Republican Eric Greitens, a candidate for Missouri’s open U.S. Senate seat, shocked viewers with a new online political ad in June 2022 that encouraged his supporters to go “RINO hunting.”

Appearing with a shotgun and a smirk, Greitens leads the hunt for RINOs, shorthand for the derisive “Republicans In Name Only.” Along with armed soldiers, Greitens is storming a house under the cover of a smoke grenade.

“Join the MAGA crew,” Greitens says in the video. “Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”

The ad comes from a candidate who has repeatedly found himself in controversy, having resigned as Missouri’s governor amid accusations of sexual assault and allegations of improper campaign financing that sparked an 18-month investigation that eventually cleared him of any legal wrongdoing.

The political ad was also launched – and quickly removed – from Facebook and flagged by Twitter at a time when the nation is still coming to terms with the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and reeling from mass shootings in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Uvalde, Texas, Buffalo, New York and Highland Park, Illinois.

The ad continues to circulate on YouTube via various news sources.

Greitens’s call to political arms is hardly new.

In his 2016 gubernatorial ads, Greitens appeared firing a Gatling-style machine gun into the air and using an M4 rifle to create an explosion in a field to demonstrate his resistance to the Obama administration.

What Greitens’ ad represents, in our view, is the evolution of the use of guns in political ads as a coded appeal for white voters.

While they might have been a bit more ambiguous in the past, candidates are increasingly making these appeals appear more militant in their culture war against ideas and politicians they oppose.

Guns as a symbol of whiteness

As communication scholars, we have studied the ways that white masculinity has influenced contemporary conservative populism.

We have also examined the ways that racial appeals to white voters have evolved under the GOP’s Southern strategy, the long game that conservatives have played since the 1960s to weaken the Democratic Party in the South by exploiting racial animus.

In some of our latest work, we have examined the ways that guns have been used in campaign ads to represent white identity politics, or what political scientist Ashley Jardina has explained as the way that white racial solidarity and fears of marginalization have manifested in a political movement.

Symbolically, guns in the U.S. have historically been linked to defending the interests of white people.

In her book “Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment,” historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz documents how America’s Founding Fathers originally conceived of the Second Amendment as protection for white frontier militias in their efforts to subdue and exterminate Indigenous people. The Second Amendment was also designed to safeguard Southern slave owners who feared revolts.

As a result, the right to bear arms was never imagined by the founders to be an individual liberty held by Indigenous people and people of color.

As illustrated in Richard Slotkin’s book “Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America,” the popular film and literary genre of the Western glamorized white, hypermasculine cowboys and gunslingers “civilizing” the wild frontier to make it safe for white homesteaders.

Drawing from this lore, contemporary gun culture romanticizes the “good guy with a gun” as the patriotic protector of the peace and a bulwark against government overreach.

Contemporary gun laws reflect a historic racial disparity concerning who is authorized and under what circumstances individuals are allowed to use lethal force.

For example, so-called “stand your ground” laws have been used historically to justify the killing of Black men, most notably in the Trayvon Martin case.

Gun control advocates Everytown for Gun Safety have found that homicides resulting from white shooters killing Black victims are “deemed justifiable five times more frequently than when the shooter is Black and the victim is white.”

Militant white identity politics

Featuring a gun in a political ad has become an easy way to get attention, but our research has found that its meaning has shifted in recent years.

In a 2010 race for Alabama agriculture commissioner, Dale Peterson was featured in an ad holding a gun, wearing a cowboy hat and talking in a deep Southern drawl about the need to challenge the “thugs and criminals” in government.

His style proved entertaining.

In this 2010 political ad, Dale Peterson of Alabama appeared with a rifle on his shoulder.

Dale Peterson

Though Peterson placed third in his race, political analysts like Time magazine’s Dan Fletcher raved that he created one of the best campaign ads ever.

In the same year, Arizona Republican Pam Gorman ran for U.S. Congress.

