ahhhhhhh living in your make believe fantasy world of military porn still eh? .. uh huh, I remember all those meetings you used to post about that NEVER took place .. lolololol ... from your first love ... the FREEPERS
Since 9/11, the right wing hate talkers have stepped up their vitriolic attacks against anyone who doesn't agree with them or doesn't look like them. Through their demonization of liberals, Muslims, Hispanics, and gays, they've opened the door to a new era of intolerance and hate in this country. And with that hate has come an increasing number of politically-based murders - murders which are becoming so frequent this year, that we haven't gone a solid month without some right wing nutjob pulling out a gun and killing people who didn't agree with their beliefs. Mike Papantonio discusses the mental breakdown in this week's Pap Attack.
======== .. and from Australia with reference to the dangerous, destructive and damaging trend in the USA ..
Hate speech, violence and the green movement - 15 May 2011
I have an article about political violence in the current issue of Green, the quarterly magazine of the Australian Greens. The editorial committee made the edition about political discourse, on the suggestion of Senator Bob Brown. I was commissioned to write about the links between hate speech and violence.
If politicians are intent on whipping up a lynch mob to divert attention from their own culpability, it is not arsonists who should be hanging from lamp-posts but greenies. Miranda Devine
[ Miranda Devine? .. kinda/maybe/just now feels sorta like an Ann Coulter of Australia .. right-wing tobejezzzoz, anyway .. :( ]
This is not some nice little debate. This is war. Tom DeWeese American Policy Center, think tank linked to Exxon-Mobil and Koch Industries.
Hate speech seems to pose three serious threats to the green movement. Firstly, it may lead to acts of political violence directed against politicians, leaders or activists. Secondly, hate speech undermines the constructive political discourse we need in order to deal with climate change. Thirdly, hate speech is the leading edge of a dangerous, new species of politics that is emerging in the USA.
.. no mystery where that poster is coming from .. :( ~~~~~~~~
How is hate speech different from angry political speech? For our purposes here, hate speech is any public communication that incites or justifies violence against a social group. It would not, for example, include a death threat made for an idiosyncratic reason, against a sole politician by a legally deranged individual. Nor does it include the legitimate argumentation of Parliamentary question time.
We are dealing with hate speech when death threats are made towards a group (or an individual based on his or her membership of a group); for example, when directed against US President Barack Obama on the basis that he is an African-American. I propose that hate speech is present in Miranda Devine’s slippery quote above, in which she sneaks a proposal to lynch greenies behind a hypothetical IF-THEN clause.
Hate speech is shifting our culture, creating a social licence to commit political violence against people who belong to designated groups: Jews, greenies, Muslims, progressives of any stripe. It is part of the deliberate political programme of the extreme right in the USA, and is funded by various ‘philanthropists’, most notably the Koch brothers, who own America’s biggest private corporation, Koch Industries (a major polluter). Rob Stein, a Democrat insider, analysed the conservative echo chamber in 2004 and estimated that they received more than US$300 million annually.
The issue of hate speech and violence crystallised early this year, after the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. On 8 January 2011 a rightwing assassin shot Congresswoman Giffords in the head, killed 6 people, and injured another 13. Giffords is hated for being Jewish, pro-choice and supporting community solar energy (and despite her relatively conservative positions on immigration and in support of gun rights).
Fox News successfully campaigned to strip the Giffords assassination of political meaning. Fox and its political wing – the Republican Party – painted the assassin as an exceptional case, deranged either by mental illness or “extreme” ideology. They used the ‘Palin defence’, which is that when they call for people to kill the president, the word kill has a rhetorical function and is thus not an incitement to violence.
The best readily available study of political violence in the US is the Secret Service’s Exceptional Case Study Project. This five-year long project looked into every person who attacked, or attempted to attack, a prominent US public official since 1949.
Bryan Vossekuil, the Secret Service’s former National Threat Assessment Center Director, warned against media agendas that explain assassins as having ideologically caused ‘political’ motives or as being ‘deranged’. He concludes: “This is a narrow and inaccurate view of assassination.” The most common factor (across 97% of cases) is that offenders had a “history of grievances and resentments”.
The point is that the culture of hate erodes the social taboo against political violence and reinforces the ‘intuitive’ worldview of the mob. Professor Rod Tiffen of the University of Sydney says that the political parties and the Murdoch media work in tandem to drive populism. He writes, “Together they form an outrage industry that absents proportion, reason and reasonableness, and where it is difficult – soon, perhaps, near impossible – to have a measured debate of policy options.”
The US Department of Homeland Security monitors domestic terrorism threats and warns of a dramatic rise in “right-wing extremism” in the USA. It blames the rise of extremism on both domestic and global changes. The key domestic causes include the election of a black man to the office of president and the economic stress caused by the financial crisis. Global factors that stimulate extremism are largely to do with the relative decline of the US in relation to China and India.
The Department of Homeland Security report also points to specific shifts in patterns of thinking and organisation within the extremist community. Extremists are becoming better at recruiting, by mixing their political asks with “accusatory” language, such as blaming the recession on the Jews. They are also becoming more unreasonable and paranoid. Fox’s Glenn Beck, for example, apparently thinks the US Government is planning to allow a foreign country to invade America and enslave its white, Christian citizens.
David Neiwert is a US journalist who specialises in investigations of extremists. His 2009 book The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right explains how the conservatives got as crazy as they are and where they are headed.
The Eliminationists cites the story of Jim Adkisson, who killed two people and wounded seven in an act of extremist political violence in July 2008. Adkisson wrote, “Know this if nothing else: This was a hate crime. I hate the damn left-wing liberals … Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House…”.
Neiwert believes it is a logical step from the right-wing extremism of Fox News and sections of The Republican party to get to violence. If greenies and liberals are in a global conspiracy with climate scientists, Jews, bankers and the UN to enslave the West, then it makes ‘logical’ sense to eliminate them. Ever since the Exceptional Case Study Project, the Secret Service has implemented protective security using behavioural analysis of these ‘logical’ precursors to assassination.
Things have gotten far worse since Neiwert wrote his book and the Department of Homeland Security wrote the Rightwing Extremism brief. In 2010, the number of active hate groups in the United States topped 1,000 for the first time, according to the Southern Poverty Law Centre. Astonishingly, this includes 330 militias, the paramilitary arm of the Patriot Movement.
It is clear that some private companies in the US are prepared to pollute the peaceful political climate in the West, in order to keep polluting the atmospheric climate. Fox News and other media are the echo chamber that reinforces the toxic slander that greenies are a treacherous threat to society. A climate petition sponsored by Liberal MP Dennis Jensen carries this comment from a Buxton, Queensland, resident called Kevin Middleton: “Taitors (sic) should be hung.”
Thanks to Charles Richardson, Jan Bryant, Tim Hollo, Guy Rundle and Deborah Cass for their comments.