Nov. 26: Sorry for Weaponizing the Justice Department Against You

Kosher cafe owner praises Final Solution; Americans back Trump deportation plans; CUNY quiet on antisemitism

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The Big Story

Special Counsel Jack Smith moved yesterday to have his remaining charges against President-Elect Donald Trump dismissed, and shortly thereafter, federal judge Tanya Chutkan agreed, thus closing the government’s efforts to imprison the former (and future) president. The charges against Trump, all stemming from his alleged efforts to overthrow the government on Jan. 6, 2021, were serious: conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct, and actually obstructing, an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights. If found guilty, Trump would have faced significant prison time. Smith claims that the charges remain solid, but DOJ legal opinion holds that sitting presidents cannot be prosecuted, so the case must end. The special counsel plans to resign his post before Trump takes office.

At the same time, official Washington is atremble over fears that Trump might unfairly use the nation’s system of justice against his political opponents. This possibility is uniformly discussed as though it would represent a red line that America has never crossed. University of Michigan law professor Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney, wrote in October that “former President Donald Trump has made it clear what he’d like to do with the Department of Justice if he’s reelected: go after his political opponents.” Former presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris warned before the election that Trump “is a guy who said he would be a dictator on Day One, who said he would weaponize the Department of Justice, take away the independence of the Department of Justice and put his loyalists in.” Former White House spokesperson and current MSNBC host Jen Psaki complained yesterday that Attorney General Merrick Garland dragged his feet in prosecuting Trump because he was hampered by his own “impartiality” and that his dithering has now put the seditionist-in-chief in a position where he can staff the Justice Department with people “who are loyal to him.”

It takes the socio-emotional insight of a child to understand that the psychological mechanism of projection is at play here. It is without a trace of irony, for instance, that Psaki noted that Attorney General Garland waited until “Trump announced his candidacy” before appointing Jack Smith as special counsel. It’s beyond obvious that Trump’s opponents are imputing onto him their own motivations, in a classic form of scapegoating. The grave concern that Trump might politicize and “weaponize” the workings of justice mirrors their guilty knowledge that they did precisely that, with a key difference: The case against them is much stronger than their case against Trump ever was.

T.J. Harker, a former federal prosecutor and astute observer of the present legal landscape, has made the point that many of the actions of Trump’s pursuers fall clearly under the provisions of USC 18 Section 242, which makes it a felony to willfully deprive an individual of his or her constitutional rights under color of law. This section is aimed specifically at public officials who use (“weaponize”) their offices to violate another’s rights. Harker cites the case of Shenna Bellows, Maine’s secretary of state, as a low-hanging example of this conduct. Bellows, a Democrat politician, lifelong professional liberal activist, and nonprofit executive, decided in December 2023 to remove Trump from the state’s primary ballot on the grounds that he had engaged in an insurrection and was thus ineligible to be president based on a vague clause in the 14th Amendment.

Bellows, neither a lawyer nor a constitutional scholar, apparently arrived at her decision based on her judgment. Her behavior before and following her announcement betrayed the willful, politicized nature of her action. Bellows had previously written social media posts excoriating Trump. She did numerous laudatory television interviews with friendly outlets that praised her “bravery” in barring Trump from running in Maine, and was celebrated by fellow Democrats. Her actions clearly deprived Trump and his supporters of their constitutional rights and were undertaken “under color of law.” Bellows acted after the supreme court of Colorado had ruled on the same basis that Trump was ineligible to appear on the state ballot. The Colorado case was spearheaded by Democrat operative and legal mastermind Norm Eisen, working in connection with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit lawfare organization he founded. The coordinated effort by Eisen, CREW, and probably Bellows also indicates a likely violation of USC 18 Section 241, which penalizes conspiracies against rights. This is one of the key charges brought against Trump and was what sent internet prankster Douglass Mackey to prison for publishing memes encouraging Democrat voters to vote for Hillary Clinton via text message. The efforts by Colorado, Maine, and Illinois to block Trump’s appearance on the ballot was overturned unanimously by the United States Supreme Court, which ruled that states do not have the authority to interfere with federal elections and that Congress alone is empowered to decide if a candidate has violated the “insurrection clause.”

