Melissa McEwan is fond of writing, "this shit doesn't happen in a vacuum." And it's always true, whether discussing violence against women, racism, and certainly when a man with Bill O'Reilly's and Ann Coulter's books on his shelf walks into a church with the sole purpose of killing liberals.
Dave Niewart continues his incredibly valuable work by providing a list of conservatives, some very prominent, calling for the murder of their fellow Americans. I won't reprint them here; you need to click through and read them all if you haven't already.
This isn't the first terrorist attack against "liberal" Americans, of course. Clinics and Planned Parenthood offices have been set on fire and bombed, doctors have been shot, members of Congress and the media have been targeted with weaponized anthrax. Black churches have been bombed, and homes owned by blacks have long been, and still can be, terrorized by white supremacists.
But I promise you that what is coming down the road will be far worse. Mainstream American attitudes are slowly changing. People are becoming more accepting of gays and other races, less likely to believe not only in the god of Pat Robertson and James Dobson, but any god at all. Battles are won and lost by both sides, but as people have pointed out before, the progressive vision is the one winning the war.
As radical conservatism declines, its adherents will turn to violence in ever increasing numbers and instances. Terrorism is the result of True Believers - it really doesn't matter what they believe - perceiving themselves as alienated from society and whatever other methods exist to exert their will over it. It's becoming harder for the richest 1% of our society to maintain an illusion of their rising tide lifting all boats - instead of capsizing them - which will put many currently comfortable conservatives in dire economic straits. But the genius of the class warfare which has been waged by the upper class against the rest of us is that the groundwork for blame has already been laid. The scapegoats for all this world's ills are the "liberals," - and not pointy-headed professors or America-hating Congresspersons. No, it's those liberals down the street. The blame for all of America's and their own personal problems lie with their coworkers, their family members, with you and with me.
Take a good look at the streets of Baghdad and Tel Aviv. The day is coming when we'll wish we lived there.
