Pragmatic politics focused on the public interest for those uncomfortable with America's two-party system and its way of doing politics. Considering the interface of politics with psychology, cognitive science, social behavior, morality and history.
Etiquette
DP Etiquette
First rule: Don't be a jackass.
Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.
In an odd editorial (not paywalled), the NYT opinion editors published another scathing attack on DJT. The attack was a headline in a huge font and short 3 paragraph attack in large font, followed by lots of photos with short captions from each of his years in office:
Donald Trump’s First Term Is a Warning
Republicans have tried to rewrite the four years of Trump’s presidency as a time of unparalleled peace, prosperity and tranquility: “the strongest economy in history,” as Senator Katie Britt of Alabama put it during the Republican National Convention. The difference between Trump and Biden? “President Trump honored the Constitution,” said Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota. Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia offered Mr. Trump’s first term as an example of “common-sense conservative leadership.”
The record of what Mr. Trump actually did in office bears little resemblance to that description. Under his leadership, the country lurched from one crisis to the next, from the migrant families separated at the border to the sudden spike in prices caused by his trade war with China to the reckless mismanagement of the Covid pandemic. And he showed, over and over, how little respect he has for the Constitution and those who take an oath to defend it.
For Americans who may have forgotten that time, or pushed it from memory, we offer this timeline of his presidency. Mr. Trump’s first term was a warning about what he will do with the power of his office — unless American voters reject him.
Nowhere in the opinion does the word authoritarian, corrupt, kleptocratic, autocratic, plutocratic, or theocratic appear. Hence my assessment of a semi-woke MSM source, not woke. The NYT still doesn't completely get it. But, it is getting better!
For years, a personal major security concern has been America's vulnerability to cyberattacks by enemies. The problem is serious and quickly getting a lot worse. In my opinion, the combination of (i) being an open society and country, (ii) the difficulty of governing, (iii) intense private sector hostility to government, (iv) intense Republican Party hostility to government, (v) broken-gridlocked government, and (vi) other factors such as the size and number of targets for hackers make the US very vulnerable.
Meanwhile, the private sector keeps gaslighting us saying that cybersecurity is a top priority. Despite cynical corporate propaganda but American companies keep getting hacked. The US government gets hacked. So does critical infrastructure such as the electrical grid, power plants and water plants. One estimate is that the economic cost to the US economy will be about $452 billion in 2024.
A rapidly growing threat comes from an increasingly aggressive and belligerent China. Breaking Defense writes:
NSA’s China specialist: US at a loss to deter Chinese hackers
"They’re not going to be motivated to stop," David Frederick, assistant deputy director for China at NSA, said of the Volt Typhoon hacking group
Officials from the National Security Agency and the State Department said they’re still struggling to come up with a way to deter a powerful hacking group allegedly backed by the Chinese government and accused of slipping into US critical infrastructure networks.
When asked how the US plans to deter the group dubbed Volt Typhoon from future attacks, David Frederick, assistant deputy director for China at NSA replied, “I don’t have a good answer to that.”
“They are trying to position themselves to have an asymmetric advantage in a crisis or conflict. If you look at the cost-benefit from their point of view and just the breadth of targets in the United States and our allies in terms of global networks, they’re not going to be motivated to stop,” Frederick said at an Intelligence and National Security Summit this week. “So that’s a hard problem — how do we get them, sort of thing.”
Volt Typhoon, which the US government says is “sponsored” by the Chinese government, has been accused of invading thousands of devices worldwide since it was discovered in 2021, Recorded reported. But the group gained more attention in May 2023 when it was more publicly outed by Microsoft security analysts.
On the same day Microsoft announced the existence of Volt Typhoon, the NSA and other national and allied agencies issued a warning about China state-sponsored cyber actors using built-in network devices to target US critical infrastructure, including in Guam.
Chinese government hackers penetrate U.S. internet providers to spy
Beijing’s hacking effort has “dramatically stepped up from where it used to be,” says former top U.S cybersecurity official
Chinese government-backed hackers have penetrated deep into U.S. internet service providers in recent months to spy on their users, according to people familiar with the ongoing American response and private security researchers.
