The Treason Pushes on the Door

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If you insist on understanding me as a Partisan. I only insist that you see me as a Partisan for Truth.

The crisis is an epistemic crisis. The revolution must be a cognitive one. So either the cognitive revolution is victorious or it's lights out for humanity.

That I cannot talk myself down from this analysis leads me to the conclusion that I must price in a very large amount of potential danger, and that the probability vectors in front of us are diffusing. Becoming more unpredictable. That creates opportunity. But also the most mortal of dangers. Life and civilization are complex adaptive systems. But they exist within a complexity horizon. Where entropy can be low enough to conserve information. This is the stability envelope that we move closer to the edge of, right now.

This is the nature of our crisis.

At its most fundamental level.

Now.

We are one Supreme Court vote away from complete constitutional collapse. Literally one justice, switching their ideological stance away. That's it. That's the margin between the American experiment continuing and its final dissolution.

Today's Supreme Court ruling should have been unanimous. Congress has the power of the purse. This isn't complicated constitutional theory—it's explicitly stated in the Constitution, understood by the Founders, and practiced for over two centuries. The executive cannot simply ignore congressional appropriations. This is a basic truth, as fundamental as two plus two equals four.

Yet four Supreme Court justices—Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh—voted to allow exactly that. They voted to fundamentally rewrite the constitutional order, to effectively transfer one of Congress's most crucial powers to the executive branch. This isn't judicial interpretation. It's constitutional vandalism.

What do we call it when officials sworn to uphold the Constitution vote to systematically dismantle its most fundamental protections? What do we call it when they attempt to concentrate unprecedented power in a single branch of government? What do we call it when they provide legal cover for the destruction of the very system they swore to protect?

The word is treason. Not in the narrow legal sense, but in the moral and constitutional sense. They have betrayed their oath, betrayed the Constitution, and betrayed the Republic. They have chosen loyalty to a man over loyalty to the document that gives their position any legitimacy at all.

The treason pushes on the door, and four justices have just voted to unlock it. Only Amy Coney Barrett's unexpected principles kept the door from swinging wide open today. Her vote, joining the Court's liberal justices, reveals something crucial: this isn't about conservative versus liberal jurisprudence. It's about whether one believes in constitutional constraints on power at all.

This pattern isn't isolated. These same four justices voted to grant presidents immunity for official acts—a doctrine found nowhere in the Constitution but conjured from thin air to protect a single man from accountability. They've voted to dismantle regulatory agencies, to undermine voting rights, to place the president beyond the reach of law. Each vote inches us closer to an authoritarian system bearing little resemblance to the constitutional republic established in 1789.

The playbook is as old as democracy itself. Legitimate institutions are captured from within, then used to dismantle the very constraints that give them legitimacy. The forms remain while the substance is hollowed out. Elections continue, courts still convene, Congress still meets—but real power operates elsewhere, unbound by democratic constraint.

What makes our moment uniquely dangerous is how this traditional authoritarian playbook converges with unprecedented technological capability. The same Supreme Court that shows little concern for constitutional constraints on power shows even less understanding of how technology is reshaping the landscape of control.

When Alito dismisses concerns about algorithmic discrimination, when Thomas suggests platforms should be treated as common carriers while ignoring their capacity for manipulation, when Gorsuch advocates dismantling the administrative state that might regulate emerging technologies—they reveal a Court utterly unprepared for the challenges of the 21st century.

The combination is lethal: constitutional vandalism paired with technological naïveté. As they dismantle the safeguards that might check concentrated power, they simultaneously fail to recognize how technology amplifies that power to unprecedented levels.

This is why the cognitive revolution must happen now. The fragile intersubjective space where human meaning is negotiated isn't just one aspect of civilization we should try to preserve—it's the foundation upon which everything else depends. When this space is corrupted, whether by authoritarian power plays or technological systems operating outside human cognitive constraints, we face threats more fundamental than any particular policy failure.

What I've come to understand is that AI alignment isn't just a problem of engineering safeguards. It's a civilizational catastrophe in waiting—a problem of preserving that intersubjective space where human meaning exists. The question becomes: how do we ensure AI operates within that space rather than diffusing it? How do we create constraints that keep AI systems from autonomously rewriting the rules of meaning itself?

We are living through the Interregnum of Post-Pax Americana—that dangerous space between stable world orders, where old constraints on power have weakened before new ones have formed. Now is a time of monsters, as Gramsci warned us. And some of those monsters wear black robes, using the language of law to dismantle the law itself.

The treason pushes on the door, held back by a single vote. How much longer will that thin barrier hold? And what are we prepared to do when it finally gives way? Because it is about to.

I write this as a Prosecutor. Representing The People, who would not be Ruled by Kings. Who would still deign to believe they can Rule Themselves.

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