I'm reminded of the term Shibboleth, a term or catch phrase that is pronounced differently by separate groups of people. In the bible, the word was used to differentiate Ephraimites from Gileadites, though -- fun fact -- was also sometimes used in WWII to root out German spies, since the th-sound is not native to German.
I'm reminded too of the chaos caused in Operation Greif (not to be confused with grief), a German commando operation during the Battle of the Bulge in which German troopers versed in American English donned American uniforms. So prepared their objective was to get behind Allied lines, cause confusion and eventually capture bridges intact over the Meuse river.
The American forces soon caught on, and got really paranoid about spies in their midst. Checkpoints bogged down the movement of Allied forces, and future psyops strategists took notes. At the checkpoints, the MPs would ask trivia questions about American culture:
Who won the 1940 world series?What team plays at Wrigley Field?Who is Mickey Mouse's Girlfriend?
It didn't work very well. The questions were made up ad hoc, and plenty of American soldiers didn't know either, and they'd be confined until their identity was verified later. But a lot of the disguised German commandos were caught.
But we're in a similar time, in which some questions just cannot be answered correctly by the infiltrators:
Who won the 2020 Presidential Election?Was the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool Sabotaged?What caused the destruction of the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab Iran, February 28, 2026?
And I suspect that we'll be able to assemble a range of shibboleth questions like these, that we can ask an LLM in order to determine its disposition regarding facts...
...if it's not obvious when the AI calls itself Mechahitler
Maybe I’m older than you are, because I could’ve said the same about Rodney King. That’s the first in my memory, but others can probably point out that it was not the first.
Oh, I remember Rodney King. But in that case, the footage was still controlled by news agencies.
The Ferguson unrest was streamed live from independent cameras on the ground. What we saw wasn't edited and it shattered a lot more illusions of what the police are about.
The current standard of Red = Republican / Blue = Democrat has only been consistent since the new century. I remember in 1980 the map turning blue for Reagan! and in 1988 Blue was still the color for George H. W. Bush.
So yeah, the parties switched positions and the colors also changed.
It's been a point of shame to me that the president of my country engages in childish bullying behavior like giving opponents derisive eponyms, insulting press correspondents or terms like Dumocrats. But I am still of the belief elected officials should selected from our best and brightest, and not from narcissistic confidence shysters.
Much the way that Trump's racism lends permission to others to also be racist, I think that Trump's low-brow manner invites others to adapt the same sort of parlance.
When someone does this, it makes me more skeptical of them, much the way that misspellings or poor grammar will, (more so, since grammatical errors, I can presume, are unintentional. Infantile prose takes will.) And I assume that others have the same reaction.
AI accuracy sounds like it is about making sure AI responses are consistent with known facts and science.
AI shouldn't be woke sounds like it is about making sure AI responses are consistent with party ideology (state ideology when it is captured by the party.)
Essentially, the two standards are going to disagree on certain emperor has no clothes issues, like whether Biden won the popular vote and the electoral vote or weather Trump really won the election as according to the Stop The Steal fringe hypothesis.
We have specific anti-woke assertions that run contrary to facts. And therefore we have facts that are woke.
“alleged violence” means SWAT, by your proposed standard.
Currently, ICE murdering people is what we have in its place. Unlike SWAT or common precincts, ICE is a paramilitary loyal to the current regime, not beholden to law or the Constitution of the United States. It's Stephen Miller's personal army.
In this era, there really is nothing for the policing crisis. We're occupied by ICE, and crime is less about behavior and more about identity, but this was the case for minority neighborhoods long before Trump.
I wonder if a Résistance is going to form the way it did when, in German occupied France, the occupying Nazis couldn't help themselves but brutalize the civil population.
As of the 2014 killing of Michael Brown and the following Ferguson Unrest, it's become public knowledge that the militarization and brutality of law enforcement in the US has become untenable. (Police weren't gentler before that, but in Ferguson there were a lot of independent cameras on the ground streaming events as they happened. The public got to see what it looks like when the police are militarized and they have no respect for the neighborhood they're in.)
