Lawless America

How the US Supreme Court is destroying American jurisprudence and taking the world with it

When a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.

—The Declaration of Independence, 1776, United States of America

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Let the World be Warned

Over several decisions rendered in the past two decades or so, but especially quite recently, the highest court in the United States—the Supreme Court—has proven over and again that it intends to fully obliterate law and precedent in America, welcoming an era of chaos in the midst of several existential threats.

The US government oversees the world’s largest economy and military, has the greatest power to stem the damage to the environment, and wields the strongest influence over geopolitics through its dominance at the UN and via its cultural hegemony. While its track record of consequences related to how it has managed any of these things warrants abundant criticism, rather than take a turn toward improving, this unelected faction of idealogues have opted to go the other way making things much, much worse.

A great deal of attention has centered on how the Court will decide issues specific to the prosecution of former president Donald Trump, and those are important, but not so much for the way they have been primarily discussed. For example, on July 1, the Court found that US presidents enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution for any ‘official act’ they conduct while in office. Mainstream media has focused on the fact that that decision potentially frees Donald Trump from many or most of the remaining criminal charges levied against him for trying to overthrow the federal government and stealing government property, including classified documents, among other transgressions.

While it is true that the decision may result in dropping some charges against Trump, which will have an extraordinarily negative impact on domestic politics in the US, there are far worse implications. To reach the desired outcome, the Court created constitutional principles where they do not exist. In other words, the so-called conservatives on the Court simply made up law, something supposedly antithetical to conservative philosophy (although in reality most political philosophies have opposed this at one time or another). As the three Justices writing in dissent state, “Argument by argument, the majority invents immunity through brute force. Under scrutiny, its arguments crumble” [emphasis added].

Making up law is not something necessarily new for the Court; it has been doing it for years, especially in Second Amendment cases. What is perhaps more nefarious here is that the law this Court has just created has imbued entirely new power upon the already most powerful person in the United States, and arguably the world—the United States President. Returning to the dissent that provides the only logical or lawful exposition throughout this disaster masked as jurisprudence, they write:

Not content simply to invent an expansive criminal immunity for former Presidents, the majority goes a dramatic and unprecedented step further. It says that acts for which the President is immune must be redacted from the narrative of even wholly private crimes committed while in office.

According to the majority a President cannot be prosecuted for official acts, however malevolent or illegal. Official acts are defined as those falling under the President’s “conclusive and preclusive” authority, nebulous terms that carry no discernible meaning, and the majority offers none. But even if a President engages in something so evil, so obviously un-presidential (or unofficial), a criminal prosecution cannot reference or even mention any of the related official acts he may have taken as part of the commission of the crime. This renders prosecution for any act impossible.

To help contextualize this, here is an excerpt from my article presciently titled, “According to Trump, Any President can do Anything, Including Kill You”:

[Justice] Kagan asked, “If a president sells nuclear secrets to a foreign adversary, is that immune?” [Trump’s attorney John Sauer’s] response, “That sounds like, similar to the bribery example, likely not immune. Now, if it’s structured as an official act, he would have to be impeached and convicted first.”

Kagan asked next, “How about if a president orders the military to stage a coup?” Sauer dithered a bit before confirming that that would probably be an official act. Sauer would not even condemn the act if the president literally stated, “I don’t feel like leaving office, I want to stage a coup” (Sup. Ct. Oral Arg., pgs. 39–42). The best [he] could offer was that such an act would be “very low risk” of happening. Perhaps low risk like a once-in-history event… sort of like a President trying to fraudulently steal an election through the solicitation of false electors submitting forged electoral slates and then igniting a riot when the plan failed. Sauer conceded that it sounded “bad,” but he believed the Founders were not especially concerned with a president committing crimes (Sup. Ct. Oral Arg., pgs. 42–43).

Trump’s attorney argued to the Court that a President could sell nuclear secrets, take bribes for pardons or ambassadorial appointments, overthrow the government to remain in power, or even kill his political opponents if committed under the auspices of ‘official acts,’ and this Court enthusiastically agreed.