The unusually aggressive and sophisticated attacks include access to at least two major U.S. providers with millions of customers as well as to several smaller providers, people familiar with the separate campaigns said.
“It is business as usual now for China, but that is dramatically stepped up from where it used to be. It is an order of magnitude worse,” said Brandon Wales, who until earlier this month was executive director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA.
The hacks raise concern because their targets are believed to include government and military personnel working undercover and groups of strategic interest to China.
The group’s emphasis on obtaining access for potential physical destruction “is nowhere near where the nations of the world behave,” said retired Gen. Paul Nakasone, who stepped down in February from his posts running U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency.
We are in deep trouble and there is no way to fix this. The federal government will remain broken for the foreseeable future while the GOP tries to replace democracy and the rule of law with authoritarianism and the rule of the thug. Our own internal divisions are not only killing us from within, our internal war makes us vulnerable to lethal external cyberattacks.
Lethal is not overkill or hyperbole (in my opinion). If the US grid goes down, think what would happen. Power to critical infrastructure like water plants would go down. Without clean water for a couple of months, people will start dying by the tens of thousands within a few weeks. After that, we will die in the tens of millions. Here in Southern California there is almost no free flowing clean water flow, if any. Where the hell would drinkable water come from? Nowhere, that's where. Same for Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, etc. And, what about sewage treatment? Those plants would be knocked out too. Consider that.
Q: If there is a major nationwide cyberattack on the US electrical grid that damages it and knocks it out of operation, about how long would it take to restore power?
A: Restoring power after a major nationwide cyberattack on the US electrical grid could potentially take weeks, months, or even years, depending on the severity and extent of the damage.
Q: Is Germaine being an irrational alarmist or something worse about cybersecurity?
News reports keep dribbling out that indicate an erosion of the neutrality, honesty and/or independence of federal and state courts. Blatant conflicts of interest and partisan bias are being denied and ignored. Judicial ethics is going extinct. The Verge reports:
Judge who owns Tesla stock greenlights X lawsuit against critics
A lawsuit aimed at punishing critics of Elon Musk’s X will go forward, thanks to a ruling from a judge with a financial interest in Musk’s success.
On Thursday, Judge Reed O’Connor denied a motion to dismiss X’s lawsuit against Media Matters For America (MMFA). The suit was filed in Texas last year and alleges that MMFA should be held legally liable for negative reporting that caused companies to pull ads from X. O’Connor dismissed objections that it was filed in a state where neither X nor MMFA is headquartered, saying the fact that MMFA “targeted” two X Texas-based advertisers — Oracle and AT&T — by mentioning them in articles and interviews is sufficient. (X is based in California, though its current San Francisco office will soon close and Musk has discussed moving to Texas.)
O’Connor also determined that X’s claims had enough merit to proceed in court — which is, to put it gently, concerning.
Unlike your standard libel lawsuit, X doesn’t say MMFA made a factually incorrect claim; it outright admits that X served ads against racist or otherwise offensive content. Instead, it argues that this situation is rare and the authors “deliberately misused the X platform to induce the algorithm to pair racist content with popular advertisers’ brands.” What constitutes misuse of a platform? Using accounts that had been active for more than a month, following the accounts of racists and major brands, and “endlessly scrolling and refreshing” to get new ads. In other words, X isn’t suing MMFA for lying — it’s suing them for seeking out bad things about a business and not reporting those things in a sufficiently positive light.
The Lever reports court news that is far scarier than the authoritarian (silencing legitimate criticism is authoritarian) crap Musk is pulling off:
Justice, Brought To You By Big Oil
Texas is opening a fossil fuel-backed business court stacked with judges who’ve represented oil and gas companies
On Sept. 1, Texas is slated to open its new business courts, a brand-new legal system backed by Big Oil — and several of the court’s main judges have in the past represented fossil fuel companies as lawyers, The Lever has found.
The judges were hand-picked over the last two months by Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, a major recipient of oil industry cash — and many can be quickly replaced if they hand down decisions he opposes, a judicial design that he championed.
