I chatted with 28-year-old Chris Broughton, a Phoenix machinist, the man who wore the aforementioned AR-15 slung across his back outside President Obama’s Aug. 17 appearance at the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, there. (Needless to say, it’s the kind that fires one shot each time you pull the trigger — not an “automatic.”)
Is Chris Broughton one of the [right-wing good ol’ boys] you’ll find if you “run a Google Image search on ‘Klansmen’ or ‘lynching,’” as Mr. Rall suggests? Only if you look at the guy hanging in the tree. Chris Broughton is black.
“MSNBC actually went so far as to edit the video so they [the viewers] could only see the rifle,” he told me. “You couldn’t see if I was black or white, and then they used that video when they were talking about white supremacists and Nazis, talking about people hating a black president. They purposely cropped the picture so they couldn’t see I was black as they used it over this report about dangerous racists and white supremacists. In the original video, my whole body was visible in the video the whole time.”
