Refusal to Call Charleston Shootings “Terrorism” Again Shows It’s a Meaningless Propaganda Term
In February 2010, a man named Joseph Stack deliberately flew his small airplane
into the side of a building that housed a regional IRS office in
Austin, Texas, just as 200 agency employees were starting their workday.
Along with himself, Stack killed an IRS manager and injured 13 others.
Stack was an anti-tax, anti-government fanatic, and chose his target
for exclusively political reasons. He left behind a lengthy manifesto
cogently setting forth his largely libertarian political views (along
with, as I wrote at the time,
some anti-capitalist grievances shared by the left, such as “rage over
bailouts, the suffering of America’s poor, and the pilfering of the
middle class by a corrupt economic elite and their government-servants”;
Stack’s long note ended: “the communist creed: From each according to
his ability, to each according to his need. The capitalist creed: From
each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed”).
About Stack’s political grievances, his manifesto declared that
“violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.”
