A few thoughts on the Supreme Court
which is to say, a few thoughts on the racial capitalist project we call the United States of America
Hi friends. I’m a couple weeks behind when I intended to get my next newsletter out, but hey, we made it (pats on the back for all of us!). Childcare, work, life, sickness, summer vibes — all the things. Let’s just call it a well needed summer hiatus. But really, the backup here is because I had something scheduled and then the final decisions from the 2023 US Supreme Court Session dropped.
This is not a “respond to current events” newsletter platform. I don’t believe everyone with any modicum of public presence needs to be a pundit on every headline. That’s neither my gift nor my grift, nor is it typically how I want to spend my limited writing time. Part of the reason I left all social media was to rewire my brain which had begun to believe the world did in fact require my commentary on every social justice moment. My plan for today was to share a post on the mundane, fun and even silly things that famous spiritual justice leaders have treasured as a core part of their life and true self. But it didn’t feel quite right as the next set of words I could give speech to in this moment. People are in pain because our society is getting worse for those for whom it has always been worse. On days like this I have to remind myself not to skirt by the wounded on the far edge of this particular Samaritan road in my holy rush.
Still, the lighthearted reminder I’d planned — to eat ice cream, indulge in sports, get in your garden, nerd out on whatever your thing is — does matter even, or even particularly, in these moments. We need to be reminded as loudly as any: keep doing what makes you feel human, because beloved, no matter what they say—you are one. Stress and grief need processing, and that includes lament and ritual and the embrace of community, but it can also include play. So that’s my little reminder on that note, which has been on my own heart and close to my own needs. But for the sake of making space for a deeper reflection on “What the heck is going on??,” I am pushing that one out for two weeks from now.
In its place, here are a some things on my mind in regards to the Supreme Court’s rulings—which is to say, here are a few thoughts on how last month the Supreme Court participated in the continuation of a project begun 250 years ago by an unwieldy alliance of elite capitalist settler-colonial white men.
I’m going to sketch out a rough picture of what I see at work in this session by thinking through the entangled around six “axes” (the kind on a graph, not the chopping kind, though maybe there’s a metaphor in there for using each axis as an ax for cutting through the fog of our times…).
The axes are: the affective, the political, the vision of order, the (counter)revolutionary, the religious, and the response.
Let’s dig in.
Axis 1: The Affective
How are we feeling, fam? How are we supposed to feel? Experientially, this is the level where news about the destruction of affirmative action in higher education, the reimposition of tens of thousands of dollars of debt on households who are already the most burdened, the erosion of environmental protections, and the legalization of discrimination against LGBTQ people first meets us. Right in the feels.
Anger but not surprise. This was how I saw most Black, people of color, and queer people — those most slapped in the face by these rulings — describe the emotional mix that washed over them.
There was another reaction I noticed. It was largely one moving among the well educated white readers of opinion columns published in the cities from which we are ruled (articles to which I won’t link). This was the measured and intelligent response from those with the critical distance to see with objectivity the full scope of rulings passed this session. This is the crowd among whom too much emotion is always coolly smiled against. From above the fray and rabble, they wrote and read and agreed among themselves that taken as a whole it was obvious that this court is not as conservative as the overly emotional make it out to be—did they not reject the wildest voter suppression attempts of the far right and find themselves in broad agreement across a swath of lesser discussed rulings? Is this court not more aligned with popular political sentiment than the radical left would have you believe? Those with self rule, in command and possession of their emotions—and thus capable of command and possession—remained unaffected.
Or perhaps that too is just part of the act. Part of how they convince themselves they have control when they have none. A lid placed on the swirl of panic just beneath the quaffed surface. Perhaps their irrational insistence that things are still operating rationally is just another way of assuaging the anxieties never fully tamped down by all the consumption and entertainment and control money can buy. Perhaps there is cause for compassion even here.
What I know is that feelings, and the manufacture of consent around the feelings we are all supposed to feel, are political. Feelings, emotion, affect, and the ways our emotions are never just individual and isolated but always part of a community, a vast social-emotional system, are the engines powering the actions we take as people and collectives. Jesus wept. Jesus was moved to compassion—literally wrenched in his gut into a state of pati cum, meaning “to suffer with.” Emotions are a bellwether of truth in times of crisis. When made tender and oriented toward love (love which refuses to be redefined as control), then our feelings have the potential to become a movement of the spirit guiding us into solidarity.