But even if an act should fall entirely under the rubric of ‘unofficial,’ such as bribery for personal gain, prosecutors would not be able to introduce the official portion as part of its prosecution. So, for example, if a President accepts a cash bribe to name a spy for a foreign power as a member of his administration, the prosecution could not even mention the appointment to the position in its presentation of the criminal case.

How, then, does one prove a bribery when one cannot say what the President gave away in exchange for the bribe? Plainly, one cannot.

Americans should shiver under the implications of this callous disregard for law and fairness, but non-Americans face equally dire potential consequences. US Presidents have already committed atrocities both domestically and across the world in the name of US interests, but they remained at least theoretically restrained by law.

For example, courts, legislators, and others wholly condemned former President Barrack Obama when he unilaterally launched drone attacks ostensibly against terrorists, but that often killed many innocent civilians as well, including four American citizens, one of which was purposely targeted. Some argue that as a result of this public protest, and perhaps because of the notion that the President remained subject to federal criminal law even related to foreign military affairs, Obama reformed the drone program to better abide by said law.

In another instance, many discussed the potential for criminal prosecution of Obama and members of his administration if Trump’s claims that they illegally spied on his campaign proved true. As with everything Trump, however, those accusations were in fact false; the alleged spying was actually surveillance being lawfully conducted on members of Trump’s campaign involved in their own crimes, including possible espionage. Nevertheless, that the commission of such an act (spying on the campaign)—itself eerily similar to what led to former President Richard Nixon’s resignation—could warrant criminal charges against Obama personally was not widely dismissed.

The idea of an entirely lawless President does not require a sojourn into imagination land. The case that brought the immunity issue before the Supreme Court in the first place involved a sprawling criminal conspiracy headed by the then-President, Donald Trump himself. See a lengthy narrative of the facts here. Since then, Trump has also overtly solicited bribes, as detailed here. Neither of these criminal efforts should come near to the definition of official acts, and should thus be prosecutable, but alas those days are over.

This matters not just for American citizens, but also for global ones because it means the United States’ abundant resources—including military assets—are essentially up for sale. A President could, for example, solicit another foreign leader to do some illegal act for his personal benefit in return for military aid, irrespective of America’s strategic interests. Because foreign relations are within the purview of the President, this would now become immune to prosecution.

Or perhaps a President could offer a hostile power some diplomatic benefit if that power attacks or even assassinates his political enemy. Again, immune. Only those foreign governments with something to give will see a return from the United States, at least under certain Presidents. In effect, the world will become one giant bid-rigging scheme.

The idea that regional or even global conflicts could turn on the whims of a single man who happens to be commander-in-chief of the world’s largest military should frighten anyone. But it will not stop at military coercion. Consider economic, environmental, or technological coercion… all dependent on the morality—or depravity—of the United States President.

Lawless bullying by the sitting US President is not the only gift the Supreme Court handed out this month. It also chose business interests over public health, and put the decision over which to prioritize directly in its own corruption-stained hands.

Regardless of the views pronounced by the few remaining detractors whose agendas turn solely on profit, the world is facing a growing, dire environmental crisis. Cyclical ice flows that provide fresh water to billions of people are drying up. Intense heat is rendering whole sections of the world virtually unlivable. “Fundamental shift[s]” in agriculture will lead to higher rates of malnourishment or starvation. Many other negative effects will emerge as the planet grows hotter and increasingly desecrated.

The United States is among the top 3 biggest contributors to this calamity, who collectively emit more pollutants than the bottom 100 combined. While in recent years the federal government has made some efforts to improve America’s role in this catastrophe, the US Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises and Relentless, Inc., two cases handled in one opinion, has effectively knee-capped any future endeavors.

