And so we all know, now, that Jarrod Ramos, the madman who walked into the offices of the Capital Gazette newspaper and killed five people, had connections with the far Right.

His attack doesn’t seem to have been politically motivated, at least not to the best of anyone’s knowledge at the moment, but he was a man of the Alt-Right just the same. He had ties to something called the League of the South, an organization whose leader, Michael Hill, has written about a guerrilla war against the Left. (Hills has said that in the coming conflict “… the primary targets will not be enemy soldiers; instead, they will be political leaders, members of the hostile media, cultural icons, bureaucrats, and other of the managerial elite without whom the engines of tyranny don’t run.”)

Is anyone surprised? Is anyone the slightest bit surprised that Ramos was of this sort? Of course not. This is what we’ve come to expect of the far Right in this country. Or, what we used to think of as the far or hard Right. But that’s no longer the case. We’re not talking fringe any more. This is what the Center Right looks like in an age of Trump.

What do we do about it? At the moment, there is little we can do except carry on the struggle. But what we must do is remember. We must recall the ideas that motivate men and women like Ramos, and we must remember from whence they came.

From, for example, NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch who advocated violence against reporters and called them “rat bastards.” And when Donald Trump himself calls journalists the “enemy of the people.”

And all the others…

All those who have made “conservative” synonymous with madness and murder.

Posted in Blog and tagged , , , , , , ,