The White Right’s Impunity

The White Right’s Impunity

If a thousand armed Blacks had gathered in one place, pointing rifles at federal officers, and two of them later cold-bloodedly assassinated policemen, the federal response would touch every Black neighborhood in America. But the armed white Right gets a pass. Racists are resources to those in power. “The national security state’s legitimacy is based on (white) mass fear and loathing of the Other.”

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

“The racist ‘underground’ functions largely in plain view.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) keeps a running tab of armed rightwing domestic “plots and conspiracies ” since April, 1995, when Timothy McVeigh and his associates blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. The attack soiled the reputations of grassroots fascists throughout the American “heartland” and prompted the U.S. Justice Department to announce formation of a “special unit” to, ostensibly, track and disrupt rightwing militants. Over the next several years, the feds busted a number of individuals involved in armed operations. Press coverage revealed that the racist “underground” functions largely in plain view, and that government operatives are all but a permanent presence in their ranks (just as FBI informant Gary Rowe was in the Ku Klux Klan car – and maybe on the trigger – when civil rights volunteer Viola Liuzzo was murdered on an Alabama highway in 1965). The whole pretense came to a halt on the morning of September 11, 2001, when the last scheduled meeting of the Justice Department unit was cancelled, for obvious reasons.

In 2009, Department of Homeland Security analyst Darryl Johnson wrote a report urging his superiors to pay more attention to “rightwing extremism .” At the time, DHS assigned eight people to track “non-Islamic” domestic extremism. Johnson thought the job required 12 people. Instead, his unit was dismantled by Obama’s newly-appointed DHS secretary Janet Napolitano, with only one analyst remaining, according to Salon.com .

The unit was ‘revived’ just two weeks ago, part of Attorney General Eric Holder’s flurry of cosmetic Obama legacy-building initiatives. Holder’s announcement was vaguely worded, so as not to create a firestorm on the Right. The unit would go after “'lone wolf'-style actors aimed to harm our nation,'' and would focus on anti-government plots and racist violence. Days later, husband and wife Jerad and Amanda Miller , who earlier this year had been among an army of fascists gathered in defense of racist rancher Cliven Bundy, shot two Las Vegas cops in the head and killed a bystander at a Wal-Mart. After declaring, “This is the start of a revolution,” they committed suicide.

“The FBI’s war has always been against Blacks, radicals, and now Muslims.”

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