Justin's Political Corner

I’m a member of the National Rifle Association and a former Army officer with assignments in the military police, artillery, and operations research and intelligence at the Pentagon.

I’m also Ted Nugent’s older brother.

Ted and I recently attended the NRA convention in Houston, where he delivered the gathering’s final speech and continued his ardent defense of the Second Amendment. Ted and I have hunted together for decades, and we legally own a large number of guns. We both understand that guns constitute deadly force, so safety is foremost in our minds. It’s part of responsible gun ownership.

And I agree with Ted that our constitutional right to bear arms should not be undermined. I want all those who are qualified to purchase a gun to be able to do so. But — and here is where I part ways with my brother — not everyone is qualified to own a gun, so expanded background checks should be a legislative priority.

I believe strongly that expanding and improving mandatory background checks will keep a lot of people who aren’t entitled to Second Amendment rights from having easy access to guns. As of today, a convicted felon can find a gun show or a private seller and buy a firearm without a background check. That loophole should be closed. Every gun transaction must include a thorough background check. Why would responsible gun owners want to protect people who threaten not only our safety but our gun rights?

The NRA has it wrong: Irresponsible gun owners are bad for everyone. If you shouldn’t have access to a gun, then there should be no way for you to access a gun! Can anyone argue with that?

Consider the mentally ill, one of the biggest threats to firearm safety. How do we preserve their rights to health privacy while keeping firearms out of their hands? It’s a huge concern, given the role mental illness has played in recent gun-violence tragedies. While some states have made progress, it’s far from universal.

But convicted felons, people with restraining orders against them and those with a history of mental illness can still find ways to purchase weapons. No one should stand for this.

The tragedy in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, and the gun violence that claims on average eight children per day in the United States, require us to think differently about what the Second Amendment really means.

Enhanced background checks need not threaten the Second Amendment. Why are the NRA and the elected representatives who support it so slow to realize this? Or do they fear a slippery slope toward greater restrictions on gun rights? If they don’t want to burden a flawed system, they should be part of fixing it.

Reducing gun violence and protecting the Second Amendment is not an either-or idea. I challenge the NRA’s leadership to partner with groups such as Evolve, which I recently joined, that seek to protect gun rights while creating a culture of responsibility, safe gun use and prudent access to firearms.

Can we imagine an NRA capable of taking that on? Or are we doomed to the uncompromising philosophy driving everything the organization does? I want to be proud of being a member of a proactive NRA.

I attended this month’s NRA convention to better understand what the organization is thinking and advocating. Speakers such as Glenn Beck and my brother are extremely articulate and connect with that audience, while Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s executive vice president, excels at creating a strident stand-and-fight mentality that does not speak for the majority of gun owners. Ted and I have talked about these matters over the years, but more often lately. I concede that he is right on some points: In some instances, cities and states with less-strict gun laws have less violent crime. But that does not argue for arming America. Ted is someone who speaks in extremes to make his points. It reflects who he is, and it works for him and his audience.

h/t: Washington Post

On Monday, President Obama weighed in on the alleged targeting of conservative nonprofit groups by the Internal Revenue Service, calling for a full investigation into what he said would constitute “outrageous” conduct. That’s one way to put it. Here’s another: depressingly normal. For much of the last century, abuse of the IRS for political ends has been the rule, not the exception. Under Republican and Democratic presidents alike, the IRS has gone after communists, students, black activists, young conservatives, and mainstream political rivals. Here are some prime examples:

Franklin D. Roosevelt: According to libertarian historian Burton W. Folsom’s New Deal or Raw Deal, Elliott Roosevelt, the president’s son, noted that FDR “may have been the originator of the concept of employing the IRS as a weapon of political retribution”—most notably against former Louisiana governor and senator Huey Long. (The famously corrupt Long, in fairness, was kind of asking for it.) Rep. Hamilton Fish, a New York Republican, alleged that Roosevelt’s IRS had gone after him on trumped-up charges—and when that failed, handed the investigation over to the FBI instead. Roosevelt’s longtime Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr., admitted that the administration had deliberately targeted his Republican predecessor, Richard Mellon, on trumped-up charges of tax evasion.

