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[H/t Heather]

We've been writing here at C&L about the danger to law-enforcement officers (not to mention civil society) posed by the far-right "sovereign citizens" movement for some time. So naturally we were pleased to see the FBI weighed in on the subject this week:

Anti-government extremists opposed to taxes and regulations pose a growing threat to local law enforcement officers in the United States, the FBI warned on Monday.

These extremists, sometimes known as "sovereign citizens," believe they can live outside any type of government authority, FBI agents said at a news conference.

The extremists may refuse to pay taxes, defy government environmental regulations and believe the United States went bankrupt by going off the gold standard.

Routine encounters with police can turn violent "at the drop of a hat," said Stuart McArthur, deputy assistant director in the FBI's counter-terrorism division.

"We thought it was important to increase the visibility of the threat with state and local law enforcement," he said.

And as it so happens, there's going to be a big gathering of "sovereign citizens" coming up soon in Irvine, California, calling itself the Freedom Law Conference, and devoted to teaching you how to free yourself from the tyranny of the federal government:

This 4-day event includes an in-depth class on Avoiding and Defeating IRS Criminal Charges, two keynote banquet speakers, 14 of the most exciting Freedom speakers in the country, and a seminar on Stopping Mortgage Fraud.

Oh, and look who they have lined up to be their keynote speaker:

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Yep, the same guy who's out there collecting all those votes for the Republican nomination—not to mention also being the new darling of a clutch of extremely confused (or are they just pseudo-?) progressives.

And in case there was any confusion about the political orientation of the gathering, they announce up front that this is a Patriot Movement event:

Here at Freedom Law School we want to connect Patriots. If you want to attend, but are worried about the cost of a room, no worries! Freedom Law School will get you in contact with other Patriots attending so you can work out splitting the cost of a room.

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We know that right-wing thinkers like Peter King and Bill O'Reilly believe the only serious domestic-terrorism threat Americans face is from "radical Islam" and its adherents. So no doubt they will again turn a blind eye to the most recent case of right-wing domestic terrorism, this time involving a plan involving one of the most toxic biological agents -- ricin, which is lethal in small doses -- and explosives.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports:

Four North Georgia men accused of being members of a fringe militia group were arrested Tuesday by federal authorities for planning to make the deadly toxin ricin and obtain explosives, federal authorities said.

Authorities said that, beginning in March, the men held clandestine militia meetings and discussed using toxic agents and assassinations in an effort to undermine federal and state government and advance their interests.

The four men taken into federal custody are: Frederick Thomas, 73, of Cleveland, and Toccoa residents Dan Roberts, 67; Ray H. Adams, 65; and Samuel J. Crump, 68.

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[Note: This is the first in a series of posts I'll be doing this fall in conjunction with the fine folks at Media Matters -- where this will be cross-posted -- exploring issues related to right-wing extremism and gun-rights advocacy. See the note at the end. -- DN]

Those of us who grew up around the NRA are all too familiar with one of the more striking facets of the organization's relentless fearmongering, its paranoid style: namely, it not only traffics in wild and groundless conspiracy theories about "gun grabbers" and Bircherite "New World Order" takeover schemes, but it forms deep associations with the very extremists whose far-right worldview fosters such paranoia.

The most recent example of this has been the way the NRA's fearmongering about President Obama has fostered real violence from right-wing extremists.

The reason for this kind of extremism is in fact a top-down phenomenon: increasingly, the people running the NRA are themselves deeply extremist.

The folks at the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence have put together a directory of the NRA's board titled Meet the NRA Directors. It's a fascinating site, one that well rewards scrolling through and reading.

In addition to what you'd expect -- a lot of ties to the arms manufacturers who funnel much of the money that is the NRA's lifeblood -- there is also, predictably, a deep undercurrent of right-wing extremism.

