Essays
The Great Suppression
Republicans have always had a talent for branding the catastrophes of their own making after the fact.
Coolidge and Hoover gave us the Great Depression. Worship at the altar of an under-regulated market until it collapsed under the weight of its own unchecked greed, dragging an entire generation into breadlines and dirt.
Bush gave us the Great Recession. A deregulated Wall Street mixed with rubber-stamped fraud dressed as financial innovation allowed banks to gamble with the mortgages of working families. When it all came apart, the real villains got bailouts. Everyone else got foreclosure notices.
And now Trump, with the help of a court he built, gives us what I am dubbing the Great Suppression.
Not a depression. Not a recession. Something more fundamentally sinister. Because this time the destruction is not a byproduct of recklessness or negligence. It is the product itself.
Suppression of the Truth
Every press conference, every unhinged social media post, every rambling dementia-addled monologue is an exercise in burying reality under a landfill of lies. Not spin. Not exaggeration. Pure fabrication. Relentless, industrial-grade fabrication, delivered with the confidence of a man who has never once been held accountable for anything in his miserable excuse for a life.
Truth suppressed so lies face no scrutiny.
Suppression of the American Dream
The same middle class these people claim to champion is being hollowed out in real time. Tariffs that are nothing more than extra taxes on the working poor. Housing completely out of reach. Education reduced to a white-washed revisionist sham. The Great Depression and the Great Recession both eventually ended. This one is not designed to.
Mobility suppressed so the disgustingly wealthy can become more disgustingly wealthy.
Suppression of our Rights
Free press painted as the radical enemy of the people. Peaceful protest met with militarized murder. The First Amendment treated like a suggestion. The rest of the Constitution handled the same way he handles classified documents: carelessly left in the bathroom of a tacky Floridian resort.
Rights suppressed so power faces no challenge.
Suppression of Accountability
His Epstein ties. The files he could have released on day one but chose to distract, bury and redact, because transparency is only a weapon he points at others. A man who promised to blow the lid off that particular darkness and instead sat on it, which points toward everything you need to know about levels of past participation.
Evidence suppressed so the guilty escape consequences.
Suppression of our Votes
This is where the project becomes permanent.
It requires the elimination of Constitutionally guaranteed representation through surgical, racially targeted voter purges. Polling place closures in communities that have the audacity to vote wrong. Blatant threats of rolling out the secret police for the purpose of voter intimidation. Gerrymandered districts drawn with the subtlety of a carjacking. The message has always been clear. Democracy is fine, as long as he gets to decide who can participate in it.
But all of those dirty tricks were vulnerable. Vulnerable to lawsuits. Vulnerable to federal oversight. Vulnerable to the Voting Rights Act, which for sixty years had been the backbone of every legal challenge to racial vote suppression in this country.
On April 29th, 2026, the Supreme Court of the United States ended that.
In a 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, Justices Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett took a Louisiana congressional map that had been redrawn to give Black voters, who make up one-third of the state, a meaningful second district. Louisiana fought against the map and lost. Federal courts ordered it redrawn. The state complied. Two Black Louisianans were elected to Congress for the first time in the state’s history. And then six justices, three of them appointed by Donald Trump, decided that the map was the problem. Not the discrimination it remedied, but the remedy. Plain and simple.
Justice Alito’s majority opinion held that the Constitution “almost never permits” the federal government to consider race, and that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which Congress passed to address precisely this kind of dilution, no longer qualifies as a compelling enough interest to justify the consideration of race even when race is the basis of the dilution being remedied. Everybody got that? The ridiculous mental gymnastics being that the Voting Rights Act, a statute passed by Congress specifically to prevent racial vote dilution can no longer be used to prevent racial vote dilution. The cure for the disease has been declared a violation of the patient’s rights.
And what is even more disgusting is that legal reasoning rests on a LIE.