The courts consist of 11 regional business courts and a new statewide court of appeals to hear appellate litigation, which are expected to have immediate impacts on environmental cases in the state. As Public Health Watch, an independent investigative news organization, reported last month, a suite of cases involving state environmental authorities will now be transferred from a generally liberal appeals court to the state’s new Fifteenth Court of Appeals, created to oversee the business courts.
There, these cases will be decided by a panel of conservative judges historically friendly to industry — particularly oil and gas interests, a powerful force in Texas.
“Greg Abbott created a boutique court for corporations where he, not the voters, gets to pick the judges,” said Adrian Shelley, the director of the Texas office at Public Citizen, a progressive advocacy organization. “It’s that simple.”
The judge that Abbott selected to head the new appellate court, Scott Brister, has since 2009 worked at a law firm known for its specialty in fossil fuel litigation. While an attorney there, Brister, a Republican, led the defense of the oil company BP in litigation over the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill, one of the worst environmental disasters in history, which released more than 100 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
Before then, while serving on the Texas Supreme Court, Brister threw out a major guilty verdict against oil giant ExxonMobil for allegedly poisoning a town’s water supply.
A jury originally awarded $7 million in damages to the plaintiffs in that case, but in 2003, Brister and his fellow justices claimed that the scientific evidence was not robust enough to support that illnesses contracted by the town’s residents were connected with Exxon’s pollution.
The court reversed the verdict on the company’s appeal, and the plaintiffs received nothing.
Texas’ model is different from many other states’ business courts, experts say: The judges are appointed personally by the governor, with virtually no oversight from the legislative branch. And they only serve two-year terms — in contrast to 12-year terms in Delaware and six-year terms in Nevada — in theory making it easy for Abbott or a successor to quickly replace a judge who doesn’t rule in favor of his political interests. Abbott has been pushing for Texas to create such a system for years.
There it is right out in the open, pro-business courts. Power flows to companies. Plaintiffs receive nothing because power has shifted to companies. This is the face of American radical right authoritarianism and the modern Republican Party. This is what they want to do to all courts. They want power shifted from the people to the elites.
In all of this, one can reasonably believe that trifling concerns like global warming, pollution and human health are going to get very short shrift from this new system of "justice" in Texas, assuming they get any shrift at all.
At his Prevail substack, Greg Olear wrote at great length last Feb. about Leonard Leo, a truly rich and very powerful radical right American authoritarian. Here are key parts of his article:
Leonard Leo and the Unholy Trinity (with Tom Carter)
How the reactionary legal activist, radical Catholic zealot & dark money maestro built alliances to capture the Court and impose his extremist agenda on America
On these pages, I’ve written extensively about Leonard Leo. In February of 2021—three full years ago—I wrote a piece called “Leo the Cancer,” an introduction to a dark money maestro his BFF Clarence Thomas once called, without hyperbole, the third most powerful man in the country. Citing great investigative journalism by Jay Michelson at the Daily Beast, ProPublica, Heidi Przybyla at Politico, and Nina Burleigh at the New Republic, I’ve also detailed how Leonard Leo personally cashed in on his legal activism; how Leonard Leo wangled $1.6 billion—billion with a B—out of the reclusive nonagenarian electronics magnate Barre Said, and the malefic effect that will have on our democracy; and how many powerful people exist in the network he’s built over the last three decades of activism.
Here is a synopsis of who Leo is, for those unfamiliar:
He’s one of the most powerful individuals in the country. His spiderweb of connections is extensive. But most Americans, including many working in Washington, have never heard of him.
Occupying the center of an intricate web of political, legal, religious, and business connections, Leonard Leo is the quintessential Man in the Middle, a veritable dark-money spider. Like a spider, he is patient, painstaking, relentless, and much more powerful than he appears. And like a spider, he prefers to stay hidden.
[He] is the individual most responsible for stripping away federal abortion rights. (The anniversary of the odious Dobbs decision was this past weekend.) As his admiring chum Ed Wheelan presciently wrote in 2016, “No one has been more dedicated to the enterprise of building a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe v. Wade than the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo.”
Tom Carter knows more about Leonard Leo than anyone not in the Federal Society co-founder’s inner circle. Tom worked in Washington for years, in journalism and then in PR. For three years, he handled media relations at USCIRF, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, where his boss was—you guessed it—Leonard Leo. He soon realized that Leo was a zealot, whose ideas were incompatible with, among other things, religious freedom.
