Mike 'Wonder Bread' Pence promotes paranoia and then uses it to justify gun violence
A scared population is easily led
“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain” ― James Baldwin
Who are the worst conservatives? The easy answer is ‘the MAGAs’. These white, rural, uneducated Americans appear to be the poster children for mindless bigotry and divisiveness. But these misdirected souls are victims of forces they do not understand and cannot appreciate.
Think of them as the debris in a tornado’s vortex that makes the storm so destructive. The wind is their bombastic godhead. By himself, Trump would be hot air. By itself, the base would be a pile of wood, bricks, and rocks. But let the wind whip up the terrestrial flotsam, and together they do damage.
However, Trump will be gone — hopefully sooner, possibly later, but definitely sometime. Left in his wake will be a parade of conservative evangelicals and their political enablers using fear to whip the base into compliance. Some will be as over the top as Trump, but those that burn the hottest, flame out the quickest. The soft-spoken but implacable Christofascists will do lasting damage — sanctimonious moralists like Mike Pence.
Individually they are easy to write off. But as a group, they are like Star Trek’s Borg. They exist as physically separate beings, but think as a single entity — call it the collective — where one philosophy is shared without variation by the hive.
Mike Pence touts his Christianity. Yet he has ripped pages from his Bible. Gone are the passages of compassion, care, empathy, and concern for the downtrodden, the have-nots, and the victims. All that remains is the hate, sanctimony, and deluded self-congratulation of the Pharisees who trumpet how God-fearing and moral they are.
This weekend, Pence showed his true colors when discussing the spate of shootings targeting innocents whose crime was to ring the wrong doorbell, turn into the wrong driveway, or get into the wrong car.
During a CBS interview on ‘Face the Nation’, Pence was asked how he would stem the violence. He replied,
"Well, our- our hearts go out to the families of lost loved ones in the incidents in- in Kansas City, and in upstate New York. I just can't imagine the pain that they're enduring in that tragedy.”
"But tragedy should not require us to forfeit our liberty. And the right of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms is enshrined in the Constitution of the United States.”
Pence’s heart is flint. Why can he not imagine the pain of the families? He has three children. You will not feel the raw pain of people who have senselessly lost a loved one, but empaths can imagine it. And because they can imagine it, their next sentence will not be a pivot to a political flashpoint.
Conservatives rip liberals for bringing politics to gun tragedies “too soon”, but these masters of the timetable get political before the blood dries. In 2014, an incel killed six — three by gunshot — and injured 14 in a rampage through Isla Vista, CA. In the aftermath, Richard Michael-Martinez, the father of a victim, pleaded with politicians to take action on gun control as he paid tribute to his son on a day of mourning at the University of California Santa Barbara.
Joe the Plumber, a 15-minute hero to the lumpen mob, summed up the conservative indifference to human life when he wrote an open letter reacting to this and other demands that the killings stop. He said pro-gun control activists "don't care about your family or your dead children at all". Then infamously added,
“As harsh as this sounds — your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.”
At the time, it was shocking. Nine years later, the message is right-wing orthodoxy. Pence is not as blunt, but his message is the same — “Fuck you.”
Mike had more propaganda to offer to the base that he will never win.
“I don't know the facts of those cases, I'm confident that local law enforcement will move forward and apply the law in a proper way. But I can't help but suspect that this recent spate of tragedies is evidence of the fear that so many Americans are feeling about the crime wave besetting this country."
What crime wave? Starting in the last two years of the Trump administration, the murder rate skyrocketed. In 2018, there were 14,949 gun homicides in the US. In 2020, there were 19,576. However, after peaking at 21,036 in 2021, the number dropped to 20,258 in 2022. This year, gun homicides are on pace to hit just over 18,000.
FBI analysis suggests that all violent crime is falling, although the data is incomplete. Regardless, there is no out-of-control spike in criminal behavior.
So where does the fear come from? The answer is from people like Mike Pence. Scaring the shit out of the gape-jawed is SOP for conservatives everywhere. It is the vocabulary of fascism. Every time Trump opens his mouth, he talks of an America of marauding gangs and other malefactors.
In his 2017 Inaugural address, it took only five paragraphs to get to doom and gloom fearmongering,
“the crime, and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”
The “carnage” did not stop. Trump trumpeted a war on drug deaths — overdoses continued to increase. There is never a solution — just endless warnings. Anyone who has watched Fox News can attest that it is a paranoia generator. A mindless horde sits entranced as the talking heads scare the bejesus out of them.
I am no psychologist, but I suspect Fox triggers the same pleasure centers in the brain as slasher movies do. The only difference is that while people know that Freddie and Jason are fake, they think Fox is telling the truth — even after the Dominion settlement.
This fear works in tandem with calls for muscular self-defense. Every man, a Rambo. Every woman, Annie Oakley. The difference is those two were well-trained — if only fictionally in one case — and knew how to use guns for effect, but wisely.
Conservative thought manipulators have given these fearful folks more than one thing to wet the bed over. The violent criminal threatening life and property is joined by a deep state cabal ravening to disarm the patriot. It is an effective strategy.
The claim that the government is coming to confiscate guns “any day now” is as fresh as it was in 2008 when a Black man won the presidency. Yet Obama spent eight years in Washington without grabbing a single gun — or Bible. The last seven years have been no different.
Pence and his fellow conservatives will keep the threats murky and indistinct. They will not tell the base that most states with high rates of gun ownership have high rates of gun homicide. God’s mouthpieces will never say that someone living in a home with guns will be more likely to die by gunshot. They will never support reasonable means to reduce gun deaths.
Guns are cancer. And Pence is a snake-oil salesman. He will take your money for a useless ‘cure’. And shrug in indifference when you die — because God moves in mysterious ways.