Friday, March 11, 2022

Two Paragons of Vice-Signaling

I know I'm not supposed to be shocked by right-wing hypocrisy*, but I can't help it. I'm just an honest schlub at heart. 

Here are two recent examples that are making my head hurt.

First, Madison Cawthorn (yes, the one who never should have been elected to Congress, and who should not be allowed to run for reelection because of his involvement in the January 6 insurrection) was recently charged for the second time with driving with a revoked drivers license. He was going 89 mph in a 65 mph zone when he was stopped. (As noted by one Twitter commenter, does anyone want to lay bets that he was actually going 90 mph or faster, but it was written down at 89 mph to keep the ticket under the 25 mph cutoff that would have put it into a different category of offense?) He also faces two other speeding citations from other counties (since October of 2021). His first revoked license charge was from 2017, before he was in Congress. It's unclear if his license was revoked when he got the other two recent speeding tickets. Because it's a second offense on the revoked license charge, he could get 20 days in jail.

Death and destruction from reckless driving is up. It seems Heir Cawthorn is doing is part to add to it.

Second, Mark Meadows, who held that same seat in Congress before becoming Donald Trump's chief of staff, clearly committed voter fraud. It seems he and his wife registered to vote in 2020 using the address of a mobile home in North Carolina where they did not live. 

They then voted by mail using that address. Meanwhile, Meadows worked with Trump to promulgate the Big Lie about a stolen election. And as we know, multiple Black people have been sentenced to substantial time behind bars for much lesser offenses related to voting or trying register to vote.

Yes, these two are owning this lib with their flagrant dishonesty and disregard for human life or the rule of law. Wow, good for them. I guess this makes them paragons of vice-signaling.

* Dave Roberts had a short thread on this question back in October 2021, which I may have already quoted (or not). This was the main point:

If you identify conservatism with any principle, you inevitably end up finding hypocrisy. But if you conceive of conservatism as efforts by dominant groups to maintain their dominance, with principles occasionally deployed instrumentally, the contradictions/hypocrisy fade away.

There's another great quote about this worldview that I cannot seem to lay my hands on, but essentially they all boil down to "rules are for the little people" which in turn becomes "might makes right." 

Every great quote about this topic is just a fancier way of saying those three words. 


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