Was Columbine a redneck christan school?

For the people on here who went there and knew people who went there, is it true they were very intolerant of people who looked different like Eric and Dylan and didn't hold the same "beliefs" as they did!! Did the school have the redneck country vibe to it? What I'm saying did the students there have a hard time accepting others due to religious beliefs or political views?

There was a lot of evangelical Christianity there, but as much as I don't like that stuff, I'm loathe to call it "redneck"--"redneck," to me, implies poverty and rural stupidity, whereas the Columbine area was upper middle class. Didn't Ralph Larkin (I know, I know) say that people moved to Littleton expressly to put their kids at CHS? And it certainly wasn't "country."

Was it Larkin who interviewed a few Columbine students who dismissed the Paducah and Jonesboro victims as “rednecks”?

Of course, some people in places like New York and Los Angeles think everybody in “flyover country” is a redneck. Suburban Denver might as well be the backwoods of West Virginia.

Larkin wrote that most of the residents of the Columbine area were clustered around the upper-middle portion of the economic spectrum but he also made the point that the area was a bastion of evangelical conservatism. IIRC he quoted one student who derided the denizens as “white trash with money”.

The Hoffschneiders were in the construction business - a “redneck”-ish profession. They had more money than the Klebolds but the latter seemed more “civilized” - not only in terms of their educational attainment but just their basic temperament.

When Rocky’s girlfriend filed a restraining order against him, his mother and his sister went over to her house and tried to smash through the front door. It’s hard to imagine Susan Klebold doing something like that.

The Harrises were somewhat more redneck- ish than the Klebolds but they were hardly bumpkins.

The Browns have always struck me as a bit snobby and uppity - and I don’t think they have any real reason to be.

LPorter101 wrote:

Was it Larkin who interviewed a few Columbine students who dismissed the Paducah and Jonesboro victims as “rednecks”?

Of course, some people in places like New York and Los Angeles think everybody in “flyover country” is a redneck. Suburban Denver might as well be the backwoods of West Virginia.

Larkin wrote that most of the residents of the Columbine area were clustered around the upper-middle portion of the economic spectrum but he also made the point that the area was a bastion of evangelical conservatism. IIRC he quoted one student who derided the denizens as “white trash with money”.

The Hoffschneiders were in the construction business - a “redneck”-ish profession. They had more money than the Klebolds but the latter seemed more “civilized” - not only in terms of their educational attainment but just their basic temperament.

When Rocky’s girlfriend filed a restraining order against him, his mother and his sister went over to her house and tried to smash through the front door. It’s hard to imagine Susan Klebold doing something like that.

The Harrises were somewhat more redneck- ish than the Klebolds but they were hardly bumpkins.

The Browns have always struck me as a bit snobby and uppity - and I don’t think they have any real reason to be.

I suppose this is a valid point about suburban Denver. I'm reminded of the famous H. L. Mencken quote about how America has three cities with character: New York, Las Vegas and New Orleans. "All other American cities are Cleveland."

LPorter, do you know anything about Rocky H. being involved in a missing persons case? It got brought up in this thread, probably just a rumor:

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Have you also seen this about Mark Ames, the reporter who bashed Rocky and got a nasty response from Rocky because of it?

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Lunkhead McGrath wrote:

LPorter, do you know anything about Rocky H. being involved in a missing persons case?  It got brought up in this thread, probably just a rumor:

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Quote :

Greene's sense of foreboding dates to 1996, the year Hoffschneider transferred to Columbine after being expelled from a private school for fighting. He had other blemishes on his record -- a 1992 arrest for criminal mischief and a 1995 arrest relating to a "missing person." As juvenile cases, their outcomes were sealed.

Rocky was born in 1979. (IIRC his birthday is December 31.) So he would have been about 12/13 in 1992 and 15/16 in 1995.

Quote :

Have you also seen this about Mark Ames, the reporter who bashed Rocky and got a nasty response from Rocky because of it?

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No, I haven't seen it. Thanks for the link.

In 2006, Mark Ames wrote an article in which he confused Dusty with Rocky:

Quote :

Columbine's Most Wanted
By Mark Ames

This is being printed on April 20th. For over 50 years this day was notorious as the anniversary of Adolph Hitler's birthday. It was one of those days that made the Normals nervous, while a faction of nerdoids could be counted on to celebrate it, as if by celebrating Hitler's birthday, they would acquire some of his anti-nerdoid, mega-evil powers.

