For years, the industry-backed legal group has been building up a pipeline of far-right judges that Republican politicians have dutifully attached to the nation's judiciary, pumping young, often under-qualified, and business-friendly judges into district courts, appeals courts, and the highest court in the land. (All six sitting conservative Supreme Court justices have ties to the Federalist Society.)

Among the organization's donors is Koch Industries, the multinational oil and gas behemoth whose current billionaire leader, Charles Koch, and his late brother David have financed a vast apparatus of think tanks and advocacy organizations that've grown so influential that they frequently write entire laws for GOP legislatures to rubber stamp.

As The Lever's Andrew Perez reported earlier this year, groups linked to the Koch network took a serious interest in the West Virginia case, which was led by a group of Republican attorneys general and major coal companies. The Supreme Court agreed to take up the case last October.

"Koch's Americans for Prosperity Foundation filed an amicus brief in the case arguing that the EPA should not be permitted to 'impose its will on the nation through regulatory diktat,'" Perez observed. "Several more Koch-funded dark money groups have filed similar amicus briefs in the case. That includes the Cato Institute, the New Civil Liberties Alliance, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Mountain States Legal Foundation."

"The New Civil Liberties Alliance also received $1 million from the 85 Fund, a charitable foundation steered by Trump judicial adviser Leonard Leo," Perez added. "A longtime executive at the Federalist Society, a conservative lawyers group, Leo also helps direct the Judicial Crisis Network, a dark money group that spent tens of millions leading the confirmation campaigns for Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett."

As Jane Mayer, the award-winning investigative journalist and author of Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, put it Thursday, the West Virginia decision is "payoff for 40 years of dark money from some of the planet's biggest polluters."

The Republican Party hasn’t adopted a new platform since 2016, so if you want to know what its most influential figures are trying to achieve ... you’ll need to look elsewhere for clues. You could listen to Donald Trump ... You could listen to the main aspirants to his throne, such as Governor Ron DeSantis ...

A more efficient way ... is to spend a weekend at ... CPAC... [where] American conservatives have shown more willingness to look abroad for ideas that they might want to try out back home...

...Hungary has a population comparable to Michigan’s and a G.D.P. close to that of Arkansas, but, in the imagination of the American right, it punches far above its weight. Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister since 2010, is now the longest-serving head of state in the European Union ... Starting in 2013, he made a political foil out of George Soros, the Jewish financier who was born in Hungary but hasn’t lived there in decades, exploiting the trope of Soros as a nefarious international puppet master. During the refugee crisis of 2015, Orbán built a militarized fence along Hungary’s southern border, and, in defiance of both E.U. law and the Geneva Conventions, expelled almost all asylum seekers from the country... Orbán continues to flog, along with academics, “globalists,” the Roma, and, more recently, queer and trans people. Last year, Hungary passed a law banning sex education involving L.G.B.T.Q. topics in schools. Nine months later, in Florida, DeSantis signed a similar law, known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. DeSantis’s press secretary, talking about the inspiration for the law, reportedly said, “We were watching the Hungarians.”...


...“You do not have to have emergency powers or a military coup for democracy to wither,” Aziz Huq, a constitutional-law professor at the University of Chicago, told me. “Most recent cases of backsliding, Hungary being a classic example, have occurred through legal means.” Orbán runs for reëlection every four years. In theory, there is a chance that he could lose. In practice, he has so thoroughly rigged the system that his grip on power is virtually assured. The political-science term for this is “competitive authoritarianism.” Most scholarly books about democratic backsliding (“The New Despotism,” “Democracy Rules,” “How Democracies Die”) cite Hungary, along with Brazil and Turkey, as countries that were consolidated democracies, for a while, before they started turning back the clock...

