The Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit is well known as the most extremist Republican court in the entire country. The circuit oversees Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, and it’s a big reason those states consistently lead the nation in bigotry and cruelty. The Fifth Circuit is so reactionary that even the extremist Republicans on the Supreme Court have tried to rein it in. This past term, the Supreme Court heard 13 cases from the Fifth Circuit, and reversed the circuit in 10 of them.

The occasional rebukes do not slow the circuit’s roll, however. It is home to a number of judges—Stuart Kyle Duncan, James Ho, and Andy Oldham, to name a few—who see themselves as Supreme Court justices some day. And those guys know that the way to get promoted in Federalist Society and MAGA judicial circles is to keep throwing out insane legal theories and bigoted opinions until the white-wing supremacy machine recognizes their contributions.

Indeed, I try not to write about Fifth Circuit opinions very much, because I know that, when people like me get angry at what they’re doing, it reads as those judges “owning the libs,” and that’s the only currency that matters in MAGAland. But they dropped an opinion last week that is so drenched in violent, racist hypocrisy that I can’t ignore it.

The Fifth Circuit announced that the cops cannot stop and frisk a person if they suspect you have a gun, but made it pretty clear that they can still stop and frisk you for existing while Black. Reading it made me feel like I had ingested a hallucinogen and was having a very bad trip into white-boy Wonderland.

The case is called US v. Wilson and it involves the stop-and-frisk of a Louisiana man named Damion Wilson. (Neither the judicial record, nor basic Google searches, reveal Wilson’s race. I’m going to assume he’s Black, but your mileage may vary.) Wilson was stopped by Deputy US Marshal Michael Atkins after Atkins observed “a bulge in [Wilson’s] waist.” Atkins believed it to be a “hard object”… like, perhaps, a gun.

Wilson was stopped and did indeed have an unlicensed firearm. Marshal Atkins wanted to talk to Wilson about a federal fugitive he was looking for. Wilson denied knowing his whereabouts, a statement that was probably false. After that, local police arrested Wilson for carrying an unlicensed firearm, searched the backpack he was carrying, found drugs in the backpack, and charged him with that too. Then they obtained a search warrant for Wilson’s apartment, found more drugs there, and charged him with more crimes. In all, Wilson was indicted and convicted on four criminal counts, including the gun charge, lying to a federal officer, and various drug charges.

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Wilson moved to have all evidence against him suppressed and his convictions thrown out. He argued that officers violated his constitutional rights when they stopped him merely on suspicion of having a gun. Wilson argued that possession of a concealed firearm is not, by itself, enough to create a “reasonable suspicion” of criminal activity or give the cops “probable cause” to execute a stop-and-frisk.

Writing for a majority panel of Fifth Circuit judges, Andy Oldham agreed. But if you think that means the conservatives were going to let this man just walk away free, you don’t know the kind of law they do down on the Fifth Circuit.

Oldham writes: “The mere fact that a citizen carries a firearm does not create reasonable suspicion that he committed a crime.” This statement is outrageous. Damion Wilson was subjected to a “Terry stop,” which is lawyer jargon for a “stop and frisk,” because the authority for cops to harass and molest you comes from a 1968 Supreme Court case named Terry v. Ohio. In Terry, the thing the defendant did to create “reasonable suspicion” was walking—back and forth—in front of a store. Cops thought he was “casing the joint” and stopped him for questioning. According to Oldham, we’re living in a world where loitering outside of a store is enough for the cops to stop you, but carrying a concealed firearm is not.

And don’t even get me started on all the other reasons courts have invented to allow cops to stop people since Terry. I don’t want to spend the next year of my life on this paragraph. Courts have regularly ruled that “acting nervous” or “looking over your shoulder” or “being present in a high-crime area” or “talking to other people who are suspected criminals” is enough to warrant a stop. And, of course, it’s far more likely that “acting nervous while Black” will earn you a stop and frisk than “looking over your shoulder while white.”

Oldham argues that carrying a gun is lawful, and doing a lawful activity cannot be the sole basis of a police stop. Because he is a Republican judge, he feels the need to spend four pages of his opinion talking about colonial America and Ye Olde England to justify his argument. But while Oldham is busy rehashing “one of the most celebrated decisions of the King’s Bench” in 1763 (I wish I were making this up), he flatly ignores the fact that otherwise legal activity is often considered sufficient to trigger reasonable suspicion from the police. Again, in the original Terry case, “casing the joint,” even if that is what Terry was doing, is not a crime. It is legal to walk back and forth in front of a store. White people call it window shopping.