Similarly, New York State Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg clearly went out of their way to confect charges against Donald Trump. James ran for office on the stated campaign promise that she would doggedly go through all of Trump’s business records until she found something to nail him on; in the end, she was only able to bring civil charges against him, and a friendly partisan judge went along with her efforts to bankrupt him. Bragg was slightly more circumspect in his campaigning and initially resisted prosecuting Trump on bizarre charges of having incorrectly recorded internal business transactions, but evidently succumbed to massive political pressure from above. Both James and Bragg are suspected of having coordinated their prosecutions with top-level Democrat officials; it is expected that the incoming administration will uncover the truth of those interactions. But both prosecutors—and the associated judges, for that matter—appear at first face to have willfully violated Trump’s rights under color of law.

“Treason doth never prosper. What’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason,” quipped the Elizabethan courtier John Harington, who also invented the flush toilet. Had Trump lost the election, we would be gearing up for his federal trials, and he might have been sentenced to jail or prison already. It’s a strange irony that the Democrats’ zeal to punish their political enemy, in the style of Algeria or Pakistan, rebounded against them, elevating Trump in the public eye and reinforcing his longtime message that “they” were out to get him. That’s what happens, it seems, when you stare into your own blind spot and shout accusations against your shadow.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Jem Hanan on how the war in the Middle East is playing out in the world’s most popular form of graphic art—manga

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The Rest

→Among the rioters and mostly peaceful protesters burning Montreal in support of Hamas last week, one participant was particularly “extra,” as the kids might say. Strutting in front of counterprotesters, masked artfully by a keffiyeh, she announced, “The Final Solution is coming your way! The Final Solution!” Adding emphasis, she gravely intoned, “Do you know what the Final Solution is? Do you KNOW what the Final Solution is!” A little later she was filmed, her keffiyeh askew, marching with her right arm thrust out, performing the Hitlergruß. What a surprise then, when it emerged yesterday that the History Channel enthusiast is the proprietor of two kosher cafés—kosher, yes, though not cholov Yisroel, according to the hechsher—inside Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital. Cleverly worded headlines at first elated antisemitic conspiracists who are always excited to uncover another perfidious Jewish “false flag,” but ultimately disappointed them when it was explained that this breathing example of antizionism indeed being antisemitism is named Mai Abdulhadi—evidently the idiot daughter of an Arab Canadian family of café franchisees. Second Cup, the coffee chain in question, has terminated its business dealings with Mlle. Abdulhadi, who is seeking legal counsel.

→New York City Mayor Eric Adams swore in his newest police commissioner yesterday. Jessica Tisch garnered respect for her commitment to rodent eradication in her stint as sanitation commissioner and before that for her work as—basically—the head of IT for the NYPD. Tisch is the second woman to serve as NYPD commissioner, and the second Jew, after Howard Safir, who served under Giuliani in his second term. Tisch is a member of the wealthy and well-known Tisch family. But she also has impressive yichus from her mother’s side, for her maternal grandfather was Rabbi Philip Hiat, a prominent figure in midcentury Reform Judaism. Commissioner Tisch took her oath with her grandfather’s police chaplain badge, and she wore a prominent Star of David around her neck during the ceremony. She is proudly Jewish, and one hopes that she will continue the NYPD’s tradition of protecting all faiths from threats of hateful violence.

