I'm Dahlia Lithwick. This is Amicus Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the Supreme Court.

I'm going to go ahead and confess right off the bat that weeks like this past one, President Donald J. Trump performing naked racism on camera,

SCOTUS deciding that the Texas legislatures racial gerrymander is just cool, cool, cool,

an inspector general finding that Pete Heggseth's signal gate messages endangered U.S. troops,

more ice roundups. It all feels very destabilizing.

It all feels very fact-free. Except we know the facts. Donald Trump is in fact a racist. Texas

did in fact enact a racial gerrymander. Pete Hexeth gleefully endangers the troops. And ICE is

grabbing innocent people and even U.S. citizens

off of the streets. So the question is which institutions plan to stand up to all of that

and which will capitulate and buckle? Later on in the show, we're going to turn to Pete

Hexeth's meme-more-turned-real war of lawless boat strikes and the split-screen explanations about the men killed in a double-tap strike because they were either, A, flipping a bombed-out hull of a boat in order to get back into the narco-terrorism fight, or B,

they were shipwrecked man being murdered by the U.S. military. Now, we don't purport to be

experts on U.S. military law on this show, but we have been documenting since at least last

February the ways in which this administration has blurred the lines between

domestic policing, unchecked powers accumulated as part of the war on terror, emergency

authority in the absence of any emergency, and the unlawful use of military force.

A few weeks back, we dedicated a whole show to troops and illegal orders. We've been

documenting all of this precisely because these actions are a cornerstone of authoritarian takeover,

and because it's such a profound and dangerous abuse of the military and members of the armed

services. Former career U.S. Naval Intelligence Officer

Malcolm Nance will be joining me to shed light on what all this looks like from within the

armed forces and what it means when there is no reliable arbiter of truth or law for the troops.

...