Connexion
There is no more notable precedent in recent years for an underdog cause toughing it out.
Same-sex marriage advocates lost 32 times in a row before November 2012, when several states then voted in their favor. Yet at no point during that extensive losing streak did they settle for a “compromise,” like civil unions or domestic unions, as their ultimate goal. Neither should we, pro-life Americans, settle for a compromise—in this case, a 15-week abortion ban that (in the words of a prominent presidential candidate) “everybody can live with.”
After all, who is “everybody”? Progressives advocating for abortion at 40-weeks and denying healthcare to babies who survive an abortion? Conservatives who are simultaneously grateful to SCOTUS for effectively nullifying the bad science of 1973 but who still know that life begins at conception? Especially with Roe gone, a 15-week abortion ban that prevents only 3 percent of all abortions and essentially leaves us more pro-abortion than most of Europe is not winning. Winning is going all the way.
After losing referendum after referendum, same-sex marriage advocates didn’t go away; they went for broke. Just three years after winning their first referendum, they achieved total victory on June 26, 2015 when the Supreme Court redefined marriage for all 50 states with Obergefell. And, less than a decade later, there is no meaningful political opposition to same-sex marriage. We must learn an essential lesson from our opposition’s success: a series of defeats at the ballot box does not mean ultimate triumph is impossible.
Fortunately, the winds are in our favor. People are waking up and rejecting the pseudo-science that has been shoved down our throats by an unholy alliance between radical activists and Big Pharma. Recently, the UK, Sweden, Norway, France, and other European nations pumped the brakes on drugging and mutilating children. Similarly, medical research reveals with increasing detail what we’ve already known to be true: Life begins at conception. Improved prenatal imaging and technology allow us to watch it with our own eyes.
No number of weeks picked out of thin air is going to satisfy our adversaries. The anti-life left just wants us to believe that our righteous cause is politically pointless. But we will not go away. According to the latest polling, abortion is the top voting issue for between 5 and 12 percent of voters. There is no doubt this can impact an election in a closely divided America. But there is no way to know for sure if these voters are pro-choice or pro-life, or if, in the end, they’ll vote on another issue come November.
What we know for sure is that killing babies is evil. Due to that conviction, Republican candidates who flounder and fail to act courageously could lose support among pro-life voters. Donald Trump wouldn’t have won in 2016 without SCOTUS taking center stage following the passing of Justice Antonin Scalia. He needs that base to retake the White House, and that base, which resides well outside the Beltway, is nowhere near accepting 15 weeks in a post-Roe America.
President Trump, like many Republicans, disappointed many pro-lifers after Dobbs. But he rightly corrected course by bailing on a 15-week ban. There should not be no such ban, federal or otherwise. Not because such a ban is too pro-life, but because it is not pro-life at all. Let’s trust the truth and go to work.
The post Does the Gay Rights Movement Hold Lessons for Pro-Lifers? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Automatic license plate readers give local police departments powers once available only to the world’s totalitarian regimes.
If you travel any meaningful distance within Illinois via the state’s highways or expressways, a detailed, time-stamped record of your route and approximate destination will be logged by multiple law enforcement agencies.
In part this is due to the state’s massive automatic license plate reader (ALPR) program, which recently expanded to cover approximately 6,600 miles of roadway. The rapid adoption of the technology by local law enforcement agencies has left them with surveillance programs that five years ago most would have thought were the domain of dystopian novels and major cities like London, New York, and Chicago.
In the state of Illinois, as is true for much of the rest of the country, the use of automated license plate readers, commonly referred to as ALPRs, remains largely unregulated; Illinois’s limited restrictions primarily pertain to sharing information that could be used against those seeking abortions or who are in the United States illegally.
Typically placed at intersections or along the side of the road, sometimes attached to police cars, ALPRs log the license plates and other identifying information of passing vehicles. If a passing vehicle is being sought by law enforcement and on a hot list, a notification may be sent out to officers in the area. Otherwise, a vehicle’s data are generally stored in a searchable database for later reference.
“We are seeing them used at all levels of government,” stated Edwin Yohnka, the director of communications and public policy at ACLU Illinois in an early 2023 phone interview with The American Conservative. “The state police have begun a very aggressive campaign of using them on highways and specifically on the expressways in and around Chicago, ostensibly in that instance because they are concerned about…the shootings that have taken place on the expressways over the last couple of years.”
“We’re seeing them used in some instances at the county level where law enforcement officials are using them…as part of regional task forces,” he continued.
In those instances, said Yohnka, the claim is that they are being used to address violent crime in larger communities or in efforts to recover stolen vehicles.
“And finally, at the municipal level,” he said, “there has been over the last twelve to eighteen months a significant push to use the camera systems in communities, you know, whether as large as Chicago or…some suburbs that by comparison are fairly small.”
In such comparatively small communities, Yohnka said, “the cameras are often marketed as a crime-fighting device.”
In the absence of much regulation at the state or national level, policies regarding their use and what if any privacy protections are in place vary considerably by agency and municipality.
“What we’re seeing then,” stated Yohnka, “is an incredible breadth in terms of, for example, how much or how long the data is stored—whether it’s stored for sixty days or ninety days.”
According to Yohnka, when the ACLU-IL did an in-depth analysis of ALPR policies in Illinois several years earlier, some places maintained the data indefinitely.
Given the strict regulations on comparable devices in Illinois such as stingrays, a device that surreptitiously collects data from people’s cell phones, there would seem to be an obvious question of why there is not greater regulation in place regarding the use of ALPRs in Illinois.
In an early 2023 phone interview with TAC, Khadine Bennett, ACLU-IL’s director of advocacy and intergovernmental affairs, explained her organization actually attempted to push for such regulation around the time the stingray legislation was passed but noted the atmosphere for the regulation in that instance was different. Not many jurisdictions at the time were using stingrays, she noted, making it easier to get bipartisan support for regulation.
“When it came time to regulate ALPRs, I think at that point there were probably maybe at least forty localities we knew of based on who responded to a FOIA who were using them,” she said.
When the ACLU-IL attempted to push for the regulation of ALPRs at the state level, Bennett said, ACLU-IL’s starting point in negotiations was a retention period of twenty-four hours for information for vehicles not actively being sought by law enforcement. This, she said, would at least prevent the proliferation of data over time. Law enforcement, however, she said, “started from a place of wanting it forever.”
Subsequently, Bennett said, the ACLU-IL went back and forth with law enforcement over the course of negotiations which came to an end when law enforcement settled on three years and refused to budge. Most localities in Illinois at the time, Bennett said, already had a retention period of 30 days; some had a retention period of only 15 days.
“So at that point,” she said, “our assessment was instead of having this really long retention period of three years…both sides essentially decided not to pursue [it].”
