Why are fascists like Putin and Tucker Carlson obsessed with drugs?
The toxic stew of patriarchy, racism, and imaginary notions of 'purity' in the drug discourse fit neatly with authoritarian tendencies.
In a segment bordering on self-parody, Fox News host Tucker Carlson blamed the following non-gun-related things for mass shootings: women, video games, social media, porn, SSRI’s (anti-depressants) and ‘government endorsed marijuana.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene, far-right conspiracist serving in the House of Representatives, also blamed drugs for the summer of violence. “When are we going to have an honest conversation about drug abuse, mental illness, and SSRI’s??? And deadly side effects. Are we really going to keep pretending?”
It’s the hard right’s new version of “thoughts and prayers,” a way to deflect their bases’s attention from guns and kneecap needed reform by flooding the zone with non-sequiturs and right-wing watchwords. The actual driver of gun violence, they say, is mental illness and medications used to treat mental illness. Then, there is a seamless pivot to the “good guy with a gun” line, reinforcing a fantasy that well-armed white people will turn into Charles Bronson during a home invasion. (The latest report on the Uvalde school shooting showed that not even 400 police officers on the scene had the courage to storm the classroom for over an hour).
But back to drugs. Drugs have historically been depicted as threats to the social order, a toxin to the body politic, and associated with whatever ethnic or racial group was in the crosshairs of reactionary rhetoric. Chinese migrant workers, San Franciscans in the late 19th century feared, were doping up and seducing white women in opium dens. In the south it was widely believed that cocaine gave black men super human strength, a fear that resulted in law enforcement switching to higher calibre bullets.
With the emergence of prominent subcultures and counter—cultures, drugs could now intoxicate the body politic in a more insidious way. The beats, the hippies, jazz musicians, anti-war activists were all coded as threats to the status quo in part by their real or imagined drug use. What this did was tarnish their credibility in the eyes of polite society. If the anti-war movement comprises a bunch of pot smoking, acid dropping college students, then they could be ignored.
Did you know the federal government terrorized and ultimately killed the singer Billie Holiday?
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