The Gathering Storm
To an extent, some of this can be resolved in the courts, but if things get too convoluted and the impasse becomes impassible, then the only recourse is violence.
After weeks and weeks of suspense, the anticipation has finally boiled over. Yesterday, the Supreme Court of the United States announced its ruling on the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization:
To quote my all-time favorite pro wrestling commentator, Tony Schiavone, This is American history, folks.
Recall that word of this impending ruling was leaked back in early May. It’s unknown what went on between then and now and if the leak had any impact on either the ruling or the timing of the announcement. At one point, it seemed like SCOTUS would delay it into perpetuity, given the high stakes and assured backlash. But here we are - it’s been announced and it’s now time to see how it all shapes out.
Here’s a look at the immediate consequences of the overturning of Roe v. Wade:
On this blog, I’ve avoided spending too much time on my personal opinions of various issues, though you can probably tell which direction my thoughts generally run. My opinions are like that of most others in the sense they’re mine alone and, though I consider them well-informed and thought out, I don’t consider them any more important than that of anyone else. However, the magnitude of the issue compels me to share my thoughts on the matter.
Nothing conveys my position on abortion better than this Facebook post by Marc MacYoung, whom I’ve quoted a time or two on this blog. Though a personal safety expert by day, his views on abortion closely reflect mine:
I'm firmly pro-choice. Here's the thing, my position has absolutely NOTHING to do with 'women's rights.'
First off entirely too many people make 'abortion' a moral issue. (Specifically harm/care - who do you take care of, who gets hurt.) One side is for the women, one is for the fetus. (Extending this to 'fetus = child'.) Both positions have calcified into intractable positions.
Secondly -- and this is hard for many people to do - there comes a point where you have to shift your thinking from principle/moral based to result based. This is leap many people cannot do. They are permanently stuck in morals/feelz/ideals. This often blinds them to the long term and unexpected consequences of their position.
(You can make the analogy of a train. A moral position is the engine. -- and that's what the focus is on. Result based thinking factors in all the cars and the caboose [end result]. That takes you back at look at the initial premise and ask "what will most likely happen if we go that way?" Not slippery slope, but objective analysis.)
Third, I am not an absolutist on "Thou shalt not kill." This is something many people are -- and it creates all kinds of problems about talking about this subject.
Fourth, I've walked through hellholes and seen first hand what happens to children born into addiction, alcoholic, physical/sexual abusive and neglect. In fact, I spent much of my life going skull-to-skull with those 'children' who grew into adults. What is happening to those children rips your soul, but the book "Manhunter" summed it up best with "I cry for the child he was. I hate the man he has become."
(Sure there are transcenders from those hells. But there are far more broken people, career criminals, monsters and poverty/abuse cycle perpetrators.)
Fifth, if a woman admits that she couldn't raise a child - whether it is from economic resources, lifestyle choices or personality -- I'd rather she abort than inflict on a child that kind of hellish upbringing. Once again, I've seen the adults such children grow up to be.
Sixth, hoping that she'll change and become a good mother -- while possible -- leaves us with too many children raised in these hells. That I find unacceptable.
Finally, until there are enough 'good people' willing to take in and raise unwanted babies -- instead of aborting fetuses -- I'm going to remain firmly pro-choice. [bold mine]
As you’ve gathered from past entries, I’m pretty much of a self-defense absolutist. If someone poses a threat to your life or well-being, I believe, with all due prudence, that taking the life of the threatening party is morally justifiable and we’re not much of a civilization if we don’t uphold this principle. Abortion is an entirely different matter, of course, but the stakes aren’t all that dissimilar. I do believe that abortion is inducing the death of an innocent life, so being pro-choice isn’t a position I hold flippantly and Marc MacYoung so eloquently lays out the inherent moral conundrum.
The question here is whether upholding the principle of right to life is worth the cost of allowing a child to be born into an sub-optimal environment for flourishing. It’s like the question of euthanasia - is it always wrong to kill someone when living not only means they do so in pain and suffering, but merely delaying their inevitable death? What exactly is being accomplished here by allowing a person to live with pain and suffering?
