By TaRessa Stovall and Stacey Patton

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

–Thomas Jefferson

Death threats. Attack weapons outside of town hall meetings.  Politicians hanging in effigy. Litany of threats and racist incidents over health care.

Racial slurs on protest signs. Swastikas and comparisons of President Barack Obama to Adolph Hitler . Accusations that the Obama administration is promoting everything from socialism to fascism to outright anti-Americanism are on the rise, with an increasingly violent undercurrent that has experts expressing serious concern.

President Obama’s movement to reform the US healthcare system has been hijacked beyond heated debate to propaganda-slinging and naked hostility, fueled in large part by super-influential rightwing media figures such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, Glenn Beck and, of course, Fox TV, which have whipped some of their followers into a fever pitch of fear, protest and rage that is more personal than political.

The British news site, Guardian.co.uk, called this “one of the most divisive debates in the US since the Vietnam War.” Their August 18 story, “Fears for Barack Obama’s safety as healthcare debate fuels extremism,” reports that “Across the [US], extremism is surging, inflamed by conservative talkshow hosts, encouraged by Republican leaders and propagating a series of wild conspiracy theories. Many fear it might end in tragedy. “Obama has been labelled as a threat to democracy and an anti-white racist by senior presenters on the TV channel Fox News … Such extremism is becoming a major security issue, prompting fears of an attack on Obama’s life or some other incident of domestic terrorism,” The Guardian.co.uk reported.

While some speculate that the protests may be driven by an undercurrent of racism, others cite the fear of government-run, socialized medical care as the main catalyst. In any case, these events seem to demonstrate the power of conservative commentators to fire up their constituents by stoking the fires of hostility.

In a July 23 posting to his site, Glenn Beck said, “Barack Obama is setting up universal healthcare, universal college, green jobs as stealth reparations. That way the victim status is maintained. And he also brings back back-door reparations.” WashingtonPost.com ran a story, “Memo from Conservative Activists Warns Against Obama Reform Plans,”on July 23, saying that, “A group of veteran conservative activists have added their voices to the fight against President Obama’s health-care reform efforts, writing in a memo released today that Democratic plans will ‘bankrupt the country and exacerbate unemployment during these difficult times.’ “The brief, single-page memo is the latest in a series of talking-points documents to emerge as part of the GOP’s intensifying attacks on proposed reforms to the health-care system, which many conservatives have begun referring to derisively as ‘Obamacare.’”

White Anger, Extremism Growing

An April 2009 report from the Department of Homeland Security   said that right-wing extremism is growing nationwide. In the report, officials warn that conservative extremists may blame the worsening U.S. economy, the reality of a black president and controversial issues such as illegal immigration, the changing complexion of America, and Obama’s proposed healthcare reform, to grow their memberships. While officials at Homeland Security said they did not have details of any attacks in the works from right-wing extremists, around the time of the 2008 presidential election, they saw more threats and “unusual interest” against Obama than ever before.

Alternet.org reported in the story, “Obama Versus the Angry White Men”  that, “On Monday, two men were spotted carrying semi-automatic weapons outside the venue where President Barack Obama delivered his latest speech on healthcare reform. When asked why he stationed himself at the meeting with a gun, one of the men replied: “Because I can do it. In Arizona I still have some freedoms.” These sightings add to a disturbing pattern of extremist gestures signaling a visceral hatred of the president, including a protester in Maryland holding up a sign that read “Death to Obama” and “Death to Michelle and her two stupid kids“, and overtly racist vandalism and hate mail at the office of Georgia congressman David Scott.”

“There is a background noise of the hostility that is about what I call white racial resentment,” Tim Wise,  a respected antiracist speaker and educator, told CNN last week. And he said that radio hosts have been “playing the white racial resentment card to get their forces revved up” against Obama’s healthcare reform efforts.

We can draw on history for lessons about the current rise of white racial resentment that Wise speaks of.  It has striking similarities to the hostility blacks faced from whites after the Civil War and during the mid-1960s as the legal victories of the Civil Rights Movement became assured.  In both instances, the hostility was driven by the economic uncertainty of the period and by the white majority’s resistance to considering blacks as equals.  The current economic crisis, in which millions of whites (and people of color) have lost jobs, homes, savings and status, is the driving force behind the recent expressions of hate.