Seven yeas ago, something far more powerful and seductive gave this day new meaning: Columbine. On April 20, 1999, students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold attacked their high school, slaughtering twelve students and a teacher, wounding 20 more, before finally committing suicide. They'd armed themselves for a much wider assault - along with a TEC-9, a Hi-Point 9-millimeter carbine and two shotguns, they rigged up 95 explosive devices - enough firepower to wipe out their school and slaughter hundreds of students, had they gone off. Among the bombs were forty-eight carbon dioxide bombs, or "crickets," twenty-seven pipe bombs, eleven 1 1/2-gallon propane containers, seven incendiary devices with 40-plus gallons of flammable liquid, and two duffel bag bombs with 20-pound liquefied-petroleum gas tanks. Had they survived, they planned to hijack a plane and crash it into New York City, "firing all the way down."

Every fake attempt to understand "why" Columbine happened has always turned into an act of willful self-deception. At first their parents were blamed. But then we learned that both grew up in two-parent homes, and both openly loved their parents, even apologizing to them in video diaries. As Harris noted, quoting Shakespeare's The Tempest, "Good wombs hath borne bad sons." Then the Internet was blamed, Doom was blamed, violent movies, the NRA, lack of religion: everything was blamed except the most obvious cause of the attack: Columbine High School.

And what a horrible place it was - and is. After the massacre, numerous parents, students, and ex-students went public about the school's "toxic" culture of brutality. Students were routinely beaten, assaulted and humiliated right in front of the teachers and administration, whose jock-principal not only tolerated it but loved the bullies. As one jock from the Columbine High football team bragged after the massacre, "Sure we teased them. If you want to get rid of someone, usually you tease 'em. So the whole school would call them homos."

Officially, Columbine is not a suspect in the crime. Yet it has continued to see unprecedented white upper-middle-class violence. A year after the massacre, two Columbine students were killed across the street from the school in a Subway Sandwich shop; a boy on the basketball team committed suicide (as did one of the victims' mothers); and two students were caught a couple of years ago with a list they'd drawn up of Columbine students they were planning to massacre.

Indeed on forums around the web, Harris and Klebold are literally heroes to thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of American kids. There have also been numerous school massacres and planned massacres since 1999 where the perpetrators referenced Columbine as their model. Every year, as April 20th approaches, the number of plots exposed soars. Recently, school massacre plots were uncovered in Reno; Platte City, Missouri; and Tacoma, Washington, among others.

All major crimes, particularly unusual crime waves like school and office massacres, have a larger socio-political context, although we're still at the stage where we refuse to recognize this possibility in white middle-class schoolyard massacres (and office massacres). But just blaming "the schools" is like blaming "the System." All crimes also have human villains as well, and we owe it to them to out these villains.

Today is the seventh anniversary of Columbine, and I think it's time we honor this day by doing something constructive, something positive. It's time to seek justice. And that means naming these villains, the willing little Nazis who destroyed Klebold and Harris, and whose viciousness eventually led to a massacre.

I present to you the swine of swine, former Columbine wrestling champion Rocky "Dusty" Hoffschneider. Harris and Klebold's hatred of Hoffschneider was obsessive - indeed most kids there hated him. But he was popular and a state champion. Which meant that when, for example, he shoved his girlfriend into a locker right in front of a teacher, the teacher looked away and let it slide. He also tormented a Jewish student, singing pro-Hitler songs and yelling out "another Jew in the oven!" every time the student scored a basket during PE. He pinned the kid to the ground and gave him "twisters," bruising his body. And then he started threatening to burn the kid alive. The student's father complained, to no avail - the PE teacher was also Hoffschneider's wrestling coach. Eventually the Jewish kid transferred to another school, the parents blaming the administration for shielding their star jock, while Hoffschneider continued bullying his way up the social ladder.

Hoffschneider enrolled in Columbine in 1996 after he'd been thrown out of a private school for fighting. He had a previous criminal record: an arrest for criminal mischief in 1992, and another arrest in 1995 relating to a "missing person," the details of which are sealed.

