By Deborah Rudacille

The week after the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a report suggesting that the election of the first African-American president and economic hard times might fuel a surge in right-wing extremism, Turner Classic Movies celebrated its 15th anniversary by screening the Civil War classic Gone With the Wind.

All dramatic fiction requires a willing suspension of disbelief, but the film’s sanitized depiction of Reconstruction-even more than its romantic gloss on plantation life-defeats imagination. The motives of a group of Southern Confederate midnight raiders are presented as entirely noble and their actions justified. By contrast, the Northern “Yankee” Union officers charged with enforcing the peace are depicted as either knaves or fools. “He can lie in the gutter for all I care. I’m not a policeman,” a Yankee captain declares after being bamboozled by the film’s male lead, Rhett Butler, into thinking the raiders were out drinking in a brothel.

I felt a distinct echo of that treacherous Reconstruction fable in the widespread conservative response to the recently released DHS report, “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.”

The report is a straightforward assessment of a potential threat to national security, saying that, “Rightwing extremists have capitalized on the election of the first African-American president, and are focusing their efforts to recruit new members, mobilize existing supporters and broaden their scope and appeal through propaganda.”

Of greatest concern to law enforcement officials is “the high volume of purchases and stockpiling of weapons and ammunition by rightwing extremists” and the possibility that the groups may try to recruit disaffected military veterans for their weapons expertise.

Conservative pundits, radio hosts and bloggers immediately accused the DHS of criminalizing dissent, creating such a ruckus that even some of their allies became exasperated.

“I read the report and didn’t see anything objectionable in it,” said Charles Johnson, co-founder of Pajamas Media and creator of the blog Little Green Footballs. “All groups need to denounce those kind of activities.”

Conservative critics of the report “are acting as if they’ve adopted the mantle of right-wing extremism,” Johnson said. “How self-defeating is that?”

The furious conservative response to the report is especially hard to understand given the evidence that some of these extremists are already acting on their beliefs.

Richard Poplawski, the 22 year-old who shot and killed three police officers in Pittsburgh earlier this month is a classic example of the type of individual described in the report as potentially dangerous, says Daniel Webster, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health gun violence researcher.

“[Poplawski] was connected to white supremacist groups, gun groups. Both convinced him that any time now ‘they’ were going to come and get his guns,” said Webster. “He’s not the only one.”

Daniel Knight Hayden, 52, was arrested by FBI agents before he was able to carry out his plan to start a war against the U.S. government with a massacre on the steps of the Oklahoma City Capitol Building during one of the tea party tax protests on April 15.

According to an article in Wired, “Hayden’s  MySpace page is a breathtaking gallery of right wing memes about the ‘New World Order,’ gun control as Nazi fascism, and Barack Obama’s covert use of television hypnosis, among many others.”

Hayden’s MySpace page is still up and includes a link to a video of radio host and “documentarian” Alex Jones, whom Charles Johnson calls “an all-purpose conspiracy guy” and the source of many of the less rational anti-Obama stories which find their way onto conservative radio shows, cable TV and blogs. Poplawski, too, was a fan of Jones.

The “conspiracy madness” that started filtering into the media last year has become even more troubling since the election of President Obama, Johnson says. “Scarcely a day goes by that some crazy story doesn’t come out. People who swallow these theories refuse to hear or deny or ignore evidence to the contrary.” The latest story making the rounds is that swine flu is a government plot.

People who should know better spread such misinformation, Johnson says, because “they treat politics as sports. You have to stick to your team no matter what and always bash the other guy no matter what.”

But where does “sport” cross the line into madness?

“Many of these extremist groups have an insurrectionist philosophy, us against the world,” says Webster. “The message is ‘you’d better get your arms now.’”

From November 2008 through March 2009, licensed gun dealers in the United States submitted 8.1 million background check requests to the FBI, 29.3 percent more than during the same period the year before. Sales of handguns and tactical rifles by Smith and Wesson jumped 25.9 percent in the three months following the election.

Not everyone who bought a gun during that period is a right-wing extremist, of course. But the state of the economy makes the recent surge in gun-sales more troubling, says Webster, for other reasons-notably the much greater risk that domestic violence will take a lethal turn.

“I was involved as a co-investigator to explore risk factors for lethal outcomes in domestic violence,” he says. “The leading predictor was access to firearms. The second most important predictor was unemployment.”

The recent surge in mass killings, including numerous familicides, is being driven by men who feel that “their place in society has been completely taken away,” he says.

“If you’ve lost your job and your wife, and possibly your kids, and your identity and role has been as a breadwinner and husband and father, suddenly this whole identity is gone. What I see in the news is exactly those kinds of scenarios-job lost, family disintegrating.”

Add political paranoia and white supremacist ideology and you have a toxic brew that could incite some mentally unstable individuals to commit exactly the type of acts identified in the DHS report-believing, like the fictional characters in Gone With the Wind and their all too real historical counterparts, that they are protecting a way of life under siege by the United States government.

Joshua Cartwright, 28, who shot and killed two sheriff’s deputies in Fort Walton Beach, Florida on April 25, not only had a history of domestic violence, but had just been laid off. His wife, Elizabeth, told a deputy that her husband, a member of the U.S. Army Reserves, “believed the U.S. government was conspiring against him and was seriously disturbed that Barack Obama had been elected president.”

Johnson says that people have tried to post insurrectionist rhetoric on his site. “They get deleted,” he says shortly. “I won’t stand for that stuff. It’s destructive and wrong.”

Still, Johnson doesn’t favor restricting free speech, even for the Alex Jones’ of this world. “My own opinion is that the proper remedy for bad speech is more speech, to criticize this stuff. I just wish more bloggers on the right would step back from the brink a little.”

Deborah Rudacille is a freelance writer living in Baltimore. Her book Roots of Steel will be published by Pantheon Books in 2010.