The Guardian reports: In the past 12 months, Jessica Campbell has had her car’s fuel line cut and its wheel nuts loosened. Late last year, she had a GPS tracker surreptitiously attached to her vehicle. She is now accustomed to being tailed by unfamiliar vehicles on Interstate 5 near her home in Cottage Grove, just outside Eugene, Oregon. Strangers have regularly come uninvited onto her property; someone even stripped the barbed wire on her fence “just to send a message”. Online, she has repeatedly been threatened with rape and death.
And last week, when she showed up at the Canyon City community hall in Grant County, she told me that someone shot at her and her entourage. They misread their GPS, took a wrong turn and stopped to get their bearings when a crack rang out with what Campbell thought was a .22 bullet whizzing by their vehicle.
Such threats are part of the pushback her work has sparked in rural Oregon.
Campbell co-directs the Rural Organizing Project, a not-for-profit group that sets out to confront the rightwing insurgency that has been bubbling away in parts of rural Oregon and throughout the west. A political organizer since high school, she now coordinates groups attempting to respond to divisive tactics from rightwing activists on immigration, race and public land ownership.
This extremist surge received national media attention during the occupation of the Malheur national wildlife refuge by the Bundy group, but it has continued to rise alongside Trump, with his legitimization of white nationalist politics and his apparent inspiration of insurrectionists across the country. [Continue reading…]
The SPLC identified 998 active extreme antigovernment groups in 2015: The antigovernment movement has experienced a resurgence, growing quickly since 2008, when President Obama was elected to office. Factors fueling the antigovernment movement in recent years include changing demographics driven by immigration, the struggling economy and the election of the first African-American president. [Continue reading…]
Why do socialists and communists like yourself are always calling God fearing, USA loving Americans “Extremists”? I would say that you and people like you are the “Extremists”, extreme hate of this country’s history and Constitution. Please go to France or Germany, better yet go to some middle eastern country and stay there.
Thank you
“Al” — if you’re only way of responding to people with whom you have political differences is to tell them to leave this country, it doesn’t sound like you attach much value to living in a democracy.
At this time, Americans who join militias are in a tiny minority — in other words, they are out on the margins of mainstream America.
America as it exists right now is a product of its history and constitution and as such includes millions of citizens who, if it was up to you, would be kicked out of this country.
If you bear this much hostility to fellow citizens how can you claim to love America?