The politics of angry white people with guns.

I went to Jackson, Mississippi recently, to report on a hostile takeover by the Mississippi state legislature of the majority Black city. The Republican state Congress is creating alternative judicial courts, with Congress-appointed (rather than elected) judges and also literally creating a whole new state controlled police force, to be deployed in Jackson. They’ve already shot 4 Black people in something like 6 months.

The first person I talked to, at the baggage claim, was an old white lady who said she’d moved because the city was so dangerous and never, ever went to the Capitol district. Then, my white uber driver regaled with me with an obviously made up story about a white woman getting murdered in her hotel as he drove me to my hotel. “Don’t ever go out at night!” “Only go out in the day with a companion!”

Omfg. I cannot emphasize enough that the people in Jackson, white and Black, are the kindest, friendliest people I’ve ever encountered. In the South, everyone is polite but you get occasional “Bless your heart” shivs. In Jackson everyone is just lovely, going out of their way to make you feel welcome. A two minute conversation and you share like 10 jokes and life stories. When I got back to NYC I had to stop myself from acting this way lest I be put in a mental hospital. It’s the kind of thing that makes me occasionally consider moving to the South. And then I remember the politics.

The politics are, “Angry, scared, white people with guns” or “Angry, scared, white lawmakers trying to ruin everything for everyone, from books to drag queens to whatever Ron DeSantis is doing right now to rip attention away from Trump.”

It’s not just the South, of course. Last week, all across this great land, we had scared angry men with guns a) shoot a child b) a high school cheerleader c) a 20-year-old girl, who died. In each case, the victim had done nothing wrong but knock on the wrong door. The whole point of being a man is to protect women and children, not be so scared of women and children you shoot them when they knock on the wrong door. It must be all that
wokeness” and feminism that’s destroyed American Manhood so thoroughly. The grandson of the guy who show the kid said he’d been increasingly red-pilled with NRA propaganda.

At an NRA convention, you don’t have panel discussions about the constitutional merits of the 2nd amendment—you have total psychopaths riling up the attendees with the fantasy that they, and their guns, are the final bulwark against terrorists, criminals, wokeness, cities, CNN (absolutely obsessed with Don Lemon), Hillary Clinton, Mike Bloomberg, I’m sure this year, Joe Biden.

Here’s an excerpt from the story that explains this dynamic between blue/purplish cities and red states:

Cliff Johnson, University of Mississippi law professor and head of the MacArthur Justice Center, notes that there’s tightly wound tension in red states with blue and purplish cities surrounded by Republican districts that are overwhelmingly white and rural. “You’ve got these lawmakers who grew up in the Baptist church, probably came through the white segregated academies in the 1970s that further confirmed their religious and political identities,” he says.

Much like the national GOP platform, the divisions between urban and rural Mississippi are deep but consciously stoked by lawmakers playing on fear. “It’s a perceived existential threat from the Left,” Johnson adds. And it’s not just liberal havens like Los Angeles and New York. All urban areas are suspect, he notes, including the deeply religious Jackson. 

You can read the whole story here.

As for those alarming crime rates in Jackson? Like virtually almost anywhere they’re confined to a couple of neighborhoods that everyone who can avoid, avoids. Obviously those people need to be served far better by law enforcement—but launching a giant second police force that’s already gotten in trouble for racial profiling and illegal stops and shootings? That’s not the way. And I actually did encounter some rude people in Jackson, they were literally all cops.