The Enabling Court: How the U.S. Supreme Court is Echoing the Fall of Justice in Nazi Germany
Thomas. Alito. Leo. What was once law is now loyalty.
The Enabling Court: How the U.S. Supreme Court is Echoing the Fall of Justice in Nazi Germany
Thomas. Alito. Leo. What was once law is now loyalty.
By Robert J. Rei, April 12, 2025
History does not repeat itself, but it warns. This essay traces the silent compliance of courts—then and now.
I. It did not begin with camps. It began with courts.
For those who still trust in the permanence of American law, this may be the final warning. When the court no longer serves the people—but instead serves the ruler—what remains is not a democracy, but an enclosure. The signs of alignment are not theoretical. They are judicial.
II. A System Redefined by Design
From Richard Rubenstein’s The Cunning of History1, we learn that the Holocaust did not erupt out of chaos—it was planned through legal instruments, bureaucratic compliance, and the strategic misuse of courts.
“Auschwitz was made possible because the German bureaucracy and the SS were in control at every step…”
“The Germans demonstrated that a modern state can successfully organize an entire people for its own extermination.”2
Today’s U.S. Supreme Court, once a defender of pluralism, now shows signs of a similar transformation—not yet in action, but in ideological permissioning.
III. From Nixon to Now: The Long Slide
The Nixon administration revealed the potential of federal tools to harass dissenters and bypass debate through fear.
“Nixon attempted to replace the give and take of the normal American political process by bureaucratic harassment. Fear was to replace debate and persuasion.”
“It would be comforting to think the abuses of power during the Nixon administration were due solely to his shortcomings. Unfortunately, the structure of government put the capacity to act as Nixon did into the hands of any president willing to exploit it.”3
During this time, Nixon used the threat of license revocation and IRS action to pressure major media outlets such as the Washington Post. These were early attempts to suppress adversarial press through bureaucratic intimidation.
Fast forward to December 2024, and Trump’s version of this strategy comes into sharp view.
ABC News, under pressure from Trump’s legal team, paid $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit concerning George Stephanopoulos’s televised remark that Trump had been found “liable for rape.” Although the jury technically ruled for sexual abuse and defamation, many legal experts defended Stephanopoulos’s phrasing as consistent with the spirit and legal weight of the verdict. Nonetheless, ABC issued a statement of regret—not because the statement was demonstrably false, but because the political cost of standing firm had grown too high.4
ABC capitulated—issuing a statement of regret and transferring substantial funds to Trump’s legal and political infrastructure. The courts enabled this—not through direct ruling, but through the machinery of civil settlement and deference.
Just as Nixon’s tactics sought to bend media through state bureaucracy, Trump bends them through civil intimidation. Both are examples of how the legal system itself can become a camouflage for power.
What Nixon attempted in shadow, Trump’s regime now seeks to institutionalize. And the Court is not stopping it—it is insulating it.
IV. Immunizing the Instruments of Power
The July 2020 Supreme Court decision to broaden the ministerial exemption under the guise of religious freedom (as detailed in Immunizing Churches to Create Immunity for a Corrupt President5) granted faith-based institutions structural immunity from civil rights claims.
The longer the court continues without adhering to the checks and balances in place or being held accountable for the obvious and increasing corruption taking place the more difficult will it be to bring the court under the control of the people,67
This case becomes precedent—not just for churches, but for power. It marks the beginning of judicial exemption culture—a roadmap to legal untouchability.
V. White Christian Nationalism and the Constitutional Cloak
As Caroline Mala Corbin documents in her academic analysis8, recent Supreme Court rulings have lent increasing legitimacy to white Christian nationalism. By subtly shifting Establishment Clause interpretation, the Court has elevated “tradition” and “history” as stand-ins for a specific religious identity—one that is exclusionary by design.
“Christian nationalism necessarily implies a hierarchy based on religion, with Christian insiders who are true Americans and non-Christian outsiders who are not… Christian nationalism does not simply lead to symbolic exclusion from the community and nation; it may lead to actual exclusion.”9
The use of ceremonial deism, legacy iconography, and accommodation doctrine creates a legal framework that both recognizes and shields a particular strain of Christian nationalism, even as it marginalizes religious minorities and secular citizens.