Now remember, in the aftermath of Columbine, Klebold and Harris have been repeatedly compared to Hitler (even though Harris explicity denounced racism and Nazis), while Hoffschneider, a violent, cruel, girlfriend-smacking, anti-Semitic fuck, has gone on to become a successful jock at Wyoming University, pampered all the way by a society that loves its spirted Nazis, and hates those who "have no school spirit," as one Columbine wrestler's father put it, explaining why Klebold and Harris were justifiably tormented as students.

Today, Hoffschneider is a top NCAA wrestler who was ranked as high as [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] a couple of years ago, before injuring his shoulder (hint-hint!). If you click on this web site:

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

you can see the pig as he is: a neckless Bush Country meathead. His bio says that he's majoring in Sociology, that ol' refuge for the very stupidest of the most mentally-challenged jocks. Oddly, the biography leaves out his greatest achievement: "Incited worst high school massacre in American history."

Rocky Hoffschneider may be a symptom of some larger evil, but he is also a perpetrator, a willing, enthusiastic executioner. We have given you his name and his general whereabouts. Now I'm asking readers to hunt him down and find out where he lives, so that we can publish his address here in the eXile. If you do, you'll get a very sweet prize from us, I assure you.

I'd also like to ask readers to consider what justice would be appropriate, and send in your entries. I can't call for something like physical harm or property damage, although I would certainly UNDERSTAND it. Remember, Rocky is a big, mean hog, but he's also an incredibly stupid, evil piece of shit. That means he's got vulnerabilities wider than the Maginot Line which you can exploit. The goal is justice. Let's ride the fucker straight to alcoholism and anti-depressants. That is the best way to mark April 20th.

Rocky got angry and wrote Ames an e-mail. Ames wrote the following article in response:

Quote :

Columbine Death Threat
By Mark Ames

Most people woke up on January 1st with a hangover. I woke up to a death threat, sent to me by the Columbine bully who inspired the most notorious school massacre of our time. Or would have, if I'd read the email the day it was sent.

A little background: as a follow-up to my book on rampage massacres at offices and schoolyards, Going Postal, I published an article in the eXile last April titled "Columbine's Most Wanted," about the notorious Nazi-jock Rocky Hoffschneider. Hoffschneider has been fingered by everyone from students to the Washington Post as one of the prime inspirations for Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's rage massacre in 1999. As I wrote, Hoffschneider not only attacked and bullied those two incessantly, but he even physically attacked a young freshman girl simply because she he saw her talking to Eric Harris. Among Rocky's famous exploits was harassing a Jewish student, repeatedly yelling "Another Jew in the oven!" every time he'd try to score a basket during PE, pinning him down and giving him painful tittie-twisters, beating and bullying the Jewish kid until finally his father pulled him from the school.

Now Rocky Hoffschneider is threatening to murder me and my family. Ostensibly the reason is that I made a mistake in my article. I referred to him as "Rocky 'Dusty' Hoffschneider" when in fact his name is "Rocky Wayne Hoffschneider." His younger brother is named "Dusty." In that article, I called on all the bullied, piss-off readers of The eXile to track down Rocky Hoffschneider and give him back a little of what he dished out. Apparently, Rocky didn't like that much. Here is his email:

Subject: Columbine

From: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Date: 1/1/2007 1:29 PM

To: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

You pretend to be above the rest of us, a god, that knows and sees all. I would like to know though that if you are the god of journalism, and know so much, how can you confuse my younger brother and myself. Two completely different people on record. He is a good person, sinless in all his life doing the best he can. Myself on the other hand is the exact opposite. I am the sinner, not the saint. I don't deny that I have not lived the perfect life in the eyes of most people, but who honestly can? I regret none of my past, as I will regret none of my future. If you think you will scare me into a corner, think again. I am not like you. I don't run and hide. I fight my own fights and always have. If you are going to talk about revenge don't call upon those who have the balls to do it, do it yourself coward. I am not hiding in another country. I am still here, unlike yourself. Before you write any more of your blasphemous articles accusing the innocent I would appreciate it if you would go back to journalism 101 and relearn that before you make accusations against the innocent people you should consider the consequences because god himself knows that if any thing happens to my brother and his family you will know first hand how truly fucked up I am. Of all the things that are certain in life, death being the most certain, as far as you and your family are concerned that is a close second.

