Chad Rector

It's dangerous to say, but since it is true, it's more dangerous to not say: The Supreme Court of the United States is not a legitimate body. It's been deliberately and systematically captured by ideologues on behalf of an anti-Constitutional project, and its extremist members have been bribed.

I love that they have started competing with each other for space in the history books, swinging for the fences with the founding-father-invoking-barn-burners.

Picture how big the Hoover Dam is. An absolute unit. The Hoover Dam has a power capacity of 2 gigawatts (GW).

The solar farm that the Admin just cancelled could have produces 6.2 GW of power. That's more than 3 Hoover Dams.

NYT headline: "Bow to the Emperor: We asked 50 Legal Experts About the Trump Presidency."

Pie chart showing over 50% of surveyed legal experts saying that Trump's second term has posed "much more threat" to the rule of law "than I expected."

Everything that's wrong with legal journalism in one New York Times headline and pie chart.

If all these "legal experts" are so shocked by the threats to the rule of law, maybe they're not the experts we should be asking in the first place.

All of this was foreseeable. Many forecast it.

Rewatched "Yes, Minister" last summer and it holds up pretty well.

This is such an essential phrase: “The only Constitutional rights upon which we can depend are those we extend to the weakest and most reviled among us.”

National Defense Ministry Honors 11 Soldiers for Refusing Illegal Orders National Defense Ministry Honors 11 Soldiers for Refusing Illegal Orders Honored for rejecting illegal orders during martial law, Marine death probe

The South Korean Ministry of Defense has awarded medals of merit to 11 officers for disobeying direct orders of superiors during the martial law fiasco, orders that they deemed to be contrary to the constitution and endangerment to democracy.
www.chosun.com/english/nati...

We're experiencing the exact same things that Turkey and Hungary experienced before descending to authoritarianism, and if you think it will end differently here without each and every one of us fighting back, you are delusional.

We are witnessing a swift and sweeping consolidation of media (traditional and social) into the hands of a small number of billionaires who are actively aligned/aligning (both via free will and coercion) with Trump and his right wing political party. This is (I’ll say it) a fascist project.

If interrogators have a choice between (1) beating an "I am a trans leftist" confession out of him that they can then go public with, or (2) running a flawlessly-by-the-book investigation that will hold up in court, but they can't do both, I'm confident they'll probably maybe possibly pick #2.

"Just the other day, I was in the audience at Lincoln Center when Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, while promoting a new book, that she doesn't think the United States is in a constitutional crisis," Farias told us. "Today, the Supreme Court, without offering a single line of reasoning, more or less declared that the Fourth Amendment, which protects everyone from unreasonable searches and seizures, nonetheless allows the Trump Administration to arrest and detain anyone who looks Latino, citizen or not, on account of the language that they speak or the kind of jobs they do. The ruling putatively covers the Los Angeles area, but the effect could be national," he continued. "If that's not a constitutional crisis, then what is?"

The New Yorker asked me “how bad” today’s Supreme Court ruling was. I boiled it down to one paragraph:

link.newyorker.com/view/5bda429...

Yes. Like "people here ILLEGALLY must be made to pay STEEP FINES and perform substantial COMMUNITY SERVICE as penance before getting a green card."

The President’s Power to Call Out the National Guard Is Not a Blank Check Domestic deployment under the law has its limits, and for good reason.

If federalized National Guard troops can't generally enter another state without that state's permission, then they can't _transit through_ those states either.

The only way to get into DC is to go through VA or MD. If both those have Dem governors... ?

🧵 Authoritarianism, Democratization, and Coalition Politics.

The consensus around here is, more or less, that the United States is currently a consolidating authoritarian regime controlled by a mix of reactionary populists and fascists.

America Tips Into Fascism Today is different than before.

The precise moment when and where in recent weeks America crossed that invisible line from democracy into authoritarianism can and will be debated by future historians, but it’s clear that the line itself has been crossed. www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/america-ti...

He doesn't like articles. Remember when he wanted people to call it "wall" instead of "the wall" because he thought it sounded better? (Coincidentally, more like Slavic grammar.)

ICE Is Nothing Like the Brownshirts Because the Brownshirts Actually Identified Themselves Let’s get this out of the way: Immigration and Customs Enforcement is nothing like the Sturmabteilung, aka Hitler’s Brownshirts. Your main clue is ...

"One was an open paramilitary wing of an openly fascist political party, the other is an unaccountable government force operating without clear uniforms, identification, or transparency... for an openly fascist political party."

This is step one in how we lose free and fair elections. It’s not that Trump will “cancel” the midterms.

It’s just everyone has to vote in person, and urban downtowns will be filled with ICE checkpoints and intimidating National Guard troops to “double check” that only citizens vote.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

Couldn't that be solved by substantially increasing the size of the House? That would be good on the merits anyway.

Of course the usual solution for an employer under pressure to staff up quickly but having trouble hiring people, where the employer is subject to pretty weak oversight, and the job doesn't require a college education but Spanish language skills are a plus, would be.... ironic.

Nebraska gerrymander had electoral college implications too.

It is everyone's patriotic duty to click on the link here, and maybe also click on a few of the ads.

I wonder if there's a paradox where Trump's perceived poor health makes it easier for elites to rationalize caving, since they can tell themselves that this is only temporary.

I almost want to sign up for Paramount+ again, quickly while that South Park episode is still up, then cancel again as soon as they pull it down.

It's like training an ostrich - it probably won't work at all, but your only hope is to have a quick feedback loop.

A D.O.J. Whistleblower Speaks Out

"A canary in the coal mine of the rule of law." This is an immensely important story about the DOJ being turned into an institution that is breaking the law at the behest of the President...the kind of story that would have tanked previous administrations. [Gift link] www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/p...

Would be fun finding all of his alts.

Yes, my go-to last year was to include a reference to a dinosaur eating fish tacos on the beach. Caught a bunch that way.

Good. Proud to be corny.