Homegrown terrorism

Rachel Maddow: Why is the U.S. so reluctant to confront its own right-wing terrorists? (Click here to read more)

By David Ferguson
Wednesday, April 16, 2014 8:59 EDT
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Tuesday night on her MSNBC show, Rachel Maddow discussed the real threat of violence from right-wing extremists here in the U.S. as opposed to Islamic terrorism, which most Americans are much more afraid of.
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She began by detailing the arrests in the late 1980s of several members of the Aryan Nation gang, a ring of counterfeiters and criminals who hoped to bring about an all-white homeland, or at least a section of the country devoted to the white race.
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In 1987, 15 neo-Nazi leaders of the Aryan Nation were arrested and charged with sedition.
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"So that was in 1987," Maddow said. "Really ambitious prosecution brought against all those different white supremacist leaders. They're going after them for trying to overthrow the U.S. government."
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By 1988, however, the whole case had fallen apart. One of the government's witnesses, Frazier Glenn Miller, fled his home state of North Carolina, changed his name, and all but disappeared until this past weekend, when he opened fire at a Jewish community center in Overland Park, KS, killing three people.
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"Heil Hiter!" shouted Miller at news cameras from the back of a police cruiser.
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After he was arrested, Maddow said, "there was still some confusion about his identity" because of his multiple aliases. Miller had been active on the Internet at right-wing sites, posting over 12,000 messages to racist message boards and websites.
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One of those message boards, the white supremacist Stormfront.org, was also home to the man who shot up a Sikh temple in Wisconsin before killing himself, a Pittsburgh neo-Nazi murderer and others.