The younger brother of Brent Douglas Cole, the far-right extremist who now faces federal assault charges after his shootout with law enforcement officers in the northern California woods,
isn’t sure where and when his elder sibling slipped into the surreal
universe of “sovereign citizens.” But he believes his descent into
right-wing extremism happened during his long residence in the woods of
Alaska.
“He’s been up living life on his own for so long that he just doesn’t
see it – that there’s rules that the rest of us follow for good
reason,” Marcus Cole of Woodinville, Wash., told Hatewatch. “He’s used
to just taking care of himself, and doesn’t understand why anyone wants
to keep him from doing as he likes.”
Brent Cole remains in the custody of the Nevada County sheriff’s
office while recovering from his wounds at a medical center in
Roseville, where he is listed in stable condition. The Bureau of Land
Management ranger and California Highway Patrol officer who both were
wounded in the confrontation on Saturday near Edwards Crossing in the
Sierra Nevadas were treated and released.
The Cole brothers grew up in Idaho Falls, Idaho, the son of a nuclear
engineer employed at what was then called the National Reactor Testing
Station (later the Idaho Nuclear Engineering Laboratory). Brent Cole was
one of the first graduates of the new Skyline High School in 1971, and
promptly moved away – to the Sierra Nevadas, not far, his brother says,
from the place where he got into the shootout.
Brent was married there a few years after high school, and the couple
moved to Texas and had a son. They also shortly divorced, after which
he moved to Alaska and took up life in the woods. He made his living
through construction work.
“I visited him in Alaska in 1997,” says Marc Cole. “He was living in a
cabin on the tundra and we had to hike a couple miles in across the
swamp. I have a picture of him in his environment. This is how he lived
for 20 years, in a cabin far away from the modern world.”
Marc believes that the solitary lifestyle, combined with a contrarian
and pugnacious personality, played crucial roles in shaping his
brother’s radical political views.
“He got into this stuff because he has always liked being
argumentative and contrary,” Marc said, adding that he doesn’t tolerate
the radical talk when the two visit now. “But I figure, you know, he’s
allowed to believe what he wants to believe. And he’s used to living in
the outback and being that wild man.
“He’s frustrated. He’d like to think that his existence matters, like
all of us do, and so he gets out there on these controversies thinking
he’ll be like a beacon for the rest of us. He believes he’s going to do
the world good. He thinks he’s going to save the world.”
Photo by Marc Cole of brother Brent working on a family home
Indeed, that kind of delusion of heroism is a theme running through much of Brent Cole’s online postings, including his page at the conspiracist United Truth Seekers
site, where he declared that his purpose was to save the U.S.
Constitution: “Let us document the breach of the terms of that written
contract, and seek redress, in international court if need be, against
the United States (Company Corporation) for breach of the contract
formed with the people .”
At another site,
Cole declared himself a “sovereign American Citizen attempting to
thwart the obvious conspiracy and subterfuges of powers inimical to the
United States.”
Brent Cole moved back to the continental United States three years
ago, after inflicting permanent damage on three of his fingers in a
frostbite incident. His brother says he mostly lived by camping around
the country in different locales during that time. In January of this
year, he was arrested on weapons charges after sheriff’s deputies found a concealed gun in his pickup in a campground.
Cole responded by filing a series of classic “sovereign citizen” pseudo-legal filings.
“I am being persecuted for being a gun owner, and for exercising my
inherent Right by unwitting or unknowing accomplices of a seditious
conspiracy against rights instituted by foreign powers inimical to the
United States of America,” he wrote.
“Those postings make him look a lot worse than he really is,” says
Marc Cole. He hosted his elder brother at his home this April for a
couple of weeks, and Brent was instrumental in helping Marc fix a rotted
deck in the back of Marc’s son’s home.
“Brent lives a simple life and doesn’t have many needs,” says Marc.
“If he could, he would spend all of his time surfing the Internet
looking for causes to champion, and then go post about them, never
leaving the house.”
He says that he isn’t aware of anything racist or anti-Semitic in his brother’s rantings, though in fact, as Devin Burghart detailed at IREHR, his Facebook postings are littered with anti-Semitic conspiracies and racist posts about President Obama.
“He isn’t a hateful person despite the causes he post about,” says
Marc Cole. “He is looking to champion the little guy and fight the big
corporations. In that he is quick to accept any conspiracy theory.”
Mostly, Marc Cole wants the world to know that despite it all, his
brother isn’t a monster: “He still carries his guns like he was in
Alaskan and is not sensitive to how tense things have gotten in view of
all of the mass shootings and rhetoric. But he is not a terrorist.”
He says none of it would have happened if his brother hadn’t gotten
into trouble over guns with local authorities. “I don’t know if he would
have even been in the area if he hadn’t had the earlier confrontation.
He was charged with misdemeanor possession of a loaded firearm at a
campground. I had to bail him out on that one.
“In April, he was here visiting me, and he went down to Texas with
his son and visited his grandkids, and I doubt he would even have gone
back to California except that they had his guns, and it was just a
misdemeanor. And they offered to let him plead guilty to something and
they’d give him his guns back, but he had this thing in mind that he was
going to prove that their jury instructions were illegal or something.”
Marc Cole says he’s tried reading his brother’s “gobbledygook”
filings and can’t comprehend them, let alone what his brother sees in
them. For the family members of people drawn into the sovereign citizen
movement, this is a common refrain. Full disclosure: The author attended school with Marc Cole in Idaho Falls, from fourth grade through high school.
A self-described “sovereign citizen”
camping out in the woods of northern California was arrested following
an armed confrontation with two law enforcement officers this weekend.
All three men were wounded in the ensuing shootout.
The shootout began, according to news reports,
when a federal Bureau of Land Management ranger contacted the
California Highway Patrol (CHP) and asked for backup at a wooded
campground near Nevada City, a few miles west of Lake Tahoe and the
Nevada border, as part of an investigation involving vehicles at the
site. As the two officers headed into the brush and began approaching a
remote makeshift campsite, they were confronted by 60-year-old Brent
Douglas Cole.
Brent Douglas Cole
Gunfire was exchanged, and Cole was hit by several rounds. The BLM
ranger was wounded by a gunshot to his right shoulder, and the CHP
officer suffered minor injuries. The two officers were treated and
released at local hospitals; Cole remains in custody at Sutter Roseville
Medical Center in Roseville, where he is listed in stable condition in
the intensive care unit.
Cole, according to The Union
in Nevada City, has had numerous run-ins with law enforcement,
including several other weapons-related incidents. The most recent of
these occurred on Jan. 26, when he was arrested by Nevada County
sheriff’s deputies and charged with carrying a concealed weapon.
Cole also has a history of indulging in far-right conspiracies on the Internet. At one site,
he described himself as a “sovereign American Citizen attempting to
thwart the obvious conspiracy and subterfuges of powers inimical to the
United States.”
On his Facebook page,
he has posted a number of conspiracy-related stories, including pieces
describing the so-called “Bilderburger conspiracy” to control the world
and various “Federal Reserve” conspiracy pieces. Likewise, his Twitter account is full of posts with a similar conspiracist bent.
After his January arrest, Cole flooded the Nevada County Court clerk
with a blizzard of nonsensical, pseudo-legal filings – a typical tactic
of so-called “sovereign citizens.” In one of these, Cole spelled his name in lowercase letters and called himself “a natural born, flesh and blood, living man.”
Another of these documents claimed that his right to own weapons is
guaranteed under the Second Amendment and that those rights nullify
California gun laws.
