Courts Ignored, Cameras Controlled: Power Writes Its Own Rules

There is a moment in every democratic backslide when the government stops pretending. When it no longer bothers with the theatre of compliance, no longer dresses the erosion in procedural language. Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet has reached that moment. Israel's Supreme Court ruled. The cabinet looked at the ruling, considered it, and formally rejected it — over the government's control of public television broadcasting. Not a bureaucratic delay. Not an appeal. A rejection. A sitting government telling its highest court: we have decided your authority does not apply here.

Call it what it is. A constitutional crisis is not a warning label for something that might happen. It is what you name what is already happening.

The Netanyahu government's move over television regulation is not, at its core, about television. It is about who controls the story. Public broadcasting is where accountability lives when newspapers are struggling, when attention spans are shorter than funding cycles, when the average voter absorbs the news in two-minute increments between work and the commute. Control the signal, and you control the frequency on which power is questioned. The Maltese reader does not need to stretch far to understand that instinct. We have watched it operate closer to home.

What makes this particular episode worth watching is the mechanism: a court that ruled, a government that simply refused. No legislative reversal. No reform process. No engagement with the legal reasoning. The court was not outmanoeuvred — it was dismissed. The distinction matters enormously, because outmanoeuvring a court still acknowledges the game. Dismissing it ends the game and dares someone to object.

JD Vance's resurfaced essay — *The Atlantic* republishing a decade-old piece in which he called Trump "cultural heroin" — arrived in the same news cycle almost as dark comic relief. Vance, now one of the most powerful men in American politics, once understood exactly what he was describing. He used the word *heroin* deliberately: something that feels good while it destroys, something that creates dependency by hollowing out the space where judgment used to be. He was right. He then decided to be the needle.

The pattern holds across hemispheres. Courts overruled in Jerusalem. Protestors dismissed in Tirana as foreign-funded theatre. Grant funding centralised in Washington so that dissent can be starved rather than silenced. Each case wears different clothes. Each case is the same body underneath.

The question worth asking — the one that never gets asked in the press conference, never appears in the official statement — is a simple one: when a government rejects a court ruling and nothing happens, what exactly is the constitution made of? The answer, it turns out, has always been the same. It is made of the willingness to enforce it. Remove that willingness, and what remains is very beautiful paper.