In 1981 Von Brunn attempted to place the treasonous Federal Reserve Board of Governors under legal, non-violent, citizens arrest. He was tried in a Washington, D.C. Superior Court; convicted by a Negro jury, Jew/Negro attorneys, and sentenced to prison for eleven years by a Jew judge. A Jew/Negro/White Court of Appeals denied his appeal. He served 6.5 years in federal prison. (Read about von Brunn's "Federal Reserve Caper" HERE.) He is now an artist and author and lives on Maryland's Eastern Shore.The Eastern Shore of Maryland. Where my people (as in my relatives) were slaves. I don't mean to be paranoid. But folks need to not brush this stuff off.
« The Zen Of Chris Matthews | Main | Shep Smith On Extremist Violence » Again10 Jun 2009 03:07 pm
Two shot at the Holocaust Museum. Suspect is a white supremacist. From dude's bio:
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First I want to be clear--I'm not blaming conservatives for this stuff, I'm only referring to one meme that arose a couple months ago. I remember when Fox and Drudge were pushing this story that Napolitano was keeping an especially watchful eye over right-wing extremist groups. And conservative media acted as if this was some Big Brother attempt to silence conservative voices in the coming Obama years. I'd say it's recently become clear that playing politics with this story was deadly wrong.
This isn't an argument for warrantless wiretapping or otherwise evading civil liberties. I'm just saying Napolitano was right.
And it should be added that the DHS report was requested during the Bush administration, because too many continue to think that the Obama administration called for the study to be done.
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/04/15/fox-dhs-bush/
Blogs seem to be a mix of pointing out the DHS report--specifically warned against anti-abortion violence and anti-Semitic violence--and bemoaning that people quickly made that connection. For myself, I think the connection jumps out and, after the right wing's moaning needs to be made. (Malkin et al, when DHS said "dangerous right wing extremists" why did you assume that meant YOU, and not this guy, or the guy from last week?)
In the last few weeks we have had an attack on an abortion clinic, an attack at a military recruitment center, and now this -- not to mention the other violence that has occurred (attack at an immigration center in NY, multiple murder-suicides, etc). It certainly give me a 'the world is going to hell in a hand basket' feeling. The nuts are out in full force, for sure.
But wasn't this the kind of feeling you had during the Clinton years? Oklahoma City bombings, rise in white supremacist groups, attacks on abortion clinics and health care workers etc.
No, not really. It's a problem of age. I was a lot younger when Clinton took office - in high school - and more concerned about avoiding the drug dealer and his friends next door and less aware of the world and what was going on. During Clinton's second term I was in college and became more aware, but even then I was more interested in growing up and making it through classes and Blacksburg, VA was your typical college town (and still is, despite recent events). Ignorance is bliss, you know?
Thats funny because I was 10 entered his second term.
Jesus this is what happens when you comment while trying to work, I was 10 when Clinton got re-elected, I think I was an anxious kid who watched the news too much.
@ L Crawfty - That is funny (and thanks for making me feel like an old lady! :). I hope that you were not worried about those things at 10, that would make me a bit sad for you.
I guess what I was saying is that the most pressing issues for me during Clinton's years were a lot more personal/local and I was a lot less concerned with America's issues. And I wouldn't trade my vapid late teens/early 20s anything!
Thinking back on it, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans during my college orientation week and I feel like a lot of it just went over my head at the time and I had to play catch up to get the full impact of what was going on down there. No criticisms here.
Here's a helpful post on this guy from Talking Points Memo:
It's not crazy to say his rhetoric is so different from Beck's, Limbaugh's or Hannity's.
Sorry, here it is. Stupid HTML:
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/06/james_von_brunn_a_profile_1.php?ref=fpa
Count me in favor of brushing this sort of thing off.
This murdering in cold blood sort of thing? I dunno. It seems like kind of a biggie to me.
Obviously there is great meaning and gravity in this. My point was that I am for not exploiting the victims or inflating the cultural relevance of an individual lunatic.
I dunno, I think James Lileks has it right.
I don't appreciate being sent to a Twitter page. I was never a big fan of Haiku either.
My initial post was clearly too flippant, but the point I was trying to make was more in reference to TNC prefacing the don't "brush this off" statement his desire not to sound paranoid. What I meant to be saying was that we should all catch our breath when discussing these isolated crimes. Both the left and the right have the habit of attaching great significance to these sorts of national stories to push their own agenda. It's exploitative and it's almost always incendiary. So, rather than brushing this off, what I am really for is for looking at this in a sober way that avoids hysterics.
In all three cases, it seems like lone nuts acting on their own. Obviously Roeder and Von Brunn have long ties with extremist groups and individuals (I haven't heard that Muhammad has such ties, but wouldn't be surprised). It may come out in their trials that they were parts of larger criminal conspiracies, but for now it looks like they were three guys who decided to act out their sick ideologies alone.
I'm not sure which worries me more--organized conspiracies to commit terrorism, or lone nuts. The former are probably capable of doing greater damage, but are also more preventable. The latter are less predictable. I mean, Roeder and Von Brunn have been haters a long long time--why did they pick now to attempt (and in Roeder's case, actually commit) murder? From a practical law enforcement POV, how do you stop a lone extremist?
