Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 31, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025
[Guardian, Drop Site Daily: May 28, 2026]
LEO Technologies, a Texas-based AI company founded and led by Elliott Broidy—a Republican fundraiser pardoned by President Donald Trump on his last day in office in 2021, days before Broidy was to be sentenced for secretly lobbying the Trump administration on behalf of Chinese and Malaysian interests—won a $106 million contract from the Bureau of Prisons to translate, transcribe, and monitor prison phone calls using artificial intelligence last month, the Guardian reported. The contract marks LEO’s first with the federal government. Broidy, who has twice pleaded guilty to separate criminal offenses.
The White House Intervened to Get a $620 Million Deal for a Company Tied to Donald Trump Jr.
Robert Faturechi, May 28, 2026 [propublica.org]
Christopher Armitage, May 24, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
Other crypto founders are serving eight, twelve, and twenty-five years in prison for the same conduct. The only thing that separates the Trump sons from those men is their last name.
Ruth Marcus, May 24, 2026 [The New Yorker]
Trump’s Jan. 6 slush fund is right from Hitler’s playbook! This is not a coincidence
Dean Obeidallah, May 25, 2026
It was about a year after Jan. 6 that I first raised red flags in both articles and on my SiriusXM radio show that Donald Trump would be increasingly defending and even praising the Jan. 6 terrorists. That was way before Trump was calling them “patriots,” pardoned them or recently erased their crimes from the DOJ website and created his $1.8 billion terrorist slush fund to reward them.
The reason I raised that concern is not because I’m some type of political version of Nostradamus. Rather it’s because I have read a great deal about the history of fascist leaders and spoken to many experts.
That history was telling us that Trump would not reject the J6 terrorists but instead embrace, celebrate and honor those who helped him wage his failed coup. After all, it’s exactly what Adolph Hitler did after his 1923 failed coup known as the “Beer Hall Putsch.”….
Here’s the Real Reason Pam Bondi is Returning to the Trump Regime
Dean Obeidallah, May 28, 2026
On Wednesday, we learned that fired Attorney General Pam Bondi was returning to work for the Trump regime. However, this time no longer as the corrupt administration’s top attorney but as a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) that will focus on Artificial Intelligence….
But why would Bondi—who has no experience in the AI area—be appointed to this board by Trump and get a hero’s welcome?! Well former prosecutor Glenn Kirschner has a theory—and it’s one that resonates with me.
Glenn’s view it’s likely two reasons. First, “This is probably a wonderful opportunity to grift Should someone be interested in doing just that,” Kirschner commented.
And second—and this is the big one—”Pam Bondi knows where all the Epstein bodies are buried and Trump wants to keep her close.” Ding! Ding! Ding! That sounds like a winner. This is especially true given Bondi will testify Friday, May 29 before the House Oversight committee. (Obviously, the timing of the new gig is not a coincidence!)
And as I have written about in the past, Bondi served as Florida’s Attorney General from 2011 to 2019 at the very time Epstein was operating his massive child rape and women sex trafficking ring in that very state. Yet Bondi NEVER investigated Epstein despite there being more one thousand victims. That was clearly a decision by her in an effort to protect Trump and other powerful men….
We also discussed Trump DOJ’s latest actions to cover up the Jan. 6 crimes. This comes in the form of Acting AG Todd Blanche deleting a massive number of Jan. 6 related files from the DOJ website about the people charged and convicted of crimes—including those who brutally beat up police officers like Michael Fanone.
Some of the records Blanche deleted–as NPR reported— include:
- Daniel Rodriguez, who pleaded guilty to driving an electroshock device into the neck of former Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department officer Michael Fanone, and who was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison.
- Thomas Webster, who was convicted by a jury of assaulting law enforcement with a metal flagpole, tackling a police officer to the ground and trying to remove the officer’s gas mask. Webster was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
- Peter Schwartz, who was convicted by a jury of assaulting police officers with pepper spray and throwing a metal chair at law enforcement. Schwartz was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
And DOJ is bragging about this erasure of records saying in a statement they are “proud” to strip the “DOJ’s website of partisan propaganda.” The goal in deleting these records is not just part of the effort to rewrite Jan. 6. It’s also to make it more difficult for the media and public to uncover the crimes committed by Trump’s followers—especially since he is on the verge of giving them a huge pay day with his $1.8 billion terrorist slush fund….
