Invasion of the Body Snatchers!

By Immigration Editor Emma Goldman

Every aspiring fascist dictator needs an enemy to oppress.  It keeps the angry white masses enraged and it provides a rationale for violence and destroying the rule of law.

President VD Amin claims our country has been invaded by enemies, by which he means anyone who disagrees with him or tries to hold him accountable for his crimes.  One of his most popular targets are immigrants. Not supposedly “illegal” immigrants, a derogatory catchall for any noncitizen who has not yet received some sort of formal status, even if their legal claim to residence is both legitimate and pending, and which must be distinguished from illegal non-immigrants, like Tom “Bag o' Cash” Homan.

Brief ICE encounter, per Brett Kavanaugh

To provide his base of white supremacists with the entertainment for which they clamor, he and his minions have unleashed ill-trained unaccountable heavily armed and masked agents with licenses to roust essentially anyone they want.

Their hunting license was recently approved by six bent Republican Supreme Court Justices (see last week's tirade), who said that these masked men could stop and detain anyone who looked Hispanic and spoke Spanish if they were in the vicinity of a car wash or other low-wage employer.  Justice Brett Kavanaugh whipped out a concurring opinion dismissing the concerns of those so rousted:

The interests of individuals who are illegally in the country in avoiding being stopped by law enforcement for questioning is ultimately an interest in evading the law. That is not an especially weighty legal interest. 

One difficulty with Kavanaugh's acute analysis is of course he assumes the answer he wants. The laxness of the criteria ensures that the dragnet will ensnare lots of other people who do have legal status and are thus worthy of constitutional protection.

Kavanaugh assumes that the intrusion on liberty, like his effort to rape a high school student, is but a mere trifle:  

If the person is a U. S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter. Only if the person is illegally in the United States may the stop lead to further immigration proceedings.

It turns out that like Brett himself, that's not quite right.  The record in the case, as recounted by Justice Sotomayor, told the real story:

A masked agent ordered Gavidia to “ ‘[s]top right there’ ” and began asking him questions. Ibid. Agents then asked Gavidia whether he is “American at least three times”; three times, Gavidia affirmed that he is. Ibid. Unsatisfied, the agents asked Gavidia for the name of the hospital in which he was born, and when Gavidia could not immediately recall, the agents racked a rifle, took Gavidia’s phone, “pushed [him] up against the metal gated fence, put [his] hands behind [his] back, and twisted [his] arm.” Id., at 6–7. Agents released Gavidia only after he offered up his REAL ID.  

And if the unlucky victim had not had a REAL ID, they could have been taken into immigration detention until such time as they are able to obtain the proper documentation, from behind bars. 

So the agents will jail you until you can provide evidence satisfactory to them to prove your legal status.  Lawful Permanent Residents usually carry around their "green card," which suffices.  But U.S. citizens dare to walk the streets without a photo ID proving citizenship (Your driver's license might not suffice).  Do you walk around with your passport?  If you look Hispanic, you'd better, says the Supreme Court. 

More recently, to provide pleasingly violent video for the delectation of President VD Amin,  a motley crew of anonymous federal agents and armed troops have rampaged through the streets of Washington, D.C.  Here's how their trifling intrusions on liberty went down there, according to a suit filed this week by the ACLU:

Trifling ICE encounter with U.S. citizen

Plaintiff José Escobar Molina is a 47-year-old man who has lived in D.C. for 25 years. He has maintained valid Temporary Protected Status (“TPS”) for El Salvador since 2001. On August 21, 2025, Mr. Escobar Molina was walking from his apartment building in Northwest D.C. to his work truck, about to start his workday, when two cars pulled up next to him. As he was about to get into his truck, plain-clothed and unidentified federal agents exited the cars and— without conducting any inquiry—seized Mr. Escobar Molina, grabbing him by the arms and legs and immediately handcuffing him. The agents arrested him without a warrant and without asking for his name, his identification, or anything about his immigration status. The agents also did not ask him where he lives, whom he lives with, how long he has lived here, or anything else about his ties to the community prior to arresting him. After ICE detained Mr. Escobar Molina overnight at its processing center in Chantilly, Virginia, the next day an ICE supervisor finally realized that he had valid TPS, which statutorily prohibits ICE from detaining him, and released him. 

