Posted on April 26, 2024

Race and the Decline of American Justice

Peter Bradley, American Renaissance, April 26, 2024


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Lawfare — using the legal system against political opponents — is now a common leftist tactic. It’s effective. Just last month, VDARE.com announced it is effectively shutting down operations after 25 years. Perhaps more than any other site, VDARE has spotlighted how America’s immigration policy leads to demographic disaster. Its shuttering would be a huge loss, especially in light of the border crisis that threatens to sweep away what remains of traditional America.

It is not just VDARE facing lawfare by George Soros-backed prosecutors such as New York Attorney General Leticia James. The National Rifle Foundation (NRA) and — most famously — Donald Trump are in their crosshairs. Unlike VDARE, Mr. Trump and the NRA have the resources and influence to at least fight back. VDARE was not even charged with anything, but has had to spend nearly $1 million as Miss James “investigates” real estate agreements regarding a property in West Virginia. VDARE has only two full-time employees and an annual budget of $800,000.

If this campaign is successful, all dissidents could face similar attacks. The Left will not stop with VDARE.

The judiciary was historically the most admired and respected branch of the US government and all Americans are supposed to be protected by the Constitution. What happened?

The legal clash

Wilmot Robertson noted the decline of the US judiciary over 50 years ago. His classic work The Dispossessed Majority (1972) has a section called “The Legal Clash” that explores how whites lost control of a system they had built.

Robertson believed that law first developed from tribal customs. Knowing their people’s fear of the supernatural, tribal chiefs claimed divine guidance for laws they laid down. As societies grew complex, laws regulated more and more behavior, and a diversity of people means a diversity of customs and attitudes. Robertson wrote:

The more minority influence has been brought to bear on the American legal system, the more breakdown is becoming apparent. The English common law, which derived from Northern European folk law, functioned adequately, at the times superbly, in the United States as long as the nation was dominated by people of English and Northern European descent. But when minorities became an important element in both the law-making and law-breaking process, American law underwent a deep transformation. . . . [T]he law is not an abstract set of principles equally applicable to all men, but an organic part of a people’s culture, with a style and form unique to its culture.

What made Anglo-American law unique? Robertson cites the notion of personal rather than collective guilt, something rarely found among non-whites. As the legal system became more diverse, the individual became part of a group, and by the 1960s, jury trials involving blacks had become a farce. Robertson lists many cases of black jurors refusing to convict obviously guilty blacks who had victimized whites. This has only gotten worse over the years and the not-guilty verdict in the O.J. Simpson murder case is a prominent example. The writers of the Constitution would abhor double jeopardy, jury nullification, and lawfare, yet these are now aspects of the US justice system.

Why didn’t the Constitution protect us from these things?

Robertson notes the Framers treated non-whites with “studied indifference.” Black slaves were “other persons” for apportionment, and American Indians were not counted at all. It took a civil war and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to grant citizenship and other rights to blacks, which shows that the authors of the Constitution meant it to apply only to whites. Even after these amendments, cases such as Civil Rights (1883) and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) granted freedom of association to whites and sanctioned exclusion of blacks.

The judiciary started to diversify throughout the 20th century, with non-whites, non-Christians, and women appointed to the bench. Starting in the 1950s, the Warren Court and later the Burger Court issued a series of defeats for whites as the judiciary moved sharply left. Whites lost all the major civil rights cases of the 1950s and 60s and any hope for a more conservative Supreme Court was dashed as justices (many appointed by Republicans) defended racial preferences in cases throughout the 1970s. There is now only one white Protestant justice (Neil Gorsuch, raised Catholic), meaning any organic link to the framers has been all but severed. Robertson wrote:

Wallowing in the deceptive glow of the liberal-minority Weltanschauung, the Warren court attempted to transform the organic law of Majority America into a code of moral and racial imperatives as inapplicable to the crucial issues of the day as they were unenforceable. The Burger and Rehnquist courts never made any meaningful counter-decisions to reverse the trend. By its ill-timed and ill-conceived reinterpretation of the Bill of Rights and other Constitutional guarantees, the Supreme Court has in effect usurped the legislative function of Congress — a gross abuse of the judicial power as defined by the Constitution.

Many conservatives like to point to the antics of Justices Ketanji Brown and Sonia Sotomayor as evidence of decline, but Robertson lists case after case of much earlier unethical and even illegal behavior by justices. Here are just a few:

  • When he heard about President Kennedy’s assassination, Earl Warren sent out a press release insinuating (wrongly) that the killer was a right-wing racist.
  • Felix Frankfurter and Stanley Reed appeared as character witnesses for Alger Hiss in his 1949 federal trial for perjury.
  • William Douglas received a $12,000 annual payment from the Albert Parvin Foundation while on the Court. The money came from a Las Vegas casino and Douglas refused to resign until it became known that Parvin engaged in many sordid financial dealings with Louis Wolfson, who was under investigation for stock fraud.
  • Abe Fortas was forced to resign in 1969 after it was discovered he was getting $20,000 a year from the same Louis Wolfson.
  • The Court reversed Muhammed Ali’s conviction for draft dodging on a technicality, because it feared black riots.

Robertson writes that the judiciary is most responsible for white dispossession because it was easier to corrupt nine justices than to out-vote or out-legislate a 90-percent-white electorate. This is a view that prominent Dissident Right voices now accept:

In his concluding chapter on the decline of US justice, Robertson cited statistics and horrifying examples of whites killed by black criminals and noted that blacks often do not think they are criminals, but soldiers in a race war. Three of the four main prosecutors targeting Donald Trump with lawfare are black — a fact that makes blacks proud:

Lawfare is a symptom of the decline of US law and the dispossession of whites. A justice system developed by and for white people does not work for an increasingly non-white nation. How could people with no history of individual rights have any reverence for the Constitution or “the white man’s justice”? Scott Greer recently wrote:

Colorblind individualism doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s the result of the unique culture brought here by a particular people. Random individuals didn’t invent fair play, meritocracy, and equality before the law from nothing. It came from the Anglo-Protestant tradition that Europeans assimilated into in America. It’s no wonder whites are the only ones who believe in it.

Solutions?

Robertson offered a solution. He approved of impeaching judges, but thought it would not solve the problem. He called instead for separate legal systems for whites and minorities. Romans had different laws for citizens (jus civile) and non-Romans (jus gentium). In the Middle Ages, England had special laws for foreign merchants. Even the US acknowledges the Napoleonic Code as the state law of Louisiana. Robertson writes:

An ethnic departmentalization of American law would return to the minorities the laws they have lived by for thousands of years, while removing minority members from the jurisdiction of laws they have never learned to live by. . . . Majority law would be a mix of Anglo-Saxon common law and American constitutional law restored to a climate of reason, respect and responsibility and ready to focus once again on what should be its primary purpose — guarding and expanding the Majority’s freedom of action.

Robertson was writing in 1972. Whites are now a fading majority (57 percent, according to the 2020 Census). Does this make separate justice more or less likely?

Many on the Dissident Right criticize Donald Trump. As president, he wasted many opportunities and talked a better game than he played, but a second term may be our best chance for at least slowing lawfare against dissidents, especially white advocates. As one of the main victims of lawfare, Mr. Trump certainly knows how it can be abused. A legal system created by whites is now being used against us by non-whites and leftists. Wilmot Robertson saw this coming half a century years ago.

About Peter Bradley

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Peter Bradley lives in Washington, D.C.