Ooh, nice.
Ghoul memorabilia? Forensic something, maybe?
No, it's more than that.
You can't separate this white supremacy stuff from the "separationist" stuff and the right-wing terrorist cultish stuff and a certain aspect of southern identity construct narrative thingies that are often co-opted by folks in this same market. It's all the same market, you see. The same narrative. The same story. The same stores.
Not everyone interested in A is all that interested in or invested in B, but it all naturally
fits together. Think of characters and setting as the ideas and notions, and plot as the whole story that binds them together.
I've spent enough time in Ruralsville, the South, to have seen it up close and personal
once or twice more times than I care to admit a lot. I've thought about this
a lot because it stares at me in the fucking face all the time. It disturbs me just as much as it does you guys, I'm just not at all surprised by it. Even as much as I've attempted to understand it, it still makes me angry every single time I see it.
Gun enthusiasm doesn't have to have anything to do with this, any more than southern identity has to have anything to do with this. I've got a strong southern identity, and the fact that I'm socially liberal is probably noticeable. Mine's all wrapped into hospitality and the blues and jazz and the land and food; I mean, I love all sorts of food, but iced tea and redfish and collards and sweet potato fries and po'boys and red beans and rice and the proper kind of barbecue (Memphis), they taste like home. Y'know? I've got like, a
relationship with it.
Ooh boy, sorry, that was almost a dangerous derail.
It's like the Confederate battle flag issue. Northern people don't get this. There's a certain segment of the population down here that uses the Confederate flag in a totally racist way, and that comes in part from the KKK co-opting the battle flag back in the 60's as a symbol for white separatism. But there's another aspect that it took me a long while to figure out, because I have some very good friends that are genuinely
not in any way white supremacists (and I've known these guys for 10+ years, I think they'd have let it slip by now) that have flags
inside their own homes, not on their cars or whatever (if they're smart enough to realize that some people constitute this as a threat; most do where I live). They're all boys, and I spent a while trying to figure this out because it makes no sense to me, but it's got something to do with their male southern identity and their families, and their ancestry and stuff, and their
relationship to the South. I've got the same construct but I relate to the women in the story; the soldiers (and consequently, the battle flag) mean little to me.
Basically, so far as I can tell, there are two ways for them to logically work the history and the facts into their narratives:
(1) I love my southern identity, and the south is allegedly racist, so racism must be good.
(2) I love my southern identity, and maybe not everything about the South, or myself, is perfect but that's okay. The South doesn't mean racism; racism is an impulse, not a character or a person. (This narrative tends to embrace other races' cultural contributions to the great shared story.)
(Here's the important part. When you say that the South
is racist, when you say that the South
is horrible, and people can't negotiate that with their construct, they tend to revert from Narrative #2 to Narrative #1. Because if you're telling them that the very essence of who they see themselves as as people is evil, they get angry. This is why you can't fully separate the proto-militia crap from white supremacy and southern identity and racism. It's all wrapped together and the vehicle of delivery for that package is
anger.)
By the way, the fact that Nixon exploited that and helped script narrative #1 ("states rights") and made it worse IMO makes me hate him with the fiery power of a million trillion suns because
this is my home. Fuck. Nixon. I don't want to derail because this is something that'll turn me into a raving psychopath. I try to intentionally stay away from these things.
Anyway. There's this store around here that sells the more innocuous confederate flag stuff (in most of the places I've lived, Narrative #2 tends to beat Narrative #1, at least amongst folks anywhere near my age; some others decidedly not). My friends and I ran by a store like that to get something entirely unrelated (middle of nowhere and I think we needed fishing stuff or something), and the guy told us where we could buy the KKK memorabilia and shit (ETA: uh, we didn't ask; perhaps we prompted by examining something in the store for oddness) - the unapologetically vile, unambiguously racist stuff.
The markets overlap.
The newsletters that cater to this sort of market (while they might keep racism out of it on the surface) you can find at gun shows and maybe even gun stores.
Again, the markets overlap.
It just so happens that this market is disturbing and scary and evil in its lack of human sympathy. But that doesn't stop me from trying to understand it, when I'm calm about it. Because of course I don't
want this here. I
hate it. I've tried to understand it for years because I want to change it for every person I meet who is susceptible to it.
But I can't remember the damn name of the market. Next time I talk to my BFF, I'll ask him.