** Note to readers: I’ve been busy for the last year and will provide an update on my activities in the coming weeks. Exciting things will be happening soon…

In February 2025, a newly installed Trump Department of Education (ED) issued a so-called Dear Colleague Letter. The letter put educational institutions on notice that ED intended to enforce the nation’s anti-discrimination laws, particularly those in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and in the Constitution. It further specified that “discriminatory practices” would not be tolerated merely because they had been repackaged “under the banner of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (‘DEI’).”

Left-wing media pundits went berserk. They said the policy announcement was a “threat to equal opportunity,” called it an “extreme and implausible interpretation of the law governing diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and claimed it had “no obvious parallels in modern American history.”

Lawsuits ensued, including one by the National Education Association in March 2025 and another by the American Federation of Teachers the same month. New Hampshire District Court judge Landya McCafferty wasted no time in granting NEA’s preliminary injunction in April. Maryland District Court judge Stephanie Gallagher followed suit in August, vacating the letter in its entirety. On October 13 of last year, ED filed a notice of appeal in the Fourth Circuit. Then, in late January, ED unexpectedly dismissed its appeal. Why? Before we get to that, we must consider some background on the explosion of DEI on university campuses.

Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard

Until about five years ago, universities referred to their lawless racial discrimination as “affirmative action.” Federal courts played along in cases such as Regents of the University of California v. Bakke and Grutter v. Bollinger. These decisions glossed over the racism of our nation’s universities by making the constitutional rights of white students contingent on the purpose of the discrimination against them (“attainment of a diverse student body … is a constitutionally permissible goal”) or the passage of time (“25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further [the racial discrimination] approved today”).

But these opinions were not serious legal reasoning, and, by June 2023, even the Supreme Court had had enough. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA), a 6-3 decision, Chief Justice Roberts summarized what normal people had known since the Civil Rights era: “A student … must be treated … as an individual—not on the basis of race.” As such, racially discriminatory “admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of” the Constitution. Roberts’s conclusion was also a logical extension of his pithy remark, penned 17 years earlier in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle, that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Justice Thomas, as expected, stated the truth most plainly: “All forms of discrimination based on race—including so-called affirmative action—are prohibited under the Constitution.” This, ED knew, included DEI.

Even though these conclusions were obvious to most Americans, I predicted 15 months ago that “admissions offices [didn’t] care about the Supreme Court’s ruling in SFFA” and wouldn’t comply. Why? Because, “to left-wing political operatives, [laws] are mere words—parchment barriers that can be obeyed or ignored as circumstances warrant.” Once again, university administrators would turn to semantic trickery to conceal their racism. This proved correct, as Orwellian terminology such as “affirmative action” became the even more Orwellian “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” or DEI.

Though DEI dates back to the 1960s or earlier, widespread use of the terminology dates to about 2023. It’s not a coincidence that DEI programs (described as such) exploded on university campuses following SFFA. They were a convenient new cover for an old practice.

This time, however, Trump’s new Department of Education under Linda McMahon was on top of the ball. ED issued the Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) shortly after Trump’s inauguration. That missive immediately exposed DEI for what it was: a new mask cloaking ancient left-wing racism.

Litigation

Judge McCafferty enjoined ED from enforcing the DCL in April 2025, dismissing ED’s reliance on the Supreme Court’s SFFA ruling as “boilerplate,” which she was “not bound” to follow. Her opinion is full of sloppy reasoning and startling naiveté. For example, she observes that, prior to the DCL, ED “had not indicated a belief that [DEI] constituted unlawful discrimination.” Furthermore, in the wake of SFFA, ED issued a “questions-and-answers document in which it stated” that schools could “continue to articulate missions and goals tied to student body diversity.” Thus, McCafferty said, ED’s about-face must support the plaintiff’s claim, since it “force[d] schools to choose between [ED’s] 2023 guidance … or trying to adapt their conduct to the 2025 [DCL] requirements.” In other words, ED couldn’t object to racist DEI practices in 2025 because it hadn’t done so in 2023 under President Biden. Using this backward reasoning, neither Dred Scott nor Plessy v. Ferguson would have been overturned.

Then, in a section of her order arguing that the term “DEI” was “vague,” McCafferty imagined that a teacher “could seek to establish [DEI] by asking her students [to] sign a collective pledge to follow the ‘Golden Rule’.” This would result in an ED crackdown, McCafferty feared, because “it is more than arguable that such a practice would come within the ocean-wide definition of DEI.” At the risk of stating the obvious, this isn’t serious legal reasoning. Nobody believes DEI is code for “do unto others as you would have done unto you.”

McCafferty’s sloppy reasoning was matched by Judge Gallagher’s technical nitpicking concerning the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), which has become a powerful end-run around the United States Constitution. It’s so powerful, in fact, that left-wing activists routinely cite the APA when the Constitution isn’t on their side. Here, the Equal Protection Clause, the Supreme Court, and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act all prohibit discrimination on the basis of race. Yet Gallagher vacated the DCL because ED didn’t follow the notice-and-comment rulemaking process of the APA. The absurdity of subordinating constitutional rights to inane statutory requirements was highlighted by another of Gallagher’s findings: The DCL had to be vacated because ED failed “to comply with, or even consider, the Paperwork Reduction Act.” Got that? Your constitutional rights can’t be enforced because the government wasted paper.

That said, it must be acknowledged that ED’s litigation tactics made the courts’ decisions easier. For example, both McCafferty and Gallagher had to find that the DCL was binding in order to strike it down under the APA. This put ED in the awkward position of arguing that the DCL wasn’t binding. While technically true (the DCL merely reminded educators of the requirements of the United States Constitution and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which are binding), the rhetorical effect of ED’s position was the equivalent of wading in the Rubicon without crossing it. That’s not a smart move: akin to saying “we didn’t really mean it” after striking the first blow.

But this is a small criticism. Judges McCafferty and Gallagher, like all activist judges, had made up their minds before the cases began. The fact remains that DEI is a thin veneer concealing invidious racial discrimination by the nation’s universities and other schooling institutions—discrimination that the Left has fully embraced and will not relinquish. That’s essentially what the DCL said. On this primary issue, ED was on solid ground. Given the Supreme Court’s ruling in SFFA, ED had reason to be confident in its ultimate success.

So why didn’t it appeal?

Political Appointees Versus the Deep State

The DCL was issued only weeks after Trump’s inauguration. Ordinarily, the short turnaround would suggest that it was rushed. Its contents suggest otherwise. It is a well-reasoned and thorough attempt to erase decades of misguided ED directives in favor of a plain understanding of the law: American educational institutions shall not discriminate on the basis of race using DEI or other theoretical underpinnings. These facts show that the DCL was not the product of career ED lawyers, who rarely act quickly and never against prevailing left-wing orthodoxies. Career ED lawyers were kept out of the loop until the DCL was ready to be released.

It stands to reason, then, that the DCL was the product of thoughtful work by one or more political appointees with experience handling civil-rights issues. These yeomen performed their work in relative secrecy, perhaps beginning shortly after Trump’s election. Moreover, these political appointees knew that the DCL would result in immediate litigation against ED, just as it did.

Once sued, ED staffed the case with trial attorneys who supported the mission. Those trial attorneys would have anticipated an adverse district-court ruling from the outset, steeling themselves for the inevitable appeals process. In short, everything about the DCL—its contents, release, and the ensuing district-court litigation—would have been handled by political appointees or trial attorneys hand-selected based upon their support for the cause.

But then, when Gallagher vacated the DCL, career appellate lawyers at the Department of Justice had their chance to gum up the works. How? Executive-branch agencies such as ED cannot pursue a “discretionary appeal” without the approval of the solicitor general, whose office is part of the DOJ. That office is staffed by career lawyers. ED couldn’t appeal Gallagher’s ruling without their approval. But, as career lawyers, they shared the leftist plaintiffs’ sentiments and opposed the DCL’s conservative agenda.

Admittedly, this is a partial explanation. The fact remains that the ultimate decision must have been made, or at least approved, by the solicitor general himself. Here, that meant John Sauer, nominated by Trump to be solicitor general in January 2025 and confirmed by the Senate in April. Sauer could have overruled the Deep State career lawyers and authorized ED’s appeal, but he didn’t. Which brings me to the second part of my explanation.

The Trump administration is mired in lawsuits. According to one tracker, approximately 655 cases challenging Trump’s executive actions have been filed since the president’s inauguration. Of those, plaintiffs have amassed a 49-5 win-loss record, 72 cases have been dismissed, and most of the balance are ongoing. DOJ is involved in most or all of them. Sauer would have known these facts. Furthermore, his office has only two dozen attorneys or so. Even with the help of other appellate attorneys—those at various federal agencies such as ED and the United States Attorneys’ Offices—the fact remains that the administration is legally outgunned and drowning in lawsuits. This is by design. When it comes to lawfare, the Left is the undisputed champion of the world.

I suspect that the above explains why the DCL was deep-sixed. Career lawyers at DOJ, miffed at being kept out of the loop when their approval wasn’t required, seized the opportunity to tank the DCL when it was. They may have advanced their agenda to Sauer with practical arguments about limited staffing and legal arguments about the notice-and-comment rulemaking requirements of the APA. If so, the practical arguments were valid. The legal ones, not so much. One does not restore constitutional rights with labyrinthine bureaucratic processes and interminable delays.

In the end, the administration abandoned a major battle to restore the constitutional rights of the majority of Americans harmed by DEI. As a result, universities won’t stop discriminating.

Visit The Martin Center.

Note: This is part two of this essay . You can read part one here.

A Symbol Manipulator Tries World Sustaining

When we bought our land, it departed from the ideal in only one particular: 800 feet of aboveground powerlines traversed the distance from the nearest public road to a utility pole serving us and a single, friendly neighbor.

Late last summer, I committed to burying these lines. Doing so would remove the land’s only defect, permitting any visitor to experience the sublime vistas unmarred by the unsightly evidence of man’s insatiable desire for power.

I coordinated logistics with the local utility. Not unexpectedly, I would be responsible for digging the trench, installing the junction boxes, laying the conduit, and paying for these items. When all that was complete, the utility agreed to provide and pull the new lines, also at my expense. Of course.

Next I phoned Brian, a local plumber and world sustainer whom I had met a few years prior. Brian offered his trencher and a willingness to assist for a reasonable price. His generosity gave a needed boost to morale and power.

I resolved myself to the total financial cost, which was unpleasant (thanks to the utility), and my own hard labor, which wasn’t.

The process began by marking and then digging a trench four inches wide, three feet deep, and 800 feet long. The trencher is a perfect tool for this project. It is nothing more than a combustion engine, some hydraulics, and an auger on a boom. Its primary purpose is to convert chemical energy (gasoline) into elliptical movement (the augur). By adding teeth to the augur, the elliptical movement is transformed into an infinite series of mini shovels each roughly three inches wide.

The trencher applied these mini shovels to the ground with awesome force and incredible persistence-cutting three feet down into the hard Earth with ease. It then deposited the resulting soil in uniform mounds adjacent to the trench, and proceeded forward at a (very) slow crawl. Though an infant could walk the length of the trench more quickly than Brian cut it, it would take 500 men to dig it in less time than required by the trencher.

Or, I should say, normally the trencher would complete this task relatively quickly. But, in a visceral reminder of Murphy’s Law, a hydraulic line burst when the trench was 75% complete, spewing hydraulic fluid onto the ground. Fortunately, Brian told me he knew a guy.

When a world sustainer like Brian says “don’t worry, I know a guy,” he means far more than he says. The lack of precision in the words does not belie a lack of precision in the idea. Indeed, those succinct five words are a proxy for a robust idea-one that a symbol manipulator like me could spend hours describing. I won’t do that. Suffice it to say, when Brian said “don’t worry, I know a guy,” he meant all of the following and more: (1) I know a guy who knows how to repair hydraulic lines; (2) he’s not a pretender; (3) he’s available; (4) he’s reliable; (5) he’s honest; (6) he’s efficient; (7) his prices are fair; (8) he will answer my phone call; and (9) he will come if I ask. I could go on.

In other words, one world sustainer (Brian) was telling a symbol manipulator (me) about another world sustainer who could solve my problem-I just had to ask. It’s sort of like the Bat signal. But real.

I’m sorry to report that I did not get to meet this second world sustainer. This unfortunate outcome was largely a consequence of two facts: first, he was very busy sustaining the world and, second, he was very good at it. Put another way, I didn’t meet him because he came very quickly, fixed the hydraulic line very quickly, and departed very quickly. I wasn’t home at the time. He charged nothing, or at least Brian wouldn’t tell me what he charged and wouldn’t let me pay for it. I was moved by this generosity, but could not accept it and compensated Brian for the extra cost when the project was finished.

At any rate, with the machine fixed, Brian completed the remainder of the trench with ease.

A trencher is an essential tool for this process, but it is almost never sufficient. Though I’m a lawyer, I’ve dug many thousands of feet of trenches-usually for drainage. Blood, sweat, and deltoids sore from hard labor are an inescapable part of it. And labor I did, spending several days slightly expanding the width of most of the 800 feet of trench with a trenching shovel.

This was necessary to accommodate the electrical conduit, which, at 2.5 inches in diameter (on the interior) can be placed easily only if the hole is four inches wide. The trencher, however, dug a hole only about three inches wide. The extra inch would provide the wiggle room needed to accommodate the imprecision of all things real: human-made “straight” lines, soil that dries and crumbles, stiff HDPE, inconveniently-buried granite, etc.

Unfortunately, widening the trench by scraping also made it shallower, as loose dirt from the trench walls fell to the bottom along all 800 feet. This had to be removed to satisfy the code requirements that electrical lines be buried at least three feet. To remove it, I stood astride the trench, bent over, and swung a narrow pick-axe in sweeping inverted parabolas, flinging the dirt out as I walked, while slowly perfecting my arcs to avoid the walls. Hundreds (thousands?) of man-pendulum arcs later, the trench was clear. Our chickens watched my slow progress with indifference.

After four days of hard labor, I was ready for the initial utility inspection. This required two weeks to arrange and minutes to complete. The inspector walked the length of my trench to confirm its depth: three feet. He didn’t bring a tape measure. With enough experience, I suppose one knows what is and is not a three-foot trench. We passed. It’s worth pausing to observe that this was an encounter, albeit brief, with a third world sustainer (Brian being the first, hydraulic Batman being the second): he did not require symbols to tell him the depth of the trench. I suppose that instantaneous and sound judgments about distance, depth, and strength are just a few of the universal skills of all world sustainers.

Next, I arranged to lay 800 feet of 2.5 inch diameter HDPE conduit. HDPE is waterproof and was selected to house the underground electrical lines that, after the conduit was laid in the trench, would be pulled through it. Unlike 20-foot sticks of PVC, which are four times as expensive, unwieldy, and must be bonded together, HDPE is relatively cheap, sufficiently flexible, and requires no PVC cement. Assuming it holds up against time and nature, HDPE is superior to PVC.

With minimal effort, I identified a vendor willing to sell and deliver HDPE at $4 a foot. He arrived in and old Dodge Ram trailing a spool wrapped in thousands of feet of bright red conduit. His 7-year old son rode shotgun. [Note: Though this man was intelligent, he was also crafty to the point of guile, and, I later learned, a deceitful opportunist. Had he lived in a different place, he would mesh well with the symbol manipulators.]

Halfway along its 800 feet, my trench is interrupted by a junction box that I installed. This junction is necessary because the utility can’t easily pull electrical lines farther than 400 feet through conduit. Thus, the vendor cut the conduit into two pieces of 400 feet each and laid them on the grounds parallel to the corresponding trenched sections.

I then walked the entire length of the trench pushing the HDPE in as I moved. The ease with which the HDPE fell unimpeded to the bottom was a welcome tribute to my sore deltoids and perfected parabolic arcs.

