Category Archives: Nazis

The Madness of President Project 2025

Mr. Trump’s agitated, increasingly irrational dementia doesn’t get 1% of the media attention former president Joe Biden’s occasional gaffes, stumbles, age-related hesitations still get.

It’s as if by his longtime assertion of brash incoherence Trump has inoculated himself, perhaps with one of Dr. Brainworm’s non-harmful, anti-scientific health injections, against anyone questioning even the most insane things he says or does. It’s just Trump being himself. Take two Tylenol and call me in the morning, when you have autism.

Heather Cox Richardson, American historian writing for future historians, records some of the latest insane Trump actions, posts and pronouncements, in her most recent Letter from an American. If you don’t subscribe to her free nightly email, you really should, her perspective is super well-informed and often illustrated with fascinating historical parallels. She is also a brilliant writer. Here’s the last paragraph of last night’s impressive inventory of floridly insane actions by the Commander-in-Chief:

Late this afternoon, Trump praised his remodeling of the Oval Office to include copious gold fixtures, some of which match polyurethane appliqué available from the home improvement store Home Depot. On social media, Trump posted: “Some of the highest quality 24 Karat Gold used in the Oval Office and Cabinet Room of the White House. Foreign Leaders, and everyone else, ‘freak out’ when they see the quality and beauty. Best Oval Office ever, in terms of success and look!!! President DJT”

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Innocuous enough, out of context, perhaps, a vain compulsive old liar bragging about his impeccable 24 karat taste. But read along with everything else this increasingly mad, impulsive, vindictive man has done the last few days, weeks, months and years and the many objectively false things he repeatedly, angrily insists are true, it sends a chill up the old spine.

The good news, such as it is, is that in order to remain the smartest man in the room (always very important to Trump, as he has said, in moments of candor) he’s had to surround himself with fools and spinelessly ambitious people willing to meekly perform being even stupider than old Stupid Is As Stupid Does. To me, that collection of loyal incompetents is one of our greatest advantages in this perilous moment.

The cream of the wealthiest 1% who are dying for a permanent one party government run by a corrupt, pliable authoritarian, to protect their vast, inheritable privileges in perpetuity and screw everybody else, have a very problematic front man for their Project 2025 in America’s President Project 2025.

Stark Raving Mad

Heather Cox Richardson, not AI, describes the speech President Project 2025 delivered at the UN last week:

Trump’s speech went on to depict a fantasy world in which he had single-handedly saved the world. He claimed to have forged peace on two continents during his first term but said that “era of calm and stability gave way to one of the great crises of our time.” He then turned to the United States, claiming that “four years of weakness, lawlessness, and radicalism under the last administration delivered our nation into a repeated set of disasters. One year ago,” he said, “our country was in deep trouble, but today, just eight months into my administration, we are the hottest country anywhere in the world and there is no other country even close. America is blessed with the strongest economy, the strongest borders, the strongest military, the strongest friendships, and the strongest spirit of any nation on the face of the earth.”

And that was the frame for the next hour of rambling boasts and insults.

Trump claimed that he had reversed the “economic calamity” left by former president Joe Biden. He had brought down costs and inflation, he said, and economic growth and manufacturing were both booming. He claimed that in his four years, Biden had attracted less than $1 trillion in investment while he had secured $17 trillion. Tax cuts and deregulation had, he said, made the U.S. “the best country on earth to do business.”

“In my first term, I built the greatest economy in the history of the world,” he said. “We had the best economy ever, history of the world, and I’m doing the same thing again, but this time it’s actually much bigger and even better. The numbers far surpass my record-setting first term.”

Trump claimed: “On the world stage, America is respected again like it has never been respected before. You think about two years ago, three years ago, four years ago, or one year ago, we were a laughingstock all over the world.

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Take courage, citizens

An insane bully has crippled one of our two political parties, rendered it a mere flapping appendage to his overbearing will.  The incoherence of the crazed leader is fervently embraced by his most ambitious and ardent followers, everybody else in the party simply does his bidding, out of fear of his rage.

