“People are armed to the hilt”: Inside the paranoid right-wing reality—where terrorists are literall

“People are armed to the hilt”: Inside the paranoid right-wing reality—where terrorists are literally everywhere

by Matthew Pulver at Salon

http://www.salon.com/2015/12/07/people_are_armed_to_the_hilt_inside_the_paranoid_right_wing_reality_where_terrorists_are_literally_everywhere/

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But it wouldn’t be a conversation with a Fox News-watching rural white American without conflating the Islamic terrorism threat with Barack Obama. “And I can also tell you this,” Christy continues. “You know, Obama talkin’ about takin’ guns…I know a lot of people that are in motorcycle gangs–clubs, not gangs, clubs–but their clubhouses are locked and stocked. I mean, they are loaded with ammo. They’re prepared.”

Prepared for what, again? ISIS or Obama? Also, did Christy just snitch on an illegal motorcycle gang? (Club! I meant club!) Right, one of those motorcycle “clubs” armed like Seal Team 6. But it’s a Muslim man peacefully praying that we’re supposed to scared of.

So Christy has revealed that her world is one of racist, Islamophobic paramilitary motorcycle gangs who arm themselves according to conspiracy theories about our president. This is where Walter will start to distance herself from the caller, lest Fox News be seen to validate that sort of thinking. Right?

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A long time ago, back in the quaint, halcyon days of 2008, a guy like Senator John McCain would push back on the worst impulses of white reactionary racism and Islamophobia. But he’d get booed for it, and conservatives would blame his eventual electoral defeat on his purported milquetoast centrism. Just seven years later, the product of right-wing media, Trumpism, reigns. Unlike McCain, Trump not only permits, but actively affirms, radical voices, tacitly when not explicitly. Why would he not, if Fox News is a forum for millions to celebrate fantasies of insurrectionary violence and state suppression of Muslims? It doesn’t pay to be the adult in the room.



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