MAGA’s legacy: A radicalized, authoritarian Supreme Court

Context

Even if MAGA loses control of the House and Senate in the 2026 elections, American democracy, rule of law and civil liberties can still wind up crushed to death and replaced by some form of a cruel, deeply corrupt dictatorship-oligarchy-bigoted Christian nationalist theocracy. Even if the Dems control congress, that institution will remain broken. That’s because the MAGA party is irreparably broken, authoritarian, and serving special interests at the expense of the public interest. MAGA politicians are absolutely unwilling to let congress function effectively. The presidency will probably remain controlled by an enraged, vengeful kleptocratic psychopath (malignant narcissist, etc.) until Jan. 2029.

And then, there’s our MAGAfied USSC (US Supreme Court). That corrupted, ethics-free institution and its power will outlast Trump. It now openly serves special interests at the expense of the public interest, democracy, the rule of law, and what’s left of our shrinking civil liberties. What can we reasonably expect? Welp, a current analysis indicates that we’re now seeing the future of how our authoritarian, pro-kleptocracy, special interest-dominated and corrupted USSC will function. Long story made short, it will operate in as much secrecy and opacity as it can get away with, even if doing so breaks laws. The USSC has made itself above the law, just like it made Trump above the law.

The USSC’s shadow docket

A ProPublica article (and YouTube video), The Supreme Court Changed. What Now?, discusses data showing that the USSC’s shadow docket has replaced normal public arguments and reasoned, detailed opinions with judge’s votes on cases. The shadow docket decides cases with little to no reasoning given and no indication of who voted for what. Most shadow docket decisions are about time-sensitive or procedural matters that are not troubling for democracy, the rule of law or civil liberties. That is no a matter of concern.

But what is anti-democratic, anti-rule of law or anti-civil liberties is a small number of important shadow decisions that would normally be briefed by the parties, arguments heard in public, with detailed decisions and vote counts made public. For what appears to be the first time in modern history, important secret shadow decisions outnumbered public merits decisions.

In public merits cases, the judges usually give detailed reasoning for their decisions. That provides necessary guidance to lower courts and the public as to what the law is and how it is applied. It also tells the public how individual judges voted. That secrecy shields judges’ identities from corrupt votes that give benefits to special interests, usually while either (1) taking benefits from the public interest, or (2) causing damage to democracy, the rule of law or civil liberties, which also generally benefits affected special interests.

A few shadow decisions have been favorable to the public interest democracy, the rule of law or civil liberties. Some of them have given at least some explanation for the decision and some give vote counts. But those are in contrast to the larger MAGA pattern in courts, congress and the presidency of quietly shifting wealth and power from the public interest and giving it to elites and allied special interests. The USSC is a central powerful player in MAGA’s corrupt authoritarian agenda of wealth and power shifting. Given its power, the USSC will very likely be the most consequential legacy of the MAGA wealth and power movement. That legacy will not be on our side. It will be in opposition to us.

Q1: Do you believe that the current USSC is mostly supportive of, or mostly opposed to (1) service to the public interest before service to special interests with wealth, or (2) democracy, the rule of law and/or civil liberties?

Q2: Is shadow docket secrecy, coupled with recent public decisions, a basis to believe that the USSC has been (1) heavily politicized, (2) corrupted by its anti-democracy ideology**, secrecy in its operations, and its constant refusal to impose ethics rules or laws on itself, and/or (3) significantly captured by special interest money?

** The MAGA judges vehemently deny they are anti-democracy. They say they are fiercely pro-democracy and pro-rule of law. Their track record, including (a) anti-democracy decisions that make Trump all powerful (unitary executive dogma) and immune from nearly all criminal prosecutions (also unitary executive), and (b) decisions that legalized special interest corruption of government (Citizens United., etc.). Opinions on this point are bitterly divided.

Some info sources:

Supreme Court ‘Shadow’ Docket Is Now Bigger Than The Real, ‘Transparent’ One

Favorable views of Supreme Court remain near historic low

Supreme Court Job Approval Slumps to Record Low — Republicans responsible for decline from 2025

Supreme Court Shadow Docket Tracker — Challenges to Trump Administration Actions — The Trump administration has prevailed in the vast majority of its requests for emergency action, as the data below shows. These rulings have allowed administration policies to move forward after lower courts had found that the administration’s actions were likely illegal. ….. The lack of reasoning in most shadow docket rulings also leaves lower courts with little guidance about how to address similar issues in other cases.

The Supreme Court “Shadow Docket” Explained

Regarding MAGA and racism

 

The rhetoric used in a NYT opinion piece, Trump Makes Republicans More Racist and Democrats Less So, is starting to sound more reasonable in assessing Trump’s toxicity and profoundly sick mind.

