I was in the middle of writing a column about how the Catlettsburg, Kentucky, police department thought it would be a super cool and totally badass idea to amp up its police cruisers by adding large and imposing decals of The Punisher’s totenkopf to the hood of its cars. The fucking crux of the column being, a podunk police force, in 2017, decided what they needed to really strike fear in the hearts of the public was to adorn its vehicles in the death’s head symbol of a psychologically deranged comic book character who employs mass murder and torture as his preferred methods of enforcing the law, a warrior, famed for ripping the genitals off of perpetrators with his bare hands and showing up to a traffic violation with a bazooka and enough hand grenades to wipe out an entire family lineage when, at a flash, my editor reached out and suggested I write about social justice warriors, the Milk & Cheese of the in-disarray left.

Those three little words have rapidly mutated, from describing an individual who is fighting for the rights of a beleaguered part of our society, sometimes an actual member of the oppressed group and sometimes not, to what it means today, habitual line-crossing zealots who come galloping in on the highest horses in all of God’s fuckin’ creation to point out how odious, stupid, contemptible and just plain disgusting any individual who doesn’t adhere lock and step within their, often extremely-privileged view of the world. News flash — if you spent anytime in the last year berating a 16-year-old girl and charging her with the crime of appropriation because she used the term “prima donna” while having no connection and or affiliation to the opera community, you’re not fighting for social justice, you’re just being a gaping, fucking asshole trolling inside the vortex of gaping, fucking assholes.

Insufferable pricks are not relegated to the far right only. Just because you grow your own kale, read Salon and would describe Father John Misty as “straight fire” doesn’t mean when you’re flinging garbage in the middle of the garbage war, you’re a virtuous cut above of what you perceive as uneducated booger-eaters and Kid Rock fanatics. This big, weird, and sometimes brutal country, filled with a bazillion different folks from a gazillion different backgrounds many of whom are impoverished, and if you can’t find a way to navigate this galaxy of diversity without being a tyrant to people on the ground floor, instead of taking the slug fest upstairs to the penthouse where it belongs, you’re in for a big surprise, because if you were really, honest Ernest, concerned about social justice for one and all, you would know spitting in your neighbors face, simply because he can’t get behind your insertion that the entire history of country music is racist, is not gonna accomplish a goddamn thing other then your neighbor doubling down and moving forward with a battering ram of Waylon Jennings right into your uppity face.

Are you fighting the good fight, or are you just fighting to fight? I know more than a few young Republicans who this time last year found Trump and his whole entourage to be reprehensible but who over the summer found themselves being humiliated and their entire belief system dismissed by some kindergarten cop SJW, so, come November, they voted Trump, for vengeance and you know the one about vengeance right? He who seeks it must dig two graves, one for his enemy and one for himself.