ring circus already, it's now drawn the participation of the extremist right. We're escalating from travesty to potential tragedy.

Namely, my old friend Bo Gritz, has leapt into the fray with a chorus of approval from World Net Daily and The Free Republic:

Former Green Beret Commander Bo Gritz is trying to conduct a citizen's arrest of Terri Schiavo's husband and the judge who ordered the brain-damaged Florida woman's feeding tube removed so she can be legally starved.

The 66-year-old retired Army Lt. Colonel with his wife, Judy, arrived in Florida from their home in Nevada yesterday with the intent of arresting anyone involved in removing the life-sustaining tube.

Gritz came bearing a notarized "citizen's arrest warrant" addressed to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Attorney General Charlie Crist.

His intent is to "paper" state and federal law enforcement offices with his warrant today – one day before Pinellas Circuit Court Judge George Greer's deadline to begin denial of food and water to Terri Schiavo.

Gritz says the "arrest" is designed to allow officials additional options as the Florida governor and legislature maneuver to save the woman from starvation.

Gritz says he successfully used the arrest-tool against federal law enforcement in August 1992 when he intervened in the so-called Ruby Ridge incident in Idaho and brought what was left of Randy Weaver's family down the hill without further bloodshed. Sammy, the 14-year-old Weaver boy, was killed along with his mother, Vicki, and U.S. Marshal William Degan. Randy Weaver and another man, Kevin Harris, were wounded by police gunfire.

Er, actually, that wasn't what happened. Bo showed up at Ruby Ridge and read out his arrest warrant at the blockade. But these threats were utterly ignored. In fact, since he was present, and Weaver was a big fan of Gritz's, the FBI decided instead to see if he could negotiate an end to the standoff. And, in fact, he did. But the arrest warrants were not only a nonfactor, they were something of a joke.

Ever since then, Gritz has made a career of showing up at standoffs and other celebrated cases and touting his public reputation, but having no effect whatsoever except perhaps to make things worse. I described in Chapter 7 of In God's Country his arrival at the Freemen standoff in Montana:

The media horde was ready and waiting for Colonel James "Bo" Gritz when he flew in to Jordan. Which, as far as Gritz seemed to be concerned, was just fine.

For that matter, possibly the most dangerous place to be that day in Montana was between Bo Gritz and a television camera. Scarcely had his light plane touched down at the Jordan airstrip before Gritz climbed out and walked out to meet the waiting newsmen. Right behind him was the man responsible for Gritz's chief claim to fame: Randy Weaver, the martyred widower of Ruby Ridge.

It had been nearly a month since the FBI's standoff with the Freemen had begun, and the situation seemingly was going nowhere, although negotiators said they were making progress. Gritz and Weaver, following through on a promise Gritz made earlier that week on his short-wave radio program, had arrived to try to broker an end to the confrontation.

It was a nasty, windblown Thursday, with gusts hitting 60 miles an hour, and Gritz's entourage seemed intent on getting out of the winds and on with the mission. Gritz held the cameras at bay, chatting briefly with the newsmen, while Weaver and Gritz's two right-hand men, Jack McLamb and Jerry Gillespie, got out of the light plane and into a large pickup. Then, saying he'd make a statement later, the onetime Green Beret colonel climbed into the truck and headed off to meet with the Freemen -- or at least try to.

Gritz was far from the first person from the Patriot movement to show up on the scene. Only two days after the standoff started, a Kansas militia activist named Stewart Waterhouse and a cohort, Barry Nelson, took advantage of the loose perimeter around the compound and sneaked onto the Clark ranch, bolstering the Freemen's numbers in the process. The FBI clamped down on activity in the area and set up a checkpoint at the four-corner intersection near the Brusett post office. The media were confined to a hill that overlooked the Clark ranch from a considerable distance.

Over the next few weeks, Jordan saw a steady trickle of militia folks come in and out of town. A small group of supporters from Medford, Oregon, took the long drive out with food supplies and a few guns, but they were stopped at the perimeter by the FBI, their guns confiscated, and turned back. Kamala Webb, a Bozeman woman who heads up a Militia of Montana group in Gallatin County, drove up with another small group, including Dan Petersen's stepson, Keven Entzel. They too had food supplies for the Freemen; they too were turned back. And then there was the occasional solitary supporter, like Bill Goehler of Marysville, California, who drove out on his Honda 750 motorcycle and demonstrated in front of the FBI checkpoint by leaning against his bike and holding an American flag upside down.

The most colorful of all the arrivals so far had been "Stormin'" Norman Olson, the onetime commander of the Michigan Militia, who visited Jordan during the third week of the standoff with his longtime sidekick, Ray Southwell. He was there to support the Freemen, he said, and to make sure the FBI didn't try to pull any fast ones.

"I don't think they should surrender," Olson said. "I think they are doing the right thing, and they ought to stay where they are."

Tension was building around the compound at that point. It was April 16, only three days away from the Oklahoma City anniversary, and many townsfolk in Jordan were growing fearful that the Patriots would descend on their town and violence would erupt. Olson only made matters worse, saying he was there to organize a "national response team" that would "meet Janet Reno and the FBI, wherever they attack in the future. Waco, Ruby Ridge, now Montana. Where is it going to end?"

Olson tried several times to enter the compound, but was rebuffed by the FBI, even when he carried a stuffed animal and a Bible and claimed he wanted to go in to "minister" to the group. Finally, on April 19, Olson gave up in disgust.

... Four days later, Bo Gritz, always more affable and media-savvy, flew in to the Jordan airstrip on his own mission: to negotiate an end to the standoff, much as he did on Ruby Ridge. After his initial bow to reporters, he and his entourage headed up the gravel road to Brusett to see if they could talk their way onto the Clark ranch.

They couldn't. At the checkpoint, a grim-faced Montana Highway Patrolman told Gritz he’d have to get clearance from the FBI. A little nonplussed, Gritz turned to the waiting news cameras and did what comes most naturally to him -- he held a press conference.

"We are going to try to do for the Freemen and FBI and the American people what we did at Ruby Ridge," he told the gathered reporters. "We don't want any more Wacos and I don't want to wait for Janet Reno to have a bad hair day to have one."

While Gritz held forth, Randy Weaver and Jerry Gillespie waited inside the pickup. Jack McLamb, on the other hand, stood outside the cluster of newspeople encircling Gritz, looking over the various lawmen who stood nearby. McLamb's specialty in the Patriot movement is recruiting policemen to the belief system; his staredown with the officers at the checkpoint had the look of someone sizing up potential believers.

Gritz spent about twenty minutes with the reporters. He told them he was unsure what standing, if any, he had with the people inside the compound. "I don't think I have any rapport at all, but I got probably the only plan.

"If the Freemen throw me out, then it gives a message to America: they don't care. If the FBI stopped me, isn't it kind of stupid? If we do bring them out, then the FBI can go home where they belong."

When he was done, Gritz got into the pickup with McLamb and headed back up the gravel road to the FBI headquarters, at the Garfield County Fairground just outside Jordan. Gritz walked in alone to talk things over with officials there; his three friends waited outside in the pickup, munching on apples and listening to Garth Brooks tapes. About an hour later, Gritz emerged, got into the pickup without a word, and drove back to the Jordan airstrip, where he had a motor home parked next to his Cessna. Evidently the FBI had said no, at least for the day.

Eventually, Gritz was allowed to negotiate with the Freemen, but it was fruitless, to no one's great surprise:

On the fourth day, Gritz gave up, evidently in disgust. After only three hours, he and Jack McLamb left the Clark ranch no closer to a surrender than when they entered. The Freemen, he said, believed Yahweh had erected an "invisible barrier" around the compound that made them invulnerable. If the feds wanted to negotiate, they said, perhaps onetime Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork could come out to Jordan and take up residence while talks progressed. Failing that, they’d accept Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Or better yet, Colorado State Senator Charles Duke, who they said understood their beliefs.

