Miranda Warnings about Judges Encouraging Discrimination and Violating our Constitution
This piece is provided for your convenience. It collects in one place links to other pieces that provide context. Such prior pieces addressed how the dominant faction of today’s SCOTUS is attacking our First Amendment freedoms and rights by undermining our Constitution. This issue (regarding our freedom of religion and conscience) was illustrated primarily in the context of a particular case in a twelve-part series about Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org., 597 U.S. 215 (2022). Additional pieces linked below addressed the freedom of speech, including the right to vote.
The issue in this Substack is, as its name states, Black-Collar Crime. It is not (even in the slightest) supporting or opposing any particular religion or faith or any aspect of any faith. The point is to oppose judges imposing their unconstitutional views (including about religion) on us. The point is to oppose judges insinuating their unconstitutional views into judicial opinions for a particularly dangerous purpose: to enable public officials to violate our rights. See, e.g., The Nexus Between Black-Collar Crime and Presidential Crime (Part II) (D.C. Circuit Judges and DOJ Attorneys Make the Case that No One Is Above the Law).
The issue in Black-Collar Crime is one that Alexander Hamilton warned against when our Constitution and republican form of government were being discussed in the great debates of 1787-1788. In The Federalist No. 9, Hamilton warned of great dangers posed by the deception of some who opposed our Constitution: “the advocates of despotism have drawn arguments, not only against the [Constitution’s] forms of republican government, but against the very principles of civil liberty. They have decried all free government as inconsistent with the order of society, and have indulged themselves in malicious exultation over [the] friends and partisans” of “republican government” and “civil liberty.”
Among those in the know, it is well-known that too many judges (including some SCOTUS justices) like to abuse their positions to play a particular game with our rights. Their game even has a name: “playing the long game.” Following Dobbs, Justice Alito was praised as “a man who is playing for the long game.” He was praised by the Notre Dame Law School’s Religious Liberty Initiative. Justice Alito and Notre Dame are famously vigorous in furthering the views of their religion.
Justice Alito was praised, in particular, for his opinions and statements in past litigation, as well as for having “teed up” future litigation “to become a landmark victory for religious” views. Justice Alito’s game plan is history, and his plan and his views have a particular force and focus: “Rome” was not “built in a day” and “robust religious [influence in] jurisprudence is not built in a day.” Examples of Justice Alito’s enterprising empire-building were provided in the video here (starting at 1:10 and culminating in the foregoing quotes at 2:20).
The name for the famous Miranda warning (of rights when people are arrested) comes from a SCOTUS decision, Miranda v. Ariz., 384 U.S. 436 (1966). One principle at work is that a word of warning can make a world of difference. But there is an even greater principle at work: our public servants should educate us, not deceive us, about our rights.
In Miranda, SCOTUS elaborated on how judges play the long game. They do not merely decide the case or controversy before them. They use their opinions or statements to teach, encourage and assist others to undermine our Constitution and defraud us of our rights. Judges can and do use their opinions to misrepresent, distort and deny our rights. Their misrepresentations, distortions and denials, in turn, encourage more litigation to even further encroach on our rights.
Particular warnings in Miranda should be as famous as the Miranda warning issued upon arrest. Miranda repeated wise warnings that had been included in prior opinions of SCOTUS justices.
The first warning in Miranda (about how and why crime is contagious, especially when judges become infected) was originally by the wise and great Justice Brandeis (joined by the wise and great Justice Holmes) dissenting in Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928)). This warning was first offered just before SCOTUS (finally) started enforcing our First Amendment rights almost 100 years ago.
Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.
In The Federalist No. 9, Hamilton warned of the extreme danger to America of “vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy,” of “furious storms” and reason, truth and justice being “overwhelmed by the tempestuous waves” of “party rage.”
Now, Justice Alito and Justice Thomas and their faction are inviting the same. This very point was made by those who framed our original Constitution and the Bill of Rights (which begins with the First Amendment). They included particular provisions in our Constitution, and they explained that they did so because extreme religious persecution starts with religious discrimination. See Part IV (The First Amendment was not the Constitution’s first protection of freedom of conscience); Part IX (Falsehoods about the First Amendment and unenumerated rights).
The Dobbs majority used deception to eliminate a right that they knew was protected in and by the First and Second Amendments. See Part IX and Part XII (SCOTUS's defense of self-defense: the right to choose to kill).
Miranda’s first warning, above, was supported by offering a second warning about how judges can and do undermine our rights. Miranda quoted the much older Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616 (1886). “[T]he constitutional rights of the citizen” often are undermined and eliminated with “stealthy encroachments” by public officials (including judges). “[T]he obnoxious thing” (officials violating our Constitution) very often appears initially in its “mildest and least repulsive form” because “illegitimate and unconstitutional practices get their first footing in that way,” by “silent approaches and slight deviations from legal modes of procedure.”
Justice Alito and his faction have not merely been promoting religious liberty, they have been promoting and encouraging discrimination and oppression based on their personal views about religion. In multiple opinions and statements they said or showed that they seek to reverse almost 100 years of SCOTUS decisions protecting our First Amendment rights and freedoms. That was exactly what they did in Dobbs.
With Dobbs, Justice Alito and his faction explicitly wiped out 50 years’ worth of precedent. They also implicitly egregiously undermined other precedent (and our Constitution) protecting religious liberty and freedom of conscience. As was addressed in Part III (The Dobbs majority knowingly violated the Constitution and flouted SCOTUS precedent):
Justice Thomas’s own concurrence in Dobbs highlighted the majority’s blatantly and intentionally illegal, unconstitutional and anti-constitutional tactics: “After overruling” many “decisions” that the justices in the Dobbs majority opposed (for personal religious reasons), only then should SCOTUS finally address “the question” of which “constitutional provisions” actually do “guarantee the” very same “rights.” “For example,” after overruling “decisions” they don’t like, they should “consider whether” the very same “rights” (“any of the rights [previously] announced” by SCOTUS) “are ‘privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States’ protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Amdt. 14, §1.”
See also Part XI (Striving and struggling toward religious supremacy); Part X (Jihadi Sam); Part II (SCOTUS justices plot a coup); The Hypocrisy Revealed by Religious Supremacists in the Mifepristone Case.
In a similar manner, for years, Justice Thomas has been leading their faction to undermine our freedom of expression (freedom of speech and press). See Who Cares about the History of the Freedom of Speech?; Viewpoint Discrimination Is Poison to a Free Society.
Justice Alito followed the foregoing by very recently leading an attack against an extremely important and extremely protected form of speech: voting. This was addressed in a series of pieces analyzing Alexander v. S.C. State Conf. of the NAACP, including Sam’s Club (SCOTUS) Says Separate-But-Equal is Cool; Alito's Gang Advocates and Protects “Political Apartheid”; and Black Magic (Justice Alito Lies Again) (Part III).