What’s worst for everyone

When I say it's a death cult, I mean it

Even beyond election issues, there’s no way to delay that trouble comin’ every day:

A federal judge on Thursday blocked large portions of a new New York gun law, jeopardizing a measure that was passed just three months earlier and underscoring the difficulty that states may face in restricting the public carrying of firearms after a major Supreme Court ruling in June.

In a 53-page order, the judge, Glenn T. Suddaby of the Northern District, said he would block the state from enforcing several provisions, writing that New York’s attempts to bar guns in a number of places deemed “sensitive” — including museums, theaters, stadiums, Times Square, libraries, places offering services to children and anywhere alcohol is served — appeared impermissible. He based his decision on the June ruling, which struck down a restrictive law that had stood for more than a century.

The Times neglects to mention that Suddaby thinks you can’t keep people from packing heat in the subway, either, potentially launching regular, rotating open auditions for a Bernard Goetz of the Week.

Now, anyone who has ever been to New York or any big city, and even quite a few people who haven’t, can see this is insane. Just plain nuts. As opposed to the sparsely-populated red state precincts where dumbasses carry assault weapons into Starbucks with no problem (besides the long-term enervating effect of living with people like that), New York is very densely packed (29,729 people per square mile) with ambitious and competitive people, a high-pressure environment where the many, many, many minor confrontations that get talked down or blown off or otherwise handled on a minute-by-minute basis will now, thanks to the New Order, become an opportunity for any number of assholes legally carrying loaded guns to kill a whole lot of people.  

There is no “law and order” solution to this except what the judge just ruled unconstitutional — and that insanity, like all the recent aggressive legal efforts by conservatives to flood cities with guns, is based on the loony 2008 Heller decision by the Supreme Court’s conservative judges that turned the Second Amendment from a hedge against tyranny into a national suicide pact.

Have you ever thought about why conservatives have been so eager to flood cities with guns?

Maybe you took their word for it that it’s because they’re so deeply in love with the Constitution and a relatively recent interpretation of one of its Amendments that they just can’t bear to see them violated.

But let’s be real a minute: Maybe there are a few scholars — the kind who have essentially been bred in academic vats and don’t know much about how the real world works — who seriously believe the powdered wig guys, for whom the last word in personal security was a muzzle-loading flintlock, really meant by the Second Amendment that people should go to Nets games toting loaded Glocks and Sig Sauers.

But normal people —not just liberals, but even conservatives who have any common sense (assuming perhaps unfairly that any still exist), cannot fail to know how dangerous, unnecessary, and just plain fucked up that is. It defies common sense.

So why do they want it?

It’s like I keep telling you guys: Conservatism is a death cult. They want to kill you. And though they expect to be protected by Wilhoit’s Law from whatever madness they unleash to kill you, if it actually means increasing the chances that they’ll die, too, they’re cool with that. That’s how intense their hatred is.

Look at their approach to — well, everything else. Climate change is almost too obvious. From the days of Al Gore is Fat to their current shtick, in which “ESG” is the latest acronym they’ve turned into a curseword to scare the rubes, even as they nominally kinda-sorta agree there’s some kind of climate problem they’re nonetheless working harder to avoid doing anything about it than they’d be required to work if they did do something about it.

They’d rather burn the planet than cooperate with the rest of us to keep it from burning. What’s that tell you?

Or take abortion. We normally talk about that as conservatives’ pitch to the rampant misogyny of their followers who thirst to see women deprived of their agency and returned to the status of chattel. And that’s certainly true!

However: Think about what chaos is created by the lunatic laws they’ve been able to pass since the Dobbs decision. All the press goes to the medical absurdities these draconian laws have created, in many cases interfering dangerously with even non-reproductive health care. But think: What can be the expected result of the sudden mass disenfranchisement of half the population, most of whom actively oppose it? Do they expect women to just get used to it and give up?

I don’t think they do, because the pleasure they take in immiserating their enemies — and depend upon it, that’s how they think of pretty much the whole gender except maybe their wives and mothers, and even that’s not certain — is far greater than any strictly legal or political result they could achieve. They want women to suffer, and since resistance is a sign that they do suffer, they welcome it.

They’re even willing to risk the midterms for the comfort of knowing they cause pain to people they hate.

What does that tell you?

On and on it goes. Think of the joy Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis and their followers took from shipping immigrants all over the country — just because it caused pain to the immigrants and to the blue cities where they dumped them. What political effect does that achieve? Are their scumbag boosters going to vote any harder for them?

No; while for conservatives racism and xenophobia are always good electoral investments, the important thing for them is that, in a country that immigrants have obviously made stronger, smarter, and more powerful, conservatives have made it respectable to hate immigrants. They cry for white people to have more babies — hell, they’ll even give you tax credits for it! Maybe even welfare! — so they never have to let another dark-skinned foreigner cross our border and work 80 hours a week to build a business and raise a grateful family again.

Student loans. Prison reform. Drug policy. In nearly every instance conservatives want — in the words of the old Simpsons gag — what’s worst for everyone.

No, I’m not discounting the financial incentive. Sure, they’re sucking up to donors who want these things, too — but those donors are by definition also conservative. These tycoons could probably live every bit as well as they do now without the graft they bid their political flunkies win for them. But they demand it nonetheless. Why? Maybe for the same reason the flunkies want it: It’s not the money but the burning desire to fuck people over just because they can that animates them. Without that ability, what’s even the point of being hyperrich?

(I mean, you’ve seen Elon Musk’s Twitter feed, right? You think that rat’s-nest in his skull contains any coherent policies, or really anything more than the will to power of a depraved child with access to a network of hired assassins?)

It is, I keep saying, a death cult. They’re willing to make this place a hell for themselves so long as you’re forced to live in it with them. And it’s getting on time we dealt with them as such.