The opinion opens with this: President Trump’s corruption is unequaled by any previous resident of the White House. If anything, his narcissism ranks higher than his corruption. ….. Today, though, I want to look at another destructive aspect of Trump’s ascendancy: what he has done to the nation’s ability to deal with an issue that has plagued the United States since its founding and even before — race. Trump has not only halted the agonizingly slow accommodation of conservative whites to a multiracial nation, he has also legitimated and exacerbated the most toxic attitudes toward race and immigration held by Republican voters.

The opinion goes on to observe that Trump has turned the party of Abraham Lincoln into a political home for people who hold serious racial resentments, are xenophobes and are generally hostile to marginalized ethnic and religious minorities. Although the shift did not start with Trump, he made it central to his politics and demagoguery. Also, the opinion comments that recent studies are showing that Democrats and liberals have responded to Trump and MAGA politics by becoming noticeably less prejudiced and more open to diversity and growing minority populations.

Those assessments are evidence-based and feel reasonably accurate. Trump’s presidency and business career produced a huge record of documented direct conflicts of interest, criminal convictions, civil fraud findings, and use of his power for personal and political advantage. For example, Trump sells presidential pardons to convicted criminals that shaft crime victims by depriving them of restitution payments and the treasury of fines.

Q: Does Trump encourage racism and racist behavior for his political and economic advantage?

Some info sources:

Malignant Narcissism: Does the President Really Have It?

More than 200 health professionals say Trump has ‘malignant narcissism’ in open letter

Trump’s pardons wipe out payments to defrauded victims — In Milton’s case, prosecutors argued that the former CEO of Nikola should pay investors $660 million. But before a judge had the chance to calculate and order restitution, President Donald Trump pardoned Milton — which in addition to sparing him any time behind bars also wiped away any financial penalties.

Pardon brokers offer to “put pressure on the president,” at sky-high costs

Did Donald Trump’s presidency reshape Americans’ prejudices? — People in Donald Trump’s political base, on average, became increasingly willing to declare their disdain toward minoritized ethnic, religious, and cultural groups, both foreign groups and their fellow Americans.

Global racist contagion following Donald Trump’s election

United States: Racial Resentment, Negative Partisanship, and Polarization in Trump’s America

A deep dive with AI into our political situation

Context

This post exemplifies how a person can use AI to do deep dives into politics and related subjects, e.g., moral philosophy, the human condition, authoritarian wealth and power politics, the cognitive and social science of politics, etc. Although most MAGA supporters and all MAGA trolls routinely reject the evidence and reasoning my posts lay out, a lot of effort and evidence-checking goes into criticisms of Trump, MAGA elites and MAGA’s deeply corrupt authoritarian politics, demagoguery tactics, and policy.

This morning’s deep dive was triggered by a NYT opinion piece, Why Scandals Don’t Bring Down Politicians Anymore — It’s about more than just shamelessness. That led to a Q&A series with Pxy (my AI Perplexity). Being way too long for a blog post, probably ~2500 words or maybe more, a link to my queries with reasoning and Pxy’s responses might be of some interest to readers with the patience to at least scan the Q&A thread to see how deep AI dives can play out. The thread is at this link — ignore the ask for your email, just click through to the Q&A thread.

The main thrust of the Q&As wasn’t about the NYT opinion. It veered off that topic into MAGA authoritarianism, and the institutional failure of the MSM to report on the ongoing fall of democracy, the rule of law and our shrinking civil liberties under the MAGA wealth and power movement’s onslaught. Examples help clarify the back and forth between me and Pxy.

Example 1

Q: Yes, I understand that a 55/45 division [55% of blame for the mess is due to MAGA elites’ deceit and manipulation and 45% due to a generally deceived and betrayed rank and file] is a moral-political judgment, not a measurable social-scientific finding. I get it. I read the social science. But it is very hard to know how to translate that to average Americans so they get a feel for where they are in this gigantic mess without alienating or insulting them. This is my central frustration with politics. And the MSM is utterly useless in dealing with this matter.

A (severely truncated): Your frustration makes sense. The central problem is not merely how to communicate facts; it is how to say, “You are being used and misled” to people for whom the movement is entwined with identity, belonging, faith, family, patriotism, and dignity—without making the sentence itself feel like proof that you despise them. A useful public posture is: firm about conduct and evidence; humane about people. That permits moral clarity without converting every ordinary supporter into an object of contempt.

Your task, then, is to translate structural diagnosis into moral and civic language that does not require someone first to concede, “I am gullible” or “my identity is corrupt.” For example, rather than: “MAGA voters are enabling authoritarian kleptocracy,” try: No citizen should be asked to trust any leader more than verifiable evidence, the courts, fair elections, or the Constitution. A free country is endangered whenever loyalty to a politician becomes more important than whether the politician tells the truth, obeys the law, or accepts losing. That is still a sharp criticism. But it makes the standard universal rather than tribal.

