"Sovereign Citizens" The Top Domestic Terrorist Threat

A new study of domestic terrorism reports that law enforcement perceives far right-wing anarchist "sovereign citizens" as the greatest threat to domestic tranquillity:

In a new study conducted by researchers tasked with  studying of the root causes and consequences of terrorism in the U.S. and abroad, the sovereign citizen movement was perceived to be the gravest terrorist threat, rivaling Islamist extremists and militia/patriot groups. 

According to National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism —better known as START— sovereign citizens were the top concern of law enforcement, even as a belief that some domestic groups including the KKK, Christian Identity, and neo-Nazis represent less of an actual terrorist threat when compared to a previous study.

Note that, taken as a whole, the fetid, far-right swamps of sociopaths such as the militia/ patriot movement, neo-Nazis, KKK, etc., comprise the vast majority of groups threatening domestic terrorism.

It's A Day Ending in "Y": Cop Shooter Is A Right-Wing Sovereign Citizen Conspiracy Nut

Another week, another "sovereign citizen" Campfire Commando shooting police officers:

A self-described “sovereign citizen” camping out in the woods of northern California was arrested following an armed confrontation with two law enforcement officers this weekend. All three men were wounded in the ensuing shootout.

Fortunately, neither of the officers was seriously wounded.  The crackpot, 60-year-old Brent Douglas Cole, has a history with right-wing conspiracy theories, as the Southern Poverty Law Center link above details.

You can't beat Charles P. Pierce's take on this, so we quote now at length :

Are you happy now, Wayne LaPierre? Are you happy now, Glenn Beck, and Alex Jones, and Dana Loesch, and everyone else who gins up thoughts of armed insurrection for the purposes of profits and ratings and their personal dreams of vicarious revolution? Are you happy now, all you Open Carry nitwits and weekend Robespierres and suburban Minuteman idiots who believe in the FEMA camps and the New World Order and all the other paranoid delights that have made those radio people into wealthy parasites and the rest of you into the most laughable suckers on the planet? 

Are you all happy now? 

People working for the Bureau Of Land Management are getting shot. It has cascaded, as most forms of madness do, from the weaponized performance art of the Bundy Ranch to threats along the highways of Utah that were so severe that the BLM people took the insignia off their uniforms, to this guy, Brent Douglas Cole, who shot a BLM agent and a Nevada highway patrolman, and who apparently is something of a lifer at the gun-crazy crackpot business.  [snip] 

It is time for the political elite in the country to force the choice, once and for all. It is time for the people who care about this country to shun these people, and the politicians who empower them, and the media superstars who pander to their worst instincts, and to the political ideas that have proven themselves to be, over and over again, the most dangerous in the country's history. It's time for Boehner, and Priebus, and entire Republican political apparatus publicly to renounce secessionism, and nullification, and the idea that we are now -- or are dangerously on the brink of—tyranny, if the word has any meaning at all. That means reading the people who promote this stuff out of your party, whether they are members of Congress or state legislators, or members of the state and national committees. That means depriving of your presence any media member who trafficks in this perilous foolishness, and punishing those Republicans who decline to do the same. 

Or you can be the party of sedition and cop-killing.

Our guess is that the despicable Republican political apparatus, all the Boehners and Priebuses of the right, will continue to stand for being the party of sedition and cop-killing -- as long as there's a Democrat in the White House, and as long as it benefits them in holding onto their jobs.  They'll merely pass it off as a deranged person committing an isolated, heinous act.  Pattern?  What pattern?!  Now move along, nothing to see here.

The only remaining puzzlement is when and how those same right-wing "media superstars" will try to make Cole into a "leftist."

More Right-Wing, White Supremacist Violence

In the past week, we've seen at least two outbursts of far-right extremist violence, with the most recent the deadly shootings in Las Vegas:

A man and a woman who shot two police officers and then a civilian in Las Vegas on Sunday may have been white supremacists, according to Las Vegas newspapers. 

The Las Vegas Sun quoted neighbors at the couple’s apartment complex saying that the two “had a reputation for spouting racist, anti-government views, bragging about their gun collection and boasting that they’d spent time at Cliven Bundy’s ranch during a recent standoff there between armed militia members and federal government agents.”  (our emphasis)

The pair, after killing the two police officers and civilian, committed suicide.  Naturally, the cowards ambushed the two police officers and the unarmed civilian;  those are the tactics "armed militia members" are most comfortable with, when they're not parading their manhood compensators weapons in a Chili's or Starbucks, or at Cliven Bundy's ranch.  As an added touch and to make clear where they stood, the pair put a cover over the dead cops that included the tea bagger "Gadsden flag" ("Don't Tread On Me").

Earlier in the week, a "sovereign citizen" named Dennis Marx attempted to take over a Georgia courthouse:

Dennis Marx, a former TSA employee and member of the 100,000-plus “sovereign citizen” movement, planned to lay siege to a Forsyth County, Ga., courthouse and take hostages before he was killed by a sheriff’s deputy on Friday.

Throwing smoke bombs and tire spikes, Marx attacked the Forsyth County Courthouse on Friday morning, striking a sheriff’s deputy in the leg with a bullet. The deputy, 25-year veteran James Rush, returned fire, and Mr. Marx was killed after a brief gun battle on the street, which was joined by a local SWAT team.

