Now that the full scope of this administration*'s political vandalism and base criminality is largely being copped to in broad daylight in various federal courthouses, a good chunk of the elite political press is moving into the Hoocoodanode? stage of political journalism. This is best exemplified by Thursday's New York Times podcast, the headline of which—"The Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, and How We Missed It"—got dragged like Hector's corpse all over the electric Twitter machine until someone at the Times sharpened up and changed the last half of it to "...and How Law Enforcement Ignored It," which is a little better, but not much.

To take the simplest argument first, "we," of course, did no such thing, unless "we" is a very limited—and very white—plural pronoun. The violence on the right certainly made itself obvious in Oklahoma City, and at the Atlanta Olympics, and at various gay bars and women's health clinics, and in Barrett Slepian's kitchen, and in the hills of North Carolina, where Eric Rudolph stayed on the lam for five years and in which he had stashed 250 pounds of explosives for future escapades.

"We," of course, did no such thing, unless "we" is a very limited—and very white—plural pronoun.

It's not "our" fault that the NYT hired Bret Stephens and Ross Douthat, and not or JJ McNab, to write for their Opinions section. It's not "our" fault that the NYT and other elite political media outlets hand-waved the fact that allegedly respectable Republican politicians, national ones as well as the local variety, attached themselves to various "respectable" extremist outfits like the Wise Users out west and the Council of Conservative Citizens, the modern manifestations of the Citizens Councils that were the polite face of American apartheid during the Jim Crow era in the South.

It's not "our" fault that the prion disease spread so wildly on AM radio and on television and, ultimately, on social media as well. It's not "our" fault that white supremacy and outright fascism has become fashionable in pockets of our military, and in our militarized local police forces. And it's certainly no surprise to "us" that the election of an African American president sent the well-nurtured crazies into dangerous hysterics.

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And, in 2009, when the Department of Homeland Security released a report describing how rightist extremism was spreading into the military and law enforcement, "we" weren't shocked—nor were "we" shocked when the right-wing media machine went to DefCon1 and, eventually, got DHS to pull the report. John Boehner, then the Speaker of the House of Representatives, said of the report:

[T]he Secretary of Homeland Security owes the American people an explanation for why she has abandoned using the term ‘terrorist’ to describe those, such as al Qaeda, who are plotting overseas to kill innocent Americans, while her own Department is using the same term to describe American citizens who disagree with the direction Washington Democrats are taking our nation. Everyone agrees that the Department should be focused on protecting America, but using such broad-based generalizations about the American people is simply outrageous.

Truth had nothing to do with it. Politics—the snarling of "respectable" conservative extremists—was all it was, and, as a subsequent NYT report informed us, the effects of this massive chickening-out was immediate and dangerous.

In February 2011, the Southern Poverty Law Center said that in the previous year, the number of domestic hate groups in the United States had reached more than 1,000 for the first time. The antigovernment Patriot movement gained 300 new groups over the same time period, a jump of over 60 percent. Every sphere of the far right was being energized at the same time. There was also an uptick in so-called lone wolves, who held extremist views but associated with no specific organization. In May 2010, a year after Johnson’s report was released, a father and son from Ohio, members of a little-known antigovernment movement called “sovereign citizens,” shot and killed two police officers during a traffic stop in West Memphis, Ark. It was the 12th attack or foiled plot by white-extremist “lone wolves” since 2009, almost all of which received little publicity.

So there were those of "us" who saw where this had been heading for 30-odd years and who are not surprised at all that the current president* was its inevitable product, and "we" also take seriously his statement on Wednesday that, if he is impeached, "the people will revolt." He wants them to do so—his people, anyway. "We" shouldn't be shocked at all by this.

John Boehner Martin H. Simon Getty Images

And if you were wondering how the elite political media was so negligent in doing its job of illustrating the obvious connections between right-wing extremism and the Republican political elite, here's the Washington Post, just this Thursday, urging support for a "compromise" that isn't even on the table, and one that would enshrine in bricks and steel the fundamental racism that drove 2016's winning presidential campaign.

Any compromise worth the trouble involves painful concessions for each side, but in this case, if assessed with cool heads, the concessions are a far cry from excruciating. The question, for both sides, is familiar: Do they want an issue or a solution? If it’s the latter, it’s eminently achievable.

Which is all bollocks.

One side has given itself over root and branch to the forces that the 2009 DHS report warned were so dangerous. It can happen here. It already has.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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