“Also, like there were more law enforcement entities using that kind of technology, so I think once you start using it, there’s a desire to keep using it,” she added.
Yet, even if a retention period of 30 days affords citizens more privacy than a retention period of three years, 30 days can still give law enforcement a considerable window into the private lives of ordinary citizens.
In a recent article published by the Brownstone Institute, Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, commented, “There’s no question that if you get enough license plate readers and you got one on every block, that put together…can create a GPS-tracker-like-record of my movement and even if there’s, you know, only one every ten miles and [I’m] driving around the country, I’m driving from Texas to California or what have you, that can be very revealing as well.”
Bennett, when asked whether people are generally aware of the use of ALPRs in their community, said, “I think it’s mixed in terms of them knowing about it. I think there are maybe some municipalities where folks had no idea, especially if they’re not following what’s happening at the local city council meetings.”
According to Yohnka, two or three years ago it was not uncommon for communities first to become aware of ALPRs in their neighborhood upon seeing them installed well after they were approved. More recently, however, he said, there has been more discussion and debate in at least some local governments in Illinois leading to a little more community awareness.
“When they are proposed, what we’re seeing is a real drive among community members to do, you know, to really kind of do some opposition or ask [for] more information about the privacy policy before they’re adopted,” he stated.
“I think there have been some instances where maybe some ALPRs have been delayed,” said Bennett. “I think we’ve seen cases where community folks have been able to…give input in terms of what the policy is for law enforcement in terms of having some level of transparency and accountability measures in place.”
In most cases, this is all opponents can usually get. Once local law enforcement is sold on the utility of ALPRs, whether as an investigative tool or as a deterrent for criminal activity, the most opponents can often hope for moving forward is a retention period around thirty days and perhaps some agreement to keep records on how the ALPRs are used and assess their effectiveness at a later date.
In the rare instance community members are able to thwart efforts to utilize the devices in their towns, proponents in law enforcement and the media continue the push for ALPRs, sometimes depicting local law enforcement’s inability to use the devices as a hindrance to their ability to fight crime even when evidence demonstrating this is lacking.
Christopher Evans, a city council member from Urbana, Illinois, made this point in a series of email comments in 2023 and 2024.
Through the correspondence he highlighted how Urbana city officials tried to bring ALPRs to Urbana in 2021 to address the uptick in gun violence the city experienced in 2020 and 2021.
This led to considerable debate at city council meetings and within the community. Ultimately, though the city council rejected the implementation of the devices in a four to three vote.
Additionally, as Evans noted, gun violence in Urban began to come down in 2022 and a report from the University of Illinois suggested a neighboring city’s ALPR program seldom facilitated arrests for likely gun felonies.
Nevertheless, Evans pointed out, representatives from local law enforcement have since made misleading statements to the press to garner support for bringing ALPRs to Urbana.
In one example Evans provided, an Urbana police lieutenant downplayed his department’s ability to apprehend a suspect in a case without ALPRs a few days before a suspect was apprehended. In another, the same lieutenant put out a press release in which he credited another town’s ALPRs as having helped apprehend suspects in a well-publicized local robbery even though the devices played absolutely no role.
The post The Dystopian Surveillance Programs Right In America’s Heartland appeared first on The American Conservative.
“It’s usually the losing party that begs for an easy settlement,” an official commented.
The Justice Department is expected to recommend dropping a fraud lawsuit which implicates Dish Network as early as this Friday, according to sources with the FCC. This proposed dismissal comes just before Dish’s CEO and Democratic donor Charlie Ergen and executives at BlackRock were scheduled to be deposed.
The case goes back to a 2015 FCC Spectrum Auction for valuable bandwidth that could be used for wireless internet. To promote competition, the FCC issued a 25 percent discount called “bidding credits” to “very small businesses” which averaged below $15 million in revenue over the previous three years. Between 2011 and 2014, Dish’s revenue ranged from $13.5 to 15 billion. Nonetheless, Dish, with backing from BlackRock, financed two ostensibly small companies Northstar Wireless and SNR Wireless, which went on to win the auctions, with discounts worth over $3 billion.
SNR and Northstar acknowledged the financing, but certified they had total independence. An FCC inquiry later found “persuasive…evidence” that the two companies served “as arms of Dish,” which had “de facto control.” The FCC, under Ajit Pai, doubted “these companies are, or could ever become, truly independent enterprises” and revoked the credits in 2020.
A senior FCC official familiar with the process tells me, “multi-billion dollar corporations setting up shell corporations to get subsidies designed for ‘very small businesses’ demands serious scrutiny in court.” This scrutiny comes in the form of a qui tam suit filed by Vermont National Telephone Company, which lost the auction to Dish and its financed “very small businesses.” Qui tam actions are filed by private parties on behalf of the U.S. Government, which will recover the bulk of defrauded money under the False Claims Act. Both the Justice Department and FCC supported the lawsuit, noting there was “a substantial interest in any discovery produced in this case that relates to Defendants’ alleged failure to disclose material facts to the Commission.”
After years of procedural and technical wrangling, a federal district court judge dismissed the case in 2021 arguing fraud had not been properly alleged and the government was not harmed. However, last November, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit unanimously reversed and reinstated the case. The three-judge panel unanimously held that the applications “contained false certifications that Northstar and SNR had disclosed all agreements, arrangements, and understandings related to the licenses” made a viable case for fraud.
The case was set to begin trial in February with both Charlie Ergen as well as representatives for BlackRock set to testify under oath. This was delayed; just as the trial was set to begin, the Justice Department informed the parties and the FCC that it would seek to dismiss the case and let Dish and its shell companies off with no penalties.
Alluding to this case and others like it, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) wrote a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday noting concerns “that the Justice Department, after initially declining, will intervene and dismiss during the late stages of litigation after the relator has spent years and resources litigating the case.” He noted this was both a waste of resources and at odds with the False Claims Act’s purpose of “empower[ing] private citizens to help the government fight and deter fraud.”
“I’ve never heard of a party in any case—government or private—to back down just after a favorable ruling. It’s usually the losing party that begs for an easy settlement,” the FCC official added. Ergen and his wife are major Democratic donors, which has been widely speculated to be a cause for the favorable treatment of Dish by past Democratic administrations. Additionally, while emphasizing he has no first-hand knowledge, the FCC official speculated that Dish’s fights with SpaceX over spectrum may have influenced the decision. SpaceX’s Starlink and Dish have been in a protracted fight over an unrelated spectrum dispute. Musk tweeted “Charlie Ergen is trying to steal the 12GHz band meant for space Internet. Not cool.”
