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The FBI arrests a right-wing extremist in Minnesota for a planned domestic-terrorism attack:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced on Monday that it had arrested a Minnesota man for plotting a “localized terror attack.”

A press release from the Minneapolis Division said that “special agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in conjunction with the Montevideo Police Department; the Chippewa County Sheriff’s Office; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; the Minnesota State Highway Patrol; the Bloomington Police Department; the Minnehaha County Sheriff’s Office (South Dakota); the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources; and members of CEE-VI (Cooperative Enforcement Effort), executed a search warrant at 1204 Benson Avenue, Lot #8, in Montevideo, Minnesota. Several guns and explosive devices were discovered during the search of the residence” on Friday.

Buford “Bucky” Rogers, 24, was arrested for unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon. An Associated Press report said that he had previously been convicted for felony burglary in 2011 and a misdemeanor charge of dangerous handling of a weapon in 2009.

It appears he came by his nuttiness the natural way -- via his family:

Throughout the interview with FOX 9 News, Jeff Rogers insisted he still doesn't know why his family is considered a threat.

"We are peaceful people, okay? We're not out to blow up the world -- none of this crap," Jeff Rogers said.

Investigators claim to have removed a computer, a military-style Romanian rifle and explosives from his shed -- specifically, Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs. Jeff Rogers said that isn't the case, describing the seized items as household chemicals.

"That's a bunch of s---," he said.

Police and Jeff Rogers both point out that Buford Rogers does not live at the home. Rather, he lives across town with his girlfriend and their new baby. Neighbors say they don't see him much, but residents told FOX 9 News the family is very dedicated to their Black Snake Militia, which some consider un-American.

Jeff Rogers is not coy about the family's political leanings, displaying an upside down American Flag and signs suggesting the government wants to implant microchips inside citizens outside his home.

"We are patriots. You guys are patriots," he said. "You see the country is going to s----."

Yet, Buford Rogers' Facebook page suggests a sinister side to his politics. In publicly visible posts from 2011, he wrote, "We already started fighting. I'm sure you'll hear about it in a bad way."

A website for the Minnesota Minutemen Militia, which says it is not anti-government, claims the Black Snake Militia is comprised of 73 members. The leader's profile shows a man who claims to be 29 years old wearing a ski mask and holding an assault rifle. His bio reads, "Im an american patriot willing to lay down my life so we may take our republic back…. [sic]"

Meanwhile, the media -- and Fox News especially -- yawn. Eric Boehlert observes:

You will likely not be surprised that none of Fox News' primetime hosts mentioned the Rogers arrest last night or the looming threat of right-wing extremist violence. That, despite the fact the shows have dedicated countless programming hours in recent weeks to ginning up fear and angst surrounding the terror attack in Boston on Patriot's Day.

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The right-wingers have been in full-on gloat mode since the capture of the Boston Marathon bombers -- not because it turned out that they were right about the nature of the perpetrators (they weren't), but because speculation that they might be right-wing extremists was wrong. Only wingnuts can convert a sigh of relief into an attack on their opponents.

The problem is that all they're really doing is attempting, yet again, to whitewash away the very real existence of violent extremists on their own side.

Leading the charge is William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection, who published a post over the weekend titled "Add Boston Marathon Bombing to pile of Failed Eliminationist Narratives":

Yet there was a theory behind the madness, the Eliminationist Narrative created by Dave Neiwart of Crooks and Liars about an “eliminationist” radical right seeking to dehumanize and eliminate political opposition. It was a play on the over-used narrative of Richard Hofstadter’s “paranoid style” in American politics.

The Eliminationist Narrative was aided and abetted by an abuse of the term “right-wing” to include groups who are the opposite of conservatism and the Tea Party movement.

In the case of Sparkman, the accusations were just Another Failed Eliminationist Narrative. And the Eliminationist Narrative would fail time and time again:

James Holmes
Jared Loughner
The Cabby Stabber
The “killer” of Bill Sparkman
Amy Bishop
The Fort Hood Shooter
The IRS Plane Crasher
The Pentagon Shooter

We can now add the Boston Marathon Bombing to the pile. The wild speculation that there was a Tea Party or “right-wing” connection proved false.

