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@AnarchoNinaAnalyzes@social.treehouse.systems · 7 days ago

"Who watches the Watchmen?" - Alan Moore

(This is our thread to discuss the Trump regime's blatant disregard for legal rulings or judicial orders, weaponization of the Justice Department to accomplish its fascist ends, and our 6-3 fascist high Supreme Court's efforts to sanctify the Trumenreich's criminality after the fact.

As you might expect, there's going to be a lot of stories to catch up on in this section over the next little while after I've been away for just under six months. Again, just bear with me. I will run out of open tabs eventually and we'll be back to "normal" current news in the Hellworld.)

AnarchoNinaAnalyzes

@AnarchoNinaAnalyzes@social.treehouse.systems replied · 9 months ago

The more things change, the more they stay the same apparently. Back when I had a little less gray in my hair, one of the many horrifying scandals to come out of the Bush Administration during the War on Terror/9-11/Iraq War era, involved the suppression of intelligence and intelligence officials who refused to support the Bush-Cheney administration's position that Iraq had, or was on the verge of acquiring, weapons of mass destruction. This mattered because although the Bush government employed a "throw a plate of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks" method of manufacturing consent to invade Iraq, the central portion of their legal and diplomatic argument, revolved around the admin's repeated assertion that US Intelligence had actionable information that Saddam Hussein had WMD's or was about to finish building them. Of course, the entire thing turned out to be a lie; Iraq didn't have WMDs, the intelligence supporting the lie was nonexistent, and warmongers who supported the war crafted a narrative that "bad intelligence" had lead Bush-Cheney to ruin. The fact that even that was a lie, wouldn't come out until later; as it turns out US Intelligence had actively told the White House that they *didn't* think Iraq had or was capable of producing WMDs, and the administration had ignored, sidelined, and removed anyone in the intel community who told them so. That story was of course small potatoes compared to the original story about "bad intelligence" and to this day many informed observers still believe the spies told lies and the White House was "duped."

I mention this now of course because Trump's Director of National Intelligence, noted fake peacenik, Islamophobe, and cult member Tulsi Gabbard, just fired two high ranking intelligence officials, and moved the National Intelligence Council under her direct supervision. Why? Well it sure does look like it's because a FOIA request turned up a NIC memo confirming that US intelligence disagreed with Trump's fascist propaganda arguing that the gang Tren de Aragua were working for Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro; a central pillar of the Trump regime's argument that they have a right to deploy the Alien Enemies Act to do fascist mass deportations and a bunch of other authoritarian buillshit.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/tulsi-gabbard-trump

Gabbard Fires Intel Officials After Memo Counters Trump Lies About Migrants Sent to El Salvador Prison

"While an ODNI spokesperson told The Hill that "the director is working alongside President Trump to end the weaponization and politicization of the intelligence community," critics framed the firings as "the DEFINITION of politicizing intelligence."

"I am concerned about the apparent removal of senior leadership at the National Intelligence Council without any explanation except vague accusations made in the media," Congressman Jim Himes (D-Conn.), the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, told The Washington Post. "Absent evidence to justify the firings, the workforce can only conclude that their jobs are contingent on producing analysis that is aligned with the president's agenda, rather than truthful and apolitical."

The NIC leaders were fired after last week's release of an NIC memo confirming that U.S. intelligence agencies never agreed with Trump's claim that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro controls the criminal gang Tren de Aragua. The April 7 document states that "while Venezuela's permissive environment enables TDA to operate, the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States."

Look, I'm not going to ask readers to offer up sympathy for creepy American spymasters; this is a country that engages in offensive espionage, political and social subversion, and activities we would call terrorism if someone we didn't like were doing them, so there are no good guys in this story. With that having been said however, we're looking at clear evidence that the Trump regime itself absolutely knows their fascist "invasion" arguments, on which much of their paper-thin legal justification for doing a host of blatantly unconstitutional activities, are complete bullshit; and they're prepared to politically punish Trump's own intelligence agencies for not agreeing to lie for them. This is, or should be, a major scandal on par with Bush's Iraq War lies; and yet curiously the focus in the media seems to be how bad it is to train your intelligence agencies to not tell you bad news the president doesn't want to hear.

Obviously, I knew Trump's invasion was a lie, and you knew Trump's invasion was a lie. But now the whole world knows Trump's invasion is a lie and we have the documents and statements to prove it; so why is anyone pretending this isn't just fascism?

