I am less optimistic than Carlson. I wrote in response to a comment on my Facebook feed in the immediate aftermath of one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in the history of the American Republic: “The corporate-state slide from soft to hard fascism begins slowly—then accelerates exponentially. A people wake up one day and the hellscape a handful of them warned the rest about is upon them. We passed the Rubicon when charges were filed and cases taken up. There’s no going back to the way we were. We have to drive the authoritarians from their strongholds.”
“Anyone who defends this verdict is a danger to you and your family.” This is true. Charitably, people celebrating this verdict don’t understand the necessary conditions for the survival of a constitutional republic based upon classic liberal values. We’re following Rome’s path to demise—from republic to empire; but the devolution to the latter is more rapid in our case because it is intentional. Progressives don’t see it because they want it. They want technocracy and the administrative state. Either they hate or don’t understand America and what she represents to history or, before today (if forever who knows), what she will mean to the future of mankind.
Also, while the celebrants may claim to have read them, they never really read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or Kafka’s The Trial. Yes, they may have read these warnings in the sense that their eyes scanned the pages and they wanted to look learned in front of their peers (or maybe it was a class assignment), but they didn’t comprehend what they were reading. To be sure, not everybody doesn’t understand; some have seen in these works the path to and the methods of Oz, the Great and Terrible—without the beneficence, of course. That flying monkeys are often sheep we knew when they dutifully put diapers on their faces and lined up to get jabbed with experimental mRNA products. But wolves wear the same clothing, so don’t be naïve.
Amid their jubilation, Democrats feign to have found great respect for the justice system. Remember how Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal was dismissed as an expression of racism (even though the victims were all white)? The Central Park Five? Ad nauseam. Do Democrats really expect everybody to forget how for year the Party has tirelessly endeavored to delegitimize the justice system or how they constantly run down the American Republic? They’re replacing 1776 with 1619 as the starting date. They’ve fashioned a new myth of original sin, smearing the nation that abolished the cruel legacy of a racialized slavery as founded in white supremacy. As they tell it, the country is illegitimate from inception. This is clear in their lack of reverence for the core institutions of our republic. They target Supreme Court justices from a desire to expand and entrench the administrative state—the unconstitutional, unelected, unaccountable fourth branch of government. That desire is totalitarian.
I am terribly distressed by all this. I knew it was here. I’ve been writing about it for years on Freedom and Reason. But to see the judicial system deployed for political purposes without the hopeful message a handful of New Yorkers might have sent to the authoritarians by doing the just and patriotic thing puts the threat to all our freedoms on another plane. They succeeded and millions are applauding. And Republicans have proven themselves ineffectual in stopping them. I posted elsewhere a variation on that Facebook comment: “We crossed the Rubicon when charges were filed and courts took them up. It’d be nice if these authoritarians made a whip for their own backs with these actions. But Republicans just lay there—even when you poke them with sticks. It’s what the establishment Republicans were hoping for anyway.” Then I changed my cover page to an upside-down United States flag.
Is there movement? “Republicans join Trump’s attacks on justice system and campaign of vengeance after guilty verdict,” an Associated Press headline reads. It’s made unclear to the reader that the piece is an editorial working as pro-regime propaganda. It’s filed under “Politics.” It can’t possibly be a news article. “The swift, strident and deepening commitment to Trump despite his felony conviction shows how fully Republican leaders and lawmakers have been infused with his unfounded grievances of a ‘rigged’ system and dangerous conspiracies of ‘weaponized’ government into their own attacks on President Joe Biden and the Democrats.” “Unfounded”? You’re not a serious person if you use this word in this context. The system is rigged and the government weaponized—it’s been found out and the conspiracy a matter of record. Denying the facts of rigging and weaponization is to admit one is untethered to reality. Or that one is a propagandist who deals in gaslights.
Falsifying business records is a misdemeanor under state law in New York. The state sets a two-year statute of limitations on the offense (New York law, CPL § 30.10(2)(a)). The charges in question had expired years earlier. That’s why employees in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office referred to the continued circulation of the charges as a “zombie case.” Various officials who looked at the case declined to prosecute—that was until Attorney General Merrick Garland deployed his number three at the Justice Department, Matthew Colangelo, to serve in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office. Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance, had declined to prosecute the case. Even Bragg himself, who ran for office on a “get Trump” agenda, had declined to prosecute the case before the White House intervened. The House needs to bring all this out. Subpoenas should be flying.