“Officers acted without warrant or any probable cause to seize my
person using a swat team style assault, and then started looking for
something to charge me with,” he complained. “I was attacked and
molested, unconstitutionally arrested, unlawfully incarcerated,
repeatedly intimidated and coerced to plead guilty to having committed a
crime, held in secret for five days, and my property and liberty taken
from me since January 26, 2014. I am being persecuted for being a gun
owner, and for exercising my inherent Right by unwitting or unknowing
accomplices of a seditious conspiracy against rights instituted by
foreign powers inimical to the United States of America.”
As soon as he recovers from his injuries, Cole will likely get to work on a new batch of “sovereign” legal filings.
A British television crew filming a gathering of Ku Klux Klansmen in
West Virginia this spring recorded one of the group’s leaders discussing
a plan to use returning military veterans to train KKK members in
combat techniques for “the upcoming battle” – presumably the “coming
race war” that the Klan and other white supremacists have long
predicted.
The nine-minute video documentary
by Barcroft TV is a striking portrait of the Loyal White Knights of the
Ku Klux Klan, an organization based in Pelham, N.C., with chapters
throughout the South, including this one in West Virginia. It includes
some appalling insights into their children’s upbringing and their
certainty about a looming social apocalypse.
But most disturbing is the segment in which the hooded Klansman
leading the rally tells the crowd about the group’s future plans:
We’re looking at something a little
different for probably the next couple of years, trying to get our men
and women ready for the upcoming battle that we’re about to take upon
us. And this is something that no Klan has ever done, and we’re going to
start it. All our boys are finally coming back home from the military,
which is good. And we’re getting a lot more military members joining,
which is good, as we’re going to start doing a lot more military
training.
Now that we got our Marines and our Army
back, they’re going to start showing us how to skin, how to survive off
the land. We’re going to try to move in another direction with the Loyal
White Knights, and that is starting armed training, hand-to-hand
combat, and stuff like that, just for the upcoming battle.
The Klansman is not correct, of course – this has been attempted
previously by other KKK organizations. Indeed, the presence of far-right
extremists within the military is a longstanding problem and frequently involves a Klan recruiter joining the armed forces.
The plan described by the Klan leader in the video is exactly the
type of scenario that the Department of Homeland Security warned about
in a 2009 law enforcement bulletin:
Returning veterans possess combat skills
and experience that are attractive to rightwing extremists. DHS/I&A
is concerned that rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and
radicalize returning veterans in order to boost their violent
capabilities.
At the time, the conservative media erupted in anger,
wildly distorting the bulletin’s contents on one talk show after
another, notably at Fox News. The reportage there – or more precisely,
the shouting from their pundits – described the bulletin as specifically
singling out veterans and targeting them for suspicion of far-right
extremism; claimed that there was no similar bulletin regarding Islamist
extremists from the DHS (there was); and said the report was based on
nothing but speculation. Fox’s Bill O’Reilly said the report was
“unnecessary,” cooked up by a bevy of myopic “far-left” bureaucrats who
chose to ignore Al Qaeda while pinning the terrorism label on ordinary
conservatives.
The Southern Poverty Law Center first drew attention to the issue in 1986, and after a period during which the military subsequently clamped down on extremists within its ranks, the problem returned during the Iraq War, as a 2006 SPLC report explained in detail. A later report in 2008 explored how the problem was worsening with racist skinheads signing up for service overseas.
The FBI drew up its own assessment in July 2008,
and pinpointed the potential danger then: “The military training
veterans bring to the [white supremacist] movement and their potential
to pass this training on to others can increase the ability of lone
offenders to carry out violence from the movement’s fringes.”
As criminologist Brian Levin explains in his interview with the
Barcroft TV reporters: “I think the real danger does not lie with the
Klan being some kind of widespread army that has tentacles across the
United States. That’s not going to happen. But what we do have to worry
about is individuals, autonomous cells, or duos committing terrorist
acts on their own because they get training, they get inspiration, and
they get knowhow from being in the orbit of these hate groups,” Levin
said. “Loose radicals coming out of that orbit represent a threat of
continuing terrorism here in the United States.”
Near the end of the video, one of the Klansmen expresses his own
hopes for what they all call “the upcoming battle”: “White people, we’re
all getting tired of the government,” he says. “And pretty soon you’re
gonna see the government collapse. And when the government keeps on
sending their money over to Israel and it finally collapses, you’re
gonna see the Klan take it back, and we’re gonna make this nation the
way it needs to be.”
In the wake of Sunday’s deadly attacks
in North Las Vegas, at the hands of two antigovernment “Patriot”
extremists, Infowars host Alex Jones warned his listeners that the media
would soon start claiming that there’s a connection between his
conspiracist media operation and the killers.
As a matter of fact, Jerad Miller – the 31-year-old Indiana man who
led the attack, assisted by his 22-year-old wife, Amanda – liked to post
on the Infowars member forum. And he constantly promoted Infowars on
his Facebook page.
In one of his Infowars posts, Miller even speculated about whether or not he should kill police officers.
“The emerging narrative in the Las Vegas shooting now includes Alex Jones,” the Infowars site complained shortly after news of the shootings broke. In short order, Jones began calling the shootings a “false flag operation”
secretly staged by nefarious federal government operatives who set it
up to look like it was a crime committed by domestic terrorists.
“The incident is custom-made to demonize the patriot movement,” the
Infowars site claimed. “The Southern Poverty Law Center has consistently
attempted to forge a link between white supremacists and members of the
patriot and constitutional movements.”
Jones became downright imaginative, explaining to his listeners, in one rant, how he would go about setting up the murders if he were a government agent, and then warning
that the shootings mean that “civil war is coming”. He also began
assigning responsibility for the “false flag operation.” In one rant, he
accused Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of being behind the crimes. In another, it was the work of President Obama and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Jones’ wild claims must be intended to distract from the fact that, as Media Matters reported,
Miller avidly posted Infowars links on his Facebook page and urged his
readers to the website – saying, in one such post, to “get informed or
get stupid”.
What those claims fail to explain is why, beginning in May 2012,
Jerad Miller became an Infowars forum member and began posting long
pieces there. In all, he appears to have published five posts, though
one of them titled “A Short Story About Protesting” is no longer
available.
By far the most striking and disturbing of these posts is the May 28, 2012, post he titled: “The Police (to kill or not to kill?).”
Most of it is devoted to him explaining at length that he’s mostly a
law-abiding citizen who doesn’t steal from people, but police oppression
over his marijuana business is driving him to think of violence: “I am
like a wild coyote,” he wrote. “You corner me, I will fight to the
death.” He continued:
I feel that I have been violated and
tread upon. That the so called justice system has done me harm. I do
not wish to kill police. I understand that most of them believe they
are doing the right thing. Yet, I will not go to jail, because I have
not committed a crime! I would rather die than be labeled as a
criminal. Let them call me a terrorist. Let them label me as a
fanatic, some nut job. I know the truth, and so does God. I’m sure our
founding fathers were labeled as such.
It concluded with what appears in hindsight to be a conclusion:
So, do I kill cops and make a stand when
they come to get me? I would prefer to die than sit in their jail, when
I have done nothing to hurt anyone.
Some of the posts are typical conspiracy theorizing of the kind that Infowars specializes in, such as the post that wondered if children’s lung cancer could actually be caused by “chemtrails” from jets. They also are mundane – one complained bitterly about his difficulties obtaining dental care, in part because of his ongoing legal and employment difficulties.
