“But all tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.” – Edmund Burke
The following excerpts are both chilling and eye-opening, taken from an article I recently read titled “The Takeover of the American Legal System,” by Aaron Sibarium:
“The adversarial legal system—in which both sides of a dispute are represented vigorously by attorneys with a vested interest in winning—is at the heart of the American constitutional order. Since time immemorial, law schools have tried to prepare their students to take part in that system.”
“Not so much anymore. Now, the politicization and tribalism of campus life have crowded out old-fashioned expectations about justice and neutrality. The imperatives of race, gender and identity are more important to more and more law students than due process, the presumption of innocence, and all the norms and values at the foundation of what we think of as the rule of law.”
“Critics of those values are nothing new, of course, and certainly they are not new at elite law schools. Critical race theory, as it came to be called in the 1980s, began as a critique of neutral principles of justice. The argument went like this: Since the United States was systemically racist—since racism was baked into the country’s political, legal, economic and cultural institutions—neutrality, the conviction that the system should not seek to benefit any one group, camouflaged and even compounded that racism. The only way to undo it was to abandon all pretense of neutrality and to be unneutral. It was to tip the scales in favor of those who never had a fair shake to start with.”
“But critical race theory, until quite recently, only had so much purchase in legal academia. The ideas of its founders—figures like Derrick Bell, Alan David Freeman, and Kimberlé Crenshaw—tended to have less influence on the law than on college students, who by 2015 seemed significantly less liberal (“small L”) than they used to be.”
“At first, the conventional wisdom held that this was “just a few college kids”—a few spoiled snowflakes—who would “grow out of it” when they reached the real world and became serious people. That did not happen. Instead, the undergraduates clung to their ideas about justice and injustice. They became medical students and law students. Then 2020 happened.
All of sudden, critical race theory was more than mainstream in America’s law schools. It was mandatory.”
“As of last month, the American Bar Association is requiring all accredited law schools to “provide education to law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism,” both at the start of law school and “at least once again before graduation.” That’s in addition to a mandatory legal ethics class, which must now instruct students that they have a duty as lawyers to “eliminate racism.” (The American Bar Association, which accredits almost every law school in the United States, voted 348 to 17 to adopt the new standard.)”
“Trial verdicts that do not jibe with the new politics are seen as signs of an inextricable hate—and an illegitimate legal order.”
“The problem has come not just from students, but from administrators, who often foment the forces they capitulate to. Administrators now outnumber faculty at some universities—Yale employs 5,066 administrators and just 4,937 professors—and law schools haven’t been spared the bloat. Several law professors bemoaned the proliferation of diversity, equity, and inclusion offices, which, they said, tend to validate student grievances and encourage censorship.”
“Law school deans have further entrenched this culture. In 2020, 176 of them petitioned the American Bar Association to require “education around bias, cultural competence, and anti-racism” at all accredited law schools, which led to the new ABA standards this February.”
“As the new ideology has been institutionalized, the costs of disobeying it have grown steeper, both for faculty and for students…(I.e.) what happened at Yale Law School earlier this month, when the school’s chapter of the Federalist Society hosted a bipartisan panel on civil liberties. More than 100 law students disrupted the event, intimidating attendees and attempting to drown out the speakers. When the professor moderating the panel, Kate Stith, told the protesters to “grow up,” they hurled abuse at her and insisted their disturbance was “free speech.”
“The fracas caused so much chaos that the police were called. After it ended, the protesters pressured their peers to sign an open letter endorsing their actions and condemning the Federalist Society, which they claimed had “ profoundly undermined our community's values of equity and inclusivity.”
We don’t need to speculate about how temper tantrums in New Haven will reshape American institutions. The ideas underlying these outbursts have already spread to boardrooms and government agencies.
Last year, NASDAQ demanded that companies listing shares on its exchanges meet racial and gender quotas. Uber and Postmates waived delivery fees from black-owned restaurants. Montana and Vermont gave non-white residents priority access to Covid-19 vaccines.
Some high-profile initiatives have been blocked, for example, the Biden administration’s attempt to prioritize minority-owned restaurants while doling out pandemic relief. But the legal guardrails that once ensured against this sort of tipping of the scales are coming undone.
“It used to be that most lawyers could work for Catholic hospital system even if they were pro-choice,” a recently retired lawyer told me. “But now people just say, ‘I oppose this client, so I can’t work for them.’” (The lawyer had planned to stay at his law firm—one of the largest in the US—for a long time. He told me he retired in 2020 after the firm’s culture became “simply unbearable,” with younger associates excoriating him for being “old and white, and part of the reason we have systemic racism in America.”)
Law firms also worry about losing their corporate clients, which, like many American institutions, have grown more stridently ideological in recent years. “I knew of and heard of clients protesting cases we were taking,” the recently retired lawyer said. “If you were going to do a gun rights case, you would incur the wrath of other clients.”
Since 2011, law firms have been pressured to drop or turn down a long list of clients: fossil fuel companies, foreign universities, a GOP-controlled House of Representatives, employers challenging Biden’s vaccine mandate, and, of course, Donald Trump.
These pressures—both internal and external—have had a chilling effect. If defending anti-vaxxers can cost you business, law firms reason, imagine the blowback of defending a transphobe or a racist.
“It doesn’t even occur to people to take controversial cases,” one lawyer in Washington, D.C., said. Religious liberty cases, for example, are “totally off the table. I wouldn’t even think to bring it up.”
Another lawyer, who specializes in First Amendment litigation, described being forced to turn away a client with far-right views because the firm thought that any association with the client—even if the claims advanced were meritorious—would be bad for business.
The problem, Strossen said, is that rights mean nothing without representation. “ANYONE who doesn’t have access to counsel in defending a right, as a practical matter, doesn’t have a meaningful opportunity to exercise that right,” the former ACLU chief told me in an email. “Hence, undermining representation for any unpopular speaker or idea endangers freedom for ANY speaker or idea, because the tides of popularity are constantly shifting.”
Wow! The current Cancel Culture of the left seems to be winning. “People of good conscience are remaining silent!”
In the 1930s, Marxists realized that in order to begin “the Long March through the institutions” in Europe and the U.S., they would have to change their modus operandi – critical theory – pitting the classes against each other, to Critical Race Theory – pitting the races against each other (for in the west there were no classes); Ultimately, creating the anarchy necessary for a Marxist take over.
The “Long March” always begins in the universities with the indoctrination of the future professionals who will be the cultural influencers of those institutions and in turn, the country. It is a “long game strategy.”
This article clearly documents that progression. If we are going to “take back America” we must take back those institutions and that must start where it all began, in the universities. We need a spiritual awakening similar to the Jesus People movement of the ‘70s with epicenters of revival in campuses across the country.
I found my faith in Christ during that time at Kent State University four years after four students were shot protesting on campus by the Ohio National Guard one block away from where I was in class at the time.
It was an awakening! Young people were coming to Christ by the droves. In fact, the son of the Mayor of Kent who called in the Guard, and one of the organizers of those riots (the Kent 25), both became believers and experienced radical life changes as I did during that period.
Jesus truly is the answer, the only answer to what we are facing as a nation and this needs to be our prayer, that this nation would truly turn back to God in repentance and seek Him and Him alone for the healing of our nation! (2 Chronicles 7:14)
As we celebrate this Memorial Day let us remember the sacrifices of those men and women who fought for (and to preserve) the freedoms we enjoy today. Let us, in honor of them, vow not to remain silent, “that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” (Gettysburg Address)
