Decimation, Due Process & Deportations

Since the Enlightenment, the Anglosphere has had a laudable commitment to due process, which means opposing the brutality of group punishment. But what happens when that commitment leads to societal suicide? Our Founders cannot have intended this, especially regarding those people who ignored due process to enter America illegally.

In 73 BC seventy slaves escaped from a gladiator school in the town of Caupa, in central Italy.  They spent the next two years attacking various towns and encouraging slaves to revolt and join them. This was the beginning of the Third Servile War.

By 71 BC the force numbered 120,000, had at its head the former gladiator Spartacus, and had become a formidable force, defeating a number of Roman legions on the battlefield. It was then, with much of the peninsula living in abject fear of both the rebels and their own slaves, that the Senate appointed Marcus Licinius Crassus command. 

Crassus was a brutal commander and revived the ancient ritual of decimation.  Decimation is responsibility taken to an extreme, where one out of ten members of a group are killed by the other members as punishment, often for the group having lost a battle. While it’s unclear exactly why Crassus utilized decimation – he ordered the deaths of up to 4,000 men out of his force of almost 40,000 – the result is clear, his men feared him more than the enemy.  They defeated Spartacus, and crucified his last 6,000 men along the Appian Way.

That one in ten responsibility ratio has been a defining maxim of American law since before there was an America, although not in the same direction. In the middle of the 18th century William Blackstone released his Commentaries on the Laws of England, which became a core element of English and then later American law.

In Commentaries Blackstone draws on the Old Testament to turn Rome’s responsibility decimation on its head.  Blackstone’s Ratio stated "is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”  This maxim was picked up by Ben Franklin stating “That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer…”

John Adams put it like this: “It is more important that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt be punished; for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world, that all of them cannot be punished.... when innocence itself, is brought to the bar and condemned, especially to die, the subject will exclaim, 'it is immaterial to me whether I behave well or ill, for virtue itself is no security.' And if such a sentiment as this were to take hold in the mind of the subject that would be the end of all security whatsoever.”

With all due respect to Blackstone, et.al. I disagree.  My disagreement is perhaps best personified by my favorite quote, from Voltaire: “Perfect is the enemy of the good.”

There is no system that is perfect, and while Blackstone said the ratio of good to bad should be 1 in 10, Franklin said it should be 1 in 100.  But both numbers are arbitrary.  How about 1 in 2 men, or 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 1,000,000. If not, why not? That maxim sounds noble and virtuous, but civil society cannot survive such a caveat.  While society and the government should do as much as it reasonably can in order to ensure that no innocent men are going to pay for a crime they did not commit, the reality is that no system operated by men is perfect.

Why does any of this matter today?  Because our Constitution is not a suicide pact. 

Over the last 4 years over 10 million illegal aliens invaded the country.  Over the previous 30 years another 20-30 million came.  In total, there approximately 35 million illegal aliens in the United States, and we finally have a president who’s decided to take on the Herculean / Sisyphean task of deporting them. 

And now that someone is trying to do something about the cancer of illegal immigration the left is throwing roadblocks in the way seemingly every other day. The rationales are varied, but a fundamental argument is “Due Process”.

Due Process is an important element of American history and jurisprudence, but like the Constitution, it’s not a suicide pact.

Thirty-five million illegal aliens is 10% of the American population. Judges across the country are telling the administration it must exercise Due Process before any of them can be deported. That is simply not feasible. Between scheduling court dates, conducting court cases and waiting on the appeals processes, there’s literally no way for the American judicial system to handle that number of cases. If each case could magically be fully adjudicated in just one day and the government could deport 10,000 people a day, it would take a full decade to deport all the illegals already here.  But they don’t take one day.  In most circumstances it takes months and often takes years. 

But we’re told that without Due Process it’s possible that someone legally here, or even an American citizen could be deported. And that’s true, it is possible. But is that a reason to not deport the 35 million illegals in the United States? No.

