Bang Bang Crazy: Supreme Court Conclusion

 

On Thursday, June 23, 2022, six of the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States wrote the conclusion to my little thread about the butchery that took place inside an elementary school in Texas almost exactly a month earlier.

And that conclusion was: we're wingnuts and we love guns, so fuck you.

It's really just that simple.

The modern "conservative" movement loves them some guns. Big guns, little guns, old guns, new guns...guns are what gives them wood. There is no firearm that the current SCOTUS majority considers too risky, too dangerous, too lethal, for some mouth-breathing peckerhead to carry around the public square.

Why? Because there's a good reason for mouth-breathing peckerheads to stroll about armed like a Nung mercenary?

Fuck, no.

It's because ammosexuals - people who get their rocks off having badass weaponry - are a crucial voting element of the Republican criminal conspiracy.

Without the gun-humpers, the racists, the incels, the bible-bangers, no Republican would ever get elected. Ever. Again.

So this is them throwing brains to their zombie horde.

There is no other reason.

They give fuck-all about the people who are going to die, who are going to live miserable lives with the damage the bullet will do to their arms or legs or guts (have you ever seen a gunshot wound? Unless it's from a peashooter .22 it's not a nice neat little hole. High-velocity ammunition shreds human meat and splinters bone. It commonly leaves you crippled and in pain for the rest of your life) or the grief of loss and rage at the insult to minds, lives, and bodies those firearms and the mouth-breathing peckerheads who will soon be humping them everywhere will do.

And don't even get me started on how the already-twitchy trigger fingers of the cowardly cops will get an order of magnitude twitchier.

Adam Serwer has a terrific article up in The Atlantic that explains that this isn't some sort of "conservative" bug. It's a feature:

"The conservative majority’s main vehicle for this imposition is a presentist historical analysis that takes whatever stances define right-wing cultural and political identity at a given moment and asserts them as essential aspects of American law since the Founding, and therefore obligatory. Conservatives have long attacked the left for supporting a “living constitutionalism,” which they say renders the law arbitrary and meaningless. But the current majority’s approach is itself a kind of undead constitutionalism—one in which the dictates of the Constitution retrospectively shift with whatever Fox News happens to be furious about. Legal outcomes preferred by today’s American right conveniently turn out to be what the Founding Fathers wanted all along."

 Which, of course, leads us to the past week's Dobbs v Jackson decision that overturned Roe v Wade.

Wingnut assurances to the contrary, people have been purging their spawn since there were people. The difference that Roe made was that the person outside the spawn was likely to survive. 

But, like the Bruen decision was not intended to make civil society safer, saner, more reasonable and more attractive for everyone but to give the Republican gun-humping faction a chubby, Dobbs isn't actually intended to make things more sane and sensible for actual human beings but to make the fundamentalist freaks that are one of the other important parts of the GOP base cum their brains out.

That's it.

That's all.

That's the entire reason these black-robed fuckers are tearing out everything built since 1929 they can lay their grabby little dickbeaters on.

Look up "nondelegation" if you really want to get a shiver of existential terror.

That's where these fucksticks are going. 1929? Just a pit stop on the way to 1879.

As I said back in May; these people are coming for us.

Any of us who aren't like them.

They're coming with force and fear.

Serwer sums it up neatly:

"The core conservative belief about the culture war is that there is a Real America that is conservative, and a usurper America that is liberal. This, not historical research, not legal analysis, is the prime means of constitutional interpretation for its current majority. (T)he right-wing justices’ vow that other constitutional rights are safe for precisely what it is worth—which is to say, absolutely nothing."

This is what they want for you:

It's from The Onion, but don't kid yourself.

It's only as funny as long as they haven't actually done it.

All these nice people? The church lady, the gruff-but-loveable old cuss down at the VFW, the nice missionary who handed you the tract the other day, the respectable attorney who's the chairman of the local Kiwanis?

They're your deadly fucking enemies and want you powerless and crushed.

So.

It's really simple:

Fight them.

Fight them or be destroyed.

The Fire Next Time, or, Jane Brown's Body

 For some time I've been wondering what the first shot of the coming "next Fort Sumpter" will be. The event that turns our Cold Second Civil War hot.

 Oh, wait. I didn't mention the whole "cold Civil War" thing? Damn. I am getting forgetful in my old age.

So you see, there is no "We the People" anymore.

C'mon. You know that. Just be willing to quit kidding yourself otherwise.

Instead there's a sort of vast inchoate mass of humans who call themselves "Americans" that takes in every damn one and every damn thing under the sky. All sorts of people, being and doing all sorts of things. Moderates, liberals, atheists, Quakers, whackos, undecideds, and the hopelessly lost.

And there's a hard, irreducible, intransigent knot of people who call themselves "Conservatives".

The latter - and they do have some internal divisions, too - don't see the former as "Americans" at all.

These "conservatives" have some ideology but are mostly defined by what and who they hate.

