If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches, that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that is not progress. Progress is healing the wound, and America hasn’t even begun to pull out the knife. – Malcolm X
Clarence Thomas roots his justification [for the individual right to bear arms] in the privileges-or-immunities clause, and in its backstory of slavery and abolition. Not only does that free Thomas from [Samuel] Alito’s white frontiersmen of yore but it also allows him to conjure the history of Black slaves arming themselves against their masters, and of Black freedmen protecting their families during Jim Crow.
In his concurring opinion in McDonald v. Chicago (2010), a landmark guns case, he concludes with this resonant image:
One man [in 1919] recalled the night during his childhood when his father stood armed at a jail until morning to ward off lynchers. . . . The experience left him with a sense, “not ‘of powerlessness, but of the “possibilities of salvation” ’ ” that came from standing up to intimidation.
Thomas tells some of this history in Bruen. He dedicates a paragraph to the horror Chief Justice Roger Taney expressed—in the infamous Dred Scott decision declaring that Black people, enslaved or free, were not citizens of the United States—at the prospect of Black citizens having the right “to keep and carry arms wherever they went.”
Mocked and misunderstood on Twitter, the paragraph reprises a longer story, which Thomas narrates in McDonald, of how terrified whites were of Black slave revolts in antebellum America.
Citing the work of Herbert Aptheker, the Communist author of a pioneering history of slave rebellions, Thomas notes that white fears of Black revolt would be “difficult to overstate.” Those fears “peaked” during Reconstruction, to which Thomas devotes even more attention in his McDonald and Bruen opinions.
If there is any rational basis to the Court’s claim that people have the right to carry guns because they fear violence at the hands of a generalized other, it is in Thomas’s account of Black arms and Black history. Of the four pro-gun opinions in Bruen, Thomas’s is the only one in which we find an empirical example of a people’s justifiable need for armed self-defense in the face of violent enemies and government indifference.
“Seeing that government was inadequately protecting them” under Jim Crow, he writes, Black people took up arms “to defend themselves” against white terrorists.
The only history that can make sense of the Court’s position on guns, in other words, is that of race war.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-self-fulfilling-prophecies-of-clarence-thomas
The story of the United States is actually the story of Eden.
The greatest cultural influence in the history of the United States was the Puritan culture that was established in the year 1621.
When those babies hit town, buddy, they were on rock and roll.
They were not a kind, mild, and gentle people. They wiped out the indigenous.
They gave us many gifts – work ethic, emphasis on education – but they were also fanatics.
For good and bad, they are our antecedents.
We have sex scandals throughout our history where when you look at the essence, you realize, wait a minute, this happens to about 50 percent of the population, and the other 50 percent are waiting in line.
Anyway, the stories that I write are about Eden and the fall from grace.
I’m not a literalist, but I mean it in the emblematic sense that the essential challenge to the human family is that we have this great gift – the great big blue ball in the universe – and we are stewards.
But look what happened when the Puritans arrived. They cut down forests. They turned capitalism into a religion.
The two people who were most aware of it, and feared its coming, were Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. It is in their letters. They feared that the vitality of the revolution would be supplanted by the mediocrity of businesspeople.
The story of Eden, and how it influences my work, is not the story of a snake in a tree, but the story of what we are doing to the tree – what we are doing to the Garden.
I haven’t read Mr. Burke’s latest novel, although I am a big fan.
Meanwhile, in MAGA country, my heavily armed, entirely white neighborhood loves this new Court.
Our HOA is a well-regulated militia.
Driving Toyota pickup trucks.
Just like ISIS and the Taliban.
