So long as victims are nonwhite
“I thought I understood gun culture. But I didn’t,” writes John DeVore at Medium.
It took a while to sink in, DeVore explains. Today he just feels naive. “It’s not about liberty or personal protection. It’s certainly not about tyranny. It’s about control. Strength. Boots, smashing faces.”
The Republican Party — once the party of business and law and order — now exists to fight for a future where white heterosexual Christians are firmly in charge of American society. And they will fight dirty if they have to.
Because “they” are coming for you, “the liberals, the Blacks, the Jews. The drag queens want to steal your children. Have you bought a gun today?”
The valorization of Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Perry was deeply unsettling for DeVore. But Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott’s intentions on pardoning Perry (allegedly spurred on by Fox News host Tucker Carlson) was DeVore’s “ah-ha moment.” Perry was convicted this month of murdering a Black Lives Matter supporter.
Twentieth Century fascism, like modern terrorism, is a nihilistic political multi-level marketing scheme. At the top of the pyramid sits a comfortable old man, like Carlson or Abbott, who benefit from the work of young, hungry young men willing to exterminate whoever they’re told is vermin.
Men like Abbott and Carlson are eager to attract recruits. So, of course, Abbott would try to pardon Daniel Perry. It’s a message to other hateful, lonely, angry men: “stand back and stand by.”
On the heels of this weekend’s scheduled mass shooting in Alabama, E.J. Dionne jumps in:
For roughly four decades, American conservatism has identified firearms as a marker of a manly rejection of urban cosmopolitanism and gun ownership as a right more important than any other. As DeSantis said in his video, the right to bear arms is “the foundation on which all our other rights rest” and essential to Americans’ “ability to rule themselves.”
“Why do Joe Biden and the liberals want our guns?” asked Gov. Kristi L. Noem of South Dakota, another speaker. “Because it will make it easier for them to violate all our other rights.”
(I’m still waiting for Obama’s “jackbooted thugs” to kick in my door all these years later.)
It comes down to a variant of the old Maoist slogan: All liberty grows out of the barrel of a gun. When Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani told a White House rally before the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, “Let’s have trial by combat,” he was speaking for a sentiment that runs deep in the gun rights movement.
Yet somehow, citizens of the world’s other stable democracies manage to secure their rights just fine without having to hoard firearms and quietly tolerate daily mass murder.
The truth behind America’s epidemic gun violence is another of those things the fetishists don’t say out loud. It’s not about the supposed Deep State.
“The state is good so long as the state is crushing those demanding equality,” DeVore snarks. “That is the official position of the Republican Party in 2023.”