One of the posts, titled “After the Event,”
is a short story depicting a conversation between a father and son –
who evidently are now capable of levitation – in a post-apocalyptic
world, set in the year 2041. The father tells the son about “the event”,
when the Earth’s population was decimated (in 2012) by a barrage of
meteors and other calamities, while a handful of the wealthy prepared
shelters for themselves underground and survived. In the intervening
years, it seems, the handful of human survivors have developed
tremendous psychic powers that enable them to fly and other things.
The father warns the son that there will be a war in the future with
the people who went underground. “Us elders cant predict how long we
will live, but we all understand how the world cant go back to the way
it was,” Miller wrote. “It is not the same place and we are not the
same people. We are all equal and nobody rules except the rules. We
are now a people of love and compassion and unity with the earth. It is
our responsibility [sic] to care for everything around us because its
in our power to do so. They would seek to destroy and exterminate and
abuse. They would taint the water as they did before.
“Son, I cant tell you how precious life is,” it concludes.
Footage shot by a Las Vegas TV news reporter covering the standoff between federal authorities and Cliven Bundy and his antigovernment “Patriot”
supporters in mid-April shows Jerad Miller – the Indiana man who with
his wife, Amanda, shot and killed two police officers and a bystander on
Sunday in North Las Vegas – threatening violence against government
officials.
After telling the reporter for KRNV-TV that “Minutemen” were
supposedly ringing the scene of the standoff, he said: “So, you know, I
feel sorry for any federal agents that want to come in here and try to
push us around, or anything like that. I really don’t want violence
toward them, but if they’re gonna come bring violence to us, well, if
that’s the language they want to speak, we’ll learn it.”
The reporter was shocked: “Well, that sounds kind of like a menacing statement, I have to tell you,” she said.
Miller responded: “You know, the people here, that have come here to
support Bundy, we’re not afraid,” he said. “You know, we know that in
the past the government has used force against civilians, like Waco,
Ruby Ridge. Alright, we’re not afraid of that.”
Miller was filmed wearing camouflage gear and a T-shirt promoting
Brandon Martines, a conservative candidate for Clark County Sheriff.
Martines recently told the Las Vegas Review-Journal
that Jerad and Amanda Miller had shown up at his campaign events and
had offered to work on the campaign, but that when he had checked their
background he discovered that Jerad Miller had an extensive criminal
history, including DUI, assault, theft and mischief charges. Martines
told them, “Look, I appreciate your support but I can’t be associated in
any way, shape or form with you.”
“They were just trying to infiltrate,” Martines said. “They obviously had an agenda.”
At the Bundy ranch, Miller indulged in the paranoid fantasy-based
strategizing that was typical of the “Patriots” on the scene there, who
at one point began turning on each other over fears that a federal drone
attack was about to strike the camp.
In the KRNV interview, Miller touted the upcoming “Operation American
Spring” – the planned “Patriot” march on Washington, D.C., that was
supposed to draw millions of people out to demand President Obama’s
resignation but only managed to draw dozens – as a possible
counterweight to any assault on the “Patriot” encampment and the Bundys.
“But with American Spring coming up, you know, a lot of their
resources are in D.C.,” he told the reporter. “They can’t send the ATF
and the FBI out here in full force. You know, and we know that.”
He also made clear that he, like many of the Bundy supporters, was
deriving much of his inspiration from web-based conspiracist outlets.
When asked to ruminate on the upside of the government’s capitulation
in the standoff, he said: “It’s going to show a lot of people that the
federal government isn’t Almighty God. You know, they can’t just go
around pushing people around doing whatever they want anymore. We have
the Internet, we have alternative media – you know, we, we pick up on
things faster, we can get around, we can support each other.”
He also mentioned that friends whom he described as being even more
prone to violence nearly came out to Nevada to join him: “I know
personally a couple people that wanted to come out here, um, and join
up, but they were afraid they might get a little trigger-happy, you
know, and wouldn’t wait for them to fire the first shot,” he said. “So
they were advised to stay home, we only need cool-headed people here
that aren’t going to antagonize them, you know, and – pretty much make
it to look like we fired the first shot, or had anything involved in any
of that kind of thinking.”
Indeed, Miller insisted that he and his fellow “Patriots” were not going to take the initial steps to violence:
So we’re not instigating anything. We are
here in response to their criminal activity, as we see it. Sure, they
have “the law” [air quotes] on their side. But is it constitutional law?
That’s the issue.
Now, another big issue is our definition
of constitutionality differs from theirs. You know, we are a little more
strict on following the Constitution in their opinion. But I am pretty
sure if our founders were alive today, they would be rolling over in
their graves, or picking up a gun and doing what we’re doing.
More likely, they would be rolling in their graves at the thought of
having a man like Jerad Miller claim their names for inspiration.
Full transcript below:
MILLER: Hopefully, people will see that there’s people out there
willing to put their lives on the line, or just their, you know,
physical bodies out there and put them in front of the tasers, be
beaten, and help stand up for people, you know. Because, if this stuff
was happening to me, I’d want people to be there for me, you know. So I
can’t expect that out of people if I’m not going to be willing to come
out and support somebody else in their time of need.
REPORTER: Well, tell us though – it’s got to be a good feeling that
this weekend, if you want to call it a victory – I mean, certainly the
BLM blinked.
MILLER: I mean, we can’t feel good about something like that because
we shouldn’t have to be out here in the first place. Sure, um, you know,
it give us a lot more hope. It’s going to show a lot of people that the
federal government isn’t Almighty God. You know, they can’t just go
around pushing people around doing whatever they want anymore. We have
the Internet, we have alternative media – you know, we, we pick up on
things faster, we can get around, we can support each other.
And that’s the real important thing. We need to be backing each other
up and we stand for our rights and our liberties, because we’re losing
them at an alarming rate. And –
REPORTER: It was getting pretty tense. It seemed that there was definitely a – fear that it was gonna become violent.
MILLER: You know, the people here, um, that have come here to support
Bundy, we’re not afraid. You know, we know that in the past the
government has used force against civilians, like Waco, Ruby Ridge.
Alright, we’re not afraid of that.
REPORTER: Well, this was the fear that it was gonna become another situation like that – until the government backed down.
MILLER: Yeah, but this is an entirely different situation than Ruby
Ridge and Waco. They didn’t have the Internet back then, you know.
Cliven Bundy has been involved for over twenty years dealing with these
people. This isn’t something new. It’s just it’s escalated to this
point, you know.
So, it’s not that Cliven Bundy escalated it to this point. It’s the
federal government. They came down here and started abusing protesters
and stuff. Sure they might have been getting in the way of a truck, but
they were just curious about what was going on up there, because it is
illegal to bury cattle out there in the desert, and they were breaking
the law. You know, they had backhoes, dump trucks – why do you need that
stuff if you’re rounding up cattle? I can understand helicopters, but
as far as the heavy machinery? That was totally uncalled for. So they
were just wanting to know what was going on.
REPORTER: Does this change your strategy going forward, that there has been – you know, put one in your corner, in your tally.
MILLER: Well, we don’t see it like that. OK? We know they’re just
falling back to regroup. They’ll be back. This isn’t over. Um, the BLM
is just right down the road. They didn’t leave.
But with American Spring coming up, you know, a lot of their
resources are in D.C. They can’t send the ATF and the FBI out here in
full force. You know, and we know that –
REPORTER: You don’t think that federal government can’t mobilize at a moment’s notice if they want to? Come on.
MILLER: Not without people getting a little, I mean, suspicious of
what they’re doing. The more they bring out here, the more will come.
