US Legal Fraternity: Compromised Over Actions Against Trump and the 2020 Election

Has the legal profession ever been more than organised self-interest dressed in robes? Has it ever consistently adhered to the higher principle of blind justice—the ideal of the Lady with the scales, eyes covered, weighing evidence without regard to power or popularity? What happens when partisanship and corruption hold the reins?

The Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1925 offers a useful contrast. Clarence Darrow defended John Scopes, who had openly admitted violating Tennessee’s Butler Act by teaching evolution. The judge kept the proceedings focused on facts rather than vague cultural anxieties. Scopes was convicted; the judge imposed the minimum fine of one hundred dollars. The Butler Act itself was upheld, yet the trial performed a public service: it forced a national conversation about science, evidence, and the proper limits of law. That science of the 1920s included discredited ideas later embraced by the Nazis—race theory, phrenology, and crude biological hierarchies. The principle of evolution by natural selection has stood the test of time; those racialist accretions have not. The Butler Act’s attempt to enforce a particular reading of Scripture was clumsy and inconsistent with the broader Christian claim that salvation rests on faith and righteous conduct, not on defending the precise geometry of the cosmos. Pi is not three. Digging does not lead to hell, nor flying to heaven. The trial nevertheless demonstrated what law can do at its best: compel argument, clarify terms, and inform the public even when the statute itself was flawed.

Today the legal profession shows a different pattern. Campaign contribution data consistently show that roughly eighty percent of lawyers and law firms lean Democratic. That imbalance is not neutral. When a profession that staffs prosecutors’ offices, law faculties, bar associations, and much of the judiciary leans so heavily in one direction, the risk of selective enforcement rises. The 2020 election remains a legitimate subject of factual and legal dispute. Opposing interpretations of election administration, mail-in procedures, and certification processes can and should be tested in court and in public argument. Denial that any serious question exists is not the same as resolving the question.

The January 6 Select Committee was bipartisan in name only. Its composition, investigative priorities, and public presentation were overwhelmingly partisan. The later pardons of certain senior figures associated with related events only deepened the appearance of selective justice. More troubling still has been the aggressive prosecution of lawyers who represented Donald Trump or advanced legal arguments on his behalf. Several of those lawyers were prominent, experienced practitioners. Treating zealous advocacy itself as a prosecutable offence risks chilling the very adversarial process the legal system claims to protect.

Judicial activism compounds the problem. Courts have blocked or delayed a series of presidential actions by the second Trump administration on grounds that often stretch statutory or constitutional language beyond recognition. The spectacle of a Supreme Court nominee unable or unwilling to offer a straightforward biological definition of “woman” during confirmation hearings crystallised a deeper loss of confidence: if basic categories can be treated as ideological traps rather than ordinary facts, the claim to neutral judging looks increasingly hollow.

A free society requires robust legal argument on contested elections, executive power, and cultural questions. What it cannot afford is a legal fraternity that functions as an extension of one political coalition. When the guardians of process become participants in the culture war, the scales tip, the blindfold slips, and public trust erodes. The remedy is not the replacement of one orthodoxy with another, but the recovery of institutional restraint: judges who stay within their lane, prosecutors who apply the law evenly, and lawyers who remember that their first duty is to the integrity of the system rather than the victory of their tribe.

Academia and Entertainment: Captured Institutions Converting to Agenda

Samuel Clemens, writing as Mark Twain, once advised that one should not let schooling get in the way of one’s education. The warning still applies, though the danger has shifted. Where once the risk was pedantry or empty credentialism, today it is the conversion of entire cultural institutions into vehicles for a narrow agenda.

Consider a recent classroom scene. An Arts/Law student sits in a literary criticism seminar. The set text is a play in which a family man leaves his wife and children to live with a goat. He tells his former wife that he loves his family, yet loves the goat more—not merely sexually, but socially and existentially. The play traces the evolution of that relationship. Class discussion centres on the meaning of love, framed almost exclusively through queer theory. The student, a Christian, asks whether this text offers a balanced sample from which to draw broad conclusions about love and human relationships. The lecturer denounces the question as inappropriate and declares that the subject matter itself may not be questioned. The student may have passed the course. High distinction is unlikely.

What does that episode suggest about literature and arts graduates who consistently receive high marks under such regimes? We are watching the steady destruction of a cultural asset. Literature once trained readers to weigh competing claims about human nature, to recognise irony, tragedy, and moral complexity. When the only permissible lens is a predetermined ideology, the capacity for independent judgment atrophies. Graduates leave fluent in the approved vocabulary yet poorly equipped to read a text on its own terms or to tolerate disagreement.

The same pattern appears in entertainment. A Hollywood figure who has survived being publicly labelled conservative is approached by a world-famous director who shares the quiet view. “Why are we whispering?” one asks the other. The question is revealing. Two people whose professional lives depend on creative judgment feel compelled to lower their voices when discussing ordinary political or cultural opinions. Does their opinion matter less than their skill? A plumber who is inexpensive and effective may believe in aliens without professional consequence. Hollywood, by contrast, increasingly elevates identity over talent. Even gifted artists whose views fall outside the narrow current orthodoxy—JK Rowling and Gal Gadot among them—have faced organised attempts at cancellation on matters irrelevant to their craft. Both remain popular with large audiences; both have been treated as liabilities by institutions that once claimed to prize excellence.