...Given that the vast majority of Hungarians, apparently including Orbán, do not attend church regularly, it seems plausible that his audience hears the word “Christian,” at least in part, as code for something else...Lauren Stokes, a professor of European history at Northwestern University, told me, “The offer Orbán is making to global conservatives is: I alone can save you from the ravages of Islamization and totalitarian progressivism—and, in the face of all that, who has time for checks and balances and rules?”...In recent years, Orbán or institutions affiliated with his government have hosted, among others, Mike Pence, the former Vice-President; new-media agitators including Steve Bannon, Dennis Prager, and Milo Yiannopoulos; and Jeff Sessions, the former Attorney General, who told a Hungarian newspaper that, in the struggle to “return to our Christian roots based on reason and law, which have made Western civilization great . . . the Hungarians have a solid stand.” ...

...The system that Orbán has built during the past twelve years, a combination of freedom and subjugation not exactly like that of any other government in the world, could be called Goulash Authoritarianism. ... “Orbán was so unafraid, so unapologetic about using his political power to push back on the liberal élites in business and media and culture,” [Rod] Dreher told me. “It was so inspiring: this is what a vigorous conservative government can do if it’s serious about stemming this horrible global tide of wokeness.” By the time Orbán ran for reëlection earlier this year, Dreher had completed his transition from aspiring ascetic to partisan booster. “Mood here at Fidesz HQ is increasingly cheerful,” he tweeted on Election Night. “ ‘Lights out, libs!’ say Hungarian voters.”


...unlike Putin-style autocrats, Orbán is often keen to maintain plausible deniability. “He’ll use such obscure methods that it might take months to figure out what he’s done,” Scheppele, the Princeton professor, told me. In 2010, Orbán established a relatively small antiterror police unit.
Bit by bit, in disparate clauses buried in unrelated laws, he increased its budget and removed checks on its power. “I was reading Article 61 of a bill on public waterworks, literally, and I came across a line that said, Oh, by the way, the antiterror unit now gets to collect personal information on all water-utility customers, which basically means everyone in the country, without notifying them,” Scheppele went on. She contends that the unit now functions, essentially, as Orbán’s secret police. “His claim is always ‘Everything I’m doing is legal’—well, of course it is, because you made it legal,” she said. The goal, as the scholar John Keane puts it in his book The New Despotism, is a kind of bureaucratic gaslighting: the ability to insist that what everyone knows is happening is not in fact happening...

There was no single moment when the democratic backsliding began in Hungary. There were no shots fired, no tanks in the streets. ... Tibor Dessewffy, a sociology professor at Eötvös Loránd University, told me. “He just keeps narrowing the space of public life. It’s what’s happening in your country, too ... it wasn’t hard for him to imagine Americans a decade hence being, in some respects, roughly where the Hungarians are today...

In 2018, Steve Bannon, after he was fired from the Trump Administration, went on a kind of European tour, giving paid talks and meeting with nationalist allies across the Continent. In May, he stopped in Budapest. One of his hosts there was the XXI Century Institute, a think tank with close ties to the Orbán administration. “I can tell, Viktor Orbán triggers ’em like Trump,” Bannon said onstage, flashing a rare smile. “He was Trump before Trump.” ...Oh, my God, Soros!” Bannon said. “You guys beat him up badly here.” Szánthó accepted the praise with a stoic grin. Bannon went on, “We love to take lessons from you guys in the U.S.”

In 2018, “Trump before Trump” was the highest compliment that Bannon could think to pay Orbán. In 2022, many on the American right are trying to anticipate what a Trump after Trump might look like. Orbán provides one potential answer...What would happen if the Republican Party were led by an American Orbán, someone with the patience to envision a semi-authoritarian future and the diligence and the ruthlessness to achieve it?..In 2018, Patrick Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed was admired by David Brooks and Barack Obama. Last year, Deneen founded a hard-right Substack called the Postliberal Order, on which he argued that right-wing populists had not gone nearly far enough—that American conservatism should abandon its “defensive crouch.” One of his co-authors wrote a post from Budapest, offering an example of how this could work in practice: “It’s clear that Hungarian conservatism is not defensive.”