The next day, Brian and I alternated operating the small tractor, of which the trencher was a part, to backfill dirt on top of the now subterranean HDPE conduit. Other than the minor inconvenience of the junction box, laying the conduit was the easiest part of the whole affair.

Having completed the trench, I was ready to schedule the utility inspection. Following that, I would coordinate with the utility to remove the above-ground poles and lines and to pull the new underground electrical through my freshly-installed HDPE conduit. But all of that was yet to come.

In the meantime, I was pleased with my work and proud of my accomplishments. And though I knew that this same feat had been accomplished millions of times across this grand country by the men I call the world sustainers, still I was unprepared to meet them in force - that breed of men who build and sustain the infrastructure of the world.

But meet them I did. And not a minute too late, now that their time has come again.

A request from the author: If you enjoyed this essay, please “like it,” share it, and comment. And please don’t hesitate to reach out directly. Your feedback is the fuel I use to continue writing.

The world sustainers are the men who build and maintain the infrastructure of our civilization. Without the world sustainers, there is nothing. No power plants or electricity, no roads or airports, no cars or boats or trains, no food and no shelter.

The symbol manipulators, by contrast, work with abstractions. For them reality is mediated by complex networks of symbols: numbers, words, ideas. When tethered to reality, the manipulation of these abstractions increases prosperity, aids peace, and expands knowledge. Indeed, in the history of the West, abstractions like money and prices did allocate capital to its highest and best use; laws did facilitate mutually beneficial and voluntary exchange; theories did aid comprehension.

The growth of the West is largely a story of the proper balance between the symbol manipulators and the world sustainers: each contributing his part, while respecting the contributions of the other. Harmony was the rule. Symbol manipulators contrived ever better ideas to organize the efforts of the world sustainers, while the latter tested those ideas in the crucible of reality, providing feedback to the symbol manipulators. Feedback fostered an iterative process by which ideas were improved and prosperity grew. Together, they built the West out of the raw materials of the Earth.

Today, however, there is disharmony. The symbol manipulators have lost touch with reality, confusing their abstractions for the real thing. As a result, they have little idea how anything works and ignore all feedback. At the same time, they notice the existence of the world sustainers, if at all, only in insults like “bitter clingers,” “deplorables,” and “flyover country.” They make asses of themselves by saying things like “I could teach anybody … to be a farmer. … You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn,” as New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg said in 2016.

The fate of our civilization requires that we rectify this imbalance. There is only one way to do so: To rear children the right way in the right places.

Ways and Places

We have some land in Tennessee. Roughly five acres. It borders a lake. To say it is bucolic would be a gross understatement. On some days in May, when the azure skies are dotted with occasional wisps of cloud, when the temperature hovers in the mid seventies, and a warm breeze lifts off the water, it borders on the sublime. On fine evenings, when the sun moves below the distant western ridge, lake and sky converge in the amber horizon. Without the vestibular system to distinguish them, you might not tell the difference.

The setting is rural and relatively isolated. To the north, we are abutted by hundreds of acres of forested public land rarely visited by anybody but our family. At night, brilliant stars beckon from eternity. Most mornings we wake to a fresh blanket of the fog that gives the Smoky Mountains their name. It burns off quickly. Wildlife abounds. Deer, bald eagles, blue herons, cranes, turkey, coyotes, skunks, racoons, turtles, snakes, wide varieties of fish, and innumerable migratory birds are abundant. We’ve even seen black bears.

Though the lake is manmade, our land feels timeless, much like Appalachia may have felt one hundred, one thousand, or even ten thousand years ago. There are tombstones we dare not disturb.

But beauty is only one reason we purchased this slice of the eternal. It is also an ideal setting for the rearing of children. My wife and I have three. For them, the setting provides the gift of total immersion in nature. The land and water provide ample opportunity to sharpen the physical and mental acuity of their developing minds.

Swimming, jumping, wrestling, kayaking, fishing, shooting, archery, hiking, camping, and fort-building are daily occurrences, as are thinking and reflecting, learning and growing. Becoming. For our children, exploration of mind and body is the defining ethos.

Skills are learned, abilities refined, fear overcome, judgment improved, and risk-taking calibrated. As a result, they are more courageous, stronger, and smarter than their typical peers. Digital screens are rare. Analog reality reigns.

My wife and I hold in mind an idea of the type of adults we want our children to become. That idea is the opposite of the type of adult birthed by the era of wayward symbol manipulators who comprise the most irresponsible generation in the history of humanity. I spent decades among that type. They are weak and self-absorbed and know very little about reality.

My children will not be them if I can help it. I hope they, and others their generation, will become the type of adults who reestablish the harmony between the world sustainers and the symbol manipulators. The fate of the West depends on it.

The Symbol Manipulators

The symbol manipulators can do nothing except on the backs of the world sustainers: they cannot create or thrive or even survive. Despite the natural priority of the world sustainers and self-evident dependence of the symbol manipulators, the latter now assume they are the essential class. This assumption is so deep-seated that it rises to hubris.

It wasn’t always this way. Before the material abundance of modernity, the symbol manipulators understood their connection to the world sustainers. But with material abundance that connection was severed. Profound ideas hatched in the minds of the political, legal, and scientific geniuses (i.e., symbol manipulators) of an earlier era created the framework in which the world sustainers brought forth today’s incredible prosperity. Ironically, that prosperity served to immunize the next generation of symbol manipulators from the consequences of their bad ideas. Temporarily, anyway. The symbol manipulators were victims of their own success.

As such, today’s symbol manipulators never learned that abstractions have meaning only when tethered to underlying realities like land, resources, and energy. They have spent their entire lives among the symbols. For them, the symbols are “real,” while the things those symbols represent are far from mind or, worse, completely unknown.

By analogy, imagine a fantastical setting where a child is born and raised entirely upon an airplane high in flight. The plane never lands. The child is introduced to the gauges and dials in the cockpit, and learns to pay close attention to the altimeter and airspeed indicator. By adulthood, he is an expert in interpreting them. He can predict how a change in one will, with high probability, effect a change in the other. He devises theorems for these things. For example, he may observe an increase in the numerals that represent airspeed and dutifully predict an increase in the numbers that represent altitude. He thinks he understands. He is, after all, an expert symbol manipulator.

Imagine further that one day the throttle on the airplane gets stuck. The throttle, the imaginary aeronaut has learned, is the thing one moves forward in order to increase the numbers on the airspeed indicator which, in turn, will increase the numbers on the altimeter. Now that the throttle is stuck, he has no means to increase the numbers on the plane’s altimeter. Faced with the present difficulty, it dawns on him that he can break the glass on the altimeter and manually alter the dials so as to increase the plane’s altitude.

To a world sustainer, this is preposterous. But to our hypothetical aeronaut it is perfectly logical. He has no lived experience with speed or altitude. He has never seen, felt, or heard these things. Indeed, he has only vague ideas about what the airplane is actually doing (flying), its mechanical operations, or its purpose. His entire world is mediated by numbers on gauges. That is, by symbols. For him, the symbols are the real thing. There is nothing else.

In reality, an altimeter is an incredibly powerful symbolic tool, but only when tethered to an understanding of the thing it represents. All measuring devices are like this. The interpretation of their symbols can add value only where it already exists and where the symbol manipulators appreciate that fact. In other words, the world sustainers come first. When that natural priority is lost (or never learned in the first place), the symbol manipulators go haywire.

The altimeter hypothetical illustrates the plight of the modern symbol manipulators. When tethered to reality, their ideas were subject to constant feedback. Feedback forced improvement and calibration. The ideas remained useful. But once severed from reality, their ideas became increasingly absurd eventually losing all connection to experience.

Symbol manipulators divorced from reality gave us the Great Society and its decades of disaster for public education and public housing. They gave us four waves of feminism and the consequent destruction of the family and women’s mental health. They harnessed the civil rights laws to violate our civil rights. They destroyed our legal institutions in the name of the law. They destroyed our constitutional republic in the service of “our democracy.” They endlessly calculated GDP because, for them, GDP is wealth, even though, as Charles Haywood has observed, it is merely a measuring stick that measures nothing at all. And they gave us armies of well-credentialed but incompetent public servants. There are endless examples.

As the social and political power of the symbol manipulators grew, they exempted their ideas from scrutiny. No feedback was permitted. As a result, their ideas ossified and began to destroy America from within. They did so without interruption for more than six decades.

Today, most symbol manipulators have no idea of the natural priority of the world sustainers and the former’s dependence upon the latter for feedback. Like our imaginary aeronaut, they were raised entirely among the symbols. And so they have gone haywire. Their theories have virtually no connection to the concrete and almost no explanatory power. Yet they worship their abstractions like idols, trusting their calculations more than their own senses.

Before my wife and I moved to Tennessee nine years ago, we spent our entire lives in blue places among symbol manipulators whose abstractions were detached from reality. Still, we were always a bit out of sorts in those places. And with the birth of our three children, we realized that we had to understand and appreciate the world sustainers in order to better educate our children to their task: restoring the harmony between symbol manipulators and world sustainers.

Thus, I have been diligent in my efforts to gain real knowledge and real skill. The process has been both painful and rewarding. Painful in that much of what I had “learned” among the symbol manipulators had to be discarded because it is false. Rewarding in that I have replaced that nonsense with the truth. I did this so that I could better educate my children. But, commensurate with the themes in this essay, I could not understand the world sustainers merely by reading about them. And so, I tried my hand at improving our small part of concrete reality. I tried my hand at world sustaining.

My recent piece at Chronicles, printed in full below.

On the evening of Feb. 7, New York Attorney General Letitia James, together with attorneys general from 18 other states sued to prevent President Trump, his political appointees (including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent), and members of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from accessing Treasury records. They sought an immediate restraining order (which was granted by Obama-appointed Judge Paul Engelmayer so quickly it’s doubtful he read the full complaint), a temporary injunction, and a permanent injunction. Their suit aimed to bar the president and his agents from doing their jobs. Forever.

They argued that Executive Order 14158 (creating DOGE), and the Treasury’s implementation of it, violated the Privacy Act, the Tax Reform Act, the E-Government Act, the “separation of powers doctrine,” and the “Take Care Clause.” They also claimed their actions were “ultra vires” and “arbitrary and capricious” under the Administrative Procedure Act. According to James, these violations “increase the risk” that the states’ “financial data” will be disclosed.

The Justice Department filed its response four days later. It highlighted the constitutional issues entailed in the plaintiffs’ challenge: “the extraordinary injunction [the plaintiffs] seek would violate the separation of powers … and intolerably inhibits the President’s exercise of his constitutional functions.”

This is a striking contrast to the dubious justice meted out during the Biden presidency: The complaint depends on byzantine statutory interpretation, whereas the government’s response focuses on concern for our form of government (a concern not raised at all by these attorneys general). But the plaintiffs’ tedious arguments about obscure statutes belie something sinister. Their complaint, and dozens like it since Trump’s inauguration, pose a grave threat to our form of government. They are nothing short of an attempted coup by lawsuit.

On Feb. 21, District Judge Jeanette Vargas (a 2024 Biden appointee) ruled on the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction. Her 64-page opinion winds its way through their many arguments, dispensing with all but one.

Vargas held that the plaintiffs’ claim “does not even arguably fall within … the Privacy Act,” that their financial data “in no way constitutes” information protected by the Tax Reform Act, and that the E-Government Act “is intended to protect individuals” not states.

She chastised them for attempting to “use the backdoor of an ultra vires claim,” which she called “a Hail Mary pass.” (“Ultra vires” is a circular term that means something is unlawful because it is unlawful). She called their separation of powers arguments “too attenuated” to prevail. And she reminded the plaintiffs that courts “have expressed serious doubts [about the] justiciability” of the Take-Care clause.

For the non-lawyers, the above quotations are the legal equivalent of smackdowns. They are about as close as the judiciary ever gets to insulting your mother and calling you “stupid.” In other words, Judge Vargas told the plaintiffs that most of their arguments were frivolous.

Most, but not all.

She agreed that Treasury’s process for granting access to DOGE personnel was “arbitrary and capricious” in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. This was so, according to Vargas, because there was an “artificial sense of urgency” and things were not “implemented in a measured, reasonable, and thoughtful way.” As a result, “the States’ financial data would be at a higher risk of being exposed.”

But obvious questions went unanswered: How is the risk elevated? What amount of risk is too high? What harm will result? Neither the plaintiffs nor the court attempted to answer these questions.

For example, it’s not clear what types of data are in jeopardy—the only definition the states gave was “sensitive bank account information and other financial data.” A cynic might argue this means the account numbers printed on the front of government checks mailed to thousands of people. At any rate, we know it doesn’t mean citizens’ social security numbers because, as Vargas observed, states don’t have standing to sue on those grounds.

The lack of answers to these questions is all the more curious given an amicus brief filed by 20 different states in support of the defendants. Led by Iowa, they objected to the plaintiffs’ motion on constitutional grounds. Thus, while the plaintiffs argued they would suffer unspecified but “irreparable harm” to the privacy of their undefined “financial data,” the 20 amicus states didn’t raise the cybersecurity issue at all. The words “financial data” and “privacy” do not appear in their brief.

True, most of the plaintiff states voted for Harris while most of the amicus states voted for Trump. But all have the same interest in securing their financial data since all are in the same position vis-à-vis Treasury and DOGE. If DOGE was a threat to their data security, wouldn’t the amicus states say so?

Vargas’ order fails to acknowledge any of this. The omission would make sense if this were an ordinary legal proceeding. But even then, the plaintiffs have not even offered enough facts to gain a preliminary injunction. They should have lost given the lack of answers to the questions raised above. But Vargas granted the injunction anyway.

This leaves two explanations: Either the cybersecurity threat alleged by James and the blue-state plaintiffs is a pretext for their real goal (impeding the president’s constitutional powers) or the red states involved in the amicus briefs don’t care about financial security. The latter seems implausible given the high price we would have to believe they are willing to pay for the privilege of filing a mere amicus brief. A better explanation is that only one side is playing politics.

One side and a district court judge, that is.

Which leads us to the most glaring omission of all. How is it that Judge Vargas could ignore the constitutional arguments raised by the defendants? The president’s exclusive constitutional powers–and the plaintiffs’ threat to the separation of powers–were the primary objections raised by the Justice Department. And they were the only objections raised by the 20 amicus states: “Plaintiffs’ requested injunction not only deprives the President of his constitutionally allocated authority–it poses a direct threat to the liberty of the American people.”

But in her 64-page opinion, Vargas didn’t address them at all. Instead, she granted the blue states’ motion based upon their argument that in exercising the president’s constitutional powers, the defendants violated the Administrative Procedure Act. This is odd since a mere statute cannot limit the president’s constitutional powers. Vargas never mentions any of this. It’s as though she doesn’t think there is any constitutional question at all.

But there is.

That question is whether the executive power is vested in a president of the United States of America or not? The first sentence of Article II answers that question in the affirmative. Vargas either ignores this or isn’t aware of it. Instead, she bases her opinion on what she perceives to be a lack of sufficient training by DOGE personnel and the “hurried nature of [the] process.”

To all this “concern trolling” about insufficient training and rushed processes the Constitution says: So what? Vargas is part of the judicial branch. Her job is to protect our Constitutional form of government against the threats to it from all quarters, not to offer her own opinion about whether Big Balls is sufficiently trained or an executive order was “hurried.” To be sure, even if DOGE employees were incompetent (they’re not) or moved too quickly (and in fact “broke things”) the Constitution would not look to Vargas (or any district court judge) for a correction. Not when the Executive is exercising his exclusive powers, anyway.

As Alexander Hamilton observed in Federalist 78: “where the will of the legislature, declared in its statutes, stands in opposition to that of the people, declared in the Constitution, the judges ought to be governed by the latter rather than the former.”

