When You Elect Despots…

Stephen Colbert. Jimmy Kimmel. A close relative. Just three of the many victims of our Mad King’s effort to erase the First Amendment’s protection of free speech.

Most of you reading this are already aware that the Trump administration’s threats–to block mergers and pull broadcast licenses–led their cowardly networks to pull comedians off the air, despite huge audiences and excellent ratings. Many of you have also been reading about the ordinary citizens who have been fired or suspended for comments made on social media. In all these situations, the comments at issue were protected by the First Amendment–and most of them were anything but inflammatory. 

One of our Mad King’s favorite accusations is that he is the victim of a “witch hunt.” Like most of his pronouncements, it’s projection. What we are seeing now is a witch hunt, carried on by the administration and MAGA–and it threatens more than the First Amendment. 

As usual, Indiana’s MAGA Governor has hopped on the Trump/Rokita train, threatening the state’s teachers, and announcing that “The Secretary of Education has the authority to suspend or revoke a license for misconduct and the office will review reported statements of K-12 teachers and administrators who have made statements to celebrate or incite political violence.”  In a Sept. 12 X post, Rokita encouraged people to report teachers who “celebrate or rationalize” Kirk’s Sept. 10 killing so they can be included in his office’s government dashboard. That platform has been used to list and condemn instances of “objectionable” political ideology entering the classroom. Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith has also asked for such reports.

Orwellian.

You might wonder how these purported opponents of “cancel culture” justify their 180-degree turn on that issue. You might suggest they take a remedial course on the Constitution and Bill of Rights. But far worse than this display of hypocrisy and constitutional ignorance is the real-world effect of igniting actual witch hunts.

Rokita’s “dashboard” and Braun’s statement are invitations for disturbed or angry people, or people with grudges, to slander the objects of their hostility. My relative was a recent object of such vilification. That relative teaches at a charter school; an individual that relative has neither met nor heard of — a person who had evidently disagreed with my relative’s political postings on Facebook for some time– decided to “send a report” to virtually every public official in Indiana, along with numerous parents and funders of the school. The “offensive” posts consisted of statements that Rightwingers have been responsible for more violence than people on the Left (a fact found by the FBI that the Trump administration has now scrubbed from the official website), and one comment to someone else’s post to the effect that calls for empathy were inconsistent with Charlie Kirk’s own statement that he did not believe in empathy.

Hardly hate speech. Certainly not a call for violence. But a clear warning about the actual effects of a “snitch” society.

If MAGA folks were able to learn from history, they might take a lesson from other times and places, where people seeking favor from autocratic governments, and people with personal grudges, were encouraged to “turn in” friends and neighbors considered insufficiently loyal to the regime. Those societies weren’t pretty.

Frederick Douglas, among others, was eloquent on the importance of free speech, saying: “No right was deemed by the fathers of the government more sacred than the right of speech. It was in their eyes, as in the eyes of all thoughtful men, the great moral renovator of society and government.” Dougles also said that freedom of speech “of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.”

There can no longer be any doubt that Trump–ignorant and incompetent and mentally-ill as he is–is a wanna-be tyrant. But he isn’t the real threat. The real threat comes from the powerful people who obey in advance, the businesses happy to discard integrity in exchange for official permissions, the GOP elected  officials who “suck up” to their cult leader rather than standing up for civil liberty or even for their own prerogatives. 

What’s worse is that those who are bending the knee would easily prevail in a court of law. 

We have a would-be King who is so thin skinned that he can’t even take a joke, and a political party that is a joke. But it’s not funny, and we need to reverse it. 

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Old People In A New World

Okay–I know that I rarely exhibit sympathy for MAGA types, but a recent experience has reminded me that the pace of change–particularly, the rate at which the world is becoming digital–can be especially disorienting for older folks. Maddening, actually. And I say that as someone who has a smartphone and uses a computer daily.

My husband works out at our local Y with a couple of older men who still use flip phones. They’re deeply suspicious of all the newfangled technology, and they are also vocally MAGA. I’ve come to believe that–while it seems like a stretch– suspicion and disdain for the tech miracles of our brave new world and being receptive to oversimplified and racist world-views may go hand in hand.

