Keir and Kamala Cut from the Same Cloth

The article below was originally published in the August issue of the New English Review under the title, "The Real Indictment Against Kamala Harris".  But this week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer demonstrated that the British government is likewise keen to use "lawfare" against its own citizens, so we reprint that piece with a short preface by the same author.

Keir Starmer has revealed his true colors as the first Stalinist prime minister of Britain. But has anyone noticed that he shares the essential trait that I recently identified with the aspiring next president of the United States: both rose to power by putting people in prison? Before seeking political office, Starmer served as the Director of Public Prosecutions, a powerful position in Britain that was already being politicized.

His outburst reveals why this skill is so useful to today’s authoritarian western politician when he threatens citizens whose political views differ from his with not only prosecutions but “convictions”. So convictions are not the culminations of court deliberations, weighing evidence in each case, applying procedural safeguards, and observing due process of law. No, convicting people of crimes is a virtue for its own sake and a legitimate weapon to threaten and punish people whose politics you dislike or whose mouths you want to stop.

Incidentally, I explored this mentality in my previous book, The New Politics of Sex (pp. 123-157), where I found that it was pioneered by none other than the feminists. They complain that “conviction rates” for rape accusations are too low and demand more convictions to increase the rate — regardless of the evidence in particular cases. They know that large numbers of citizens, whose cases they have not examined, are guilty of crimes. So in this, as in so many respects, we can thank the feminists for introducing innovative methods of authoritarianism.

The surreal prospect of Kamala Harris as a major party presidential candidate—and before that possibly the president of us all—offers irresistible temptations to the satirists and those who laugh to keep from crying. Her shallow philosophizing and word salads have filled us all with, shall we say, amusement (at least until now). Not since Dan Quayle has any VP or public figure offered such a tempting target for ridicule (and he was an intelligent man, as it turns out, whose bravery in stating unpopular truths has been vindicated).

I will resist the temptation and risk ruining everyone’s fun by posing a serious question: How did this hopeless mediocrity rise so high in American public life? Being a politician’s mistress offers one alluring explanation, but the real reason is more sobering. It is precisely the one that she herself has been playing up, but it is also the same reason why so many mediocrities wield so much power in Washington and across America: she was a prosecutor.

In US politics, this is now the foolproof career path to power: from prosecutor to district attorney, to state attorney general, to governor, and from there on up to Congress and beyond. This says something serious indeed about American politics and specifically about the current regime’s capacity to inflict so many disasters in so many places at once.

If one common denominator connects the otherwise perplexing assortment of crimes and catastrophes of the last 4 years, it is the mischief of prosecutors, former prosecutors, quasi-prosecutors, would-be prosecutors, and a citizenry habituated to farming out its civic responsibilities to lawyers of all kinds, the most deadly of whom are prosecutors.

Prosecutors and other judicial entrepreneurs have had their fingers in most of the pies, whether by commission or omission: from the Covid lockdowns to the BLM-Antifa riots, to the lawless cities, open borders, election-rigging, the security and law-enforcement apparat fabricating hoaxes like “Russiagate,” the false-flag and lawfare operations against Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and peaceful protesters on January 6, and even war in Ukraine.[1]

Critics like Tulsi Gabbard launch sensational attacks accusing Harris of being a bad prosecutor. But like all politicians who are themselves products of the system, Gabbard covers up more than she reveals. The litany of injustices she attributes to Harris is nothing out of the ordinary; all prosecutors routinely do the same and worse. Harris herself almost gloats about it:

America has a deep and dark history of people using the power of the prosecutor as an instrument of injustice. I know this history well—of innocent men framed, of charges brought against people of color without sufficient evidence, of prosecutors hiding information that would exonerate defendants, of the disproportionate application of the law.

The scandal here is not one or a few rogue prosecutors but our penchant for electing public office-holders whose foremost qualifications and proudest achievements consist of using any devices at their disposal to transfer as much of the population as possible into America’s vast archipelago of prisons.

Harris is simply the reductio ad absurdum of a tendency that is not limited to ideologues from the Left. More polished and plausible political operators use similar maneuvers to betray our trust by their fecklessness or perfidy, including conservative Republicans.

