You’d have these very liberal anchors and you could see them biting their lips as they had to read news copy and introduce clips that just totally undercut the liberal narrative. I remember one almost fainting over a story about a welfare cheat who was bragging on air about having five kids from five different fathers to get all sorts of government handouts. You would have never seen that in the past, though it was absolutely true and absolutely a story. But that anchor had no choice but to grit his teeth and read a story that probably converted a few thousand citizens away from liberalism!
Competition was only a part of it. The other key component was conservatives working their way up on the inside. For years, conservatives had stayed out of journalism, but the web and guys like Andrew Breitbart inspired talented conservatives to go out and get jobs in the media as journalists.
It could be hard to get a job, and hard to keep one, if you were a known conservative. I remember one reporter at ABC was found to be conservative and fired. Well, he sued under the new federal Political Discrimination Act that made it illegal to fire someone over their political beliefs if the job was not expressly political. Well, ABC had to argue that being an “objective” reporter was political, and that really hurt their credibility.
Oh, as a conservative I thought the law was inappropriate—it’s none of the government’s business why you choose to hire or not hire someone—but after Obama and Hillary we got a lot less fussy about using liberals’ own tactics against them! It’s our media now.
Chapter Ten: Breaking and Remaking the Law
“When Everything Is a Crime, Everyone Is a Criminal”
Conservatives had long defended a criminal justice system that dispensed little justice and was barely even a system. But by the 2010s it was obvious that the system was failing—and as the liberal administrations abused the justice system for their short-term political ends, it became clear that it required conservative attention. By embracing conservative values, the insurgency drew new recruits while leaving the liberals to defend a decaying, discredited institution.
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Jerome Timms (Republican Congressman)
The conservatives first brought up eliminating the mandatory minimum sentences and vastly cutting back the drug war when they only had the House. The liberals thought this was great—and they immediately got to the conservatives’ right on it, calling them soft on crime and so forth. But no one bought that—the conservatives were plenty tough. They just wanted to be smart about the problem, and more important, fair.
It was black urban Democrats who joined the Republicans to pass the bill. Hillary vetoed it—she said, “Someone has to protect the village’s children.” By then my mom was in jail and I was a teenager. I was disgusted. Hillary knew better than us what was good for us? I understood then how sometimes racists smile at you like they’re your friends. And how sometimes the people other people tell you are racist aren’t.
I started working as an aide in Congress on the big Criminal Review Project. We went through every federal law, statute, and regulation and recommended changes to reduce penalties, make them clearer, or get rid of them entirely. When we started, the experts told us the average American was inadvertently committing three felonies a day. That’s unacceptable in a free country.
There were just too damn many laws, too damn many rules, and too damn many crimes. When everything is a crime, everyone is a criminal. And everyone is then at the mercy of the government.
Prosecutors had too damn much discretion, and far too many people were getting caught up in the criminal justice system. Ending that un-American state of affairs was the right thing to do, and for Republicans, it was a politically smart thing to do.
It was not just about drug laws, though drug laws presented a huge target for politically savvy reform. Look at me—my mother’s release from prison was because of it, and reform won Republicans a lot of credibility.
It was also intellectual property law where huge corporate interests turned civil infractions into criminal offenses. It was computer laws where simply breaching a contract was a crime—a crime, punishable by jail! Did that protect society? No, it was not just a waste of judicial resources but it put the government in the role of enforcer for companies who, if they wanted their intellectual property protected, should have hired lawyers to go do it.
What do you call a system that made it a crime to “jailbreak” your iPhone? We conservatives called it ridiculous. But it used to be a reality.
The liberals, aided and abetted by some Republicans, had created a system that criminalized conduct that should not, under any reasonable, rational, or just conception, be considered criminal—civil maybe, but in a lawsuit you only seek money. Here, they would throw you in jail.
I remember one kid, a genius in Boston, got indicted for going into a computer system. He didn’t damage anything. Sure, what he did was wrong, but he was looking at years in jail—years of his life! He killed himself. That’s not just crazy—it’s unjust.
Think about it—thanks to a craven Congress doing the bidding of a bunch of giant companies, you could be labeled a felon and put in prison—at our expense, mind you—for years for the “crime” of displeasing some conglomerate.
Moreover, when you combined these unjust laws with the nearly unfettered discretion of prosecutors, you had a justice system that was functionally indistinguishable from an injustice system.
The goal of prosecutors stopped being to seek justice—it was to get convictions. Part of that was our fault collectively. Reacting to the shameful mugger-hugger liberalism of the past, we encouraged a crackdown on criminals. Fair enough, but then when crime stopped being such a concern, we turned away and the prosecutors, acting in our names, kept it up without accountability. You could hardly blame them—it was up to us as citizens to ask not just how many convictions they got, but were they just results?
