On July 4, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt celebrated American Independence Day with a radio address that praised democracy while warning against the dangers of authoritarianism. Dictatorships were plentiful at the time, from Adolf Hitler in Germany and Benito Mussolini, a.k.a. Il Duce, in Italy to Josef Stalin in the Soviet Union. Gen. Francisco Franco had prevailed in the Spanish Civil War, setting up a fascist regime in Madrid.

Only five months after FDR’s Independence Day 1941 speech, Pearl Harbor was attacked.

The conservative website The Bulwark honored FDR’s address 82 years later by publishing it in article form on July 4, 2023. And by doing so, the conservative website is sending out a warning that democracy is stillunder attack.

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FDR told listeners, “In 1776, we waged war in behalf of the great principle that government should derive its just powers from the consent of the governed — in other words, representation chosen in free elections. In the century and a half that followed, this cause of human freedom swept across the world. But now, in our generation — in the past few years — a new resistance, in the form of several new practices of tyranny, has been making such headway that the fundamentals of 1776 are being struck down abroad. And definitely, they are threatened here.”

The architect of the New Deal was referring to the authoritarians of 1941. But FDR’s warning could easily apply to the 2023, which finds democracy under attack in parts of Europe, Asia and Latin American as well as in the U.S. The Bulwark, in fact, has published countless articles describing ongoing efforts by the MAGA movement to undermine U.S. democracy — and noting MAGA’s affinity for authoritarians like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

“It is simple — I could almost say simpleminded — for us Americans to wave the flag, to reassert our belief in the cause of freedom, and to let it go at that,” FDR said during his address. “Yet, all of us who lie awake at night — all of us who study and study again — know full well that in these days, we cannot save freedom with pitchforks and muskets alone, after a dictator combination has gained control of the rest of the world. We know that we cannot save freedom in our own midst, in our own land, if all around us — our neighbor nations — have lost their freedom…. I tell the American people solemnly that the United States will never survive as a happy and fertile oasis of liberty surrounded by a cruel desert of dictatorship.”

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President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s July 4, 1941 speech is available in article form on The Bulwark’s website at this link.

Image: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration via Wikimedia

Well-known political expert, author, journalist, and CEO David Rothkopf is blasting conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court after their disastrous rulings last week, warning the Court is now a “threat to democracy” and suggesting some justices should be “considered” for impeachment.

Rothkopf, also a national security and foreign policy commentator, is a columnist for The Daily Beast and the author at least seven books, including American Resistance.

“Watching debates about Supreme Court here and elsewhere is the latest study in GOP efforts to normalize the unconscionable, the corrupt, and the contra-constitutional. This is a court in which a majority of those on the right took their seats under questionable circumstances,” Rothkopf said at the start of a lengthy thread on Twitter.

“Of them, a cloud of corruption hangs over Thomas & Alito. Kavanaugh took [his] seat despite allegations against him that were not properly investigated. Questions surround his payoff of personal debts. Gorsuch’s ascension is also clouded by questions surrounding Kennedy’s departure,” he says.

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Justice Clarence Thomas has been under fire for months over his relationship with billionaire GOP donor and businessman Harlan Crow, who reportedly has had business before the high court. The far-right wing justice and his wife, Ginni Thomas, (who has been accused of working to undermine the 2020 presidential election results,) may have received gifts totaling over $1 million in luxury vacations, travel, food, lodging, and clothing. Experts say Thomas was required to disclose portions of those gifts and that he did not.

Justice Samuel Alito is also the beneficiary of luxury travel, including a fishing trip to Alaska courtesy of another billionaire, and a trip to Rome during which he delivered a highly-criticized speech just days after delivering his opinion striking down Roe v. Wade. That trip was reportedly paid for by a religious liberty organization whose leader reportedly bought Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s Indiana home.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito delivered the keynote address last week at the 2022 Notre Dame Religious Liberty Summit in Rome. #ReligiousLiberty2022

Read a summary of his remarks and watch a video of his full speech here: https://t.co/KuCkdBWbHa pic.twitter.com/uU2pRYFqkt

— Notre Dame Law School Religious Liberty Initiative (@NDLawRLI) July 28, 2022

Indeed, Rothkopf also skewers Justice Barrett, or at least her confirmation.

“Barrett received her seat in a rush to judgment that was unlike any we have ever seen and completely contrary to the way the GOP Senate treated prior Dem nominees (Garland). In the time since the majority took over, they have cast aside one core principle after another,” he observes.

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“Stare decisis went out the window. (Precedents were ignored without any sound justification.) Promises to honor past decisions as established law (like Roe) proved worthless. Past claims that the right valued originalism and condemned judicial activism were wholly ignored,” Rothkopf charges.

“When precedent went against them, absurd arguments drawing on ancient and irrelevant legal decisions were used to supersede the clear intent of the framers and decades, sometimes centuries of legal precedent.”

