If you are having trouble understanding how conservatives could be simultaneously running on law and order while also promoting and hyping vigilantism you are not alone. While this seems like a contradiction, one in a seemingly endless list of contradictions, it isn’t. If you see a contradiction here, you are just making an incorrect assumption on what the purpose of law and order is to conservatives.
To quote Frank Wilhoit
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.
For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual.
As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.
So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.
Kyle
Why would Kyle drive 20 miles to a place where he doesn’t live with a firearm he does not legally own to walk into a crowd and start pointing that firearm at the people? This is a 17 year old who by all accounts, was a supporter of the police. Surely he much have known it was illegal for a 17 year old to own a gun. He much have known he actions would be seen as premeditated and not self defense. None of those actions makes sense unless you consider “Blue Lives Matters” as nothing more than an elaborate backwash of pseudo-philosophy to cover the one fact of conservatism. There are people like Kyle, that the law protects but doesn’t bind; and there are people, unlike Kyle, that the law binds but does not protect. And Kyle is there to bind the protestors to the law that doesn’t protect them.
Mr. and Mrs. McCloskey
When you look at the image of Mr. and Mrs. McCloskey standing there, holding firearms incorrectly; think about how they think they are part of the group the law protects, but does not bind and how they are pointing those firearms at people the law binds but will not protect.
BLM is perfectly echoing anti-conservatism, the idea that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.
