Ever watch the news reports about Iraq and the Middle East and thought that its easy to fool and confuse relatively primitive and unsophisticated Iraqis and Iranians? Time to add Joe Average in the US of Ignorance to the list.... Mainly down below what Robin Williams once described as the "Manson/Nixon" line the good ol' boys have been cleaning their M16s and dusting off Dixie in response to the Obama administrations social initiatives.

While it may all feel very Bo and Luke Duke, their Hazard County rednecks are logging onto the net and getting their conspiracy theories right from the headless horse's mouth and the Internet is right at the heart of all the conspiracies theories and dire warnings of disaster which Abner and Leroy are finding so appealling. And of course since this is the land of a hundred million guns and a place where hunters can own armour piercing bullets for hunting the protests are not a polite march on 1600 Pennsylvania Ave and a signed petition.

A recent news report claimed a 250% rise in 'patriot' groups with a rise in in anti-government extremist groups and armed militias. All this driven by increasing worries about the economy and the increasing propagation of conspiracy theories by parts of the mass media such as Fox News.

The Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC),a prominent civil rights group in their report entitled "Rage on the Right", say the rise in right wing is "a cause for grave concern" given their propensity to use violence. They reported that "...patriot groups have been fuelled by anger over the changing demographics of the country, the soaring public debt, the troubled economy and an array of initiatives by President Obama that have been branded "socialist" or even "fascist" by his political opponents," (Nice to know the good ol' boys are egalitarian in the paranoia, at least!)

Since the installation of Barack Obama, right wing extremists have murdered six law enforcement officers. One man (For UK bloggers read insane gun toting nutjob who would probably be locked up in a civilised country) told police he had learned on white supremacist websites that a genocide was under way against whites and then murdered two black people and planned to kill as many Jews as possible on the day after Obama's inauguration. Of course Obama's government can't win, if they respond to these lunatics they are accused of pursuing their left wing agenda, which in the states usually means taking guns away and possibly allowing ill people to use hospital even if they don't have money! If they do nothing they are tacitly endorsing the situation.

The truth is that like "foreign" countries the USA also has its contingent of ignorant, easily led natives more than willing to believe anything they their instinct tell them to be true and in the 21st century the internet can feed this sort of information far faster and with much more content than ever before. The current climate appeals to the apocalypse maybe gang and you can bet that even as I type this survivalists are sharing stories of the best way to cache food and shoot black people in a way that suits Youtube video formats.


For Barack its likely to be a hard struggle to wins the hearts of minds of people whose politcal views are still enshrouded in the values and attitudes 19th Century.