Americans’ collective panic over the idea of fostering Syrian refugees in recent weeks proved a windfall for conservative upstarts. Presidential candidates have since turned to fear mongering and circulated debunked immigration myths, as governors showboated toothless threats regarding the admittance of refugees into their states in response to amnesty programs supported by President Obama and Hillary Clinton.

It’s a continuing trend, as we reported several weeks ago, of Presidential hopefuls pivoting campaign messages to accommodate a fear narrative in the wake of the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris, one which gives a default upper hand to Republicans, for whom defense, immigration and terrorism has always been their métier.

But that opportunism has been complicated by a spate of domestic terrorist attacks that have occurred here in the U.S., each of which harbor the inconvenient feature of being committed neither by Islamic extremists or refugees, but by homegrown terrorists whose convictions plant them firmly within the fringes of the Republican Party.

The November 27 shooting at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood facility that left two civilians and a police officer dead, and the November 23 white supremacist shooting at a Minneapolis Black Lives Matter vigil — a movement that has been repeatedly referred to as a “hate group” by Fox News — have either left Republican Presidential candidates in a puzzling state of silence, or turning logical feats in an attempt to downplay the role that their paranoid, extremist rhetoric toward Planned Parenthood and Black Lives Matter may have played in inciting people to commit these crimes in the first place.

carly fiorinaToday’s Republican Presidential candidates have been placed in the unenviable position of vilifying extremists as a point of principle while sharing their beliefs, of distancing themselves from domestic terrorists’ actions while holding an acrimony toward the same targets.

Carly Fiorina, whose repeated references to an apocryphal video that purportedly showed a fetus being kept alive so its brain could be “harvested” — which was allegedly indirectly referenced by Colorado shooter Robert Lewis Dear Jr. upon his surrender — appeared yesterday on “Fox News Sunday” to claim that suggesting a link between the Colorado Springs shooting and today’s pro-life movement was indicative of “typical left-wing tactics.”

“It is so typical of the left to begin demonizing the messenger because they don’t agree with your message,” Fiorina said.

In a November 24 video posted to his Facebook page, Mike Huckabee excoriated Obama for failing to align terrorists with Islam, noting that “bomb-throwing Baptists, Anglican arsonists and radicalized Roman Catholics don’t commit these atrocities.” Appearing on a November 29 broadcast of CNN’s “State of the Union,” however, Huckabee spent the segment attempting to disassociate Dear from the pro-life movement.

And offering the most puzzling response of all, Ted Cruz at an Iowa rally yesterday claimed Colorado shooter Dear was a “transgendered leftist activist.” While there’s no current information suggesting Dear was either transgender or a member of the left, the New York Times recently uncovered that he had made a habit of handing out anti-Obama political pamphlets to neighbors.

Conservatives who were quick to suggest the November Paris attacks were somehow an indictment of Obama’s policies, the same politicians who lay blame on an entire religion for the acts of a militant few, now balk at the notion that there could exist a connection between extreme anti-abortionists’ actions and the conservative machine that promulgates messages engendering those actions. In the same way that contrarian rallying cries of “all lives matter” took a convenient respite when those lives suddenly belonged to displaced Syrians, so too has conservatives’ benevolence taken a bow of silence when it comes to Planned Parenthood employees, or shooting victims who align with the Black Lives Matter movement.

It's not the only sign that the right's rhetoric has gone too far. A study released by Washington-based research organization The New America Foundation found the majority of “terrorist” attacks to occur on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001 have been committed by right-wing terrorists — white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and assorted anti-government extremists — and almost twice as many people have now died in these attacks in America than have died at the hands of Islamic extremists.

Moreover, it's possible that some Republican voters have also finally discovered their threshold for these toxic talking points. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found Donald Trump’s poll numbers have tanked in the last week — revealing his biggest fall since July — ever since he suggested that the U.S. require Muslims to register on a government database. Outright fascism, thankfully, still isn't en vogue in America.

Or maybe, like everything else, this too is all Obama’s fault. In a Saturday statement on the Colorado shooting, Obama made points that are sure to kick off yet another paranoid conservative debate about guns, claiming that “if we truly care about this … then we have to do something about the easy accessibility of weapons of war on our streets to people who have no business wielding them. Enough is enough.”