How the War on Terror Created the Age of Trump (W/ Matt Kennard)
Chris Hedges, May 27, 2026
Matt Kennard shows in his new book that the bipartisan War on Terror laid the groundwork for the Trump presidency and the rise of fascism — now, with extremists empowered, we face the consequences.
Trump’s $250 Greenback Is a Gift to the Criminal Class
Timothy Noah, May 28, 2026 [The New Republic]
National Park Entrance Fees Are Funding Trump’s D.C. Projects
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 05-29-2026]
Strategic Political Economy
GRAPH: Not All Oil Is the Same (types of oil)
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 05-26-2026]
The Mystery Gasoline Surcharge: How Oil Incumbents Are Trying to Maintain Fossil Fuel Dominance
Matt Stoller, May 29, 2026 [BIG]
Among American elites, there appears to be an aggressive embrace of new technologies, whether crypto, generative artificial intelligence, or automated systems in war. But there is an important exception. If you deploy energy systems at scale that compete with fossil fuels, you will be ignored. The reason is both the narrative power of oil companies, and the Trump administration’s view that fossil fuel infrastructure is a deep source of American strength.
What’s interesting about this dynamic is that clean tech systems – batteries, solar panels, electric vehicles – are having real impacts, far more measurable than crypto or AI. Here is a chart of annualized gasoline sales in California, which has dropped by 2.5 billion gallons a year since 2019, despite more cars on the road. And California is leading the way in America; a quarter of new cars there are electric….
[TW: I have not yet come across a book that, imho, adequately explains the proper principles of political economy for a republic. I have been pondering these principles since it became clear around 2009-2010 that President Obama and the Democratic Party leadership had no intention of imposing accountability and justice on the financial predators who had created the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Among the principles of political economy of civic republicanism I have identified are
[1. Scientific and technology progress are fundamental and essential to a republic’s economic health (note I do not use the term “economic growth” here).
[2. Because private enterprise, in reality, is mostly risk averse and therefore unwilling to invest in breakthrough science and unproven technology, one major responsibility of the national government is to encourage and support scientific endeavors and the development of new technologies — including outright funding. First Secretary of the Treasury was explicit about this in hid December 1791 Report to Congress on the Subject of Manufactures, which carefully and thoroughly refuted the “free enterprise” and “free trade” nostrums of British empire factotum Adam Smith. Point number 2 is reflected repeatedly in the history of how nations actually industrialized, including
- USA’s deliberate seeding of new armory machine tool technology into the rest of the economy in the early 1800s (which created the bases for modern industrial mass production);
- the massive land giveaways that supported the development of nationwide rail networks in the mid-1800s;
- outright national funding of the telegraph and infant electricidal industry;
- agricultural research and development, including fighting pests and diseases, and identification and support of new crop breeds;
- outright government funding of the road and highway network that made possible the widespread use of automotive technology;
- early funding and continued support for aviation and aerospace technology;
- the development of transistors, integrated circuits, computers and the internet.
[To use Marxist phraseology, it is the political superstructure — the government — that most often creates and determines new means of production — the exact opposite of the disastrously erroneous Marxist view of reality.
[3. Unfortunately, though it is government support which creates new industries, new companies and huge private fortunes, the human faults of avarice, lust for power, pride end up transforming these new industries, new companies and new private fortunes into opponents of further change to the means of production. When this inevitably occurs, Marxist analysis of how the means of production determines the political superstructure tends to reflect reality with more fidelity than other forms of economic analysis.
[4. Therefore, a republic must always take steps and impose measures to limit the accumulation of wealth, the translation of wealth into political power, and misuse of the political system by concentrations of wealth and the morbidly rich. The argument that every billionaire is a policy failure must be fleshed out by developing this framework of civic republican political economy. Much of the history of neoclassical and Austrian economic thinking is a series of case studies in how concentrations of wealth and the morbidly rich used academia to develop schools of political economy which justified selfish behavior and concentrations of wealth, and in effect suppress and bury a decent exploration and consideration of civic republican political economy.
[5. Civic republican political economy therefore demands making moral judgements about what is good and bad for the preservation and development of human existence. Preserving the use of fossil fuels endangers human life istelf and is therefore bad. Remember that two of the basic principles of civic republicanism are justice, and the General Welfare. Gambling, prediction markets, crypto, and artificial intelligence should all be rigorously subjected to moral judging. Markets cannot and will not do this. The essence of the evil of neoliberal and neoclassical economics is that they use mathematical certainty as a facade to evade moral judgement.
