Radical Right Theories Flourish in Aftermath of Sikh Killings
Infowars, the conspiracist website maintained by Alex Jones, seems to have led the charge. In an article published earlier this week after neo-Nazi Wade Michael Page killed six people in Oak Creek, Wis., writer Kurt Nimmo accused the federal government - and, ludicrously, the Southern Poverty Law Center - of somehow being tied to the shootings. The proof? Only dubious claims pulled from Page’s life story. The alleged skinhead gunman was in a psychological operations unit in the Army during the 1990s.
As Nimmo wrote, “It now appears the government has taken its psyop to the next level. … Instead of merely concentrating on small time busts and demonizing ‘rightwing extremists’ for propaganda purposes in a compliant corporate media, they have decided to add the racist ‘white power’ angle to the domestic terrorism narrative.”
Never mind that the “white power” angle is absolutely correct. White supremacists have a long history of violence and domestic terrorism.
In 2009, Richard Andrew Poplawski, who had posted racist and anti-Semitic screeds on white supremacist websites, killed three police officers responding to a domestic dispute at his home in Pittsburgh. Six months later, James von Brunn, a longtime neo-Nazi, shot a security guard to death at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. That same month, longtime white supremacist Dennis Mahon and his brother were indicted in Arizona in connection with a mail bomb sent years earlier to a diversity officer in Scottsdale that injured three people. Then, just last year, police arrested neo-Nazi Kevin William Harpham for placing a bomb packed with nails dipped in rat poison along the route of a Martin Luther King Jr. Day Parade in Spokane, Wash.
It’s no surprise that Nimmo got it wrong. The idea that the federal government would orchestrate such events to implement martial law, install a “New World Order” and role back the liberties of Americans has been a staple of the antigovernment “Patriot” movement’s mythology for years.