She took the use of guns in political ads even further by appearing at a backyard range and firing a machine gun, pistol, AR-15 and a revolver in the same ad.

Though she gained attention for her provocative tactics, Gorman eventually lost to Ben Quayle, son of former Vice President Dan Quayle, in a 10-candidate primary.

Aside from the shock value, guns in ads became a symbol of opposition to the Obama administration.

In this 2014 political ad, Alabama congressional candidate Will Brooke used a high-powered rifle to shoot holes in Obamacare legislation.

Will Brooke

For instance, in 2014, U.S. congressional candidate Will Brooke of Alabama ran an online ad in a Republican primary showing him loading a copy of the Obamacare legislation into a truck, driving it into the woods and shooting it with a handgun, rifle and assault rifle.

Not done, the remains of the copy were then thrown into a wood chipper. Although Brooke lost the seven-way primary, his ad received national attention.

The call to defend a conservative way of life got increasingly bizarre – and became a common tactic for GOP candidates.

Well before Greitens, U.S. congressional candidate Kay Daly from North Carolina fired a shotgun at the end of an ad during her unsuccessful campaign in 2015 asking supporters to join her in hunting RINOs.

The ad attacked her primary opponent, incumbent Rep. Renee Elmers, a Republican from North Carolina, for funding Obamacare, “Planned Butcherhood” and protecting rights of “illegal alien child molesters.”

Before he drew the ire of Trump, Brian Kemp climbed the polls in Georgia’s race for governor in 2018 with an ad titled “Jake” in which he interviewed his daughter’s boyfriend.

Holding a shotgun in his lap as he sat in a chair, Kemp portrayed himself as a conservative outsider ready to take a “chainsaw to government regulations” and demanding respect as his family’s patriarch.

The ads of the most recent cycle build on this development of the gun as a symbol of white resistance.

In this 2022 political ad, Marjorie Taylor Greene is wearing dark sunglasses and carrying a high-powered rifle.

Marjorie Taylor Greene

Conservative GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, from Georgia, ran an ad for a gun giveaway in 2021 that she made in response to what she claimed was Biden’s arming of Islamic terrorists as well as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s allegedly sneaking the Green New Deal and other liberal legislation into a budget proposal.

Firing a weapon from a truck, she announced she would “blow away the Democrats’ socialist agenda.”

The culture wars continue

Surrounding himself with soldiers, Greitens goes further than those before him in this latest iteration of the Republican use of guns.

But his strategy is not out of the ordinary for a party that has increasingly relied on provocative images of violent resistance to speak to white voters.

Despite the violence of Jan. 6, conservatives are still digging their own trenches.

Ryan Neville-Shepard, Associate Professor of Communication, University of Arkansas and Casey Ryan Kelly, Professor of Communication Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

When U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar decried Israel's 11-day aerial bombardment of Gaza this May and declared that "Palestinians deserve protection," Florida's Republican U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio responded by saying that Israeli violence and U.S. support for it were justified because Israelis "live in a very tough neighborhood."

Rubio did not invent that phrase or its use in describing Israel's place in the region where it sits. In 2016, 82 hawkish senators signed onto a letter to President Barack Obama advocating greater guarantees of military aid to Israel, saying that "members of Congress from both parties have been proud to work with you and previous administrations to provide Israel the essential resources it needs to survive in a very tough neighborhood."

Conservative think tank analysts also use the term, such as Aaron David Miller of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace—who calls Israel "a tiny state in a tough neighborhood"—as do critics of U.S. policy toward Israel. For example, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has used the phrase, "a challenging neighborhood" and progressive U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has said, "I think Israel is in a really tough neighborhood."

The significance of American officials describing Israel as placed in a dangerous neighborhood is unmistakable. In the racist geographies of the United States, "tough neighborhoods" are to be avoided, they are to be policed, and they are inevitably Black. The trope of the "dangerous neighborhood" is so widespread that it communicates all of these things without explanation. This makes it a perfect device for people across the U.S. political establishment to justify military aid and other support to Israel—whether enthusiastically or with some reservations—to an American audience.