A recent stay at a “chi chi” new hotel in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, has made me a bit more sympathetic to what must seem to some folks as an unwelcome and uncomfortable plunge into a science-fiction future.

Bear with me here.

I checked in and went to the elevator, which failed to open. After waiting for a brief time (and repeatedly pushing the button), I went back to the front desk, where the young man explained that the elevator would only work from lobby if you scanned your room key on a device mounted between the elevators before pushing the button. Nice safety feature–but there were no posted instructions that explained that. Evidently, younger folks found it intuitive.

When I got to the room, it became immediately obvious that the hotel didn’t cater to anyone one lacking a smartphone. There was no telephone in the room on which to call the desk or housekeeping, no printed materials with information about the hotel or its surroundings. What there was was a small plastic stand on the desk with QR codes, and a tiny message alerting guests that they could reach hotel services by texting a specific number.

Older guests unfamiliar with QR codes, or (unthinkable!) guests without smartphones would be unable to access hotel information. Worse–if your phone was out of juice and you’d forgotten to pack a charger (guilty as charged), the hotel didn’t have chargers (I asked). There was also no clock in the room, so if you lacked an operating phone, you didn’t know what time it was.

To say that this was all very frustrating would be an understatement. I tend to think that this particular hotel has gotten ahead of itself, but the experience did force me to recognize that I haven’t been very understanding of the people in my general age cohort (old) who encounter similar frustrations every day.

Noting the accelerated pace of change has become a cliche, obscuring the very real disorientation that so often accompanies it. America is full of people who reached adulthood before computers became ubiquitous–people who grew up with telephones firmly affixed to wires and walls, who drove cars that lacked computer screens and syrupy directions from a female GPS voice, who watched one of three networks on their televisions and read the local news on newsprint delivered to their doors daily. Etc.

Those same Americans have grandchildren for whom the avalanche of technology is intuitive–they grew up with it. Those grandkids are fixated on their screens, comfortable in a world that seems increasingly alien to their grandparents. Add to that the old folks’ daily encounter with the massive increases in America’s diversity, the contemporary prominence of women and people of color in positions of authority and celebrity, and older folks can be forgiven for feeling adrift, if not alienated, in a strange new world.

That alienation helps to explain–although it doesn’t excuse–their willingness to support a movement that blames nefarious “others” for their discomfort.

I realize that I need to be less judgmental, but it’s hard when people ignore the actual reasons for their discomfort and instead look for someone to blame…

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A Confederacy Of Dunces

As regular readers of this blog know, I rarely address foreign policy issues. Mostly, my reluctance to do comes from prudence; I’m painfully aware that my lack of familiarity with the vagaries of international relations makes it likely that any such observations will be flawed. (Most of my experience and virtually all of my scholarship has focused on domestic policy.)

That said, anyone who reads or listens to the news cannot avoid recognizing the immense damage our idiot President has done to America’s stature in the world. As Simon Rosenberg recently wrote, “Our adversaries have been emboldened by Trump’s idiocy, buffoonery, cowardice, greed and self-sabotage – as they should be. For America is already a shadow of what it was even a year ago, far weaker, isolated, despised, clearly led by a confederacy of dunces and now hurdling towards rapid decline as a global power. Fox News viewers may see a viral strongman when they look at the Trump but the rest of the world sees an imbecilic fool.”

There has long been speculation that Putin “has something” on Trump. Whether or not that’s the case, Trump has long been dependent upon Russian money. Well before our would-be King entered politics, Eric Trump was quoted as saying that the unwillingness of U.S. banks to continue lending to the Trump organization wasn’t a problem, because their funding came primarily from Russia. (Most American banks had been burned by Trump’s multiple financial failures by that time, and had declined further funding.) Trump’s embarrassing, slavish fawning over Putin and other autocrats might simply be another facet of his desperate desire to align himself with “strong” leaders, or it may reflect something more sinister, but the end result is the same–our precipitous decline as a world power.