That's a pretty big trifle, Brettster.  And in Washington, the agents confess that their criteria for arresting people on the street are laughably vague and racist:

In some instances, the racial profiling is blatant and explicit. For example, on August 31, 2025, while a Latina woman was walking to a CVS in Northwest D.C. to pick up medicine for her daughter, an armed officer in camouflage stopped her to check her immigration status simply because—as the officer stated explicitly—the officer believed she did not “look like a citizen” and looked like she is from another country. In fact, the woman is a U.S. citizen. 

What does it mean to not look like a citizen in the eyes of the immigration police?  The answer is provided by the victims themselves. 

We have a niece who is a U.S. citizen and was adopted as a baby from Guatemala.  Does she “look like a citizen?”  If so, why does she fear driving in New Hampshire and always carries her U.S. passport card?

And, although it seems like a million years ago, we remember when an immigrant with a valid student visa was violently kidnapped on the streets of Somerville and asported in chains to the immigration gulag in Louisiana by masked agents because she signed a letter protesting the war in Gaza.

The conclusion: the body snatchers are empowered to arrest and detain anyone who “looks like” an immigrant, which means anyone who isn't white, thanks to the current bent Supreme House of Lords.

The question is whether, as in the remake with Jeff Goldblum and Donald Sutherland, resistance is futile.

It is not.

First, as the Ozturk case demonstrates, at least the lower federal courts are not inclined to rubber stamp lawless assaults on anyone they choose, whether because they wrote letters or spoke Spanish.

2025 reboot: no stars

Second, the public furor over such lawless arrests may help turn public opinion, especially Hispanic public opinion, against the regime that empowers the body snatchers.  Despite what every half-assed third-way Democratic consultant seems to say, public opinion is not stationary.  It can be influenced by exposure and advocacy.   

Third, let's remember to place the blame for the invasion of the body snatchers where it belongs: on every f***in' Republican from 1968 to today, who undermined the rule of law by voting in the gang of crazed sex offenders and handmaids who now dominate the Supreme Court. 

Let's also note how many elected Republicans are now opposing the invasion of the body snatchers.

Today that number stands as 0.0, more or less.

Should we recover our democracy, in addition to reconstructing the out-of-control immigration police, we will need to reform the Supreme Court with new seats, limits on jurisdiction, and the impeachment and removal of any of these clowns who lied under oath to Congress about their sordid pasts. 

There is no alternative.  As the great Yvonne Abraham once said, “Resistance may or may not be futile. Acquiescence definitely is.”  

UPDATE:

Documents reviewed by The New York Times show that the July 15 firing of Ms. Beckwith occurred less than six hours after she told Mr. Bovino, the Border Patrol chief in charge of the Southern California raids, that a court order prevented him from arresting people without probable cause in a vast expanse that stretches from the Oregon border to Bakersfield. She was removed not only from her post as acting U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of California, but from the office altogether.   

Civility and its Discontents, Supreme Court ed.

 

By Legal Correspondent Saori Shiroseki

While still on the air for who knows how much longer, Stephen Colbert invited Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on his show recently to plug her new children's book, There's an Alito Under My Bed [Intern, check title – Ed.] and chat a little about the Supreme Court.

As is now clear to even the meanest intelligence, the six bent Republican Justices on the Supreme Court have continued to rule us all not as judges applying the law but as an unelected House of Lords, imposing their warped reactionary political views on the rest of us.

How do we know this?  Because the three unbent Justices tell us, if you deconstruct what they write.

Here's Ketanji Brown Jackson, condemned by dead hatemonger Charlie Kirk as an unqualified diversity hire despite her two Harvard degrees (for those keeping score at home, that's two more degrees than St. Charlie ever earned) and her stellar career on the district and appellate court levels, dissenting from an idiotic lawless shadow-docket decision that allowed the U Bum Administration to continue to withhold illegally NIH grants for medical research:

 NIH v. APHA, No. 25A103 (Aug. 21, 2025), slip op. at 17 (Jackson, J. dissenting).