J. D. Vance has voiced admiration for Orbán’s pro-natalist family policies, adding, “Why can’t we do that here?” Rod Dreher told me, “Seeing what Vance is saying, and what Ron DeSantis is actually doing in Florida, the concept of American Orbánism starts to make sense. I don’t want to overstate what they’ll be able to accomplish, given the constitutional impediments and all, but DeSantis is already using the power of the state to push back against woke capitalism, against the crazy gender stuff.” According to Dreher, what the Republican Party needs is “a leader with Orbán’s vision—someone who can build on what Trumpism accomplished, without the egomania and the inattention to policy, and who is not afraid to step on the liberals’ toes.”

In common parlance, the opposite of “liberal” is “conservative.” In political-science terms, illiberalism means something more radical: a challenge to the very rules of the game. There are many valid critiques of liberalism, from the left and the right, but Orbán’s admirers have trouble articulating how they could install a post-liberal American state without breaking a few eggs (civil rights, fair elections, possibly the democratic experiment itself) ...

Trump may run in 2024, and he may win, fairly or unfairly. What worried me most ... was not the person of Donald Trump but a Republican Party that resembled Orbán’s party, Fidesz, ... comfortable with naked power grabs, with treating all political opposition as fundamentally illegitimate, with assuming that any checks on its dominance were mere inconveniences to be bypassed by any quasi-legalistic means. “There are many things that the Americans here want to learn from the Hungarians,” Balázs Orbán had told me. “We’re going to keep our heritage for ourselves, our Christian heritage, our ethnic heritage . . . that’s what I think they want to say but they can’t say, and so they point to someone who can say it. If they want us to play that role, we are fine with that.” After I got back to the U.S., I spoke to [Rod] Dreher, who mentioned that he was thinking about moving from Louisiana to Budapest, where he had been offered a job with the Danube Institute. “I really like the Hungarian people, and I think it could be useful to build a network of Christians and intellectuals who are thinking about the future,” he said. “We in the West still have so much to learn.”

... She emerged in the party as someone who can speak about systemic racism and police brutality while insulating Democrats from GOP charges that they are soft on crime or hold extreme progressive ideologies. Heading into the midterms, Demings provides Democrats a big-name candidate in their hopes to hold on to the Senate. The 65-year-old three-term moderate has appeared uninterested in upending the system, so there’s no worry of her being caricatured as a leftist or a “socialist” bearing “woke” ideals as she runs in a bastion of Republican conservatism. With her consistent track record in policy and tone, “you never have to wonder where she stands on an issue"...

As a member of the intelligence and judiciary committees—the bodies with jurisdiction over impeachment inquiries—Demings was part of the team responsible for gathering intel for the first Trump trial. While several colleagues submitted their names to Pelosi for an impeachment manager role, Demings didn’t. It wasn’t that she doubted herself or her abilities, far from it. Her “ego is healthy,” she told me. But she thought about the two previous impeachment trials—Bill Clinton’s and Andrew Johnson’s. Those managers were white men and all attorneys. “Sometimes we get caught up on what we’ve seen,” she said, telling on herself. “I’m a person who goes around and tell people, ‘Forget if you’ve never seen it before. Blaze a new trail.’ ”...

Once the curtains went up on Trump’s first impeachment and her national prominence rose, the trolls came out in droves. They phoned to threaten her. They emailed to call her ugly and comment on her hair. “Because that’s what you do with women, right?” she said. “ ‘Oh, she’s doing a really good job,’ so let me go to, ‘You better put that chicken down, Val, because that suit looking a little tight today!’ But I was so laser-focused, and I’m so used to it. I’ve been called the names, y’all better come with something else.”...

The premise of Vauhini Vara’s debut novel, “The Immortal King Rao,” is as simple as could be: A young woman named Athena, raised in secret on an island in the Puget Sound by an aging father who has injected her with genetic code that allows her to access the entire internet and also all his memories, finds herself in a prison named after her mother, awaiting judgment by algorithm for a crime she insists she did not commit. While she waits, she writes a lengthy self-defense addressed to the Shareholders of the mega-corporation that has replaced the U.S. government, indeed all governments, just as “Shareholder” with a capital “s” has replaced the word “citizen.”

