RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/lawyers-for-radical-change

The transformation of the legal profession marks a fundamental change in American democracy. In the republic’s early days, lawyers provided ballast for stability and served as an anchor against excessive populism. The judiciary’s sober attachment to formal order was a primary reason for giving it the power to review the constitutionality of legislation. Law was the profession most likely to preserve the enduring framework of republican government against the mutable passions of the hour.

Nowadays, lawyers are a force for often-radical progressive change. Nothing symbolizes that shift better than the American Bar Association. Once an embodiment of conservatism, it has been captured by the Left. Its resolutions at its annual meeting constitute a wish list of Democratic Party proposals. It also deploys its influence in the accreditation process of law schools to make them even more monolithically left-wing than they already are.

The reasons for the shift lie, at least in part, in the reorientation of lawyers’ interests. Since the birth of the modern regulatory state, lawyers are no longer primarily the allies of commercial classes, as they were in the early republic, but instead the technocrats and enablers of regulation and redistribution. The more the nation intervenes in economic affairs to regulate and redistribute, the greater slice of compliance costs and transfer payments lawyers can expect to receive. Thus, they cannot be counted on as supporters of property rights or even of a stable rule of law. Their interest lies frequently in dynamic forms of legal transformation and the uncertainty they bring. Far from supporting a sound, established social order, they are likely to seek to undermine it. Only an ideological attachment to older forms of legal orders, like that which Federalist Society members manifest, can call lawyers back to the essential role they play in the civic life of our republic.

Today’s American Bar Association uses its accreditation power to make law schools monolithically left-wing.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18539/protesters-justices-homes

I think interfering with the personal lives of judges, whether in their homes, the restaurants they eat in, or their children’s schools, goes beyond what should be acceptable in a democracy. Such actions, even if constitutionally protected, should be condemned by decent people.

We live in an age where many, on both sides of the political spectrum, believe, and act on the belief, that noble ends justify ignoble means. That of course is a matter of degree. There may well be extreme situations where such intrusive protests might, under some circumstances, be morally acceptable. But this should not apply to protesting unjust judicial decisions of a divided court.

Most non-violent protests are constitutionally protected. Violent ones are not. And there are close cases that may turn on the specific facts, such as entering the Capitol to protest the counting of the votes of presidential electors. (I am representing one such defendant).

So I will protest the morality of those who are demonstrating in front of US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s home, while defending their right to do so peacefully and within constitutional limits.

Pro-abortion protestors have assembled in front of Justice Samuel Alito’s family home in an obvious effort to intimidate or punish him. It will not change his draft opinion regarding the overruling of Roe v. Wade, but the question arises: are such protests legal and/or desirable?

https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/present-at-the-creation-2/

CRB: Since our interview with you three years ago (Spring 2019), a lot has happened. In 2019, you told the CRB’s readers that Donald Trump’s election in 2016 was “a kind of miracle,” and you called him “an unworthy vessel chosen by God to save us from the evil on the Left.” And you finished that passage by remarking, “If he doesn’t win in 2020, I would despair of the future.” Now it’s 2022. Trump didn’t win. Are you despairing?

NP: Well, I have to resist being in despair—it’s my natural default position anyway—but I still feel pretty much the way I felt to begin with. The fact of the matter is, the idea of his being an unworthy vessel for doing God’s work—though of course not meant literally—I think makes sense. And my prime example always was King David, who did many bad things, which, according to the Bible, is why God did not allow him to build the Temple. I used to use this analogy so often that my son John, who was a mild Never Trumper, at some point said, “Stop with the King David already!” But there is now a complication. Trump has done a few things that go beyond the vices that the imperfect vessel is allowed, even while doing God’s work. For example, in 2020 he lost Georgia for the Republicans, which cost them the Senate.

CRB: But you consider that political malpractice? Losing Georgia?

NP: Yes, I do. However, I have to say that I am perfectly prepared to believe that the 2020 election may have been stolen. Yet the outraged reaction to anyone who says that or believes that has been absolutely astounding. Because think of Stacey Abrams, whom I regard as a nothing and a no one, lost her bid for the governorship of Georgia by something like 50,000 votes. And to this day, she has refused to concede, and for that refusal she was turned into a hero of the Democratic Party. So, the idea that it’s shocking beyond belief to cast some doubt on the 2020 presidential election is utterly demented. Anyway, the Democratic Party spent two and a half years and 20 billion dollars or whatever it was, trying to prove not just that Trump had stolen the 2016 election, but that he was actually a Russian agent, that is to say a traitor. The ignominious Representative Adam Schiff walked around for two years saying that he had definitive proof of Trump’s treason, but he couldn’t reveal it because it was classified. Not only did he get away with this, he was elevated. I mean, he became an even more important figure in the Democratic Party than he had been. I think this remains one of the great political disgraces of our time.

CRB: Do you think Trump should run again in ’24?