Axis 2: The Political
So what is the nature of this court? Where does it sit in what we call our American political spectrum?
I’m not the expert. What I will say is that I have no time for shallow pundits claiming this team of unelected sycophants is a more modest group of jurists than perhaps we feared. They are exactly what we feared: the embodiment of the last 50 years of the conservative legal movement come to roost in the seat of power. They need not act like nor embrace the fringiest politics of those who sacked Congress on January 6th to still lead our nation further down the path of fascism.
In her dissent against the majority opinion on Biden v. Nebraska (the student loan case), Elena Kagan described the actions taken by John Roberts and his co-signers as not only bad jurisprudence causing harm to Americans. She went so far as to describe the actions of this conservative court as a vast overreach of their constitutional power. “In every respect,” writes Justice Kagan, “the Court today exceeds its proper, limited role in our Nation’s governance.” So this is where we are headed. Something like a judicial coup. To write something as strong as this begs the question, as the 5-4 podcast’s team did, who is she speaking to? The answer seems to be the other branches of government who are supposed to not only be checked by the judiciary but to have the power to check them in return. As
has been reporting, so far the Senate Judicial Committee has utterly abdicated its role to investigate the gross abuses of power and influence Thomas and Alito have been openly guilty about. So what now?If this is the political spectrum we’re operating in—an ascendent, openly fascist white nationalist right wing; an aggressively conservative court undoing civil rights and the powers of the state to advance the common good and protect the rights of the vulnerable, historically disenfranchised, workers and nature itself; an impotent Democratic party too conservative and cautious to recognize it has direct access to grab the wheel of a ship being eagerly steering into an iceberg; and a heterogenous progressive/left/movement conglomerate struggling to heal, reorganize, and coalesce for renewed federal-level action in the wake of the exhausting Trump years; to say nothing of the resurgent pressure from broader geopolitical forces on domestic policy-making—then, so far as the functioning of democracy and retaining/advancing of structures for the common good (not to mention the particular good of the oppressed) are concerned, we are indeed in a scary position with limited break pedals in place to keep it from getting worse.
Axis 3: The Vision of Order
The Roberts Court, not only the right wing but in important ways all of its members as well as the institution itself, is committed to the rights of property.
That makes sense, of course, because that is the job of the Supreme Court. In Article III Section 2 of the Constitution, which establishes the judicial branch and spells out its powers, the framers wrote, “The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority.”
These people’s job is to ensure the actions of the other branches of government, and all who participate in and shape this great project called the United States of America, in the immortal words of Alan Jackson’s voiceover from his hit duet with Jimmy Buffet It’s Five O’clock Somewhere, “keep it between the navigational beacons” established “under this Constitution.”
What are those navigational beacons through which we must keep course? What were the Scylla and Charybdis the founders of this nation attempted to sail between? What tension (or contradiction) were they attempting to hold? Where exactly was the point through which they sought to thread the needle in their drafting of the constitution?
I’ve been thinking about this line from W.E.B. du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America that gets us to the heart of the answer to those questions. He writes,
“The true significance of slavery in the United Stares to the whole social development of America lay in the ultimate relation of slaves to democracy. What were to be the limits of democratic control in the United States? …and how would property and privilege be protected? This was the great and primary question which was in the minds of the men who wrote the Constitution…”
This was the great and primary question on the minds of the men who wrote the Constitution: how can we establish a democracy that ensures freedom for us white, property owning men, while upholding our system of slavery in which our Southern representatives are direct owners of human beings and our Northern representatives are invested financially and profiting via commodity trading?
I’ve offered a handy diagram below to illustrate the conundrum.
It is obviously a doomed, and dumb, position to place oneself in. But the entire social world and worldview of the founders rested on their conviction that white men were entitled to rights and life which, to them, were a source of happiness derived precisely from the right to pursue and possess property (as John Locke put it in his Second Treatise on Government, as quoted with slight modification but fully retained underlying intent by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence)—land, money, commodities, and stolen people from Africa and the Americas who were “raced” Black and Indian, and thus, in this white property owning imagination, reducible to commodities.
