This is it. This is all American politics is capable of producing.
"Fox & Friends" co-host Brian Kilmeade asked Walker where he stands on gun control measures such as universal background checks or raising the age to buy assault weapons from 18 to 21.
"Well, you know, it's always been an issue, because as I said earlier on, they wanna score political points ... People see that it's a person wielding that weapon, you know, Cain killed Abel," Walker said. "And that's the problem that we have. And I said, what we need to do is look into how we can stop those things.
"You talk about doing a disinformation," Walker continued, "what about getting a department that can look at young men that's looking at women, that's looking at their social media? What about doing that, looking into things like that, and we can stop that that way?"
Walker also mentioned "putting money into other departments rather than the department that's wanting to take away your rights," but did not specify any agency.
Earlier this week, Walker struggled to answer a question on gun control from a CNN reporter, only going as far to say, "What I like to do is see it and everything and stuff."
This is all, of course, in response to the latest of the mass shootings that have recurred with greater frequency over multiple decades now. It's so routine now that it's not even worth raising the question of what is to be done about it. We already know the answer is nothing. Whatever passes for a policy response can only involve a slight acceleration of the already gushing flow of money directed into police and surveillance.
Public policy doesn't emerge through democratic process at all anymore. Democracy isn't operating in any meaningful sense. A couple of days ago, John Ganz published an essay where he suggests society itself is barely operating.
We seem to be in the slow and torturous process of dissolving ourselves as a civil and political society. Laws cannot be changed or passed. No one wants the responsibility of governance. The answer is always “it can’t be done.” But it was done to us. The laws actually were made worse.
I highlight the last bit. It matters that the dismantling has been done on purpose. That there is an ideology at work in this nihilism. It's the desired result of decades of libertarian and neoliberal political program. Ganz identifies that in the essay as well.
Now each man can be his own commando force, an army of one, each man is the sovereign that can decide on the exception when the laws of society no longer apply, when he can suddenly resort to violence. No one can tell him otherwise: he has a gun. There’s no “legitimate” or “illegitimate,” just force. The only solution on offer is to further distribute sovereignty: make more men their own armed-to-the-teeth statelet to be a check the other guy. The idea is hopefully that will create stasis—if not exactly peace— through mutual fear. Every man his own nuclear-armed power.
The gun fetish is just one manifestation. But it's far more endemic that just that. The hellworld ideology of distributed sovereignties existing in mutual fear is also evident anywhere we find "entrepreurial mindset" propaganda. It's what explains the rise of crypto currency and NFT speculation. It's why the dominant mode of oure political response to the pandemic was based in "individual responsibility." It's the animating worldview behind the charter school movement which we now see metastasizing into a full scale retreat from even the idea that public education should be a thing.
What is to be done, or what can be done is difficult to know now. If people had any belief in each other maybe there would be an opportunity to organize a way to change. If we still had democracy maybe there would be a lever there that organized people could grab onto. But all the evidence now tells us, what the appearance of figures like Senator Herschel Walker tells us, is that no such opportunities exist. It's all just oligarchy made legitimate through nihilism now. And it looks very much like it's on autopilot.
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