- Amanda Marcotte on how the Supreme Court has been captured by far-right conspiracy theories;
- How the simplest explanation for what’s going on, on several fronts, is basic white supremacy;
- About Russell Vought;
- Trump’s morality and his rationale for accepting Afrikaner “refugees”.
Once again: ideology vs. reality.
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 26 May 2025: “A court captured by far-right conspiracy theories”: How the GOP drove the Supreme Court off a cliff, subtitled “In her new book ‘Lawless,’ law professor Leah Litman chronicles the collapse of reason at the highest court”
An interview, with this intro by Marcotte:
“Strict Scrutiny” co-host Leah Litman has the profile of a person who, in previous eras, would seem like a defender of the Supreme Court. She’s a law professor at the University of Michigan and once worked as a law clerk for former Justice Anthony Kennedy. In recent years, she’s become one of the most outspoken critics of how the current iteration of the nation’s highest court has abandoned good faith readings of the law, basic legal reasoning, and even facts in pursuit of a far-right agenda. In her new book, “Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes,” Litman chronicles the decline of this once-venerated institution. She spoke with Salon about her book and how recent cases suggest the court is getting even more unhinged in this second Donald Trump administration.
They discuss the case in which Sam Alito felt he was oppressed by a children’s book called UNCLE BOBBY’S WEDDING. We mentioned this back on April 23rd.
Litman:
I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. The justices keep providing me with so much content and so much material after I finished the manuscript. It perfectly reflects this notion of conservative grievance: the idea that social conservatives, religious conservatives, all the core parts of the Republican constituency, are the real victims. And there’s no discrimination except against white evangelical Christians. That worldview was on display.
…
During the same oral argument, you had Neil Gorsuch insisting that the book “Pride Puppy” involved a sex worker who was into bondage. If you read the book, there is a woman wearing a leather jacket, and she’s at a Pride parade. Neil Gorsuch took from that and insisted, no, the book actually involves bondage and sex workers.
They are addled by their prejudices.
The Supreme Court has been running on these fast and loose characterizations of the facts for a while. We all can have a good laugh at the idea that “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding” is a personal attack on people who don’t believe in marriage equality. But the uncomfortable reality is that a conspiracy theory-laden universe is in full swing at the Supreme Court. It’s a court captured by far-right conspiracy theories. That worldview interferes with their assessment of the law, their assessment of the facts, and their ability to engage with reality.
Is this about the Christian nationalist agenda? Or is it larger than that?
I think it is larger than that. I agree that one of the ideas they are most committed to is that conservative Christians are the victims of a society that doesn’t share their views. But they are also very committed to the idea that white conservatives accused of racial discrimination are very put upon. That idea has inflected a lot of their jurisprudence on voting rights. This term, they are hearing another Voting Rights Act case that asks them to say it’s actually unconstitutional racial discrimination for states to try to ensure that black voters are represented in districting. It’s super transparent in the cases of religion, but it’s definitely present in other areas of law as well.
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Sometimes these things are simpler than the lawyers make them out to be. In the past few days, we’ve had a Supreme Court hearing on birthright citizenship, and we’ve had Afrikaner “refugees” welcomed into the United States, whose views sound just like MAGA. The simple underlying truth is that white people are refugees and should be welcomed into the country, while brown people are illegal immigrants or criminals or terrorists and should be deported, without due process. It’s a white supremacist agenda.
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Russell Vought. What is his agenda exactly? It seems that a democracy with separation of powers is interfering with his authoritarian goals. Which happen to include Christian nationalist goals.
The Atlantic, McKay Coppins, 16 May 2025: The Visionary of Trump 2.0, subtitled “Russell Vought is advancing a radical ideological project decades in the making.”
Opening para’s:
The opening act of Donald Trump’s second term was defined by the theatrical dismantling of much of the federal government by Elon Musk and his group of tech-savvy demolitionists. Everywhere you looked in those first 100 days, it seemed, Musk’s prestidigitation was on display. Look there—it’s Elon in a black MAGA hat waving around a chain saw onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Look here—it’s Elon introducing Fox News viewers to a teenage software engineer nicknamed “Big Balls” whom he’d hired to help slash the government. The performance had a certain improvised quality—pink slips dispersed and then hastily withdrawn, entire agencies mothballed overnight—and after a while, it started to feel like a torqued-up sequel to Trump’s first term: governance replaced by chaos and trolling.
But that version of the story misses a key character: Russell Vought.
Then:
Vought’s agenda includes shrinking the government, but it goes deeper than that. His vision of state power would effectively reject a century of jurisprudence and unravel the modern federal bureaucracy as we know it. A devotee of the so-called unitary executive theory, he wants to see the civil service gutted and repopulated with presidential loyalists, independent federal agencies politicized or eliminated, and absolute control of the executive branch concentrated in the Oval Office.
It’s no surprise that
He grew up in Trumbull, Connecticut, with a devout family who sent him to a private Christian school and Bible camp in the summers.
And:
Vought has expressed pride in his record of pushing boundaries in ways that unsettle less dogmatic Republicans. Whereas many religious conservatives distance themselves from the “Christian nationalist” label, Vought wears it proudly. At a Heritage event, he sarcastically derided some of the Cabinet officials in Trump’s first term, whom he described as “a bunch of people around him who were constantly sitting on eggs and saying, Oh my gosh, he’s getting me to violate the law.”
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What is the Trump’s morality? A pointless question; he has no morality beyond self-interest. This is about the Afrikaner “refugees.”
Washington Post, Dana Milbank, 16 May 2025: This is what happens when we have a morally lost president, subtitled “What’s needed more than anything at this moment is to make our leaders moral again.”
The Trump administration showed the world its true colors this week. Or, more accurately, its true color.
The president has halted the admission of refugees, including those who helped the U.S. military in Afghanistan and those fleeing war in Sudan and Congo. But he has made one exception: White South Africans.
With details. In fact:
But under the country’s “expropriation” law, no land has actually been taken from the Afrikaners, who are 7 percent of the population but own most of South Africa’s farmland. They face high levels of violence, but Black South Africans face even higher levels in what has been one of the world’s most violent countries for some time.
It’s hard to see this refugee policy, and the exception for Afrikaners, as anything but an assertion of white supremacy.