To say yes would be basically to treat the United States the way blue states treat homeowners victimized by squatters.  Across the country we hear horror stories of homeowners whose lives are turned upside down by squatters.  The owner not only loses access to or use of their homes but they’re still required to pay the mortgage, taxes and insurance.  This can go on for years.  And when the squatters finally leave – sometimes only after being paid to do so – the homeowners often find tens of thousands of dollars of damage. Such situations make anyone with a functioning brain see red with fury.  It’s simply insane.

Now multiply that exact scenario by 35 million and you have America’s illegal immigrant disaster.

Which brings us back to Blackwell and Adams. One wonders if they would suggest that it’s better that 35 million immigrants remain in America illegally than one citizen accidentally be deported. What if the number were 45 or 75 million, either of which would be possible after 4 or 8 more years of the next Democrat in the White House.  At what point does “Due Process” become “Accept the collapse of the Republic” because that’s exactly the position Democrats and swamp dwelling RINOs have put Trump and America in. 

Of course this is only an issue because activist judges across the country have overstepped their Constitutional powers and embraced nationwide injunctions as the vehicle for undermining Trump. 

I’ve advocated for the president to ignore the judges, but so far he’s chosen not to do so.  He is considering however a suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, similar to what Lincoln did in 1861. As I read the Constitution it seems to my non-lawyer eyes that it’s Congress who can suspend the writ*, and perhaps he’s planning on asking them to do it. Of course there’s zero chance that that snake infested swamp will do so.  Or he could do as Lincoln did and suspend it unilaterally and then ignore SCOTUS.

I realize that doing so would open a Pandora’s Box of potential disasters from Democrats and RINO swamp weasels in DC, but if the leftists leave Trump no other options, is his job to sit by and watch the Republic collapse? I don’t think so.  But make no mistake, we're not here because Donald Trump is some sort of would be dictator.  We're here because Democrats have been attempting to decimate American exceptionalism for decades.

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA

*Note from Andrea, the brilliant editor of AT with point I find quite compelling: Vince is entirely correct that the accepted way of reading the power to suspend the Writ of Habeas Corpus is that it’s limited to Congress. The reasoning is that the permission to do so is contained in Article I, which establishes both Congress's powers and limitations.

However, one can argue that because the authority to suspend the Writ of Habeas Corpus is included in Section 9, Lincoln was correct to say that he, too, had the authority. That’s because there are clauses in Section 9 that clearly extend beyond Congress, such as the prohibition against Foreign Emoluments or the Ports Preference Clause. If these clauses do, and if the President is charged with being the Commander in Chief and front-line of national security, it makes sense that he would also have authority over the Writ of Habeas Corpus.

Donald Trump’s Lost Honeymoon

As the west was seemingly spinning off its axis of common sense, it was the relief of a lifetime when Donald Trump prevailed in 2024.  Suddenly the world that had been turned on its head was going to be set right again. We were going to have an actual border again. Men weren’t going to be allowed to play in women’s sports.  Freedom of speech was going to be a thing again. DEI was going to be fading in the rear-view mirror rather than a roadblock to merit and success.   

On most of these things the President has been rock solid. But, sadly there are troubling circumstances nonetheless. 

One is highlighted by Democrat Jamie Raskin’s warning to countries who work with the Trump administration: "If and when we come back to power, and we will, we are not going to look kindly upon people who facilitated, to use the word of the day, who facilitated authoritarianism in our country. That's an assault on our Constitution and our people," Raskin is essentially threatening those who work with the Trump administration with consequences when Democrats returned to power.

That promise showcases one of the fundamental problems with the Trump 47 administration:  Executive Orders. The problem with EOs is that they are not laws, and therefore are susceptible to reversal by the next guy who sits in the Oval Office.  (One that should have been but never was is JFK’s Executive Order 10988, which allowed federal employees to unionize.)

