"Governor Hot Wheels"

On the Collapse of Moral Proportionality in American Politics

United States Representative Jasmine Crockett / Shutterstock.com

There is a particular kind of moral incoherence that has infected our political discourse—the inability to distinguish between rhetorical transgressions and substantive moral horrors. We're expected to react with identical outrage to a crude joke about a wheelchair and the systematic dehumanization of people being deported without due process, beaten, and stripped of dignity in actual detention facilities.

This false equivalence serves power by equating superficial violations of decorum with profound violations of human rights. It demands that we chastise Rep. Jasmine Crockett for calling Greg Abbott “Governor Hot Wheels” with the same moral fervor we would apply to condemning the horrors being inflicted on deportees in El Salvador—horrors that Abbott himself has championed and celebrated.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And not all moral transgressions carry equal weight.

To be clear: mocking someone's disability is inappropriate and beneath the dignity of public discourse. History offers us a powerful counterexample in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who led America through the Great Depression and World War II from a wheelchair—a fact largely hidden from public view in his era. Roosevelt's physical limitations never diminished his moral authority or capacity for leadership. Similarly, Abbott's use of a wheelchair should never be a target of derision or shame. His physical condition has no bearing on his moral obligations or his capacity to fulfill them.

Yet one cannot help but notice the striking hypocrisy in how the same right-wing voices now screaming about Crockett's indignity have built an entire political aesthetic around cartoonish hypermasculinity, raw physical strength, and disdain for perceived weakness. The same movement that produces endless memes of Trump as a muscled strongman, that obsesses over “alpha” masculinity, that mocks political opponents as “weak” or “low energy,” suddenly discovers a commitment to dignity and respect when a Democrat makes a tasteless joke about a Republican's disability.

This selective outrage reveals the fundamental insincerity of their moral position. It's not about protecting human dignity; it's about weaponizing the language of dignity selectively against political opponents.

But the deeper issue remains: Abbott has wielded his considerable power to enact policies that inflict actual, material suffering on vulnerable human beings. Policies like the mass deportations that led to men being marched through gauntlets of armed guards, beaten, stripped naked, and thrown into overcrowded cells.

The photojournalist who witnessed these deportees described watching men age a decade in two hours. He saw a young man sob, “I'm not a gang member. I'm gay. I'm a barber,” only to be slapped for his tears and beaten for his vulnerability. This man was denied phone calls, visitors, books—reduced to something less than human in a system that Abbott enthusiastically supports.

I'm not prepared to manufacture equal moral outrage for a tasteless joke and the systematic torture of human beings. This isn't about whataboutism or blame-shifting. It's about moral proportionality—about recognizing that in a world of limited moral attention, we must calibrate our responses to the actual harm inflicted.

The same media ecosystem that breathlessly reports on Crockett's rhetorical transgression has largely normalized the ritualized dehumanization happening under Abbott's watch. The same Republican politicians expressing outrage at Crockett's language have remained conspicuously silent about the suffering their policies create. And the same public that demands perfect decorum from their opponents is often willing to overlook grotesque cruelty when it's wrapped in the language of security or law and order.

This pattern of moral confusion extends beyond this single incident. We saw it when Susan Collins expressed her “deep concerns” about family separations while taking no meaningful action to stop them. We see it when commentators equate protesters blocking traffic with policies that strip healthcare from millions. We see it in the ritualized performance of offense that treats all violations of norms as morally equivalent, regardless of power differentials or concrete consequences.

There exists a profound asymmetry between someone making an inappropriate joke and someone implementing policies that strip human beings of their fundamental rights. Words matter, but they don't matter equally in all contexts. The moral weight of an insult, however tasteless, simply cannot equal the moral weight of actions that cause direct human suffering.

Crockett's error was tactical more than moral. By choosing childish mockery, she gave Abbott's defenders an easy distraction from the substantive horror of his policies. She allowed the conversation to shift from what Abbott does to what Crockett says—a shift that invariably benefits those in power. But the underlying moral stance—standing up for the vulnerable against the powerful—remains sound, even if the expression was flawed.

The moral reckoning our moment demands isn't about policing language with equal vigor regardless of context. It's about recognizing which actions truly violate human dignity at scale. It's about maintaining a sense of proportion that doesn't equate a verbal jab with the systematic destruction of human lives. It's about refusing to allow superficial concerns about civility to eclipse substantive concerns about cruelty.

In a world where people are being beaten, humiliated, and dehumanized with state approval, the disproportionate focus on rhetorical missteps represents not moral seriousness but its opposite—a retreat from the difficult work of moral judgment into the comfortable performance of offended sensibilities.

We can acknowledge that Crockett should have chosen her words more carefully without pretending that her verbal transgression exists on the same moral plane as the policies she's fighting against. We can hold a more complex moral position that recognizes both the value of civil discourse and the necessity of moral clarity about what truly threatens human dignity.

The moral crisis of our time isn't that our discourse has become too coarse. It's that we've lost the ability to distinguish between what offends our sensibilities and what destroys human lives. It's that we've elevated the performance of concern above the substance of compassion. It's that we've created a moral framework where saying the wrong thing is treated as equivalent to doing the wrong thing—a framework that inevitably protects power at the expense of justice.

“The greatest tyrannies are always perpetrated in the name of the noblest causes.” — Thomas Payne