AutistoMephisto

Judge Boasberg does have one other card he can play, according to FRCJ Rule 4.1(b). If the US Marshal service is unable or unwilling to carry out a federal court order, the Judge who issued the order can deputize individuals to carry it out.

This. Every trick Orbán used is straight from Putin. After he fully seized power in Russia, authoritarians the world over flocked to Moscow to learn directly from the master. Then they went home and got to work. The Danube Institute, the Hungarian equivalent of the Heritage Foundation, hosted a large neoreactionary conference where they laid out the case that democracy doesn’t work. That democracy is a well-meaning but fundamentally flawed system of government. The reason they think it’s flawed? Because it requires giving all people equality under the law. Women equal to men, gay equal to straight, non-Christian equal to Christian, Non-white equal to White, and this is really the only one that matters, poor equal to wealthy. The obscenely wealthy cannot comprehend a world in which the voice of those with less wealth is equal to their voice. By virtue of their enormous fortunes, taken through exploitation and inherited from their ancestors, they feel that they and they alone should have the right to govern. That they are inherently superior because they were fortunate enough to be born into lives of wealth, connection, and privilege.

Exactly. You can’t gaslight away a rumbling belly.

He can’t recreate them out of whole cloth, you’re right. But he’s got friends who could. They have the capital, they have the manpower, they have the brainpower, and could easily leverage all of that to creating privately owned alternatives, paving the way for Curtis Yarvin’s world to exist. America as we know it would be dead and replaced with hundreds, if not thousands, of small city-states owned and controlled by corporations, whose executive boards would have absolute free reign to control. If you’ve ever played BioShock, it would be akin to a bunch of Raptures, but on dry land.

Yarvin posits it as a collection of corporate city-states that would compete for citizens like corporations compete for customers. If you don’t like the oppression going on in your current city-state, you can simply move to another one and join it.(Nevermind that the corporate oligarch running your current city-state could write policy forbidding you to leave, or placing conditions on your emigration, such as taking all your money.) There’s also some crypto nonsense about how borders wouldn’t exist because you can be a citizen of one of those “network states” without ever having visited simply by logging in and signing up like you could for a social network. (Nevermind that the corporate oligarch running your current city-state might have beef with the oligarch of the state you wish to join and could restrict access to their network.)

See, the thing is, those tools of empire were government-funded. Congress allocated money and resources to those tools for them to do their jobs. The intent is to eventually replace those with privately owned, profit-motivated alternatives. Why do you think they cut NOAA and NWS funding and fired all their probies? So that private companies can fill the void. Then if you want life-saving weather information in the event of a tornado or hurricane, pay a monthly subscription fee to some billionaire’s weather/disaster alert service.