The most striking example of this is Robert K. Brown, the longtime publisher of Soldier of Fortune magazine. As David Holthouse has explored in some detail already, Brown's magazine was for years the monthly Bible of the "militia" movement in the 1990s, one of the movement's more prominent promoters. The magazine not only promoted the concept of militias but offered advice on how to form them and urged participants to prepare for persecution from the New World Order.

The ties to violent extremists run deeper, in fact:

Soldier of Fortune distributed copies of a newsletter called The Resister during the 1990s. The Resister was published by Steven Barry, then a member of the Army’s Special Forces and leader of the unsanctioned Special Forces Underground organization. The newsletter initially drew inspiration from the controversial siege at Ruby Ridge. The content of the newsletter evidenced a “white Christian militia mentality,” according to Michael Reynolds from the Southern Poverty Law Center, containing racist and anti-Semitic content while also exploring “New World Order” conspiracy theories. When Timothy McVeigh was arrested for the Oklahoma City Bombing, in his possession was a Soldier of Fortune-distributed copy of The Resister.

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We talk a lot here at C&L about how right-wing mainstream media act as "transmitters" for right-wing extremism, legitimizing radical ideas from the most violent and racist elements of the Right by repackaging them for general consumption. The inevitable outcome of this kind of transmission is what Anders Breivik, the Norwegian right-wing terrorist, represented in many ways -- but it's something that occurs far more often in the USA, and most frequently in recent years on Fox News.

David Holthouse at Media Matters has the most recent example: Fox's recent coverage of an ATF sting operation called "Operation Castaway," which Fox has been trying to depict as yet another rogue gun operation gone awry -- except that it's not:

Nothing in the more than 500 pages of Operation Castaway court documents, which are public records, indicate anything other than a textbook operation culminating in the interdiction of a large shipment of firearms bound for Honduras. Eight traffickers including Crumpler were convicted and sentenced to between two and a half and seven years in federal prison.

Despite this winning outcome, Operation Castaway is under attack from right-wing bloggers and Fox. These critics are disregarding basic standards of fact checking in their rush to link the Tampa investigation to Operation Fast and Furious, the failed ATF initiative in which agents knowingly allowed firearms to be trafficked across the border into Mexico.

In one typical example, Fox Business host Lou Dobbs branded Operation Castaway "a second version of the botched operation Fast and Furious" during his July 11 broadcast.

And who was their source for this information? Why, the far-right wingnutosphere's nastiest and nuttiest elements, of course -- a militiaman straight out of a 1990s caricature:

There is no evidence in the court files to support Dobbs' claims and he offered no original reporting to back them up. Instead, he relied on references to "new reports" and "allegations" without revealing their dubious origin--anonymously sourced blog items on conspiratorial websites.

The first of these posts appeared July 6. It was headlined "Breaking News: Source claims ATF's Tampa SAC walked guns to HONDURAS! Part of Operation Castaway?" [SAC is an acronym for Special Agent in Charge.] Citing "private correspondence from a proven credible source," the blog item reported that Tampa ATF deliberately facilitated the smuggling of firearms to Honduras "using the techniques and tactics identical to Fast and Furious."

The July 6 blog item was republished with no additional reporting by dozens of pro-militia and other right-wing websites. It jumped to Fox News in the July 8 broadcast of Special Report with Bret Baier, which featured an interview with "online journalist" Mike Vanderboegh, one of the bloggers who posted the original item. Vanderboegh was a leading figure in the 1990s militia movement who more recently led the Alabama Minuteman Support Team, a border vigilante group, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Vanderboegh was also one of the first to report on the failed Fast and Furious investigation.

"Mike Vanderboegh communicates with a host of ATF agents daily on his web site," said Fox News reporter William La Jeunesse. "Agents told him Wednesday Operation Castaway out of the Tampa office, also knowingly sold guns to criminals, in this case, 1,000 to buyers for the violent drug gang, MS-13. Those guns to Honduras."

La Jeunesse gave no indication that he'd made any attempt to confirm Vanderboegh's story. He simply gave the blogger a national platform.

