As you may have heard, Marko Elez, one of the Muskrats Elon turned loose on the treasury, has bragged online that he was racist before it was cool (spoiler: it’s not cool and never was), that he wants to normalize bigotry against Indians and that he wants to kill the Civil Rights Act. He was briefly dismissed from his post, then rehired after snowflake JD Vance whined it was unfair: ““I cannot overstate how much I loathe this emotional blackmail pretending to be concern. My kids, god willing, will be risk takers. They won’t think constantly about whether a flippant comment or a wrong viewpoint will follow them around for the rest of their lives.”
Marko Elez is 25 years old. That’s not a kid. And if he’s so immature his views shouldn’t be held against him, why are we trusting him on a major government project? And how is describing his views accurately “emotional blackmail”? It isn’t — it’s that Vance doesn’t think his viewpoints are wrong or not so wrong they should affect his career. Which is a common view on the right — it’s their right to be racist shits, but nobody has the right to criticize them for it. Free speech flows one way. Vance has no problem with people being hounded or harassed for being “too woke” — his compassion is for those who are too racist. Because they’re his allies.
Nobody in the Trump camp has any compassion for LGBTQ people. The VA is canceling suicide prevention training because it includes a focus on LGBTQ suicide. “The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) was told this week by DOJ that they’d lose their funding if the org didn’t remove any mentions of LGBTQIA+ issues from their public materials, I’ve learned. Staff were told they need to deadname trans kids in their reports to comply.”
Of course lots of people, even in the Republican camp, might feel slightly uncomfortable about such cruelty. Isn’t that the opposite of what Christ taught us? Vance’s solution is to lie: Jesus, he claims, taught us to “love your family and then you love your neighbor and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” As noted at the link, that’s completely wrong.
Right-wing Christian pundit Megan Basham takes the same stance, arguing the point of the Good Samaritan parable isn’t that we should help people, it’s that we can’t possibly live up to the Samaritan’s standard so we should just turn to Jesus and find salvation. Which is close to the antinomian heresy — that if we’re not saved by works don’t matter. Though I’m less troubled by that than by the implication we might just as well shrug and pass the beaten Jewish merchant by and then ask Jesus to forgive us. If we find someone beating by the side of the road, the thing to do is help them — not because it’s important to our souls but because they need help! I’m quite sure Basham would expect that if she were the victim — but she’s not paid to be nice to other people. Or to tell the truth.
Compassion for others does not benefit Republicans. Therefore they have to kill it.
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