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My expedition into the extremist right-wing corners of the white American mind began in November 1992, when Amendment 2 passed in my home state of Colorado. I had just moved to New Mexico to pursue a Ph.D. in history at the University of New Mexico, but I deliberately maintained my voting status in Colorado for a couple of extra months specifically so that I could vote against that legislation. Blatantly homophobic and overtly discriminatory, Amendment 2 ensured that gay, lesbian, and bisexual peoples had no recourse if they were fired or denied housing on the basis of their sexual orientation and stripped them of any basis on which to claim discrimination.1 Orchestrated by Colorado for Family Values (CFV), a right-wing Christian fundamentalist group based in Colorado Springs, Amendment 2 shocked pundits and progressives everywhere because it had passed (52 percent to 48 percent) in what people thought was a “liberal” Western state. I knew how the amendment had passed. I had been watching CFV’s grassroots campaign for at least six months. It was a masterpiece of spin and organization , employing such catch phrases as “family values,” “fairness,” and “no special rights” to downplay its exclusionist message. CFV’s foot soldiers also knew their target audience. They didn’t expend much effort in the heavily populated Denver/Boulder area, considered urban and socially progressive. Instead, they concentrated on smaller rural communities that tended to be more conservative , especially where God and sodomy are concerned. When the returns rolled in, I felt as though I and my progressive views had been ridden out of town on a rail, like an outlaw whose worldview of her home state was completely transformed for the worst. Barely settled in New Mexico, I had no ties yet to my new home and those I felt to my old had been cut—without my consent, without my participation, without a chance to really draw battle lines. I felt as if the earth had been ripped from under my feet. I had grown up in rural Colorado and graduated from high school in a town of 3,000. The people who had voted “yes” included people with whom I had gone to school, people who had been neighbors. I felt an almost overwhelming sense of sadness that spin had trumped logic and that many of my friends no longer felt welcome Preface Fishing in the Abyss in Colorado. The passing of Amendment 2 was thus intensely personal for me. Perhaps not the best reason to pursue a topic of research, but it was the one that initiated my first analyses. Six months later, I was poring over CFV campaign literature and comparing it to the rhetoric espoused by the 1920s Ku Klux Klan in Colorado. This was when I discovered that, although the targets had changed, the underlying ideological message had not: White America is under attack from outside forces that must be stopped if the greatness of this country were to be maintained. My research became a paper that I presented in 1994, a month after the Colorado Supreme Court ruled 6 to 1 that Amendment 2 was unconstitutional.2 I still hadn’t figured out what I hoped to discover during the course of my work, but I realized something about the American public. CFV had gotten a reputation as a group of hate-filled “fascist,” obsessive, mean-spirited religious fanatics lurking on the fringes of American society. I wasn’t ready to make that declaration yet, since I felt that CFV and the 1920s Klan knew exactly what they were doing and that they were tapping into extant American historical and social currents. By early 1995, I was well on my way to researching my dissertation, which dealt with white supremacist groups in the American West. The Randy Weaver and Waco standoffs were adding fuel to a burgeoning militia movement in rural America, and I felt a pressing need to figure out why this was occurring and where the strands of white supremacist ideology in this country came from. Following the horrific bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, I began to realize that there was something uniquely American about the white supremacist movement I was studying, that there were links to mainstream conservative rhetoric and ideology, and that there was something about sacred American myths regarding character and identity that indicated to me that the right-wing lunatic fringe really wasn’t lunatic...

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