The judicial transformation is not only legal—it is cultural and theological. It prepares the terrain for authoritarian compatibility by sanctifying a single worldview.
VI. Behind the Robes: The Teneo Network and the Strategic Capture of Law
What we are witnessing is not merely a conservative judicial turn—it is a generational realignment, orchestrated quietly, professionally, and with long-range intentionality. The center of this movement is The Teneo Network, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit described by its own members as “the Silicon Valley of Conservatism.”
To wit, the Teneo Network’s central goal, objective, and purpose is to—
“to advance a worldview and thereby change a culture.”
Led by Leonard Leo, this network has seeded, trained, and installed judges, advisors, and operatives across the judiciary. Its purpose is not governance. Its purpose is dominion.10
VII. The Bureaucracy of Punishment: KL Echoes in Modern America
(“KL” is the abbreviation for Konzentrationslager, the German term for concentration camp.)
In KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps11, Nikolaus Wachsmann shows how the Nazi regime did not need to dismantle the judiciary—it simply trained it to look away.
“German judges and prosecutors, like most other civil servants, largely backed the regime.”12
This legal framework of “gray zone rule” finds disturbing echoes in the policies driven by Stephen Miller—Trump’s former senior adviser and ideological enforcer and now current Chief of Staff of the White House. Miller oversaw the construction of extra-legal detention zones, separation without tracking, and enforcement regimes built on fear. His architecture was not sloppy—it was purposefully ambiguous, designed to operate in the space between law and cruelty.
And just as Hitler pardoned sadistic camp guards to affirm their untouchability, so too has Donald Trump begun to pardon or promise pardons to January 6 insurrectionists—those who attacked democracy in his name. These are not isolated gestures. They are signals to the judiciary: “Do not restrain me. This is what I reward.”
VIII. Digitized Domination: IBM Then, Cloud Now
With no central registry and decades of incomplete census data, the Nazi regime turned to Dehomag, IBM’s German arm, to execute the largest census in European history.
In IBM and the Holocaust13, Edwin Black exposes how the Nazi regime’s ambition to identify and isolate German Jews relied not on ideology alone, but on advanced data processing, provided by IBM’s German subsidiary.
“The Nazis were desperate for rapid identification tools. Census data was outdated, inconsistent, and too slow for their social engineering goals.”14
As Edwin Black recounts in IBM and the Holocaust: “If only the Nazis could at least obtain information on the 41 million Germans living in Prussia… IBM’s Dehomag was.” Positioned and ready to assist the Nazis in their efforts.
“Dehomag would handle almost the entire project… If the government would gather the information, Dehomag would handle everything else.”15
This was not surveillance as reaction—it was preemptive identification as policy. And it worked. The Nazis did not begin with violence. They began with data structures.
Today, the U.S. government quietly expands its interagency data-sharing systems, predictive policing models, and private-public surveillance integrations. Stephen Miller’s bureaucratic camp model can now be optimized with algorithms. The KL can now be cloud-hosted. And the punch card has been replaced by biometric and behavioral patterning, driven by AI.
Rubenstein warned in 1975:
“Of supreme importance as a weapon of bureaucratic domination is the modern computer… The organizational tools with which such a society can be set up have been greatly improved since World War II.”16
IX. Curriculum and Control: Reframing the Past to Justify the Future
As authoritarian systems mature, they do not only control institutions—they revise memory. In July 2023, historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote of Florida’s new educational standards:
“Taken as a whole, the Florida social studies curriculum describes a world in which the white male Founders of the United States embraced ideals of liberty and equality—ideals it falsely attributes primarily to Christianity rather than the Enlightenment—”
“U.S. Black enslavement was not the same as indentured servitude…”
“Taken together, this curriculum presents human enslavement as simply one of a number of labor systems…”17
This is not academic error—it is strategic amnesia. And it is part of the same pattern: erase the past, distort the present, control the future.
