As of Tuesday, April 6, the FBI arrested 64 year old Charles Alan Wilson of Selah, Washington for making death threats to Washington Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat. While Wilson denies being either a Tea Party supporter or a Republican, his phone threats, and apparently his conversations with the FBI, sounded like they were taken right off of Fox News and the statements on conservative blogs and at Town Meetings on Health Care reform. His conversations with the FBI representing themselves as calling from the conservative anti-health care reform organization, Patients United Now, part of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, elicited that Wilson held conservative views.
www.justice.gov/usao/waw/press/2010/apr/pdfs/WILSON%20COMPLAINT.pdf
This directly supports my assertion that death threats to members of congress, particularly Democratic or Liberal members of the House and Senate, are coming from the right, and are NOT as some writers and commenters on the right 'blogosphere' have alleged, originating from the left trying to make the right's tactics and rhetoric look bad.
Prior to making the death threats, legally exercising his first amendment rights to free speech, Wilson had routinely left many very ugly, expletive-laden messages with Murray's office, and also with the office of the other Washington senator, Senator Maria Cantwell's office, but none of those messages previously contained the illegal death threats which triggered the FBI Investigation.
Wilson boasted in his death threat messages and in his conversation with the FBI about his gun ownership, which was legal, the .38 he owned was registered, and his conceal carry permit.
Representative Steve Cohen has released expletive-laden email which threatens that "if our tea parties had hoods, we would burn your ass on a cross on the white house lawn".
The capitol police are investigating. The FBI has multiple investigations in hand relating to death threats against members of congress; a recent statement indicated that speech alone was not sufficient to trigger an investigation, and that speech was protected by the First Amendment.
Some individuals from the Tea Parties should be praised for speaking out now, if belatedly, against violence. Some members of the Tea Party have described receiving their own 'hate speech' communications, and being egged. Tea Party buses in Searchlight, Nevada appeared on video to have been egged by angry supporters of Health Care Reform and Senator Harry Reid. The egging and the abusive phone calls, voice mails, email, and 'snail-mail' letters are also reprehensible, but they do appear to be generally far below the bar of the threats emanating, based on their content, from the right.
While Tea Party leaders and others acting as spokespersons for different segments of the right have asserted, they do not advocate violence. However, they have been remiss not only in tolerating extreme and provocative, even threatening language, but in endorsing the worst kinds of misinformation about the issue.
Some on the right are already backpeddaling from their own rhetoric, and they are claiming that they are not responsible for the violence and threats of violence, and that these individuals do not represent their groups, and may not even be members of them. I would point out that groups like the Tea Party entities are very loosely organized, and do not appear to have formal membership criteria or dues. So long as someone professes to share some or all of the opinions expressed by those groups, to support their actions, and to use their rhetoric, and so long as that is all that is necessary to belong, the people making these threats DO belong.
Regardless of membership, so long as these individuals in the course of making their threats are using language and concepts, and most particularly the factual misinformation provided by these groups, by Republican members of Congress, and by the right wing media like Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and other talking heads on the radio, there is a direct connection, a direct responsibility. It is egregoiusly irresponsible to claim that when threats on the lives of our elected representatives and their families directly use your words, that you don't share in the responsibility for having used those words. The right incited this behavior; they should own it, and they should correct it.
If we are to conduct ourselves according to our motto "E Pluribus Unum", BOTH sides need to remember that democracy does not guarantee that any party will get their way, or that we will be pleased with every outcome of democracy. It promises us a representative process which offers us as a nation a method of determining our government and our laws. We cannot properly do that if we continue to expand the polarization of the left and right, we will not BE the UNITED States if this polarization progresses too far. We will become the Disunited States of America.
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