Frazier Glenn Miller’s connection to the now-infamous Vanguard News Network (VNN) has been well documented over the past several days after he killed three people at Jewish community centers in Kansas City but, according to a new comprehensive report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the more popular Stormfront forum can be linked to nearly 100 murders in the last five years.
Stormfront users have included Wade Michael Page, who shot to death six people before killing himself at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012; Richard Andrew Poplawski, who murdered three Pittsburgh police officers in 2009; and Anders Behring Breivik, who bombed a government building in Norway, killing eight people, and then massacred 69 people, most of them teenagers, at a summer camp in 2011.
Stormfront’s homicidal trend began just four years after the site went up. On Aug. 10, 1999, Buford O’Neil Furrow, a known Stormfront user, left his parents’ home in Tacoma, Wash., and drove to Los Angeles, where he shot and wounded three children, a teenage girl and an elderly woman at a Jewish day care center. Furrow then shot and killed a Filipino-American postal worker. But the trend took off after Obama’s inauguration in January 2009.
According to the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, hate killings ‘accelerated rapidly’ after President Obama took office in January of 2009, leading to nearly 100 murders since then.
The first thing that jumps out at you is obviously the fact that President Obama took office in 2009 and that he is, in fact, a black man.
Sure, there are certainly other factors involved such as the NRA’s endless drumbeat, Fox News, Hate Radio, and long-running anti-government conspiracy theories which have become more popular and mainstream in recent years, but each of those can also be linked back to race. The militia movement has a long, ugly history, but the fact that hate killings accelerated after the nation’s first black president took office is hardly surprising.
When conservative entertainment shock jocks bleat about the impending race war, martial law, or FEMA camps, they’re only throwing gasoline on the fire.
The last thing we need is to radicalize a whole new generation by telling them the NSA is vacuuming up every single detail of their lives and then hand Pulitzers to the men responsible for misleading them.
Too late.