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White-hot rhetoric

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, on April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, murdering 168 innocent Americans.

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, on April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, murdering 168 innocent Americans.

It was the first time many Americans became aware of the heated "federal-government-is-evil" screeds that had by then become a staple of conservative-talk radio, and they were horrified. Within a week, Rush Limbaugh felt compelled to write a full-page article for Newsweek headlined, "Why I'm Not to Blame."

This year, April 19 finds a renewed and heightened threat of extremist violence. It's the scheduled date of an unarmed "Second Amendment" rally in Washington, but also a subsidiary "open carry" rally in Virginia. In a sickening commemoration of McVeigh's actions, participants are invited to come armed and to travel in small convoys to a park on the Potomac about a mile from the National Mall, so they can "step up to the edge."

We certainly are at the edge of something and it's scary as hell. In recent weeks, the violent rhetoric of the presidential campaign and the "town hall" melees last summer has been ratcheted up several notches - and the paranoid fantasies of government-run concentration camps and the equation of democratic rule with "tyranny" has moved from the shadows into the mainstream:

_ Take Mike Vanderboegh, a former militia member and a scheduled speaker at the April 19 armed rally. He told the Washington Post he was pleased that so many people heeded his blog's call to break the windows of members of Congress who voted for health-care reform. Vanderboegh (who lives on government disability checks) says many Americans are armed and capable of "perhaps even initiating a civil war."

_ Take Sarah Palin, whose political-action committee published a map showing the districts of 20 Democratic members of Congress marked with rifle crosshairs. When the health-care law passed last week, she Twittered, "Don't retreat, instead, RELOAD!" She dismisses any suggestion that her repeated gun imagery is inflammatory. What part of "RELOAD!" are we to pretend we don't understand?

_ A new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center says the number of "Patriot Groups - militias and other organizations that see the federal government as part of a plot to impose 'one-world government' on liberty-loving Americans" - increased 244 percent last year. The center's Mark Potok told WHYY's Terry Gross last week that the national mood is reminiscent of the "white-hot heat" that marked the period leading up to Oklahoma City but that it is much more widespread, spreading through the tea parties and "aided and abetted by certain political figures, especially in the Republican Party."

_ A Harris Poll released last week showed that extremist ideology has taken hold of an unhealthy minority in this country. It turns out that President Obama's unwillingness to support even common-sense gun control has not placated them: 61 percent of Republicans believe that Obama is out to take their guns and 41 percent say Obama wants to use an economic collapse or terrorist attack as an excuse to take dictatorial powers.

Twenty-four percent of Republicans said they believe that Obama is the anti-Christ.

Who knows if there's any way to walk back this hysteria, but we have to try. Reasonable Americans and the media have to call out Republican leaders on their unwillingness to speak out against this insanity.

Fifteen years ago, we may not have known what extremist rhetoric could trigger - pun intended. Today we have no excuse.