Dwight Eisenhower: The FBI’s counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO, relied heavily on the compliance of the IRS to go after members of the Communist Party. Per a 1976 Senate report, “In its efforts against the Communist Party, the FBI had unlimited access to tax returns; it never told the IRS why it wanted them, and IRS never attempted to find out.”

John F. Kennedy: In 1961, Attorney General Robert Kennedy teamed up with United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther to produce the “Reuther Memorandum,” which proposed curtailing the influence of far-right groups in two ways. The first was the enforcement of the Federal Communication Commision’s “Fairness Doctrine,” to limit their use of the airwaves. The second was the IRS, through an initiative called “The Ideological Organizations Audit Project,” which explored the political activities of conservative nonprofits. The program eventually expanded to the other of the side of political spectrum, but according to the 1976 Senate investigation, that was mostly a facade of nonpartisanship.

Richard Nixon: The godfather of “Nixonian tactics” believed he’d been a political target of the agency in the Truman administration—not that he needed an excuse to use the Internal Revenue Service as a tool with which to dispatch “enemies.” Under Tricky Dick, the IRS created the Special Services Staff (SSS) to investigate thousands of perceived enemy groups and individuals. (Nixon aide Pat Buchanan feared that groups like the Ford Foundation and Brookings Institution were acting essentially as Democratic organs.) White House counsel John Dean testified that the administration pushed the IRS to audit reporters who wrote stories critical of Nixon, such asNewsday’s Robert Greene. Nixon himself wanted the SSS to focus on political adversaries like 1972 presidential challenger George McGovern, student groups, and civil rights organizations like the NAACP. When the IRS audited Billy Graham, a Nixon ally, the president responded with force: “Get the word down to the IRS that I want them to conduct field audits of those who are our opponents, if they’re going to do in our friends.”

Jimmy Carter: Republicans accused the born-again Christian president of an “unconstitutional regulatory vendetta” against religious institutions after his IRS director, Jerome Kurtz, introducednew regulation to end the tax-exempt status of Christian schools. Kurtz ultimately had to retain Secret Service protection after a wave of death threats from supporters of religious education.

Ronald Reagan: This one hit close to home. Mother Jones had been around for six years when, in 1981, Ronald Reagan’s IRS tried to shut it down. The agency concluded that the magazine was not living up to its tax-exempt motives and instead functioned like any other publishing house, with the goal of making as much money as possible. That was weird, given that Mother Jones had to that point never made a profit. The timing was also suspicious—a half-dozen or so other left-of-center publications came in for the same scrutiny by the agency. MoJo eventually won—but not until it had burned hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees.

Bill Clinton: The conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, which filed a string of lawsuits against the administration centering on public records, alleged that it was in the crosshairs of the Clinton White House—along with a dozen other groups and individuals that had gotten on the president’s bad side. The list of of audited parties in the Clinton era included Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, the Heritage Foundation, and the National Rifle Association. Documents later released by the IRS during the Bush administration revealed that high-ranking Democrats, including a half-dozen members of Congress, had written to the IRS requesting an investigation into Judicial Watch’s nonprofit status. One IRS official allegedly told the group, “What do you expect when you sue the president?”

George W. Bush: The NAACP experienced an unwelcome case of Nixon Nostaliga in 2004, when it found itself under IRS scrutiny after the group’s chairman, Julian Bond, told attendees of its annual convention to oust Bush. (The president had been invited to the convention but declined.) After a two-year investigation, the IRS backed off.

h/t: Tim Murphy at Mother Jones

HOUSTON (AP) — The incoming leader of the National Rifle Association has a long history with the powerful gun rights lobby and a penchant for bold statements that are sure to enflame an already explosive national debate over gun control.

James Porter, an Alabama attorney and first vice president of the NRA, assumes the presidency on Monday after the group’s national convention wraps up in Houston. He didn’t wait until then to ignite a new furor over gun control, telling the NRA grass-roots organizers on Friday they are the front line of a “culture war” that goes beyond gun rights.

“(You) here in this room are the fighters for freedom. We are the protectors,” Porter said.