→New York’s city council held a hearing yesterday regarding the implementation of the recommendations of the Lippman report, which addressed the festering antisemitism on display at City University of New York campuses over the past year. CUNY Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez faced withering remarks from the few council members who attended the hearing, who expressed dismay at the slow pace of reform and the seemingly lackadaisical response of CUNY’s administration to glaring anti-Jewish sentiment, especially at the City College of New York campus in Harlem. Much of the hearing focused on the weakness and unreliability of the CUNY online “portal” to report incidents of hate and on the evident failure of campus security to ask masked protesters to identify themselves as students. The CCNY campus, it emerged, was effectively given over to outside agitators. Students from other CUNY colleges testified that a resolutely antizionist approach defines classroom instruction and that Jewish groups such as Hillel have faced harassment, with little concern from administrators. It seems like the CUNY higher-ups have taken Sen. Chuck Schumer’s counsel to heart; he reportedly told former Columbia University President Minouche Shafik that campus antisemitism is only an issue for Republicans and can be more or less ignored.

→Eight years ago, Donald Trump’s plans to secure the nation’s borders and begin deporting illegal aliens inspired the “Resistance” to turn out in force to oppose this alleged human-rights catastrophe. Now, following his reelection and a renewal of his promise to deport millions of recent arrivals, vocal opposition to Trump’s agenda is still heard, but it’s weaker. While professional agitators in the National Lawyers Guild, the ACLU, and the vast Tides Foundation-funded nonprofit network are gearing up to file suit against the incoming administration, popular opposition is muted. The mayor of Denver promised to turn out 50,000 people to block ICE from arresting and deporting illegal aliens, but so far it doesn’t seem like Mile High citizens are signing up to put their bodies on the line. Perhaps years of crying about incipient fascism have worn thin. Or perhaps four years of open borders have warmed the public to the idea that good fences make good neighbors. A recent CBS poll revealed that 73% of Americans think that Trump should prioritize deporting illegal immigrants when he takes office.

→Socialist New York State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, a supporter of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement and a tireless and tiresome opponent of Israel, was interviewed by Mehdi Hasan about his long-shot candidacy for mayor. Asked what he would do if he were mayor and Benjamin Netanyahu came to New York, Mamdani responded that he would “arrest” him, regardless of the nonparticipation of the United States in the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court. “This is a city that [sic] our values are in line with international law,” Mamdani averred. “It’s time,” continued the assemblyman from Astoria whose other main campaign platform is to eliminate bus fare, “that we actually step up and make clear what we are willing to do to showcase the leadership that is sorely missing in the federal administration.” It’s curious to imagine the NYPD operating at the personal whim of a mayor who seeks to set foreign policy by himself, imposing compliance with a treaty the United States has not ratified. That’s one way to “showcase leadership.”

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

The New Yorker’s Cavalcade of Ignorance, by Armin Rosen

Some of the greatest minds in America have gathered in the pages of the country’s leading weekly to declare how little they understand things now, and how little they care to understand them moving forward

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Ending ‘Race’

Here’s how America can end the sordid alliance of the state and discredited 19th-century pseudoscience

by Michael Lind

Since 1976, the U.S. Census has been forbidden by law to ask Americans about their religious identity. And yet it is allowed to ask Americans about their racial identity. To make matters worse, instead of relying on self-identification for ethnicity and race, the federal government insists that every American choose an identity from a small set of official “races” approved by … the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

Yes, you read that right. The bureaucracy that assigns Americans to this or that official “race” in the 21st-century U.S. version of the Nuremberg Laws is OMB. According to USA.gov, “The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) oversees the performance of federal agencies, and administers the federal budget.”

Why is OMB given the task of formulating the number of “races” into which the American population is supposed to be divided? For the answer, we must go back to the aftermath of the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, which struck down racial segregation in employment, voting, housing, and other areas. Having outlawed Jim Crow, the civil rights movement then split into a colorblind liberal wing led by Bayard Rustin and others, who argued that the next step should be race-neutral economic reform, and a color-conscious wing, associated with Black radicals, who demanded racial quotas in hiring and university admissions and Black-majority congressional districts. The colorblind liberals lost the argument.

