America Is Now an Insane Country-- Guest Post By Eric Zuesse

On the same day when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, on September 3rd, that Texas might lead the way to America’s outlawing abortions, Houston Public Media headlined “Doctors Say Texas Leaders Failed To Stop COVID-19 From Spreading”, and reported that:

Texas schools have amassed more than 50,000 confirmed coronavirus cases in students in just a couple of weeks. More than a dozen school districts have closed temporarily as a result of the disease, and Texas is a leader in child deaths from COVID-19 with 59 as of Sept. 3.

But state leaders have spent weeks of the surge pushing through controversial bills around abortion, voting restrictions and bail reform while Gov. Abbott has been fighting local governments over their efforts to stem the spread of the disease.

On the one hand, America’s Supreme Court is so concerned, about the alleged ‘right to life’ of non-conscious early-stage human fetuses, as to dictate to any woman in whose body such an object is being formed, “That is state property and you have no right to terminate it.” (It’s not the mother’s property; it doesn’t belong to her-- not even because it’s part of her own body’s health and is affected by what foods, medications, etc., that she consumes while it’s in her body, nor because her own health or maybe even her life will be affected by its presence in her body. It belongs to the state. Is that sane? But it is this Court’s opinion.) However, on the other hand, America’s public are actually so little concerned about their own-- real-- “right to [conscious] life,” as to allow (and to accept their Government’s allowing) unnecessarily many real deaths, from covid-19, such as by maskless crowds. At this time, when one of the deadliest and most intensely communicable pandemics in all of global history is raging, unmasked people are being allowed to mass together in crowds of strangers, to entertain themselves and to unintentionally catch and transmit this sometimes deadly disease-- allowed to amplify the numbers of these diseases and deaths. Everyone in those entertainment crowds goes home, and now has an increased likelihood of spreading the disease to their loved ones and friends. This produces vast numbers of entirely preventable deaths throughout the entire U.S. population, despite America’s claimed ‘right to life’ (but, apparently, this is a country that is especially concerned only for unborn fetuses, not for real and conscious people).

Americans, obviously (if one is to judge by its government, which claims to be representative-- a democracy-- but is actually representing fetuses more than people), care more about protecting the lives of pre-conscious fetuses than about protecting the lives of themselves, and of all of the strangers whom they meet-- really conscious beings. Is that priority-ordering sane? People crowd into entertainments, at a time like this? That’s sane?

Also on September 3rd, at this time when “Texas schools have amassed more than 50,000 confirmed coronavirus cases [and when the number of new covid-19 active cases among Texas students had tripled in just the latest week],” NPR’s Nina Totenberg headlined “The Supreme Court Heads Toward Reversing Abortion Rights”, and she reported:

The Supreme Court's conservative majority tossed a legal bomb into the abortion debate late Wednesday night.

By a vote of 5-to-4, the court's most conservative members upheld, for now, a Texas law that, in effect, bans abortions after about six weeks. But almost as important as the result was how the court reached its decision-- without full briefing and arguments before any court.

The court majority, including its three Trump appointees, emphasized that it was not ruling on the issues presented in the case. Still, it refused to block the law from going into effect for procedural reasons. The unsigned court order was just one long paragraph in length. And within a day, state legislators in Florida and elsewhere announced plans to introduce copycat legislation in their states.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who has dissented from almost every decision upholding expansive abortion rights, disagreed this time. He called the Texas law unprecedented because it not only bans abortions after roughly six weeks, but delegates enforcement powers not to state officials but to the general "populace at large." Roberts noted that the law appears to be deliberately structured to prevent courts from being able to promptly consider the constitutionality of the law…

Specifically, the law confers on any individual the right to file suit for money damages against a clinic, or any person who aids or abets an abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected.

