Every news outlet I’m seeing says the same basic thing. The Supreme Court, injected with right-wing activist justices, are actively working to end representative government.

“Today’s decision in Trump v. Slaughter takes a wrecking ball to a 90-year pillar of American law,” said House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin. The US Supreme Court on Monday upheld President Donald Trump’s firing of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, overturning 90 years of precedent and giving the chief executive what dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor called “a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted.” […] Chief Justice John Roberts joined fellow conservative Justices… appointed by Trump… [to rule that] independent executive agencies ‘exercise the president’s power, not their own, and thus must be responsible to him’.

Read that twice. Independent agencies can not be independent because that would enable them to be independent.

It’s the literal statement of a king governance model, ending rule of law. The king doesn’t follow the laws, which would require he only fire people for violating those laws (e.g. Constitutional loyalty). The Supreme Court says the executive (e.g. King) is the law, and everyone exercises his power by definition and can’t be independent, so anyone he fires is at his arbitrary and improvised discretion.

Is this a surprise from Roberts?

I’ve written before that he was promoted to the Supreme Court seat because he was the guy who told President Reagan to suppress CDC science on AIDS transmission and let hundreds of thousands of Americans die from intentional executive indecision.

The documented record on Roberts (his 1985 memo to Fred Fielding) proves he advised deleting the CDC’s truthful statement from Reagan’s briefing materials, removing the line saying AIDS was not transmitted through casual contact. He recommended the President generate confusion on what he called a “disputed scientific issue,” despite the CDC having already published its conclusion two weeks earlier that there was no dispute. Reagan’s press conference then ran Roberts’ propaganda, sowing doubt rather than relaying the science.

So, no, not really a surprise that the same justice who says we must rush to end democracy was the guy who said the President must slow down and wait on warnings about a deadly disease. Roberts has one consistent principle: the executive should be unchecked and the public unprotected. That is his record, and it is the exact reason the GOP wanted him on the bench. In better times his disloyalty to the Constitution would be called seditious, for wielding state power to destroy the structure that checks state power.

It’s not subtle when a white man in government literally says “states’ rights” are why he keeps blocking Native American communities from having access to water.

“We have significant unresolved concerns with the legislation that may affect each of our states’ rights to and interests in Colorado River water,” negotiators for Utah and Wyoming wrote in March to the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in a previously unreported letter. New Mexico and Colorado sent similar letters.

[…]

For 83-year-old Marilyn Tewa, the stalemate means her family will continue to go without running water. Tewa serves on the Hopi Tribal Council, where her duties include working on the water rights agreement, but her village of Mishongnovi, on the tribe’s northern Arizona reservation, lacks indoor plumbing.

Every other day, she loads 5-gallon buckets into her pickup and drives 5 miles to a windmill originally built for livestock that draws untreated water from underground.

“That’s what keeps us alive,” Tewa said, tapping the spigot on a May afternoon.

“States’ rights” is a dehumanizing battle cry from the Civil War. The lobby group may as well be waving a Confederate battle flag, crying long live Custer, or remember the Alamo. The racist dog whistling is loud.

And if I had a dollar for every huge tech corporation claiming they are donating to water charities to help the poor people in Africa… while they completely ignore actual threats especially to the people in their own backyard.

This is not conjecture. I was working with a huge global tech firm that was pushing a water charity donation pledge. When I started to question the ethics of the charity, the head of it came to meet with me in person.

At first it was cordial and he said things like “happy to answer your questions” though soon he seemed a bit frustrated, even deflated as if I had unmasked him. I had asked straight questions like “exactly how many villages had security issues after a well was dug”.

To his credit he told me could confirm exactly 15 examples (at that time). I appreciated the transparency, yet he seemed disturbed by having to admit to the fact an utterly simplistic solution (get donations, drive in, dig a well, leave) to a complex problem was in fact making lives worse.

Many of those tech corporation executives have second and third homes in these states, filling swimming pools and watering lawns, actively denying Native Americans the basic water to survive.

Elon Musk had initially said he would run his companies with robots because human life was overrated. When he failed at that, he told reporters it changed his mind about human life having value.

Tesla then became known for gaming human safety regulations, being far worse than other companies and unsafe for workers.

Tesla Had 3 Times as Many OSHA Violations as the 10 Largest US Plants Combined

SpaceX is even worse, as it now has been found to be unsafe for workers, following investigations of a preventable death.

It’s unclear whether SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was at Starbase—a name now used both for the newfound company town and the company’s production and launch facilities near Boca Chica Beach—on the day Bautista died. His private jet’s flight log shows his plane flying from Los Angeles to Brownsville on May 21, six days after the incident, and returning to California on May 22, the same day as the last Starship launch. The Starship exploded on May 22, prompting another mishap investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration. Musk hasn’t publicly commented on Bautista’s death. Cameron County Sheriff Manuel Treviño told the Observer in an email that the law enforcement agency gave all the evidence it collected to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

[…]

Bautista’s death is the first worker fatality at SpaceX’s South Texas facilities, but there have been numerous injuries there in the last few years. Just among its own employees—not including those working for contractors on-site—SpaceX saw 427 injuries and 9 respiratory illnesses between January 6, 2022, and June 10, 2025, according to documents SpaceX filed with OSHA and acquired by the Observer through a records request. These injuries included concussions, second-degree burns, partial finger amputations, hernias, dislocations, crushed hands, and broken ribs, legs, and ankles.

One of the reasons given for SpaceX in Texas being so much worse than the national average is that it’s not in California. Elon Musk infamously complained to California that he disliked their worker safety regulations. The death and injury of workers in his Texas operations show exactly what he intended.

The company’s facility in Hawthorne, California, which has more than twice the employees of Starbase, has less than half the injury rate of the South Texas site. OSHA confirmed these calculations as accurate when asked by the Observer.

Trump used forced deportations to put hundreds of Venezuelans into a detention facility that collapsed into rubble. They are now missing and feared dead.

A deportation flight from Miami arrived in Venezuela hours before Wednesday’s earthquakes. On board were 146 Venezuelans, including 19 women and seven children, according to ICE Flight Monitor, an initiative of Human Rights First, which tracks deportation flights. They were transported to a hotel in La Guaira. …caught up in the Trump administration’s drive for mass deportations. In May, ICE Flight Monitor tracked 288 deportation flights to 38 countries, including Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cameroon, Chile and the Ivory Coast. The U.S. ran 12 deportation flights to Venezuela in May, operating three days a week, according to ICE Flight Monitor. […] Liliana Rojas told Telemundo that she has been trying to locate her 33-year-old partner. The detention center where he was held in El Paso, Texas, says only told that he was deported.

“No one is giving an answer about anything,” Rojas said.