9 Conservative Myths About Right-Wing Domestic Terrorism

By Sara Robinson, Campaign for America's Future. Posted June 20, 2009.

But now they're turning around and insisting that nope -- nobody ever did anything because some talking head told them to. And that sound you hear? Don't worry -- it's just the head of the ad sales department quietly having a stroke because we've completely undermined her ability to ever sell another spot.

6. All that crazy stuff you hear on the right -- you can find the left wing saying things just as bad. They're equally culpable for how bad it all its.

False. There is no equivalency whatsoever to be drawn here.

It’s absolutely true that the commenters can get just as out of hand on liberal sites as they do on conservative ones. (And most of us who've been hanging around the Internet for a while have the flamethrower scars to prove it.) But the problem has nothing to do with the commenters. It has to do with the opinion leaders who are driving the conversation.

On the right, it's actually hard to name a single major voice who hasn’t called for the outright extermination, silencing, harassment or killing of liberals. Rush. Bill O’Reilly. Ann Coulter. Sean Hannity. Laura Ingraham. Michelle Malkin. Michael Savage. Glenn Beck. Bernard Goldberg, who has been cited by at least one assassin as the inspiration for his actions. Michael Reagan, just yesterday. This kind of eliminationist language is stock in trade on the right. A lot of them literally cannot get through the week without it.

And I’m sorry -- but you just don’t hear anything like this same murderous vitriol coming from any of the major voices on the left. Kos' commenters may engage in that, but Kos himself does not. Nor does Arianna [Huffington]. Ed Schultz talks tough, but he's never called for liberals to silence conservatives. Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow are flaming liberals -- but they would choke on air before actually threatening anyone with bodily harm. Both of them have said repeatedly that they regard that kind of thing as a grossly irresponsible use of a media soapbox. Every reputable left-wing leader or talker wholeheartedly agrees.

Furthermore, you don’t see Volvos and Priuses (Prii?) out there sporting "conservative hunting licenses," despite the fact that "liberal hunting licenses" have been a hot item on the right for years. We’re not the ones driving the huge surge in gun purchases, either. And most importantly: You don’t see us out there shooting up fundamentalist churches, crisis pregnancy clinics, conservative gatherings or cops.

You have to go all the way back to the 1970s to find anything like that kind of overt political terrorist violence coming from the left. But starting in the 1980s, we've had ongoing waves of it coming out of the right -- now including the nine violent right-wing attacks on innocent Americans since Barack Obama was inaugurated.

I agree that it’s time to dial this down. But since it's the right wing who gathers power by whipping up people’s fear and anger -- and it's the right wing (and only the right wing) that's now actually taking up arms and killing people -- then all I have to say is:

You first.

7. "Dial it down?" Don't you mean that you want to use the power of government to forcibly shut up right-wing hate talkers?

False. There are a few folks in Congress who tried to gin up support for some kind of legislation -- but progressives should resist this impulse and denounce it as the shameless grandstanding that it is. We believe in the First Amendment. And if we compromise it now, we're no better than the Bush-era conservatives who were so eager to shred the Constitution when they felt threatened. We are better than that -- or should be.

Besides, we've already perfected a tried-and-true method that actually works. Even better, it's grounded completely in conservative free-market philosophy; so when the right wing starts blustering about it, we get to fire right back and call them out as hypocrites. Big fun all around ... and so much more elegant than wantonly trampling on people's civil rights.

Short and simple: We take our appeal to the advertisers. We note who the hate talkers are, what they're saying, what date and time they said it -- and then we write letters to the CEOs of the companies that sponsored those shows. Do these people speak for you? Is this the kind of media you want your product associated with? If the answer is no, what do you intend to do about it?

Note that this is not a boycott -- just a call for moral accountability. Being associated with hate speech is so bad for business in so many ways that no boycott should be required. It taints the brand. It usually violates the sponsors' own human resources standards -- any employee who said that stuff at the office would be canned on the spot. It's horrible PR, especially if some enterprising blogger decides to make an issue out of it. Simply pointing that out has often been enough to convince executives that it's a bad idea, and they need to get out before it blows up in their faces.

See more stories tagged with: domestic terrorism, right wing violence

Sara Robinson is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a consulting partner with the Cognitive Policy Works in Seattle. One of the few trained social futurists in North America, she has blogged on authoritarian and extremist movements at Orcinus since 2006, and is a founding member of Group News Blog.

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