Some of you may remember Vanderboegh from the health-care debate: he's the fellow who urged his readers to throw bricks through Democrats' windows, and they in fact did so. One of his victims was Gabrielle Giffords, who had a brick thrown through an office window -- well before she was shot. (Wonder if they've checked that brick for Jared Loughner's DNA.)

And of course, being the sensitive and thoughtful fellow he is, Vanderboegh escalated the rhetoric when he was called on it:

May I tell you my personal motive for doing this? I’m trying to save the lives of Nancy Pelosi, and every one of these people who do not understand the unintended consequences of their actions. [...] Because they are not paying attention to the million of people across this deepening divide that politics no longer avails them. [...] We refuse to participate in the system, and we refuse to pay the fines, and we refuse arrest. Now where do you suppose that’s going but a thousand little Waco’s.

This is almost identical to the phony rationale that Vanderboegh has trotted out for publicly fantasizing about my violent death: he's just trying to wake me up to the consequences of my work, you see. As you can imagine, I'm deeply touched.

Here's Vanderboegh leading one of those open-carry "Second Amendment" rallies in the Washington area last year:

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I guess it should no longer be a surprise that Fox News would treat this kind of character as a credible information source. But that's because being a right-wing propaganda channel means you don't have to actually tend to the truth, fact, or reality.

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Militiamen are really a bunch of bad pennies who just keep popping back up:

LOLO - A former militia leader who went on the run Sunday after allegedly shooting at Missoula County sheriff's deputies seems well-equipped for a long sojourn in the woods, given the caches of weapons, food and gear already discovered, Undersheriff Mike Dominick said Monday.

Some 65 county, city, state and federal authorities combed a 30-square-mile area west of Lolo on Monday for David Burgert, who once led Project 7, a Flathead County militia group accused of plotting to assassinate judges and law enforcement officers in hopes of provoking a war with the federal government and NATO.

Burgert holds intense anti-government views, and has survivalist skills, Dominick said.

"He has that type of mentality where he believes in training, in preparation," he said. "... This guy seems to have had a plan."

Authorities discovered ammunition in the Jeep Cherokee in which Burgert originally fled on Sunday and also located a second car, loaded with ammunition, food and camping gear, that they believe belongs to Burgert. They're searching for yet another that Dominick described as a tan or red Jeep Wagoneer-type vehicle dating to the 1980s.

I reported on Burgert's original spree back when it happened:

Kalispell made the news last year when a militia outfit called Project 7 was broken up by local police. Its leader, a 38-year-old named David Burgert, was arrested for jumping bail on an earlier conviction for assaulting an officer and resisting arrest; when captured, officers uncovered him in possession of an arms cache of about 30 weapons and some 30,000 rounds of ammo.66

What was even more disturbing was the simultaneous discovery of his plans for this materiel: To run amok in a killing spree against local authorities. Burgert had organized a team of about 10 people to target some 26 city and county officials, including some of those same police officials, mayors and judges who came out for the potluck last summer.

Burgert, who received support from the usual far-right suspects, eventually pleaded guilty to federal firearms charges in the case, and faces a maximum 10-year prison term when he's sentenced in September. But no one has ever been charged in the alleged conspiracy, partly because any evidence that the plot extended much beyond Burgert's fantasies was not very strong. He has countered by filing a lawsuit against the FBI and Montana's state Division of Criminal Investigation.

Of course, we've been reporting for quite some time now that the Patriot movement of the 1990s is fully resurgent in 2011, thanks in large part to its close associations with the Tea Party movement. Indeed, we've reported that places like Montana are significant hotbeds for this kind of extremist revival.

David Holthouse at Media Matters observes that Burgert's fugitive run is occurring in the context of a fully resurgent extremist right in western Montana:

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Joe Miller may not be answering questions about anything to any reporters in Alaska, but he's more than happy to go on Fox News and get a Hannity Job -- you know, one of those appearances where Sean strokes you, tosses you a bunch of softballs, and lets you promote your campaign and issue non-answers whenever you like.

