Blowout Prevention

On July 17, 2010 there was an incident on Interstate 580, a major East-West corridor in the San Francisco Bay Area, with overtones of political violence. The San Francisco Bay Area is the 6th largest Metropolitan Area in the United States.

A middle aged person, a parolee apparently from a California state prison, was going west toward the San Mateo Bridge when his erratic driving behavior was observed by members of the California Highway Patrol. As a result he was stopped. What made this incident unique was that a gun battle between the driver and the CHP ensued.

The incident started around midnight when two CHP officers tried to stop a white Toyota Tundra pickup that had been speeding and weaving in and out of traffic on westbound Interstate 580, said CHP Officer Sam Morgan. The officers used a loudspeaker to direct the driver off the freeway, but he stopped on I-580 west of Grand Avenue, Morgan said. As officers walked toward the pickup, they saw the man pick up a handgun and open fire on the officers, police said. The officers said they returned gunfire and radioed for help. Three CHP vehicles had their windows shot out, but no officers were shot, police said. They said the driver was armed with a rifle and a shotgun as well as the handgun and fired at least two of the weapons during the shootout.

Anyone with a sound mind does not engage in gun fights with law enforcement impulsively and when the event was investigated further, extraneous circumstances for the shootout were soon discovered. As a paroled felon, the perpetrator was having problems finding employment to support himself and believed that the U.S. Congress was implementing a “left-wing agenda” which he believed was making it difficult for unemployed white people to find jobs. Apparently this was easier to believe than accepting his not finding work might be related to the fact that such efforts might be hampered by his record from a felony conviction.

He lived next door to his mother and she had an extensive collection of firearms which she anticipated would provide utility once the “revolution” she and her son observed on the horizon, a “revolution” resulting from the “left wing agenda” that was being pushed through Congress by a Democratic president and members of congress. As his mother stated:

I think we're going to be caught up in a revolution." But she said she had told her son many times that "he didn't have to be on the front lines."

Good idea, one certainly doesn't want to be on the front lines. I imagine those M1A1Main Battle Tanks would be pretty difficult to stop with guns from Wal-Mart.

What I find so interesting about incidents like this one is the so-called “left wing agenda” was really legislation designed to improve the living conditions of people like this person and his mother. See for example, The Already Wealthy. Such “left wing” agendas have brought the American people a standard work week with minimum wages, prohibition of discrimination based on, among other things, ethnicity and age, Unemployment Insurance, Social Security, Medicare.

The immediate “left wing agenda” which this individual and his mother feared and believed would bring about a “revolution” had taken steps to insure banks and investment institutions were supervised and regulated so they would not have to be “bailed out” by the tax payers as they were in the fall of 2008, made health care easier to obtain for him and his mother, created jobs through an economic stimulus and was largely responsible for the U.S. automobile industry becoming profitable and indeed surviving the crisis that had beset them for the previous decade or more of mismanagement.

I’m not going to provide references for these references as they are easily found on the Internet.

In any event, the questions that need to be answered are (1) where does the idea that there is a “left wing” agenda being brought to the United States and (2) where does the absurd idea that this “agenda” will produce a “revolution” come from. I can readily think of two sources:

The Republican Party

The right-wing media

I’ve already written so much on the Republican party there is very little more than I can say without repeating what I’ve previously covered in detail so I would offer these links:

Did the Republican Party lose an Election or a Civil War

Delusional Beliefs and Political Extremism

The Endemic Pathology of the Republican Party

Say Americans - Why So Scared?

as well as others. They all contain extensive references supporting my viewpoint.

I’ve discussed the right-wing media before as well however there is one person in particular that has developed a set of elaborate conspiracies to explain what he sees. And these alleged conspiracies play very well into the belief that there is a “socialist” or “left-wing” agenda being implemented and that, as a result, a “revolution” may ensue.

There is a splinter political party where one can find these ideas expressed however from the most part I don’t see the members of this party having that much influence. What we are really looking for is one person whose ideas, however convoluted, might incite others to violence. What I am thinking of is one person who sees immediate danger from left wing groups, is advocating, explicitly or implicitly, a self-defense force comprised of American citizens to fight it, and has a national audience of followers. Is there anyone out there who fits that profile?

As a matter of fact there is. The person I that I have in mind for this role is an individual Glenn Beck. His biography is somewhat interesting and more on it can be found of the reference cited. It should be noted that there are others like him; they all have much in common; they are too numerous to mention; some of them are trying to get elected to the U.S. Congress; they all have ignorance and stupidity in common; Beck can serve as a prototype for all of them.

He and his followers believe in a world something like this:

Even before Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, the internet was seething with lurid conspiracy theories exposing his alleged subversion and treachery. Among the many false claims: Obama was a secret Muslim; he was not a native U.S. citizen and his election as president should be overturned; he was a tool of the New World Order in a plot to merge the government of the United States into a North American union with Mexico and Canada. Within hours of Obama’s inauguration, claims circulated that Obama was not really president because Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts scrambled the words as he administered the oath of office. A few days after the inauguration came a warning that Obama planned to impose martial law and collect all guns.

Based on what he says, it is difficult not to conclude whether his ideas are racist and he is advocating violence in defending “his” country from a convoluted conspiracy based on ... well one is not exactly sure what the conspiracy is based on. Anti-Christian and anti-capitalist beliefs I guess.

I don’t watch his program but from the excerpts I have seen, it is apparently quite an act. However it is not that different from other “talk shows” one finds on the Fox network. This is again based on samples from the on-going propaganda coming from the Fox network that I have witnessed.

From what I have been able to discern, it is difficult to conclude whether the constant dribble is an act, merely something designed to provide the intended spectators what they want to see and hear, or if it is what the sources of the slobber themselves really believe. Again hard to say.

Either way it is clear there are groups of really strange people in this country who believe things that are totally absurd; to say it differently, they believe constructs of reality that cannot be real.

Therefore it is not a stretch to construe that the audience and the perpetrators are delusional, they see things and profess fears about constructs of reality that are unsupportable by any set of objective indices. That they advocate violence as a solution to these "problems" and characterize those whom they regard as villains in very hostile terms is disturbing to any observer who does not share their core beliefs.

Whether they are present in sufficient numbers to determine the outcome of an election by non-violent means is unclear at this point. They may consist of nothing more than a loud and outspoken minority with extreme and highly marginal beliefs.

The danger to any organized society however is that they do indeed advocate violent solutions to problems that are totally imaginary or constitute a set of problems that have some semblance of reality connected to them but the causes attributed to the set of problems by the extremist viewpoint are obviously false and imaginary.

An example of the latter would be what Adolf Hitler told the German nation in the run up to World War 2: the German economy was indeed deep in a depression but Jewish merchants weren’t getting rich as a result. Something like that could never happen in the United States could it?

So they should not be ignored. They should be on the radar of federal law enforcement whose job it is to protect the United States from subversive elements that advocate violence and hold extreme and absurd views about the country.

Indeed to "ignore them" would be dangerous as there are already examples of murders and acts of terrorism that have been committed based on the professed ideology such groups accept as valid and use as a basis for individual and collective behavior on a daily basis.