This means that the Administrative Procedure Act is nothing as compared to the will of the people and the Constitution’s delegation of executive power. And the people have made their will apparent: DOGE shall implement President Trump’s executive orders. Quickly.

As Victor Davis Hanson observed years ago, the left hasn’t been playing by the Marquess of Queensberry Rules for a long time. With organizations like the 65 Project, the left weaponized the sanctions and ethics referral process against conservative lawyers like John Eastman. As a result, they nearly destroyed our constitutional system. Still, too many right-wing attorneys persist in their gentlemanly demeanor. The time for gentlemanliness is over. Left-wing attorneys who use the legal system to subvert our form of government must be forced to defend their professional licenses personally.

By filing a complaint in federal court, an attorney certifies that the arguments made therein “are warranted by … nonfrivolous argument.” Similarly, state rules of professional conduct prohibit bringing a lawsuit “unless there is a basis in law and fact for doing so that is not frivolous.” Sanctions and ethics referrals are the remedy for frivolous complaints.

Letitia James, and the 18 state attorneys general who joined her, violated both. Indeed, despite having granted their motion, even Judge Vargas knocked down all but one of their arguments with flowery language like “not even arguable” and “Hail Mary pass.” All of them must be sanctioned and subject to ethics complaints.

In truth, however, the plaintiffs’ arguments are even worse than frivolous. They are subversive. Judge Vargas facilitated this subversion. In granting the injunction, Judge Vargas joined the plaintiffs’ lawsuit coup. Her detailed attention to irrelevant statutes, while ignoring grave constitutional issues, is not legal reasoning. The omission betrays a lack of competence, intellectual dishonesty, or both. Vargas should be removed.

Note: If you enjoyed this essay, please like, restack, or comment on it. Knowing that people enjoy them keeps me going.

Thanks to Mark Pulliam and to Chronicles Magazine.

Prior to her resignation on Feb. 13, Danielle Sassoon was the acting United States attorney for the southern district of New York. She and several of her colleagues resigned following a disagreement with Emil Bove, the principal deputy attorney general. These “courageous” resignations were instigated not by a supposedly “lawless” executive order from President Trump to prosecute his political opponents, but by the opposite: a Department of Justice instruction to Danielle Sassoon to dismiss the case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat.

After four years of unchecked abuses of the government’s prosecutorial power—abuses that shattered all pretense at legal reasoning and had no historical precedent—we’re now awash in so-called “principled resignations.”

Sassoon’s resignation was public. In an eight-page letter leaked to The New York Times, Sassoon claimed that the Trump Justice Department’s decision to terminate the Adams prosecution was unlawful. News outlets touted Sassoon’s “American bravery.” At the same time, they emphasized her “strong conservative” and “Federalist Society credentials.”

But Sassoon and her colleagues (several others resigned as well) are wrong about the law. The Executive Branch (i.e., the president) has exclusive power over criminal prosecutions, a power recognized by the Supreme Court in United States v. Nixon. The insistence of Sassoon’s self-righteousness reflects the opposite of moral courage. The spectacle of radical leftists denouncing law abiding Republicans for refusing to prosecute a minority left-wing Democrat, while at the same time celebrating dubious conservatives for their poor judgment, incoherent legal reasoning, and insincere opportunism masquerading as high principle is something to behold.

At first blush, Sassoon’s arguments seem to reflect the sober deliberation of an experienced prosecutor. After all, the eight-page resignation letter consists of more than 4,300 words and includes dozens of citations. It also references her experience as a Supreme Court and Fourth Circuit clerk. It looks a bit like a resumé!

But how is it that we know about this letter at all? It used to be the case that if a senior manager instructed a low-level public servant to do something of questionable legality, the subordinate could object, report the matter to one of the many inspectors general, rely on whistleblower statutes, and, in the hardest cases, resign. That’s it.

These remedies (objection, inspectors general, whistleblower statutes, and resignation) are ideal responses to lawless executive requests. Ginning up obscure federal charges to prosecute the opposition’s presidential candidate while coordinating with state officials to do the same, as the prior administration did to Donald Trump, easily justified such remedies. Indeed, that lawlessness is now the sine qua non against which future misconduct will be compared. But there were no notable Justice Department resignations in June and August 2023, when Jack Smith indicted Trump for questioning the 2020 election and stealing office paper. Ditto for the Manhattan DA’s office when Alvin Bragg indicted the president for paying “hush money,” even though doing so is not a crime.

But in the Adams case, there was no questionable conduct or lawlessness to justify Sassoon’s resignation. There was a difference of opinion on policy. Sassoon, however, was not in a policy-making role. She was the acting United States attorney, which meant she took direction from those above her in the department’s hierarchy. That includes the president, the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, and Emil Bove, the principal deputy attorney general (not depicted on the chart, but deriving his authority from the deputy attorney general), who issued the instruction to Sassoon. Sassoon’s repeated references (at least six) to the Justice Manual to support her position confirm this point. The Justice Manual, however, merely “sets forth internal Department of Justice policies and procedures.” It is not a law.

At any rate, it’s unusual to resign following an instruction not to prosecute (or to dismiss) —it’s hard to violate anybody’s constitutional rights or any law by not prosecuting him. Nevertheless, Sassoon reasoned that the dismissal “should be called out for what it is: an improper offer of immigration enforcement assistance in exchange for a dismissal of his case.” In other words, the dismissal was improper not because of Adams’ rights but because of the government’s motives. Sassoon offered no legal explanation as to why the president can’t do what she alleged is improper. Instead, she relied on innuendo, which was parroted by NBC, BBC (“explosive allegations of a quid-pro-quo”), and others.

This isn’t the first time public officials have buttressed weak arguments with innuendo. True, it may seem sinister to dismiss a case in exchange for cooperation. Much as it may have seemed sinister that Trump paid Stormy Daniels not to talk about his alleged affair with her. But in that salacious matter it seemed that way because political operatives in the media characterized it as such. They called it the “hush-money” case. They claimed Trump paid Daniels to “buy her silence.” The implication is that paying hush money and buying silence are criminal actions. They aren’t. Using non-disclosure agreements to settle civil disputes is a routine practice that happens thousands of times every year.

Similarly, the Adams dismissal seems sinister because Sassoon called it “improper,” “alarming, and “unlawful.” This was so, according to Sassoon, because senior policy officials were motivated to dismiss the case in the hope that Adams would cooperate on immigration enforcement. But the government does this sort of thing all the time. It forgoes prosecutions, collects fines instead of seeking convictions, downgrades charges, uses informants, grants immunity, offers plea bargains, and seeks reduced sentences. Sometimes, it even interferes in cases for reasons having to do with national security, as it may have done in this Adams case. And, of course, the president may simply pardon any person he chooses for any or no reason. These are all examples of the government taking a less severe prosecutorial stance for reasons extraneous to a defendant’s guilt. By Sassoon’s logic, all of it is “improper.”

Sassoon also seems to think that Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 48(a) permits a court to refuse a government motion to dismiss when “it is prompted by considerations clearly contrary to the public interest.” Perhaps. But this is beside the point. While a court may deny a motion to dismiss, it may not compel the Executive branch to advance a prosecution in the face of that denial.

As the estimable John Lucas reminds us, the three branches of government are co-equal. The Judiciary may not compel the Executive to exercise its exclusive powers. Criminal prosecution is one of those exclusive powers. As Biden’s Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said in her Senate confirmation hearing: “the Executive Branch has exclusive authority and absolute discretion to decide whether to prosecute a case.” Prelogar was quoting United States v. Nixon, a Supreme Court case that makes no appearance in Sassoon’s resignation letter, her high court clerkships notwithstanding.

It might be good policy to have a reason not to prosecute, but the Executive doesn’t need one. Sassoon appears not to have considered this. Instead, she claims that dismissing the Adams case is contrary to the public interest because “it is unclear why Adams would be better able to aid in immigration enforcement” if he’s not prosecuted. Whether Adams will be better situated to assist the government is legally irrelevant, though it’s probably true that he will be in a better position to assist the administration if not bogged down by legal action. I imagine many New Yorkers might see the dismissal as supporting their interests, given the tens of thousands of illegal aliens in the city. “Get them the hell off the street” sounds unequivocal. At any rate, Sassoon’s opinion that the dismissal is not in the public’s interest raises no legal question about the Executive’s prosecution power at all. It’s just her opinion and no one elected her to implement it.

Sassoon’s letter misstates the Executive’s power, confuses the law, and intersperses irrelevant policy concerns. Her incoherence is reflected in New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s statement about the Adams dismissal: “This is not supposed to happen in our system of justice.” It’s not clear what “this” refers to. The most succinct description of “this” affair is that one political party (the Republicans) decided not to use the criminal justice system against a political figure of the other party (Adams) and may stand to gain politically from it. Perhaps Sassoon and Hochul object to the de-weaponization of the criminal justice system under Trump’s Department of Justice.

To their credit, not everybody caught up in this Adams kerfuffle behaved poorly. Biden holdovers Kevin Driscoll (former acting head of Justice Department’s criminal division) and John Keller (former acting head of the public integrity section) seemed to have resigned without airing their disagreements in public. But they are now exceptions to the new rule.

That new rule seems to be something like this: When you’re ready to leave, find some pretense to justify your action to the whole world while getting a jump on marketing for your next private sector gig. Jack Smith, a perennial and beleaguered mercenary for left-wing political hitjobs, blazed the path just weeks ago. Though his lengthy obsession with prosecuting his political opponents failed he also made his resignation in public.

For Smith, though, leaking to The New York Times was insufficient. Instead, he sought to violate Justice Department policy and Donald Trump’s due process rights (and the due process rights of Walt Nauta and Carlos de Oliviera), by disclosing a full report to Congress. A report that he wrote. Smith insisted that the public must know what he knew because, well, he believed it. And now we all know what Sassoon believes.

All that remains is for Smith and Sassoon to capitalize on their public homage to left-wing shibboleths by landing gigs at big law firms. In Smith’s case, his recent flirtation with Covington & Burling, from whom he received $140,000 in free legal services, suggests he’s on track to do so.

As for Sassoon, we’ll see what comes next. My money is on a white-collar practice group at a big law firm. Partner, of course.

**

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Tom Klingenstein recently sent me President Trump’s note about an essay I wrote for The American Mind and Tom Klingenstein earlier this year. For those who have not read it, the essay is reprinted below.

In 1865, Abraham Lincoln concluded his Second Inaugural Address with an appeal to mercy. “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right,” the nation worked to bind up its wounds. Six weeks later, the Great Emancipator was killed by an assassin’s bullet, though he rose to immortality and became a world-historical figure.

Having ordered the great armies of the Union to battle, Lincoln knew that his country would maul itself in a great internecine conflagration. He endured as brother killed brother, as 600,000 of his countrymen succumbed to the ravages of war, as his political rivals undermined him, and as a vitriolic media spewed venom. Even before that fateful day in 1865, Lincoln survived earlier assassination attempts, including one from a sniper’s bullet that passed through his hat. Lincoln endured this and aimed for reconciliation, because he knew that greater principles were at stake. He was merely their embodiment.

Donald J. Trump is now the focal point on which a battle for America is being fought. He has become the embodiment of the principles of the Founding for many millions of Americans who still cherish those ideals. Arrayed against him and them are those who deny those principles, hate those who live by them, and wish to destroy the United States of America. They will do anything to win.

But even in the face of animosity and pending conflict, Trump’s rhetoric has shifted in tone to the prudential. He sees that after the struggle is won, there must be a reconciliation between Americans. His intuition is of great historical significance.

The Forces of History

The emergence of Donald Trump was contingent on forces that predate him, specifically a decades-long effort to overthrow Western civilization in general and the United States of America in particular. It consists of the Left’s subversion of our form of government, hijacking of our stable legal institutions, relentless criticism of our history, cynicism about our Founding principles, and erosion of our productive and stable social norms. The Left targeted these institutions because they stood in the way of their utopian scheming. Since these institutions were so robust, however, ordinary Americans were slow to realize they were under assault. Until 2016, most Americans had no real idea how late the hour was.

It was then that Donald Trump and the currents of history began to converge. As Lincoln’s debates with Stephen Douglas brought essential questions about America into stark relief, Trump’s 2016 election pulled the wool from many benighted eyes about the same types of questions. “Make America Great Again” and “America First” may not have been high rhetoric worthy of our 16th President, but they had the redeeming characteristic of raising some obvious questions: What is America, exactly? What does it mean to be great?

The Left has known their answers to those questions for a long time: They do not believe that all men are created equal. They mock God. They deny that we are endowed with certain unalienable rights. They scoff at the idea that the purpose of government is to secure those rights. And they govern with or without your consent. The Left also know that American institutions and the American people do believe those things. As such, the Left view them both as enemies of their grand schemes and set about destroying them. Most ordinary people had no idea they were under assault.

The Great Awakening

Donald Trump knows that we must fight if we wish to preserve the self-evident truths of our Founding. In 2016, he also understood that most Americans would defend them if only they saw that they were under assault. And so, thanks to Trump, ordinary Americans finally perceived the threat (2016), came to understand its severity and scope (2020), prepared to fight back (2024), and, with the assassination attempt, now realize it’s a winner-take-all contest.

Having recognized all this early on, Trump became the embodiment of our willingness to defend those self-evident truths. As such, it is not Trump that the Left hates, but the ideas he represents and the fact that Americans are willing to defend those ideas. By this I mean that Trump—even though he is not the president—now represents the only people in the long history of the Earth who are unified not by tribe, race, religion, or force, but by confidence in self-evident truths.

It may seem odd that a man who is not an elected official should represent so many Americans. But appearances are deceiving. As with Lincoln, Trump embodies an idea so that he may be elected, not the other way around. In this way, Trump understands that the people who have sought to destroy him really seek to destroy the United States of America. These people hate Trump because they hate the self-evident truths of our Founding. Your truths. This is summarized by Trump’s pithy observation: “They’re not after me, they’re after you. I’m just standing in their way.”

It is now apparent that the enemies of the United States of America know no limits in their willingness to destroy Trump. First, they tried to do it with lies, bombarding the country and the world with deceit so pervasive that nothing like it had ever been seen in the West. Next, they corrupted our form of government by subverting a national election to keep Trump from the presidency. Then, they hijacked the criminal and civil justice systems to prosecute him. And now, one of their foot soldiers tried to assassinate him.

As I said in a previous article, winning this contest will require that unpleasant things be done. People who subvert our form of government, who weaponize the criminal justice system, who prosecute their political enemies, and who incentivize (or worse) the assault or murder of their opponents must be held to account. This can be done within the letter of the law; but, still, examples must be made. It is not enough to assume that an election defeat will cause America’s internal enemies to give up. They must understand that we intend to restore the principles of the American Founding and that their lawlessness will not stand in our way.

Reconciliation

However, once that message is delivered, there is room for malice toward none and charity for all. Indeed, just as the struggle to restore the country is essential, so is reconciliation with those who are willing to see the error of their ways. Without it, there is no America.

As the Civil War came to its end, and power was reconsolidated in the national government, Lincoln was equipped to deliver an awful wrath upon those who had initiated the conflagration against him and against the United States of America. Ordinary men would act upon the confluence of power and justification to punish their enemies. Lincoln was different. The war, he understood, was fought to restore the grand ideas upon which the nation was founded, those embodied in the Declaration of Independence. At the conclusion of the war, those ideas–the greatest ideas–could only be saved by reconciliation.

Trump may face a similar conundrum. Many people on the Left have committed grave crimes against the nation and against Trump personally. If victory comes, he may have an awesome power to deliver retribution. A mere mortal would use that occasion to bring an unfathomable wrath upon his enemies. But, as with Lincoln, Trump is something more. Just hours after the attempt on his life, we saw this: “in this moment, it is more important than ever that we stand United, and show our True Character as Americans, remaining Strong and Determined, and not allowing Evil to Win.”