For those of you who are not acquainted with the abstruse legal thinking of Calvin and Hobbes, the friendly legal analysts at Balls & Strikes helpfully summed up Justice Jackson's dissent:

The key words here are “stops just short.” 

Which is at least surprising given Balls & Strikes' columnist Madibe Dennie's spot on analysis of Jackson's dissent:

Jackson’s dissent is not a mere disagreement with a colleague’s judgment. She is demonstrating that what her colleagues are doing isn’t even judging; laws have little to no bearing on the outcome of their decisions, which are determined instead by Republican policy goals. For a long time, members of the public and the coordinate branches of government have accepted the Supreme Court’s rulings because they assumed, from the outside looking in, that it is a legitimate body to be taken seriously. Jackson is showing why it is not. 

When the Republican majority invented without legal basis a “major questions doctrine” to prevent EPA from doing what it was empowered to do under the Clean Air Act (regulate air pollution), Justice Elena Kagan similarly criticized her Republican colleagues for not acting like judges: 

The current Court is textualist only when being so suits it. When that method would frustrate broader goals, special canons like the “major questions doctrine” magically appear as get- out-of-text-free cards.  

West Virginia v. EPA, No. 20-1530, slip op. at 28 (Kagan, J., dissenting).

And she knows full well that when a Supreme Court majority in effect overturns acts of Congress because of its own policy preferences, like lining the pockets of Republican fossil fuel magnates, the Supreme Court loses its legitimacy:

But in Kagan’s view, the public’s trust in the Court is vital, so the trustworthiness of the Court is, too. It is a reason for the judicial modesty she values: justices don’t inherit legitimacy. Legitimacy is a form of respect from the people, which the Court either fosters or fritters away by what it decides—and, critically, how. Its majority opinions must shape and command public opinion. Story professor Richard H. Fallon’s book on the subject is Law and Legitimacy IN the Supreme Court (emphasis added): Replacing of with in underscores what Kagan highlighted: “The Court earns its legitimacy by the way it behaves.” 

Lord Thomas and the Knights of Schickelgruber's Teacups

She knows the current Court is an illegitimate political entity. Why won't she say so? 

Which brings us to Justice Sonia Sotomayor.  Recently, in a case on the shadow docket staying a lower court's order preventing the ICE body-snatchers from stopping people because of their ethnicity, language, and apparent vocation she dissented:

this Court decides to take the once-extraordinary step of staying the District Court’s order. That decision is yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket. We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.

Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, No. 25A169, slip op. at 1-2 (Sotomayor, J., dissenting)(emphasis added).

Dissents don't ring any louder than that.

But when interviewed by America's leading political commentator, Stephen Colbert, she tempered her critique markedly:

You know I don't always agree with my colleagues.  Some of them.  And they can be really frustrating....What I look for to maintain our collegiality is the good in them.  

Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Sept. 9, 2025 at 16:45ff  (paywalled). 

We have to ask at what point is maintaining collegiality inconsistent with a Justice's duty to defend the Constitution by pointing out that six of her colleagues are acting as unelected aristocrats and not judges?   

If it is the case that the Supreme Court has replaced its legitimate role as a court of law with an illegal unconstitutional role as an unelected Council of Doges, doesn't that require a political solution?

You'll be shocked to learn that we raised this question in March, 2024, before the last score of unconstitutional Court decisions:

What's the point of pretending the Court is acting as a court when it indisputably is not, according to the unbent Justices who sit on it? 

We'd argue that the maintaining the false pretense is itself dangerous because it helps perpetuate the injustice and corruption of the six Republican wardheelers in robes.  

Imagine how powerful the effect would be of three past and present Justices admitting that the current Court is not only strutting down First Street NE naked, its pubes flying into Coke cans all over Capitol Hill, but that the time has come for the President and the Congress to fix the ongoing coup against democracy with appropriate legislation.

They're just calling balls and strikes

Indeed, the time came in 2000. 