Porter, 64, whose father was NRA president from 1959-1961, is part of the small, Birmingham, Ala., law firm of Porter, Porter & Hassinger. The firm’s website notes its expertise in defending gun manufacturers in lawsuits.

Porter takes over the organization as the NRA finds itself in a national fight over gun control in Washington, D.C., and state capitols around the country. The NRA had a major victory regarding gun control with the defeat in the U.S. Senate of a bill that would have expanded background checks for gun sales. But it lost ground in some places as several states passed laws expanding background checks and banning large ammunition magazines after December’s mass shooting at a Connecticut elementary school.

Porter has called President Barack Obama a “fake president,” Attorney General Eric Holder “rabidly un-American” and the U.S. Civil War the “War of Northern Aggression.” On Friday, he repeated his call for training every U.S. citizen in the use of standard military firearms, to allow them to defend themselves against tyranny.

Gun control advocates say Porter makes outgoing NRA President David Keene look like a moderate on gun issues, even though Keene had said the NRA would try to punish lawmakers who voted in favor of expanded background checks and other gun control measures.

Keene had worked to offer a softer, if equally staunch voice for the gun lobby’s ideas when compared with Wayne LaPierre, the fiery executive vice president who remains the NRA’s most prominent voice on the public stage.

Porter as president, “pulls (the NRA) more into the extremist camp,” said Josh Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. “With Jim Porter, they’ve gone full crazy.”

New President, same extremist agenda at the NRA.

H/T: TPM

For much of its more than 140-year history, the National Rifle Association promoted gun ownership, shooting, and hunting as good, clean, constitutionally-protected fun. That changed in the past four decades as the NRA transformed into a hardline group closely allied with the gun industry and the conservative establishment whose only solution to gun violence is ever more guns. Watch the shift unfold in this collection of ads promoting the organization from the early 20th century to the present.

1920: “Rifle shooting is a mighty fine sport.” This Remington ad in Boys Life declared that the NRA was “a United States Government organization.” It wasn’t, but that gives you a sense of just how tight the gun group and the government once were—before the NRA entered its current state of perpetual freak-out about the feds coming for Americans’ guns. 

1970: “Hunters Beware!” Sounding more like the contemporary NRA, this ad warned about “powerful forces—possibly well-intentioned but ill-informed—working eagerly yet relentlessly to curb and eventually abolish the hunting rights, privileges and freedoms you enjoy today.” Bonus: A guest appearance by future pro football Hall of Famer Chris Hanburger.

1982: “I’m the NRA” This famous campaign, launched in 1982, was intended to demonstrate the NRA’s broad appeal. Ads included kids (such as eight-year-old BB-gun enthusiast Bryan Hardin), women, African Americans, cops, and clergy. A more recent version of the campaign has featured NRA celebrity board members Tom Selleck and Karl Malone.

Late 1980s: “Why can’t a policeman be there when you need him?” Fears about violent crime fueled these ads promoting concealed-carry laws. The notion that gun laws are ineffective because criminals break them remains a core NRA argument, as does the idea that armed citizens routinelyfend off attackers.

1995: Bill Clinton is “daffy.” With the number of hunters on the decline, you’d think the NRA would embrace high-profile recreational shooters. Yet in this poster sold to its members, the NRA unintentionally distanced itself from its longtime stance that hunting was central to gun rights, declaring that “Mr. Clinton, the Second Amendment is not about duck hunting.”

1997: “Gun rights are lost on our kids.” Heston promised to lead a $100 million, “three-year crusade…to restore the Second Amendment to its rightful place as America’s First Freedom.” For the kids, of course.

2013: “Are the president’s kids more important than yours?” All the anti-government paranoia, fear-mongering, and liberal-baiting of the past few decades culminated in this video, produced in the wake of the Newtown massacre. By opposing putting armed guards in every school in America, Obama proved himself to be “just another elitist hypocrite” whose kids are protected by the Secret Service.

H/T: Mother Jones

National Rifle Association board member Ted Nugent made several inflammatory remarks about the Obama administration during an interview on NRA News, including doubling down on his previous claim that he will be “dead or in jail” if the president was reelected.