In an unbridled power grab, the Court overturned forty years of precedent, including “thousands of judicial decisions.” Now, ideological or uninformed judges alone will decide the policies of federal agencies with charters to protect people, the environment, the economy, and many other significant matters. Unelected courts will assert their ignorance in place of scientists, economists, or other experts. As the dissent put it:

When does an alpha amino acid polymer qualify as a “protein”? How distinct is “distinct” for squirrel populations? What size “geographic area” will ensure appropriate hospital reimbursement? As between two equally feasible understandings of “stationary source,” should one choose the one more protective of the environment or the one more favorable to economic growth? The idea that courts have “special competence” in deciding such questions whereas agencies have “no[ne]” is, if I may say, malarkey.

This decision is not about whether courts will better protect the public and ensure the proper enactment of policies toward that goal. No, what this Court did was to ensure that any monied interests that bristle at those pesky laws prohibiting them from profiteering more easily can simply circumvent them by filing a complaint in a friendly jurisdiction. As the dissent rightly pointed out:

Agencies have expertise in those areas; courts do not. Some demand a detailed understanding of complex and interdependent regulatory programs. Agencies know those programs inside-out; again, courts do not. And some present policy choices, including trade-offs between competing goods. Agencies report to a President, who in turn answers to the public for his policy calls; courts have no such accountability and no proper basis for making policy.

Like it did in the Citizens United case back in 2010, the Court has interjected itself as the arbiter of what words mean—words whose definition had heretofore not been confused. As Justice Stevens wrote:

The fact that corporations are different from human beings might seem to need no elaboration, except that the majority opinion almost completely elides it.

To reach the sought-after conclusion that a specific Political Action Committee could smear one particular candidate in the days before an election, the majority determined that corporations and individual people share precisely the same rights as they pertain to free speech.

Critics at the time noted that this arbitrary choice would profoundly affect elections by allowing an unrestricted flow of cash into campaigns. Moreover, it would all but neuter the value of individuals’ voices in the political sphere. In short, it allowed corporations to purchase elections on the pretext of exercising their right to speech. The same went for wealthy donors who no longer suffered the impediment of caps on donations.

And indeed, the critics were correct. Since the decision, campaign spending by corporations and the ultra-wealthy has increased by about 900%. Super PACS flood electoral cycles with “dark money,” funds whose sources they do not name, which prevents regular people from knowing who is spreading what message. A very large majority of the public opposes this, but the Court then and now harbors no concerns for what the People want, society needs, or Congress dictates by law.

In this context, if there is any question that the Loper and Relentless decision represents a pure transfer of power to the judiciary and a nod to business over public wellness, allow the dissent to sum it up:

At its core, Chevron is about respecting that allocation of responsibility—the conferral of primary authority over regulatory matters to agencies, not courts.

Today, the majority does not respect that judgment. It gives courts the power to make all manner of scientific and technical judgments. It gives courts the power to make all manner of policy calls, including about how to weigh competing goods and values. (See Chevron itself.) It puts courts at the apex of the administrative process as to every conceivable subject—because there are always gaps and ambiguities in regulatory statutes, and often of great import. What actions can be taken to address climate change or other environmental challenges? What will the Nation’s health-care system look like in the coming decades? Or the financial or transportation systems? What rules are going to constrain the development of A.I.? In every sphere of current or future federal regulation, expect courts from now on to play a commanding role. It is not a role Congress has given to them, in the APA or any other statute. It is a role this Court has now claimed for itself, as well as for other judges.

When the nation with the greatest influence over global health falls into the hands of big business that harbors not a single care for its requisite destruction, the fight against climate change and other world calamities is over. American emissions will surge because profiteering is easier when one can poison the nation’s wells or air. Artificial Intelligence and other revenue-generating technologies that already present an existential threat in the form of the gobbling up of energy and water resources will take precedence over human survival. Equal rights and due process will become saleable commodities.

