How To Buy A Supreme Court

And by that I mean we are asking the question who ensures that the American Supreme Court does not just sort of collapse into a ball of pure corruption, And the answer was nobody.

bunch of really funny things. I saw this morning. Actually, there was this hair salon who was refer for to serve LGBTQ clients, which now all of like all of like the suppliers for the hair Sloan are no longer sending orders to the hair salon because they're also allowed to discriminate from this hair salod because of the same ruleing.

So it's creating all these really complicated like supply chain things with businesses choosing to be really homophobic and queer phobic and then like type of like a supplier is just not then just not giving these businesses the supplies they need to operate their business, which is pretty funny.

like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years of history that predate the American system arguably can traces back to the Roman system. One of the things that's fundamentally based on is that you cannot try a case on a hypothetical. Something has to something has to actually happen for you to have a case, and this case has just thrown that shit out the window. So what this case was is there's this woman who supposedly is

a wedding wedding website designer. And we'll get back to that in a second, because oh boy, uh just straight up lied to the court and claimed that a guy had requested her make a wedding website for a gay wedding. And this never happens, right, this like did not happen the less like track down the guy who she said had like requested a website, and that guy is a straight b had already been married, and she is a web designer.

entire case, she set up this entire site. What appears to have happened, She's not wedding website designer now, right, what appears to have happened is that she and like the sort of like one of the one of the sort of like right wing like legal networks got together and cobbled together this business like specifically so they could get this ruling.

rich Supreme Court justices are, like Clarence Thomas. And in all of the pieces about Clarence Thomas, right, it starts with like he is like the poorest Supreme Court justices and and his family makes eight hundred thousand dollars a Year's.

all over the US. He also, okay, so he has a giant mansion, right, and in his giant mansion is a bunch of Nazi memorabilia, including an autographed copy of.

some reason. I don't know why. Well, I mean, she's a billionaire, obviously, Like this is why he hates Tito. But its funny thing is it's like almost all it's like almost entirely communist. Like there's no like Mussolini or anything.

It's like it's all communists. There's no Husselini what. No, No, there's like there's there's a host name Barick, and then there's one of what what's the guy's name, I don't remember his name, Uh, Prince of the the guy who shot ar Street Ferdinand, which is weird because that guy was not he wasn't he wasn't evil. No, Well, that's I will not I refuse to take a position on that.

Hillo paintings. It will be like bush, They'll be like like a renoir, and then they'll just be a Hitler painting. It's like he's this guy all of his friends would because this guy has like a bunch of like right, we because he's one of I'm all be like, this man is not a Nazi, and I'm like, I I he hasn't he has. I don't know, man, Like, there are not many non Nazi reasons why you would have like multiple of Hitler's paintings hanging on your wall and also the signed autograph copy.

like incredible corruption that he's doing. So okay, so I'm gonna start with like this is like this is like like the level one corruption, which is so Crow bought Clarence Thomas's mom's house and then did quote tens of thousands of dollars of improvements to the home and he seems to have bought the house for like significantly above market rate. And so this is this is a this is I'm gonna I'm gonna be We're gonna do it. We're gonna do a corruption anatomy here because this is

a classic Chicago, uh corruption scam. Sore. There's like there's like six revenue streams in this. Right, you have the money from the sale which goes to like you know that that that that's that's like, that's your level one bribe, right, is you're selling you're selling, you know, you're you're selling your ho to someone at above market value. The level two bribe is, uh, you're not. You're now throwing in the renovations because his mom is still living in this house. Right.

The level three of the bribes is that Okay, so now now once you once you have a renovation contract, you now have a contract that pays out money and you can use that to like reward your political allies. And so this is this is this is a classic like absolutely classic like Chicago, uh like payoff scheme. Now.

