This afternoon, a gunman — reportedly white supremacist James von Brunn — shot and killed a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington. Discussing the shooting, Fox News’ Shepard Smith reminded the audience that when the Department of Homeland Security released a report warning of violent, right-wing extremists earlier this year, “the right went absolutely bonkers!” He called the report a “warning to us all,” and said DHS was “warning us for a reason.” Watch it:
Southern Povery Law Center’s Heidi Beirich told Smith that the shooting is a reminder of the real danger extremists and “crazies” pose to the U.S.:
SMITH: There’s these crazies out there. And we know it’s absolutely — there is no truth whatsoever — zero to any of those ideas. Yet, they live within the computer and they fester within people’s minds.
BEIRICH: Shepard, you’re hitting the nail on the head. We’re extremely concerned about these kinds of crazed conspiracies, whether they’re about the President, or the fact — we’re hearing things like FEMA setting up camps to round up Americans and put them in. I’m getting bad sort of deja vu from the 1990s, when anti-government militias were on the rise, when Tim McVeigh committed that violence in Oklahoma City. I’m really hoping we’re not going through a repeat of that.
Watch it:
The Wonk Room’s Andrea Nill highlights anti-immigrant screeds written by Brunn.
Update
Smith said that the e-mail Fox receives from viewers “has become more and more frightening.” He read an example, from a “birther” who called President Obama “Hussein,” and said it was, “I promise, a representative sample of the kinds of things that we get here.” Watch it here.
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