If you want a picture of the future, imagine a ChatGPT version of an LGM post — forever
By 
It’s easy to focus on Samuel Alito’s flag problem—two flags, actually, both with strong ties to efforts to delegitimize and overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The upside-down American flag and the “Appeal to Heaven” pine tree flag are not ambiguous. They’re not “patriotic” in some neutral sense. They are symbols of reactionary grievance, used by those seeking to reject democratic outcomes when those outcomes do not favor them.
But if we only talk about Alito’s flags, we risk missing the forest for the pine tree. The deeper crisis is not just one bad justice with bad optics—it’s a Court that no longer sees itself as bound by the norms of impartiality, precedent, or public accountability.
The post-Bush v. Gore Supreme Court has become a partisan instrument. Its majority was engineered through a combination of judicial hardball (see: Garland, Merrick), norm-breaking appointments (see: Barrett, Amy Coney), and a far-right legal pipeline (see: Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society). The current conservative majority doesn’t just lean right—it’s aggressively pursuing a maximalist agenda on guns, abortion, labor rights, and the administrative state. Alito is not the outlier; he is the perfect expression of the majority’s worldview.
Let’s remember that this is the same Court that overturned Roe v. Wade with a decision that read more like a culture-war blog post than a sober legal opinion. It’s the same Court preparing, apparently without irony, to weigh in on cases that could impact the outcome of the 2024 election—while one of its justices is quite literally flying insurrectionist flags.
Calls for Alito’s recusal, or even resignation, are necessary but insufficient. What we need is structural reform: term limits, expansion, jurisdiction stripping—tools that are all constitutional and available, if only the political will existed to use them.
The legitimacy crisis of the Court isn’t coming. It’s here. And if a few flags are what it takes to get the broader public to notice, then so be it. But let’s not stop there. Let’s name the real issue: an unelected, unaccountable Supreme Court that is entrenching minority rule.
That dreck is from querying ChatGPT with the prompt “write a blog post in the style of Lawyers, Guns & Money.”
I’m sorry, Dave, but the robot versions of us are pretty twitchy still, and seem likely to remain so, given the inherent limitations of “artificial” “intelligence.” Is that what you want to read, as labor costs are removed from the production cycle by our omniscient tech overlords?
I love the commenters and other readers on this site, I really do. In just the past few days I got a lovely card from one of you, featuring a painting the commenter likes, just because. Another reader alerted me to the liminal existence of Jennifer Campos — a discovery which triggered a whole new writing project all by itself. I also discovered that another reader is somebody who wrote an essay 43 years ago that basically got me into academia because it featured such a great and cool insight — one by the way that’s absolutely essential to understanding the inescapable limitations of the pseudo-texts generated by Large Language Models.
It’s all a seamless web is what I’m saying.
But freelancing, which is what this is, is hard. I’m not saying it’s like using a new tungsten carbide drill as part of the preliminary coal face scouring operations, but it’s real work. This is my 6,250th post on LGM, addressed to what my wife refers to as my “internet friends.” This site takes up way way too much of my time, bur we’ve got a thing going on (We both know that it’s wrong. But it’s much too strong/to let it go now).
Look, Erik kids around on this site a lot, when he pretends to hate all of you so much — at least I’m pretty sure he’s kidding — but he’s NOT kidding about how this site will go away if its readership doesn’t voluntarily support it. We can’t do this for free, because none of us can justify the investment of time and most of all emotional and creative energy that drains us of the life essence if we don’t get some modest but minimally reasonable recompense, in the form of some tangible medium of exchange.
So give what you can, please.