Plain and simple.
You know – this week, you know, people can’t just take off work right
away. People can plan for vacations and things like that. If they come
back, and there’s a standoff for a couple weeks, people will make it
down here.
You know, people are just – a lot of people are just waiting to see
what would happen. I know personally a couple people that wanted to come
out here, um, and join up, but they were afraid they might get a little
trigger-happy, you know, and wouldn’t wait for them to fire the first
shot. So they were advised to stay home, we only need cool-headed people
here that aren’t going to antagonize them, you know, and – pretty much
make it to look like we fired the first shot, or had anything involved
in any of that kind of thinking.
The armed people here are just here to keep the peace. You know,
certainly, we did have yesterday morning like a little armed
confrontation with them. But yet the sheriff was there one our side –
which he shoulda been here, you know, Day One. Telling them to get out –
they have no right to this land. The Constitution only allows the
federal government to own land for military bases, shipyards, arsenals,
capital buildings and emergency shelters. I don’t see any of that out
here. So are they literally declaring –
REPORTER: But the sheriff said he cannot supersede the federal government.
MILLER: Ah, that’s not what the Constitution says.
[Break]
MILLER: Ah, there’s a lot of these guys that are self-set. And
they’re really dedicated to freedom, that’s all they do, is they train,
they go out, you know, and they protect our borders and things. Like
that Minutemen are coming – and we’re just gonna be, uh – They’re out
here. They’re out here right now. You don’t see ‘em. You know – that’s
what they do.
So, you know, I feel sorry for any federal agents that want to come
in here and try to push us around, or anything like that. I really don’t
want violence toward them, but if they’re gonna come bring violence to
us, well, if that’s the language they want to speak, we’ll learn it.
REPORTER: Well, that sounds kind of like a menacing statement, I have to tell you.
MILLER: Well, I mean, you hear this kind of rhetoric from the
government all the time. We’ll put down citizens, we’ll put down
protesters, we’ll beat you up, we’ll gas you, we’ll shoot you with
rubber bullets. I mean, heck, down in New Mexico they shot and killed a
homeless man out in the desert. You know. They shot and killed this man.
Sicced a dog on him while he was laying there dying. And they caught
this all on video.
REPORTER: On this issue, you’re saying you guys aren’t going away.
MILLER: No, we’re not going away, but we’re not firing the first
shots, either. We will defend ourselves, if it has to come to that. But
we’re hoping that, you know, our show of force yesterday is enough to
get them to go, ‘Hey, this is a sensitive subject, this is a sensitive
area, perhaps we should leave it alone.’
Because any further involvement with the federal government is just
going to be seen as instigating. Alright, if they come back here –
‘cause the only reason we showed up here is ‘cause they were here doing
what they were doing. It’s not like we came here to get their attention
and they came. No, they came here and got our attention, and we came. So
it’s what they’re doing is what’s bringing us here.
So we’re not instigating anything. We are here in response to their
criminal activity, as we see it. Sure, they have “the law” [air quotes]
on their side. But is it constitutional law? That’s the issue.
Now, another big issue is our definition of constitutionality differs
from theirs. You know, we are a little more strict on following the
Constitution in their opinion. But I am pretty sure if our founders were
alive today, they would be rolling over in their graves, or picking up a
gun and doing what we’re doing.
Jerad Miller, the Indiana man who with his wife, Amanda, shot and
killed two police officers and a bystander Sunday in North Las Vegas
before dying in a suicide pact at a Wal-Mart store, posted several
videos at YouTube in the past year that revealed his paranoia and
antigovernment views.
One of the videos
contains an extended soliloquy by Miller on government drones that
turns into a quasi-philosophical rant about the nature of courthouses as
centers of “authoritarianism.”
The latter is noteworthy in light of a report by the Las Vegas Review-Journal
that among the documents found at Miller’s apartment was a carefully
laid out plan to attack an unidentified courthouse building in Las
Vegas, taking it by armed force and then executing public officials
inside.
The video begins with Miller pulling out a conspiracist magazine
devoted to government drones, titled “Drones: Are They Watching You?,”
which was published in 2013 under the auspices of magazine publisher Source Interlink
– a company that changed its name earlier this year. Miller waxes
paranoiac about the likelihood that people like himself are under
surveillance by them.
After complaining at length about the ankle bracelet he was forced to
wear as a result of being placed on house arrest in 2013 (according to the Lafayette Journal & Courier,
Miller was accused of violating his in-house arrest twice that year),
he turns his attention to the local courthouse near his home, which is
within view of his window:
A beautiful building, even though it is a monument to authoritarianism. It’s just a big concrete building a … thing …
that people have to go to, or else they go to jail. You gotta go get
your marriage license, you gotta go get gun permits – whatever it is,
you have to go down to that big stone structure monument to tyranny, and
submit, crawling, groveling, on your hands and knees: ‘Oh, give me
permission to do this, give me permission to do that.’
I dunno. Sounds a little like Nazi
Germany to me. Or maybe Communist Russia. ‘Where are your papers? Do you
have the authority to be here? Do you have the right to be here? Where
are you going? Where are you coming from? Who’s in your car with you?
Can I search your car? Can I stick my finger up your butt? No, oh,
that’s probable cause, you probably got drugs up there.’ Because that’s
what they’re doing now. They’re sticking fingers up people’s butts –
lookin’ for drugs. Big scary drugs.
Really, people? It’s time to wake up. This is getting ridiculous.
Other videos that Miller posted on the channel suggested that he was
emotionally devastated by his conviction and sentence for marijuana
possession in 2013. In a couple, directed to Amanda Miller, he weeps bitterly
as he soliloquizes about how much he will miss his wife while he is in
prison, saying she always makes him smile, “no matter how crabby of a
mood I’m in because of the New World Order and shit.”
In another video,
he frets briefly about the possibility of something monumental
happening while he is behind bars: “I pray to God that this Sunday is
not the last time I ever see you again,” he says. “I swear to God that
they better not fucking do this shit while I’m in jail. I’m pretty sure
they won’t. Pretty sure it’s not happening that fast.”
This kind of paranoia is common among antigovernment “Patriot”
movement followers, particularly the reliance on conspiracist
publications for information. It’s also reflected, with greater
intensity, in the Facebook post that Miller published on June 2:
We must prepare for war. We face an enemy
that is not only well funded, but who believe they fight for freedom
and justice. Those of us who know the truth and dare speak it, know that
the enemy we face are indeed our brothers. Even though they share the
same masters as we all do. They fail to recognize the chains that bind
them. To stop this oppression, I fear, can only be accomplished with
bloodshed.
It appears that in the space of the intervening year, Miller’s
paranoia graduated from weepy-eyed frustration to boiling hatred. The
combination of radical antigovernment views with personal problems has
driven others to commit violence in the past, and Miller appears to be
the latest to fall into this downward spiral.
A man and a woman who neighbors say were militant white
supremacists walked into a North Las Vegas mall pizza shop on Sunday
and, shouting declarations about the “start of a revolution,” opened fire on two Metro police officers
eating lunch there, killing both men. The two then walked into a
neighboring Wal-Mart and ordered everyone out, though not before
shooting one bystander to death. The two then shot themselves after
exchanging gunfire with police inside the store.
According to the Las Vegas Review Journal,
police found swastikas in the couple’s apartment, and the couple’s
neighbors described them as “militant” people who talked about
conspiracy theories, killing police officers, and “going underground”.