Gritz and his entourage, wearing baffled scowls, packed up and flew out of town that afternoon. The standoff had reached 38 days with no end in sight.

Gritz's next big adventure was to get involved in the Linda Wiegand case -- involving a mother who had fled with her children as part of a custody dispute -- which wound up getting him charged with attempted kidnapping (of which he was eventually acquitted).

Then, of course, there was the whole attempted suicide thing. Bo eventually remarried, this time to a woman named Judy Kirsch, who was raised in an Oklahoma Christian Identity church.

When I knew Gritz, he worked hard to downplay his Identity involvement -- and, in fact, he had distanced himself from those associations in part because of a public dispute with the Rev. Pete Peters (the nation's leading Identity preacher) over the latter's pronouncements urging the death sentence for homosexuals. However, his marriage to Kirsch has erased much of that old reticence, though not all of it. As the ADL explained:

Even since unreservedly accepting Christian Identity, upon his marriage to Judy Kirsch in 1999, he has avoided the bigoted language typical of that movement.

Through Kirsch, Gritz became active in Dan Gayman's Missouri-based Church of Israel, attending and speaking at its religious celebrations. The influence of Gayman and Christian Identity led Gritz to rename, and spiritualize, the Center for Action. It became the Center for Action -- Fellowship of Eternal Warriors. Pursuing his new mission, and adding a religious gloss to old themes, he "anointed" a small number of God's "Israelpeople" to "meet the increasing challenge of Satan’s globalism." He spent a year, he said, identifying a dozen "warrior-priests" who clearly "embody the strengths of God’s Israelpeople" -- including old friend Richard Flowers, Steve Kukla of the Oklahoma-based Sovereign Studios and Sheldon Robinson, co-defendant in the Weigand case. Gritz recruits new candidates on his Web site, telling readers: "Contact me if you feel that God has called you to be a spiritual warrior for these last days."

The Fellowship of Eternal Warriors represents the most thorough merger to date of Gritz's paramilitary training, opposition to the federal government and religious ardor. While he has since parted ways with the Church of Israel and Dan Gayman, his efforts to prepare for spiritual warfare remain undiminished. Gritz now attends both the Christian Identity Rose Hill Covenant Church in Oklahoma and the Inter-Continental Church of God in California, continues to promote SPIKE training, whose newest edition qualifies participants as a "Master Blaster," and runs the Center for Action. His religious beliefs remain somewhat vague, however, in part because he has not, at least publicly, articulated the racial implications of his Identity faith. Nonetheless, Gritz has upped the ante by enlisting God against the government and its supporters. He says:

I can assure you that if I was ever convinced that it was God's Will for me to commit an act of violence against the laws of our land, I would hesitate only long enough to, like Gideon, be certain. I would then do all within my power to accomplish what I felt he required of me. . . If God does call me into the Phinehas Priesthood . . . my defense will be the truth as inspired by the Messiah.

This latter reference is particularly disturbing, especially for those who've read Chapter 6 of In God's Country and understand the "Phineas Priesthood" reference. Essentially, though, the notion of the "Priesthood" is that one enters it by committing a killing of someone who has broken "God's law"; it is easily the most radical and potentially dangerous component of the extremist right's belief systems, especially within the context of Identity.

This is the kind of element that a scene like the Schiavo case -- with all its attendant supercharged hyperbole -- was bound to attract. People like Gritz are drawn to these events like flies to cloaca.

And of course, when it all spirals out of control, people like Jeb Bush and Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly -- you know, those "mainstream" conservatives who have thrown gasoline on this bonfire at every step of the way -- will somehow find a way to blame the carnage on liberals.

That fanatical contingent

Jonathan Chait, filling in for Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, raised many eyebrows when he wrote earlier this week:

I actually agree with Marshall and the DLC on the suicidal purity of the Democratic party's left wing, embodied by the Howard Dean movement and its fanatical internet contingent, even if I disagree with his support for Lieberman in particular.

Chait appears to be now joining the chorus of "moderates" on the left accusing the activist left of fomenting irrational hatred of Bush and the right, especially expressed by the "fanatical internet contingent" and its "suicidal purity."

Funny thing about that. It was only a few short months ago that the leading example of "irrational Bush hatred" offered up by wags on the right was this piece by Jonathan Chait:

[Bush] reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school--the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it. I hate the way he walks--shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks--blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudo-populist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him. I hate his lame nickname-bestowing-- a way to establish one's social superiority beneath a veneer of chumminess (does anybody give their boss a nickname without his consent?). And, while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more.

As Bob Somerby pointed out at the time:

Much of the column was a critique of Bush policy. But Chait framed the piece as a tongue-in-cheek confession of his visceral "hatred" for Bush. And it isn’t just Bush’s policies, Chait says. "I hate the way he walks," the scribe writes -- "shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo." Chait also hates the fact that Bush gives nicknames, and says, "I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more."

Does Chait really "hate" the way Bush holds his arms? If so, he ought to be sent to a home. But, although Chait’s piece was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, the result was one thousand percent predictable. In yesterday's New York Times, David Brooks discarded Chait's serious ruminations -- and quoted the list of his trivial complaints ... . Gravely faking for his national audience, Brooks then drew the scripted conclusion: Can't you see how crazy these liberals are? Can't you see that irrational "hatred" is driving these complaints about Bush?

Guys like Jonathan Chait did their best to thoughtlessly hand ammunition to right-wing propagandists about irrational Bush hatred from the left.

So how is it that they're the ones pointing fingers now?

Our little Osamas

Now that the dust has settled from the Lefkow murders, it's clear that the killer was not connected to any known hate group. That idiosyncratic outcome might ordinarily leave us to write it off to the vagaries of crime in our society, but it's worth reflecting a little on what the incident, perhaps incidentally, revealed.

The most striking feature of the incident involved the reaction by the extremist right to the murders: openly cheering them, and urging similar action for other judges. This is consistent, it should be observed, with the far right's historic approach to violence that benefits their cause: Even if they cannot claim credit for it, they will exploit it.

It's called piggybacking, and it was evident, as I've explained previously, in the aftermath of September 11, particularly in the actions of the anthrax killer. The domestic terrorists of the American far right see any kind of violent disturbance as an opportunity to spread chaos, which is the centerpiece of their long-term strategy.

This is why I've argued consistently that any serious "war on terror" will, by its nature, consistently recognize domestic terrorism as a significant component of the real threat that confronts us.

Unfortunately, this has been twisted by some of my critics on the right into something I (for obvious reasons) didn't say, to wit, that "if (and only if) our enemy list is broadened to include right-wing domestic terrorists, then the left will recognize that its values are threatened and react by confronting both the domestic terrorists and the Islamic fundamentalists."

What I am arguing is that any serious war on terror will of its own encompass the domestic-terror threat and deal with it appropriately. The current war on terror is predicated on a symmetrical military response, which is exactly the wrong approach to an asymmetrical threat.

It's not that domestic terrorism should be given the focus of our approach; rather, it's that the failure to focus on it at all leaves us vulnerable in a way that also reveals the incoherence of our antiterrorism policy. The reason I keep stressing our handling of domestic terrorism is that it gives us a prism for understanding what's wrong with our ongoing response to the broader phenomenon of terrorism.

Nicholas Kristof's recent column on our "Homegrown Osamas" touched on some of this, discussing the white supremacists whose ugliness was again on display for all to see in this most recent incident:

After the Oklahoma City bombing, American law enforcement authorities cracked down quite effectively on domestic racists and militia leaders. But Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors 760 hate groups with about 100,000 members, notes that after 9/11, the law enforcement focus switched overwhelmingly to Arabs.

