Murder in Washington: Part of a frightening pattern?

You can’t say we weren’t warned, said Errol Louis in the New York Daily News. In April, the Department of Homeland Security alerted local police departments to be on the lookout for “right-wing extremists” driven to violence by the election of a black president, the humiliation of recession-related job losses, and the widespread anger and disillusionment among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. “A roar of complaint” went up from conservatives, who said the Obama administration had slandered everyone on the Right and was trying to suppress legitimate political dissent. But with last week’s murder of Stephen Tyrone Johns, a guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., the warning now seems prescient. Johns’ accused killer, the white supremacist and Holocaust denier James von Brunn, comes from the same mold as Pittsburgh gun nut Richard Poplawski, who killed three cops in April after saying he was worried that Obama would take away his guns. That same month, white supremacist Joshua Cartwright, distraught over Obama’s victory, killed two Florida sheriff’s deputies. In May, pro-life zealot Scott Roeder allegedly gunned down Wichita abortion doctor George Tiller.

Why so much rage? asked Frank Rich in The New York Times. “A sizable minority of Americans is irrationally fearful of the fast-moving generational, cultural, and racial turnover Obama embodies—indeed, of the 21st century itself.” From the point of view of these seething reactionaries, white males are being forced out of their rightful place of power by blacks, Hispanics, immigrants, and uppity women. In frustration and rage, they are responding with violence.

And who’s helping them pull the trigger? asked Andrew Breitbart in The Washington Times. Why, the vast right-wing conspiracy, of course. Determined “to further marginalize the Republican Party,” liberals are insisting that Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and other conservative critics of the Obama administration are somehow to blame for inspiring nuts like Roeder and von Brunn. This is pure “guilt by association”—no different from saying that Barack Obama is a terrorist because his friend Bill Ayers once blew up buildings with the Weathermen. Though the Left doesn’t get the distinction, conspiracy nuts and neo-Nazis are not conservatives, said Jonah Goldberg in National Review Online. Von Brunn, for example, has written that George W. Bush was part of the 9/11 conspiracy cooked up by Zionists. He opposed the Iraq war. On his list of possible targets found in his possession was neoconservative magazine The Weekly Standard. You won’t hear those details, though, from liberals who are now seizing on the acts of a few nuts “to paint the Right as an undifferentiated blob of evil.”

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You don’t have to be a liberal, though, to worry about some of the rhetoric on the Right, said Steve Young in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Fox News’ Shepard Smith said on the air last week that the e-mails received at the network had “become more and more frightening,” and he warned that armed, angry people were talking about taking out their guns. And please don’t tell me that the recent spate of shootings was the work of a few, isolated “loners,” said Sally Kalson in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Thanks to the World Wide Web, seething psychos never need leave their house to find a community of “like-minded compatriots feeding their paranoia, egging them on with crackpot theories, baseless slander, twisted theology, and wild-eyed hatred.” Von Brunn, Roeder, Poplawski, and Cartwright were all loners, but “a forest full of lone wolves is still a very dangerous place.”