I spent my winter holiday break in Hawaii, at a friend's giant hippie castle in Diamondhead, so I didn't get this email until later. Initially I was thrilled that I'd pissed off one of the biggest assholes I've ever researched, and took his death threat as a compliment. But a mistake is a mistake. What's worse, some readers from Columbine High told me that Dusty was actually a decent guy, in spite of the fact that he's also a thick-necked wrestling jock like his brother Rocky. It makes sense that Dusty would be good  the younger brother of a raging asshole is bound to be more sensitive and compassionate; it comes from hard experience. Dusty is a wrestler; but his big brother Rocky is an Ultimate Fighter, which is another unpleasant thought not only from the point of view of the fact that this makes me a high-placer in the 2007 Ghoul Pool, but also because I'm a big admirer of Ultimate Fighting, and the unavoidable knowledge that recognizable assholes like Rocky Hoffschneider are made for this sport kind of undermines the sick exotic rush I get from watching it.

In any event, I recently returned to Moscow and sent this reply:

Rocky Hoffschneider,

I received an email from you to my Russian email account ( [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] ), which I'm copying below. Given the sloping-forehead tone of your email, I assume it really is you who wrote it.

Here is my reaction:

1. I reviewed the material and you're correct, only you, Rocky Wayne Hoffschneider, not Rocky "Dusty" Hoffschneider as I wrote, are the asshole who helped make Columbine happen; that in the crunch of deadline time, between my 2 television shows and my print journalism, I screwed up your name and mixed in your brother's name, because sometimes guys like me, who have interesting and overworked lives, and tens of thousands of fans, make mistakes; and that I regret this mistake, particularly as I'm hearing that your younger brother Dusty is actually a decent guy; so I am going to correct this mistake in our paper.

2. The fact that you brag about not having any regrets about all of the blood on your hands proves my point that dicks like you, the popular jock meatheads and the Red State pigs they grow up to be, are the real sociopaths, not guys like Klebold and Harris whose violence was beaten into them.

Mark Ames

Editor

The eXile

I still haven't heard back. I suspect his email was sent from one of those untraceable accounts. Stay tuned.

Then Rocky sent him another e-mail and Ames made one last post:

Quote :

Hi buddy,

I was happy to see you corrected your fuck up on the exile, confusing my brother and myself. You really didn't get to me but I commented on your columbines most wanted under a different name and you neglected to correct yourself for a couple of months and I was concerned for my brother and his family. [...]After two months you didn't correct yourself and I figured I should try a little harder to get your attention. Obviously it worked. Within a few weeks you wrote a whole new piece of garbage. I also commented on how you lacked the ambition to do the foot work necessary to write a descent article. [...] Two months wasn't enough? I would call what you did a little more than a mistake, my brother has two infants you crybaby fuck. You cry a river for two adults if I remember right, who murdered 13 people but have no regard for an innocent family. And you call me a sociopath?...

That really doesn't matter to you right. After all you have an exciting life. So exciting you couldn't figure out who two completely different people were. How long did it take you to write the first piece of trash without doing any research, 20 minutes? How could a scholar like yourself let a not so "thick necked jock", as you can see in the picture, correct someone as accomplished as yourself. I just lost even more respect for over educated fuck ups like yourself. I guess I am one up on ya. [...] I am not like your buddies Dylan and Eric. I don't expect you will publish this one because it shows how incompetent you are once again. No wonder you had to go to Russia to get a job. My advice to you concerning your future poor me articles is cry a river, build a bridge, and get over it. Sometimes life sucks. [...] Maybe next week you can make excuses for terrorists after bashing the United States once again you un American prick. I apologize, I don't want to upset you I know your sensitive. Look on the bright side buddy, you still have me.

