While Donald Trump is bragging about closing
mosques to fight Islamic terrorism, there has been an
under-reported surge of right-wing terrorism recently in the
U.S.
Since July, when anti-choice crusaders released hoax videos that
falsely claimed that Planned Parenthood sells fetal body parts,
there has been a rash of arsons at clinics, at least one of
which doesn’t perform abortions. Just this week, police in New
Hampshire arrested a teenager threatening a Planned Parenthood
with a hatchet. After the racist church shooting in Charleston
in June, itself an ugly act of domestic terrorism, there were a
series of fires at black churches across the South.
And now St. Louis law enforcement fears that there’s an arsonist
on the loose in the city, setting fire to churches with
predominantly black or racially mixed congregations. This is on
top of what the Southern Poverty Law Center was already calling
a resurgence in domestic terrorism across the United States.
That we are living in an era of major conservative backlash is
not news. From the wholesale assault on reproductive rights to
the dramatic increase in restrictions on voting to the bizarrely
enduring Donald Trump campaign, the evidence everywhere suggests
that right-wing America is freaking out and lashing out. They
can feel their control over the country, which has a black
president and legal gay marriage now, slipping out of their
fingers.
The temper tantrum has grown so massive it’s threatening even
the Republican party, which is being torn apart by purity tests
and fury over even the slightest hint of cooperation with
liberals, who are seen as a subversive threat to be stomped out
instead of fellow citizens to work through your issues with.
So it’s really not a huge surprise that, with right-wing anger
levels so high, a small number are taking it to the next level
and setting fire to churches and clinics. Unfortunately, this
isn’t really getting the media attention it deserves.
The summer’s church burnings got a smattering of coverage, but
less than the debate over the Confederate flag. The fire
bombings and arson attacks that have hit four Planned Parenthood
clinics since interest renewed in attacking the organization
have barely registered in the national media, according to a
report by Media Matters. These St. Louis burnings are so
frequent and close together that they are getting more national
media coverage, but it has barely gone beyond bare bones
reporting to dig into the deeper issue of the connection between
the rise in right wing radicalism and the rise in domestic
terrorism.
“The media need to report these incidents as what they are:
domestic terrorism,” Ilyse Hogue of NARAL said in a recent press
release on the clinic attacks. She is exactly right about that.
Terrorism, by definition, is violence enacted in order to assert
your political will. And while none of these have been as
horrible as the Charleston shooting, this rampage of right wing
arson attacks should still be very concerning. These are no
ordinary crimes, but an attempt to use violence to cheat the
democratic system and to intimidate people through the threat of
violence. You know, terrorism.
It’s tough to report on this because, inevitably, conservatives
while whine and throw tantrums in an attempt to silence
discourse about right wing terrorism. Last week, the Justice
Department created a new position to coordinate agency responses
to domestic terrorism, a reasonable idea since domestic
terrorists kill more Americans than foreign terrorists do. This
position focuses on all forms of domestic terrorism, whether
they are motivated by racism, Islamic fundamentalism, or
Christian fundamentalism.
In the past, when the Obama administration tried to address
domestic terrorism, they faced an ugly backlash from
conservatives who dismiss, despite all the evidence to the
contrary, the fact that all this hateful right-wing radicalism
does inspire violence. This time, possibly because the shootings
in Charleston were so horrific, the backlash response has been
muted in mainstream conservative spaces like Fox News.
Still, the more fringe right was going nuts. WorldNetDaily
published an alarmist article suggesting that this was part of
“Obama’s legacy of targeting conservatives” and denying that
domestic terrorism is real, claiming that all the
anti-government and racist attacks are about “mental illness”
instead. (They don’t even acknowledge the issue of anti-abortion
violence.) The article also asserts that it’s a cover story for
what is actually an attempt to—what else—take all your guns
away.
Bryan Fischer at Renew America wrote that Obama has ” an abiding
hostility to people of Christian faith”, and that this renewed
effort to stomp out domestic terrorism is evidence of it.
Breitbart News, which is closer to the mainstream of
conservatism, though it isn’t quite on the level of Fox News,
also raised the alarm, putting “domestic terrorism” in scare
quotes and trying to discredit the Southern Poverty Law Center
and minimizing right-wing terrorism.
The fact of the matter is that a lot of conservatives are more
interested in evading responsibility and avoiding hard
conversations about what kind of extremism they’re producing
than about actually taking measures to stop terrorism. A recent
exchange on a Facebook page advertising a protest at a Planned
Parenthood clinic in Pullman, Washington, is a small but
terrific example of how these things go. The clinic, which does
not perform abortions, was set on fire and suffered extensive
damage in September. Video shows someone throwing a flammable
object through the window. But even though their extensive
picketing of the clinic almost certainly inspired the arsonist,
anti-choicers in the area kept picketing the burn site.
One young conservative showed up at the Facebook page organizing
one of these protests to express that he is “concerned, very
concerned, about this new Planned Parenthood protest that is
scheduled for a week from tomorrow in Pullman again”, because of
the arson and because the clinic “does not even provide
abortions”. He was concerned that this would ignite the
“supposed war on women image”. In this, he is correct. Few
things scream “war on women” like following up an arson with a
protest in service of cutting women off from affordable
contraception and other non-abortion reproductive health
services.
However, the young man’s concerns were blown off. “But
John….just because some arsonist committed a crime does not mean
we should stop advocating for the life of the unborn, or caring
about the health of women,” a woman immediately replies. (When
antis talk about “the health of women”, they’re usually
referring to their belief that non-procreative sex, even if
accomplished just with contraception, is inherently bad for
women.) Soon after, the young man’s post was deleted, though
it’s unclear if the organizers took it down or he did, for fear
that his reasonable opposition to seeming to support misogynist
terrorism would make his fellow anti-choicers dislike him.
It was a small moment, but indicative of the indifference that
conservatives demonstrate to terrorism done in their name.
Considering that would-be terrorists generally think they’re
expressing community values, that shrug response is going to be
read as support. In light of this, it’s all the more important
for the media to cover acts of domestic terrorism. If nothing
else, it will raise the heat on ordinary conservatives to
condemn these acts, hopefully discouraging future terrorism. It
might even lead to a debate about how radical right wing
politics are inevitably going to lead to some right wingers
thinking violence is the solution when democratic methods fail. |