David Neiwert Would Like a Word

"There are very few places besides The Bulwark that have been committed to sounding the alarm about right-wing domestic terrorism, about Trump and the MAGA movement and their... and the kind of violent tendencies that he's stoking."  -- Tim Miller, The Bulwark podcast, September 12, 2025

"Sacajawea carried a baby on her back all the way to the Pacific Ocean. And somewhere, that baby thinks he discovered America." -- Bert Cooper, Mad Men.

And Tim Miller is that baby.  

If I looked for a month I don't think I could find a clearer or more succinct example of how completely the Never Trumpers have erased the long history of the Left's critique of the Right than Tim Miller's offhand, self-congratulatory remark about "sounding the alarm".   

Hundreds of Liberal writers and bloggers were sounding the alarm about the dangerous trajectory of the Republican Party back when Tim Miller was bopping through the halls of Regis Jesuit High School rocking out to Ricky Martin and Jamiroquai.  But because the existence of a vast body of urgent, accurate, detailed pre-Trump analysis of the trajectory of the Republican Party would fuck up Never Trumper claims that, A) no one coulda seen this coming and, B) they and only they were the first and boldest humans to ever stand athwart the GOP's Pretty Hate Machine and shout stop...all of those millions of words spilled by Liberals in the deeply unpopular cause of warning the nation about where Republican madness was taking us is just ... disappeared.  

Gone. 

Bulldozed down the Memory Hole and paved over.

And so, in aid of once again transgressing conservatism's #1 rule -- No Fair Remembering Stuff -- here's a little history for whoever at The Bulwark has the duty of monitoring this little blog 'o mine on the downlow.

From Wikipedia:

David Neiwert is an American freelance journalist and blogger. He received the National Press Club Award for Distinguished Online Journalism in 2000 for a domestic terrorism series he produced for MSNBC's website. Neiwert has concentrated in part on extremism in the Northwest.

...He went to work at MSNBC in 1996 as a writer-producer, where he continued through late 2000. Since then, he has focused on writing books and producing his blog Orcinus, which tends to report on the crossover between the mainstream and the far right.

The Northwest Progressive Institute named its annual awards to the region's best liberal bloggers after Neiwert. He edited the political blog Crooks And Liars from 2008 to 2012. As of 2018, Neiwert worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center as their Pacific Northwest correspondent.

In January 2019, Neiwert left the SPLC blog Hatewatch to join Daily Kos as a correspondent...

And speaking of the SPLC, also from Wikipedia:

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit legal advocacy organization specializing in civil rights and public interest litigation. Based in Montgomery, Alabama, it is known for its legal cases against white supremacist groups, for its classification of hate groups and other extremist organizations, and for promoting tolerance education programs.: 1500  The SPLC was founded by Morris Dees, Joseph J. Levin Jr., and Julian Bond in 1971 as a civil rights law firm in Montgomery.

Since the 2000s, the SPLC's classification and listings of hate groups (organizations that "attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics") and anti-government extremists have been widely relied upon by academic and media sources...

You may also remember that, way back during Before Time, the Department of Homeland Security published a report entitled, “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment”.  Which, if you were on the left and had been paying any attention at all to American politics for the past few decades, came as no surprise.  

And if you were on the Right, it was an occasion to completely freak out and set the howling dogs of conservative media on those DHS commies who concocted this obvious Lefty propaganda.  Here's a sample:

Michelle Malkin:  “One of the most embarrassingly shoddy pieces of propaganda I'd ever read out of DHS.” (Newsweek)

Also Michelle Malkin: “A piece of crap report that serves as a sweeping indictment of conservatives.”  (CBS News)

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH): “To characterize men and women returning home after defending our country as potential terrorists is offensive and unacceptable.” 

