We live in frightening times.
By Mark Potok
 |
| Oklahoma City, 1995, not Benghazi |
It’s
déjà vu all over again.
Twenty
years ago, the passage of the Brady gun control bill helped ignite the first
wave of the “Patriot” movement, a combustible mix of gun-toting militias and
baseless conspiracy theories about government perfidy that culminated in the
1995 mass murder of 168 people in an Oklahoma City federal building.
As
this year began, the first serious talk of gun control since the early 1990s, a
reaction to the slaying of 26 people in a Connecticut elementary school, set
off a comparable furor.
Patriot
leaders like Chuck Baldwin vowed to refuse to register or surrender their
weapons, calling on other pastors to do likewise. The Oath Keepers, a Patriot
group composed of present and former members of law enforcement and the
military, said its people would never succumb to such “unconstitutional filth.”
Other Patriots warned furiously of secession, nullification, even civil war.
We
live in frightening times.
Before
the first wave of the Patriot movement died down at the end of the 1990s, law
enforcement officials had broken up scores of terrorist plots aimed at the government and others.
Now,
after four years of a major Patriot resurgence, it seems likely that the
movement and its violence will spurt ahead yet again, driven, as it was in the
1990s, in large part by hatred of gun control. The other powerful drivers of
the movement have been the re-election of President Barack Obama — who, like
Bill Clinton in the early 1990s, is seen as a liberal traitor — and the sorry
economy.
The
movement’s resurgence since 2008, when there were just 149 Patriot
organizations, has been dramatic. As the Southern Poverty Law Center reported
this week, that number reached an astounding 1,360 groups in 2012, a rise of
813 percent in four years. At the same time, the number of hate groups remained above 1,000, as it has since 2010.
Patriot
groups are now working overtime to stoke the political flames.
Richard Mack was an iconic hero of the Patriot movement in
the 1990s, when he was an Arizona sheriff who sued the Clinton administration
and won, triggering a weakening of the Brady Bill’s background checks for gun
buyers.
Now, Mack is back as head of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace
Officers Association, and he says that of 200 sheriffs he met with recently,
most “have said they would lay down their lives first rather than allow any
more federal control.”
Once
again, the threat of violence seems to be looming. Already, to the surprise of
some analysts, a major new study of domestic political violence from the
radical right — “Challengers from the Sidelines: Understanding
America’s Violent Far-Right,” by the director of the Combating Terrorism Center at West
Point — found that right-wing violence is up by a factor of four from the
1990s.
Eighteen
years ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote then-Attorney General Janet
Reno to warn about extremists in the militia movement, saying that the “mixture
of armed groups and those who hate” was “a recipe for disaster.” Just six
months later, the Oklahoma City federal building was bombed.
Today,
with our country’s political polarization at historic levels and government
officials being furiously demonized by Patriots, we may be approaching a
comparable moment.
In
the 1990s, warnings that might have prevented some of the violence from the
radical right failed to stick. Now, as we face another large and growing threat
from the extremists of the Patriot movement, the country needs to do better.
One important start would be to demand that the Department of Homeland
Security, which gutted its non-Islamic domestic terrorism unit after
unjustified criticism from the political right, rebuild its important
intelligence capabilities.
Mark Potok is a Senior Fellow at the Southern
Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the author of its new report on the rise of right-wing extremist groups. SPLCenter.org
Distributed via OtherWords. OtherWords.org
Distributed via OtherWords. OtherWords.org