AR-15 lapel pin is a perfect symbol for a GOP that’s become a death cult

The backward walk of devolution that is the modern Republican Party, and the near-death experience of American governing, can be best told through the story of two adjacent Long Island congressional districts that, over the course of one generation, sent two radically different kinds of human beings to Capitol Hill.

In 1993, a stunning act of violence turned an everyday citizen into a political activist who tried to change the world for the better — by getting elected to Congress. Carolyn McCarthy was shocked when her husband was murdered and her son wounded when a rage-addled madman boarded a Long Island Rail Road commuter train and began firing a Ruger 9 mm pistol, killing six and wounding 19. A nurse by training, she ran for Congress in New York’s 4th Congressional District as a Democrat three years later and won an upset victory, largely on her promise to Long Islanders that she would be “the fiercest gun-control advocate.”

McCarthy’s storyline had an almost Frank Capra-esque feel, albeit tinged with sadness. But her tenure overlapped with the rise of a far-right Republican Party that fetishized firearms ownership and thus ensured there would be no Jimmy Stewart-style satisfying ending to her crusade for justice for the gun attack on her family. In fact, McCarthy was a House member in 2004 when her colleagues allowed a ban on assault weapons to expire, triggering a rise in mass shootings like the one that shattered that LIRR commuter car.

She retired in 2014, eight years before voters next door in New York’s 3rd Congressional District, covering Long Island’s North Shore and parts of Queens, elected a GOP grifter and con man who called himself George Santos. While McCarthy had gone to Washington to get something done on guns, the cash-strapped Santos reportedly confided to friends he wanted to cash in on the lucrative congressional pension and free health care.

In winning election on a completely made-up resume, Santos is the final downward spiral for a Republican Party that has become 100% about the performance and 0% about the policy. So when his new GOP colleague from Georgia handed Santos a lapel pin in the shape of an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, the New Yorker did what any outrageous showman would do: He pinned it on.

The sight in recent days of Santos and several of his Republican colleagues parading through the hallowed halls of the U.S. Capitol with a mini-celebration of a killing machine that serves no civilian purpose beyond mowing down large numbers of innocent people in the shortest possible time is perhaps the most hideous assault on human decency I’ve seen in more than 40 years of covering U.S. politics.

But that’s the point, isn’t it? The lapel pins — like those Christmas cards of their adorable blond kids armed to the teeth with high-powered weaponry, or the right’s new love affair with the toxic fumes of gas stoves — are meant to “trigger the libs” and sustain a career arc that generates prime-time hits on Fox News and fund-raising emails without ever having to get anything done. Yes, you could argue this column, then, is a perfect example of what these cons want. But what a choice: playing along, or remaining silent while America sheds the skin of humanity.

It’s one thing to embrace the more extreme interpretations of what the Second Amendment means around the rights of individual citizens to buy or own a gun, for purposes like hunting or self-defense. It’s something else entirely to worship the AR-15 and similar assault rifles, which were invented in the 1950s for the military and weren’t meant for civilians until the lucrative gun manufacturers who also finance the National Rifle Association saw a gold mine in marketing them to men obsessed with their masculinity in an era of social change.

And so these AR-15 lapel pins appeared on the chests of Santos and his fellow newcomer Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida — even in the same week that, back in Luna’s home state, four gunmen in a sedan opened fire on a crowd of people in Lakeland, wounding 11. Even as the notorious list of deaths from mass shootings involving AR-15-style weapons — in now-infamous locales like Uvalde, Texas, Las Vegas, Orlando, Fla., Sutherland Springs, Texas, Parkland, Fla., and Newtown, Conn. — grows longer and longer.

Imagine members strutting around the corridors of Congress in late 2001 with a Boeing 747 lapel pin, or wearing a spiky replica of the coronavirus when New York City’s morgues were overflowing in the spring of 2020. Explain to me how worshiping an AR-15 — when the blood stains are still being scrubbed off a dance studio in Monterey Park, Calif., Club Q in Colorado Springs, Colo., or a bus in Charlottesville., Va. — is any different, really?