The other thing that's so so Harlan was contacted about this and she claims that he's buying this house because he wants to preserve it for plus austerity because Clarence Thomas lived there, sure, which like she is very weird. She did give one hundred thousand dollars to Harvard to buy a portrait of like to get them to hang up a portrait of Clarence Thomas, so you know, he

is a deeply weird guy. But this, uh, this reeks of eye of oh boy, now, yes, yes, well Republica, like pro Publica points out also that they they bought two random vacant lots in the area from Thomas for like unclear reasons, and you know, you can also you can also ask why does the Supreme Court justice like own a bunch of random vacant lots? And the answer to this question is that these people are part of

the real boorgeois. They are like they they they are like as alien to us US state scamming, right, this is like yeah, like basically yeah, like they're they're they're they're they're doing stuff, like they do stuff with their money that like makes them like like they they are like as dissimilar to us as like we are from

like a fucking Neanderthal. Like these people like the way they think about money, the way they like just like the way they act in the world, the way they relate to other people, like the fact that they're just buying random fucking lots, like across the street from their parents' house, Like why who knows?

And again, this is the standard that holds from like like the fucking president of the United States down to again like a random astronomer. They are not allowed to have to do anything that has quote even the appearance of impropriety. Now do you want to do you want to know who? These standards don't apply to just the Supreme Course, yep, does not apply to them. They had there's only one thing they have to do right and aga again this amazing, Like so again everyone else has

actual enforceable ethics standards. The Supreme Court has you have to report it. It doesn't have to go to an excess commission. You just have to report it. And yeah, do you do you? I'll give you three guesses as to how much of any of the ship that I just talked about that Clarence Thomas reported.

private chef. If Thomas had chartered the plane in the one hundred and sixty two foot yachts himself, the total cost of the trip could have exceeded five hundred thousand dollars. Fortunately for him, that wasn't necessary. He was on vacation with real estate mogul and Republican mega donor Harlan Clohe who owned the jet and the yacht too.

parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There's something normal about it, doubt, doubt.

have a way to adequately describe what this is. What I'm going to do instead is to remind everyone that Thomas was one of the justices who decided Citizens United, the twenty ten case that made it legal to bribe politicians through campaign donations and allowed corporations to directly involve themselves in legal campaigns, leading like directly to the hell hole we now I'll live in. Now once again, Thomas was required to report this as a gift to the government,

and he simply did not. And you know, this is one of those things where okay, so like if a normal person does this right in in the government, you would take them to court. But we've now returned to our problem of who watches the watchers because it's Supreme Court right, they've established themselves as a dictatorial ruling council based on a power grab, and you know, I'm gonna I'm gonna do my the Supreme Court rant I do every time. But the Supreme Court does not have the

power of judicial review. They do not have the power to strike down laws. They don't have it. They fucking get invented it out of whole cloth in eighteen o two. It doesn't exist, it's not real, it's never been real. You can just fucking ignore them. But in the meantime, while everyone believes it's real, they get to do this bullshit. And you know, so, yeah, so that that Indonesia trip is like the big one that we know of. He

took another one to like Moscow and another. But the other thing that that see, he seems to have been doing a lot is basically like he like just uses Harlan Crowe's private jet as like his own jet. Republica calculated that like one, just like one flight that he took in twenty sixteen would have cost seventy thousand dollars, which is more than I make in a fucking year.

and and this onother thing we should specifically know. So Okay, the the reason the Supreme Court has to do any of this at all is that the stream is that like someone finally had a good idea right after Watergate that was, like we should actually make everyone in the government disclose their gifts and this and this law actually like included the stream Court, although I feel like it won't in like two years when they strike that law

down or some shit. But you know, but again, like one of the things fit like specifically in this law is if you take a private jet, you have to report it. And Thomas has been just like jetting around in this fucking jet for like a like many like at least like at least seven years that we know of, and has never reported it. So let's sure.

like political lobbying group. But it's like so it's a lobbying group, but like the actual thing that it does is reverse lobbying, which is you can go to the lobbying group and use it for like to get access to Clarence Thomas. And that group funded God, I didn't write down the number of mount but like that group got like two hundred thousand dollars that again his wife works for, got like two hundred thousand dollars from Crow. There was another story.

