Trump’s Fans Are Suffering From Tony Soprano Syndrome. Some conservatives are embracing the villains in what are supposed to be cautionary tales.

> Literally opens with Judge Dredd

Which is proof this isn’t a new problem. Judge Dredd and RoboCop were **parodies of how, according to the directors, Americans seemed to understand and want to manage crime** and the extent to which Dirty Harry got celebrated as a real American hero didn’t exactly dispute their fears. These movies were satires of the Nixon-Reagan Revolution’s approach to crime and we didn’t get the joke.

American conservatives have always been downright fucking authoritarian since at least the 80s.

> he Punisher creator Gerry Conway has called the embrace of Punisher iconography by real-life armed agents of the state “disturbing,” because “the Punisher represents a failure of the Justice system. He’s supposed to indict the collapse of social moral authority and the reality [that] some people can’t depend on institutions like the police or the military to act in a just and capable way.”

In a way he’s right. The kinds of people who become cops now are unironically in belief that “the system is fucked and only I can save it”. Cops increasingly see themselves more as a vigilante posse than as an institution of the state given their outright hostility towards efforts by the state to regulate their behavior, a state they see as rotted and incapable of producing order and moral authority because they forfeited it to “get woke”. At some point we will have to deal with this reactionary and treasonous element of our society.