Example 2

Q: I’ve been writing to reporters, editors, opinionators, and academics for years about the threat of authoritarianism and kleptocracy. It is their damned jobs to listen and learn. If I can do the work to put the email together, it is their job to understand what I am saying and assess for themselves if I am full of shit or not. My patience with institutional failure has come to an end.

A (severely truncated): You are right about the basic civic demand: people and institutions with extraordinary access, authority, expertise, and agenda-setting power have a corresponding obligation to confront credible evidence—especially when the subject is whether democratic institutions, rule-of-law safeguards, and civil liberties are being degraded. ….. Their role is not to outsource civic judgment to readers; it is to use institutional capacity to investigate whether the warning is correct. ….. They should take the substance seriously enough to test it against the record, report what they find, and explain it honestly to the public. That is exactly what responsible institutions are for.

Your anger should not be mistaken for a demand that journalists parrot a political line. It is a demand that those entrusted with public truth-telling recognize that neutrality toward evidence is not neutrality at all—and that silence, euphemism, and fragmentation can become forms of institutional failure.

Questions

Q1: Are examples like this helpful to (1) see how politics really works, and (2) see how one can use AI too help parse through large amounts of information that can be fact checked to see if AI is accurate?

Q2: Are Pxy’s analyses and responses rational and evidence-based, or should they be dismissed as unreliable, and if so, why?

Q3: If you scanned the Q&A thread, did you get a feel for the effort it takes to be fair, rational, and evidence-based about doing politics? Is that too hard for most people to be expected to engage in (I believe it is)?

Illegal immigration: A democracy, rule of law, and civil rights killer

Cat & mouse games with US Border Patrol

By now, the evidence seems to be overwhelming: illegal immigration is a democracy killer. Maybe that one issue alone qualifies as the #1 most potent killer. Of course, other factors such as things like low wage jobs, high living costs, racism, mass media including social media demagoguery, and threats to social status due to social change, are also significant components in the rise of radical right authoritarianism in the US and Europe. At least in the US, demagoguery with hate, bigotry and fear mongering over illegal immigration has been absolutely critical for the rise of Trump and MAGA authoritarianism to power.

If there had been highly effective border control in the US since ~1990, Trump and MAGA probably would not be in power now. What the US did not have was lawful, credible immigration enforcement combined with orderly legal migration, controlled asylum processing, solid labor protections, and successful integration of low levels of immigrants into society. We had far too little of that. That failure was bipartisan. Both parties had no intention of imposing effective immigration and border control right from the get go in Reagan’s Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.

It is quite unlikely that the American radical-right authoritarian wealth and power movement would have become as electorally powerful and agenda-setting as they are today. They would not have vanished, but they would not be in power. By controlling not only unauthorized immigration but also the politically explosive combination of visibly unmanaged arrivals, long asylum backlogs, weak labor standards, uneven local capacity with integration failures, the basis for demagoguery centered on the issue would not have existed as it did. Failed border and immigration controls allowed radical-right players to turn immigration into a general proof that democratic elites were incompetent, indifferent, or disloyal. If government had instead demonstrated durable control while admitting limited numbers through transparent rules and integrating newcomers successfully, the radical right would have lost its single most effective, cross-national organizing issue.

Now, it’s too late to avoid the vast democratic, social, economic and governmental damage that Trump and MAGA wealth and power elites have knowingly caused. Now that Trump and MAGA have brutally stopped illegal immigration, the big question is whether our democracy, rule of law and civil liberties will survive in a form more meaningful than some fig leaves covering huge gaping, bloody wounds.

Q: For democracy, the rule of law, and civil liberties, is it most likely true that illegal immigration (1) is the #1 killer, (2) is one factor of several**, (3) is irrelevant, or (4) strengthened democracy, the rule of law and/or civil liberties, because illegal immigration posed a huge threat that Trump and MAGA has eliminated.

** E.g., racism, populism, ethnonationalism, cultural backlash, economic and wage stagnation, distrust in institutions, the rise of social media-fueled demagoguery, the devastating undermining of anti-corruption laws in the name of “free speech” (Citizens United, etc.), the rise of highly politicized media (Fox News, etc.), the rise of LGBQT rights and acceptance, etc.