We don’t live in a perfect world and not everyone is born into the best environment for flourishing, yet the parents find a way to raise their children and turn them into productive, upstanding citizens. I think a healthy, strong culture encourages people to reproduce and to fight for their children’s well-being at all cost. Unfortunately, this is a responsibility too many of us aren’t capable of meeting, especially in this age of decadence, and some obstacles are too much to overcome. I’ve seen a bit of what MacYoung refers to when he speaks of “hellish upbringing” and you’re not much of a human if the thought doesn’t cross your mind: Would it have been better off if this child hadn’t been born?
Increasingly, I’ve come to sympathize more with the pro-life argument, for reasons that’ll become obvious as you read on. But I still believe that even a society that strongly values life needs to remember: sacrifices are necessary to maintain a civilization’s viability. If you disagree, remember this, something I’ve tried to convey repeatedly throughout my time writing this blog: the government will kill as many of us as necessary to maintain its own stability. Civilization is a wonderful thing, but running it can be nasty business.
Unfortunately, we live in a time when this sort of nuance has become difficult or even dangerous to convey. Part of the problem is that the pro-choice Left has regarded even the slightest, most reasonable restriction on abortion as an infringement on women’s rights. Take a look at abortion rights as they exist in arguably more progressive Europe:
In Dobbs v. Jackson, the case underlying the overturning of Roe, concerned a Mississippi state law which banned abortion after 15 weeks. Mississippi is perceived, derisively, by the Left as a cultural backwater, a badlands for bigots and -phobes of all kinds. As you can see, however, this put Mississippi in line with nearly all of progressive Europe, policy nuances aside. Even in Germany, a country known for its high degree of social leftism, abortion is technically illegal and permissible only in the first 12 weeks or in the instance of a serious medical issue. Abortion on-demand doesn’t exist in Germany to any meaningful degree, as one must jump through hoops before the procedure can be performed and deviation from this procedure results in criminal prosecution.
So what happened at SCOTUS was that the Jackson Women's Health Organization abortion clinic decided to legally challenge a perfectly reasonable abortion law, fully consistent with the progressive developed world, and ended up losing far more than it bargained for. And for what? To kill the unborn on demand?
The Left makes much of the fact the general public, like me, prefers pro-choice policies over pro-life ones. However, here also exists a critical nuance: most Americans also believe a line should be drawn somewhere and that abortion shouldn’t be legal right up to birth:
Though there’s been a noticeable rise in the number of Americans who think abortion should be permissible right up until birth, the overwhelming majority still believes abortion is most justifiable in the first trimester of pregnancy. As with so many things in our country, a minority is trying to impose their own dream society on the entire country. Over time, I think a schism of sorts occurred among pro-choice Americans, becoming “pro-abortion” instead, and dispensed with Bill Clinton’s “Safe, Legal, and Rare” doctrine. Take a look at the reason why most women get abortions:
Again, I believe abortion to be morally justifiable because allowing the child to be born would bear a cost on that child, parent(s), and society which, in the long run, would be more detrimental than upholding the child’s right to life. However, these statistics show nearly all women who receive abortions do so because having the child would be inconvenient to them and ruin their good time. There’s literally no other reason to have an elective abortion. This should bother all of us, including pro-choice Americans, because reproduction is how a civilization and species survives and to so casually dispense with the living is indicative of a culture which doesn’t value life in general.
One final thing to remember is that the supposedly “extremist” American right-wing has been the most consistent on the issue. It’s the Left that’s actually moved in a more extremist direction. I’m old enough to remember when even the most ardent pro-life conservative favored leaving it up to the states to decide, which was as ideal a compromise there could be. But the Left, with their anti-federalist bent, considered that, too, an infringement and pushed for a nationwide solution to their liking, prolonging the impasse. In that sense, I consider the overturning of Roe to be on sound legal ground for the reason explained succinctly by someone far more impressive than I:
Despite being referred to as “the law of the land,” Roe was never a law, it was a ruling. Courts, not even SCOTUS, make laws. They judge whether something is consistent with the law or not. In places like Europe, abortion is an issue codified into law, something states in the U.S. have attempted to do. With Roe out of the way, a serious attempt can be made at the state level, to codify abortion into their respective laws. Many on the pro-choice fear this could lead to some states outright banning abortion - I understand their fear, but the cost of compromise is that you have to be willing to lose something. The Left’s intransigence on abortion and refusal to consider even reasonable limits on the practice is as big a reason why we find ourselves where we’re at today as was the Right’s fight to outlaw abortion.