As is generally the case, Charles Pierce leads us to the heart of the matter:

Yeah, like Dennis Marx, these two jamokes allegedly marinated themselves in the stew of guns and paranoia that bubbles daily in the conservative media from fringe radio hosts and chain e-mails all the way up to the polite precincts of the National Review Online and the Fox News Channel. That shouldn't surprise us any more. The enabling of dangerous loons and the empowerment by firearms thereof is simply a staple of conservative politics in this country, yet another fetish object, yet another set of conjuring words for the conservative priesthood, which (always) deplores the activity of a few while realizing in its heart of hearts that it has no political future at the moment, no real substantial constituency, without people like this and millions of others who share Dennis Marx's motivations and his view of the world, but who thus far have declined the opportunity to ventilate their fellow citizens.

We would only add that it should also come as no surprise that the "mainstream media" will do its gosh darned best not to dwell on these stories when there's a good Bergdahl Benghazi!!!  non-scandal to over-inflate.

Meanwhile, it's not a moment too soon that the Justice Department is refocusing on the domestic terrorist front.

UPDATE:  Raw Story has more on the Las Vegas killer-creeps, with photos and the pair's Facebook likes (Rand Paul, Ron Paul, Freedom Works, the NRA, "patriot movement's" Alex Jones, etc.).

UPDATE II:  Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog trashes typical right-wing attempts to paint the two Las Vegas wingnuts at "leftists."  Leftists, my ass.

UPDATE III:  The Anti-Defamation League weighs in:

“The two police officers who lost their lives are only the latest in a series of casualties in a de facto war being waged against police by right-wing extremists, including both anti-government extremists and white supremacists,” said Mark Pitcavage, ADL Director of Investigative Research.

Confronting Sovereign Citizens And Right-Wing Libertarians

From the banal in Keene, New Hampshire --

The activists selected this New England-cute city of 24,000 for liberation mostly because it lies within that flinty bastion of Yankee individualism known as New Hampshire, where “Live Free or Die” is carved into the collective granite.

Back in 2003, a libertarian-leaning group called the Free State Project decided that this small state could be a liberty lover’s paradise if enough like-minded people settled here. (The movement, by the way, tends to attract white males, according to Carla Gericke, the group’s president, a white South African who has lived for many years in this country. “I’m the token African-American,” she joked.)   (Ed.:  Yuk-yuk.)  (our emphasis)

And just who are these freedumb fighters "activists" saving us from?

They are part of a broader effort by about two-dozen activists, most of them from someplace else, to unshackle Keene from the “violent monopoly” of government and its enforcers, including these parking officers who work in weather fair and foul. (our emphasis)

Gotta watch out for those violent meter maids!  How nuts do you have to be to see this as "liberty loving?"

To the  fatal in Tanana, Alaska --

A sovereign citizen shot and killed two Alaska state troopers last week during an argument over a $150 couch, authorities said. 

Nathanial Kangas is accused of killing Trooper Sgt. Patrick “Scott” Johnson and Trooper Gabriel Rich as they attempted to arrest the suspect’s father. 

A mother and daughter called Tanana village police Wednesday night because they feared 58-yer-old Arvin Kangas would break into their home and steal a sofa he had sold them.

The elder Kangas told a village public safety officer that he had no jurisdiction to arrest him, and the officer called state police for backup after he said the older man made threats against him with a shotgun.  (our emphasis)

The common thread here is that civil authority and domestic peace is increasingly being threatened, sometimes with deadly consequences, by groups of far-right extremists calling themselves "sovereign citizens" or "libertarians."  As we saw with the Cliven "Hoof" Bundy carnival, it doesn't take much for these freedumb fighters shitwits to grab their guns and claim that they're not answerable to the law.

This has been brewing for some time, but the advent of America's first African-American president led to an explosion in the growth of the sovereign citizen/ nullifier/ secessionist/ militia movement.  At some point, just as George Washington had to put down the Whiskey Rebellion, governments at all levels will have to confront these "domestic terrorists" (h/t Harry Reid).  Sooner is probably better than later.

Disturbing

We noticed this report from NBC News of a plot in Las Vegas to abduct and murder police officers by members of the lunatic "sovereign citizens" movement.  The movement doesn't recognize the authority of police officers or of government, and actively plans and executes killings of law enforcement officials.  Adherents to this crackpot movement have killed police in shootouts in Louisiana and Arkansas.  The Southern Poverty Law Center categorizes the movement as engaged in domestic terrorism.

Charles P. Pierce, writing in Esquire.com, connects the dots of this dangerous movement with the far-right:

"It has an audience because an audience has been created for it, in dozens of books, hundreds of hours of radio programs, and an entire Internet universe. It has an audience because its more polite adherents have found politicians to pander to it, politicians who should know better, but who would rather not. It has an audience because the NRA has told that audience that it is a besieged remnant of the America that once was free. People are making a buck on it. People are achieving power behind it. I don't really know how they sleep at night."

More Nutbaggery On The Far Right

This article in Talking Points Memo is chilling. It concerns the views of so-called "sovereign citizens," who believe that they are exempt from the laws of government as "sovereign" entities. Among their followers are nutbags who shoot up government offices, or engage in gun battles with police or Federal agents.

As we noted on June 8, the Department of Homeland Security seems shy about cracking down on these dangerous characters. There's been a proliferation of far-right militia-type groups with a seething anger toward the Administration in the past two years, following President Obama's election. We need to take the violent threat posed by these pathetic clowns seriously.