So Much Coping and Seething as the Supreme Court Decides to Take Up the Trump Bump Stock Ban

dacian, the DUNDERHEAD. Now where did Charles say that “it’s perfectly acceptable to gun down 413 people with a bump stock”?
You do like to exagerate and prevaricate.

Have you figured out the firing sequence of a cartridge yet?

OMG! It’s not an act. You really are that stupid.

dacian, you are priceless to our side.

To Walter the Beverly Hillbilly

You reading comprehension is at the 5th grade level. Go Back to school. Charlie certainly did imply it was ok to gun down 413 people as long as you took longer than 10 seconds to do it, then bump stocks are totally ok to be sold to the public.

Walter what is the firing sequence of a cartridge? Remember this was your original question which you are to terrified to answer.

ildelusion.. say now, that MIGHT just have sme usefulness these days.

Yeah, was supposed to read ildelusion. Forgot the copy paste in the clipboard was italics code instead. Which is why the entire rest of the post was in italics. No termination clause.

“They use tax money to maintain a pipeline of cases that give them what they want if the SCOTUS were to change its composition.”

You bet your ass they will. The first thing they will do when they have an ideological head-lock on the court will be a ruling that ‘Heller’ was wrongly decided, and they have precedent for that in the ‘Dred Scott’ case over a hundred years back.

Our 2A rights in no way are “settled law”, the moment the new court guts ‘Heller’, the clock is ticking on how long America stays in one piece, since there are a sizable majority that will refuse to live like that…

The clock’s already ticking. You defuse this thing or you sit back and watch the fireworks.

The real question is which bomb to defuse first. Unless you’re the pretty colors and loud noises type.

Keep in mind that the immigrants coming here helped to install oppressive and corrupt governments in their own country. Then, instead of changing it, they went somewhere they think they don’t have to worry about the government. Now they’re here. You know what they say. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

We even have the data to back that up in this country. For every Lefty we win over, they’ll bring in two more. Those people spit out kids much faster than the typical American. Democrats know they aren’t importing future Republicans. If that were the case, they wouldn’t be doing it.

Democrats are only “bad” at governing because making the country great isn’t their goal. There’s a reason they sneer at the mere notion of that. Their goal is to consolidate power and wealth for a select few, while degrading their political opponents. Unfortunately for us, they’re very good at that.

Then what explains the hard fact they have had an ideological headlock on the public school system for at least 40 years by now, and the public is still split nearly 50-50?”

1. They’re up like 400% over where they were. It’s not called a “long game” for nothing. Also, keep in mind that they’re looking for a critical mass, not an overwhelming majority. If that critical mass is hit then purges will cow most into silence.

Oh, and that critical mass is less than 50-50, by the way. They don’t actually have 50%. If they did, we wouldn’t be having this delightful banter on TTAG.

2. The counterpoint to this, from a purely political perspective, is that R’s have lost the popular vote in 7/8 of the last presidential cycles. There’s a reason the Left trashes the Electoral College when they lose, because in a purely popular vote system the mostly don’t.

3. As I’ve pointed out before, Gramsci is their blueprint here. They’re looking to capture or destroy pillars of society that make that society resistant to infiltration. They don’t necessarily need to completely take over each pillar, significant demoralization is enough to divide their opponents in a way that’s effective. Tip of the wedge sort of thing. They’ve been remarkably good at this. As I’ve pointed out before you now have two generations of adults that, shall we say, greatly dislike Boomers and the feeling would seem to be mostly mutual according to the media.

Which is sad in many regards because the entire point is to keep both groups fighting each other in a manner that allows for the killing of the Golden Goose to roaring applause rather than righteous anger. Woodchippering the Boomers is the way to do that, and the way to get that is to ensure that the majority under 40 despise that generation.

The Left has only openly discussed this since the 1920’s.

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Let’s actually take a short stock of where we were ~100 years ago and where we are now from a semi-Gramscian point of view.

In 1910 the Left controlled basically nothing other than a few openly Commie rags with little circulation in large cities. They’d been mostly discredited by the “labor” actions of Communists and anarchists turning to violence in the late 1800’s. Emma Goldman actually got herself deported in 1919 over her associations with such people. (She would later learn a very hard lesson at the hands of Lenin and the Fabians combined.)

Since then, we’ve had the New Deal (TND) introduced. Keep in mind that much of it was struck down until the SCOTUS handed a giant win to FDR in Wickard and that they did this mostly for political reasons growing out of Pearl Harbor.

Since that time, Americans have mostly accepted what parts of TND which have remained. Including an interpretation of the Commerce Clause which empowers the Federal government to no end.