One of their neighbors said the man told him he had come out to Nevada to participate in the recent standoff with federal authorities
over rancher Cliven Bundy’s cattle 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas. He
also told the neighbor that he had been kicked off of Bundy’s ranch
property, though Bundy’s wife said
she was unaware of any such person
having been on their ranch.
The neighbor described them as “weird people” and said he suspected they used methamphetamines.
Sunday’s nightmarish scene in Las Vegas erupted shortly before noon
at the Cici’s Pizza restaurant near the Wal-Mart in North Las Vegas on
Nellis Boulevard. The man, described as a tall, bald white man with a
scruffy beard, and the woman walked in and opened fire. According to
witnesses, before opening fire, they shouted that “this was the start of
a revolution.” The woman reportedly walked up behind one of the
officers and shot him in the head at the soft drink stand. They then
took the officers’ guns and ammunition.
The Review Journal reported that they then draped a Gadsden Flag – the yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” banner long popular with antigovernment “Patriot” movement followers, and more recently adopted by the Tea Party – over the corpses of the two officers.
The slain officers were identified as Alyn Beck, 41, and Igor Soldo, 31.
The pair then emerged from the shop and headed toward the nearby Wal-Mart,
telling other bystanders to “tell the cops it was a revolution.”
Shortly after entering the Wal-Mart, the man fired his gun at the
ceiling and began ordering everybody out, upon which a scene of mad
panic ensued as people fled the store. At some point during this, one of
them shot and killed a female customer at the store. Her identity has
not yet been released.
Then the pair retreated to the rear of the store and, as police
arrived, began exchanging gunfire with police. At some point, the couple
proceeded with what police described as a “suicide pact”: The woman
shot the man first, and then shot herself.
According to Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie, Beck leaves a wife
and three children, while Soldo is survived by his wife and a baby.
“It’s a tragic day,” Gillespie said at a news conference at which he
was visibly shaken. “We have lost two officers with young families.”
Gillespie said the reports of “revolution” talk were still
unconfirmed, and added that his office was still working on uncovering a
motive for the killings.
After months of debate over orca captivity stirred up by the documentary Blackfish,and months of the world's largest keeper of captive killer whales refusing to participate, the company was finally persuaded to sit down at a table and engage the issue with their critics, in the form of a remarkable roundtable discussion sponsored by Voice of San Diego and titled, "What SeaWorld and 'Blackfish' Mean for San Diego."
The roundtable, which was held Thursday in San Diego (you can watch the entire discussion here), featured SeaWorld
veterinarian Todd Robeck, a senior animal trainer at SeaWorld named Kristi Burtis, former UC San Diego professor Susan Gray Davis, who has analyzed the park's business model, and Dr. Naomi
Rose of the Animal Welfare Institute, a veteran orca biologist. It was hosted by Scott Lewis and Lisa Halverstadt of Voice of San Diego.
Getting them to even engage in an open debate was an achievement. When Blackfish aired on CNN last year, SeaWorld refused to even come on air to discuss the film and its contents. Rather than expose itself to open questions, it chose to counter the film with an in-house spin campaign that revolved around a dishonest website it titled, "The Truth About Blackfish."
But more recent developments -- including pending legislation now in the backrooms at the California Legislature that would outlaw orca performances in the state and require SeaWorld to begin returning its orcas to the wild -- seem to have had their effect, and so when Voice of San Diego suggested this forum, SeaWorld finally deigned to open up and finally deal with the debate.
The company probably regrets this now. If you break down the hour-and-a-half discussion, it becomes fairly evident why SeaWorld has so assiduously avoided an actual debate over the facts with their critics, because whenever their representatives tried to make some kind of factual point, they either were blown out of the water by their critics' tart factual counters, or they wound up looking foolish as they fumbled about with charts and graphs.
They fumbled about when confronted with a question about the negative health effects of captivity for orcas. They had to admit that they had published misleading material. Their claims to offering "education" to children and substantive research in the scientific community were exposed as shams.
In the end, the best they could muster was a strangely emotional appeal to their audience's children and the ostensible benefits that SeaWorld offers them, marking an odd nadir in the debate. It seemed particularly ironic, given that SeaWorld is prone to accusing their critics -- who were resolutely fact-oriented throughout the discussion -- of relying on emotional appeals.
Moreover, on the really central questions in the debate, SeaWorld came off as incompetent and dishonest. The apotheosis of this came when Robeck -- who is chief of SeaWorld's breeding program -- evaded the seemingly softball question: "Is it really your contention that there are no health effects to being in captivity?" [The video atop the post features this moment.] Robeck first attempted to deflect disingenuously, and then spent the next several minutes pulling out charts and graphs that he claimed proved that, with their improvements in the care for the animals, their orcas lived as long as orcas in the wild now -- all of which Rose deftly punctured in a brief and devastating retort.
There were many other telling moments in the debate. Another key question -- SeaWorld's claim that its "animal ambassadors" provide a unique educational moment for children -- came fairly early in the discussion, and what was revealing was how shallow and facile SeaWorld's claims were in the face of hardnosed academic findings that their "education" was really just a facade for marketing the park and its experience, while the truth about animals such as orcas and dolphins is distorted and sometimes outright false.
Similarly, SeaWorld's oft-touted claims that it conducts research that benefits orcas in the wild too (see Sam Lipman's superb debunking for more on this) was trotted out, and promptly became a fiasco when Rose pointed out that, for a company that holds the largest collection of captive orcas in the world (not to mention one that is awash in money), a mere 50 research papers in 50 years' time is an output that can only be described in one word: "pathetic."
The sharpest illustration of the dubiousness of SeaWorld's claims came during the discussion of orca dorsal fins. SeaWorld has claimed [see No. 42] that "Nearly one-quarter of adult male southern resident killer whales in the wild have collapsing, collapsed or bent dorsal fins." Yet anyone who has studied the southern resident killer whales -- here's a complete catalog, so you can see this for yourself -- knows that not a single one of these whales has a collapsed fin.
The study that SeaWorld cites, in fact, is a study by Dr. Ingrid Visser of a single small population found in the waters of New Zealand, and who are not even remotely related to southern residents. And even then, as Melissa Cronin at The Dodo explained, it grossly misinterpreted that dataset: "Only one orca had a collapsed fin in the study, but SeaWorld confused
fin abnormalities with collapsed fins in an attempt to make the public
think that dorsal fin collapse is normal among orca whales. The park
also neglects to use updated research that has been published in the
years since by Visser and others."
Appropriately, Visser was outraged at the misuse of her research: “I hope, that as a scientist yourself and as the Director of Research at
SeaWorld,” Visser wrote in an e-mail to SeaWorld's research Dr. Judy St. Leger, “you
can see how wrong this misrepresentation is – not only to inform the
public by distorting the facts but also misrepresenting the data by not
presenting it in context.”
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And sure enough, in Thursday's roundtable, Todd Robeck -- at the end of a robust discussion of orca dorsals in which the veterinarian also mistakenly claimed the fins are made of cartilage, then retracted that when called on it -- acknowledged directly that this information was "misleading," and appeared to suggest that SeaWorld regretted making the claim.
Yet even though Robeck acknowledged directly that the claim by SeaWorld was false and misleading (and also indicated an astonishing ignorance of the wild orca's natural history), the claim remains up on the SeaWorld site. Anyone visiting "The Truth About Blackfish" even today (being June 7) will still read this false claim in the "Blackfish Analysis" (not to mention the risible assertion that there's no evidence wild orcas live with their mothers their entire lives -- see No. 24).
