Is Gun Power a Perverse Idea?

Matt and Sam's first ever guest, Patrick Blanchfield, is an Associate Faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and author of the forthcoming book Gunpower from Verso books, which you can and should pre-order here. In the wake of the massacres in El Paso and Dayton, we turn to Patrick—a truly brillant writer and thinker—to help us understand how these traumatic reptitions of spectacular violence are rooted in American history and ideology.

Patrick's work:

• "The Market Can't Solve a Massacre" (Splinter)
• "Recoil Operation" (New Inquiry)
• "Ghosts of 2012" (N+1)
• "The Gun Control We Deserve" (N+1)
• "Thoughts and Prayers" (N+1)
• "'They're Coming for the Ones You Love': My Weekend of Gun Training in the Desert" (The Nation)
• Declaration of War: The Violent Rise of White Supremacy after Vietnam (The Nation)

Other sources cited:

• Evan Simko-Badnarski, Condition Yellow (Images from Patrick and Evan's trip to a firearms training institute in Nye County, Nevada)
• Thomas Meaney "White Power," London Review of Books
• Adam Kotkso, Neoliberalism's Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capitalism
• Jonathan M. Metzl, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland
• Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture (1993)
• Okkervil River "Westfall"
• Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America
• Benjamin Madley, American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873

PS If you haven't already, please subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon! For $5/month, you get additional episodes and other subscriber-only content. For $10/month you get the bonus content + a digital subscription to Dissent magazine!