This is from three days ago.
The Atlantic, Adam Serwer, 27 Jun 2026: The Court That Will Believe Absolutely Anything Is ‘Race-Neutral’, subtitled “The majority gives Trump yet more license to discriminate.”
Trump-administration officials have made no secret of their desire to purge the United States of nonwhite immigrants. Donald Trump has declared, “If you import The Third World, you become The Third World,” a common refrain repeated by his advisers. Trump has also said that immigrants have “bad genes,” that they are genetically predisposed to crime, and that they are “poisoning the blood of our country”—coming, as they are, “from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”
And yet conservatives claim to worship the Constitution and the Declaration, which come with phrases like “all men are created equal,” which even taken figuratively, they clearly do not believe.
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This is from yesterday.
Robert Reich, 29 Jun 2026: The Court Sides With Dictatorship — and Chaos, subtitled “Today’s ruling is even more disastrous than people realize”
Earlier today, the Supreme Court declared war on U.S. democracy. It also declared war, basically, on modern society, on everything it takes to function in the 21st century. And I’m not sure that people understand that yet.
This is about Trump being allowed to fire officials in government agencies whenever he likes.
We live in a complicated world, a world of technology, where there are all kinds of spillovers, all kinds of ways in which it’s important that there be well-established ground rules. If you’re a business, take the example of medicines and foodstuffs, where we have an FDA, Federal Drug Administration, that is charged with ensuring that products that people consume are safe. We do that for very good reason. We know that not just that that there have been examples, historically, of products that were foods, medicines that were not at all safe, but also that people want some assurance.
The fact that something has been FDA approved is a bit of a warranty, that it might turn out to be very harmful, but probably not. Businesses that want to invest in developing stuff need to know that there are some ground rules that determine what they can and cannot sell.
Now imagine that all these decisions are made by political appointees who are loyalists to the president, who basically do whatever the president wants, whatever the people around the president want.
Because Trump and his ilk want to remove all government oversight on business people, whose number one job is making lots and lots of money. And everyone wishes they can become wealthy, too.
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Then today, the 14th Amendment survived, but only barely.
Robert Reich, today: Born in the U.S.A., subtitled “The Supreme Court did the right thing, but four justices are dangerously off their rockers”
Today, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s Day One executive order canceling the right to birthright citizenship. Good. That executive order declared that children born in the U.S. would not be considered citizens if their parents were living in the country illegally or were visiting the country on temporary visas.
… Trump and his Solicitor General, who argued this case before the Court, also said that narrowing birthright citizenship was necessary to prevent “birth tourism”—the practice of immigrants coming to the U.S. to give birth here and obtain citizenship for their child.
… What I find troubling is that the decision was 5 to 4 rather than unanimous or nearly so, as it should have been.
Only five of the nine justice ruled against Trump on constitutional grounds. Brett Kavanaugh dissented on statutory grounds; while agreeing that Trump’s executive order was unlawful, he argued that the court should have resolved the case under federal immigration law rather than the Constitution.
The Court’s three most conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito — dissented. Thomas wrote for the group: “The Court adds to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.”
Pure and utter claptrap.
Thomas, Gorsuch, and Alito are so far to the right of America that their views on this case and other matters should be presumed bonkers. Yet what’s particularly sobering is that Trump is only one justice away from having a Supreme Court majority that would have gone his way on this absurd reading of the 14th Amendment.
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The core of the conservative argument is distaste for foreigners, especially brown ones. It couldn’t be more obvious. WWJD? Here’s a few headlines from my favorite aggregate site, JMG, all today.
- Heritage Foundation: Birthright Ruling Is “Tremendous Betrayal And We Will Lead Fight To Correct This Error”
- Vance: Welcoming Immigrants, Backing LGBTQ Rights, And Believing Climate Change Exists Is Anti-Catholic (Then this is a big problem with Catholicism)
- GOP Bills Would Ban “Pregnant Aliens” From Country
- MAGA Screams Over Birthright Citizenship Ruling
- Johnson Moans When Told Of Birthright Ruling [VIDEO]
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Similarly,
The Bulwark, yesterday: Yes, the Cuts to USAID Have Killed, subtitled “Elon Musk dismisses the human toll of the Trump administration’s gutting U.S. foreign aid—but it’s real and it’s measurable.”
But Musk is wrong. Many people, including many children, have died as a direct result of the cuts he and his DOGE team made to USAID. And the number of deaths no longer being prevented by the agency will only grow.
Because to Musk, those people are unreal. They don’t exist. Not when helping them might undercut, ever so slightly, the wealth of billionaires like him.
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Briefly noted.
- Salon, Amanda Marcotte, yesterday: “Nuclear Family Month” shows that MAGA is still coming for same-sex marriage, subtitled: “Red state anti-Pride proclamations demonize most straight people along LGBTQ folks”
- Once again: tribal mentality. To expand the tribe, demonize any activity that does not advance reproduction. It might have made sense once, thousands of years ago.
- Washington Post, Max Boot, yesterday: Pete Hegseth’s purges claim one of the military’s superstars, subtitled “Gen. Christopher Donahue heads into early retirement as the defense secretary seeks to root out MAGA disloyalty.”
- Tribalism: It’s all about loyalty, not competence or experience.
- Washington Post, Leonard Downie Jr., today: The ‘deep state’ didn’t take down Nixon. But why did Vance say it did?, subtitled “Courts, Congress and the press drove Watergate. And such a scandal could happen again.”
- There was no such concept as the “deep state” in the 1970s; there was the rule of law. Nixon broke laws. Currently “Deep State” is a MAGA bogeyman to blame for anything they don’t understand.
- If there’s any truth behind Vance’s claim… it’s because current Republican scandals far outnumber and outweigh what happened with Nixon. This is not a point on their side.
More from JMG.
- Leavitt: Vote For Trump To Stop “Communist” Dems
- Paranoid idiot.
- Demented Senior: I Have “Highest Poll Numbers Ever”
- Delusional idiot.
The more I see stories like this, the more I try to self-evaluate and wonder, am I in some of bubble where *very rare* instances of delusions like the above come disproportionally to my attention? That they don’t really reflect a large portion of the US population?
But then, but then… Trump did win the last election. Apparently.