Of course, it would always help if people like Jacobson managed to review the posts of the people he's attacking -- since neither I nor anyone at Crooks and Liars ever speculated in print that the perps were white right-wing extremists. Others did, however -- and frankly, we discussed it among ourselves. But we knew that it was irresponsible to speculate publicly until we knew more, and so we waited -- unlike a few progressives, and even many, many more conservatives. (More about that in a moment.)

The fact, however, is that the speculation about right-wing extremism's potential role was entirely rational, considering that in the past four years, there have been nearly 70 acts of domestic terrorism committed by right-wing extremists in the United States, compared to just over 30 such acts committed by Islamist extremists here. (I have prepared a report on this that Mother Jones will be publishing soon.)

And let's not overlook the OTHER terrorist attack that occurred in the same week -- namely, the ricin attacks on the White House and Senate, a case that is still officially unsolved, now that the original suspect has been released. However, considering both the targets and the fact that ricin has long been a favorite weapon of right-wing extremists, there is a high likelihood that one or more of them will eventually prove to be the source of these attacks.

Indeed, just in the past year alone, we've observed the following entirely successful acts of domestic terrorism, perpetrated by extremists animated by various kinds of far-right ideologies and their eliminationist rhetoric:

An Army veteran named Wade Michael Page walks into a Sikh temple and opens fire, killing six and wounding four

Two Tulsa men embark on a killing rampage targeting black people, killing three and wounding two

A group of Louisiana "sovereign citizens" kills two sheriff's deputies when they try to serve warrants

A Utah skinhead shoot six police officers, killing one, when they try to serve a warrant

A black man named Ray Lengend torches a Muslim mosque

An ex-convict tries to blow up a Wisconsin women's clinic because it performs abortions

We've also had a couple of unsuccessful plots broken up:

Seven members of a racist skinhead organization arrested for training to launch a terrorist race war

"FEAR" militia plot broken up when members are charged with murder of member and his 17-year-old girlfriend

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Neiwert's insights after covering right-wing extremism movements, his gift with language, his considerable storytelling skills all combine to make And Hell Followed With Her a near compulsive—and frightening—read. His ability to combine the history of these various organizations with the more immediate crime, and his analysis of the mindset of those who spent their lives immersed in the delusions of the right wing, make this book an important one, one with implications that reach far beyond one woman, two deaths and one border town.

If you'd like a sample, AlterNet published the entirety of Chapter 12 at its website:

The Anti-Immigrant Paranoia That Drives Shawna Forde to 'Patrol' the American Border

You may also want to peruse the discussion of the book that occurred Sunday at the Firedoglake Book Salon (thanks to Brian Tashman for hosting, and to Bev Wright for arranging everything).

Finally, here's the audio of my interview with Steve Scher at KUOW-FM earlier this week:

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I think you'll find that what they're saying is true: This book is a must-read, not just important but compelling as hell too.

Longtime Crooks and Liars readers are already familiar with the tragic case of Brisenia Flores and her killer, the Minuteman movement figure Shawna Forde. Soon they will be able to read the full account of the story.

The book represents several years' worth of work. Beyond covering the exploits of Forde -- including her trial and those of her cohorts -- the book also covers the entire story of the Minuteman movement, which I have been writing about continuously since 2005, including an earlier investigation of its fundraising activities.

You can read some of the results of my most recent investigative work on the Minutemen and Shawna Forde's role in the movement in the AlterNet article I wrote last year, which in many ways is a condensed version of much of the material in And Hell Followed. However, as you'll see, there is a great deal more in the book, including much more detail, as well as the full story of what occurred in Arivaca that terrible night in 2009.

The book opens with a recounting of how that night ended, with a 911 call to dispatchers in Tucson. You can hear that call here:

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Of course, I have many people to thank for this book. But it is above all a project of the the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute.

It's really an amazing, weird, twisted, and deeply disturbing story, one worthy of the Coen Brothers (and in fact, we are currently working on selling the film rights to the book). I hope you are as moved reading it as I was writing it.

Note from Susie: I read a whole lot, more than 50 books per year, and you couldn't pay me enough to make me recommend a book I don't like. Dave's new book is mesmerizing, in the same true-crime style as "Under The Banner of Heaven." Beautifully written and compelling. You really will want to read this --and then you'll want to see the movie.

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As Susie has already noted, a number of pro-gun nutcases -- including gun-rights lobbyists like Larry Pratt, with actual influence inside the Beltway -- have responded to the atrocity at Sandy Hook with the atrocious argument that "gun free zone" policies caused the massacre, and that what we ought to be doing is arming our schoolteachers.