It is astonishing and ennobling that a man could rise to this lofty height in the face of such vituperative and personal hate. They defamed him, tried to destroy him professionally and politically, tried to bankrupt him, stole an election from him, tried to incarcerate him, and now have tried to murder him. Like Lincoln—perhaps more so—Trump has cause to take retribution. But, also like Lincoln, Trump understands that this struggle is not about him. Rather, it’s about the self-evident truths of our Founding. Restoring those principles requires the type of man who can do the unpleasant things and rise above the desire for personal vengeance, no matter how justified. It requires a man for the ages.

It is not for us to know how or when these ordeals for Trump and we Americans will end. We can only know, as Lincoln said, “that the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” Altogether, as in “when all is said and done.” In the meantime, we can see that Trump’s character, while flawed, points beyond itself to nearly-extinguished ideals of patriotism, heroism, and sacrifice. The type of things that cannot be motivated by mere personal vanity or the desire for power. His character has given us time to orient ourselves to the enemy so that we may stand and defend those self-evident truths—and, after that, go about the business of reconciliation.

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Note: This short essay was published today at Tom Klingenstein.

The people of this great nation are slow to anger, patient, and inclined to give the benefit of the doubt. They also have an ancient reverence for the rule of law, deferring to its pronouncements in even the most controversial matters. But, for the last eight years, some of the most corrupt, cynical, and treacherous men and women ever to walk the halls of power in Washington, D.C., exploited these admirable traits. I’m speaking, of course, of the leadership and even some of the rank-and-file of the Department of Justice. 

Finally, on November 5, the people of the United States of America delivered a late but stunning rebuke to the ruling elite, the Washington bureaucracy, and above all the Department of Justice. Indeed, never in this country’s history has such a public and censorious rebuke been delivered so clearly to a single federal agency. 

That rebuke makes clear that the Department of Justice has failed totally to meet the high standards of excellence expected by the American people. It has disgraced itself in every respect: wallowing in dishonesty, targeting its opponents, kid-gloving its allies while hammering its enemies, obliterating legal norms, weaponizing the legal system, prosecuting the political opposition, and normalizing lawfare. 

In short, the Department of Justice has reached the nadir: it is treacherous and pathetic. And all the world knows it. 

Worse, at this very minute many career DOJ bureaucrats are busy justifying their disgusting misconduct. They are speaking to anybody who will listen, but mostly to themselves. Self-justification is certainly an ingredient in the human condition. It is also hubris — outrageous arrogance. The doubling down on one’s prior misconduct in the hopes that sheer acts of willpower can redeem evil. But only repentance can redeem. Acknowledging the error of one’s ways is the first and hardest step towards atonement. Hubris will prevent many within DOJ from taking that first step. And though the country will eventually move on, relegating those stubborn few to the ash heap of history, those few will harbor a grudge with an eternal flame. They will ultimately end their days locked within a suffocating prison of arrogance.

Other, more introspective personnel within the Department need not share this sorry fate. For those line attorneys who aided and abetted the gross misconduct of the past few years, the country invites you to reflect on your errors. Though now roused to anger, we Americans are also quick to forgive, when forgiveness is possible. And it is possible for those who didn’t lead the charge to destroy our institutions. But the onus is on you to earn that forgiveness. You must begin the process of soul-searching, of doing the hard work of introspection, of owning your mistakes, and of accepting the consequences. Some of you will choose to leave; others will be forced to do so. This is the only way to return to the truth. 

Finally, and fortunately, much of the Department of Justice is still staffed by good people. They are loyal to America, its people, and its Constitution. In countless ways, these people resisted and obstructed the recent treachery: refusing to prosecute unjust cases, to tamper with evidence, to spy on their fellow citizens, to lie to federal courts, to subvert our form of government, to impair our way of life, or to repeat the ocean of lies spewed forth by the department’s venomous leadership. Even in this moment of anger, America recognizes that, without them, the situation would be even worse — hard as that is to imagine. And with them, we will rebuild the  reputation of the Department of Justice and strive to regain the respect of America — as its obedient and faithful servant. Never again its master. Never. 

Jack Smith, Merrick Garland, Kristin Clarke, and others in DOJ face an uncertain future. Earlier this year, in an essay entitled “The Post-Constitutional Order,” I wrote that they “have wagered everything — their property, their careers, their reputations, and their liberty — on the regime’s retention of power.” Now the verdict is in. The evil regime lost its grip on power. As a result, some of these offenders may lose their licenses. Others may face prosecution. Some may end up in prison. 

Whether they face material consequences or not, America has already delivered its verdict. History will long remember that as to the charges of betraying our nation’s founding principles, perverting our form of government, and subverting our way of life, the nation finds them: Guilty.

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This piece below was published yesterday at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

***

Mere law has never impeded the Left’s pursuit of its political objectives. The same pattern holds in our universities. Indeed, achieving political objectives now appears to be the primary aim of many American colleges, and willful defiance of the law has been de rigueur in admissions offices for 60 years. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, Proposition 209 in California, Proposal 2 in Michigan, and countless other explicit prohibitions on racial discrimination have done nothing to inhibit the Left’s racist utopian scheming.

Thus, it’s no surprise that admissions offices nationwide are ignoring the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which, once again, outlawed race-based discrimination in admissions.

Repeat Offenders

Fifteen months after the Supreme Court ruled in SFFA’s favor, the organization found itself sending letters to several elite universities. In these missives, SFFA alleged that Duke, Yale, and Princeton continue to violate the law, the Supreme Court notwithstanding. Take, for example, the organization’s letter to Duke:

Your college just reported its admissions data for the Class of 2028—the first class admitted after [the Supreme Court’s ruling]. Compared to the Class of 2027 (when you explicitly gave racial preferences to African Americans and Hispanics), you now have fewer Asian Americans. Your Class of 2028 is 29% Asian American, a decrease of 6 percentage points.

Given the well-documented racial disparities in educational achievement and standardized test scores, such data are hard to explain. To be sure, as reported by the New York Post, some schools appear to have complied with the Supreme Court’s ruling. For example, at MIT the percentage of black, Hispanic, Native American, and Pacific Islander students in the Class of 2028 dropped to 16 percent, down from 25 percent the prior year. The percentage of Asian students rose from 40 percent to 47 percent. This is as expected, given the disproportionately superlative academic performance of Asian students. It is suspicious that the opposite happened at Duke, Yale, and Princeton.

Still, there are some possible explanations for the admissions figures that, if true, would be lawful. They include: (1) SFFA’s admissions data are wrong; (2) Asian students’ and black students’ standardized test scores are suddenly materially worse and better, respectively; (3) not enough high-scoring Asian students applied to the schools in question or, alternatively, accepted an offer of admission; (4) more Asian applicants refused to disclose their race; or (5) the universities have found some clever but lawful loophole in the high court’s opinion. Absent one of these explanations, it stands to reason that the admissions offices are ignoring the law, just as left-wing activists have done for 60 years.

We can safely eliminate the first explanation, as I am not aware of any claim that SFFA’s admissions data are wrong. Indeed, Duke’s website confirms SFFA’s 29-percent figure, while the New York Times acknowledges the six-point decrease in Asian student enrollment. Curiously, the Times also references a one-point increase in admitted black students, which suggests that racial discrimination in Duke’s admissions office is worse than alleged.

As for the second explanation, average SAT scores in 2023 for Asian and black students were 1219 and 908, respectively. These figures were down from 2022, when Asian students scored 10 points higher and black students scored 18 points higher (white students’ scores showed similar changes). In other words, black students have performed proportionally worse than Asians since the Supreme Court issued its ruling in SFFA. This cannot explain a decrease in Asian or an increase in black enrollment. Thus, we can eliminate the second explanation.

As for the third possibility, perhaps there is some unrelated reason that Asian students decided not to attend Duke, Yale, or Princeton. For example, the increase in Asian student enrollment at schools like MIT (which appears to have stopped discriminating post-SFFA) may explain part of the decrease at Duke. This implies that, prior to SFFA, many Asian students admitted to Duke were overqualified but chose to enroll anyway because better schools discriminated against them. Once that discrimination ended, these Asian students “shifted up.” The problem with this explanation is that Asian students enrolled at less prestigious schools than Duke also should have “shifted up,” thereby sustaining or increasing their enrollment percentages there. But that didn’t happen, so this explanation doesn’t work either.

Another possibility is that, post-SFFA, a substantial number of Asian students refused to report their race, thereby increasing the total number of enrolled students who didn’t report. At first blush, this seems plausible. It’s true that “11% of [students] enrolled in the Class of 2028 declined to share their race.” This was up from five percent the prior year. And this six-point increase corresponds exactly to the six-point decrease in enrolled Asian students. Still, it’s hard to believe that this increase in nondisclosure accounts for the change. After all, it would require that no other racial group changed its disclosure rate. It would also require that more Asian students chose not to disclose even though SFFA won at the Supreme Court in June 2023, not long before regular applications were due in January 2024. Put another way, there was no better time than January 2024 to identify as Asian on one’s college applications.

This brings us to the final explanation. In SFFA v. Harvard, Justice Roberts opined on the various ways universities may consider race:

[Universities may give a] benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, [but it] must be tied to that student’s courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university.

This language was unfortunate. Roberts’s exception consists of words so capacious they swallow the rule. Any university that wishes to continue discriminating on the basis of race will have little difficulty pretending that “courage and determination” or “heritage or culture” were deciding factors. Of course, Asian students also have “courage and determination” and “heritage or culture.” Indeed, as it relates to standardized test scores, it appears they have more than other students, which again implies that a fair admissions process would have increased their enrollment rates. Since the opposite happened at Duke, Yale, and Princeton, this last explanation also is implausible.

Plain Old Racism

In reality, everybody knows what’s going on here. The idea that university bureaucrats relied sincerely upon some loophole in the majority’s reasoning is belied by experience. For law-abiding people, court orders, legislative statutes, and public referenda are law. But to left-wing political operatives, they are mere words—parchment barriers that can be obeyed or ignored as circumstances warrant. And they can be ignored with minimal risk, since there are rarely consequences for left-wing ideologues who violate them.

In the educational context, consider California’s Proposition 209 and Michigan’s Proposal 2. The former amended California’s constitution by adding a new Section 31, which states in relevant part, “The State shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, color, [or] ethnicity.” The latter did something similar in Michigan, amending the state constitution such that no “public college or university … shall … discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.” Both public referenda were supported by sizeable majorities: 55 percent and 58 percent, respectively.

These amendments, passed nearly 30 years ago in California and nearly 20 in Michigan, couldn’t be clearer. But that’s the point—they are already sufficiently clear. It’s not as though a clause was omitted or there was some confusion about their explicit or intended meaning. Everybody knows exactly what they say and do.

Yet, despite this clarity, in the decades since the people of California and Michigan amended their constitutions to prohibit racial discrimination, universities in those states doubled down on their affirmative-action admissions policies. And they did it with impunity.

In 2014, when a radical left-wing organization called By Any Means Necessary lost its challenge to Proposal 2 in the Supreme Court, University of Michigan president Mary Sue Coleman announced defiantly, “Despite this decision from the Supreme Court, the University of Michigan remains deeply committed to using every legal tool at our disposal to bring together a diverse study body.” Meanwhile, the Wolverines’ admissions office did everything it could to continue discriminating on the basis of race.

In 2005, the year before Proposal 2, the median SAT score for black students admitted to the University of Michigan was 1160 “versus 1260 for Hispanics, 1350 for white, and 1400 for Asians.” Eighteen years later, in 2023, it appears nothing has changed. From this chart, we can discern that the average SAT score for Michigan’s freshman class of 2023 was near 1470. We can also see that the class contained 432 black students. The problem is that not more than 2,259 black students in the entire country scored that high. Thus, either 20 percent of the highest-scoring black students in the United States enrolled at the University of Michigan in 2023, or the university continues to discriminate.

The same holds for California’s universities. For example, 524 and 662 black students were admitted to UC Berkeley and UCLA in 2023, respectively. But those prestigious universities, like Michigan, had average SAT scores above 1400. Unfortunately, there just aren’t enough black students scoring this high, unless more than 70 percent of the best black SAT test-takers in the land went to just these three schools last year.

The lesson here is that racial discrimination in university admissions is the sine qua non of left-wing political goals. It will not be impeded by mere laws or court orders. Without personal consequences for those who violate them, these laws and court orders will not deter left-wing political operatives from doing what they want. For them, the concept of lawlessness has no meaning except when tied to a consequence. Every admissions decision is a mere utilitarian calculation that considers only the likelihood of being caught and the penalty. This is not hyperbole: It’s why they call their organizations things like By Any Means Necessary. Any means include lawless means.

Just as university admissions offices in California and Michigan didn’t care about their state’s laws, Duke’s, Yale’s, and Princeton’s left-wing admissions offices don’t care about the Supreme Court’s ruling in SFFA. That’s not going to change unless individuals in the admissions offices face personal consequences.

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Note: Mark Pulliam and I co-authored the below essay, published today at Tom Klingenstein. Mark writes at Misrule of Law and is a frequent contributor to Law and Liberty. Check them out.

Over the last four years, regime lawyers and government officials have repeatedly ignored the constitution, stretched the meaning of federal and state statutes, and shredded legal norms. They have investigated, prosecuted, and persecuted their political opponents. They did this to suppress those who challenged their rule and to send a message to would-be challengers. 

With Donald Trump’s election and pending inauguration (assuming no shenanigans between now and then), unpleasant things will have to be done to hold these people to account. The regime’s aggressive lawlessness will require a response. 

The response must balance the immediate need for accountability with the ultimate need for reconciliation. On the one hand, we must hold responsible those whose criminal conduct subverted our constitutional order. On the other, we must prepare to reconcile with the millions of Americans who erred grievously in supporting the regime’s lawlessness — at least with those people who are humble enough to acknowledge their error. 

Equal justice under the law, an essential feature of the rule of law, means enforcing the law in an even-handed manner. Violators must be held responsible for their actions. This is not “retribution,” any more than arresting a thief or murderer constitutes retribution. All citizens are expected to obey the law. No one is above the law. Lady Justice is depicted wearing a blindfold, not so that she can ignore lawbreaking, but so she can mete out punishment regardless of the identity of the perpetrator. Over the past four years, the regime has applied the law in a one-sided manner — punishing political opponents (sometimes by fabricating crimes or seeking disproportionate punishment) while looking the other way as agents of the regime ran roughshod over legal norms. Many Americans lost respect for our legal system due to the unfair and unjust manner in which laws were enforced and violations were condoned.

With the inauguration of President Trump to his second term, the double standard must end. Those who violated the law during the Biden administration must be held to account. This is a necessary first step to restoring the rule of law, and, just as importantly, restoring public faith in equal justice under the law.

Indeed, fashioning an appropriate response will be the most important task of Trump’s first year. It will require an attorney general with the backbone to design and implement it. Here’s a sketch of how that might look. 

Accountability

There are many examples of regime conduct that can be prosecuted under existing federal criminal statutes. These cases should be investigated, presented to grand juries for indictment, and prosecuted. For instance, 18 USC 242 makes it a federal crime to deprive somebody of a constitutional right under “color of law.” A Trump DOJ could use this statute to investigate the regime’s lawless prosecutors, government officials, and even judges. 

Consider, as just one example, the conduct of Shana Bellows. Bellows, the Maine secretary of state, used the power of her office to remove Donald Trump from the ballot in Maine. Though not a lawyer, Bellows claimed that Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment required her to do so. The Supreme Court smashed that pretense in Trump v. Anderson, ruling unanimously that Trump must be restored to the ballot in states where he had been removed, including Maine.  

