'Shameless' Supreme Court's latest double standard sparks outrage

May 11, 2026Far Left

The Supreme Court's latest ruling allowing a red state to pursue its redistricting efforts sparked outrage on Monday. On Monday, the Supreme Court issued an unsigned ruling allowing Alabama to pursue a new election map that could eliminate two Democratic-held seats. The ruling paved the way for the Republicans to add more seats in Congress as the 2026 midterms approach. Political analysts and experts reacted to the ruling on social media. "The Supreme Court is rigged," Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) posted on X. "They're shameless fascists and political hacks, and they shouldn't be able to go anywhere without people screaming in their faces, reminding them that they're scum," political commentator Kyle Kulinski posted on X. "Roberts is a GOP operative and a crook, and it’s really time to stop pretending otherwise," Jesse Lee, a former Biden administration official, posted on X. "[I don't know] how anyone can still act like the Supreme Court majority has any credibility now," Jen Rice, a reporter with Democracy Docket, posted on X. "Of course they did. Gotta help out the [Republicans] before it's too close to an election to change the maps," lawyer T. Greg Doucette posted on Bluesky. "At this point, anyone who cares about justice and the rule of law just needs to be upfront about the fact that this is an illegitimate court whose decisions will be undone at the first opportunity, and that opportunity, being peaceful, is the best these partisan hacks can hope for," Chris Kluwe, a Democratic candidate for office, posted on Bluesky.

Growing surveillance state under Trump admin sparks nationwide backlash

Raw Story

8 hours ago

Growing surveillance state under Trump admin sparks nationwide backlash

Resistance is mounting across the United States against the increasing use of surveillance tech company Flock Safety’s cameras, with a growing number of cities canceling contracts as the artificial intelligence-powered license plate readers are quietly being installed in thousands of locations nationwide.State and local police departments first used the Atlanta-based company’s automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems for standard law enforcement purposes, but they are now being employed for a much broader range of uses, including immigration-related searches and other actions supporting US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during the Trump administration’s deadly anti-immigrant crackdown.“We have cameras that are used for everything from illegal dumping to drug houses to hotels that are just big problems,” Flock Safety engineer Kevin Cox told prospective customers during a demonstration of the company’s Condor Camera, according to a Thursday report in The Washington Times.“There are endless, endless uses for what we can do with these things,” Cox added.Those uses include spying on constitutionally protected protest activity and enforcing abortion bans by tracking pregnant people’s travel across states—even ones in which the medical procedure is legal.The ACLU—which recently launched a “Get the Flock Out” campaign to “fight creepy ALPR cameras”—says there are currently between 80,000 and 100,000 Flock devices installed nationwide that conduct more than 20 billion scans per month. More than 5,000 law enforcement agencies use the cameras, and some of them keep their locations a secret.“Flock’s ALPR cameras aren’t like your normal traffic cameras,” the ACLU explained. “This surveillance technology records and tracks every car that comes into view, and then an AI algorithm catalogs the make, model, color, license plate number, bumper stickers, and even scratches. This personal information is then uploaded into a nationwide database that any law enforcement agency with a Flock contract can search—with few regulations or oversight on how they use what they find.”The backlash against creeping state surveillance has even transcended the partisan divide.“I think our country is in a kind of uniquely anti-surveillance environment right now, which is to say that, in a time where it seems there is nothing that is not partisan, opposition to government surveillance is nonpartisan,” ACLU privacy and surveillance attorney Chad Marlow told The Washington Times on Thursday.There is growing action—both legal and otherwise—to end the use of ALPRs across the country.According to the public information project Ban Flock Cameras, 82 Flock contracts were terminated across 28 states between August 2021 and May 2026, with 39 of those cancellations occurring in the first five months of 2026 alone.Even Amazon-owned Ring announced earlier this year that it would stop doing business with Flock Safety.Susie O’Hara, a member of Santa Cruz, California’s nominally nonpartisan City Council, told WBUR earlier this year that she grew increasingly concerned about local use of eight Flock cameras last year after learning that police were sharing data gleaned from the cameras with the company’s national network without city officials’ knowledge, a violation of state laws banning the practice.O’Hara became increasingly convinced that Santa Cruz should cancel its Flock contract after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good, a US citizen, in Minneapolis in January.“I have goose bumps on my arms thinking about the absolute chaos that was happening in Minneapolis,” she said. “And just the absolute insanity of what we were seeing... It was totally clear to me that we should in no way consciously be in this system at all—just no way.”Less than a week after Good’s killing, the Santa Cruz City Council voted to terminate the city’s Flock contract, becoming the first municipality in California to do so.“For us, the threat to our civil liberties was greater than any benefit we could get from the flawed product,” Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley told KQED at the time.Chad Kemp, who represents District 32 on the nonpartisan Dane County Board of Supervisors in Wisconsin—which in April voted to stop funding two dozen cameras leased from Flock—told The Washington Times that “there’s a public safety issue here, but there is also a privacy issue.”“There are serious concerns about individuals who can be monitored without their knowledge, or if it is even constitutional or ethical to track people without a warrant,” he added.At the national level, US Reps. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) last year launched an investigation into the use of Flock cameras to track pregnant people across state lines for abortion care and to conduct unauthorized immigration enforcement operations.Krishnamoorthi and Sen.

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