I want to talk about is that this kid. Okay, So a thing, a thing that I didn't understand until I got to like college, is that like okay, So like I knew intellectually that private schools existed, I did not understand that private schools there are like like there's like because I was used to like like Christian private schools, right, yeah, yeah, I did not, like I didn't like get how rich people could be, and I didn't understand that that they were.

Like I like walk in there and there's like nine kids who all speak Latin, and every single one of them went to a private school that was like fifty at least fifty like somewhere between fifteen one hundred thousand dollars a quarter. Yeah, it is like what the fuck? What the ship? So claras Thomas isn't so his the schools he's going to aren't quite that expensive, but the kid, the ones he sends this this kid to, So for two years, the estimate is that it was one hundred

and fifty thousand dollars per year. That was for two years, So seventy five dollars a year, which again more than I make it a year.

Court justice like what? And you know, but like so, But the funniest part about this is, again, whenever any of these pieces come out, like every single conservative like pundits like in Unison and like like all of their fucking newspapers, all of their magazines, they're all funded by these people, so they all like publish like identical things going like how dare you criticize like the noble friendship of hard of this billionaire and the Supreme Court justice

or just pals. They're just extending hospitality like you would to any other friend by taking them on a half a million dollar cruise around on your yacht. It's it's it's it's like incredible stuff. All right, we should do we should, we should we should do one more ads because you know who's so these are advertisements that we are being paid to promote.

a unique situation the history of the court. And then like like literally two months later, so Samuel Alito, who is a Supreme Court justice I in and this is in. This is two thousand and seven, appears on a a two hundred thousand dollar fishing trip in Alaska with billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer, who is Singer is like one of the most like Okay, as much as I don't like Harlan curowe like Singer is like one of the most evil people who's ever lived. Do you know who Singer is?

that's like one thing that he does. The other thing that he's cool, Well yeah, I mean it sucks because like every single person who would work they lose their drop. But this is that's the less bad thing that he does, right Like like this this is what I'm talking like, this is like legitimately one of the worst people in the world. Like for like any like Mitt Romney, right like that was the worst shit that he ever did. Was was like just destroying a bunch of people's lives

by like annihilating these companies. For Singer, that's that's like the fuck, that's the bullshit stuff like that, that's like that's the fucking brush league shit. Singer's actual game is so one of the things that happens over the course of the seventies and eighties is you get a bunch of uh I've talked about this at length of many liberalist and episodes, but you get a bunch of these economies that basically like across the Global South, that just implode.

And they implode because there's this combination of like commodity prices drop, and then they have all these adjustable rate like loans that they're taken out, and when Paul Volker hot like hikes interest rates, all of these like loans suddenly have like twenty percent interest. And so you have all these economies all over the world that just fucking are imploding because they suddenly have this like unbelievable that

they can't pay off. And so over the course of the nineties, this kind of like like anti IMF revolts starts, and I have the International Monetary Fund are the people who you're borrowing money from who also destroy your economy to like you know, like pay the IMF back the money. By the time you get into like the two thousands, it's gotten less bad. Well, I guess bad again, tails Nate.

But there had been this process of debt restructuring where these countries were allowed to like only pay like a small percentage of the debt because they just literally couldn't pay it because their economies have been destroyed. Or and this is another very common thing. You get a country where like a bunch of loans were taken out by like a dictator and he would just like buy plans

with them and then he get deposed. But you know, the IMF and like the World Bank was still hold them liable for the loans, and it's like, well, okay, like that's like the money's gone right, Like it's in like a bunch of gold bars. This guy like drove

across the border when he like fled Singer. Singer is like the last guy who league goes in for like to buy this debt and the result is this, So for example, like he buys a bunch of the debt of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the result of this is that he turns like the entire Congoese economy into this debt servicing machine. We're like just like every like there's they're like they're they're there's they're stripping the copper wires out of the buildings in order to

