Wither the loonies of the far right?
Now that the Rush Limbaugh era is past, what’s a right-wing loonie to do? Take over Montana!During the ’90s you couldn’t get away from them. The lunatic fringe of the right wing were everywhere. Rush Limbaugh’s reedy voice and fat, smirking face filled the airwaves, bravely defending the perquisites of white men. Numerous Limbaugh “mini-mes” crowded the AM dial, spewing vitrolic about jack-booted thugs killing innocents at Waco and Ruby Ridge.
Tracts circulated about mysterious, night-flying black helicopters filled with U.N. storm troopers preparing to take over the country. Charlton Heston proudly boasted that Federal agents would have to pry his gun out of his cold, dead fingers to disarm him. Weekend militias crawled through the hills. Even stranger groups, like the Montana Freemen declared themselves independent of the U.S., financing their movement through check-kiting and printing their very own currency. They declared that U.S. law didn’t apply to them, and that the only legitimate law rested in the Magna Carta and Admirality Law (of all things).
I think the wave crested with Timothy McVeigh’s home-grown terrorist assault on a Federal building in Oklahoma that left 168 men, women and children dead. It finally broke with his conviction. I remember tuning in that day to local “hot air” radio host Mike Savage and hearing the resignation tinged with regret in the voices of his callers. It was the end of an era.
So where are they now?
Tags: black helicopters, Charlton Heston, Magna Carta, Mike Savage, Montana, Oklahoma, Ruby Ridge, Rush Limbaugh, terrorism, Timoty McVeigh, United Nation, Waco, wing-nut