Posted on 07/07/2014 7:29:15 PM PDT by marktwain
The Rise of the Anti-Media is a profound academic examination of how the gun culture has been able to triumph in the face of overwhelming opposition from the ruling elite. This is not a book that is light summer reading. The issues examined, the research done, and the theory put forward to explain the phenomena, are worthy of serious study. Information in the book is dense. Brian Anse Patrick packs a great deal into only 282 pages. The book captured my attention. I devoured it in a day, but find myself repeatedly returning for more insight.
It helps to have been intimately involved in many of the subjects discussed. Nearly everyone who has been involved in second amendment activism during the last five decades will find themselves nodding in agreement as they read this book.
Rise of the Anti-Media contains an important historical narrative of how we arrived at where we are, but it goes much further. It develops a theory that explains how it happened and how it works. This has considerable practical value; it is not simply of academic interest.
The historical information alone is worth the time taken to read the book. Did you know that Franklin Roosevelt vetoed the Uniform Revolver Act that was passed by the New York legislature in 1923, apparently favoring the more restrictive Sullivan act?
The meat of the book, however, is in the theory of how the gun culture created and developed the means to overcome the control of information flow by the ruling elite. Brian Anse Patrick explicitly details how the gun culture that we know today was precipitated from the existing culture by attacks from the ruling elite; how opposition in the old media helped to grow and solidify it; how it came to form what he terms "horizontal interpretive communities".
It is through the power of those overlapping communities that the gun culture is able to defeat attacks on the right to keep and bear arms, develop and pass legislation, defeat and elect politicians, and shape the national understanding of the Constitution.
Here is what Professor Patrick has to say about the power of the NRA:
But NRA is not the source of the power. The power lies in the matrix of horizontal associations that constitute the new gun culture. NRA has money because these people provide money, lots of it, regularly. They are not minions or "rank and file." Emphatically, they do not serve the NRA; rather, NRA serves them as best it can.I do not want to give the impression that Rise of the Anti-Media is about the NRA; it is not. The NRA is covered, but is only a small part of the overall picture.
I think that “horizontal interpretive community” is a 21st century name for “committees of correspondence”.
That sounds like something a leftist would have thought up
“I think that horizontal interpretive community is a 21st century name for committees of correspondence.”
It is a good comparison.
Reading the book, there is no question where the author’s fits. He is one of us. I would not be surprised if he is a freeper.
I should say “where the author’s sympathies fit”
I was looking in my copy, and found this quote:
“The many state-level associations are like the Revolution’s state committees of correspondence.” Page 215, Rise of the Anti-Media
Bookmark
Or is the rise of the anti-media simply a product of the explosive growth of internet-enabled social nedia, websites, blogs, online `newspapers’ and other IT-based factors which traditional (meaning liberal) media is no longer able to control or ignore?
Ten years ago during the 2004 presidential campaign, “blog” was a new term.
Youtube.com has been in existence for less than a decade.
Texting for all it is misused is mass instant communication. Video uploads create instant news such as from the Middle East.
Talk radio is an established conservative bastion. Pathetic liberal imitations quickly wither & die.
In other words, the genie is out of the bottle & the MSM will never be able to put it back in.
Three network TV channels plus PBS? Gone with the wind!
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