Radical Chicano activists like those of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) jumped on the racial-preferences bandwagon and argued for the recognition of a pan-Hispanic “race” whose members would be eligible for race-based affirmative action like Blacks. Some “white ethnics” like Irish Americans and Italian Americans argued unsuccessfully that they, too, should be included in affirmative action, because their groups had been discriminated against by Anglo American Protestants for generations.

To forestall conflicting and arbitrary racial and ethnic classifications, Caspar Weinberger, secretary of health, education, and welfare in the Nixon administration, ordered the Federal Interagency Committee on Education (FICE) to come up with a consistent system of classifying Americans by race and ethnicity. The recommendations led to OMB Statistical Policy Directive No. 15, adopted in 1977, which mandated the classification of all Americans as members of one of five official races: American Indian or Alaskan Native; Asian or Pacific Islander; Black; White; and Hispanic.

Why five arbitrary pseudo-races? Why not three? Or 17? Who knows. However, in March 2024, OMB announced that the five official races of the United States will be expanded to seven, beginning with the 2030 Census. “Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander” will be separated from the “Asian” category, and a new Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) category will be added.

The seven official races that are scheduled to be identified in the 2030 census are as arbitrarily defined and ludicrous as the former set of five used by OMB and the Census Bureau from 1977 to 2024. Even without the inclusion of Pacific Islanders, the “Asian” category is as absurd as ever, lumping together South Asians with East Asian nationalities like Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese. Jews, Arabs, and Iranians (from the word for “homeland of the Aryans”) will cease to be “white” for U.S. government purposes and will now be “nonwhites” in the MENA category. The “white” category will continue to exclude blond, blue-eyed Paraguayans of exclusively German descent—they are “Hispanic or Latino,” you see—but will continue to include ethnicities as diverse as Portuguese and Danes.

“Garbage in, garbage out” (GIGO) was a motto in the early days of computer programming. It applies today to the misleading racial statistics that the Census Bureau collects and their equally misleading applications.

The purpose of a national census is to provide the government with accurate and useful data. But lumping together recent immigrants from Ghana and Nigeria with Americans who are mostly of European descent and whose ancestors of whatever skin color arrived here centuries ago but under the archaic segregation-era “one drop rule” count as “Black” is worse than useless. Likewise, no scientific purpose is served by combining Filipinos, Chinese, and Indians—who have nothing historically, culturally or linguistically in common—in a single arbitrary category dreamed up by a few federal bureaucrats and academics in the 1970s.

When comparisons of income, education, and other characteristics are made between these arbitrarily defined panracial groups, the result is not scholarly discovery but sheer confusion. For example, using Census definitions, in 2021 so-called “Asians” had a median household income of $101,418—43% higher than the national median income of $70,784. But this is a meaningless statistic, because there are no generic Asian Americans. Among the nationalities arbitrarily assigned to the Asian category, Indians have the highest average household income—$119,000—while Burmese American households made only $44,000 a year.

But accuracy of data is not the point of America’s system of official racial classifications and never has been. Since the 1970s, the unspoken rationale for America’s system of half a dozen official pseudo-races is to identify Americans eligible for rewards from the ever-expanding racial patronage racket pushed by the post-New Deal Democratic Party. Now is the time to end it.

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For half a century, Democratic strategists have hoped that immigrants from Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and other countries, instead of following Irish, German, Italian, and other white groups down the road of assimilation and intermarriage, might function as cohesive racial voting blocs like the Black American bloc, which since the civil rights revolution has voted overwhelmingly for Democrats. For the last generation progressive Democrats have therefore shrugged off the party’s loss of white working-class voters, telling themselves that they could compensate for the losses by importing nonwhite voters from other countries who will vote strictly on party lines without caring about either the bread and butter economic issues or the cultural issues that have severed many working- and middle-class Americans of all races from the party’s fantastically wealthy, self-serving elites.

The left-wing Urban Institute is candid in describing the financial benefits of the new MENA category to its members under the existing affirmative-action racket: “MENA Americans’ recognition as a distinct marginalized identity grants them legal recognition for policies that were created to protect racial minorities … Finally, policymakers will be able to better assess how to allocate its [sic] trillions of dollars to meet the MENA community’s unique situations.”