Finally, the debate became truly telling when the debate turned to the question of "water work" displays in which trainers get into the water with orcas -- something that SeaWorld is currently forbidden from doing, per the order from the Occupational Health and Safety Administration that followed the death of Dawn Brancheau, the focus of Blackfish.
This included a brief moment of hilarity when Burtis, at the end of an enthusiastic rant about how totally awesome it is to work for SeaWorld, because everyone always asks how they can get her job, cluelessly opines: "I don't know too many jobs where people are asking, 'Hey, how do I get a job writing for Voice of San Diego?'"
To which host Scott Lewis quickly retorts: "All the time." The audience bursts out in laughter.
Then, Burtis' enthusiasm is turned on its head, offered as evidence that, indeed, SeaWorld really is not about education by Dr. Davis, who offers some keen insight into just how important these shows are to SeaWorld's entire business model.
As she explains, the shows with trainers are the essence of SeaWorld's brand, not any "education" or "research" or "animal rescue" fig leafs (worth noting: SeaWorld has never yet participated directly in the rescue of a wild killer whale, except when it was taking one captive). What SeaWorld is selling is not an understanding of the animals, but a spectacle -- the jaw-dropping sight of seeing a relatively tiny human mastering these gigantic creatures and seemingly controlling them.
After all these telling blows accumulated, the SeaWorld spokespeople were only left, in the end, with an emotional appeal. And even that failed.
It came at the closing, as everyone gave their final thoughts. As they had throughout, Rose and Davis were calm and thoughtful and referenced the science and business acumen behind their positions. But when Burtis and Robeck took their turns, it was get-out-your-hankies time.
First, Burtis referenced the plight of one of her admirers whose fragile health and well-being were bolstered by her visits to SeaWorld and the time she spent with killer whales, suggesting that the animals had special healing qualities (something we thought only the hippies and psychics believed). And then Robeck became severely choked up as he tried to explain how special SeaWorld is to children -- pulling out a picture of his 9-week-old son on his iPhone at one point -- and then asserting, in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary (not to mention a paucity of substantiating evidence), that the knowledge gained from keeping orcas captive would be critical to helping wild orcas survive.
It was all strangely maudlin. But in the end, it was probably fitting. Because that was the best SeaWorld had, and it remains probably the only card they have left to play.
At some point, the heart-tugging narratives are going to have to contend with the cold reality coming their way. As Dr. Rose noted, "The market will speak." The truth is getting out, and no amount of tears or smears will change that. SeaWorld can either come to terms with the reality coming their way, or they can crawl back into their hidey hole and watch as their brand name goes the way of the Edsel.
A man described by authorities as an antigovernment “sovereign citizen” entered a courthouse in suburban Atlanta this morning armed with multiple guns and explosives and opened fire. The man was shot and killed by sheriff’s deputies shortly after wounding one officer in the leg.
Dennis Marx
According to Sheriff Duane Piper, the man, Dennis Marx of Cumming,
Ga., drove up to the courthouse in his SUV and emerged from the vehicle
with several guns and some explosives, and reportedly wearing a
bulletproof vest and a gas mask. As he approached the entrance,
he threw out homemade smoke grenades that briefly covered his approach
with orange smoke, as well as pepper spray grenades and homemade spike
strips. Forsyth County deputy Daniel Rush
came out to confront Marx and was shot in the leg. Then, as Marx
proceeded into the building, he was met with a hail of gunfire and was
killed.
The wounded deputy, a 25-year veteran, was taken to a local hospital and treated. Sheriff Piper praised him,
saying Rush’s actions stalled Marx long enough for SWAT team officers
and other deputies to arrive in place and protect the people working
inside.
“It would be a guess to think how many lives he saved had he not
engaged him right there,” Piper said. “Mr. Marx’s intention was to get
inside that front door and to take hostages.” Piper said
that Marx was well known as a “sovereign citizen” to deputies at the
time of the attack. Marx had a long-running lawsuit against the
sheriff’s office over alleged unconstitutional raids on his home, and
was due in court Friday morning to face marijuana and weapons charges.
Marx apparently had been living for the past week in a motel. When deputies went to his home, they found evidence that it had been rigged to blow up when law enforcement entered. Piper told a WSB-TV reporter he was confident the place had been set up as an explosive trap.
“We are quite certain it’s booby-trapped with the purpose of killing
law enforcement,” he said. Piper noted that it appeared Marx had been
planning the assault for some time.
Marx had been in trouble with sheriff’s deputies since at least 2011, according to the Forsyth News,
when he was arrested on marijuana charges, as well as weapons
possession charges. He had been suing the sheriff’s department for
alleged civil rights violations and use of excessive force, and had
filed papers in the suit using pseudo-legal language common to
“sovereign citizen” court actions.
An amendment to the complaint he filed on April 2 alleged that a
Forsyth deputy had caused a death in his family by setting events in
motion that led to it.
“Plaintiff also has information and receipts to verify his statements
to defendants regarding the seizure of plaintiff’s family’s property,
leaving plaintiff and plaintiff’s family without the means to properly
protect themselves and/or relocate, as is their Constitutional right,
leading directly or indirectly to the death and/or murder of one member
of plaintiff’s family,” the motion read.
A woman identified by WSB-TV as Marx’s attorney
said she had recently withdrawn from the case because Marx had been
dissatisfied with her representation. She said she had asked Marx to
take a psychological evaluation, but he had refused.
Bonnie Erbe, the longtime host of the Public Broadcasting Service’s
“To The Contrary” program, has long been a proponent of dubious claims
that immigration depletes natural resources and worsens global warming,
as well as an apologist for the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration
Studies (CIS). So it was not really a surprise when CIS awarded Erbe
its annual journalism prize this year for her “reporting on
immigration’s effects on health care, poverty, and natural resources, as
well as on birth tourism.”
Erbe, who was given the award Tuesday at a gathering at the National
Press Club in Washington, D.C., told the audience in her acceptance
speech that she “no longer” considers herself a progressive, “because I
don’t believe the progressives really support the environment.”
Erbe acknowledged that she works closely with CIS and Numbers USA,
and openly accepts their frequently dubious studies as accurate: “We
work with them on many projects,” she said, praising them for their
growing influence, “shown by the growth of their website and email list
they run a very necessary organization with now more than 2 million, I
believe.”
She explained her thinking on immigration, saying she doesn’t have a
problem with immigrants as people, but as a mass phenomenon: “Anyway,
immigrants are fabulous. Immigrants make the best Americans. They work
the hardest for the least amount of money. They contribute so much to
this country,” she said. “But in the journalistic community, if you dare
raise any negative impact of mass immigration that we have now, both
legal and illegal, you are shunted aside as some kind of strange person
who has – you know, has a very strange approach to reporting.”
Erbe said she became concerned about immigration mostly as an
environmental issue, and came to part ways with liberals over the issue
of overpopulation, “because they support open-border immigration, pretty
much.”
“I certainly came of age as a progressive, but I am no longer a
progressive because I don’t believe the progressives really support the
environment, and to me, that’s the most important issue. If we don’t
deal with climate change and human impact on the planet, there’s not
going to be a planet in 50 years, it’s my personal belief,” she said.
“And you can’t – you say that in journalistic or political circles, and
people look at you cross-eyed. And some – and we get objections from
viewers sometimes. We also get great, you know, emails saying, thank you
for doing this; I have – I hear this nowhere else on TV. But we also
get people who say – you know, call me bad names and say that our – that
begins with R – and call us out for just reporting what are the facts.”