I realize that some conservatives believe that the only problem with prosecutors is that they do not lock up more people. Harris is now exploiting this simplistic thinking, repackaging herself as “fearless” on crime. But this is equally part of the danger she represents, because the corollary to leniency for the guilty is punishment of the innocent. Both devices and more constitute the larger menace: the legal industry’s capacity for proliferating the criminality it claims to be combating.

The Soros-bankrolled hacks who allow dangerous criminals to devastate our cities and terrorize urban dwellers, while targeting law-abiding citizens for criminal prosecution and persecution, and who engineered the “lawfare” operations against Trump and his supporters with draconian prison sentences, are only the most visible variations on the theme. Soros is simply mobilizing and directing attack dogs that are already well-trained and available to be unleashed.

The criminalization of America has been ongoing for decades.[2]  In the “assembly-line justice” meted out by most criminal courts, hearings last a matter of minutes, when young men, for the most part, are sentenced to months or years in prison and consigned to lives of intermittent incarceration, poverty, and homelessness from which it is almost impossible to escape.

But those processed by criminal courts are often set on the path to both criminalization and criminality by operations of probate courts, administrative courts, family courts, and all kinds of newfangled specialty courts that operate beneath the media radar screen and adeptly generate business for themselves by creating criminals to prosecute.

Why is this permitted, decade-after-decade, until it reaches the point where it determines our political outcomes?

We allow this because it mostly operates upon disfavored sectors of society, those we assume to be natural or inevitable criminals—those whose lives most of us are content to see consigned to regimes of systematic injustice, believing it will never touch us. The largest group is young, low-income black males.

While this social sector does have serious problems of violent criminality (which cries out for serious examination), young black men are not born criminals.  Their own career path to criminalization-criminality is the corollary of the prosecutors.’ It is orchestrated and choreographed by functionaries who inhabit a legal-political underworld that is too dreary for most people to notice, but it is supervised by judicial river rats like Kamala Harris.

To understand this, we should start by realizing that young black men today are far less likely to be incarcerated for violent crime than for unpaid child support. (Or for drug-dealing, which is driven by child support because the penalties for selling drugs are less harsh than those for not paying child support.) This is because most young black men, even those who populate the prisons, are not violent criminals or criminals at all. They are interned for failing to perform their role as latter-day slaves to labor for the vast welfare state-within-a-state, whose penal component is represented by Harris.

This is the bread-and-butter for huge numbers of entry-level prosecutors and prosecutrices, as well as for the ringmasters of the circus, the attorneys general—occupations and offices sustained largely by the systematic incarceration of young black men (and increasingly others). Putting these men in the pokey is now a major growth industry, employing increasing numbers of young black women.

Those raised watching courtroom dramas like “Perry Mason” may believe that prosecuting is a skill demanding a modicum of forensic finesse. But prosecuting allegedly unpaid child support is so formulaic and demands so little intelligence that even Kamala Harris can do it. A robotic prosecutor simply shows some meaningless numbers to an equally robotic judge (both of whose salaries come from child-support collections), who issues an order locking up the next dozen.

Needless to say, quaint niceties like “due process of law” play no part in this legal underworld. No trials or convictions are required, and no record will likely even be found specifying the terms of their internment.[3]

Demand for cadres of these procuratorial simpletons is generated by politicians who have preceded them up the political career ladder, principally attorneys general and governors.  The state attorney general is the key office for amassing government revenue from child-support collections and also serves as the stepping-stone to governorships and other higher office.[4]

You can readily see how Harris personifies this dynamic. If you want to understand why we are confronted today with the specter of President Kamala Harris, it is because we have provided these opportunities to her ilk. She has risen through the ranks by exploiting the mechanisms for systematically sending massive numbers of youth to populate the already gargantuan American prison gulag.

Ever since the pseudo-reform of welfare under the Clintons, child support has been marketed as a wholesome crusade to force “deadbeat dads” to pay for the children they have sired and “abandoned.” In fact, it is a cynical, money-making bureaucratic scam that scavenges the families decimated by welfare, confiscates their wealth for the state, and proliferates and entrenches the very poverty it claims to alleviate. Worse, it gives politicians a financial interest in dissolving as many families as possible, because they can raise revenue and build careers through child-support collections. This explains why the permanent immiseration of black America never abates but only worsens and why it is rapidly spreading to other communities: The politicians ensure that it does.

