When short-haired, god-fearing and country-loving patriots are the good guys (no cops bust up a tea party rally), while the long-haired hippies are the bad guys (see COINTELPRO, police treatment of occupy or the WTO protests), what else you want to call it?

Yes, there are more dimensions to politics than 'left' and 'right', but it does indeed seem that the security services are always worried about a certain type.

Well on the extreme end of things you have ruby ridge and waco. Then you've got the addition of militia groups to Domestic terror lists.

And then you have the IRS specifically targeting right wing non-profits.

The IRS never specifically targeted right wing non-profits. The list of keywords they used included both right wing indicators like "tea party" and left wing indicators like "progressive".

The tax categorization these organizations were applying for is meant to exclude political activism, so flagging organizations with explicitly political names was a reasonable approach.

Well, let's distinguish between degrees here. Both Occupy and the Tea Party have silly, simplistic solutions to real problems, and aren't violent. The cops really have no business hassling either group, let alone infiltrating them like they want to be secret agents.

Actual militia groups.. I mean, Oklahoma City happened, right? Imagine if there was a group of hippies or, god forbid, Muslims with the level of rhetoric that some of these militia groups have along with the training routines and arsenals to prove they're serious.

My beef with how the police treat hippies and muslims is the well-documented, "infiltrate, keep suggesting violent actions until someone says 'maybe', then arrest them" routine. If someone's suggesting violent actions ahead of time and making actual preparations for such without prompting, then that may actually be a threat. Regardless of politics.

EDIT: This is not to say the ATF acted appropriately at Ruby Ridge or Waco. They shouldn't be the first ones shooting.

Except that it turns out the IRS wasn't actually targetting right wing groups.

Whereas COINTELPRO on the other hand...

Bringing right/left as if it were even relevant to this conversation is a simple way to shut out debate of the topic of the NSA infiltrating gatekeepers - which any libertarian or reasonable conservative would normally not defend, but you've made them by calling it 'right wing'.

I didn't bring it up initially, but there IS a huge cultural divide between 'real americans' and multiculturalism/cultural-liberalism, with security services mostly coming from the 'real americans' camp. That's what the OP was presumably referring to with the "right-wing" comment.

Libertarians are theoretically on the sidelines of that debate if not fully on the multiculturalist side. I guess discussions like this one separate the actual libertarians from the crypto-republicans.

> When short-haired, god-fearing and country-loving patriots are the good guys (no cops bust up a tea party rally), while the long-haired hippies are the bad guys (see COINTELPRO, police treatment of occupy or the WTO protests), what else you want to call it?

The Tea Party generally gets permits for its rallies, and complies with insurance and crowd control requirements. Occupy and WTO protestors generally do not. This is sufficient to explain all or most of the differences in treatment.

If security services judged people by their hair, they would be rather easy to infiltrate and subvert.

The US is far to the right relative to the rest of the world, but I get where you're coming from. I didn't mean to imply that the "right wing" was the crux of the problem-- totalitarianism is the problem.

Right. (hah) The non-establishment right wing and tea party appears just as much angry/worried about the increasing collusion between government and wall street as the non-establishment left, if not even more. Increasingly, big govt and big business are becoming harder to tell apart. Corruption is everywhere, but the scariest part is the ability of US govt to silence and intimidate critics both without and within.

"Right Wing Authitarian" is a term defined by Bob Altemeyer. It does not map exactly to the left/right usually associated with politics. It is intended to refer to the authoritarian personality type, regardless of their political positions.

His book on the subject ("The Authoritarians") is incredible, and has a lot to say about the rise in authoritarianism that has been slowly creeping into today's politics.

https://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_authoritarianism