Yet while it’s about “owning the libs,” the GOP’s performance art is also about much more than that. It’s instructive to look at who has been handing out the AR-15 lapel pins: Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia. In the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up department, Clyde was born on Nov. 22, 1963 — the exact day that someone with a rifle gunned down President John F. Kennedy — and he has built his political career around the cult of firearms.

» READ MORE: Don’t be ‘horrified and heartbroken’ at Uvalde. Get mad as hell and do something.

A Navy combat vet who before this week was best known for his declaration that the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection was like “a normal tourist visit,” Clyde was first elected in 2020 largely on his high profile in the north Georgia exurbs as the owner of the Clyde Armory gun store. He grew that operation from his garage into a $25 million business, marketing AR-15-style guns in the heart of Trump country. That’s because, in the Donald Trump/George Santos GOP, grievance is highly profitable — and often a grift.

But Clyde’s career is also a tribute to the ways that today’s GOP has inherited the flag that Southern segregationists like Georgia’s Lester Maddox waved in the 1960s. The Georgia freshman was one of only three House members to vote against the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act and 14 who opposed the creation of the Juneteenth holiday. In doling out his AR-15 pins, Clyde reminds us that the NRA’s radical interpretation of the Second Amendment arose only after Black civil rights gains in the 1960s and that for its true believers, gun ownership is a surrogate for their core value, which is white supremacy.

For much of America’s history, white supremacy — enforced by everything from the bias baked into our laws and codes to the terror of lynching — has dominated. When the swings of social change and a more enlightened government advanced the rights of Black people, women, the LGBTQ community, and others, Republicans competed as the anti-government party backed by the new terror of their unbridled gun cult, but even that increasingly is a losing hand in a more diverse and better educated America. If the white supremacy-soaked far-right can no longer rule our nation, today’s Republicans are all too happy to blow it all up, in a world of mass shootings, insurrections, and unchecked pandemics. Their nihilism — wittingly or not — has turned them into a death cult.

At the start of 2023, Clyde, Santos, and Luna are the avatars of what some have called “the Seinfeld Congress” with the House back under Republican control — a show about “nothing.” The next two years are indeed likely to see little more than a surge of Fox News-friendly stunts around protecting gas stoves or banning drag shows, but the GOP’s lack of interest in policy is worse than inertia. Americans are dying from do-nothing government.

It’s not only the hundreds who’ve been needlessly killed since 2004 in the surge of mass shootings by AR-15-style weapons and large-capacity magazines that Congress had banned in the 1990s, only to let that successful law expire. And it’s not just the rejection of 99% of the world’s top climate scientists by a political party screaming, “Drill, baby, drill!” in the face of growing wildfires and 1,000-year floods that are destroying homes and lives.

Today, the leading candidates for the 2024 Republican nomination for president — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and our ex-president Donald Trump — seem locked in a bidding war for who can most dissuade the public from using the COVID-19 vaccines that both men once touted before vaccine denial was swept into the jet stream of conservative nihilism. DeSantis has even launched a criminal probe of the vaccine’s production — pretending that research hasn’t shown that the shots have been highly effective in preventing hospitalization and death. As the pandemic nears its third anniversary, some 400 to 500 Americans are still dying every day — many needlessly.

And things could get worse. In recent days, health experts are increasingly alarmed about newer H5N1 strains of the so-called bird flu that seem to spread more easily among mammals, which is highly worrisome because human infections with the bird flu have been much more deadly than COVID-19. In other words, a major outbreak of bird flu would require exactly the type of communal response — both in terms of government spending and action and public cooperation — that today’s nihilistic Republican Party is built to prevent.

So when the next pandemic strikes, our first line of defense will be the Andrew Clydes and George Santoses waving the silly millimeters of their do-nothing death cult’s AR-15 lapel pins against the lethal threat they can’t see and don’t understand. God save the United States of America.

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