Pretending since then that nothing is wrong has led us to observe helplessly the plight of 26,000 pregnant rape victims in Texas and the outrageous stacking of the criminal justice system deck in favor of a corrupt Russian-owned insurrectionist criminal defendant.

And the stakes are so much higher, now that the six bent Republicans have repeatedly decided to enable a tyrannical Presidential coup against American democracy. 

Publicly calling out one's colleagues as frauds and subverters of our nation is hard.  How much harder would it be knowing you could have acted decisively to save our nation by insisting on a political solution to Supreme Court lawlessness but you were too busy looking for the good in Brett Kavanaugh?

And if you're like any number of helpless women Yale students, perhaps Brett will help you look for the good in him by whipping it out. 

Bang bang unity

 

By Nelly Bly in Washington with Spy Archivist Aula Minerva

If it’s a day ending in “y”, a loser white guy with insanely easy access to high powered weapons has once again inflicted death, torment, and terror in America.

Actually it happened multiple times last week in America but the one that attracted the most attention, for some reason probably unrelated to the ability of the hard-right to manipulate the American media, was the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a loathsome extremist hatemonger and rabble-rouser. For those of you who came in late, there is no justification for violence against such an individual, no matter how odious. 

The current Trump Regime immediately transformed Kirk into a martyr for the cause of Fascism, like Horst Wessel, dispatching real troops and Vice President Jimmy Don Vontz to accompany Charlie's body back to Arizona. 

Just as ridiculously, our fearless media, after firing a Republican who dared to note that Charlie's brand of divisive, hate-filled rabble-rousing might have somehow contributed to the current climate of anger and division, resurrected Kirk as a saintly martyr for free speech and debate:

 

Poor Ezra has been dragged so hard for this blazing hot take that St. David Brooks took him out for a consolatory soprassata sub (Ezra being of the class who would be comfortable savoring such an elite treat).  Even California Gov. and former Kimberly Guilfoyle boy toy Gavin Newsom said that “ The best way to honor Charlie’s memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse.”  

OK Gavin, here's some spirited discourse about that great philosopher Charlie Kirk:

[My spouse] works and does not have a marriage where she is considered inferior to her husband or required to obey him, as Kirk arrogantly told Taylor Swift she should do after learning of her engagement. (“Reject feminism,” he said. “You’re not in charge.”) We also live in a Haitian immigrant neighborhood, and if you only listened to Charlie Kirk, you might be under the impression that my neighbors eat pets. You would also be encouraged to believe that, simply by virtue of being non-white immigrants, they were “replacing” white people—and that, since they are also Black, they are dangerous. “Happening all the time in urban America,” he said, “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact.”

But he was always so nice to those hacks and pundits he talked to (like Ezra Klein!).

And now that he is being lionized as a martyr to free speech, let's take a quick look at his actual views on such freedom.  When college professors say things Charlie Kirk doesn't like, they are doxxed and harassed on his professor watchlist, putting them in danger of harassment and worse:

Professor Watchlist, launched in 2016 [by Kirk], describes its goal as seeking to inform students and parents about professors that may “discriminate against conservative students” or advance leftist ideology. More than 300 professors have been listed on the site for various reasons — some for political commentary, others for teaching subjects targeted by the right, such as critical race theory, gender studies, or systemic inequality.

But critics argue the list is more nefarious and can open professors to online harassment, public backlash, and even threats. Professors listed there, like Copeland, say they’re concerned about their safety and others who are more vulnerable. 

Nothing bespeaks a commitment to free discourse like intimidating professors who dare to disagree with you.  Someone explain this to Ezra, we're busy. 

The punditocracy is also wetting itself, whether through tears or otherwise, proclaiming that Kirk's killing represents some sort of watershed or inflection point in a country long drenched with hate, stoked by President VD Amin and every other Republican, and political violence:

The shooting of two schoolchildren the same day in Colorado was not one of the worst moments in recent political history, according to The Atlantic.  Nor was the cold-blooded murder of Democratic Minnesota Rep. Melissa Hortman, her husband, and her dog by a hard right whackjob in June.  

