TO THE RIGHT, WE'RE NOT HUMAN

In his latest column, Jamelle Bouie writes about right-wing support for Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot and killed two left-wing protesters in 2020, as well as for Daniel Perry, who may receive a pardon instigated by Governor Greg Abbott after being convicted of murdering a Black Lives Matter protester in 2020, and Daniel Penny, a newly minted right-wing hero who strangled an emotionally agitated but apparently nonviolent homeless man on a New York subway car earlier this month.

Bouie writes:

In listening to conservative fans of Rittenhouse, Perry and Penny, you would never know that there were actual people on the other side of these confrontations. You would never know that those people were, in life, entitled to the protection of the law and that they are, in death, entitled to a full account of the last moments of their lives, with legal responsibility for the men who killed them, if that’s what a jury decides.

What you would know is that some Americans are “heroes” and “law-abiding citizens,” and others are not. You would know that those Americans get the benefit of the doubt. And you would learn that to be seen as a problem by one of these law-abiding citizens is to be in jeopardy and even, potentially, to forfeit your claim to life.

The reason that, after listening to right-wingers, "you would never know that there were actual people on the other side of these confrontations" is that right-wingers don't think there actually were people on the other side of these confrontations. In two instances, there were left-wing demonstrators. In the third case, there was a Black man asking for money. To the right, these aren't people.

Michelle Goldberg, in her latest column, makes this clear:

[Ron DeSantis] is fluent in the language of the religious right, and strives to check all its policy boxes. “Put on the full armor of God. Stand firm against the left’s schemes,” he said at the Christian Hillsdale College last year, substituting the “left’s schemes” for the “devil’s schemes” of Ephesians 6:11.

There it is. DeSantis swaps in "the left" for "the devil" -- because the devil is what we are to the right. That's who mentally ill beggars and LGBTQ people and Black people who haven't embraced right-wing orthodoxy are: devils. I could list more of the right's enemies, but they all fall into the same category. All devils.

I have a theory that the contemporary popularity of zombie stories is a reaction to the cultural taboo against overt bigotry. Many people are still bigots, of course, but it's not polite to be an open bigot. As a result, it's generally not acceptable to turn a particular ethnic or religious group into the enemy in popular culture. But we still want stories that allow "good" people to feel virtuous when members of a group we don't consider human are killed. So instead of, say, Jews or Blacks or Muslims, we have zombies.

But the right has a long menu of enemies. Right-wingers still want leeway to deny they're bigots, so they demonize their enemies. We threaten Western civilization. We're causing societal breakdown. We want to destroy America, Christianity, the family.

We're effectively devils or zombies, so it's okay to kill us. We're not human.