Who do actual law enforcement officers see as the biggest terrorist threats in America? Surprise! It’s not Islamic radicals:
Approximately 39 percent of respondents agreed and 28 percent strongly agreed that Islamic extremists were a serious terrorist threat. In comparison, 52 percent of respondents agreed and 34 percent strongly agreed that sovereign citizens were a serious terrorist threat.
….There was significant concern about the resurgence of the radical far right [following the election of President Obama], but it appears as though law enforcement is, at present, less concerned about these groups.
That’s odd. The authors of this report apparently don’t consider the sovereign citizens part of the radical right. But their roots are in the Posse Comitatus movement, and they identify strongly with both the white supremacist Christian Identity movement and the anti-tax movement. That’s always sounded like the right-wing on steroids to me.
I’m not trying to foist responsibility for these crazies on the Republican Party, any more than I’d say Democrats are responsible for animal rights extremists. Still, their complaints seem like preposterous caricatures of right-wing thought, in the same way that animal rights extremism bears a distant but recognizable ancestry to lefty principles.
In any case, this comes via Zack Beauchamp, who explains the sovereign citizens movement in more detail for the uninitiated.