Matt Lewis : “This is almost unbelievable. The message is simple: If you are a conservative, you might be dangerous…” (Townhall)  

Resistance hero Bill Kristol dismissed it as “Juvenile.”  (Salon)

Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.): “I am disturbed and personally offended by the Department of Homeland Security's view that returning military veterans and gun owners are likely to commit terrorist acts.”  (PolitiFact) 

Lance Fairchok: “The Homeland Security Assessment targeting mainstream conservatism was amateurish, poorly written and its logic absurdly shallow.” (American Thinker)

Richard Thompson:  “This is not an intelligence report but a diatribe against those who oppose the policies of the Obama administration. It is a declaration of war against the American people and our constitution.” (Thomas More Law Center)

Although they should have expected it, defenders of DHS's findings were still caught flat-footed by the Right's coordinated and aggressive attacks, pointing out that the report was basically just ... math.  The findings were nothing more or less than a narrative explanation of statistics collected by law enforcement and run through spreadsheets and charts and such.  From Daryl Johnson (former DHS analyst) in WIRED: “It was an extremely frustrating time, to see conservatives and media folks taking the report out of context and misinterpreting it.” 

Shoulda asked literally any Liberal bloggers, Daryl.  We coulda warned you that this is always the way the Right reacts to facts it disapproves of.  It's why they lost their mind when Barack Obama was elected.  It's why they nominated Donald Trump three times, and elected him twice.

So, what poisonous fruit was born out of the Right's massed attack on DHS's pre-Trump warning about "Rightwing Extremism"?

From ABC News, January 6, 2022:

DHS official whose early warning about militias was rebuffed speaks out about Jan. 6

More than ten years ago, a report written by a Department of Homeland Security official warning about the resurgence of right-wing extremism caused outrage among conservatives and some veterans groups across the country.

Titled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," the report was met with harsh criticism from officials including then-House Minority Leader John Boehner, who accused the agency of not focusing on the "real threats," like Islamist terrorism.

The internal study singled out white supremacists and warned that veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan could be targeted for recruitment by right-wing extremists. But due to the ensuing political backlash, the DHS caved to pressure and dismantled the unit that had published the report -- and all work connected to analyzing and tracking the rise of violent right-wing extremism was halted.

Now, on the anniversary of the day that right-wing militia members helped storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Daryl Johnson, the DHS official who wrote the report, says he and his team could "have repelled against the growth and the radicalization of [extremist] movements."

"We could've helped stem the tide and growth," Johnson told ABC News in an interview for the new ABC News documentary "Homegrown: Standoff to Rebellion," which charts the rise of the anti-government movements at the center of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol...

Johnson said the formation of groups and movements like the Tea Party "serve as a breeding ground and a recruitment pool for more hardline extremists" like the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, dozens of whose members were present on Jan.6.

"These two movements started getting more organized as their membership grew," said Johnson, "and they started actively participating in protest activity, organizing rallies."...

Johnson's DHS report, which was leaked to conservative media, was meant for law enforcement so they could "be prepared for the threat within," Johnson explained.

"And just like a disease or something of harm in our own bodies, this threat metastasized over time," said Johnson. "Year after year, the cancer and the virus spread within the body of America, to the point where we're now in a critical life-or-death situation."

In April, a Washington Post analysis of data compiled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies revealed a growing threat from homegrown terrorism, with right-wing extremist attacks and plots "greatly eclipsing those from the far left and causing more death."

And that’s the bitter irony. 

Long before The Bulwark rebranded clear-eyed observation and common sense as some kind of uniquely Never Trumper superpower of insight and bravery, Liberals, journalists, watchdog groups, and even DHS itself were documenting, warning, and pleading with America to take right-wing extremism seriously. Those warnings were mocked, buried, or attacked until the threat metastasized into the open violence of January 6th. 

So when Tim Miller congratulates The Bulwark for “sounding the alarm,” what he’s really doing is standing on the rubble of a memory hole his own movement dug -- pretending to discover a country that others had already mapped, at great cost, long before he ever showed up.

I Am The Liberal Media