Rolling Stone writer Jeb Lund [above] blames Republicans for the Charleston church shooting. His editorial is a bilefest draped in sarcasm, to the point of semi-coherency. Like this: “This [crime] 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. We can’t afford to allow political discussions of these events, because if we do, we might notice what’s already there, wracking the body politic like gangrene.” And what’s “there,” behind door Number One? Gun-toting ghouls . . .
Movement conservatives have fetishized a tendentious and ahistorical reading of the Second Amendment to the point that the Constitution itself somehow paradoxically “legitimizes” an armed insurrection against the government created by it. Those leading said insurrection are swaddled by the blanket exculpation of patriotism. At the same time, they have synonymized the Democratic Party with illegitimacy and abuse of the American order. This is no longer an argument about whether one party’s beliefs are beneficial or harmful, but an attitude that labels leftism so antithetical to the American idea that empowering it on any level is an act of usurpation. Leftism no longer constitutes a debatable misuse of American power, but theft and governmental overreach.
In other words, a 1995 article by a Gary Willis “proves” that the Second Amendment doesn’t protect Americans’ individual right to keep and bear arms – a contention struck down by common sense and the Supreme Court (twice). Conservative/Republican Americans availing themselves of this natural, civil and Constitutionally protected right are insurrectionists who view the Democrat Party as fair game. More specifically. . .
And nothing — nothing — emphasizes that [government] overreach and theft like black people. Mendacious twit and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley issued a statement saying, “We do know that we’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another,” but to riddle it out all she needed to do was go outside and look up at the traitorous rag borne by Confederate armies and raiding parties and rapists and murderers that flaps outside the capitol as if to say, “Enact change at your own risk.”
Like the rest of his left-leaning colleagues, in the aftermath of Roof’s racist attack, Lund has seized on South Carolina’s Confederate flag-flying as a symbol of Republican racism. This despite the fact that the Democrat Party was responsible for the South’s post-slavery racist political infrastructure. (Lest we forget, the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, was a Republican.)
We’re deep into SMH territory here. It gets worse, though. Lund retreads the meme that [white] Republicans are racists because they oppose Barack Obama, a black American, and the welfare state.
. . . plain and simple, when Barack Obama stole the country from its rightful stewards, it was black Americans who did it. But he needn’t have bothered. 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.
Lund equates the right’s faith in limited government, free market capitalism, liberty and personal responsibility with a desire to enslave African-Americans. He reckons Republicans have armed whites with hatred and firearms. Roof’s attack was the logical result of that “strategy.” Lund’s rant descends into . . . wait for it . . . a racist screed.
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.
In his pursuit of Republican demonization, Lund is channeling white supremacists. Huh. But make no mistake: Lund is not alone in his attempt to portray the defenders of liberty as the enemies of liberty. Here’s his sarcastic conclusion:
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. Because that would mean at least two weeks of everyone laboriously having to explain to you what a horrible, misleadingly coincidental thing Dylann Roof’s alleged acts were. You’ll want that explanation to seem fresh when the next coincidence happens. And the next. And the next.
Or you’ll want a gun to defend yourself, so that the next atrocity is met with the resistance it requires. Whether you’re black, white, Hispanic, Christian, Muslim, conservative, liberal, gay, straight, old or young. And while you’re considering this, remember that American gun control began life as a Democrat agenda to disarm freed slaves. And that’s the truth.