Over the subsequent decade and a half, Tom became a dedicated Leo watcher. He reads every article about him. He’s developed his own network of sources. And he warns everyone who will listen about how powerful Leonard Leo is—and how dangerous to our democracy.
Whenever I write about Leo, someone on social media will invariably bring up Jeff Sharlet and The Family, as if Leonard Leo and his crew are the same thing. They are not. Leo & Co. are radical Catholics; The Family are Protestants. Yes, both are Christians, but being Christian didn’t stop Catholics and Protestants from fighting each other in Europe for centuries. Conflating the two mischaracterizes who Leo is and what he ultimately wants.
Carter has a smart way of breaking down the relationship between 1) Leo and his radical Catholic cohorts; 2) Evangelical Christians; and 3) Mammon-worshipping rightwing billionaires. He calls it the “Unholy Trinity.” (Another name might be “The Devil’s Triangle,” if we felt like hat-tipping Leonard Leo’s penultimate SCOTUS appointment, the odious Brett Kavanaugh.)
“The libertarian billionaires want something,” Carter explains. “In 1980, one of the Koch brothers ran for vice president, got less than 2% of the vote—on a platform which is very much today’s MAGA platform. So it was not a popular platform. It’s never been a popular platform, but they knew [they didn’t] have the votes. So the Kochs, the Scaifes, the Uihleins, Paul Singer, Harlan Crow, Barre Said, all of these guys have different individual wants, but in general, what it boils down to is they want lower taxes on their multi-billion-dollar companies, and they want no federal regulation.”
Basically, these soulless gajillionaires, many of whom inherited their wealth, would rather spend hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in lobbying efforts—funding all manner of vile rightwing fuckery to make sure their hard-inherited cash doesn’t help the less fortunate—than pay their fair share.
“So where do we get the votes? Where do we get the votes?” Carter explains. “Well, Paul Weyrich, a very devout, hardcore Catholic, who has said the more people vote, the less people will like our positions,” had a planning sesh with Jerry Falwell—“a top Catholic meeting with a very, very top Evangelical.”
I keep posting this short video
for good reasons
[Racism] is not going to sell in the [] late 1970s, early 1980s. ‘What do we want? What do we want? I know. Let’s get behind abortion. Let’s become anti-abortionists.’ So this was a political marriage between Paul Weyrich—conservative Catholics—and Jerry Falwell—conservative Evangelical Christians. And that’s how the anti-abortion movement really came about. It wasn’t Roe that started it. It was these two guys basically in a backroom deal.”
And that’s how the second prong of the Unholy Trinity fits into the picture. Falwell’s community, Carter explains, “are the votes. Those are the infantry. Those are the door knockers, the Evangelical Christian nationalists, which we’ve read so much about.
“At the same time, Leonard Leo and his Catholic cabal was beavering away in Washington trying to rig the judicial system. It’s been said if you want to create a fascist society, the first thing you do is get the judges, and that’s what Leonard was doing,” Carter tells me. “It’s what I call the Unholy Trinity. You’ve got the libertarian billionaires; you’ve got the Christian nationalist foot soldiers, the infantry; and you’ve got the extreme Catholic—Leonard Leo—cabal, driving the tanks, or to use a different analogy, kicking the goals. They’re the ones that are getting stuff done. They are putting the scores on the scoreboard.”
“There’s been a lot of stories, ink, books, articles on Christian nationalism and how there is no separation of church and state, and we want Jesus at the top of the heap, our version of Republican Jesus at the top of the heap. There’s been very little on the [radical] Catholics, and they’re actually the ones that are doing a lot of the lifting,” Carter says. The goal is to not just eliminate the separation of church and state, but to elevate the church to the dominant position—where it was in the Middle Ages, when the Pope crowned the emperors.
