Desolation Row
It's all over now, Baby Blue
The morning after Election Day, 2024, I flew from Cedar Falls to Boston, making a connection in Minneapolis.
At midnight all the agents, and the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone that knows more than they do.
Then they bring them to the factory where the heart attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders, and then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles by insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping to Desolation Row.
Fifteen months ago, I had a fair idea of what was in store for our civil rights in the upcoming Administration. Trump had revealed to me, as an educator, his learning style, when he said, “Can we take the guns, first, and then give them Due Process?”
Due Process is too much an abstraction for Trump—it is a term, to him. He does not comprehend adhering to philosophical frameworks, or how they are fundamental to the practice of justice (at least under the old Constitution). These people keep saying we have to give them something, but why can’t we just give it to them after we take the guns? Why does the order matter?
And that is a large part of the reason he doesn’t care about justice. In my decades of teaching adults, and working with learning-disabled students, I can see Trump’s incapacity to comprehend abstractions. He understands retribution, but that is all. He is experiential in his learning approach and mechanistic in his comprehension.
Had he applied himself, he may have made a decent engineer, as that is a field featuring mechanistic experimentation.
It is why all of his interior designing is of one “look.” He developed an ornate aesthetic that he believes communicates he is wealthy, and he is not capable of cultivating his own style.
I made it a point to put C-SPAN on in the background (and sometimes the foreground) yesterday, for AG Pam Bondi’s testimony, because I suspected it would be among the more historically-significant Congressional moments. The Epstein files are being covered up, but in the “neutrality” of corporate media—how can we know for sure? Redactions are tricky, and it’s best to err on the side of caution, you know.
Well, yesterday, the survivors showed us.
When asked if they had attempted to speak with the Trump Administration’s DOJ, they answered in the affirmative. When asked if any of them had been interviewed by the DOJ, none of them had. When then asked if they would like to speak with the DOJ they unanimously affirmed they would.
Coverup.
Unlike with Watergate, however, the corruption is replete. Those overly-redacted files are proof there are FBI agents obstructing justice. Unlike the soldier in an “engagement” with a target, who cannot be expected to know whether an order to destroy it is legal, FBI agents are specialists in identifying evidence of crimes. They know that emails about trafficking tween girls are evidence; they know that the law says not to redact the names of the men who trafficked the victims—yet they did it anyway.
We know the top of the Trump Administration is rotten, but we are finding that in the middle ranks, there are corrupted, veteran federal agents. FBI agents who illegally redacted perpetrators’ names (and exposed victims’), as well as the ICE and Border Patrol agents who murdered Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
It is a matter of discipline, but not on the part of the agents. The justice system itself suffers from ongoing attacks by a de facto dictator seeking retribution for imagined offenses, an Attorney General who is so fully corrupted as to become a literal Enemy of the State (mass lawbreaking is happening by her and under her orders), and a Supreme Court that suffered a collective delusion when the opportunity came for them to become kingmakers.
If there is any remnant of the old Constitution still in effect, we may be able to amendment our way through the crisis. First among them would be something to differentiate speech made by corporation-people and speech by living, breathing people. Maybe something along the lines of corporations not being allowed a voice in electoral politics until they turn 18. I dunno. The particulars are secondary at this time.
Another amendment worthy of consideration would be one that states the Executive is capable of criminal activities, just like all other people.
Funny thing is, we don’t need such an amendment, at all—this is written into the Constitution, and was recognized until the summer of 2024, when the Supreme Court made an unconstitutional ruling. How do I know it is unconstitutional, when that is the Court’s role? Because the Constitution specifies how we are to amend it, and if we have to amend the Constitution in that specific way to “fix” the Supreme Court’s decision, then the Court must have amended it (unconstitutionally) first.
This was not Plessy v. Ferguson, where the language of the 14th amendment was in question, nor was it Brown v. Board I and II, that revisited Equal Protection and committed the Original Sin of finding it is in the state’s interest to end racial segregation. “Legislating from the bench,” was the accusation, and it has underscored every Supreme Court nomination I have witnessed.
Unless the six Justices who violated the Constitution with their actions are impeached and removed, we will be stuck with a two-tier justice system, with the President immune from accountability and thus reserved from discipline.
Without discipline, the entire justice system collapses. The Justices who amended the constitution from the bench undermined it. The President who does not comprehend abstractions has captured it, and uses it as a bludgeon and levers it for emoluments. The Attorney General is sheltering murderers, child molesters, and money launderers, while compiling a secret list (revealed in her testimony via an absence of denial) of thought-criminals.
The short-form conclusion is this: It is extremely unlikely the nation-state once known as the United States of America comes out of this coup. The institution is under attack by agents of global capital who are acting to dismantle state supports for the population. There is an undeclared War on Immigrants that is combining the power of the state to surveil and apprehend with private, population-control corporations. Together, they are obtaining large warehouse spaces in strategic locations across the country, to be used as concentration camps.
The Justice System is corrupted; the federal attorneys with principles have resigned and those remaining are desperate (or power-hungry) enough to do as they are ordered. Pam Bondi has shown that she is as committed to the bit as any member of the Administration—they have no intention of ever leaving. There is only one way out.
On the way out of this, we will not be able to rely on the old constitution. We will have tribunals instead of trials; with international participation, if we hope to create a new, functional justice system. Protections such as pardons and not permitting double jeopardy were destroyed when they voided the old order. In a way, we will be freeing ourselves when we accept there is no longer a nation to be saved, but instead a new social institution to be created. Go corporate/fascist or go free. You cannot have both, no matter what the Democrats say.
Leave your stepping stones behind, there's something that calls for you
Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you
The vagabond who's rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore
Strike another match, go start anew
And it's all over now, Baby Blue
Sobering read. Thanks a million for offering your clear-eyed view, Keith.