After reading the Department of Homeland Security intel report on “right-wing extremism” that clearly designates conservative political dissent as part of the threat, I finally figured out why it all seems so familiar. First, there’s the report’s leading villain, the “military veteran” returning from war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then there are the “white supremacists” well known for their “longstanding exploitation of social issues such as abortion, interracial crime and same-sex marriage.” According to the government, we might see a growing movement of similarly pro-life, pro-law-and-order, pro-marriage ... “white supremacists. And what about the “many right-wing extremists” who “are antagonistic toward the new presidential administration and its stance on a range of issues” including immigration, expanding government programs and gun control? According to the report, such “right-wing extremists are increasingly galvanized by these concerns and leverage them as drivers for recruitment.” Sounds like a GOP voter drive to me.

We’ve seen this cast of characters before in all of the schlock Hollywood movies that harvest a diseased crop of villains from the American heartland, endlessly returning them to the screen as the “crazed veteran,” the “religious zealot” and the anti-immigration “Nazi.” These are the stock villains who are now similarly demonized in this report. This fantastic worldview that sees the country imperiled by military heroes, traditional values and border security meshes perfectly with the also-official flip side to such paranoid liberal fantasy: namely, the harmlessness of the Islamic “extremism,” which Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano recently renamed “man-caused disasters.”

But Hollywood-fantasy-turned-Washington-reality isn’t simply crummy entertainment. It presents a grave menace to political discourse. Napolitano, who supports the DHS report, is plenty content to deal in the politics of fear — just not fear of Islam. Fear of conservatism, however, is okay by her. The DHS report repeatedly reaches back for inspiration to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing of a federal building, citing “military veteran” and domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh. While the DHS report is thin on specifics and devoid of sources, it exposes the federal government’s outrageous strategy to portray conservatism as “right-wing extremism.” The report defines the term this way: “Right-wing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented, and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.” Presto — the federal government has just taken key conservative positions and cast them as “primarily hate-oriented” pathologies that are beyond civilized political discourse. What we are seeing is the most extraordinary governmental attempt in history to limit the spectrum of debate by demonizing a range of positions as “right-wing extremism.” This is unconstitutional and un-American.

But not in the Obama era. This is a time when the following statement would surely set off a red alert with all law enforcement authorities who received the report: “What we have to do is bring back the recognition that the people of this country can solve its problems. I still believe the answer to any problem lies with the people. I believe in state’s rights and I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the [community and private levels]. I believe we have distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution to that federal establishment.” In the language of Homeland Security, which “right-wing extremist” said that? Ronald Reagan.

Diana West blogs at dianawest.net. She can be contacted via dianawest@verizon.net.

Copyright 2009, Diana West.

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