The FCC is an independent agency, and ultimately ruled against Dish on that issue. “The Biden Administration has almost universally sided against Elon Musk’s businesses over the last year.” While it could not fully control FCC’s ruling on Starlink, “if the DOJ protects Dish from the fraud lawsuit—this could sidestep the FCC to harm Starlink,” the official speculated.
While the reason remains undeclared, the Justice Department is inviting speculation by reversing its position and dropping a case implicating a prominent Democratic donor on the eve of trial.
The post Why Is Biden’s Justice Department Going Soft on Democrat Donors? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Why a transpartisan ticket could still happen, although it looked likelier six months ago.
Running mate announcements usually come around July or August. During this interlude between the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries, rumors are flurrying that presumptive nominee Donald Trump will choose former contenders Vivek Ramaswamy or the recently engaged Tim Scott. Donald Trump Jr. has indicated his preference for ideological alignment with the suggestions of J.D. Vance or Tucker Carlson. Some surveyors, those uninitiated in the spirit of Trump’s second candidacy, suggest Kristi Noem or Elise Stefanik. And others slow down the internet with the suggestion of Nikki Haley.
Outside the safe predictions, there remains the wild card pick of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Through his switch from the Democratic ticket to an independent run, the candidate has already indicated that he prioritizes the end of getting to the White House over the means.
Some adjacent to Trump world don’t seem to think it’s such a crazy idea. Days after Kennedy announced his candidacy in April, Steve Bannon said he received a standing ovation from a “hardcore MAGA, War Room posse crowd” when he suggested that Kennedy would be worthy of Trump’s consideration were Kari Lake not available. Longtime political operative Roger Stone, a week before Kennedy’s announcement, floated the idea in a Substack post that, according to him, elicited more public comment than anything he’d ever written.
The problem with this idea is Trump’s penchant for loyalty. Kennedy wrote the foreword to the January 2024 title Trump’s War on Capitalism, an autopsy critical of the administration’s policies written by Ronald Reagan’s first Office of Management and Budget director, David Stockman. Kennedy also suggested in January that Trump overruled his own instincts in his treatment of Covid and the subsequent lockdowns.
Some who were once supportive of the idea have backed away. Stone, one of the original public faces of the proposition, now tells The American Conservative that “dynamics have changed dramatically since the time I mused about RFK as a potential running mate for Donald Trump.” Stone’s April article relied on the potentially positive electoral effects of a “‘bipartisan’ unity ticket,” citing John McCain’s alleged interest in tapping the independent Democrat Joe Lieberman as his running mate in his 2008 bid.
Stone believes that the proposed ticket is no longer “viable or plausible.” He also worries that Kennedy’s candidacy could mirror Ross Perot’s effect on the election results of George H.W. Bush in 1992: “All of the legitimate polling shows that if RFK succeeds in getting on the ballot, he draws a disproportionate number of votes from Trump, rather than Biden or whoever the Democrats replace Biden with.”
Former Trump administration official Douglas Macgregor told TAC back in August for its profile of Kennedy that the pair would make “a very powerful combination” in a third party run. Now he says the idea is “not plausible.” Macgregor continues, “I wish it were because it would undoubtedly sweep the opposition away, but to date the two men have been unable to even meet for the discussion.”
And according to our most recent interview, Kennedy himself does not seem to be interested in such a discussion. When asked whether he would be remotely interested in running with Trump, he replied, “I would say the answer to that is no. I don’t think my marriage would survive it.” (Kennedy is married to actress Cheryl Hines of Curb Your Enthusiasm fame.)
Kennedy’s popularity with voters under the age of 45 and independents poses a threat to both Trump and Biden. On the question of which candidate will be hurt more by Kennedy’s candidacy, his own description of the political orientation of his supporters corroborates Stone’s fear.
After he transitioned to an independent candidate, Kennedy said, “what we immediately saw was the enthusiasm of our voters increase. We had a lot of voters who like my campaign but were very wary of getting involved with the Democratic party.” Between now and election day, Kennedy hopes to increase his appeal among baby boomers by making more appearances on network television. In the meantime, “the younger kids talk to their parents [and] we’re seeing a lot of conversions.”
Those who are wagering on a Trump-Kennedy ticket can’t be blamed for thinking outside the box. The two men share similar instincts on trade, foreign policy, election integrity, and, more recently, immigration. They talk the same game about excluding neoconservatives from the White House and administrative agencies, curbing the influence of the military-industrial complex, and spreading out childhood vaccinations. Trump said in June that he respects Kennedy; Kennedy has not made Trump a primary target of his campaign. On January 27, anonymous sources told the New York Post the Trump team had already reached out to Kennedy about joining the ticket, which the Trump campaign denied.
Kennedy says he doesn’t want the job. But would he turn down the offer?
The post RFK for VP? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Settlements should go to the injured party or the people’s government, not ideological third-party organizations.
During the Obama administration, a concerning trend emerged within the Justice Department. Settlement funds from federal lawsuits were being diverted not to victims or the U.S. Treasury, but to third-party organizations, often ideologically aligned with the administration. This practice effectively transformed legal settlements into a covert funding mechanism, circumventing Congressional oversight and the will of the American people.
This trend was halted in 2017 by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a decision I and many others applauded as a step toward ensuring settlement funds are used to address the harm caused by wrongdoing. However, under the Biden administration, there has been a troubling reversal with these third-party payouts reinstated. This decision raises ethical questions and signifies an apparent disregard for legislative authority and fiscal responsibility.
My bill, H.R.788, the Stop Settlement Slush Funds Act, aims to permanently end this misuse of settlement funds. It prohibits government officials from entering into settlement agreements that direct payments to entities other than the United States, except where necessary to remedy the harm caused. This bill is not just a legal formality; it is a critical safeguard for the integrity of our justice system and the proper allocation of public funds.
The historical record is littered with past instances of settlement funds abuse. In 2014, the Justice Department reached an almost $17 billion settlement with Bank of America over its role in the sale of mortgage-backed securities in the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis. While the settlement aimed to address serious financial misconduct, much of the funds were diverted to third-party non-profit organizations instead of victims or the U.S. Treasury. This allocation of funds was rightly criticized because it bypassed Congressional authority over government spending and raised questions about the potential for these funds to be used for purposes unrelated to the damages in a lawsuit. Essentially, this practice allowed the Executive Branch to direct large sums of money to favored groups without legislative oversight, undermining the appropriations process defined by the Constitution.
Legal experts have identified these practices as unlawful and unethical. By diverting funds away from victims or the Treasury, the Justice Department is using its power to allocate public funds based on political preference, not legal merit or public interest. Settlements in legal cases are typically meant to compensate victims or rectify the harm caused. Redirecting these funds to third parties may mean the actual victims or affected parties do not receive the full measure of justice or compensation they are due.