Those facts, as Erbe sees it:
We’re not dealing with the fact that we
are the major contributors to greenhouse gases and what we do – and this
is our cultural disadvantage, but when we do take immigrants from
developing nations who have very small carbon footprints, we turn them
into the rest of us, who have huge carbon footprints, and turn them into
greater contributors to global warming.
And we need to do something somewhere.
We’re not doing anything on any of the fronts. Immigration is just one
of the fronts where we need to start controlling thing – things, but
again, is anybody going to listen? Does anybody care? No.
This is not particularly new for Erbe. In the past, she has both praised CIS and its “studies”, and has ardently promoted the view (also long promoted by FAIR and CIS’s founder, John Tanton)
that immigration causes environmental degradation in the United States.
Indeed, much of Tanton’s work has entailed attempts to transform
immigration into an environmental issue.
And Erbe noted at the end of her speech that she was donating the proceeds from her award to PFIR, whose main purpose as a “greenwashing” outfit is to argue against immigration on environmental grounds. Erbe appears to have bought into their claims whole.
The claim, for instance, that immigrants worsen carbon emissions, as ThinkProgress has explained, is based almost entirely on CIS studies that employ “deeply flawed methodology”:
The report claims that a person’s CO2
emissions is directly related to his or her personal income — so a
person making $110,000 per year will emit 10 percent more carbon than a
person who earns $100,000 per year under the report’s methodology. Thus,
because the report claims that each Mexican immigrant earns 53.2
percent of the average U.S. resident, it claims that these immigrants
must also produce 53.2 percent of the carbon emissions.
But this is simply absurd. If such a
relationship actually did exist, that would mean that Mitt Romney, who
earned $21.6 million in 2010 — or more than 600 times the average annual
income according to the CIS report — also must have produced 600 times
the CO2 emissions. That’s enough of a carbon footprint to fuel over
2,200 vehicles or power more than 1,400 homes for an entire year. Not
even John McCain owns that many houses.
Think Progress also notes that data actually demonstrates that
immigrants produce lower carbon emissions than their native-born citizen
counterparts. “And as CAP Senior Fellow Andrew Light told
ThinkProgress, even if we could suddenly remove the entire carbon impact
created by immigrants, it would only decrease the U.S.’s carbon
emissions by 7.32 percent in a good year. Clearly, immigrants are not to
blame for the U.S.’s large climate footprint.”
Of course, that has not stopped CIS and its nativist cohorts from
pointing the finger of blame, nor has it stopped Erbe from blithely
aiding in that process. These views were adroitly satirized by Stephen Colbert a couple of years ago.
“I say, why stop with global warming?” he asked in a segment on the
CIS claims. “There are so many problems on which conservatives and
liberals can come together to blame immigrants. … So, liberals,
conservatives, let’s make sure America continues to be a country people
strive to come to, by kicking out the people who came here.”
After letting a special unit devoted to monitoring domestic terrorism
fall dormant following the Al Qaeda attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced this week
that it was reviving the group. The Domestic Terrorism Executive
Committee will focus on extremists motivated by antigovernment and
racial hatred, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement
Tuesday.
Predictably, pundits from the extreme conspiracist right,
particularly antigovernment “Patriot” groups, worked themselves into a
frenzy over the announcement, warning their followers that a “war on the
white man” was about to come down from the Obama administration. A
similar reaction greeted the 2009 leak of a report from the Department
of Homeland Security that focused on the domestic radical right, with
right-wing groups describing it as an attack on the political
conservatives.
In his statement
announcing the DOJ committee’s revival, Holder noted that this decision
comes after more than a decade of focus on the threat of international
terrorists, while a number of recent incidents have underscored that
they are not the only threat. “We must also concern ourselves with the
continued danger we face from individuals within our own borders who may
be motivated by a variety of other causes from anti-government animus
to racial prejudice,” Holder said. Severalnewsaccounts
noted the move appeared to be in response to such incidents as the
April murder of three people at Jewish institutions near Kansas City,
Mo., the bombing of the Boston Marathon last year, a neo-Nazi attack on a
Sikh temple in 2012, and a number of similar attacks. Non-Islamic
domestic terrorist activity has clearly picked up in the years since
Barack Obama was first elected in 2008.
“We’ve been pushing DOJ to devote more resources to domestic terrorism for a long time,
so we’re delighted that the Attorney General has taken this step,” said
SPLC President and CEO Richard Cohen, who recently wrote a column for MSNBC describing how the committee was meant to meet on 9/11 but never did again.
The response was considerably less measured, however, when it came to
right-wing media, particularly pundits inclined to promoting conspiracy
theories. One far-right website, run by documentarian Pat Dollard, headlined the news story: “Holder Mobilizes Group To Wage War On The White Man.”
Over at conspiracist pundit Alex Jones’ Infowars website,
there was little doubt about Holder’s intentions: “In reality, Holder’s
task force will undoubtedly focus on the Obama administration’s
political enemies, mainly returning military veterans, conservatives and
those who identify with the Tea Party. Such groups have been
increasingly linked to terrorism by multiple federal agencies. … Given
the documented history of the federal government’s involvement in
facilitating terrorism, the administration will likely do whatever it
can to create the necessary scenario to bolster its executive power.”
The conspiracist website The Daily Slave
was similarly hysterical, adding some personal vilification into the
mix by claiming that Holder “only obtained his job because of his Black
skin and his support of government financed terrorism,” and suggesting
that he had been “accused of direct involvement in the Oklahoma City
bombing back in the mid 1990s through his role in the Clinton regime.”
(The only such accusations came from the extreme right and they were
utterly baseless.)
“Simply put, this clown is an evil lawyer terrorist who should be
tried for high crimes and treason,” The Daily Slave concluded. “His
announcement of a task force to stop ‘homegrown’ terrorists is a joke
when he himself is a terrorist criminal. This savage should be rotting
in a prison cell.”
Another conservative website called The Daily Dose
published a post claiming that Obama administration officials already
“exhibit behavior consistent with that of despotic tyrants.”
“One of the chief offenders, Eric Holder, has just announced that he
is coming after everyday American patriots, especially those who use the
Internet,” it read, claiming that Holder is using recent terror
incidents “as the premise to target both Americans and our right to
freely communicate over the Internet.”
“One can expect that the domestic group comprised of those evil
racist heterosexual redneck Christian veteran gun-owning crackas will be
occupying most of the top positions and garnering most of the
attention,” it concluded.
The commenters at these sites, just as predictably, were even more
wild-eyed. “Holder needs [to be] executed for treason and murder of the
American People and their blood bought Constitution,” wrote “propel7”
at Infowars. “He is nothing more than a degenerate NAZI. His end will be
the same as Mussolini, at the hands of the People. Shove this up your
Homo-grown ass.”
At Glenn Beck’s The Blaze,
where the reportage was relatively restrained, commenter “timeryder”
wrote: “This regime is now justifiably terrified that attempts to
overthrow them and re-establish our constitutional government and the
rule of law may occur. A nazi/Stalin regime like rule is about to begin
where people will be arrested and detained without evidence but on
suspicion alone. Unlike Germany, there are no allies to come to our
rescue to stop it.”
While it has so far remained confined to far-right conspiracist
sites, this sort of hysteria is reminiscent of the response in 2009 when
the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a bulletin to
law-enforcement agencies warning of recruitment of returning veterans by
far-right extremist organizations and its potential to enable
domestic-terrorist attacks. Then, a number of right-wing pundits from the mainstreamdenounced the bulletin for supposedly “targeting” veterans and smearing them, a narrative that dominated media reportage despite the efforts
of then-DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano to defuse the situation.
