Black Banners, One.

The only other important thing to be said about Fear & Loathing at this time is that it was fun to write, and that's rare — for me, at least, because I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking — which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling. Nothing is fun when you have to do it — over and over, again and again — or else you'll be evicted, and that gets old. So it's a rare goddamn trip for a locked-in, rent-paying writer to get into a gig that, even in retrospect, was a king-hell, highlife fuck-all from start to finish... and then to actually get paid for writing this kind of manic gibberish seems genuinely weird; like getting paid for kicking Agnew in the balls. So maybe there's hope. Or maybe I'm going mad... In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upward mobile — and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: Not necessarily to Win, but mainly to keep from Losing Completely... The Swine are gearing down for a serious workout this time around... So much, then, for The Road — and for the last possibilities of running amok in Las Vegas... Well, at least, I'll know I was there, neck deep in the madness, before the deal went down, and I got so high and wild that I felt like a two-ton Manta ray jumping all the way across the Bay of Bengal. ~Hunter S. Thompson

Yesterday, a draft of a Supreme Court decision reversing Roe. Vs. Wade was leaked to the media.

I'll note that for multiple reasons this is a terrible idea, and if the sheer amount of public rage I've seen in the last day or so is any indication, Republicans are going to get their asses kicked over this. You don't change anything that from 58% to 75% of Americans support and not expect there'll be hell to pay. You'd think Republicans would have learned that after the Trump years, but no.

And especially considering that in the leaked document, Sam Alito seems to gleefully anticipate going after other decisions he doesn't like. Presumably, interracial marriage and LGBT rights, for example.

This seems to have gone over badly enough that it Republicans aren't even talking about it, except trying to redirect the focus onto the leak itself. And that's not working either, because nobody cares.

Several people that I follow have caught on to something I thought of right away. If these fuckers want to go after any right that's by court decision or otherwise not enumerated in statute, that leaves open a whole hell of a lot of territory that most people don't...indeed have never even had to...think about before.

Republicans have openly supported totalitarian fascism for awhile. But this SCOTUS bullshit adds another aspect: 

All that is not forbidden is permitted.

Think about how few aspects of the vast swirl of modern life texts like the Bible or the US Constitution actually describe or legislate or regulate...not out of malice, but simply due to the attrition of time and the advance of progress. And then think about how narrowly these sons of bitches choose to interpret those texts when they bother to obey them at all. Think about how much power that kind of mentality could give somebody in a position like being a Supreme Court Justice.

But there's lots of Republicans like that...

All they care about is their own pleasure and power. They flaunt their evil and the media treats politics as some kind of a catty game.

And an electorate that's been apathetic until the last six or seven years...combined with a media and political class desperate to return to "normal" or create the next crisis they can cash in on...makes them think they'll eventually get away with it all.

And for the eventuality that they don't...well, that's the real reason for this shit. 

Bear with me;

A lot of elected Republicans, strangely, seem not to be celebrating this decision. They're crapping their pants about it, because nobody ever really thought this would happen.

But for decades, these fucking people have pushed hate of abortion and women's liberation like drugs. They've written whole continent-spanning forests worth of dystopian novels about what might happen if reproductive freedom were an unquestioned right. I'm serious.

Seriously, how the fuck is bodily sovereignty or medical care not an unquestioned right??

These people live in terror of a world where Abortion is freely available and you have to have a license to get a gun. (In other words, most of the rest of the First World nations.)

Think about that for a second.

Now, whether they wanted to or not, whether they were thinking about this or not (and worse, I suspect they weren't) Alito and his clique have just pissed pure rocket fuel onto the smoldering fires of the Culture War.

And I find it interesting that this happens at a time when #1 America is clearly becoming less conservative and #2 We're staring down the barrel of a renewed Cold War with a New Soviet Union...if not the possibility of WWIII.

I think it's deliberate. I think civil conflict...if not straight-up civil war...is the goal. Certainly, that's what a section of the Republican Base wants.

And like I wrote yesterday there's one hell of a lot of these right-wing Jihadist types who seem desperate to martyr themselves for their shitty beliefs...and more to the point, to be seen doing so.

Which suggests for some it's just a scam. Certainly, at the top of the heap, that's true.

But I'm here to tell you, for many others, it isn't. 

There's Evangelicals, Fundamentalist Christians, Pentecostals and particularly Radical Catholics out there who are every bit as fucked in the head as some "Death To America" screaming, Black Banner-carrying Jihadist who's toting an AK-47. And most of them don't get interviewed on FOX News or by the New York Times nor get fake books like J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy written about them.