During an April 8 interview on NRA News, Nugent also accused the Obama administration of engaging in “jack-booted thuggery” and complained that not enough was done to stop the reelection of Obama, asking, “When I kick the door down in the enemy’s camp, would you help me shoot somebody?” Nugent clarified that his reference to shooting people was “a metaphor” and that he’s “not recommending shooting anybody.”

Nugent told a gathered crowd at the NRA’s annual meeting in April 2012 that, “If Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year. Why are you laughing? Do you think that’s funny? That’s not funny at all. I’m serious as a heart attack.” He concluded his remarks with a call for the audience to “ride into that battlefield and chop [Democrats] heads off in November.”

Nugent, who is also a columnist for birther website WND, brought up those past comments after NRA News host Cam Edwards falsely claimed that proposed background check legislation would make it so “any time somebody went to your ranch and you loaned them a gun to do some hunting or to do some plinking that would be a five year felony.” According to Nugent, those who laughed at him for saying that “if this America-hater, if this freedom-hater, if this enemy of America becomes the president again I’ll either be dead or in jail” were ignoring the threat of “draconian felonies”:

EDWARDS: You look at what is going on now with the U.S. Senate. They still don’t have the votes for the so-called universal background check bill and that’s a very good thing because this bill is awful. I mean we might as well call this the Ban Ted Nugent Act of 2013. Do you realize, Ted, that under the language right now, any time somebody went to your ranch and you loaned them a gun to do some hunting or to do some plinking that would be a five year felony?

NUGENT: Sure. Well that’s why. I mean come on. And I know that the moderates, by the way if you are a moderate we’d like to thank you for standing up for nothing. If you’re a moderate I suppose you would have been playing poker while Davy Crockett was on the wall of the Alamo. It’s time to take a side.

That’s why I said almost a year ago, Cam, and people recoiled in horror. And I know it caught a lot of my friends off guard, when I said if this America-hater, if this freedom-hater, if this enemy of America becomes the president again I’ll either be dead or in jail. And remember when I was on the stage with you and some people chuckled?

EDWARDS: Yup.

NUGENT: So we find humor in a disastrous statement from a guy who is on the frontlines, who has been in the frontlines of the war against gun ownership for at least forty-plus years. So it’s funny that I might be dead or in jail. And that is so indicative of how callous and disconnected some are, because you are talking about arbitrary, punitive, capricious draconian felonies. 

Edwards’ characterization of the proposal to expand background checks is incorrect. While the legislation would require a criminal background check on almost all gun sales, there would be exemptions to the requirement, including gifts between family members and firearms loaned for lawful hunting or target shooting purposes.

Furthermore, the legislation would allow an individual to temporarily transfer a firearm to another individual without a check so long as the firearm does not leave the transferor’s “home or curtilage.”

Nugent used the NRA News interview as an opportunity to make more inflammatory statements about the Obama administration.

Warning of government firearm confiscation, Nugent suggested that the federal government was engaged in “jack-booted thuggery,” a term used in the infamous 1995 comparison by NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre between federal law enforcement agents and Nazi stormtroopers:

A lot of people, Cam, I’m afraid, listen to the outrageous examples, the freedom-stomping and jack-booted thuggery. And they wince a bit and they furrow their brow and they shake their heads. But then they still don’t do anything.

Nugent also blamed the reelection of President Obama, who he refers to as the “Chicago gangster, ACORN rip-off scam-artist-in-chief,” on the alleged silence of Obama’s critics. He went on to ask, “When I kick the door down in the enemy’s camp, would you help me shoot somebody?”

H/T: MMFA

Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy (D) tore into the National Rifle Association during an appearance on CNN’s State Of The Union on Sunday. The NRA this week introduced its legislative response to the massacre in Malloy’s home state. Its plan focuses on arming school staff.

