New study suggest conservatives are dangerous

Mark Tapson:

A West Point think tank has issued a report titled “Challengers from the Sidelines: Understanding America’s Violent Far-Right.” Perhaps it should have been titled “Demonizing America’s Mainstream Right,” because the paper, while focusing on domestic terrorists, links them ideologically to law-abiding, Constitution-revering, mainstream conservative American citizens, making it easy for left-wing media to demonize the latter and for the government to target them.

The report, which warns America about “violent far right” groups such as the “anti-federalist” movement, was issued last week by the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. It was written by Arie Perliger, who directs the Center’s terrorism studies and teaches social sciences at West Point. The CTC normally produces reports on al Qaeda and other violent Islamic groups throughout Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Previous reports similar to this latest one, for example, featured such topics as “Crime and Insurgency in the Tribal Areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan,” “Radical Islamic Ideology in Southeast Asia,” and “Al-Qa’ida’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq.”

But this latest study looks within our own borders and connects limited government activists to three movements it identifies as a racist/white supremacy movement, an anti-federalist movement, and a fundamentalist movement.

The first group is fairly self-explanatory: violent racists like the KKK (no mention in the report of their origins in the Democratic party) and skinheads. The third group, the fundamentalists, is identified by the report as including mainly Christian Identity groups such as the Aryan Nations. They “fuse religious fundamentalism with traditional white supremacy and racial tendencies,” “promoting ideas of nativism, exclusionism, and racial superiority through a unique interpretation of religious texts.” The report goes on to discuss the various facets of the movements and their motivations. Certainly when such groups perpetrate violence it is legitimate to identify them as domestic terrorists.

But the characterization of the middle group is where the report gets interesting and more problematic. After describing liberals rosily as “future- or progressive-oriented” and conservatives as paranoid about a New World Order and clinging to an idealized past, the report asserts that the “anti-federalists” want to undermine “the influence, legitimacy and effective sovereignty of the federal government and its proxy organizations.” The members of this movement

espouse strong convictions regarding the federal government, believing it to be corrupt and tyrannical, with a natural tendency to intrude on individuals’ civil and constitutional rights. Finally, they support civil activism, individual freedoms, and self-government.

This pretty much describes every conservative I know,...

Well there you have it.  They must have found the founders even more frightening.  I( don't really associate the groups they name as conservatives or even right wing.  None of them would be welcome at a Tea Party rally. nor would they feel comfortable in such a setting.  This follows a tendency among studies like this to describe Islamic religious bigots as "ultra conservative."  The fact is that these people are radical fascist who are way beyond conservative in any sense of the word.

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