Only Brown People

are a real threat. If you believe that, you've been listening to the likes of Michelle Malkin. Here's Rick Perlstein on domestic terrorism. The MSM doesn't want to be bothered. I did a check similar to Perlstein's and found almost no follow up on the Free Militia story. I've seen almost none on the Liberty U story. The Virginia Tech, shootings, on the other hand, were good for days -- until it was established that the shooter was not Muslim.

Environmental activists, on the other hand. . . .

The FBI has called them "the No. 1 domestic terrorism threat," and their members include four of the Bureau's 11 Most Wanted homegrown terrorists. Yet in more than 1,100 acts of arson and vandalism, the members of the Earth Liberation Front have never killed a single person.

I tend to think the government's overreaching, but then I tend to think that governments do. (Strange, too, that the government is eager for sentence enhancements for "terrorism," but not for hate crimes against gays, isn't it?)

Thanks to Digby.

And just to show you how much of a threat brown people are, here are some comments by Glenn Greenwald about that latest scary poll.

The hysteria over the Pew poll about American Muslims continues unabated, with the focus now on the finding that while 80% of American Muslims oppose attacks on civilians in all cases, 13% said they could be justified in some circumstances. The "discussion" illustrates some standard failings of our political discourse.

Michelle Malkin went to National Review to proclaim that the poll "should be a wake-up call, not another excuse for the mainstream media to downplay the threat of homegrown jihad." Mark Steyn said it demonstrates the existence in America of "a huge comfort zone for the jihad to operate in," and Jonah Goldberg warned how "significant" this is. On CNN last night, Anderson Cooper was horrified -- just horrified -- that "so many" American Muslims would support such violence. . . .

One of the questions [the University of Maryland poll] asked was whether "bombings and other types of attacks intentionally aimed at civilians are sometimes justified"? Americans approved of such attacks by a much larger margin than Iranians -- 51-16% (and a much, much larger margin than American Muslims -- 51-13%):

Look at that last figure -- only 13% of American Muslims think that attacks against civilians are justified compared to 51% of Americans as a whole. I guess that just proves how un-American Muslims are.

Maybe it's just the way my mind works, but this does bear relation to the ongoing discussion of hate crimes. Maybe it's just that Michelle Malkin, America's most popular racist, is such a key factor in both questions. Dave Neiwert has some astute observations on that facet:

What we're seeing in this case is the symbiotic relationship between ostensibly mainstream "transmitters" like Malkin and the far-right extremists from whom they draw their ideas and memes. The extremists give the transmitters material for "pushing the envelope," and in return the extremists find their ideas gaining broader circulation and given the imprimatur of mainstream media.

That's how extremist effluent, the kind that muddies the waters and poisons the well, works its way into the mainstream, thanks to folks like Michelle Malkin and John Leo. And as it does so, the center of the pendulum keeps getting washed farther to the right.

I see it as a fairly tightly interrelated complex of issues. Malkin and her ilk are key players, of course, because they are appealing to all that is worst in this country with little regard for truth and no interest in making things work for as many people as possible, which is what America is about. The common element in Malkin's screeds against Muslims and against hate crimes laws is racism. That carries over into anti-gay rhetoric quite easily: it's the age-old hatred of the Other, being played for power and influence.

The tactic works because most people don't question the axioms. An axiom is, by definition, a given: it's an irreducible, self-evident truth. Unfortunately, most of what I'm seeing in the public discourse starts from premises that are neither self-evidently true nor irreducible: they are mere assertions that leave too much unexamined, which is not the way to arrive at a persuasive conclusion. At least, not if you're trying to persuade me.