Hatred in Black and White at the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot

[RamboLiberal]

I just finished reading this book - I highly recommend - great read from inside the Tea Party and the other RW nutjobs and how they believe everything that comes out of Beck's, Palin's and the other RW blowhards mouths.

As individuals, you could not paint the members of the so-called Tea Party Movement with a broad brush, nor would you want to. As a journalist, I traveled from Arizona to Massachusetts, talking to the rank-and-file of the right-wing backlash against the Obama presidency in order to understand what was driving this angry and at times logic-impaired insurgency. And on that human level, the common denominator I found time and time again was fear -- whether it was folks whose jobs vanished when they were in their late 40s and early 50s who turned to Glenn Beck or a group like the Oath Keepers to figure out who to blame, or people seeking an outlet for their "discomfort" over a rapidly changing America that had so suddenly placed a black man with an unorthodox life story in the Oval Office. But in a group setting, raw fear can get masked by bravado crossing the line into hate.

And so you end up with the ugliest thing that I came across in my reporting, this portrait of hatred in black and white that was openly sold and circulated widely at the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot in West Point, Kentucky, on a Saturday night back in October of 2009.

One thing that "Bazooka Brother" Brian Kitts told me certainly rang true, which was that the gun aficionados of Knob Creek were big-time history buffs, especially when it came to World War II. In the massive tent of vendors, it was hard to round a corner without hearing a Hitler diatribe blaring from a war-history DVD for sale or see some kind of relic like a rocket shell from the iconic war. It all played into a grand historical narrative that had nothing to do with the complex forces dragging down middle-class America -- things like globalization and the complete outsourcing of once thriving manufacturing sectors. A number of people I met in Kentucky that weekend drove down from Wisconsin's Paper Valley, where a string of plants making plastics for small appliances vanished in favor of factories in China in just a few short years.

The idea that a man like Barack Obama -- who in his look and his background and style was so alien to their core culture, totally regardless of his actual policies -- wanted to take their guns away just made sense to them on a gut level that defied logic, just like the notion that hard times, along with uncomfortable-for-some changes in an increasingly multicultural America, were not the result of sweeping social forces but a guy in the Oval Office who is modeling his rule after Hitler. It all makes no sense, but it also is not new -- in 1963, historian Richard Hofstadter wrote of "the paranoid style in American politics" and said of fringe groups most threatened by change that "the paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms -- he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds..."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-bunch/hatred-in-black-and-white_b_711608.html

[Doctor_J]

1. These are the people that Hartmann and the prez himself

are trying to find common ground with. And those on our side are still against using violence. Hopefully our side will come to our senses before it's too far gone.

[rfranklin]

2. "They are history buffs..." Ignorant buffoons is more like it....

Hitler thought that African Americans were inferior and never would have touched a black man in that way. Do they not remember the treatment of Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics? What freakin' idiots!

[chervilant]

3. hmm...

In my own research, I've found Hofstadter's work an excellent historical overview of the genesis of today's paranoid, fearful party of no. I highly recommend his essay entitled "The Paranoid Style in American Politics."

[Wilber_Stool]

4. It can be found

here:

http://www.kenrahn.com/jfk/conspiracy_theory/the_paranoid_mentality/the_paranoid_style.html

in its entirety.