Rush Limbaugh: “Adolf Hitler, like Obama, also ruled by dictate.” He compares Obama and the Democrat Party to fascists that do not allow private sector, put to death the unfit, etc.
Glenn Beck, Fox News host: he called Obama a fascist, a Nazi, a Marxist and alleged the establishment of a secret network of government-run concentration camps for dissenters.
Anne Coulter has said that people are rightly worried over health reform, as "one excellent way to cut costs is to let old people die."
Betsy McCaughey has claimed that the House health care reform bill would "absolutely require" end-of-life counseling for seniors "that will tell them how to end their life sooner."
Sarah Palin: "The America I love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."
U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told people at a town hall meeting that they have “every right to fear” a provision in a House bill that would provide funding for end-of-life counseling. Grassley said. “We should not have a government program that determines we’re gonna pull the plug on Grandma.”
In short, then, critics of the Proposed Health Care reform claim that it is fascist, it is socialist, it is communist, it is un-American, unpatriotic—it is against everything good in the American system.
All of this plays into conspiracy theories and prejudices of the right-extreme fringe that has experienced a revival since the Barack Obama won the presidential election.
While President Obama held a town hall meeting in New Hampshire on August 11, 2009, one of the protesters outside wore a 9mm pistol clearly visible in a holster at one of his legs and held a poster with the words: It is Time to Water the Tree of Liberty!
He referred to the following passage from a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1787 to William Smith and that is a guiding light for the anti-government extremists of the militia, white supremacy variety:
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
Why does this matter? Remember Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City Bomber? When he was arrested shortly after he had ignited the truck bomb that killed 168 and injured hundreds more, he wore a t-shirt with a picture of Abraham Lincoln in the front with the words “sic samper tyrannis” (thus always to tyrants) and in the back a picture of the tree of liberty with red blood droplets on it.
Up to his execution, McVeigh was convinced that he had exploded the lethal car bomb as a patriot who had all the good reasons for watering the tree of liberty with the blood of innocent people.
In McVeigh’s car, law enforcement officers also found clippings from the anti-government novel "The Turner Diaries" by neo-Nazi William Pierce who used the pseudonym Andrew McDonald. The book provides a fictional account of an all out race war—starting with bombing of FBI headquarters in Washington. All of this was the fictionalized version of the hateful ideas that William Pierce and his National Alliance propagandized and that the Oklahoma City bomber used as guide and blue print.
Again, the point here is that hate speech and conspiracy theories and calls to action will sooner or later lead to violence.
See the following excerpts from the white supremacist Aryan Nation’s web site and the depicted tombstone:
"WHITEY is buying guns and ammunition at a record pace .... no-stop since the Marxist Communist Obama entered illegally (not a U.S. confirmed citizen) into the White House, and WHITEY is awakening to the Jews and their` financial rip-off of the U.S. Treasury (U.S. taxpayers) and the giving of such, to the JEW banks, lending financial houses, and to the Jews themselves without having to disclose where and how much money went where!!
Keep preparing and obtaining the main ingredients you and your loved ones need to survive. FOOD, AMMUNITION, WEAPONS TO SHOOT THE AMMUNITION, A FRESH WATER SUPPLY OR WATERING FILTERING SYSTEM .... shelter - and to be with like-minded people who want not only to survive, but to also DESTROY ALL THOSE WHO WANT TO KILL OR HARM YOU.
Civil war is already on this nation’s Southwestern border and pushing up into Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona, as well into portions of Texas. The United States will not see CIVIL WAR happen at once across the country, but instead a gradual increase from area to area...."
When the talking heads on radio and television and increasingly public officials and would-be-candidates and ruthless lobbyists elevate outrageous lies into the realm of mainstream discussions (i.e., the charge that President Obama was not born in the United States, that he and his supporters are Nazis or socialists, or communists, and enemies of everything good in America, that the health care reform plans for death panels), they risk to motivate people to use violence.
This must stop before it is too late.
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