like fucking pay for or metaphorically. So metaphorically they are stripping the copper wires to pay this debt off. Uh, not metaphorically, they are taking food from the mouths of babies, because the way this stuff is paid for is they cut a bunch of government assistance programs and they're like, you know, they don't build fucking hospitals, they don't staff hospitals, and so like a lot, like he has killed a lot of people, and his his most famous version of

this was this battle that he waged against Argentina. So in two thousand and one, there is this massive like basically like the the last twentieth century, like the last twentieth century, communist revolution happens in Argentina in two thousand and one, and they lose, but it's they they lose like pretty it like only pretty narrowly doesn't work, Like there is a there is a timeline that is not that different from this one where like like a bunch

of anarchists basically have taking control of Argentina, and the result of this is that Argentina defaults on its debt. And you know, they default in this debt, so they enter this restructuring program and all of the rest of the like people who are like holding this debt are like, okay, well, in order to let the Argentina economy recover and get like some of this money back, we'll just like let like, okay, well,

we'll like write off most of our debt. But Singer like looks at this and is like, oh shit, I'm just gonna buy all this debt that I know is junk and can't be repaid, and then I'm gonna go to the courts in the US and like just force Argentina to repay it. Now, this is not how debt is supposed to work. Right. Thing about debt, right, and think about like lending someone money or you know, this

is what essentially what buying someone's debt is. Right. The thing about that, right is if the person can't pay you back you're supposed to, you're out of the money, right like that That's that's that's you know, this is this is the theoretical economic justification for why you can

charge interest because there's risk. But what Singer figured out is that you could just use the US court system and you know the threat of the the the implicit and explicit threat of the US military to just like force people to pay you whether they have money or not. And so and this is what so, this is what he does. He's he's like the one he's the one creditor because he buys like an enormous amount of this debt and he's the one creditor who refuses to negotiate.

And so he like starts running around the US trying to like steal Argentinian assets, Like he tries to have like Argentina's Central bank reserves seized. There's other like the most famous incidence, he tries to steal an Argentinian worship in order to pay down the debt. There's another one where like he tries to like he tries to steal Argentina's entire pension fund. And this causes this like series of of like lawsuits that sort of like run their

way through the courts. And in twenty fourteen, one of

these cases finally makes it to this reviewing court. And this is where Singer's two hundred thousand dollars Alaskan fishing trip pays off because Samuel Alito rules that Argentina has to play Singer two point four billion dollars, and eventually they do so Alito like like he's also he also has another guy who just like pays for his vacations, who's the uh I don't know if I want to say incredibly named or disturbingly named, but this guy's name

is Robin Arkley, the second Wait, Robin Robin Arkley the second second God Okay, Yeah, and he's a also like a genuinely terror person, like these are these are all like you read Hitchhickers. Have you read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

when the revolution came. And that's like all of these people, these are like the worst people in the fucking world or like in the US. So this guy Arcley makes his fortune like buying distressed mortgages and then for closing on people's houses and flipping them, so he.

a bunch of trips. So when when Republica like reaches out to Aledo about this, he gets so mad that she the Wall Street Journal editorial board allows him to publish a like an op ed that is just him yelling about how this article that hasn't come out yet

is fake. And one of the specific things that he's really mad about is part of this article is talking about how the wine at this met at this like lodge that he's staying at that's being paid for by by the fucking mortgage slipper guy has a thousand dollars a bottle wine, and Clarience Tyer was just like, no, the wine is not was not a thousand dollars a bottle.

You can check the website, and then Republica was like, well, yeah, but that's because the lodge, like the quality of the lodge was downgrade after Alito had like one of the like just just just a truly incredible meltdown that he was just allowed to have in the op ed section of the Wall Street Journal in like in response, not

even in response, like before this article came out. And the other thing that we learned from this is that also apparently former Justice Antonin Scalia also was taking trips from this guy. So this is just like every conservative like justice in the last like twenty years has just been doing this. They've just been getting like flown around the world on fancy vacations by their billionaire friends. Well, I don't actually know if I actually might merely be

a millionaire. I'm not toither sure, but he may might be a billionaire. I don't know.