Dogmatism over Jurisprudence

This Court does not reach its decisions strictly on behalf of business interests. Its majority has made no secret about its intent to contort (or, what it cheekily calls “interpret”) the law under a theocratic paradigm. One Justice, Samuel Alito, readily agreed to the statement that we need to “to return our country to a place of godliness,” captured in a recording. This is precisely what the vaunted Founders of the country fought so vigorously against. But Alito and the others like him are not concerned about religion; they are about as God-fearing as Balaam. They are about placing power and control within the hands of a specific subset of elites.

Consider the Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, where it infamously overturned fifty years of precedent to reach a decision at odds with the view of a large majority of Americans, and one that has seriously imperiled women’s health since. The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania aptly summed up the thinking behind the US Supreme Court’s obviously misogynistic opinion:

The Dobbs majority relied upon the patriarchal notions of eminent authorities of old English common law, including Lord Matthew Hale, [whose] beliefs were driven by his goal of keeping women from encroaching upon the rights of men. [Hale] who presided over the hanging of two women accused of being witches [thought that giving women] legally enforceable rights over their own bodies was a threat to the freedom of men.

The state court was pointing to the Supreme Court’s reference to Matthew Hale, whose purported scientific knowledge about women’s physiology convinced him to oversee their execution as witches. America’s highest juridical body saw fit to rely on the pontifications about childbirth by a 17th century man who said this at a criminal trial accusing two adolescent girls of witchcraft:

[The jury must decide] first, whether or no these children were bewitched? Secondly, whether the prisoners at the bar were guilty of it.

That there were such creatures as Witches [Hale] made no doubt at all. For first, the Scriptures had affirmed so much. Secondly, the wisdom of all nations had provided laws against such persons, which is an argument of their confidence of such a crime.

Again, the highest court of the United States supported a 21st century legal decision based partly on the philosophical musings of that man. But it was not finished there, writing:

English cases dating all the way back to the 13th century corroborate the treatises’ statements that abortion was a crime.

If Hale’s belief in the supernatural as a basis of modern law was not preposterous enough, this Court saw fit to reach back seven centuries to situate the alleged morality of its reasoning in the 21st. (Let us not forget the status of women’s rights in those days). And frankly, it did a poor job even at that.

Historian John M. Riddle, an expert in the history of medicine, detailed how even Peter of Spain, who later became Pope John XXI, wrote an entire text targeted toward the poor instructing them on what drugs to use to conduct a safe abortion. Peter published that text in the 1200s. Abortion over the centuries was viewed as a necessary procedure for troubled pregnancies.

This Court simply found a handful of history’s judges who shared misogynistic views equal to their own, instead of analyzing the historical trends on the issue. The majority referred, for example, to a criminal prosecution involving abortion from 1732 in which the judge described the case he presided over this way: “[I] never met with a case so barbarous and unnatural,” as if comparing the alleged barbarity of a case in which—at its time—common medical practice included “regulat[ing] a woman’s menses” to 21st century procedures makes any logical sense.

As if it helped, the Supreme Court added an appendix to its majority opinion highlighting all the laws across the states criminalizing abortion. The newest law it could find was from 1919… more than a century ago. But the Court’s reference to the inquisitors of medieval sorcery is not its only hail back to certain dark ages of human history.

In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, the Court took a case in which a wedding website creator wanted to discriminate against people based on their sexual orientation, conduct that violated Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA). The plaintiff filed a “pre-enforcement challenge,” a lawsuit in which she claimed that a newly passed law will harm her in some hypothetical future scenario. She worried, specifically, that she might have to “generate works” that “demean another person, or defy her religious beliefs by, say, promoting atheism.”

Notably, the plaintiff included as evidence an alleged request made for her services by a gay man. That man, however, was “married to a woman, that they share a child together, and that they were already married at the time the request.” Further, he denied any knowledge of such a request. In other words, the plaintiff’s evidence was contrived (which seemingly should have been obvious since she did not yet have an operating business). Presenting evidence in court that the litigant knows is false is a crime.

Amanda Shanor, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business and an attorney who represented a client in a similar case to this one, noted:

I think as a practical matter, that piece of information [the apparently fabricated request] did not end up mattering for the lower courts or for the Supreme Court's decision. We could question whether or not that's right.

