Rory’s phone has been ringing off the hook after a shooting at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Tennessee. Apparently, one Jim Adkisson opened fire during a children’s play, killing two adults and wounding seven others. According to the Knoxville News, upon questioning the suspect told police that he targeted the church
“because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country’s hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of media outlets.”
When Adkisson’s home was searched,
officers found “Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder” by radio talk show host Michael Savage, “Let Freedom Ring” by talk show host Sean Hannity, and “The O’Reilly Factor,” by television talk show host Bill O’Reilly.
The obvious question is, what is the connection between these two pieces of information and the shooting? What really drove Adkisson to target the Unitarians Universalist church, which is famously progressive and welcomes anyone from gays and lesbians to atheists?
Did Adkisson hear one too many exhortations to violence against liberals on shows (like Michael Reagan’s or Michael Savage‘s), and just snap? Or does the violent rhetoric merely have an excellent chance of connecting with a violent listener? The rhetoric Adkisson used in his 4-page manifesto–the phrasing, the misdirected anger, the identification and targeting of the ‘liberal movement’–all bear the marks of clear influence by right-wing talk radio.
Certainly the shooter is unhinged, but if listening to shock jocks was all it took to turn you into a serial killer, we’d all be dead by now.
The attack Sunday morning lasted only minutes. But the anger behind it may have been building for months, if not years.
“It appears that what brought him to this horrible event was his lack of being able to obtain a job, his frustration over that, and his stated hatred for the liberal movement,” Police Chief Sterling Owen said.
Adkisson was a loner who hates “blacks, gays and anyone different from him,” longtime acquaintance Carol Smallwood of Alice, Texas, told the Knoxville News Sentinel.
Authorities said Adkisson’s criminal record consisted of only two drunken driving citations. But court records reviewed by The Associated Press show that his former wife obtained an order of protection in March 2000 while the two were still married and living in the Knoxville suburb of Powell.
The couple had been married for almost 10 years when Liza Alexander wrote in requesting the order that Adkisson threatened “to blow my brains out and then blow his own brains out.” She told a judge that she was “in fear for my life and what he might do.”
His ex-wife had been a “former long time member” of the UU chruch. By the way, the first draft of the AP article above by Duncan Mansfield has a slightly different focus:
Karen Massey, a neighbor to Adkisson, told the Knoxville News Sentinel about a lengthy conversation she had with Adkisson a few years back in which she told him her daughter had just graduated from a bible college. She said she was surprised by his reaction when she told him she was a Christian.
“He almost turned angry,” she told the newspaper. “He seemed to get angry at that. He said that everything in the Bible contradicts itself if you read it.” She also said Adkisson spoke frequently about his parents, who “made him go to church all his life. … He acted like he was forced to do that.”
Indeed, several right-wing blogs reacted to the shooting as an act of anti-Christian violence. But Unitarian Universalists aren’t Christians. Talk radio buffs will recall parallels to Rush Limbaugh’s prouncement that the Virginia Tech shooter had to have been a liberal. When Adkisson’s taste in literature came to light, the link between shock jocks” talking about fighting liberalism and Adkisson going out and doing the shooting became the topic of the day on the blogs.
AlterNet’s Joshua Holland:
I’m not denying for a second that progressives and liberals are filled with anumus towards the right, but it is an animus of a different nature. Most progressives believe that conservative leaders are greedy, self-interested and represent only the interests of the very wealthy, and their followers are simply chumps dazzled by social issues into voting against their own interests. We don’t consider them to be bent on the destruction of our country (even if some of us believe that is the likely outcome of their governance).
The difference manifests itself, not infrequently, in incidents like what went down in Tennessee. It’s certainly not isolated — just last week, a group of teens beat a Latino migrant to death. And why not? People like Michelle Malkin don’t make arguments about the costs and benefits of immigration; they paint a picture of an invading army bent on our destruction. They say that illegal immigration is part of a plot to “reconquer” parts of America — literally to annex the SouthWest. Abortion clinics are bombed, and providers are assassinated, and the bombers and assassins inevitably see the procedure as “killing babies” — who wouldn’t act to stop actual babies from being killed?
