Question submitted by ThatPoetGuy

FreeRepublic is a nexus for right-wing hate. StormFront is a nexus for right-wing hate.

And so is DU's Guns forum.

All day every day, the Guns forum overflows with right-wing propaganda, anti-government paranoia, and calls for violence. All with moderator support.

But if a rational person says, "you know, that thing you said isn't true, it originated on a right-wing blog, here's the url," the moderators will delete that post.

Many of DU's pro-gun posters aren't liberals with a tolerance for guns. They're violence-loving extremists. Many of them call for violence in language that is far more extreme than any of Glenn Beck's unhinged nonsense.

Like other right-wing extremists, their calls for violence are shrouded in appeals to liberty. No man is free when only the police are armed, they say, a dozen times a day; and if anyone points out that that sentiment is calling for people to shoot at cops, the moderators will delete the rational statement and leave the call for violence.

It's horrifying, but it's true: there's a section of DU that is far more reactionary than FreeRepublic. And the moderators are the ones responsible for making it a center of right-wing hate speech, propaganda, and calls for violence. This is their intention.

These moderators should be demoted. They should be shamed, and they should be banned.

I used to be a donor here. But I wouldn't donate to a site that contains such a polluted cesspool of right-wing hate. Even Freerepublic is a more liberal site than the Guns forum here.

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There are many Freepers posting on the Guns forum. People who have no liberal ideas, on any subject. Many of them have never posted anything remotely critical of any Republican, but routinely bash Democrats and liberals, and have a special hatred for Black politicians.

I've googled a couple of them, and found them using the same usernames elsewhere on the internet. It came as no surprise to me to find them posting racist, hate-filled screeds:

"Fuck them and the shitty poor decision making welfare leaches that they are pandering to," "it's one of the worst sequels ever, and that's ignoring all the homo bullshit," claiming Obama was born in Kenya, that Democrats are spying on us (but Bush wouldn't).

I understand it's against site rules to accuse other DUers of not being "real" liberals, but it seems to me that prohibition exists to keep people from being at each other's throats over what a "real" liberal is. I don't think that prohibition exists to protect conservatives and punish liberals, and yet that is exactly how the Guns forum moderators have chosen to use it.

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There are so very many right-wing lies throughout the guns forum. They propagate there, they multiply; it's how propaganda works, in "memes" (as Marshall McLuhan called them, not "memes" as in lolcats).

These are dangerous falsehoods, and it should be the work of liberals to point out their falsehood. Allowed to go unchallenged, they accomplish the work of FOX News; they propagandize, mislead, misdirect, turn us against each other.

DU's Guns forum moderators allow the lies to stay, but they delete even the most polite challenges to them.

For instance, there's a right-wing book, spreading right-wing propaganda, called _The Racist Roots of Gun Control_. It's a revisionist history of how the gun control movements came about. No part of it is true. If you believe it, you might as well believe that the Civil War was purely about states' rights, that the Founding Fathers intended America to be a Puritan land, that McCarthyism saved America from the Reds, or that the Nazis were actually liberal.

THAT'S how extreme and unhinged the "racist roots of birth control" argument is. It's historical revisionism at its worst, and its aim is to smear liberals, real historical figures of the left, who opposed gun proliferation.

It's a vicious, sleazy, dishonest argument that originated with a right-wing liar and has been amplified up and down the right-wing noise machine.

Here on DU, on the Guns forum, pro-guns posters frequently refer to this argument. They frequently malign those who think urban communities should be allowed to set their own safety regulations by calling those liberals racist. And this vicious, disgusting, mean-spirited smear is allowed to stand.

But if one were to say so much as, "you know, those arguments aren't true; they're historical revisionism born entirely from the right-wing imagination," moderators will strike down the post within minutes.

DU's guns forum moderators look the other way when pro-gun extremists call gun moderates racists. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of these posts have been allowed to slide. Google DU for the exact phrase, "anti-gun bigots," and you will get literally thousands of hits.

Moderators never look the other way when anti-gun moderates suggest, politely, that a pro-gun argument has its roots in right-wing propaganda. These posts are deleted with extreme prejudice.

These moderators shouldn't be moderators. Like many of the pro-gun posters, they haven't got a liberal bone in their bodies.

I understand that DU's deletion software makes it hard for administrators to oversee the actions of the moderators, but I'm telling you right now, as clearly as I can:

there are moderators here at DU who are deliberately sabotaging the dialogue.

DU's Guns forum has right-wing moderators. Moderators who hate liberals and hate liberalism with a raging, fiery passion.

DU would be a better site if they were demoted and banned. Let them slink back to StormFront where they belong. Even on StormFront, they'd still be considered extremists.

Through this one forum, they've managed to make DU unconfomfortable for everyone, and worse than that, they help to pollute the American discourse with their lies.

Did the founder of the Million Mom March go to prison for murder? No, she didn't. It's a completely baseless right-wing lie. It originated on a right-wing blog, and it's been repeated over and over on DU's Guns forum by the many Breitbarts who are here, abetted by right-wing moderators whose only intention is to harm this site and hurt every liberal cause.

1. I think it is probably true that many of the regulars in the guns forum are right-wingers. But unless they post something that exposes them as right-wingers they can post here. At least they're all concentrated in one forum, so they can be easily avoided.

2. We have no way of knowing if people on other websites using the same or similar usernames are the same people.

3. The moderators of the Guns forum are the same moderators that are assigned to all the other forums. If you think they are a bunch of right-wingers, you are completely wrong. But at least you aren't the first person to come to this completely unoriginal wrong conclusion.