Alleged Terrorist Tracked after Buying $15 Money Order Made out to Katherine Harris
Chad Castagana was arrested over the weekend for sending threatening letters to prominent liberals, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-California), Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York) and television personalities David Letterman, Jon Stewart, Keith Olbermann, as well as Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone.
The alleged terrorist is 39 and lives with his parents in the Los Angeles suburb of Woodland Hills. He was apparently a frequent contributor to the ultra-rightwing extremist website Free Republic, whose members are known as “Freepers.”
Castanaga was arrested by the Joint Federal Terrorism Task Force in part because he purchased a money order for $15 that he had made out to “Friends of Katherine Harris” at the same time he purchased stamps and envelopes with which he intended to send another round of fake anthrax mailings.
On MSNBC’s Countdown yesterday, host Keith Olbermann, in an interview with Radar Online’s John Cook, revealed that Castagana was a follower of rightwing militarist talking heads Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin and Laura Ingraham:
OLBERMANN: [The] Ann Coulter-Laura Ingraham-Michelle Malkin connection is—how is that best described? Is that hero worship? Or crushes of some kind, or do we know what that is?
COOK: Well, I mean, if he is idolizing them, that sounds like hero worship to me … They sort of present a kind of rhetorical world view where they have their troops out there, and I think he thought of himself as one of their troops and wanted to live up to their standards. And I mean, I don’t think we can always hold these people responsible for the actions of the least hinged of their followers, but I think it is clear that he was an acolyte of the Coulters and the Malkins, and I think that they clearly enjoy having acolytes, and they clearly sort of issue calls to action — not necessarily to send threatening powder-filled envelopes to you in so many words, but they certainly exhort their followers to let themselves be known.
If convicted, Castagana could face 15 years in prison.
Every job imaginable has groupies… even someone as seethingly loathsome as Ann Coulter. And sometimes, groupies will go to extraordinary lengths to get what they want. Think he knows the way to The Coulster’s Lair?
Cook is wrong. We can and should start holding these wingnut extremists responsible for the behavior of their rabid fans. Their rhetoric is clearly designed to inflame and incite anger. As they have ratched up the bile to hold their audience, they generate waves of death threats and now this pretended anthrax scare.
I believe they’ve crossed the line between free speech and hate speech and should thus be held accountable.