The thought leaders of this extremist Catholic movement are quite open about the necessity of force to get their way. “Force will be required,” Carter says, paraphrasing the thought process of these leaders. “Force is going to be needed, because not everybody is going to want to do what we say we want to want done. So if you’re Jewish, or Catholic [but don’t] believe in integralism, or an atheist, or anything else, you automatically become a second-class or third-class citizen in this Christofascist world. Think about the Spanish Inquisition or, more recently, think about Franco’s Spain or, today, Orbán’s Hungary. These are autocratic societies run according to religious principles, whoever happens to be at the top of the heap.”
If this unholy power grab is complete—which, if Trump wins re-election, it will be—it ain’t going to be pretty for the rest of us. Which is to say: most of us.
Carter sums up the situation succinctly—and ominously: “They’re bringing the Inquisition.”
Q1: Although Olear refers to the billionaire prong of the unholy trinity as libertarian (roughly the opposite of authoritarian), they support DJT and his authoritarianism, so is Olear using the wrong label for the unholy billionaires, who actually are authoritarian, not libertarian?
Q2: If they get enough power, is it more likely than not that one or both of the two Christian prongs of the unholy trinity, authoritarian (theocratic) Catholicism and Protestantism, will try to bring back old-fashioned Catholic inquisition tactics (like those shown below), or will they more likely try to impose a softer, more modern and woke variant, with less torture and murdering replaced by more subtle means of force, e.g., making people opposed into second-class or third-class citizens (like what modern China does today to its citizens who resist)?
The HuffPo and lots of others are reporting about comments DJT made in an interview with Mark Levin, a RRA (radical right authoritarian), that RRA Faux News broadcast. What DJT said amounted to a confession that he interfered in the 2020 election. He said:
“Whoever heard, you get indicted for interfering with a presidential election, where you have every right to do it, you get indicted, and your poll numbers go up.”
But, his confession is of no importance. Why? Well, if it is up to Merrick Garland to do anything about it, he won't because he is as corrupt as DJT and actively protects DJT and his toxic RRA legacy. Maybe Jack Smith or some state prosecutor can use that admission as evidence in some prosecution or another. But given the way our rule of law routinely fails to touch rich and/or powerful people and businesses, odds of this being significant evidence is a court case appear to be low.
The American Prospect writes about one lingering ill-effect on the DoJ (Dept. of Justice) that is left over from DJT's time in office and before even then:
Garland Has Yet to De-Trumpify His Office of Legal Counsel
The Department of Justice has failed to revise dubious decisions made to shield Trump from scrutiny
One former employee of the Office of Legal Counsel, upon quitting her job during the Trump presidency, described the OLC’s work to The Washington Post succinctly: “using the law to legitimize lies.” Three years later, and a year after Trump left office, most of those legitimized lies remain intact.
It will come as no surprise that former President Trump abused the powers of the Department of Justice. But in reviewing the opinions released by the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel over Trump’s four years, its deference to his agenda, in spite of those abuses, stands out. Deferring to the president has been the OLC’s norm since the pre-2016 era, which is itself troubling; that impulse becomes particularly alarming when the president is charting a course to sabotage American democracy.
The OLC is both a powerful and secretive force within the executive branch. It provides authoritative legal opinions to the president and executive branch agencies, opinions that can form the basis for controversial executive actions. Most of the OLC’s determinations are never released to Congress or the public. A few are published without fanfare on its website.
We have no idea how many confidential opinions, formal or informal, the OLC offered Trump or anyone else during Trump’s term, and no idea if any of them have been reconsidered since. That’s an obvious problem. In the aftermath of a presidency marked by a norms-shattering regime of corruption, the usual procedures—like the OLC’s stubborn secrecy, and reluctance to depart from its past opinions—have become unacceptable. The Office of Legal Counsel requires new transparency and deserves renewed scrutiny.
While we don’t know the full extent of the OLC’s misdirection under Trump, we do know that of the 48 opinions published on its website during Trump’s presidency, only three have been publicly revisited under President Biden. (Again, 48 isn’t the full number of released opinions, since some aren’t listed on the website—like the 2017 OLC memo approving Trump’s travel ban, which was released in response to a FOIA request. Visibility of the office remains patchwork.)
