The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Sunday, July 6, 2025

Notebook: Sometimes I think we’re nearing the time when, with the decline and fall of the 4th Amendment and the Supreme Court’s despotification of the executive, our personal libraries–not just our sexuality, our ethnicity, our published opinions and some of our job titles–and may start to be a liability. How would I explain having on my shelves Al-Qaeda in Its Own Words? It doesn’t help that Harvard and Presses Universitaires de France, essentially two of the world’s two most prestigious university presses (only Oxford and Cambridge are missing), are the publishers. The book was put out in 2005, edited by Gilles Kepel in France, then translated by Pascale Ghazaleh for publication here in 2006, a useful, necessary direct line to the enemy’s thinking (just as journalists’ interviews with binb Laden, like the ones conducted by Robert Fisk and Peter Arnett a quarter century ago (an excerpt of the Arnett interview is included, without naming Arnett), seemed to me as they should have seemed to the State Department and every American intelligence agency, extremely useful windows, not treasonous exercises as the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Times would have you believe). And not just to understand the “Moral Jurisprudence of Jihad,” but for the same reason that it’s essential to keep up with CPAC conferences’ propaganda and the shah’s Truth Social account, and for the same reason that we immunize against the worst diseases. If we are to speak with clarity against the more destructive forces around us, we ought at least to try to understand them in order better to oppose them. Along the same lines, and in the spirit of the ongoing fascistication of the country, I just received Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South, a surprisingly slim book (because it doesn’t include Plato, Aristotle, parts of the Bible, Paul, Augustine and other pre-Colonial standards of the genre) edited by Paul Finkleman of the University of Tulsa College of Law, from 2003 (when white Christian power was marching into Baghdad). Familiar territory, this book: Thomas Jefferson, John Calhoun, Edmud Ruffin, the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, Thomas R.R. Cobb (who thought slavery was part of natural law), and so on. Not bedside reading exactly. More along the lines of reading–and preparing for–the abyss, to the extent possible, assuming we are not so deluded as to think we are not yet halfway down. You don’t have to look far. Scroll down to the quote below, from the Dred Scott decision, and tell me if it isn’t the mirror image–the carbon copy, the audio double, the parroting–of the shah’s current war on birthright citizenship. 

—P.T.

The words “people of the United States” and “citizens” are synonymous terms, and mean the same thing. They both describe the political body who, according to our republican institutions, form the sovereignty, and who hold the power and conduct the Government through their representatives. They are what we familiarly call the “sovereign people,” and every citizen is one of this people and a constituent member of this sovereignty. The question before us is, whether the class of persons described in the plea in abatement compose a portion of this people, and are constituent members of this sovereignty? We think they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word “citizens” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the government might choose to grant them.

–From Chief Justice Taney’s opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1857. 

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