evidence: Raniere’s sentencing coincides with the entrance of another postfeminist horseman in the form of Amy Coney Barrett, the ultraconservative judge Donald Trump nominated to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. She was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice on October 26, the apotheosis of Senator Mitch McConnell’s campaign to reinvent the American judiciary as a conservative political engine. In her short time as an appeals court judge, Coney Barrett has argued for expanding gun rights and restricting abortion rights, couching all of her contradictory convictions in that great conservative judicial fantasy: total adherence to the original intent of the framers of the Constitution. Since the outset, when her law professor at Notre Dame secured her a clerkship with Justice Antonin Scalia, Coney Barrett’s career has been paved by men who saw her as a useful political tool. In a profile in the New York Times, Elizabeth Dias writes how Coney Barrett benefitted from a Republican initiative "to cultivate female and minority candidates for the courts to help counter the perception that the party was interested mainly in promoting white men."