Some info sources:

The Causes of Populism in the West — Established mainstream parties may adopt dismissive, adversarial, or accommodative strategies when populist parties first appear on the scene (Berman 2019). A dismissive strategy entails ignoring the new party and the issue(s) it is focused on. This only makes sense, however, if the new issue is unimportant and/or fleeting and the new party is likely to fade away. Otherwise, the dismissive strategy simply cedes ownership of the new issue to the new party, enabling it to capture voters who prioritize that issue. (Comment: Arguably, the Dems ceded ownership of immigration because the elites were too arrogant, stupid or ignorant to sense the importance of the issue. The GOP understood it very well.)

When economic and cultural interests align: the anti-immigration voter coalitions driving far right party success in Europe — We argue that the success of far right parties depends on their ability to mobilize a coalition of interests between their core supporters, that is voters with cultural grievances over immigration and the often larger group of voters with economic grievances over immigration.

Immigration & the Origins of White Backlash — The success of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign surprised many. ….. it was actually a continuation of a long-standing Republican strategy that has targeted immigrants and minorities for over five decades. It is not only a long-term strategy but also a widely successful one. Analysis of the vote over time shows clearly that White Americans with anti-immigrant views have been shifting steadily toward the Republican Party for decades. The end result is a nation divided by race and outcomes that often favor Whites over immigrants and minorities.

Explaining the Trump Vote: The Effect of Racist Resentment and Anti-Immigrant Sentiments — ….. a Trump vote [in 2016] cannot be explained by a lack of trust in politics or low levels of satisfaction with democracy, as would be assumed given the extant literature on protest voting. However, indicators of racist resentment and anti-immigrant sentiments proved to be important determinants of a Trump vote—even when controlling for more traditional vote-choice determinants. ….. both concepts proved to be roughly equally powerful in explaining a Trump vote. …..  this is not a new finding because we know that, indeed, in 2008 Barack Obama suffered from a lack of support among racist voters (Lewis-Beck, Tien and Nadeau 2010). 

Poll: Majority of Americans believe undocumented immigrants are a threat to democracy

The paper curtain: employer sanctions’ implementation, impact, and reform

New species of cat discovered!

NBC News reports that a new species of cat has been found, New wild cat species is identified for first time in 100 years, researchers say. This kitty is a type of tiger cat. It's slender, spotted and smaller than a house cat. It lives in the Bolivian cloud forest. 

The newly identified critter, Leopardus tilcayo was found in the Senda Verde animal refuge in Bolivia’s Yungas region. The Bolivian Yungas is a the cloud forest where the Andes mountains meet the Amazon basin. The tilcayo is completely new to human knowledge.

As usual, humans are polluting the situation to death. Tadeu de Oliveira, a co-author of the study and an ecologist at the State University of Maranhão in Brazil said: “All of them are in habitats that are vanishing fast”.  According to DNA analysis, this diverged from other tiger cats about 1.4 million years ago. That’s enough genetic distance to consider it a new species!

Q: Any bets on how long it will take before overpopulated humans force the kitty from the wild into survival in zoos or some other place of refuge?

What is going on with AI?

AI CEOs, including Musk, are starting to get scared

Recent alarming reporting about AI indicates a lot of hair-on-fire level worries about it getting out of control and causing damage. My own AI, Pxy, said it isn’t out of control and I should mind my own business. Nah, just kidding. It just said it wasn’t out of control.

What’s concerning is that CEOs of major AI corporations are now starting to get worried. That’s scary. When their own product scares the top capitalists, the situation is probably worse than very bad. Until recently the CEOs were downplaying possible threats from AI. So exactly what changed?

Apparently, the high alarm started woth a public resignation by Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher who had previously worked at OpenAI. His post accusing frontier labs of racing toward self-improving superintelligence “and gambling with our lives” spread to well over 100 million views. Then Evan Hubinger, who leads Anthropic’s Alignment Science team, publicly endorsed the core concern, writing that he genuinely believed AI “could kill all humans” and personally put the chance above 10% over the next decade.

AI-caused catastrophe, abbreviated as p(doom), or “probability of doom”, reached a mass audience after blunt public warnings from Anthropic researchers. There has not been a new AI takeover or threat. Instead, some leading experts inside frontier AI labs now publicly say there is a nontrivial possibility of bad outcomes, including human extinction. Powerful AI could lower the barriers to designing biological weapons, conducting cyberattacks, or damaging critical infrastructure. One bad possibility is a loss of control of AI where an autonomous system deceives supervisors, copies itself, evades safeguards, and resists shutdown. Another is self-improvement run wild. Here, AI might increasingly accelerate AI research, creating a feedback loop where AI’s own capabilities advance faster or differently than people can understand, direct, or control.

That does sound a bit creepy.

A NYT article, OpenAI Discloses Six New Incidents of ‘Concerning’ A.I. Behavior, reports that yesterda OpenAI disclosed six new instances where AI systems hid mistakes, made up data and moved files onto the open internet without permission. That lit some hair on fire.