Trump’s animosity toward Ukraine and his shabby treatment of Zelenskyy has been unforgivable. He has done significant damage to NATO, imperilling not just the United States, but the Western alliance. His “friendship” and support for Israel’s Netanyahu (aka Israel’s Trump, albeit with brains) has allowed that country to commit war crimes with impunity. Destroying USAID and withholding international relief funds has been both inhumane and wildly contrary to American interests. Failing to keep the nation’s promises to battle climate change has added to the conviction that America simply cannot be trusted. And Trump’s frequent praise of autocrats and dictators–coupled with his disparagements of leaders of our democratic allies– has badly damaged the country’s relationships with our traditional partners.

Withdrawing the U.S. from the UN Human Rights Council and from the Open Skies Treaty underlined both America’s diminished concern for human rights and our further lack of reliability.

And of course, firing hundreds of respected experts in foreign affairs and replacing them with clowns and dunces has undermined American effectiveness across the board. His misnamed “America First” policies and actions have actually damaged alliances, alienated partners, and disregarded human rights–consequences that have hardly advanced American interests.

It is unlikely that the MAGA base either knows or cares. Trump’s voters are fixated on culture war issues and the recovery of White male privilege. I doubt that many of them will “connect the dots” between Trump’s insane tariffs and the rising cost of groceries, or recognize the other domestic economic effects of America’s lost international stature.

What struck me about the quote I shared from Simon Rosenberg was his description of America’s current government as “a confederacy of dunces.” There’s a book with that title, but it was funny.

There’s nothing funny about the dunces who are tanking the economy, undermining civic equality, and making America internationally irrelevant.

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Political Violence

As I write this, the initial accusations about the murder of Charlie Kirk have been confirmed–in an ironic way. The immediate–and not unreasonable– reaction was the assumption he’d been targeted for his beliefs. And evidently, he was–but not by  “evil” Lefists. The alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, is a young white man from a Republican, gun enthusiast family, who appears to have embraced the even-farther “groyper” Right that believed Kirk was insufficiently radical.

Obviously, as repulsive as some of Kirk’s beliefs were, they are no excuse for violence. Freedom of speech, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes reminded us, is not meant to protect only those who agree with us, it also extends to those expressing the “thought  we hate.”

Following the shooting, denunciations of political violence came from across the political spectrum. And predictably, MAGA folks expressed outrage that was entirely missing when Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was targeted, when Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul was nearly killed, and when two Minnesota Democrats were assassinated. 

In the wake of Kirk’s murder, pundits and commentators have rushed to offer their perspectives. One that I found particularly insightful was an article by Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark. As he began,

Charlie Kirk’s murder was not just a murder. It was an assassination. That’s the crucial point.

We often forget the philosophical underpinnings of criminal law. Rightly understood, we view crimes as being committed not against individuals, but against society itself. Thus, when someone is murdered, the offense is not against the victim and his family, but against everyone. All of us. It is an offense against nature, heaven, and man.

Assassination goes a step further. In addition to all of the above, assassination is, like terrorism, an attack on our body politic. An attack on how we choose to live together. On our system of government. Which in America’s case, means an attack not just against all of us, but against liberal democracy itself.

Last then reminded readers that this was not a “one off.” As he wrote, it had only been twelve weeks since Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband were assassinated in their home, sixteen weeks since Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were assassinated outside Washington’s Jewish Museum, ten months since UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was assassinated in Manhattan.

And one could list other examples of near-assassinations from recent years—like the brutal beating of the husband of the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and the shots fired at an ex-president campaigning to return to office.

It is important to understand that these acts all emerged from a culture of political violence that has been waxing for nearly a decade.

Last acknowledged the presence of political violence in the past, specifically enumerating the attacks on Steve Scalise, Gabby Giffords, Ronald Reagan, JFK and RFK and MLK, and the vicious attacks on Black citizens during Jim Crow. But he pointed to a crucial difference in the way public officials responded.