As mentioned, the plaintiff did not even have an operating business, making the introduction of the request as evidence even more suspect. The Court acknowledged only the absence of a business, not the fake evidence, writing:

While Ms. Smith has laid the groundwork for her new venture, she has yet to carry out her plans. She worries that, if she does so, Colorado will force her to express views with which she disagrees.

Not a good start, but the Supreme Court desperately wanted to rule on the issue, contrivances notwithstanding.

The Court began with a legal trope it has come to use often, and sometimes in the most nefarious ways—that conduct equates to speech. While this is not inherently bad, burning the flag or draft cards in protest are examples, its uncritical or distorted application allows for particularly bad outcomes (see Citizens United for some illustrations).

But the line must be drawn somewhere and in this case, the Court selected a rather arbitrary and capricious place. How, for example, does one differentiate between making someone a cake and allowing them into a restaurant to eat? Under this holding, such a line quickly became muddled. Previous precedent by the Supreme Court itself highlighted this ambiguity and thus handed down a more concrete interpretation. This court rejected it.

In any case, here the majority declared that a “company has a right to post a notice that says, ‘no [wedding websites] will be sold if they will be used for gay marriages’.” But the dissent rightly countered:

When a young Jewish girl and her parents come across a business with a sign out front that says, ‘No dogs or Jews allowed,’ the fact that another business might serve her family does not redress that “stigmatizing injury.”

The Colorado law and general principle at issue was rather simple: If companies want to do business with the public, they must fairly accommodate the entire public. What speech one produces is one’s own business, but business with the public is just that—business with the public, irrespective of the business owner’s or customer’s views. It is not like the law required businesses to “generate work” for absolutely anyone. It did not, for instance, require seamstresses to create swastika-emblazoned clothing, but it did require the equal treatment of people of protected classes such as race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc. What the majority did in this case was turn back time to when fountains for “blacks” and “whites” was just fine, as long a facility had both.

The dissent concluded:

Today is a sad day in American constitutional law and in the lives of LGBT people. The Supreme Court of the United States declares that a particular kind of business, though open to the public, has a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class. The Court does so for the first time in its history…

Although the consequences of today’s decision might be most pressing for the LGBT community, the decision’s logic cannot be limited to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. The decision threatens to balkanize the market and to allow the exclusion of other groups from many services. A website designer could equally refuse to create a wedding website for an interracial couple, for example…

The unattractive lesson of the majority opinion is this: What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is yours. The lesson of the history of public accommodations laws is altogether different. It is that in a free and democratic society, there can be no social castes. And for that to be true, it must be true in the public market. For the “promise of freedom” is an empty one if the Government is “powerless to assure that a dollar in the hands of [one person] will purchase the same thing as a dollar in the hands of a[nother].”

Stare Decisis no more

The Cornell School of Law defines stare decisis as “the doctrine that courts will adhere to precedent in making their decisions.” In any legal system, the consistency of law and judicial decisions is critical to the maintenance of order. Especially in complex areas of law, such as tax, business, or environmental, to operate legally one most know what the law is. Without such predictability, proving someone’s “willfulness” to break the law would near the impossible.

Since 2022, the Supreme Court has overturned decades’ long precedent on several legal doctrines. Again in Loper, the dissent articulates the problem far better than I can:

Adherence to precedent is “a foundation stone of the rule of law.” Stare decisis “promotes the evenhanded, predictable, and consistent development of legal principles.” It enables people to order their lives in reliance on judicial decisions. And it “contributes to the actual and perceived integrity of the judicial process,” by ensuring that those decisions are founded in the law, and not in the “personal preferences” of judges. Perhaps above all else, stare decisis is a “doctrine of judicial modesty.” In that, it shares something important with Chevron. Both tell judges that they do not know everything, and would do well to attend to the views of others. So today, the majority rejects what judicial humility counsels not just once but twice over. [Citations omitted].

