How Glenn Beck Helps Violent Right-Wing Militias

Reading last week's disturbing news accounts about the Midwestern arrest of nine alleged members of a Christian militia known as the Hutaree, a group whose members were reportedly planning to kill cops in order to spark a wider, armed revolt against the U.S. government, I noticed this nugget [emphasis added]:

FBI agents moved quickly against Hutaree because its members were planning an attack sometime in April, prosecutors said.

My hunch is the self-described "warriors" of the Hutaree probably circled April 19 on their calendars for any cop-killing fantasy they might have planned to pull off. Why April 19? That was the day, 17 years ago, when the FBI staged its final failed assault on cult leader David Koresh's heavily armed compound in Waco, Texas. It was on April 19, 1993, following a 51-day siege, that Koresh's fanatical followers, rather than surrendering to authorities, staged mass suicides (and, in some cases, executions) as the compound burned to the ground.

Precisely two years later, on April 19, 1995, right-wing zealot Timothy McVeigh commemorated the Waco inferno by declaring war on the federal government and blowing up his rented Ryder truck outside of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. McVeigh's act of far-right radical terrorism sheared the north side off the Murrah Building, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds more. ("I reached the decision to go on the offensive -- to put a check on government abuse of power," McVeigh later wrote.)

April 19 remains an almost mythical date among dedicated government haters. It's a date that lives in infamy as proof of the dark consequences of when a tyrannical government (run by Democrats) turns on its own.

So yeah, as the Hutaree gun nuts allegedly plotted in the woods of Michigan on the best way to kill cops, pieced together their seditious plans to wage war on the U.S. government, and planned their upcoming confrontation with the Antichrist, I'm guessing the landmark militia day of April 19 loomed large.

For anyone who thought the dark, Waco-fueled chapter of domestic extremism in this country was behind us, the Hutaree arrests were a jarring reminder that, with the election of another Democratic president, the violent militia message is back.

And it's stronger than ever.

Not only have the number of radical-right extremist groups exploded in the wake of President Obama's election (more than 500 today, as compared to just 200 during the 1990s), but these militia members now have a proud sponsor in the person of Fox News' Glenn Beck, who has done more than any other person to amplify and mainstream the movement's hateful and foreboding anti-government message. Beck continues to give a voice, and national platform, to the same deranged, hard-core militia haters and self-style "patriots" who hounded the new, young Democratic president in the early 1990s in the wake of Waco.

On TV and the radio, Beck rarely bothers to mention the militia movement by name. Instead, he's simply co-opted their rhetoric as his own. He's acted as a crucial transmitter, warning about Obama fronting his own private "army," and urging followers to "start food storage."

Not to mention these previous militia moments:

• Beck asserts: "The second American revolution is being playing out right now"

• Beck says "what is ahead may loosen the bonds of society," may end with "a French Revolution"

• Beck: "There is a coup going on ... it has been done through the guise of an election"

• Beck: "You can't convince me that the founding fathers wouldn't allow you to secede"

• Beck: "[I]f we don't have some common sense, we're facing the destruction of our country... it's coming"