He orders criminal acts because the Supreme Court already told him, the 6-3 winner of Trump v. US, that he’s allowed to do whatever crimes he wants as much as he wants and plus he “has his Article II” and no pardon, even if he sells it openly for $10,000,000, can ever be challenged in court  (see Trump v. US).

In spite of all the long-time professional prosecutors at the Department of Justice reporting that there is no righteous case to be brought against James Comey, (and others [1]) leading to the resignation (firing according to Trump) of President Project 2025’s own recent appointee who refused to bring this legally infirm indictment, he will appoint somebody, totally unqualified, to do what he wants them to do and they will do it.  With the cringing blessing of the righteous, blonde attorney general, Pamela Jo Bondi.

So James Comey is indicted the other day on two counts stemming from the same supposedly lying sentence, elicited by supreme weasel Raphael “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz a former debating champion.  The DOJ’s inspector general has already found Comey’s statement to have been truthful. Cruz tried to lay a clever lawyerly trap, during Trump’s first administration, but it didn’t work.  Still, it is good enough for Trump’s latest inexperienced Acting State Attorney. That single sentence of claimed perjury is the sum and substance of two serious, and extremely flimsy, felony counts against James Comey with a penalty of up to 25 years in prison. Yer typical Trump case.

Watch Lawrence O’Donnell explain that all to you in the first minute or two. Then watch James Comey address the country to express his resistance to tyranny and his confidence in the American system of justice and the strength of our democracy. 

Let it add a little bit of steel to your spine during these nerve-wracking days, (talk about the times that try men’s souls.) Let it be a tonic like that top rated Jimmy Kimmel monologue, like all acts of courage and clarity during a time of terror, cowardice and incoherence.

Woof, woof…grrrr!!!!

They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets!

[1] or NY Attorney General Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff, Fed governor Lisa Cook, NJ  Representative Lamonica McGiver, or anyone else who catches the Orange Polyp’s evil eye.

Nothing to see here! Witch hunt!

Would I be out of line, on the day thousands of the faithful are lining up for a mega-MAGA memorial service for slain MAGA icon Charlie Kirk, to note that these accidentally publicly divulged messages to his “apolitical” Attorney General come off as the ravings of an even whinier version of history’s own Mr. Hitler?

I hasten to add, to be scrupulously fair, that Bill Clinton got off a plane to speak, secretly, with Obama’s US Attorney General while his wife was a candidate trying to illegally steal the US election for president in 2016 after conspiring with George Soros!

One can’t be too careful these days.

Attempted fascist seizure of the FCC, a shock? Censorship is a Nazi’s dream

Many of the richest, most pathologically greedy white men in the world (and their corporate alter egos) have an irresistible impulse to control everything.  This is no conspiracy theory, just look around at what these self-interest blinded entities are doing.   One of the world’s most lucrative entities, Disney and its affiliated corporate “persons”, is vying to become number one (presumably tired of smelling like number two) planning to consolidate more power, wealth and influence by buying another major television network group.   They need Trump’s MAGA-headed FCC (president gets to pick the chairman) to approve their purchase of a huge swath of ABC — employer of nightly Trump exposer Jimmy Kimmel — or Nexstar, or some combination of corporate properties.  

It was easy for Trump’s FCC chair, a pugnaciously partisan chap named Brendan Carr, to lean on the morally flexible corporate “person” who owns Kimmel’s contract, during a far-right podcast, to immediately fire Jimmy Kimmel because, “nice little monopoly you’re trying to build here, shame if something happened to it…” Not long ago Carr tweeted his true beliefs about the First Amendment (under the Biden tyranny, one supposes) and the proper role of the FCC:

Trump and his mouthpieces say if you speak ill of the radical rightwing movement that included both the martyred Charlie Kirk and his murderer, you risk your livelihood, if not your kneecaps and your nose. Unlike in a defamation case, the truth of your statements, or the ones you quote, is no defense against the charge of illegal opinions. What is best for the ever more feeble president’s delicate ego is the only consideration. Desperate men do desperate things in desperate times. What’s the world coming to when Cucker Carlson begins speaking common sense truth?

