The FBI is investigating the hanging death of a U.S. Census worker near a Kentucky cemetery. A law enforcement official says the word ‘fed’ was scrawled on his chest.

The body of Bill Sparkman, a 51-year-old Census field worker and occasional teacher, was found Sept. 12 in the Daniel Boone National Forest in rural southeast Kentucky.

Glenn Beck, along with the rest of the right, has regularly pushed the ACORN-Census conspiracy for months.

>> Bachmann: Census Could Send People to Camps
>> Beck asks Bachmann “the odds” the gov’t will fine those who don’t complete census, says he’s “considered” not filling it out

These people are just going to escalate, like they always do.

Republican officials such as the Florida state chairman are playing a dangerous game with an unhinged segment of public opinion that regards Obama not as an elected official with whom they disagree, but as an illegitimate usurper of the presidency.

That paranoid fantasy is what’s really behind the ‘birther’ movement and the allegations that the president is — take your pick — a secret Marxist or a secret Muslim.

It’s the kind of fanciful anxiety that produces comments like this, posted on a conservative website this week: ‘Barack Obama and his left-wing Chicago machine regime are putting into place laws and institutions which will insure that there will never again be free elections in America.’

These are the people who are stockpiling ammunition and keeping their children at home next Tuesday.

This is the same kind of speech that gave Tim McVeigh ideas. Only its much worse now.

Glenn Beck’s America.

As reported by Saturday’s NY Post, ‘a Long Island mother of three — armed to the teeth with an assault rifle and shotgun — was arrested for scouting out and taking pictures of an Air National Guard base.’

Her arsenal included an XM-15 assault rifle, a shotgun and 500 rounds of ammunition.

The woman, Nancy Genovese, had been seen at the base a few weeks earlier, taking photos and questioning the guards. This time she had returned to take photos of the perimeter of the base. It’s not difficult to make the connection that she was paranoid about ‘FEMA Camps’.

Genovese is a Glenn Beck fan, according to her MySpace page (archived here). ‘He is mad as hell and so are we. He is right and so are we’, writes Genovese, who also posted a video of a Glenn Beck rant.”

Remember, they’re not Birchers. Except they are.

This last comment was a reference to popular right-wing conspiracy theories about Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)-constructed prisons and concentration camps for U.S. citizens. Such conspiracy theories had long been staples of the militia movement, but received a reinvigorating shot in the arm following the election of Barack Obama as president. Almost overnight, right-wing conspiracists across the country revived all of their 1990s militia conspiracy theories about the “New World Order,” planned gun confiscations, and government plots against the citizenry. Once more, wild speculations about SHTF (“s—t hits the fan”) and TEOTWAKI (“the end of the world as we know it”) scenarios became rampant.

Poplawski bought into the SHTF/TEOTWAKI conspiracy theories hook, line and sinker, even posting a link to Stormfront of a YouTube video featuring talk show host Glenn Beck talking about FEMA camps with Congressman Ron Paul.

And to update August’s earlier comment, this is now the sixth opinion Glenn Reynolds has promoted because he’s too cowardly to put his own out there.

ALSO: Fox News, now sponsoring tea bag parties?

So Oliver might want to become better informed before he wildly accuses mainstream conservative outlets of promoting “conspiracy theories.” The Obama is a Muslim – wasn’t born here – fake birth certificate – is a terrorst – crew are relegated to the fringes of conservatism with most mainstream conservatives condemning the idiocy.

Andy McCarthy on National Review Online, July 6, 2008:

Our Jim Geraghty seemed to pooh-pooh the birth certificate controversy about a week ago, but according to the above cited report (at a site called DougRoss@Journal) and a new one from Israeli Insider, there are new developments, and the Obama campaign appears to be stonewalling. Shouldn’t it be a fairly easy matter to prove he was born in Hawaii if he really was? Why wouldn’t Obama just end this quickly?

Granted, National Review is the sort of publication that once advocated against Martin Luther King so it should be consigned to the fringes of American society. But alas, what is fringe and nutty to most Americans is mainstream conservative thought. Like the National Review. Like the ideas being pushed by Fox News, right wing radio and the like about Democrats and liberals from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama.