Malloy specifically called out NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre for his absolute opposition to commonsense gun regulations, including the new gun law just enacted by Connecticut. After watching a clip of LaPierre mocking Connecticut’s new law, Malloy shot back, “Wayne reminds me of the clowns at the circus. They get the most attention”:

MALLOY: That’s what he’s paid to do. But the reality is is that the gun that was used to kill 26 people on December 14th was legally purchased in the state of Connecticut even though we had an Assault Weapons Ban. But there were loopholes in it that you could drive a truck through. This guy is so out of whack, it’s unbelievable. 92% of the american people want universal background checks. I can’t get on a plane as the Governor of the state of Connecticut without somebody running a background check on me. Why should you be able to buy a gun? Or buy armor-piercing munitions? It doesn’t make any sense. He doesn’t make any sense. Thus my reference to the circus.[…]

Bring it back to reality. Why are they against universal background checks when 92% of the American public is in favor of them? If they can’t answer that question — and they can’t, Candy — What this is about is the ability of the gun industry to sell as many guns to as many people as possible even if they’re deranged, even if they’re mentally ill, evening if they have a criminal background, they don’t care. They want to sell guns.

h/t: Think Progress Justice

Fear itself, President Franklin Roosevelt famously observed in his First Inaugural Address, can present the greatest obstacle to progress. It can easily overwhelm our discourse, paralyze our politics, and splinter the social construct that binds us together as a people. Given enough time, this fear might even convince some that our democratic institutions are a lost cause, our shared problems obviously insurmountable, our collective solutions hopelessly inadequate. In this frightening world, then, the only safe bet worth making is on oneself.

To get a sense of how part of America is going all-in on this bet look no further than National Geographic Channel’s hit reality show Doomsday Preppers. Filmed in an unblinking documentary style, each show profiles a few individuals from the modern-day survivalist movement, all of whom have become convinced that the arrival of a stark, dystopian future is only a matter of when, not if. Though even FEMA believes we’d all be better off doing a little prepping, for these folks, not preparing for what they see as unavoidable disaster is a life-or-death gamble. And though the show often descends into caricature, dismissing the popularity of Doomsday Preppers as mere pop-cultural voyeurism would be a mistake.

That’s because the show is a microcosm of something else stirring in our country, something more foreboding. The ominous prophecies of government tyranny, financial meltdown and violent anarchy featured on Preppers inform more than just the survivalist movement circa 2013. They’re also being absorbed into contemporary conservatism, which has increasingly bought into these same doomsday storylines hook, line and bunker.

Rose McDermott, a political scientist at Brown University, recently published a study in the American Journal of Political Science that analyzed people’s susceptibility to succumb to fearful thinking. In it, she found a correlation between heightened fear and current conservative attitudes toward immigration and segregation. “It’s not that conservative people are more fearful, it’s that fearful people are more conservative,” McDermott explains. “People who are scared of novelty, uncertainty, people they don’t know, and things they don’t understand, are more supportive of policies that provide them with a sense of surety and security.”

This latent conservative anxiety is also the bubbling undercurrent that runs throughout the 60-odd-year history of the survivalism movement in America. A vast majority of its adherents are undoubtedly harmless “small-s survivalists,” as then Chicago Tribune reporter James Coates calls them in his 1987 book, Armed and Dangerous: The Rise of the Survivalist Right. But Coates also points out that the survivalist movement’s origins nonetheless rest upon a virulently right-wing, or “big-S,” foundation of violence, racism, and anti-Semitism.

“The godfather of latter-day American survivalism of both the big-S and the small-s variety is Robert DePugh,” writes Coates. In the late 1950s, DePugh’s thinking began to coalesce around racist conspiracy theories and tales of imminent societal collapse, many of which form the rootstock of today’s apocalyptic scenarios. By the 1960s, DePugh had founded the Minutemen, the notorious precursor of the anti-government resistance group Posse Comitatus. Across the decades, these Survivalist Right groups and their spinoffs have developed a frightening reputation for criminal activity and violent behavior. Just last summer, five men, including one with suspected Posse Comitatus ties, were arrested in Louisiana for the murder of two sheriff’s deputies.

In recent years, a sort of rebranding has taken place within the survivalist movement to distance it from the poisonous “big-S” worldview as well as from fatalistic End Times religious sects. As a result, around 2008, the more artful, less incendiary term “prepper” began to appear on survivalist message boards, and it has gained momentum ever since. Nevertheless, it’s almost impossible for prepper types to avoid encountering the extremist elements within the movement. “When the small-s survivalists set out to swap ideas with like-minded people,” Coates writes, “they don’t have very far to look before running up against the Survival[ist] Right.”

