| fordy said: The DHS report even warned of a rise in right-wing extremism. At least two of those ones that you mentioned are a direct result of such a thing, direct scare campaigning by groups looking to drive fear into people, such as "we're becoming a socialist state" or "they're coming for your guns". |
Which two, pray tell? The schizo Jared Loughner who didn't even bother to vote in 2010 (you know, the Tea Party's banner year) despite voting in the two previous elections? Joe Stack, whose manifesto was pure Occupy Wall Street? Or maybe Bill Sparkman bought so strongly into anti-government rhetoric that he decided all government workers had to go, starting with himself.
The telling thing is that the media often tiptoes around the views of outspoken jihadists like Nidal Hasan, and despite the (not really) anti-war movement's extreme rhetoric during the Bush years, the media didn't try to pin every random instance of violence on them. But now that the scary conservatives are the ones who are pissed off about being out of power, the media regularly rushes to hang anything around their neck until it's proven otherwise. And once they finally have to admit that there was no link, the damage has already been done and it's an established meme that Jared Loughner was a Sarah Palin fanboy or some such nonsense.