Well, we constitutional conservatives started doing that. A lot of religious folks were very focused on reforming the justice system, and so were libertarians. Then you added the minority community that felt itself victimized and you had the ultimate strange bedfellow coalition.
Criminal justice system reform was a twofer for constitutional conservatives—it was the right thing to do, and it was a powerful wedge aimed right at the heart of the liberal coalition because it split out minorities and the young.
When everything was a crime and liberals chose who got prosecuted (people like us) and who didn’t (other liberals—did you see any arrests after the 2008 Wall Street scandals?), it gave them tremendous power.
We thought, “Let’s take it away from them, and in the process show young people and minorities why conservatism is their friend.” The liberals walked right into the trap. They couldn’t help but resist because every reform we proposed would strip them of power.
When we took power again, we started reigning in the “fourth branch” of government—bureaucracy—by reasserting Congress’s proper role as creators of laws rather than delegators. We tried to withdraw from the various agencies the power to “interpret” law through regulations in such a way as to create criminal conduct. We felt that the federal government had no business criminalizing behavior without a vote by the Congress and the signature of the president on the entirety of the law. Elected representatives had to personally vote on—and be accountable for—each infraction that could support criminal liability.
When the liberals started whining, we threw the idea of fining some little kid for helping an injured bird back in their faces.
We pushed to require that every criminal law have an intent element—no more strict liability violations where the government need not prove the specific intent to commit the alleged “crime.” When the libs whined about this—they really thought this was a great issue to base their comeback on—we would give the examples of people ruined because some chemical spilled on their land and they didn’t even know it, but were prosecuted anyway because intent wasn’t an element of
the crime. President Marlowe was totally behind us.
While the Democrats were busy protecting their ability to inflict injustices on innocent Americans, we hit them again, this time with a real nuke. Prosecutors used to be able to load up dozens of charges for the same thing against an accused. These are called “counts.” With so many counts, there would be the potential for enormous sentences, essentially forcing the accused to plea bargain out or risk decades in jail if he demanded his right to trial. It was designed to encourage plea bargaining, but it caught up innocent people because they couldn’t risk demanding a trial. Sure, sometimes lots of charges are justified—there are bad people out there—but the risk to innocent folks was far too great. It was just wrong, and we stopped it.
We used a four-pronged approach to solve other problems with the system.
First, our reforms allowed the defendant to put exonerating evidence before the grand jury. Indictments used to be handed down after the grand jury heard only from the prosecutor. We empowered citizens once again to truly decide who gets prosecuted and who doesn’t.
They used to say a prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. That’s a disgrace—we directed grand juries to be informed that their most important duty was not to indict if the prosecutor did not meet his burden. That changed the whole focus of the system, from assembly line into an individualized process designed to protect the innocent.
Second, we took more power from the prosecutor and gave it back to grand juries. For any case where the potential sentence exceeds five years, we now allow the grand jury to propose a plea bargain, and if the prosecutor doesn’t wish to offer it, the judge may direct that it be offered.
Third, we required that the US attorneys reveal plea bargain offers to juries—they may wonder, rightly, why the US attorney would have accepted five years before trial but is asking for 30 years because the citizen demanded his right to a trial. The prosecutors were furious, but if the government can’t stand behind its actions, then we have a problem.
And fourth, our reforms required the federal government to pay the reasonable costs of defense for those charges it could not prove to a jury. That took care of a lot of the shakiest charges we used to see on those 100-count Christmas tree indictments, which is good. A prosecutor should not bring any charges he does not believe he can prove beyond a reasonable doubt anyway. Moreover, too many lives were being ruined and too many innocent people left destitute by having to fight dozens of false criminal charges. A jury sees a hundred-count indictment and figures, “Gee, something here has to be true,” even if it isn’t.
What did the Democrats do? They tried to get to our right on crime, and we were happy to let them. That left us minorities, libertarians, and young people, as well as constitutional conservatives.
The justice system still isn’t perfect today, but it’s no longer a disgrace. We promised to fix it and we did. And in the process, we helped to win over folks who used to blame us for this kind of injustice.
We wanted to win over the young, tech-savvy, 20-something generation, so we decided to not be the side that wanted to stick them in a federal prison for a third of a century for a glorified violation of a computer terms of service advisory.
We ended the so-called War on Drugs. I detest drugs and get tired of users, but I also detested cops getting killed saving people from themselves. And I hate the human and fiscal cost of putting admittedly stupid, often not great people in jail for decades over pharmaceuticals. I experienced that damage firsthand.
After Marlowe’s pardons, we pushed to reevaluate drug sentences, not because we like drug users but because the old approach was not solving the problem and was causing more problems than it solved. Putting people in jail for decades was clearly not deterring the conduct—if doing what we were doing worked, we’d have been a drug-free paradise of hard-working, solid citizens.
Note that we also pushed through a ban on any federal government aid for drug users. If the states want to subsidize them, fine, but as far as the federal government goes, if you use drugs you are on your own.