Indeed, its relationship with Israel includes a minimum of $3.8 billion in U.S. military aid each year as well as extensive exchanges between American police departments and Israel. U.S. police departments train with Israeli forces, with the aim of mutually enhancing each side's ability to patrol its "neighborhoods."

The "Israel is in a tough neighborhood" trope is one of countless entry points into the relationship between the racist domestic repression regime of the U.S. and the violence that it carries out and supports abroad. These relationships are long-standing, rooted in the colonization of the land and requisite violence against its Indigenous peoples, and the enslavement of the Black population. The foundational violence and surveillance necessary to dispossess Native peoples of land and maintain slavery—which have evolved to be deployed against racialized groups of migrants to what would become the United States—has had utility in imposing the U.S. will abroad too.

This connection between U.S. violence within and beyond its borders is important, especially in light of a renewed national conversation about American policing. That conversation, driven by Black-led uprisings in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others in 2020, has revealed the predatory, racist nature of policing. It has exposed the failure of the criminal justice system to provide justice for victims of police violence. It has called attention to the roots of American policing in slavery, and it has launched a mainstream discussion about defunding and abolishing police departments. It has also highlighted the militarization of police, offering an opportunity to bring greater attention to the practices of forces that operate domestically, and those U.S. and U.S.-supported forces acting abroad.

This historical depth of the unfolding "racial reckoning" conversation is welcome and relevant to both an exploration of police and military violence today. Forms of violence honed against Indigenous and Black populations in the fledgling United States were not left in the past, unrelated to the militarism of our time. On the contrary, these histories produced methods that inform and refine U.S. violence in ongoing ways. As historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz points out in An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, the U.S. military uses countless terms from the conquest of the continent in the "Indian Wars" to label its operations and weapons today. Dunbar-Ortiz writes that Pentagon officials referring to restive places in Iraq and Afghanistan as "Indian Country," giving Osama Bin Laden the codename "Geronimo" in the Navy SEAL operation that assassinated him, and naming Army helicopters "Blackhawk" and "Apache" are "recent examples of the persistence of the colonialist and imperialist sensibilities at the core of a military grounded in wars against the Indigenous nations and communities of North America."

This violence does not just travel in one direction—from the Continental United States to places beyond it—via wars. U.S. imperial violence elsewhere also fuels and informs policing, militarism, and racist violence domestically. The U.S. declaration of war against Japan during World War II involved the domestic internment of people of Japanese origin. American soldiers who tortured Vietnamese people during the U.S. war in Southeast Asia in the '60s and '70s brought their brutal methods back to the U.S. as police officers in Chicago, torturing Black residents in the '80s and '90s. And, as Asian scholars and activists have argued, particularly in light of the rise of anti-Asian violence, U.S. militarism in the Pacific informs racism and misogyny that targets Asians—and especially Asian women—here. Writer and organizer Cynthia Dewi Oka offers histories of genocidal U.S. violence in Asia as "context for the massacre of Asian women in Atlanta," adding, "It has been the most normal thing for Americans to kill Asians."

The deep nature of the relations between places and groups of people in the United States and around the world does not only mean that we are bound together by oppression and violence. It also means that we are linked by resistance.

There are rich histories of resistance against U.S. empire for mutual liberation. In one such chapter, at the height of the U.S. war in Vietnam, radical Black soldiers stationed in Okinawa supported the local struggle against the enormous U.S. troop presence and militarization of Okinawa. A leaflet distributed by Black soldiers to Okinawans in 1970, written in English and Japanese, declared that "Black GIs are trying to become part of the solution, not the problem. The Black GIs are willing to talk to the Okinawans in order to form much better relations between the oppressed groups, because we have so much in common."