Let me try that again. The premise of “The Immortal King Rao” is as simple as could be: A boy named King Rao is born into a large Dalit Indian family that has gained a foothold in the middle class through shrewd investment in a coconut farm. King is sent to study engineering in the United States, where he becomes the lead programmer and public face of an early computer company turned lifestyle brand turned global superpower, eclipsing Gates, Jobs et al. After falling spectacularly from grace, King retreats to a small island where his daughter, Athena, plays Miranda to his Prospero: ward, caretaker, secret sharer. He hopes for a day when he might right the wrongs he committed, as well as those he feels were committed against him.

Once more, with feeling. The premise of “The Immortal King Rao” is as simple as could be: A phenomenon called Hothouse Earth, the endgame of climate collapse, is gradually extinguishing human civilization and probably all life on the planet. But this idea is too big and scary for anyone to deal with, so they don’t. The Shareholder Government continues to use Social Capital ratings to keep its Shareholders working, consuming and posting. Meanwhile, in the Blanklands — formally recognized autonomous zones outside of Shareholder control — people who call themselves Exes have achieved something like functional anarcho-communism à la Proudhon’s workers’ collectives. The Exes believe that as the contradictions inherent in the Shareholder system become harder to ignore, more people will embrace their model. Unfortunately, by the time everyone turns toward their city on a hill, there’s a good chance that hill will be underwater.

“Amid the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade and ending federal protections on the right to an abortion, New Mexico’s Governor signed an executive order Monday related to abortion access in the state. The order addresses issues several outstanding issues as they related to New Mexico’s willingness to help other states that now have different laws on the books related to abortion.

The order comes as New Mexico lawmakers consider more definitions surrounding abortion following the state’s 2021 law, repealing a 1969 abortion ban in New Mexico. The governor was joined at Monday’s press conference by lawmakers and reproductive rights advocates, including Senate Majority Whip Linda Lopez (D-Albuquerque), and representatives of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains and the ACLU of New Mexico.

“We will not further imperil the rights and access points of anyone in the state of New Mexico,” Governor Lujan Grisham said. “As long as I’m Governor, everyone in the state of New Mexico will be protected, out of state residents seeking access will be protected, providers will be protected, and abortion is, and will continue to be legal, safe and accessible.”

The order can be broken down into three elements. The first surrounds assistance from New Mexico state agencies to other states. It directs all New Mexico state employees, appointees, officers or any others acting on behalf of the state to not provide assistance to any “investigation or proceeding initiated in or by another State that seeks to impose civil or criminal liability or professional sanction upon a person or entity” for various choices related to reproductive health care services that are legal in New Mexico.

The second elements seeks to define protection of health care and other professionals licensed in New Mexico. It directs New Mexico’s Superintendent of Regulation and Licensing to work with boards to develop policies ensuring “no person shall be disqualified from licensure or subject to discipline by a New Mexico board of professional licensure” for providing reproductive health care services otherwise legal in New Mexico, but illegal in another state.

The third element outlines limits on interstate extradition related to states that have outlined criminal statutes related to abortion. The order states the “Office of the Governor shall decline any request received from the executive authority of any other State to issue a warrant for the arrest or surrender of any person charged with a criminals violation of a law” as they relate to legal practices surrounding reproductive health care in New Mexico.

“It means we will not cooperate for any criminalization or attempt at removing a license, or holding accountable a provider here who might be under national license or regional license [in respects to abortion],” Governor Lujan Grisham said Monday. “I will not be executing, if there were any, warrants or extradition for any provider related to this issue.”

The order comes as several nearby states have enacted trigger laws, immediately banning or curtailing abortion procedures amid the Roe v. Wade decision. In New Mexico, abortion remains legal after lawmakers repealed a 1969 law during the 2021 legislative session.”