It's hard to take such selective outrage seriously, although we must. 

Their murder: not an inflection point,
according to The Atlantic

Speaking of inflection points, the day after the shootings in Utah and Colorado, America remembered the 24th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks. While that was an echte national trauma (unlike Charlie’s demise), some of the parallels are instructive.

Memories of 9/11 have grown somewhat distant, except for those who continue to mourn the loss of someone they loved on that date or due to the delayed effects of the toxic cleanup ever since. We want to remember what happened after.

You may (or more likely don't) recall that the President on that date was an insanely unqualified and feckless right-wing Republican named George W. Bush. If you don’t remember him, just follow his flacks, shills, and bag-carriers, many of whom have reinvented themselves as our most sententious allies weekdays at 4 Eastern or in numerous blogs and social media posts. 

Bush had been elected by a narrow 5-4 Supreme Court majority the previous year. Since being installed in office, he lounged around the White House and his vacation home (or “ranch” as his flacks told the press to call it) in Texas, doing dumb s*** to appease the hard reactionary right (like limiting life-saving research into stem cells) and the now-departed neocon war hawks (like terminating nuclear arms treaties with Russia).

What he wasn’t doing was listening to the multiple warnings he received from intelligence agencies and his own terrorism adviser, Richard Clarke, about al-Qaeda threats to the homeland. Since that intelligence didn’t fit with the Bush Administration’s preconceived list of bad ‘uns (Russia, Iraq, North Korea), Bush felt free to do nothing to protect us from al-Qaeda. This is an established fact, and easily distinguishable from the bizarre and falsified conspiracy theory that he knew about the actual attack in advance. After being caught with the chaps down and boots off (remember how he loved to play cowboy), he and the entire Republican Party called not for an inquiry into the causes of this intelligence debacle but for Unity.

In the face of the 9/11 calamity, we were told to Unite as a country. What we weren’t told explicitly was that meant we all had to support whatever George Bush and Deadeye Dick Cheney did in response to the challenge of 9/11.

The mother of the alleged assassin
of Charlie Kirk, shown here indoctrinating
him with left wing extremism

We all had to acquiesce in the unconstitutional seizure, imprisonment, and torture of anyone Deadeye Dick and his wingman Donald Rumsfeld thought deserved it, although almost all of the 780 persons they sent to the Guantanamo concentration camp have since been released without as far as anyone knows plunging the world into terrorism. 

When anyone dared to raise questions about these shenanigans, Bush flacks like Ari Fleischer (now shilling for the very democratic Saudi theocracy) said: “all Americans...need to watch what they say, watch what they do.” 

And indeed anyone who dared to question the Bush Administration's insane response – invade a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 – was routinely attacked as unpatriotic and soft on terrorism. Bush's 2004 opponent, war hero John Kerry, was smeared as a coward who didn't deserve his Purple Hearts.

The result was not very unifying, but it did serve to cement Republican power until Bush's catastrophic fumbling of Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq War, and the entire national economy finally caught up with him.

By the way, one of the pundits who backed the ridiculous bloody unnecessary war on Iraq was named Jeffrey Goldberg, who went on to fame if not fortune as the editor of, wait for it, The Atlantic! 

The moral we extract from this tale is that drinking from the chalice of Unity, if it means abandoning basic principles of right and wrong (like the rights of women and minorities) is not only fatuous, it is a path to political disaster.

The correct response to political and other gun violence is to control guns so that they don't end up in the hands of white male losers.  All this prattle about video games ignores the truth, freely available to anyone who reads The Onion, that while young men in all countries  are addicted to video games, only in one country does that lead to murder.  That should be something we should all be able to unite around, amirite?

If instead of fighting for what's right, we follow the pundits' advice and stifle ourselves in the name of Unity, then Unity will result.

We'll unite around “One Country, One People, and One Leader.”

It sounds a lot worse in the original German.  