This is now the Trump Court. Whereas, previously, signed 5-to-4 conservative U.S. Supreme Court rulings were common, the Court’s new ruling is an unsigned 5-to-4 theocratic ruling by all 5 of the U.S. Supreme Court’s fundamentalist Christians: four Roman Catholic fundamentalists (Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh), and the only Protestant fundamentalist) (Barrett), ruling that the new Texas law, which places $10,000 bounties on the heads of anyone who participates or assists (or “intends” to) an abortion in Texas, should maybe be allowed to be enforced by this private bounty-system in Texas, and should temporarily be allowed to be enforced that way, though “this order is not based on any conclusion about the constitutionality of Texas’s law,” but the ruling instead invites all other states to consider passing similar laws so that the U.S. Supreme Court itself maybe won’t need to act in order to outlaw abortions, and thus this matter might simply go back to being a state instead of federal matter. Interestingly, the billionaires-controlled U.S. ’news’-media report details of each of the two (signed) dissenting opinions, but say little if anything about the one (and far more important but unsigned) five theocrats’ majority decision (not even stating the names of the five ‘Justices’ in that majority-opinion), so that the public won’t understand what’s happening (which that majority decision is imposing).

Among the very few public commentaries on that majority (5-to-4) decision was one by the NYC lawyer, Mr. Luppe Luppen, who headlined “The Supreme Court Guts Roe and Opens a New Era of Nullification”, and he summed up by saying “If state legislatures can effectively turn off constitutionally protected rights by inventing or copying procedures that flummox these five Justices, they may well try to do it.” He pointed out the legislative chaos which that will cause. However, his assumption, there, that the five theocrats were simply “flummoxed,” instead of carrying out a very systematic and carefully thought-out pro-theocracy restoration of the coathanger-abortion era in America, wasn’t backed by him citing any evidence, because it is simply false. A lot of preparation by anti-abortion organizations went into their preparing this challenge. Moreover, these theocratic ‘Justices’ are respected by the public, though they are carrying out the commands in the Bible, instead of in the U.S. Constitution, and it’s achieved by their own, and by the ’news’-media’s, deceits, and, especially, by ‘news’-media refusing to call lies “lies” (such as that a younger-than-six-week-old fetus is alive in the same sense that, say, its mother is). Though, during Trump’s Presidency, Democratic Party ‘news’-media were starting to call his lies “lies,” none of the American media call lies “lies” generally, and it’s not being done in the reporting on this case.

As regards Americans being so little concerned about their own-- and actual-- “right to [conscious] life” as to allow (and to accept their Government’s allowing) unnecessarily many real deaths, from covid-19,” RT headlined on September 5th, “‘Not a mask in sight’: Fans return to US college football in a BIG way-- to the delight of many, but the horror of others (VIDEO)”, and posted numerous photos of huge crowd-scenes of Americans at sporting events and other entertainments, in which no one was wearing a mask. Covid isn’t just a matter of private health, but it is especially a raging matter of public health; but, if Americans don’t care about the health of anyone but themselves, and if they are stupid enough to believe that by attending such events they are not endangering both themselves and others, then what else can this be but an insane country, where such dangerous behavior is legal? It might be common for many countries-- France, for example, being another-- but still it is, quite simply, insane. And it has consequences.

On September 4th, the New York Times bannered “Kentucky’s schools struggle as coronavirus outbreaks close entire districts.” What type of life will America’s forcibly non-aborted children be living, in such a land, which has one of the world’s worst public-health systems, and a psychopathically casual attitude toward causing real deaths?

A government like this does not represent its public, but simply misrules them. To accept such a government would be insane, if the public were informed that they are living in a dictatorship. But neither the government nor its ‘news’-media says that they are (they instead call this a ‘democracy’); and, so, America’s insanity must have its source in the country’s rulers (who peddle the falsehood that ‘the people rule here’). But how can America be a democracy and yet have a higher percentage of its people living behind prison-bars than does any other country on this planet? Only an insane-- or else profoundly misinformed-- person could believe that such a police-state is a democracy.

Is insanity normal? Is it good? Or is it bad? Is there any doubt about that? What about misinformation? It’s the way to get the public to accept such a status-quo.