The Feds are right to be especially alarmed about Al Qaeda. But we also need to be more vigilant about the domestic white supremacists, neo-Nazis and militia members. After all, some have more W.M.D. than Saddam.

Two years ago, for example, a Texan in a militia, William Krar, was caught with 25 machine guns and other weapons, a quarter-million rounds of ammunition, 60 pipe bombs and enough sodium cyanide to kill hundreds of people.

We were too complacent about Al Qaeda and foreign terrorists before 9/11. And now we're too complacent about homegrown threats.

The problem was underscored by a recent report in a conservative publication of a plea by white supremacists for an alliance with Islamist radicals:

In a letter posted on its Web site the head of the white supremacist group Aryan Nations offers his thanks to radical Islamic terrorists and extends the group's hand of friendship.

Aryan Nations National Director August Kreis writes (www.aryan-nations.org), "We as an organization will also endeavor to aid all those who subvert, disrupt and are (sic) malignant in nature to our enemies. Therefore I offer my most sincere best-wishes to those who wage holy Jihad against the infrastructure of the decadent, weak and Judaic-influenced societal infrastructure of the West. I send a message of thanks and well-wishes to the methods and works of groups on the Islamic front against the jew such as Al-Qaeda and Sheik Usama Bin Ladin, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and to all Jihadis worldwide who fight for the glory of the Khilafah and the downfall of the anti-life and anti-freedom System prevalent on this earth today.

Kreis continues by saying (sic), "I ask our Islamic fellow fighters against jewry to remember the co-operation between Mufti Haj Mohammad Amin al-Husseini and Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler during the last century and to remember that all that is of the past it is our duty to surpass!"

Allying themselves with "real" terrorists has always been something of a fantasy of the extremist right. And the history of such gestures is that they have always been refused with scorn, for good reason.

Nonetheless, such gestures do underscore the reality that Islamist radicalism is a form of right-wing extremism, and its most natural allies in America are not -- as people like David Horowitz and Powerline are fond of suggesting -- on the left, but on the far right. The claims to the contrary are just another instance of the "up is down" kind of Newspeak that has become pervasive in conservative discourse.

But that's not to say that the response to American neo-Nazi "lone wolf" terrorists and white-supremacist terror cells should be the same as that to Al Qaeda. For all their occasional similarities, there are important differences between them, and the response has to reflect that as well.

My sometime correspondent Dr. Jeffrey Bale of the Center for Proliferation Studies outlines some important caveats when assessing the domestic right-wing threat, and they're well worth heeding:

[T]he fact is that the overwhelming majority of acts of domestic right-wing violence have up until now been incidents of opportunistic street violence, as opposed to carefully planned and organized campaigns of terrorism, which are an entirely different thing. There are of course small cells of extremists who have been and still are busily plotting acts of more serious terrorism, but fortunately most of their actions have hitherto been interdicted or failed because the would-be perpetrators were 1) not terribly sophisticated from an operational standpoint, 2) easily infiltrated or "stung" by members of the law enforcement community, or 3) so amateurish as to be unable to maintain secrecy about their plans.

But rat-packing members of "out-groups," setting off the occasional homemade bomb at an abortion clinic, shooting an occasional "enemy" (like Alan Berg or abortion doctors), or robbing banks to fund other violent or criminal activities (like the Phineas Priesthood) -- however horrible these actions are, especially for the actual victims -- are in no way comparable in scale or impact to the systematic, large-scale campaigns of terrorism that have been and continue to be carried out in other parts of the world by well-trained, operationally sophisticated groups of professional terrorists. Anyone who is intimately familiar with the details of numerous operations carried out by left-wing and neo-fascist terrorists in Europe, left-wing and right-wing terrorists in Latin America, or religious terrorists in various parts of the Muslim world -- as I am -- cannot fail to be impressed, by way of contrast, by the extraordinarily amateurish quality of most acts of domestic right-wing violence. This certainly doesn't mean that they should be ignored or that their perpetrators should not be severely punished, only that it is apparent that the kinds of serious terrorist actions carried out by the Order and McVeigh have been -- fortunately -- relatively rare in this country.

Moreover, the fact that small, violence-prone fringe groups are capable of carrying out gruesome acts of violence does not mean that they are politically, sociologically, or culturally significant, in the sense that they represent extensive constituencies or broad-based social forces in the U.S. The fact is that such groups have long been confined to the margins of society and politics in America -- unlike, say, the general Christian right -- and short of a total social breakdown that is likely to be where they remain.

I agree with most of this analysis, though I differ on a couple of significant points:

-- The ongoing ideological traffic between the mainstream right and its extremist counterpoint is increasingly blurring the line behind which the far right has traditionally remained. I am not so complacent about the prospects of their remaining there, especially given the likelihood of future terrorist attacks that will further traumatize the national psyche.

-- I disagree that domestic right-wing violence has been "relatively rare" in this country. Relative, perhaps, to the Middle East, but not to America insofar as it has experience terrorism on its soil.

As I explained before:

It's true that, generally speaking, domestic terrorists are neither as competent nor as likely to pose a major threat as most international terrorists, particularly Al Qaeda. And the belief systems that feed the domestic terrorists have not become pervasive in popular Western culture the way Al Qaeda and Wahhabism generally have insinuated themselves in the Islamic world (though there has been an increasing blurring of the lines between the mainstream and extremist right in recent years).

Nonetheless, given the right actors, the right weapons, and the right circumstances, they remain nearly as capable of inflicting serious harm on large numbers of citizens as their foreign counterparts. This is especially true because they are less likely to arouse suspicion and can more readily blend into the scenery.

Most of all, what they lack in smarts or skill, they make up for in numbers: Since the early 1990s, the vast majority of planned terrorist acts on American soil -- both those that were successfully perpetrated and those apprehended beforehand -- have involved white right-wing extremists. Between 1995 and 2000, over 42 such cases (some, like Eric Rudolph, involving multiple crimes) were identifiable from public records.

Some of these were potentially quite lethal, such as a planned attack on a propane facility near Sacramento that, had it been successful, would have killed several thousand people living in its vicinity. Krar's cyanide bomb could have killed hundreds. Fortunately, none of these plotters have proven to be very competent.

The rate has slowed since 2000, but the cases have continued to occur. And someday, our luck is going to run out. Certainly, if we are counting on their incompetence, the fact that the anthrax killer (whose attacks in fact were quite successful in their purpose) has not yet been caught. Likewise, if Al Qaeda attacks again, that will likely signal a fresh round of piggybacking.

It's vital that we take domestic terrorism seriously not because it represents a threat as immediately lethal as Al Qaeda. It doesn't. It's vital because we need to keep it that way.

The far right's clear willingness to piggyback on all kinds of public violence means that the subsequent aftershocks of a major terrorist attack could prove to be equally devastating to the national well-being. Their small-potatoes aspect belies their ability to wreak tremendous havoc.

We cannot say we are dealing with terrorism seriously until we confront this reality.

[Originally posted Monday at The American Stree.]

Blogging about

I've got a post up at The American Street on "Our little Osamas". Be sure to check it out.

John McKay at archy has an interesting take on the role of nationalism in genocidal atrocities, with an interview from Yugoslavia.

Discover Your Mommas Network makes me laugh. Hard.

Check out the very, very nice redesign by Eric Muller at Is That Legal?, as well as his very thoughtful piece on judging our ancestors. Eric's redesign may inspire me to finally do something with this site.

Hal Turner: The right's Ward Churchill

One of the real consequences of the right-wing transmission belt is that it has an amplifying effect. It's often described as an echo chamber, but what actually occurs is more of a two-sided dynamic of upwardly spiraling ugliness: the mainstream "transmitters" indulge in a little bit of rhetorical nastiness, and soon those on the extremist right are playing the same tune, but even more hatefully, more viciously, more ... fascistically.

