Back in April, there was a huge fuss over an internal report by the Department of Homeland Security warning that current conditions resemble those in the early 1990s - a time marked by an upsurge of right-wing extremism that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing. Conservatives were outraged. The chairman of the Republican National Committee denounced the report as an attempt to ‘segment out conservatives in this country who have a different philosophy or view from this administration and label them as terrorists. But with the murder of Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion fanatic, closely followed by a shooting by a white supremacist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the analysis looks prescient. There is, however, one important thing that the D.H.S. report didn’t say: Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment. Now, for the most part, the likes of Fox News and the R.N.C. haven’t directly incited violence, despite Bill O’Reilly’s declarations that ‘some called Dr. Tiller ‘Tiller the Baby Killer, that he had ‘blood on his hands, and that he […]