Facing down the Democratic legal tsunami

Sydney Smith (1771-1845), the great English wit and Anglican divine, once said that he never read a book before reviewing it because he found that “it prejudices a man so.” (He also confided that his idea of heaven was “eating pâté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets.”)

I have nothing to add to Smith’s soteriological dictum. In partial defense of his announced journalistic practice, however, I will note that while it might compromise his reliability as a literary cicerone, there are plenty of situations for which such lack of exposure is a beneficial prophylactic.

I write during the Democratic National Convention. I have sat down to watch none of it. Like Smith, I know that doing so would prejudice me. I am confident that the few slivers I have gleaned from friends and the odd recycled video clip afford me a more impartial frame of mind from which to comment on the significance of the event.

I had not known what a finely honed sense of irony the Democrats could deploy. That was on display when the self-help guru Oprah Winfrey, who is black, regaled the crowd with heart-wrenching tales about how she was a victim of “racism” and “income inequality.” Oprah Winfrey, for those who have not been following along, commands a personal fortune of about $3 billion.

I also appreciated the performance of Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow, who warned that, should he be reelected, “Donald Trump would be able to weaponize the Department of Justice to go after his political opponents. He could even turn the FBI into his own personal police force. That’s not how it works in America!”

But you’re wrong about that, Senator. That’s exactly how it works in Obama-Biden-Harris’s America.

Dear Reader, you are probably perusing this after September 18, when Donald Trump is scheduled to be sentenced by Justice Juan Merchan in New York. Trump was found guilty of thirty-four felonies for… What was that again? Oh, right. For a book-keeping error that might have been construed as a misdemeanor had it not exceeded the statute of limitations by the time Alvin Bragg, the George-Soros-installed New York prosecutor, glommed on, terrier-like, to Trump’s ankle. Bragg dispensed with the statute of limitations issue, elevated the misdemeanor to a felony, multiplied by thirty-four because that’s how many payments were made and said that it all amounted to election interference.

I, too, worry about the weaponization of the DoJ and FBI, which is why I stand amazed that the Dems’ chief political rival is facing a veritable tsunami of legal prosecutions in several states. To say that the prosecutions are “dubious” is to belittle the unsettling power of dubiety. As I have noted before, what we are witnessing in the demonization of Donald Trump is the revival of the antique practice of issuing “bills of attainder” against an individual or group that the regime fears or dislikes.

The practice is unconstitutional, but then so, under the Eighth Amendment, are “excessive fines,” which did not stop Judge Arthur Engoron from slapping Trump with a $355 million fine (and bail of $450 million) for overvaluing his real estate assets when applying for a bank loan. Trump paid back the loans and interest, on time. The banks were happy and said they would do business with him again. So this was a trial for fraud in which no one had been defrauded. There were no victims, no harm, no money lost. And no matter to the anti-Trump judiciary. They continue to try to destroy him.

There was a lot of talk at the DNC. Barack and Michelle Obama told us how evil white people, especially those named Trump, are. Vice presidential nominee and Democratic party jester “Tampon Tim” Walz told us how awful it was that J.D. Vance went to Yale. As Hamlet observed in another context, it was all “words, words, words.”

Most of them, as was widely pointed out, were lies. Sometimes the lies were half-acknowledged by the Dems’ clean-up details, as when, responding to the fact that Walz has repeatedly overstated his military credentials, they said he “misspoke.” That reminded me of the correction from an American newspaper that Edward Burne-Jones quoted: “Instead of being arrested, as we stated, for kicking his wife down a flight of stairs and hurling a lighted kerosene lamp after her, the Revd James P. Wellman died unmarried four years ago.”

Amusing, that, but what about the realities our ruling class covers with its lies? As the political scientist Michael Mandelbaum notes in “America the Unprepared,” an essay in the Jerusalem Strategic Tribune, “the principal product of Washington, DC is words.” Mostly they go unheeded. But occasionally they touch upon matters of exigent importance. Mandelbaum quotes this sobering passage from a recent report from the Commission on the National Defense Strategy.

The threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945 and include the potential for near-term major war. The United States last fought a global conflict during World War Two, which ended nearly eighty years ago. The nation was last prepared for such a fight during the Cold War, which ended thirty-five years ago. It is not prepared today.

Management of the circus performance in Chicago is responsible for that unpreparedness. The prospect that they might be entrusted with the welfare of America for another four years is alarming. Which brings me to what Henry Kissinger once identified as “the dilemma of conservatism”: “that it must fight revolution anonymously, by what it is, not by what it says.” I feel certain that Sydney Smith would agree.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 2024 World edition.