UPDATE 9/14:  It turns out that real History Professor Heather Cox Richardson remembers the Republican abuse of post-9/11 Unity too:

In the wake of the attacks, Bush’s popularity, which had been dropping, soared to 90 percent. He and his advisers saw that popularity as a mandate to change America, and the world, according to their own ideology. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” he announced. He and his loyalists attacked any opposition to their measures as an attack on “the homeland.”

They tarred those who questioned the administration’s economic or foreign policies as un-American—either socialists or traitors making the nation vulnerable to terrorist attacks—and set out to make sure such people could not have a voice at the polls.  

From the New York Times Public Editor: What are they thinking?

Editors’ Note: A million years ago, the New York Times decided that its readers deserved an advocate who would review their concerns about its work product, investigate, and report their findings. It worked well — for the readers that is. After a few years, the Times mandarins decided that it no longer needed any critique of its work, presumably because in their minds it was flawless. So they s***tcanned the public editor and everything worked out great, for the easily bruised sensibilities of Times hacks, that is.

For the rest of us, not so much. It turns out the Times gets stuff wrong. A lot. For that reason, at least one former public editor, the formidable Margaret Sullivan, has continued her fearless criticism in The Guardian. To further assist her and others, the Spy has appointed its own Meta-Content Generator, A.J. Liebling, to serve as the Times Public Editor in Exile. Today he takes a look at the Editorial Page or whatever the f*** they are calling it now.

By A.J.Liebling
Meta-Content Generator 

The collapse of The Washington Post Editorial Page into a thinly-disguised agitprop outlet for Rocketman Jeff Bezos's wet dream of plutocrat supremacy over the entire universe has had its inevitable results: anyone who had anything intelligent to say (e.g., Catherine Rampell or Eugene Robinson) has lit out for the territories and no one takes it seriously anymore.

Imagine looking at the wreckage of a once if not great at least pretty good newspaper and saying, “Cut me a slice of that!”

Enter King Arthur XVI, the highly-qualified supremo of The New York Times, who obtained his post through the usual triumph of meritocracy: from daddy. Having purged his Editorial Page of know-nothing hacks who won only one Nobel Prize, like Paul Krugman, he and his minions seem intent to turn the op-ed page into a vast wasteland of right-wing talking points.

His all-dud line up of reactionary white guys – Bretbug, St. David Brooks, Weird Ross Douthat, National Review Dave, and Six-Months Tom Friedman – provides a firm foundation of skippable content.  This leaves the Times Opinion Page with exactly two readable columnists: Jamelle Bouie and Michelle Goldberg (at least when she's not transphobia-curious).

Over the past week King Arthur's pages have produced a bounty of clangers.  Let's look at a few of the worst.

Let's start with one of the easiest targets: the ever sententious and ever wrong St. David Brooks. He put down his fancy-shmancy soprassata sub this week and explained why he is not a liberal.  (Like anyone asked.)

Professor Driftglass took this apart so beautifully we can only quote him in awe.

First he points out that St. David's criticism might better be directed at the saint in the mirror:

Let's start in 2003, when Brooks was a full-throated cheerleader for the Bush administration’s bloody debacle. Liberals who warned it was a disaster in the making were dismissed by Brooks as unserious, soft, elitist, stupid, parochial, un-American dopes who refused to “fully grasp” the urgent reality of WMDs that never fucking existed, in a war we never should have fought, brought to us by a regime who lied us into it.

And when it all fell apart, from Brooks, no apologies, no retractions. Just shuffle on along to the next heap of steaming Conventional Wisdom. And the next. And the next...  

He then places St. David's intellectual enterprise in its correct context: a 40-year bad-faith effort to falsely equate white racist plutocratic anti-democratic Republican policies with moderate Democratic policy initiatives like health insurance for all, expanding opportunities for victims of racism and bigotry, or spending on clean energy: 

Brooks' columns during the Trump era have been a masterclass in denial, obfuscation, and finger-wagging at the wrong goddamn people. Faced with open fascism, Brooks scolds liberals for being too mean, too smug, too coastal, too online. “Populists are angry because of liberal condescension,” he opined, as though Nazis needed our hugs. Meanwhile, liberals correctly called Trump an existential threat. Brooks squinted real hard and decided the real problem was college kids on Twitter. For Brooks, this is what passes for “grasping reality.”

