The Baby Broders keep telling me that the American Taliban isn't violent!
Byron Williams, a 45-year-old ex-felon, exploded onto the national stage in the early morning hours of July 18.
According to a police investigation, Williams opened fire on California Highway Patrol officers who had stopped him on an Oakland freeway for driving erratically. For 12 frantic minutes, Williams traded shots with the police, employing three firearms and a small arsenal of ammunition, including armor-piercing rounds fired from a .308-caliber rifle.
When the smoke cleared, Williams surrendered; the ballistic body armor he was wearing had saved his life. Miraculously, only two of the 10 CHP officers involved in the shootout were injured.
In an affidavit, an Oakland police investigator reported that during an interview at the hospital, Williams "stated that his intention was to start a revolution by traveling to San Francisco and killing people of importance at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU."
He was armed and primed for violence. And guess where he got his ideas for his attack?
Observers of this most recent act were mystified by one of Byron Williams' reported targets: the Tides Foundation, a low-profile charitable organization known for funding environmentalists, community groups, and other organizations.
Beck, it turned out, had attacked Tides 29 times on his Fox News show in the year-and-a-half leading up to the shooting.
Now, in exclusive interviews and written correspondence with journalist John Hamilton, Williams speaks for himself. He asks Hamilton to be his "media advocate" and repeatedly instructs him to watch specific broadcasts of Beck's show for information on the conspiracy theory that drove him over the edge: an intricate plot involving Barack Obama, philanthropist George Soros, a Brazilian oil company, and the BP disaster.
Williams also points to other media figures -- right-wing propagandist David Horowitz, and Internet conspiracist and repeated Fox News guest Alex Jones -- as key sources of information to inspire his "revolution."
In a separate exchange with Examiner.com's Ed Walsh, Williams sought to defend Beck from "Obama and the liberals," whom he said are afraid of Beck "because he often exposes things that are simply forbidden in news." Williams said that Beck advocates non-violence and that he had already researched the conspiracy theories that informed his alleged plot -- before seeing them "confirm[ed]" on Beck's show.
Yup. Glenn Beck.
"I considered all of the news agencies to be censored," Byron says. "So perhaps Fox has broken away from the mold."
"There's only one conservative channel," he adds. "That's Fox. All the other ones are all liberal channels."
At one point, I ask Byron if he thinks Fox is worthwhile.
"I'm not gonna say anyone is worthwhile," he replies. "I would have never started watching Fox News if it wasn't for the fact that Beck was on there. And it was the things that he did, it was the things he exposed that blew my mind. I said, well, nobody does this."
As I write in American Taliban, the conservative Right has built an alternate reality, using Fox News and the rest of its noise machine, to indoctrinate its followers in reality-busting conspiracy theories. These followers have stockpiled guns and bought so much ammunition that a shortage remains to this day. And they have a might-makes-right philosophy that justifies the use of violence to carry out their extremist agenda.
It's a dangerous and volatile mix. The weenies may blanch at the "American Taliban" moniker, but the shoe fits. We have our own homegrown extremists, they're increasingly agitated and active, and they are bound to become even more dangerous if they fail to take back Congress this November (and/or the White House in 2012) as they widely expect.
It may be easier to pretend they don't exist, or that they're not as bad and violent as extremists in the Middle East (and elsewhere). But the differences today are only in matters of degree. We have to remain vigilant to make sure it stays that way.