More Right Wing Crazies Stockpiling Arsenals of Weapons for Insurrection

I don't claim by any stretch that all conservatives are racist. What I'm asserting below, connecting the dots, is that racism among a significant, and surprisingly large segment of the base, is embraced and exploited by the right for money, votes, and power. It is more than tolerated, it is encouraged to be part of their politics and to set part of their political agenda. For some, it is because they dislike having to share the traditional position of political power and social and economic privilege among white christian(more or less) males with women and with people of color or alternatively, who do not originate from Europe, preferably western Europe. For others, it is sufficient that people of color - and with the recent policies and legislation, increasingly women - are voting not only for democratic candidates, but actively AGAINST conservatives.

At right is a 2008 Reuters photo with the caption: “Republican National Convention page Isaac Aguigui watches from the edge of the floor at the start of the first session of the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota September 1, 2008.”

photo above from Pandith News; left photo appears to be Aguigui's mug shot
From Business Insider:
Anarchist Leader In Assassination Plot Was Apparently A Page At The 2008 GOP Convention

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Shortly after the media frenzy over these "anarchist" militant revolutionaries and their alleged aspirations to overthrow the government (with $87,000 of weapons and multiple members with loose lips), Gawker revealed that their leader, Isaac Aguigui was apparently a page at the Republican National Convention in 2008.

Gawker reports that they found a photo of what appears to be Aguigui, or maybe just a guy who looks incredibly like him and also has the name "Isaac Aguigui."
The caption of the photograph says "Republican National Convention page Isaac Aguigui watches from the edge of the floor at the start of the first session of the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota September 1, 2008."

From Business Insider:
Military Anarchists Were Busted Trying To Overthrow The Government And Assassinate Obama



Nomadic Lass via Flickr

There was a recent revelation in a relatively well-covered murder trial involving four US Army soldiers facing murder charges for the shooting death of another soldier and his 17 year-old girlfriend.The revelatory pieces of information are contained herein, released by the AP:

Prosecutor Isabel Pauley says the group bought $87,000 worth of guns and bomb-making materials and plotted to take over Fort Stewart, bomb targets in nearby Savannah and Washington state, as well as assassinate the president.

 

Remember when the conservatives had a meltdown because the Obama administration recognized the threat from violent right wing extremists, which is factually a greater threat than Islamoterrorism to this country?  All extremists are legitimately suspect because they lean towards any means necessary to achieve their purpose; all terrorists are genuinely dangerous because they embrace violence to do so.

It is not a coincidence that the Sikh mass shooter in Wisconsin first discovered and then embraced white supremacy and neo-nazi groups in the military.  Clearly, while not an indictment of the military overall, there is an apparent niche for that kind of politics there.

The militia white supremacists are just a bit more overt about it, and a good bit more honest in their violence and hatred as right wing authoritarians and fascists. The right can't win in a fair, honest and legal election; so they claim voter fraud where none exists.  The right can only take power to try to move this country backwards into the worst abuses that disgrace our principles, to the shameful days of our past.  The only difference with the white supremacists and militias and the other members of the GOP who go along with the voter suppression and disenfranchisement is they get down to the violence inherent in that a lot quicker.

Apparently the leader of this group was a page at the 2008 Republican Convention.

As author and professor Juan Cole noted, this guy is a bigoted White militia leader.  I've heard too many of the right wing supporting white supremacists, taking their money, courting their racism, and trying to return to the bad old days of yesteryear when we had a very real group of people who were second class citizens, people of color.

If anyone doubts that a segment of the right is extremely racist, you have only to look at this year's incident where two delegates through nuts at a black CNN camerawoman, telling her this was how they fed the animals.  If you have any doubt about the role of white supremacists in the conservative movement you have only to look at the groups welcomed to participate in CPAC during recent years that have been notoriously and historically racist, like the John Birch Society (one of the founders was the father of our current political corrupters, the Koch brothers) and two prominent white supremacists were speakers, alongside our current crop of radical right wing candidates for office at the GOP convention.

From News One:

Two white supremacists are set to speak at panels at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference that will also feature speeches by Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.
The first white supremacist is Peter Brimelow the owner of the website VDare, which is labeled by the SPLC as an anti-immigration hate website. VDare has featured the works of noted white supremacists, Jared Taylor, Sam Francis, Virginia Abernethy, Kevin MacDonald as well as conservative pundits, Michelle Malkin and Pat Buchanan.
Brimelow has been a featured guest on the white supremacist talk show “The Political Cesspool” and is a prominent anti-immigration activist despite the fact he was born in England. Brimelow will speak on a panel called “The Failure of Multiculturalism: How the pursuit of diversity is weakening the American Identity.”
The other white supremacist is Robert “Bob” Vandervoort who spoke on a panel called “High Fences, Wide Gates: States vs. the Feds, the Rule of Law & American Identity.” Vandervoort works for the site ProEnglish.com and also was the organizer for Chicagoland Friends of American Renaissance which met regularly with the Chicago Chapter of Council Of Conservative Citizens.
American Renaissance is white supremacist organization run by notorious racist Jared Taylor that organizes a conference of racists including neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan including David Duke and Stormfront owner, Don Black. The Council Of Conservative Citizens is another white supremacist organization. 

