AlterNet: Right-Wing Pathologies Revealed After Adkisson Shooting at Unitarian Church

[marmar]

Right-Wing Pathologies Revealed After Adkisson Shooting at Unitarian Church

By John Dolan, AlterNet. Posted July 29, 2008.

When Free Republic forum posters learned that the gunman was from their own demographic, out came the conservative madness.




A classic drama full of hatred, ignorance and irony played out this week in the forum section of right-wing Web site Free Republic, as "Freepers" tried to make sense of a church shooting in Tennessee that killed two parishioners and wounded many others. The grotesque irony of the FR discussions is that, after early posters had indulged all their bigoted guesses about the identity of the killer, they found out the gunman was actually straight out of their own demographic: a 59-year-old white man named Jim Adkisson, who left a four-page letter ranting against liberals, was known by his acquaintances to hate "blacks, gays and anyone who was different from him," left a pile of books by O'Reilly, Savage and Hannity behind in his car, and even wore a red-white-and-blue shirt to his church killing spree.

It's morbidly fascinating to watch the FR threads as the posters wriggle and bluster to try to accommodate this most inconvenient truth. And if you have the stomach to read them, you can learn a lot (perhaps more than you'd like) about the pathology of the contemporary American Right. For myself -- and I realize this will be the most profound heresy to progressives committed to the populist line -- reading these posts is a timely slap in the face, a painful reminder that maybe, just maybe, heartland Americans aren't such wonderful people at all. What you see in these posts is the oldest, deepest and meanest strain in American culture: the Ulster America founded by violent sectarians who moved westward again and again, from Scotland to Northern Ireland and then to the southern United States, then again westward into the American continent, to find a place where they could hone their hair-trigger intolerance without fear of interference from warmer, more humorous people. But that's me, and I'm often accused of "cynicism," whatever that means. At any rate, I'll present a little background on the site and then discuss a few of the posts. Make of them what you will.

For those who want to do their own analyses before reading on, here are the Web addresses of the three FR threads discussing the Tennessee shootings, in the order they appeared:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/search?;s=tennessee%20church

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2052204/posts

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2052590/posts

For those unfamiliar with online right-wing culture, Free Republic is a far-right Web site established in 1996. It soon found a huge, loyal audience among the right wing's most rabid, ignorant and openly fascistic voices -- or as FR calls them, "grassroots conservatives." Even other right-wing Web sites shun FR, and you'll often observe posters to these sites worrying, when online discussions become openly racist or fascistic, that they're becoming too much like "the Freepers," as FR's ranting posters proudly call themselves. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/93198/right-wing_pathologies_revealed_after_adkisson_shooting_at_unitarian_church/

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

1. Good for Alternet.

Shine a light on roaches and they scurry.

[geomon666]

2. Please don't insult the roaches. They at least serve a purpose. n/t

[gatorboy]

10. Yes, sometimes our shoes need something to do.

[malaise]

3. The best article on this to date

K & R.
Freepers are sick, intolerant, hateful people.

[ellenfl]

4. wow . . . k&r

just one thing . . . are we allowed to post links to fr? if not, the op might want to delete those links. they are in the story anyway. don't want anyone to get in trouble. if i'm wrong about that . . . never mind!

ellen fl

[Catherine Vincent]

8. Yes, we are allowed to post links from FR. They're good for laughs.

I think it's that other site you're thinking about....(CU).

[ellenfl]

22. ok. thanks. what's cu? eom

[mrreowwr_kittty]

5. Official RW Talking Point: "It wasn't a 'real' church so the victims don't count"

:puke:

Have I mentioned how much I loathe these people?

[Octafish]

6. Police found ''a pile of books by O'Reilly, Savage and Hannity behind in his car...''

The hate that was inside those books got stuck between the guy's ears, unfortunately.

[hyphenate]

20. Ooops!

Perhaps the Coulter tomes got caught underneath the driver's seat. And the amount of acid and vitriol in any wrong-winger's writing should have been enough to corrode a hole in the bottom of the car itself....