History offers an instructive contrast. The mid-century Hollywood blacklist of communists was widely denounced, and rightly so when it punished people for beliefs rather than actions. Yet it is also true that committed communists worked inside the industry and sought to advance their politics through it. Figures such as Nixon and Reagan, whatever their other faults, understood the stakes and pushed back. Today the institutional immune system appears weaker. The direction of pressure has reversed: open conservatism is the riskier stance, while progressive conformity is safer.

Intellectual independence used to be a prized academic virtue. In many Ivy League departments the proportion of faculty who identify as conservative now falls below ten percent; in some fields the figure is closer to zero. Australia has its own illustrations. A Sydney University professor of Australian poetry was effectively pushed out after his private conservative views became public through a privacy breach. When a multi-billion-dollar bequest was offered to an Australian university specifically for the study of Western culture, the institution struggled to identify suitable scholars or structures to receive it. These are not isolated personnel disputes. They are symptoms of institutional capture.

It is entirely appropriate that a free society wrestle openly with questions of cultural identity, meaning, and morality. Democracy requires such argument. What is dangerous is the conversion of universities and entertainment institutions into enforcers of a single orthodoxy. When classrooms treat dissent as moral failure and studios treat talent as secondary to correct opinion, the culture itself is impoverished. The remedy is not silence or counter-orthodoxy, but the recovery of genuine intellectual independence—the willingness to let a text, a film, or an argument stand or fall on its merits rather than on its alignment with the prevailing agenda.

The censorious, tribal left have damaged institutions in pursuing culture war.

A century ago, American teachers functioned as a broadly conservative cultural force. Their purpose was straightforward: school children in the knowledge, habits, and civic competence required to function as free citizens. Excellence was measured by mastery of reading, writing, arithmetic, history, and practical skills. Students were expected to learn how to operate within groups—classrooms, teams, communities—rather than be continuously sorted and affirmed according to personal identity. That approach drew on older traditions of formation that predated the republic itself.

That is no longer the prevailing model. Large parts of the education establishment now treat schooling as identity formation and emotional management. Children are encouraged to locate themselves primarily through difference rather than shared standards. “Safe spaces” frequently function less as protection than as mechanisms that police speech and isolate students from disagreement. Simultaneously, stimulants and other psychiatric medications are prescribed at rates that would have seemed extraordinary a generation ago, often to manage the very behavioral and attentional variation that schools once expected children to master through structure and expectation. Young students are mobilized for adult political causes while ordinary competitive sports and physical rigor face new restrictions or ideological overlays. The result is not liberation; it is confusion dressed as compassion.

Nurses once embodied a parallel ethic of disciplined service. Florence Nightingale’s reforms emphasized cleanliness, order, systematic observation, and subordination of personal ideology to the patient’s recovery. The profession trained people to follow evidence and medical hierarchy while exercising practical judgment at the bedside. Today the cultural climate inside parts of healthcare has shifted. Open discussion of alternative approaches or skepticism toward prevailing orthodoxies can carry professional risk. At the extreme, a small number of practitioners have claimed a mercy rationale for ending lives they judged irredeemable—cases that, while rare, reveal how far ethical language can drift when traditional restraints weaken. Legal frameworks for assisted dying in some jurisdictions formalize what earlier nursing ethics would have rejected.

These were not peripheral occupations. Teachers and nurses sat near the center of middle-class respectability and institutional trust. Educating a person was understood as expanding capacity, not dissolving inherited categories. A nurse treated Theodore Roosevelt after he was shot in 1912; the decision to leave the bullet in place reflected clinical judgment under constraints, not ideology. Healthcare outcomes have improved dramatically through technology and science, and costs have risen accordingly. Education spending has also risen substantially in real terms, yet long-term measures of student achievement—NAEP long-term trends, PISA results—have been largely flat or declining in key areas for years, with sharper drops after 2010 and further damage during the pandemic years. More money and more ideological intervention have not produced corresponding excellence.

Critical thinking is valuable. What passes for it in many institutions today is often the opposite: the intersection of relativist ethics and identity-based moral claims that disable ordinary judgment. Students learn to detect power and oppression with great sensitivity while remaining poorly equipped to weigh evidence, tolerate disagreement, or master difficult material. The former Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov described a process of ideological subversion that begins with demoralization of education, media, and culture—changing a generation’s perception of reality so that facts lose their force. Whether one accepts the full Soviet operational claim or not, the observable pattern inside Western institutions matches the symptoms he outlined: relativism in place of standards, politicization of neutral functions, and the replacement of competence with correct attitudes.

Thirty years ago a family could still treat a Disney film as a relatively safe alternative to the more openly manipulative currents of television. That confidence has eroded. Major entertainment corporations have absorbed progressive cultural priorities so thoroughly that their output frequently prioritizes messaging over craft or broad audience appeal. Box-office underperformance of several high-profile projects and internal cultural conflicts are not coincidental. Parallel debates—whether biological sex is real and binary—illustrate how far basic categories have been contested inside institutions that once treated them as settled.

The damage is not abstract. When teaching prioritizes identity over literacy, when medicine prioritizes affirmation over evidence-based caution in certain domains, and when cultural institutions treat traditional forms as suspect, the institutions themselves lose the trust and competence that made them valuable. Recovery requires restoring the older priorities: transmission of knowledge, disciplined service, and the formation of capable citizens rather than the continuous management of identities. The alternative is continued institutional decay under the banner of progress.