Trump has issued Executive Orders addressing issues from immigration, energy, education, keeping men out of women’s sports and more.  They’re great, but unfortunately Congress is not turning those EOs into laws… which means that the next time Democrats steal the White House, all of those can be immediately repealed, which is exactly what happened with Trump 45’s EOs. Has he learned nothing?

Another area of concern has to do with rouge judges.  Trump has faced an unprecedented number of nationwide injunctions and insane court orders.  These have included everything from immigration to federal waste and fraud to transgender surgeries to men in women’s sports. Trump is allowing himself and his agenda to be hamstrung by Obama and Biden activists.   Axios even wrote a piece titled “Lower courts' growing power over the president”.  President Trump just passed his first 100 days, what’s commonly called the “Honeymoon” for a president where he has the momentum and usually the greatest chance of getting legislation passed.  But this administration is not doing that, in large part because the GOP party is full of RINOs and lawmakers are too busy grandstanding or sucking up to donors by introducing over 5,000 mostly pointless bills and resolutions, 95% of which will end in the shredder. 

Given that the GOP House is led by a guy with a pathetic 75% Liberty Score, the filibuster gives Democrats a veto over pretty much anything and the Supreme Court is led by swamp dweller, Trump has few good options.  But few doesn’t mean none. This is probably a bad quote to showcase given the circumstances, but it fits.  After a Supreme Court ruling that went against him in 1832, President Andrew Jackson may or may not have said about the Chief Justice, “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”

In that same vein, Trump should simply ignore the lower courts’ injunctions that go beyond the specific participants in any case.  Judges have no Constitutional power to make nationwide injunctions and Trump should act accordingly. Force Congress to come up with a solution.  And for those who cry that Trump would be doing something unprecedentedly unconstitutional… not so much. Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase even though he believed he had no Constitutional power to do so.  Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, FDR forced internment of over 100,000 Japanese American citizens, Obama weaponized the IRS to target his opponents and invented DACA while Biden bragged about defying the Supreme Court after they rejected his cancellation of student loans. And there are others.

The reality is, the judiciary is running a coup d'état and if Trump doesn’t end to it soon, his legacy will be failure and the collapse of the Republic.

While the judiciary is the most critical issue, there are still others that must be addressed.

Trump must charge and make examples out of the people behind the persecution of the J6ers and the members of his team who were targeted, like Mike Flynn. Trump has taken more abuse from more sides than any president in American history. They’ve indicted him, they’ve charged him, they’ve sued him and they’ve literally tried to kill him twice – that we know of.  And they did all of that once he was out of office and had spent his entire term in office struggling against the swamp – both across the aisle and in his party.  These people targeted not only Trump, but the Constitution and the Republic.  If not addressed, it will happen again.  

Then there are two more issues: The Epstein list and election fraud. 

We were promised throughout the campaign that the Epstein list was a top priority.  It’s clearly not, as we’ve just been told that the White House doesn’t know when it will be released. That’s after we were told there was an issue with national security.  There should be nothing that involves a blackmailer pimp selling access to children that should impact national security.  It doesn’t matter if that list includes politicians, generals, justices, or anyone else. If someone is on tape doing anything worthy of blackmail with children, they should be exposed, tried and convicted.  If the list never sees the light of day, particularly after Epstein and his primary accuser committed “suicide”, then the public will know for sure that the rich and powerful – including politicians – are not held accountable, regardless of their transgressions.  That is not a message a nation struggling to bring back law and order needs.

Then there is the Democrat’s using every dirty trick in the book to create circumstances where they can steal elections, and that includes ActBlue, the money laundering scheme specifically designed to illegally funnel untraceable money to Democrats. If Trump doesn’t fix the integrity of American elections, the country will quickly become California, a single party nation utterly unmoored from reality, common sense and quickly devolving into a dystopian nightmare which will beget a civil war. 

Donald Trump was elected to fix America.  He can’t do that so long as the people who broke it are still free and in positions to keep him from doing so. No one is talking about rounding up anyone simply because they’re Democrats. No, but those who used their positions to illegally thwart Trump from executing his Constitutional duties, used their offices to illegally destroy the lives of opponents, and those who stole the election in 2020 must be held to account. It must be done publicly, transparently, and constitutionally.  But most of all, it must be done.