This is the thing that came up like really prominently when there was a case that you know, there was a case about the attempt to like overthrow the government in twenty twenty or in twenty one that like well in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one that Thomas like objectively should have recused himself from because his wife tried

to overthrow the government and he's didn't. And this and this is a this is a really important thing, which is that Supreme Court justices it's like your fucking daughter like could be one of the plaintiffs in a case, and you don't have to recuse yourself. Is recusing yourself is completely voluntary, m which is not how this works for fucking anything else. Right, But again, the Supreme Court

is not like it's not actually a court. It's just like a fucking it's just this like weird dictatorial tribunal

that is subject to like absolutely no authority whatsoever. And Okay, So it also turns out that there's like there's like yet another layer of fuckery with this, which is that universities use Supreme Court used Supreme Court justices to solicit donations by like so, so they'll they'll have like a don invite a justice to like give a talk at the university, and they'll pay them a bunch of money, and then they'll they'll have them like go to a dinner,

and then they'll advertise to all their donors like, hey, if you give us a bunch of money, you can go to this dinner with Supreme Court justice. And so a bunch of like like a bunch of people who have cases in front of the Supreme Court like use this to go get access to a bunch of Streme Court justices. So it's great. Uh, this is this is really fun. Uh Oh did I did I do the Venmo thing? No, it's not the Venmo thing. Okay, okay,

here's the Veno thing. So two days after I started, like like two days ago, like from the time of writing, this will be like like this will actually be like almost exactly. Wow, It'll be like almost a week from when when this comes out. Uh. There was another thing of this that came out, which is that a bunch of lawyers had just been sending money on Venmo to one of Claren's Thomas's aids. And these okay, like the the these these are like these are not just people

who have like active cases. These are like like one of the guys who venmoed h Thomas's aid is the guy who won the affirmative action case. And another one of the one of the other lawyers who ven met him is the guy who I don't know if you remember this, like like in like the last like term of the court, there was a case where the Supreme Court like fucked the EPA's ability to regulate greenhouse gases, so that lawyer also paid a bunch of money on Venmo.

Clarence Thomas's aid. So this is this is the level though of corruption that we're working at, right, which is like people sending public Venmo transactions to the aids of Supreme Court justices who's about who are about to hear their cases. Uh, that's so good. Now. The reason this is happening that the right has built like just an

extensive and incredibly extensive network to seize control of the judiciary. Uh. Liberals have produced no such network because they're fucking hacks and this and this is not it's not just the sort of like there's only one like liberal billionaire, Like, no,

there are liberal billionaires. The actual a real problem with a liberal attempt to like take control of the judiciary is that like liberal like liberal lawyers are hacks instead of actually like trying to hold on to like judicial positions, right, and you know, to have to like move their way up through like circuit courts in order to like like seize control of like large, like increasingly large portions of

of the court system, which is the Republicans did. Uh, the Democratic lawyers, they'll they'll get like like they they do the even lazier corruption, which is like they'll just they'll be a judge for like three years, and then they'll just leave the private practice because they're all just

fucking greedy shits. And you know, the result of this is that all these like fucking liberal lawyers, uh, you know, they go into private practice and make a quick buck and they leave us to fucking burn a death in the smolder and keep while they spend their vacations in Bali and you know, and and again. So the only the only thing that like could conceivably slow down the Supreme Court is the fact that like, technically speaking, although it's never actually gone through, it is possible for like

Congress to impeach Supreme Court justice. But the Democrats don't want to do that because.

fucking Republic. And the Democrats are just like, well, if we do anything, it'll undermine the faith in our institutions. So I gad fuck them. But also like, we don't fucking need these people like you could, Like you could, you can fit all of these people in one submarine and we could just be fucking dumb with it.