Sure, Joe's fellow Alaska Republicans may think it's a bad idea for Miller to avoid answering appropriate questions about his past:

No electable candidate can seriously pursue public office without implicitly saying to voters, "I promise to be ethical, honest and accountable and to make my candidacy as open and transparent as possible." It is unacceptable -- and certainly not a winning strategy -- to explicitly refuse to answer reasonable questions about oneself, and to disrespect the Alaska public and the press' right to do so before the questions have even been asked.

So what does Miller do? He goes on Fox with Hannity, who asks him about the letter -- and Miller, rather than answer, simply deflects the question, saying it's just another feeble attempt by his opponents to try to keep Alaskans from thinking about his bright and shiny future Alaska free, free at last! from federal influence.

In fact, that's Miller's answer to all of Hannity's soft questions, including those about how his militia/security goons roughed up and handcuffed a reporter at one of his events. And you'll note that Hannity doesn't even bring up the matter of the goons' hard-core militia background.

And perhaps sensing that this wasn't enough, he also trotted out the weird claim that Hopfinger followed him into the men's room at the event.

This is, of course, not just a bogus smoke screen but a lie. Hopfinger was tackled by thugs when Hopfinger tried to ask him questions immediately after Miller had given a speech -- there was no men's room involved in the "arrest" incident.

There was, however, a brief meeting between the two in the men's room before Miller spoke -- but only because Hopfinger happened to be using the men's room at the same time, not because he had followed Miller in there.

The incident was described in one of the Dispatch's early reports on the whole affair:

Hopfinger seemed still baffled by the events Sunday night. "This is a public school," he said. "This is a public event," adding that Miller clearly knew whom he was talking to because the men had earlier exchanged pleasantries in the men's restroom.

Hopfinger said he didn't think that was the time or place to ask Miller difficult questions about what happened in Fairbanks. He figured, he said, it would be better to wait until after Miller was done with his town hall meeting and ask the questions then.

Full disclosure: I took note of this aspect of the story because I thought it was funny -- especially having been in the same situation: Reporter runs into the men's room before an event and winds up in urinal next to the person you're there to cover -- and for whom you have some tough questions that he has been evading. It may flash briefly in your mind to ask them there and then -- but for most working journalists, common sense and decency restrains them.

I called the Dispatch to confirm that Hopfinger had in fact not followed Miller into the men's room. Hopfinger was unavailable, but one of his reporters confirmed this was the case, saying he had never met Miller before and just happened to wander into the men's restroom at the same time.

I think it says everything about Joe Miller's paranoid state of mind that he assumed that Hopfinger followed him in.

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[H/t Heather]

60 Minutes' Byron Pitt had a superb segment last night on the sovereign citizens movement, springboarding from the tragic case of Jerry and Joe Kane, two sovereign citizens who mowed down a couple of West Memphis, Arkansas, police officers before themselves being killed.

It was actually a well assembled and insightful piece of reporting, including the analysis provided by J.J. McNabb, who is unquestionably one of the leading experts on the movement from the outside. And while they let movement guru Alfred Adask run off at the mouth, in the end his own radicalism and complete lack of any connection to reality were made self-evident by his own words.

The only question is: Will Peter King finally listen and hold a congressional hearing on right-wing-extremist domestic terrorism, too?

The story particularly featured the work of Bob Paudert, the police chief in West Memphis father of one of the two slain officers. We've discussed Paudert's work previously (more here). He's been adamant that the information that could have saved his officers that day hadn't been disseminated to them because it was being bottled up.