[Though it omits any consideration of government’s role in supporting the early development of the petroleum industry, Stoller’s article is an excellent case study of how an industry, once mature, becomes a force for oligarchy and against republican governance. – TW]
Paycheck to Paycheck Statistics: How Many Americans Are Struggling? (2026)
[WealthVieu, May 6, 2026, via seekingalpha.com]
[See especially the table, Paycheck to Paycheck by Income:]
Household Income % Living Paycheck to Paycheck
Under $25,000 85%
$25,000-$50,000 75%
$50,000-$75,000 65%
$75,000-$100,000 52% ….
[Benzinga, via Naked Capitalism 05-29-2026]
More workers are raiding their 401(k)s as average balances fall, Fidelity says
[CNBC, via Naked Capitalism 05-29-2026]
Oligarchy
The Digital Media Oligarchy: Who Owns Online News?
[FAIR, via Naked Capitalism 05-25-2026]
[TW: Who owns what: explains much.]
Felonomics
The National Debt’s Unforgiving Math
Jared Bernstein, May 25, 2026 [The Atlantic]
…What changed? The national debt held by the public, about $31 trillion, is now the size of the U.S. economy, up from 39 percent of the economy in 2008 and 79 percent in 2019. For most of the country’s history, the fact that the economy’s growth rate surpassed the interest rate on the debt enabled us to keep paying our bills.
But as my colleagues and I show in a policy brief for the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research, the fiscal outlook today is much more challenging. We concluded that the combination of higher deficits and climbing interest rates raises the risk that borrowing will become more expensive and will push government debt levels to climb relentlessly. This is a debt spiral.
[TW: Notable because Bernstein had been a voice of reason against the scare mongering of the (anti)Republican deficit hawks. I have increasingly fearful of what might be the consequences of so large a part of the federal budget siphoned off to interest payments, Especially now that Trump is so rapidly destroying USA standing in the world, and huge incentives for massive dumping of dollars holdings. An archived version of the article was not available yet, so I could not check whether Bernstein placed enough emphasis on the fact that the run up in budget deficits is entirely the result of the Bush Jr., and Trump tax giveaways to the morbidly rich.]
Stealth Deregulation & Institutional Decay
Dave Nadig [via The Big Picture 05-27-2026]
Asawin Suebsaeng and Andrew Perez, May 27, 2026 [Zeteo]
[Mountain State Spotlight, via Naked Capitalism 05-29-2026]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Andrew Rivera, May 30, 2026 [More Perfect Union]
There’s a trap in your grocery store that you don’t even know about. Kroger wants you to think that you’re saving money by joining their loyalty program, but that’s not the full story. These loyalty programs, they’re complex surveillance schemes designed to harvest your data, build a psychological profile on you, and maximize how much you’re willing to spend….
A Consumer Reports investigation revealed that Kroger collects such vast amounts of data that it builds profiles of its customers, including income, gender, household size, and education level — and it sells that data to tobacco firms, financial companies, and data brokers. Home Depot captures internet activity, including browsing history and in-store Wi-Fi usage. Macy’s tracks customers’ license numbers, search history, and even ethnic origin and sells it to data brokers.
It’s all part of an emerging industry: how to hack your brain. Because companies invest a lot in these programs, they expect a big return on their investment….
Your Mattress Got Worse on Purpose
[Worse On Purpose, via The Big Picture 05-24-2026]
The practice has a name. Mattress retailers call it the “name game,” and it exists to deliberately confuse buyers. The manufacturer makes one mattress, then ships it to ten different retailers with a different cover and a different model name on each. The world’s largest mattress maker now owns America’s largest mattress retailer. The FTC tried to stop them and lost. A funny, angry tour through the enshittification of the mattress business — private equity, foam compression, fake reviews, and the bed-in-a-box pivot to “premium.” You will recognize every move from other industries.
Meat Packing Industry Wage-Fixing Continues with Cargill Lockout
[UFCW 7, via Naked Capitalism 05-25-2026]
The Reserve Currency Trap: The Mechanics of US Industrial Erosion
Craig Tindale. [via Naked Capitalism 05-27-2026]
Important
Speculation and the end of the neoliberal imagination
[Free Market Moralism, via Naked Capitalism 05-28-2026]
Health care crisis
What Will It Take to Contain the Central Africa Ebola Outbreak?
[Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, via Naked Capitalism 05-24-2026]
Predatory finance
Why Private Debt, Not Government Spending, Drives Crises
Steve Keen [YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 05-26-2026]
Shadow Banking’s $1.47 Trillion Takeover Of U.S. Bank Lending
[Forbes, via Naked Capitalism 05-30-2026]
Goldman Sachs Just Confirmed the Worst-Case Scenario
[Eurodollar University, via Naked Capitalism 05-26-2026]
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Elon Musk’s Plan to Make You Invest in SpaceX
Ryan Cooper, May 20, 2026 [The American Prospect]
Jim Stewartson, May 30, 2026 [MindWar]
… Perhaps the most harmful consequence of SpaceX going public is that many of the protective rules the markets have on public companies are being changed or dropped—just to be able to list Musk’s stock.
- Profitability Requirement: Historically, the S&P 500 required 12 months of public trading and four consecutive quarters of positive GAAP earnings. S&P gutted this requirement to admit SpaceX.
- Seasoning Period: Nasdaq reduced its inclusion seasoning window from 90 trading days to 15, and FTSE Russell cut its requirement to just 5 days. S&P 500 historically required a 12-month public trading wait.
- Free-Float Minimum: Nasdaq and CRSP eased their minimum float thresholds to accommodate the relatively thin initial float (around 3%–5%).
This means index funds, which are held in most retirement accounts, will be forced to buy Musk’s unprofitable company. In effect, the richest man has figured out how to make almost half of America subsidize his empire, with vastly less oversight than it should require.
As diabolical as this is, however, it appears to be a defensive move, not an offensive expansion. Musk, like Thiel, seems to be bunkering down by consolidating his operations under one authoritarian roof.
But for what? Why is the broligarchy so nervous? ….
How Prediction Markets and Crypto Firms Steamrolled a Watchdog Agency
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 05-25-2026]
Restoring balance to the economy
Private Equity Blocked from Buying Homes. Mostly.
Matt Stoller, May 24, 2026 [BIG]
Wall Street titans start to see their power ebb in the waning days of the Trump era, losing fights over both housing and railroad regulation….
…So what hiking housing prices? There is a split in both parties over that question. One theory comes from a group of Wall Street-friendly liberals and libertarians, known as the “Abundance movement,” who argue the problem is that we’re not friendly enough to capital, and the solution is to remove zoning limitations. Yet despite the removal of many such limitations in states like California, there hasn’t been a spurt of homebuilding.
A different theory comes from anti-monopolists, who believe that the consolidation of financing power and homebuilding capacity led to supply restrictions. That group argued that Wall Street cash was pouring into single family housing as an asset class, driving up prices for ordinary people. And those buyers, as corporate landlords, didn’t serve renters particularly well. There is substantial evidence behind this theory….
Greg Casar, May 28, 2026 [The American Prospect]
We face potential unemployment on par with the Great Depression. We need a mass employment program to get through it. AI can pay for it.
The Case for a New Works Progress Administration
Asad Ramzanali, Ganesh Sitaraman, May 29, 2026 [Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator]
…AI might be a new technology, but many policy responses for how to deal with social dislocations are old and well-known. If society experiences mass unemployment, the most direct policy solution is mass employment. In fact, this is exactly what the United States government did in response to the Great Depression. One in four workers were unemployed at the worst part of that crisis in the early 1930s. In response, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created a wide range of New Deal employment programs, from the Civilian Conservation Corps to the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The WPA is particularly notable because Congress funded it with $4.9 billion in 1935, an astonishing 6.7% of U.S. Gross Domestic Product. The scale of WPA job creation aimed to match the devastation of Great Depression job loss.
Ben Zipperer, May 21, 2026 [Economic Policy Institute]
Creating new economic potential – science and technology
Scientists Discover a Massive Reservoir of Drinking Water Hiding Beneath the Atlantic Ocean
[ZME Science, via Naked Capitalism 05-30-2026]
Disrupting mainstream politics
Graham Platner Reveals The Real Story Of FDR
David Sirota, May 29, 2026 [The Lever]
…In the popular telling, Roosevelt in the 1930s tried to add justices to the high court, but his initiative proved controversial among voters, and he was eventually rebuffed, delivering a blow to his legacy. Google FDR and “court packing” and you’ll see how pervasive this fable is.
It is commonly described as everything from a “cautionary tale” to a “losing” battle to a “terrible idea” — a narrative that has been internalized by Democrats, who see its moral as, Don’t ever tangle with the high court, and especially not with so-called “court packing.” Hence, the last Democratic president rejected court expansion even as the Roberts Court was repealing the 20th century.
