We all know the Republicans are hot for the opportunity to strip trans people all of their rights, and are eager to inspect the genitals of every woman who tries to enter a women’s restroom. Of course, I’m a man, and I say I’m obviously a man (some may disagree), so this does not affect me in the slightest, because like a real man I lack empathy and don’t actually care about other people.

At least, that’s how I think they want society to be. Peel off the trans people, a tiny easy minority to target, and that’ll set a precedent and make it easier to oppress all the other people we’re not supposed to like. We must make America pure! I am so lucky to be a member of the ideal subset of humanity that is destined to be privileged even further, because enforcement is coming.

During an interview with reporters last week, Indiana Senator Mike Braun went beyond the usual Republican line that decisions about abortion rights should be left up to the states. The question of interracial marriage, too, he said, should be left to the states to decide.

Braun was responding to a reporter who seemed to be testing how far he would take his states’ rights philosophy: If the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade improperly interfered with individual states’ ability to set their own rules for abortion, as Braun argued, which of the court’s other decisions should be overturned on that basis? Should the court’s unanimous 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia, which decreed state laws forbidding interracial marriage unconstitutional, also be overturned?

Braun said, emphatically, “Yes.” States will naturally have differing views on such issues, he continued, adding that “when you want that diversity to shine within our federal system, there are going to be rules, and proceedings, that are going to be out of sync with maybe what other states would do. That’s the beauty of the system.” He later tried to walk back the statement about Loving, claiming to have misunderstood the question, an implausible assertion given that the reporter reiterated and rephrased the question to check for understanding, which did not seem to bother Braun at the time.

It’s going to be a beautiful system, don’t you worry. We’re going to dictate who can marry, nobody will care about that, it’s all for the best. And that’s all!

Except…well, maybe we’ll also police gay marriage, and start cracking down on contraceptives.

Nevertheless, Braun’s comments reflect a broader shift among Republicans and those in the conservative legal movement. Emboldened by their new 6-3 majority on the high court, conservatives again and again have proven willing to challenge rulings seen very recently as firmly settled law. Case in point: Braun also indicated that the Supreme Court’s 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which legalized contraception for married couples, should be overturned, a statement he did not walk back. And he is not alone in that position. Other Republican politicians, including Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn and several candidates in this year’s race for state attorney general in Michigan, have also denounced Griswold. And just last week, during Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings, Texas Senator John Cornyn attacked the court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

We’ve seen this before. The Republicans are just following the true spirit of America, of the sort that inspired another country.

The idea of banning Jewish and Aryan marriages presented the Nazis with a dilemma: How would they tell who was Jewish and who was not? After all, race and ethnic categories are socially constructed, and interracial relationships produce offspring who don’t fall neatly into one box.

Again, the Nazis looked to America.

“Connected with these anti-miscegenation laws was a great deal of American jurisprudence on how to classify who belonged to which race,” he says.

Controversial “one-drop” rules stipulated that anyone with any Black ancestry was legally Black and could not marry a white person. Laws also defined what made a person Asian or Native American, in order to prevent these groups from marrying whites (notably, Virginia had a “Pocahontas Exception” for prominent white families who claimed to be descended from Pocahontas).

The Nuremberg Laws, too, came up with a system of determining who belonged to what group, allowing the Nazis to criminalize marriage and sex between Jewish and Aryan people. Rather than adopting a “one-drop rule,” the Nazis decreed that a Jewish person was anyone who had three or more Jewish grandparents.

Won’t it be neat-o when that set of rules is enshrined in our constitution?

If you’re curious to know why Apple doesn’t manufacture iPhones in the US, the NY Times has the answer.

I’m sorry, but what? Let’s just reduce an economic issue to the physical characteristics of the work force. I suspect that skill and training and having good tools is more of a contributor to the ability of the Chinese work force, and the greatest virtue to an American capitalist company is the price of their labor. Despite my massive, sausage-like hands, I managed to do delicate microsurgery and single-cell work on insect nervous systems because I practiced a lot and had a beautiful hydraulic micromanipulator and an excellent microscope.

Do you think the Republican anti-education initiatives might reduce the availability of engineers? Don’t worry about the American electronics industry. All we have to do is hire delicate-fingered women at significantly lower wages, and legalize child labor.