Why is that happening? Well, as we noted then, we need look no further than the right-wing shriekosphere, which has done everything it can to demonize factual reportage of the actual threat of domestic terrorist activity from right-wing extremists:
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The incident was yet another reminder that one of the most significant ongoing threats to law enforcement officers in this country comes from right-wing extremists of the Patriot/"sovereign citizen" variety -- people who take Republicans' government-bashing rhetoric to its illogical extreme and declare themselves free of federal laws and functionally laws unto themselves. There are constant reminders of this threat -- from the Hutaree Militia to the Richard Poplawskis out there.

Of course, we all were witness to the right-wing shrieking over that Department of Homeland Security bulletin warning police officers around the country about the nature of this resurgent threat. That's because conservatives are more concerned about whitewashing away these embarrassments than they are with the lives of police officers. They like to use dead cops as props to attack liberals while loudly arguing, as Glenn Beck did a couple years ago, that even paying attention to such right-wing threats is a smear of mainstream conservatives.

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Tim Steller had an interesting profile of Richard Mack in the Arizona Daily Star the other day:

For years, Richard Mack wrote books and gave speeches, arguing for gun rights, sovereign states and "constitutional sheriffs."

At first, not many people listened to Mack, a two-term Graham County sheriff who lives in Safford. Many wrote him off as a radical.

But that's changing. The tea party's nationwide emergence and Arizona's drift to the right are bringing Mack's ideas from the political edge into the eddies of the mainstream.

Since Barack Obama's election as president, Mack, 58, has been a hot national speaker, and some of his dearest ideas have come up in the current Legislature.

A system for Arizona to "nullify" federal laws reached the floor of the state Senate before being voted down last month. Another bill would have forced federal regulators to register with the sheriff in any Arizona county where they want to work.

The bill's author, Rep. Chester Crandell of Heber, said Mack inspired him.

"I think the county sheriff has that power and should be protecting the rights of the people," Crandell said. "This is a way to send a message and say we are a sovereign state."

This is, of course, the same scheme tea-partying legislators in Montana are attempting to pass, too. And as you can see from the above video, it all emanates from Mack's ceaseless promotion of the radical right's extremist localism -- the belief that the sheriff, and not the federal government, represent the supreme law of the land.

Mack certainly didn't invent this system. Rather, it was first promoted back in the 1960s and '70s by the old Posse Comitatus movement, which contended that "there is no legitimate form of government above that of the county level and no higher law authority than the county sheriff. If the sheriff refuses to carry out the will of the county's citizens:"

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Douglas Kennedy eagerly filed this report from the wilds of Montana this morning for Fox News, describing the exploits of a Montana Tea Party Republican legislator named Greg Hinkle, from Thompson Falls -- just coincidentally the home of the Militia of Montana ...

Hinkle is a Republican state senator from Thomson Falls, and he recently proposed a law, likely the first of its kind, asking federal law enforcement to first seek approval of county sheriffs before any federal intervention in the state of Montana. He calls it “The Sheriffs First Bill.”

“I believe that before any federal agency does any action within a county,” he explained, “they should cooperate with the sheriff, coordinate with the sheriff and go to him and say this is what we need to do in this county.”

For instance, Hinkle would want the FBI to first notify a Montana sheriff before executing a search warrant or making an arrest in the state of Montana.

At one point he allowed for arrest of any federal agent who didn’t comply, but has since taken out that language. He also reluctantly added a line that allows for federal agents to notify sheriffs “after the fact,” in order to get the bill through the Montana House of Representatives.

Nonetheless, legal observers still call Hinkle’s bill “a clear violation of the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution.”

“The federal government does not have to ask or even inform local law enforcement about what they are doing,” said James Cohen, a constitutional law professor at Fordham Law School in New York. “Sometimes they do because it’s convenient, but they do not have to.”

Hinkle points out that the bill has already passed the Montana State Senate (with the original language) and is expected to pass the House in the next couple of weeks.

He also says there’s a lot of support in Montana, a state which he says well remembers the deadly federal raids at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992 and Waco, Texas, in 1993.

