You will be incredulous when I say that it has been a great week for decency in America. Three days ago an aging white man walked into a synagogue with a collection of firearms and shot 17 people, killing 11. Three days before that, an aging white man shot two black men in a grocery store. Several days before that a different aging Caucasian man mailed bombs to a dozen critics of our current president. And of course this is all against the backdrop of yet another aging white man’s metronome of anti-semitic fear mongering about Latin American refugees and asylum seekers, who must have it pretty bad in Honduras considering they’re still on their way here.
That sounds a lot like the most indecent week in recent memory, doesn’t it? But while the drum of right wing violence beats on, the national dialogue is bending over backwards to appeal to reason, prayers, and decency, and to condemn violence in general on all sides. In the face of skyrocketing extremist Christian terrorism in the United States, a national news media has been cowed by those same right-wing extremists into providing “fair and balanced” calls for decency as vitriolic rhetoric continues to inspire violence.
As the right continues to defame the nature of news (truth, facts, etc.), centrist pundits and the mainstream left continue to bury their heads in the sand in the interest of decency and order, as though Dr. King never warned “that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity,” or that “the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice.”
The simple truth of the matter is that we in the United States have a domestic terrorism problem, and have since our foundation. It is a problem that ebbs and flows in the fringes of the mainstream, and today enjoys legitimacy on a national level unseen since the Jim Crow era. The legitimacy granted to right wing extremists by the rhetoric of our federal government has increased racial and right wing violence in America, and squeamishness on the part of the Obama Administration allowed it to flourish.
In 2008, Department of Homeland Security analyst Daryl Johnson warned that the financial crisis and election of a black man to president could lead to an uptick in right wing extremism and violence. His report was intended to warn and inform law enforcement agencies nationwide, but was leaked and triggered widespread political backlash from the right. He went on (recently, but before this past week) in a WashPo OpEd:
“Unfortunately, the Department of Homeland Security caved to the political pressure: Work related to violent right-wing extremism was halted. Law enforcement training also stopped. My unit was disbanded. And, one-by-one, my team of analysts left for other employment. By 2010, there were no intelligence analysts at DHS working domestic terrorism threats.”
In the interest of not hurting feelings on the political right, the Department of Homeland Security abandoned investigations into real, credible, and accelerating dangers of terrorism on American soil. Dangers that we have seen materialize into right wing terrorist violence in the decade since that happened.
The difference between active Christian Identity militias and Al Qaeda is their legitimacy in the local mainstream, nothing else. And right now a Republican State Representative in Washington state is advocating for a Christian caliphate to secede from the nation. The President of the United States enjoys the rabid support of neo-nazis and white supremacists. A robust disinformation campaign surrounds hot-button issues of immigration, gun rights, and religious freedom, and it hinges on ancient tropes of anti-semitism, racism, and jingoistic nationalism.
This is dangerous. And appeals for reason and measured response from the middle only allow the center to drift right and further endorse right wing extremism. Indecent actions and beliefs cannot be met with decency.
Talk is not cheap, words have meaning, and language matters. It’s time we use language that accurately describes the current threats to American ideals: religious extremism is religious extremism, whether it is Christianity or Islam. Terrorism is terrorism whether the zealots brandish the Q’ran or the Bible. And state-sanctioning of that terrorism is the same whether it is Saudi, Pakistani, or American.
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