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And just like that, bag pipes became my favorite instrument.

The federal trial of Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Duga

Patrick says

The federal trial of Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Duga

How likely is it that judge will convict another judge, especially if both are Dems?

Remember the Wisconsin judge who tried to help sneak a criminal illegal alien out of the courthouse? Welp, she’s been convicted by a jury. Yesterday, the New York Times ran the story headlined, “Judge Convicted of Obstructing Agents as They Sought Undocumented Immigrant.”

I wouldn’t even try handicapping Judge Hannah Dugin’s appellate chances, given how unusual this case is. But, barring an appellate miracle, she now faces sentencing of up to six years in prison. Even if she never serves hard time, the felony conviction will end her judicial career and will probably ensure she never even works as a lawyer.

At trial, Dugin’s lawyers brought in a powerhouse character witness— a popular former mayor. He testified to rapt jurors that he’d known Dugin since she was 11 or 12, that she was “very honest,” and that he was “sure she’ll tell you what really happened.” Then Dugin declined to testify, rendering the mayor’s efforts immediately impotent.

Judicial prosecutions are vanishingly rare. I wouldn’t say it doesn’t exist anywhere, but I could not find another modern example. For a judge to be prosecuted at all, their case has to run a treacherous gauntlet of collegial protection, institutional deference, immunity doctrines, and raw politics that effectively foreclose all but the most egregious cases of judicial misconduct.

Consider, for example, this Reuters Special Report from 2020:

Special Report: Thousands of U.S.
judges who broke laws, oaths
remained on the bench
By Michael Berens and John Shiffman
June 30, 2020

So once again, the Trump Administration has shattered “norms and customs” and modern records, by successfully prosecuting this unicorn-like case through to conviction— even though Judge Dugin’s misconduct, while unacceptably lawless, arguably does not even rise to the “most egregious” levels of judicial misconduct.

Republicans are launching a new U.S. House caucus aimed at confronting what they warn is the growing influence of Sharia law inside the United States.

Texas conservative Reps. Keith Self (R-TX) and Chip Roy (R-TX) have just announced the formation of the “Sharia Free America Caucus,” Fox News reported.

The effort reflects a broader push among conservatives to address national security concerns tied to radical Islamist ideologies.

The Kennedy Center’s governing board has just voted unanimously to rename the Washington, D.C., performing arts complex after President Donald Trump.

On Thursday, the board voted to change the venue’s name to The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.

The move is a major symbolic victory for Trump, who has made the institution a cultural priority of his second term.

Trump had publicly hinted at a renaming, and the unanimous vote marks the most significant step to date.

It remains unclear when the change will formally take effect, and the procedural path forward has not yet been announced.

Beyond their immateriality, one of the challenges in addressing DEI is the sheer scale of the criminal enterprise. The rolls of the guilty number in the hundreds of thousands, if not the millions. They permeate the institutions. Putting them all on trial individually would be a Herculean task. Moreover, in most cases their individual culpability is quite minor. Odious as their ideological commitments may be, they’ve probably not done much more than make a remark on a hiring committee to the effect of ‘But are we sure we want to hire another white guy?’ Some of them have done more than that, but very, very few of them are guilty of anything that rises to the level of illegality that you could throw them in jail for even for a few months, let alone justify their mass slaughter.

Yet as a class, the damage they have done has been immense. As a class, they’re responsible for destroying millions of lives. As a class, they have the blood of hundreds of thousands of suicides on their hands. As a class, they’ve stolen careers from millions, and through this they have stolen hundreds of billions of dollars, all of which represents families that were never started, babies that were never born, inventions that were never brought to market, scientific breakthroughs that were never made, era-defining creative works that were never produced. The civilizational damage these termites have done to the arts, to scholarship, to the sciences, and to technology is almost impossible to overstate.

To not hold them accountable would be a monstrous miscarriage of justice.

This is really a special case of a more general tactic that the managerial class has spent the last century perfecting. Every question is handled by a committee or a system or some other impersonal mechanism. The result of this is to diffuse accountability through a giant formless mass of human oatmeal. All of them are a little bit culpable, but no one person is entirely or even primarily responsible. It is therefore difficult to know where to direct one’s fire. There are very few high-value targets, and simply removing one person here or there has no actual effect on the system, since individual functionaries are easily replaced.

