When Words Selectively Matter

Pandora wrote a great post on Friday, looking at Steve Newton’s efforts to minimize concerns that liberals (especially those on this blog) might have about the Hannitys and Becks and whoever of the US airwaves who use their broad reach to try to legitimatize (and manipulate) their listeners’ fears and anxieties and resentments by invoking the business of revolution and civil war and various bits of violence targeted to liberals.

His only response was to my comment back to Liz, who made a claim (that Steve does too) that Missouri Law Enforcement was targeting 3rd party members as terrorists.

I can’t speak for the other individual who Steve addresses, but a decent close reading of the report referenced certainly fulfills none of the hyperbolic claims made for it either by Steve or the guy who wrote the article Steve links to. But observe this — Steve represents my claim as follows:

… both of whom challenged me for suggesting that the MIAC report on the modern militia movement encouraged Missouri LEOs to focus on supporters of third-party candidates.

Actually, the “challenge” was to Liz, but after I had read that entire paper, I couldn’t find anything there that serves as explicit “encouragement” or “targeting as terrorists” 3rd party members.

And he concludes his long post thus:

The grim reality here, Tom and cassandra, is that this strategic alert does present political party preference and government criticism as significant identification markers for dangerous right-wing extremists.

Anyone see the problem here? Steve starts out claim that this paper makes 3rd party members into targets and terrorists, and ends up changing that claim to “significant identification markers”. While this paper does include a reference to the tendencies of political preference of militia members, it also discusses the militia insignia they wear, the books they read and the movies they admire as identification markers too. So that what worries Steve is the references to 3rd party membership — not the books and movies. And let’s remember when AG Ashcroft had fantasies of home contractors calling in to report people with Korans or other Arabic reading materials on their shelves.

Further, Steve wants to dance around the provenance of the briefing material by impugning the fact that the Missouri Militia’s webpage was not included in the briefing (which would be a real liability if this briefing was intended to actually target these militias) and run through a “reasonable man” scenario to demonstrate that this information could be used badly.

But that doesn’t have much to do with the briefing itself. The briefing provides no orders, it provides no conclusions, it doesn’t even have a real threat assessment. It does provide summary background material of the type pretty routinely given to law enforcement on potential threat groups — like gangs, the Russian mob, the violent anti-abortion groups, Fred Phelps followers. Background material that may or may not be useful if that officer finds himself in a law enforcement action involving these groups. And let’s remember what real targeting looks like: the State of Maryland actively monitored and infiltrated several nonviolent activist groups, even putting names of leadership on terrorist watch lists. The evidence of a briefing paper is not evidence that the State of Missouri is doing anything like that to either militia groups OR to 3rd party members. Belonging to a militia isn’t exactly illegal here — the Republic of Texas is alive and well, even though some of their members were sent to jail some years back for threatening to assassinate Bill Clinton, actually kidnapping people and actually interfering with the police. While I don’t know the political affiliation of the Republic of Texas, their involvement with law enforcement was as a result of their criminal behavior. Not because they belonged to a third party. But using the “reasonable man approach”, this report provides data that may be useful to law enforcement when these people “go off the reservation” and incur the attention of the police. It does not lead a reasonable reader to believe that all 3rd party members are affiliated with militia groups. And wouldn’t you think that if this briefing was wrong about the usual political affiliations of militia groups, that the folks getting their dudgeon up might actually go off and prove that to be wrong?

A recurring subject here at Delaware Liberal is the increasingly violent rhetoric that gets ginned up and pointed at liberals and Democratic leadership. Steve has been a frequent critic of our assessments and positions of the eliminationist right-wing rhetoric — ranging from admonitions that these people may have genuine concerns to the weak tea of incredibly false equivalencies. Positions that don’t take into account that the reasonable man would not hear anything rational about Ann Coulter’s wish that terrorists should have taken out the NYT building. And really, the Coulters and the Hannitys and all of the rest aren’t really pointed at reasonable men, are they? But somehow a reasonable man reading that Missouri Law Enforcement briefing is supposed to think that this history and other data about militia groups is somehow meant to make all 3rd party members into a target.

I, for one, don’t have any problem with law enforcement having information about groups largely arrayed for violent or criminal behavior. Constant profiling of people based on this information — not on potential criminality — would be wrong. But I will note that there is quite the double standard here. Our concerns about the real violent rhetoric of wingnut commentators (with bodies to show for it) are to be dismissed, while any mention of 3rd party members on a police briefing is a call to defend the ramparts.