The “Stop Settlement Slush Funds Act” is a response to ensure settlement funds are used transparently and appropriately. This bill is designed to uphold the principles of justice and ensure every dollar obtained through settlements serves the public interest. No matter who is in the White House, the Justice Department’s enforcement actions should support justice, and not be co-opted towards partisan ends.
The post Ending Slush Fund Settlements: Protecting the Public Purse From Partisan Abuses appeared first on The American Conservative.
Remedies are available to communities that are unhappy with policing quality.
There’s never a cop around when you need one, goes the adage; judging from the cross-complaints by various racial and ethnic groups against each other these days, the old saying must be true.
While President Joe Biden has said that white supremacist terrorism is the deadliest threat to the United States, Asian-Americans might differ. In 2023 so far, there have been 2,500 reported incidents of black-on-Asian crime in the United States, both “hate” and the garden-variety kind. Asian women were victims in 60 percent of the cases, and 80 percent of the perpetrators were black males.
In 2022 the Anti-Defamation League recorded the most incidents of assault, vandalism and harassment of Jews in its 110-year history. While there were fewer similar incidents against Arabs, Muslims, and Sikhs (often mistaken for Muslims), the number (431) was still significant. Indian-American convenience store owners are victims of both break-ins and shoplifting that police in Jersey City’s “India Square” neighborhood say they can do nothing about.
Meanwhile, it is widely believed that black men are disproportionately the victims of police violence, although the facts tell a different tale; in 2021, those who described themselves as “liberal” or “very liberal” overwhelmingly thought that between 100 and 10,000 unarmed black men were fatally shot by police that year, when the actual number was—29.
With this wide disparity in views, it is perhaps time to consider a variation on the Daniel Patrick Moynihan quip, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts.” If a one-size-fits-all police force doesn’t work for every racial and ethnic group, how about bespoke gendarmes, cut to the measurements of the neighborhoods and populations they cover?
In other words, shouldn’t every group be entitled to its own militia, but not to their own police? The idea isn’t so far-fetched as it seems, and even has legal and historical precedent to support it.
Contrary to the view that there is only one militia in the United States—the National Guard—the states have the power to recognize companies on their own, and some do. In Massachusetts, the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company was chartered by the state legislature in 1638 and remains in existence today. Massachusetts also recognizes what it refers to as the “unorganized militia,” which is comprised of “all able-bodied citizens and all other able-bodied persons who have declared their intention to become citizens.” They can be called into service in times of war, invasion, threats to homeland security and “assisting civil officers in the execution of the laws.”
The latter function is a vestige of English common law that dates from the ninth century, when an official responsible for keeping the peace would assemble a group referred to as the posse comitatus (from the Latin for “power of the county”) to respond to an emergency, such as a riot or the pursuit of a criminal. The practice was formalized by the Statute of Winchester in 1285, which “preserved and codified well-tried features from earlier systems, and in particular…reaffirmed the principle of local responsibility for policing,” according to T.A. Critchley’s A History of Police in England and Wales. That law made it “a duty of everyone to maintain the King’s peace, and it was open to any citizen to arrest an offender.” If an “offender was not caught red-handed, hue and cry was to be raised.” This latter term referred to an ancient Saxon practice that required all able-bodied men, upon hearing the outcry of the constable or a private citizen who witnessed a crime, to join in pursuit of the suspect until he was apprehended and delivered to the sheriff. (Kyle Rittenhouse had more than a little history on his side during civil unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 2020, when he shot three men, two fatally, despite the media consensus that he would be found guilty of homicide and other criminal charges.)
The states of which our republic is composed share their monopoly police powers only grudgingly, however, and sometimes refuse to do so for prejudicial reasons. In the years leading up to the Civil War, a Massachusettsian Irish-American militia company—the Emmet Guard—was disbanded by Governor Henry Gardner of the nativist and anti-Catholic Know Nothing party; “Put none but Americans on guard!” was the Know Nothings’ rallying cry. The company continued on its own as an independent self-supporting militia, and offered their services to President Lincoln, who accepted. They were added as Company C to the Massachusetts Third Battalion of Rifles in 1861 and fought with distinction at Annapolis, Maryland, during the “early days of gloom and trouble” for the Union; they continued to serve after their term ended.
The inadequacy of publicly-constituted police forces to protect American citizens can be traced to several sources: efforts to defund the police and transfer resources to softer approaches such as the “holistic model of public safety” proposed by the Minneapolis City Council, which failed by a 56.2 to 43.8 percent vote in November of 2021; the low esteem and high risk that comes with the job of law enforcement; and pressure on municipal budgets generally. Regardless of the cause, the current public safety shortfall casts man back into that state of war described by Thomas Hobbes, when men “live without a common power to keep them all in awe,” and life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Private militia companies would of course have to remain subject to the ultimate authority of the states that chartered them, but that would lead to the end long desired by those who want to read a right of personal self-defense out of the Second Amendment; well-regulated militias, with training in firearms safety; non-lethal weapons or properly licensed lethal weapons; and background checks for personnel.
With that sort of civilian force patrolling Asian, Jewish, Indian, and other neighborhoods whose residents are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators, those who must defend themselves in the absence of the ordered liberty that is supposed to be guaranteed by their governments might stand a fighting chance.
The post Two, Three—Many Well-Regulated Militias appeared first on The American Conservative.
School choice at the primary and secondary levels will have salutary effects for colleges and universities.
Ever since June of 2022, when Arizona became the first state to legalize universal school choice, the adoption of this K–12th grade reform has accelerated beyond even its longtime boosters’ wildest dreams. Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah, and West Virginia have all enacted policies that fund families to educate their kids, not just at the local public school, but at a private school, a homeschool, an online academy, a tutoring service, or a parent-run micro-school.
According to recent polling from RealClear Opinion Research, which surveyed 1,000 registered voters, the legalization of school choice is no longer just a conservative or Republican priority; 66 percent of Democrats and 69 percent of independents now say they too are in favor of it. Eight states with partial school choice programs—Alabama, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Wyoming—are seen as likely to make them universal within a year, and Governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, is working to expand choice for purple Pennsylvania.
As school choice policies proliferate, education experts have naturally focused on associated K–12th grade issues. How, for example, can the growing number of families who want to homeschool, either on their own or in neighborhood collaboratives, evaluate the effectiveness of various online courses? Should private tutors be certified? And to what extent should homeschooled children and those in small private schools have access to public school athletic and science facilities?
In any case, over the coming decade, the growing number of children who are being educated outside of a traditional public school—or even outside a conventional private or parochial school—will be headed for the next level. The changes which are now happening to primary and secondary schooling will have profound implications for higher education.