And even Cons defend this status quo. I mean, point out that in 2019 (pre-covid expenditures and the inflation derived from those expenditures) Social Security and Medicare were a combined ~$55 trillion in the hole and that both are transfer payments, essentially welfare for the elderly by definition, and you get ardent capitalists screaming something about how they “paid in” as a deflection from the salient point that without serious reform this is a ponzi that WILL collapse and will almost certainly collapse the economy Argentina-style (though an argument can be made that Chile is a better example) when it goes. Keeping this status-quo is not actually better for the elderly, but good luck convincing them of that. Even Conservatives tend to defend TND to the hilt at this point.

But again, the Gramscian perspective; capture the pillars.

In Marxist theory there are basically five pillars (though there can be some argument about the number/type in various schools of thought). These “pillars” are the route of transmission of values that make the society resistant to Marxism to the next generation. This produces a “cultural hegemony” which is anti-Marxist, a slight twist on Tocquevillian thinking.

These pillars are, in no particular order, Religion, Law, Arts & Culture, Education and Media. In Marxist doctrine, regardless of the flavor, these things create an embedded power structure and this power-structure is maintained by the ruling class via institutions such as courts and universities. As Gramsci himself wrote:

“Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. … In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.”

Gramsci’s thesis is, essentially, a domino theory. If you take over K-12 then you change the downstream dynamics of all the other institutions via controlling the inputs. If you control K-12 long enough, tightening your grip and increasing your activism within that institution over time, you then control the production of the lion’s share of K-12 grads. A higher and higher proportion of the kids are now actually activists for your cause and those kids are the feeders for undergrad programs which feed post-graduate schools, like law schools.

In essence you create 18 year old activists and send them off in numbers to change the cultural dynamics of law schools, which over time will change the cultural dynamics of the legal system in your favor because it’s being run, mostly, by your activists.

And what have they actually captured? You can argue dates and times if you like, but they inarguably control K-12, most of the undergraduate schools, much of key graduate programs, a large portion of the legal system, the media, arts and even portions of what I will generally refer to as “the church” (though really it’s a subset of various denominations) which have recently bought into ideas like DEI and gay marriage and huge swaths of local, state and federal government too.

IOW, capturing the K-12 program while Blue Sky was a thing worked quite well. They’ve used entryism to take over and now they gatekeep quite openly. What do you do to push back? Basically nothing. That’s why you’re experiencing what amounts to a slow motion Cultural Revolution.

And keep in mind that critical mass thing. The folks over in Organizational Behavior the psychology world can show you a lot of data that backs the concept that these activists need not be a majority or even close to one. If they are loud, mean, intransigent they can take over with 20-30% because most people simply won’t push back, they’ll go with the dominant narrative in most cases. The dominant narrative being the one that tends to be the loudest or most ruthlessly enforced.

They even have a term for this. “The Long March Through the Institutions”.

Which raises the question of how the Right reacts to this historically and in the here-and-now, but that’s another topic. The short answer is “poorly”.

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Go back in time, not far, to perhaps 1995 and a nearly unbelievable amount of what you see today was quite literally unthinkable. If you had a time machine and went back to then and warned people you’d be looked at as bat-shit nuts.

Target and Bud Light openly insulting the majority of their customers while DAs allow rampant crime because racism while teachers push grade school kids into gender reassignment surgery and parents can be silenced or even arrested for pointing out that there’s actual pornography in school libraries? Unpossible.

And that’s just a dollop of what’s going on.

And, as noted, if they take the SCOTUS, it’s game over without a no-shit shooting war that, quite frankly, you’re unlikely to get if they keep doing what they’re doing via a slow application of the ratchet effect. Conservatives didn’t really notice what was going on for decades, I mean we’re talking 75+ years of myopia.

SCOTUS is the last castle the Republic holds, really. And it’s under siege. Shockingly, to me, few seem to understand this. Worse, whenever the Right loses a castle they don’t tend to make plans to take it back, they just say “Castles suck” and walk away. Ceding yet more territory to the enemy while simultaneously claiming some species of moral victory.

Mostly at this point people would rather fight each other over bullshit identity politics while decrying identity politics in the next breath. This is something the Right is not immune to. They’re simply blind to the fact that they do it. Why? Because propaganda works in ways most Cons deny are possible. Which, by the by, makes the propaganda all that much more effective.

Modded. Wait for it. Or don’t.

“Modded. Wait for it. Or don’t.”

It made it, fear not…

Did I… I guess I am naive to that sort of stuff, but since you mentioned it the writing seemed a bit off.