Under Attack.” In April 2009 LaPierre suggested on Beck’s show that administration support for international efforts to adopt strict gun-licensing standards amounted to a United Nations plot: “They’re trying to pass, basically, a global gun ban on all individual possession of firearms ownership.”
The paranoia whipped up by the NRA (as usual with the gun-rights crowd) had no known basis in reality. In the list of thirteen priorities for action in Obama’s first year and beyond that was leaked to the New York Times, jobs and the economy completely predominated. Gun control was not on the list. Nor was there even a whisper of it from any Obama administration official in 2009.
Which, for the paranoid at heart, only proved once and for all that something nefarious was afoot.
Whether he was grounded in reality or not, Beck was tapping into something very real by promoting gun paranoia. In fact, one of the remarkable ways the fringe hysteria manifested itself in the real world after the election was in the astonishing surge in gun sales.
The initial spike occurred before the election, when firearms groups began noticing a surge in federal background checks for new gun purchases. In November alone, the number, 378,000 checks, was 42 percent greater than for the same month a year before. One gun-friendly outdoor news service named the new president its “Gun Salesman of the Year.”
The only time gun rights really made their way into the news was during the confirmation hearings for Eric Holder, the nominee for attorney general, where one of the voices testifying against his confirmation was a “gun rights expert,” Stephen Halbrook. Halbrook had authored a recent book about the Second Amendment. What upset the gun crowd about Holder was his support of the gun ban in DC, as well as an op-ed piece he had written in October 2001 for the Washington Post, “Keeping Guns Away from Terrorists.” The article largely was an eminently sensible column about closing up gun-sales loopholes used by many terrorists to obtain weapons.
Nonetheless, the fears that Obama was a closet gun-grabber secretly plotting against them became widespread, particularly in the rural areas where the right to bear arms is traditionally prized. Obama’s election produced a lightning bolt of fear among many, and they responded by a run on both guns and ammunition and even gunpowder.
“Barack Obama would be the most anti-gun president in history —bar none,” the NRA’s chief lobbyist, Chris Cox, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. Warnings like that—as well as Glenn Beck’s paranoid musings with Wayne LaPierre—produced predictable results among gun owners. “They’re like, ‘Hey, maybe I should buy one of these before they become illegal,’” one gun-shop owner told a reporter. “If you look in any NRA magazine or you’re into guns, you see a lot of bills that are in the works.”
At the NRA’s big annual convention in Arizona that May, all the talk was about the spike in gun sales. The footage coming out of Arizona was striking for the level of paranoia. Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, warned for the camera: “Whenever they can, wherever they can, the Democrats want to take away the rights of law-abiding citizens to own and purchase a gun, a right that is guaranteed under the United States Constitution.”
Leonard Junker, a fifty-six-year-old trucker and Republican Party organizer from Tucson, told reporters, “Right now is a pivotal time in our history with a president and a total administration that is anti-gun. I truly believe that they want to disarm us.”
People were driven to buy guns not just from fear of Obama but also fear of the social chaos they believed would result from his administration. Video footage from the NRA convention featured a number of white conservative women who were drawn to the organization via fearmongering. In one video, a woman talked about how women were buying guns partly out of a fear that society was about to fall apart. Glenn Beck’s apocalyptic scenarios of a dog-eat-dog society obviously had struck a chord.
One year later in Arizona, that paranoia would strike home in a blizzard of bullets.
Even in its nascent form, Alt-America wanted Barack Obama to fail. Indeed, its earliest inhabitants were drawn to it out of their determination to make that happen.
Even before the inauguration, Sean Hannity had announced on his nationally syndicated radio show, Hannity, that he was organizing a force to attempt to stop Obama from enacting “radical” policies. He called his show the outpost of “the conservative underground.” Another radio host, Mike Gallagher, promoted an effort by a far-right online group called Grassfire to present a petition announcing that signers were joining “the resistance” to Obama’s presidency. That was soon followed by the campaign to prevent Obama from being sworn into office.
The message was clear: conservatives did not consider Barack Obama to be a legitimate president, a fact underscored by the growing Birther campaign. The right had set out to delegitimize Bill Clinton when he was elected president in 1992; now they intended to do the same to Obama. The effort to undermine and destroy Clinton had revolved around his alleged sexual proclivities; the campaign around Obama would focus on his foreignness, his name, his background, and, ultimately, his blackness.
Leading the charge after the election was Rush Limbaugh, who announced his hope that Obama would fail: “Based on what we’ve seen with General Motors and the banks, if he fails, America is saved. Barack Obama’s policies and their failure is the only hope we’ve got to maintain the America of our founding.”
Limbaugh’s wish for Obama’s failure stirred outrage among liberals and centrists alike, but he was defiant. At the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2009, he justified his stance:
Ladies and gentlemen, the Democrat Party has actively not just sought the failure of Republican presidents and policies and now wars, for the first time. The Democrat Party doesn’t stop at failure. Talk to Judge Robert Bork, talk to Justice Clarence Thomas, about how they try to destroy lives, reputations, and character. And I’m supposed to say, I don’t want the president to fail?
The rant was widely distributed and was discussed in several press reports. It became one of the definitive conservative responses to Obama’s election: open political warfare, a defiance of the new president’s every objective, was to be the right-wing political project for the ensuing eight years.
And within weeks, it had created the impetus for a new right-wing movement: the Tea Party.
Ron Paul, a GOP presidential hopeful who had been a Texas congressman from 1976 to 1985 and then again from 1997 to 2013, played a critical formative role in the gradual merging of the extremist right and mainstream conservatism in the years around Obama’s election. He was also one of the fathers of the Tea Party.
Right-wing populism began surging to the fore in 2008 with Paul’s insurgent Republican campaign. A longtime outsider generally considered to be a fringe candidate, Paul, who called himself a Libertarian, began surprising longtime political observers by attracting large, enthusiastic crowds to his rallies and drawing in substantial contributions.
Paul announced his candidacy in March 2007, and drew little notice at first. However, his presidential candidacy began picking up significant traction early on in the Republican primaries, in no small part because of his opposition to the Iraq War. He began using ingenious online fund-raising methods that quickly broke all kinds of records and won him the position of the GOP’s top fund-raiser for the critical