The greatest danger to the post-1960s racial spoils system of the Democratic Party and the bizarre OMB system of racial categories on which it is based was the possibility that the new immigrants, after a few generations, would lose their distinct identities and merge with so-called whites in a new, mixed-race majority whose members voted on the basis of interests other than racial identities bestowed by bureaucrats. To forestall such a disaster for identity politics, Democrats have used the institutions they controlled, like the federal civil service, the universities, and the media, to brainwash immigrants and their descendants into assimilating, not to a transracial American melting pot, but to government-sponsored, panethnic pseudo-nationalities.

Thus Mexican Americans and Puerto Rican Americans and Argentine Americans have been taught that they were all part of one big, permanent “Hispanic” or “Latino” community, on the basis of which they would obtain various preferences and rewards from the government, ostensibly to counteract the virulent racism directed against them by “whites.” Meanwhile, immigrants from Indonesia, Pakistan, and South Korea have been encouraged to identify, not with the American people as a whole—or even with the cultures and interests of their ancestral nations—but with the newly imagined community of “Asian and Pacific Islanders.” To promote the fiction that these government-fabricated pseudo-nationalities are real, there are AAPI student groups on campus and Hispanic nonprofits and more recently MENA lobbies.

The larger message of this new form of officially sanctioned segregation was and is clear: Today’s voluntary immigrants are not comparable to the Irish and Italians and Germans of yesteryear, who aspired to become Americans—and did so. Rather, they are and will forever remain the new Blacks, a permanently distinct “race”-based underclass whose members can claim special benefits in hiring, jobs, and congressional redistricting solely on the basis of their genes, while depending on Democrats to protect them from persecution by allegedly powerful white supremacists who at any moment might restore segregation and carry out ethnic cleansing.

According to the logic of the Democratic racial spoils system, members of each of the five (soon to be seven) official OMB “races” are interchangeable. For example, if there is a Hispanic quota for a professor at a university, it can be filled by a Swedish Brazilian, a Black Venezuelan, or a Yaqui Indian of Mexican descent. An Indian American can represent a Chinese American community in Congress—they are all “Asians,” after all—but a Polish American cannot, though the Polish American politician might represent other government-designated whites like Greeks or Italian Americans.

On top of the informal rule that all members of an OMB Census category are interchangeable racial units, another rule has been superimposed by the left: All of the official races except “white” belong to a single superrace or supercategory, “people of color.” Loyal people of color must only vote for Democrats in all elections at all levels of government. Of course, Irish Americans and Italian Americans once overwhelmingly preferred Democrats to Republicans, but nobody in the 21st century would accuse an Irish American who voted for Republicans of being a traitor to the Celtic race. And yet Hispanic or Black voters who dare to vote for Republicans or independents by definition are alleged to be “traitors to their race”—their race, that is, as defined by Census bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., and their allies in the Democratic Party and progressive NGOS and identity-politics departments on campus. As Joe Biden told the podcast host Charlamagne tha God during the presidential contest in 2020, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black.”

Yet in spite of their best efforts, Democrats and their propagandist allies in the universities, media, and nonprofit sectors, to say nothing of the U.S. Census Bureau, have obviously failed to consolidate today’s voluntary immigrants into permanently separate Democratic racial voting blocs, each with a panethnic sense of identity and community. To the shock of Democratic strategists who staked the future of their party on racial identity politics, the various national immigrant diasporas lumped together arbitrarily as “Hispanics” and “AAPI” are acting like the new Irish and the new Italians, not the new Blacks. They are losing foreign languages, assimilating to America’s transracial common culture, and marrying outside of their ethnic groups in numbers that increase with each generation.

