The Gun Cult Was Never about Overthrowing Tyranny

Over on the Book of Face, Diane Williams writes:

Let’s stop pretending this is complicated.

Mel Gibson beat the mother of his child while she held their infant daughter. He didn’t just yell. He didn’t just lose his temper. He didn’t just “slip up” on tape. He punched Oksana Grigorieva in the face, broke her teeth, gave her a concussion, and followed it up with an unhinged voicemail so vile it could be used as an instructional video for abusers.

“I’ll put you in a rose garden,” he said.

“You’re going to answer one day, boy.”

“You need a bat in the side of the head.”

He gasped through the call like a beast trying to breathe through its own rage, threatening to kill her — and by extension, threatening every woman who’s ever been told by a man with power, “You’ll never get away.”

And now?

He’s armed again.

Because the U.S. government decided he deserved it.

MEL GIBSON DIDN’T EARN REDEMPTION — HE BOUGHT IT

This isn’t redemption. This is rot wrapped in celebrity.

Mel Gibson has never shown meaningful contrition. His public image rehab didn’t come from atonement. It came from Hollywood cowardice and right-wing forgiveness, the same people who will scream “family values” while handing a man like this a fresh Glock and a box of ammo.

The only thing Mel Gibson regrets is that we heard him.

But you know who doesn’t forget?

The woman who lost her teeth. The baby who watched her mother bleed. And the millions of survivors watching this play out, knowing the state just set a precedent:

You can beat her. You can terrorize her.

And if you’re rich enough, white enough, and famous enough,we’ll give you your guns back.

MEET PAM BONDI — THE ENABLER-IN-CHIEF

Let’s talk about Pam Bondi — Trump’s handpicked Attorney General, the same political leech who once helped delay investigations into Trump’s fake university and then miraculously received a donation.

She had a choice.

She saw the audio. Saw the broken teeth. Saw the threats. Saw the photo of a bruised face and read the transcript where Gibson practically foamed at the mouth promising violence. And she signed the paperwork anyway.

She chose to side with the man who said:

“You should just smile and blow me, because I deserve it.”

That’s who Pam Bondi sided with. That’s who she trusted with firearms. Because nothing says “law and order” like re-arming a domestic abuser with a track record of violent threats, racism, and open misogyny.

There’s no rehabilitation here. Just rot in high heels and a signature pen.

THEY FIRED THE ONE WOMAN WHO DID HER JOB

Elizabeth G. Oyer wasn’t a judge — she was the U.S. Pardon Attorney, and she did something almost unheard of in Washington: she told the truth.

She reviewed the case and said no. She said Mel Gibson posed a risk. She said this wasn’t just a bad headline — it was a dangerous precedent.

So what did they do?

They fired her.

Because in this Justice Department, integrity is a liability.

Let that sink in: the man who once screamed “You look like a f*ing pig in heat” got his rights restored, and the woman who objected is now unemployed.

This wasn’t justice. It was a goddamn warning.

THIS IS A HELL OF OUR OWN DESIGN

If you’re a survivor, what does this tell you?

It tells you that the law does not protect you. That even with audio, even with photos, even with broken teeth and a baby in your arms — the man who did it can still win. All he needs is a few million dollars and the right people in office.

It tells you that Pam Bondi will hand him a gun. That Hollywood will hand him another movie deal. That America will hand him a standing ovation if he stages his comeback with just the right mix of crocodile tears and Christian nationalism.

And it tells every abuser watching:

Be patient. Play the victim.The system was built for you.

CLOSING THOUGHTS — AND A CURSE FOR THE COWARDS

This isn’t just a miscarriage of justice.

This is institutional complicity dressed up as due process. A celebration of white male rage, given a second chance because the world still thinks power is proof of virtue.

Mel Gibson is not a victim. He is not misunderstood.

He is a man who beat a woman while she held a child — and he is now armed and empowered by the government.

To every coward who helped make that happen — to Pam Bondi, to the cowards in the Justice Department, to the agents of rot who traded conscience for loyalty:

May you one day sit across from a survivor and explain why his gun mattered more than her life.

We will not forget this.

And we are not done screaming.

Good job America.

MAGA Battle Cry Against Their Victims: WE WILL TAKE YOUR FREEDOM! BUT YOU WILL NEVER TAKE AWAY OUR GUNS!!!!

Guns were never about “standing up to tyranny”. When Trump told an audience of NRA white racists that he was going to give the cops millions in military grade hardware, they did not quail in fear at the power of a heavily-armed state coming to get them. They cheered. Because they knew the barrel of the gun would not be pointed at them.

This has always been about arming violent whites to be able to take vengeance on those they hate and fear. It’s about heavily armed self-pity and seething resentment that only extends empathy to that tiny circle who are extensions of the conservative’s ego (Gibson is forever fighting to defend or avenge a single person he happens to care about in his movies) while regarding the sufferings of the entire rest of the world as non-existent, contemptible, funny, and/or guilt manipulation.

The core blunder of the “prolife, family values” conservative is that he has reduced Christianity to a cult of white fertility whose summum bonum is “the family” (ie, extensions of his selfish ego). It has resulted in a heresy rooted in blood, tribe, nation, and ethnicity which deploys violence as its marker of manhood and maturity.

Jesus, in contrast, every single time he addresses the family radically subordinates it to the Kingdom in the most shocking language.

“If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” (Lk 14:26)

The family is a great good. Therefore, the family and the ties of blood, race, ethnicity, etc. is a *huge* temptation to idolatry. Heresy is never simply false. It is *always* the exaltation of some great and good truth or thing above the worship owed to God alone.

We cannot possibly understand the present hour in the American Church without facing that fact. Cartoonish assessments of those in the grip of this heresy as simply being “plain evil” are folly. They are people blinded by inordinate, monomaniac love for a couple of real, but subordinate, goods who cannot see that they are idolators because they live in terror and hatred of those trying to bring them back to sanity.

Heresy tends to mutate into its Shadow. Now the pious “prolife” “Catholic” worshipper of antichrist celebrates beating women, killing children in Africa and Pakistan, deporting children with brain cancer, and sentencing the innocent to Salvadoran hellholes.

Naturally, it celebrates arming violent men.