Last week, he says, we saw “a decision on affirmative action that ignored precedent, reality, and justice and contained, in its carve-out for military academies, a sub-decision that refuted the logic of the main opinion. In the case of reversing the Biden student loan decision,” Rothkopf writes, “a brand new doctrine was presented out of whole cloth. The decision regarding the ‘right’ of a website designer to refuse to do work for a ‘gay’ couple was based on both a lie and a hypothetical, should never have been taken on as a case and was grossly wrong on the law,” he adds.

Rothkopf appears to believe the conservative justices will not stop.

“These judges are acting with impunity because they believe a GOP controlled Senate will never challenge them and that a fundamental flaw in the way the Constitution grants power to underpopulated states assures that the document that was created to evolve never will,” he writes.

And he suggests some of the Supreme Court’s justices might need to be impeached.

“They also know that Senate rules essentially mean they can act with impunity despite their wholesale corruption and the fact that several of them should, in all likelihood, be seriously considered for impeachment.”

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Pointing to Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, he adds: “This is, as [she] has said a constitutional crisis. This is an illegitimate, rogue institution that is seeking to reverse decades of progress and impose the will of a white, wealthy, Christian, male, straight minority on the majority of Americans.”

“This is a moment that calls for action on the part of Democrats in power to use their ability to call Senate hearings and to challenge this extremist cluster of judicial terrorists wherever possible. But more than that, it demands absolutely clarity from the voting public,” he says.

Rothkopf warns conservatives in the Court are poised to do even more damage to democracy and the American people.

“Unless Democrats win the presidency, hold and increase their majority in the Senate and retake the House, this tiny band of malevolent and dangerous actors will gut many of the most important provisions of the past century and a half of American law.”

“They will destroy lives and put millions of others at risk. Next year’s election must be in part, about this threat to democracy even as it is also about the threat posed by GOP presidential candidates. Stop. Consider the consequences.”

He warns minority Americans will continue to see their civil rights “stripped” away.

“Consider the basic rights that will be stripped away from women, people of color, our LGBTQ brothers and sisters, voters, and all who believe in the ideals that have guided American leaders as we have struggled to perfect our nation,” he says. “The only people who can save us are you and your fellow voters. The only way to do so is to mobilize, be active, donate to candidates and remain committed to defending our country against the threat posed by the MAGA GOP in our legislature and our judiciary. Starting right now.”

Image: Adam Parent/Shutterstock

The Heritage Foundation and its vice president, Roger Severino, are praising the Supreme Court’s decision last week favoring the First Amendment rights of a Colorado business owner and designer over the Equal Protection rights of the LGBTQ community as a “victory for tolerance.”

Heritage, the once-vaunted right-wing think tank that has melded into pro-Trump MAGA right-wing extremism, just weeks ago attacked President Joe Biden and his historic White House Pride Month celebration, declaring: “The ‘Pride Flag’ does not represent anything good and it certainly does not represent America. It should have never disgraced the South Portico of the White House.”

Now it is using the Supreme Court decision in 303 Creative v. Elenis to continue its anti-LGBTQ attack.

“The LGBT Left says they just want to live like everybody else. That’s a lie,” Heritage on Monday wrote. “If you don’t compromise your beliefs and kowtow to their demands, they’ll make an enemy out of you. The 303 Creative decision rejects their efforts to make Americans pledge allegiance to their flag.”

Roger Severino is a former Trump administration official who served as the head of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights. He used that position as a sword to attack the LGBTQ community.

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In 2019, Severino was the Trump administration’s top official behind a new regulation offering special religious rights to medical providers while harming LGBT people.

“Patients want doctors who match their values,” he said, defending the policy, which would allow medical professionals to deny service to anyone for reasons of conscience.

In 2020, Severino, as The New York Times reported, “finalized a regulation that will erase protections for transgender patients against discrimination by doctors, hospitals and health insurance companies, a move announced on the four-year anniversary of the massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando and in the middle of Pride Month.”

In an interview with Newsmax posted on Monday, Severino called the Supreme Court ruling in 303 Creative v. Elenis, “a tremendous victory for free speech and tolerance and pluralism.”

“The Supreme Court opinion focused a lot on West Virginia v. Barnette, which is a case from World War II,” Severino said. “That said Americans cannot be forced to pledge allegiance to the flag. Now this opinion elaborated and essentially saying, you can’t force Americans to pledge allegiance to the pride flag as well.”

There is no indication anyone of any authority has ever tried to “force Americans to pledge allegiance to the pride flag.”

Watch below or at this link.

The LGBT Left says they just want to live like everybody else. That’s a lie. If you don’t compromise your beliefs and kowtow to their demands, they’ll make an enemy out of you. The 303 Creative decision rejects their efforts to make Americans pledge allegiance to their flag. pic.twitter.com/5NniwXVSLq

— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) July 3, 2023