The right refuses to acknowledge the consequences of the atmosphere they helped create and continue to foster, so its up to regular Joes like myself to point them out.

Also:

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann says she fears the Obama administration will create “re-education camps for young people, where young people have to go and get trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward and then they have to go to work in some of these politically correct forums.”

UPDATE: Ooooh, this one clearly rankles old Insty, because he actually responded… Oh, no he didn’t. He called me a “shill” for Media Matters and accused me of being on a listserv. Its days like this I’m glad that when I was deciding what side of the political aisle I wanted to be on, I didn’t make the same mistake as Glenn Reynolds and choose the one where we encourage people to shoot cops. Also, kind of funny for Reynolds to call me a shill when he spent years writing articles for a lobbyist and is a key figurehead in the joke that is “PajamasTV”. But whatever, this clearly annoyed The Prickly One.

UPDATE 2: Reynolds has updated his post again. First, “Jim Treacher emails”. Funny, this isn’t the first time that has happened. In the past Reynolds has forwarded me attacks that Jim Treacher, who last I checked is some kind of comedy writer for the unfunny RedEye show on Fox News (apparently Treacher doesn’t write for Red Eye, but wrote a blog for the unfunny guy who hosts the ridiculously unfunny Redeye or some crap that I don’t care about, but I do know for sure Treacher sends cowardly emails to Reynolds about me), sent to him. Apparently they’re some kind of email buddies and Treacher isn’t the guy who can’t talk to your face without big bad Instapundit to back him up.

Then, Reynolds characterizes himself as “an early booster of Oliver Willis’s blogging career”. Hmmm. I started blogging a while before he did, and in the aftermath of 9/11 we linked back and forth. We agreed on the invasion of Afghanistan, but when Reynolds started advocating for the invasion of Iraq and calling those who were against it pro-Saddam anti-Americans I and others called that out for the bullshit it is and was. Reynolds, as is the usual tactic from him and the right, tries somehow to change history and make out that when I began working for Media Matters it changed my outlook on things. Oh, to be as intellectually dishonest as Glenn Harland Reynolds and have to look at yourself in the mirror every morning, knowing that you’ve built an entire media persona and career filled with excrement and that you’re past the point of no return on it. I would have sympathy for him, but he signed up for it on his own and churns out swill every day without anybody compelling him to.

Furthermore, Reynolds has an almost patholigical aversion to pushing out his own position and instead hides behind others. My guess is he does it because he’s wrong so often and get called on it, it must be easier to just link to someone and say “Heh. Read the whole thing.” Or say “so and so emailed me to say x”. Some of us, especially some of us liberals, have the balls to put our own opinions up and stand behind them.

Not to pat myself on the back – but I will anyways – I am one of those people.

ALSO: Don Surber jumps on Reynolds idiot train as well, doing the conservative thing they always do by trying to use a totally unrelated recent event as comparison. Surber’s argument is that because I didn’t write about the shooting in Oakland, somehow I can’t write about this one. Does the right understand that we are completely on to this silly game of theirs? We’ve watched it for years. The mainstream media laps up this “two sides” bull, but we don’t.

The shooting in Oakland was horrible, but the guy who did it was just a bad guy. The killing in Pittsburgh was the result of right-wingers spreading disinformation. This guy, already disturbed, was apparently helped over the edge by conspiracy theories pushed by the mainstream right in America.

August notes: “Wow, Oliver, you know you’ve pissed off Instapundit when he has to link to five other people’s thoughts.” Heh. Indeed.

A writer at Volokh report cites happiness studies to try and prove that people on Fox News haven’t been pushing paranoia about Obama being anti-gun (which is what I and others have ben saying). Or something. Oh, conservatives…. distraction is the name of the game.

Pittsburgh police say a man wearing a bulletproof vest opened fire on officers during a domestic disturbance call, killing three of them.

Police chief Nate Harper says the motive for Saturday’s shooting isn’t clear.

Friends say the gunman recently had been upset about losing his job and that he feared the Obama administration was poised to ban guns.

>> Was Pittsburgh shooter driven by right-wing gun paranoia about Obama?

>> In this video, Richard Poplawski’s friend says that he was concerned over “Zionist control of the government” which is a key belief of the extremist militia right.