See too Joseph Stack.

There is some limited purposes in defining the political beliefs, onto a right – left paradigm, of political terrorists.  But, the only real thing I mean to do in classification is to assert it as Terrorism.  There is a bumper sticker out there which reads “Not All Muslims are Terrorists, but all Terrorists are Muslims”. 

The problem gets into the realm of defining the world beyond the Terrorist — are there “Terrorist backchannels”?  In some odd lone shooters, we have seen a flutter of fans of various talk radio personalities — which brings a murky land of casuality that tips us way over past the mean audience.  But while we play a partisan or ideological game with James Lee, I can’t escape the question of – er, why?

Before I fired up my computer this morning, I assumed that conservative partisans would have been busy little beavers during the night. Sure enough, not one but two e-mails awaited me, crowing about James Lee’s environmental extremism. Since then, I’ve run across plenty more Web posts with headlines dubbing Lee a “Violent Liberal Environmentalist” or a “Liberal Ecoterrorist” or otherwise crowing about his not-a-conservative status.
I was more surprised, I confess, by a post at the liberal blog Think Progress, detailing how Lee’s online manifesto “Echoes Anti-immigrant Groups’ Malthusian Screed,” then walking readers through the sinister phenomenon of nativism’s greenwashing. It’s not that I think liberals are necessarily above that sort of opportunistic bashing. But linking Lee’s behavior to an ugly right-wing ideology took considerably more creativity and chutzpah than the right’s gloating about Lee’s fondness for An Inconvenient Truth.
So, if we were forced to pick sides between James J. Lee: left-wing enviroradical and James Lee: militant right-wing nativist, the data points favor Option A.
But, to state the obvious, we’re not forced to pick sides. Lee wasn’t an ideologue driven by his own political extremism to do something drastic. He was, first and foremost, batshit crazy. We’re talking about someone who so lost touch with reality that he thought the best way to save the planet was to force a television network to run game shows promoting the ideals of “human sterilization and infertility.” (Can’t you just envision the “Jeopardy” spin-off? Thanks so much, Alex! I’ll take chemical castration for $400.)

Right?
The first entity I saw play the Discovery Institute shooter for partisan or ideological advantage was the Alex Jones Kurt Nimmo land of Prison Planet Infowars.  They are kind of more annoying at this than your standard liberal or conservative Democrat or Republican, because their myopia is just that much blunter.  Theirs is a realm where if Arabs or Muslims did it, the Government did it — in preparation to shut down them.  If Right Wing Extremists did it, than be on guard as the Government – run Establishment Media exploits this to clamp down on them.  Also, they’ll use this as a pretext to take your guns away.  And all the while they’re ignoring the violence at the border committed by Hispanics and Latinos. 
And now this James Lee guy –  he’s just following Master Eugenicist Al Gore!

I am reminded about when Ted Kaczynski met Timothy McVeigh.

Of all the inmates McVeigh came to know at the Supermax, he found  he had the most in common with the fifty-seven yearold Kaczynski.  Initially Kaczynski had refused to speak with McVeigh.  “He fell for the propaganda against me,” McVeigh believed.  In truth, Kaczynski had misgivings about the way McVeigh had executed the Oklahoma City bombing.  Kaczynski’s bombings had targeted carefully selected individuals, people he blamed for the ills of America.  Kaczynski felt the Oklahoma City blast, killing scores of low-level government employees, was a bad action because it was unncessarily inhumane.  In time, though, Kaczynski came to believe that his fellow bomber had, like him, been demonized by false media reports.  There was more than a mutual appreciation for the outdoors between them; their political views often coincided.

One important link between the two men was their mutual disdian for federal agents and prosecutal miscondut.  McVeigh once gave Kaczynski a copy of [—]

Kaczynski laid out his feelings about McVeigh and the bombing at Oklahoma City in an eleven-page letter to the authors of this book.

“On a personal level I like McVeigh and I imagine that most people would like him,” Kaczynski wrote. 

McVeigh told me of his idea (which I think may have significant merit) that certain rebellious elements on the American right and left respectively had more in common with one another than is commonly realized, and that the two groups ought to join forces. This led us to discuss, though only briefly, the question of what constitutes the “right.” I pointed out that the word “right,” in the political sense, was originally associated with authoritarianism, and I raised the question of why certain radically anti-authoritarian groups (such as the Montana Freemen) were lumped together with authoritarian factions as the “right.” McVeigh explained that the American far right could be roughly divided into two branches, the fascist/racist branch, and the individualistic or freedom-loving branch which generally was not racist. He did not know why these two branches were lumped together as the “right,” but he did suggest a criterion that could be used to distinguish left from right: the left (in America today) generally dislikes firearms, while the right tends to be attracted to firearms.

[…] In reply, McVeigh indicated that I might some day want to shoot at a tank. I didn’t bother to argue with him, but if I’d considered it worth the trouble I could have given the obvious answer: that the chances that I would ever have occasion to shoot at a tank were very remote. I think McVeigh knew well that there was little likelihood that I would ever need to shoot at a tank—or that he would either, unless he rejoined the Army. My speculative interpretation is that McVeigh resembles many people on the right who are attracted to powerful weapons for their own sake and independently of any likelihood that they will ever have a practical use for them. Such people tend to invent excuses, often far-fetched ones, for acquiring weapons for which they have no real need.

But McVeigh did not fit the stereotype of the extreme right-wingers. I’ve already indicated that he spoke of respect for other people’s cultures, and in doing so he sounded like a liberal. He certainly was not a mean or hostile person, and I wasn’t aware of any indication that he was super patriotic. I suspect that he is an adventurer by nature, and America since the closing of the frontier has had little room for adventurers.

See, if the Extreme Right and the Extreme Left can get along and come to these common understanding, why can’t the More Moderate Right and More Moderate Left?  Then again, McVeigh was probably against the War (whichever one) and Kaczynski probably would do away with Social Security.
One point of order — people who get to determine these things — the Experts who overwhelm anything I say here about this matter — don’t consider Kaczynski’s acts of terrorism Terrorism.  Maybe it’s a bias toward not being able to identify a mass of movement beyond him, but it largely boils down to his Manifesto reading more as a man complaining about his daddy than laying out any grand Political Philosophy. 
He has a book coming out soon, by the way.

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