This parable’s staying power is fantastic for the master planners who spent 50 years buying most of the seats on the current Supreme Court. Any parable that deflates liberals’ support for a confrontation with Supreme Court power is a tale that fortifies the American Right.
Except there’s one problem: This particular tale is false. Wildly, absurdly false — and its moral is the opposite of what Democrats and liberals came to understand, as explained by Platner….
Platner’s telling of the FDR story is entirely, provably accurate: FDR’s gambit may have failed to actually expand the court, but that wasn’t necessarily its true goal. Its objective was to force the court to stop blocking the New Deal, and in that, it was incredibly successful. Indeed, the gambit wasn’t a cautionary tale about loss, as liberals and Democrats perceive — on the contrary, it was a guidebook for political success.
And yet, if your information diet is exclusively corporate and liberal media, it’s entirely possible you’ve never heard that….
Platner instinctively opted to use that opportunity to tell liberals the real story of what happened — a story that might make liberals realize that for decades they’ve been fed horeshit that helps politicians and media convince them that Democrats are always powerless, when in fact they aren’t. Indeed, if Democrats regain control of Congress and the presidency, they can do what FDR did — they can try to expand the Supreme Court. They can also legislate term limits and do what Platner is promising: impeach specific justices….
David Sirota, May 29, 2026 [The Lever]
… “We cannot continue down this path,” oysterman Graham Platner told about 200 onlookers. “Like many generations of Americans before us, we’re going to have to rise to the occasion. We’re going to have to get uncomfortable…We’re going to have to learn how to fight. It’s the only way that we’re going to get through this, but get through it we have to, because the alternative is unacceptable.”
The barn was silent. The crowd that only minutes ago was boisterously gorging on local oysters and a keg of hard apple cider was now riveted by the sandy-haired 41-year-old U.S. Senate candidate in jeans and a navy sweatshirt.
“ Corporate conservatism in America, it knows what it wants — it’s got a light at the end of its tunnel,” the Democrat said in a gravelly voice now familiar across social media. “It’s one in which we own nothing. All we do is work and consume. Everything’s a subscription model. Nobody owns a home. We all rent. Our entire existence will just be turned into a way for those who have enough already to pull more and more and more. That is what they want. But we need to define a better future… in which our economy and our political system actually has the needs of working people at its forefront. And we’re going to have to build power and get it.”
And then Platner asked the crowd to imagine his campaign as part of an effort to create something that doesn’t yet exist: a serious congressional opposition to Donald Trump and oligarchy….
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
[The One Percent Rule, May 26, 2026, via Naked Capitalism 05-27-2026]
On 15 May 2026, Pope Leo XIV issued Magnifica Humanitas, an encyclical on the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. The document runs through the Social Doctrine of the Church from Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum to Francis, then turns to AI, digital power, truth, democracy, work, freedom, war, and hope. It opens with two biblical scenes. In Genesis, a people in Shinar build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens. In Nehemiah, a ruined Jerusalem is rebuilt after exile, section by section, family by family. The digital age, Leo says, has given us another building site, AI. The question is not whether to build. We are already building. The question is whether we are building Babel or Jerusalem.
I think this is the most serious religious document yet written about artificial intelligence because it refuses the two simple comforts that now dominate public speech about AI. It refuses the sales pitch, with its confident predictions and its quarterly earnings cadence. It also refuses panic. Leo’s encyclical is neither a product brochure nor a fire alarm. It is more severe than both. It asks what kind of human being is being trained by the systems we are building, buying, praising, fearing, and slowly obeying….
The encyclical is at its sharpest when it rejects neutrality. “Technology is never neutral,” Leo writes, because it bears the marks of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it. This is not a slogan. It is a test. Ask who pays for the system. Ask what it optimizes. Ask what it must ignore in order to work at scale. Ask who can appeal. Ask who is made easier to manage. Ask what kind of person the system needs us to become so that the system can call itself successful. The answer will not be found in the demo. Demos are designed to be charming. A demo is a machine wearing its Sunday clothes….
Matt Ford, May 27, 2026 [The New Republic]
Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on Monday. The 42,000-word statement is being described by major media outlets as centering on the rise of artificial intelligence and the moral, spiritual, and social challenges that it poses to modern society. Even the encyclical itself says that its topic is “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.”
[Vukture, via The Big Picture 05-24-2026]
Joe Lim estimates that 90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise, and he should know. For three years, Lim ran a company called Floodify, which at its peak operated 65,000 dummy social-media accounts used to drum up attention on behalf of paying clients. On a typical day, he says, Floodify posted 50,000 videos across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and X, all of them designed to pass for the unscripted output of ordinary users. Vulture on the slow realization that the algorithmic feed isn’t curating reality so much as constructing one. A useful frame the next time a “viral moment” looks too clean.
