In response to a Reddit post relaying Felon45’s bad, very unpleasant day in court:

Comment
byu/theindependentonline from discussion
inlaw

Here is the text, in case it disappears from the source at some point:

I mean that’s really just the heart of it.

The entire conservative movement, as it is, based on the things that they do and say, is based on ignorance and lies. There is no element of it that isn’t fundamentally wrong at the deepest level.

And not just on an effective policy level, but on a legal level and on a basic, fundamental, scientific-laws-of-reality level.

That’s why they’ve tried to stack the judiciary and the courts. That’s why they attack institutions of learning, and of scientific research, and that’s why they need to have a massive propaganda network across every media outlet, and that’s why they only keep getting nuttier and nuttier. They have severed all their mooring lines to reality and so they’ll just keep drifting in the abyss of batfuck nuttery forever.

Science offends them because their believes are contradicted by basic scientific evidence. And instead of doing the emotionally mature thing and reframing their understanding, they try to burn down the thing that makes them angry. Like fools.

They are to a great degree deeply immature and deeply emotionally volatile. Their social circles reinforce, rather than correct, these behaviors. They cannot handle any degree of social friction or embarrassment. They know no other way to exist besides social domination because they can’t compromise, can’t empathize, can’t tolerate the possibility they may not understand nearly as much about the world as they want to believe they do, so they double and triple down on forcing those fundamentally wrong views on everyone around them. They aggregate in a giant ignorant mob and burn books, take down websites, throw death threats at anything that contradicts them.

They’re the American Taliban, or any other band of zealous, power-hungry fools. A destructive movement based entirely on dominating everyone else around because they’re just too emotionally fragile to deal.

They’re wrong about trans people. Wrong about autistic and ADHD people, wrong about vaccines, wrong about basic principles of modern medical science, they’re wrong about global warming, they’re wrong about basic economic theory. They’re wrong about who makes a good, competent leader of a nation. They cannot look at a pants-shitting moron octogenarian rapist, fraud, and traitor, and accurately conclude that that is what he is, and that that temperament is disastrous when given any degree of power.

They’re wrong about fucking everything. I’m not talking about on an opinion level. I’m not talking about “well I disagree with your view on this”, they’re just wrong about fundamentally true things that we have proven through our entire corpus of scientific understanding.

So of course Trump’s tariffs crash the market. Of course his idiot EO on gender makes no fucking sense and legally turns all of us into women. Of course his supporters die in far greater numbers from COVID after he tells them not to mask and to swallow a bottle of horse dewormer.

Because they’re wrong. Because they make shit up, and it’s not fucking true, and it doesn’t fucking work and everyone has a bad time because you’re listening to, taking the advice of, and being legislated on behalf of, fucking idiots.

It’s just our great misfortune we have so many people in this country so totally divorced from reality that they’re willing to follow along with this sheer stupidity.

The heart of a nation is the law, and the heart of the law is the truth.

The entire process of the law is about determining, to the best of our ability to do so, what the truth is. Which persons did what actions. What did those persons believe and think at the time of those actions. What damage did those persons do, and what fundamental rights were violated in doing so?

That’s what the law is, at its core, and that is why the conservative party cannot, and indeed should not, ever govern.

The only thing they can do with power is destroy. They build nothing. Their entire endeavor is simply gaining, and retaining power. Not governing once they have it. Just breaking, and stealing, and lying, and cheating their way into more power.

To truly build through legislation requires an adherence to the truth. The absence of truth in law is corruption. Corruption doesn’t build, it only takes. It erodes. Supplanting truth with whatever ruling or outcome is most convenient to the rich and the powerful, at the expense of the rest of the nation.

In the past twenty years, conservatives have started two forever wars on a lie. They have spread constant and obvious lies about the climate. They have spread lies and conspiracy theories about their political opponents, about their own nature and intentions in power. About their fellow citizens. They have enshrined judges to the highest positions in the land who lied outright in their confirmation hearings and proved themselves a liar in contradictory and profoundly unconstitutional rulings.