The court understands that its fundamental obligation as interpreter of the constitution is to uphold a catastrophic image of democracy precisely (mis)construed as the sphere within which the rights of property are sovereign. And it knows that the rights of property have always been the property of whiteness.
A cluster of overlapping, or interpenetrating, or intersecting, concepts/forces are involved here which all have their legal expressions and associated jurisprudence: property, race, debt, rights (civil [voting, citizenship, speech] and economic [education, wealth, land, work]) gender, sexuality and class. I’ve written about this in some detail before, including the post below which followed a ruling during the 2021 Supreme Court session which upheld the rights of corporate landowners to restrict union organizers from talking to farm workers on their property.
In that essay I unpack the idea of racial capitalism with help from the Latin American sociologist Anibal Quijano who helpfully unpacks the idea that “race” is never just a matter of prejudice or exclusion from certain places, activities, right, or privileges — race is fundamentally an economic category that defines one’s place in the capitalist chain from ownership to extraction, from the Human to the commodified thing, from the owner of capital to the one capital of being reduced to capital. Thus, in place of “race” he uses the phrase “race-labor.”
Quijano helps us link race and class, but to drive the point home already made above, this is an order built by and for the white property owning (Christian) man. It revolves around and is intended to serve what Willie Jennings calls the “racial paterfamilias.” Look no further than this and and the past couple of years of Supreme Court rulings to comprehend what bad news this is for those whose genders and sexualities diverge from the
I’m getting into all of this because it helps us understand that this vision of order is operative not only in these two three or four cases liberals are upset about. It is equally at work in a case like Twitter, Inc v Taamneh et al. where the majority opinion, written by Justice Thomas (the most radical conservative on the court), said that “internet platforms may not be sued for aiding and abetting international terrorism by failing to remove videos that support the Islamic State” and was agreed to unanimously. What? Another unanimous decision was made in favor of (or “sidestepping” the claim against) Google/Youtube, reinforcing the scope of their liability shield (also regarding videos that support terrorism. Talk about commitment to an ideal that scuttles democracy!). Relatedly, there was a 7-2 decision in favor of copy write law (regarding Andy Warhol’s use of a photograph of Prince…I’m not in the weeds on this one, Warhol may have been in the wrong, not to mention his use of an image of a Black man without consent; the point is just that here again property rights win).
Nothing is more powerful in America, legally speaking at least, than the rights of property. That’s why most lawyers in this country, certainly the best paid, represent the needs and right of corporations (legal institutions designed for the interest of property) not people; and most of the time when lawyers are represent people it is those with property (ie, wealth).
The ways this order is designed for property show up in the more palatable forms and cases seen in the unanimous decisions listed above, but the “darker” elements of the racial capitalist vision of order this court upholds are frighteningly advanced by the court’s conservative majority. Going back to Quijano’s concept of race-labor, between the mortgage issuing banker and the mortgaged slave, between the white elite and his property (property who, it must be said, as full people, always resisted and exceeded these violent reductions), were a long chain of laborers serving the white elite power structures. These were people who could not be reduced to commodity but neither could they issue credit. Rather they were the indebted class. Within racial capitalism, this too has always been a crucial structure of extraction. Many English settlers were run off their common lands through the process of enclosure into the swelling cities of the industrial age where the were transformed into wage laborers, fell into debt, were imprisoned for said debt, then run out of their debtors prisons onto ships headed across the Atlantic. They got here and opted into the tier of whiteness available to them: the still-indebted laborer who’s only possession was whiteness and the power over Black people this offered. (Some of my ancestors were among this group.) After slavery’s abolition, Black people were simply plugged into the lowest rung of the laboring indebted class.
Thus, in Nebraska v. Biden, the court ruled to ensure debt—and the social/moral status of “the indebted”—remained immutable. The Lord’s prayer (“forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors”) and powers of the President explicitly granted by Congress (see: HEROS Act) be damned.
Without the space to unpack each decision case by case, my urging is simply to keep this vision of order in mind when considering the deeper “whys,” the ones that may or may not show up on the page of judicial decisions, behind every decision made by every member of the court.
Axis 4: The (Counter)Revolutionary
Thanks to the work of Black historians in particular, many of us have become more familiar with the idea that a pattern of backlash tends to follow breakthroughs in social justice in American history. After Reconstruction comes Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan. After the Civil Rights movement comes Goldwater, Nixon, and Reagan.
