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Home > Rolling Stone Writer: Charleston Massacre Proof That GOP ‘Has Weaponized Its Supporters’ and ‘Made Violence a Virtue’

Rolling Stone Writer: Charleston Massacre Proof That GOP ‘Has Weaponized Its Supporters’ and ‘Made Violence a Virtue’

By Tom Johnson | June 19, 2015 | 11:10 AM EDT
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Anger, sadness, and disgust have been nearly universal responses to Wednesday night’s apparent act of racist terrorism in Charleston, S.C., but Jeb Lund doesn’t think such reactions make sense coming from conservatives.

In a Friday screed for Rolling Stone, Lund argued that the Charleston shootings shouldn’t have surprised anyone, given that “American movement conservatism has already made these kinds of killings political. The Republican Party has weaponized its supporters, made violence a virtue and, with almost every pronouncement for 50 years, given them an enemy politicized, racialized and indivisible.”

The key ingredients in this politicization, Lund declared, are guns (“Movement conservatives have fetishized a tendentious and ahistorical reading of the Second Amendment”) and racism (Obama’s election, Lund wrote, “merely confirmed an extant narrative that equated all vaguely left-leaning government action with mass redistribution to a parasitic black population on the road to American collapse”).

So the magazine that glamorized Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as a cover boy is going to lecture about making violence a virtue? From Lund’s piece (bolding added):

[W]ith 50 percent of major American political parties telling people like [Dylann Roof] to fetishize arms and rebellion just as the truth of their America is absolute and under attack, it's amazing that we don't meet a new version of him every week…

…Here's Mona Charen writing in the famously pro-segregationist, terrorism-pardoning, MLK-dismissing National Review, already shaking her head about how groups might have a political response to an act that is by definition political… 

The fact is, this is political because American movement conservatism has already made these kinds of killings political. The Republican Party has weaponized its supporters, made violence a virtue and, with almost every pronouncement for 50 years, given them an enemy politicized, racialized and indivisible…

Movement conservatives have fetishized a tendentious and ahistorical reading of the Second Amendment…At the same time, they have synonymized the Democratic Party with illegitimacy and abuse of the American order…[They claim that] leftism no longer constitutes a debatable misuse of American power, but theft and governmental overreach.

And nothing — nothing — emphasizes that overreach and theft like black people…

With each new iteration of right-wing reaction, another layer of distinction between the objects of their resentment has eroded, until Democrats, minorities and theft function as one aggregate of American subversion. Probably nothing certified this perception for movement conservatism quite like Barack Obama's winning the presidency twice as a milquetoast social democrat, and with over 94 percent of the black vote: plain and simple, when Barack Obama stole the country from its rightful stewards, it was black Americans who did it…Obama merely confirmed an extant narrative that equated all vaguely left-leaning government action with mass redistribution to a parasitic black population on the road to American collapse...

The enemy is one entity now. Black people are the engine of the Democratic Party, which is the engine of bad government, which is the engine of illegitimate oppression. They are part of a vast national criminal enterprise — against which our founders gave us a special amendment as a lethal and liberating tool. To kill them is an act of rebellion, the hunting down of the criminal and the freeing of yourself and the just.

But whatever you do, do not profane this moment by politicizing it. Do not ask about the politics of Fox News and Republican leaders celebrating an armed, avowed criminal like Cliven Bundy... Do not ask why the former governor of Texas used to hang out at Niggerhead Ranch and winkingly campaigns on his support for Tentherism. Speaking of which, do not ask why that constitutional interpretation has led multiple conservative state legislatures to pass nullification acts of gun control just as conservative attorneys general invoked nullification to undermine an Affordable Care Act that the Tea Party demonized as an imperial handout to shiftless minorities. Do not ask why Newt Gingrich's biggest applause line of the 2012 campaign outside of "Obama is a food stamp president" was berating black debate moderator Juan Williams in South Carolina (for whom "work...seemed to be a strange, distant concept"), while the biggest Kinsley gaffe of 2012 was Rick Santorum saying, "I don't want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money"…

Most of all, do not under any circumstances politicize this moment, because you might risk discovering how much it could echo 50 years of the violently anti-government racialized rhetoric of a Republican Party piggybacking on 150 years of Southern white resentment.

Crime
Culture/Society
Guns
Conservatives & Republicans
Liberals & Democrats
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Racism
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Rolling Stone

Source URL: http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-johnson/2015/06/19/rolling-stone-writer-charleston-massacre-proof-gop-has-weaponized-its