The end of the internet’s golden age.
[Axios, via The Big Picture, May 27, 2026]
Axios with a tidy summary of what just ended: search referral traffic, social distribution, the open-web business model. Pair with the TechCrunch “Search as you know it” piece from last week.
Fear and Loathing in Palo Alto
Alex Bronzini-Vender, May 19, 2026 [Washington Monthly]
… Theo Baker, an investigative journalist wunderkind and soon-to-be Stanford graduate, is not the first to trace Silicon Valley’s rot to his university. (The authors Malcolm Harris, John Carreyrou, and Noam Cohen have each staked out similar territory.) But he is the first to document, with rigor and detail, the institution’s recent history and culture. Baker’s much-anticipated debut book, How to Rule the World, is three things at once: an account of his George Polk Award-winning investigation into former Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s research misconduct, an ethnographic study of the campus’s social “underbelly,” and a personal memoir….
The argumentative spine of How to Rule the World, though, is Baker’s case against Stanford. Its culture, he argues, inculcates fraud. Venture capitalists throw ungodly sums of money at undergraduate “builders” with little due diligence. Students, predictably, learn to misappropriate it, overclaim their abilities, and misrepresent themselves to their peers and to the public. Feeling pressure to appear accomplished and perfect, students engage in all manner of deception to keep up. And these issues, in Baker’s freshman year, extended all the way to Stanford’s presidency. Baker writes in the prologue that “power protects itself, secrets remain hidden in plain sight, and robust guardrails are lacking,” and this was true both of “the president, whose research had escaped scrutiny for years,” and in “the underbelly of the student body.” Tessier-Lavigne and his students, he argues, both participated in the university’s fake-it-till-you-make-it culture….
Collapse of independent news media
Finley Williams, May 30, 2026 [The American Prospect]
… Late last year, the American Press Institute published a “guide to influencer collaborations,” while The New York Times launched a TikTok-style “Watch” tab which features short, informal clips describing recent events, or showing a reporter explaining their latest story. The Washington Post was a notable new-media early adopter, when journalist Dave Jorgenson famously launched its TikTok, and later The Washington Post Universe, in 2019. The Post’s TikTok has amassed almost two million followers….
Resistance
Christopher Armitage, May 30, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
…Cooper v. Aaron, the 1958 case where the Supreme Court declared that its interpretations of the Constitution are “the supreme law of the land.”³ Every state official who takes an oath to support the Constitution must therefore obey the Court’s rulings, even when those rulings are wrong. This doctrine, which legal scholars call judicial supremacy, treats Court decisions as binding not just on the parties to a case but on everyone, everywhere, forever, until the Court itself changes its mind.
Cooper arose from the desegregation crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas, where Governor Orval Faubus deployed the National Guard to prevent Black students from entering Central High School. The Court’s assertion of supremacy served a morally urgent purpose: forcing state officials to stop nullifying Brown v. Board of Education through defiance and delay. Nine justices signed the opinion, an unprecedented show of unanimity designed to signal that resistance was futile.
Cooper’s doctrine has been accepted as settled constitutional law for nearly seven decades. But settled is not the same as correct. James Madison, the principal architect of the Constitution, explicitly rejected the claim that the Supreme Court holds exclusive authority to determine constitutional meaning. In his Report of 1800, Madison argued that state governments retain authority to judge whether the constitutional compact has been dangerously violated by the federal government.⁴ That authority, Madison wrote, must extend to violations by the judiciary as well as by the executive or the legislature.⁴
Abraham Lincoln offered a similar analysis when confronting Dred Scott. He accepted that the Court’s ruling bound the parties to that case. Dred Scott himself remained enslaved. But Lincoln refused to treat the Court’s constitutional reasoning as binding on the political branches. “If the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court,” Lincoln warned in his First Inaugural Address, “the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.”⁵
Lincoln acted on this position. His administration issued passports to Black Americans and, through Attorney General Edward Bates’ November 1862 opinion declaring free Black people citizens of the United States, repudiated Dred Scott’s central holding through executive action.⁶ The Act to Secure Freedom to All Persons within the Territories of the United States, signed by Lincoln on June 19, 1862, flatly prohibited slavery in any territory, directly contradicting the Court’s ruling. As historian Paul Finkelman wrote, “With one sentence, Congress undid a key aspect of the holding in Dred Scott.”⁷ Republicans treated Dred Scott as what it was: a corrupt ruling by partisan justices who had abandoned constitutional interpretation for political advocacy. They complied with the judgment in the specific case while refusing to accept its reasoning as controlling precedent.