Take admissions, for example. It was one thing for college and university admissions officers to deal with applicants from diverse academic backgrounds when that meant the differences between a traditional independent school and the typical public school. But with the rise of micro-schools, online academies, and other programs using curricula matched to the unique learning styles and interests of each child, identifying those students who are ready for college becomes a very different challenge.
According to the National Microschooling Center, there are already an estimated 125,000 micro-schools operating across the U.S., collectively teaching around 1.5 million students. As Kerry McDonald, Education Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Freedom, has observed, the education one may provide is “nothing like” what another may do.
At the very least, the emerging K–12 landscape will require many colleges and universities to reverse their position on objective testing, which has become increasingly unfashionable in recent years. Beginning in 2022, MIT took the lead in requiring applicants to once again submit their SAT or ACT scores, saying the university views these exams as the most effective way to identify talented students in today’s environment.
If one thing will likely be different about the coming return to testing, it is the availability of more diverse assessments, allowing admissions departments to define for themselves what they mean by “prepared” for college. Already more than 250 religious and mission-oriented schools, such as Hillsdale, accept the 8-year-old Classical Learning Test (CLT), which emphasizes mastery of ancient literature and history, in place of the SAT or ACT.
As for the college experience itself, it will likely be shorter for many applicants. With so many K-12th grade students now being educated in ways that best match their interests and learning abilities, many will arrive on campus far more advanced in their knowledge of college level material than today’s freshmen. A recent graduate of a STEM focused micro-school, for example, could easily be ready for upper-level courses from day one. Just as someone who has come from one of the increasingly popular “forest-sited” micro-schools across the US may already know more about ecology than someone with a bachelor’s in it.
While a more condensed undergraduate education, reduced from the equivalent of four years to perhaps three or even less, means fewer nights and weekends for the lighter side of college life, it also means the cost of a degree will be significantly less than it otherwise would have been. And for the more elite colleges and universities, it means the ability to accept a larger number of applicants without having to expand the school’s physical plant.
Research suggests that more students going to college from K–12th grade placements suited to their individual learning styles will significantly reduce the current high percentage of undergraduates suffering from anxiety, depression, and other emotional disorders. In a recent study titled “The Effects of School Choice on Mental Health” for the journal School Effectiveness and School Improvement, Western Carolina University Professor Angela Dills found that high school students in states with school choice were less prone to suicide and had a lower likelihood of mental health problems later in life.
The ability of school choice to accommodate diverse learning styles also promises to restore the lopsided gender balance which has developed at most colleges and universities, with the ratio of women to men averaging 60 percent to 40 percent. A major reason for this, according to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, is that the structure of public education, which requires students to sit quietly for long periods, academically favors young girls, whose ability to concentrate develops much sooner than boys’. The result is that young males not only do less well in class but are therefore less qualified for financial assistance when they apply to college.
Finally, school choice will enable colleges and universities to realize their desire for a more diverse student body without having to violate the recent Supreme Court ruling declaring affirmative action policies unconstitutional. According to a 2021 study by Albert Cheng of the University of Arkansas and Paul E. Peterson at Harvard, minority students from lower-income households who have publicly funded access to alternative K–12th grade placements are 30 percent more likely to go onto college and, once admitted, 70 percent more likely to get a degree.
People may think of school choice as a conservative policy, says Peter Murphy, vice-president of Albany, New York’s Invest in Education, but it “is one of the most progressive policies I can think of. It gives low-income families access to the same kinds of schooling as rich kids.”
The post The Coming of K–12 School Choice Will Also Change Higher Education appeared first on The American Conservative.
Why do the statue warriors come after some perceived villains, and not others?
In northern Mexico City, about three miles west of the Palace of San Lazaro, stands a tall monument topped with a bronze statue of Cuauhtemoc, the last Huey Tlatoani, or emperor, of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. On the base of the monument, which was erected almost four centuries after Cuauhtemoc’s defeat at the hands of the Spanish conquistadors, is the following inscription:
A la memoria de Quautemoc y de los guerreros que combatieron heroicamente en defensa de su patria.
Or, in English:
To the memory of Cuauhtemoc and the warriors who battled heroically in defense of their fatherland.
Cuauhtemoc was born into a royal house that ruled over about six million people, from a capital whose size and wealth rivaled the best cities of Western Europe. All of this changed in November of 1519, when the emperor made the ill-advised decision to let Hernan Cortes, who had arrived with a force of about 600 Spaniards and 20,000 Tlaxcaltecs, into the capital for negotiations. In a failed bid to preserve his own life, Montezuma ended up governing as Cortes’s puppet for several months while the Spaniards ransacked the city for gold, until at last they were expelled in an uprising led by the fallen emperor’s brother, Cuitlahuac.
Cuitlahuac died of smallpox after only 80 days on the throne, and the chiefs of the Mexica proclaimed his 25-year-old cousin, Cuauhtemoc, the new Huey Tlatoani. Meanwhile, Cortes had retreated to his base in Tlaxcala, a hardy indigenous republic that had decided to support the Spaniards’ bid to take the place of the Mexica as overlords of what would later be called New Spain.
Within a year, Cortes was back in the Valley of Mexico with an even larger army. All of Cuauhtemoc’s former advantages were gone. Most of his vassals, upon seeing that a new power had arrived in their world, had leapt at the chance to rebel against him, and there were now as many natives attacking Mexico-Tenochtitlan as defending it. Meanwhile the capital, which stood in the middle of a lake and could only be reached by long causeways, was not quite as isolated as before, thanks to a Spanish shipwright named Martin Lopez, who had taught the Tlaxcaltec carpenters how to build lake brigantines, which they carried over the mountains in pieces and reassembled on the shores of Lake Texcoco.
Notwithstanding all these advantages, plus such wonder weapons as steel swords, steel breastplates, horses, and cannon, the siege of Tenochtitlan was no easy battle for Cortes’s men, and the Mexica held out for 79 days. Early on they even won a small victory, when two brigantines chased a fleet of canoes into a reedy thicket, ran aground on submerged palisades, and were taken in an ambush. When the Spaniards had reached the main island, they were often lured into narrow alleyways, or backed against canals, where their weapons and tactics availed them little. More than a hundred Spaniards were taken alive in these skirmishes and sacrificed to the gods; their heads and hands were sent to the Spaniards’ native allies to intimidate them into deserting. It was only with great effort that Cortes kept his army together.
The battle did not end until about half of Tenochtitlan’s inhabitants were dead, and seven-eighths of the city had been razed to the ground. On August 13, 1521, Cuauhtemoc surrendered, fully expecting to be ritually killed in much the same way as his own empire’s defeated foes. Instead, Cortes spared his life—for the next four years. In 1525 he was implicated, along with several other Aztec nobles, in a conspiracy to assassinate Cortes, and the men were hanged from a ceiba tree.
