Former Chair of the Counter-terrorism Security Group for the U.S. National Security Council Richard Clarke claims that “right-wing” groups are a terrorist threat to the United States in an April 19 interview with National Public Radio.
While Clarke didn’t define what “right-wing” means (assuming it means something other than people he doesn’t like), Clarke reacted to a question about pro-gun, pro-Second Amendment rallies in Washington, D.C. and Virginia April 19 (attendees were urged to bear arms at the Virginia rally). Clarke responded:
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And we have to remember when we worry about al-Qaeda and foreign threats, that one of the biggest, certainly the second largest and second most destructive attack in our history inside our borders, was done by these people, American right-wing people. Extreme right-wing, anti-government, violent people. I think the United States has a serious threat today from those people because legitimate public officials are egging them on and legitimate public officials who are conservative and who are Republican aren’t criticizing them or aren’t criticizing them enough.We need to de-legitimize these people, or we will have another Oklahoma City.
While the left-right paradigm is something of a meaningless term, most view “right-wing” as something involving smaller government. Clarke apparently adopts this paradigm, but to claim that Timothy McVeigh comes from the “right” and is “anti-government” takes a little faith. McVeigh learned how to kill with his service in the government, the U.S. Army, and had no organizational affiliation with militias (he attended a few meetings in Michigan and was encouraged to go elsewhere) or any other conservative organization (other than an NRA membership while he was in the Army). But McVeigh was a big fan of William L. Pierce’s novel The Turner Diaries (written under the pen name Andrew MacDonald). Pierce called for national socialism —i.e., Naziism — and totalitarianism. Moreover, McVeigh editorialized in favor of socialized medicine in a letter to the New Jersey Lockport Union-Sun & Journal in 1992:
No one is seeing the “big” picture. Maybe we have to combine ideologies to achieve the perfect utopian government. Remember, government-sponsored health care was a Communist idea. Should only the rich be allowed to live long? Does that say that because a person is poor, he is a lesser human being; and doesn’t deserve to live as long, because he doesn’t wear a tie to work?
Is this the profile of a “right-wing,” “anti-government” person? While McVeigh claimed, after his capture, to be a libertarian and attacked a federal government building at Oklahoma City, his history is one of being employed by government and supporting a racist varient of socialism promoted by former American Nazi Party functionary William L. Pearce.
Clarke, who served every president from Reagan to the second Bush, stated in the same NPR interview quoted above:
There is a small percentage of people who own guns that I find very scary. And they are the ideological remnants of the Ku Klux Klan, the ideological remnants of the John Birch Society. Throughout our history, we’ve had right-wing people who say they don’t like the U.S. government, they want to take down the U.S. government, they think violence against the U.S. government is okay. And since the election of Barack Obama, these people have grown in volume and I think they’ve grown in number.
In Clarke’s view, Americans have the right to keep arms, but not to bear them as the Second Amendment guarantees. Moreover, he knowingly linked together the racist and violent Ku Klux Klan with the anti-racist and nonviolent John Birch Society.
Clarke apparently sees anyone who supports smaller government as a potential bomb-maker. “You can see it during the health care debate and all around the country in the last year. There were people who were saying ‘oh, I don’t support the crazy people, but I support these guys,’ who are just right on the border of the crazy people, of the people who have guns and are making bombs.”
Making bombs? Who’s making bombs? Nobody Clarke can prove. But that does stop him from implying that law-abiding Americans who oppose ObamaCare and other violations of the U.S. Constitution are somehow aiding and abetting bomb makers. Clarke, after all, has a social agenda:
We need every every politician, every church leader, every synagogue leader every mosque leader on a regular basis to be preaching on a regular basis against violence and against people who would attack the government.
Even preach against people, apparently, who attack extra-constitutional government only with their words.
Photo: Richard Clarke
