Categories
crime and punishment litigation

An Anti-Lawfare Law Firm

lawfare, justice, Jeffrey Clark, law

We witness lots of lawfare, so we need lots of anti-lawfare. 

That’s why former Trump administration official Jeffrey Clark, a victim of lawfare himself, is opening a new law firm.

Democrats went after him because, he says, “I am a strong Trump supporter and thought Georgia investigating its election in 2020 at a deeper level was worth doing.” As part of this vindictive campaign, the DC Bar has been pushing to revoke Clark’s license to practice law.

On the X social media platform, Clark says that the firm, which he is leading, will combat all kinds of weaponization of the law, “but especially abuses of congressional and state legislative branch oversight, perversion of bar discipline processes, and . . . bogus criminal indictments.”

He is looking for help. “We already have a small team of dedicated lawyers with Article I, Article II, and/or Article III branch experience at the federal level and state government experience as well. You would join them and me in this important effort to turn our country around.”

He links to a page on itsyourgov.org describing the positions.

There you’ll learn that your duties would include “preparing rapid-response filings and ethics defenses for attorneys facing bar complaints, representing clients in constitutional, administrative, and investigative proceedings, and pursuing strategic litigation — including civil suits and possibly counter-complaints — against entities abusing legal and regulatory processes.” 

So if you’re an ace lawyer who finds this project exciting and worthwhile, and think you could help, you know what to do.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Jack Woodford

Louella remarked that when foreign nations had intercourse with this country they knew they had been intercoursed.

Jack Woodford (John Woolfolk, 1894–1971), The Autobiography of Jack Woodford (1962).
Categories
Today

Roger Williams

On October 9, 1635: After many religious and policy disagreements, Roger Williams was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Categories
ideological culture tax policy

Kill the Class Warfare

wealth, taxes, socialism, capitalism, envy, resentment, Mises, egalitarianism

In his 1922 book Socialism, Ludwig von Mises explained why socialist policies are, in reality, forms of “destructionism.” They create nothing, just erode and destroy the economic bases of civilization.

The motive animating the socialists’ rationalizations — exploded in systematic detail by Mises — is resentment and envy.

Which are also behind a new tax on billionaires slated to appear on California’s November 3 ballot as Proposition 40.

Billionaires haven’t done anything wrong merely by earning great wealth. Typically, they’ve done something right. They’ve been industrious and entrepreneurial and helped people improve their lives. Typically, they earn their billions; which, incidentally, they don’t stuff under a giant mattress but invest further.

This doesn’t stop the tax’s demagogic proponents, like Ro Khanna, from claiming that the interests of the “donor class” are inherently opposed to those of the “working class.”

Khanna wants government to privilege one “class” over the other. But as Dmitri Bolt points out, neither should get a government-enforced advantage. “The real choice is between freedom and its absence: between an economy in which people are free to work and keep the fruits of their labor, and one in which politicians get to decide how much success is too much and which class deserves to pay for everyone else.”

Investors create opportunities for everybody, of whatever “class.” And when the walls seem to be closing in economically, it’s often because politicians like Khanna have “chosen to restrict one group’s freedom while pretending [to expand] opportunity for the other.”

Californians have a great opportunity to choose freedom over internecine class warfare in November.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Frank Herbert

It’s shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. 

Princess Irulan in The Humanity of Muad’Dib, in Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965).

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Today

Solzhenitsyn for the Win

On October 8, 1970, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize in literature. In his acceptance speech, given after his deportation from the USSR, he said that “during all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared this would become known.” In 1962, Nikita Khrushchev had allowed Solzhenitsyn’s short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch to be published, and defended the novel at the presidium of the Politburo, claiming that there is “a Stalinist in each of you; there’s even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil.” Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn’s works were not published in the Soviet Union from 1964 through 1989. Stalinists won, for a time, with Solzhenitsyn being deported to West Germany in February 1974.

Categories
crime and punishment international affairs

Chinazi Repression in America

Xi Jinping, China, CCP, spying, police

“A California woman was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport on Oct. 4 on a charge of acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government,” reports The Epoch Times. “The woman is accused of surveilling Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te’s U.S.-based son.”

Foreigners spying on Americans, and on other foreigners on American soil, goes back at least to 1798, when the Adams Administration kicked Constantin François Chassebœuf — that is, Volney, author of The Ruins (1791) — out of the country.

But it’s not just spying. “A Bronx man was convicted of the same charge in May, accused of operating a Chinese undercover police station in New York City for China’s Ministry of Public Security.” The Epoch Times’s article calls it “transnational repression.”

These “police stations” are all over the place. Four years ago, I quoted one source saying that there were at least “54 of these Chinese ‘service stations’ in 30 countries . . . including one in New York City.” While this all technically follows under the rubric of “rendition,” these fake cops don’t usually “arrest” and transport targets as prisoners. Instead, they threaten harm, often to relatives back home. 

The Epoch Times quotes Attorney General Todd Blanche, who says the Department of Justice will keep investigating “as long as the conduct persists.” The AG admits, however, that it’s “hard to catch because once you catch one, there’s a lot of others.”

The problem, Blanche says, is not the lack of existing laws to counter transnational repression, but that there is just so much of it and it is inherently hard to sort out.

But worth the attempt, surely . . . if America is to continue to be the “land of the free” and a refuge for dissidents fleeing totalitarianism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Aristophanes

οὔποτε ποιήσεις τὸν καρκίνον ὀρθὰ βαδίζειν.

You will never make the crab walk straight.

Hierocles, in Peace (421 BC), a play by Aristophanes, line 1083.
Categories
Today

Fordism

In 1913, Ford Motor Company launched a new manner of production for the Model T: a continuously moving assembly line.

Earlier in the year, Ford employees had assembled magnetos using this technique, improving efficiency to a marked degree: “Instead of each worker assembling his own magneto, the assembly was divided into 29 operations performed by 29 men spaced along a moving belt,” explains History.com. “Average assembly time dropped from 20 minutes to 13 minutes and soon was down to five minutes.”

The chassis was added on such a line on October 7, so that “all the major components of the Model T were being assembled using this technique,” which, when combined with high wages, came to be known as “Fordism.”

The consequence? A complete commercial success for Henry Ford, so much so that “by 1916 the price of the Model T had fallen to $360 and sales were more than triple their 1912 level. Eventually, the company produced one Model T every 24 seconds, and the price fell below $300.”

Categories
national politics & policies

Not for the Swift

Rand Paul

What if Rand Paul hadn’t been in the U.S. Senate?

For several years now, reports Reclaim the Net, lawmakers have been trying to pass legislation to require Americans to provide ID to do many of things on the Internet we can now do anonymously. In 2024, the bill — with the cuddly name of Kids Online Safety Act, it prompts us to ask, what brute would want kids to be unsafe online? — passed in the Senate but failed in the House. The Hill reports that “concerns over censorship and freedom of speech prevented it from ever hitting the House floor.”

The Senate bill doesn’t mandate age verification directly. But it does require the FTC, in assessing whether a platform has complied with “duty of care” requirements, to determine “whether a reasonable and prudent person under the circumstances would have known that the user is a minor.”

How could platforms avoid liability for sure without imposing some kind of ID verification on all users?

In a fourth attempt rushing the Act through, senators from both parties, last week, sought to get it passed by unanimous consent. Last Wednesday, the objection of one senator, Kentucky’s Rand Paul, prevented this. 

The Act will still probably pass the Senate. Maybe it will be blocked in the House. But speed is on the side of those who are eager to sidestep examination and reflection. It may be the case that, with the help of Sen. Paul’s slow-down, friends of privacy and freedom of speech will get another reprieve.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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