#Fascism #TulsiGabbard #Trump #DNI #USIntelligence #CIA #TrenDeAragua #Invasion #FakeWar #AlienEnemiesAct #Bush #IraqWar #Propaganda #ConspiracyTheories #IdeologicalPolicing

Common Dreams

Gabbard Fires Intel Officials After Memo Counters Trump Lies About Migrants Sent to El Salvador Prison | Common Dreams

Tulsi Gabbard sparks controversy by firing top intelligence officials—seemingly over memo contradicting Donald Trump's claims about deported migrants.

AnarchoNinaAnalyzes

@AnarchoNinaAnalyzes@social.treehouse.systems replied · 9 months ago

While repeatedly losing in court has been an early theme of the Trump regime's project to install a fascist dictatorship in America, I don't think it's safe for anyone to assume the crux of the danger we're facing rests solely on to what degree the Swine Emperor and his cronies are willing to simply ignore court orders. Lost in the reality that so far the Supreme Court has held the line against the Trump administration on the question of due process for migrants the regime wants to deport, is the fact that this 6-3 fascist-high bench is the same body that granted president Trump virtual immunity from prosecution for "official acts" undertaken as president, without even bothering to define what an official act is.

That 6-3 fascist majority means the Supreme Court, which is dominated by Federalist Society appointees hand-picked by far right megadonor Leonard Leo, is very closely aligned ideologically with the Christian Zionist fundie fascist wing of the Trump cult, as exemplified by folks like Marco Rubio, and the Heritage Foundation. They might not agree with everything the more openly white nationalist and authoritarian elements in the Trump regime want to do, but guys like Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas are more or less in lockstep with the vast majority of reactionary right wing objectives Trump and his minions are trying to accomplish here. In practice that means that while the 'conservative" justices on the Supreme Court are prepared to align with the law and block some portions of the Trump regime's agenda, they are just as likely to piss on decades of legal precedent and make some bullshit up to advance that agenda; particularly when it aligns with the agenda of the Federalist Society and its donors.

A good example of what that looks like can be found in the recent unsigned shadow docket stay the Supreme Court issued allowing the Trump regime to effectively "fire" two executive branch officials working for consumer and labor protection agencies, while their formal cases against the government make their way through the courts. A ruling might I add that was issued despite the fact that the agencies involved operate independently of the US executive branch, and there is a clear SCOTUS precedent against removing members of independent boards "without good cause."

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/05/supreme-court-wilcox-harris-humphrey-executor-ignore-roberts-trump/

The Supreme Court Makes Sure the Law Does Not Get in the Way of Trump’s Takeover

"On Thursday night, the Supreme Court’s six Republican-appointed justices allowed President Donald Trump to remove two executive branch officials: Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board and Cathy Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board. In doing so, the court refused to enforce a major precedent. The decision indicated that, despite recent rebukes, the court is willing to disregard longstanding precedent for Trump to proceed with his overhaul of the federal government.

Before the court’s actions, a unanimous 1935 Supreme Court precedent called Humphrey’s Executor insulated both Wilcox and Harris, as members of independent boards, from removal without good cause. On Thursday, the GOP-appointees effectively cabined—or overturned—Humphrey’s Executor, in a glib order; they discarded the precedent that undergirds the modern executive branch in the same way they might toss out an old shirt they no longer feel like wearing.

The court offered a few justifications. First and foremost, it nodded at the Unitary Executive Theory. The theory rests on the idea that the Constitution vests all the executive authority in the president, and therefore it’s unconstitutional to place limits on how the president uses that authority. This theory was crafted by conservative lawyers in the 1980s and early 1990s, when Republicans seemed to have a lock on the presidency but couldn’t get control of Congress and therefore needed a justification for the president to act unilaterally. The Roberts court has spent the last 15 years embedding the theory into constitutional law—even though many academics argue it is an inaccurate and opportunistic reading of the Constitution and the nation’s history."

If the truth be told, the extraordinary lengths the Trump regime has undertaken to fire the National Labor Relations Board's Gwynne Wilcox in particular is an epic tale of authoritarian cracker fuckery in its own right, but we don't have the space to get into it here. The principle point to take away from this story is that a 6-3 fascist high SCOTUS isn't trying to thwart parts of Trump's agenda because they care about the law; they're doing it to retain legitimacy so they can play Calvinball for the American right whenever Trump's agenda aligns with Leonard Leo's, using the Unitary Executive Theory. This in turn means that Americans cannot count on SCOTUS to stop Trump's illegal fascist activities, even if the regime decides to obey a given court order.