Studying how ideas and narratives develop within survivalism is key to understanding how its doomsday thinking has propagated outward into the mainstream. “Survivalism centers around this crafting of tales,” says Oregon State sociology professor Richard G. Mitchell, Jr., who spent fifteen years inside the movement while researching his 2002 book Dancing at Armageddon. “The survivalist trick is to tell their story in such a way that there’s a delicate optimism achieved, that what you have in terms of your personal resources, your material resources, your time, your knowledge and so on, is pretty much what you need.” What a survivalist chooses to prepare for, then, is not based on what is the most statistically probable threat to their safety, but on what fits their individual fears and unique circumstances, he says. For example, large numbers of survivalists stockpile gas masks, but as Mitchell has pointed out before, more people have been killed by vending machines tipping over in the past 30 years than have died from biological or chemical terrorist attacks.

This rigid, irrational worldview, one that tries to force fit reality to one’s beliefs rather than the other way around, is a hallmark of reactionary thought. Nearly 50 years ago, Richard Hofstadter, in his seminal 1964 Harper’s essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” identified how irrational fears had fueled a similarly unhinged, anti-communist wing of conservatism. Hoftstadter’s essay predates the popular usage of the term “survivalism,” but it nonetheless recognizes the broader similarities between individuals with an inward, self-focused paranoia and those with an outward-looking group-based fear, what he calls the “paranoid spokesman” in politics. “They both tend to be overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression,” he writes.

In addition, both survivalism and right-wing political populism experience cyclical ebbs and flows in their popularity. What are subtle shifts, however, become amplified by the press into dramatic boom and bust cycles. After large-scale trigger events—most recently, events like the 9/11 terrorists attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and the dual shocks of Obama’s 2008 election and the Great Recession—media attention in these groups inevitably picks up, and another generation comes forward to put a new gloss on age-old themes.

Thus, a movement like the Tea Party can ride the zeitgeist rollercoaster from non-entity up to sensation and back down to political afterthought in four short years while the demographic cohort that overwhelmingly identifies with it—white, married, male, middle-aged conservatives—is remarkably homogeneous. Likewise, popular survivalist websites of today, such as endoftheamericandream.com and SHTFplan.com (short for “shit hits the fan”), like to repeat the claim that their burgeoning movement has as many as three million followers across the country. But Mitchell says these same numbers were bandied about throughout his many years of research. And in a survey conducted for his book, Mitchell found survivalists to be strikingly homogeneous as well—white (97 percent), married (74 percent), male (89 percent), fairly well educated (52 percent had a bachelor’s or higher degree), and with an average age around 40.

The similarities don’t end there. Just as a New York Times/CBS poll found that “Tea Party supporters over all are more likely than the general public to say their personal financial situation is fairly good or very good,” survivalists also tend to be firmly ensconced in the middle class or well off. For these people the term “survivalism” is an awkward misnomer. “This is not the homeless on the streets of New York,” Mitchell points out. “This is a hobby. It is always done with surplus time, resources, money, interest and so on. You don’t run into a lot of really poor survivalists,” Mitchell notes, laughing.

Because today’s preppers share so many personal characteristics with the modern-day right-wing populists, it’s not unexpected that the former’s doomsday narratives would gain exposure to and a foothold among the latter. (It should be noted that Mitchell also documented a long, if much less prevalent, tradition of left-wing survivalist retreats and communes, which was touched upon in a Season One episode of Doomsday Preppers that featured “Calamity Janet” Spencer, a left-wing survivalist who plans on feeding 1,000 post-apocalyptic survivors in her “Armageddon Inn.”) Nowhere is this give and take more apparent than on the issue of guns. As it is with much of the American right-wing, gun ownership is of fundamental importance to survivalism. Mitchell found that, by far, the most popular step in crisis preparation—taken by nearly 64 percent of survivalists—was to acquire firearms.