They lie. They operate in bad faith. They con, and cheat, and grift, and seek power so that they can abuse power.

And you can tell me all you’d like that what the conservative party is now, isn’t “real” conservatism, but I don’t know what you’re talking about when you tell me you’re a “real” conservative. Regan? Back when he was banning guns because black people owned them, and lying about AIDS existing or being “caused” by gay people?

Conservatives have always been this. Dating back to the days they thought they could own people and force those people do to their labor. This is who they are, what they are. Obsessed with hierarchy. Obsessed with dominance. Too immature to deal with the world as clear-eyed adults, and dooming everyone around them because they refuse to come to grips with a reality that terrifies them.

We have given these fools power over and over and over again and they have destroyed, and they have stolen, and they have ruined. They are fools. Their words and their actions prove this so many times over, and the sooner the collective people of America come to grips with who and what these people are, the faster we can actually begin the road to undoing the damage their ignorance and stupidity and stubbornness and cruelty has done to the rest of us, and to the rest of the world, too.

EDIT: When I was three or four years old, somewhere around there, my parents were trying to teach me how to write the alphabet. I was very good, except at some point I became convinced that the letter “e” was written like “n”. I didn’t really have a reason to believe that, except that maybe I just got mixed up looking at a chart once and decided that was the way it was.

My parents were trying to teach me how to write my name – which ends in e – and I wrote it perfectly, except every time, I wrote ‘n’ at the end.

And they tried to tell me, very nicely, that that was not correct. It was written ‘e’, not ‘n’.

And the more they told me that, the angrier I became. They showed me the chart, and very clearly demonstrated that the letter was ‘e’. They showed me in books where people had my name, and showed me that it was written ‘e’ at the end.

They showed me incontrovertible proof that I was wrong in as nice a way as they possibly could.

So, I ripped up the paper and threw it at them. I told them I hated them and that they were stupid. I stormed into my room and I wouldn’t come out the rest of the night. I cursed them under my breath and threw a tantrum and hurled toys against the wall.

I didn’t have a concept on how wrong I was. I figured, hey, I got all the other letters right, who was to say I was wrong about this one? My parents? Pff. What did they know?

I was too young and too ignorant to understand how much more my parents knew than me. How limited my scope of understanding was.

I only had my own hurt feelings, my tiny baby pride, and I was desperate to protect it, to find a plausible lie to live in where I was right. It seemed plausible that I could be right, because I simply lacked the breadth of perspective and maturity and experience and wisdom to understand even how much I lacked. Dunning Krueger.

And this conservatives. This is the fundamental truth of them. This is who they are, what they are. This is the molten core that fuels everthing they do, and think and believe.

They live their entire lives like this, and conservatism, and Donald Trump, that is is their ‘n.’ The incontrovertible proof of how profoundly wrong they are which they refuse to let go of, because subconsciously they cannot bear the pain of admitting they were wrong. They cannot face it. They cannot face the torrent of shame, and guilt, and a lifetime of pigheadedness that waits behind the door of them reconciling themselves with reality.

The longer they remain in ignorance, the greater their debt to reality becomes. And they cannot pay it, cannot even read the total on the bill slipped under the door.

They have made it an integral part of their identity and have decided they would rather die inside the house than admit it is on fire. It is not congruent with reality, but they do not have the emotional maturity to change. To grow. So, they double down. And triple down.

For many of them, some part – a very small part – understands the bill is there on the floor near the door.

They don’t pick it up. Won’t pick it up. Many will never develop the emotional courage to admit that they are acting like irrational children too terrified to be wrong to begin redressing their grievous errors. Testimonies and interviews of people in post WWII Germany reveal that many of the common folk who voted for Hitler never admitted the magnitude of what they’d done. Never admitted their mistakes. Never fully reconciled with them.

But they know. And this is part of the reason they’re so miserable and angry all of the time. They live in cognitive dissonance, and are refusing to look at the light and find their way out.