If Americans see that the government is no longer constrained by the Constitution and that we’ve devolved from a nation of laws to a nation of men, then their willingness to be governed by said Constitution will evaporate. Anarchy and tyranny are the antipathy of a Republic, but that is ahead if Trump doesn’t demonstrate that no one is above the law, even government officials. 

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA

Of Foxholes and Atheists and Donald Trump

 The leftist elites always hate Republicans, but there is something much deeper going on with their hatred for Donald Trump. The desire to destroy him has an almost religious element to it.

They say there are no atheists in foxholes. The basic premise is that when facing an existential threat, particularly when lives are on the line, people will look for something stronger than themselves, often God, to pull them through.

The opposite might be when things are good. Then, atheism, or at least an indifference to God, grows.

Sadly, in this context, the last 75 years have been very good for the West. WWII was horrible, of course, but there were some good things that came from it.

The first good thing features two sides of the same coin, and that coin is the utter destruction of Germany and Japan. I don’t mean their defeat, but rather the utter destruction of their infrastructure and that of many of the nations fighting them. The result for the relatively unscathed United States was that its full wartime manufacturing footing put it in a position to provide pretty much of everything the war-torn world needed. The result was that by the middle of the 1950s, the American economy, with 5% of the world’s population, approached 40% of world GDP. Times were indeed good.

The other side of that coin was that because the German and Japanese infrastructures were so completely destroyed, they could leapfrog over many iterations of evolution and begin again with the latest technologies, machinery, and processes. The result was that by the 1980s, the Japanese and German economies were the most powerful in the world after the US.

The second positive outcome of WWII was the Cold War. Now the Cold War had many downsides, including the hot wars in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere, but what it did was draw a clear line between who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. America and the West were far from perfect, but we knew that at the end of the day, the West was the land of freedom, while the communists were tyrannies constantly seeking to expand.

The result of that clarity was that, for the most part, Western nations understood there was real danger in the world and prepared for it. They focused on trading with one another, they took defense seriously, and while they sometimes tolerated communists in their midst, they rarely made heroes of them.

The consequence of that Cold War clarity, and the Soviet and Chinese understanding that the West was willing to fight to preserve freedom across the planet, was a relative peace. And that relative peace was the West’s undoing.

For the half-century from the end of World War II until 2000, the world experienced more economic growth than it had in the previous 2,000 years combined. Driven by relative peace, world trade took off both within the West and with the developing world.

But then a funny thing happened on the way to perpetual prosperity. The West, basking in its victory over the Soviets and its certainty that communist China would evolve into a modern Western democracy if only allowed to sell us tchotchkes, began to turn on itself.

The peace / communist parties, which had been funded by Moscow and had always been a fringe element of modern Western polity, suddenly morphed into environmentalists and cloaked their anticapitalist ideas in far more voter-friendly “Earth First” shibboleths. Now, just as the money spigot from Russia was coming to an end, a far larger resource was becoming viable…Western governments.

The result was the extraordinary growth in the power of the far left in Western politics. And it wasn’t just environmentalism that was driving the train. As the Cold War wound down, Western nations used their “peace dividends” to shower citizens with benefits while simultaneously seeking to regulate their economies into perfection. (Spoiler alert: It didn’t work!)

The perfect encapsulation of the West’s metastasizing can be seen in the form of the European Union. Imagined as a vehicle to foster peace and then trade between perpetually warring European states, it morphed into a leviathan that not only seeks to control virtually every aspect of citizens’ lives in its member states, but it seeks to control who can grow what and when, how states can control their borders and even whether sovereign states can conduct their own elections.

Like so much of the modern West, an idea that started out as something ostensibly good metastasized into cancer. Stopping the pouring of chemicals directly into rivers morphed into eviscerating farms. A temporary safety net for the downtrodden morphs into generational welfare. An empathetic desire to help victims of war morphs into an invasion by legions of military-aged men.