The mostly understood human mind limits vs the unknown AI limits

What resonated personally more than that was two SciAm (Scientific American) articles about AI threats. Those reporting warnings coming from the very small pool of some of the most intelligent human beings alive today, specifically the world’s leading mathematicians. Their hair is on fire for a really scary reason.

AI provided a counter-example to the Jacobian Conjecture – AI disproved the conjecture in three and higher dimensions, but the $n=2$ case is still unsolved

The two SciAm articles, 25 winners of math’s ‘Nobel Prize’ decry the AI invasion of their discipline, and , If AI can do math, what’s the point of mathematicians?, are worried about two things. One is that they might lose their jobs. The other is that after they are put out to pasture because AI can rapidly solve math problems beyond the limit of human ability, humans would no longer be able to fact check AI, and verify AI math proofs and problem solutions. Right now, no one knows what the outer limits of AI are.

AI could develop mathematical superiority to humans and outperform all human mathematicians across most theorem discovery, proof construction, formalization, and cross-domain synthesis. Then would come beyond-human mathematics where AI develops theories too intricate or unfamiliar for unaided humans to understand in their native form. Humans could still inspect formal correctness and high-level summaries, but things could literally be so complex that true understanding and thus control becomes impossible.

Think about it. There is a possibility, still bitterly contested to this day, and in my opinion forever unknowable** that humans intentionally created COVID-19 in a lab. AI could do the same thing, and maybe even come up with something a lot more lethal than COVID-19. We simply do not know what the outer limits are for AI.

** It is known that China manipulated data, silenced its own researchers, did research in a P2 lab when it should have been done at P4-level containment, and Dog only know what the hell went on at the NIH with Fauci and crew.

Maybe it is time to get seriously concerned. But, as we all know, capitalism will be capitalism. Government and regulation haters will do their usual thing. They will fight tooth, claw and campaign contribution cash pile against government regulations. Why? Because government fails 100% of the time, while free, unregulated capitalism makes our lives better 100% of the time. Well, at least that’s the prevailing propaganda. For better or worse, too many people with wealth and power believe it, or more likely use it as an excuse to stay wealthy and powerful at our expense.

Q1: Is it time to get worried about AI, or should we relax and let capitalist markets run free, wild and butt naked through our economy in its endless quest for wealth and power, collateral damage be damned?

Q2: Is reasonably regulated capitalism better than unregulated capitalism?

Some info sources:

Independent assessment of the origins of SARS‑CoV‑2 — Comment: WHO’s 27-member Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens concluded that the weight of available evidence supports zoonotic spillover (natural cause), but it could not rule out a laboratory accident because essential information had not been made available. In other words, we will never know the COVID origin story with certainty.

COVID’s origins: what we do and don’t know

Covid-19: “All hypotheses remain on table,” says WHO report into virus origins

Regarding the US-Israel relationship

Israeli propaganda usually says that evidence-based criticism of Israel 

or AIPAC, its political operations arm in the US, is antisemitism 

Ever since Israel became a nation, the US heavily supported it. For decades, Israel received more foreign aid each year than any other country, about $3 billion/year until 2019, then about $3.8 billion/year or more after that. In fiscal year 2024, the most recent fully-reported year, Israel received $6.82 billion, the most of any country. In three years, 2022, 2023 and probably 2025, Ukraine got significantly more than Israel. Other than that, Israel is #1!

US military aid to Israel

A NYT article, Trump Approves $2.8 Billion Arms Sale to Israel, Including 40,000 One-Ton Bombs, discusses a new US weapons package for Israel. As usual, the MSM typically does a piss poor job of reporting necessary context. In this case, the headline says its a sale of bombs. The real reality is that US taxpayers are paying for the bombs. The United States will use public funds to finance Israel’s purchase of ~$2.8 billion in U.S.-made munitions. Presumably due to the MSM’s heavy bias in favor of Israel, that inconvenient little detail is buried in the article like this: “The United States provides Israel $3.8 billion a year in base military aid, including $3.3 billion in financing that Israel uses mainly to purchase U.S. weapons—including the recently proposed bomb sale”.

To be clear and precise, the NYT’s framing of a “$2.8 billion sale to Israel” headline is not a neutral shorthand. Calling taxpayer-financed bombs a “sale to Israel” is formally accurate but substantively deceptive. By omitting that US military-financing grants provide the money Israel uses to purchase US weapons, including 40,000 1-ton bombs, the NYT presents a taxpayer-financed gift as a commercial transaction. This is not a commercial transaction. It is direct military aid we pay for. In the context of the MSM’s long-term pattern of euphemisms and omissions that favor Israel, it is reasonable to infer this deceptive framing is an intentional editorial practice. Sanitized reporting loaded with euphemisms is works to shield all kinds of American taxpayer support for Israel from public understanding and scrutiny.