In 2020 during the George Floyd protests, there were calls to defund the police and abolish ICE. We're experiencing today the consequences of our failure to use collective power to pressure the states for reconstruction of the police state into something that actually serves the public.
Now that ICE is nothing short of a rogue department serving a captured executive, is funded more than national militaries, and has been able to murder, abduct and torture people without due process and without oversight or accountability, maybe, maybe, once we get out of this fine mess, we'll actually do something about the unchecked police state.
If there are no public defenders, then those who can afford defense have a disproportionate advantage.
In fact, you don't need to get rid of them. In every county in every state, public defenders are grossly underpaid and understaffed, and so poor people are wrongfully convicted at a far higher rate than those who can afford to retain their own defense.
Since the middle class is becoming vanishingly small, it means most of us are being denied fair and equal access to justice.
Now, if rich people were required to also rely on public defenders or pro se, and then public defense was nonexistent or underfunded, then one could argue protection was equal.
And in the current era, rich people also have the option to bribe federal officials, say the DoJ to drop the case, or President Trump to pardon them. It's expensive but some people are really outrageously wealthy.
It does raise the question, how often does law enforcement respond to a violent situation in progress? I mean outside of Hollywood police procedurals?
Most of what we hear about are active gunmen? Do those not warrant overwhelming force by a disciplined municipal SWAT unit?
Most of what we hear about in the Trump 2.0 is alleged violence from protestors.
In contrast, how often do police show up post hoc? In those cases, we may need paramedics and hazard control, and then investigators.
When it comes to non-violent crime, we need non-violent civil officers. Law enforcement as it currently stands only adds more risk of the incident escalating into violence. Usually, it is law enforcement who opens hostilities (and then lies about it in court).
While not arguing to the contrary, it raises the question why we have them at all. Instead we should just have an investigative bureau to root out those who have committed crimes, and the US Marshall service can make arrests once a case is ironclad.
In the meantime, that leaves a gap where we need responders to handle crises. Let's fill that with paramedics and crisis counselors. If it's a hazard, the fire department (or other hazard cleanup) responds. And if it's a violent situation in progress, we can go straight to SWAT.
There. Now our responders have a duty to serve the public.
Maybe the courts can take a page from the slush fund case, and sanction the lawyers who would dare engage in what is weaponization of the legal process.
I keep hearing lawyers are supposed to adhere to a code of ethics as officers of the court. It's gotten so bad that the DoJ and DHS have both lost presumption of regularity; courts now presume in advance they are going to lie.
If you have to engage in abductions by secret police;
if you have to wear masks to conceal the identities of your agents
if you have to use private torture prisons that defy inspection mandates;
if you have to refuse due process to your victims;
if you have to invade their homes without a warrant;
if you have to defy regulations such as failing to wear identifying attire and body cameras
if you have to seize them arbitrarily based on the color of their skin (and ignoring their authorization papers)
if you have to shoot people arbitrarily and with impunity in the meantime,...
...then maybe you are the worst of the worst, and your country is the shithole country.
(And maybe that is why people are leaving the US faster than they're coming in. And it's our best and brightest who are emigrating to elsewhere.)
especially when our Supreme Court is at least 50% MAGA-cooked
It's 2/3rds cooked or 66%. Every last one of the far-right supermajority is a member of the Federalist Society, a Catholic Christian nationalist and defies consistency of legal theory to push the MAGA ideological agenda.
I look forward to everyone saying this was all just a hiccup in the country’s history and everyone really just overreacted to it.
There is a lot of wishful thinking that this is somehow not as bad as the German Reich even though we're seeing a lot of the same events that run when the ultra-wealthy sponsor a tin-pot dictator to rule with an iron fist.
There are some differences. For one, we have better information distribution, which goes both ways. When ICE shoots someone, or when a hospital gets bombed in Palestine, video of it hits the internet in minutes and is distributed worldwide in hours. (I suspect the motivation behind the wave of age-verification is partly to discourage or at least track who is watching this kind of content.)