Historian Wesley Iwao Ueunten frames such acts in a context of solidarity between Okinawans struggling against the enormous U.S. troop presence in Okinawa and Americans—particularly Asian, Latino, and Black Americans on American campuses, in Black neighborhoods, and on and around military bases themselves. "In an age long before 'transnationalism' became widely used," Ueunten writes, "and before faxes, the internet, affordable international flights and cheap long-distance phone calls made it easier to travel between the corners of the U.S. global empire, political movements in the United States were strongly conscious of what was happening in Okinawa."

The racist nature of the violence that the U.S. carries out and supports abroad—and its grounding in domestic U.S. racism—provides for connections and solidarity with those on the receiving end of U.S. violence abroad and with Black America in particular. We are in a powerful moment, for example, of Black and Palestinian solidarity. This includes campaigns to stop exchanges between U.S. police and Israel, as well as other acts of protest against the support of Israeli violence by American institutions. In his recent resignation from the faculty of Harvard University, for instance, scholar Cornel West notes among a list of grievances that the "Harvard Administration's hostility to the Palestinian cause was disgusting." This comes after years of Black public intellectuals like West, Angela Davis, Michelle Alexander, and Marc Lamont Hill using their voices to lift up solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle.

Indeed, the recent decision by Ben & Jerry's to stop selling its products in Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in protest of Israel's occupation of those places was pushed in significant part by Black Lives Matter activists.

The linkages between U.S. violence in the heart of the empire and places around the world are many, and the need to deepen an awareness of them is urgent. In light of the reduction of the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan, for example, Stephen Semler of the Security Policy Reform Institute points out that weapons from occupying forces may see an afterlife in the hands of U.S. law enforcement. If American police find themselves newly armed with guns and vehicles that were once used in Afghanistan, it will be through the 1033 Program—which is a conduit for the Pentagon to direct used weapons from battlefields abroad to police departments here.

The links between American policing and violence around the world, therefore, are organic. So too should be the opposition to police abuses here and the abuses that the U.S. carries out around the world. Current calls to defund the police converge with long-standing demands to cut the Pentagon budget and reinvest funds that have been used for war and militarism into social spending to provide for human needs. The calls to defund the police are precisely aimed at a conversation about investing public wealth into education and social services rather than policing—a discussion that mirrors calls to redirect war funding into public benefit. Activists today pursuing such conversations and action have the inheritance of proud histories of transnational solidarity against empire to draw upon, and are challenged to renew and deepen them in our time.

This story first appeared at Yes! Magazine.

Khury Petersen-Smith is the Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. He writes about US empire, the War on Terror, solidarity with Palestine, and anti-racism in the United States. He is a contributor to In These Times, The Nation, Truthout, and Common Dreams. Khury is based in Boston, MA, and speaks English. He can be reached on Twitter @kpYES

I'm going to try connecting things that don't at first seem related. They are the fight over a commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection; the disproportional number of covid deaths in states run by Republican governors; this week's shooting massacre in San Jose, Calif., and every other one like it; and, let's see, what else? Well, feel free at the end of this piece to add your own examples. There are plenty more.

All have in common the political concept that God divided the world between the elected and the unelected, that is, between His chosen and everyone else deserving of eternal damnation. (They deserve what's coming to them, in other words.) For the chosen, anything is possible. For God's enemies, God's law. All politics, all historical struggle over power and limited resources, can be seen through a lens in which everything begins with the chosen and ends with the chosen. It's a closed circuit—politically, religiously, economically and every way that matters. Important for you to understand is this: it's impervious to democracy, morality, justice and the truth. If you want to keep this republic of ours, you've got to keep these people away from power.

The commission

The Republicans in the United States Senate this morning filibustered a bipartisan House bill that would have created an independent ideologically neutral commission to investigate the January 6 sacking and looting of the United States Capitol. The United States Congress created such commissions after the Oklahoma City bombing in the 1990s and the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Along with being good for democracy and patriotism, a commission of this kind is the right thing to do.