[DailyGrind51]

7. Remember Limbaugh's monologue following Oklahoma City?

Same desperate attempt to avoid responsibility.

[baldguy]

9. "...perhaps if Bill Clinton had called out Rush Limbaugh when the Oklahoma City bomb went off..."

"...demanding that Limbaugh fly to the bomb site and help clear the wreckage with his own soft, manicured hands, perhaps this tide of hate could have been stopped before the proliferation of O'Reillys, Hannitys and Savages percolated down to the car trunk of a mean, stupid, white Tennessean."

If only.

[Canuckistanian]

12. That's a good quote.

Clinton did half-heartedly call out the AM radio hate-mongers... and got crucified for it, as far as I recall.

Too bad it was never followed up.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

11. Exactly.

The traffic in hate 365 days a year, wallow in intolerance and seize upon any difference, no matter how slight, to attack those who aren't them. Then they break their backs with their contortions when all that dark filth bears its fruit.

For the life of me, I do not know how they have live like that. It is diseased thinking at its worst.

[Jokinomx]

13. Wow ... what an eye opener.....

I actually read some of the posts at the FR. Whew... those people are out there!

The funniest reasoning...

"Could be a liberal disguised as a conservative in order to give conservatives a bad rap."

Then a response...

"That’s a theory that could be plausible. Maybe he’s really a liberal and wanted to end his life and make conservatives look bad. That would explain why someone who hates religion would attack a liberal church."

:shrug:

Talk about paranoid about being a conservative! Idiots

[progdonkey]

14. what's up with all the "Ulster" stuff?

I'm not really that educated on English-Irish history (I've seen In the Name of the Father, Michael Collins, and Patriot Games--such is the extent of my knowledge of the issues surrounding Northern Ireland), so where does he get this whole "Ulster America" thing that he keeps coming back to? I get that Ian Paisley is an extreme right-wing, anti-Catholic, homophobic ass, but I don't see what connection that has to the Freepers. Does he have the registry of all posters at FreeRepublic and has seen that they're all descended from Scots-Irish protestants?

That is, is Freeperville supposed to be an arm of the Unionists, or something? Are there no Catholics at Freeperville?

The repeated return to talking about Ulster Protestants and the like just seems incoherent at best and just as irrationally bigoted as these Freepers at worst. :shrug:

[supernova]

15. A lot of Ulster Irish were forced out

out No Ireland and some of them were originally Scots who were driven out of Scotland (hence the term "Scots-Irish")

His thesis is that these two tribes never stopped fighting. Their descendants are doing it even now.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots-Irish_American

[progdonkey]

17. and that's relevant to the Freepers and this shooting... how?

Sounds like this guy is just an Irish Catholic who's using this as an opportunity to bash political rivals... kinda like the Freepers he's highlighting.

Basically, he's just as much a bigot as they are.

[MsTryska]

24. The Ulster protestants aka Scots irish

Which inhabit the south are protestant - you would know them now as Southern Baptist.


he's tryign to state that the black and white "kill them because they are going to hell" kind of fundamentalist thinking has it's roots in the Ulster Protestant foundations of large parts of the South and West. I don't see it as bigoted.


Much like American prudishness can be directly tied to our Puritan roots.

[ellenfl]

23. hatfields and mccoys? eom

[FredStembottom]

16. He takes "ax-grinding" to new levels in that article.

.... along with lumping vast swatches of American humanity into one big redneck pile.

:argh:

[progdonkey]

19. yeah, I'm reading it and just thinking, "Okay, and...?"

It just comes out of nowhere. I can handle criticism of a political, social, or ethnic group if it's well-founded, fair, and relevant to the topic. I don't see how this is any different from criticizing awful anti-Palestinian comments by extreme right-wing Israelis by saying "Such a typical Jew response." The guy's using the comments at Freeperville just as an opportunity to rant and rave about people he hates, whether they're related or not.

[ProudToBeBlueInRhody]

18. Deep down....the hand wringing is just an act.....

....deep down they think the guy is a hero.

[RedEarth]

21. I tend to think that as well

[ellie]

25. That was very interesting.