Free Republic

An unfortunate tendency on the right these days is to attempt to win arguments through tendentious and shallow redefinitions of what constitutes “left” and “right.” That tendency flared up in recent days with efforts to rebut any notion that the Holocaust Museum shooter was a right-wing extremist and, instead, to rebrand him as a leftist – or “vile leftist monster,” as Rand Simberg put it in one such creative feat of ideological legerdemain at Pajamas Media. According to Simberg, there’s nothing in James von Brunn’s biography that qualifies as right-wing, “if by that you mean someone who adheres to individualism,...

WASHINGTON, June 12, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The online ravings of the man who shot and killed a security guard in Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum on June 10th show that he does not fit the description of the “right wing” or “conservative Christian” extremist that has been portrayed in the liberal mainstream media since the shooting. In one of many online tirades, the shooter, 88 year-old James von Brunn wrote, “Christianity and the Holocaust are hoaxes. ‘Christianity’ destroyed Roman Civilization. The ‘Holocaust’ Religion is destroying Western Civilization.” Between them, he said, they destroyed the “Aryan gene pool.”He wrote, “socialism represents the future...

Over at Evolution News & Views, I reflect on the question of whether it's "beyond the pale" to read, quote from, and reflect on the worldview implications of James von Brunn's addled thoughts on evolution and eugenics. Excerpt (keep reading after the jump): "Our culture is very comfortable reminding us often of atrocities committed in the name of religion -- whether it's the Crusades, the Inquisition, or 9/11. Ironically, the day of the Holocaust Museum shooting, an interesting new Jewish web magazine, Tablet, published a fascinating scholarly essay by Paula Fredriksen about how under the Nazis, some German theologians tried...

Answer: Hatred for the Truth. All crime is spurred on by hate. Whenever a criminal, for whatever reason, walks into a public place and starts shooting, the first thing that liberal, Darwin loving “calumnists” like MSNBC’s “tingle up the leg,” and master propagandist, Chris Matthews tries to do is link the hate monger with Conservatives or Christians. Matthews, on Hardball, tried to connect racist, James von Brunn, with Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh. This is a radical progressive, Saul Alinsky smear job, and Truth is the last thing Matthews is concerned with exposing to the American public. The American media...

Now isn't this fascinating. James von Brunn, the white-supremacist suspect in today's Holocaust Memorial Museum shooting in which the guard who was shot has now tragically died, describes the relevance of evolution to his sick thinking. He's obsessed with "genetics." He writes in his manifesto (emphasis added): Approval of inter-racial breeding is predicated on idiotic Christian dogma that God's children must love their enemies (a concept JEWS totally reject); and on LIBERAL/MARXIST/JEW propaganda that all men/races are created equal. These genocidal ideologies, preached from the American pulpits, taught in American schools, legislated in the halls of Congress (confirming TALMUDIC conviction...

Crazies. Lone nut jobs. Isolated loonies. Those are frequent descriptions of people like James von Brunn, the 88-year-old white supremacist accused of opening fire at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and killing a black guard. Others believe he represents something more dangerous: a growing racist movement motivated by a number of converging factors, including the first black president. The potential for an increase in violence from whites who feel they are slipping from power is high, people from across the ideological spectrum say. "I believe we are headed for an unprecedented level of conflict and racial turmoil," said Carol Swain,...

American Mensa is distraught to hear of the violent events at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, June 10. Our thoughts are with the victims and the family and friends of Stephen Tyrone Johns, the security guard who was killed in the attack. The accused shooter in this event, James Von Brunn, is a former member of American Mensa. Mr. Von Brunn was a member more than 20 years ago and his membership tenure lasted less than a year. Mensa has more than 57,000 members across the United States and more than 110,000 members worldwide. Our members include...

For those who objected to my post yesterday quoting Holocaust Museum shooting suspect James von Brunn on the role of evolutionary doctrine, however distorted, in his rationale for racism, let me ask you a question. Try this thought experiment. If in his crazed manifesto he had somehow found support for his thinking not in evolution but in intelligent design, do you think we would have heard nothing about it from the media as in fact we've heard nothing (except from me) about his evolutionary thoughts? What if he had based his hate explicitly on Biblical literalist creationism? Or on Roman...

On June 10, the nation tragically witnessed a memorial dedicated to commemorating an atrocity become the site of yet more death. Just before 1 p.m., longtime neo-Nazi James Wenneker Von Brunn entered the Holocaust Museum on the National Mall and opened fire in an attempt to complete the Final Solution his hero had left tentative, an omission Von Brunn dubbed “Hitler’s biggest mistake.” As former Defense Secretary Bill Cohen wandered the museum grounds, Von Brunn killed Stephen T. Johns, a black security officer, then was shot himself. As of this writing, the 88-year-old is in critical condition. The white-wing fringe...

Happy Thursday! Did that controversial Homeland Security report on right-wing extremists (pdf) get it right? Several bloggers, commentators and news reports suggest it did, accurately predicting the deadly shooting at the Holocaust Museum. "Civil rights activists say a string of recent attacks blamed on right-wing extremists, including Wednesday’s shooting at the Holocaust Museum, show that conservative critics were too quick to fault the Department of Homeland Security over an April report warning about the potential for such violence," reports Politico. (Leave your thoughts in the comments section below.) Homeland Security's Office of Intelligence and Analysis distributed the report (pdf) to...

Today, an 89-year old documented nut entered the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. I have no idea what the politics of Stephen Tyrone Jones were, but the man serving as a guard died a hero: he died standing in the way of this evil man and the innocent and unarmed people he would have murdered. A question immediately comes to mind: what side of the bowl did this nut inhabit? Obviously he was a nut. But was he a rightwing nut or a leftwing nut? What the left want us to believe is that James von Brunn is a rightwing...