But then right-wing propaganda has been honed to effectively manipulate the general population. The combination of fear, hatred, culture-war ideology and red-pill conspiracy theories that is offered by FOX News encourages viewers to silo themselves so they only get their information from FOX and reject conflicting content from other sources. We've seen how this formula has informed the President, US Senators and Supreme Court Justices in their policymaking, how FOX News opinion is regurgitated verbatim in the words and arguments of elected officials.
Then there's the problem that the ultra-wealthy are really rich. The top three hundred-ish wealthiest persons have a larger share of the global wealth than ever before in history. (One estimate is four times that of the gilded age), and they seem determined to do anything necessary to continue to accumulate more. Once they're done wrecking the United States, they'll still have the means capture and exploit the rest of the industrialized world. Europe has been softened by decades of neoliberalism and is already seeing far-right movements get purchase. The UK is where we were in 2015, one charismatic strongman away from putting on a Reich all its own.
At this point, the US recovering from this as just a hiccup is a remote possibility, but if it were to happen, the culture and policy in the States would have to fundamentally change. Something far more than the New Deal or the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And even if the Democratic party were to, by a stroke of luck, seize power in 2028 (despite all the election tampering and the churning propaganda machine), the establishment Democratic party is too captured by business interests and is too far right wing, and will be content to wait for the wealth-sponsored Republican juggernaut to rally and take over again.
I'd love to be proven wrong, though, and there are some historians and history buffs online who think the people of the US will rise to the occasion after all before the water runs out. For now, though, things look bleak.
It’s truly astounding how this MAGA administration appears to be fundamentally allergic to ever taking responsibility for anything.
Trump is leading by example from the top down. There are countless examples of him refusing to take responsibility for the consequences (we all suffer) for his unilateral decisions.
I hypothesize this is the new masculinity, with examples like Josh Hokit disparaging Michelle Obama at the UFC fight at the White House, or Trump intervening with FIFA regarding the red card and one-game suspension of Folarin Balogun.
Similar to conspicuous consumption of the gilded age, the arbitrary and capricious discharge of strength, the open abuse of power is intended to demonstrate a man is beyond the reach of consequences, or does not care what consequences occur.
I suspect (but do not know) that self-ascribed guardians of masculinity such as Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Mat Walsh and Bill O'Reilly would at least see this as the natural progression of the expression of manhood they have asserted for the last decade.
You know you've really hit the time travel jackpot when future you appears to try to stop you, and another future you tries to stop them from stopping you.
Sherman, set the Wayback machine to February 1, 2016, I was writing about how Jason Leopold was labeled a FOIA Terrorist. Leopold was insisting that his FOIA requests be actually honored and fulfilled, and some conservative officials didn't like that, nor the notion of there being investigative checks on government. Leopold wore the epithet with pride.
I also noted the recent incident of Ahmed Mohamed in September, 2015, who, fourteen years old at the time, brought a science project, a digital countdown clock, to school and turned it on. Because it was a brown Muslim boy with a countdown timer, the alleged adults in the room decided he was a terrorist with a bomb. Mohamed found himself separated from parents, guardians and legal representation, booked by law enforcement and ended up in juvie before the hullabaloo was sorted out, because he was brown and possessed a digital timer he built, himself.
And so by the time Leopold was being branded as a Tango, I submitted that the term terrorist had long escaped its meaning as a criminal seeking to use violence to further a sociopolitical agenda and had turned into a blanket derisive: Terrorist was anything that a conservative reactionary doesn't like.
Kinda like gay in the eighties.
Kinda like woke in the mid 2020s.
The problem is, now there are captured judicial and paramilitary agencies that serve the ideological whims of Donald Trump, his regime and the MAGA movement. Now there are state agents, essentially hired goons, to take the term terrorist (and Antifa) seriously, specifically to turn noncooperation, civil disobedience and even legal protest into a dissident-gang-related conspiracy, to criminalize what should be legal, and to turn minor crimes into major ones deserving of harsher punishment. Or maybe even as justification to gun down a civilian on sight. (Law enforcement officers do that a lot here in the States.)
