The Republican Embrace of Vigilantism Is No Accident

[cigaretteman]

By Jamelle Bouie
Opinion Columnist
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It’s been nearly three years since the riots and subsequent shooting in Kenosha, Wis., where a gunman — Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old from nearby Antioch, Ill. — killed two protesters in what a court eventually determined was self-defense.
Among the most troubling aspects of the shooting was the almost jubilant reaction of conservative media to the news that someone had taken the law into his own hands and meted out lethal force. Tucker Carlson praised Rittenhouse as someone who decided “to maintain order when no one else would.” Ann Coulter said she wanted Rittenhouse “as my president.” Marjorie Taylor Greene, then a candidate, called him an “innocent child,” and Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky praised Rittenhouse for his “incredible restraint.”
Rittenhouse would go on, after his acquittal, to become a minor conservative celebrity. He met with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, got a standing ovation at a Turning Point USA conference and earned the praise of the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, who said, “Kyle Rittenhouse did what we should want citizens to do in such a situation: step forward to defend the community against mob violence.”
At the time — noting, as well, the celebration of Mark and Patricia McCloskey, two would-be vigilantes, at the 2020 Republican National Convention — I wrote that this was an ominous development for what it revealed about the conservative mood. There seemed to be a bloodlust, defined by an almost reflexive embrace of anyone who used lethal violence against a perceived antagonist.
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That bloodlust appears to be getting worse.
We saw it last month, when the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, announced that he would try to pardon Daniel Perry, 35, an Army sergeant who was convicted of murder in the shooting of Garrett Foster, 28, at a Black Lives Matter protest in July 2020.
Perry said he had been driving through downtown Austin when he encountered a group of demonstrators in the street. Foster, who was in legal possession of a semiautomatic rifle, was in the group. When the demonstrators approached Perry’s vehicle, he opened fire, killing Foster. Perry claimed self-defense, telling police that Foster pointed his rifle at him. But prosecutors said that Perry could have driven away from the situation, and witnesses testified that Foster never raised his rifle at Perry.
After the verdict, the judge in the trial unsealed court records that show Perry’s extreme anger and fantasies of violence toward protesters. “I might have to kill a few people on my way to work, they are rioting outside my apartment complex,” Perry wrote to a friend. In a separate message, Perry said that he “might go to Dallas to shoot looters.”

None of this mattered to the conservative media personalities who denounced the guilty verdict as unjust. It was a “legal atrocity,” said Carlson, who wondered if Texas “no longer recognizes the right of self-defense.” It was an “unfair conviction,” said Rittenhouse, who urged Abbott to “step in and free Daniel Perry.”
The governor obliged, announcing on Twitter that he was “working as swiftly as Texas law allows regarding the pardon of Sgt. Perry.”

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Opinion | The Republican Embrace of Vigilantism Is No Accident

The parable from the Gospel of Luke still has a lot to teach us, but it doesn’t mean what many on the right seem to think it does.

www.nytimes.com

 

[cigaretteman]

Although it is possible the jury made a mistake when it handed down a guilty verdict, neither Carlson nor Rittenhouse nor Abbott tried to argue the case on the merits. Instead, they made a simple assumption: that any violence against a left-wing protester is justified on its face. Perry had lived out the right-wing fantasy of lethal violence in defense of “order.” By their lights, he had done nothing wrong.
Prominent conservatives have taken the same view of Daniel Penny, the 24-year-old assailant in the killing of Jordan Neely in a New York City subway car this month. What we know is that Neely, who was homeless, was erratic and acting hostile toward other passengers. Witnesses say he had not attacked anyone. At some point, Penny, a former Marine, placed Neely in the chokehold that killed him. Two other passengers restrained Neely while he struggled on the ground. Penny is now charged with second-degree manslaughter.
We don’t know much, yet, about Penny’s mind-set or motivation during his confrontation on the subway. But this has not stopped conservatives from valorizing him in the same way they valorized Rittenhouse and Perry. “The Marine who stepped in to protect others is a hero,” said Greene, now a congresswoman. The decision to charge Penny, said the Fox News host Greg Gutfeld, was “pro-criminal” and “anti-hero.”
In a testament to conservative enthusiasm for Penny, an online fund-raiser has raised more than $2 million for his legal defense. And DeSantis, now angling for the Republican presidential nomination, stepped in with a message of support. “We must defeat the Soros-Funded DAs, stop the Left’s pro-criminal agenda, and take back the streets for law abiding citizens,” he said on Twitter. “We stand with Good Samaritans like Daniel Penny. Let’s show this Marine … America’s got his back.”
It’s the same language, the same tropes, the same ideas. In listening to conservative fans of Rittenhouse, Perry and Penny, you would never know that there were actual people on the other side of these confrontations. You would never know that those people were, in life, entitled to the protection of the law and that they are, in death, entitled to a full account of the last moments of their lives, with legal responsibility for the men who killed them, if that’s what a jury decides.
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What you would know is that some Americans are “heroes” and “law-abiding citizens,” and others are not. You would know that those Americans get the benefit of the doubt. And you would learn that to be seen as a problem by one of these law-abiding citizens is to be in jeopardy and even, potentially, to forfeit your claim to life. We see this in the worst of the discourse around Neely, who is framed not as a citizen with rights worth respecting, but as a dangerous nuisance who deserved his fate.
One last point. Ron DeSantis called Penny a good Samaritan. We also saw that language used in defense of Rittenhouse during his trial. In American English, the term “good Samaritan” has come to mean any person who helps someone else in distress, but the actual parable of the good Samaritan is a little more complicated. In the story, a traveler is assaulted by thieves who rob him, beat him and leave him for dead. Three people pass him. The first, a priest, ignores him. The second, a Levite, also ignores him. But the third, a Samaritan, binds his wounds and helps him recover, asking for nothing in return.
This parable, found in the Gospel of Luke, begins with a question. “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus answers with the story and asks, “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” To which the questioner says, “The one who showed him mercy.”
The power of the parable comes from the context. The Samaritans were a despised out-group. Someone who overheard Jesus’ exchange with the “expert in the law” who began the conversation might assume that the Samaritan would ignore the injured traveler, but he would be wrong. And it is not just that the Samaritan helped, but that he showed the decency the other two, presumably more respectable bystanders, lacked. The parable of the good Samaritan is a story of selflessness, yes. But it is also a story of the folly of prejudice and the essential equality of all people.
Given the full meaning of the story, do we think a modern-day good Samaritan would use lethal force or act as a vigilante in defense of order? Probably not. But the idea that he would — and that this is what it means to act either ethically or responsibly — is evidence enough of a sickness that festers in too many American hearts.

