Right-Wing Militias Are Thriving — and the Media Won’t Talk About It

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/right-wing-militias-thrive-post-bundy-and-media-wont-talk-about-it

Three months after the standoff at the Cliven Bundy ranch, the Southern Poverty Law Center has issued a report—” War in the West: The Bundy Ranch Standoff and the American Radical Right“—stating what should have been obvious at the time, but which most media coverage utterly obscured: The standoff was not some quirky, standalone event that spontaneously just happened out of the blue. Rather, it was a highly coordinated event reflecting the threat of a larger militia movement, which in turn has drawn together multiple threads of far-right ideology over the course of the last 40 years.

On the purely tactical level, the report notes that Bundy’s armed supporters had “overwhelming tactical superiority” due to their pre-positioning on the high ground above the confrontation—under the direction of a Montana militia member and Iraq War veteran—which is a primary reason why the Bureau of Land Management wisely withdrew. On a somewhat broader level, the report warns of the events’ ripple effect. “Just in the months since the Bundy ‘victory,’ tense standoffs between the BLM and antigovernment activists have taken place across the West — in Idaho, New Mexico, Texas and Utah.”

That’s in addition to the violent Las Vegas rampage of Bundy supporters Jerad and Amanda Miller, which left three innocents dead along with the two shooters. And it places these events in a larger context. First in the Obama era—“Since 2009, there have been 17 shooting incidents between antigovernment extremists and law enforcement”—but also beyond. It stretches as far back as the Whiskey Rebellion in the 1790s, but gaining much more organizational coherence with the confluence of the racist, anti-Semitic Posse Comitatus, starting in the 1970s, and two more mainstream movements, “the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s and 1980s and the Wise Use movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s.”

“The Bundy ranch standoff wasn’t a spontaneous response to Cliven Bundy’s predicament but rather a well-organized, military-type action that reflects the potential for violence from a much larger and more dangerous movement,” said Mark Potok, senior fellow in the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, and lead author of the report, in a statement accompanying the report. “This incident may have faded from public view, but if our government doesn’t pay attention, we will be caught off guard as much as the Bureau of Land Management was that day.”

[Mnemosyne]

1. K&R nt

[DirkGently]

2. "The media" actually discussed those two incidents at length.

The larger question seems to be why so little was done about the Bundy situation in particular afterward. I'm trying to imagine the situation if an Occupy protester had drawn down on NY Cops from a sniper position. Well, besides the Occupier being summarily killed, that is.

But the failure here is governmental, not the lazily bashed "media."

[xchrom]

3. i didn't see the media discuss those -- i saw them sesationalize

the militia idiots -- damn near treat them like the uber-patriots they portray themselves as.

discuss -- no.

[DirkGently]

4. MSNBC went quite in depth with Chris & Rachel.

I'm sure Fox did what you suggest, but Fox is hardly "the media" writ large.

I think Rachel went all the way back to Posse Comitatus, Sovereign Citizens, Tim McVeigh, etc.

[xchrom]

7. good for those 2 --

the rest of the media certainly did not.

[malaise]

10. Al Sharpton had a serious discussion on this with some one from Southern Poverty

yesterday

[polichick]

5. It's stunning how "our" gov't handled this...

and how Occupiers were treated so differently - tells us who's in charge.

[xchrom]

6. +1

[napkinz]

8. kick

nt

[Octafish]

9. Gosh. Oliver North wanted FEMA to use Michigan Militia-types for the Big Round-Up.

REX-84

[Boomerproud]

11. The media in general and the government are both frightened of RW militias.

and the American people, by and large don't see the problem. What I saw on the news was almost support for the militia members and how the BLM "screwed up" and got their asses kicked for their "governmental overreach". This wasn't just on Fox.