Roeder could have been stopped years ago when he was pulled over with bomb making equipment in his truck planning on going to an abortion clinic, or more recently when he was super-glueing the locks at the Wichita clinic. The FBI could have warned him to stay away from the clinic and Tiller, even threatened him with arrests over the locks. There are always warning signs when these things happen. It's like the line between a man stalking a woman and actually killng her, there are always signs and you chose to act on those signs or not.
And Van Brunn was in prison for nearly six years for trying to attack the Federal Reserve back in 1981. It was all there.
I don't disagree with either of you. Roeder definitely should have been stopped before he acted, and law enforcement had ample probable cause. I don't know yet with Van Brunn (it looks like he served his time and was released). It seems likely that law enforcement was lax or complacent or whatever.
My point is that whatever an individual is going to do is harder in advance to figure than what a group is going to do. With a group (a terror cell or militia), there are more ways for the information to leak out. You can have infiltrators, informants, cell members who aren't disciplined about talking, etc. And because they have to plan their acts carefully so that they can all act in concert, there is something there that can be foiled.
But with an individual, the plan can be much more flexible because he (or she) doesn't have to coordinate with other cell-members. Thus it is harder to prevent.
Of course, as I said, this speculation may be irrelevant if it turns out that Roeder, Muhammad, or Von Brunn were in fact parts of larger conspiracies that knew in advance about these attacks.
So, not for nothing, but that's not really helpful. Lots of people have been to prison, but once they have served their time they are given only minimal surveilence. Also, its not like this was an intricate plan that the feds could have gotten wise to. Step 1: Get Gun, Step 2: Go shoot people.
This is the problem with lone nuts, you really cannot do a whole lot to prevent this. And if what you are saying is that you want much MUCH more draconian measures taken against released felons then I am right there with you, but pretty much every liberal in the country would cry foul on that.
I don't know. Seems to me it'd be nice if we paid more attention to violent felons with a grudge, rather than say some dumb kid with too much pot in his backyard.
I'd just like to see some outrage or at the very least a little serious introspection by serious people on behalf of Republicans and the far right rhetoric that seems to be safe haven/breeding ground for this kind of shit.
Grassley was outraged to the point of incoherance because Obama spent an afternoon with the kids in Paris....WTF
And you have Boehner saying Obama wants to "import" terrorists into the U.S. I mean, WE know that Boehner has little, if any, credibility. But there are ignorant and/or paranoid people out there who will cite insane statements like Boehner's as FACT simply because an official said it.
Republicans are pro-Isreal to the point that liberals get mad at us for being to pro-Isreal and ignoring the needs of Arabs/Palastinians. And when Arab leaders deny the Holocost Republicans get at least as bent out of shape as Dems.
So PLEASE check yourself before you blame us for this crap.
hehe right, some of your best friends are . I got ya.
tags gone wild.... some of your best friends are ...insert minority here.... I got ya.
First of all, don't bring Israel into this. It's not related. Anti-Semitism is awful. There's an actual political debate to be had about the fates of Israel and Palestine. There's not a debate about to be had about a man gunning down innocent people at a memorial.
Furthermore, MikeCee was right. There WAS a muted reaction to the Tiller murder on the right. I'm sure Mike hopes, as we both all do here, that conservatives do the right thing and denounce this abomination. The fact is however, there are still many people on your side that continue to think violence and racism is acceptable. As TNC and I both noted the other day, check the McCain/Palin rally footage. Now, I understand you wouldn't want those people to speak for you, and I genuinely believe you on that. I wouldn't want some liberal/Democratic constituencies speaking for me (animal rights terrorists certainly come to mind, as does a lot of the green movement). But don't read things people aren't writing.
MikeCee just wanted some serious conservative to try to address this issue. Yes, I'm sure he wanted someone more high-profile than a blog commenter, but you could have taken it upon yourself to express your disgust without playing games. It's really a shame you didn't take that opportunity.
How is my saying "don't blame us" playing games, but Mike saying "blame them" is not? If someone accusses me of something it is my right, and my duty to address that.
No one is blaming anyone. MikeCee just said he wanted conservatives to condemn this nonsense. It might be a "Sister Souljah" moment if you will. I cannot believe you prioritize putting words into someone's mouth over expressing your anger or sadness about this.
Does anyone really wonder if a foreign nation were to invade and occupy the United States, our energy services be reduced to a few hours at most per day, all our medical professionals flee the country, hundreds of thousands forced to flee into exile, more dislocated and homeless, how we would dissipate into the kind of thuggery that marks our fringe hate groups here. Just look at our prison cultures.
We are fortunate here that guys like this are not vested with institutionalized power, and more, for the most part seen by our society as the worst form of sociopathic humanity, and important to remember that such sociopathy is not simply the earmark of one faith, one ethnicity, one race.
First, Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns has died. So today a white supremacist killed a black man guarding the holocaust museum.