And now, after decades of being wrong about everything -- literally everything -- David Brooks climbs atop his Times soapbox to inform us that he can’t be a liberal because liberals don’t “fully grasp reality.” ...This is the captain of the Titanic scolding the passengers for not steering the ship correctly.  

There's really nothing left of St. David after that demolition. So let's see if Brooks is the exception or the rule of bad-faith Times inanity. 

Can you guess the answer? Let's turn to another Times op-ed black hole of nonsense, that fearless advocate of free speech and Bibi Netanyahu, Bretbug:

 

If bad-faith reactionary Republicans like Bretbug (or their equally dim but marginally less evil both-sider colleagues like Bruni) are going to condition their support of Democrats on “finding” one who adopts his hard-right Likudnik opinions, then they’re really not concerned about the Republican coup against American democracy, are they? 

Surely the Times balances these weak-thinking hacks with sparkling guest authors.

Not so, and stop calling us Shirley.

Here's a recent offering from a man named Charles Munger who heads up an organization that opposes California's effort to offset the Texas gerrymander with one of its own:

  Who is Charles Munger, you may ask.  According to the Times Op-Ed editors:

He's a few other things as well, including one of the heirs to his late daddy's multi-billion dollar fortune made by finagling with Warren Buffett over many decades.  It's just barely possible that some lucky kid who inherited a giganto wad of pelf might have a vested interested in Republican success.  Do Times readers deserve to know this?  According to King Arthur XVI, such superfluous information would just clutter their minds.

Of course, if the lucky underserving winners of inherited wealth who now spend their days shilling for the political order that allows them to hold on to their ill-gotten gains do not persuade, perhaps the Times can interest you in a non-billionaire shill for that same order.

Twice in one week, the Times graced us with musings of one Nicole Gelinas. Here she is complaining that the reason for Zohran Mamdani's popularity is some sort of creepy “charisma” rather than perhaps the power of his idea that not all New York City government should operate for the benefit of the richest 1% (like Charlie):

And by the way, a sex pest doesn't have a charisma problem.  He has a creepiness problem and possibly a criminal justice problem. 

Gelinas followed that up with another banger:

Because nothing would ease traffic congestion in Manhattan like unleashing thousands of robocars on the streets to crash into pedestrians and each other.  

What Gelinas seems to be mad about is NewYork's brilliantly effective congestion charge, which is bad because it meant that after she was injured she had to pay $25 for a ride share into Manhattan.  I certainly hope that when she finally fought her way into the city, she was not forced to wait for two minutes for someone at Duane Reade to open a shampoo cabinet, like her predecessor Pamela Pill.

Who is Gelinas by the way and why do Times Editorial Page editors feature her so prominently?  Probably they are impressed by her academic background, as the Dyspeptic Fellow in Urban Affairs at that great academic institution:

Well, if she's good enough for PragerU, the insane agitprop website that features crude animations of Frederick Douglass supporting slavery, she's got to be Times material!

By the way, her other distinguished position is as a propagandist for the right wing bulls**** volcano [Surely, think tank? – Ed.] the Manhattan Institute founded by former Reagan black ops spook Bill Casey.  Among other delicts, it has provided a forum and a paycheck for the likes of fascist hatemonger and university destroyer Chris Rufo. 

The lavishly financed Manhattan Institute appears to have no difficulty flooding the marketplace of ideas with publications designed to push its warped racist plutocratic views.  Why they require the assistance of the Times Editorial Page is a mystery known only to King Arthur XVI.  

The likely answer is “balance.”  We certainly think that an editorial page should offer a diversity of views, which is why we look forward to columns by democratic socialists and even Marxists.  We'll let you know when we see one.

Perhaps the Times was simply auditioning Gelinas to fill the the ferbissiner middle aged woman Op-ed slot from which Pamela Pill was recently ejected.  If that was the reason, let's just say that Ms. Gelinas has proven herself to be a worthy successor.