I’ve been talking about legal activities, but what should be the dispositive fact in this case is that in Louisiana, at the time of Wilson’s stop and arrest, carrying a concealed firearm without a permit was in fact illegal. Louisiana has since changed the law (because we live in Hell), but that has no bearing on Wilson’s case. It was illegal to carry a concealed firearm without a permit; cops saw what they suspected to be a concealed firearm; they stopped Wilson and asked if he had a permit for it. He did not. Game Over. Do not pass “Go,” do not collect $200.

Oldham cannot outright ignore the fact that Wilson’s activity was illegal, but he does wave it away. He argues that since Louisiana did allow some people to carry concealed firearms (with a permit), the cops are not allowed to assume that anybody carrying a concealed firearm is “suspicious.” The analogy he makes is to cars. He says that it’s illegal to drive without a license, but the mere fact of driving does not give cops reasonable suspicion to stop every driver to check if they have a license.

This argument is infuriating if you’re a person like me who has been stopped multiple times for driving while Black. Cops invent reasons to stop Black people all the time for the mere crime of driving past them. Moreover, Oldham flatly ignores the existence of “police checkpoints.” There are indeed times where cops stop everybody on the road to check if they are sober and have their license.

As if to prove the underlying hypocrisy of all of his own arguments, after accepting the wild proposition that carrying a concealed gun in a state that made it illegal to carry a concealed gun does not create reasonable suspicion of a crime, Oldham says that the cops had ample alternative reasons to stop Wilson. According to Oldham and the Fifth Circuit, Wilson’s suspicious activity was… posting a picture on Instagram.

Wilson was stopped by a US marshal who was looking for a fugitive named Malik Fernandez. Wilson had posted a picture of him and Fernandez, approximately four months prior to Wilson’s stop. Fernandez’s last known address was a house owned by someone (not Wilson) in Wilson’s family. And apparently when he went to the house, the marshal was told that to find Fernandez he needed to talk to Wilson. The marshal wanted to talk to Wilson about Fernandez, and, according to Oldham, that, and not the gun, gave them enough “reasonable suspicion” to stop him.

That’s a cool story… but it’s not the one the actual cops testified to. The cops on the scene said they stopped Wilson because they suspected he had a concealed weapon. The cops used the weapon, and not all of this other mumbo-jumbo about who Wilson took selfies with, as the reasonable suspicion justifying the stop. If you think that Wilson shouldn’t have been stopped because of the weapon, then logical consistency demands that you let him walk free.

Oldham wants to have it both ways: He wants to put Wilson in jail, essentially for “not snitching,” but also wants to have his 1763 rant about the sanctity of gun ownership. It’s an intellectually gross legal argument where you can trace Oldham bending himself into a pretzel to achieve the outcome he wants.

But this leads to the last reason I want to highlight this case. Liberals often suggest that we should somehow use the conservatives’ own arguments “against them” in court. There is a belief that we can somehow catch them in their own hypocrisy. It’s the line of thinking that says we should “ban Viagra” and see how the Republican men like it, or that we should use all the cases that allow Christians to engage in bigotry under the guise of religion and use Islam or Judaism to beat the Christians at their own game.

The Wilson case shows why these strategies will never work: because, when caught in their own hypocrisy, Republican and Federalist Society judges will just engineer the outcomes they want anyway. Wilson, and his lawyers, essentially trapped the ammosexuals in their own logic. And then Oldham just nonsensically wrote his way out of the trap. Wilson should be free based on the Republicans’ own Second Amendment nonsense, but he’s not free because Andy Oldham wanted to keep him in jail.

And that is that. There is no “checkmate.” There is no moment where the scales fall from their eyes. There is no point at beating the Republicans at their own game, because when they are beaten they just change the rules.

The way to win in court is not to argue Republican judges into submission. Republican judges do not care about arguments and will achieve the outcomes they want regardless. The way to win in court is to bring more Democratic judges to the panel than Republicans. That’s it. That’s the only way. The end.