Terrorist went from a kind of violent criminal, to a generic derisive designation to essentially a joke. And now it is an ambiguous label by which to persecute political enemies of the regime.
The Roberts court is not consistent to precedent (even in regards to its own prior rulings) nor to any legal theory but only what serves a specific (far-right, pro-Republican, white Christian nationalist, corporation-serving) ideology.
We've already seen the way SCOTUS has dismantled the fourth and fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States. And we've seen how the Roberts court has nullified the VRA.
It can apply the same methods to dismantle the rest of the Constitution, particularly the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth and nineteenth amendments.
And left alone unhindered to continue its work without consequences, I have no doubt it will.
The White Christian Nationalism movement in the US isn't restricted to evangelical protestants, and certainly doesn't include all of a given denomination.
Case in point, the six far right justices on the US Supreme Court, all of whom are Catholic, are White Christian Nationalist, and who rule aligned with MAGA and Trump a large majority of the time. Also, all of whom are Federalist Society members.
Note that Justice Sotomayor is Catholic and is not White Christian Nationalist, and not a member of the Federalist Society.
So I wonder where the SCOTUS MAGA six brand of Catholicism charts compared to J. D. Vance's brand of Catholicism (or for that matter, Peter Theil's brand of Catholicism (Given Vance is really just a Thiel Minime.)
Nobody voted for this specific result, aside from 6 people in black robes.
An awful lot of people voted for the larger package of which this is a component. It's like saying nobody buys the car for its doorlock mechanisms. And yet, they bought the car.
This is a good place to link the Behind The Bastards two-parter on Clarence Thomas. (on YouTube: Part One, Part Two)
Justice Thomas is a creepy, creepy man, and does so love his billionaire masters.
Operation Greif
I'm reminded of the term Shibboleth, a term or catch phrase that is pronounced differently by separate groups of people. In the bible, the word was used to differentiate Ephraimites from Gileadites, though -- fun fact -- was also sometimes used in WWII to root out German spies, since the th-sound is not native to German. I'm reminded too of the chaos caused in Operation Greif (not to be confused with grief), a German commando operation during the Battle of the Bulge in which German troopers versed in American English donned American uniforms. So prepared their objective was to get behind Allied lines, cause confusion and eventually capture bridges intact over the Meuse river. The American forces soon caught on, and got really paranoid about spies in their midst. Checkpoints bogged down the movement of Allied forces, and future psyops strategists took notes. At the checkpoints, the MPs would ask trivia questions about American culture: Who won the 1940 world series? What team plays at Wrigley Field? Who is Mickey Mouse's Girlfriend? It didn't work very well. The questions were made up ad hoc, and plenty of American soldiers didn't know either, and they'd be confined until their identity was verified later. But a lot of the disguised German commandos were caught. But we're in a similar time, in which some questions just cannot be answered correctly by the infiltrators: Who won the 2020 Presidential Election? Was the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool Sabotaged? What caused the destruction of the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab Iran, February 28, 2026? And I suspect that we'll be able to assemble a range of shibboleth questions like these, that we can ask an LLM in order to determine its disposition regarding facts... ...if it's not obvious when the AI calls itself Mechahitler
Rodney King
Maybe I’m older than you are, because I could’ve said the same about Rodney King. That’s the first in my memory, but others can probably point out that it was not the first. Oh, I remember Rodney King. But in that case, the footage was still controlled by news agencies. The Ferguson unrest was streamed live from independent cameras on the ground. What we saw wasn't edited and it shattered a lot more illusions of what the police are about.
Red v. Blue
The current standard of Red = Republican / Blue = Democrat has only been consistent since the new century. I remember in 1980 the map turning blue for Reagan! and in 1988 Blue was still the color for George H. W. Bush. So yeah, the parties switched positions and the colors also changed.
Trump shoulders a lot of the blame.