Yes, these people are evil. And insane. And unfortunately, they play a real role in our politics.

One of the realities about the right-wing gun lobby that has frozen politicians into inaction when it comes to dealing with the mass proliferation of guns and their attendant violence in America is that they in fact are only partially about guns. They really are broad-ranging far-right organizing vehicles, attacking liberal politics and policies on a number of fronts -- including taxes, the environment, abortion rights, and yes, education.

Indeed, their contribution to our national conversation about education largely consists of a steady flow of vicious rhetoric attacking public schooling and public schoolteachers. They usually depict them as incompetents and parasites, not to mention "socialists." Their broader, Randian politics constantly undermine public schools, from gutting their funding to perpetuating degrading perceptions of educators.

And no one is more prone to those vicious attacks than Larry Pratt, the longtime head honcho at Gun Owners of America, one of the most conspiracy-prone of all the right-wing gun orgs. Pratt was one of the originators of the militia movement of the 1990s, and he's still doing his best to pollute American politics with similarly toxic concepts.

I reported about Pratt's activities related to Tea Party organizing for AlterNet back in 2010, based in part on an appearance he made at a Tea Party event in Montana that year. (You can see the longer video I made at that event here.)

Here's what Pratt told that crowd:

You know, one of the big problems – I don't have to, this is not a news flash to anybody here – but one of the big challenges that we face in getting the freedom message across is what's happening in the schools. The schools are propagation, propaganda centers for the hard left. And kids are coming out not only ignorant of basic facts, but actually instructed that being an independent person and self-reliant is not the goal in life and that we ought to be a bunch of drones like in Europe.

I heard an example of this kind of indoctrination. Seems that this sixth-grade class was getting drilled by the teacher as she was asking, 'Well, how many people support President Obama?' And all the hands went up save Johnny's. And Johnny kind of stared back at the teacher. She said, 'You don't support President Obama?' He said, 'No ma'am.' 'Why not, Johnny?' 'Well, my daddy's a Republican, and my mama's a Republican, so I'm a Republican.' And the teacher said, 'Well, now Johnny, if your mama were an idiot, and your daddy were a moron, what would that make you?' [Pause] 'An Obama supporter.' [Applause]

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If there is any kind of silver lining lurking in yesterday's horror show at Sandy Hook Elementary, it is this: The national conversation on guns is sharply changing. Perhaps that's because, as Charlie Pierce observes, this bell has been tolling long and loud -- and now we realize that it tolls for us.

It's a reflection of the depraved state of our national conversation that it took a parade of massacres culminating in a schoolhouse full of murdered 5-year-olds to awaken that realization in us. But that's where we are. The question now is how to get out of it.

Particularly because the other half of the conversation -- the gun-rights absolutists who increasingly retreat into paranoid conspiracy theories to justify their worldviews, as well as an insurrectionist interpretation of the Second Amendment asserting that the real purpose of gun ownership is to enable the overthrow of a tyrannical government -- is just plain ol' bug-eyed crazy. Not to mention psychopathically insensate, exemplified by the Brian Fischers and Mike Huckabees out there blaming liberals for the murders.

How exactly are we supposed to conduct a conversation with people who cling insistently to irrational nonsense?

And what is nearly certain to happen next is going to make the conundrum inescapable.

It's clear, both from his remarks yesterday and his radio address today, that President Obama has now screwed up the political courage to try to tackle the matter of the mass proliferation of guns in American society. And that, as it happens, will fall in line with the paranoid predictions of the gun nuts before the election.

You remember what they were saying:

"[The Obama campaign] will say gun owners -- they'll say they left them alone," LaPierre told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Friday. "In public, he'll remind us that he's put off calls from his party to renew the Clinton [assault weapons] ban, he hasn't pushed for new gun control laws. ... The president will offer the Second Amendment lip service and hit the campaign trail saying he's actually been good for the Second Amendment."

"But it's a big fat stinking lie!" the NRA leader exclaimed. "It's all part of a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and destroy the Second Amendment in our country."

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Our friend and sometime contributor Leah Nelson has a post up over at the SPLC's Hatewatch site examining that fringe world between far right and far left -- dominated by the rightist element, in the person of Alex Jones and his proto-Patriot conspiracy shop.