William H. Prescott, the grandson of the hero of Bunker Hill, whose 1843 History of the Conquest of Mexico was largely responsible for introducing these events to the English-speaking world, had this to say of Guatemozin (i.e., Cuauhtemoc):
Such was the sad end of Guatemozin, the last emperor of the Aztecs, if we might not rather call him “the last of the Aztecs,” since, from this time, broken in spirit and without a head, the remnant of the nation resigned itself, almost without a struggle, to the stern yoke of its oppressors. Among all the names of barbarian princes, there are few entitled to a higher place on the roll of fame than that of Guatemozin. He was young, and his public career was not long; but it was glorious. He was called to the throne in the convulsed and expiring hours of the monarchy, when the banded nations of Anahuac and the fierce European were thundering at the gates of the capital. It was a post of tremendous responsibility; but Guatemozin’s conduct fully justified the choice of him to fill it. No one can refuse his admiration to the intrepid spirit which could prolong a defence of his city, while one stone was left upon another; and our sympathies, for the time, are inevitably thrown more into the scale of the rude chieftain, thus battling for his country’s freedom, than into that of his civilized and successful antagonist.
Are these the words of an airy idealist, filled with romantic fantasies of the noble savage? A man so eager to make out the Europeans as villains that he was willing to overlook the brutality of Cuauhtemoc’s empire, and the 20,000 or so human sacrifices it performed each year? Hardly. In another passage, Prescott writes:
The Indian empire was in a manner conquered by Indians…. The Aztec monarchy fell by the hands of its own subjects, under the direction of European sagacity and science. Had it bean united, it might have bidden defiance to the invaders. As it was, the capital was dissevered from the rest of the country, and the bolt, which might have passed off comparatively harmless, had the empire been cemented by a common principle of loyalty and patriotism, now found its way into every crack and crevice of the ill-compacted fabric, and buried it in its own ruins. Its fate may serve as a striking proof, that a government, which does not rest on the sympathies of its subjects, cannot long abide; that human institutions, when not connected with human prosperity and progress, must fall – if not before the increasing light of civilization, by the hand of violence; by violence from within, if not from without. And who shall lament their fall?
Basically, William H. Prescott had a clear enough view of history to see that men worthy of admiration can be found on all sides of a conflict. And while he could hardly regret the final outcome of the war, he could, at the same time, admire the courage and skill that Cuauhtemoc and the other Mexican warriors showed in defense of their homeland, and of the only way of life they had ever known.
Nobody in present-day Mexico is trying to bring back the Aztec system of government, or the religious rites that flourished beneath it. At the same time, nobody is trying to tear down Cuauhtemoc’s statues, or scrub his name off of streets and plazas. Most Mexicans seem to recognize the injustice of erasing a man from history because he didn’t live up to a later culture’s moral principles.
At least, they recognize the injustice of doing that to a non-white man. Europeans such as Cortes himself are different. There are hardly any statues of Cortes left in Mexico, and those that remain are frequent targets of vandalism. This, in a country where everyone alive today, of whatever political persuasion, has a lot more in common with the Spanish viceroys than with the regime that they replaced.
Meanwhile, one country to the north, it is Confederate heroes who have borne the brunt of the double-standard. All of the virtues that Prescott praised in Cuauhtemoc are also to be found in Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, James Longstreet, and Nathan Bedford Forrest. Like the Mexica during Cortes’s final siege, they showed great courage and resourcefulness in defending a homeland that—however barbaric its way of life might look to future generations—commanded in them the most natural feelings of patriotic duty. They faced a more numerous, technologically superior enemy, and they held out much longer than might have been expected.
“Honour thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land, which the LORD thy God giveth thee.”
To Christians and Jews, this is one of the Ten Commandments revealed from heaven at Sinai. But it is also ingrained so deeply in mankind’s sense of natural law that one would search in vain for a pagan nation for whom filial piety is not a central virtue. Most of the human beings who ever lived have never seriously doubted the moral lessons that they received, by word and by example, from their parents and older generations.
If you accept the worldview of enlightenment liberalism—or, for that matter, the worldviews of medieval Christendom and biblical Israel that lie at its root—then you will recognize limits to this virtue. Gideon destroyed his father’s altar to Baal; King Asa burned his mother’s idol of Asherah; both are praised by the Biblical narrator for these deeds. Yet Gideon only destroyed the Baal altar after an angel told him to do it, and Asa probably had temple priests to turn him against the cult of Asherah. Left wholly to themselves, neither of these men would have acted; our culture puts hard limits on what even the best of us can do.
Robert E. Lee grew up in the American South, at a time when slavery had been an ordinary part of life since long before the birth of anyone then living. Yet slavery existed uneasily in a nation that justified its own founding with a claim that “all men are created equal.” Meanwhile, that pro- and anti-slavery ministers could peach from the same Bible only added to the confusion.
Over the first 55 years of his life, Lee entertained many doubts about the morality of slavery, and he even manumitted several of his own slaves in 1862. Lee also viewed the secession of the southern states as a dangerous mistake. Yet when the matter came to war, he never doubted which side he would have to fight on: Virginia was his homeland, and defending Virginia from invasion was his duty, and the pricklier points of the slave question didn’t change any of that.
Nathan Bedford Forrest is a harder man to honor than Lee; his brutality toward black Union soldiers during the war, and his role in founding the Ku Klux Klan after it was over, do not reflect well on his character. But like Lee, Jackson, and Longstreet, as a soldier Forrest was ultimately a man fighting to defend his homeland, and the only way of life he had ever known, from violent disruption by outsiders.
When the war broke out in 1861, the 39-year-old Bedford Forrest left behind his prosperous life as a plantation owner and livestock trader to enlist as a private in the Confederate Army (he was the only soldier on either side of the war to be promoted from private all the way to lieutenant general). This sort of courage and dutifulness is nothing to wink at, even in a man whose values are offensive to our own.
If leftists continue to shine the best possible light on Aztec war heroes who literally cut people’s hearts out and offered them to their gods, then they have no real basis for wailing on Forrest. Cuauhtemoc, of course, grew up in a world where opposition to human sacrifice didn’t exist at all. In his country, courage in battle, honest conduct within one’s own social class, and fierce loyalty to one’s tribe were the only virtues—and they were virtues that he displayed par excellence during his short and chaotic life.
To the fair-minded observer, Robert E. Lee, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and Cuauhtemoc have much in common with each other—and with many heroes who are generally seen on the “right” side of history, such as Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, or Volodymyr Zelensky. It is of course rare for leftists to see things this way. They seldom ask about a man’s character, the complex amalgamation of virtues and vices that drive his conduct. Instead, they ask mainly about his race and his social background. Cuauhtemoc and his countrymen were people of color; thus they can only be victims, not oppressors. General Lee? He was a brutal racist.