It's been a point of shame to me that the president of my country engages in childish bullying behavior like giving opponents derisive eponyms, insulting press correspondents or terms like Dumocrats. But I am still of the belief elected officials should selected from our best and brightest, and not from narcissistic confidence shysters. Much the way that Trump's racism lends permission to others to also be racist, I think that Trump's low-brow manner invites others to adapt the same sort of parlance. When someone does this, it makes me more skeptical of them, much the way that misspellings or poor grammar will, (more so, since grammatical errors, I can presume, are unintentional. Infantile prose takes will.) And I assume that others have the same reaction.
Ideological propaganda
AI accuracy sounds like it is about making sure AI responses are consistent with known facts and science. AI shouldn't be woke sounds like it is about making sure AI responses are consistent with party ideology (state ideology when it is captured by the party.) Essentially, the two standards are going to disagree on certain emperor has no clothes issues, like whether Biden won the popular vote and the electoral vote or weather Trump really won the election as according to the Stop The Steal fringe hypothesis. We have specific anti-woke assertions that run contrary to facts. And therefore we have facts that are woke.
Policing during Trump 2.0
“alleged violence” means SWAT, by your proposed standard. Currently, ICE murdering people is what we have in its place. Unlike SWAT or common precincts, ICE is a paramilitary loyal to the current regime, not beholden to law or the Constitution of the United States. It's Stephen Miller's personal army. In this era, there really is nothing for the policing crisis. We're occupied by ICE, and crime is less about behavior and more about identity, but this was the case for minority neighborhoods long before Trump. I wonder if a Résistance is going to form the way it did when, in German occupied France, the occupying Nazis couldn't help themselves but brutalize the civil population. As of the 2014 killing of Michael Brown and the following Ferguson Unrest, it's become public knowledge that the militarization and brutality of law enforcement in the US has become untenable. (Police weren't gentler before that, but in Ferguson there were a lot of independent cameras on the ground streaming events as they happened. The public got to see what it looks like when the police are militarized and they have no respect for the neighborhood they're in.) In 2020 during the George Floyd protests, there were calls to defund the police and abolish ICE. We're experiencing today the consequences of our failure to use collective power to pressure the states for reconstruction of the police state into something that actually serves the public. Now that ICE is nothing short of a rogue department serving a captured executive, is funded more than national militaries, and has been able to murder, abduct and torture people without due process and without oversight or accountability, maybe, maybe, once we get out of this fine mess, we'll actually do something about the unchecked police state.
Only poor people get screwed.
If there are no public defenders, then those who can afford defense have a disproportionate advantage. In fact, you don't need to get rid of them. In every county in every state, public defenders are grossly underpaid and understaffed, and so poor people are wrongfully convicted at a far higher rate than those who can afford to retain their own defense. Since the middle class is becoming vanishingly small, it means most of us are being denied fair and equal access to justice. Now, if rich people were required to also rely on public defenders or pro se, and then public defense was nonexistent or underfunded, then one could argue protection was equal. And in the current era, rich people also have the option to bribe federal officials, say the DoJ to drop the case, or President Trump to pardon them. It's expensive but some people are really outrageously wealthy.
Violent situations in progress
It does raise the question, how often does law enforcement respond to a violent situation in progress? I mean outside of Hollywood police procedurals? Most of what we hear about are active gunmen? Do those not warrant overwhelming force by a disciplined municipal SWAT unit? Most of what we hear about in the Trump 2.0 is alleged violence from protestors. In contrast, how often do police show up post hoc? In those cases, we may need paramedics and hazard control, and then investigators. When it comes to non-violent crime, we need non-violent civil officers. Law enforcement as it currently stands only adds more risk of the incident escalating into violence. Usually, it is law enforcement who opens hostilities (and then lies about it in court).
"Police have no duty to protect people"
While not arguing to the contrary, it raises the question why we have them at all. Instead we should just have an investigative bureau to root out those who have committed crimes, and the US Marshall service can make arrests once a case is ironclad. In the meantime, that leaves a gap where we need responders to handle crises. Let's fill that with paramedics and crisis counselors. If it's a hazard, the fire department (or other hazard cleanup) responds. And if it's a violent situation in progress, we can go straight to SWAT. There. Now our responders have a duty to serve the public.
