I was struck by a couple of headlines in Friday’s Guardian. One of them blared, ‘Supreme court’s Voting Rights Act ruling cited misleading data from DoJ.’ Basically, the article explained that corrupt “Justice” Samuel Alito cited data that suggested that black voter turnout had exceeded white voter turnout in the last election in Louisiana. Turns out, one had to use some rather creative accounting to get that outcome, which, you will not be surprised to hear, was not supported by any other measure.

The other headline? ‘Tennessee Republicans redraw maps to erase last Democratic, Black-majority district.’ THAT headline is the direct result of the Robert’s Kangaroo Court’s ruling that racism is over and not a problem in voting, based on fraudulent data. The second headline pretty much condemns the first as a biased and ridiculous decision. The court wanted to help Republicans, so the court helped Republicans. It’s pretty simple, really.

Oh, yeah, John Roberts, the leader of this band of thieves, insists “supreme court not ‘political’ after Trump-friendly rulings.” Oh, well, if he says so. Wait, what’s the rule? Actions speak louder than words? Hmm, that makes it seems like he’s saying one thing and doing another. THAT sounds like classic politics, to me…

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If you’re anything like me, you need a break from from his ugly face from time to time. You need a distraction, something to clear your mind from the insanity. To that end, I’ve been watching videos on YouTube that are rather mindless and easy to take.

I found this guy, SB Mowing. All he does is drive around town (Wichita, I think) and clean up yards of abandoned and overgrown properties. He shows his work in ten minute videos, all at very high speed. The videos are all pretty much the same. How much variation can there be in mowing a lawn? But watching them is strangely satisfying.

It’s like watching a fish tank. It has a calming effect I can’t explain, but do yourself a favor. Find ‘SB Mowing’ on YouTube and give one of his videos a look. You might find it has the same calming effect on you that it has on me. No, I don’t know the guy and he doesn’t know (or likely care) that I’ve written about him. But I digress. That isn’t what I wanted to write about at all.

Another video series I’ve stumbled across is a cop showing videos of traffic stops when the driver of the vehicle is what is sometimes (incorrectly) called a ‘Sovereign Citizen.’ These videos are not relaxing. There’s quite a bit of shouting. They’re more…astonishing.

There’s a whole scam out there on the internet “teaching” people that they don’t have to follow the law. It all looks and sounds very official and it teaches it’s adherents to think they can get away with things if they just play semantic games. For instance, when they get pulled over, obviously driving, they insist they’re NOT “driving.” They’re just “traveling.”

They have stacks of papers, all of which are intended to prove they don’t have to follow the law because of this or that obscure section of a commercial code or whatever. For reasons I don’t understand, they’re also told to be obnoxious to the cops, or at least that’s how it seems since they invariably are obnoxious to the cops. They’ll only open their window a crack, not all the way down. They challenge the cop’s authority almost immediately. They shout a lot.

They don’t register their vehicles. They honestly believe they don’t have to. That’s usually what gets them pulled over, where it is soon discovered they also don’t have a valid Driver License, which they insist, they also do not need. These are ticket offenses but – also invariably – the “travelers” argue and agitate and fail to cooperate so aggressively, they usually escalate their charges to felonies and end up in handcuffs going to jail.

The reason I mention it is this: these people genuinely and honestly believe they’re going to get away with this. (It should be mentioned, NONE of these people are up for Mensa membership any time soon.) They genuinely and honestly believe they’ve found some magic bullet nobody else has found and now they’re free to live their lives outside the law. It never crosses their mind that NOBODY likes paying vehicle registrations or for Driver Licenses and EVERYBODY would be waving those pages if they had any effect, whatsoever.

but they believe it. Deeply. They follow the script. They go through the motions. They wave the papers and demand to see supervisors and sheriffs. They shout at cops, refuse to cooperate, wave their papers some more, and insist they know more after fifteen minutes on the internet than the cops who do the job every day and, oh yeah, have been through school on the subject.

Always, the free travelers lose these confrontations. Occasionally, one of them will realize as they’re being put in the back of the cop car that maybe they’ve been deceived, but mostly, they go into the back seat screaming and yelling and certain they’re going to get the cop’s jobs and receive a massive payout from their promised lawsuits. Spoiler alert: they don’t. I think that’s the thing that so fascinates me about these videos – the level of dedication the “travelers” have in their clearly false belief.

And they do believe, faithfully and fervently. Their faith does not save them, though. Their belief does not translate into beating the consequences of their actions. It’s mind-boggling. Then one thinks of the general population of the United States. These kinds of people are everywhere, clinging desperately to some fraudulent belief or another. It reminds me to reexamine my own beliefs from time to time. Am I staying loyal to some erroneous thinking just because it’s comfortable, like an old shoe?

For clarity, this is an observation about MAGA. I mean, these free travelers may or may not be MAGA but they clearly display the MAGA mind and MAGA’S dedication to wrongheadedness. The free travelers believe in their thing just as deeply as MAGA believes in 47 and no amount of evidence can convince them they’re wrong – even after going to jail, going to court, then going to prison.

The Free Travelers faith in that stack of papers consistently lands them in jail. MAGA’S faith in 47 has made the US a nightmare to live in and a laughingstock on the world stage. They don’t know that. They can’t see it. But their faith does not save them (nor the rest of us) and their belief does not translate into beating the consequences of their actions for any of us. I wish we could get them to reexamine their beliefs but faith never seems interested in introspection or closer inspection. Curious…