During his monologue on Monday’s show, Kimmel said: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half staff which got some criticism but on a human level you can see how hard the president is taking this.”. . .

. . .Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker posted: “This is an attack on free speech and cannot be allowed to stand. All elected officials need to speak up and push back on this undemocratic act.” He pointed out that in 2023, Brendan Carr [1 — my footnote] himself posted: “Free speech is…the check on government control. That is why censorship is the authoritarian’s dream.” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) warned of a coming campaign to “use the murder of Charlie Kirk as a pretext to use the power of the White House to wipe out Trump’s critics and his political opponents.”

. . .On CNN, conservative pundit David Frum called it “state repression.” On his show, right-wing activist Tucker Carlson said: “[I]f they can tell you what to say, they’re telling you what to think. There is nothing they can’t do to you because they don’t consider you human…. A free man has a right to say what he believes.”

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Dan Rather wrote a very cogent explanation of the corporate side of this hideous “free market” canning of a popular comedian for poking fun at an increasingly unpopular wannabe dictator. There is already a lot of blowback on this fascistic over-reach, even Lyin’ Ted Cruz denounced the unethical, illegal, unconstitutional quid pro quo move as a mafia-style shakedown (see following post).

Trump clearly believes in free speech only for himself and those debased enough to publicly kiss his crusty ring. Whatever else you want to call the recently martyred Charlie Kirk, he was not actually a champion of free speech or open debate. He was a well-financed bully, who franchised his billionaire-funded MAGA youth movement on 800 college campuses. He often used the Bible, and his take on Christ’s teachings, to figuratively whack people in the head during his staged free speech cage matches. “Read Leviticus 19,” an Old Testament section he liked to cite to shut his critics’ mouths. Note Mr. Kirk’s flagrant violation of these commands of his white, Christian God, from Leviticus 19:

16 “‘Do not go about spreading slander among your people.

“‘Do not do anything that endangers your neighbor’s life. I am the Lord.

18 “‘Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.

33 “‘When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. 34 The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.

Of course, any devil with access to the internet can quote scripture — and cut and paste it. Just because Kirk slandered accomplished, brilliant Black women as lacking “mental processing power”, preached that gun murders were an acceptable, prudent price for the freedom to own guns, advocated for public, televised executions of the president’s enemies and was, to put it tenderly, no friend of foreigners residing among us, does not make him … uh, does not, he wasn’t… not a hypocrite. He was not NOT a hypocrite is all I’m saying.

His death was horrible and literally nobody deserves to die that way, but to call him a Christian martyr whose death demands national mourning and not a bad word said against the self-made millionaire White Christian Nationalist is false. 

“‘Do not lie.

“‘Do not deceive one another.

12 “‘Do not swear falsely by my name and so profane the name of your God. I am the Lord.

Leviticus 19.

Here’s Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, definitively nailing the evil, mean-spirited, nasty, heartless, catty, possibly violent, definitely radical (and comedic) comments that got Jimmy Kimmel fired… in Kimmel’s own explosive, obscene words.

[1] Brendan Carr, chairman of the FCC, is a Trump-appointed Trump ass licker. Here’s his application to president-elect Trump, a la Bill Barr’s.

Heather:

On the podcast of right-wing influencer Benny Johnson on Wednesday, chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Brendan Carr said that Kimmel’s words were part of a “concerted effort to try to lie to the American people” and that the FCC was “going to have remedies that we can look at.” “Frankly, when you see stuff like this,” he said, “I mean look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Carr explained: “There’s actions we can take on licensed broadcasters. And frankly, I think that it’s really sort of past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney and say…’We’re not gonna run Kimmel anymore…because we licensed broadcasters are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC.'”