They keep pushing the envelope, and after awhile, they can't push any farther without becoming explicit bigots and unmistakable fascists. So they push farther anyway.

Usually, Michael Savage provides some of the more vivid examples of this amplification -- as when he said of the tsunami disaster, "It's not a tragedy. I wouldn't call it a tragedy." However, Savage occupies a somewhat unique space somewhere exactly in between the mainstream and genuine extremism; most "transmitters" tend to align more clearly with movement conservatism (see especially Rush Limbaugh) or the extremist far right.

One of the most repugnant of these latter figures is the fellow who pushed himself to the fore during last week's investigation into the murders of a federal judge's husband and mother in Chicago: Hal Turner.

Turner's case is particularly instructive, because he not only is unusually -- even eagerly and proudly -- vile, he also has history of activity within the Republican Party. On top of that, he reportedly has (or had) a friendship with one of the conservative media's leading figures: Limbaugh Jr. himself, Sean Hannity.

What it illustrates is how the dynamic of the transmission belt works: the extremist side of the equation provides the mainstream right-wing agitators with a fresh supply of outrage and talking points, and the mainstream connections give the far right a legitimacy, a connection with the larger political discourse, they would not otherwise have.

During the 1990s, Turner made a habit of calling into Hannity's WABC radio program as "Hal from North Bergen," one of the show's regular callers. "Hal" liked to say increasingly outrageous things: in August 1998, according to the One People's Project profile [Google cache],
he remarked on Hannity's show that "if it weren't for the white man, blacks would still be swinging from the trees in Africa." Hannity not only failed to rebuke "Hal" for the remark, he continued plugging into Turner whenever he called.

Turner in fact had a history of quasi-racist activism, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which profiled Turner last year:

As early as 1994, he was defending racism, holding a rally for New York radio talk show host Bob Grant, who had been fired from his show for making racist comments about blacks. In the late 199s, Turner often called in to local radio shows as "Hal from North Bergen," telling their hosts things like, "The problem with police brutality is that cops don't use it enough."

All this culminated in 2000, when Turner stepped forward to run for the Republican nomination for Congress in his home district in New Jersey. He appeared on Hannity's Fox News program and received his old friend's endorsement. Turner himself has claimed that during this time, he and Hannity were "good friends." Hannity himself has since remained mum on the subject -- because as noxious as Turner may have been before 2000, afterward, his true stripes became unmistakable.

Turner lost that race, and it became something of a turning point for his ideological career. Where before his bigotry had been of the "edgy" variety, he soon openly embraced the ideology of various hate groups and white supremacists, as the SPLC explained:

In 2000, Turner sought the local Republican nomination for Congress, and was enraged when GOP leaders instead supported Theresa de Leon, a dark-skinned Hispanic who was the chief financial officer for New York's Legal Aid Society and the mother of 10 children. It was at this moment that Turner had a reported "epiphany," deciding the system was rigged against white men and abandoning all ties to the mainstream.

Not long after, he started up "The Hal Turner Show," renting time on shortwave radio maverick Allan Weiner's WBCQ, located in Monticello, Maine.

Building up a substantial audience and paying for the five-nights-a-week, two-hour show with advertising and donations, he became a favorite of many on the radical right, including several in the neo-Nazi National Alliance*. After neo-Nazi World Church of the Creator* leader Matt Hale was arrested in late 2002 for allegedly soliciting the murder of a federal judge, Turner openly supported Hale.

"I don't think killing a federal judge in these circumstances would be wrong," he said, referring to the judge's ruling against Hale's group in a copyright dispute over its name. "It may be illegal, but it wouldn't be wrong."

Turner's reptilian nature, of course, was revealed for all to see this past week as he expanded on the earlier remarks -- "I have rendered an opinion that what she did on the bench makes her worthy of being killed, yeah" -- as well as posting "Gotcha!" over a picture of Judge Lefkow after the killings in her home by someone, it turned out, who had no connection to the white-supremacist movement.

This isn't the first time that Turner has threatened judges. As Farmer at Corrente details, citing Daryle Jenkins' One People's Project material:

In one instance he has threatened to incite people to "dispense revenge" on Federal Judge Maryanne Trump Barry and New Jersey NAACP officials and their attorneys after a fire in North Bergen claimed the lives of four people in 1998. Turner charged the NAACP with the deaths because they filed an anti-discrimination lawsuit against the local fire department. Barry was the judge who presided and imposed a hiring freeze on the department until the matter was resolved. After the fire, Turner, a real estate agent with access to the names and addresses of virtually everyone who lives in the state, wrote a letter that appeared on deja.com (now Google) that said that he was going to release the names and addresses of Barry, the NAACP officials, and their lawyers to the families of the fire victims. "It would be interesting to see how those families dispense revenge on those who are really responsible for the deaths of their loved ones, he wrote."

At other times, Turner has voiced other kinds of extremism, as when he defended the Bush side in the 2000 election by openly advocating civil war if Al Gore were to win the then-contested outcome of the Florida vote:

Not since the early 1860's, prior to the Civil War, has the US population been so divided and openly talking about violent civil warfare. Radio callers are making unprecedented open and public calls to employ the Second Amendment (right to keep and bear arms) to protect the integrity of the Constitution and of the Bush election.

This election has pitted brother against brother, parent against child, young against old, white against black, Gentile against Jew. The anger is palpable and the situation grows steadily worse.

An examination of Turner's record reveals a long and sordid history of all kinds of outrageous remarks, particularly those expressing the ugliest kind of racial bigotry. This is how Turner "pushes the envelope." But it is the open advocacy of the intimidation of judges by invading their personal lives in a way that purposely exposes them to the threat of violence.

Turner did this last week, too, publishing the names and office addresses of three federal judges who ruled in the same case in which Lefkow was involved with Hale, and vowing to publish their home addresses. It's possible to do this while advocating merely for civil protests, as Turner claimed to be doing -- he even added a disclaimer urging everyone not to break any laws.

But it's not possible to do this while simultaneously celebrating -- which is to say, condoning and encouraging -- the murders of Judge Lefkow's family members. It's not possible to claim you are merely advocating nonviolent protests when you make it clear that you see the killer as having carried out a "comeuppance," and that you believe some judges "deserve to die."

It was this moment that should have crystalized, in the national consciousness, just what it is these people stand for: they openly condone, and indeed encourage, the use of criminal violence as a way of intimidating (or "sending a message to") the nation's judiciary.

Here's Turner's message, in a nutshell: "Nice family you got there, judge. Be a shame if anything should happen to it."

Could you imagine the uproar if, say, a spokesman for radical Islam did the same on the airwaves? Hell, we wouldn't stand for it if it were the Mob.

And could you imagine what would happen if such a figure had run as a Democrat for Congress? If he had a long-term friendship with a prominent "liberal media" figure?

We already have an idea what would happen in terms of law enforcement. The case of Sherman Austin -- arrested for merely having a link on his Web site to another site that discussed bomb making, something that would have gotten half the Patriot movement in trouble back in the 1990s -- does not compare favorably with Turner's.

An even more germane comparison, though, is to Ward Churchill. The right has been eagerly trying to drape Churchill around the left's neck for the past several months, even though he has no connection to Democrats or prominent liberals, and no one on the left seriously endorses his views.

The same can't be said of Turner. Indeed, it seems to me that people like Sean Hannity, who have made Turner's career possible, have a lot to answer for in this regard.

It's possible that Hannity has severed all ties with Turner, and disavows any prior relationship with him now. If that's so, though, we don't know, because he refuses to say. But we do know that, even before Turner went completely off the deep end, he engaged in nakedly racist banter even on Hannity's show and not only suffered no consequences, but used the reputation gained from that kind of outrageousness to run for Congress and to launch his own talk-show career.

