Right Wing Terror Suspect Arrested In Georgia Ranted About Health Reform On Erickson’s RedState.com
Imagine my surprise to learn that one of the would-be right wing terrorists arrested in Georgia this week was a commenter at Erick Erickson’s RedState.com.
Today, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published a broader picture of the four men accused of the terror plan. Dustin Baker at the blog GAPolitico flags one important part of the AJC story: that accused terrorist Fred Thomas blogged on redstate.com, the website edited by CNN’s Erick Erickson. The Thomas blog post highlighted by Baker and AJC revealed that at one point, he did not “advocate a general rebellion against the U.S. Government for cause,” but seemed conflicted about the idea of violent revolution. Something apparently changed between that unpromoted post, published in July of 2008 and this year, when the alleged plot began taking shape.
A ThinkProgress examination of Thomas’s online writing in the following years shows that the alleged terrorist grew more and more upset, and expressed sympathy with the anti-Obama conspiracies posted on RedState. Last year, he posted a comment to a popular RedState post about the evils of health reform. Thomas claimed that the “ObummerCare Bill” not only “won’t be forgiven,” but will lead to “TYRANNY of the worst order” and “civil war.” (view a screenshot of the comment here)
The other blog Thomas mentions in his RedState comment is apparently the militia website run by Mike Vanderboegh, who gained infamy for calling for violence over the health reform bill and for writing an online series advocating a new civil war against President Obama. ThinkProgress has covered Vanderboegh, who recently signed up as a commentator for Fox News, here and here.