“Leftism might actually be noble if their concern for the marginalized wasn’t simply an incidental externality to their seething hatred of the normal and the good.” - David Pivtorak on “X”
By James Howard Kunstler - June 24, 2024
Did you entertain feelings of doom during last week’s brain-withering heat-wave? The sheer anxious waiting and wishing for it to end was a nice analog to the stifling psycho-political miasma oppressing this nation — alternately known as the republic (for which we stand) and “our democracy,” as “Joe Biden” likes to style his regime of lawfare, warfare, and garish state-sponsored depravity. Well, rejoice and ring them bells! The political weather is breaking. The week ahead looks like an all-you-can-eat, steam-table banquet of consequence.
The Supreme Court (SCOTUS) teased last week with an opening round of lesser decisions on bump stocks for rifles, abortion pills for women inconvenienced by motherhood, and a few other interesting cases. The court’s term draws to a close with the end of June. Pending are several cases liable to rattle the windows and shake down the walls.
One is the question as to whether the government can use private company proxies to censor constitutionally protected free speech (Murthy v. Missouri). The case has been simmering for years, with lower court actions that took a dim view of the intel blob’s coercive intrusions into social media. Probably the most galling part of the story is that virtually every act of censorship and de-platforming was committed against those telling the truth about some vital public issue, whether it was the danger and ineffectiveness of the Covid vaccines, or the probity of the 2020 elections, or the existence of Hunter Biden’s laptop and its dastardly contents. That is, the government’s actions were entirely in the service of lying to the American people.
This raises a greater question that redounds from the courts onto the November election: just why is the US government so deeply invested in all that lying? The answer is obvious: it has been engaged in nefarious activities that it seeks to hide and deny. And all of that has served to wreck the country. Even worse, the government has gaslit half of the public into cheerleading and rolling over for all that dishonesty, so as to keep them “safe” from hobgoblins such as “misinformation.” Considering “Joe Biden’s” cratering poll numbers, it looks like the public is tired of this incessant lying and is fixing to vote his regime out of office.
We begin to see evidence that even some hardcore regime hacks are breaking out of that consensus trance, for instance, the Cuomo brothers denouncing the lies around lawfare and Covid. Andrew, once the New York state AG himself, told the shocked studio audience on Bill Maher’s HBO gabfest, beloved by Wokesters, that the Alvin Bragg case never should have been brought to trial. His brother Chris has been telling his podcast followers that Covid policy was a fiasco and the vaccines were harmful, and he apologized for his prior shifty reporting on all that when he had a CNN show.
Also upcoming at SCOTUS: Fischer v the United States, as to whether the DOJ tortured a federal statute on shredding financial records to overcharge J-6 rioters. In 2015 the court limited the scope of that law (part of the 2002 Sarbannes-Oxley Act), but Attorney General Merrick Garland used it anyway as an all-purpose dragnet to prosecute hundreds of people who merely paraded through the US Capitol — which provided legal footing for the House J-6 committee to color that event dishonestly as “an insurrection.” A decision against the government should lead to the release of many J-6 prisoners and perhaps lawsuits for malicious prosecution under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA). It would also toss out the pertinent charges in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s DC case against Donald Trump for supposedly fomenting an “insurrection.”
Another biggie case pending (Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo; Relentless v. Department of Commerce) will determine whether executive agencies of the US Government (e.g., the EPA, CDC, Depts. of Energy, Education, Commerce, etc.) can issue regulations as if they have the force of law — that is, push citizens and businesses around by fiat where the law is ambiguous or nonexistent. A lot has changed since SCOTUS initially sought to define the scope of agency authority in their 1984 decision known as Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. The federal bureaucracy has become an unaccountable behemoth, issuing sometimes arbitrary and capricious regulations that make it increasingly difficult to accomplish anything in our country. It has also enabled much of the government’s monkey business around Covid. This court appears to lean towards overturning Chevron.
Also pending this week: whether SCOTUS will stay Steve Bannon’s four-month jail sentence scheduled to begin July 1 while he appeals to the SCOTUS. Bannon was convicted for contempt of Congress when he refused to testify to the J-6 committee, basing his refusal on executive privilege. Note that SCOTUS did not keep White House advisor Peter Navarro out of prison for exactly the same charge. The DOJ must reply to SCOTUS’s request for “input” on the matter by Wednesday June 26th at 4:00 p.m. At issue is whether the government is interfering in the election by shutting up Bannon during the climax months of the campaign.
Today, Judge Aileen Cannon will ask Special Counsel Jack Smith’s lawyers to do some ‘splainin’ about how come he got to be Special Counsel without being nominated by a president or confirmed by the Senate, which is the lawful procedure. It’s therefore possible that Judge Cannon can determine that Mr. Smith is not operating lawfully. That’s not the only thing that can deflate the so-called Mar-a-Lago Documents case, but it could lead to a determination that this was a malicious political prosecution, with consequences for AG Merrick Garland.
By the way, you know what this case is . . .
[SNIP]