 

[cigaretteman]

By Greg Sargent
and
Paul Waldman
May 16, 2023 at 6:15 a.m. EDT



When Ron DeSantis defended Daniel Penny, the former Marine accused of killing a man suffering from mental illness on a New York City subway, the Florida governor didn’t just laud Penny as a hero. He also cast the law enforcement apparatus prosecuting Penny as presumptively illegitimate.

In so doing, DeSantis joined many on the right seeking to transform Penny into a martyr being punished by the “deep state” for supposedly defending civil order. But this is particularly sobering coming from DeSantis; it suggests the two leading contenders for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination — DeSantis and former president Donald Trump — are open celebrators of vigilante “justice."

“Law and order” and “tough on crime” rhetoric from Republicans goes back more than half a century and has a long history of shading into support for vigilantism in popular culture. (Think of Charles Bronson in “Death Wish.”) But in the Trump era, it seems that wide swaths of one of our major parties have taken to blatantly celebrating extralegal violence.



“The idea that individual citizens should do this — that’s a different place to go,” said Sam Tanenhaus, who recently completed a biography of William F. Buckley, the conservative commentator who played a key role in tough-on-crime politics with his ill-fated 1965 campaign for New York mayor.
DeSantis didn’t merely valorize Penny as a good Samaritan. DeSantis is also raising money for Penny’s defense, arguing that his prosecutors are pro-criminal:

Penny has been charged with second-degree manslaughter in connection with the May 1 death of Jordan Neely, a man with a history of mental illness, homelessness and violence. Neely was shouting on a New York subway car in a disturbing manner, and Penny put him in a chokehold for several minutes. Neely died. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office said Neely “should still be alive today.”



Like all defendants, Penny should be presumed innocent of the charge until proved guilty. A lot remains unknown about what happened. It would be one thing if right-wing figures were merely reminding people of this presumption and urging them to allow the justice system to do its work.
Instead, some are valorizing Penny as a hero and the victim of a prosecution that has been decreed inevitably unjust, no matter what the facts prove. They argue that Neely was a threatening figure who needed to be restrained, and that subway riders who fear for their safety have been unfairly victimized by political and societal failures. Therefore, not only was Penny’s apparent use of lethal force justified, a jury cannot legitimately decide it was excessive.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), for instance, hailed Penny as a “hero” who “stepped in to protect others.” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) suggested that Penny is being persecuted for standing up to “anarcho-tyranny.” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page echoed DeSantis, describing Penny as “the Subway Samaritan.” This, of course, is an allusion to the biblical Samaritan who aids a traveler who had been robbed and beaten; the tale doesn’t involve putting the perp in a chokehold until he dies.



To Tanenhaus, all this is a continuation of — but also a departure from — the history of GOP “tough on crime” politics. Buckley’s 1965 campaign emphasized fear of crime and drew on the White backlash to the civil rights movement, Tanenhaus says, by calling for the unshackling of police and stricter sentencing.
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This continued through Richard M. Nixon’s “law and order” presidential campaigns and Ronald Reagan’s use of tropes like the “welfare queen,” Tanenhaus notes. Trump’s 2016 presidential candidacy was consciously modeled on Nixon’s efforts to win over northern Whites disaffected by images, if not experiences, of urban disorder.
That sort of politics long blamed disorder on liberal elites who supposedly restrained law enforcement. But the Trump era has added a more open lionization of violent vigilantes who are supplanting law enforcement as the way to restore “order” and are victimized by law enforcement in retaliation for doing that.



“The vigilante as the lone hero victimized by the Soros conspiracy — we’re in a new place,” Tanenhaus said.
The right in recent years has repeatedly portrayed vigilantes as heroic, and victims as deserving of death. Fox News valorized Edward Gallagher, the Navy SEAL accused by members of his own unit of killing multiple unarmed civilians, and Trump pardoned him. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) vowed to pardon a man convicted for the 2020 murder of a Black Lives Matter protester; the killer had texted about his intent to kill.
And in 2020, Kyle Rittenhouse descended on urban disorder in Wisconsin with an AR-15-style rifle and killed two protesters. Conservatives could have argued that Rittenhouse shouldn’t have gone there but ultimately acted in self-defense, as a jury found. Instead, they celebrated him because he killed people. As Tucker Carlson enthused, “Rittenhouse went to Kenosha to clean up the filth.”
For some on the right, it is self-evident that Neely was mere “filth” that called for a “clean up." To them, the real criminals are the administrators of the justice system who are pursuing the superfluous exercise of determining whether violently ending his life was justified. As Tanenhaus bluntly concluded of the right’s campaign: “We’re really talking about lawlessness.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/16/ron-desantis-daniel-penny-neely-vigilantism/