He shrugged his shoulders and offered me one of those smiles that is really not a smile; a facial expression that suggests that life often presents you with very unexpected challenges.

The “he”, in this case, is a good friend of mine who is a long-time progressive activist.  He had just informed me that he had received a written death threat from a right-wing, underground group.  The death threat is being taken seriously by the police because this same group has made other death threats.  My friend’s security has been increased, and he has to look over his shoulder.

Why the death threat?  Apparently because he was publicly outspoken against the Arizona anti-immigrant law.  It is also my guess that given that he is white that some of these right-wing idiots especially take exception to his opposition to white supremacy, as recently represented by the passage of the SB 1070 anti-immigrant legislation.

The death threat received by my friend brought much closer that the old adage that “…words will never hurt you…” is wrong.  Words are extremely powerful, which is one reason that the political Right concentrates on manipulating them.  They know that words create images and that words articulated by certain people who are considered either opinion-makers or, in this case, race traitors can have an impact on multitudes.

Whether this particular death threat is serious is impossible to judge.  What is clear is that the language of ‘civil war’ has become central to an important segment of the political Right.  It is not simply about the suppression of alternative points of view.  The political Right has always been intolerant.  What is emerging is a language of what some people would call “neo-Confederacy”, that is, that it is time for good white people to take back the USA by any means necessary and, in effect, implement, in a 21st century variation, the objectives of the Confederate States of America.

“Take back,” you ask?  As this same friend said to me, the combination of dire economic conditions along with an African American in the White House just drives the political Right crazy.  This fact is one that we on the left side of the aisle must take very seriously.  For all of the criticisms that we have of President Obama—correct criticisms in most cases, by the way, ranging from his approach to Iraq and Afghanistan to his pro-corporate slant on healthcare reform—what we must grasp is that the political Right simply cannot stand the symbolism of an African American having risen to the Presidency of a nation-state that they believe to be destined for them alone.  How else can anyone make sense of the otherwise intelligent individuals, such as Newt Gingrich, suggesting that President Obama is a socialist?  Obama is no more a socialist than I am an astronomer, but that does not matter.  What he represents for the political Right is what matters.

So, the death threat received by my friend is about an attitude toward political struggle in the USA and about the future of this country.  An important segment of the political Right, egged on by those who suggest that it is time to go to war (even when they use the term euphemistically), simply cannot tolerate the disappearance of the Confederate dream; the ultimate dream of the settler.

Sticks and stones will definitely break your bones, but words are far more powerful.  This is why the Right sees in institutions such as Fox News the means and opportunity to present a story that appeals and energizes their constituency; a story that drives this constituency to distraction, combining nightmares with myths to the point that reality is not real but is a zone of fantasy mixed with fear.

When the political Right cannot distinguish reality from this zone of fantasy the consequences can be fatal…for the rest of us.  For this reason none of us can afford to ignore these threats or write off the language of war arising from the Right.  They actually mean it. 

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum and co-author of, Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice   (University of California Press), which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA. Click here to contact Mr. Fletcher.