This is of course in the larger context of the two prong strategy that began in the Nixon administration, and continued long after Nixon resigned, and continued beyond his death.  The 'Southern Strategy' and the less well-known 'Northern Strategy' devised by racists like former Republican candidate, Pat Buchanan.  I was particularly struck by a statement made, on air, by former MSNBC host Cenk Uygur about a conversation off air that he had with former MSNBC host Pat Buchanan before Buchanan was fired for his blatant white supremacist racism from that network.  Uygur indicated that when he spoke with Buchanan about the intentional racism of the southern strategy, and how it had benefited the GOP in the early years but was now in fact working against the GOP, as people of color become a larger demographic in the U.S., he indicated Buchanan's claimed the Southern Strategy had kept whites in power, despite the voting rights act and other civil liberties legislation in the 60's, for 40 years, so it "had a good run", and was therefore apparently worthwhile for the GOP.

So while Karl Rove whines that the Democratic party is 'playing the race card', it is in fact the Republican party and the Tea Party that pander to people like these white supremacist militants who want to overthrow the country and commit further presidential assassinations.  Ron Paul has taken money from white supremacists like Stormfront, Mitt Romney cynically and deliberately uses surrogates like birther Donald Trump to raise money from racists conservatives, and won with that white demographic strongly in southern campaigning.  Prominent Republicans like former governor Haley Barbour are supporting both Romney and Ryan as a surrogate and campaigner:

Most of the uproar over Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour’s comment, “I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” misses the point entirely. When the potential 2012 Republican presidential candidate made the remark to Andrew Ferguson in an interview for The Weekly Standard, speaking in defense of racist Citizens Councils that ruled the South before and during the civil rights era, it was no mere slip of the tongue. Barbour was simply playing the “Southern Strategy” card. 

Even a cursory study of Barbour’s past reveals the recent remark was not out of character. In the past he’s recalled that turbulent time when Ole Miss was violently forced to integrate as “a very pleasant experience.”

In his office he’s been known to show interviewers his prized possession: The last handwritten note of Ronald Reagan, dated Nov. 14, 1994, mere days after the president had announced that he was suffering from Alzheimer's and was retreating from public life. It was addressed to Barbour, who at the time was the chairman of the Republican Party.

Dear Haley, 

Congratulations on a great job for the Republican Party. I couldn't be happier with the results. And please don't count me out! I'll be putting in my licks for Republicans as long as I'm able.

This is the same Ronald Reagan that, immediately after being nominated by Republicans as their presidential candidate, played the Southern Strategy to the hilt by giving his first speech on August 3, 1980, at the Neshoba County Fair, just a few miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi, the town widely associated with the 1964 murder of three civil rights workers. In it, he repeatedly used what had by then become the coded racist buzzwords: “states’ rights”—the notion that each state has the right under the Constitution to perpetuate its traditions any way citizens deem fit, even if those traditions were racist.

Such subtly coded racist rhetoric resonated with voters then, just as Barbour’s revisionist version of history of the South he came of age in resonates with his base now.

It is not an accident that despite Tampa being in an area likely to be threatened by hurricanes, and which is notoriously untenable due to heat and humidity in August even when there are no actual storms raging, Florida was a southern state that like the rest of the deep south was a part of the confederacy that has a long history of racism in this country.  It is no accident that the state of Florida is trying, despite laws to prevent purging the voting rolls of ELIGIBLE LEGAL VOTERS within 90 days of an election, and that they did so in a manner calculated to disenfranchise this time around 100,000 legitimate, legal, valid voters.  Now Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Texas are trying to one-up Florida's dirty politics directed against people of color. But all that will do besides trying to re-institutionalize racism in government, which is both UnAmerican and contrary to the fundamental premise of representative government in the Constitution, is guarantee that when history is written, the Republicans of the early decades of this millenium will have disgraced themselves and their politics as bigots who are corrupt, unethical and morally bankrupt. That's why they have to put so much money and effort into characterizing themselves as religious and the 'values' party, and call themselves patriots.  It is because they are none of those things they 'doth protest too much' to the contrary.

I don't want to go back to this; apparently the GOP and Tea Partiers and their militia friends DO.






Either you think these were the good old days where the good ol' white boys were in charge the way God intended, not women, not minorities; or you think these were the bad old days that we have genuinely moved beyond.  Apparently the old white male GOP is waxing nostalgic, and not in a good way.  And the new militants want the old days back too.