In this case, it's these pseudo-economists who put out conspiracist newsletters to investors -- their most recent theory being that President Obama is plotting to defy the Constitution and ensconce himself for a third term come 2016 -- whose Planet Bizarro version of reality gets a good sharp look:

'Anarcho-Capitalists’ Seen as Cousins of the ‘Patriot’ Movement

The star of the show is a fellow named Porter Stansberry, a scam artist/"financial guru" convicted of making over a million dollars selling false "inside tips" (he claimed a First Amendment defense) and was subsequently fined $1.5 million by the SEC.

Evidently soured on the government by his brush with the law, Stansberry has turned from scam artist to antigovernment radical, using various Internet publications to mix dubious investment advice with apocalyptic warnings about a coming era of tyranny that will destroy America.

His most recent insight? According to a YouTube video distributed across a multitude of far-right websites and discussed with great seriousness by figures like antigovernment conspiracist Alex Jones, President Obama is planning to overthrown the Constitution, implement socialism, and seize a third term in office.

According to Stansberry, Obama won’t even have to use force to do it. Instead, the president plans to buy his third term with untold profits gained from mining America’s vast shale oil deposits, which will lead to an era of extraordinary prosperity unlike anything America has seen before.

“All of this new wealth,” Stansberry says, “will seem like a gift from the Prophet Muhammad to the administration of Barack Obama.”

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Now that they've lost their election and are seeing their political future circling down the drain, a lot of folks on the political right are drowning in despair and retreating even further into the cocoon of non-reality they've created for themselves. And that response is especially acute on farthest fringes of the Right, where the militiamen are stocking up for the Obamacalypse.

Even among the larger population of mainstream conservatives, they're not handling the election results well. Fully 49 percent of them think Obama won with the help of ACORN-induced vote fraud -- apparently oblivious to the fact that ACORN has been defunct for the better part of two years. Then again, those same polls show their numbers overall are shrinking in a downward spiral.

The most hard-core of these among the "mainstream" Republicans just had their most recent moment of glory -- protecting America from the "threat" of a loss of sovereignty under the guise of a basic act of decency such as recognizing the rights of the disabled. As Dan Drezner observes, it's hard to tell just what these "sovereignists" are on about.

Though actually, if you've been observing the American Right for a long time, it's not hard at all to see what these folks are on about: They're succumbing to their inner John Birchers, retreating to a paranoid fantasyland in which President Obama and the Democrats are about to destroy every last vestige of freedom in America on behalf of the ever-conspiring Communists who lurk inside the New World Order.

The Right has been warming up to this for a long time, including their insane hysteria in the run-up to the election. And whenever they suffer a bad election, they go through paroxysms of discontent in which large chunks of them opt for total withdrawal from American society as preparation for the End of the World As We Know It. And some of them fantasize about how they can take on evil oppressive liberal dictatorship.

You can actually find a whole genre of books dedicated to this worldview. I call it "Patriot Porn" -- fictional books that tell the tales of brave bands of patriotic survivors who take on the powers of the evil liberal/commie/Mooslim overlords and carve out their pocket of resistance and survival. They have titles like By Force of Patriots and Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse, and Firebase Freedom (whose author, the late William W. Johnstone, appears to have been dead since 2004 but somehow seems to keep producing, zombie-like, these awful paranoid Patriot fantasy titles such as The Blood of Patriots and Phoenix Rising; Firebase Freedom is coming out this month). And yes, you can actually pick up the Johnstone books off the grocery-store paperback shelf.

So it shouldn't surprise anyone that a number of right-wing "Patriots" are deciding to live out that very fantasy. Via Digby, here's the announcement from an outfit calling itself the "III Citadel":

Patriots understand that an epic storm is coming to America.

Economic collapse is imminent. Disruptions of Just-in-Time supply lines will lead America into chaos. Violence along racial, ethnic, religious and economic class lines will bring forth famine, disease and a fundamental reset of life in America.

A group of Patriots have decided to build a community off the most likely lines of peril, a bastion of Jefferson's Rightful Liberty where we may remain safe, warm, healthy and comfortable while American society suffers the inevitable destruction that must accompany the decades of degenerating morality of our Countrymen.

The location of this compound of right-wing extremists is the deep woods of northern Idaho -- in fact, in one of my favorite, oft-visited fly-fishing areas (the St. Joe River is a balm for the soul), Benewah County. It is deeply wooded and mountainous terrain with few roads. This fourth-generation Idahoan has seen the likes of these folks before. It has pretty much never turned out well.

