Almost a year old but still

The ruling on presidential immunity is just the latest piece of evidence that shows that originalism was just a confidence game by the right to gain power. The court’s conservative majority has revealed itself to be a corrupt political machine with both short- and long-term goals. Today, the court is determined to protect Donald Trump and the Republican Party; longer-term, its mandate is to protect and defend the powers of those who will enable white minority rule in America for years to come.

The court’s immunity ruling is nearly a blank check for Trump, a brazen attempt to protect him from his ongoing criminal cases and to grant him virtually unlimited power if he gets back into the White House. With its ruling, the Supreme Court’s right-wing block has made it clear: They are tired of democracy. The justices want a dictator.

But they only want a right-wing dictator. It is not hard to imagine how differently the justices would have ruled if the question of presidential immunity had come before them in a case involving a Democratic president.

In order to get confirmed, Trump’s appointees to the court lied to the Senate by claiming that they saw Roe v. Wade as settled law; they ripped it up as soon as they consolidated their power on the court. In quick succession, they have gone after voting rights, affirmative action, gun control, environmental regulations, while sending out the word that now is a good time for conservative lawyers to bring their most extreme lawsuits to the court in order to create more right-wing precedents. This court could ban access to contraceptives next; another target could be a reversal on the legalization of gay marriage. The court is now so radical that it would not be surprising to see it go after Brown versus Board of Education, the historic Supreme Court ruling that declared that separate but equal schools were unconstitutional and which helped formed the basis for integration.

This court will be remembered like the justices behind the Dredd Scott decision, the worst ruling by the Supreme Court in American history. Their robes don’t hide their naked grab for political power.

https://theintercept.com/2024/07/01/supreme-court-trump-presidential-immunity/

In a whistleblower disclosure filed with Congress and corroborated by internal documents, NPR reports, Berulis said that the DOGE employees first set up a process to hide their activities on the servers, rather than allowing account activity to be tracked. This alone is a “red flag,” cybersecurity experts said, and a technique mimicking what a malicious hacker may use when trying to infiltrate government systems.

Berulis noticed soon after the raid began that a DOGE engineer was working on a “backdoor” to the NLRB’s case management system, which would allow the rogue group to extract information surreptitiously. Then, he saw within the system’s metrics that there was a massive spike in data being extracted from the network and sent to an unknown location that could contain a huge amount of case information.

The IT worker first spoke out internally against the DOGE raid — but when he did, his attorney has said, someone taped a threatening note to his door that contained sensitive personal information about him, as well as pictures of him walking his dog that looked like they were taken by a drone.

Meanwhile, the information exfiltrated by DOGE includes a huge amount of sensitive information about American workers, including “ongoing contested labor cases, lists of union activists, internal case notes, personal information from Social Security numbers to home addresses, proprietary corporate data and more information that never gets published openly,” NPR wrote.

At one point just minutes after DOGE accessed the systems, for instance, employees noticed log-in attempts from an IP address located in Russia — attempts that used a newly-created DOGE account with the correct username and password.

https://truthout.org/articles/whistleblower-who-exposed-doge-raid-of-nlrb-data-finds-threats-taped-to-his-door/

The article describes how Central ND News, a fake local newspaper, was used as a propaganda tool by the oil company Energy Transfer during its legal battle with Greenpeace over the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Though disguised as a regular newspaper, the publication focused on discrediting protesters and praising the pipeline company, promoting old stories as if they were current news. Greenpeace argued in court that this was a calculated attempt to sway jurors, but the trial proceeded—and ended with a North Dakota jury awarding Energy Transfer over $660 million in damages from Greenpeace.

This case is framed as part of a broader trend of “pink slime journalism”—a term coined to describe partisan outlets that masquerade as legitimate local news. These outlets, often backed by right-wing donors or corporations, publish algorithm-generated or biased content in favor of their sponsors. The company behind Central ND News, Metric Media, is tied to a history of misleading media operations. This kind of pseudo-journalism is now more widespread than actual local newspapers in the U.S., posing a growing threat to journalism, democratic discourse, and free speech.

The piece also notes that Democrats have their own version—Courier Newsroom—though the main focus is on right-wing abuses and their implications for activism, protest rights, and public trust in media

https://jacobin.com/2025/03/pink-slime-journalism-greenpeace-big-oil/

the VPNs acquired are:
- ExpressVPN
- Private Internet Access
- Zenmate
- CyberGhost

And the VPN review sites they purchased are:
- vpnMentor
- Wizcase

So if you use any of those, time to look for other options.

https://cyberinsider.com/kape-technologies-owns-expressvpn-cyberghost-pia-zenmate-vpn-review-sites/

s text tells the story of Indigenous farmworker organizer Alfredo "Lelo" Juarez, who was violently detained by ICE on March 25, 2025, while driving his wife to work in Skagit County, Washington. Despite asking to see a warrant and reaching for his ID as requested, ICE agents smashed his car window and arrested him within seconds. He is currently being held at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma.

Juarez is a central figure in the farmworker labor movement. At just 14 years old, he co-founded Familias Unidas Por La Justicia, an independent union in Washington State. He has played a vital role in advocating for overtime protections, heat and smoke rules, and exposing the exploitative nature of the H-2A guest worker program. As a trilingual bridge between English, Spanish, and Mixteco-speaking workers, he’s been essential in organizing efforts. His union considers him a foundational figure whose work is imprinted on every major achievement.