We needed to relook at our strategy not for the benefit of the people who got prosecuted but for our own benefit. Imprisoning people should be a last resort—though there are plenty of knuckleheads whose behavior puts them far beyond the last resort. We need to save jail for people who should be in jail.
The minority community viewed the drug war as an assault upon itself. Moreover, because it was the police who enforced the drug war—and because police are about the only “conservative” government workers—we conservatives ended up getting the blame for all the abuses and negative consequences.
Many minority Democrats saw what we were trying to do, and they were natural allies with conservatives for pro-family, pro-community justice system reform designed to minimize the impact of drugs while preserving families and strengthening communities. To their credit, they rejected the Clinton administration’s pleas not to cooperate with us.
The inner cities are still the least conservative parts of this country, not counting faculty lounges, and are therefore most in need of conservative solutions. We needed to be in these communities, if not winning them then at least making the liberals break a sweat to retain them. Criminal justice reform was just the ticket to earn us a fresh look
There were just too many damn laws. I think there still are. The federal government, frankly, has almost no business criminalizing any more behavior. Crime is predominately a state problem. Every new law is, therefore, an expansion of government, which is presumptively bad. Instead of coming up with a hundred new laws a year, we tried to change the dynamic to come up with a hundred to repeal. Or, better yet, two hundred.
Law is a powerful weapon in the hands of a too-powerful government. We started stripping some of that power away, and we did it in the name of the values of fairness, compassion, and justice. You know, the stuff liberals lie about holding dear.
* * *
Billy Coleman (Activist)
Coleman’s raw milk farming is what had originally brought him into conflict with Walmart and other large companies that had used their connections to drive small competitors under. As a liberal, what he did not expect was to see the full weight of the criminal justice system fall upon him.
In the late 2010s, I was running an organic farm. No antibiotics, not hormones, no chemicals—nothing. Pure cow. That was out motto: “Jacob’s Creek Farms: Pure Cow.”
Well, we sold in little stores around the region. A lot of these stores were mom and pop operations. I knew a bunch were Tea Partiers, and I didn’t like that because at the time I was what you would probably call a liberal. But, you know, they did their thing and I did mine. They wanted to sell my milk and I wanted them to, so we were cool.
Well, they start going under because Walmart was undercutting them. Then all sorts of new regulations come on that most of these small stores couldn’t handle. The Walmarts and the other big companies didn’t even notice the new regulations—in fact, they had supported them. It crushed the little guys!
What was keeping these small stores going was partly that they would sell raw milk. People would drive out from the city to buy it. Well, sure enough the feds start coming around, telling us our local raw milk is unsafe and we can’t sell it. The hell with that—my milk was healthier than any of that processed junk that Walmart was selling. Of course, Walmart was all over the campaign to ban local raw milk. They said it was to protect the children. We said it was to protect their profits.
Well, we keep selling our stuff and we start getting harassed. One day, I am out in the barn and suddenly I am looking down the barrels of a bunch of assault rifles!
I thought they had made some kind of mistake, but they hadn’t. They came to serve a search warrant on my farm and they brought the SWAT team. Why the hell did the Agriculture Department have a SWAT team anyway?
I got charged with a bunch of violations, including conspiracy. I was looking at 10 years in federal p
rison and losing my farm. They offered me a plea deal—plea to a felony, do two years, but I still lose my farm because it is “a mechanism of a criminal enterprise.” My lawyer told me to take it, but I told the deputy US attorney to go to hell.
I thought I was done for, but then I started getting all this support from these conservatives, and not just in my area. I started getting interviewed on conservative media—the regular media ignored it—and I got so well known that the US attorney tried to revoke my bail.
The feds complained to the judge that the conservatives were trying to taint the jury pool. They sure as shit were. The jury heard the evidence, saw that I was guilty as hell of selling raw milk, and acquitted me.
The feds went ballistic. There were more raw milk prosecutions and more acquittals. The feds finally got a judge to issue a gag order saying that no one could discuss the raw milk cases in public because it “perverted justice.” Well, there was sure some justice being perverted all right, but not by us.
The juries were still refusing to convict—it was called “jury nullification,” and juries were doing it on gun cases too after Hillary Clinton put her ban in effect. Finally, liberal judges started ordering juries to convict, and when they wouldn’t, the judges would just find the accused guilty themselves. The Supreme Court even upheld that travesty until the impeachments and President Marlowe’s pardons.
Now, I sell raw milk to anyone who wants to buy it. I figure if you are an adult, you can decide for yourself what you put into your body. The government has no business being involved.
I had been a liberal, but after I got to really know liberalism, well, count me out.
* * *
Puff (Hemp Advocate and Activist)
Puff is clearly feeling it now. He inhales deeply once more before continuing.
Conservative Insurgency: The Struggle to Take America Back 2009 - 2041 Page 18
