I can explain away Donald Trump (borderline psychopath) and his various minions (cowardly sycophants, gullible idiots.) But the bloc of six on the Supreme Court, and their brethren in the Federalist Society, what do we make of them? Their rock-ribbed conviction looks like religious zealotry, albeit their justification comes not from a conventional bible but from Project 2025, or perhaps some related but secret manifesto. By all accounts, their mission involves the derailing of much of the United States Government, especially the parts that grant voting, economic, and environmental justice to the general populace.
It’s all loathsome, but the attack on environmental justice is truly confounding.
Hey guys, global climate change is real. You don’t need me to tell you this. You don’t even need the climate scientists of the world to tell you this—which they are doing, repeatedly, as insistently as they can muster. All you need to do is step outside and/or look at a thermometer. Year after year, the records for hottest months ever measured are dropping like dominoes. We’ve got wildfires, we’ve got hurricanes, we’ve got melting ice caps and snowbanks and one whole continent—Antarctica—that appears poised to slip and splash into the ocean.
I could go on.
So why don’t these yahoos appear to give two figs? Why does the possibility—and it’s not a trivial possibility, logic suggests the process will be triggered if carbon dioxide levels keep increasing as they have been—why does the possibility of ocean acidification and the death of all those creatures therein, such as the oxygen-producing phytoplankton—not scare the living SHIT out of their Harvard-educated asses?
As I look at the Federalists, the best explanation I can fathom (Occam’s Razor, usually works) is that reptiles have taken over their cerebral cortexes. Could be genetic, could be acquired, maybe a combination of both. Regardless, this mindset explains why they want to undo not merely a few pitiful public policies, like Obamacare and Johnson’s Great Society and the New Deal. No, the events they want erased began way back—about 65 million years ago, when the asteroid struck Earth and killed all the dinosaurs. Restoring the Mesozoic era, all hot and swampy, that’s the cause that gleams in their eyes and stokes the fire in their scaly bellies.
I would not be surprised, not surprised in the least, if one of these visionaries steps up to a microphone, works themselves into a frenzy, then puffs out their fine suit until it split opens. As they burst out of their skin and hair and breasts, they reveal their true selves as a modern-day, spiffed-up Allosaurus or Velociraptor. They would screech and holler, kill a few people, and generally trash the place until animal control arrives.
After the shock wears off, you know what else wouldn’t surprise me? The New Lizard Party would poll pretty well! Maybe not elected right away, but within a few years and with the help of good messaging, we’d have our first Lizard councilreptiles and senators and governors, and eventually most of the government, led by a Lizard President.
The lizards might begin with a ban on public breastfeeding, but the new laws would hardly stop there.
Change, people, change! That’s the mantra of evolution, the force driving all life on Earth: believers, deniers, and the unaware alike. As a decidedly non-reptilian politician once declared, change is coming for us whether we like it or not. The challenge is to manage and shape the change to our mutual benefit.
The time has come to tell the Reptilian Party to go to hell. Their time has long since passed, the impact from that asteroid is irreversible. Our only choice is to boldly go into the future, where no one has gone before. Cue the music and the Enterprise zipping across the screen.
