She charges that what the conservative movement and the Republican Party has  been up to amounts to "sedition in slow motion, a gradual corrosive undermining of the government's authority and capacity to run the country. And it's been at the core of their politics going all the way back to Goldwater." There are both secular and religious and overlapping seditious ideas, (that are certainly well represented in the Hutaree case) tossed on the sea of factions, personalities and institutions of the right. Robinson's broad point is worth carefully considering since it clarifies the nature of the threat posed by a wide swath of the right, and anyone who has watched the news in recent weeks can understand the issue.  More immediately, Robinson says that rightist and GOP leaders waving around revolutionary flags, shouting revolutionary slogans at Tea Party functions, and engaging in eliminationist rhetoric is "play acting" and "playing with fire" and that "they need to bring this incendiary campaign to a screeching halt. Right now." While that is most unlikely, finding ways to hold them to account is an obvious first step.

Here is where she thinks we need to begin:  

We need to start talking about this for what it is, and calling it out whenever it happens. Leonard Zeskind points out that the feds have never been able to make a sedition charge stick against a right-wing group (if the Hutaree are convicted, it'll be a first); but the first step in stopping sedition is making sure everybody knows exactly what it is when they see it. And that means calling out the S-word every time we see the conservatives defiantly flinging their hands and feet out over that line to score a few cheap political points.

I think she is right, and I would add a point or two towards what needs to be a wider conversation.

Firstly, I would say that we need to sort out which elements on the Religious Right embrace seditious ideas, particularly those who are taking explicit steps to take action on such ideas.  Robinson correctly points to Wilson and Tabachnick's work in this regard. Her summary is excerpted below:

When the "spiritual warriors" of the Transformations movement proudly announce that they've mapped every town in America -- literally creating target maps of "demonic activity" that pinpoint government offices, non-Evangelical houses of worship, clinics, theaters, Indian mounds and sites; or even just households with Muslims, neo-pagans, Goth-baby teenagers, or Obama stickers on their cars -- they're putting us on notice that they've identified the specific people and places that need to be "cleansed" in order to purify their communities. According to researchers Rachel Tabachnick and Bruce Wilson, these "transformation" attempts have already become government-level issues in New Jersey, Arizona, Texas, and Hawaii.

At present, they claim that they're only mapping their neighborhoods so they can pray over us all; and their attempts to take over local government are being done by purely democratic means. But, as has often happened before (yes, the Nazis started out just this way), the day may come when they'll decide that mere prayer and organizing is not enough. Like any street gang, they've taken proprietary responsibility for a piece of turf; and they believe God is holding them accountable for everything that happens there. The resulting performance pressure is a perfect setup to justify more aggressive cleansing tactics if they can't convert the town by peaceful means.

And some of these groups have already effectively crossed the line, in spirit if not in prosecutable fact. When the Christian dominionists train up "Joel's Army" by sending their sons to the US armed services so they can get the combat experience they'll need to set up a worldwide theocracy, that's evidence of an active plan to effect an armed government takeover. When senior US military officers put their commitment to Jesus ahead of their commitment to uphold the Constitution and regard the military as God's force in the world, we should be very afraid.

For years now, we've dismissed all of this as crazy talk, the rantings of a loony fringe that will never get enough traction to become a material threat to our democracy. But we're well past the point where it's no longer quaint and funny, or an embarrassing breach of democratic etiquette that polite people should just ignore.

Second, we need to renew the broad principles of the Talk to Action project,  one of which I reiterated the other day,

we have taken the view from the beginning, that labeling, demonization and epithets are poor and often counterproductive substitutes for terms that allow for actual discussion and help us all to better understand the Religious Right in its many, and ever evolving, factions, leaders, ideologies and so on.

In that regard, too many people still resort to meaningless epithets such as "Christianist" and "American Taliban" as if these terms have any resonance with anyone; without any regard for the counterproductivity of calling people stupid names; and what they actually communicate when they are used.  

One of the consequences of labeling and demonization tactics is that adopting misleading and loaded language can limit our own capacity to understand the various elements of the Religious Right. By developing our thinking around pejorative epithets, we limit our capacity to grasp the breadth and depth of the subject. It is as if, for example, we were going to try to study and to report on the entire world of stone, minerals, ore, crystals and so on and insisting on only using the word "rocks."

A further consequence is that we can limit our capacity to meaningfully communicate with one another as well as with broader publics about these complex and controversial subjects, by substituting fashionable epithets for the powerful vocabularies that are readily available to meet our intellectual and communications needs. We use such vocabularies all the time on this site.