Conservative Enemies of the State
By Matthew Vadum
Conservative organizations are “hate groups” and Tea Party supporters are potentially dangerous extremists, according to educational materials the Obama administration is using to indoctrinate members of the nation’s armed forces.
In response to a Freedom of Information Act request made by good-government group Judicial Watch, the Pentagon recently released 133 pages of lesson plans and PowerPoint slides provided by the Air Force from a January 2013 Defense Department diversity training center “student guide” entitled “Extremism.”
Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton slammed the Department of Defense documents for what he described as their bias against conservatives.
“The Obama administration has a nasty habit of equating basic conservative values with terrorism. And now, in a document full of claptrap, its Defense Department suggests that the Founding Fathers, and many conservative Americans, would not be welcome in today’s military,” said Fitton.
And it is striking that some of the language in this new document echoes the IRS targeting language of conservative and Tea Party investigations. After reviewing this document, one can’t help but worry for the future and morale of our nation’s armed forces.
The DoD materials not only take aim at modern conservative groups but label America’s Founding Fathers as extremists who would be unfit to serve in today’s military.
The teaching guide advises that instead of “dressing in sheets,” radicals today “will talk of individual liberties, states’ rights, and how to make the world a better place.” American patriots who fought for Independence from the United Kingdom in the 1700s are identified as adhering to “extremist ideologies.”
“In U.S. history, there are many examples of extremist ideologies and movements,” the document states. “The colonists who sought to free themselves from British rule and the Confederate states who sought to secede from the Northern states are just two examples.”
This language mirrors what the public is now being fed by the mainstream media. The term “neo-Confederate” is increasingly used by journalists and leftists as an epithet to smear anyone who doesn’t long for an all-powerful federal government unconstrained by the Constitution.
For example, MSNBC contributor Joy Reid said a few days ago that supporters of the Second Amendment draw their inspiration from the antebellum, slave-holding South. “There’s this sort of neo-Confederate thread that runs through this pro-gun movement and NRA movement,” she said in a discussion about gun control.
The DoD teaching guide treats Islamic terrorism as insignificant, ignoring, for example, the murder spree committed by self-described “soldier of Allah,” U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, at Fort Hood in 2009. The guide references Islamic extremism only in passing and doesn’t provide a precise definition for extremism. “[W]hile not all extremist groups are hate groups, all hate groups are extremist groups,” it states.
Curiously, at times the materials blather on almost incomprehensibly, using psychobabble to alert soldiers to the supposed perils posed by extremists.
The materials repeatedly refer to extremists as “haters,” an urban colloquialism that appears in hip hop music and in humorous graphic art posted on the Internet. The pseudoscientific materials also discuss the “seven stages that hate groups go through.”
It is as if the authors are winking at each other, acknowledging that what they’re writing is nonsense.
But the tone elsewhere in the teaching guide is deadly serious. It advises soldiers to rely on the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center as a resource in identifying hate groups.
A 2006 report from the SPLC claimed –improbably– that “large numbers of potentially violent neo-Nazis, skinheads, and other white supremacists are now learning the art of warfare in the [U.S.] armed forces.”
The SPLC is a leftist attack machine funded by George Soros. After it labeled the conservative Family Research Council a “hate group,” a gay rights activist shot up FRC headquarters in Washington, D.C. in a terrorist attack in 2011. FRC president Tony Perkins blamed the “hate group” designation for the attack, saying the gunman “was given a license to shoot … by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center has been at this game a long time, making money by sliming conservatives. It is so fabulously wealthy that it stashes cash in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands, two of those tax haven countries the Left keeps complaining about. In addition to those foreign accounts, in its most recent publicly available tax return (for the year ended Oct. 31, 2012), the SPLC discloses gross receipts of $46.8 million that year and an absolutely astounding $256.5 million in net assets.
Many hardcore left-wingers don’t take the SPLC seriously. It was mocked by the far-left Nation magazine’s JoAnn Wypijewski who described its founder, Morris Dees, as a “millionaire huckster.”
The SPLC lumps all sorts of groups on America’s political Right together, labeling them enemies of the Republic. Conservative, libertarian, anti-tax, immigration reductionist and other groups are all viewed as legitimate targets for vilification. To the SPLC, you practice “hate” whenever you fail to genuflect with politically correct reverence before every human difference.
According to Mark Potok of the SPLC, even everyday symbols are secret amulets of hate. He describes the Gadsden flag, a yellow-colored flag that bears the phrase “Don’t tread on me” and features a coiled rattlesnake ready to strike placed above the phrase “Don’t tread on me,” is a symbol of hate that in “contemporary society [is] the flag of the militia movement.” The flag says “Don’t mess with us,” and implies, “Don’t mess with us at the point of a gun,” says Potok.
In fact the Gadsden flag, a favorite of Tea Party supporters, has been used by the U.S. Marines and Navy since 1775. In 2002 the secretary of the Navy ordered that a variation of it, the rattlesnake jack, be flown on all U.S. Navy ships for the duration of the Global War on Terror. The order has not been rescinded by the Obama administration. Perhaps Potok didn’t get the memo from his leftist friends in the White House.
Since taking office in 2009, the Obama administration has been on a relentless drive to stigmatize and delegitimize opposing points of view. The latest assault on American values comes from the same administration that instructed Department of Homeland Security officials to treat conservatives and libertarians as potential terrorists.
It’s also the same rogue regime that goes out of its way not to label actual Islamic terrorists as terrorists, that calls terrorist attacks “man-caused disasters,” and refers to the Global War on Terror as the “Overseas Contingency Operation.”
The Obama administration refuses to disavow Saudi-style blasphemy laws and issued the FBI report, “Guiding Principles: Touchstone Document on Training,” which forbids FBI agents from treating individuals associated with terrorist groups as potential threats to the nation.
Americans ought to be concerned that the newly discovered Defense Department teaching guide attempts to spread the Obama administration’s venomous hatred of conservatives to heavily armed individuals charged with defending the nation from enemies both foreign and domestic.
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