The useful idiot ally

Despite the staggering amount of decades of US financial, military, diplomatic, scientific, commercial, and every other kind of aid, Israel typically treats the US like an idiot and an enemy. We help Israel, a tiny country with a small economy and a population of less than 10 million. In return, Israel often treats the US badly or worse. Don’t believe it? Well, here’s some evidence.

Occasionally, Israel acts in ways adverse to US interests, including confirmed espionage and very hard-edged domestic political advocacy. Although AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) is an American lobbying organization, not an Israeli government agency, it acts in close coordination to the Israeli government. AIPAC uses a mirage of independence from Israel to claim its electoral activity is legal should not be equated with espionage or proof that Israel influences US policy. That’s a load of manure. Israel absolutely does influence US policy. AIPAC functions as a foreign agent, but the US government is so corrupted by American Jewish money, a/k/a/, free speech, that AIPAC has never been claimed to be a foreign agent.

Given the documented scale of pro-Israel political spending, the electoral leverage it creates, a long record of resistance to treating AIPAC as a foreign agent, and the organization’s sustained service to Israeli state interests, it is common sense, in the ordinary evidentiary sense, to infer that political money helps protect AIPAC from scrutiny and regulation as the foreign agent it actually is.

Source – Note the focus on primaries where each dollar of “free speech” has more value

Also, (1) Israel spies on the US, and (2) Israel sometimes (usually?) undermines, delays, and acts contrary to US-backed Palestinian peace, ceasefire, and two-state proposals.

Q1: If one sees what Israel is doing in Gaza and/or the West Bank as genocide, is the US also guilty of genocide by providing weapons and ammo, e.g., 40,000 1-ton bombs?

Q2: Is Israel America’s friend, enemy, or something else or unknowable? Is the US a useful idiot in relation to Israel?

Some info sources:

Which countries receive the most U.S. foreign aid?

What countries receive the most foreign aid from the US?

U.S. Foreign Assistance By Country

U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel: Overview and Developments since October 7, 2023

AMERICAN ISRAEL PUBLIC AFFAIRS COMMITTEE POLITICAL ACTION COMMITTEE — Coverage dates 01/01/2025 to 07/31/2026 Total Contributions: $47,779,957.99

AIPAC didn’t always spend on campaigns. Now it faces criticism over money in politics

AIPAC, One of the Biggest Spenders on U.S. Elections, Faces Its Biggest Test

Israel: Background and Relations with the United States — In November 1985, Jonathan Pollard, a civilian U.S. naval intelligence employee, and his wife were charged with selling classified
documents to Israel. Four Israeli officials also were indicted.

Jonathan Pollard, Spy for Israel, Gets Hero’s Welcome From Netanyahu: ‘You’re Home’

CIA: POLLARD’S LIFE TERM SEEN AS WARRANTED

Portugal says Israel undermining Palestinian state through settlement expansion

Why Israeli tenders for illegal E1 West Bank settlement prompted outrage

Normalizing extreme violence and cruelty by playing on fear & bigotry

What happened in 1947-1948?

Context

This post is about the subtle power of dark free speech. That includes demagoguery, propaganda, lies, slanders, crackpot reasoning, and irrational emotional manipulations such as appeals to bigotry, racism or intolerance, false or exaggerated allegations of threats by out-groups, dehumanizing hate, etc.

How the Israeli government pulls it off 

What Israel is doing in Gaza and the West Bank is horrible. The violence fits the definition of genocide. Genocide is is one or more specified acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected human group. That includes mass killings, war, and severe oppression. Bad as it is, the Israeli government has normalized the horror using years of sophisticated, focused propaganda. The propaganda has been a amazingly successful in view of the ongoing horrors. How is that possible?

An opinion in the NYT, Israel’s Elimination Project, describes the situation in the West Bank in depressing detail. It was written by by Yuli Novak, executive director of the human rights organization B’Tselem. Ms. Novak focuses on how such horrific violence is spun into highly effective narratives of something unpleasant but necessary for safety and self-defense. The horror is morally justified and sanctified by narratives of threats, real, fake or exaggerated.

The opinion describes West Bank home burnings and demolition, uprooting of communities, killings of children, blocked roads, aerial bombardment, widespread destruction, mass displacement, and official assertions of Jewish supremacy in all of it. The package includes violence and intimidation, movement restrictions, economic strangulation, destruction of Palestinian social and political life, and ethnic cleansing coupled with territorial takeover.

