The GOP Embraces the Kyle Rittenhouse Approach to Kindergarten
In the futile and hopeless hours of familiar gridlock after the most recent mass shooting in Nashville, the social media meme war that serves as proxy for our political process launched again into overdrive. Some themes were familiar: Republicans love guns more than they love children; the party that purports to revere life seems unwilling to do anything to stop mass murder. But there was a newer, bitter twist to many of the posts, connecting the GOP’s 2023 war on books, education, sexuality, and teachers to its unwillingness to protect children in schools.
These complaints were doubly poignant, noting, as they did, that Republicans seem to believe that public school teachers who can’t be trusted to curate classroom libraries are fit to be armed with guns. Others commented that no child has yet died from reading a book about Rosa Parks, and yet the GOP maintains that the problem of mass school shootings is unfixable. The central thread was that Republicans are prepared to intervene in every last aspect of public education—from book bans to curriculum laws to surveillance of educators—but will never lift a finger to prevent or decrease mass murder of small children in places that are meant to keep their bodies safe, above all things.
The flaw in these arguments is that they assume there is hypocrisy at work when social conservatives set out to micromanage what children learn in public schools yet evince not a lick of remorse or regret about the fact that children are being slaughtered there with military-strength firepower they want readily accessible throughout the nation. That alleged hypocrisy, however, is readily explained by larger and more chilling trends in conservative policymaking.
It’s not simply that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Rep. Thomas Massie and Sen. Marsha Blackburn and Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee and Rep. Andy Ogles all love their guns more than they love other people’s schoolkids (although that is abundantly clear). It’s not merely that in America, being in the pocket of the NRA and gun manufacturers remains a more vital political imperative for many elected officials than the health and safety of their constituents. (Also true). It’s not even the fact that empty “thoughts and prayers” has become such a necessary and sufficient political response to mass carnage that it is now teeming with meaning. No, the real reason conservatives can comfortably reconcile dead schoolkids with book bans is far more frightening.
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-gop-embraces-the-kyle-rittenhouse-approach-to-kindergarten/ar-AA19hlPr
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