On his blog at TimWise.org Wise, whose latest book is Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama, gave his analysis of the dynamic behind the headlines: “By playing upon white fears–fears of a black President with a funny name, fears of a country that within about 30 years will no longer be majority white, fears of the inability to take for granted that our Leave-it-to-Beaver, Norman Rockwell, Boy Scout-approved national narrative will continue to predominate–the right hopes to prove resurgent, and the GOP hopes to remain a living entity. They have all but abandoned any hopes of attracting large numbers of people of color. The writing in that regard is on the wall and they seem to very much know it.

“So they have retreated into the laager–South African imagery very much intended here–and decided to go all in as the party of nostalgia, a white nationalist party, in effect, whose only hope is to claim that the nation has lost its greatness, and that everything that made America, well, America (you know, back in the days of segregation) has been lost. And that such a transformation, from a formal white supremacist state, to a multicultural society, is of course a bad thing.”

MoveOn.org said on their site, that, “Right-wing extremists are disrupting town hall meetings with attacks on President Obama’s plans for health care and clean energy. But we’re showing Congress that ordinary Americans continue to support his agenda for change.”

Real Danger

The combination of the fact that whites are fast becoming the minority in this country; the worsening economy; and the first African-American president “have led to an increase in hate groups, up from 602 groups in 2000 to 926 in 2008,” said Heidi Beirich, Director of Research and Special Projects at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a Montgomery, Alabama-based organization renowned for its tolerance education programs, its legal victories against white supremacists and its tracking of hate groups.

This increase in hate groups, “is a substantial rise; it’s more than 54 percent, which shows the dimensions of how the hate movement is growing,” Beirich explained.

The SPLC released a report “Return of the Militias“  on August 12, detailing the return of militia groups in the US. It says that, according to law enforcement officials, 50 completely new militia groups have sprung up nationwide. “[These] are not hate groups, but they’re organizations that are extremely anti-government, tend to trade in weird conspiracy theories—i.e., FEMA is creating concentration camps that people will be put into—and tend to be paranoid about gun rights,” said Beirich, who added that “We’ve seen runs on guns and ammunition that are phenomenal. The thing about the militias is that they are the ones involved in most of the domestic terrorism that occurred in the country between 1995 and 2005.”

In the last 6 months, the SPLC has seen about a half dozen new domestic terrorism incidents “involving people who are extremely anti-government, anti-Obama and, in some cases, extremely racist and anti-Semitic, as in the [Washington, DC] Holocaust Museum shooting,” Beirich said. “Most of the people involved in this recent domestic terrorism have some beef about Obama.”

Overall, “we’re getting a mixture of kind of white supremacists, anti-government militia types, people who are just extremely mad because the country’s going in a [racial] direction they don’t feel good about, and it’s kind of a really scary situation,” Beirich added. The SPLC monitors many of these groups’ web sites, “and we’ve had comments logged onto our blogs, saying ‘I’m gonna kill that N***** President,’ that we’ve sent on to the Secret Service.”

Emphasizing that “it’s really important for people to understand these extremist movements are on the rise … we need to take them seriously and do what we can to counter them,” Beirich added that “When you see somebody who is a victim of some kind of hate crime, you really need to stand tight with the victim(s), because that kind of crime tries to send a message that we can’t be a multicultural society, that the victims don’t belong, and so it’s really important to stand with them.”

Where is our vaccine?

Free speech is one thing. Debate is healthy and dissent can lead to real and positive change. But fear, hatred, close-minded rage and increasingly hostile words, symbols and actions that turn into threats—whether against private citizens, elected officials or the President of our United States—hold no possibility for progress, problem-solving or viable solutions to very real problems that plague millions of people around our nation.

What if the conservative fear-and-hate-mongers found the courage to promote critical and analytical thinking among their followers; what if they encouraged them to consider the facts first and foremost, and craft rational arguments that respected difference and worked toward viable change? What’s happening now is domestic terrorism, festering and infecting more people than the anticipated Swine Flu pandemic.

And those gun toting extremists calling for “the tree of liberty” to be refreshed clearly need a lesson in history.  They may not realize that they are using the words of a slave owner who complained about a monarchy encroaching upon his freedom which depended upon the enslavement of others.  The use of this mantra by Thomas Jefferson is a measure of how confused and hypocritical their opposition to Obama’s healthcare reform.

What you can do:

• Visit Color of Change
• Visit MoveOn.org
• Visit the Southern Poverty Law Center

TaRessa Stovall is Managing Editor of TheDefendersOnline and Web Content Manager for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. Stacey Patton is Senior Writer and Editor for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and The DefendersOnline.