There Could Be An Armed Racist Brick Thrower Near You
March 23rd, 2010Not Far From Here…
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A Pinson, Alabama militia activist is not walking away from taking credit for brick-throwing incidents at Democratic Party offices across the country this weekend when protesters took to the streets against national health care reform passed by the House and signed into law by the president on Tuesday.
In fact, Mike Vanderboegh, 57, who publishes a radical, right-wing blog full of wild racist pro-gun rants against illegal immigrants, President Barack Obama, national health care reform, black gangs and other choice subjects, claims to be written from a “strict constructionist, libertarian point of view.”
But in fact, he’s advocating that local law enforcement officials get ready for “civil war” against the federal government and black people and be willing to allow citizens to take the law into their own hands when the revolution comes.
Vanderboegh seemed to be taking credit for bricks thrown through the window of the Democratic Committee headquarters in Monroe County, N.Y., this past weekend, according to the Montgomery Advertiser and other news reports.
Vanderboegh encouraged his readers on Friday to throw bricks at the windows of Democratic headquarters across the country. Late Saturday night or early Sunday morning, a brick was thrown through the glass doors at the Democratic Committee’s Rochester, N.Y., office.
Attached to the brick was a quote from Barry Goldwater: “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.”
“I guess that guy’s one of ours,” Vanderboegh said in a telephone interview. “Glad to know people read my blog.”
A brick also was thrown at the window of Rep. Louise Slaughter’s district office in Niagara Falls, N.Y. Reports of brick-throwing at Democratic offices were also reported Monday in Arizona and Kansas.
Authorities said the two western New York incidents were apparently in protest over the bill to reform health care that passed the House of Representatives on Sunday.
Monroe County Democratic Committee Chairman Joseph Morelle said he is considering asking the district attorney to file charges against Vanderboegh, a possibility the blogger said he considered.
“That would certainly give me an opportunity to make my case to a larger public,” Vanderboegh said. “I wouldn’t enjoy a sedition charge but I’m willing to accept it. Perhaps that’s a more efficient use of my resources than getting arrested for vandalism.”
Vanderboegh’s little blog, SipseyStreetIrregulars, which takes its name from a fictional street in a novel he claims to be writing, receives between 5,000 and 7,000 hits a day, he also claims.
He said his call to break windows is to get the attention of Democrats before the country breaks into civil war.
“If it takes a few bricks and broken windows for people to understand how close we are to widespread violence in this country,” he said, “then the bricks in the windows will have been worth it.”
Vanderboegh has consistently portrayed himself as a moderate, first in the militia world and more recently in the anti-immigration movement, according to a recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“But he hasn’t always sounded that way,” according to the report.
Back in the mid-1990s, he wrote a document entitled “Strategy and Tactics for a Militia Civil War” in which he discussed the utility of snipers using “violence carefully targeted and clearly defensive: war criminals, secret policemen, rats…”
Take note that was during the Cinton years. He seems to only have a problem with Democrats, not Republicans, which have proven to be far more corrupt and worse for working people over the past few decades.
On Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC tonight, Vanderboegh repeats what he said about being a member of the Three Percenters, or three percent of gun owners, apparently the ones with the most far-right, whacked out view of the Second Amendment in the land.
They talk about President Obama as a “tyrant,” but uttered not one word of protest against President George W. Bush while his adminstration dismantled the Fourth Amendment against illegal searches and seizures by authorizing the illegal spying on every American’s e-mail, Web browsing habits and phone calls.
A Google background search on Mike Vanderboegh shows he is quoted as a member of the Alabama militia for his white rage in the book White Rage: The Extreme Right and American Politics, by Martin Durham.
Make no mistake about it. The so-called Tea Party movement and other radical, right-wing extremist groups like Vanderboeg’s Three Percenters, now on the rise since the election of the first African American President in U.S. history, are not interested in protecting the Constitution for all Americans. They are twisted in their views against this president — because of his race.
There is no other way to explain it. If they had been interested in fighting big government and tyranny they would have been the first on the ramparts to protest and call for the impeachment of George W. Bush, who many scholars now say was one of the worst presidents in U.S. history.
In addition to waging a war in the Middle East justified by false, ginned up intelligence, on top of running up record federal deficits, creating a giant, new government bureaucracy in the Homeland Security Department, the Bush deregulation cabal that raided the federal treasury in Iraq and New Orleans came very close to collapsing the world economy.
If not for the last minute credit market bailouts by Bush and Obama, the likes of Vanderboegh — who admits to surviving on Social Security Disability and private insurance through his wife’s job — would be eating his shoelaces about right now.
That actually happened with people in Birmingham during the depths of the Great Depression in the 1930s, before this country was saved by government spending on the part of the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat.
Mr. Vanderboegh has every right to spew his hate. We have every right to loath it.
If his words lead to illegal acts of violence, he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Whether Vanderboegh is just another joke, like so many other nuts who have gone before, remains to be seen. If he actually carries out any violence, we suspect he won’t get away with it. Chances are the Secret Service and the Birmingham FBI office already have all their spying tools aimed at his house.
Perhaps our new U.S. Attorney, Joyce Vance, should take notice.
How are you going to start a revolution with a brick or a rifle when you can’t move anywhere in the world without the authorities knowing everywhere you go? Without sophisticated listening devices monitoring everything you say to everyone you contact?
Maybe old Governor Bob Riley and Google should use that Google Earth-Virtual Alabama system for more than monitoring the damage from tornadoes and hurricanes. Maybe they should zoom down that satellite and mapping system on Pinson, Alabama, and watch out for old Mr. Vanderboegh.
I suspect if he ever got elected to any public office, he would turn out to be the most authoritarian personality of them all.
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Tags: Alabama, Mike Vanderboegh, Pinson, SipseyStreetIrregulars





March 24th, 2010 at 10:03 am
It always annoys me to no end when people with racist views claim to be “libertarian” and/or associate themselves with politicians who are not, or were not, racist, such as the late Barry Goldwater.
Being a libertarian presupposes that you believe a wide range of human activities should not be “politicized,” i.e., brought under the aegis of government social engineering.
From around 1875 until the victory of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s, racists practiced mass social engineering in the South, using state and local government repression as the means. It was commonly called Jim Crow and represents, after slavery and the theft of Native American lands, the worst episode in the nation’s history.
African-Americans, from around 1867 until the end of the 1870s, were voting and asserting their rights in a number of ways. A combination of vigilante repression and local and state government repression, with the connivance of Northern and Western politicians, especially after 1880, allowed the Bourbon Democrat establishment to effectively erase most of those rights by the end of the century.
Key to doing so was sanctioned end-runs around the Constitution, and the 13th through 15 amendments, such as the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision by the Supreme Court which allowed government-enforced segregation for the next half century.
Racists would bring back all or part of that kind of government-sponsored repression based on race — a concept which is historically and socially constructed. The only change would be cloaking the new repression in some new wool to conceal the old wolves underneath.
True libertarians, by contrast, view all human beings as having the same inherent or natural rights, and further believe there is no moral or ethical justification in any circumstance for violating those rights.
March 24th, 2010 at 2:34 pm
There are Libertarians and then there are libertaryans. Vanderboegh would seem to represent the latter group.
March 24th, 2010 at 3:12 pm
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