Strengthening executive power and undercutting legislative power is a running theme throughout the Office of Legal Counsel’s Trump-era opinions, so it’s significant that the OLC in 2021 acknowledges that it “failed to accord the respect and deference due a coordinate branch of government.” In fact, it weaponized the separation of powers to undermine congressional oversight of the executive branch. By that same token, the OLC can now play a role in restoring congressional oversight. All it takes is Garland deciding it isn’t his job to defend the last president’s loathsome legacy.
All it takes is Garland deciding it isn’t his job to defend the last president’s loathsome legacy. Really?
From what I can tell, Garland firmly believes it is his job to defend the last president’s loathsome legacy because he has done a damn good job of doing just that so far.
Early on, in May of 2021 it was clear to me that Merrick Garland was not going to seriously go after DJT and his cadre of thugs, traitors and grifters. Thus calling for firing him for timidity and gross incompetence seemed like sound reasoning based on the evidence I relied on. One of the deeply disturbing things that set me off in 2021 was an informed assessment that the Mueller report faded away, as if it had all been for nothing. To this day, DJT crimes the Mueller report clearly documented have not been prosecuted. That bit of nastiness is footnoted in my blog post.
of justice felonies that DJT committed during the Mueller
investigation -- all 4 are documented in detail in the Mueller report
Garland never prosecuted any of those felonies
Now, after being made aware of some information, I'm not at all sure that timid incompetence was the correct way to view the situation. That assessment was very likely wrong. It definitely was based on incomplete knowledge. That is always a danger.
Anyway, I was just made aware of some deeply disturbing things about Garland and his mentor Jamie Gorelick I was ignorant about. Although what I quote below might sound to some like deranged crackpot conspiracy theory, there seems to be at least a reasonably good and defensible basis in circumstances to support the idea that Garland is not a timid incompetent, but instead is a deeply corrupt, complicit traitor.
The information comes from Sarah Kendzior, an author, anthropologist, researcher, and scholar. She has a Wikipedia page. From that information, she does not appear to be a crackpot. At her substack, Sarah Kendzior's Newsletter, she wrote this in Nov. of 2023 in a very long article, Servants of the Mafia State; Merrick Garland, Jamie Gorelick, and the truth:
I have told this story in pieces over the years. I am now putting the information in one article to make it easier to find. The story touches on so many atrocities that it is impossible for me to cover them all, and I encourage folks to pick up where I left off. The point of describing a crisis is to give people tools to fix it. This shadow network affects everyone, regardless of where you live or for whom you voted.
It is common to hear Garland described as an institutionalist. This is true. He protects a broken and corrupt institution, the Department of Justice. He protects it instead of protecting the United States or its people. He protects it above democracy or freedom or a future. He protects it over justice itself.
The DOJ Industrial Propaganda Complex that emerges when any critique of Garland is made insists that justice is imminent. They bleat that Garland is merely “dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s”.
Which he is, in the word COMPLICIT.
Garland is not unique in his role as a mafia state enabler. He follows a long line of DOJ cover-up operatives marketed as saviors of American democracy: James Comey, Robert Mueller, Bill Barr, Cy Vance, and so on. Over and over, Americans are told that these prosecutors are going to “get Trump” and dismantle his criminal network. Over and over, they serve their real role, which is to run out the clock and allow criminal elites to escape accountability.
The FBI and DOJ need to protect Trump, because in doing so, they protect themselves.
Many fail to understand Garland’s role due to an elaborate propaganda network (the mechanics of which I will break down) and a reluctance to recognize complicity among officials who are often portrayed as feuding. It is easier to attribute disaster to one political party instead of examining networks and recurring figures responsible for a multitude of tragedies over the past twenty-five years.
Jamie Gorelick is one of these figures, a Forrest Gump of 21st century corruption. Like Garland, she is a Democrat who serves GOP objectives, the most notable of which for Garland was working as Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s lawyer and getting them the White House clearances that they should have been denied due to conflicts of interest.
As a result of Gorelick’s actions, Kushner gained classified intelligence that he likely shared with or sold to foreign states, including Saudi Arabia, from which he pocketed two billion dollars, and Israel, to which he has been tied since birth due to his family’s long friendship with the Netanyahu family, to the point that Benjamin Netanyahu slept in Jared’s bed when visiting the United States.