#Trump #Fascism #Courts #NLRB #SCOTUS #GwynneWilcox #USPol #LeonardLeo #FederalistSociety #GOP

Mother Jones

The Supreme Court Makes Sure the Law Does Not Get in the Way of Trump’s Takeover

When their visions align, the court lets Trump do whatever he wants.

AnarchoNinaAnalyzes

@AnarchoNinaAnalyzes@social.treehouse.systems replied · 9 months ago

At this point, I think the degree to which bald-faced racial animus and white nationalist ideology helps form the very core of what the Trump regime does on a day to day basis, makes it ridiculously irresponsible not to discuss the open white supremacy underpinning those actions when reporting on them. I think we're all aware that Donald Trump and the vast majority of his administration are committed racists, but when politically-empowered racists start devoting the immense power of the state to prosecuting white grievance, and re-establishing an ethno-nationalist legal, political, and social order, that should be front page news no matter how many times it has already come up before. Take for example the relative lack of media uproar about the news that Trump's Department of Justice is launching what's effectively an "anti-Affirmative Action or DEI" investigation into the Black Democrat Mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson for literally hiring Black people, in a minority majority city.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/chicago-mayor-brandon-johnson-justice-department-investigation-black-rcna207840

Justice Department to investigate Chicago after mayor's remarks about hiring Black officials

"The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said Monday that it was opening an investigation into the city of Chicago after Mayor Brandon Johnson's comments Sunday highlighting prominent Black officials in his administration.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon wrote in a letter to Johnson posted on X that she had “authorized an investigation” into whether Chicago is “engaged in a pattern or practice of discrimination” following Johnson’s remarks at a church Sunday.

“If these kind of hiring decisions are being made for top-level positions in your administration, then it begs the question of whether such decisions are also being made for lower-level positions,” Dhillon wrote.

Johnson said in remarks at Apostolic Church of God that the deputy mayor, the chief operations officer, the budget director and others are all Black people. Johnson said some of his detractors criticize him by saying the only thing he talks about "is the hiring of Black people."

“No, what I’m saying is when you hire our people, we always look out for everybody else," he said."

Alright so bear with me for a moment because the amount of racist petulant adult baby shit going on here is significant, and I'm not sure the quoted passage does it justice. The (un)Civil Rights division of Trump's Justice Department is investigating the Mayor of Chicago for crimes against whiteness because he highlighted the effectiveness of hiring Black people in a city that's roughly 65% non-white, and 30% Black, while speaking at a Black majority church. So, what normal people would call "political campaigning."

As the article goes on to note, the announcement of this investigation comes despite the raw demographic data showing only a slim majority of Black employees among the Mayor's Office staff:

"According to the mayor’s office, white and Black employees are a majority of staff members, with 30.5% of employees identifying as white and 34.3% identifying as Black."

So, the Trump administration is harassing the Mayor of a majority-minority city winger racists have been demonizing for years, because Johnson hired a staff that looks more or less like the community he serves, demographically. Of course there's a little more backstory here, because Mayor Johnson has been critical of Trump's racism and racist policies; to which any rational person should probably respond "well, good for him; at least he got something right given how poorly his tenure as Mayor has gone." The reality here however is that someone inside the Trump regime heard a Black Mayor brag about hiring Black leaders in his administration at a Black Church and decided that was probably a race crime against whiteness. Normally, the story would end there, with a note that "crackers believe the weirdest shit" but because this is a white nationalist government prepared to move heaven and earth to prosecute white grievance, here we are.

I sincerely hope the reason media minions are missing the point of this story isn't that Trump sent out the Indian-American lady to announce the threat on Johnson; we're far too late in the game for "but they have a minority friend" to carry water. Maybe folks don't want to talk about Brandon Johnson because he's a bad Mayor, who ran as a progressive, and has more or less let down all the people who brought him to power in Chicago. That's fair, but when the Trump administration is using the Department of Justice to target its political opposition for blatantly racist reasons, Very Serious People TM in the discourse could at least use that story to stop equivocating about whether or not these guys really are cracker nazis, doing cracker nazi shit.