There’s a parallel pattern, it seems to me, present in Supreme Court jurisprudence. Legislation and rulings passed for revolutionary purposes are later reinterpreted with the most mind-bending Orwellianism for counter-revolutionary purposes. The very acts, amendments, and judgements made to expand rights and perhaps even tilt the course of the American project away from the hegemony of racial capitalism are used as tools for retrenching the original goals of racialized capital.
Two years ago, while researching the history of the corporation (ie, where did this structure and the idea for it come from and how did it evolve into what we know today?), I stumbled across a counter-revolutionary example that, for me, was shocking.
Here’s the quote from Jeffery Kaplan’s brilliant article, “The Birth of the White Corporation ”that I pulled previously for the post above:
“In 1883, the very same year that the US Supreme Court heard arguments in favor of declaring that a corporation is a natural person, the Court also invalidated the enforcement of civil rights for African Americans. This was the first of a series of decisions that led to the Court’s approval of racial segregation. The Court eventually held that both corporate personification and racial segregation were justifiable under the Fourteenth Amendment, which was passed with the explicit purpose of protecting the rights of former slaves after the Civil War. This connection is more than a mere oddity of US legal history. These court decisions are part of a common social structure in which the exercise of social power through property rights continues to mask the concomitant disempowerment of people of color. In effect, what the courts decided is that corporations are people while African Americans are not; and that, while property could no longer be held in the form of black skins, it could still be invested in white ones.”
So here we have the Supreme Court using the 14th Amendment to the constitution passed through great struggle during the Reconstruction to establish the rights of the emancipated formerly enslaved, being used for radically different purposes—but, to reiterate the vision of order points from above, purposes that wholly aligned with the older intents (or shall we say, “original intent”) of racial capitalism. Honestly the creativity required to event think of making a jurisprudencial leap this unrelated to the source text is just wild. Unfortunately, though as we said above not surprisingly, this kind of thing isn’t uncommon. This is just how conservative factions in the Supreme Court have operated for two centuries: taking what little has been done for good and turning it back toward evil. And by and large, we see these inversions deployed on matters involving race. So there’s plenty of screwed up precedent for the court to draw on when and if it wants to take something meant for justice and deploy it for oppression.
There were three such remarkable instances along these lines in the majority decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College — aka, the affirmative action case.
The first Orwellian act of logic once again turns on the 14th Amendment. The 14th Amendment, as a brief recap, was the second Amendment passed after the Civil War. If the 13th Amendment finished the job of emancipating slaves and abolishing the institution of slavery, the 14th Amendment was passed to wrestle again in this new context with the fundamental question du Bois raised above: what is the relationship of the now liberated slave—Black men, women, and children—to the US body politic and the functions of our democracy and economy? If Black folks are no longer slaves, then what are they? Resident aliens? A paid workforce otherwise disenfranchised? Citizens with all the rights thereof? The Amendment went through many iterations and is the product of tense and conflicting politics, so the text of the 14th is a complicated perhaps conflicting answer to those question, but it is an answer to those questions none the less (as well as sorting out what to do with those who recently engaged in insurrection but were now once again part of the same political body).
Nevertheless, the team that sued against Harvard and UNC brought their case on the basis that affirmative action violates the 14th Amendment. The majority agreed.
The second Orwellian inversion occurs through the court’s conservative misappropriation of Brown v. Board of Education. The majority argues, in effect, that Affirmative Action is not a tool for undoing centuries of still operating race-based discrimination and segregation. Rather, they argue, Affirmative Action is itself an act of racial discrimination simply by nature of bringing racial consciousness and awareness of structural inequity to the process of admission/inclusion (Thomas goes so far as to put Affirmative Action in the camp of Plessy v Ferguson). Thus Brown is flipped by this court from operating as a tool for integration into a tool for sustaining historical patterns of segregation. (Justice Jackson’s dissent starting on page 209 of the pdf is the definitive thing to read here).
There’s a third grotesque inversion—or even an inversion of the inversion—I want to call out. Did you catch the one exception made among higher education institutions still allowed to practice affirmative action? Following this ruling, the only colleges still allowed to practice race-based quotas for admission (ie, ensuring a higher than otherwise percentage of Black and Brown people) are this nation’s military academies.
