Tony Perkins and Ken Blackwell of the Family Research Council are attacking the Obama administration over a Ohio National Guard training drill last month that simulated a threat from “two school employees who are disgruntled over the government’s interpretation of the Second Amendment.”
News of the drill started circulating in conservative media this week, feeding anti-Obama paranoia (even though last year’s drill simulated a threat from a radical environmentalists).
On yesterday’s edition of Washington Watch, Blackwell and Perkins said that the drill must have been the idea of the federal government, and argued that there is no reason at all to fear any danger from right-wing extremists. “When you look back at incidents of domestic terrorism in this country, it’s not done by right-wing, conservative people or organizations, it’s done by left-wing extremists,” Perkins said. Blackwell concurred: “Absolutely, that’s been the factual history of domestic terrorist attacks and efforts.”
That is completely false, of course.
The nonpartisan New America Foundation found that the pool of “‘non-jihadist’ terrorists” is “overwhelmingly made up of right-wing extremists.” The Director of Terrorism Studies at the West Point-based Combatting Terrorism Center found attacks by right-wing extremists up “more than 400%” since 2000.
John Tirman of the MIT Center for International Studies notes that in “the START database on terrorism in America,” from “1990 to 2009, START identified 275 ‘homicide events’ that killed 520 people and were committed by right-wing ideologues. There were many more incidents of destruction of property, nonfatal attacks, and other acts of thuggery by white supremacists, private militias, and the like.”
“Fifty-six percent of domestic terrorist attacks and plots in the U.S. since 1995 have been perpetrated by right-wing extremists, as compared to 30 percent by ecoterrorists and 12 percent by Islamic extremists,” writes Ken Sofer. “Right-wing extremism has been responsible for the greatest number of terrorist incidents in the U.S. in 13 of the 17 years since the Oklahoma City bombing.”
Since Perkins and Blackwell were already just making things up, why not one more? The two FRC leaders proceeded to accuse the Southern Poverty Law Center of being listed on “the domestic terrorism list. ”
“It’s not conservatives,” Perkins said. “If it were conservatives who were doing that kind of stuff we would never hear the end of it.”
