Ask A Genius 759: Irretrievably Broken
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/05/24
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: The overall topic is what does irretrievably broken mean in terms of America.
So we had a shooting; this 18 year old asshole gets in a fight with his grandma, shoots the grandma, starts driving, crashes his car, I think the gunman is dead. So I don’t know if they’ll ever know if he intended to go shoot up a school but he was going to shoot up some fucking place. He’s wearing body armor, he gets in a crash, he leaves his crashed vehicle with, I think an AR-15. The cops shoot at him but since he’s wearing body armor he’s still able to enter an elementary school and kill at least 19 kids and two adults.
Just from his name and the town, he’s Latino. The dead people are mostly Latino. People on Twitter are already arguing about what were the motivating factors and it’s still too soon, the shooting is only 10 hours old to know if he left any written statement of its intentions but it’s likely that everyone will do what everyone does. The annual NRA convention is three days from now, also in Texas. Trump is supposed to speak, Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas is supposed to speak, and Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas is supposed to speak. They are they will likely say don’t let these mass shootings fool you into thinking that we need some kind of gun control because that’s what the left wants.
So, likely nothing will happen but all these people except Trump who’s a deeper asshole than even Cruz or Abbott, at least Cruz and Abbott said that their hearts are broken over this and then they got ratioed on Twitter. When you get ratioed on Twitter, you get 5 or 10 or 15 times more comments saying fuck you hypocritical piece of shit, then you do people liking the tweet and say you got ratioed because they are pieces of shit. But this won’t lead to any change or any legislation. Likely this guy was a well-known psycho, didn’t stop him from being able to buy a gun at age 18. It may not even lead to any more Democrats getting elected; it’s still likely that Republicans will take over two of the three branches of national government after the election in November. And they will use their power to stop any as best they can which is pretty good. Any further investigations into the insurrection on January 6th where Trump and his cohorts tried to overturn the presidential election; the first time any president has tried to do that in our history.
And so people are thinking that given the increasingly unapologetically fascist and racist orientation of Republicans and their willingness to fuck with election processes that when they control the House and the Senate and also the Supreme Court that the U.S will be, if it’s not already, irretrievably broken. But we should maybe discuss briefly what irretrievably broken means.
[Recording End]
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