Thanks,

Rocky Hoffschneider

Dear Mr. "Glass Neck" Hoffschneider,

Congratulations, you're the winner of our [sic] letter of the week! Yes, you, Rocky "Glass-Neck" Hoffschneider, the infamous "Columbine Bully," have just won a spankin' new [sic] T-shirt! All you have to do is email your address to [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] , and we guarantee, the T-shirt's yours! Why did we choose U, Mr. Hoffschneider? Because we believe you're special. You tugged our heartstrings. Not just because of your losing battle with English grammar (remember kids, we upright-walking humans write "you're sensitive" not "your sensitive"; you see Rocky, the "'re" indicates a shortened version of the word "are," which is what we cognitively-evolved humans call a "verb"). No, you tugged our heartstrings because we did a little research on your "career" as an Ultimate Fighter, and what we found...hold on while we get out the box o' Kleenex tissues...jesus, this is so difficult! It's like Brian's Song meets I Am Sam by way of Million Dollar Baby - the last half hour, that is... Anyhoo, what we discovered is that your one bout in the Ultimate Fighting league was just an amateur warm-up on a Colorado card...and even then, you got your ass kicked. Or rather, your neck squeezed. Note the small print at the very bottom of this article: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] Imagining poor you, Rocky "Glass-Neck" Hoffschneider, getting squeezed with a "triangle choke" sort of brings to mind the very best of Curley Howard of the Three Stooges. Except of course that it's not funny. Not funny at all. Folks, there's nothing funny about a boy born with a glass neck. So Rocky, chin up. Oops, that was inappropriate. Well, what we mean to say is that rather than offering sentimental platitudes, we're offering you a [sic] T-shirt. Wear it proudly. Because [sic] means "oops I have no fucking idea how to spell or write or even wrestle, and yet I'm being quoted in the original so that the whole world can see what a mongoloid I am." If you wear it, people may forget about your glass neck. So send us your mailing address, and wear that shirt proudly, Rocky! We're proud of you, and you should be too!

Oh crud, I'd read that first article you linked to a lot of times without ever remembering the missing persons case bit. How'd that happen?

I never thought Mark Ames' feud with Rocky was good for anything but a laugh--I imagine Rocky is just about as bad as people make him out to be, but he's an outlier to the massacre at best, IMO. And frankly Ames' article is sort of embarrassing to me now--a bunch of juvenile taunts at someone who, dick though he was, can't really be blamed for the massacre. So I was almost amused when he got in trouble in Russia, sort of like the weird schadenfreude I felt when Hunter S. Thompson got the shit kicked out of him by bikers at the end of his Hell's Angels book, then realized he had been wrong about the Hell's Angels for his entire book, which he spent defending them and repeatedly claiming they were the victims of wrongful stereotypes courtesy of the squares that he, Thompson, despised.

LPorter101 wrote:

Was it Larkin who interviewed a few Columbine students who dismissed the Paducah and Jonesboro victims as “rednecks”?

Of course, some people in places like New York and Los Angeles think everybody in “flyover country” is a redneck. Suburban Denver might as well be the backwoods of West Virginia.

Larkin wrote that most of the residents of the Columbine area were clustered around the upper-middle portion of the economic spectrum but he also made the point that the area was a bastion of evangelical conservatism. IIRC he quoted one student who derided the denizens as “white trash with money”.

The Hoffschneiders were in the construction business - a “redneck”-ish profession. They had more money than the Klebolds but the latter seemed more “civilized” - not only in terms of their educational attainment but just their basic temperament.

When Rocky’s girlfriend filed a restraining order against him, his mother and his sister went over to her house and tried to smash through the front door. It’s hard to imagine Susan Klebold doing something like that.

The Harrises were somewhat more redneck- ish than the Klebolds but they were hardly bumpkins.

The Browns have always struck me as a bit snobby and uppity - and I don’t think they have any real reason to be.

Great post.

Columbine is and was middle class and upper middle class. It was quite more 'evangelical born-again-y' than most similar class neighborhoods in California or Boston. But these were "affluent evangelicals", not at all like the methodists in dirt-poor rural Appallachia.
Isaiah Shoels was like what... one of 3 black students in the whole school in 1999? If you look at the yearbook you'll see a few hispanic kids and a handful of Asians, but this was extremely white in comparison to the geneeral US population.

I would not call it 'redneck-y'. But looking at it from a wider perspective, it does feel more lowbrow and less refined than the same social class neighborhoods in Poland or say New England. The Hoffschneiders case in point, but in general it was more about sports and less about education than many similar rich schools. Likewise the arts didn't seem too popular there... how many CHS students went to something like Oberlin college?

At least that's my take on it.

Littleton was very Conservative Christian.

Interesting. Reminds me of the west suburbs of Chicago like Kendall county that hate everything to do with Chicago.