Does CNN Now Qualify as ‘Law Enforcement’?
DHS “refuses to release a report on ‘right-wing’ terrorism that somehow found its way into CNN’s hands.”
The Department of Homeland Security refuses to release a report on “right-wing” terrorism that somehow found its way into CNN’s hands last week during the farcical White House summit on Don’t Say Islamic Extremism.
Your tax dollars are once again hard at work – defaming conservatives, deflecting from worldwide murderous jihad and denying the public access to information they funded.
CNN splashed the big scoop on its website: “DHS intelligence report warns of domestic right-wing terror threat.” The fear-mongering piece featured a huge map of 24 alleged acts of “violence by sovereign citizen extremists since 2010.” CNN’s Evan Perez and Wes Bruer prominently quoted Mark Potok of the widely disgraced propaganda outfit the Southern Poverty Law Center. Potok claimed that “there are as many as 300,000 people involved in some way with sovereign citizen extremism.”
This is the same SPLC that was forced to apologize to famed neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson just last week for categorizing him as an “extremist” because he supports the traditional definition of marriage.
This is the same hate-instigating SPLC whose target map and list of social conservative groups were used by left-wing domestic terrorist Floyd Lee Corkins to shoot up the Washington, D.C., office of the Family Research Council in 2012.
This is the same SPLC whose explicit aim, according to Potok, is to “destroy” its political opponents and which admits it is “not really set up to cover the extreme left.” Harper’s Magazine’s Ken Silverstein called the SPLC and its work “essentially a fraud” that “shuts down debate, stifles free speech, and most of all, raises a pile of money, very little of which is used on behalf of poor people.”
None of these facts was mentioned in CNN’s report promoting the threat of “right-wing” terrorism. So you can see why I was curious to know more about the “24 violent sovereign citizen-related attacks” the cable network kept citing without specifics. I asked both CNN and DHS for a copy of the assessment. CNN’s Bruer brusquely told me on Twitter: “Not public doc. But not new that gov’t lists sov. citizens as terror threat.”
Sure, it’s “not new.” But CNN’s report was new (and conveniently timed to coincide with the White House agenda of talking about every other kind of terrorism besides jihad). I wanted to read the new document, not just what CNN and the SPLC want the public to know and think about it.
Liberal media outlets have a bad habit of purposely misclassifying terrorist incidents as “right-wing.” Last April, both CNN and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow joined with the SPLC to foment fear of conservative Americans by claiming that “right-wingers” have killed 34 people since 9/11 for “political reasons,” while jihadists have killed 21.
But a closer look at the rigging of that phony factoid simply confirms the malevolent intention of so-called objective journalists and “hate watch” groups to marginalize conservative political speech and dissent. The CNN/MSNBC/SPLC smear job involved both the dishonest deflating of left-wing and jihadist incidents, and the dishonest inflating of “right-wing” incidents.
First, carving out the 3,000-person death toll from the 9/11 jihadist attacks is a rather convenient way to rig the scales, isn’t it? So is omitting the 10-person death toll from the jihad-inspired Beltway sniper spree of 2002.
The conservatives-are-worse-than-jihadists casualty data counted Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter James Von Brunn, who killed a heroic security guard, as a “right-winger.” But Von Brunn was neither “left” nor “right.” He was a rage-filled maniac and 9/11 truther who hated Fox News, the Weekly Standard and Rupert Murdoch.
Also counted as “right-wing” in the CNN/MSNBC/SPLC data: Andrew Joseph Stack. He’s the lunatic who flew a small plane into an Austin, Texas, office complex that contained an Internal Revenue Service office in 2010. Stack’s ranting suicide manifesto targeted George W. Bush, health care insurers, the pharmaceutical industry and the “capitalist creed.”
Also listed as “right-wing:” Richard Andrew Poplawski. He was the disgruntled, unemployed loser who shot and killed three Pittsburgh police officers in a horrifying bloodbath in 2009. Left-wing publications asserted that the “heated, apocalyptic rhetoric of the anti-Obama forces,” along with Fox News and Glenn Beck, motivated Poplawski to slay the officers. But Poplawski was a dropout from the Marines who threw a food tray at a drill instructor, had beaten his girlfriend, and demonstrated violent, racist tendencies that had nothing to do with politics. Poplawski was outraged that his mother wanted to kick his unemployed ass out of the house.
Joshua Cartwright, another serial woman abuser, also murdered two police officers in the aftermath of a domestic violence call. Left-wing operatives focused on a single remark from Cartwright’s victim about his views on President Obama to paint him as a “right-wing radical,” whitewashing his long history of violence against his partner and senseless paranoia.
Were any of these falsely classified incidents included in the DHS assessment hyped by CNN and SPLC last week? We’ll never know. When I asked DHS public affairs officer S.Y. Lee for the document, he told me it’s “not for public release” because it’s “an FOUO document (for official use only). Same as many DHS products to law enforcement.” I asked whether CNN now qualifies as “law enforcement.”
No response.