Litigants in a system lacking respect for precedent will face whimsical courts and judges. Expertise or reliance upon historical practice will make little difference. Victory will go not to the party presenting the best evidence and soundest case, but to those who cozy up better to the judge, particularly in matters where ideological concerns come into play.

Innovative or foreign-owned businesses may eventually opt not to bother, preferring to operate only in jurisdictions with laws upon which they can rely. The benefits of starting or doing business in the United States will be outweighed by the costs or risks. American citizens will become victimized by corporations even further as little will constrain them from any number of abuses, and their substantial coffers will allow them even greater leeway than now to forum shop for friendly judges.

Criminality will also become an unpredictable, but powerful cudgel against any oppositional forces. Without concern for previous courts’ determinations on specific elements of penal law, rogue district attorneys will be free to “try out” any charge against any person they do not like knowing that familiar judges can choose to interpret the criminal code no matter how absurdly they wish. What holds judges back from doing so now largely is the fear and indignity of being overturned by an appellate court, and for prosecutors it is the fear of losing the case, but those days are all but over.

Historical Lessons Not Learned

David M. Driesen argues that:

No autocrat defeats democratic government on his own. Rather, the heads of state rely heavily on a political party that supports his democracy impairing measures with lock step party line votes.

History has shown this over and again. A key provision and symbol of the establishment of dictatorial rule is the abolishment of an independent judiciary. In the case of the United States, the appearance of independence among justices at the circuit and Supreme courts is becoming just that—an appearance—and a faltering one at that. Whether they would admit it or not, the yoke around the necks of this legion of compliant magistrates consists of subservient loyalty to the autocratic dogma, debts owed to the patriarchal societies who emplaced them or, for most, some combination thereof.

Federal judges are appointed with the “advice and consent” of the Senate. The appointment of at least five of the present Supreme Court justices thus required a compliant party willing to accept their obvious lies told in their confirmation hearings. Judges at the circuit and district levels often face far less scrutiny, allowing presidents to install particularly extreme candidates with little fanfare.

Federal judges nonetheless possess extraordinary power, able to impose nationwide injunctions, which effectively halts existing federal laws. This then forces the Supreme Court to take cases quickly. Altogether, this creates a pipeline for any issue that the extremist party wishes to ram through from initial suit all the way to becoming the effective law of the land.

When the Supreme Court acts merely as a party-aligned rubber stamp, accepting cases without the traditional legal foundations or those based on fabricated issues, so long as they meet the ideological demands of the day, the move toward a single-party dictatorial regime is nearly complete. This is not some brilliant blueprint dreamed up at a Federalist Society gala; tyrants have followed this trajectory throughout history.

An Example

On March 23, 1933, an act was passed by the German parliament entitled The “Law to Remedy the Distress of People and the Reich,” also known as the “Enabling Act.” In just five paragraphs, the Act allowed Adolf Hitler to bypass parliament to pass whatever laws he wanted, leaving the German citizenry without any constitutionally afforded rights. In just a few months following the passage of the law, only one political party would remain in Germany: the National Socialists—i.e., the Nazis.

Just about two weeks following the passage of the Act, Hitler’s regime fired all Jews from the civil service. That same month and in the month following, the government banned opposing political parties and all trade unions. While the Nazis began dismantling structural obstacles through legislative procedures, they crushed any lingering resistance through the courts. Judges who did not rule in line with Nazi racial or political preferences were swiftly removed. Otto Georg Thierack, then Minister of Justice, unabashedly admitted “that judges were not the ‘supervisor’ but the ‘assistant’ of the government” and that “the government ‘can and must’ give [judges] the ‘general line’ to follow.” In a speech in 1934, Hitler offered a more vivid rendition:

When people confront me with the view that only a trial in court would have been capable of accurately weighing the measure of guilt ad (and) expiation, I must lodge a solemn protest. He who rises up against Germany commits treason. He who commits treason is to be punished not according to the scope and proportions of his deed, but rather according to his case of mind as revealed therein.

