[Warning: Naked self-promotion ahead.]

My book The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right continues to attract a lot of interest, partly because it so clearly anticipated the current descent into madness of mainstream conservatives, currently drowning in a lake of right-wing extremism. I didn't predict tea parties, but I did warn that '90s-style militia wingnuttery was about to swamp the Republican Party, and I do explain how this is happening.

So this week I was the featured interview at Amanda Marcotte's podcast at RH Reality Check. We specifically focused on the way right-wing domestic terrorists have had a profound impact on women's reproductive rights. This is a brief interview; it starts at about the 8-minute mark and continues to the 24-minute mark.

And I was also featured as the live guest on Second Life for this week's episode of Virtually Speaking on BlogTalkRadio.

This is an hourlong session and fairly broad-ranging. It was fun for me because I've known Jay Ackroyd for over 10 years -- online (we useta post at the old Slate forum The Fray back in the day), but we only finally met in person this summer at Netroots Nation. We talk about posting at Crooks and Liars, among other things. I also get to talk about my favorite moment of the past year: Having been the guy who made Sarah Palin crazy enough to try to have McCain lie, thereby cementing her rep as a diva among the McCain campaign.

It's now been a full year since I've been at C&L. I think I'll celebrate by running the video that made Palin crazy, which occurred my first week here:

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Meanwhile, John Amato and I are ensconced in the writing process this weekend for our upcoming book from PoliPoint Press: Over the Cliff: How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane. (Due out next spring.) We'll have more details as we get closer.

In the meantime, I'd like to say thanks to the community of readers and commenters here at C&L for welcoming me so warmly and making me feel right at home from the start. It's been a blast, with lots more to come.

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Yesterday on Hardball, Chris Matthews had on John Velleco, who's listed as the "Director of Federal Affairs" for the Gun Owners of America, a gun-rights group that makes the NRA look relatively sane in comparison. (That's probably the reason for their existence.)

And Velleco, of course, does not disappoint. Matthews hammers him for about four minutes, trying to get him to answer a simple question: If you were a Secret Service officer, would you let everyone carry a gun into a presidential event? It seems like an absurd question, but Velleco actually answers it affirmatively.

But then, that shouldn't be terribly surprising. As hate-group expert Brian Levin, the second guest, tries to explain, the GOA has a long history of right-wing extremism, dating back to the days in the 1980s when it was part of Willis Carto's white-nationalist operation. The main figure in all this was GOA's longtime and current leader, Larry Pratt.

Moreover, as the ADL explains, Pratt actually played a critical role in the formation of the militia movement in the 1990s:

In 1992, Larry Pratt, leader of a radical gun- rights group [the GOA] and an advocate of the formation of militias, issued a statement in the wake of the Rodney King riots urging the Los Angeles Police Department to "take advantage of what the Founding Fathers called the unorganized militia" in order to forestall further unrest. Many people initially joined the fledgling militia movement largely as a way to protect more aggressively their right to bear arms; even today, gun-related issues dominate many of the newsletters published by militia groups.

The SPLC has more on Pratt:

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My longtime friend and colleague Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates was interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air earlier this week, talking about right-wing extremism (a term he actually loathes). It's a fascinating discussion and an enlightening listen, as it often is with Chip.

The focus of the discussion was a new paper Berlet wrote for PRA: "Toxic to Democracy: Conspiracy Theories, Demonization, and Scapegoating". [The main PDF is here.]

Berlet bounced off the paper for Huffington Post in discussing the Holocaust Museum shooting, and sums up his argument concisely:

People who believe conspiracist allegations sometimes act on those irrational beliefs, and this has concrete consequences in the real world. The shooting today is a prime example of why it is a mistake to ignore bigoted conspiracy theories. Law enforcement needs to enforce laws against criminal behavior. Vicious bigoted speech, however, is often protected by the First Amendment. We do not need new laws or to encourage government agencies to further erode civil liberties. We need to stand up as moral people and speak out against the spread of bigoted conspiracy theories. That's not a police problem, that's our problem as people responsible for defending a free society.

... Apocalyptic aggression is fueled by right-wing pundits who demonize scapegoated groups and individuals in our society, implying that it is urgent to stop them from wrecking the nation. Some angry people already believe conspiracy theories in which the same scapegoats are portrayed as subversive, destructive, or evil. Add in aggressive apocalyptic ideas that suggest time is running out and quick action mandatory and you have a perfect storm of mobilized resentment threatening to rain bigotry and violence across the United States.

Now the only question is: Will Bill O'Reilly send one of his ambush crews after Chip now?

BeggarsCanBeChoosers: A rather large flaw in the fervent condemnations of pro-choice advocates as 'Nazis' is that Hitler himself, and the Nazi doctrine he created, were unequivocally opposed to any individual right to abortion. Guess it's time to take another look at that much maligned DHS report on right-wing extremism.

Truthdig: War Is Sin

We are respectable negroes: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack of Black Privilege in the Age of Barack Obama

Election Law: Live blogging the Coleman/Franken oral argument

Jesus' General: Tancredo PAC's Executive Director goin' all Chuck Norris on the Brown! 

Surviving the World : Lesson 132 - Twitter (h/t swimgirl)

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The American Right is never happy unless it has someone it collectively decides will be the Voodoo Doll of the Moment -- a single liberal figure upon whom it can focus all its energies at destroying. And it's obvious that Janet Napolitano is the going to be the first Obama administration official they go after.

You can tell, because already they are starting to lie, distort, and generally smear her any way they can; no hypocrisy is too gross to indulge along the way. No matter that the right-wing extremism report at the heart of the controversy is in fact accurate in every detail.

Yesterday ex-Sen. Rick Santorum was on Greta Van Susteren's show doing the lying, smearing, and hypocrisy schtick for the sake of running down Napolitano:

Santorum: Well, it's not a good thing for this administration to have a Secretary of Homeland Security, who has over 40,000 veterans working in that department out there attacking veterans as potential homeland security problems.

This is flatly false: the report does not smear veterans, but appropriately raises a red flag over the indisputable fact that right-wing extremists intend to recruit veterans.

On it went:

Van Susteren: She didn't actually write the report. She didn't read it before it went out, maybe.

Santorum: It's her department -- the people that she hired. I mean, these are people that she hired, that the Obama administration hired to write this. This isn't holdovers from the Bush administration that wrote this. These are her folks!

This is simply a baldfaced falsehood. These reports were in fact commissioned under the Bush adminstration, as was reported last week by Fox's Shepard Smith and Catherine Herridge:

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