The Terrorist Threat: Right-Wing Radicals and the Eliminationist Mindset

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted June 12, 2009.

DN: Oh yeah. Pop a bowl, and then just watch.

JH: As you note, eliminationism is not a new phenomenon, but in the book you argue that it's been on the rise since the mid-1990s -- over the last 10 or 15 years. What factors do you think account for that?

DN:  Well, one of the great achievements of FDR in the 1930s was that he really formed a longstanding ruling coalition between liberals and conservatives. It lasted for many years -- there was an agreement that they would rule within that framework and that political extremists on either side would be excluded from governing.

I think part of the story is that in the 1990s -- led by people like Rush Limbaugh -- conservatives decided that they didn't want to share power with liberals anymore. They basically decided that they wanted all the power for themselves.

In order to obtain political power once they cut off that relationship, I think that they needed to form a new coalition, and that meant that they became much more closely aligned with the extremists on the right. Particularly, we saw in the 1990s a lot of cross-hatching, as it were, between mainstream conservatives and the patriot militia movement, true far-right extremists.

And over the years, people like Limbaugh and Coulter and many others have transmitted these ideas and themes from the extreme right, repackaged them for mainstream consumption, and broadcast them into the popular culture.

The effect of that has been this powerful gravitational pull on mainstream conservatism so that it's become increasingly right wing, and part of the consummation of that was these tea parties that we just saw, which were classic right-wing populist gatherings. I went to the one in Seattle, and it was all the usual right-wing populism. Let's get rid of the Fed, end the income tax, all of these things, these ideas that we saw originating with the Posse Comitatus movement back in the 1980s. They have gradually worked their way into the mainstream. But it's still a very radical approach to governance, and ultimately is very extreme.

JH:  In the book you tie -- you detail wonderfully -- a lot of examples of eliminationist rhetoric coming from sources that are considered credible by many. Limbaugh and Coulter are certainly examples of that. And we have seen time and time again, how incredibly overheated it becomes and can lead to a spike in hate crimes. When you call out the right on this, their answer is that they can't be held accountable for people who are unhinged, who have ... whatever, mental disorders.

DN: Yeah.

JH: I just wonder how you respond to that defense.

DN: Well, in a real simple way I would say that it's just nonsense. There is a very clear causal connection between hateful rhetoric that thoroughly demonizes other people to a point that they are objects fit for elimination, and the violent action that follows. As I explain the book with example after example -- historical examples.

Eliminationist rhetoric has the effect of creating permission for people to act. We can't turn away from that. We can't simply say, "well, the only person responsible for [Kansas abortion provider] George Tiller's death was [alleged gunman] Scott Roeder." I'm sorry, Scott Roeder got a lot of his ideas -- got a lot of his hate -- from listening to people like Bill O'Reilly. Yes, he was clearly a radical. He was a Freeman and was also associated with the Army of God. But you have to understand that people like that actually see people like Limbaugh and O'Reilly as liberals.

And compared to themselves they are relatively liberal. So when a guy like O'Reilly broadcasts their beliefs and says what they are thinking is right, it not only validates them, not only validates their beliefs, but it also spurs them to action, because their thinking is that if even the liberal media is saying it, it's even worse than we thought. That is a spark to action.

I use an anecdote to illustrate this point very clearly. A key case for me relatively early on in my work on this kind of phenomenon was in 1986. We had a case in Seattle where this drifter named David Lewis Rice walked up to the home of a family in a Seattle neighborhood one Christmas Eve. He was pretending to be a taxicab deliveryman -- delivering a Christmas  package to them. He pulled a toy gun, tied them up, and over the next eight to 12 hours proceeded to kill them brutally and horribly with all kinds of torturous means -- this man David Goldmark, his wife and their two children, who were both under the age of 10 -- using an iron and ice pick, and it was really an awful case.

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Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.

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