Words from John and State of The Holler

Hey Y’all,

Well, it’s official. The Holler has stuck around for an entire year thanks to you and a very timely part-time gig at the dive bar I live above. I’m rushing to get this out so I can tend to dive bar duties, but I couldn’t hit send without telling you how much I appreciate all of you.

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Talk to you soon,

JR

Video Transcript and Sources

Six of the nine supreme court justices belong to a group that started as a college club with three people in 1982. It’s called the Federalist Society and its members are about to overturn Roe V. Wade.

What do they all have in common? The Federalist Society… and a dark treacherous soul.

It’s incredible. Every sitting conservative justice on the *Supreme Court* … of *America*… came from this group. They also have 42,000 right-wing lawyer members, 150 law school campus chapters, and 75,000 lawyer’s groups nationally. Not to mention all these alumni including senators, house members, governors, attorneys general, media moguls, and other bat-man villains controlling our politics on behalf of a super-rich elite.

They call themselves “a group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the current state of the legal order.”

Translation: they’re thousands of lawyers whose only purpose is to drag our legal system to the right and strike down any law that inconveniences a handful of people with power.

The wild part is that The Federalist Society is one group of dozens that enable conservatives to gut constitutional rights without holding the house, senate, or presidency…. and it was all carefully planned out 50 years ago. Here we go…

Back in the seventies, ordinary people were getting power and the super-rich didn’t like that. The EPA and OSHA were created. Unions were strong. There was a consumer movement. All of it meant less money and power for the super-rich.

This crust bucket (Lewis Powell) wrote up a playbook for conservatives to fight back that birthed the “beachhead” strategy which was to establish conservative cells at traditionally liberal places: media, universities, non-profits, etc.

Lewis Powell. Former Supreme Court Justice, author of the Powell Memo, noted crust bucket, and enemy of The Holler.

Along comes one dusty-ass chemical tycoon named John Olin. Olin was a graduate of Cornell University. He was busy making an ass-ton of money and polluting poor communities in April of 1969 when something very disturbing, to him, happened.

John M. Olin. Dusty-ass chemical tycoon and legacy conservative philanthropist.

A group of armed black panthers took over the administrative hall at Cornell and made a bunch of demands for fair treatment. Olin, who at the time was the 31st richest American, *did not like* groups of armed black people demanding fair treatment, so he decided to give most of his money to a bunch of groups that were… not about that.

Olin started establishing “Law and Economics” programs at elite universities whose purpose was to fight any *law* that threatened the “economics” of profiteering. Stuff like pollution laws, labor laws, tax laws… anything that offered basic fairness and threatened billionaire power.

Elite university capture by billionaires.

Enter three conservative Yale nerds that started The Federalist Society. They got a little seed money from a conservative non-profit, and then a $5.5 million dollar endowment from John Olin with more that flowed from the Koch brothers and other right-wing billionaires.

40 years on and one of their members, Justice Samuel Alito, authored the draft opinion to overturn Roe V. Wade. And unfortunately, there are other things on their to-do list.

Supreme Court Justice, and man very interested in your reproduction, Samuel Alito.

This is one small snapshot of how billionaires control our system, but it’s still true that there are more non-billionaires than billionaires, and whenever the working class unites better… non-terrible things come into reach.

The Holler

Guess what six Supreme Court Justices have in…