Falsifying business records becomes a felony if performed to commit or conceal an underlying crime (known as a predicate crime). That is, some voodoo was needed to resurrect the charges. But when the inevitable guilty verdict was handed down, Trump wasn’t convicted of any underlying crime, since no underlying crime was ever specified. Rather, in Kafkaesque fashion, prosecutors conveyed to the jury (selected for their bias against the president) the crime of violating federal election law with a vague theory that Trump desired to appear more appealing to voters during the 2016 election by minimizing the distribution of negative information about him, i.e., the standard practice of impression management. No state prosecutor has ever charged anyone with such a predicate crime in the nation’s history. Prosecutors also insinuated two alternatives, both just as theoretically vague, something about falsification of additional documents and tax violations. The judge presiding over the case, Juan Merchan, told the jury that they didn’t have to all agree on which theory they preferred, just make sure the verdict was unanimous. (See former federal and state prosecutor Elie Honig’s Intelligencer piece “Prosecutors Got Trump—But They Contorted the Law.”)
Merchan’s daughter, Loren Merchan, is president of Authentic Campaigns, a Chicago-based progressive political consulting firm. Merchan’s top client is Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the lead prosecutor in Trump’s first impeachment trial. Also a client is the Senate Majority PAC, a major Democratic Party fundraiser. Judge Merchan himself donates to ActBlue, Progressive Turnout Project, and Stop Republicans. When Trump, along with many others, raised ethical concerns about what was obviously a conflict of interest, Merchan put in place a gag order punishing the president for continuing to talking to about the conflicted situation. The president, exercising his First Amendment right to free speech, a vital right for a criminal defendant facing the awesome power of the state, was fined several thousands of dollars and threatened with jail time.
Trump’s defense team was never informed as to nature of the accusations against him in advance of the trial. No predicate crime was identified in the indictment but instead developed over the course of the trial. In other words, they made it up as they went along, and even then it never materialized. There was no theory of the case. In New York State an indictment must be presented stating that there is sufficient evidence to bring a felony charge against the defendant and specify the charge to be prosecuted at trial. This requirement is found in the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution. Add to this the First Amendment guarantee to free speech and press, and the Sixth Amendment guarantee that Trump had a right to a jury composed of impartial members drawn from the local community, as well as protection from convictions unless every element of the crime has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt by the same jury. How can a jury prove elements of a crime not specified in the charging documents, let alone never developed at trial?
I agree with those who say we need to highlight that every decision Judge Merchan made in the case that advantaged the prosecution, as well as the matter of his unconstitutional gagging of the defendant, but, more importantly, at its core, even if one accepts the theory that Trump violated federal election law, the case is unconstitutional—and not just because the defendant’s constitutional rights were violated; it should never have been brought because federal campaign finance violation or any other federal crimes lie outside Bragg’s jurisdiction as the district attorney of Manhattan. Such matters fall to federal prosecutors, not to local domains. That’s why the underlying crime was never specified; only a vague theory was offered to the jury to engineer a conviction so Democrats could campaign against a convicted felon.
Let’s make the political utility of the conviction even more obvious that it already is. The indictment listed 34 felony charges but never specified the crime Trump allegedly concealed. The 34 felony counts were misdemeanors arbitrarily elevated to felonies. Without specifying the underlying crime (actus reus—rendering absurd any attempt to establish mens rea), the court attempted to skirt the law while violating the principle of federalism in alluding to federal election violation. Any judge with only a little more integrity than Merchan would overturn this case on appeal for any or all the reasons identified in the foregoing. But Trump is unlikely to get any relief in New York State’s appellate system, which is just as corrupt as the Manhattan DA’s office. The case will have to go up to the Supreme Court (which may be packed by then having sidelined Trump). In the meantime, Democrats will be able to chant the number “34” to the delight of their brainwashed minions. With the documents and the Georgia election interference cases at a standstill, and the New York civil fraud trial only boosting his poll numbers, the “hush money” case was the best hope the Democrats had, and they secured their conviction.
I don’t want to get in the weeds on this, but it is worth noting that, without a case, Bragg and crew had to put on a circus. At the center of the negative information Trump allegedly suppressed is an unproven claim by porn actress Stephanie Clifford (aka Stormy Daniels) that she and the president had a consensual sexual encounter in 2006. The president denies the encounter, and in 2018 Daniels was ordered to pay $293,000 of Trump’s legal fees after her libel case against Trump was dismissed. She was later ordered to pay an additional $245,000 after her appeals failed. In other words, when Trump said he didn’t have sex with Clifford, she sued him for libel, and the court not only dismissed the case, but punished her for bringing it. Clifford’s efforts could be construed as an ongoing effort to extort money from Trump. The attorney who worked with Clifford on the NDA (nondisclosure agreements are a standard legal device used in impression management and the protection of information), adjudicated felon and serial perjurer Michael Cohen, to whom Trump paid legal fees, paid Clifford for her silence while he skimmed off the top tens of thousands of dollars. In fact, the NDA Cohen directed Clifford to sign in exchange for money was never signed by Trump. The prosecution put both Clifford and Cohen on the stand. The handpicked jury was apparently impressed by the spectacle.
Take time today to think about the Kafkaesque maneuver of elevating misdemeanors to felony status without either proving the underlying crime or showing that what was alleged was an even crime at all—while putting on the stand a porn actress whom a court ordered to pay the president more than half a million dollars in legal fees and a disgraced attorney who pocketed thousands of dollars from a presidential candidate in what looks like an extortion scheme. Take time to consider the constitutionality and fairness of a case alluding to the violation of federal election law tried in a local court in one of the most corrupt cities in America in which numerous constitutional rights were violated.
Putting this another way, and when you understand what happened here, if you are honest with yourself, you will see clearly the political motive behind it: because Trump allegedly attempted to minimize negative information about him that he reasonably expected would be used by the Clinton campaign and establishment media to appear more appealing to voters during the 2016 election, he committed the predicate crime of running for president with an intent to win. And because he won, and because he is on track to win again, he is the target of a lawfare campaign organized by the Democratic Party. That’s the real motive here. Trump won the presidency in 2016. The establishment denied him reelection in 2020. Had he ridden off into the sunset after January 20, 2021, none of this would be happening. But he didn’t, and the tens of millions of Americans at his back threaten the establishment’s hold on power.
The establishment also needs to rehabilitate Hillary Clinton’s unexpected defeat by manufacturing the perception that her repeated claims that 2016 was rigged are justified. X users are already suffering the obsessive tweeting about Clinton’s denied presidency. But it’s not just about rehabilitating her image (and possible future run). It’s about covering up the Democrat’s project to undermine Trump. The Obama White House, the Clinton campaign, and the FBI manufactured the Russian collusion case involving Trump (the Steele dossier, Crossfire Hurricane—classified files related to Crossfire Hurricane being the raison d’etat for the FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in the foundering documents case). If they had only known about Clifford’s claim during the campaign (the story broke in 2018). All they had was “Grab ‘em by the pussy,” which Steve Bannon cleverly negated by bringing to the debates several of Bill Clinton’s rape victims.
The conviction in a Manhattan courtroom, in one of the most corrupt justice systems in America, confirms the reality and purpose of the various lawfare projects that many of us identified from the start. The establishment never thought Trump would win. They were terrified by what he might do as president, so they worked tirelessly to undermine his presidency, with considerable success. They’re even more terrified about the prospect of a second Trump presidency. A second term, this time with a clear plan to deconstruct the administrative state (Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Project), is a clear and present danger to the globalist project of managed decline—mass immigration, power projection abroad (NATO expansion and war with Russia), entrenchment of the technocratic apparatus and accompanying ideology (progressivism), and perpetuation of the deep state.
In the 1960s, documented by the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s, these same forces discredited and neutralized politicians and leaders who threatened their goals. They defamed and even assassinated their enemies. Today, they use disinformation (Russia collusion, a phone call to Zelensky, an insurrection nobody has been charged with) and lawfare (impeding ballot access, impeachment, zombie cases, show trials) to undermine a presidency. The hoaxes and lawfare are dutifully dissimulated by academics, cultural managers, and establishment journalists. Trump derangement syndrome is so pervasive that those who should know better are cheering on the fascistic state tactics of the establishment.
The Democratic Party and their surrogates are telling everybody that Trump and the “MAGA extremists” (slur your words and you’ll have Biden’s mantra) are delegitimizing the judicial system by condemning the verdict. But the delegitimation of American institutions is not because millions of Americans are calling bullshit on what was clearly a show trial worthy of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, of the People’s Republic of China. The delegitimation is occurring because those institutions have been captured by forces who use the machinery of what’s supposed to be a system of justice as a weapon against their political enemies. Meanwhile, when it comes to the real and serious crimes that affect ordinary Americans every day, especially those living in urban spaces, those same forces sabotage the machinery and people die. The only conclusion I can come to is that these forces hate American and intend to replace it with a tyranny. And that, comrades, is why our fathers were revolutionaries.
freedom and reason 