The right wing aren’t being hypocrites when they celebrate Alex Pretti’s execution. They are celebrating because the second amendment’s long history of vigilante violence has now become official state policy.
White vigilantes assassinated Harry and Harriette Moore in their homes for starting a school for black children. They murdered Jewish men in Mississippi for trying to help Black folks register to vote. They killed JFK, Malcolm X, MLK and RFK.
Black men returning home from WWI with military honors inspired white racial terror in the 1920s. Latin folks in baggy suits in Los Angeles during WWII caused white GIs to take the law into their own hands, murdering Jose Diaz.
4chan and X and groypers no longer need to become “lone wolves” to exert lethal violence onto people they hate. They can simply join ICE and become $40k richer.
Now that the state has spent a year actively recruiting the very people who anonymously fantasized about being the next Dylann Roof into its modern day slave patrol, we see the violent history of the second amendment become official state policy.
The state can move with haste to erase a rainbow crosswalk, but ask them to defend children from the people who caused a memorial in the first place and suddenly they’ve got cement for sandals.
When “lone wolf” men open fire on LGBTQ folks expressing joy in a club or brown kids in a school, it’s easy to understand that the state has simply outsourced its violence with the second amendment.
The second amendment exists to support the atrocities at Charleston and Pulse and Uvalde and El Paso, not in contradiction to them.
It has always defended white women like Carolyn Bryant from being forced to see a black boy in public. It has always been for George Zimmerman, never Philando Castile.
The second amendment *has always been* a tool for the white folks of Cedar Key and Sumner to brutalize, murder, and burn down Rosewood, a black community that committed the crime of thriving in proximity to white folks. It has always been a tool for Tulsa. Or Groveland.
The second amendment *has always been* a tool for the slave catcher. The second amendment *has always been* a tool for vigilantes acting on behalf of the state.
The second amendment is the enforcement clause of The Turner Diaries. It has never been a defense against tyranny, it has always been against egalitarian resistance.
Right wingers are actually being intellectually consistent, but rhetorically dishonest, when they defend Kyle Rittenhouse’s vigilante violence while condoning the execution of two Minnesotans, with the most recent victim was allegedly armed.
After all, the American Revolution was fought, in no small part, because colonists thought it was their God-given right to arm themselves to wipe out Indigenous folks who were already here. Look up the Paxton Boys. Look up what the Haudenosaunee Confederacy called then-General George Washington.
we don’t need to quarter troops in homes if every single person is armed and able to become a troop at a moment’s notice.
The second amendment exists because of the third amendment. While I have been un-ironically in favor of a 21st century interpretation of the 3rd amendment as a way to dismantle the surveillance state, the pairing of the two is pretty simple:
This “tyrannical government” explanation was, essentially, invented in 2008 by Justice Scalia in DC v Heller. This ruling was a canary in the coal mine, one that signaled that our government institutions were being taken over by what were essentially neo-confederate legal theorists.
The second amendment was never intended to be defense against a tyrannical government. We know this, because one of the first things Washington did after becoming president under the new Constitution was violently put down a rebellion in Pennsylvania.
Seems the NYT does more editing of its employees' social media feeds than the words published in its pages
i saw this man tie a damsel to the train tracks while wearing a top hat
Imagine being the New York Times and having Jamelle Bouie on staff — by all accounts, one of the best in the business — and censoring him because he correctly told people you sourced a Nazi for a political hitpiece.
yes. they literally blame higher education for a social order that doesn’t give unquestioned deference to people like themselves
But the right wingers who voted Trump because they love slurs and hate trans folks? Well the party really needs to do some soul searching to figure out how to reach those folks.
“Moderate” Democrats will call students and Muslims who didn’t want to vote to fund war crimes in Gaza “ideologically pure” or “geopolitically naive” or “short-sighted, single issue voters.”
I was watching A Complete Unknown and made a joke that Bob was “only paying $150 a month for that apartment.”
He was actually paying closer to $70.
Barnes & Noble owes its entire existence to a customer base that still enjoys physical copies of books and media, and yet they put the world’s most annoying stickers on top of every item they sell.
Money printer go brrrr …
moneyontheleft.org/2025/05/09/b...
Do you see how “🤷♂️ you get what you get” when it comes to voting doesn’t seem to inspire folks to vote? Trump ran three times in a row, won 2/3 of those times, and won the popular vote for the first time in decades. Centrism isn’t a winning strategy.
I think it’s ok to make voting against war crimes and the mass death and suffering of children your only issue, even if it doesn’t impact you personally. Why does the left always have to give up their positions?
I don’t think you can decide how Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims more broadly choose how to react to war crimes. All Harris had to do was say “I will not continue Biden’s policy of funding Israel war crimes.” That’s not an impossible standard.
