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Right-Wing Pathologies Revealed After Adkisson Shooting at Unitarian Church
By John Dolan, AlterNet
Posted on July 29, 2008, Printed on July 30, 2008
https://www.alternet.org/story/93198/
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:
https://www.freerepublic.com/focus/search?;s=tennessee%20church
https://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2052204/posts
https://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.
The
same hatred of "liberals" that drove the Tennessee killer is on
display, with unconscious irony, in the house advertisement appearing
at the top of one of the forums on the church shooting. A bald eagle
stands before an American flag, with the caption, "Driving liberals
crazy and having fun doing it!"
The first posts reacting to the
church shooting are smug gloats. Many posters were absolutely certain
that the gunman would turn out to be a Muslim:
It
appears that the identity of the gunman is being protected. ...
(S)omething tells me this guy had a Quran in his pocket and a diaper on
his head. Wonder what was inside the diaper?? The picture in the
article showed both a white and a black person. So it couldn't be a
black guy in a white church. If it were a white guy in a black church,
they would be holding nothing back from the media. My best guess the
shooter was probably a diaper wearing Islamic fanatic.
Other
posters displayed a different sort of hatred, one that is consistently
underestimated by liberal commentators: the weird, atavistic, violent
hatred felt by American Protestants for churches they consider
heretical. To read these posts is to be reminded of a fact we don't
like to admit at all: America still clings to the culture of the mean,
violent Ulster Protestants who populated the South and West. For
Freepers like this, what's worth mentioning about the church shooting
is not that two people were shot to death and many more wounded, but
that it happened in a Unitarian Church -- and worse yet, while the
children's choir was singing "Annie," a nonreligious song! A Freeper
sums up his contempt in this post:
Three words: Unitarian Universalist Church
(Having said that, I still offer a prayer for all involved. Very sad, when you gotta be armed just to go to church.)
Note
the broad-minded concession after the sneer at Unitarians; it's "sad"
even when mere heretics are murdered. Another poster gets his
compassion out of the way first so he can get to his real point, the
worthlessness of Unitarians:
Prayers up for the victims.
That being said, the term "Church" is relative in the case of Unitarian
Universalists ... and certainly nothing "Christian" about it.
Several
Freepers are obsessed by the fact that children were singing "Annie"
when the gunman opened fire. They're not music critics; their outrage
is at the fact that a secular tune was being sung in a church at all.
That interests them far more than the murders. "GOP Pachyderm" doesn't
even mention the killings, so angry is he at the choice of song:
Kids were practicing a scene from "Annie"? Are you sure this was a church?
Yes,
that's clearly the most important fact about this story. Another poster
sneers, "I suppose for a UUC, Annie would be quite appropriate," while
a poster calling himself "antiunion person" comes up with a classic bit
of Freeper humor: "This guy must have really hated Annie to open fire
like that."
The easy familiarity of the slurs -- "UUC" is
apparently recognized slang, among Freepers, for "Unitarian
Universalist Church" -- suggests that these people spend a great deal
of time spitting on other denominations. One joke repeated several
times on the three threads dealing with the story is that it's
surprising that mere Unitarians were able to tackle the gunman. In
fact, it seems the congregation behaved with great courage and
alertness, before Adkisson could fire the several dozen shotgun shells
he'd brought with them. But that, like everything else about the story,
doesn't fit Freepers' picture of the world. Unitarians are liberals,
and liberals are cowards. That's what they've been told, and evidence
to the contrary just becomes a punch line.
Then, after the first
few dozen posts, comes the biggest shock of all, the news that the
killer was no Muslim but a white American straight out of a FR
demographic profile. How are the Freepers going to handle that?
The
simplest and most honest position is represented by a Freeper using the
name "Weegee" who defends the gunman in grotesquely comical language.
As "Weegee" sees it, Adkisson was simply expressing "a difference of
opinion" -- enlightening those Unitarian sinners with a shotgun:
How
is this a hate crime? ... (The gunman's) anger, from this excerpt,
appears to have been with church leadership which taught acceptance and
celebration of sinful activities. So it could be construed as a
difference of opinion in religious doctrine.
This
is the voice of Ulster America, the line that has been breeding true,
unfortunately, for hundreds of years. Maybe it's time we faced that
fact that many millions of our fellow Americans think like Weegee --
millions of little Ian Paisleys with a slightly different accent.
Another
straightforward response favored by those reacting to the
identification of the gunman is denial. He simply can't be a
right-winger. It must be a plot to discredit conservatives:
The
libs and the MSM (mainstream media) have salivated for years over the
prospect of angry, white, christian, conservative terrorism against
their pet immorality and perverted views of religion.
They will attempt to play this up as such as much as possible a such
when the truth is, this was simply a diluded. [sic] depressed
individual who snapped and became a murderer.
It has nothing to do with conservatism or traditional values, despite the upcoming best efforts of the MSM to the contrary.
Posters
like these can barely keep up the pretext of regret for the killing of
people who embrace "immorality and perverted views of religion" -- even
while they're attempting to say that their Ulster-American ideology has
"nothing to do" with the killings. One poster even waxes indignant at
the "character assassination" directed at Adkisson:
He's
NO conservative ... just a deluded lunatic sociopath. I don't recall
the MSM targeting people with any other philosophy for outright
character assassination!
And of course, there are those who jump straight to the pure liberal-conspiracy theory:
"This
guy is no more a true constervative [sic] than Timothy McVey [sic] was.
Conservatives don't commit acts of terrorism. I won't believe this
until the killer's actual letter is released. It could be the sheriff
is a liberal himself and is saying these things to smear conservatives.
Could be a liberal disguised as a conservative in order to give
conservatives a bad rap.
Which prompts this reply
from a relatively sane Freeper: "As I understand it, Eastern Tennessee
is just chalk [sic] full of Liberal Sheriffs." More to the point, most
people would agree that McVeigh was a conservative -- a conservative
terrorist, just like Jim Adkisson. In fact, 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. Maybe. Personally, cynic that I am, I doubt anything could
have stopped this. This is bedrock America speaking, Ulster America.
Maybe it's time we looked it in the face, instead of pretending that
our compatriots are all just good-hearted folks who have been misled.
John Dolan is an editor of The eXile. He is the author of, most recently, Pleasant Hell (Capricorn, 2005).