Garland has refused to investigate Kushner. A likely reason is that, were he to investigate Kushner – who remains a profound national security threat – he would also be investigating his best friend.
It is one big club, and it is destroying our country.
Crises of institutional integrity are beyond partisanship. They cannot be fixed by elections. They can only begin to be remedied when the rot is revealed. The road to accountability begins with evidence, context, and history.
Reckoning with this horror is difficult, but an informed public is a powerful public. Never forget that state officials are paid to serve you. You deserve more than a plate of platitudes meant to weaken your capacity for critical thought.
Merrick Garland gained national prominence when he was blocked from the Supreme Court by Republicans in 2016. The refusal of the GOP to hold hearings gave the Americans the false impression that Garland is a staunch Democrat and defender of liberty.
In reality, the GOP refusal had little to do with Garland, but with their desire to pack the court with right-wing extremists once Trump ascended. Garland is not a right-wing extremist. He is a cog who serves corrupt interests under the guise of being “moderate” and “cautious” – stalling investigations and blocking evidence from public view. That is what he did during his brief tenure at the Clinton DOJ from 1994-1997. That is what he does at the Biden DOJ now.
GOP extremists have long praised Garland. In 2017, after Trump fired James Comey, Mitch McConnell suggested that Garland become the FBI director.
“I have spoken with the president about it. I recommended Merrick Garland,” McConnell said in May 2017. He recited the propaganda line that Garland “was the prosecutor in the Oklahoma City bombing case.” (Garland was not. The lead prosecutor in the Oklahoma City bombing case was Joseph Hartzler, and how that lie gets circulated will be explained later.) McConnell added that Garland “would make it clear that President Trump will continue the tradition at the FBI of having an apolitical professional.”
In October 2021, Donald Trump praised Garland as “a good man” and said he was glad Garland was Attorney General. At that point, the DOJ had not even opened an inquiry into the Capitol attack, a dereliction of duty that was obvious to anyone with eyes and ears, but which Garland’s backers staunchly denied until time had run out, and it was too late.
In other words, once Garland and Trump had achieved their goals.
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There is much more. I am only including highlights because if I were to list every crime she [Jamie Gorelick] abetted, I would have an epic.
It is time to move onto another job for which she remains largely uncredited: Merrick Garland’s chief propagandist.
From evidence like that, Kendzior says that
the DoJ has a troll bot propaganda farm that
made the DoJ and Garland look good
It does look sort of suspicious
Kendzior's article about Garland and his close friend and mentor Jamie Gorelick is very long and packed with depressing details of corruption and sleaze, and including links to information that back up those details. Maybe all of this sounds like crackpot conspiracy theory to some, but to me it has the feel of truth, sad and discouraging as it is.
Based on this, I reassess Garland. He is not a timid incompetent defending his valiant DoJ institution. He more likely is a corrupt, complicit traitor who maintains the moral rot in the DoJ. If so, Garland's moral rot is on a level with DJT himself.
Q1: Is it plausible that Garland is a corrupt, complicit traitor instead of a timid incompetent?
Q2: In view of the evidence that Kendzior cites, did Biden make a major mistake in making Garland attorney general, or did Biden know what Garland was but nominated him anyway (or did Obama err in nominating Garland for the supreme court)?
The National Religious Broadcasters association has joined a complaint alongside two East Texas churches calling for the Johnson Amendment to be declared unconstitutional. The complaint was filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in Tyler on Aug. 28.
Congress approved then-Senator Lyndon Johnson’s amendment to the U.S. tax code in 1954 that prohibited 501(c)(3) organizations such as charities and churches “from engaging in any political campaign activity.” In 1987, Congress added a clarification that the amendment also applies to statements opposing candidates.
According to a National Religious Broadcasters statement, the complaint details how organizations have “engage[d] in electoral activities that are open, obvious and well-known, yet the IRS allows some, but not all, such organizations to do so without penalty.”
The Internal Revenue Service, it continued, routinely “acts in an arbitrary and capricious manner” toward nonprofit organizations “that disfavors conservative organizations and conservative, religious organizations.” Such an unequal enforcement, it determines, constitutes “a denial of both religious freedom and equal protection.”