According to Edgar Franks, the political director of Familias Unidas, Juarez's arrest is clearly politically motivated — a form of intimidation aimed not only at him, but at immigrant workers organizing for better conditions. ICE, emboldened by Trump-era policies, is increasingly aggressive, often operating without warrants and with little accountability. Franks argues that the current administration’s tone gives agents a sense of impunity.

Juarez’s case is part of a broader crackdown on immigrant activists and pro-Palestinian student organizers, with several recent detentions pointing to a troubling pattern. Franks links this to Project 2025, a plan that aims to deport politically active immigrant workers and replace them with more easily controlled H-2A laborers. The strategy, he says, is to dismantle growing worker power in the fields by creating a workforce with fewer rights and less ability to organize.

Despite his detention, Juarez has remained resolute. When supporters visited him, his message was simple: keep organizing. His story has inspired rallies and support across the country, particularly from labor unions, who see his case as emblematic of a broader attack on worker and immigrant rights. Juarez, who has spent nearly half his life organizing, is now a symbol of how powerful — and threatening — grassroots labor organizing can be to entrenched systems of power.

https://truthout.org/articles/with-detention-of-beloved-farmworker-organizer-ice-comes-for-the-labor-movement/

The Great Dechurching, a forthcoming book analyzing surveys of more than 7,000 Americans conducted by two political scientists, attempts to figure out why so many Americans have left churches in recent years. The authors find that religious abuse and corruption do play roles in pushing attendees away, but that a much larger share of the people surveyed indicated that they left the church “for more banal reasons,” as Meador puts it:

The book suggests that the defining problem driving out most people who leave is … just how American life works in the 21st century. Contemporary America simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success. Such a system leaves precious little time or energy for forms of community that don’t contribute to one’s own professional life or, as one ages, the professional prospects of one’s children.

As Meador notes, part of the problem is the unusual role that religion has come to play in some Americans’ lives. The Atlantic writer Derek Thompson coined the term workism in 2019—and diagnosed himself as a worker under its thrall. “The economists of the early 20th century did not foresee that work might evolve from a means of material production to a means of identity production,” Thompson wrote then. “They failed to anticipate that, for the poor and middle class, work would remain a necessity; but for the college-educated elite, it would morph into a kind of religion, promising identity, transcendence, and community.”

Workism doesn’t deliver on these promises, Thompson noted: “Our jobs were never meant to shoulder the burdens of a faith, and they are buckling under the weight. A staggering 87 percent of employees are not engaged at their job, according to Gallup. That number is rising by the year.” Even so, for those who have come to view work as the guiding principle of life, other priorities can quickly fall by the wayside. “The underlying challenge for many is that their lives are stretched like a rubber band about to snap—and church attendance ends up feeling like an item on a checklist that’s already too long,” Meador writes.

Meador, for his part, arrived at an ambitious way for churches to bring Americans back into the fold after reading The Great Dechurching. Maybe churches could better serve their members by asking more of them, he argues:

A vibrant, life-giving church requires more, not less, time and energy from its members. It asks people to prioritize one another over our career, to prioritize prayer and time reading noscripture over accomplishment … Churches could model better, truer sorts of communities, ones in which the hungry are fed, the weak are lifted up, and the proud are cast down.

Creating an environment where people can ask more of one another, and give more in turn, seems like a wise rule of thumb for any community. If only American life didn’t make such a prospect feel so daunting.

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/08/why-church-religion-attendance-decline/674916/

Pope Francis is dead. I am conscious that this channel is numerically irrelevant, and even more that since abandoning leftist groups on Telegram, I'm mostly using it as a space for myself, and thus right now I'm mostly speaking to myself. Nevertheless, as a person who has struggled and is struggling a lot with faith, I'd like to say that Francis was one of the main reasons as to why I decided to reconvert again to Christianity (with a lot of unresolved questions). He offered a look into a Christianity that was a response to the Christofascism that's become the norm in political life. He promoted peace (the only global leader to do so in good faith, frankly), was deeply conscious of the perverse nature of capitalism, and brought attention back to the poor and those struggling as well as the environment.
I'm now terrified they'll elect a disgusting reactionary in his place. If that were to happen, I don't think I'll stay in the Catholic Church much longer.
He'll be sorely missed.

A stunning article written by a friend

https://www.legauche.net/movimento-socialista/papa-francesco-lavoro-migranti-ambiente-e-movimenti-un-bilancio-di-un-pontificato-anomalo/

"In recent weeks, polls have shown Republican voters becoming far more skeptical of cutting taxes for the rich. Reflecting that shift, GOP lawmakers are now trial-ballooning proposals to increase some levies on the wealthy. Some MAGA voices are attempting to articulate a Republican-leaning, tax-cut version of Democrats’ traditional redistributionist rhetoric, arguing that higher taxes on millionaires should finance bigger tax cuts for the working class.

Whereas more than half of Americans approved of Reagan’s first major high-income tax cut proposal, only about a third of Americans approved of Bush’s similar tax proposal at the same time in his presidency. By the time Trump assumed office for his first term, less than a third of Americans supported his high-income tax cut initiative, knowing that such policies have failed to benefit them personally or boost the macroeconomy."

https://jacobin.com/2025/04/gop-tax-revolt-collapse-trump/