And it’s not just capitalism and freedom that have taken body blows. The third leg of the stool upon which western civilization stands is Christianity, and it has been brutalized by Western prosperity, as have the foundations of Christianity, namely, marriage and children.

As they say, idle hands are the Devil’s workshop. The West’s relative prosperity has caused citizens not focused on a common enemy to turn on their own history. From British universities dropping Shakespeare and Chaucer to the New York Museum of Natural History removing Teddy Roosevelt’s statue to the Spanish government’s vow to “decolonize“ the nation’s museums, to the cancer of DEI, across the West, nations are turning their backs on their own foundations, the things that set them apart from—and above, frankly—every other civilization in human history. From socialism to communism to Islam, Western intellectuals have led the charge, via schools and the media, to champion everything that is anti-Western, anti-capitalist, anti-masculine, and anti-white.

At the end of the day, the globalist elites co-opted the hard-won prosperity and peace by leveraging technology, Chinese tchotchkes, and social media algorithms to aim society’s guns at the very things that built success in the first place. They’ve created a Mexican standoff where everyone loses as the core elements of Western civilization are undermined by policies specifically formatted to destroy them, while the resulting “culture” is not equipped to support anything close to the same level of civilization.

All of this is why Donald Trump is for the left, a new Jesus Christ—not in the sense that he’s godlike, because I think we can all agree that he’s not, but because he embodies their eventual destruction. Thus, just as Christ was a heretic whose message of love and a gracious God had to be destroyed because it threatened the established order, Trump’s pro-America, pro-masculinity, and pro-Western civilization message must be destroyed because it threatens the New World Order.

The globalists argue that they are best equipped to structure the lives of citizens, organize world economies, and control everything from speech to cow farts to electricity generation. Any message that suggests that citizens should control their own lives, that capitalism makes for the most prosperous outcomes, and that free speech is a cornerstone of civilization must be quashed.

Western elites think Donald Trump is the common enemy they need to unify citizens under the banner of globalism. They’ve got it backwards. They’re more likely to discover exactly how many of their citizens feel like they’ve been crouching in a foxhole waiting for someone to inspire them to climb out, pick up their weapons, and charge into a battle of ideas to take back their lives. Imagine the sheer horror on the globalists’ faces when they realize that Donald Trump just might be that guy...

When Government Brutalizes Children

 Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny – Thomas Jefferson

With all due respect to Jefferson, sometimes that perversion happens quickly. Such is the case in America where half our governments have launched a war on a quarter million years of biology in what seem like two weeks…

Of course, sometimes biology sucks.  My wife and I never had children. We tried, but never could. Sometimes, God’s plan doesn’t go the way you hope. We had a dog, however, Lady, a beautiful pointer we got when she was a puppy. One day when she was about seven she suddenly stopped eating.  We took her to the vet and it turned out she had pancreatic cancer.  The next day he told us there was no hope. He said he could wake her up and send her home with us, but she’d only last a couple of weeks and be in pain the whole time. We obviously couldn’t do that and said goodbye as he gave her the shot.

 

It was excruciating.  We poured all of our parental love into a puppy whose whole life was about having fun and being around us. It was almost unbearable to lose her. We cried for days. It was, and remains, the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced, and I’m old! I loved that dog more than almost anything on the planet. I certainly liked her more than most people I know.

 

To most people, this probably sounds crazy, and maybe it is. But here’s the thing: At the end of the day, as much as we loved her, we knew Lady was a dog, not an actual person. We weren’t raising her to be a good person, to graduate from college, or to raise a family. But some people get that opportunity with actual children, and they abuse it…

 

In terms of people abusing their children, there are too many stories to tell, but here I’m addressing only one aspect of that abuse: government.

 

Government plays a role in the raising of children. I don’t mean they are or should be raising America’s children. No, just the opposite. But government does have a role to play in a functioning society, things such as enforcing laws, providing a framework for resolving disputes, protecting the rights of citizens, etc.

