Kellyanne Conway’s ignorant attempt at justifying the proposed U.S. travel ban on people from predominantly Muslim countries due to the nonexistent “Bowling Green massacre” has prompted a look back of a Bowling Green slaughter planned by a virulent racist, not a Muslim.
ProPublica has pieced together the 2012 story of a wannabe terrorist in Bowling Green, Ohio, located a few hundred miles away from its Kentucky city namesake that was cited by Conway, a Donald Trump confidante.
Schmidt
Richard Schmidt, a white supremacist, was arrested in possession of 18 firearms, among them two AR–15 assault rifles, an AR–10 assault rifle and a Remington Model 700 sniper rifle.
Law enforcement authorities also found body armor and approximately 40,000 rounds of ammunition. Prosecutors alleged that he had been aiming to carry out a wide assortment of killings against blacks and Jews.
“This defendant, quite simply, was a well-funded, well-armed and focused one-man army of racial and religious hate,” prosecutors said in a court document.
Schmidt’s plans for mass murder, which received a modest amount of attention in the media because he had no ties to Islamic jihadis, revealed that he had a list of names and addresses of those to be assassinated, including the leaders of NAACP chapters in Michigan and Ohio.
Because a judge ruled that the prosecution failed to establish that Schmidt was a political terrorist, he was sentenced to less than six years in prison and he is eligible for parole in February 2018, according to ProPublica.
The Schmidt case contrasts markedly from the phony “massacre” described by Conway, for which she has recanted. In that case, two Iraqi immigrants in Bowling Green, Kent., were arrested and convicted for previously planting IED explosives that targeted U.S. soldiers during the Iraq War. The two defendants were sentenced to life and 40 years in prison.
A similar xenophobic response occurred this past week when a right-wing extremist opened fire at a Quebec City mosque in Canada, killing six and wounding many others.
The immediate flurry of commentary on right-wing websites — when initial, inaccurate reports indicated an incredulous attack on a mosque by Muslims — dissolved into a virtual blackout of conservative coverage when the single perpetrator was identified as an Islamophobe and an admirer of President Trump. The president also avoided comment at that point.
Police later announced that the suspect, Alexandre Bissonnette, was known in the city’s activist circles as an online troll who was inspired by extreme right-wing French nationalists, stood up for Trump and was against immigration to Quebec, especially by Muslims.
Meanwhile, in the U.S. the Trump administration’s focus on political killings is headed in a very different direction.
Reuters reported that the Department of Homeland Security is planning to retool its Countering Violent Extremism program to focus solely on Islamic radicals. Government sources told the news agency the program would be rebranded as “Countering Islamic Extremism” or “Countering Radical Islamic Extremism,” and “would no longer target groups such as white supremacists who have also carried out bombings and shootings in the United States.”
It wouldn’t be the first time the Department of Homeland Security chose to look away, ProPublica reminds us:
In 2009, Daryl Johnson, then an analyst with the Department (of Homeland Security), drafted a study of right-wing radicals in the United States. Johnson saw a confluence of factors that might energize the movement and its threat: the historic election of an African-American president; rising rates of immigration; proposed gun control legislation; and a wave of military veterans returning to civilian life at a time of painful economic recession.
The report predicted an uptick in extremist activity, particularly within “the white supremacist and militia movements.”
Response to the document was swift and punishing. Conservative news outlets and Republican leaders condemned Johnson’s report as a work of “anti-military bigotry” and an attack on conservative opinion. Janet Napolitano, the (Obama administration’s) head of Homeland Security at the time, retracted the report and closed Johnson’s office, the Extremism and Radicalization Branch.
One more piece of information that is especially pertinent in the Bowling Green, Ohio, case – Schmidt had accumulated his arsenal though he was a convicted felon who killed a man and wounded two other people in 1989.
One page of the Schmidt list of targets in 2012 had the name of Scott Kaufman, the chief executive officer of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit. He said he was stunned when federal agents showed up at his office.
“For a convicted violent felon to amass an arsenal with 40,000 rounds of ammunition with no red flags popping up is problematic,” Kaufman said. “No matter where you stand on the gun issue, it makes you wonder. The moment I saw my name in this guy’s notebook, I freaked out.”
Photo: Presented as an illustration only
Headshot: U.S. Department of Justice
