July 1, 2024: Supreme Court Made America a Dictatorship

All my life, the 4^th of July has been a happy, almost frivolous, holiday. 

When I was a child, parents bought tons of firecrackers and we kids played with them for days leading up to the 4^th. We put them under cans and blew the cans sky high. We put them in the ends of pipes to get the big echoing noise that produced. We put a lot of them under an overturned container loaded with sand from our sandpile and watched it shoot up and throw sand all around. 

That sort of play would appall most parents today. They would be sure our parents, who were indoors, ignoring us as we played all day long without supervision, were derelict in their duties for turning a bunch of kids loose with fireworks for days at a time. 

But nobody got hurt, at least not among me and my playmates. And we had soooo much fun. 

That was a different America then. People were not so crazy. They were also a lot more patriotic. My parents grew up half-starved and desperate in the Great Depression. Then, they had to fight World War II. I knew a lot of men who were walking on clanky false legs or who had visible scars on their bodies from wounds received in combat saving the world from fascism in Europe and Asia. 

My parents knew freedom was not free. They understood things like the necessity of holding presidents liable to the same laws that everyone else must follow because the men among them had seen the death camps, witnessed the ravages of the Japanese occupations, and watched as their friends died in combat. 

One of my mother’s cousins liberated a Nazi death camp in Europe. Mama told me about it. She said he told her that, hard as it was to remember the horrors of combat, thinking about what he saw in that camp was worse. 

Fifty million people died because fallen clergy of two faiths — Shintoism and Buddhism in Japan and Christianity in Europe — sold their souls to fascism. Fifty million people died because the moneyed classes in two great countries acted in untrammeled greed and threw the power of their gold behind psychopaths. Fifty million people died because governments set the dogs of absolute dictatorship loose by giving men — a man — the power to do whatever he liked without fear of consequence under the law. 

My parents’ generation of Americans understood that. A man like Donald Trump would never have been elected president by that generation of Americans. A Supreme Court that could overturn both the Constitution and the Magna Carta by making a president above any laws and setting him free to do whatever he liked to anyone he chose would never have been allowed to stand by that generation. 

If the Supreme Court of that day had tried such a thing, members of both political parties would have risen up and impeached them all. And every American would have backed them. 

Because my parents’ generation knew the price. They had paid the price. They knew the evil of fascism and allowing one man to be above the law. They had seen it. They had been to the funerals and the men who bore the scars on their bodies and in their souls of putting this evil down lived and walked and acted among us. 

My mother’s cousin knew the satanic evil of making a chancellor, or a king or a president above the law. He had seen it, and the memory seared his soul all the days of his life ever after.

What have we become that we have allowed what the Supreme Court did to us last Monday? 

What satanic, black evil has entered into us that we allow a corrupt Supreme Court to destroy our Constitution and the rule of law the way the Supreme Court did on July 1, 2024? 

The Supreme Court gave the president the same level of power that Hitler, Stalin, Pinochet, Idi Amin and Pol Pot wielded. 

The Supreme Court handed the president the power to do anything he wants, so long as he says it’s an “official act.” There are no limits to power like that. 

No Supreme Court is going to rule against a president who can have them killed. No Congress is going to impeach a president who can have them killed. No one is going to object when the same billionaires who created this monster have their property seized and then get tossed out of windows or drink their cup of polonium tea. No clergy will stand up to a president who will kill them. 

As for you and I, we won’t end up being tossed out of windows or murdered by Seal Team Six. Our fate will be the fate of the millions who have perished in totalitarian regimes since time began. We will be among the disappeared, the ones who vanish and are never seen again. We’re bound for the camps, the work assignments, the gulags.

That is what absolute rule by an absolute dictator means. And that is what the Supreme Court decreed for America on July 1, 2024. 

We are fortunate in one respect. Joe Biden is our president, and he is not cut from the killer cloth of the people who put this horror story together. Joe Biden isn’t going to use these powers against us. 

But Donald Trump will. He’s said he would when he didn’t even have the power. His first reaction after the ruling was to talk about plans to put Liz Chaney in the stock. 

I look back on every July 4^th of my long life and all I see are halcyon summer days of easy fun and self-congratulatory celebration. I grew up in the greatest, safest country in the world. I was born in a democracy and I never considered for a moment that I would not hand on a democracy to my grandchildren. 

But I did not reckon with the satanic evil of greed that has been behind this whole movement for the last 50 years. I did not reckon with the organized, sinister attack on America that was taking place right in front of my complacent eyes. 

This 4^th of July is not like any other in my life. I am still gobsmacked, still absorbing and reckoning with the magnitude of the fact that the Supreme Court of the United States overturned the Constitution and made America into an absolute dictatorship of the same breed that has caused untold human suffering throughout history. 

I have prayed almost without ceasing since this decision was handed down. One thing I know: This is satanic. The whole movement behind it is satanic. And millions upon millions of Americans, including whole denominations of Christians, are in the thrall of this satan. I think if we had the eyes to see them the skies above the Supreme Court, the Federalist Society, the crowds that throng Trump’s rallies and many, many of our churches, would be black with demons. 

This 4^th of July is not carefree. I am not celebrating. I have sorrowed and sighed for days. But today, I am not sorrowing. I am praying.