re: #122 talon_262

OMFG…

Yes. I hope Charles updates his post with a link to his old post that had the AoG documentary. Everyone should see it.

Notice also the confluence of many elements in the AoG manual: anti-government sentiment, anti-public school sentiment, anti-evolution. There’s a great deal of crossover amongst these groups. So-called ‘lone wolves’ have loose ties to or associations with various extremist groups typically, and then when one of them does something everyone plays “keep away”, throwing the guy back and forth and arguing “Well, he isn’t exactly on the right…he had no official ties to Operation Rescue…” etc., etc.

The AoG though explicitly outlines plans for operating as lone individuals, and as BigPapa pointed out upthread, they choose to work in leaderless sorts of cells. This is why it’s been incredibly difficult for the organisation as a whole to be identified and stopped.

During the Clinton administration (the last time we had a huge wave of abortion related violence and AoG activity) there was a multiyear effort to prosecute and identify some of these people. It failed. And the Bush DOJ did not prosecute with the same level of intensity:

washingtonindependent.com

The NAF — the organization that most closely tracks such data in the United States — also reports that between 2000 and 2008 there were at least 17 cases of “extreme” violence against abortion providers in the United States, such as arson, stabbing and bomb attacks. At least 607 letters threatening Anthrax contamination (they did not actually contain anthrax) were sent to abortion providers between 2000 and 2002 alone. During the entire eight years of the Bush administration, the federal government prosecuted only 11 individuals for any acts of violence against abortion clinics or providers.