John Roberts owns this nightmare — and he has no one to blame but himself

John Roberts owns this nightmare; without him and his corrupt Republican co-conspirators against democracy on the Supreme Court we never would have had a reality star neofascist ascend to the highest office in the land.

And it’s getting worse daily.

On the morning of April 12, 2025, the North Carolina Supreme Court tried to quietly nullify the votes of over 5,000 Americans, many of them active-duty military and overseas citizens.

Four Republican justices attempted to throw out these ballots after the election, claiming they lacked photo ID, even though the state's own voting portal didn’t allow IDs to be uploaded. The goal? Overturn the narrow 734-vote victory of Democrat Allison Riggs over Republican Jefferson Griffin.

A federal court has temporarily blocked certification, but make no mistake: this is what stolen elections look like in John Roberts’ post-Citizens United, post-Shelby County America.

Justice John Paul Stevens saw it coming. In his Citizens United dissent, he wrote:

“The Court’s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation.”

He warned that allowing unlimited and often anonymous money to flood our politics would “short circuit the democratic process” and “shatter” public faith in government.

Stevens was right. But Justice Stevens’ dire warnings didn’t stop five Republican appointees — three openly taking gifts from billionaires — from striking down hundreds of state and federal laws that had limited the political power of corporations and the morbidly rich since 1907. With Citizens United, Roberts’ Court handed them the keys to our democracy.

And now the reckoning is here.

The richest man in the world, Elon Musk — with a social media empire compromised by Russian influence and a checkbook that bleeds billions — bankrolled Trump’s return to power in 2024. Trump now uses that power to crush any Republican who steps out of line.

And make no mistake: this marriage of oligarchy and authoritarianism rests squarely on the shoulders of John Roberts.

It was Roberts who gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County, claiming “our country has changed” and racism no longer exists as a problem. The result? Four million mostly Black and brown voters were purged or disqualified in 2024, handing the election to Donald Trump. Now, as you read this, at least ten million more are in the crosshairs for 2026. This is the fruit of Roberts’ five Republicans’ decision.

Then came the big con: declaring Trump immune from prosecution for his “official acts.”

This grotesque doctrine now shields him as he dodges court orders, defames rape survivor E. Jean Carroll, and refuses to pay her what a jury awarded. It even allows Pam Bondi’s Trump-hacked DOJ to argue against his having to pay Carroll — because raping and defaming women is now apparently part of a president’s job.

Roberts watched as Trump bulldozed the Constitution and responded with such tepid finger-wagging that Trump’s lawyers mocked the Court openly. This isn’t “restoring faith in the judiciary.” This is enabling a dictatorship.

And John Roberts owns it all:

— He owns Lisa Murkowski’s whispered fear: “We are all afraid... retaliation is real.”
— He owns the purges of civil servants who tried to do their jobs while Trump loyalists like “Big Balls” and Elon Musk fired anyone not in lockstep.
— He owns the dismantling of our national security infrastructure; gutting the FBI, neutering the NSA, and kneecapping agencies that track hostile foreign actors.
— He owns the future Trump emergency declaration (particularly if there’s a terrorist attack) that will install him as dictator-for-life.
— He owns the death of American credibility on the world stage and the economic depression his tariffs and chaos will provoke.
— He owns Trump’s lies that Kilmar Garcia has MS13 tattoos on his hand, a gaslighting characteristic of dictators like Putin, Pinochet, and MBS. As Rep. Maxwell Frost said of Trump’s willingness to lie to imprison people: “Today it’s Mr. Garcia, tomorrow it can be any one of us.”
— He owns the increasing deaths of women in states with near-total abortion bans.
— He owns the stolen votes of millions who might have stopped this rolling catastrophe but couldn’t, because John Roberts’ Court helped rig the system against them.
— He owns Doge, Musk, and “Big Balls” destroying America’s diplomatic and scientific primacy in the world.

And now, Roberts faces the destruction of the very branch he leads. If the judiciary can no longer check power, what’s left?

We’ve seen this movie before, just not in America (with the exception of the Confederacy, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy), but throughout modern world history.

Within months of taking power, Hitler neutralized judicial oversight via the Reichstag Fire Decree. Mussolini packed Italy’s courts with fascist loyalists. Viktor Orbán rewrote Hungary’s constitution to push out hundreds of judges. Putin’s courts take instructions directly from the Kremlin via what Russians call “telephone law.”

And here? J.D. Vance says Trump can ignore the Supreme Court entirely. And he is. That’s where we are.

The time for pretending is over: We now live in an early-stage dictatorship. The Court has ordered Trump to bring those men back from El Salvador and he is telling it to go screw itself.

Early Saturday morning (at 1 am), seven justices briefly found their voices, blocking Trump’s illegal deportation regime, over the fascists objections of Thomas and Alito.

We’ll soon see if that was a real stand, or just kabuki theater to cover their robes with the scent of legitimacy. Buses were stopped, but the people are still in El Salvador. Trump is still playing dictator, refusing to recognize the authority of the Court.

If Roberts still refuses to check Trump’s power, and Republicans in Congress continue to cower before him, it falls to us.

Not with violence but with truth, organizing, voting, and yes, a peaceful revolution that requires all of us to be in the streets every week, to speak out in every venue possible, and to unrelentingly demand courage of our elected representatives or replace the ones still cowering in fear.

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