Readers of this newsletter will know about the most-recently revealed perverted behavior of “Justice” Samuel Alito—the flying of anti-American, pro-insurrectionist flags at his two homes.
The first flag, an upside-down American flag, is a symbol of distress. Alito blamed his wife for hoisting this one. What do people like the Alitos have to be distressed about?
Like almost all Republicans, and certainly like MAGA Republicans, who are scions of the perpetually aggrieved wing of the party going all the way back to at least the 1950s, the Alitos are distressed that the majority of Americans do not share their “values”—the fear-based, anti-social, and Anti-American prejudices that I have dissected meticulously in my books Asshole Nation, Scum America, and Conservative Estimate, as well as in this newsletter.
In their own minds, Republicans are downtrodden victims, unjustly prevented by an uncomprehending liberal hegemony from realizing their glorious ideal: their longed-for illusion of a non-existent 1957, where white-supremacist, misogynous, fake-Christian, anti-federalist people like them called all the shots.
This self-pitying view is, of course, delusional. They are not victims. On the contrary, they cannot get what they want because the majority of decent Americans don’t endorse their perverse dreams, which center on holding unjust power, using it to oppress others, and not suffering any consequences for it.
This is deep irony—blinding self-ignorance. These people are in no sense victims. They are the beneficiaries of millions of fingers on the scale, put there by people like them precisely for people like them.
Flying a distress flag ironically reveals just how oblivious the Alitos and their Republican co-conspirators are to reality. Their feeling of distress shows that, despite all the power they have, they still want more.
And that’s the weakness of the power-hungry. No matter how much they have, they always want more, because the need for power is an insatiable vice that cannot be satisfied. And people like that are monsters, because they will go to any lengths to get their next hit of power.
The second flag the Alitos flew was the so-called “Pine Tree Flag.” It features a pine tree with the caption “An Appeal to Heaven.”
The origin of this caption is found in John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government:
And where the body of the people, or any single man, is deprived of their right, or is under the exercise of a power without right, and have no appeal on earth, then they have a liberty to appeal to heaven, whenever they judge the cause of sufficient moment. And therefore, tho’ the People cannot be Judge, so as to have by the Constitution of that Society any Superiour power, to determine and give effective Sentence in the case; yet they have, by a Law antecedent and paramount to all positive Laws of men, reserv'd that ultimate Determination to themselves, which belongs to all Mankind, where there lies no Appeal on Earth, viz. to judge whether they have just Cause to make their Appeal to Heaven.
—John Locke, Second Treatise on Government, §168
So the point of flying this flag is to advertise that you believe there is no judge on earth to whom you can appeal, so you are claiming the anterior right—the right to revolt.
The irony here is even thicker than in the last example.
Part of the genius of the American constitution is that is provides a court system for Americans to appeal to. At the top of that system is the Supreme Court. And Sam Alito sits on the Supreme Court. For him to fly that flag is ludicrous self-criticism. It says that his court is not legitimate, that nothing it decides should be accepted, that people should revolt rather than appeal to it. The appeal to heaven is a condemnation, both of him and his court.
So by flying the second flag, Alito amplifies the Republican delusion of victimhood. It shows that he wants to overthrow the very institution he populates—the very institution whose power he is abusing to force Decent America to live in the world of his fevered dreams.
As usual, Alito and his fellow Republicans are not intelligent or self-aware enough to get the irony. They just like the feeling of mouthing off, puffing out their chests, throwing insults at those they despise. But just as they don’t see that flying the distress flag shows how weak they actually are, so too they don’t see that flying the Pine Tree Flag shows how illegitimate they actually are.
Alito is a paradigmatic Republican figure. He exemplifies the deep irony shared by most Republicans—the kind of irony that Sophocles showed in Oedipus Rex, which blinds a person to his true character. This blindness combined with the character flaw of arrogance causes such people to destroy themselves and those nearby.
Alito shares the following traits with most Republicans. He thinks that he is righteous when he is wicked. He thinks that he is untouchable because he has never suffered any serious consequences for his outrageous “beliefs” and the behavior they spawn. He thinks that he can recreate a perverted golden age that never existed by using power, however unjustly obtained, to impose his twisted prejudices on everyone else.
The blindness of Alito and Republicans to their vices makes them no less vicious. And at the very peak of their pile of vices is, as I mentioned, the ironic hypocrisy of their relentless assertions of victimhood.
Alito and the vice-ridden Republicans are not victims. They are would-be tyrants who want to force decent Americans to knuckle under to their authoritarian, white-supremacist, misogynous, minority will.
As such, they should never be treated like victims. They should be treated like criminals, because that is what a tyrannical soul trying to establish minority rule is in a democracy, whose laws are all based on majority rule. Their self-ignorant arrogance also causes them to commit unethical acts like taking bribes from their criminal Republican conspirators. This only makes it easier—once Decent America wrests the power back from them—to prosecute them and convict them of their crimes—as we should soon see as a result of the Trump election-subversion/hush-money trial in New York.
Their self-blindness, which generates the irony, is setting them up for disaster. All we decent Americans need to do to facilitate the self-destruction of Republicans and their party of ironic self-delusion, is to turn out at the polls in November and hand the government over to the Democrats.
With a strong Democratic president, Senate, and House of Representatives, the moronic irony of Republican self-ignorance will finally meet its match.
The Supreme Court can be expanded, taking away the ability of Republicans to reverse any more of the progress made in the twentieth century, and making it possible to reverse the horrendous reversals of the current troglodyte-majority court.
Gerrymandering can be legislated away, making it impossible for Republicans to continue their illegitimate over-representation in Congress.
The Citizens United case can be reversed and money can be seriously limited and its sources can be revealed in elections, making it impossible for billionaires to spend unlimited amounts of money to deceive or confuse people.
The Dobbs decision reversing Roe v. Wade can be reversed again, restoring the right of reproductive health care to all Americans in every state.
Finally, the Republican hopes to outlaw contraception, to reverse gains in LGBTQ+ rights, to destroy Obamacare, to put an arsenal of guns in the hands of anyone who wants them, to outlaw interracial marriage, to force everyone to bend the knee to their greed-and-power-perverted notion of “Christianity,” to destroy the climate by burning every last drop of fossil fuel, and to impose their entire vicious program of making America unjust again.
Decent America can put an end to the Republican-fueled chaos of the last half-century by just taking their undeserved power away at the polls.
Let’s do it. Let’s leave the indecent Republican minority gnashing their teeth outside the gates.
Because that is the place earned by the moronic irony of their self-deluded, perverted desires.