Katharine Moody fears a return to apartheid and a cementing of dictatorship in the land of her birth

By Katharine Moody*

I come from a long line of progressive conservatives.

In 1920s Canada, my British grandfather sent his children to a French-language Catholic school at a time when fear surrounding a revenge of the cradles was predominant in Canadian society.  He was forward thinking enough to accept the country would become bi-lingual someday and wanted his children be able to participate in that integration. 

And at a time when women were not expected to have a career, he insisted all his daughter’s become nurses as nurses had saved his life during World War I.

One of those daughters, my mother, married my father, a US soldier stationed in Texas in the early 1950s during the Korean War. She was a nurse and became charge nurse of the Emergency Room in San Diego’s main public hospital. 

She implemented a change in patient care which prioritised seeing people in ER based on the urgency of their need, as opposed to the colour of their skin.  And, as if that wasn’t enough to draw attention and ire by parts the white community, she then gave up her seat in the front of a bus to a heavily pregnant black woman during the height of a Texas summer. 

The bus driver stopped the bus on the side of the road but my mother refused to let the woman get up. An argument ensued with the driver, but she stood her ground, holding the frightened pregnant woman down by her shoulder.  As my mother was dressed in uniform at the time, the bus driver complained he would report her to her hospital employer – which he – backed up by his company - did. 

The hospital rang the Air Force base where my father was stationed. They wanted him transferred out of Texas as his wife was “becoming a nuisance”.  As an enlisted soldier, he couldn’t be ordered to transfer, and as he was the base’s lead cryptographer, neither did the officers want to lose him. So, to appease the bus company, the Air Force offered him a transfer to Alaska, at a time  before it had become a US state. The idea being that his wife would never want to live there. However, they took the transfer gladly, both delighted to farewell the Jim Crow south.

Hence, reading this article: The Supreme Court is Illegitimate sent shivers down my spine. The last line of defence, regarding a return to apartheid and a cementing of dictatorship in the land of my birth, has collapsed.  And moreover, none of the six conservative Justices had the guts to sign the order that buried the struggle of millions of black and white Americans before them.

Many outside the US do not realise that the apartheid state in the US was outlawed less than a generation ago. Most associate the civil rights movement with passage of the Voting Right Act 1965, but in fact the struggle against apartheid was far, far more than just that - just as this recent unsigned decision by the Supreme Court is far, far more than just about Alabama’s re-districting map.

“This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We [the present Supreme Court] seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.”
- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, August 2025

To me this latest decision in Allen v. Milligan foretells that this Administration and its racially regressive agenda will always win – not just in the highest court in the land, but more seriously, in federal elections. The upcoming mid-terms will provide no electoral relief as the Administration will not allow that – just as they nearly did not allow that in 2020. 

Now, the unitary executive theory has been brutally embedded in practice; ‘Cheater-in-Chief’ has a full line up of Cabinet and Congressional officials without a moral backbone amongst them; and a bevy of wealthy corporate scoundrels who will pay princely sums to the Calvinball President and the equally illegitimate GOP.

Racial discrimination and prejudice now have an openly, acceptable face in the highest court too, and as the linked article above states;  

“Whatever meagre shred of legitimacy the U.S. Supreme Court had went up in flames with its shadow docket decision allowing Alabama to move forward with a racially discriminatory congressional map with no time for election administrators to prepare.”

The intended “no time” to prepare, bulldozes through decades of precedent under the Purcell principle, ensuring the upcoming mid-terms will be chaos and the Administration will win. 

The ballot box no longer matters. I suspect, a return to Jeffersonian democracy will require either civil war (a state or multiple states attempting to extricate themselves from the union) and/or a military coup. 

*Katharine Moody is a retired Massey University planning programme academic, having entered the teaching profession following her role as Radio Spectrum Manager under the Shipley and Clark governments. She was born and raised in the US and moved to New Zealand in 1978. She currently works as an advocacy planner on a pro-bono basis. She comments on interest.co.nz as "Kate".