Defend Lee’s statues, this sort of thinking seems to suggest, and a moment later you’ll be trying to put up statues of Hitler and Himmler. But it is very easy for a thoughtful person to make a distinction here. Hitler and Himmler didn’t grow up in a world where it was acceptable to gas the Jews. The Nazis, and the Communists, fought to introduce new evils to society, not to defend a cultural heritage to which they were bound, despite its flaws, by ancestral custom and natural law. An enormous gulf lies between the Nazis’ death camps and Cuauhtemoc’s human sacrifice, and an even larger one between Nazis and the Confederate generals.
Yet the political left has a way of looking at violence and oppression that effaces all these distinctions. It goes somewhat like this: white on white violence is bad, white on non-white violence is worse, non-white on white violence is unthinkable, and non-white on non-white violence is ignored.
The rule is simple, but it explains a lot of things. Why do anti-gun activists care more about mass shootings (which are mostly white-on-white) than the much deadlier problem of urban gang violence? Because nonwhite-on-nonwhite violence is ignored. Why did the 2015 Charleston church massacre stay at the top of the news for so much longer than did most other mass shootings? Because its perpetrator was white, and its victims were black. Why did the 2016 sniper attack that killed five policemen, and wounded nine others, at a Dallas BLM rally get dropped by the press like a hot rock? Because it was the other way around.
This rule even works at the largest scales of geopolitics. During the Cold War, the United States allied with Red China against the USSR because the nonwhite-on-nonwhite violence of the former was more palatable, to America’s liberal elites, than the white-on-white violence of the latter. Yet the USSR, despised as it was, never had to face anywhere near the hatred from American liberals that the pre-1994 regime in South Africa endured. After all, even though white-on-white violence is bad, white-on-nonwhite violence is worse. And since nonwhite-on-white violence is unthinkable, when people in present-day South Africa sing about killing white farmers, the New York Times writes an op-ed about how the song isn’t hateful.
This same principle explains why minimizing the Holocaust (white-on-white violence) will ruin your career, while minimizing Aztec human sacrifice (nonwhite-on-nonwhite, except for a few Spaniards at the very end) usually won’t. It also explains why it’s so much easier to have a statue of Cuauhtemoc than one of Robert E. Lee. After all, those hundreds of towns and villages that had to send tribute of boys and girls for slavery and sacrifice to Mexico-Tenochtitlan were of course nonwhite, but so were their rulers. So all is forgiven.
Don’t you know your Kendithought? Aren’t you aware that oppression requires whiteness? Hernan Cortes and his companions? Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, James Longstreet, and Nathan Bedford Forrest? Those men were evil incarnate. People with a healthy respect for our collective human past—or even just an ounce or two of common sense—will recognize this double standard for the absurdity it is.
The statues of Cuauhtemoc should keep standing, and the statues of Robert E. Lee should also keep standing, and for the same reasons. If we are to learn from the past, and not use it as a mere political football, then we need to preserve the memory of great men in their full human complexity—both admiring their greatness and recognizing their flaws.
We also need to acknowledge that all of us, whatever our race, are subject to the same human failings and weaknesses. Had we lived in the past, we would most assuredly have believed things, and done things, that we find dreadful in the present. And as we live in the present, we will believe things, and do things, that people will find dreadful in the future. If we want future generations to acknowledge our strengths, and not just condemn our weaknesses—to refrain from bulldozing our statues—then we had better learn to extend the same courtesy to the generations that came before us.
The post The Color of Oppression and the Statues We Tear Down appeared first on The American Conservative.
The struggle for life is the struggle against unaccountable administrators.
A Washington, D.C., jury on Tuesday found five pro-life protestors guilty of felony conspiracy against rights and violation of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act for their protest at an abortion clinic in October 2020, according to a Justice Department press release. The protestors, members of the left-wing Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (PAAU) group, will face sentences of up to eleven years in prison, pending appeals.
The group chose to blockade the practice of Cesare Santangelo in the well-heeled Foggy Bottom neighborhood after an undercover video showed the abortionist suggesting that he would leave the survivors of surgical abortion to die. This is not only monstrous, but also against the law. The PAAU blockade must be regarded, then, as something akin to danda justice—a private party stepping in extralegally to right a wrong the state has declined to pursue.
The law is only as good as its enforcement, and its enforcers. We live in the disco era of prosecution. At the federal level, our brave legal pioneers are busy running interference for the infanticide industry—explicitly—while working hand-in-glove with the state security apparatus to do down anyone posing the threat of accountability from the body politic. At the state level, prosecutors are equally busy chasing political whales. We accept that the law is the law, even if we think it is a bad law that should be changed. Yet why do the PAAU protestors each face more than a decade of prison time while Santangelo sits pretty in his swanky abattoir without so much as a how-do-you-do from law enforcement?
Following the Dobbs decision, the parameters of the next stage of the fight for life are beginning to come clear. Statewide referenda are proving to be bad vehicles for pro-life measures, while laws passed the usual way through state legislatures are meeting with more success. (This should be unsurprising, given what we know about the relative strength of each team’s get-out-the-vote operations.) The courts, even courts with conservative judges, are unreliable guarantors. (You may be getting the sense that Dick the Butcher had a point.) Perhaps above all, the pro-life apparatus must articulate a positive agenda rather than ceding the premises of the struggle.
Yet the struggle does not occur in a vacuum. If the pro-life cause is at the mercy of a politicized law enforcement regime, gains in law are not secure. A friendly administration should not be a cause for complacency; if your safety depends on the policeman liking you, you are not in fact safe. You are certainly not free. The struggle to enshrine the right to life for the unborn has an identity of interest with the struggle to revive the ancient liberal principles of rule of law and equality before the law. In our own time, that struggle takes the form of the war on the administrative state—trimming its powers and increasing its accountability to the actually political portion of the state. Popular sovereignty and the primacy of the political are, as things stand, allied causes to the right to life.
Western political culture has undergone erosion and degradation in a variety of ways over the past two or three generations. Politicians have blithely reintroduced the rule of men into arenas previously governed by law. A fog of confusion about what governments actually do has descended upon our political and governing classes, who seem incapable of understanding that they are rulers rather than activists. The actual business of ruling has been shifted over to bureaucrats who are unresponsive to the normal workings of politics and who, unsurprisingly, are corporately not very interested in respecting your political rights.
