Ayn Rand Akbar! (American Revelation XV: Eleven.)

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning.

I turn this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.

I touch the name Andrew Johnson; I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

~Facing It, by Yusef Komunyakaa, US Army Veteran

...

"The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride." ~Volodymyr Zelenskyy, allegedly 25 February 2022, Associated Press

I saw this earlier today.

Some nut apparently beheaded his father for *Checks Notes* being a Federal worker.

Somewhere, somebody, shouted "Ayn Rand Akbar!"

Radical Islam said "No comment."

Now I'll note speaking as a veteran and a relative of a bunch of people who've had Federal jobs...being a Federal employee hardly makes one a "Liberal." (In fact, if I had to guess, there's a non-zero chance Dad was a Republican but not *That* kind of Republican, and that was the problem.)

And maybe it's just me, but in the eras in which the various texts that became the Bible were written, in the Bronze Age and Classical worlds (you know, what these motherfuckers say they want to go back to) generally and the Greco-Roman world in particular...patricide was seen as the greatest crime that one could commit. In fact, patricide was punished savagely. Especially in places like *Checks Notes Again* places like Sparta, or the earlier eras of Rome.

I'm just going to go out on (not much of) a limb here and say this is the kind of shit that results from endless bad-faith absolute bullshit on the part of Republican elected officials, combined with the fact that a large part of their voter base is both mentally unstable and outright stupid.

And it's only getting worse, and going to get worse yet.

Yeah, I said it, if you don't like it, fuck you. 

Also; RE: Tom Cotton's bad-faith idiocy here, I've been to Singapore. By the standards of the USA, it's a very conservative country (I was there once, when I was in the Air Force, for a training exercise) but it's not that kind of conservative. It's also diverse and pluralistic and urban enough (the whole island is a giant city with golf courses and small patches of jungle-themselves mostly military training areas and nature preserves--mixed in.) for somebody like Tom Cotton to be willfully unable to see any of it for what it is.

These fucking people have no idea what the hell they're doing. 

Hell, they don't want to get a clue...or a life, for that matter.

I suppose it's just more fun, Beavis and Butthead style, to go around saying stuff is "gay" or something, and saying stupid racial slurs (I gather that Owen Benjamin is a ridiculous racist) and worrying about what other people do. I mean, I wasn't allowed to act like that as a kid, if you really want to know how far downhill this shit has gone in my lifetime.

 If you wonder why the Right is a soup sandwich, there's your answers.

And they don't care. 

I mean, maybe it's just me...but if you're going around insinuating that sex with women is gay, you lost the plot on something or other a long damn time ago.

(Seriously if I'd said something that stupid, one of my grandparents would have immediately smacked me upside the head.)

But shit like that is typical of These Fucking People. 

They're reactionary and stupid, and all Republicans will ever give a shit about is that they always vote Republican. They don't give a damn if it's contradictory and stupid and doesn't hold up to the most cursory thought process. They didn't think about it in the first place! These motherfuckers just want to get Power, so they can turn right around and use their willful stupidity to hurt people...including each other.

And these fucking people want to inflict a panopticon surveillance society on all of us, and hand "Enforcement" of it all off to the "Moms For Liberty" types and litigious racist assholes like Stephen Miller.

If you're not seeing how this ends badly, for them as much as everybody else, you're not looking.

These motherfuckers look at the bad guys in a Neil Blomkamp film (or Warhammer 40K) and imagine themselves on the gold throne or the shiny space station...they don't think about the damage they'd do to themselves (let alone others) to get there...nor that the guy on the golden throne has been dead for longer than anybody can remember.

And I swear, at this point, these fucking people are hoping that when [their part of] civilization and society comes flying apart in a violent, suicidal rampage where no one who did it wants to be responsible for anything, that it'll make for a big enough explosion to take out the rest of us, and that the rich elites most responsible for the utter debasement of conservatism can just slink off and have their own little Galt's Gulch Shangri-La somewhere...they don't realize that the problem is, well, them and the fact that their whole motivation for seeking Power in the first place is debasement, dominance and pleasure.

They long to live in the kind of world where a rich dude gets caught fucking his cousin, and he can just write to the local religious leader and have them make it legal...but only for him.

I'm not 100% sure these fucking people realize what a few generations of excessive politicization, reactionary idiocy and religiosity on it's own is gonna do to their own group. Now, throw in debasement for fun, incest and patricide and...well, Okay, it's more or less the Trailer Park Borgias...and those fucking people for the most part failed all the way upwards to the nobility and the Papacy.

(Yes, that's what the people who radicalized the dude in the OP are thinking, whether they realize it or will admit it or not. Cut off enough heads and fail, you're ISIL and everybody hates you, but succeed and you're the Catholic Church.)

But, they forget that the rest of us have the benefits of 500 years of civilization since then, that we want to partake of and don't want to lose. They forget that the excesses of the people they think they're going to emulate were a huge part of why the Reformation and ensuing four centuries of wars and crazy shit happened in the first place.

And if we're being honest, I don't think they've thought all the way through what else playing assorted fuck-fuck games with people who think Radical Islam doesn't go far enough actually might entail when (because it's not an "if" proposition) they lose control of the mob.

All of the assorted revolutions will be short.

But you don't want to live through them.

Not when what they result in is that part of Humanity basically becomes an extremely diverse version of the Technocracy from the White Wolf RPG's and the other part is a bunch of pasty savages dancing around fires shouting "Unga Bunga" while waiting for their Old-White-Man Witch Doctor to come out of his hut...the odds are real good that the time it took to create that shit is going to be real hard on anybody in the middle between those two extremes.

And the people who started out shouting Ayn Rand Akbar will have long since eaten the would-be denizens of Galt's Gulch.

The fact that these people are too stupid to realize this is not a justification for allowing these fucking people's desired world of Techno-Savagery to continue.

We have the power to say "No." The difference between us and ancient people (or "Conservatives") is that we do not have to accept the inevitability of Revelation and its torments, nor fall into Victorian escapism to think we're going to get out of it if we're "Special" enough. 

We can reject the entire concept.

We were given the power to be citizens, and not ignorant savages beholden to strongmen *Checks Notes* 248 years ago.

Use it.

American Revelation does not have to be inevitable.

Слава Україна!

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six. ~Revelation 13:16:18

Eleven

I fear thee, ancient Mariner!
I fear thy skinny hand! And thou art long, and lank, and brown, As is the ribbed sea-sand.
I fear thee and thy glittering eye,
And thy skinny hand, so brown.'
Fear not, fear not, thou Wedding-Guest! This body dropped not down.
Alone, alone, all alone, Alone on a wide, wide sea! And never a saint took pity on my soul in agony. ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner