What does it mean to say that a country has “the rule of law?” Or, that the United States is “a country of laws, not of men?”
The essence of these is objective and impartial justice. The idea is that no matter who you are, or who you know, you will be accorded the same consideration under law without regard to anything but the facts and circumstances of the matter at hand. When you have “a country of laws, not of men,” you can have reasonable assurance of being treated fairly in any dispute either with your fellow citizens or the state itself. When you have heard the phrase “better to be judged by twelve than carried by six,” the speaker is actually expressing confidence in the ability of our justice system to act with both impartiality and prudence.
Although this is an ideal that is impossible to achieve perfectly in practice due to human imperfections and differences in access to quality legal representation, for the most part, especially in criminal matters, it has been an ideal to which the American people aspired, and they took seriously when seated on juries as well. Even people in positions of authority understood that the perception of the legitimacy of their authority required their adherence to this idea.
And of course, this also, in a seeming (albeit resolvable) paradox, points out that that in order to have a “nation of laws,” you require first and foremost a nation of men whose character is such that they can, and will, deal with matters in a fair and equitable way, even if it is contrary to some other goal they might have. That is, to have a nation of justice requires not only just laws, but also just men.
Even with authorities acting in good conscience, not all criminals will be apprehended, and since all Americans commit an average of three felonies a day, it is not practical to enforce all laws on everyone all the time. If that were to happen, we wouldn’t even have any guards left to feed the prisoners. While this certainly speaks to the fact we have too many laws criminalizing too many things in the first place, which in and of itself provides fertile ground for abuse, it also addresses the issue of police and prosecutorial discretion.
People would be most familiar with this in the form of traffic stops. If there is a line of cars on the highway, all of whom are driving in a fashion that endangers the public, the cop may only pull over one motorist. The fact that the others got away and did not get a ticket doesn’t mean that the motorist who got nabbed shouldn’t be penalized. If a reader is old enough, he may even remember a time when a cop might break up some late-teen drinking parties in the woods — and instead of filing charges, send the kids home and confiscate their booze. As a teen in high school, I went through a round of being bullied, followed by a couple of weeks of my beating up those bullies. Instead of suspending me, the principal exercised discretion by telling the kids I beat up that they had received their punishment, and admonished me to leave them alone thenceforth — unless they tried to bully me again.
It is clear that when dealing with people in authority who have good will, discretion in and of itself can also serve justice. Discretion can be exercised in a way that yields a long term social benefit and decreases injustices under the law while also preventing its excessive application.
These concepts that used to be accepted as given across all political affiliations have, however, perished.
One can observe, for example, that the Constitutions of both Liberia and Colombia are based on that of the United States. The results, at least for 200 years, were radically different. We got good results because we had, by and large, good men charged with upholding the Constitution. But as the men charged with upholding our Constitution have come to increasingly resemble their contemporaries in “developing nations,” the results have likewise matched.
We no longer live in a nation of laws where someone can be reasonably assured of fair and impartial treatment, and instead of using discretion to prevent state excesses, police and prosecutorial discretion are now used to selectively punish people deemed, because of their ideas, to be unworthy of being treated as human.
The link above referring to our committing three felonies a day tells of Joseph Nacchio who, as the CEO of Qwest Communications, refused an NSA request to wiretap all of his customers. Because of that refusal, he was prosecuted for “insider trading.” Had he been compliant, he never would have been charged with a crime. This sort of thing has been going on for quite some time, but it is rare enough or non-glamorous enough that the average person pays little attention. Maybe they think it only happens to “bigwigs” for “corruption,” or only to “religious nuts” like the Branch Davidians — whose alleged crime was failure to pay a $200 tax.
The average American has been blissfully unaware of a government who considers its people to be its enemy, attributing government excesses to special edge cases and others who somehow “deserve” it.
Just over a year ago, I wrote an article warning “normie conservatives” that they were next.
The events of January 6, 2021 will drive that point home, in spades.
The Unite the Right rally in 2017 should have been enough to wake people up. Although many of the participants were racialists of various affiliations, quite a few were not. The unfortunate death of Heather Heyer, brought about when James Fields fled a violent mob, including a leftist who later bragged about chasing Fields with an AR-15, served to dishonestly paint the entire event as some sort of planned “Nazi” or “white supremacist” riot, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Meanwhile, every person who participated in that event had his identity painstakingly ascertained, with every effort made to make sure livelihoods were lost and families were destroyed. Some, as previously described on wvwnews.net, were driven to suicide. There were numerous altercations as the participants in the rally tried to flee organized leftists, including leftists armed with a makeshift flamethrower and other weapons. The leftists were never prosecuted.
Though the leftists never faced justice, the participants in Unite the Right who even did so much as fire a warning shot to fend off armed attacks were prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. People who merely attended the rally, but planned and traveled across state lines to do so, were charged with federal conspiracy crimes. Numerous young men are now in prison whose only crime was self defense, or in one case, accidentally hitting a pedestrian while fleeing an armed assailant — an armed assailant who admitted his crime on video, yet was never charged. And the charges were, of course, overblown when levied against the right. Using pepper spray in self defense was construed as using “chemical weapons,” as though it were a planned Sarin attack.
Most Republicans ignored this episode, dismissed it, and went to great pains to emphasize their own virtue. After all, these young men who were being unjustly prosecuted while their assailants walked free were “Nazis,” and “white supremacists” and therefore “deserved” punishment for their ideas alone. And if there is one thing the establishment right has been well-trained to do, it is to distance themselves from “Nazis.” Sometimes they run off and marry Asians, Jews and Hispanics just to prove how “totally not racist” they are.
So they looked the other way while innocent men were sent to prison. They ignored people just slightly to their right being removed from social media platforms, didn’t object when commentators slightly to their right were denied the ability to use Patreon, Paypal or even a bank account.
When Kyle Rittenhouse, who should never have been charged with a crime, was charged and imprisoned, they were surprised — but only because they continued to misunderstand what was going on.
After January 6, 2021, dawn is breaking over Marblehead.
The riots that occurred all summer (but magically ended with the election stolen by Biden’s partisans) were called “peaceful protests” while people’s businesses burned in the background. Parts of cities were cordoned off and declared to be “autonomous zones” where rampant criminality reigned, and nobody named it an insurrection. People were killed for being suspected of being Trump voters, but it was never called terrorism. And progressively over the past four years, so-called “cancel culture” has targeted people’s livelihoods, even reaching as far as the founder of the Free Software movement. But establishment Republicans didn’t lift a finger to stop this, even when they held both houses of Congress and the Presidency. They merely whined, a little.
Not being satisfied with the cold-blooded killing of Ashli Babson, a 12-year Air Force veteran, on January 7th, 2021, newspapers across the country crowed with pleasure as they revealed attendees of the Trump rally intended to “stop the steal” being doxed, and losing their jobs. One by one, their names rolled out, with fathers, mothers, husbands and wives from all walks of life ranging from nurses to lawyers being released from their jobs — in many cases merely for having attended the rally at all. At least one suicide has occurred.
Headlines and talking heads all across the country, reading from the same script, called the events of January 6th, with no fires and minimal destruction, “riots” and even “insurrection.” It is being called “domestic terrorism” in Congress, with the incoming Biden administration pledging to act decisively against these Trump supporters.
And with only a couple of exceptions, every single federally elected Republican condemned them too.
By way of background, the men and women who showed up to “stop the steal” had every right to do so, and they had every reason to be angry. According to what video I have seen, which admittedly is not much, the building was unlocked for them and they walked in peacefully. If they destroyed public property, they certainly should not have — although what little was done pales in comparison to the police stations that were burned over the summer by leftists. Although Donald Trump is an imperfect figure to say the least, no reasonable person can carefully consider the evidence and conclude that Biden actually won. It is clear that the pandemic was used as an excuse to authorize so-called “mail-in” voting, and that untold hundreds of thousands if not millions of ballots — were illegitimately dumped into the mix in the wee hours of the morning.
Every step along the way, every attempt to secure a fair hearing and justice was denied through reference to administrative process. The truth, in law, does not matter. What makes votes “real” is the act of their having been declared so by a Secretary of State, not what actually happened. (Although people think this is a new thing — it is not. There is serious doubt that the 16th Amendment, giving us the income tax, was properly ratified. But because the Secretary of State declared it to have been ratified, courts ever since have stated that the matter is beyond their jurisdiction. This is why you cannot fight the income tax in court on the basis of the 16th Amendment’s non-ratification.)
Even so, what makes this new is ordinary people who simply love America and wanted nothing more than fair treatment under the law are the new “terrorists.”
You see, it was never really about “Nazism” or “White Supremacy” in the first place. It was always about censoring any dissent at all, and it was just a matter of time before the definition of “hate” or “terrorism” was made wide enough. So all that time that conservatives spent disavowing people like me and standing on their heads to prove how “totally not racist” they were, was not only wasted — but cleared the path for their own suppression. Even now, despite all that disavowal, the Speaker of the House of Representatives has cast those who supported Donald Trump and sought a fair election as white supremacists.
If things don’t change, ten years from now our kids or grand kids will be taught in school that Donald Trump was secretly gassing Jews in the basement of the White House, which is why those who supported him must be hunted down. Maybe, if the surviving Trump supporters aren’t too dull, they will wonder how many of those Nazi confessions made under torture back in the 1940’s were accurate.
Reality should start to set in. The solution is not in Washington. Establishment Republican politicians hold you in contempt and just lie to you once every two to six years to try to convince you to keep voting, and that somehow your voting makes the endemic corruption of Washington your fault. They try to diffuse responsibility for their actions (and inaction) onto their abused constituents in order to escape accountability.
Welcome to the party, Mr. Normie Republican! I am not gloating at your pain. This situation sucks, and I expect it took you by surprise. But it didn’t take us by surprise at all — we knew what was coming, which is why we were objecting to it long ago, even while you called us conspiracy theorists.
But now YOU are a conspiracy theorist too, and someone who will be under surveillance, set up, jailed, run out of a job and more. You are a DISSIDENT. You are one of us now.
Considering how much we have been right about, I would humbly suggest that we might be right about some other things too, and it would be in all of our interests if you would join our efforts. We will hang together, or we will hang separately.