Maybe a gentle letter-writing campaign will produce some answers. Hannity's e-mail address at Fox is Hannity@foxnews.com. You can also send him e-mail at this page. However, these kinds of form e-mails have a history of being giant black holes, especially for those impertinent enough to ask pointed questions.

You might have better luck by also contacting his superiors at Fox at the various addresses here.

Did Sean Hannity help launch the career of a notorious racist and hatemonger who has called for terroristic retaliation against federal judges? Is he still personal friends with this moral reprobate?

Discerning viewers want to know. Especially after having their own decency and patriotism impugned, over the last several years, by the likes of Sean Hannity.

New feathers for old hats

Seems we've had a spate of bad pennies cropping back up around Seattle lately. First it was Keith Gilbert getting busted.

Now John L., Kirk -- who shook out a few nickels with a "common law court" operation back in the 1990s, before he was busted for building pipe bombs for the Washington State Militia -- is back in the news with a fresh scam: taking advantage of the naivete of young girls and grieving widows.

You see, back in 2003, a police officer named Patrick Maher was slain with his own gun when it was taken from him by a teenager during an altercation in Federal Way, a suburban city midway between Seattle and Tacoma, an incident that left a deep mark on the community.

So when it came time to name a new middle school being built in Federal Way, a 13-year-old named Kara Dameron decided naming it after Maher was a good idea. And it probably was.

Problem is, the school district has a policy to name its middle schools only after "peoples, places or events from Native American literature." Maher was Irish.

So she went to work and collected signatures for a petition and appeared before the school board, hoping to overcome their objections. So far, there's no indication her pleas have come to any avail.

So far, so good. As Robert Jamieson put it in a laudatory column for the P-I:

I'm in the kid's corner. She's smart. She has moxie.

But then there was this:

And now, she's got a whole other kind of support.

An Indian tribe calling itself the Sovereign Government of Little Shell Pembina has rallied to Kara's side. The tribe -- with North Dakota roots and composed of Pembina Chippewa Native Americans -- is not federally recognized. But that didn't stop a tribal representative from bestowing a posthumous honor on Maher, a Certificate of Adoption.

Actually, the "tribe" has not "rallied to Kara's side." Rather, her cause has been taken up by the aforementioned John L., Kirk. (That's how he insisted on punctuating his name when he ran the "Justus Township" of King County. It's a Patriot thing.)

A recent KOMO TV report had a little more on this, though it too was oblivious to the nature of the "tribe" which had ostensibly adopted Maher:

A Chippewa tribe from North Dakota is adopting Officer Maher.

"We honor Patrick Maher as a great warrior," said John Kirk of The Little Shell Pembina Band Tribe.

"It's really overwhelming," said Renee Maher, Patrick's wife. "I think Patrick would be so proud and so honored to be part of the tribe."

The adoption could be critical because Federal Way School Board policy says middle schools can only be named for a person, place or event in Native American literature.

"And if that is one of the stumbling blocks to the school's policy that has now been eliminated, officially and on the record," Kirk said.

First, a little bit about the "Little Shell Pembina Band". It is not a real tribe; rather, it is a right-wing activist group with a history of issuing bogus license plates and other antigovernment activity associated with white supremacists.

The "band," which appears all over the Web, seems to originate from a group of con artists who organized around one or more former (and discredited) tribal judges from a legitimate Pembina tribe. They are known to sell spurious tribal "memberships" and associated paperwork at Ramada Inn-type seminars -- the kind at which we saw militias organized in the 1990s -- and tell their customers these papers enable them to assert "immunity" from legitimate court prosecutions, traffic citations, foreclosures, and tax judgments, all on the grounds that the "tribal" courts have exclusive jurisdiction.

It's apparently quite popular in North Texas, having drawn many present and former Republic of Texas members as customers. (I'm told that some arrests were just made recently in Tarrant County based on "retaliation" charges, but I don't have details.)

The group that appears closest to being a legitimate representative of the tribe, such as it is, completely disavows these con artists:

THERE ARE NO AUTHORIZED SPOKESPERSONS, JUDGES, MARSHALS, CLERKS OF COURT OR OTHERS AUTHORIZED TO REPRESENT THE PEMBINA NATION LITTLE SHELL BAND OF NORTH AMERICA. The exception is of course the Grand Council, and our webmaster of the pembinanation1863.com web site.

We urge all that are members to use your common sense and see what is going on for what it really is; a scam, prepetuated by a few that want power and your money. You are not helping the Tribe or yourself.

For those who have been victimized through the mail we urge you to contact the United States postal authorities at the following Web Site.

What is going on here is an interesting permutation of the kind of right-wing scams we saw occurring in the 1990s, which themselves were kind of fresh takes on old right-wing monetary scams of the 1970s and '80s. It's the Freemen go Native.

Those who've read In God's Country are familiar with the milieu: Cobbling together a string of legal gobbledygook and odd citations from a bizarre range of sources, the scam artists will tell their angry, so-suspicious-they're-gullible taxpaying customers that they have figured out a way to place themselves above the "phony" laws of the mainstream -- namely, by becoming a "sovereign citizen." Once so anointed, you're no longer obligated to bother with such mortal nuisances as taxes, insurance, foreclosure laws, speed limits, traffic tickets, or library fines.

The Montana Freemen kind of perfected this scam in the '90s, though many others perpetrated a version of it and continue to operate freely. The "Little Shell Pembina Band" scam is an original take on this: By becoming a member of the tribe, one can claim such "sovereign citizenship." And just think: No more worries about gold-fringed flags, either!

John L., Kirk, as it happens, was one of these men. He didn't operate altogether freely, though -- not after he was arrested in 1996 and eventually convicted of felony bomb-building.

I attended his first trial. It was quite an experience.

Kirk, you see, has a long history of both unsavory behavior and right-wing extremism. He was one of eight men arrested and charged with conspiring to build bombs intended to be used, among other things, against federal agents at the Jordan, Montana, standoff involving the Freemen. He was one of the four clearly convicted by that original jury in the first trial, and got one of the stiffest sentences. For good reason.

As I explained in Chapter 11 of In God's Country, he was closely associated with another of the four self-proclaimed "Seattle Freemen" arrested, a shadowy fellow named William Smith who claimed a close friendship with Montana Freemen leader LeRoy Schweitzer:

While Smith was the man with the ideas, it was John Kirk who made them reality. Kirk, who had pleaded guilty in 1980 to molesting his daughters, met Smith through the same gatherings as Gene Goosman. This community was the remnant of the old McCarthyite anti-communist groups of the 1950s and 1960s that had floated about Seattle's fringes; Goosman had been been an official of Homer Brand's old Duck Club, the Seattle constitutionalist group whose paranoid style had convinced David Rice in 1986 that the entire Goldmark family was comprised of Communist conspirators, which in turn inspired Rice to hideously murder David and Annie Goldmark and their two children in their Madrona home on Christmas Eve that year. Since that incident, the radical right in Seattle kept an extremely low profile, and appeared to have drifted into virtual non-existence -- until, that is, John Kirk and the Freemen came along.

Kirk, who told his friends he had been in Special Forces in the Army, used to have work as a television repairman for J.C. Penney but had been out of a job since the 1980s; the couple got by on Judy's income from her job at Boeing as a data technician. John had taken to wearing a beard under his chin and talking about the big government conspiracy, and had become an active member in Goosman's community of Christian Patriots.

Kirk first made a splash as the co-founder of a Justus Township in rural Snohomish County, in the town of Sultan. With Bill Hardisty and another Patriot named Clayton McFarlan, they filed papers in Snohomish County declaring themselves "sovereign citizens" and establishing their township. The trio also turned up at a common-law court training session in Boise on December 14, 1995, convened by Gary DeMott's Idaho Sovereignty Association. Kirk told the gathering he intended to announce the court's formation the old-fashioned way -- by having a crier announce it from the steps of the post office. If such a crier actually did so, his appearance went unreported.