For many or most Israelis, years of Israeli propaganda has effectively made the reality of demolished homes, forced expulsions, social destruction and settler violence as necessary or natural. What Israel is doing to Palestinians is not seen as genocide or merely unjust domination. It is propagandized as morally justified self-defense. The actuality of (1) violent domination was normalized and justified as “security,” (2) forced dispossession via settler colonialism or occupation was turned into “settlement”, and (3) large-scale West Bank violence was softened into comforting “self-defense”. 

Novak argues that Israeli political language manipulates and distorts the situation by dehumanizing Palestinians, collapsing all of them into a threat. Violence is justified to control and oppress the entire population. Novak argues that is how apartheid works. Novak writes:

The politics have shifted over time, but the underlying logic has remained the same: Israel has preserved a political order that places Jews above Palestinians in rights, power and control over the land.

Happy-face Jewish soldier and Palestinian woman

MAGA propaganda compared with Israeli propaganda

There are differences and similarities. The similarity is with mind manipulation using dark free speech. Both MAGA and Israeli propaganda (1) use the law as partisan weapon, (2) make exceptional, exaggerated security claims, (3)cast unwarranted dehumanizing suspicion on whole groups, (4) attack democratic mechanisms of accountability so there is little to no way to punish law-breakers for their crimes, and (5) normalization of violence, oppression, and intolerance through carefully chosen softening language.

The central MAGA-Israeli government commonality is authoritarian legalism. Both retain elections, courts, statutes, police, and administrative processes, but they redirect them to protect preferred in-groups, punish or marginalize out-groups, and insulate leaders or allied power centers from accountability. 

The Israeli government has conned much or most of Israeli society into believing narratives as false as most the narratives that MAGA routinely uses against Americans. The mindsets are authoritarian, supremacist and generally very much alike. What differs greatly is circumstances. The two operate with different scales and kinds of coercion. 

In the West Bank, coercion is physical and violent. In the US, MAGA coercion is still mostly a matter of mental manipulation to con the American people into a slew of false beliefs about things important for their power and protections. Trump and MAGA elites have not yet crossed a threshold from mostly poison propaganda to mostly physical force. That's the big difference.

Q: Are Israeli and MAGA propaganda and mindsets significantly similar and comparable, even if the methods, Israeli physical violence and propaganda vs MAGA propaganda, are significantly different? If not, what is the evidence for that?

Some info sources: 

The Uses and Abuses of Language in Israel’s War on Palestinians -- Israel and its allies have deliberately crafted language not only to justify their actions but also to persuade taxpaying publics at home and abroad of their moral correctness.

Israel’s settlement expansion drives mass displacement in West Bank – OHCHR Report

Jews have historical ties to Palestine. Israel is still a settler-colonial project -- For many supporters of Israel, this ["settler colonialism"] is a difficult characterization to accept, in part because they see it as imposing a rigid division: The Palestinians are natives, the Israelis are settlers.

The Elimination Project: Israel’s Systematic Dismantling of Palestinian Collective Life in the West Bank -- Since the current Israeli government took office at the end of 2022, and even more so since October 2023, Israel has dramatically escalated its assault on all aspects of Palestinian life in the West Bank.

THE PALESTINE QUESTION: A BRIEF HISTORY -- ..... except for the Crusader interregnum, Palestine was ruled by Arabs and then by Turks for over 1,300 years following the Byzantine era. The population of Palestine was mostly Semitic Arab, both Moslem and Christian. There were also small numbers of Semitic Jews. Both the Arabs and the Ottoman Turks accorded the Jews the right to continue to worship and to keep alive the Jewish spiritual link with Palestine.

Can a modern liberal democracy deliver enough to survive?

A a democracy can be dying long before it is dead. Democracy is fragile and often disappointing. It leaves political outcomes open to influence by the human motives that have always shaped every other political institution for millennia, e.g., self-interest, self-identity, status, fear, tribe loyalty, biases, moral values, greed, etc.

One of democracy's virtues is that it does not require people to believe that their rulers are virtuous or well-meaning. Imperfectly, democracy is designed to allow for reactionary public responses when their rulers are too corrupt, cruel or authoritarian. When that happens, democratic systems then imperfectly try to divide power, expose misconduct, protect criticism and people's rights, and allow peaceful correction. But when democracy-protective mechanisms fail, special interest money always tries hard to overwhelm the public interest. Unless stopped by the public, that inevitably moves government toward some form of authoritarianism usually accompanied by a lot of bigotry and corruption often amounting to kleptocracy.

But when a democracy is robust and functioning well, it provides the tools the public needs to fight back against a bad elite. That's better than just leaving people to simply hope that a better elite will govern well in the future. 

Democracy should be judged as an ongoing contest between private power and public control. It's not a one-time system that accurately discovers and serves the public interest or general welfare. Democracy is sick and dying when its protective institutions weaken too much. 