#Fascism #Trump #USPol #IdeologicalPolicing #Racism #WhiateNationalism #Chicago #BrandonJohnson #PoliticalIntimidation #JusticeDepartment #HarmeetDhillon #WhiteGrievance #AffirmativeAction #DEI #Nazis

NBC News

Justice Department to investigate Chicago after mayor's remarks about hiring Black officials

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said she authorized the probe after Mayor Brandon Johnson's comments about hiring prominent Black officials for his administration.

AnarchoNinaAnalyzes

@AnarchoNinaAnalyzes@social.treehouse.systems replied · 7 months ago

I originally started this thread to articulate and verify a then-controversial argument about the American establishment's response to Trump's fascist agenda. Specifically I argued that sitting by quietly and relying on American courts to stop Downmarket Mussolini's dictatorial ambitions was not only cowardly, but would ultimately be wholly ineffective. This is because not only does the entire Trumpenreich regard the law as useful only when it can be used to prosecute a fascist agenda, but also because every enforcement agency that could potentially hold Trump accountable for violating court orders, ultimately works for the Swine Emperor himself. The Courts have no army or police force to compel a wayward nazi president to obey their rulings.

This was not a particularly popular opinion outside the antifascist radical left at the time, but I think the light of history has reflected well on my take. As it turns out, so does the Washington Post who recently published the results of an extensive investigation into every court order issued against the Trump administration, to find that the regime or its minions are violating over a *third* of all such orders in some way or another, and by a variety of clearly intentional methods.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/07/21/trump-court-orders-defy-noncompliance-marshals-judges/ (Archive: https://archive.ph/jJpnx)

Trump officials accused of defying 1 in 3 judges who ruled against him

"President Donald Trump and his appointees have been accused of flouting courts in a third of the more than 160 lawsuits against the administration in which a judge has issued a substantive ruling, a Washington Post analysis has found, suggesting widespread noncompliance with America’s legal system.

Plaintiffs say Justice Department lawyers and the agencies they represent are snubbing rulings, providing false information, failing to turn over evidence, quietly working around court orders and inventing pretexts to carry out actions that have been blocked."

This is a very granular study of 165 lawsuits against the Trump administration where courts have ruled against the regime's (often illegal) actions and the results of those court orders; WaPo found that in a staggering 57 of those cases, the US government had taken steps to subvert, ignore, or openly violate those court orders. This comes from a larger pool of 337 cases against the Trump regime brought to court, which means you've got about a fifty percent change of beating the fascists in court, and at best a two thirds chance of that actually meaning anything even if you do. Does that sound like a legal system capable of protecting Americans and their civil rights from a fascist administration to you? Yeah, me neither.

It is of course deeply ironic that this analysis is coming from The Washington Post; an outlet which by my reckoning has played a prominent role in pushing the idea that actively resisting the Trump regime in the streets is unacceptable lawlessness and it is far better to wait for court decisions that may be entirely meaningless to stop the fascist creep in our society. Even Jeff Bezo's pet media company however was willing to note that this alarming situation has grown out of an American judiciary unwilling, or perhaps unable, to hold the Trump administration to account for openly violating the law and the orders of our courts.

"Outside legal analysts say courts typically are slow to begin contempt proceedings for noncompliance, especially while their rulings are under appeal. Judges also are likely to be concerned, analysts say, that the U.S. Marshals Service — whose director is appointed by the president — might not serve subpoenas or take recalcitrant government officials into custody if ordered to by the courts."

I should note that the rest of this article focuses on diving into the myriad of ways the Trump administration has found to openly violate, undermine, or ignore court orders as a matter of foundational policy; efforts which expose the Trump regime's belief that the Swine Emperor has absolute power over immigration law, national security, federal funding, and the government workforce as a whole. This is a thorough investigation, that also clearly demonstrates that none of this is an accident and the Trump regime is usurping the power of the American judiciary entirely intentionally.

All of which leads me ask the Very Serious People TM in our society who insisted on allowing the Trump regime to openly do illegal fascism while waiting for the courts to swoop in and save the day, one simple question - what now? After all, we are now sitting in the same position we were when I told you months ago that only massive society-wide resistance would end Trump's fascism, and that expecting judges with no armies to stop him was a fool's errand; only now, even WaPo is admitting the courts know they can't stop him and Trump's agenda is a half year closer to becoming our reality. Dare you even answer?