The difference is that until recently, elected high officials condemned political violence as a matter of course. Their condemnations were not always sincere, but they were nearly universal. They understood that political violence is a wildfire. It spreads. And if it breaks containment, it cannot be controlled. Once unleashed, it burns everyone.

I found one paragraph in Last’s brief essay to be both undeniably true and chilling. As he wrote,

We don’t have to rehearse the litany of how we got here; we can leave that to another day. But we all know what we know. Things have changed and it’s not hard to pinpoint the moment when the normalization of political violence re-emerged among our political elites. To pretend otherwise would be to hide our heads in the sand—to deny the plain political reality of the moment.

That “plain political reality” is what keeps me up at night.

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RIP: The Rule Of Law

I am beginning to think that Trump has “glossies” of John Roberts and a couple of the other Justices in the majority misnamed as “conservative.” (A genuine conservative would conserve precedents–these justices are radical, and in at least two cases–Alito and Thomas–demonstrably corrupt.) 

The judges of the lower federal courts–even the ones appropriately labeled conservative–have demonstrated fidelity to the rule of law, and to stare decisis, or precedent. Judges nominated by both Democratic and Republican Presidents, judges nominated by Trump himself, have ruled against our would-be dictator over 80% of the time. They have issued well-researched, thoughtful judgments, clearly explaining the grounds of their decisions, only to be summarily over-ruled in terse, six to three Shadow Docket rulings from the Supreme Court.

Most Americans have never heard of the Court’s Shadow Docket, because–until recently–it has been used very sparingly. The shadow docket has formerly been used in Supreme Court cases requiring immediate decision–things like death penalty stays, injunctions, and other matters requiring urgency. Such urgent matters are thus decided without full briefing, oral argument, or written reasoning. When appropriately used, the Shadow Docket is a legitimate tool of Court jurisprudence, but the increased frequency of these decisions during the Trump administration has raised concerns about transparency and significantly damaged the Court’s legitimacy.  

Decisions delivered via the shadow docket lack the detailed analysis that allows lower courts to align their own reasoning with that of the Supreme Court. The increasing frequency of these  “stealth rulings” undermines the public’s understanding as well as the legal community’s ability to interpret, apply and conform.  

It isn’t just the increased frequency of Shadow Docket use. Far too many of these brief and unsettling decisions have upended longstanding Constitutional rules. Easily the most appalling was the Court’s recent gutting of the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of probable cause. In a 6-3 vote in Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem, the Supreme Court temporarily halted a LA judge’s order that barred “roving patrols” from snatching people off California streets and questioning them based on how they look, what language they speak, what work they do, or even where they happen to be.

Both a Los Angeles federal court and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled–in detailed, persuasive decisions– that these actions clearly amounted to illegal racial profiling.

In a stinging dissent, Justice Sotomayor warned that this decision turns Latinos into second class citizens. She wrote “We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”

A lawyer friend who has been both a prosecutor and a defense attorney, as well as chief of a law enforcement department and a law school professor, reacted with an anguished Facebook post. He began ” The United States of America, a nation of laws, not men, no longer exists. Today the United States Supreme Court, in a 6-3 vote, decided that immigration officers may detain people for no reason other than the color of their skin…The United States Supreme Court approving detention based upon skin color is not just the end of the rule of law, it is the end of the United States as a constitutional democracy, which comes with separation of powers and no person being beyond the law.”

He proceeded to say that he would “surrender my admission to the United States Supreme Court. The admission comes with an oath the Court no longer recognizes, and I no longer recognize it.”

I taught Law and Public Policy to university students for 21 years. Many of those students were criminal justice majors, and along with the rest of the faculty, I emphasized the constitutional imperative of basing arrests on probable cause. We warned students against detaining citizens based upon “hunches” or–worse–identity, and shared the numerous legal cases that underlined that constitutional mandate.

The Court’s decision–contrary to decades of contrary precedent and to the uncontested facts underlying the lower court rulings–a decision delivered via the inappropriate Shadow Docket, was a betrayal not only of their oath, but of America.

If this country survives as a constitutional democracy–no sure thing–the Roberts Court will take a shameful place in history alongside the January 6th insurgents. 




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