As Bill Hardisty later explained it, the "Justus Township" they had created was meant to encompass the entire "Washington republic," with all of that title's implications for the court system as well. He described it as "a geographical and political township that covers Washington state and a hell of a lot more." Evidently, the township also incorporated a common-law court.

Two weeks later, Kirk -- who actually lived with his wife, Judy, in the southern Seattle suburb of Tukwila -- presided as the "Referee/Magistrate" of the first recorded session of "our one supreme court Common Law, Washington republic." According to the document itself, the court was convened on Mercer Island at the home of James Gutschmidt, a Patriot who was attempting to stave off foreclosure on his property, who claimed in the document he was "not a Fourteenth Amendment citizen or subject ... not a resident, but a Citizen as described in the Holy Bible and in the Constitution prior to the Fourteenth Amendment."

The genuinely distasteful aspect of this is that Kirk is now championing the posthumous cause of a law-enforcement officer. But he was convicted of building bombs that were intended, at least originally, as part of an armament for dealing with federal agents in Jordan had that situation erupted into "another Waco" (it did not). He and his mates in the militia often expressed an eagerness to gun down law-enforcement officers themselves, as in the day they all went target shooting, and an informant named Ed Mauerer happened to have a tape recorder rolling:

The following week [after their first meeting], the training for the Seattle Freemen began in earnest. Six of them -- Kirk, Smith, Burton, Rice, Ross Tylor and another man who was never identified -- drove up from Seattle to meet Marlin Mack and Ed Mauerer for some target practice. They arrived an hour late; Smith was apologetic, explaining that it was his fault.

... The group drove out to a gun range and set up targets. Marlin Mack and Mauerer started explaining weaponry and how to use it -- which types of guns were most effective, and the conditions for using pistols as opposed to rifles or shotguns. Then they began firing away at human silhouette targets with the letters "ATF" printed on them. After awhile, Mauerer pulled down one of the chewed-up targets and joked about it with the Freeman who wouldn't give his name.

"That poor ATF guy's already dead a couple of times,’’ he laughed. "Been hit in the head, the nuts, the gut."

The Freeman had a better idea: "Should bring a couple of real ones and hang 'em up there."

The most chilling moment in the trial came, though, when prosecutors showed the videotape from the day that John Kirk showed up at Ed Mauerer's place and proceeded to build him a pipe bomb in his garage. Outside in the back yard -- with just a thin wall between them and the pipe bomb -- a group of young girls, gathered for a birthday party, squealed and played. An undercover FBI agent was present as well.

Finally, on June 14, all the pieces fell into place. It was a sunny day. Mauerer and German had agreed to rendezvous with the Freemen at a gas station on the edge of town, ostensibly to go up to test out some "toys" Kirk said he had for them. The Freemen were late, as usual, which gave Mauerer a chance to create some cover. When Kirk and Richard Burton arrived an hour after the anointed hour, Mauerer went to a phone and pretended to call the owner on whose land they were going to conduct the practice. He went back to the group and said they couldn't go up there now, because the owner's disapproving wife had returned from a shopping trip. Instead, Mauerer invited them over to his house.

When they arrived there, a birthday party for Mauerer's young daughter was under way in the back yard. The four men went to Mauerer's garage, where he had a workbench, to take a look at the "surprises" Kirk had for them in his bag. When they closed the door, Kirk set the bag down on the bench and pulled out some pipe bombs.

There were two completed pipe bombs, constructed of short, wide pieces of pipe and end caps with a fuse; Kirk also had the components to build another one, and the makings of a couple of pill-bottle bombs. When Kirk pulled them out, [undercover FBI agent Mike] German instinctively walked to the window to place himself between the bombs and the girls playing outside, whose squeals and laughs could be heard through the thin pane of glass separating them from the garage's interior. He stayed there for most of the demonstration.

Kirk himself scarcely blinked an eye. He proceeded to go through the steps of putting the bomb together, from selecting the right powder and tamping it down properly, placing the detonator squarely, to ensuring that no powder remained on the threads. If they weren't properly brushed out, Kirk warned the men, then even tiny amounts of powder could ignite in tiny flashes as the caps were being screwed on and set off the explosive inside: "You're holding a bomb," Kirk said, "and believe me, it'll take your head clean off." German shifted his position nearer the window.

It was clear Kirk expected one of the two "students" to learn bomb-making in a hands-on way; he asked the men which of them was going to do it. German was palpably reluctant -- "Ummmmmm...," he said -- and Mauerer was less than eager, but the informant quickly realized that German couldn't be in the position of building a bomb, so he stepped forward. He brushed out the threads some more and screwed the cap on slowly. The sound of laughing girls continued to filter through the window. When he was done, Mauerer let out a gasp and set the bomb down.

When the lesson was over, they packed the bombs into a box. The four men went back in the house and talked further. Kirk told German he had another bomb at home just like the one they had built, and could get that to them as well. German said he could come down the next morning and pick it up.

"Let me do this, Rock," Kirk said, "I'm not going to be there, but my wife is."

"Okay."

"So I'll tell her you're coming and I'll put this in a bag."

The next morning, German and Mauerer made the two-hour drive south to Tukwila. On the way down, German called Mack and told him he had a buyer. They made arrangements to meet that night.

When the two men arrived at the Kirks', no one answered the door, but it was open. They walked around to the back yard and found Judy playing there with a couple of her grandchildren, who were playing in the yard on a broken-down playset. "Rock" [German's nom de plume] introduced himself and they exchanged pleasantries. Judy Kirk went over to the barbecue grill, opened it, and pulled out a brown paper sack with the bomb inside.

"This was to keep little hands off it," Judy said, pointing to the grill and to the nearby children.

... When FBI agents later examined the bombs Mack and Kirk had made, their experts decided the militiamen had been extremely lucky. All the bombs had traces of powder in their threads; all could have gone off in their makers' hands, or even as they were being transferred. Twice, it had happened with children nearby.

None of this, of course, should reflect badly on poor Kara Dameron. She's clearly a sincere and well-meaning middle-schooler who's trying to do a good and right thing. Frankly, the district's policy sounds foolish, especially in the face of the kind of community support she's mustered.

But she has been snookered by a very skilled and adept con man with a truly vile track record, and no sign of having changed an iota: the current scam is just an update on the old one. What does he get out of scamming Kara Dameron? Legitimacy for his scam, which relies on drawing people into a belief system and then soaking them for large sums when they achieve True Believer status.

If the School Board has any wisdom at all, it will go ahead and name that new middle school after the heroic Officer Maher. But it will decline to do so on the basis that he has Native American affiliation. He does not. And the people trying to claim they can give it to him should receive some attention from genuine Native Americans.

Lefkow killings: Not terrorism

The Chicago Tribune is reporting that a suicide in Wisconsin may have uncovered the identity of the person who killed Judge Lefkow's husband and mother -- and that person is not connected at all to the World Church of the Creator or any other white-supremacist movement:

Investigators today said a Chicago man who shot himself in the head during a traffic stop Wednesday evening in Wisconsin had a suicide note claiming responsibility for the slayings of U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow's husband and mother last week.

Sources also said they recovered a stocking cap and coveralls from the van belonging to Bart Ross, possibly linking him to the sketch of the older of two suspicious individuals witnesses saw near the judge's Chicago home the day of the slayings.

"It was simply a suspicious vehicle. It turned out there could be much more involved here," West Allis Police Chief Dean Puschnig said at a news conference this morning in the Milwaukee suburb.

