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This article first appeared inInTheseTimes magazine’s special issue on the spread of the far Right.
“Violence is a part of America’s culture,” the Black Power militant H. Rap Brown once said. ”It is as American as cherry pie.”
Another equally American tradition is looking away from the problem when it comes from the Right.
As researchers have repeatedly found, the Right is where political violence in America overwhelmingly originates. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies—an eminently respectable, bipartisan think tank—right-wing political violence accounted for more than 90 percent of all attacks or plots in the first half of 2020, far outpacing terrorism from any other source since 1990. And since 2020, it’s gotten increasingly worse. A Reuters investigation published in August found that U.S. political violence is worse than it’s been at any point since the 1970s. Of the 18 fatal acts of political terrorism they counted since the Jan. 6 insurrection, only one came from the “Left” (involving a Democratic county official who allegedly murdered a reporter investigating him for corruption).
But you would never know this from listening to the mainstream media for most of the past three decades. And as calls to violence metastasize into a routine component of Republican politics—as when former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee made the H. Rap Brown-like declaration that, should criminal prosecutions of Donald Trump continue, 2024 will be the last U.S. election “decided by ballots rather than bullets”—that denial may soon be among the biggest problems we have.
Americans “hate each other enough to fantasize about killing one another, in cold blood, over political culture disagreements,” I wrote in the conclusion of my 2008 book, Nixonland. The book is about how the shape of those disagreements was forged in the crucible of the 1960s. The reviews were good, including a kind notice in the Washington Post. But the Post’s reviewer, Elizabeth Drew—a longtime Washington correspondent dating back to the Nixon era—took exception to that particular passage, about a divided America’s mutual hate. She thought the author “becomes carried away and pushes his theme too far.”
She must not have been reading what I was reading while I was finishing the book.
During a single month in 2007, a bomb was defused at an Austin, Texas, abortion clinic; a Liberty University student was arrested with napalm bombs he planned to use against people protesting Jerry Falwell’s funeral; the FBI raided a three-county, far-right Alabama terror ring that was plotting to massacre Mexican immigrants with a stockpile including 130 grenades and a rocket launcher; and an anti-immigrant militia member was apprehended at a rally in Washington, D.C., carrying an M1 rifle and a map with lines pointing to the speaker’s platform.
The problem might have been that my reviewer was getting her news from sources like the Post, which didn’t run a word on any of these foiled terrorist plots. I learned about them from “alternative” media. It’s a sad state of affairs for a nation when “alternative” translates to accurate and “mainstream” to blinkered.
This sort of mainstream media denial goes back a long way. After the Oklahoma City bombing, speculation that Muslim jihadists were responsible saturated mainstream media. New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal wrote, “Whatever we are doing to destroy Mideast terrorism, the chief terrorist threat against Americans, has not been working.” After news broke that a homegrown Christian was responsible for the bombing, mainstream voices still strained to blame anything except the Right’s gathering forces of hate against the federal government.
When the Post profiled Timothy McVeigh in 1995, it cited his parents’ divorce as one possible motivation for his terrorism—ignoring the fact that he was part of a movement that, by the mid-1990s, included more than 850 anti-government militia groups, and that its rhetoric was echoed by “mainstream” conservatives. In 1995, shortly before McVeigh’s attack, a National Rifle Association mailer excoriated federal agents as “jack-booted government thugs” who wear “Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms” as they “attack law-abiding citizens.” The prior summer, G. Gordon Liddy—who’d transformed himself from........