So when can a state tell the Court no? Lincoln articulated the conditions in his 1857 speech on Dred Scott: a decision deserves acquiescence as settled doctrine only when it has been “made by the unanimous concurrence of the judges, and without any apparent partisan bias, and in accordance with legal public expectation, and with the steady practice of the departments throughout our history, and had been in no part based on assumed historical facts which are not really true.” ….
Trump v. United States gave the Supreme Court the power to decide, case by case, which presidential actions are immune from prosecution. Given this Court’s track record, we know exactly how those decisions will go. A Republican president who orders the assassination of a political rival commits an official act. A Democratic president who sends aid to Ukraine commits treason. The doctrine has no basis in constitutional text, no grounding in historical practice, and no support in precedent….
These rulings share a common characteristic: they expand Republican power and contract Democratic power, consistently, predictably, across every domain. When the Court rules on voting rights, the result restricts ballot access in ways that benefit Republicans.¹⁶ When the Court rules on campaign finance, the result allows more corporate money to flow to Republican candidates.¹⁷ When the Court rules on regulatory authority, the result strips power from agencies that enforce environmental, labor, and consumer protections that Republican donors oppose.¹⁸ When the Court rules on presidential authority, the result expands executive power when Republicans hold the White House and contracts it when Democrats do.
The pattern extends to the Court’s procedural choices. When the Trump administration seeks emergency relief, the Court grants it. When the Biden administration sought similar relief, the Court denied it….
David Sloss, a constitutional law professor at Santa Clara University, has made the case for state defiance in response to Bruen. Sloss argues that the ruling violates the Tenth Amendment, which reserves to the states powers not delegated to the federal government.²¹ The Supreme Court held in United States v. Lopez that the power to enact local gun regulations is not delegated to the federal government.²² Therefore, Sloss argues, state gun laws fall within the sphere of reserved state authority, and federal interference, including interference by the Supreme Court, exceeds constitutional limits.²¹
The same logic extends to other domains. Blue states possess independent authority to protect their residents in areas where the federal government has no legitimate constitutional claim. When the Supreme Court issues rulings that exceed constitutional boundaries, states retain the Madisonian authority to judge those violations and act accordingly….
DOJ sues Massachusetts over refusal to issue undercover license plates to ICE
[Drop Site Daily, May 29, 2026]
The Justice Department sued Massachusetts Thursday over the state’s refusal to issue confidential license plates to federal immigration agents, arguing the policy discriminates against ICE and CBP in violation of the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause—one of four such lawsuits filed Wednesday and Thursday against Massachusetts, Maine, Washington, and Oregon. Governor Maura Healey rejected the suit as another “specious complaint against political enemies,” arguing that confidential plates are reserved for criminal law enforcement and that ICE’s civil enforcement work does not qualify.
Lyna Bentahar, May 30, 2026 [The Lever]
On May 19, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz signed a law making it a felony to host or advertise prediction markets, making the state the first in the country to outlaw prediction markets. The law will go into effect in August.
More than a dozen states across the country are seeking to regulate prediction markets as they’ve exploded in recent months, due to concerns about how they encourage problem gambling and risk enabling insider trading. Hawaii and North Carolina are also considering legislative bans similar to Minnesota’s.
Just two days after Walz signed Minnesota’s law, Rhode Island’s attorney general sued the prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket, alleging that the companies have operated in violation of the state’s gambling regulations. And in Massachusetts, the state’s Supreme Court appeared poised to reject Kalshi’s claims that it was not bound by the state’s gambling laws….
[Blood in the Machine, via Naked Capitalism 05-25-2026]
[Unherd, via Naked Capitalism 05-26-2026]
An Incomplete List of Successful Anti-Data Center Legislation
[404 Media, via Naked Capitalism 05-26-2026]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
[The Atlantic, via The Big Picture 05-24-2026]
On the now-mainstreamed 2020 denialism in elected office: Parikh is just one of many election deniers who were long relegated to the fringe and are now—with Trump back in office and still not over his electoral defeat six years ago—embedded inside the government. system. Whether ‘winning’ is the right word depends on the time horizon; the trend is unmistakable. The universe of people pressing debunked theories is so broad that it’s a feature of the system.