The largest operator of ABC affiliates, Nexstar—which needs FCC approval for a $6.2 billion merger—said it would stop airing Kimmel’s show from its stations. Then ABC suspended Kimmel’s show.

Benny Johnson, the podcaster on whose show Carr threatened Kimmel, was one of the influencers Russian state media funded to spread propaganda before the 2024 election. After Kimmel’s suspension, Johnson posted on social media: “We did it for you, Charlie. And we’re just getting started.”

Transactional love

And the temporary triumph of enraged, heedless incoherence marches on. It’s no surprise that the most obsessively greedy in our nation, and their counterparts in foreign nations, would fall in line with a Nazi-like mob boss who promises them even more wealth — or the loss of it, and worse, for the capital crime disobedience to the Leader. A solid 65% of Americans oppose this kind of open tyranny, the percentage is probably much higher in the case of individual Project 2025 policies (e.g., cutting federal funds and closing rural hospitals so MAGA members will die — to give even more to those who already have hundreds, or thousands, of millions).

It is crucial in this sickening moment in our history to keep our equanimity as much as possible. We face a true catastrophe, but it is not a catastrophe until the curtain actually comes down. The constant roaring threats from these irrational, incoherent fascists are not quite the same as them actually being in charge, firmly and finally in control. Their crazed desperation to seize lawless power and put troops on the streets in Anarchist Jurisdictions before our next election tells us the outcome of this battle for America’s future is far from settled.

We must do everything in our power to remain calm, strong, and reasoning, in the face of desperately violent incoherence. We owe ourselves and the future the preservation of conversation, debate and discussion, rather than a centrally run AI based dystopia where only 1% get to thrive and enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Nazi logic, Federalist Society style

There is an argument raging, between Nazi-types (blind, loyal obedience to the needs of an infallible Leader) and those to the left of Nazis over who are the actual Nazis at this perilous moment in history.   Read any history of the Nazi era and you will find not only historical rhymes, but direct one-on-one correlations between the America First movement during Hitler’s time and the one marching for MAGA today.   Here are four:  

1) the Leader is infallible and essential to protection from inhuman enemies; 2) personal loyalty to the Leader is the single most important value in the nation; 3) lies useful to the Leader, especially demonstrable ones, must be repeated with utter conviction, those who call them out angrily demonized and eliminated; 4) the Leader gets to decide who to attack, even kill, and he is always right to do so.

I don’t use the N-word word lightly as a mere insult, it is accurately descriptive of the fascistic regime we are facing now. These Nazis are always in a rage when faced with facts they hate. Check out FBI director Kashyap Patel’s torrent of rage at Adam Schiff, denouncing the senator as a coward and buffoon, for constantly “lying” about Russian electoral interference in 2016 and the Day of Love on January 6, 2021, as Schiff probed into the Trump cover up of the Epstein files and its recent preferential treatment of Epstein’s lying accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell [1].

Nazi logic is instrumental, transactional, designed to beat down your adversary by any means necessary, including inverting cause and effect and lying outright, then indignantly lying about the lie, with rage, more often than not. It is not strictly logic at all, because it is all based on the irrational will of psychopathic leadership whose every crazed word is law, enforced by terror and violence, but Nazi intellectuals will wrap it in a framework that makes it sound, to those unwary, unsophisticated or inclined to the same worldview, irrefutably logical.

Think of John Roberts needing only one lie, that the Senators who voted 98-0 to reaffirm the Voting Rights Act were relying on forty year-old data showing outdated forty year-old racist voting patterns in many states. The rest of his argument (if you lie, as he did, claiming that the Senators hadn’t studied thousands of pages of current voting data at numerous hearings [2]) sounds entirely reasonable. After reading his calm, logical ruling, before you get to the dissent, it seems plausible that the guy’s just calling balls and strikes and fairly ruling on the facts and the law. Check that shit out.