Eventually, Napolitano caved in, withdrew the report, and publicly
criticized its authors.
That response resulted, as the SPLC later reported,
in the gutting of the DHS’s section on right-wing domestic terrorism
and the retirement of the veteran analyst who headed it up, Daryl
Johnson, from the agency. Most of the rest of his team, which focused on
non-Islamic domestic terrorism soon followed.
As it soon emerged, the DHS bulletin in fact anticipated a
substantial resurgence in right-wing extremism and its associated
violence that began in 2009 and has only begun to subside slightly in the past year.
The report also was somewhat prescient in accurately noting that some
of the more lethal of these extremist recruits would be military
veterans, an observation that became manifest in such incidents as the attack on a Sikh temple in 2012 by a neo-Nazi who was recruited while in the Army, and last year’s arrest of a group of Georgia radicals who organized a far-right militia unit while in the Army, eventually murdering two people in an attempt to hide their plans to commit terrorist acts.
Some person or group in rural Missouri with an apparent hatred of
President Obama managed to briefly shut down morning traffic on
Interstate 70 on Monday by hanging an effigy of the president from an
overpass.
According to local news reports,
the effigy – a mannequin wearing a rubber Obama mask – was spotted
hanging from an I-70 overpass on Lefholz Road, near Grain Valley in the
rural outskirts of Kansas City, at about 5:30 a.m. Deputies responded to
remove the display and found what they feared might be a bomb attached
to it.
“The item that we had, we thought possibly could have been explosive,
so we went ahead and shut down I-70 is both directions to ensure that
if it was explosive there was nothing that was going to cause a hazard
to any passerbys, and once we removed that from the scene we opened up
I-70 almost immediately,” Sgt. Ronda Montgomery, spokesperson for the
sheriff’s office, told reporters.
The item turned out not to be a bomb, and the interstate was reopened
after a couple of hours. The sheriff’s office continued investigating
the incident.
“We are talking with neighbors and canvassing the neighborhood,”
Montgomery said. “We are putting the pieces of the puzzle together.”
Political science professor Max Skidmore of the University of Missouri-Kansas City told WDAF-TV
that political dissent is protected by the First Amendment but this
action may have crossed the line by threatening the president. “It’s
some person who is simply vicious and whose hatred overwhelms what
little good sense he or she may have,” he said.
The spectrum of gun rights groups runs the gamut. But you know a gun
group has gone too far when even the National Rifle Association is
criticizing it. (Update: The NRA has retracted its criticism – more below.)
That’s the position that Open Carry Texas – which believes citizens
ought to be able to pack any kind of heat in public and in just about
any kind of setting, including bars and political conventions – now
finds itself in.
Open Carry Texas first attracted public notice last week when the group’s armed members were banned from Chipotle franchises as well as Chili’s and Sonic restaurants
after different chapters of the group entered eateries around the state
bearing assault rifles and other firearms. That was followed by a
series of subsequent episodes that upset local Texans, who accused the
group’s members of bullying tactics and intimidation.
All that negative press coverage in a state like Texas appears to
have motivated the NRA to express concern about the nature of the
protests. The group, which supports “open carry” for handguns, on Monday
issued a statement criticizing Open Carry Texas members for having “recently crossed the line from enthusiasm to downright foolishness.”
“[W]hile unlicensed open carry of long guns is also typically legal
in most places, it is a rare sight to see someone sidle up next to you
in line for lunch with a 7.62 rifle slung across his chest, much less a
whole gaggle of folks descending on the same public venue with similar
arms,” the statement reads.
It continues: “Let’s not mince words, not only is it rare, it’s
downright weird and certainly not a practical way to go normally about
your business while being prepared to defend yourself. To those who are
not acquainted with the dubious practice of using public displays of
firearms as a means to draw attention to oneself or one’s cause, it can
be downright scary. It makes folks who might normally be perfectly
open-minded about firearms feel uncomfortable and question the motives
of pro-gun advocates.”
There was good reason to question the motives of at least some of
those involved, it turns out. A Marine Corps veteran and gun rights
supporter, James Henry, got into an argument with Open Carry Texas
supporters on Friday while filming one of their demonstrations in
Dallas. He was followed and verbally harassed by members of the group,
who videotaped him. Now the man is facing death threats and has to himself carry a weapon at all times.
“One said you’re going to wish you had a gun, boy, when I fill you with
holes,” Henry told a Dallas TV station.” “I’m being used on this one
side as a proponent for gun control which I don’t agree with and also
being used as a proponent that I’m some crazy left wing guy, which I’m
not,” he said. He just happens to find the Open Carry tactics repugnant:
“That is not being ambassadors for responsible gun owners to support
gun rights.”
That was followed by another recent incident in which a group of Open Carry Texas supporters showed up fully armed
to protest a women’s anti-gun violence organization, Moms Demand Action
for Gun Sense in America (MDA), at its regular meeting at a Dallas-area
restaurant.
A spokesperson for MDA said that the four mothers who comprised the
gathering were all inside the Blue Mesa Grill when the Open Carry
advocates “pull[ed] up in the parking lot and start[ed] getting guns out
of their trunks,” and then waited in the parking lot for the women to
come out. The women remained inside instead, fearful of “inciting a
riot.” The Open Carry advocates reportedly shifted their operation to a
nearby Hooters after a couple hours.
MDA issued a statement decrying the Open Carry advocates as “gun
bullies,” noting that the four mothers and remaining restaurant
customers were “terrified by what appeared to be an armed ambush.”
The outrageous antics of Open Carry Texas’ supporters provoked a counter-protest
at one of the group’s suburban demonstrations in North Richland Hills,
where a man named Glynn Wilcox and his son showed up with signs opposing
the group’s “intimidation.”
“While everybody has the opportunity to carry open arms, carrying
them in a front forward sling and making a scene of it isn’t showing
you’re trying to get rights,” said Wilcox. “You’re being a bully.”
Open Carry Texas’ stance amid all this controversy has been defiant.
Rather than scale back its aggressive tactics, the group’s leaders
recently called on delegates to arrive fully armed at the Texas state Republican convention later this summer.
As for the NRA, Open Carry Texas’ spokesmen thumbed their noses at the much larger organization and announced on Facebook that they were tearing up their memberships.
“It is unfortunate that an organization that claims to be dedicated
to the preservation of gun rights would attack another organization
fighting so hard for those rights in Texas,” it said. “Already, OCT
members are posting pictures of themselves cutting up their life
membership cards. If they do not retract their disgusting and
disrespectful comments, OCT will have no choice but to withdraw its full
support of the NRA and establish relationships with other gun rights
organizations that fight for ALL gun rights, instead of just paying them
lip service the way the NRA appears to be doing.”
Update: Media Matters reported Tuesday evening that the NRA’s top lobbyist, Chris Cox, retracted the group’s criticism of Open Carry Texas:
Cox said that the statement was “a
mistake” and that “it shouldn’t have happened,” adding “our job is not
to criticize the lawful behavior of fellow gun owners.” Cox also blamed
the statement on a “staffer” who Cox said “expressed his personal
opinion.” Referencing media interest in the statement, Cox termed it a
“distraction.”
He says none of it would have happened if his brother hadn’t gotten
into trouble over guns with local authorities. “I don’t know if he would
have even been in the area if he hadn’t had the earlier confrontation.
He was charged with misdemeanor possession of a loaded firearm at a
campground. I had to bail him out on that one.