Funny that a parachuting reporter would forget this, but in reality, Montanans remember even better the longest armed standoff with federal agents in history: the 81-day FBI standoff in Jordan with the Montana Freemen. (Yes, yours truly was there.) As Jim Lopach, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Montana, put it in a retrospective piece:

Lopach said the real legacy of the standoff could be that it gave people a reason to consider how far and how deep devotion to political individualism should go.

"It might be a moderating thing," he said. "It might be that they saw the dangers of extremism."

In reality, Hinkle's bill is one we've known about for awhile. It was one of a package of bills that Montana Patriot-movement leader Gary Marbut announced last September in Hamilton at a gathering I covered. (You can watch the video of Marbut describing it here.)

Tonight Marbut wants to talk about a new piece of sovereignty legislation he plans to promote in the state legislature, something he calls Sheriffs First. The bill would make it a crime in Montana for a federal officer to arrest, search or seize without advance written permission from the county sheriff, Marbut explains, to enthusiastic applause.

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Glenn Beck has done lots of mainstreaming extremist beliefs and ideas in his two-plus years at Fox News -- especially far-right ideas that have circulated for years among Patriot-movement militiamen and John Birch Society members, from various "New World Order" theories and claims to "Tenther" theories to his abortive flirtation with FEMA concentration-camp theories.

Judging from the hints he's been dropping on his Fox News show all this week, on Friday he's going to once again dive into the deep, dark and murky waters of classic far-right conspiracism of the Bircher kind. He dropped hints the other day while discussing the "Liberty Dollar" scamsters -- claiming, on the one hand, that he knew ahead of time that what these characters were doing was breaking the law, but simultaneously, they were telling the truth when it came to the evil Federal Reserve.

BECK: Well, this guy was misguided, but he wasn't trying to bring down the United States -- at least, from what he told me. He believed the Fed was destroying the dollar -- and, really? That's a hard stretch, isn't it?

You, by the way, have to watch this show on Friday -- because there is some truth to that. The unbelievable history of the Fed. The, uh -- what is it, the uh, 'Monster,' is that what it was called? The Monster? The Creature of Jekyll Island. We will give you the truth and none of the crazy conspiracy theories on the Fed on Friday. Anyway.

Beck is referencing one of the widest-read conspiracist works about the Federal Reserve, G. Edward Griffin's The Creature from Jekyll Island, and it appears -- vows to eschew conspiracy theories notwithstanding -- that he intends to cite it as a credible source, much as he did with Jonah Goldberg's fraudulent Liberal Fascism thesis in his "documentary" exposing the nefarious fascist roots of modern progressivism. In that case, he promised to eschew "conspiracy theories" too.

Beck, as we all know, has previously demonstrated a fondness for the Birch Society, and this is consistent with that: Griffin, after all, was a close personal friend and longtime associate of Birch Society founder Robert Welch, and wrote a popular Birch book published in 1964, The Fearful Master: A Second Look at the United Nations.

The Creature from Jekyll Island is in many ways a compendium of previous works claiming that the Federal Reserve is a fundamentally illegitimate -- and therefore deeply nefarious -- organization. Most of these theories were deeply anti-Semitic in nature, since they depicted the Fed's bankers as part of a Jewish cabal intent on destroying white American society. What sets Griffin's work apart is that -- like most Birch texts, which assiduously avoided anti-Semitism -- he manages to scrub out the anti-Semitic elements while keeping the paranoid conspiracist elements intact.

Since its publication in 1994, Griffin's book has become a popular text for a large number of right-wing extremists, particularly tax protesters and Patriot movement believers. Griffin himself was involved in organizing a gathering on Jekyll Island last year that the Southern Poverty Law Center credits with helping revive the militia movement.

It has been debunked thoroughly, of course -- probably most notably by historian Gerry Rough, whose three-part series on the origins of the Fed, "Another Twist on the Jacksonian Bank War," pretty thoroughly reveal just how fraudulent Griffin's text really is. You can read it here: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

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