I am a retired attorney who has particular interests in Constitutional law and politics. Now that the two are on a collision course, I feel compelled to contribute to the conversation. I confess that I escaped a rabidly Republican household, parents, siblings, cousins. This has left me with an indelible understanding of how they think and what they value. They are almost certainly fine with the authoritarian playbook that is Project 2025. These are transformative times.
June 6, 2025. Everyone is talking about the massive fight between the big guy and the billionaire buddy. It’s kind of a big and public fight. In front of everyone. Some qualified experts have said it’s not a real fight or not a real problem, that they’re pissed at each other but still need each other, and the association won’t end. It’s at least partially performative. At least one brilliant attorney believes this fight is the end of their relationship, that there’s no coming back from this for both fools. I can see why he’d think that. There is evidence to support either theory. I tend to think the two narcissists need each other too much to really nuke the relationship forever. They each get something that the other can supply, and I don’t see that changing. In the meantime, it’s a down and dirty fight. So the fight between the two narcissists is crazy but probably not of lasting importance in how everything shakes out, unless they break things, I don’t know. They’ve already broken so much between them.
The real problem, as pointed out by the great historian and author Thom Hartmann, is that they’re openly fighting over custody of the country, the tech bro billionaires or the big guy. This has become a very serious problem because billionaires are allowed, openly allowed and encouraged, to spend vast sums of money to control the outcomes of elections. We have been watching this for years now. In fact, we act as if things have always been this way, so it must be right. Like some kind of amnesia, like someone erased the past. In fact, there was a time not so long ago when we had laws against enormous donations to political parties from partisan groups, because that ends up allowing money to control the election. They knew that was a bad thing. And this is interesting: “no other advanced democracy” allows this level of money flooding the election system (Thom Hartmann). Just ours. And how many billionaires regularly purchase political candidates, parties, Political Action Committees (PACs), and agendas? So many I can’t count them all. And many we don’t know about.
The problem with this much money and corruption in our election system is that it perverts our country. It changes it at a molecular level. This business that’s happening now, all of it, it isn’t normal. It’s not the way it’s supposed to be. What we’re watching, with his billionaire associates and his billionaire cabinet and his billionaire purchased Supreme Court, and the tyrant at the top, is the remaking of this country into an authoritarian oligarchy. Back in around 1919, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” How did he know? Other great thinkers have said similar things. This oligarch takeover was planned decades ago, before 1978, when another corrupt Supreme Court decided that money is protected free speech and corporations should have all the rights of a human being. Ludicrous. Travesty. But law. Then in 2010, the Roberts court reinforced that ruling with Citizens United, which holds basically the same as the 1978 case, free speech and human rights nonsense. So the Supreme Court is in on the whole right wing extremist takeover. They call Democrats activist judges, but they’re the activist extremists. Projection must be a party-wide thing. Well, damn, news flash, the Supreme Court just gave doge full access to every human being’s social security data, and they don’t have to disclose what they do with this treasure trove of personal data. Think about it. This is very bad. This ruling is a crime wave.
The two problems we have to somehow rectify are the obscene and illegally obtained massive fortunes of the few, and the scary people who work on Project 2025 and really do want to control your personal life. It’s a scary christian nationalist, more accurately a white christian supremacist patriarchy, manifesto they want to smother us with. I’m not capitalizing Christian here because there is nothing Christian about it, as that word is generally used. There are a lot of these guys, they’re patriarchal, and some stepford wives. The surveillance system you’ve been hearing about, that will be used to spy on our private home lives to make sure we conform to their version of a correct citizen. I know it sounds far off in the future, but it’s not. Since this last assertion is scary, I’m going to leave it right there. But know that 70% of the big guy’s executive orders came straight from Project 2025, the white christian supremacist patriarchy manifesto. These people, the oligarchs and the scary people, will not stop on their own. We need to stop them. Knowledge is the first step. And admitting what is happening is next.
Take care and stay connected