Maybe the courts can take a page from the slush fund case, and sanction the lawyers who would dare engage in what is weaponization of the legal process. I keep hearing lawyers are supposed to adhere to a code of ethics as officers of the court. It's gotten so bad that the DoJ and DHS have both lost presumption of regularity; courts now presume in advance they are going to lie.
The worst of the worst
If you have to engage in abductions by secret police; if you have to wear masks to conceal the identities of your agents if you have to use private torture prisons that defy inspection mandates; if you have to refuse due process to your victims; if you have to invade their homes without a warrant; if you have to defy regulations such as failing to wear identifying attire and body cameras if you have to seize them arbitrarily based on the color of their skin (and ignoring their authorization papers) if you have to shoot people arbitrarily and with impunity in the meantime,... ...then maybe you are the worst of the worst, and your country is the shithole country. (And maybe that is why people are leaving the US faster than they're coming in. And it's our best and brightest who are emigrating to elsewhere.)
MAGA-cooked Supreme Court
especially when our Supreme Court is at least 50% MAGA-cooked It's 2/3rds cooked or 66%. Every last one of the far-right supermajority is a member of the Federalist Society, a Catholic Christian nationalist and defies consistency of legal theory to push the MAGA ideological agenda.
Some might say that, but they'd be wrong.
I look forward to everyone saying this was all just a hiccup in the country’s history and everyone really just overreacted to it. There is a lot of wishful thinking that this is somehow not as bad as the German Reich even though we're seeing a lot of the same events that run when the ultra-wealthy sponsor a tin-pot dictator to rule with an iron fist. There are some differences. For one, we have better information distribution, which goes both ways. When ICE shoots someone, or when a hospital gets bombed in Palestine, video of it hits the internet in minutes and is distributed worldwide in hours. (I suspect the motivation behind the wave of age-verification is partly to discourage or at least track who is watching this kind of content.) But then right-wing propaganda has been honed to effectively manipulate the general population. The combination of fear, hatred, culture-war ideology and red-pill conspiracy theories that is offered by FOX News encourages viewers to silo themselves so they only get their information from FOX and reject conflicting content from other sources. We've seen how this formula has informed the President, US Senators and Supreme Court Justices in their policymaking, how FOX News opinion is regurgitated verbatim in the words and arguments of elected officials. Then there's the problem that the ultra-wealthy are really rich. The top three hundred-ish wealthiest persons have a larger share of the global wealth than ever before in history. (One estimate is four times that of the gilded age), and they seem determined to do anything necessary to continue to accumulate more. Once they're done wrecking the United States, they'll still have the means capture and exploit the rest of the industrialized world. Europe has been softened by decades of neoliberalism and is already seeing far-right movements get purchase. The UK is where we were in 2015, one charismatic strongman away from putting on a Reich all its own. At this point, the US recovering from this as just a hiccup is a remote possibility, but if it were to happen, the culture and policy in the States would have to fundamentally change. Something far more than the New Deal or the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And even if the Democratic party were to, by a stroke of luck, seize power in 2028 (despite all the election tampering and the churning propaganda machine), the establishment Democratic party is too captured by business interests and is too far right wing, and will be content to wait for the wealth-sponsored Republican juggernaut to rally and take over again. I'd love to be proven wrong, though, and there are some historians and history buffs online who think the people of the US will rise to the occasion after all before the water runs out. For now, though, things look bleak.
No responsibility is the new masculinity
It’s truly astounding how this MAGA administration appears to be fundamentally allergic to ever taking responsibility for anything. Trump is leading by example from the top down. There are countless examples of him refusing to take responsibility for the consequences (we all suffer) for his unilateral decisions. I hypothesize this is the new masculinity, with examples like Josh Hokit disparaging Michelle Obama at the UFC fight at the White House, or Trump intervening with FIFA regarding the red card and one-game suspension of Folarin Balogun. Similar to conspicuous consumption of the gilded age, the arbitrary and capricious discharge of strength, the open abuse of power is intended to demonstrate a man is beyond the reach of consequences, or does not care what consequences occur. I suspect (but do not know) that self-ascribed guardians of masculinity such as Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Mat Walsh and Bill O'Reilly would at least see this as the natural progression of the expression of manhood they have asserted for the last decade.
