Chief Justice John Roberts has created the most conservative court in modern history: In just the last few weeks, his court has helped financial firms bilk pension funds, strengthened fossil fuel companies’ power to fast-track pipelines, limited the power of regulatory agencies that police Wall Street, and stealthily let Donald Trump hide his tax returns. As a reward for Roberts’s continued defense of the wealthy and powerful, much of the national media has obediently depicted him as a great hero of moderation, because he sort of seemed to snub Trump in a handful of other rulings.

The press corps is willfully covering up the Roberts Court’s class war — and the cover-up is happening even as the court’s latest salvo is now reverberating far away from the Washington political theater out here in the actual, real world.

Indeed, one of the Supreme Court’s least-noticed rulings in the last few months just helped the planet’s most rapacious financial firms — and one of Donald Trump’s billionaire pals — stomp on thousands of public-sector workers and retirees in one of America’s poorest states. It also helped Wall Street avoid a full public examination of schemes that fleece investors. As one industry trade publication put it: “Hedge fund managers slept a little bit easier” after the events that unfolded last week.