Beware of Wingnut, Disgruntled, Homegrown Anti-Government Terrorists

by Bill Berkowitz

Surely you remember the five-step color-coded terrorism alert system – ranging from green (go shopping to defeat terrorism) to red (stay at home and defeat terrorism by shopping online) -- devised by the shrub junta to keep Americans on its collective toes.
If this system hadn't been phased out by President Barack Obama's then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, it would probably be flashing red. Not because of actions by homegrown self-described 'patriots' who threaten to shoot children crossing the country's southern border, or anti-choice fanatics who maintain they're doing dog's work by killing doctors who perform abortions and bombing abortion clinics, or because of the shoot-em-up actions of disgruntled domestic wingnut anti-government xenophobes, but rather because these days, it's all about the threat to the homeland posed by ISIL and other jihadist groups.
Last week, in about ten minutes time, Larry Steve McQuilliams, 49, of Austin, Texas, shot off an estimated 100 rounds of ammunition throughout Austin's downtown area; firing at the federal courthouse and the Mexican consulate. No one was killed or wounded other than McQuilliams, who was shot and killed by a police officer.
Early media accounts reported that McQuilliams may have had "anti-government" and "anti-immigration motives."
You think?
Consider this: Had McQuilliams been a muslim, how would media outlets handled their first reports? Would they have even considered labeling it solely as an "anti-government" act or would it have immediately been labeled an "act of terrorism?"
McQuilliams' attack was just the latest in a seemingly never ending series of wingnint anti-government-motivated attacks which have included: anti-government gatherings at the Cliven Bundy ranch in Nevada, during which well-armed "patriots" faced down government officials; anti-Semitic-motivated shootings in Overland Park, Kansas; an attempted attack on a Forsyth County Georgia courthouse by a man with ties to the Sovereign Citizen movement; and Jerad and Amanda Miller's Las Vegas rampage, which resulted in the deaths of three people, including two police officers.
It is an indisputable fact that homegrown anti-government wingnuts – many of whose actions are fused with some type of 'christian' belief system -- have unleashed more violent attacks in the United States than homegrown or foreign-born muslims. Nevertheless, almost every time a wingnut shoots up a neighborhood, attacks a government building, kills police officers, it is described as an act by a person who is/was "anti-government," and may have been mentally disturbed, but rarely is it seen as an act of terrorism.
It is interesting to note that, as Raw Story's Scott Kaufman reported, "White supremacists on the Stormfront forum are claiming that the Austin man who opened fired on a federal courthouse, a police headquarters, and the Mexican consulate last week is a 'false flag' designed to stir up hatred against anti-government wingnut Americans."
In a recent Foreign Policy piece titled Terrorists Among Us, Americans have good reason to be afraid of another attack on U.S. soil -- only it's not going to come from the islamic state. Micah Zenko pointed out that:
"As they have been intermittently since 9/11, Americans are again terrified about terrorism. Those who think a domestic terrorist attack is 'likely' in the next few months increased by 10 percentage points from March to September, while the percentage who think the country is 'less safe' than before 9/11 rose by 19 points over the past year. This change ... occurred precisely as the Islamic State intended with the dissemination of its horrific beheading videos of two U.S. citizens in late August and early September, which 94 percent of Americans saw or heard about -- the highest percentage of any news event in the last five years. Despite this spike in fear, as several U.S. officials declared soon after: 'We have no credible information that [the islamic state] is planning to attack the homeland of the United States.'"
Although Zenko's essay focuses on three disparate events that appear to have more to do with domestic violence, and mental health issues of the perpetrators than the making of a political statement, nevertheless, he is on the mark when he writes:
"It is a certainty that if any of these incidents were directly tied to the islamic state they would have resulted in an overwhelming national outcry to do something, including the still further expansion of military objectives abroad and constraints of civil liberties at home. However, we have become fairly inoculated to such horrors, even those identical to what terrorists groups aspire to accomplish. ... Bizarrely, we are less afraid of the devastation of terroristic acts than we are of the motivations of the people behind such acts."
In April 2013, Mother Jones reported that "Between September 11, 2001, and the end of 2012, there were no successful bomb plots by jihadist terrorists in the United States. Jihadists killed 17 people ... in four separate incidents during this time, according to data collected by journalist Peter Bergen and the New America Foundation. All four of these incidents involved guns, including Nidal Hassan's shooting rampage at Fort Hood, which killed 13 people. In contrast, wingnut extremists killed 29 people during those 11 years."
What will it take for the government and the media to recognize that threats and attacks by mostly white disgruntled well-armed wingnuts are acts of terrorism?