I keep thinking about Janet Napolitano, the former governor of Arizona who became Barack Obama’s first Secretary of Homeland Security. In April 2009, Republicans and conservative groups were demanding that she resign because her department had so deeply insulted right-wing Americans. See, DHS’s Extremism and Radicalization Branch (Homeland Environment Threat Analysis Division) in coordination with the FBI, released a report titled “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,” and it was pretty much straight up and down accurate in describing how nutzoid right-wingers, almost all of them white people, were becoming terrorists, driven to utter despair by the dual insults of the Bush-induced, severe economic downturn and the election of the first black president. To the writers of the report, those factors “present unique drivers for rightwing radicalization and recruitment.”