 

But that’s not the government I’m talking about. No, I’m talking about the government that not only facilitates parents abusing their children but actively participates in the abuse itself.

 

The whole point of biology is to perpetuate the species. The whole point of civilization is to strengthen and perpetuate culture. When government undermines those things, it becomes illegitimate. Case in point. Colorado.

Last month, the Colorado House gave initial approval to a bill that would classify “misgendering”—that is, referring to a person by their actual, biological sex—as a crime if that person pretends they’re something else. What’s more, “It would also consider misgendering by a parent ‘coercive control’ and require courts to consider it when deciding child custody cases.”

 

So, a Colorado father who recognizes that his son is actually male and refuses to refer to him as a girl just because his college-educated liberal Munchausen-by-proxy-addled wife wants to turn little Johnny into little Jane could actually lose custody. (It’s almost always college-educated liberal Munchausen-by-proxy-addled women who do this.)

 

A father actually lost his parental rights to his boys because the mother, who wanted to castrate one of them, left Texas and moved the boys to California. Once there, the state sided with her.

 

This is insanity. Humans have been on earth for 250,000 years, and for all that time, there were two sexes, male and female. While you have a tiny fraction of people who genetically didn’t fit in either camp, that doesn’t make it normal, just as the existence of Siamese twins doesn’t make having two heads normal for humans.

 

The reality is that the trans psychosis that has infected the United States is the result of grooming-obsessed LGBT activists seeking to normalize that which is not normal, politicians seeking to empower themselves by promoting victimization, and a hypocritical medical system, as opposed to a Hippocratic system (“first, do no harm”), that profits at the expense of children’s physical and mental health.

 

Biology tells us that humans are men or women. There’s nothing in between beyond genetic mutations. Throughout human history, across the planet, the dominant family structure was built around what we’d call a nuclear family, with a mother and a father and their biological children at the core. Throughout history, the household structure might change (such as including grandparents or servants) but the core of a nuclear family persisted. Why? Because it’s demonstrably the most reliable organization for the perpetuation of culture and the species.

 

But somehow, in the last twenty years, we’ve decided that not only is the millennia-long definition of marriage as something between one man and one woman no longer valid but also that the most basic element of human biology, the definition of men and women, is somehow fluid.

 

If that insanity only applied to adults, it might at least be arguable, but that’s not what’s happening. We’re seeing governments embrace mental illness on an epic scale and use their police powers to help parents butcher their children and often do so at the urging of hospitals that make money off of the blood of those victims.

 

Somehow, this grooming cabal has convinced enough voters that this travesty is sufficiently normal that governments are now enforcing it.

 

The thing I don’t understand is how some parents can be so disconnected from human nature that they’re willing to butcher their children or give them medicines with the potential to destroy their lives. Nor do I understand others who, even if they have straight kids, are willing to vote for a government that butchers other people’s children and allows tweens to make life-altering decisions before they can legally vote or drink beer. Hell, I hated clipping Lady’s nails because I was scared I’d hurt her!

 

If you’d have told me 20 years ago that almost every state would have transgender clinics where they mutilate children and that half of the population would live in states where the government is complicit in this madness, I would have said you’re crazy.

 

But that’s where we are. In the best of circumstances, when adults “transition” (which is, of course, a fantasy), they’re 12 times more likely to be suicidal than those who don’t get the operation. The consequences for children are likely far higher.

 

It’s bad enough that parents sometimes abuse their children for their sick fantasies. That half of state governments help them do so is disgraceful. A government that refuses to protect children and enables their mutilation has lost all legitimacy. Donald Trump should threaten to withhold money going to any state that supports this – education, transportation, Medicare, Social Security, and every single dollar if the state doesn’t outlaw this butchery. Sure, they’ll whine, but that’s a small price for saving the tens of thousands of children whose lives would be destroyed by this butchery every year.