No one is above the law, Democrats chanted in lockstep in reference to their persecution of President Donald Trump. But the hypocrisy of Democrats is unbounded. Democrats are condemning the arrest of Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan, warning it could threaten the rule of law.
Dugan is accused of obstructing a US agency and concealing an individual to prevent his arrest. On April 18, 2025, she allegedly helped Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, an illegal Mexican immigrant facing charges of battery, evade arrest by federal immigration officials at the Milwaukee County Courthouse. According to the criminal complaint, Dugan, after becoming aware of the presence of ICE agents, directed Flores-Ruiz and his attorney to exit her courtroom through a non-public jury door, delaying his arrest. The charges carry a maximum penalty of six years in prison and a 350,000 dollar fine.
The hypocrisy is easy to explain. More than operating with double standards, progressives see the judiciary and the administrative state—when it carries forward their agenda—the same way Islamists see theocracy. Rule by clerics and technocrats is the antithesis of liberalism and republicanism. But this is the world Democrats want Americans to in.
The goal of a one-party state led by Democrats is to acquire power to put in place judges and administrators who advance progressive ideology. This is what lies behind the strategy of open borders. It’s why Democrats are especially outraged by the arrest of judges who interfere with deportation. Democrats want to keep every illegal alien in America, even terroristic gang members, because they believe that most of them will vote for Democrats out of appreciation for allowing them to enter and stay in our country. Deportation is a direct threat to the party’s objective. And so, Trump is an “authoritarian.” That means that democracy and the rule of law don’t matter. And that means they never do except as instruments for advancing the progressive agenda.
To cut through the fog of ideology, controlling immigration is a federal obligation—and it is necessary: without control over our borders and who is allowed to be in our country, we have no country. Judges that interfere with deportation efforts are activists in the globalist project to erase borders. They should be removed and their courts defunded or abolished. If they break the law, then they should be arrested and prosecuted.
There is nothing authoritarian about any of this. Nationalism is not inherently authoritarian in character. Nationalism is a set of moral and political principles centered on the belief that a group of people who share a common identity—through culture, ethnicity, history, and language—should form a sovereign nation-state. Every patriotic American should be a nationalist. More than this, every person who believes in the Enlightenment project should be a nationalist.
A child of the Enlightenment, the modern nation-state emerged in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Enlightenment ideas about popular sovereignty, combined with the revolutionary experience of overthrowing aristocracy, led to peoples redefining themselves as nations of citizens rather than subjects of a king. The modern rule of law emerges from this arrangement. Liberalism and republicanism represent the apex of this development. Lose these and lose freedom.
Progressives’ fellow travelers give away the game. Today on X, none other than arch-neoconservative Bill Kristol writes: “If they were arresting judges in another country with an authoritarian-inclined (even if democratically elected) government, we’d be alarmed.”
Note that Kristol, who has for a long time now aligned his opinions with Democrats and progressives (really, there is no light between neoconservatives and Democrats, since the former is merely the rebranding of Cold War progressivism), doesn’t care if the government was democratically elected. He doesn’t believe in republicanism. He only believes in advancing the progressive cause. This might sound odd given that Kristol is a neoconservative. But the reality is that, in light of common elitism, neoconservatism easily converges with progressivism.
Recall what Kristol’s father, Irving, the “father of neoconservatism,” once said: “What’s the point in being the greatest, most powerful nation in the world and not having an imperial role?” This is the heart of neoconservatism: to use U.S. military power to usher in a New World Order. And neoconservatism is merely the rebranding of Cold War progressivism.
I responded to the son’s post that, if another country were arresting judges who were illegally thwarting the will of the electorate, then we would be applauding. This is because we believe in the rule of law and democracy. We’d be alarmed if the United States supported anti-democratic forces that were thwarting the will of the people of that country. But this is what neoconservatives desire: the overthrow of popular governments and the installation of regimes that carry out the imperialist agenda. We have been alarmed about this many times.
Frankly, I don’t see how such an interpretation even crosses the mind of anybody who claims to believe in democracy and the rule of law. It rather exposes an authoritarian mind. Kristol doesn’t like Trump and his agenda, which the populace voted for, because it stymies imperialism, so it’s authoritarian. This is typical of neoconservative framing. Governments that do the bidding of corporate elites are “democratic.” Those that resist global corporate power are “authoritarian.” This is an Orwellian projection. Kristol, like progressives, desires the rise of the judicocracy and lawlessness because these are means to stifle democracy. His is the mind of a cleric, not a republican.
This is how something called the “Democracy Project” can arise with the premise that the United States has a moral duty to spread democracy (here a euphemism for corporatism) worldwide, even by military force if necessary. Neoconservatives, such as Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, dressed imperialism in American values—capitalism, democracy, and human rights—and portrayed these values as universal, arguing that promoting them abroad would make the world more stable and secure—and serve America’s interests.
But these are not America’s interests. These are not America’s values. Not the coded version, that is. Decoded, these are the interests and ambitions of transnational corporations and world financial organizations.
Readers should know that the guiding light of neoconservatism, political philosopher Leo Strauss believed that classical political philosophy (supplanted in the progressive mind with postmodernist notions of power, but with the same attitude) contained hidden truths accessible only to the elite. The masses needed guiding myths to maintain social order.
If that sounds like the thinking of Walter Lippmann and Reinhold Niebuhr there’s a reason for that: they all represent the same broader cultural and political shift in elite circles. Lippmann, in Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925), argued that the average citizen was too uninformed and emotionally driven to truly participate in rational democratic decision-making. Democracy, he argued, needed to be managed by a knowledgeable elite—experts, journalists, and technocrats—who could interpret reality for the public and manipulate them towards the right ends. Likewise, Niebuhr, a theologian and political thinker, emphasized the limits of human reason and virtue, advancing a “Christian realism,” wherein such idealistic projects as democracy and peace would always fail. Thus, leaders had to balance moral ideals with the reality of power—often requiring myth to maintain social order. Both Lippmann and Niebuhr were progressives.
Like the followers of Lippmann and Niebuhr, Straussians interpreted their man’s ideas as justifying an assertive role for elites in shaping political life—including the promotion of democracy (as so warped) abroad as part of a larger civilizational mission. This interpretation heavily influenced the architects of the so-called “Democracy Project” in US foreign policy after the Cold War. But the mission wasn’t spreading civilization, but entrenching the power and privilege of the New Aristocracy.
Like Lippmann, Niebuhr, Strauss, and his father, Kristol is an organic intellectual for the New Aristocracy. He’s an elitist and a globalist. He is a neoconservative. Democrats are neoconservative. They align with progressivism. Those who want to protect the American Republic need to get that straight in their heads.
freedom and reason 