The Pistol-Packing, Q-Believing Congresswoman Who Might Just Be the Future of the Republican Party
I am currently moderately obsessed with roughly three minutes of Youtube content that could easily pass for a devastatingly satirical sketch about our country’s fetishization of guns or a Sundance-worthy short film.
In it, a scarily focussed young woman strides confidently down the streets of Washington D.C and explains that she has just been elected to Congress and even though she lives in “one of the most Liberal cities in America” she refuses to give up her rights.
That’s why she’s vowing to always bring a murder weapon with her to congress in the form of a Glock she fondles lovingly throughout a clip whose slick style can be summarized as “cell phone advertisement by way of the mock commercials in Starship Troopers.”
To really drive home just how excited this lunatic is to be bringing a gun to her new place of employment the words “I WILL CARRY MY GLOCK TO CONGRESS appear over her right shoulder in the video alongside her signature.
Talking about her gun gives this pistol-packing 2nd amendment advocate a sense of exhilaration and excitement I personally need to take powerful stimulants at concerts to achieve.
When she talks about how being a li’l old first term congresswoman, she doesn’t have a phalanx of bodyguards or a secret service detail of her own, so in order to even the score as a 5 foot tall, hundred pound woman she needs to constantly be carrying something that can kill people instantly you get the sense that she fantasizes about a scenario where she gets to righteously use her gun in self-defense to kill a whole bunch of motherfuckers, that she lives for the moment when she would finally get to be the fabled good gun owner confidently taking down a bad gun owner with lethal force and a hail of godly gunfire.
Striding confidently around Congress, this woman asserts that the real problem with guns and our society is that there just aren’t enough guns to keep people safe, but if everyone in Congress was packing at least a nine millimeter handgun at all times no one would ever have to worry about violence.
Ah, but this clip is no satirical sketch or savagely brilliant short film. Instead it’s a real-life video from Lauren Boebert, who made headlines when she said of QAnon, “Everything I've heard of Q, I hope that this is real because it only means America is getting stronger and better” and of course when she vowed to carry her Glock to Congress for self-protection, to really stick it to the Libs and perhaps most importantly, for branding.
Boebert later backtracked on her Q support when it became politically advantageous to do so, but the damage to her reputation was done. She’s an extremist who obviously saw in Trump’s vulgar showmanship and antagonistic, pugilistic persona a kindred spirit whose garishly populist movement and unhinged cult of personality she could cynically co-opt for herself.
Before she ran for public office, Boebert owned and ran Shooters Grill, a Colorado eatery that encourages its attractive female servers to open-carry. In that sense, it’s like Hooter’s, but with a much greater chance that patrons, staff and management alike will die in a gun-related accident.
The thirty-four year old Boebert has already attained a level of notoriety and fame wildly disproportionate to her actual power.
Donald Trump loves to use the phrase “straight out of central casting” to describe politicians he likes. Needless to say, Boebert is straight out of central casting, a tiny, conventionally attractive gun-toting rebel who’s like Sarah Palin 2.0, only younger, less educated (Boebert dropped out of high school but later got a GED), more militant and even more media-savvy.
In the Youtube video Boebert comes off less like an actual politician than someone playing one on an HBO Max drama about a sexy, rebellious congresswoman who fights socialism and gun control during the day and solves crimes and kills criminals at night.
Like Trump, Boebert is all about getting a reaction. It doesn’t matter if the response is positive or negative: all that matters is that people are paying attention.
Watching Boebert embody every negative stereotype about Americans as gun-obsessed narcissists just itching for a chance to use their weaponry I couldn’t help but worry that Boebert represents the future of a Republican Party radicalized by Trump’s terrible time in office to be the worst, most extreme possible version of itself.
Boebert is so extreme and so unhinged that there’s seemingly no limit to how far she will go. Who knows? Ten years from now Boebert could very well be bragging about carrying her AR-15 to her job as president in the White House and we would have only ourselves to blame.
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