Shepard Smith

In the wake of the two high profile shootings recently, I've been reading a lot about the motives and drives of those who committed the acts themselves. If I were an alarmist, I'd be ridiculously scared, but right now I hold steady at "fairly unnerved".

Believe it or not, the Department of Homeland Security report warning of right-wing extremist was spot on, it seems. Whether it's a self-fulfilling prophecy or not is impossible to discern, but the fact that President Obama has only been in office for going on five months and things like this are already happening is somewhat frightening. The threat of the right-wing domestic terrorist is similar to and just as real as the left-wing extremist committing arson and tossing Molotov cocktails around.

But for the first time, there are legitimizing forces in the media. People are being encouraged to disbelieve that the president is a United States citizen, to believe that Obama wants to take their guns and control their lives and take away their right to religion. People are even being told that their entire way of life is threatened unless they do something about it - but these same people are not being told how to do it.

I have plenty of respect for conservatism in this country, especially fiscal conservatism. I accept that we've traditionally been an individualist society, and though I am of the opinion that we should move away from this ideal, it's fact that the "American Way" means complete self-sufficiency in every way possible to many people. It's also fact that there are crazy people on both sides of politics. You have your stereotypes: the eco-terrorist, torching SUV dealerships and animal testing labs, and the white supremacist shooting abortion doctors and progressive politicians.

The one difference between the two? Well, the first is generally peaceful and, although people do get hurt, generally targets property and not people. The latter have been stockpiling guns since Obama won the election.

The legitimizing forces of Limbaugh, Hannity, and Beck are the catalyst here, I feel. They tell people that their darkest fears are about to come true, that their freedom is in jeopardy, and they have to fight back. For these extremists who take every word from the lips of these conservative figureheads as gospel, that could (and apparently, has) been interpretted as "kill abortion doctors" or "shoot up people at a national monument." The level of rage, pain, and fear of some wings of the right in this day in age is already at a frenzied level. It's only going up from here.

But oh, there's one shimmering light on Fox News - one who's being boycotted by bloggers and called out for a firing. That would be Shepard Smith, one of the folks that isn't always caught toeing a party line behind him:



The man sounds legitimately frightened by the e-mails he receives. He mentions above the dehumanizing factors that many extremist figureheads use to rile up their bases: the meme that Obama is not a natural born citizen of the United States, calling him "Hussein," calling him a socialist, and saying that he's destroying everything good about America. Of course, the figureheads use these terms and memes to garner more loyalty from their bases, but the side effect is that some of their listeners (perhaps even a small, small fraction of them) believe all of it. Believe that these "facts" make the president and those who support him inhuman and unAmerican. This is the scariest part. If you actually buy that in four years, Obama will have some kind of Nineteen Eighty-Four-esque governmental system set up where conservative thought is forever outlawed and people are utterly controlled by their government, well, you might do something about it.

And perhaps a small, small percentage of these true believers will pick up a gun.