#Fascism #Trump #Dictatorship #USPol #Courts #RuleOfLaw #Authoritarianism #WaPo

AnarchoNinaAnalyzes

@AnarchoNinaAnalyzes@social.treehouse.systems replied · 7 days ago

"Who watches the Watchmen?" - Alan Moore

AnarchoNinaAnalyzes

@AnarchoNinaAnalyzes@social.treehouse.systems replied · 7 days ago

I want to start with a short look at a current story from Reuters, because I think it exemplifies the way the Trump regime's brazen lawlessness and criminality, dovetails perfectly with the larger fascist project to transform America into both a white ethnostate, and a fascist dictatorship; under Swine Emperor Trump, and of course his odious shadow chancellor, Stephen Miller. As the title of the piece indicates, judges across the US have ruled over 4,000 times that ICE is illegally detaining migrants and yet the regime continues to openly break the law to do so, because they wish legal precedent agreed with their "novel" interpretation of the law; it doesn't.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/courts-have-ruled-4400-times-that-ice-jailed-people-illegally-it-hasnt-stopped-2026-02-14/ (archived: https://archive.ph/uNDJX )

Courts have ruled 4,400 times that ICE jailed people illegally. It hasn’t stopped.

"Hundreds of judges around the country have ruled more than 4,400 times since October that President Donald Trump’s administration is detaining immigrants unlawfully, a Reuters review of court records found.

The decisions amount to a sweeping legal rebuke of Trump’s immigration crackdown. Yet the administration has continued jailing people indefinitely even after courts ruled the policy was illegal.

"It is appalling that the Government insists that this Court should redefine or completely disregard the current law as it is clearly written," U.S. District Judge Thomas Johnston of West Virginia, an appointee of President George W. Bush, wrote last week, ordering the release of a Venezuelan detainee in the state.

Most of the rulings center on the Trump administration’s departure from a nearly three-decade-old interpretation of federal law that immigrants already living in the United States could be released on bond while they pursue their cases in immigration court."

The basic issue here is that the Trump regime and its Gestapo, want to hold migrants they've kidnapped in concentration camps without bail, while they wait for their immigration court dates. The law however, specifically the foundational legal principle of habeas corpus, disagrees. In response, the regime is simply ignoring the law and detaining everyone they kidnap even after they've received a court date, unless directly ordered by a judge to release a specific individual. This has resulted in the filing of more than 20,200 federal lawsuits (almost all of which the government *will* ultimately lose because the law doesn't work the way Stephen Miller wishes it did) to free kidnapped immigrants being held in US concentration camps.

Why? Well as the article notes, not everyone can afford or otherwise has an opportunity to file a habeas corpus petition in court, nor are there enough lawyers or judges to hear all these cases in a timely manner, leading to long delays; all while people suffer inside a Gestapo concentration camp intentionally designed to torture its kidnapped and illegally confined prisoners. Indeed, this massive backlog of cases means that even after a judge orders the ICE Gestapo to release a kidnapped person, the Trumpenreich routinely fails to release those people quickly.

"Using court dockets, Reuters found more than 700 Justice Department attorneys representing the government in immigration cases. Five of the attorneys each appeared on the dockets of more than 1,000 habeas cases.

Partly as a result of that legal logjam, judges have found that the government has left people locked up even after judges ordered their release.

In a court order, issued last month in Minnesota, Schiltz said the government had violated 96 orders in 76 cases. The U.S. Attorney there, Daniel Rosen, said in a filing two days later that the cases had created an "enormous burden" for government attorneys."

Of course, one could note as a judge in another recent case did, that this "enormous burden" for government attorneys was a self-made problem for the Trump regime; not only because of the sheer number of people the Gestapo has disappeared from our streets who have a legal right to bail while they await an immigration hearing, but also because Trump's lawyers vigorously contest every single habeas corpus petition filed against the government to release concentration camp prisoners.

The truth however, as we know from our study of ICE's concentration camp conditions, is that the Trumpenreich is not ignoring court orders or dragging its feet in response to them because government lawyers are overworked, nor even as a petulant temper tantrum to appease a racist base. There is a method, behind this malevolent cruelty.

This is all part of Stephen Miller's larger plan to torture migrants in concentration camps until they agree to give up their claims to stay in America and self deport. You can't torture people into surrendering their own legal rights, if you do not in fact "have the body." And that's why Trump's Gestapo doesn't care how many times a judge says they broke the law.

#ICE #Fascism #Trump #Courts #ConcentrationCamps #StephenMiller

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