Alito’s opinion claims that “Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate, even turning out at higher rates than white voters in two of the five most recent Presidential elections nationwide and in Louisiana.” He uses this to argue that racial disparities in voting have effectively been solved, so the law designed to remedy them is no longer necessary.
However, the two elections he cherry-picked are 2008 and 2012. The Obama years.
He reached back nearly twenty years to find the only two presidential elections in American history where Black and white turnout reached parity, and he deceptively presented those two as if they were a recent trend.
He skipped 2024.
He skipped 2020.
He skipped 2016.
And he intentionally skipped those because in all three, the racial turnout gap was wide. And widening, actually.
Since 2013, non-coincidentally, the year Roberts’s Shelby County ruling gutted Section 5 of the VRA, the gap has not just grown. It has exploded. This is a critical fact that was just blatantly omitted.
But why stop the deception there?
On closer inspection of his cited Louisiana statistic, the part of Alito’s claim where he says Black turnout exceeded white turnout in two of the last five elections in the state, it was actually calculated using non-standard methodology that includes non-citizens, people with felony convictions, and others legally barred from voting in the total denominator.
So The Guardian re-ran the numbers using the real methodology that every credible election researcher uses.
Not surprisingly, the result was Black turnout in Louisiana has NOT exceeded white turnout in ANY of the last five presidential elections.
Not once.
When using the actual methodology, Alito’s “two of five” is actually zero of five.
Wrong years.
Wrong trend.
Wrong calculation.
Wrong ruling.
Yet this is the “factual” foundation on which six justices gutted the most important civil rights statute in American history.
Of course, within hours, Louisiana suspended its scheduled May 16 primary. Even though more than 100,000 voters had already cast early ballots. And the Supreme Court waived its own 32-day rule and finalized the ruling within a week so that the state could redraw the map before the 2026 election. Six justices set aside their own procedural norms to make sure the new legalized voter suppression mechanic would be in place in time to flip the seat. Rigging the midterms is that essential to those in power.
And then Alabama filed its emergency petition the next day. Coupled with the redistricting already done by Texas, The New York Times projects that up to twelve House seats could shift from Democratic to Republican control. NPR identified fifteen majority-Black or near-majority-Black districts across the South that are now vulnerable. The previous record for Black House representation loss in a single cycle was four seats, set at the end of Reconstruction. Callais could match that. Callais could exceed that.
Grand Wizard John Roberts has spent his entire judicial career working toward this outcome. He wrote the Shelby County decision in 2013 that gutted Section 5 of the VRA, arguing that racial discrimination in voting was a solved problem that federal preclearance was no longer needed. The day after Shelby, Texas implemented a voter ID law that had previously been blocked for violating the VRA. Within five years, fourteen states had imposed similar restrictions. Section 2 would be hollowed further in 2021. Callais is just the final nail in the coffin.
The three disgraceful Trump appointees, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, joined Roberts to provide him with the votes he needed to legally sanction non-white voter suppression. And they will stay on that bench, killing whatever remnants of citizens’ rights remain, until the 2050s.
This was the most consequential racial vote suppression decision since Plessy v. Ferguson, that little gem from 1896 that gave us the concept of “separate but equal” which allowed Jim Crow Laws to operate for the next fifty-eight years. In fact, the consequences of this ruling cannot be overstated. It is the cold reality of a court that has now declared the cure for racial vote dilution to be a return to racial discrimination. The remedy is now the violation.
But this time around, Jim Crow did not require white robes and a rally with burning crosses. As it turns out, all it needed was legislature willing to rig a map and a court willing to say that map was somehow constitutional.
Votes suppressed so corruption faces no ballot.
And conscience suppressed in the very court that was supposed to prevent that.
Coolidge and Hoover broke the economy through neglect.
Bush broke it through incompetence.
Trump and his court are breaking something deeper, on purpose, and openly daring us to call it what it is.
So I will.
This is The Great Suppression.
Not because they passively let it happen.
Because they actively wrote it into law.