…
I’m not advocating censorship here, but at the same time, I think it’s important to note that inciting people to violence is not a protected form of speech. In Rwanda, the genocide of 800,000 people was spurred on by extremists on the radio — Rwanda’s Shock-Jocks — who said that it was every loyal Hutu’s duty to wipe out the “cockroaches” who were destroying the country, and that speech was condemned as a crime against humanity.
Who really killed those Unitarians? Was it the preachers who spread hatred and intolerance? The politicians who court and flatter them instead of condemning their hate speech? The media machine that attacks liberals, calls them “traitors” and suggests you speak to them “with a baseball bat”? The economic system that batters people like Jim Adkisson until they snap, then tells them their real enemies are gays and liberals and secular humanists?
If you ask me, it was all of the above.
You killed them, Pat Robertson. You killed them, Pastor Hagee. You killed them, Ann Coulter. You killed them, Dick Morris and Sean Hannity and the rest of you at Fox News.
Right-wingers love to “joke” about mowing down, rounding up, and otherwise “wiping out” all things liberal. It’s become a standard feature of conservative-movement rhetoric. And whenever anyone calls them on it, they have a standard response: “Aw, c’mon — it’s just a joke!”
In reality, of course, rhetoric like this has historically played a critical role in some of the ugliest episodes in American history, as well as thousands of little acts of xenophobic brutality: functionally speaking, it gives violent — and frequently unstable — actors permission to act on these impulses. People like this always believe they’re standing up for what “real Americans” think — and the jokes tell them that this is so.
It’s all too easy to shirk responsibility for one’s contributions to the culture in which this happened with pithy statements like, “Millions of people listen to that stuff and only one guy took it to heart.” Thing is, all of us who put ideas “out there” into the public sphere know damn well that we influence people, which is why it’s important not to be flippant and toss around dangerous ideas as “jokes.” And somehow, “Hey, I was only kidding; it’s not my problem if the guy couldn’t understand a joke” doesn’t strike me as being of particular comfort, to the people who lost someone in a real-world manifestation of such “hilarity.”
Donald Douglas at RealClear Politics responds (but you have to wonder how a liberal would fare offering up the same explanation for any other crime on, say, Fox News):
media reports and blogging analyses have zoomed in on Adkisson’s professed hatred of liberals while ignoring his economic dislocation and his statements signaling a larger social-psychological alienation. Yet, I’d argue it’s unwise to generalize from this one case, to impugn the entire conservative establishment as “out to kill” left-wingers.
…In other words, the Adkisson case provides a case study in the secular demonology of the left. We’re seeing the politics of hatred in action. It’s marked by demands for vengeance and modes of discourse seeking to protect the perceived purity of the liberal sensibility. It is irreligious and opportunistic. It is the repudiation of decency. It is the absence of divine soul. With it, we see the Bush adminstration, John McCain, Bill O’Reilly, and Fox News attacked as the manifestation of the Fourth Reich.
I am not so naïve to think that the next left-winger who’s accused of commiting a brutal crime will be spared the wrath of the conservative blogosphere. I do think, however, that there’s a qualitatively ideological distinction between left and right when it comes to moral judgment and the relative balance of grace.
Regardless of grace or divinity, should shock jocks take any care in advocating violence when they know people are listening? We don’t know for sure whether Adkisson actually listened to talk radio or not, but he apparently went at least one step further and bought the books of Savage, Hannity and O’Reilly. But taking a leap of faith and assuming that the shooter had listened to these shows at least once or twice, did the right wing talk radio movement build up an irrational hatred of liberals, or did merely help Adkisson select his victims? What responsibility to prevent actual violence do shock jocks have, if any?
Do shock jocks pander to people with the worldviews of Jim Adkisson? Or do they help create them?
Read more about the shootings here.
