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…
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):
