A Simple Reminder of Who Your Betters Are

Last week in the U.S. Supreme Court, the most powerful judges on Earth began their formal dive into the Biden administration’s federal vaccine mandate policy. The occasion was marked by a profoundly representative reminder of what power is really about in this age, and, more sadly, what it is not about.

Justice Gorsuch hinted at his opposition to the mandate by commenting that the ordinary flu kills hundreds of thousands every year, which, if one assumes he was referring to American deaths, is nonsense. Before the media had even fully revved up the motor on its mockery machine, however, their own side came up with a whopper even more ludicrous than that, as Justice Sotomayor screamed her support for the mandate by claiming that a hundred thousand children are in serious condition with Covid-19 right now, a statement which would be absurdly fantastical regardless of whether she meant it nationally or globally. 

Here is why these competing inanities are relevant: Gorsuch and Sotomayor are recent but experienced lifetime appointees to the United States Supreme Court. They are tasked with deciding issues that determine the fate of a nation of world-historical significance. They each have a staff comprised of three or four clerks, all of them top-of-the-class law school graduates, whose role is to help the justices prepare their minds and their rhetoric for the historically important decisions they must render. And yet last week, speaking publicly about one of the most anticipated and consequential issues the court will take up this year, the two justices who have chosen to put themselves out in front on the issue have shown that they do not know what the hell they are talking about.

Any idiot, in five minutes of internet browsing, can find the true, official numbers the two justices chose instead to fabricate in their imaginations. And if these two justices, either one of whom could realistically end up as the decisive vote on the issue at hand, lack either the basic curiosity or the sense of professional responsibility to simply look up the correct flu death estimates, or the truth about the rate of serious illness among children during this pandemic, before shooting their mouths off in recorded statements, what hope is there that they or their top gun clerks even possess, let alone will bother to apply, the basic logical skills needed to digest and interpret those correct numbers which they did not even have the intelligence to look up on Google before speaking out?

We are not talking about evil geniuses here. We are talking about people who lack the most elementary competence and seriousness regarding the work they have been assigned. Such are the men and women who currently decide the fate of the human race. These are your best and brightest, your trusted leaders, your top graduates, your most accomplished. You would not feel confident with such individuals managing your local McDonald’s. Yet your life and the future of your nation, and of all nations, rest in the hands of such individuals.