There’s a mythology that goes around the conservative and the white supremacist movement on social media. It’s that everything that seems to one’s eyes and ears to be true is in fact false. While most domestic terrorists are white men with conservative, frequently hate-filled ideological leanings, they are in fact mentally ill left-wing socialists!
A 2015 survey of law-enforcement agencies conducted by the Police Executive Research Forum and the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security found that the police rate antigovernment extremists as a greater threat than reactionary Islamists. The authors wrote that “right-wing violence appears consistently greater than violence by Muslim extremists in the United States since 9/11, according to multiple definitions in multiple datasets.” According to the Department of Homeland Security, “Sovereign Citizens”—fringe antigovernmentalists—launched 24 violent attacks from 2010 through 2014, mostly against law enforcement personnel. When Robert Dear shot and killed three people at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic in 2015, it became the latest in a series of bloody attacks on abortion providers dating back to Roe v. Wade in 1973. In the 30 years that followed that landmark decision, providers and clinics were targeted in more than 300 acts of violence, including arson, bombings, and assassinations, according to a study by the Rand Corporation.
And so while blue is not red, people like Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks want everyone to know that the real reason Republicans are running away from elections in droves, is not that their time is up. It’s not that they’ve transparently sold their souls to the devil. It’s not that they are frightened of being politically humiliated in an election. It’s because … they are afraid of left-wing assassinations. You know, like Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, Mahatma Gandhi and Jesus of Nazareth. Explaining on “The Dale Jackson Show,” Brooks suggested that while there were a few factors, the threat of left-wing violence was a big one.
He also said the “socialist Bernie Sanders wing of society” was pushing for a revolution that would lead to Maoist level of violence.
“There are a growing number of leftists who believe the way to resolve this is not at the ballot box but through threats and sometimes through violence and assassinations,” he said.
Rep. Mo Brooks is the same guy who, when voting to take away millions of Americans’ health insurance, said that they should “live good,” and that would solve their problems. He subsequently announced, without irony, that he had become a part of the “high-risk pool” himself with a cancer diagnosis. Of course, using the terrible shooting event of Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise in June of 2017 as a political propaganda tool, is nothing knew to Rep. Brooks. He took audio from that terrible day and used it in an Alabama Senate ad just a month after the event.