Lord have mercy.
Again, I want to point us to a passage from du Bois’s book Black Reconstruction for helping us make sense of how this is not just messed up on its own merits (hypocracy of the court) and from the perspective of our own point in time, it also stands in a particular lineage of tossing Black bodies into the furnace of this nation’s military machine for the sake of the empire. Du Bois brings us into a critical turning point of the Civil War:
“…if Lincoln could hold the country together and keep slavery, he would do it…In August [of 1862], Lincoln faced the truth, front forward; and that truth was not simply that Negroes ought to be free; it was that thousands of them were already free, and that either the power which slaves put into the hands of the south was to be taken from it, or the North could not win the war. Either the negro was to be allowed to fight, or the draft itself would not bring enough white men into the army to keep up the war.” (Reconstruction, 82)
America has long realized it cannot win its wars without sufficient poor people willing to pick up guns and go die. Every bad faith justification of this pattern (but look at all the benefits we give our veterans! aren’t vets the folks in this country who actually get a social safety net, education, etc. etc? but Blacks did get emancipated and citizenship after they fought in the civil war, right?) can shove it. Black people have made up the difference when we need more folks to die on the altars of American idols and this court wants to ensure they continue to disproportionately do so.
Axis 5: The Religious
If there is a crack in the power of capital visible in this year’s slate of decisions, or if not a “crack” then at least a countervailing force to which we in this country give due consideration and legal heft, it is religion. Not just any religion or any random religious question, of course. It’s one that lines up squarely with the Puritan origin story we like to tell ourselves. The one that (ironically, you would think, for conservatives today) happens in New England (not the South where Christians showed up with slaves and indentured servants to make a killing out the gate) where a supposedly innocent group of persecuted Christians arrive just trying to worship and live as they see fit.
The only other “major” case to receive a 9-0 unanimous decision was made in favor of Gerald Groff, a former missionary now working as a mail man. Groff wanted an exemption from the Post Office from working on Sundays. This is a country where religious liberty for that kind of person (white male) worshiping that kind of God (the evangelical version) asking for that kind of exemption (a Sunday Sabbath day from work; read about our history of Blue Laws) has an enormous body of precedent and under this court—as committed to the rights of businesses and property as they are—he is going to get it.
I’m also a white Christian man who doesn’t want to work on Sundays. There’s nothing wrong with the decision as such. I hope it gives grounds for Jews to take off on Saturdays and Muslims to take off on Fridays, should they want to. We will see.
However, the first questions that have to be raised following a fairly benign and unanimously agreeable decisions like this one (to say nothing of the Court’s other recent religious liberty decisions in favor of [Christian] Hobby Lobby and against birth control; support for [Christian] prayer in public schools; as well as the gathering push for posting the [Christian appropriated version of the] Ten Commandments in classrooms) is this: what is really going on among conservative Christians that they fear a loss of power and even claim persecution when, despite dwindling numbers, their political power, particularly legal, is ascendent? Clearly the perception isn’t grounded in reality. There is plenty of discussion happening on this so I’ll just leave it at that.
The second question, which I am more interested in, are the ways (Christian, conservative, white) religion is operating as a power structure and source of what I’d like to call “sub-” or “pre-legal” paradigmatic agreement around all of the issues. How are conservative Christian norms (with their attendant assumptions and inner operative features of colonialism, capitalism, and whiteness) exerting power over every question coming before this court right now? Philosophically (and I know I’ve already lost some of you, I typically try not to go down these roads, bless you; and bless y’all who are totally rocking with me on this stuff and way ahead of me!) this is trying to get at the ways Christian-religious structures unfold within racial capitalism even as racial capitalism (even in its secular expressions) are unfolding within the Christian-religious imagination. And, further, how do we map the linkages from this epistemological-ontological register into concrete legal and political structural forms and processes, then on into the realm of material life where bodies and places and cultures are physically (violently) touched by these modes of power?