It’s doubtful that Bellows has considered the possibility that DOJ might prosecute her. After all, the Department is staffed with regime allies, and under Merrick Garland it wouldn’t dream of doing so. But following Trump’s inauguration, Garland and his henchmen will be replaced with honest and tough prosecutors who should investigate Bellows’s conduct carefully to determine if she attempted to use her official position to deprive Maine’s citizens of the right vote for Trump — a federal felony under 18 USC 242. 

A brief review of publicly available facts shows that her conduct likely satisfies the elements of that offense. There are three: (1) The willful (2) deprivation of an individual’s constitutional right (3) while the defendant was acting under the color of law. 

The first element is what is called the mens rea, or intent. It requires proof that Bellows acted “with the particular purpose of violating” a Constitutional right or “with reckless disregard [of] the risk” that her conduct would do so. Her public statements alone prove her intent, as does the fact that she “did the rounds” on several regime-approved propaganda outlets that feted her “bravery.” A grand jury subpoena for her official email will almost certainly uncover further evidence of her intent.

Second, in removing Trump’s name from the ballot, Bellows violated numerous constitutional rights of Maine’s citizens (and of Donald Trump), including their right to vote. Prosecutors will have no difficulty proving this element and may find that Bellows violated other civil rights under the First, Fifth, Twelfth, and Fourteenth Amendments.

And, of course, Bellows was acting in her official capacity — that is, “under the color of law.” That’s how she was able to remove Trump’s name from the ballot in the first place. She had to be Maine’s secretary of state to do so. This satisfies the final element of the offense. 

The brief analysis above paints what prosecutors call a prima facie case. If the facts are what they appear to be (that is, if the facts described above are in fact true), and if prosecutors can prove them beyond a reasonable doubt, then a jury should find Bellows guilty of this felony.  That’s all there is to it. Bellows ought to hire an experienced criminal lawyer. Soon. 

Similarly, Trump’s new attorney general should investigate the members of Colorado’s Supreme Court. Late last year, the majority upheld a decision to remove Trump from the Centennial State’s ballot. Just as it is important to make an example of lawless executive branch officials, judges must be made to understand that they, too, cannot escape criminal liability merely by characterizing their criminal conduct as a legal order.

Indeed, prosecutors could look to the majority opinion itself for language to prove willful intent. Here’s the place to start: “We are also cognizant that we travel in uncharted territory.” This quote alone strongly suggests that the author of the opinion knew he was depriving Coloradoans of a fundamental civil right. After all, there is only one way in which the opinion is “uncharted”: state officials (in this case judges) used their official positions to try to subvert a national presidential election by denying half of Colorado’s citizens the right to vote. This goes to the very essence of the conduct prohibited by 18 USC 242. 

These are just a few examples. Investigations should be opened into Jack Smith, Jay Bratt, Fani Willis, Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Alejandro Mayorkas, Jocelyn Benson, Jena Griswold, and many others. A thorough search of the United States code will likely uncover offenses they have committed, including offenses that can be proved easily. Indeed, applying the federal criminal code to their conduct will require prosecutors to do much less creative interpreting than state and federal prosecutors did in prosecuting Donald Trump, John Eastman, and Douglass Mackey, among others. 

Reconciliation

People who subvert our form of government, who weaponize the criminal justice system, who prosecute their political enemies must be held to account. But after examples have been made, we must go about the business of reconciliation. Acts of mercy will facilitate this. But mercy will have this effect only if the offenders understand who holds the cards. Those who get a pass must be made to understand that, but for the restraint of their fellow citizens, they would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. 

Repairing the damage wrought by years of malicious, divisive, and destructive regime lawlessness will not be easy. The devastation is widespread. But it can be done. First with a calibrated but serious response, then with reconciliation. 

It must be clear to all Americans that, during Trump’s second term, the conservative half of the country that suffered tremendous injustice from the regime’s lawlessness suddenly had the powerto exercise an awful retribution. And chose not to.

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Note: Republished below is my most recent piece for The American Mind.

Lawfare—the regime’s exploitation of our legal system to prosecute its political opponents—reaches far and wide. It has corrupted our criminal and civil justice systems, administrative bureaucracy, state and federal courts, colleges and universities, electoral system, bar licensing authorities, and congressional proceedings, among countless other institutions.

Much digital ink has been spilled (including by me) exploring the legal defects in regime lawfare. The federal prosecutions of Donald Trump are rife with due process violations while the state prosecutions reveal rampant judicial and prosecutorial misconduct. Numerous lawsuits against Elon Musk reveal arbitrary agency decision making and a vindictive Department of Justice. The removal of Trump’s name from the ballot by certain state election officials violates Article II, the Twelfth Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment, and much more. The selective prosecutions of Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro violate the Fifth Amendment.

Penn’s pretense that Professor Amy Wax’s speech was really “conduct,” the abuse of defamation law to railroad Mark Steyn, and the prosecution of Douglass Mackey for election-related memes pose a grave threat to our free speech rights. Meanwhile, the January 6 prosecutions jeopardize our rights to assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances while exposing DOJ’s rank hypocrisy. And then there’s the attack on John Eastman, which is rife with due process and First Amendment violations—and almost unbelievable judicial overreach.

For decades, the regime has worked to proscribe all the speech and action it opposes. That process is nearly complete. When it does, lawfare will become “lawful.” At that point, political prosecutions will adhere strictly to statute. Prosecutors, plaintiffs, and government bureaucrats will pay scrupulous attention to legal niceties. And courts will ram down defendants’ throats all the due process they can swallow. Indeed, to quote a former law professor of mine, we will have nearly reached the point where, like Hell itself, our country “is full of laws and due process is strictly observed.”

Three Goods in Tension

Through centuries of continuous refinement, our legal system was able to reconcile three goods: doing justice in an individual case, preserving our form of government, and protecting our way of life. We called this process the “common law.” (Our Constitution was structured using the same type of legal reasoning.) The common law and our Constitution earned the respect of ordinary people because of their reason-based reconciliation of these three goods, the grandest accomplishment of our Western legal order.

In principle, reconciling the tension between these goods was quite simple: no decision in an individual case should undermine our form of government or impair our way of life. Higher goods take priority. At the same time, the impairment of individual rights must be no greater than necessary to preserve our form of government and way of life. If simple in theory, reconciling these goods proved difficult in practice. Doing so required judges to discover rules to balance them, procedures we call “due process.”

Due process is the set of rules that, in most cases, assists the search for justice in individual cases without impairing our form of government or way of life. It governs every aspect of the criminal justice system: investigation, indictment, pre-trial litigation, trial, verdict, sentencing, and appeal. In criminal cases, due process includes the rules of criminal procedure, the rules of evidence, and constitutional law (for example, the right listed in the Fourth Amendment for the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures), as well as an enormous body of case law and statutory requirements.

But due process has been a victim of its own success. It has worked so well for so long that Americans revere it while never asking the question, “What happens when the strict observance of due process undermines our form of government or way of life?” We don’t ask because we tend to think solely in terms of defendants’ rights—and those are protected most of the time. In that regard, the legal system has earned our respect. The problem is that we have forgotten the other two goods.

We assume that justice is whatever happens when process is duly applied. Weirdly, we have a tendency to believe this even when the rules are inane or the consequences destructive of our way of life.

Lawfare capitalizes on this one-dimensional respect. It exploits the legal system’s procedural rules for the purpose of fundamentally transforming our form of government and way of life. It does this by using the legal system to make examples of the political, legal, and intellectual champions who are trying to preserve America: prosecuting, bankrupting, and marginalizing them to send a message to you. It confuses us into accepting the legitimacy of these political prosecutions by focusing our attention solely on the question, “Were the defendants afforded due process?”

Now, however, history presents us squarely with a different but more important question: What happens when the strict observance of due process undermines our form of government and way of life?

Conflict of Ends

As mentioned above, the lawfare against Trump, Eastman, Musk, Navarro, Bannon, Steyn, Wax, Mackey, and others is unlawful. But it is less unlawful than you might think.

I don’t mean that it is justified. Rather, the creeping tyranny of a century’s worth of progressive scheming has redefined lawfare as lawful. The goal posts have moved. When it comes to the regime’s opponents, speech is assault, assembly is sedition, ridicule is defamatory, petitioning the government is obstruction, and memes are a civil rights violation. As I wrote last fall in “Show Trial, American Style”: “Today, all sorts of inane activities are ‘crimes’—a bastardization of the moral nature of law well documented nearly 15 years ago by Harvey Silvergate and Alan Dershowitz in Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent.”

Conversely, for the regime, raiding the home of a president is due process. Arresting him is necessary to save “our democracy.” The Fourteenth Amendment requires the opposing presidential candidate be removed from the ballot. State legislators’ prerogative to pass election laws must be ignored. Equal protection requires unequal application of the laws. It’s lawful to trick citizens into voting for a candidate who isn’t running. And directly threatening the opposing side’s lawyers isn’t a Sixth Amendment violation.         

The point is that there are now enough statutes and inane legal opinions that anything can be reclassified as its opposite. All that’s required is a cursory search of civil statutes, the criminal code, or the Code of Federal Regulations plus a little bit of forum shopping—whether for a benighted jury pool (for example, Washington, D.C. or New York) or a left-wing judge (everywhere) or both (almost any American city).

Resolving the Conflict

So what happens when the strict observance of due process undermines our form of government?

You might recall that during her tenure as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton availed herself (for still unknown reasons) of the use of a personal email server where she stored highly-classified information. This was a federal crime, and an Intelligence Community inspector general referred it to DOJ for investigation.

Shortly before the 2016 election, former FBI Director James Comey issued an unusual statement announcing his recommendation not to prosecute Clinton: “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case,” Comey explained, citing the weakness “of the evidence” and “the context” of Clinton’s actions. Viewed narrowly, this conclusion was nonsense. DOJ had sufficient evidence to prove each element of 18 U.S.C. 1924 beyond a reasonable doubt. As a technical matter, any federal prosecutor would feel comfortable proving those facts while affording the defendant all the due process the law requires. How do I know? I watched Comey’s statement live from a United States Attorney’s Office while I was a federal prosecutor.

But in a larger sense, Comey was right: no reasonable prosecutor would bring that case, even though the evidence was overwhelming. Why? Because indicting a leading party’s candidate for president would subvert our form of government—a higher level good than the need to do justice in any given case. You simply cannot indict the opposition’s candidate without undermining the electorate’s faith in the legitimacy of representative government—that is, in our form of government. Of course, this is not what Comey meant when he referred to a “reasonable prosecutor” declining to prosecute. How do we know? Because Comey supports the prosecution of the other party’s leading candidate for high office.

The Clinton example is revealing. It shows why we must let the guilty (Clinton) go free for our sake.1 Lawfare reverses this process. It insists on strict rule application at any cost. It is the technical application of the law to subvert the justifications for law in the first place. It is the use of the legal system to undermine our form of government and way of life. Lawfare is perfected when political prosecutions comply fully with statutory law and due process is strictly observed. And with that, the practitioners of lawfare can dismantle our civilization. 

To avoid this, we cannot look merely to due process to decide if justice has been done in politically charged matters. Why? Because there is already a law proscribing nearly everything. We’ve created a haven for those who would wage lawfare—people like Jack Smith, Alvin Bragg, Fani Willis, and others, the Lavrentiy Berias of twenty-first century America.

The federal and state prosecutions of Donald Trump are perfect examples of this. Though I’ve written on the legal weaknesses of those cases at length, by focusing on the elements of the offenses I risked distracting from the larger point. For the same reasons that “no reasonable prosecutor” would have prosecuted Hillary Clinton (the real reasons, not the reasons cited by James Comey), they never should have indicted Donald Trump. But by doing so, malevolent prosecutors have injured our form of government and threatened our way of life. Indeed, it is irrelevant if Trump is guilty of the crimes charged—at least it is irrelevant as a legal matter.

By corollary, it is a mistake to limit our criticisms of lawfare to the legal shortcomings of any given case—as though the civil and criminal prosecutions of Trump, Eastman, Musk, Steyn, Wax, Bannon, Navarro, Mackey, the January 6 defendants, and others are acceptable provided they follow the appropriate procedural requirements.

Lawfare is the process of using due process to render the principles of the American Founding unlawful. We must refuse to discard the principles of the Founding—even when Congress outlaws them, an overzealous prosecutor indicts them, or an activist judge sentences them. As Justice Robert Jackson said, “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.”

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Last night, Providence intervened on our behalf. The full power. The full glory.

Beginning in the pacific, it harnessed the pioneer-turned-entrepreneur spirit of the people of the West. Picking up momentum, this providential and American force buffeted the great red woods and swirled through the Rockies, drawing on the fortitude of the high-mountain folk.

Descending the eastern slopes, it galloped across a thousand miles of plains and rushed the mighty Mississippi, feeding on the hearty independence of the former and the thick communities of the latter. Thence it coursed through the ancient mountains of Appalachia, drawing strength from the indomitable ferocity of the descendants of the Scotts-Irish.

As it approached the capitol city, the monuments to Washington and Lincoln served as beacons. Speaking to us from beyond time and space, those men who transcended history proclaimed on behalf of our whirlwind: “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” All heard.

It reached its zenith at the instant it arrived at its terminus - the apex of corruption. There, pausing for one moment so that all the Earth could turn and bear witness, it smashed the doors of Congress and the White House, swept into the corridors of evil, and cleansed this chosen land of a billion lies.

Last night, Providence intervened on behalf of we, the Americans.

Now, it is time to Make America Great Again.

In no particular order:

1. My gut tells me Donald Trump is going to win the popular vote and the electoral college.

2. Having been on the far right my entire adult life, it’s strange to see the culture move in this direction. The vibe is definitely shifting. Dare I say that the political left is now the home of the loser?

3. The democratic base is mostly poorly informed, neurotic, weak, unattractive, demented, obnoxious loser platoons like this:

4. Meanwhile, the right is full of industrious, creative, and vibrant people, building more prosperous businesses, new technologies, deeper faiths, stronger communities, better money, healthier food, resilient men, elegant women, hardier children. Better everything.

5. Basically, do you want to be a nation of whiny losers or superlative winners? Your answer to that question tells me who you’ll vote for. If you think it’s a false choice, that answer also tells me who you’ll vote for. Loser.

6. Somehow, the democrats manage to attract people who publicly hate our country and those who still publicly pretend to love it. One of them hasn’t got the memo yet.

7. Today, at 2:56 pm, two F-15s flew over Knoxville. This is rare, except for flyovers when the Vols are playing. Though probably a routine training flight, it felt ominous. The regime should have considered that. Perhaps they did. Either way, it seems like a foolish decision. For the next few days (weeks? months?), shows of force - particularly military force - may be interpreted as a menace to our liberty. Best to keep those jets on the ground until January 20, eh Lloyd?

8. In 2020, Trump got 74 million votes. Nobody disputes that. Biden “got” 81 million votes. Half the country disputes that. The combined 155 million votes required a turnout rate of nearly 70%, the highest in more than 100 years. Such high turnout lacked “believability,” given that Biden was deeply unpopular and never left his basement to campaign.

9. Compared to 2020, Trump is MORE popular today, with more support from black men and Hispanics and, of course, everybody who supported him in 2020. He’s going to clear 80 million votes.

10. If the regime is going to cheat by juicing Harris’ numbers, they’ll have to manufacture enormous voter turnout. Anything above 70% will lack “believability.”

11. Is there a way for the participation rate to go down, but for the total votes to go up? Yes. Increase the “denominator” - that is, the number of eligible voters. But where oh where could we “find” several million people whose citizenship status isn’t being tracked?

12. The Supreme Court’s decision in Department of Commerce v. New York suddenly feels relevant. There, the Court effectively barred the Census from asking people if they are citizens.