Separately, court documents show that in a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court, Chicago, Ross blamed doctors for a medical procedure allegedly gone awry and lawyers and the courts for failing to give him relief. Lefkow dismissed the suit last September.

Other court records show Cook County sheriff's deputies attempted to serve Ross notice of eviction from his Northwest Side home on Feb. 28 -- the day someone shot execution-style Lefkow's husband and mother.

Given the abundance of other evidence at the scene, it seems highly likely this is indeed the killer. His note describes details only the killer could have known. Apparently he comes close to matching the elder of the two suspects police were seeking, taken from composite drawings.

The note also says he acted alone, and there's no suggestion he had an accomplice, either. The drawing of the older man was taken from a witness who saw someone lurking near the Lefkows' yard. The drawing of the younger man was taken from a witness who saw two men hanging out in a car in the neighborhood; that witness could only provide a composite for one of the two men.

So I think it's clear that, contrary to my speculation (and that of many others), this was not a case of domestic terrorism. The speculation was well-grounded and reasonable, but until we had more facts, it was always mere speculation.

What remains an interesting question, however, was the response on the extremist right, which amounted to reveling in the murders, not only as a "comeuppance," but also as a lever against other judges. It was a form of terroristic extortion: "Nice family you got there, judge. Be a shame to see anything happen to it."

I'll have more on that point soon.

UPDATE: Ross's DNA matches that found on the cigarette butt in the Lefkow home. That should seal it; the only potential remaining question is whether he acted alone, and there's no indication he didn't.

Hate reverberates

Has anyone else noticed how silent the right side of the pundit class -- ncluding the blogosphere -- is about the nasty remarks about liberals made by Republican Rep. Jim Gibbons of Nevada last week? I've been scanning them and haven't seen a word, either of approval or disapproval.

Which is kind of funny, considering the way they jumped all over Howard Dean for saying: "I hate Republicans and everything they stand for." Jeff Jacoby's response was typical:

Intense political passions are nothing new in American politics, and they are not limited to one side of the aisle. Plenty of Republicans despise Democrats. Some conservative authors and radio hosts sully themselves by resorting to insults and invective when talking about liberals. But the willingness of so many Democrats to openly call themselves "haters," to make contempt for the other party their stock-in-trade -- that is something we haven't seen before. No doubt there is a kind of crude pleasure in hating so uninhibitedly, but it's no way to rebuild a Democratic majority.

Why not? After all, it's worked perfectly well for Republicans.

Because as the Gibbons episode rather fully illustrates, naked hatred of the opposition has in fact been the stock-in-trade of the conservative movement for some time now.

As Atrios has pointed out, it turns out that Gibbons' speech was lifted whole from a copyrighted speech first delivered back in 2002:

ELKO - The speech delivered by U.S. Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., during Friday night's Lincoln Day Dinner in Elko was largely plagiarized from a copyrighted speech by Alabama State Auditor Beth Chapman.

Chapman told the Elko Daily Free Press this morning Gibbons had not requested permission to use her speech, which she said she delivered Feb. 2, 2003, at a Stand Up for America rally in Alabama.

... Gibbons is under fire from Nevada Democrats for his speech in general and particularly the lines: "I say we tell those liberal, tree-hugging, Birkenstock stocking wearing, hippie, tie-dyed liberals to go make their movies and their music and whine somewhere else."

Those words, with the exception of "I say," were taken verbatim from Chapman's speech.

Since then, Gibbons has only dug his hole deeper. It's a gift, I guess.

As Atrios suggests, the incident raises obvious issues regarding Gibbons' apparent plagiarism. But it also points to a deeper, more systemic issue.

It's disturbing enough that Gibbons, a congressman with actual power on Capitol Hill, would utter such hateful remarks. It's even more disturbing -- but really emblematic of the state of conservative discourse -- that there's nothing new to them.

Chapman's speech, titled "Stand Up For America," in fact seems to enjoy a great deal of popularity with the conservative crowd. (How Gibbons thought he could get away with using it without giving credit is a question only he can answer.) She copyrighted it because of its enormous spread among the right-wing Internet set.

But this kind of talk, in fact, well precedes 2002 (though, as we pointed out at the time, it certainly spread deep and wide among conservatives back then). Certainly, the 1990s were rife with examples, particularly if you were to go back through old transcripts of cable-TV talk shows and Rush Limbaugh radio broadcasts, because overt hatred of liberals was the raw fuel of the conservative movement in that decade, particularly during the runup to the Clinton impeachment fiasco.

It goes back even farther, though. It was not uncommon to hear it even back in the 1980s, when conservatives were first rising to consolidate their control of the Republican Party behind Ronald Reagan.

A recent Washington Post piece about Jack Abramoff, which discussed his long association with conservative-movement leaders Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed, mentioned this:

While at the College Republicans, Abramoff, Norquist and Reed quickly earned reputations as zealots. Abramoff wrote in the 1983 annual report: "It is not our job to seek peaceful coexistence with the Left. Our job is to remove them from power permanently." The group's recruits were required to memorize a speech that included the lines: "Democrats are the enemy. Wade into them! Spill their blood!"

This is, of course, the same Jack Abramoff who is now at the center of a fundraising scandal implicating House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. (See the Arizona Republic report for more details.)

Norquist has a history of similar propensities,, along with many other current conservative figures. Norquist, of course, is also embroiled in the current scandal.

In fact, Abramoff, Norquist, and DeLay are emblematic of a clear trend with the Republican hatemongers: Behind the nasty rhetoric is a nasty operative with no sense of ethics, people who are willing to say and do anything in order to win. People like that also have a tendency to indulge in all kinds of bad behavior when they think no one's looking. These three are only the recent examples; the conservative landscape is littered with such figures. Think of Rush "Oxycontin" Limbaugh, Bob "What hookers?" Livingston, Henry "Youthful indiscretions" Hyde, Newt "I believe in the instutition of marriage so much I've done it three times" Gingrich. And that's scratching the list.

But more significant has been the effect of their hatefulness on the national discourse over the past twenty years and more. It has grown nastier, more hateful, more degraded, precisely because of deliberate efforts by conservatives to make it so. When liberals have responded with temperate, reasoned answers, they have been brushed aside as weaklings. It's been like reasoning with the schoolyard bully after he takes your lunch money.

I actually don't think hatefulness is a constructive way to respond. But punching back, at some point, becomes necessary. Because sometimes, that's the only way to make bullies stop.

So it's kind of amusing that when liberals finally develop enough spine to respond in kind, these bullies cry foul. It's hard to have any sympathy for them -- unless, of course, you're a conservative.

Get us out, indeed

Now that that great supporter of the United Nations, John Bolton, has been named the American U.N. ambassador, I'd like to humbly suggest an excellent hire for the position of assistant ambassador, if there is such a job. (And if there isn't, they ought to create one.)

And I think President Bush should nominate John Trochmann of the Militia of Montana.

After all, this is a president who, as I've noted previously, has expressed nostalgia for those old John Birch Society billboards that shouted, "Get Us Out of the U.N.!" I think that when it comes to dealing realistically with the U.N., he'll find Trochmann right up his alley too, maybe even more so than Bolton.

Here's a brief excerpt from Chapter 4 of In God's Country, on Trochmann and M.O.M.:

He detailed for me the various troop and tank sightings that led him to believe that foreign troops were massing on, or in some cases within, our borders, preparing for a United Nations invasion of the U.S. Their ultimate intent: "A business takeover of America," he said.

What, I asked, like a corporate takeover? Multinational corporations?

"Correct. A financial investment. America has become a multi-trillion-dollar business to these people. And they believe that people like you and I are wasting their natural resources at much too rapid a pace. And we must be culled back.

"The investors, according to the information we have in print from the United Nations, will guarantee them up to 990 percent per year return on their investment, which is a pretty good incentive, especially for the politicians that are voting against the people. It's obvious where their love lies."