NP: I was afraid you were gonna ask me that question. Obviously he wants to run. All his virtues, which are considerable in my opinion, are balanced by some serious vices, though nothing as bad as King David’s. Take, for example, his disgraceful treatment of Mike Pence. Pence was as loyal to him as any vice president could have been. And yet when he asked Pence to do something that Pence had no power to do, he treated it as though Pence were refusing to help him when he would have been committing some kind of unconstitutional crime if he had done so. Now I’ll tell you why in the end I come down, with doubts and worries, to answering yes, I think he should run and I would support him if I thought he had a good chance of winning. On the other hand, I believe that Republicans have a very good bench—especially Senator Tom Cotton, but also half a dozen other very impressive young Republicans who would be okay with me. But I can’t shake myself of the feeling that there was something miraculous about the 2016 election….

CRB: May we quote you on that?

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/16/no-data-supports-threat-of-white-supremacists/

Joe Biden will travel to Buffalo on Tuesday, ostensibly to join the upstate New York community in mourning the murders of 10 people at a local grocery store over the weekend. It is, of course, appropriate for Biden in his role as president to grieve with Americans devastated by such a brutal massacre of innocents, especially an attack that from all accounts was racially motivated.

What’s not appropriate is for Biden to use the atrocity as a platform to fuel even more hatred and division in a country ripping apart at the seams in so many ways—but that’s exactly what he will do. The man who launched his 2020 campaign for president touting the lie that Donald Trump commended “very fine” white supremacists after a 2017 protest in Charlottesville can be expected to promote another lie; violent white supremacists and domestic extremists pose a heightened threat to the country.

That tired mantra remains an animating feature of the Biden regime. On his second full day in office, Biden instructed his national security team to devise a whole-of-government approach to combat “domestic terrorism,” largely using the events of January 6, 2021 as the pretext. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki promised a “fact-based analysis upon which we can shape policy” when she announced the initiative on January 22, 2021.

But the 32-page report, issued by Merrick Garland’s Justice Department during a public ceremony in June, was long on rhetoric and very short on facts. 

While noting mass shootings committed by white men in Charleston, Pittsburgh, and El Paso, the analysis failed to prove what it described as a “persistent and emerging” threat of domestic terrorism. (The authors also claimed the “victims [of] the U.S. Capitol” join the “tragic history” of American terror attacks including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing which killed 168 people including children.)

Further, the unrelated handful of acts took place over a six-year period, hardly representative of a systemic pattern of white-on-black violence. Horrible and sickening? Yes. Carnage that merits the harshest punishment possible for the perpetrators? Yes.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/woke-rationale-censorship-joseph-hippolito/

Within one week, the Left’s allies in the political Establishment joined forces in their quest to destroy democracy for the sake of saving democracy.

On April 21, President Barack Obama spoke at a symposium Stanford organized to address social media problems. His recommendations included more government regulation against “toxic information,” which he defined as “lies, conspiracy theories, junk science, quackery, White supremacist, racist tracts, misogynist screeds.”

“You just have to raise enough questions, spread enough dirt, plant enough conspiracy theorizing that citizens no longer know what to believe,” Obama said. “Once they lose trust in their leaders, in mainstream media, in political institutions, in each other, in the possibility of truth, the game’s won.”

On the same day, Hillary Clinton tweeted support for the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which “sets for the first time the rules on how Big Tech should keep users safe online,” especially regarding “misinformation or propaganda in light of Covid-19,” the Financial Times reported.

“For too long, tech platforms have amplified disinformation and extremism with no accountability,” Clinton tweeted. “The EU is poised to do something about it. I urge our transatlantic allies to push the Digital Services Act across the finish line and bolster global democracy before it’s too late.”

Then on April 27, the Department of Homeland Security announced the creation of a Disinformation Governance Board, which would promote the Biden “Administration’s” narrative on “irregular migration and Russia.”

It should surprise nobody that those actions coincided with Elon Musk’s attempt to buy Twitter, increasingly known for banishing users who express opinions that contradict “woke” ideology or the Democratic Party’s policies. But the Left’s panic represents far more than fear over losing a convenient means to control narratives.

Such panic reflects the pervasive influence of an idea that violates the nation’s basic political and cultural values.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/defending-constitution-part-ii-jason-d-hill/

What type of ethos and mindset equipped the Founding Fathers to arrive at the correct moral and political systems that would result in a Constitution that so aptly matched the nature of man? The answer lies in their deepest perception of the nature of existence.

What emotional projection did they enact upon the universe, and how did the ethos they each commonly held translate into a rational philosophy of life? I believe that the Founders held a passionate love for this earth and of humanity. The most blatant expression of their love of man was to be found in the recognition and defense of him as a rational and autonomous, sovereign individual and all that was entailed in the recognition and affirmation of this truth—that he was deserving of life, liberty, and the pursuit of his own individual conception of happiness. Their love of man took the form of a deep respect for him, such that he should choose his own conception of the good life for himself with the explicit understanding that it was impermissible for the state to regulate, coerce, or encourage one conception of the good life over another; each man, based on a rational observation and analysis of his station in life and his values, was to be left alone to determine what was good for him and his life.

The discretionary power to choose from a broad array of values was his and his alone. The Founders started with a civic love for humanity and man that they translated via a political system that secured the individual rights of persons.

The rights, which secured life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, were unassailable.