13. It’s weird that the government of the United States isn’t permitted to ask if people are citizens.

14. What kind of country prohibits its government from asking if the people in the country are citizens?

15. It’s not impossible that Harris could win the electoral college while losing the popular vote. This would be ironic given that the left has spent five decades complaining about that outcome. Still, cheating this way would be more believable since it would require the regime to manufacture a smaller number of fraudulent votes in just a handful of cities like Philadelphia and Detroit. This would avoid the believability problem relating to excessively high turnout rates. See #5 and #6 above.

16. If Trump loses, future historians will no longer say “cross the Rubicon” to mean “the point at which the republic was finally destroyed.” They’ll say “raid the Mar-a-Lago” instead.

17. Speaking of Rome, the hour approaches. Soon we will roll the dice. Then, iacta alea est:

Thanks to Raw Egg Nationalist and Man’s World Magazine for printing this and other essays of mine.

****

Americans are terrified of being accused of racism, or nativism, or any of the other go–to allegations used by leftists to disarm their political opponents. Knowing this, leftists have spent decades shifting the Overton Window—the limits of acceptable public opinion. They’ve succeeded. Today, virtually all political positions opposed by the left are outside the Overton Window. Anything outside the Overton Window is, ipso facto, racist or nativist or any of the other leftist taboos.

In other words, the left has mastered the technique of eliminating debate about their political views simply by rendering the opposing views socially unacceptable. As a result, Americans are afraid to express views outside the Overton Window. Doing so could cost them their jobs or social standing, or expose them to public humiliation or shame.

At the same time, people who hold views inside the Overton Window (essentially every position on the political left) do so without realizing that they are the pawns of other, more intelligent or cunning actors. These people are what we refer to as “normies.” They accept the prevailing political discourse without question–indeed, without even realizing there is something to question. For example, if the woke left has successfully recharacterized a given political subject as racist, xenophobic, or nativist, the normie accepts that new characterization without question.

As I explain below, normies are never swayed by technical objections to leftist dogma. For the most part, they’re not even aware of those technical objections. On the other hand, normies can make substantial changes to their political orientation, but only as a consequence of tectonic paradigm shifts or, in some rare cases, individual awakenings usually prompted by traumatic or spiritual experiences.

By contrast, non-player characters (NPCs for short) are pugnacious defenders of political dogma. In many cases their entire conception of reality has been heavily conditioned by other minds. They are committed to the conditioning dogma because it provides them deep psychological nourishment. They are physiologically incapable of abandoning that nourishing dogma because it is their identity. To abandon it would be to commit suicide. As a consequence, they will follow the Overton Window wherever it moves, even if the new view is diametrically opposed to the old. They cannot change.

Except for members of the ruling elite who are opportunists, all Democrats are either normies or NPCs. By contrast, many Republicans are normies, but none is an NPC. There is no such thing as an NPC on the right if only because there is no coherent right-wing dogma to provide the essential psychological nourishment. That’s not to say that in principle there can’t be a right-wing drone-slave ideology analogous to woke leftism, only that today there isn’t one. In the modern West, all NPCs are on the woke left.

Based Americans are neither normies nor NPCs. They are the people who have realized that something is gravely wrong with the West. 20 years ago, there were no more than a few thousand of these people. Four years ago, there were millions of them. Today, there may be tens of millions.

Based Americans hold views outside the Overton Window. Today that means they hold views that are, by and large, true. Their mental models accurately depict the state of reality and are constantly updated to respond to new information. They are operators.

One way to think about the current struggle for the West is to conceptualize it as a war between the based and the NPCs / ruling elite for the minds of the normies. The elite wish to turn the normies into drone-slave NPCs. The based hope to set them free. A war of 15% versus 15% over the minds of 70%.

Today, there are many fronts in that war, though none is as important as the struggle over mass foreign invasion. If this struggle is lost, the majority of foreign invaders (absurdly called “undocumented migrants” in NPC newspeak) will become drone-slave NPCs. As a result, based Americans will be marginalized and utterly disempowered. A thousand years of darkness will ensue.

Scylla and Charybdis

Given the woke left’s control of the Overton Window, based Americans are in a bind. If they confront the issue of foreign invasion head on, they risk being marginalized and caricatured as racists, nativists, or xenophobic. Conversely, if they attempt to flank the issue and attack its periphery, they divert resources from the main event. Unfortunately, based Americans are not particularly good tacticians. They have yet to learn that flanking maneuvers cannot defeat woke leftism.

There are many examples. Based Americans are afraid to say that blacks commit crimes disproportionately. Instead, they oppose defunding the police. They’re afraid to say that transgenderism is a psychological disorder, so they object to a few children’s books in public libraries. In the case of immigration, they’re afraid to say that we don’t need reasons to exclude foreigners. Instead, they talk about the numbers of convicted felons who have crossed the border illegally.

Why? Because observing the disproportionate crime rate among blacks, the psychological disorder inherent in transgenderism, or the essence of nationhood are outside the Overton Window and, therefore, risky. Conversely, opposing defunding the police, criticizing the public library’s book selection, or noticing that many illegals are violent felons, are inside the Overton Window and, therefore, not risky. For now, anyway.

Never mind that many views outside the Overton Window also happen to have the redeeming characteristic of being true, including the three mentioned above. This is consistent with the essential reality denial of woke leftism. That said, we must give credit where it’s due. The left’s mastery of political propaganda is so thorough that it has no difficulty removing from polite society topics that are self–evidently true. Impressive.

Rearranging the Deck Chairs

In the case of immigration, the woke left’s strategy of shifting the Overton Window has succeeded. This means that most based Americans are afraid to say anything that looks like this: “This is our country, you will leave when we tell you to leave. No reason will be given.” Instead, as per the leftist playbook, we resort to attacking the periphery. Here, that means publicizing the incidental side effects of immigration like crime, inflation, or housing shortages.

Republicans in Congress are masters of missing the action: They think they’re flanking the opposition when in fact they are AWOL. Their battle plan is always the same: marshal facts they believe can be used to expose and embarrass the woke left. They do this by sending meaningless subpoenas and politely worded cover letters to Biden appointees.

When the responses come (if they come at all), they usually do reveal leftist policy failures. After all, it’s not as though the last 60 years of woke leftism have led to widespread virtue, material prosperity, or prudential governance. With these responses in hand, Congressional republicans believe they’ve hit political pay dirt. They are always mistaken.

A recent example is Congress’ March 13 demand for information about convicted felons among the incessant waves of illegals entering the country. That letter generated a response from Immigration and Customs Enforcement on September 25. There, ICE Deputy Director Patrick Lechleitner acknowledged that the tsunami of illegals invading the United States of America includes a huge number of dangerous felons. In short, he acknowledged that ICE (which is part of the Department of Homeland Security under its beleaguered Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas) is either willfully derelict or grossly incompetent. Which one matters not.

For what it’s worth, ICE’s figures revealed that 662,566 violent criminal illegals entered the US during Biden’s term in office. Among them were more than 15,000 murderers.

Horrible figures, no doubt. And, of course, had such figures materialized under the leadership of a Republican administration . . . blah, blah, blah . . . you know the rest. Double standards, hypocrisy, etc.

Predictably, though, Republicans thought they’d hit pay dirt. They hadn’t. What they failed to realize–what they always fail to realize–is that those Americans who are already willing to speak the “primary truth” (that illegals must leave because we say so) don’t need the peripheral fact that illegal immigrants bring crime with them. It is, after all, peripheral. Conversely, the normie mind that can’t conceptualize (let alone speak) the primary truth will never know about the illegal immigrant crime rate. Not unless we change the paradigm. They need to know that it’s okay to want foreigners out simply because they are foreign; i.e., not American.

There’s Nothing to Learn from the Second Kick of a Mule

So why do Congressional Republicans send these subpoenas and report these facts? They’re continuing to operate on the naïve assumption that by exposing these technical shortcomings, normies will hold the regime accountable for its incompetence–that they will vote the bastards out. That won’t happen for two reasons.

First, as it pertains to the normie mind, the regime has obtained total narrative supremacy. Normies know what the regime wants them to know and nothing more. For example, normies had no idea that Joe Biden suffered from advanced dementia until the regime permitted them to know in July 2024–a concept I explained in Normie Reality Model 1.1 Will be Downloaded Tonight. This was the case even though the signs were obvious more than four years earlier, when he first ran for President.

In the case of illegal immigration, this means that most normies will never know about the mass importation of violent felons. Since they will never know, the regime’s technical incompetence will not be exposed and no Normie votes will change. Indeed, most normies are blissfully indifferent to illegal immigration in general, let alone aware that it is an impending civilizational catastrophe. Any public opinion poll confirms this.

Given this stark reality, the tacit Congressional republican view that normies will cast votes based on the numbers of illegals who are violent felons is grossly irresponsible.

Second, by pointing to technical shortcomings, the right becomes vulnerable to technical rejoinders. All this plays into the hands of the ruling elite by crowding out existential issues that can’t compete for the public’s mental bandwidth. The left knows this, which is why it disputes the data while highlighting obscure stories of falsely accused illegals.

The left’s response implies that the precise figures matter: as though illegal immigration is fine for America provided that only 662,565 felons have entered the country, and not one more! Once that tacit premise is conceded by the tactical retards on our side, down the rabbit hole we go. Subpoenas are issued, Congressional letters delivered, and right–wing social media inundated with outrage porn for the based. The left responds with its spin. The nation must, MUST!, find out if it’s 662,565 or 662,566 illegal felons. This will decide the fate of the West, or something.

And republicans think they’re winning the debate. After all, the left’s characterization of the facts is often facially absurd and easily rebutted (see, e.g., Debunking the Myth of the ‘Migrant Crime Wave or a million other agitprop “news” stories). In reality, however, we’ve already lost. The dispute rages for months, years–as long as the left wants it to rage, which is always just long enough to distract Normies until the next election. Meanwhile, the invasion continues apace.

Based Americans allow this discourse shift to happen because we don’t know how to control the Overton Window. Instead of observing that no illegal can be falsely accused if he isn’t here in the first place, we question our national sovereignty. Doing that is, after all, less socially risky. This astonishing dichotomy reveals the power of the Overton Window to displace reality and realpolitik. These are the benefits of total narrative supremacy, you see.

Post Mortem

For the past 60 years, when handed facts like these, Republican strategy has consisted of something like this: The left has a terrible track record of atrocious public policy failures. These failures cover the whole spectrum, from domestic to foreign policy, housing projects to foreign wars, public education to law enforcement, illegal immigration to sexual perversion, and so on. If we marshal facts on these policy failures and disclose them to the American public, we will regain power and restore the country! The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t work. At all.

Pointing out left wing policy failures has done nothing to slow the advance of left-wing ideology. The country is now on the verge of destruction despite mountains of evidence of catastrophic leftist policy failure in every domain.

What gives?

The problem with all right–wing attempts to expose left–wing failures is that by nitpicking program implementation, Republicans tacitly justify the underlying policies.

In the case of illegal immigration, focusing on technical failures implies the need for nothing more than technical solutions—as if illegal immigration would be a good thing provided it didn’t include convicted felons. In reality, counting and tracking those who are convicted felons is no more relevant than counting and tracking the number that are left handed. Illegal immigration is, itself, an existential issue, even assuming that not a single illegal is a convicted felon.

As I explained in A Republic, If You Can Keep It, Americans don’t need reasons to exclude foreigners: it doesn’t matter if illegal immigrants work really hard, are “good people,” are “people of faith,” are family-oriented, commit fewer crimes, will “reduce price inflation,” or will add to U.S. productivity. Though much of that is false and though huge numbers of illegals are none of those things, all of it is irrelevant.

The survival of the West depends upon us mustering the will to stop the influx of foreign invaders and then quickly deporting tens of millions of them—not on arguing about how many are felons.

To do this, Americans need to resist the urge to criticize the side effects of such immigration and start confronting the issue head on. They need to stop fearing the dreaded Overton Window. We must re–normalize certain essential political ideas that the left has removed from the domain of acceptable public discourse.

And, for what it’s worth, the technical dispute will be resolved, usually long after the real battle has already been lost. Here, this means that many years from now, on page 193 of a DHS inspector general report (probably in a footnote), the government will admit the mundane fact that Congressional Republicans were right way back in 2024: actually, there were 662,566 felons admitted into the country illegally when Kamala Harris was Vice President.

But that report will be issued in Spanish, long after the primary surrender has rendered the primary issue moot.

If you enjoyed this article, please like or share it. Doing so boosts the reach of Amicus Republicae. Thank you. - tj

My most recent piece at The Federalist reprinted below.

With the prosecutions of former President Donald Trump, attempts to deprive John Eastman of his law license, and the absurd contempt proceedings against Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, Americans now understand that something is dreadfully wrong with our legal system. Recently, the ongoing destruction of our legal system has moved to the Great Lakes State. 

There, a legal dispute arose after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. withdrew from the presidential race and petitioned Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to remove his name from the ballot. In a sane world, Benson would have removed Kennedy’s name upon receipt of his petition. But Benson is a far-left radical who fancies herself a “guardian” of democracy. She even wrote a self-congratulatory book to that effect. Thus, she refused. 

Benson refused because she understood that if Kennedy’s name remained on the ballot, many Michigan voters would cast a meaningless vote for him, which would help Kamala Harris. On the other hand, if Benson removed Kennedy’s name from the ballot, many of those same voters would cast a crucial vote for Trump, whom Kennedy endorsed on Aug. 23, 2024. Since Michigan is a battleground state, this single dispute could alter the 2024 election and, by implication, the future of the United States of America. 

With Benson’s refusal, Kennedy filed suit. The matter made its way through the Michigan state courts and ultimately to the Sixth Circuit. There, the table was set for the legal system to demonstrate its impartiality by ordering Benson to remove Kennedy’s name from the ballot.  Instead, the court did the opposite.

A Partial Court

The facts reveal that there was no logistical justification for Benson’s refusal to remove Kennedy’s name —  it wasn’t as though she didn’t have time to do so. Indeed, as the dissent reveals, Benson initially distributed ballots without Kennedy’s name after a lower court ruled against her. Moreover, the two Michigan statutes Benson cites in her opposition were of doubtful authority — certainly not sufficient to warrant throwing an entire national presidential election into chaos.

Since there was no justification for Benson’s conduct, the court resorted to legal sleight-of-hand.  The majority opinion, drafted by Judge Eric Clay and joined by far-left activist Judge Rachel Bloomekatz, resembles all modern legal opinions. It looks like a legal opinion that does what legal opinions are supposed to do: reason from first principles. 

But looks can be deceiving. 

In reality, the court reached its conclusion first and then backfilled it with “reasoning.” This is why the opinion is full of references to obscure legal principles such as res judicata, laches, and the Rooker-Feldman doctrine. The use of obscure principles to decide issues of tremendous national importance is the hallmark of a judge who made up his mind first and then groped around for legal justifications — the very opposite of what a judge is supposed to do.

If you haven’t heard of these legal principles, don’t worry. They are not the right legal tools for deciding important issues like, you know, who the president of the United States should be. Instead, they are intended to make it seem like the court’s order was the product of legal reasoning when in fact it was rank partisanship.

Weaponized Legal System

Meanwhile, the 11-page majority opinion never acknowledges the actual dispute: Kennedy wants Michigan’s voters to be able to vote for Trump, the candidate Kennedy endorsed. At the same time, Benson wants to deceive voters into thinking they can vote for Kennedy. Kennedy knows that if his name is removed, Michigan’s electoral votes could go to Trump, which could decide the national election. Benson also knows this and doesn’t like it. Again, this is the crux of the entire legal dispute, which is odd given that the court never alludes to it. 

A legal system that refuses to acknowledge plain facts is not capable of delivering honest truths. This is what it means to have a weaponized legal system. Everybody knows what’s happening here: the majesty of the law is providing cover for partisan politics.