In 2015, 46% of U.S.-born Asian newlyweds and 39% of U.S.-born Hispanic newlyweds marry an American of another race—usually white, because so-called whites are still the numerical majority. Among Black Americans, interracial marriage shot up from 5% in 1980 to 18% in 2015.

Remember all those stories in the press in the 1990s and 2000s claiming that the melting pot model of the American nation is obsolete and the new model of American identity is the salad bowl, in which lettuce leaves and croutons retain their identity, even as they are stirred around? It’s nonsense. The melting pot, which once fused dozens of European immigrant ethnicities into a common American community, is now melting away racial differences as well.

America’s bungling and politically correct Census Bureau bureaucrats have tried to cope with the blurring of divisions among its officially promulgated races by means of expedients like allowing Census respondents to check more than one race. But rather than try to prop up the crumbling system of official federal races, we should just abolish official subnational races, once and for all.

In 1976, Congress outlawed the collection of religious data by the Census Bureau. In 2025, the Republican majority in Congress should outlaw the collection of racial data by the Census, whether on the basis of the existing bogus racial classifications or any substitutes, beginning with the 2030 Census.

Cue the outcry from “civil rights groups” (a code name for de facto Democratic nonprofits staffed and subsidized by rich establishment Democrats). If the federal government can’t assign every American to one or several arbitrarily defined races, how would it be possible to fight cases of discrimination on the basis of race?

The absence of questions about religion in the U.S. Census and on other government forms does not prevent Americans from suing if they believe they are victims of religious discrimination. In the same way, individuals will remain free to sue employers and other organizations for racial discrimination, and juries will remain free to deliver verdicts in their favor, even after Congress has banned the use of nonsensical racial categories by the Census. Gone will be the days when you had to check one of half a dozen “race” boxes on Census and other federal and private organization forms. But racial discrimination will continue to be illegal under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

To prevent the Census Bureau from going around a ban and using the same existing racial categories in its American Community Survey questionnaires, Congress should mandate that the federal government can ask questions only about specific countries of ancestral origin, not about pseudo-biological races. Respondents could put down more than one.If the purpose of the Census is accuracy, then an American of German and Mexican and French descent should put down Germany, Mexico, and France. If family tradition refers to a polity that no longer exists—Austria-Hungary or the Romanov empire—then write that down. The more accurate, the better, if you are really interested in empirical demography and not corrupt Democratic racial patronage politics.

What about Black Americans who do not know where their ancestors in Africa came from? For them the generic African American category might be kept. But contemporary immigrants and their descendants from Africa or other countries in the Western Hemisphere would be required to identify their specific countries of origin—Haiti or Angola, say.

These reforms reflect common sense. They are based on the way both native-born Americans and immigrants actually think about themselves. Outside of the weird elite subculture of the center left, most Mexican Americans do not think of themselves as generic “Hispanics” or “Latinx,” any more than German, Swedish and Austrian Americans think of themselves as “Teutonics” or Jewish and Arab Americans think they are part of one big happy affirmative-action-eligible family of MENAs.

The Republican majority in Congress should act now to ban racial questions from the Census and the American Community Survey, given the possibility that they could lose one or both houses of Congress in the 2026 midterms. There are no political downsides for Republicans if they stand up for race-neutral, colorblind law and public policy. Democratic attempts to demonize Trump and Republicans as racists have not deterred growing numbers of Hispanic, Asian, and even Black voters from voting Republican in recent elections. The number of nonwhite voters whom the GOP might lose by preventing the Census Bureau from continuing to assign Americans to absurd racial categories is negligible. And if Democrats decide to use the filibuster in the Senate to mount a diehard defense of arbitrary racial classifications in the Census, their focus on a niche issue that seems odd to “normies” of all races would be free publicity for Republicans who stand for the proposition that Americans should be treated as individuals, not as units in government-designated racial blocs.

Separation of church and state means that the federal government and employers and universities and other organizations are not permitted to ask you to identify yourself by your religion. Six decades after the civil rights revolution, the time has arrived for the separation of race and state.