New Reconstruction? Try New Jim Crow.
Bad faith too cheap to meter!
I was going to start this column with a pitch for why you should drop everything and buy my new book, “After The Great Redo” — speculative fiction about a future American Reconstruction — but then John Roberts and his pesky gang of anti-constitutionalists did that thing where you re-legalize Jim Crow.
Thanks to Roberts, by far the worst American to ever live, my book pitch will have to wait until next month. So it goes.
You may have read about the Supreme Court’s out-of-control right-wing majority delivering the final body blow to the Voting Rights Act (VRA) this week. We were always headed toward such a bleak and anti-democracy outcome with a 6-3 Republican activist majority on the land’s highest court. These far-right freaks had taken great pains to weaken the VRA — one of the great achievements in western democracy — until it was, like Roe, a husk of its former self. This week’s ruling, allowing Republican state legislatures to go ahead and legally create racist voting districts, was just the final step.
THIS BODY BLOW.
As the proprietor of Bad Faith Times, I have dedicated many blog posts and analyses to the judicial philosophy that has allowed the American Right to undo the 20th century’s vital small-d democratic gains. Roberts and company have done this primarily with weaponized bad faith jurisprudence, a deeply dishonest and ultimately destructive philosophy that has allowed Roberts and Alito and Thomas and Gorsuch and Coney-Barrett and Kavanaugh to pretend racism is over, or that it is actually quite racist to draw voting districts that ensure fair representation based on race.
Racism has to be a thing of the past for the right wing because the unreality they have carefully crafted over this past quarter century would collapse under the weight of the truth: That racism in the third decade of the 21st century is alive and well and maybe even more virulent than it was a half century ago, thanks to billionaire-owned blackbox social media algorithms that function as little more than fascism creation machines. With racism over (in the Right’s unreality) it’s time to move on from the protections Americans of color may have needed way back when. Or so the thinking goes.
Sam Alito has done as much heavy lifting as anyone to construct and carry out this bad-faith judicial philosophy. Back in December, when evaluating Texas Republicans’ new and wildly racist electoral maps, Alito said there was no way to evaluate whether the redistricting was racist because one could not prove racist intent among the racist lawmakers who passed the gerrymander into law. Alito, without a shred of irony, said Republican legislators in Texas should be granted the presumption of good faith in their mid-decade redistricting, ordered by a president who was elected twice because he promised to be a huge fucking racist when in power.
The Major Questions Doctrine adopted by Roberts and the Court’s conservatives to stop Barack Obama from making any policy whatsoever is intolerable for a democratic republic. In no way should the land’s highest court weigh in on every single policy considered by the executive or legislative branches. This, as you know well by now, allows Roberts and the Court’s right wingers to play defense against Democratic efforts to make American life slightly better. Quite conveniently, it lets them play offense for Republicans when they are in power.
This is why anyone who believes Democrats could reap the benefits of an imperial presidency — like the one Roberts gave to Trump — needs to adjust their expectations and support a lasting and sustainable change to the Supreme Court that will neutralize the country’s six robed enemies sitting on the Court today.
Things have gotten so bad — SCOTUS has become so radical and dangerous — that even normie Democratic politicians are calling the Court a “captured institution” in desperate need of reform. As Alex Rikleen, a US Senate candidate in Massachussets, told me a few months back: Any elected Democrat who believes the party can succeed and counter the GOP’s authoritarian offensive without first reforming the Supreme Court is “living in a land of make believe.”
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Now to tell you about all the blogging stuff I’ve been working on over the past month on BadFaithTimes.com.
We’re Going To Need So Much Judicial Review
(That there above? That’s a link.)
I told you I write about the Supreme Court a lot. It’s because the Right’s bad-faith approach to politics is most clearly seen in the power the Court’s majority wields against the republic.
Over the past decade they have overturned long-standing legal precedents because they say constitutional originalism leaves them no choice. Whatever. You and I know that’s bullshit. Not everyone does though. In this blog post I wrote about taking a page from Roberts’s anti-democracy playbook and using judicial review to overturn the utterly absurd jurisprudence of the Roberts era. All of it.
You Are Valuable Because You Exist. The Machine Is Not.
Tech oligarchs like Sam Altman are doing everything they can to put machines and human beings on equal footing, a critically important step in forcing AI into the lives of every living person and mainstreaming the acceptance of AI as inevitable and good for society and equal to you in every way.
We are not “stochastic parrots,” as Altman believes.
The Worst Democrat
Spoiler alert: It’s John fucking Fetterman, that big ghoul who only dressed up when he gets to bow to Donald Trump.
I wrote about how Fetterman tricked me during his 2022 Senate run, and why I thought he was a new kind of Democrat — one who would simply refuse to engage with the right wing’s tired bad-faith attacks.
Media Outlets Don’t Understand This Political Environment
That Democratic candidates keep winning in Trump districts doesn’t seem to register with major media outlets. Probably that’s because the one rule of 21st century politics is that nothing can ever be good for the Democratic Party.
On a Bad Faith Times podcast, I talked about the current political environment, why mainstream media can’t really grasp it, and why racist gerrymanders won’t be enough to save Republicans in 2026.
The Backburn To Save American Democracy Goes On
The gerrymandering of Virginia is the best sign yet that elected Democrats are (finally) awake to the threats we face from a radicalized Republican Party that has no place in a functional democracy.
Gerrymandering the shit out of Virginia was just part of a larger project that constitutes a backburn to save what remains of democracy in the US before the fascist fire devours it all. What would have been unimaginable even a couple years ago is now reality: Elected Democrats are aligned in the all-out fight for control of Congress.
Peter Thiel Has Wanted To End Politics For a Long Time
I took absolutely no pleasure in reading Thiel’s insane 2009 essay on ways libertarians could escape not just the United States, but humanity altogether.
That Thiel penned this nonsense six months after Barack Obama was elected is no coincidence. Thiel, along with the rest of the American right wing, had decided it was done with democracy after one (1) Black man was elected to lead the American empire. This was the end of the line. We won’t be playing this game anymore, the American Right said with one voice.
Obama’s election was a radicalizing moment for white people across the world. We’re still dealing with the fallout today.
You Are With Resistance Politics Or You Are Against Resistance Politics
Apologies for the George W. Bush-style headline. There’s no taking the elder Millennial out of me, I guess.
Resistance politics — participating in actions like No Kings, for example — is not going to make you feel or sound cool or “based” or however internet-poisoned youths say it. But dismissing ardent and well-meaning opposition to a fascist regime because it’s not cool enough is unacceptable. My advice would be to grow the fuck up.
Pick a side: Us or them. I pick the side with the fucking furious “wine mom” aunts opposing the Trump regime with everything they’ve got.
This is now your OPEN THREAD.
Price on gas at the station across the street jumped by 60 cents overnight, now at $4.89, that is for Cleveland, I am guessing it costs an arm, a leg and a kidney in places like California.
Never forget, resistance is NOT futile.