He’s Against God. He’s Against Guns: A Failing Authoritarian President Plunges Deep into the Right’s Paranoid Playbook
Wednesday afternoon, President Donald Trump, slumping in the polls and desperate, attached Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to the “radical Left,” warning Americans Biden would “take away your guns, destroy your Second Amendment. No religion. No anything. Hurt the Bible. Hurt God. He’s against God. He’s against guns.”
Nonsensical vocal construction aside, Trump’s appeal was pure paranoia, a sloppy mishmash of Right Wing scare tactics that have poisoned American discourse for generations. The slapdash-nature of Trump’s “speech” only shows, once more, how purely incompetent he is and how the orthodoxy he is “defending,” that being religion and the right to bear arms, he has no actual understanding of besides their ability to motivate voters. The American Right has been using this paranoia for years and years now, but at least those politicians and pundits grasped the issues. Trump’s usage is embarrassing and his obvious willingness to take this paranoia all the way speaks to the danger he presents.
The American Right has been swimming in conspiracy theories for generations now, many of them organic in nature and many of them designed and harvested for political and financial gain. Throughout the 20th century, Republicans have used fear of encroaching dystopias, especially in the case of the Red Scares of post-World War I and post-World War II eras, to target liberals and projects designed to better lives. In almost every instance of populist movements, be it labor solidarity, Civil Rights, the present Black Lives Matter protests, the Right has countered with baseless accusations of infiltration and manipulation by anti-American forces, including socialists, communists, and shadowy cabals with ulterior motives.
In the post-USSR world, the Right has plunged into a New World Order-style paranoia campaign that regularly accuses Democrats and liberals of being involved in an antichrist-like campaign designed to strip America of its religion and weapons in order to make way for a one-world government in service of evil and the literal devil. This has created what I’ve come to call The Cult of the Shining City and a nationalist, secular, apocalyptic, white-identity evangelicalism that infects our current political world. This narrative has created a messiah-like figure in Trump, who relishes the role and uses it to pursue his natural instincts as an authoritarian. Though this fever-dream reality has inspired white terrorism in the past, including Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, Trump’s embrace of the mythology and its power has further radicalized paranoia white Americans to the point where violence in the streets is an unfortunate component of modern society.
The Republican Party did not construct this reality, or lay the foundation for Trump, alone. The National Rifle Association has been a more than willing accomplice, and their history of fueling and profiting off white supremacist paranoia played no small part in constructing our current crisis. It is no coincidence that New York Attorney-General Letitia James announced Tuesday, before Trump’s bizarre condemnation, that she was seeking to dissolve the NRA after years of flagrant crimes and abuses. As expected, the NRA countered by calling it a Left Wing conspiracy against them and the Second Amendment.
On the latest episode of The Muckrake Podcast, Muckrake EIC Jared Yates Sexton discusses with co-host Nick Hauselman the NRA’s history of corruption and how they helped drive the Right’s fascistic turn.
The grift has been discovered, documented, and nailed dead-to-rights, so the only move left, for both the NRA and Donald Trump, is to embrace the fascistic conspiracy theories and dive deep. Joe Biden, a career-politician who helped craft the modern police state and culture of mass incarceration, has been a centrist for decades now, and is certainly no radical. The idea that Biden, who is a proud and vocal member of the Catholic Church, would attack religion, much less the Second Amendment, is a pure farce, but the Right’s new tactic of painting him as a far-left liberal is telling. They’re running out of options, and they’re relying on the old playbook, despite the risks.
Heading into November’s Election, the Right is showing a willingness to hold onto power at any cost. They have already inspired people to carry out violence, to intimidate, to attack, to murder, and have yet to flinch as the consequences grow in number. To even a casual observer, it is obvious that this culture of paranoia and conspiracy theories and gleeful fascism has created an environment ripe for disaster and mass tragedy, but that has yet to so much as give them pause.
We must understand that this has been the Right’s operating procedure for generations now. It has cost lives and progress time and time again. In this moment of reckoning, where the check is coming due and the consequences of their actions loom large, they have shown a giddy willingness to embrace any action, no matter how toxic or poisonous or ultimately disastrous.
Jared Yates Sexton is the author of American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed its People, available for pre-order from Dutton/Penguin-Random House. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Politico, and elsewhere. He currently serves as an associate professor of writing at Georgia Southern University and is the co-host of The Muckrake Podcast.