These cynical attempts to subvert our legal order are both hypocritical and routine — rule for thee but not for me is the defining ethos of woke leftism. Thus it’s almost trite to observe that the outcome of this case would have been different had Kennedy endorsed Harris. Reasonable people know this. They also know that years of pointing out hypocrisy has revealed that leftist operatives are immune to these sorts of allegations. Their side never holds them to account. 

Even so, it is hypocritical that the bureaucrats who control Michigan’s election system want Kennedy’s name to remain on the ballot. It was, after all, only last year when their leftist counterparts in at least 37 states attempted to remove Trump from the ballot. In both cases, these types insist that they are saving “our democracy” by violating every one of its legal norms.

The most straightforward interpretation of Benson’s conduct is that she used the “color of law” (i.e., her legal authority) to disenfranchise voters who prefer Kennedy but would accept Trump. A Trump Department of Justice would be well-advised to scrutinize this conduct. 

At any rate, the Sixth Circuit’s opinion in Kennedy is rank partisan politics dressed up in legal nonsense. It mimics the form of legal reasoning without any of its substance. In a normal country, with properly functioning legal institutions and well-trained nonpartisan judges, the opinion would have consisted of one sentence: “Since Robert F. Kennedy is not running for president, his name shall not appear on the presidential ballot.” That’s what used to be known as legal reasoning.

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Thanks to Raw Egg Nationalist and Man’s World Magazine for printing this and other essays of mine.

For decades, our ruling elite have been hard at work destroying the foundations of Western Civilization.

The list of things they “own” is long, but certainly includes gutting American culture, normalizing perversion, losing wars, dumbing down education, offshoring our manufacturing base, bankrupting the treasury, adulterating our food, opening our borders, debasing the dollar, impoverishing our citizenry, indoctrinating our children, pursuing social pipe dreams, immiserating blacks, collapsing our legal institutions, mocking empirical science, and ridiculing our history.

At the same time, this ruling elite celebrates itself in the smug self-confidence that its Herculean efforts have brought us to the doorstep of a carbon-free, social-justice utopia.  In reality, however, it has foisted upon America an intergenerational catastrophe of biblical proportions.  To paraphrase Winston Churchill, never in human history have so few squandered so much on behalf of so many.

Normies are beginning to grasp the scope of this unfolding intergenerational catastrophe.  They are also looking for somebody to blame.  I submit to you that there are really only three “types” who deserve it (your blame, that is): the members of the ruling elite itself, their mandarin servants, and their jack-boot street thugs, the proles.

As I’ve written elsewhere, the ruling elite is served by an obsequious class of mandarins in high finance, big law, big tech, elected government, the administrative state, and the intelligence community.  These mandarins are rank-ordered by their effectiveness in advancing and protecting the ruling elite’s entrenched power.

Invariably, the mandarin servants are unimpressive people with bland personalities and tiresome thoughts.  They are masters of “failing upward” by being just bright enough to grasp the career advancement opportunities available to those who agree to parrot embarrassingly stupid leftist tropes.  At the same time, they are not bright enough to formulate anything resembling a real thought or to demonstrate any real skill by which they might distinguish themselves or, you know, contribute to our civilization.  They are one of the many symbols of our decadent and dying culture.

Mediocre Man is a Spineless Shill

Last week MSNBC solicited the opinions of one of these mediocrities–retired Brigadier General Steve Anderson.  

Anderson is not special.  He is the opposite of special.  He is the perfect example of a spineless man willing to debase himself by mouthing idiotic platitudes in exchange for crumbs from his ruling elite overlords; in his case, a pension and middling social status.

Like a good drone/slave/NPC, Anderson dutifully attests to the MSNBC host the numerous “reasons” America should elect Kamala Harris.  You can watch the short video here, wherein Anderson spews forth this gobbledygook:

She is an inspiration. Not only is she positive, she brings hope and optimism.  But as a black woman, the product of a mixed marriage, she will inspire millions of people throughout the world.  Our credibility as a nation, you know, that we would be able to allow our country is so great, that we allowed a woman like that to become the commander in chief, the president of the United States.  That is going to send a powerful message all over the world. People like Vladimir Putin are going to say ‘Hey, wait a minute, these guys are truly have a democratic country, they truly are representative, they truly are fighting for all their people and Kamala Harris is a manifestation of that.

“A woman like that,” indeed.  I’ll resist the urge to end the essay there.  As with most dogmatic nonsense, to rebut this statement would require me to imbue it with more coherence than it inherently possesses.  Doing so is not worth my effort or your time.  So instead of dissecting all this sycophantic gibberish, let me make two passing observations.

First, who does Kamala Harris “inspire or bring hope or optimism to?”  Her entire professional career testifies to the benefits of the well-played race card and selectively applied fellatio–just ask Montel Williams or Willie Brown.  Perhaps she’s an inspiration to young lazy girls of “mixed marriages” who look forward to a career of demeaning sex work and nauseating identity politics.  You too can be the President of the United States, just perform sexual favors on powerful men and remind the world that you’re Indian black.  You don’t even have to earn a single primary vote!

Second, I agree that allowing “a woman like Kamala Harris to become the commander in chief” will absolutely reflect on “our credibility as a nation.”  But, for anybody with a properly functioning cerebral cortex, at least some working memory, and a modicum of judgment, her election would reflect negatively on us.

Of course, Anderson must appear to believe (and may in fact believe) that electing Harris will reflect positively on American credibility.  He does this by suggesting that upon Harris’ election, even Vladimir Putin will revisit his erroneous geopolitical decisions.  This beggars belief.

Poor old Vlady!  If only he’d known that America was the type of country that could elect a low-IQ social justice warrior despite her massive character flaws and loose morals, he wouldn’t have gone through all the trouble of invading Ukraine, or something.  Just imagine, this is what passes for “thinking” by a Brigadier General in the United States Army.

At any rate, don’t hold your breath waiting for Putin to withdraw from the Donbass simply because a low-information “mixed marriage” harpie wants to be President.  That’s not how the world works.

Mediocre Man is Mass Man

Worse, Anderson’s gibberish is emblematic of a much deeper problem.  You see, Anderson is the typical mandarin servant.  They are numerous.  There are millions of this type of man.  They now dominate the West.  They have infested government, academia, big business, law firms, big finance, etc.  They control most of the levers of power.   In Anderson’s case, the United States Army (before he retired).

And since they are so numerous and so powerful, their specific character flaws add up to general disaster.  They are weak, stupid, lame, soft, and undignified.  They lack the physical and mental courage to defend any worthy ideal, let alone the acumen to do so.  They are easily led astray by opportunities for minor advancement into the middling ranks of a faceless and dehumanizing bureaucracy, where they lord over those they perceive to be of a lesser station.  They are small men; pathetic men.  And they have traded their dignity, independence, and judgment for a slightly larger pension and the smug satisfaction that comes from being a cog in a wheel of incompetence.  In exchange for these sad benefits, they routinely debase themselves by reciting publicly linguistic gibberish like that depicted in the video dissected above.

And worst of all, they are incompetent to perform the tasks demanded of their station.  I mean that in a clinical sense, as in “they are not qualified to do what is required of them.”  As a result, because these weak, stupid, and venal men wield such power, America is failing.

We lack the competence to maintain our basic infrastructure, our grand strategy is nonexistent, our government is a train wreck, our budget is a mess, our legal institutions rotten, and our intelligence community is a clown show.  I could go on, but you know it all already.

Ironically, part of the reason the mediocre men hate Vladimir Putin is because weak and unserious men must hate those who remind them of their character flaws.  This is not an apology for Putin.  But, it won’t do to level insults at our adversary merely because he is our adversary.  To do so distracts us while empowering him.  Instead, we must confront the world as it is, which requires that we recognize Putin as a deadly serious man and, therefore, a deadly serious adversary.

We, by contrast are not led by serious people.  Instead, we are led by men like Brig. Gen. Anderson and Kamala Harris, whose “thinking” about the world was stunted at some level between childhood and adolescence.

In a deadly serious world, men like Anderson and women like Harris are plainly inadequate.  They are, at best, mediocre men (and women) in a time that requires high intelligence, mental fortitude, and courageous independence.  In short, we now require superlative excellence but we’ve got world class incompetence.

***

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-tj

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A rough and terrible beast is loose in the West. Its power grows daily. Decades ago, it was a mere nuisance. Back then, it could have been tamed if concerted force had been brought to bear. No more. Today, it threatens to topple the last bastion of civilization on Earth.

This beast is totalitarianism. It rapes the mind, replacing its ability to reason with a comforting and infantile dogma.

Woke leftism is totalitarian. It has raped the minds of millions of our countrymen, turning them into drones. These drones are the mental slaves of ideas they don’t understand and forces they cannot see.

Today, woke totalitarianism uses various techniques to brainwash its victims. It learned these techniques from the expert mind flayers of the twentieth century: the Soviets, the Khmer Rouge, the Chinese Communists, others.

And it used these techniques on Jackson Reffitt.

The Sins of the Father

On January 6, 2021, Jackson’s father Guy participated in the Electoral Justice Protests in Washington DC. This grave sin cast Guy into the role of heretic to regime orthodoxy.

For his “sin,” the elder Reffitt was sentenced to more than seven years in federal prison - an astoundingly unjust sentence in any decent society. I know. I was a federal prosecutor. (I’ve written about DOJ’s kid-glove treatment of leftist terrorists here versus its harsh treatment of right-wing defendants here.)

But in totalitarian dictatorships, it is not enough merely to imprison heretics. They must be destroyed, their friends ostracized, and their families debauched. In Guy’s case, it meant that the woke leftists had to rape his son’s mind. And so they did.

The video above depicts the dull, apathetic remains of a boy whose mind has been viciously raped by woke totalitarianism.

During the first 17 years of his life, Jackson was almost certainly the victim of incessant political conditioning. After all, this is what passes for “education” today. He was indoctrinated to respond approvingly to all leftist tropes and to denounce everything else. He was relieved of the responsibility of thinking but permitted to relax in the embrace of mindless totalitarian conformity.

Thus, he was conditioned to pay the toll every totalitarian slave may ultimately have to pay - whether to betray his family. That test was thrust upon him on January 6th. Under the immense pressure of the slave drone ideology, he reported his father to the FBI and testified against him at his “trial.”

Try to imagine the nightmare in which Jackson Reffitt’s father lives today. Imagine living in a small cell, always recalling the horrible day your own son testified against you on behalf of the beast. Knowing that you cannot reach him with facts or reason. Not even with love. That your son is deeply mistaken about the nature of reality, but does not know it. That his mind has been used and discarded by more powerful people who care nothing for his wellbeing. This is what it means to be mind raped.

Reffitt junior is not to blame. As a child (or young man - he was 18 at the time), he stood no chance against the vast apparatus hell-bent on turning him and his father into a warning.

And of course all the regime propaganda outlets dutifully reported the story. Incessantly. After all, the whole point was that you know about it. It wouldn’t be a warning otherwise.

These sadistic woke ideologues even made an off-Broadway play in which they acted out their orgiastic fantasies against an absurd caricature of Reffitt senior. Nevermind that he is a man, a husband, a father, an American - just like many of you (take note). Totalitarianism has no time for decency, moderation, or mercy. A healthy society, conversely, does not do this sort of thing.

At any rate, a government that turns family members against one another to retain its political control has the hallmarks of a totalitarian dictatorship. Your government did this to Guy Reffitt and his son and many others following January 6th.

Origin Story

There can be no doubt about the origins of this technique. In 1956, the well-known Dutch psychoanalyst Jost Meerloo documented its development and use in the communist totalitarian dictatorships. At 304 pages, Meerloo’s The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing is worth your time. If only to understand what you’re up against.

Here Meerloo explains the use of conflicting loyalties (the exact technique used on Jackson) as a brainwashing technique:

Clever as the Nazi techniques were, they were not as irresistible as the methodical tricks of the communist brainwashers . . . all of a sudden the enemy puts before you a clash of loyalties: your father or . . . your fatherland . . . This is a brutal choice to have to make, and when the inquisitor makes use of your additional inner conflicts, he can easily force you into surrender. A clash between loyalties makes either choice a betrayal . . . He cleverly exploits the victims early ambivalent ties with his parents. The sudden outbreak of hidden moral flaws and guilt can bring a man to tears and complete the breakdown. He regresses to the dependence and submissiveness of the baby.

That easily describes the case of Jackson Reffitt.

Totalitarianism destroys conscientious adults and rapes the minds of people like Jackson Reffitt for two reasons. First, doing so serves as a release valve for the pent up rage of totalitarian slave drones (think BLM or Antifa rioters). Second, the destruction of these living human beings is a message to you, the holdout.

The price of your refusal to bend the knee to the totalitarian dogma will be the destruction of everything you love, the estrangement of your friends, the destruction of your communities, the evisceration of your churches, the annihilation of your family, the rape of your child’s mind. Imprisonment is nothing as against these things.

This is what the leftist totalitarian ideology has done to Guy Reffitt and his son. This is what they are doing to America. This is what they intend to do to you.

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Americans do not need reasons to oppose immigration or to demand illegal aliens be deported. This is our country. If we want you out, you’re out. No explanation necessary.

This is what it means to have a country in the first place - the ability of insiders to exclude outsiders. When this condition no longer holds, there is no longer a country.

Since most countries are defined by racial, ethnic, or religious criteria, most countries exclude outsiders on racial, ethnic, or religious grounds. Yes, they use the dreaded raaaaaacism to excluuuuude people.

Of course, none of this matters for most countries on Earth, since most countries are not places that decent people with decent ideas want to live.

But, for what it’s worth, Chinese racism is the reason that you will never be a Chinese citizen.

America is different. Since 1776 (as perfected in 1865), there have been no racial, ethnic, or religious criteria to be an American. Instead, being an American required that, among other things, one held a deep and abiding commitment to certain self-evident truths. Namely:

that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The idea of forming a community around an idea was new in the history of men on Earth. So new, in fact, that our founding fathers went to the effort of telling the world about it. Fortunately, they also went to the trouble of writing it down. We call that writing the Declaration of Independence.

We have forgotten what it is that makes us a country - the ability to exclude people for any reason or for no reason whatsoever. At least, a lot of us have forgotten. Like these people:

Or, perhaps, they haven’t forgotten. Perhaps they understand perfectly well. Perhaps they know that brave men and women who understand the self-evident truths in the Declaration of Independence are not the type of people that can be ruled by totalitarian dictators - people like them.

And so, they want you to forget.

But we Americans are these courageous people. This is also why we are the last holdouts against global totalitarianism.

Make no mistake, this is what is at issue: freedom or totalitarianism. Though this essay is about illegal immigration, the dispute about foundational principles lies beneath all the battles that make up the massive ideological struggle of our time.

In all those battles, all the other western redoubts have surrendered to the slave drone ideology of woke totalitarianism or are otherwise helpless. Great Britain, Australia, and Canada are finished.

We are all that is left. We, the Americans.

But we have forgotten much. Now it is time to remember. The hour is late. We must join the battle for the last best hope of men on Earth. Now. (Skip to 24:35)

Here is what we must remember. As it relates to the question of illegal immigration, if we’re going to justify ourselves by providing reasons (which we are not required to do), then the reason is this: those millions of foreigners do not understand the ideas in the Declaration of Independence.

If they did, they wouldn’t be foreigners. If they did, their countries would look like America. If they did, they wouldn’t flee to our shores.

Contrary to the Congressional testimony of this nonentity, it doesn’t matter if illegal immigrants work really hard, are “good people,” are “people of faith,” are family oriented, commit fewer crimes, will “reduce price inflation,” or will add to U.S. productivity. Though much of that is false and though huge numbers of illegals are none of those things, all of it is irrelevant.

Let me repeat: none of those things matters at all.

