I’m not going to rush to say the DHS report on right-wing extremism has been vindicated. The report was very broad, and we’ve seen in the past how painting groups with broad ideological brushes has led to government surveillance of nonviolent groups on the left. The issue shouldn’t be that the DHS report was “right”, although it certainly didn’t “smear” right leaning groups in the sense that right wing domestic terrorism is, like left-wing domestic terrorism, a concern. The issue is that the right gleefully cheered on a surveillance state, then became apoplectic when the same ham-handed approach was applied to them.
Conservatives regularly associate liberals with America’s enemies, and then feign shock when people decide to use violent means to confront the forces of “terrorism, despotism, and liberalism” to use Sean Hannity‘s formulation. When the DHS report came out, the right didn’t simply suggest that the report was too broad, they argued that right-wingers, by their very nature, are wonderful and good, and incapable of violence, and that any suggestion otherwise would be absurd. This is directly related to the extreme dualist worldview that leads people to shoot up Holocaust Museums and murder abortion doctors: conservatives are good, liberals are evil. It would be one thing if that worldview was confined to the right wing fringe, but it’s not. As Dave Neiwert has written, combine that with prominent right-wing figures endorsing outlandish conspiracy theories, and the ultimately someone is going to take the whole thing very seriously and do something about it.
— A. Serwer