Right off the bat is the fact that, as the announcement explains, this "community" is going to revolve around the manufacture of weapons:

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We all remember Anders Breivik, the right-wing extremist who massacred dozens of (mostly) young Norwegians in the summer of 2011, right? Well, now it seems that people in Poland have narrowly escaped having their own version of such a terrorism-induced bloodbath, at the hands of an admirer of Breivik:

Last week the Polish government announced the thwarting of a terrorism plot that is worrisome in its audacity and in who was behind it. In a country with minimal experience of terrorism, the discovery of a sophisticated homegrown bomber seeking to decapitate the government by blowing up the parliament and the president has caused shockwaves and introspection.

The would-be bomber, Dr. Brunon Kwiecień, a forty-five year old research scientist at Krakow’s Agricultural University, fits few currently fashionable profiles. Neither a jihadist nor marginally employed or socially bereft, Kwiecień is married with two children, has a respectable income, and is reported to have been exceptionally interested in explosives since his youth. A skilled chemist popular with his students and considered unremarkable by his university colleagues, he came up with a truly audacious plot to blow up the Sejm, the Polish parliament in Warsaw, during a joint session where both houses, the president and the full cabinet would be present. As Kwiecień is reported to have conducted visits to Warsaw to select his targets, this appears to be more than the figment of a demented imagination.

The seriousness of the bomber’s intent was evidenced by the astonishing haul made by Polish police after Kwiecień’s arrest on November 9. Among the items seized were a dozen illegal firearms, some 1,100 rounds of ammunition, body armor of various types, several detonators (including cell phones triggers) and an amazing four tons of high-grade explosives—more than enough to flatten several city blocks—which the bomber had access to due to his job. There seems to be little doubt that Kwiecień had the technical competence to build the bomb, but his efforts to find collaborators fell short.

As Stratfor explains, this was an attack for which Kwiecień was well suited, requiring a skillset well within his range of competence:

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Our "liberal media" here in Seattle is something else -- particularly the Republican-owned Seattle Times, which is astute enough to include a few liberal voices on its editorial page and among its columnists. Our TV stations are pure mush. And don't get me started on the subject of local talk radio.

The worst, though, has to be the Times. Because, those handful of liberals notwithstanding, its editorial content (especially its editorials) is relentlessly right-wing. This was embodied in their endorsement yesterday of Republican John Koster in Washington's new 1st Congressional District.

Indeed, their rationale was enough to make you laugh out loud:

We disagree with Koster on social issues, but in Congress right now, his fiscal viewpoint and elected experience are what’s needed.

Koster’s reputation and performance as the practical conservative who can articulate and act on those views and find common ground is needed and welcome.

Actually, Koster's "reputation and performance" make irrevocably clear that he is a Tea Party fanatic, a fiscal extremist who, in his six years in the state's Legislature, voted against five of six budgets. It's entirely predictable what he'll do if elected to the House: Sign up with the Tea Party caucus and immediately link arms with the bloc that has refused to pass any kind of jobs bill or face up to the problem of unemployment, simply because doing so would ensure a difficult re-election for President Obama, and who already tried to drive the American economy over the cliff with their brinkmanship on the debt ceiling.

And that's just on the fiscal side of things. Koster is so extreme on so many other issues -- particularly on abortion and education -- that the notion of him "finding common ground" with Democrats on anything is endlessly risible.

What the Times didn't tell its readers, though, is that Koster has a long history of far-right extremism -- not merely with the Tea Party, but back in the 1990s, with the far-right Patriot/militia movement.

The Times' softball profile of Koster made an oblique mention of this fact -- so we know that they have to be perfectly aware of all this:

His record also shows a steady streak of conservatism: He voted against five of six budgets and introduced legislation to allow a group of people in northern Snohomish County to secede and form a new county, "Freedom County."

Actually, it runs much, much deeper than that.

John Koster played a significant role in helping promote far-right "Patriot" movement property-rights organizing in the Puget Sound region in the 1990s – organizing that in many cases involved recruiting militias, extremist "sovereign citizen" schemes, and efforts at secession. Koster's role was important: As a state legislator, he introduced bills that promoted and legitimized the far-right agenda of these groups, particularly their efforts at forming new counties, carved out by "secession" from larger urban counties in western Washington.

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