This is a very big deal, huge actually. The current USSC will probably declare the JA (Johnson Amendment) unconstitutional on grounds of undue burden on free speech, undue burden on religious freedom and/or anything else they can think of. The court might even find a way to apply the history and traditions test. If the JA is overturned, theocratic Christian nationalist (CN) church leaders will be free to fill their sermons with all the lies, slanders, fake American history, and poisonous bigotry, e.g., seething hate of the LGBQT community, that dominates dark free speech from CN elites.
Plaintiffs [Christianity] contend that the Johnson Amendment, as written and as applied by the IRS, violates the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause, Free Exercise Clause, the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause (Void for Vagueness), the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause (Equal Protection), and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
To be clear, if the JA is overturned, priests, pastors and other church elites will be free to openly threaten their flocks with things like excommunication, ostracism, expulsion from the church and condemnation to eternal damnation in Satan's lake of fire if they vote for the wrong candidate according to God's sacred and infallible will.
The really interesting aspect of this lawsuit is the nature of the JA itself. The JA was passed into law as an explicit condition on a church maintaining its tax-exempt status, not an outright prohibition on speech or religious freedom. As it is now, CN churches and religious leaders still have significant freedom to speak on political and moral issues - they just can't explicitly endorse or oppose candidates while maintaining tax-exempt status. One source comments:
Repealing the Johnson Amendment would either require an act of Congress or the Supreme Court ruling that the law is unconstitutional. Neither of these possibilities have occurred. While there is frequently language introduced by Republican lawmakers to repeal it, such legislation has historically been unsuccessful. Most recently, in the Republican tax reform bill in 2017, repeal language was dropped due to the Senate’s reconciliation rules.
Radical Republican theocratic politicians failed to repeal the JA, most recently in 2017, so the next line of attack on the JA is the USSC. Churches already can implicitly endorse and oppose candidates but even that is not enough for the aggressive, kleptocratic CN wealth and power movement. Theocratic Christianity wants to rip off the JA fig leaf and go full Monty in politics. Churches can already say, for example, that politicians who support abortion rights are agents of Satan or otherwise terrible people in God's eyes. Churches already know exactly how to implicitly endorse or oppose a candidate without running afoul of the JA.
The courts have consistently held that tax exemption is a privilege, not a right, and organizations can choose to forgo tax-exempt status if they wish to engage in prohibited political activities. That is the main barrier that the USSC has to somehow knock down if the authoritarian CN theocratic agenda is to take its power to the highest level so far. This lawsuit is the clearest example of the ravenous greed that constitutes a major motive and goal of the elites who control America's authoritarian radical right Christian nationalist wealth and power movement.[1]
Given the radical, theocratic intend of this USSC, this lawsuit is terrifying. If the JA does get invalidated, that will happen most likely in June-July of 2026 or 2027. In normal times with a normal USSC, the chances of repeal of the JA would seem to be low. But with this radical theocratic court, certain things that are implausible but important to the CN movement become possible, maybe even likely.
No one thought the Roe v. Wade would be overturned, but it was.
No, Christian nationalism is a political ideology and a form of nationalism, not a religion or a form of Christianity. It directly contradicts the Gospel in multiple ways, and is therefore considered by many Christian leaders to be a heresy. While Jesus taught love, peace, and truth, Christian nationalism leads to hatred, political violence, and QAnon misinformation. While Jesus resisted the devil's temptations of authority in the wilderness, Christian nationalism seeks to seize power for its followers at all costs. And while Christianity is a 2,000-year-old global tradition that transcends all borders, Christian nationalism seeks to merge faith with a single, 247-year-old, pluralistic nation.
Why should Christians oppose Christian nationalism?
Pro-democracy, pro-love Christians must speak out together to show the country that Christian nationalism does not represent Jesus or our faith. When we do this, we prove that the biggest critics of the Christian-nationalist ideology are in fact Christians, and thus disprove the source of its biggest power: the false perception that the religious-right speaks for all American Christians.
I am not the only person who sees CN as bigoted (anti-love) and authoritarian (anti-democracy).