The answer to this is actually quite straightforward, requiring only the ruthless will to carry it out.

Since the locus of responsibility is at the systemic level, the systems must be targeted. Which is to say, the institutions. Which is also to say, the people staffing the institutions, as a class. Because they act collectively, and refuse all personal accountability, indeed using organizational opacity to make personal accountability impossible, collective accountability is the only possible solution.

The end goal is simple: to take their power, and to take their wealth. This requires something more than memes and podcasts. Ultimately we are talking here about access to material resources. Young white men need to be able to afford houses, they need to be able to support families, they need access to real, tangible property and prosperity. ...

The obvious place to begin is in the courts, and the necessary elements for a courtroom feeding frenzy are already in place. The 2023 Supreme Court case Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard established that affirmative action in university admissions is unconstitutional; of course, universities have by and large ignored this ruling (thereby leaving themselves open to further legal action). ...

Most recently, just a couple of days ago and in clear response to the Compact article, the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission put out the word to white men to bring DEI-related discrimination to their attention (unfortunately, there’s a 180 day statute of limitations on EEOC complaints, but this is only one potential avenue of many). ...

The universities are all quite clearly guilty of grievous violations of civil rights law, and there is no reason not to turn that body of law against them via class action lawsuits seeking to extract ruinous penalties. This can be paired with a broad spectrum of federal actions: DOJ investigations paired with massive fines; cutting off the supply of research grants; cutting off the supply of federal student loans. Similar actions can probably be pursued at the state level. Here it is worth pointing out that Trump is being very stupid in allowing 600,000 Chinese exchange students to be brought in for the purpose of propping up the universities; quite aside from the national security risk, there is no reason to prop them up, and he should instead be doing the opposite.

Meanwhile, private class action lawsuits – for example, from young white men and their parents, or young white male academics – can be launched on the basis of admissions and hiring discrimination. Apart from possible punitive damages, these would turn up internal documents in discovery, which could then be used to inflict reputational damage. University faculties and staff are notorious for leaving internal paper trails in which they admit to flagrant violations of civil rights law in service of racial justice.

The overall strategy would be to starve the universities of capital flow, while simultaneously raiding their capital reserves, with the goal of driving them to bankruptcy. The process can be accelerated enormously just by removing accreditation: without the ability to grant degrees, a university ceases to be a viable enterprise. When it enters receivership, its assets – real estate, patents, copyrights, whatever remains of its liquid capital, trademarks, physical plant such as laboratories and IT infrastructure, everything – are acquired by a third party, which then has the opportunity to reconstitute the institution under new leadership. ...

The result of this would be to achieve almost immediate turnover of the personnel in higher education. Universities would no longer be fortresses of civilization’s enemies, but realigned with Western civilization. Enemies would be punished and friends rewarded, at massive scale. ...

So much for the universities. What about the private sector? The movie studios, the publishing houses, the television networks, the large corporations, the financial institutions? These are of course also just as guilty of systematic discrimination on the basis of race and sex; they are at least equally tempting targets for plunder or expropriation; and, crucially, they are also failing due to a decade of substandard products and services. Hollyweird just had one of its worst years on record, for instance.

Once again class action lawsuits and DOJ investigations are an obvious strategy. Proving discrimination in the case of any individual applicant is usually impossible, but demonstrating systemic discrimination should be very easy at the statistical level. Did a corporation have a DEI policy? Did white men comprise an obviously tiny fraction of new hires during the Cancelled Years? OK then, the organization is guilty of illegal discrimination, and we are now fining you one googolplex dollars; since you can’t pay that, your assets now belong to the plaintiffs, and everyone who works at your company is out of a job.

As an example, every white male software engineer who’s struggled to find employment over the last few years could target IBM, which under Arvind Krishna is on the public record as discriminating against white male software engineers as a matter of policy. ...

Blackrock has something like $13 trillion in assets under management, and around $160 billion of its own liquid capital. For its role in ESG, its direct assets should simply be fined away from it, Larry Fink should be thrown in jail, and its assets under management put in more responsible hands.