Bad Faith Is Turning Us Into Monsters
The sweetest, most earnestly good-hearted woman I know – a paragon of selflessness and unconditional love – sorta kinda wants conservative Supreme Court justices to take a permanent dirt nap.
It's not that this lady wants the Court's six frothing right-wing justices to die. She would never say so directly; she's far too sweet to sound like a deranged Twitter addict. This woman, who I've known since high school, is no radical leftist. She's not even a cringe resistance lib. She's decidedly apolitical.
She sometimes reminisces about the "good" Republican presidents – Eisenhower and Reagan and George H.W. Bush. She loved Barack Obama's non-political message of unity and intentionally vague change. And in 2020 she voted for Joe Biden because – like most Americans – she was deeply repulsed by the vulgarity and norms-flaunting of Donald Trump.
In conversations about the hyper-politicized Supreme Court, poisoned by a slate of stolen Republican seats, this lady – a suburban dweller in her 60s – expresses the same kind of hopelessness that has become so terribly prevalent online. This sense that there is nothing that can be done about the Supreme Court justices crafting policy from the bench has infiltrated not just the manic Twitter circles I frequent, but real life. This woman, my friend, is extremely not online. She has no idea what we talk about in our broken-brain conversations; she would require a six-week class to understand the nonsense we talk about in the Bad Faith Times discord channel.
And yet, she feels what we feel – that our judicial system has a killer flaw (lifetime Supreme Court appointments) and there's no way around it. Sometimes, I suppose, Twitter is real life. For her, as for broken-brain millennials posting 17 hours a day, the hopelessness has curdled into something much worse, something sinister.