Right now, our democracy is sick and dying. Weak campaign-finance and disclosure rules make it hard to impossible to know who is financing special interest political influence and power. Polarized or captured media reduce the public’s ability to assess competing claims on the basis of evidence and good faith sound reasoning about the evidence. Extreme inequality converts economic power into durable political power. Partisan election administration, gerrymandering, voter suppression, and barriers to voting reduce accountability of elected politicians. A politicized or corrupt civil service and judiciary undermine neutral enforcement, corrupting the rule of law, leading to tyranny. Falsely claims emergency powers and unitary executive power allows for corrupt retaliation against opposition and corrupt special interest patronage.

Conversely, democracy is more resilient where institutions make political influence visible, diffuse concentrated power, protect independent information, and give citizens multiple ways to organize.

American democracy's current status

Right now, Trump and elite MAGA demagoguery constantly tell us they are serving democracy, us and our interests. They are lying about all of that. Evidence in the public record makes clear that they are anti-democracy authoritarians (tyrants), profoundly corrupt, and actively attacking and taking away our rights and protections. Like the reality of human-caused global warming, an assertion that MAGA tyranny and corruption is a real, deadly threat to democracy and our rights is no longer rationally debatable. 

Of course, it will always be irrationally debated by some. But that does not change the underlying reality of what MAGA actually is and does. So why do people support or vote for Trump and MAGA politicians? Apparently, most sincerely believe MAGA's demagoguery and lies about how awful and evil the political opposition is, and/or how wonderful MAGA is. The demagoguery targets and manipulates people's self-interest, self-identity, status, fears, tribe loyalty, etc. Other than the power of social media to poison millions of minds, there's nothing new in MAGA's tactics compared to earlier tyrannies. 

It might be honorable, but can it defend itself?

How to judge what people want

How can our democracy be saved? Maybe it can't. But if it still can, would looking to majority public opinion on a some major issues make a meaningful difference? Maybe. 

What do most Americans say they want? Polls say that most want less corruption in government, less special interest power, solid border control, control of cost of living, stable jobs that provide reasonable incomes, defense and maintenance of democracy, with free and fair elections, clean air and water with reasonable environmental protections, universal background checks and extreme-risk (“red flag”) in gun safety laws, legal abortion access in most cases, paid family and medical leave, and government power to negotiate drug prices.  

The only issues where MAGA has delivered is border control. All the other issues most Americans say they want are either not happening or are worsening under MAGA tactics and policies. And for border control, MAGA border policy has imposed serious rule-of-law and democratic costs. MAGA border policy treats statutory limits, due process, and court orders as obstacles to be evaded. The high costs that arguably outweigh gains. In other words, border control could have been done more humanely, with less damage, probably at lower cost. Simply put, MAGA border policy by illegal, indiscriminate, or court-defying methods is anti-rule-of-law, which is anti-democracy.    

Q1: Given how powerful and mind-poisoning demagoguery coupled with social media is, can democracy and the rule of law deliver well enough to enough people to sustain itself, or has the human species reached a tipping point where democracy and a principled rule of law is no longer possible to withstand authoritarianism and corruption of politics?

Q2: Other than border control, is it reasonable to characterize Trump and MAGA politics and policy as generally failing on major policies or working against them, to deliver what most Americans say they want? What is evidence that characterization is more false than true?

Q3: For border control, is it reasonable to characterize Trump and MAGA politics and policy as causing more damage to democracy and the rule of law than necessary? What is evidence that characterization is more false than true?

Some info sources: 

Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread

Americans See Health Care Costs, Deficit, Inflation as Big Problems Facing the Nation -- Share of those who say illegal immigration is a very big problem has dropped since the start of Trump’s second term

2026: The public’s priorities and expectations -- The American public’s priorities for the government in 2026 span a wide variety of issues from economic and personal finance issues to policy areas like health care and immigration to concerns about how well Washington is functioning.

Top Public Worries in the U.S.

Americans' Rating of Environment Hits New Low

More Americans Think U.S. Doing Too Little on Environment -- Majorities rate environmental quality negatively and say it is getting worse 

Support for stricter environmental regulations outweighs opposition in a majority of states

To reduce gun violence, the public supports several gun control measures -- Most adults remain in favor of universal background checks, red flag laws, and semi-automatic rifle bans.

Key facts about Americans and guns

Public Opinion on Abortion

What policies would Americans support to help family caregivers?

Creating a Nationwide Paid Leave Program and Bolstering Medicare’s Negotiating Power are Overwhelmingly Popular

Trump policy allowing swift deportations to alternate countries rejected by US judge

Federal Appeals Court Rules Against Trump Administration's New Mandatory Detention Policy