They hate "liberals", first and foremost.

But the different internal divisions hate different aspects of these "liberals".

The racists, who are primarily invested in being white and that being the default position of "American" hate the pushy darks and anyone who has the temerity to even slightly question that White Is Right.

The gunhumpers - many of whom are white, too - hate anyone who tries to pry them off their lust objects, all fifteen of them.

The religious nuts - many of whom are also white (but not all; this is where the largest fraction of not-white "conservatives" come into the GOP tent) - hate anyone who's not doing whatever their invisible sky daddy says they're "supposed" to do, or doing things that the transparent sky wizard says they're not "supposed" to do. So they hate mostly abortions and the women who have abortions, and anyone involved with abortions. But they also hate non-straight people who are doing any sort of non-straight things (like having other-that-hetero-sex) or ARE doing things that straight people are doing (like marrying and having kids and going to yard sales and shit) plus Muslims and Jews and...well, you get the idea.

There's also some people who don't "hate" so much as are either just regular old greedy bastards - these are mostly just your basic rich people doing what rich people have always done, which is simply whatever it takes to make themselves richer - or people who have drunk the Ayn Rand kool-ade and are stupid enough to actually believe that big corporations and big rich people will screw you (the average non-wealthy person) over slower than big government, so they're just fucking idiots.

Anyway...all the the things these people love - theocracy, plutocracy, weapons, racism - are largely anywhere from unpleasant to outright offensive to everyone else. So they can't really run ON those things. Turns out that if you tell non-"conservative" people what these various "conservative" people really want, about 98.7% of those non-"conservative" people haaaaate all that stuff. 

I mean, hate, like with the intensity of a million suns.

So the "conservatives" just usually lie, and instead talk about how if you don't vote for them the commie liberals will flouridate your water and make you gay marry a Muslim transsexual.

Seriously. That's it. Flogging tax cuts for the rich, and feeding red meat culture war shit to the base.

Other than that the GOP's got nothin' for the vast majority of the American people.

So for about the past 40 years the "conservatives" have been at war with the liberals and everyone else who isn't "conservative". It's been a cold war, mostly; until lately no actual shots have fired.

But then on Friday Ruth Bader Ginsberg died and so now here's what's gonna happen.

Trump will send the name of some reliable bag of Federalist Society wingnut hate (apparently smart money is on some Opus Dei lunatic named Amy Coney Barrett who is chock full of the sort of old-fashioned Inquisitorial spite and malice that appalls most cradle Catholics) before Ginsberg is cold.

Moscow Mitch McConnell will ram this internet-comment-section-level-troll through confirmation and she'll be sworn in before Election Day to help her pals like Thomas and Kavanaugh strongarm "conservative" talking points onto everyone in this country.

And then it'll be Game On. 

They'll come for the 20th Century.

You think I'm joking?

Abortion will be first, of course. Roe will be toast. There will still be abortions - because as long as there is sex there will be abortions, don't kid yourself, - but only safe for the rich. For the poor and the lower class they'll often as not kill the women along with their spawn, which is the point.

Obergfell will be next, and, frankly, we'll be damn lucky if they don't overrule Griswold, Loving v. Virgina and Brown v. Board.

Lochner. Fuck. Lochner.

If you don't already, you need to Google Lockner v New York, because that's what the rich "conservatives" really want; a return to the Gilded Age, when plutocrats like John D. Rockefeller could say "The public be damned" and really do it. The six-vote "conservative" Supreme Court is gonna drive us back there most quick smart.

Along with any sort of workplace protection, you can kiss environmental and financial regulations bye-bye. Welcome back to the industrial world that used to set rivers on fire, and the highway to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum by way of 1895.

The only happy news is that as we roam this dystopian thermal hellscape at least we'll all be heavily armed, because any and all sort of firearms regulation is going to be dead'er than a dodo.

So after Donnie and Mitch seat their wingnut it won't matter how many liberals or "centerists" get elected. Every piece of legislation they pass will be litigated to the Supremes, who will take their "conservative" axe to it.

And the only real answer to prevent this "conservative" Day of Jubilee?

Go full FDR. Elect a Democratic President and Democratic Senate and Democratic House, and...

Pack the Court.

And when that happens, the wingnuts will howl like rabid wolves, and the real red-meat nutbars, the Proud Boys and Nazis and wanna-be Freikorps will turn out with their rifles.

And there we'll be; waiting to see who fires the first cannon at the big brick fort in the harbor.

That's how I see it. I don't like that, but I also don't see any way around it. The Right is going to force the Everyone-Not-Right to bend the knee or they'll shoot.

And your and my and everyone else's choice is simply whether we're willing to bend the knee or shoot back.

I don't have to like that.

But I don't see any alternatives other than even worse ones; a corporatist "conservative" future where we all the "rest of us" end up as serfs in climate change Hell.

And, goddamn it, I'll go down fighting before I surrender to that.