Obviously the easiest place from this session to link the conservative Christian ideology operating inside of legal structures to push legal outcomes on cases that are not explicitly matters of religious liberty is in the most notorious case I have not really touched on in any depth yet: 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, aka the LGBTQ case. This issue was not framed or decided as a matter of religious liberty per se, rather it was argued on the basis of freedom of speech (the idea being that creative labor is a form of speech and no one should be coerced to say something they disagree with). Once again we have a conservative evangelical getting a vote in her favor. Only in this case, anti-discrimination bulwarks built up over decades get decimated in the process.
I highly recommend listening to Matt and
’s whole discussion of this session over on their Know Your Enemy Podcast, but particularly the parts about this case and the anti-LGBTQ hate group conservative legal movement behind it. I can’t begin to do it justice. All I can add is my shared rage and heartbreak at the social injustice and emotional condition this leave queer people in.The one comment I want to add to this discourse is a reflection in light of the racial capitalist vision of order I’ve been describing above. How does the all out attack on, as well as the abject sense of horror conservative Christian seem to experience toward, LGBTQ people fit into the picture I painted above?
Here is my thought. Religion, when it is reduced from its mystical roots as a path of life through encounter with divine mystery which breaks us out of isolation into communions of love with all life, becomes nothing more than a tool for organizing empires through (1) guarding the borders from outside threats, (2) policing purity of those within the borders, and (3) regulating fealty and tribute to an idol-god. The Inquisition, which reached its highest (or lowest) points in the early centuries of the age of conquest and colonialism, is a classic example. The Pharisees were another. The fear mongering of the modern Christian conservative movement against LGBTQ people is nothing more than our religious era’s policing and attempt to purge itself of perceived impurity. It is our witch hunt, our massacre of ourselves—indeed, it is attempting to blot out what is often most beautiful about ourselves, thanks in large part precisely to its nonconformity.
It is this broader function of religion-reduced-to-religion — religion as the substratum of the racial capitalist order and its attending property rights for the racial paterfamilias, coupled with this policing/purification function — that it appears to me this court is bound and determined to uphold. This is the tried and true operation of every false imperial peace, every Pax Romana and Pax Americana. But friends, shalom does not lie down that path.
Axis 6: The Response
In a way, a response to a recognition that all the above is what we’re dealing with is what this whole newsletter is striving to be. Just as Tolstoy asked, “what then shall we do?” and King wondered, “where do we go from here” I am trying to meditate in my own far less brilliant way on those questions for today.
I have begun by reminded myself that my hope is not and never was in the Supreme Court, regardless of its size or composition. No unelected council tasked with determining the rightness or wrongness of our social trajectory by reading a 250 year old document designed to ensure the continued prosperity of white male property owners can preserve, much less create, the world we need.
At the same time, as someone interested in the strategy of social change, I also believe that no tactician living in this country who has half a toe in the real world and who cares about the suffering and thriving of actual people can ignore that the high court impinges mightily on every project of liberation so long as it’s jurisdiction stands. We must inhabit that tension with eyes wide open because that is the place we actually live.
It is easy to get caught up on the level of court reform: what the Democratic Party should do, and what our job might be to make it happen. Ethics inquiries, checking court overreach, expanding the court, terms limits for judges, etc. The elections and campaigns and grassroots organizing required to make such changes politically popular and doable. All good and well.
Perhaps we could scale outward and call for another Reconstruction—another refounding (but with reparations this time)—to truly remake the project of this nation toward something else other than a resort for property-holding white men. Surely this is so. Let us prepare accordingly.
Essential as that kind of work is, neither the answer nor the question can be solely directed to structural transformation and its associated strategic efforts. I am reminded of Howard Thurman’s deepest wondering: What is the meaning of the religion of Jesus to those with their backs against the wall?
The answer he arrived at was this. The gift Jesus offers begins in the inner liberation found when the oppressed discover themselves to be loved and precious and good in ways the empire seeking to dominate them is powerless to change. On this inner foundation of love comes the outward gushing life of love that rejects the empire and builds communities liberated from its ways of death. This then is always the response. To reroot ourselves in love for a life of living. To form selves and communities and institutions and movements on this holy ground.
For the present moment, my recommended response is simply this…
take a deep breath in
hold for two counts
let that deep breath out, slowly from the gut
now three more times, slowly
now onwards, beloved, toward love
*as always your grace for typos is appreciated
**I would love to hear your feedback, pushback, reflections or inspirations on any of this!