On one level I'm fairly certain that anyone who has been paying attention is aware of the intimate connection between the American political right, reactionary federal judges manipulating the law to install a Christian nationalist political order, "counterrevolutionary" think tanks and activist organizations, and fascist billionaires funding this whole anti-democratic shitshow. By that same measure however, it's certainly fair to ask if a wholly complicit mainstream media is paying attention to any of this at all. Which isn't to say that they haven't reported on these connections, but rather to point out that after doing so, corporate media has largely relegated discussions about this ominous situation to background noise and normalized it as "accepted reality." Despite this effective "blanket of boredom," evidence of these interconnected relationships in the larger American fascist movement continues to emerge on a regular basis; and independent or non-profit media outlets like ProPiblica are still reporting on them, even if mainstream for-profit media refuses to stay on the case.

https://www.propublica.org/article/ginni-thomas-email-scotus-ethics-reform-first-liberty-institute

Ginni Thomas Privately Praised Group Working Against Supreme Court Reform: “Thank You So, So, So Much”

"Thomas expressed her appreciation in an email sent to Kelly Shackelford, an influential litigator whose clients have won cases at the Supreme Court. Shackelford runs the First Liberty Institute, a $25 million-a-year organization that describes itself as “the largest legal organization in the nation dedicated exclusively to defending religious liberty for all Americans.”

Shackelford read Thomas’ email aloud on a July 31 private call with his group’s top donors.

Thomas wrote that First Liberty’s opposition to court-reform proposals gave a boost to certain judges. According to Shackelford, Thomas wrote in all caps: “YOU GUYS HAVE FILLED THE SAILS OF MANY JUDGES. CAN I JUST TELL YOU, THANK YOU SO, SO, SO MUCH.”

Shackelford said he saw Thomas’ support as evidence that judges, who “can’t go out into the political sphere and fight,” were thankful for First Liberty’s work to block Supreme Court reform. “It’s neat that, you know, those of you on the call are a part of protecting the future of our court, and they really appreciate it,” he said.

Recording of a July 31 call between First Liberty Institute leadership and donors to the organization Credit:Obtained by ProPublica and Documented

On the same call, Shackelford attacked Justice Elena Kagan as “treasonous” and “disloyal” after she endorsed an enforcement mechanism for the court’s newly adopted ethics code in a recent public appearance. He said that such an ethics code would “destroy the independence of the judiciary.” (This past weekend, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said she too was open to an enforceable ethics code for the Supreme Court.)"

I think it's easy enough to get the gist of what's going on here from the lengthy quote I published, but the key points to acknowledge here are the wife of a Supreme Court justice, who we know is in the pocket of a far right billionaire looking to stack the courts with fascist judges who are enabling the installation of a permanent Christian nationalist order in American society, is actively thanking a far-right religious liberties organization looking to fight court reform on behalf of those same fascist judges on the take, and that organization is openly talking about how judges who aren't down with their program are "treasonous." Which is pretty funny given that First Liberty Institute is fighting to preserve the right to bribe judges, and Ginni Thomas herself was intimately involved in Trump's January 6th, 2021 coup attempt in the wake of Biden's election victory in 2020.

On some level I understand the temptation to say "big deal, any fool can see that they're working together." As a counterpoint however, I think folks are vastly overestimating the general public's grasp of the bigger picture here. The media as a whole isn't diving into these relationships anymore, and the average American certainly isn't reading ProPublica on the regular. The fact is that the more we dig, the more we uncover a whole spider web of relationships, sympathies, and coordination between far right extremist organizations, reactionary activist groups, "counterrevolutionary" think tanks, billionaire nazis, the federal judiciary, and the (extremely) right wing portion of the US political class. This inbreeding and cooperation clearly exists on a level that makes Smedley Butler's exposure of the "Business Plot" conspiracy in 1933 look like a Sunday picnic. What we're watching here is a well-funded, highly coordinated, and completely mainstream plot by establishment actors all across the American right to effectively install a fascist political, legal, and economic order in America, against the will of (most of) it's citizens, while corporate media simply shrugs.