If the Republicans do not explicitly see themselves as God's chosen, they act like it implicitly—in that they have decided, as a political party over a number of years, that only Republicans can rule legitimately. The country is politically polarized, because the Republicans now insist on a polarized worldview in which the Republicans are good, because they are good and the Democrats are bad, because they are bad.

Calls to "do the right thing," like establishing a truth commission, cannot therefore be seen as merely "doing the right thing," because no matter how moral or how patriotic it might be to call for establishing a commission, such calls are actually politics in disguise. In this view, the Democrats are not acting morally or patriotically. They are trying to extract an advantage that the Republicans would never give up voluntarily. If the Republicans agreed to a commission, the Democrats would win, which would be intolerable from a party that's supposed to lose, because God's chosen always win.

The covid deaths

Enough time has gone by since the beginning of the covid pandemic to see that states with Republicans governors had far more deaths than did states with Democratic governors. Among other things, such as lockdowns and school closings, this is due to the fact that Democratic governors and the residents of their states accepted the necessary inconvenience of wearing face masks until there was a viable vaccine.

Wearing face masks to prevent catching the covid, before there was a viable vaccine, was widely seen as commonsense. Commonsense, however, is not politically neutral when you believe the Republicans are good, because they are good, and the Democrats are bad, because they are bad. "Commonsense," like calling for "doing the right thing," is politics in disguise according to people who believe they are God's chosen. Indeed, the more you insist on commonsense, the more they resist, much to the bewilderment of those who can't make sense of perspectives that are not supposed to make sense.

Very little is going to make sense when everything in life is polarized between being for the chosen or against the chosen—when God's victory is proof of my elect and God's defeat is also proof of my elect. The Democrats can't possibly have my best interest in mind, because the Democrats stand for rules and laws that can be used to take this country away from me, a country that was given to God's chosen. The Democrats and their calls for commonsense must therefore be opposed at all costs, even if the cost of refusing to wear a face mask means a terrible death by the covid.

The shootings massacres

The shooting massacre in San Jose, which killed nine people, including the killer, is the latest in a seemingly endless string of massacres that America has witnessed since the expiration of the assault weapons ban in 2004 but especially since 2012 when a young man shot to pieces 20 kids in an elementary school in suburban Connecticut.

The Republicans are the problem. They have blocked, time and again, legislation in the Senate that would do something about mass death. They have cited the Second Amendment and its preservation of the right to self-defense as their reason. There's something to that, but only something. It's no coincidence the Sandy Hook Massacre came shortly after the American people reelected the country's first Black president.

Barack Obama's reelection was confirmation that the rules of democracy were no longer reliable. The Republicans have since launched myriad efforts, coordinated and ad-hoc, to change the rules of democracy to give them prejudicial advantage. Behind this effort is an understanding that goes all the way back to the Puritans—that this country was given by God to his chosen, which is to say, to white people. To many white Americans, the election of a Black president was, quite literally, a robbery.

The Second Amendment can therefore be understood as a remedy to the crime, as a means of restoring a religious covenant, the Constitution itself, which for many white Americans is "linked to white nationalism and the idea that God has ordained this country for whites and therefore licenses white nationalist violence," said filmmaker Sierra Pettengill in a recent interview with historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Dunbar-Ortiz added: "The Constitution is worshiped as the embodiment of [this] covenant—and so the Constitution for them is the direct word of God giving instructions."

Every day that goes by takes the United States farther away from this covenant, and closer to God's enemies. I think every single shooting massacre, one way or another, is rooted in this political concept: that God's enemies deserve what's coming to them.

Conclusion

We talk a lot about the Republicans and their information bubble. But that does not cause people to believe they are God's chosen. That kind of thinking has been with us since before the founding of the republic. It has always been with us. It will probably always be with us. Whether it has access to real power, however, is the question.