A West Point think tank has issued
a report titled “Challengers
from the Sidelines: Understanding America’s Violent Far-Right.” Perhaps it
should have been titled “Demonizing America’s Mainstream Right,” because the paper,
while focusing on domestic terrorists, links them ideologically to law-abiding,
Constitution-revering, mainstream conservative American citizens, making it
easy for left-wing media to demonize the latter and for the government to
target them.
The report, which warns America about “violent far right”
groups such as the “anti-federalist” movement, was issued last week by the Combating
Terrorism Center (CTC) at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. It was
written by Arie Perliger, who directs the Center’s terrorism studies and
teaches social sciences at West Point. The CTC normally produces reports on al
Qaeda and other violent Islamic groups throughout Asia, the Middle East and
Africa. Previous reports similar to this latest one, for example, featured such
topics as “Crime and Insurgency in the Tribal Areas of Afghanistan and
Pakistan,” “Radical Islamic Ideology in Southeast Asia,” and “Al-Qa’ida’s
Foreign Fighters in Iraq.”
But this latest study looks within our own borders and
connects limited government activists to three movements it identifies as a
racist/white supremacy movement, an anti-federalist movement, and a
fundamentalist movement.
But the characterization of the middle group is where the
report gets interesting and more problematic. After describing liberals rosily
as “future- or progressive-oriented” and conservatives as paranoid about a New
World Order and clinging to an idealized past, the report asserts that the “anti-federalists”
want to undermine “the
influence, legitimacy and effective sovereignty of the federal government and
its proxy organizations.” The members of this movement
espouse strong convictions regarding the federal government,
believing it to be corrupt and tyrannical, with a natural tendency to intrude
on individuals’ civil and constitutional rights. Finally, they support civil
activism, individual freedoms, and self-government.
This pretty
much describes every conservative I know, especially in the face of the accelerating
big-government bloat and Constitutional revisionism of collectivist Barack Obama,
The Man Who Would Be King. The report’s suggestion then, whether intentional or
not, is that mainstream conservatives are ideologically sympathetic to racist
terror groups.
“The far right represents a more extreme version of
conservatism,” the report continues, “as its political vision is usually
justified by the aspiration to restore or preserve values and practices that
are part of the idealized historical heritage of the nation or ethnic
community.” Remove the bit about “ethnic community,” which is a consideration
that is far more important to the race-obsessed left than to the right, and
conservatives would proudly stand by that vision.
Extremists
in the anti-federalist movement, the report notes, direct most their violence at
the government and their law enforcement proxies – something mainstream
conservatives, who are fiercely supportive of law enforcement (while the left
high-fives each other for defecating on cop cars) would certainly not endorse.
It adds: “While far-right groups’ ideology is designed to
exclude minorities and foreigners, the liberal-democratic system is designed to
emphasize civil rights, minority rights and the balance of power.” Translation: conservatives have a
racist, xenophobic streak, but the left is inclusive, tolerant, democratic, and
non-totalitarian. Um, no.
This is not some obscure academic paper – the CTC describes
itself as “the largest provider of counterterrorism education to federal,
state, and local government in the United States.” This paper will have an
impact on how our own future military leaders view not just the violent
terrorists the report addresses, but also, potentially, the mainstream
conservatism to which it links them.
Progressive websites like the Daily
Kos and Think
Progress are predictably crowing about the report and attacking
conservative
umbrage
about it. “Aren't conservatives
supposed to be hawkish on terror?” taunts The
Atlantic Wire. “Conservatives love appealing to these kinds of studies when
arguing that we need to get tough on terror, right?” Right. We are – and should be – hawkish on terror,
and domestic terror is no exception. The issue is not that conservatives want
to whitewash far-right terror groups, but that this report opens the door to
viewing principled conservatives as suspicious and threatening.
Want to talk
whitewashing? It is the radical left
(including the Obama administration) and their media accomplices who sweep
Occupy Wall Street violence
under the rug, embrace domestic terrorists like Bill Ayers as esteemed
academics, ignore New Black Panther threats of a race war, and dismiss Islamic
terror on our own soil as “workplace violence” – all the while demonizing Tea
Partiers as violent and racist, without a shred of evidence of either.
I look forward to the Combating Terrorism Center at West
Point issuing a counterbalancing report warning Americans about the danger from
violent far left movements and linking them to progressive philosophy. The
report could identify groups that our media and government either turn a blind
eye to, such as the militantly racist New Black Panthers, or that they view
approvingly and whose innumerable violent crimes they ignore, such as the
simultaneously anarchic and big-government anti-capitalists of Occupy. It could
characterize such threatening movements as not only stemming from socialism and
leftist identity politics, but also being empowered by having their representative
occupying the White House.
I look forward to that
report – but I’m not holding my breath.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 1/25/13)