X. A Sudden Glove of Fairness?
Then, suddenly—a unanimous 9–0 ruling: the Supreme Court requires the return of a wrongfully deported man to the U.S. from El Salvador.1819202122
Is this fairness? Or is it judicial camouflage?
Hypothetically, this decision may have served as optical misdirection—a coordinated projection of impartiality designed to quiet criticism in the lead-up to more consequential rulings. If the justices are colluding to defend a coming authoritarian move, such a case may be a planted gesture of balance.
This moment is no anomaly. It is part of a broader pattern—one visible even before this ruling. As writer Don Knight recently detailed in The Midnight Manuscripts23, Supreme Court justices such as Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have accepted millions of dollars in undisclosed gifts, luxury trips, and benefits from powerful billionaire patrons with vested political interests. These justices, as Knight lays out, have ruled consistently in favor of authoritarian power structures, corporate immunity, and the erosion of public accountability. The Court is not only issuing camouflaged rulings—it is also camouflaging the corruption behind them.
XI. This Is the Precedent
Neither the German judiciary nor the bureaucratic system collapsed—it cooperated.
This moment is not an echo of history. It is a repetition in slow motion. The courts do not have to break for democracy to fall. They only have to bend—and remain quiet.
Thank you for reading; If you benefitted from reading this essay, then please by all means, restack it, share it, note it, in general spread its message wide and far, so that every American citizen can be a fully-informed individual—ready to take against the Authoritarianism that the now corrupted Supreme Court is actively creating an architecture of permission and precedent with which the Trump regime seeks to hide behind as it continues its criminal disintegration and destruction of America’s historic Democracy rooted in its decades long liberal consensus, that at one time resulted in the international community recognizing and relying upon a country once-upon-a-time rooted in the Rule of Law.
Robert J. Rei, April 12, 2025
The Enabling Court: How the U.S. Supreme Court is Echoing the Fall of Justice in Nazi Germany Thomas. Alito. Leo. What was once law is now loyalty. © 2025 by Robert J. Rei is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Ibidem
Ibidem
ABC News agrees to contribute $15 million to Trump presidential foundation to settle defamation suit, Cara Tabachnick, Faris Tanyos, December 14, 2024, CBS News, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/abc-news-trump-15-million-settle-defamation-suit/
Ibidem
See also footnote #20
The Supreme Court's Facilitation of White Christian Nationalism, Caroline Mala Corbin, 2020, University of Miami Law School, University of Miami School of Law Institutional Repository, https://repository.law.miami.edu/fac_articles/911/
Ibidem
KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, Nikolaus Wachsmann, 2015, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York
Ibidem
IBM and The Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation, Edwin Black, 2001, Crown Publishers, New York
Ibidem
Ibidem
Ibidem at footnote #1
US Supreme Court tells Trump administration to facilitate return of Salvadoran man deported in error, John Kruzel, Andrew Chung, April 10, 2025, Reuters, https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-upholds-order-facilitate-return-deportee-sent-el-salvador-error-2025-04-10/
Justices direct government to facilitate return of Maryland man mistakenly deported to El Salvador, Amy Howe, April 10, 2025, SCOTUS Blog, https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/04/justices-direct-government-to-facilitate-return-of-maryland-man-mistakenly-deported-to-el-salvador/
Judge demands daily updates on return of wrongfully deported Maryland man, Sareen Habeshian, April 11, 2025, Axios, https://www.axios.com/2025/04/11/trump-doj-maryland-man-el-salvador-prison
Judge rebukes Trump administration, demands to know status of illegally deported man, Blake Brittain, Jeff Mason, April 11, 2025, Reuters, https://www.reuters.com/legal/judge-orders-trump-administration-advise-its-steps-return-wrongly-deported-2025-04-11/
He was deported in error. Why won’t the government provide any information about him?: We don’t know what happened to Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s whereabouts — and it should worry every American., Nicole Narea, April 11, 2025, VOX, https://www.vox.com/politics/408528/trump-el-salvador-alien-enemies-gang-deportation-supreme-court
