Christians and fascists and guns, oh my!

Or that’s what they'd like you to think, at any rate.

Calling Conservative Christians Fascists To Target Guns Backfires On Anti-Gun Zealots
An article from a couple weeks ago in Mother Jones raised the alarm about the dangers of conservative Christians with weapons, complete with the usual specter of fascism being raised. But, anyone capable of just a little bit of critical thinking and armed even with cursory historical knowledge will see pretty quickly that there’s a serious flaw in the thinking.

Oh, I have no doubt whatsoever about that. At this point, what I have doubts about—serious ones, grave ones, in fact—is whether they very much care whether the flaws in their alleged “thinking” are quickly discernible by even the meanest intelligence or not. From where I sit, it looks more and more as if they’re actually flaunting those flaws, daring anyone to do anything about ‘em.

While you can certainly find fringe figures who use Christianity as a cover for messages of hatred and authoritarian theocracy, the writer didn’t do a great job of making the case for the T.Rex Arms channel being one of those. Mother Jones could have certainly cherry-picked some much better examples from the YouTube channel to build the case of dangerous Christian extremism, but instead chose to criticize the idea that tyranny should be resisted first. I’ll come back to that in a minute.

After that, the article gets into beliefs that most Americans (including most conservative Christians I know and am friends with) would find to be a little extreme. But, as a country with religious freedom and freedom of speech, the Botkin family has a right to both hold such beliefs and to espouse them online. What we haven’t seen is any kind of call for armed revolution to institute a government that forces everyone to do things like keep adult daughters living at home until they’re married off. All they could come up with to criticize is that T.Rex Arms was instrumental in getting an ammunition tax repealed (the horrors!).

But, let’s ignore all of that and assume for the sake of argument that mainstream conservative Christians are arming themselves and preparing to install a fascist, theocratic dictatorship that will force women to be treated like breeding livestock, LGBT people to be thrown from rooftops and non-Christians to be converted by force. Wouldn’t that be exactly the kind of situation where you’d want to have guns and resist tyranny?

Mother Jones‘ writers can’t have it both ways.

Oh, can’t they? You’re joking, right? I mean, if there’s one and only one thing we should have learned about them by now, it’s the tremendous delight they take in their fantastical hypocrisy. These are “people” who’re fully and firmly convinced that they have been endowed by Mother Gaia and/or Teh Divine Goddess (no, NOT Hillary Clinton, although she’s the next best thing for the older shitlib set) with an unalienable right to have their cake and eat it too.

You can’t in good faith say in one breath that fascist doom is coming and then in the next breath rail against the alleged fascists for opposing gun control. I mean, if anything, people planning on installing fascism by force would want to collect up everyone’s guns to keep people from fighting back, right?

Yep, as history shows us, that’s almost always they way it goes with their nasty, loathsome ilk.

In the end, the authoritarian anti-gun left is making a confession when they throw these kinds of accusations around. They’re the ones who don’t want people like the Botkins to have religious liberty and freedom of speech because it gets in the way of taking guns away. They probably aren’t fascists, but authoritarianism is a lot like poop. It doesn’t matter what flavor the poop is, nobody wants to dine on it.

Au contraire, mon seestaire, fascist is just exactly what they are. Nothing odd or puzzling about that, of course; despite having bamboozled almost everybody into thinking otherwise, fascism has always been purely a Left/“liberal” phenomenon, not a Right one.

As amusing as I did find your “backfires" double-entendre in the title, this isn’t any such thing. Such things won’t ever be, really, unless and until Real Americans see to it that injury is inflicted on them by it.