They're the nuts in the crowd in the picture that MTG posted, the unshaven, overweight, contrarian nerd boy in your gaming group, and the red-haired girl with the crazy eyes that works in the Deli at Walmart.

They're the door-to-door Baptists from a different church that kept showing up in the summer of 1999, despite being told not to. And they didn't stop until I met them at the door with a clunky late-1990's cell phone in one hand and a loaded shotgun in the other. And I told them if they didn't leave immediately, I was going to call the Sheriff's department and have them arrested for stalking. I'd already spoken to Deputies about it and provided documentation, too.

And I was a Baptist at the time, just not Baptist enough for those fucking nuts. They left and they didn't come back, but that wasn't my last brush with the Crazy.

They're the Pentecostal flying monkeys from my ex-wife's church that she sicked on me in a saga that lasted for several weeks, ended up with both me and the community college that I attended threatening legal action and multiple stalking charges actually pressed...and a couple people went to jail.

They're the Calvinist dickhead on the Christian forum threatening Gays and Lesbians with burning at the stake.

And they'll be the fucking weirdos and harassers and stalkers of more secular varieties, too.

This is what SCOTUS just enabled, and given half a chance the nuts will be up all of our asses bothering us about "Have We Found Jesus Yet?" and demanding the right to tell the rest of us how to live our lives, and inflicting all type of unnecessary totalitarian bullshit on LGBT folk, people of color, and women. It ain't just Abortion they're after.

And they'll lose their shit and turn to violence when people defend themselves, and when there's the inevitable, heavy civil and legal resistance too, when cities and regions and states...not to mention the Federal government...codify protections they dislike, that were previously on this judicial-based honor system. And especially when the State has to defend itself and its people against these fucking barbarians, and it will come to that. Yes, when they can't get their way politically or it doesn't work out how they planned, they'll resort to violence and war.

And then Republican politicians will try and defend that shit, like Lisa Murkowski trying to claim that Ukrainian soldiers "weren't getting enough training" to use Javelin missiles. Javelin was after my time, but you can learn to use a rocket launcher in about an hour...and the Ukrainians were some damned gifted amateurs for like five minutes. Now the average Ukrainian infantry brigade is a tank-killing machine.

I suspect it won't be all that long before we join the Ukrainians in posting pictures of guys we knew, bearded dude-bros who...regardless of their politics...stood up and fought to defend their country as people should.

And Republicans will try to defend the bad guys and diabolically insinuate shit and rhetorically attack our own military when it happens here.

And then they'll do their damnedest to sell weapons and every other damn thing to both sides and turn a profit off of the war.

Seriously, do you think these "Pro-Life" fanatics would be hesitant in the least, in a divided country or one fighting against a right-wing insurgent war, to send suicide bombers into areas they control to blow up a women's health center, whether or not it provided abortions?

These fanatics have already murdered people in churches.

Even as a conservative I thought you couldn't get much lower than that. But then, I've always been more-or-less pro-choice myself simply because I would not want the responsibility of deciding for another. 

And I've always practiced safe sex.

And then the same fucking people have priggish religious dudes in Congress who then put it on camera that they got a hand job from another dude, they put up rapists as Supreme Court judges, and apparently they're running a Softcore Vampire Porn actress for the governor of my state.

I mean, are you fucking kidding me?

It's Bacchanalia at Ancient Roman levels for the "Christians" and the "Conservatives." It's "Childbirth As Punishment For Sex" for all the rest of us.

And I've seen multiple women just completely cut all of us dudes off today, and deservedly so.

And the damned nuts are hoping that they can get their own ravening mob worked up enough screaming "Deus Hoc Vult!" That they won't notice the difference between how Republicans talk and what Republicans do. 

Or, for that matter, that they're broke and have no food to eat.

Conservatives want to force the rest of us to act like their own mental image of themselves...without realizing that the rest of us have eyes and can see what they actually do. 

And they don't and won't walk their own talk, they never have. It's all just a superior justification for cruelty, even in their minds.

If these people were screaming "Allah Akbar" they'd all have been dead 20 years ago.

But they white Republican Christians, so too much of society gives them a pass.

Seriously, we as a people need to run these motherfuckers out of our government in November if not before...and there's not a small number of them I think should be run out of this country on a rail and put on a boat to Vladivostok.

Republicans, what's left of them, are fundamentally just as Un-American as a goddamned Soviet Commissar or a Taliban drug-lord.

These fucking people are political, religious and social terrorists. They've dedicated themselves to the destruction of America and are willingly prostrating themselves before foreign dictators.

Vote like your life depends on it, because it almost certainly does.

Слава Україна!

 It ain't much, but it's the only weapon we have against the Greedheads.

~Hunter S. Thompson, On Voting.