What matters is the survival and perpetuation of the principles of the American founding. It is these high principles that built the framework for our material prosperity, our rugged independence, our moral agency, and our capacity for self governance.

The ideas that flow from the Declaration of Independence sustain America, and America is the country that sustains the West. Without these ideas, there is no America. Without America, there is no West. Without the West, there is no civilization. It is that simple.

Soon, very soon, the massive influx of foreigners will tip the balance too far. Too few people will understand the principles of the American founding. When that happens, the land-area that you call the United States of America will not be a country. It will be the living space of slave drones who lack the capacity to organize themselves into a self-governing constitutional republic.

That point is the point of no return.

And that point is impending. We are on the brink of losing everything.

We are on the brink because regime word slingers have weakened us with woke nonsense. They have caused us to question our founding principles or to forget them. They have saturated us with baseless self-loathing and false guilt. They have poured poison into our ears. They have sown confusion and doubt with verbal and logical gobbledygook.

The regime hates America because it hates the ideas on which it was founded.

Instead of those ideas serving as the framework of our American civilization, the regime aims for no ideas. Its slave state will be manifest when the regime’s ruling elite is able to translate its stunted adolescent will into unrestrained power - power over you and the world.

They do not intend to permit any self-evident truths to stand in their way.

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It used to be said that the sun never sets on the British Empire. From the seventeenth century until America became the world’s hegemon, England undertook what Rudyard Kipling called “The White Man’s Burden,” and sought to civilize the world. Where the British stayed, they largely succeeded. Today, the success of Great Britain’s colonization efforts is, arguably, the only reason that civilization exists at all, anywhere, in the 21st century.

Beginning in the middle part of the 20th century, however, the self-loathing left undertook the Herculean task of retconning the great legacy of British colonialism. The did this by pointing out that the British were white while ignoring that they were civilized.

Today, merely observing that somebody is white is sufficient to prove his guilt in any matter involving racial performance disparities - like, for example, the level of civilization a country has attained.

But it wasn’t always that way. Back then (in the early/middle twentieth century), self-immolation by white leftists was avante garde among the types of people who use phrases like avante garde. It was new and edgy. Signaling your virtue by preaching white guilt felt gooooood. And British colonialism was an easy target. Today, you are living in the wreckage of this intellectual temper tantrum.

At the same time, though, the leftists insisted that British paternalism actually impeded the civilizational advancement of the empire’s third-world people. This was always nonsense, though it took time for it to be obvious.

At any rate, much of this amazing history is retold in Bruce Gilley’s The Last Imperialist: Sir Alan Burns’ Epic Defense of the British Empire - a short but enthralling page turner about combat, adventure, and idealism in service of the Union Jack’s civilizing mission. I recommend it.

Theory Meets Reality

Today, those same leftists simply ignore what appears intuitively obvious: former British colonies that obtained their independence too soon are shithole countries. But, intuition can be misleading, so I put mine to the test.

Great Britain’s colonies included Australia, the Bahamas, Bermuda, Canada, Egypt, Ghana (the Gold Coast), Guyana, Honduras, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Kenya, New Zealand, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Sierra Leone, Singapore, South Africa, Sudan, Uganda, and, of course, these United States of America, among many other smaller nations.

Using publicly available information, I created the chart below showing the number of years each of these countries was a British colony together with its current per capita GDP (2022).

I then used the above information to determine the “correlation coefficient” between “Years as Colony” and “Per Capita GDP.” This is just a fancy statistical way of saying “is the length of time that a country was a British colony a good predictor of its GDP?”

Drum roll please. The correlation co-efficient was 0.67! This is considered on the cusp of “very strong” in the study of politics and economics. Rarely do you find correlation this high unless the predictor variable (years as a colony) at least partially causes the response variable (per capita GDP). If you’re interested, my math is at the bottom of this article.

In other words, the longer the British colonized a country, the more prosperous it is today.

Of course, I’m using per capita GDP as a loose proxy for the level of “civilization,” though I recognize that I could use other factors or a combination of them - crime rate, infant mortality, median GDP, etc. And, there’s no doubt I’ve oversimplified this issue.

That said, if we were to “complicate it,” my intuition is that the case for Britain’s civilizing influence would be strengthened. But you get the point: Nobody’s in any hurry to move to Sierra Leone, after all.

The Immiseration of the Third World

Sadly for the people of the third world, the great legacy of British colonialism ended abruptly when its most belligerent former colony - the United States of America - came under the spell of utopian leftist thinking. This began with the progressive era. By World War II, FDR was browbeating Winston Churchill to abandon Britain’s remaining colonial empire on the silly premise that all of its colonies were prepared for self-governance.

Most were not, particularly those in Africa. The left hated and still hates this fact. But they were undeterred.

A mere two decades later, the British empire was no more - the 1950s and 1960s alone saw at least 13 colonies gain their “independence.” Most of those countries were the nation-state equivalent of children and, like children, unprepared for independence. Today they continue to pay the price in poverty, disease, crime, infant mortality, corruption, you name it. In other words, all the hallmarks of leftist social policy.

Of course, despite the astronomical suffering wrought by leftist policies, the era of reality denial continues to the present day. Perhaps I’ll perform a similar analysis on American cities controlled by Democratic mayors.

In sum, a simple empirical analysis confirms an intuitively obvious fact: the best thing that could ever happen to any country is for it to have been colonized by the British. For a very, very long time.

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[The math is below — keep scrolling.]

If you enjoyed this article, please like it, share it, restack it, or talk about it in the comments. I appreciate every gesture.

- TJ

My work:

“The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” So says Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, that tattered document that exists today as a mere anachronism - a symbol of what once was. It is openly mocked by our ruling elite who believe, as Kamala Harris believes, that our benighted past is all that stands in the way of their utopian future.

This is why, for example, Doctooooor Jill Biden can hold a cabinet meeting in the White House and the ruling elite can assume that we mere plebes won’t raise any difficult questions. Questions like, why is the unelected second-spouse of the lamest of lame duck Presidents holding a cabinet meeting? Isn’t that the job of The President? Never mind, you plebe, can’t you see that the clapping seals (26 seconds in) are the regime mandarins and ruling elite who run this country without your consent?

A cynic might understand this as: our historical form of government is an obstacle to their limitless power.

Kamala Harris summarizes this smug entitlement with her vapid “what can be, unburdened by what has been” - a mantra that presumes she and her handlers are smart enough to discard all the lessons of history because they read a few chapters of John Rawls somewhere between sorority rush and college graduation.

Curiously, this slogan is both precise enough to require that we memory-hole our history and broad enough to mean whatever our ruling elite need it to mean . . . today, tomorrow, or next week.

But, it’s never broad enough to mean what I, personally, want it to mean.

Why, for example, can’t we unburden ourselves of critical race theory, transgender normalization, racial quotas, legal positivism, progressive technocracy, the income tax, the Federal Reserve, the administrative bureaucracy, Nancy Pelosi, green energy, New Jersey, renamed professional sports teams, meddlesome Karens, virtue signaling, human resource departments, fiat currencies, and Bill Kristol. There is little doubt, after all, that those things are both burdensome and “have been’s” or, in Kristol’s case, a “has been.” Those are the criteria, right guys? Right? Guys?

At any rate, I observe that the President of the United States - as in The President - is supposed to have all power vested by the Constitution. Not some or a good amount or even most. All.

Of course, our ruling elite do not take this sort of thing seriously. By “this sort of thing,” I mean the idea that words codified into laws could actually impose upon them some sort of obligation. If they did, at least they’d go through the motions of removing demented Joe Biden from office. There’s a procedure for doing exactly that, you know. It’s literally the reason why we have the Twenty Fifth Amendment. And Joe Biden is (and has been for many years) incompetent. As Victor Davis Hanson would say, he’s non-compos mentis.

But, instead of following the actual procedure designed for this purpose, the ruling elite take for granted that you will not notice that Joe Biden is clearly not in charge, that he hasn’t been for a long time, that no single person is in charge, that it appears a committee of insiders wields all Presidential powers, that these insiders don’t bother even to consult with the actual “elected” president, that all or most of those insiders are unelected bureaucrats, that the composition of this committee appears to change without notice, and that this is certain to continue at least through inauguration day.

In other words, the ruling elite intend that a cadre of anonymous and unelected powerbrokers wield the presidency without your knowledge or consent. Indefinitely.

And they think that we are so stupid or docile (or both) that, instead of acknowledging any of this, they seek to placate us with endless replays of Joe Biden eating his favorite ice cream, while Jill Biden holds cabinet meetings, and Kamala Harris assaults us with word salad while professing how “joyful” and “optimistic” her campaign is, whatever that means.

Meanwhile, this farce of a government controlled by a farce of a ruling elite maintain its grip on power precisely because … perhaps we are that stupid or docile.

I’ll close by noting that Harris promises “what can be, unburdened by what has been.” I submit the opposite is true. Now that we’ve been “unburdened” of our form of government, we’re going to find out “what we can’t be” - namely, a free and prosperous people.

If you enjoyed this piece, please “like it” below.

Note: This article was first published earlier today (9/19/2024) on The Federalist.

On Sept. 4, the Department of Justice indicted Russian nationals Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva for their covert funding of domestic media outlet Tenet Media. The media outlet deployed $10 million of Russian money, according to the indictment, which was reportedly used by right-leaning talent to create content for an American audience. The talent included Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, and Dave Rubin, among others, who all appear to have been unaware of the funding source. 

The indictment is odd for several reasons. First, prosecutors would have known early in their investigation that the defendants would never set foot in an American courtroom, with extradition from Russia being impossible. This raises the question: Why investigate and prosecute a case that will never be tried? Second, the DOJ announced the indictment with an unusual amount of fanfare, going so far as to coordinate the announcement with simultaneous press releases from the Treasury Department and State Department. In my career as a federal prosecutor, I never once saw that happen. That’s not to say it never happened, but it’s rare. 

Predictably, the usual cohort of regime propaganda outlets breathlessly hailed the indictment, never failing to capitalize on an opportunity to paint their opponents as Russian agents, regardless of the truth of such claims. The New York Times (“Russia Secretly Worms Its Way Into America’s Conservative Media”) and MSNBC (“MAGA Influencers Are Scrambling After the DOJ’s Russia Indictment”) are just two examples. Other regime mandarins acted accordingly. YouTube, for example, removed hundreds of Tenet Media videos.

The widespread and immediate media coverage of a case that was dead on arrival (from a prosecution perspective) strongly suggests that smearing right-wing news sources was the DOJ’s goal. This was accomplished by inundating the country with the regime-friendly narrative that Johnson, Rubin, and Pool were associated with Russian intelligence. They’re not, and the DOJ knows it. 

Despite this, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco claimed that RT “co-opted online commentators by funneling them nearly $10 million to pump pro-Russia propaganda and disinformation across social media to U.S. audiences.” In the same press release, Attorney General Merrick Garland claimed that Tenet Media was “creat[ing] and distribut[ing] content … with hidden Russian government messaging.” One wonders how Garland could discern the “hidden” nature of the messaging while the American public could not.

Both of these statements are, at best, only partly true. The indictment contains no allegation that Tenet Media pumped pro-Russia disinformation to U.S. audiences. The word “disinformation” appears only twice, both times in the section entitled “background on Russian influence operations,” which have no bearing on the present matter. Further, there is no allegation that Tenet Media’s content was false, a prerequisite for “disinformation,” according to the regime’s definition. 

Indeed, the only substantive crime charged was a failure to file registration paperwork under a law that makes no distinction between true and false information (money laundering was also charged but only “in furtherance of” the failure to register; in other words, if there were no failure to register there would have been no money laundering).

These facts reveal that the DOJ didn’t bring the indictment to convict Kalashnikov or Afanasyeva (they’ll never set foot in the United States) nor to impede disinformation (there wasn’t any). Despite this, the DOJ announced the prosecutions to a global media frenzy in press releases choreographed with other major cabinet-level agencies that were amplified by the usual legacy media institutions. The association between conservative commentators and Russian intelligence was complete. 

This “guilt by association” smear tactic is an ancient form of propaganda, one which Democrats have deployed with great success in recent decades. What’s relatively new is the DOJ’s use of the criminal justice system to seed an association in the minds of normal Americans: Russia is bad, right-wing commentators are connected with Russia, therefore right-wing messages are “bad.” Put another way, the coordinated press releases were the purpose of the indictment. The criminal justice system was merely the vehicle, albeit one that imbued those press releases with more authority than they would otherwise possess. 

This mental association trick is the left’s go-to tactic when it comes to information warfare. It consists of smearing political opponents by inducing a false mental association with Adolf Hitler, racism, or Vladimir Putin. The regime’s incessant lies from 2016 through the present are sufficient proof: such as Russiagate, Crossfire Hurricane, the Mueller report, Hamilton 68, and the “51 former intelligence officials” scandal in which dozens of former intelligence community personnel lied to Americans that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation — a fact that our three-letter agencies knew to be false at the time. And it’s election season, so all that Russia, Russia, Russia nonsense is being rehashed again by has-beens who haven’t updated their world model since the Berlin wall fell. 

‘Disinformation’ DOJ Style

Though the Kalashnikov indictment doesn’t allege that any Tenet Media content was false, recall that Deputy Attorney General Monaco called it “disinformation” and “propaganda” while Garland called it “hidden Russian government messaging.” Plainly, DOJ wants you to believe that conservative commentators were Russian dupes but doesn’t want you to inquire whether Tenet Media’s content was true. 

Here’s where it gets interesting. On the same day DOJ unsealed the Kalashnikov indictment, it also unsealed a warrant to seize various websites designed as part of a Russian intelligence operation called Doppelganger. According to DOJ’s affidavit of probable cause, Russian state-sponsored entities created spoofs of well-known media sources, including websites for The Washington Post, Fox News, Der Spiegel, and other foreign and domestic outlets. They then planted stories on those spoofed website that were designed, according to the affidavit, to advance Russian interests. 

Though not part of the Kalashnikov indictment, the Doppelganger affidavit provides insight into what DOJ considers to be “disinformation.” Of its 277 pages, nearly 190 are documents obtained by the FBI. These documents were created by Russian intelligence entities for Russian intelligence consumption. They describe a multifaceted influence operation by which Russian intelligence would prepare stories for American and European audiences. 

If you assumed that Russia’s intelligence services prepared false stories to advance their interests at our expense you’d be mistaken. Instead, Russian intelligence specified that their goals included convincing Americans to focus on creating jobs, reducing crime, and reducing illegal immigration at home instead of spending money overseas.

They realized that “[i]n order for this to be effective you need to use a minimum of fake news and a maximum of realistic information.”

And they observe that the Democrat Party consists of “far-left globalists who advocate for perversion of traditional moral and religious values” as compared with Trump supporters, “whose priority is to preserve traditions of the American way of life.” No wonder DOJ doesn’t want you to hear about this. 

As for the news stories DOJ calls “disinformation,” here are a few headlines and subheadlines: “[the U.S.] national debt has already surpassed $33 trillion,”

“Young Americans Face a Poverty-Stricken Old Age,”

and “Migration Crisis Will Bury [Biden’s] Future with Ukraine.”

Do these seem false to you?

When viewed together, the Kalashnikov indictment and Doppelganger affidavit reveal that DOJ’s definition of disinformation is something like: “true and reliable information that is unacceptable to prevailing left-wing orthodoxy.” Thus, while we do have massive problems with debt, illegal immigration, crime, and job creation for citizens, and while I have never heard a compelling and succinct explanation for why we should spend a dime in Ukraine, our government doesn’t want us to receive information that might validate these concerns.

Instead of addressing these concerns, the DOJ has weaponized the criminal justice system to censor views it doesn’t like. 

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If you enjoyed this article, I would appreciate you liking it or sharing it .

-TJ