Here comes fellow Federalist Society stalwart Boof Kavanaugh, who denied, during his tantrum laden confirmation hearing, that the “boof” under his photo in the Georgetown Prep yearbook was a reference to having hard alcohol poured into his colon through a tube (it was a reference to his flatulence, he lied, sheepishly), making a particularly incoherent restatement of the demands of justice and the constitution’s Bill of Rights.

Neither, according to this supremely entitled mama’s boy and five other Federalists, is a brown, Spanish speaking or day laboring person’s Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable search, seizure, detention and extrajudicial rendition to foreign countries for the “crime” of displaying traits of a “non-white” culture an “especially weighty legal interest.” Nazi Logic 101.

Notice how Nazi logic twists the question under review: he turns it not into an innocent person’s right to go about their life in peace, protected by the Constitution, but a question of a guilty person using our law to “evade arrest”. Smug motherfucker, too, Boof Kavanaugh.

As the old maxim of justice goes, turned on its head by Nazi logic: better that a thousand innocent people get sent to a dictator’s torture prison, without the due process of a judicial hearing, as required by our laws, than one guilty person avoid their fate!

[1] Ladies and gentlemen, Kashyap Pramod Patel, from earlier today, fed up with being questioned about the concealment of the Epstein files and preferential treatment for sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell (note tepid gavel use by MAGA Senate Judiciary committee chairman, 91 year-old Chuck Grassley, during Patel’s outburst, and his idiotic “both of you be quiet” at the end):

[2] Only when you read Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent (another magnificent piece of clear, precise legal and moral logic) do you realize the audacity of the Roberts majority’s legal sleight of hand. You learn that the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act was passed, after 21 hearings and 15,000 pages of evidence of ongoing discrimination in the states under preclearance, by a vote of 390-33 in the House and, after further debate, 98 to 0 in the Senate. Reading the John Roberts decision you’d have no reason to suspect that President George W. Bush called a news conference to sign the reauthorization into law a week later, as Ginsburg writes (quoting Dubya):

recognizing the need for “further work . . . in the fight against injustice,” and calling the reauthorization “an example of our continued commitment to a united America where every person is valued and treated with dignity and respect.” 

Nepo baby Trump attacks Diversity, Equity and Inclusion hiring by Black president of conservative Virginia university; kills eleven “suspects” on boat in international waters

George Mason University, the home of the Antonin Scalia School of Law, for fuck’s sake, home base for the Heritage Foundation, with professorial chairs endowed by Charles Koch and friends. Black president, Dr. Gregory Washington, is being pressured by Trump’s minions to apologize for comments he made about the importance of diversity hiring in 2020 and 2021. You see, the Civil Rights Act was racist, according to the persecuted U.S. president (and his boiling “brain”, Jewish Nazi Stephen Miller), presumably because it failed to recognize that only rich white men can be true victims of vicious, systemic racism. You can’t make this shit up, as one of Trump’s supremely flexible appointees stated in chastising the school president in a recent official statement:

The Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, Craig Trainor, upped the pressure in a statement last month, saying Dr. Washington “waged a university-wide campaign to implement unlawful D.E.I. policies that intentionally discriminate on the basis of race,” the statement said, adding, “You can’t make this up.”

Read all about it.

Unfortunately, you can’t make this up. However, everywhere you look our low IQ, increasingly demented mad leader is making himself less and less useful to the billionaire tech fascists who put him into power. How do you like this headline?

First another reminder: there is absolutely no connection, beyond years of purely superficial, 100% transactional friendship between Donald Trump and convicted procurer of underaged “prostitutes” Jeffery “Hoax!” Epstein. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Suspected drug smugglers, you get that? I think you’re a drug smuggler, you make me suspicious, I’m a very stable genius, I can kill you and everybody around you, who I also suspect is a drug smuggler. I’m Duterte! [1] I will kill you! This is a turn on Alan Dershowitz’s incoherent defense of the big guy at one of his impeachments (subsequently written into US law by the Koch Six): if the president truly believes he has a good reason to violate the law, he can’t be punished for that.