Arming oneself becomes a necessity for survivalists who game out the aftermath of societal collapse, explains Coates in Armed and Dangerous. “The most important question, after stockpiling food, water, clothing, machine guns and other gear,” he writes, “is protecting these treasures from the hordes of the less foresighted who are likely to start streaming out of the cities.” This compulsion for a well-stocked arsenal to defend against urban (read: non-white) marauders can have unforeseen and tragic consequences, however.

The violent potential for this intersection of guns and survivalism became tragically apparent last December, after the infamous school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. In the aftermath of the tragedy, it was revealed that the military-style assault rifle Adam Lanza used in the killings was stolen from his mother Nancy, whom he shot and killed first to start his rampage. “Nancy had a survivalist philosophy which is why she was stockpiling guns,” said her former sister-in-law, Marsha Lanza. “We talked about preppers and preparing for the economy collapsing.” Not long after, an unstable survivalist in Alabama stormed a school bus and killed the driver before holding a five-year-old boy hostage for a week in his well-stocked, homemade underground bunker. (Law enforcement authorities eventually stormed the bunker, killed the man and rescued the boy.)

The Newtown massacre rightly shocked the larger national conscience and prompted a renewed awareness about the toll of gun violence. However, the counter-narrative crafted by the gun industry’s main lobbying arm, the National Rifle Association, quickly resorted to sounding survivalist-style alarms to justify the group’s intransigence. NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre raised the specter of sinister motives behind the Obama administration’s plan for universal background checks—a measure supported by nine in ten Americans, incidentally. He claimed that the plan was a precursor to an ominous “universal registry of law-abiding people” that could lead to government confiscation of all guns. In February, LaPierre conjured up even more paranoid fantasies in an op-ed for a right-wing opinion website. “Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Riots. Terrorists. Gangs. Lone criminals. These are perils we are sure to face—not just maybe,” La Pierre wrote. “It’s not paranoia to buy a gun. It’s survival.” By March, a right-wing website was hawking LaPierre’s 336-page, hardcover “survival guide” that he’d originally authored back in 2010.

LaPierre is not alone in leveraging survivalist imagery in service of stopping new gun control legislation. Not long after President Obama unveiled a commonsense package of reforms in mid-January, GOP Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell sent out an incendiary fundraising email chock full of similarly paranoid allusions. In it, he stoked conservatives’ fears and talked of them being “literally surrounded,” where “freedom is under direct assault,” due to Obama’s “attempt to gut our Constitution.”

These statements are provocative, to be sure, and to see them enjoy the imprimatur of such prominent public figures is even more unsettling. Still, it would be a mistake to think of this rhetoric as the source code of doomsday myths. “Those who are on the fringe don’t get their ideas from Mitch McConnell,” Mitchell remarks. “They’re going to turn to Glenn Beck or Laura Ingraham or Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly.” Though these and other right-wing media personalities act independently through their respective TV, radio and Internet platforms, they form a powerful chorus that picks out, rearranges and amplifies tales of impending chaos or looming oppression in an ever-churning feedback loop. To see this vicious cycle in action, look no further than the months-long campaign organized around the lie that Obama’s healthcare reform law would set up unaccountable government “death panels” that could deny coverage, encourage suicide and even institute euthanasia.

Some right-wing sites, like World Net Daily, tread boldly into deeper, murkier waters. Despite counting as contributors such conservatives as Rick Santorum and Pat Buchanan as well as Fox News personalities John Stossel and Andrew Napolitano—all of whom enjoy, deservedly or not, some mainstream media respectability—WND.com is renowned for pushing crackpot “birther” conspiracies and apocalyptic sensationalism. In December, the site conducted a bizarre poll asking morbid, leading questions about the hypothetical aftermath of a massive power outage. Among its published “findings”: 50 percent of Americans believe that within two weeks of a catastrophic emergency their home would be attacked by looters; 58 percent would be willing or somewhat willing to use a firearm to kill a neighbor they deemed a threat.

