By now, you’ve heard about the right-wing plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan. Unfortunately, this kind of foolishness is going to become the rule over the next year at least, and it’s probably a good idea for all of us to have a cursory understanding of what is going on in the minds of conservatives these days.
Regarding the plot, the main thrust of it wasn’t something about the incoherence of modern firearm law — in fact, Michigan is one of those states that uses a very light touch in regard to guns, which is why protesters armed with rifles were allowed inside the capitol building back in May of this year without any consequences. In both cases, the conservatives involved were not angry about anything that we might think of as a substantive attack on conservative values, but instead they were angry about being forced to wear a mask in public during a pandemic. Mask-wearing appears to be the thing that conservatives are ready to start a civil war over, outshining everything from abortion to the Second Amendment in importance (though, they might find those things to be sufficient as well). In fact, there was just another incident like this — a man was planning to kill the mayor of Wichita, Kansas over the mask ordinance there.
I don’t see any reason not to make fun of them about this. I mean, if they’re making us wear a mask in public during a pandemic, what will be next? They might make us wear seat belts, or require restaurants to pass a health inspection! They might even prohibit honest, God-fearing parents from murdering their own children! That it is asinine is no reason to ignore it, though. We need to understand their mindset, because it isn’t going away — and it has been this way for a very, very long time.
So these particular conservatives in Michigan planned to kidnap Governor Whitmer due to her tyrannical mask ordinance. To be clear, the ordinance isn’t squeaky clean — it was created by the state health department rather than going through the legislature, which would be the correct route — so they’re not entirely wrong about it being a problem. But they were going to try her for treason, which is fun for a couple of reasons: First, nothing she did can be defined as treason — insurrection, perhaps, but not treason. Treason requires that the crime was done to benefit an enemy of the United States (I’ll get back to that). Second, nobody outside of conservatives who have gone off the rails is going to respect the secret show trial that you had in your friend’s barn, and you’ve already decided that she is guilty, so the only point of having a trial is because you are somehow getting off on it. Basically, the whole thing was a childish fantasy by people who really don’t understand how the world works.
Regarding this being a childish fantasy: We’re likely to find out that this plot never really got beyond the “wouldn’t it be cool” stage, and so wasn’t really a plot after all. Federal law enforcement has a long history of jumping to conclusions or even inducing people to take the step that turns “wouldn’t it be cool” into an actual plot, and we already know that federal informants provided first-hand accounts that led to these arrests. It wouldn’t be surprising at all to find out that the plotters were induced to do or say things by that informant that ultimately resulted in their arrests — and that has somehow become legal.
Beyond the infantile nature of their plot against the governor, another clear reason why these plotters are jackasses is because they opposed wearing a mask in the first place. Wearing a mask and physically staying away from each other are reasonable things to do with a pandemic like this one, but they and their ilk simply would not do the right thing. That’s what induced Michigan’s health authorities to mandate that people wear masks.
You may know about T-Rex Arms, a small-arms-related company in Centerville, TN. Their founder is a relatively young man named Lucas Botkin, who is one of the most impressive shooters on YouTube right now. He and his brother Isaac are experts in small arms, but, like everyone, they have blind spots. Their biggest blind spot would be religion.
A post on “Gun People Who Hate Gun People” linked to a story about the father of Lucas and Isaac ( The Cold, Unforgiving World of Geoffrey Botkin ) and summarized Lucas thusly:
I’m still surprised that people don’t know that Lucas Botkin, head of T. Rex Arms is a gay-hating cult member. His dad, Geoffrey Botkin, is a leader of the quiverfull movement, and there’s this maelstrom of allegations of sexual abuse surrounding this cult that basically says that America needs to return to Biblical law to defeat satanism. The kicker? Lucas Botkin is listed as a staff member at the Botkin Conservatory, so it’s not like he’s keeping his distance.
As male Quiverfull children, Lucas and Isaac were literally born to kill; children are arrows in the quiver of God, and they’re not meant to just stay in the quiver. They’re meant to fly into whoever opposes their conception of Biblical law. The girls are supposed to grow up to make more arrows. I’ll stop with describing this metaphor because I think you get it.
Still, like I said, Lucas and Isaac know about guns, and even though their motivation is being prepared to murder everyone that doesn’t agree with them during the Apocalypse, I hate to see good knowledge go to waste, so I’ve watched some of their videos. The most recent one I saw was When and How to Resist Tyranny. This video starts out just fine, with Isaac talking about a relatively new pistol brace called the Honeybadger and the legal insanity surrounding it. This is a bizarre kink in US gun law that I’ll devote a whole post to some other time, but for now I’ll say that Isaac makes good points about the pistol brace controversy. The problem is that early in the video, Isaac jumps right off the side of the whole thing and starts talking about the Bible and says that the remainder of the video will be devoted to an interview with some conservatives who got arrested in Moscow, Idaho for blatantly refusing to comply with the local mask ordinance.
The Moscow, Idaho anti-maskers are an organization called CrossPolitics, whose logo features a US flag bowing before a Christian cross, indicating that their primary allegiance is to their interpretation of the Bible, and not their country. They went to the town hall without masks and sang hymns as a protest against the local mask ordinance. As you probably know, singing is the most effective way to spread a respiratory virus like covid — it’s even worse than coughing because it is sustained. The police showed up and arrested them for endangering public health. CrossPolitics is portraying it as two different violations of their First Amendment rights. The first violation would be to their practice of religion, even though they could have gone and practiced it somewhere else that didn’t endanger the public. The second violation would be to freedom of expression (and protest), even though the right to protest doesn’t give you the right to break the law while you’re doing it and conservatives are the first to point this out when centrist or leftist protests include violations of the law.