Note the NY Times characteristic Nazi-tolerant delicacy in framing this obscenity — the issue in their subhead is not, God forbid, that this is clearly the alarming claim of a dangerously unhinged, murderous, dictatorial psychopath. The last guy who did it is in front of the International Criminal Court. We, at the Grey Lady, note that it appears to be problematic to treat criminals (who have been convicted after a trial) as enemy combatants, although, admittedly, the power the Orange polyp claims is to treat suspected criminals (no trial, nothing but my suspicion and your death!) as wartime combatants — and summarily kill them, as he did to eleven people on a boat the other day.

We are living in the shit, boys and girls, and the NY Times is innocently helping. For every important article highlighting grotesque fascistic excess by this desperate regime, we get several mealy mouthed headlines like this, to keep things fair. To not piss off an obviously insane, revenge-twisted maniac to take some kind of profit crushing retaliatory action, one supposes.

[1] Mr Rodrigo Roa Duterte, born on 28 March 1945 and a national of the Republic of the Philippines. President of the Philippines, Mayor of Davao City, and allegedly the founder and head of the Davao Death Squad (‘DDS’), at the time of the relevant conduct.

Arrest warrant issued on 7 March 2025

Allegedly responsible for the crime against humanity of murder, committed on the territory of the Republic of the Philippines between 1 November 2011 and 16 March 2019 in the context of the ‘war on drugs’ campaign. . . On 12 March 2025, Mr Duterte was surrendered to the International Criminal Court after being arrested by the authorities of the Republic of the Philippines in accordance with the warrant of arrest.

link to indictment

Literal Nazi fucks

Who but a Nazi pulls this kind of brutal, illegal shit at 1 a.m. of a holiday weekend? This is from Labor Day:

The rush to deport children in the middle of the night on a holiday weekend, in apparent violation of the law, looked a great deal like the administration’s removal of undocumented immigrants from Venezuela to the notorious terrorist CECOT prison in El Salvador in March. At the time, President Donald J. Trump denied that he had signed the order invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act the administration used to justify the rendition of the men to El Salvador. “Other people handled it,” he said, even though his signature is on the document that appears in the Federal Register.

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I pose the question again: who but a Nazi targets the children of “others” for illegal deportation, at 1 a.m., to a country they, or their parents, fled for fear of persecution?

A regime that renders people they deem alien enemies, of their children, in the dark of night, to places like war-torn South Sudan and a torture prison in El Salvador, is not a democracy governed by laws. It is a totalitarian regime driven by a lust for unchecked power. These insane, enraged, cruelty-addicted fuckers are Dick “Darkside” Cheney on steroids. Adolf Eichmann (and his ilk) got nothing on rabid “MAGA” loyalists Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Tom Homan and their foul-smelling Nazi ilk.

Of course, nobody ever accused Eichmann of protecting pedophile sex traffickers and their clients.

Nice if-pology idiotically framed as an apology from judge scolded by Gorsuch and Kavanaugh about their new rule on binding precedent

This is one of the scariest distortions I’ve read in the New York Times recently. The article focuses on the conditional apology given by a Reagan appointed federal judge after he was scolded by two bullies on the 6-3 Leonard Leo majority Supreme Court for not following “binding precedent” — an unsigned summary order, with no legal reasoning they released on an emergency basis to serve President Project 2025.  Their ruling on massive cuts to the The Department of Education, they scolded, obviously applied to cutting NIH grants to study cancer, Alzheimer’s, HIV and similar deadly plagues. This was a bit of unprecedented bullying by these radical right ideologues.   The Grey Lady styled it as the federal judge (who ruled correctly) messing up and legitimately being required to apologize.