But I digress. We’re Not At the End, But You Can See It From Here was never about debating policy, it’s about helping readers understand events as they unfold. A predicted, back in May, that the eventual SCOTUS ruling could provide the spark necessary to kick off a major low-intensity conflict in the U.S. that would last a generation or more. I still believe that to be the case, even if, for now, the reaction from the Left is more or less what we’ve come to expect from them. However, there are a number of factors which makes the outbreak of internal conflict far higher than ever before.
First, SCOTUS has been completely de-legitimized, first by the leak, then by the reaction by both public and government figures. Look at what President Joe Biden, who claims to be a devout Roman Catholic, said in reaction to yesterday’s ruling:
As we’ve come to expect, Biden is lying - abortion was never a “Constitutional right.” No surprises from our anarcho-tyrant-in-chief. It’s worth noting, when he was a senator, Biden proposed exactly the same sort of policy the overturning of Roe now permits, underscoring the emptiness of Biden and how his entire career has been defined not by any strongly-held beliefs or principles, but by managing to stay relevant:
However, the bigger issue is that not even the Office of the President of the United States is defending the institution of SCOTUS any longer. When such stark schisms emerge within the political system itself, we’re headed for serious trouble. Not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not this year. But legitimacy crises often have similar beginnings.
Look at what Kari Lake, candidate for Arizona Governor, said about enforcing gun laws seen as infringing on the 2nd Amendment:
This sort of talk has become more common and, unfortunately, we’re reaching a point where it’s no longer just idle talk. Not only is the gulf between Washington and numerous state capitals as wide as it’s been in a long time, but the Regime, which occupies positions of power and influence at all levels, also finds itself in increasing opposition to state and local authorities, plus millions of Americans.
Now, look at what Democratic Governors Gavin Newsom of California and Kathy Hochul of New York said about the SCOTUS ruling the day before yesterday striking down a New York law requiring a “demonstration of need” to obtain a license to carry a firearm in public:
The American Left has never been supportive of federalism, but they’re willing to be flexible when it comes to certain issues. What this is all leading to is a situation where the federal government and state governments are increasingly at loggerheads. On a long enough timeline, we could see the federal government attempting to enforce their laws on states, states ignoring federal laws, etc. To an extent, some of this can be resolved in the courts, but if things get too convoluted and the impasse becomes impassible, then the only recourse is violence.
Even the politicized military is making it clear whose side it’s on:
Granted, this isn’t some major departure from precedent, since military installations are federal grounds to start. But announcing very loudly that state laws won’t pertain to the military carries symbolic significance, a statement that the military serves strictly at the pleasure of Washington and Washington only, not the nation at large. Again, no real changes here, but let’s dispense with the notion the military is an apolitical, non-partisan actor in all this.
Last night saw some protest action and some of it turned violent:
At the Arizona state capitol, what was described as a “hostage situation” by Senator Kelly Townsend nearly developed:
Finally, consistent with the fact assassination is now viewed favorably by many Americans, this also happened:
There’s a lot more to come on this, but I sincerely believe we crossed a Rubicon of sorts yesterday. It could very well define the character of the rest of our lives. The critical mass and political momentum exists to kick off an internal armed conflict in our country and it could come sooner than we realize.
Unfortunately, I have no answers on how to bring America back from the brink. All I can say is what I’ve always said: stay tuned, stay prepared, and stay safe. Come what may, nothing is more important than seeing you and your families through the tumult to come.
Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.
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This event definitely adds fuel to what I addressed in the following piece back in November. It will even have ramifications north of the border during our next electoral cycle.
https://thenomadhistorian.substack.com/p/the-coming-obsolescence-of-north?r=pgobs&utm_medium=ios