As we have been reminded recently, we live in a dark moment. The same forces covering for industrial baby murder are making themselves ever less accountable and responsive to the political will of the people. No wonder institutional trust—and, consequently, institutional affiliation—is at an all-time low. The temptation to drop out is becoming ever stronger. We face the prospect of being the first nation in history to stop existing as such, not because of invasion or disaster, but simply because everyone in it stopped thinking it existed, or that they were part of it. Yet the simple fact of the matter is that things will not improve if we stop trying.
We wish the PAAU five the best in the appeal process. Yet even in the case of their success, we must not lose sight of these two central points: Victories not secured in law are impermanent, and the struggle for the rights of the unborn is of a piece with the struggle to preserve popular sovereignty. If a candidate tells you he is for life but not against our state security apparatus and politicized law enforcement system, he is lying to you.
The post Sovereignty Is a Life Issue appeared first on The American Conservative.
As whistleblowers languish in prison, allies of the national security state get sweetheart plea deals.
There are rising complaints from Donald Trump and his supporters that the Biden administration has “weaponized” the criminal justice system to harass and intimidate political and ideological opponents. That maneuver, they contend, is creating a corrupt, “two-tier” system with one, very lenient standard for the president’s allies and another, far harsher, standard for his adversaries.
Now, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin has weighed in on the debate about the existence of a two-tier justice system, but she contends that the problem is nearly the opposite of what conservatives allege. “Four-time indicted former president Donald Trump never tires of painting himself as a victim. He and his supporters claim there’s a two-tiered justice system. They have a point on that score, but not in the way they intend.” Rubin notes that “No one, for example, has seriously considered pretrial detention for Trump—even electronic monitoring or asking him to relinquish his passport. He’s not getting the same treatment as everyone else.”
Both sides make valid points. However, they also focus on secondary manifestations of a politicized justice system. Rubin, for example, is correct that wealthy, socially prominent defendants have enormous advantages and are treated differently from poor defendants facing criminal charges. However, there are more graphic and significant examples of such preferential treatment. Being a loyal member of the political establishment and committed to preserving Washington’s entrenched foreign policy appears to be the most significant factor of all.
Rubin noticeably failed to mention the Justice Department’s effort to get court approval for the brazen sweetheart plea deal for Hunter Biden. Yet that episode was a transparent attempt to derail a serious investigation into allegations that the Biden family had engaged in illegal influence peddling with respect to several foreign governments. The stench surrounding that ploy was so great that federal district Judge Maryellen Noreika took the highly unusual step of declining to ratify the deal. The mere attempt, though, illustrates the pervasive favoritism and outright corruption in America’s criminal justice system.
Worse, the Hunter Biden episode is only the latest example of politically connected establishment types receiving preferential treatment from federal prosecutors. That pattern has been especially evident with respect to misconduct by poohbahs in the national security community.
For example, a subsequent investigation showed that in 2000 Bill Clinton’s national security advisor Samuel R. (“Sandy”) Berger had illegally removed classified documents on two separate occasions from the National Archives—reportedly by stuffing them down his pants before exiting a secure reading room. After months of negotiations in 2005 with federal prosecutors, he entered a guilty plea to a misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified material. The penalty phase of the plea bargain highlighted the sweetheart aspect to an even greater extent. Berger avoided having to serve any jail time, receiving probation and a modest fine. The government didn’t even permanently revoke his security clearance. Instead, he merely had to relinquish it for three years.
The favorable treatment given to another prominent national security official, CIA director David Petraeus, was even more flagrant. Petraeus admitted that when he served as the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, he gave highly‐classified journals to his lover, Paula Broadwell, who was writing a laudatory biography. He also admitted that he had lied to FBI and CIA investigators about his conduct. The latter offense alone typically results in a felony prosecution and a prison sentence.
Despite such flagrant misconduct by a high-level official, Petraeus only had to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor charge of unauthorized removal and retention of classified information. Moreover, as part of the plea bargain, he did not have to serve a single day behind bars. His sentence consisted of two years of probation and a fine reportedly less than he routinely charged for a single speaking engagement.
In late January 2021, federal Judge James Boasberg managed to surpass the outrageous nature of the Berger and Petraeus episodes when he sentenced former FBI assistant general counsel Kevin Clinesmith to a mere 12 months’ probation and community service. Clinesmith had admitted falsifying evidence submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court for a warrant to spy on Carter Page—a one-time foreign‐policy advisor to former President Donald Trump.
Clinesmith’s offense was a gross abuse of power by a high-ranking government official. A Wall Street Journal editorial pointed out that prosecutors had confirmed that “evidence of Mr. Clinesmith’s animus toward Donald Trump is considerable.” The nature of the offense resulting from such political and ideological bias was—or at least should have been—horrifying. “Mr. Clinesmith changed an email confirming Mr. Page had been a CIA source to one that said the exact opposite, explicitly adding the words ‘not a source’ before he forwarded it.” In other words, the FBI’s assistant general counsel had committed forgery and then committed perjury when he submitted the sworn document to the FISA Court.
It is instructive to compare the mild treatment given to Berger, Petraeus, and Clinesmith with the multi-year prison sentences meted out to whistleblowers and investigative journalists who dared expose abuses that national security agencies committed. The disparate outcomes show the biased, two-tier justice system in action. Prominent establishment offenders did not even receive a slap on the wrist, they barely received a gentle tap.
Conservatives are correct that the bias has become increasingly malignant and partisan. However, one should not overstate the partisan aspect. Berger, for example, received his lenient treatment from George W. Bush’s administration. Allegiance to the political establishment and the bipartisan foreign policy blob still appears to be the dominant consideration in such cases. Thus far, the vocal outrage by both sides about an unfair, two-tier justice system has been selective, ideological, and partisan. A deeper, more principled analysis is needed to create the foundation for genuine reform.
The post The Real Malignancy in America’s Justice System appeared first on The American Conservative.
You may have seen the biggest viral video of the week already, but if you haven’t, here it is:
Since NYC doesn't do much, the hard working people have no choice but to take matters in their own hands.
— Joel Fischer 🇺🇸 (@realJoelFischer) August 2, 2023
Great job guys 👍 pic.twitter.com/7fEPGXfe0I
In Stockton, California, two gentlemen of Indian extraction administered correction to a shameless shoplifter. News reports are fairly thin, but a close and repeated viewing of the footage reveals that, to the gentlemen’s credit, the correction is administered with a professionalism and precision (no blows above the legs) that suggest that this may not be their first time dealing danda justice.
The American Conservative takes a strong line on property rights—three cheers for the stickwallahs. At the same time, the private defense of publicly guaranteed rights is a sign of failure. As far back as Homer, it is recognized that justice administered by a state rather than by private individuals is the ticket. Private justice is an expedient pursued in places like Mexico. Welcome to the future.
The post This Video Shows What Justice in a Failed State Looks Like appeared first on The American Conservative.
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