The court system served as the last tool of ostensible legitimacy to weed out any lingering oppositionists before the mask was ripped off to reveal a full-fledged dictatorship.

First, prosecutors were allowed to select whatever venue they felt was most “appropriate” for their cases. Next, the government passed restrictive requirements on defense attorneys that minimized them into little more than symbolic relics. Finally, they eliminated the appellate system altogether. As the Nizkor Project explains:

Nazi legal theorists freely admitted that there was no place in their scheme of things for the truly independent judge. They controlled all judges through special directives
and orders from the central government.

Eventually, organizations at the highest levels, such as the notorious Gestapo, or secret police, dispensed with adhering to any illusion of judicial procedure at all. Their mission was very simply stated and contained a notable absence of any remnant of due process:

The Secret State Police takes the necessary police preventive measures against the enemies of the State on the basis of the results of the observation. The most effective preventive measure is without doubt the withdrawal of freedom which is covered in the form of
protective custody [emphasis added].

On the Precipice

Today we face the most dangerous threat to humanity ever in our existence. Our ecological system is tilting so dramatically that soon places will become unlivable. The greedy and the lustful for power continue to downplay our peril because they know that their stolen resources will protect them from the worst effects for at least their own lifetimes (they hope). Enslaving mankind to succumb to their will and serve their venal purposes is the mission. And this is all they care about. Where better to start than by stealing the power of the largest government on Earth? It starts with demolishing judicial independence and rule by law.

Donald Trump is not the true threat. He is merely the mechanism for duping enough of the people to complete the true puppeteers’ plan. Thus, while the Court seems intent to bend to his will, the true masters the justices serve are not this public-facing, indolent buffoon. As stated, the methodology is not unique to our political moment. Indeed, if Americans learned history more vigorously, many more would recognize that.

Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Josef Stalin, and other murderers did not rise to power on an opposition-less wave. No, those cretins utilized the same tactics that today’s employ, recruitment through propaganda. They convince people to adopt their views uncritically, often positioning them against some ‘other’ that means to do them harm. The specifics of today’s methods and chosen ‘others’ are no more creative than those adopted over previous centuries; the trick is in convincing the witless that they are. With the ability to disseminate no end of nonsense so easily and to so many, executing this ploy is becoming ever simpler.

As I wrote elsewhere:

Victory for this mutinous lot… will be what Sulla was to Athens. The project of 2025 will be one of stochastic terrorism escalating to full-scale familicide, as the federal government humiliates itself like post-Soviet kleptocracies tend to do. Generations accustomed to some semblance of protected rights will mourn their erosion. The ‘others’ will suffer first, those not pretending hard enough to be Christian, straight, or white, but jackboots invariably cannibalize their own. Eventually, exhausting and bloody resistance will be the manifest necessity of the day. After all, stupidity and devilry do not make lasting governance.

As long as American society continues to quibble over made-up or artificially inflated issues, accepts agenda-driven liars as truth-tellers, and clings to the belief that the devilry of their chosen tribes will somehow benefit them at the expense of others, it is doomed. And it will take the world down with them. Thomas Jefferson offered the inevitable solution, the quote with which this article opened, should society look the other way long enough. Is that the path Americans want? It is something to think about on this day, American Independence Day.

Devotees may indeed get their resurrection, but if they do, it will be coming in a gang of four.

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I am a Certified Forensic Computer Examiner, Certified Crime Analyst, Certified Fraud Examiner, and Certified Financial Crimes Investigator with a Juris Doctor and a Master’s degree in history. I spent 10 years working in the New York State Division of Criminal Justice as Senior Analyst and Investigator. I was a firefighter before I joined law enforcement.

Read a separate, though related analysis of the Supreme Court’s persistent turpitude in my piece titled “6 to 3 — The Numbers of the Beast.”

Or, to read another exposition on the destruction of society by villains driven by greed and avarice, click below.