Shep Smith on Fox News spent a good part of his broadcast condemning the hate email that he gets about President Obama, blacks, Jews, etc., and he went so far to read some of it on the air. He finally said what I've been thinking for months and TNC has touched on recently: If you truly believe that all abortion is murder, that Barack Obama is a Marxist who illegally assumed the office and is sending code to terrorists (Gaffney suggested the "bow" was code), and that Jews are secretly running the world and holding you back, is it really surprising that you have decided to pick up a gun and kill someone?
Anyone have a link? I constantly wonder how Shep keeps his job at Fox.
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200906100041
He's got too much dirt for them to fire him.
I really wish there was a way to watch Shep Smith without watching foxnews.
Or heck I'd be a lot easier on fox if they would replace, Glenn Beck, O'rielly, and Hannity with more Shep.
If you wonder why Fox has gotten more conservative over the years it is because when they put less conservative or moderate people on, conservatives are less happy and liberals don't watch because they are to busy making Faux News jokes. Similarly MSNBC has drifted steadily left as conservatives stop watching anything other than Fox. If you want balance in your reporting you need to stop complaining and watch Shep on Fox, not care that it is Fox, and show them that more moderate or maybe even liberal people will be an advantage and not a liability.
JD,
Fox has gotten more conservative over the years because that what its core audience (hard core movement conservatives and/or partisan Republicans) wants, which turns off whatever liberal viewers (Alan Colmes fans primarily) it may have had in the beginning. In other words, liberals don't watch Fox News because it has gotten more conservative and even more blatantly unfair and unbalanced in its reporting and presentation of debates, and we have decided not to watch it. The conservative bias on Fox is what creates Faux News jokes, not the other way around.
As for MSNBC, it has gotten more liberal in its slant in response to the increasing conservative bent of both Fox and CNN, not because conservatives are only willing to watch Fox News. Many conservatives watched Glenn Beck on CNN, and still watch people like Lou Dobbs and Nancy Grace and Wolf Blitzer and even Jon King. With Fox serving the hard Right and partisan Republican audience, and CNN serving the soft Right and moderate independents, MSNBC had to veer left to capture the Left, partisan Democrats, and liberal-leaning independents. Otherwise, it would have been redundant.
Mediamatters and/or YouTube are your friends.
The sick irony is that a good number of the firefighters, paramedics, nurses, and doctors trying to save his life are probably either black or Jewish.
Any one in a mood to "move beyond the reductionism of the victimology of the left" this afternoon?
Nope, not me either.
This story is part of where we live, part of who we are, and part of what we have to know. Knowing that, in our bones as well as our brains, is the only way we get strong enough to make it any better.
What a shame. It seems the freemen mentality is on the rise again. I feel like this is one of those "lest we forget" moments. After all no one ever said that terrorism is soley the province of Al-Qaeda. Extremism is not the province of any one group of people. Such a shame.
My heart goes out to the family of Officer Tyrone Johns and I hope the others wounded are ok. For myself this is another powerfull lesson that the tolerance, open-mindedness, and a willingness to listen are ends in an of themselves. I hope that justice will be served.
Not to get all history geek on people here, but TNC has been talking up John Brown a lot lately. The first person to die at Harper's Ferry was a freed slave baggage handler working for the B&O Railroad named Hayward Shepherd.
Just sayin'
Oops! I posted that on the wrong thread. I'm an idiot.
IMO it fits right where it is.
It is suicidal to walk into a guarded building with a rifle and start shooting. Despite his history of being a white supremacist, the guy is 88 years old. This makes me wonder if dementia were factor in what he did. How do you go from spewing hatred on your website to actually killing people in broad daylight?
The Jew haters on stormfront and other white supremacist websites should have a little one on one time with Yehoshua Sofer. That would shut them up real quick. Not to mention put them out of commission for a long, long time.
Yeah man my uncle teaches at UM-ES and lives there too.
Seeing where this dude lived shook me up a little.
Thank God for the safety of the Black folks in this fool's community. May God bless the soul of the departed Mr. Johns.
...and whatever other folks this maniac may have sought to target.
Didnt mean to privilege Black life as more valuable, just that a Black man was shot defending a Jewish Holocaust Museum and the thought occured to me that I had family in his area, etc.
Sorry.
Given that this was the 2nd extremist shooting that I've been aware of in as many months, I agree that we need to keep an eye on all of this. I think this shooting and the shooting of the 3 Pittsburgh police officers in April were not directly related, but were still linked by the emerging resentment and paranoia of extremist groups.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09094/960660-100.stm
This makes my hair stand on end. It harkens back to the inflammatory rhetoric spread by right wing nut jobs all the way back to June,1963 when JFK made the historic speech on Civil Rights that incited Delabeckwith to kill James Meredith, Chrry and his pals to kill those precious four little girls at 16th St Baptist Church, and ultimately JFK himself, who walked into a firestorm of right wing venom in Texas, which had spat upon Adlai Stevenson just days previous. No way should Limbaugh anmd his ilk be allowed to fan the flames of hatred and encourage those borderline sociopaths who are one bullet away from infamy.
Sorry that wasn't Meredith--I was distracted at work. I meant Medgar Evers, my bad.