Obeying is obviously extremely important to conservatives, and yet here they are protesting having to obey a relatively simple and reasonable ordinance. And no discussion of a bodily-autonomy issue can happen without pointing out that conservatives deny the right of women to have bodily autonomy.
What are the factors that determine whether conservatives see a particular law as one that should be obeyed or rebelled against? In either condition, they are prone to getting homicidal. It all comes down to the social hierarchy that they believe is legitimate. Rules that emerge from what they believe to be a legitimate hierarchy must be obeyed, and rules that emerge from an illegitimate hierarchy must fought against. And the thing is — this is exactly what every reasonable person with a spine believes. The problem is the factors that make them believe a given hierarchy is legitimate or not.
For example, we would say that the elected governor of Michigan has some degree of authority by nature of having been elected through a fairly democratic process. But if that governor is a woman and a liberal/Democrat, they are not going to consider her to be a legitimate authority. This was the same situation with the Obama presidency — he was Black and a Democrat, therefore no matter how conservative his actions were, his authority was not legitimate and should not be obeyed. In terms of the pandemic, more conservatives would have gone along with the mask mandate if someone they considered to be a legitimate authority had clearly supported it from the outset. However, since part of that social hierarchy involved God, there are some conservatives that would never support doing anything about the pandemic other than praying that the Angel of Death pass over their house and kill the Muslims down the way instead.
Would they have been more likely to obey the ordinance if it had been enacted by the legislature? Yes, and really that’s how it should have been done. But many of them would have still refused because they see the authority of the entire government as illegitimate. In fact, many conservatives don’t even see liberals like Whitmer as American citizens, which is how the idea of “treason” starts to make sense in regard to the mask ordinance. Citizenship is the right-wing’s preferred way of manipulating human rights, and conservatives generally want to remove the protection of citizenship from everyone except straight, white, Christian, property-owning men. They literally do not think anyone else should be allowed to vote, and then they definitely want a republic where a group of elite men (who they might say were chosen by God) consider the votes of the rest of the men and then decide what to do.
Women’s suffrage was a mistake, they say. The civil rights act — including voting protections — was also a mistake, they say. Only people with “skin in the game” (property owners) really ought to be able to vote, they say. Only Christians have the moral authority to be trusted with voting, they say. LGBTQ people are criminals at best or perhaps not even human, they say. These are all aspects of the hierarchy that they believe to be legitimate, and when power is wielded by an illegitimate hierarchy it is no different from a puppet government installed by a foreign nation. Therefore, the actions of the Whitmer government are “treason”.
When an illegitimate hierarchy, run by women, black people, and “perverts”, doesn’t even bother to get permission before enacting an ordinance related to disease — something that is the will of God — this is pretty much the worst thing a government can do. We’ve seen this with problems other than the pandemic, including vaccinations and helmet laws. Just this year, Missouri revoked the law requiring motorcyclists to wear helmets because the Missouri state government is currently controlled by conservatives. I’m betting that if you went back and looked at the implementation of nationwide seat belt laws, that the same arguments were used against it. (No need to take that bet, I just took a minute to look it up, and yes, we had the same kind of resistance to seat belt laws.)
We have these people who don’t think most Americans are citizens, and who don’t respect the religious or metaphysical beliefs of other people. Should they be determining how we all live? Aren’t these exactly the people who are apt to create a “tyranny of democracy”? I’m too much of a fan of democracy to say that they should be excluded from it, but we certainly can’t negotiate with them. If your position is that women have the same rights as men, and their position is that women are non-citizens who should be required to obey their husbands (or fathers), what is the middle ground? If your position is that LGBTQ people can live and love as they choose, but their position is that they should be executed for violating the will of God, what is the middle ground?
The biggest factor in the rise of fascism in the US today is that the hierarchy conservatives see as legitimate is threatened by various demographic trends including the increase in non-religious people (threatening the rule of Christianity), the increase in Latinx and Hispanic people (threatening the rule of white people), and the ongoing gap between the the educational achievement of boys versus girls, which is leading to women having dramatically more power at every level of society. And, of course, there are political changes that have been anathema to the conservative hierarchy, like the dramatic increase in women and non-Christians in elected positions, and marriage equality. Fascism represents a desperate attempt by the group that holds power to maintain that power in the face of what seems like an insurmountable challenge. It is inherently genocidal because it acknowledges that mass murder is likely the only way to stop the power shift from happening. Again, what is the middle ground?
The most important thing to remember, however, is that though concerns of executive or judicial branch overreach are completely legitimate, conservatives are not sincere when they bring them up. As we’ve seen, they will happily use any position of power to usurp the law or accepted operating procedures if it benefits their preferred hierarchy. These are arguments made disingenuously, meant to convince an audience that genuinely believes in, for example, the rule of law or the separation of powers. Conservatives themselves are really only interested in maintaining power. Though we should demand better behavior from government, we should not believe that conservatives would ever hold themselves to the same standard that they demand from Democrats.
Christianity is completely compatible with democracy, but only if Christians respect the right of other people to reject Christianity, and only if government policy reflects the country’s diversity of religious belief. Thankfully, many Christians do believe in religious liberty. (Here’s an argument for why Christians should support religious freedom.) Conservatives have made themselves crystal clear: They do not support democracy.