You're talking about a military action, aren't you?

"Yes," he said. "A military coup, if you like. Using foreign troops and foreign equipment."

Trochmann told me that Ruby Ridge and Waco were mere harbingers, test runs for what they intended to start doing to average citizens. Street-gang members from the Bloods and Crips, he said, were being trained in Spokane right then for house-to-house-search-and-seizure techniques. When the big crackdown came, they'd round people up, ship them off to concentration camps (which he said were already being built), and then "liquidate" them until the population was stabilized.

Obviously, Trochmann has many years' practical, on-the-ground experience in dealing with nefarious United Nations activity (which might make him qualified to be Homeland Security chief too, but I guess that job's been filled). Who better than a severe critic to keep an eye on this hopelessly corrupt operation?

I imagine Trochmann and Bolton would get along just great, don't you? Birds of a feather, as they say.

Carefully taught

Yeah, this sounds like just the kind of day-care center I'd want to drop my daughter off at:

State records call a recent inspection at a Sarasota child care home "routine," but some activities at the house are anything but typical.

The child care center, in a modest residential neighborhood, is also home to a self- professed white supremacist and neo-Nazi who hosts a well-known Web site and Internet radio show.

Michael Herbert Blevins, who calls himself "Von Bluvens," has been a leader in the white supremacist movement, according to national watchdog groups.

In interviews posted on various Web sites, Blevins, whose wife, Bernadette, operates the day care, has advocated shipping blacks back to Africa, deporting Mexicans and wholesale "extermination" of non- whites. He also has called for putting Jews to sleep and produced artwork of an apparent gas chamber with the title "Haulocost: This time it's for real."

A neighbor says she has seen a Nazi flag in a back bedroom of the home, down the hall from where young children spend the day.

Sarasota County officials, who regulate child care homes under a state contract, say they have no reason to close the day care. They stress they have found nothing that violates health and safety regulations, and they also must consider Blevins' constitutional right to free speech.

It's true that the Blevinses have every right to operate their business. But you have to wonder about any parent who knowingly subjected their child to that environment. It would border on abuse.

'Gotcha'

Here's an outtake from the transcript of the Friday, March 4, edition of Dateline NBC, dealing with the reaction to the Lefkow murders on the far right, including people like Hal Turner, whose activities in this case are already cause for concern:

[DENNIS] MURPHY: (Voiceover) There's no question that white supremacist Web sites and forums buzzed this week with the news of the Chicago murder. Bloggers like Hal Turner, writing his Web page form his house in New Jersey, put up a picture of Judge Lefkow with the caption, "Gotcha."

(Web pages; Hal Turner working at computer; Web page)

MURPHY: In the names of all things decent in civilization, where does that kind of sentiment come from?

Mr. HAL TURNER: Because it was factual.

MURPHY: You were happy that...

Mr. TURNER: No.

MURPHY: ...those people were murdered?

Mr. TURNER: No, not at all. "Gotcha" was more of a ribbing, a zing, a...

MURPHY: A ribbing? This..

Mr. TURNER: Yep. This judge chose to make rulings in--in a case against people that I know. It was almost as though she had gotten a comeuppance.

MURPHY: (Voiceover) Turner says he's been questioned by federal agent this is week about the murders of judge Lefkow's family. He denies any involvement. But Matt Hale vs. the judge has been regular fodder for Turner's rants, going back to 2002 when he had a shortwave radio show. He said then that while killing the judge might be illegal, it wouldn't be wrong.

(Turner; Lefkow home; Turner working at computer; photo of Turner wearing earphones; photo of Joan)

Mr. TURNER: I have rendered an opinion that what she did on the bench makes her worthy of being killed, yeah.

MURPHY: Do you still believe that?

Mr. TURNER: Yeah. Yep, that's my opinion.

Turner's sentiments, obviously, tell us all we need to know about these wretches. Even if the Lefkow killings turn out to be unrelated to the World Church of the Creator, people like Turner are clearly using the event to intimidate the judiciary. They're saying: "See? This is what happens when you don't rule in our favor." It's a form of terrorism.

If that isn't a crime, it ought to be.

Targeting judges

Far more interesting than the official reaction to the murders of Judge Lefkow's hudband and mother has been that of other white nationalists and even supposedly "mainstream" conservatives, like the fine folks at Free Republic. For the definitive rundown from a red-blooded point of view, Jesus' General has all the key posts, notably these:

This may be a blessing in disguise. Our country is grappling with judges who do not understand that there is a war, and issues about "torture", rights for enemy combatants and etc, these new threats may wake them up because for the first time in these judges lives, they are vulnerable and threaten. Survival is no longer an academic thing. Make a dumb ruling that undermines the police and military ability to fight criminals and terrorists have personal consequences.
17 posted on 03/05/2005 4:53:40 PM PST by Fee

They know who the left wing judges, reporters and university professors are.

It is simply a matter of each individuals 'activist' choosing a suitable target and then taking action.
5 posted on 03/05/2005 4:42:23 PM PST by BenLurkin

Those were merely anonymous posters in a mostly impotent right-wing forum. Hal Turner -- whose activities on this matter have been noted previously, including by law enforcement -- has not taken it another notch and begun specifically targeting more judges.

He was planning on doing this tonight, evidently, on Geraldo Rivera's Fox show, giving his plan a national kickoff. He outlined it, however, on his Web site.

Turner points out, correctly, that Matt Hale was actually given a favorable ruling by Judge Lefkow. [Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune has more on this: Hale in fact targeted Lefkow "simply because he believed she'd married a Jewish man (her husband is an active Episcopalian) and he believed there was a racially mixed marriage in her family."]

However, he then goes on to name, as the "real villains" in this scenario, three "certain judges on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals," giving their office addresses, and goes on to say:

With the federal judiciary in the spotlight over the Lefkow killings, it seems to me that much of the efforts of pro-whites to criticize Judge Lefkow were. . . . . . . misplaced. As such, I believe it is time to put the judges named above into the arena of public scrutiny.

Let them experience rousing public debate which they cannot control. Let them feel the pressure of public scorn which they cannot control. Let them see it and hear it at their courthouse, at their private homes, in their social circles and, of course, here on the internet.

Clearly the federal judiciary is not nearly as thick-skinned as they would have us believe. Given the Lefkow situation, federal judges are whining for more protection even though there is not one shred of evidence indicating the Lefkow killings are even related to the Judge's court docket!

In terms of public relations, - whether one is "for" or "against" - it is always best to "strike while the iron is hot." Given the media spectacle, public awareness, frayed nerves and serious concern over the Lefkow situation, the timing is perfect right now to stoke the fire of public opinion against these other Judges.

Now, as far as launching public pressure campaigns go, Turner may be demonstrating tremendous insensitivity by targeting three specific judges for such a campaign, but legally speaking, he is probably within his rights in doing so.

But he crosses the line in short order:

Needed immediately is: Home addresses of the aforementioned Judges. Background and Biographical info. Photos. Voting records, property ownership records. Info about any skeletons in their closets: alcoholism, drug use, homosexuality/lesbianism, race-mixed families . . . .You know, the whole nine yards. The full monty.

This strikes me as a manifest threat, particularly his plan to publicize their home addresses and gather private information about them. I imagine the Marshals Service and the FBI may see it the same way, but I could be wrong. (In the Sun-Times today, Turner says: "There is nothing on that page that should even remotely should be deemed as an illegal threat." I'm not so sure, particularly given this specific context, in which members of a judge's family were assassinated in their home.

Of course, he adds the non-sequitur at the end:

Please do not break any laws when undertaking your efforts.

Sure. Just like Matt Hale told Benjamin Smith [PDF file] not to break any laws.