FBI Arrests Domestic Terrorist, Christian Nationalist

You may have heard about the many liberal politicians and media personalities who have received letters with a white powder in them. The white powder was obviously intended to make the recipients think about anthrax - even though it wasn't anthrax, it was still a form of terrorism because the letters were designed to terrorize the people who received them.

The person who sent these letters may have been caught - and he has an interesting background. The accused, Chad Castagana, has no driver's license but he did have an internet account which he used to post anti-liberal material at major right-wing blogs where he unashamedly espoused a Christian Nationalist worldview.

Federal agents said he had sent more than a dozen letters containing a mysterious white powder to Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, "Late Show" host David Letterman and "The Daily Show" host Jon Stewart among other high-profile figures. Castagana used aliases such as "William Shatner" and fake return addresses and sent the letters over a three-month period, beginning in September, according to the FBI.

Many of the notes inside the envelopes contained death threats, insults and anti-Semitic phrases, federal agents said. The contents of one letter to Stewart referred to Alan Berg, a Jewish talk-show host assassinated by white supremacists in 1984 in Denver. ...

"Suffice to say, he was presenting a clear danger by sending threats," said Laura Eimiller, spokeswoman for the FBI's Los Angeles office. "Initial testing did not find the powder to be a biological threat."

On an old van parked in the driveway of Castagana's hillside home, the phrase "Death to all liberals" is inscribed on the van's dirty back window.

Source: LA Daily News

Apparently, he has admitted at least some things to the FBI:

Castagana told federal agents that he used household substances to make the white powder, to make sure he was being taken seriously.

Castagana "described himself as a compulsive voter who votes Republican, and he said that he sent the letters to specific individuals because he did not like their liberal politics," according to an FBI affidavit.

Bruce Wilson at Talk To Action quotes some things he wrote at Free Republic:

Liberals and Lefties everywhere in America's institutions are trying to slowly but increasingly ban Christianity from America, from our site, from our discourse !

They have already succeded in banning any sign of Christianity from ourPublic Schools !!

If THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST were released today for the first time, it would be slapped with an NC-17 rating !

Dave Neiwert points out how the actions of Chad Castagana relates to the broader eliminationist rhetoric that is common with Christian Nationalists — and especially with some conservative pundits whom Castagana is a fan of:

Haters like the people Castagana claims as his heroes -- Coulter, Malkin, Ingraham, just for starters -- are constantly engaging in the worst kind of eliminationist rhetoric directed primarily at liberals. It is simply an inevitability that, when this kind of hate is broadcast to millions of people daily, some of them are eventually going to start acting it out in fashions precisely like this. And worse.

All these figures, of course, have the right to speak as they wish. But the media-industry figures -- the producers and executives who put them on the air, thereby giving them a bullhorn to broadcast it nationally and spew it across our television sets and radios -- are simply being irresponsible.

There are a lot of haters out there. Glenn Greenwald cites Pam Atlas who has called for the murder of American diplomats and the bombing of the U.S. State Department:

Pam Atlas, like Ann Coulter, is the exposed id of the Bush movement. She continues to be embraced by the right-wing blosophere because, for many of them, the sentiments she is expressing -- as extreme and attention-seeking though they may be -- are not at all objectionable to them because the same sentiments motivate them. There have been enormous amounts of ink spilled on the so-called "Angry Left" and the allegedly rabid liberal bloggers (mostly based on the fact that some delicate pundit received e-mails with bad words in them), but the pulsating and ever-increasing hate-mongering in the right-wing blogosphere has been all but ignored.

Assuming that Chad Castagana is guilty — and his reported comments indicate that he is — then Chad Castagana is a terrorist. However, he's not terrorist who prays to Mecca five times a day, has brown skin, wears funny clothes, or who speaks a foreign language. Instead, he's a Christian who lives in the suburbs, has white skin, votes Republican, and speaks English. Could this have anything to do with why major conservative pundits who tend to scream bloody murder at any hint of Muslim terrorism in America have little or nothing to day about the arrest of an actual terrorist who have committed several verifiable acts of domestic terrorism?

 

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