Researching time travel
You know you've really hit the time travel jackpot when future you appears to try to stop you, and another future you tries to stop them from stopping you.
"Terrorist" as a perjorative
Sherman, set the Wayback machine to February 1, 2016, I was writing about how Jason Leopold was labeled a FOIA Terrorist. Leopold was insisting that his FOIA requests be actually honored and fulfilled, and some conservative officials didn't like that, nor the notion of there being investigative checks on government. Leopold wore the epithet with pride. I also noted the recent incident of Ahmed Mohamed in September, 2015, who, fourteen years old at the time, brought a science project, a digital countdown clock, to school and turned it on. Because it was a brown Muslim boy with a countdown timer, the alleged adults in the room decided he was a terrorist with a bomb. Mohamed found himself separated from parents, guardians and legal representation, booked by law enforcement and ended up in juvie before the hullabaloo was sorted out, because he was brown and possessed a digital timer he built, himself. And so by the time Leopold was being branded as a Tango, I submitted that the term terrorist had long escaped its meaning as a criminal seeking to use violence to further a sociopolitical agenda and had turned into a blanket derisive: Terrorist was anything that a conservative reactionary doesn't like. Kinda like gay in the eighties. Kinda like woke in the mid 2020s. The problem is, now there are captured judicial and paramilitary agencies that serve the ideological whims of Donald Trump, his regime and the MAGA movement. Now there are state agents, essentially hired goons, to take the term terrorist (and Antifa) seriously, specifically to turn noncooperation, civil disobedience and even legal protest into a dissident-gang-related conspiracy, to criminalize what should be legal, and to turn minor crimes into major ones deserving of harsher punishment. Or maybe even as justification to gun down a civilian on sight. (Law enforcement officers do that a lot here in the States.) Terrorist went from a kind of violent criminal, to a generic derisive designation to essentially a joke. And now it is an ambiguous label by which to persecute political enemies of the regime.
We can't trust this court. It shows no consistency.
The Roberts court is not consistent to precedent (even in regards to its own prior rulings) nor to any legal theory but only what serves a specific (far-right, pro-Republican, white Christian nationalist, corporation-serving) ideology. We've already seen the way SCOTUS has dismantled the fourth and fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States. And we've seen how the Roberts court has nullified the VRA. It can apply the same methods to dismantle the rest of the Constitution, particularly the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth and nineteenth amendments. And left alone unhindered to continue its work without consequences, I have no doubt it will.
I wonder if there's an intersection...
The White Christian Nationalism movement in the US isn't restricted to evangelical protestants, and certainly doesn't include all of a given denomination. Case in point, the six far right justices on the US Supreme Court, all of whom are Catholic, are White Christian Nationalist, and who rule aligned with MAGA and Trump a large majority of the time. Also, all of whom are Federalist Society members. Note that Justice Sotomayor is Catholic and is not White Christian Nationalist, and not a member of the Federalist Society. So I wonder where the SCOTUS MAGA six brand of Catholicism charts compared to J. D. Vance's brand of Catholicism (or for that matter, Peter Theil's brand of Catholicism (Given Vance is really just a Thiel Minime.)
"Voted for this specific result"
Nobody voted for this specific result, aside from 6 people in black robes. An awful lot of people voted for the larger package of which this is a component. It's like saying nobody buys the car for its doorlock mechanisms. And yet, they bought the car.
For everyones information and edification
This is a good place to link the Behind The Bastards two-parter on Clarence Thomas. (on YouTube: Part One, Part Two) Justice Thomas is a creepy, creepy man, and does so love his billionaire masters.