Let us also note that an emergency application from Special Counsel Jack Smith languished for seven months before the 6-3 far right majority granted candidate Trump unprecedented blanket immunity for any crimes committed by a US president as part of his “core duties” (try to imagine the hypothetical where a president would have to commit a crime to do his job, the six provided none).   Their delayed ruling effectively ended the prosecutions of Trump for violating the Espionage Act (by taking classified documents to his home when he was out of office), obstructing justice (having his lawyers lie by claiming he’d returned everything), and trying to overturn the results of an election he was well aware he lost. 

In glaring contrast, every one of Trump’s emergency applications, complaining he’s not being allowed to commit random illegal acts, is immediately heard and almost invariably decided by the far right six in the hardened sociopath’s favor. As was his emergency application after he was busted by federal judges for illegally firing tens of thousands of civil servants without cause and violating other laws.

Here is the Gray Lady’s idiotic headline about the Supreme Court extending its power in a hideously fascistic manner (while neutering lower federal courts):

Judge Apologizes to Conservative Justices in Case Over N.I.H. Cuts

Judge Young said on Tuesday that he had not realized he was expected to rely on a slim three-page order issued with minimal legal reasoning in April to his case dealing with a different agency.

“Before we do anything, I really feel it’s incumbent upon me to — on the record here — to apologize to Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh if they think that anything this court has done has been done in defiance of a precedential action of the Supreme Court of the United States,” said Judge Young, who was appointed to the bench by President Ronald Reagan in 1985.

“I can do nothing more than to say as honestly as I can: I certainly did not so intend, and that is foreign in every respect to the nature of how I have conducted myself as a judicial officer,” he added.

Since the beginning of President Trump’s second term, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has sided with White House in nearly every case it has considered.

Source

Wrong headline.  Wrong framing.  Here’s a better headline, off the top of my head:

Respected federal judge bullied by Trump appointees for not recognizing their unsigned, three page “emergency” shadow docket ruling as binding precedent.

Honestly, I don’t know what’s wrong with the New York Times sometimes, they only intermittently serve the interests of democracy in their reporting.

For one thing, the federal judge’s apology was conditional — if I offended you, I’m sorry. This is known as an if-pology. The New York Times apparently doesn’t make this distinction. The judge defended his actions while “apologizing”– how was he expected to know an unsigned three page emergency ruling was now binding federal precedent according to two members of the highly partisan Supreme Court majority? How indeed? He had to be told by two of the six doctrinaire jurists who made their way up the far right judicial pipeline by proving their brazenness and fidelity to the dogma of their extremist judicial fraternity.

Read the rest of the article, it doesn’t spell things out with the greatest of clarity, but it eventually manages to make clear how offended the judge who apologized was to be singled out this way for an ass whupping by Kavanaugh and Gorsuch (two prep school bullies whose powerful mothers both assured them they were destined to sit on the Supreme Court). Another triumph of incoherence by Project 2025’s architects, with a snazzy assist from the journal of record.

Supreme Court precedents are binding rulings that all federal courts must follow. They are traditionally based on articulated legal reasoning, analyzing and evaluating the arguments of both sides in light of past Supreme Court decisions directly impacting the issue in question. Supreme Court holdings are based on centuries of case law, legislative history, the text of the Constitution, the merits of both sides of the constitutional argument presented.

These emergency “shadow docket” rulings, sometimes only a paragraph, answer only the narrow burning question placed in front of the court for immediate, emergency decision.  The Supreme Court, in the past, has rarely ruled this way, except on the eve of an execution, for example.  It is now routine for Trump to run to his appointees for these “shadow docket” rulings which are made without briefing or argument, citing no cases, no precedent, no legal analysis.  His record is something like 16-0 in these unsigned majority  orders.

To force federal judges to consider these abbreviated, unsigned emergency rulings “binding precedent” is an abomination on the Constitution, the specialty of this particular group of six transactional corporate assholes in robes. Shame on the Grey Lady for helping to obscure how radical and dangerous this latest overreach by these judicial arsonists is.