MAGA Isn’t Broken. This Is What It Was Built to Do
[The Rational League, via The Big Picture 05-24-2026]
A pointed counter to the “victims of propaganda” framing — argues the movement is functioning exactly as designed. The internal left-of-center debate on how to think about MAGA voters keeps getting sharper. The most dangerous thing about MAGA is that they mean it.
The Conspiracy Is the Cover Story – The truth is right in front of your eyes
Mike Brock, May 30, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
Iran-Contra was a conspiracy. Members of the executive branch of the United States, operating outside the knowledge of Congress and in direct violation of the Boland Amendment, ran a covert weapons-sales program to Iran and used the proceeds to fund a paramilitary force in Nicaragua. The operation involved Oliver North in the National Security Council, William Casey at the CIA, John Poindexter as National Security Advisor, and, at various levels of awareness, President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H. W. Bush. The conspiracy was uncovered, hearings were held, indictments were filed, several of the conspirators were pardoned. The documentary record is in the National Archives. The conspiracy was real. It happened.
The 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh by the Central Intelligence Agency was a conspiracy. The 1974 secret oil-for-security handshake between Henry Kissinger and the Saudi royal family was a conspiracy. COINTELPRO was a conspiracy. MK-ULTRA was a conspiracy. The tobacco industry’s coordinated suppression of cancer research for forty years was a conspiracy, and it is documented in the Master Settlement Agreement filings. The Sackler family’s strategy to addict tens of millions of Americans to OxyContin was a conspiracy, and it is documented in the bankruptcy filings. The NSA’s PRISM program was a conspiracy, and it is documented in the Snowden archive. The Saudi murder of Jamal Khashoggi was a conspiracy, and it is documented in the CIA assessment that the United States government attempted, briefly, to suppress before having to release….
Pizzagate was not a conspiracy. The Great Reset was not a conspiracy. The 9/11-as-inside-job theory was not a conspiracy. Chemtrails are not a conspiracy. Lizard people are not a conspiracy. The election was not stolen by Italian satellites controlling Dominion voting machines through Hugo Chávez’s ghost. Adrenochrome harvesting is not a conspiracy. QAnon’s the Storm was not a conspiracy. The moon landing happened. The vaccines were not bioweapons.
These are conspiracy theories. They share a structure. The structure is that an imagined coordination is asserted, the coordination is held to produce outcomes that no actual coordination of the kind described could plausibly produce, and the assertion is unsupported by the documentary record except through a chain of motivated misreadings and outright fabrications. They are not facts. They are theories about facts that do not exist.
The distinction is not subtle. The distinction is the difference between knowing how the world is run and pretending to know how the world is run. The distinction is the difference between Daniel Ellsberg and Alex Jones. The distinction is the difference between James Risen and Steve Bannon. The distinction is the difference between the Panama Papers and Q drops….
[The Intercept Briefing, May 22 2026]
The Pro-Israel Lobby’s Quiet Cash Shuffle
Luke Goldstein, May 22 2026 [The Lever]
The South Rises Again
CARTOON – SCOTUS conservatives raise a confederate flag over a slain Civil Rights Act.
Dr. Paul Zeitz, May 27, 2026
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Report: Chief Justice John Roberts’ Wife Made Over $10 Million As “Legal Consultant”
[Forbes, via The Big Picture 05-24-2026]
The disclosure-versus-recusal gap at the Court keeps widening: Jane Roberts, the wife of Chief Justice John Roberts, made more than $10 million in commissions over an eight-year stretch where she matched top lawyers with elite law firms—including some that had cases before the Supreme Court—according to documents obtained by Insider, as concerns grow about justices possibly having unreported conflicts of interest.
Christopher Armitage, May 27, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
Supreme Court’s John Roberts Faces Impeachment Resolution from Democrat
Jason Lemon, Newsweek, via scotusblog.com, May 26, 2026
On Thursday, Rep. Steve Cohen, a Democrat from Tennessee, introduced a “long-shot effort” to impeach Chief Justice John Roberts “centered on allegations that the Supreme Court under his leadership has acted in a partisan and inconsistent manner,” according to Newsweek. “In a statement announcing the resolution, Cohen said that Roberts has led the court to be ‘understood as biased: with decisions designed to benefit Republicans at the expense of representative government, seemingly contradictory and unexplained orders, and a pattern of ethical breaches that raises questions about the role of the wealthy.’”
Leave a Reply