Crucially, this includes not only ultra-leftists like Harris, complaining about the “racism” of the justice system, but self-described “family-values” Republicans like Senator Josh Hawley. It is difficult to say whose hypocrisy is more cynical.

Like welfare itself, the child-support machinery it generated subsidizes single motherhood, facilitating and proliferating it. By evicting fathers from their homes and forcing them to pay for their children through the state machinery (they are not permitted to give the money directly to the mother or children), state governments collect vast amounts of operating revenue. But more, the fathers who are criminalized by their inability to pay the crushing sums must endure the further tragedy and humiliation of seeing their sons—deprived of the fathers who are the greatest factor for stability in their lives—become real criminals and therefore additional fodder for the prosecuting industry. The same enforcement machinery that criminalizes the fathers ensures that a large proportion of their father-deprived children end up as violent criminals, addicts, dropouts, prostitutes, and otherwise dysfunctional people. This is how the prosecutors—and judges and others in the judicial oligarchy—keep themselves in business and grow its operations.[5]

That enterprise is now large enough and wields enough political clout to place one of its own in the presidency and impede her rivals with lawfare attacks.[6]

Whether she wins or loses the presidential contest, the legal-political cesspool that threw up Kamala will continue to grow and breed unprincipled political characters who despise and hijack  justice for their own purposes, until we ourselves summon the determination to refrain from pointing our own fingers of accusation at obvious villains, and fingers of laughter at obvious clowns, and get our own political house in order.

[1] From the start, international judicatures, most notably the International Criminal Court, have endeavored to insert themselves into the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, with threats of criminal prosecution and rulings that are determined by political calculations and that make it clear that they are political players whose first priority is not legal justice but maximizing their influence in the international competition for power.

The legalistic framework is adopted even by non-jurists.  Just as domestic political opponents are pursued as criminals on the thinnest of pretexts, even thinner pseudo-judicial procedures are mobilized against international adversaries.  “I have determined,” declares Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, “that members of Russia’s forces and other Russian officials have committed crimes against humanity in Ukraine.”  This “determination” was seconded by Harris.  Those who thought that the “rule of law” required that determinations of criminal guilt be made by courts, weighing evidence and observing due process of law, can be forgiven for being perplexed at how politicians can issue declarations of guilt or innocence, proceeding from an omniscience that is sufficiently infallible to establish others’ criminal culpability and based not on standard definitions of crime or rules of evidence but on how those parties conduct public and foreign policy.   Here too, one might wonder if similar standards of justice guided Harris during her career as a criminal prosecutrix.   “Crimes Against Humanity in Ukraine”, State Department press statement, 18 February 2023, https://www.state.gov/crimes-against-humanity-in-ukraine.  In the international context, accused “criminals” face an even lower burden of proof than those accused in domestic political contexts; see John Laughland, Travesty: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International Justice (Pluto, 2007).

[2] For references to journalists and scholars who have investigated this in depth, see chapter 3 of my new book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went “Communist” and What to Do about It (Arktos, 2024).

[3] Conservatives now complain about practices like “predawn, no-knock raids and circus arrests before awaiting media (to whom time and place of said arrest have been pre-leaked).”  But they did not complain when this technique was pioneered by child-support enforcement – they applauded – so now they too have become its targets.  Michael Anton, “The Pessimistic Case for the Future,” in Up from Conservatism: Revitalizing the Right after a Generation of Decay, ed. Arthur Milikh (Encounter, 2023), 3.

[4] How state governments and politicians profit financially by intentionally proliferating fatherless children and collecting the resulting child support – which funds general government operations — is explained in my book, Who Lost America?  Not accidentally, attorneys general now spearhead campaigns to curtail parents’ rights elsewhere.  “Sixteen State Attorneys General File Brief Opposing Parents’ Rights,” Daily Citizen, 3 July 2023, https://dailycitizen.focusonthefamily.com/sixteen-state-attorneys-general-file-brief-opposing-parents-rights/.  Here too, we were warned.  See John Gizzi, “State Attorneys General: A National Association of Aspiring Governors,” Capital Research Center, September 2005.

[5] “The one great principle of the English law,” wrote Charles Dickens, “is to make business for itself.”

[6] Another prosecutor, Keir Starmer, recently became Prime Minister of Britain.

This article first appeared on the New English Review.