Of course, thanks to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy, hundreds of thousands of people in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut did lose power for days, if not weeks. As for those predictions of roving, bloodthirsty gangs and pitched, neighborhood gun battles? They never materialized. Even a favorite right-wing trope—repeated by the NRA’s LaPierre—about looters “running wild in south Brooklyn” turned out to be a gross exaggeration. In fact, New York City saw a widespread decrease in crime immediately following Sandy, even enjoying a record eight-day span without a single homicide. But as is so often the case, facts are no match for the hard-wired doomsday prepper mindset.

Consider a January front-page post on SurvivalBlog.com by “Elizabeth in the Northeast.” A single mother, Elizabeth describes the rather caring, well-organized emergency aid she and her two children received at a local evacuation shelter the frantic night Hurricane Sandy made landfall. Nevertheless, she summed up her experience interacting with the many on-site government workers this way: “I didn’t feel like a refugee from Monster Storm Sandy, I felt deep within my soul and in my heart that my children and I were in a farce of being shipped off to a concentration camp similar to what I had seen in Schindler’s List.”

Fleeing one’s home during a natural disaster can understandably generate overwrought emotions. But what failed Elizabeth last October were not our public institutions; they, by most accounts, performed admirably. What failed was her trust in them. This is perhaps the most insidious aspect of the survivalist mentality—the willful abandonment of faith in civil society’s ability to function, often contrary to all evidence. This doesn’t make someone apolitical—a common, self-identified claim among preppers—it makes them anti-political and an apathetic stance toward government should never be confused with an apocalyptic one. “If you talk about politics, you’re always talking about actions in the collective,” observes Mitchell. “To do that is to negate the very fundamental notion that individual action is the most crucial factor with survivalism.”

Ironically, a not unsubstantial number of people winning elections these days do so under a banner of being thoroughly disenchanted with the idea of government and the value of collective action. On the state level, it’s not hard to find evidence of reactionary, doomsday thinking among these political self-abnegators. To cite three recent examples: an Idaho state senator blithely comparing her state’s proposed health exchange to Nazi concentration camps; a Wyoming state rep advocating the legalization of gold and silver as legal tender due to “the potential coming collapse of the dollar”; a Texas county judge warning that Obama’s reelection could lead to “civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war maybe.”

At the national level, polarization studies show that Republicans have tilted even further toward the extreme right in recent years as well. No surprise then, that Mitt Romney, the party’s 2012 presidential standard-bearer, rehashed the bitterly divisive “maker vs. taker” argument, one that has deep roots in survivalist mythology. Likewise, Representative Paul Ryan, chosen to be Romney’s vice presidential nominee, fast-tracked his reputation within the party by authoring a plan to dismantle Medicare in favor of a go-it-alone healthcare voucher system. And don’t look to Tea Party favorite and Republican rising star Senator Marco Rubio if you want to avoid yet another man-made financial crisis or fear being abandoned after the next major natural disaster. Rubio, recently hailed as “The Republican Savior” on the cover of Time, joined a small cadre of hard-right conservatives who uniformly voted against avoiding the fiscal cliff, raising the debt ceiling, and allocating desperately needed disaster relief to victims of Hurricane Sandy.

h/t: Alternet

PFAW’s recent Right Wing Watch in Focus report on opposition to more effective regulation of guns noted that promoting conspiracy theories is a primary strategy used by extremists to block common sense policies.  New evidence comes in the form of a recent email from Sen. Rand Paul raising money for the National Association for Gun Rights, a group that is so far out there it thinks the National Rifle Association has gone soft.

Rand Paul’s letter uses inflammatory rhetoric to push the conspiracy theory that registration of guns and requiring background checks for gun purposes – which is supported by an overwhelming majority of Americans, including gun owners – is just a prelude to “confiscation” by the “gun-grabbers.”

And make no mistake, the gun-grabbers’ TRUE motives behind gun registration is always the same — outright gun CONFISCATION, and to do that they must first register every gun and gun owner.

Another letter Paul signed for the group argues that President Obama is working to empower United Nations bureaucrats to confiscate Americans’ guns:

I don’t know about you, but watching anti-American globalists plot against our Constitution makes me sick.

An earlier alert from the National Association for Gun Rights was labeled: “Obama declares war.”

Why is Rand Paul raising money for these guys?

h/t: RWW