Biological Reality Refuses To Bend To The Will Of Democrats

posted by Derek Hunter at TownhallVIP 

I really don’t like basketball. In fact, I hate it. A game is too long, and all that matters is the last 2 minutes which, since each team gets a thousand timeouts, takes a long as the rest of the game. There are only so many ways to get a ball through a hoop, and they’ve all been done. Event he slam dunk contest is boring, as pretty much everything there that can be done has been as well. No-look passes? I’ve seen the highlight videos of Larry Bird. Buzzer-beaters to win the game? Michael Jordan exists, and we have the video to prove it. Half-court shots as time runs out? Seen hundreds of them. Even if I didn’t hate the game, the only thing new in it in decades is the people doing all the things that have been done a million times. Boring.

That hasn’t stopped the media and marketing people in basketball from trying to get people hyped about the game with each new person doing the same old thing, or someone making a move that hasn’t been done in a while. But sorry, that doesn’t do it for me either. 

This year, however, those people are trying a different tactic: gender. 

I’m sure Caitlin Clark is a great player. She could easily beat me in a game of one-on-one. But that’s not an accomplishment, I not only hate the game, I rarely ever played it as a kid, so she would win. But I like my chances of striking her out or beating her in a best of 7 shootout. 

That’s neither here nor there, she’s the all-time NCAA college basketball scoring champion. That’s not nothing, but is it really fair to compare her points total toPete Maravich, the former record holder? 

Of course, it’s not. Clark played against women, and Maravich played against men. While the level of competition relative to other players of the same gender is comparable, against each other it’s not even close. 

What kind of a sexist things to say is that? It’s not sexist in the way saying “A woman’s place is in the kitchen,” because I don’t believe that. In fact, it’s not sexist at all – it’s just reality. Reality isn’t sexist or feminist or woke, it just is. 

Yes, you can easily find women or girls who could absolutely wipe the court with most men, there’s no question about that. But the best women will lose to the best men in a real competition setting nearly every single time (have to use the qualifier because exceptions will happen, the Washington Generals win on occasion, if only by accident).

There’s a simple way to test this theory. Clark could enter the NBA draft. She is the greatest female basketball player around right now, where do you think she’d go in the NBA draft? 

Would she even get picked? Probably, actually, if only for the media relations coup. 

In the early 1990s, a woman named Manon Rhéaume was on the receiving end of a lot of buzz in the NHL. A great goalie in women’s hockey, Manon was three chances to play with three different NHL franchises – the Tampa Bay Lightning, St. Louis Blues and Boston Bruins. The hype around her each time was huge, and none of them amounted to anything. She was still a great female goalie, but that didn’t matter because she wasn’t good enough to compete with the men. If she would have even been close, one of those teams (failing at the time) would have taken a chance on her for the simple reason of putting butts in the seats. But the closest she came was a couple of periods in pre-season games. Only two periods, actually, in two different pre-season games with two different teams. She got more of a chance than most goalies playing in college or in juniors could ever dream of, and everyone passed. 

The reason you’re hearing about Caitlin Clark so much – and, honestly, the tone of the coverage is annoying, as it portrays her as team of one, steamrolling everything and over-hyped to the point of obnoxiousness – is because the equity brigade is out in full force making it seem as though the public at large care. 

When Jon Stewart hosted the Daily Show the first time, you would have thought it was the top-rated show on television. It wasn’t, not even close. Remember the show “30 Rock”? I loved it, it’s hilarious. But it was on more magazine covers than it had viewers. Neither of those shows cracked the top 100, and were beaten by reruns of Family Guy on the Cartoon Network. But they were liberal shows made by liberal stars, and the left-wing industrial complex mobilized to prop them up because of it. 

There’s not much difference between that and Clark. 

I don’t revel in saying it, I’m content to ignore basketball in all its forms, but it’s nearly impossible to ignore what’s being shoved in your face every time you turn around. 

Clark’s team will either win or they won’t. She will go on to the WNBA and the hype will follow, at least for a while. There will “think pieces” about how little she’s being paid compared to her male counterparts, none of which will focus on attendance, ratings or the fact that she could have tried her hand at the NBA but knew that wouldn’t work out well for her.

And once the machine hyping her now is done with her, it will seek out someone or something else. All the biological truths and practical lessons will be ignored or forgotten because the liberal propaganda machine isn’t about to let reality stand in its way.

X22, And we Know, and more- April 1st

 

Fani Willis, in Pursuit of a Trump Conviction, May Get Gagged for Defying Judge, ‘Talking About Race’

 A clue to the district attorney’s allegedly reckless rhetoric — she has accused her critics of ‘playing the race card’ — could be that she is trying to win not only her trial, but also an election.

The latest declaration of the district attorney of Fulton County, Fani Willis — that  “recently, they tell me, they don’t like me to talk about race. Well, I’m going to talk about it anyway” — could put her in line for a gag order from Judge Scott McAfee. 

Those comments were made at an awards ceremony held in the Georgia county on Friday. They come a week after she boasted that “the train is coming” in respect of convicting President Trump and his co-defendants despite the ongoing efforts to remove her from the case. During a speech in January in observation of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, she accused her critics of “playing the race card,” an explosive charge at Fulton County, a majority-minority jurisdiction.

While no such order has been requested by Mr. Trump or his 18 co-defendants, Ms. Willis’s rhetorical razzle-dazzle around race could soon catch further judicial notice. Mr. Trump’s speech is already restrained in the District of Columbia and Manhattan because of his criminal trials there.

Ms. Willis is already skating on thin ice. The Georgia Court of Appeals is mulling a request by Mr. Trump et al. to disqualify her from the case on account of her relationship a special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, her former lover. Critics point to the $650,000 paid out to him and to the trips they took together. 

Judge McAfee found that entanglement to be accompanied by an “odor of mendacity,” but he also appeared sympathetic to a second ground for disqualification proffered by the defendants. That critique centers on the speech Ms. Willis delivered at Big Bethel AME Church. In that oration, she defended Mr. Wade as a “superstar” and criticism of his credentials as driven by race. 

Speaking of her critics — and her defendants —  Ms. Willis asked “isn’t it them that’s playing the race card when they only question one? Isn’t it them playing the race card when they constantly think I need someone from some other jurisdiction in some other state to tell me how to do a job I’ve been doing almost 30 years?” She said in respect of an award garnered by Mr. Wade, “You know they ain’t just giving this to Black men.”

Ms. Willis’s defendants argued in court that the district attorney’s comments amounted to an effort to taint the jury pool. The district attorney denied she was talking about the cadre she intends to convict. Judge McAfee’s response to that was, “Maybe so. But maybe not. Therein lies the danger of public comment by a prosecuting attorney.” He called her speech “legally improper.”

The judge, though, stopped short of disqualifying Ms. Willis. He reasoned that the case “is too far removed from jury selection to establish a permanent taint of the jury pool.” Judge McAfee, though, appears to be inviting a further challenge from the defendants. He wrote in his ruling that “the time may well have arrived for an order preventing the State from mentioning the case in any public forum to prevent prejudicial pretrial publicity.”

Judge McAfee, in order to underscore the point, added in his opinion that “providing this type of public comment creates dangerous waters for the District Attorney to wade further into.” One of Mr. Trump’s attorneys, Steven Sadow, took to X to note that “apparently Judge McAfee’s warning to Willis in his disqualification order about talking about the case in a public forum is simply being ignored. Does that surprise anyone??”

In the wake of the speech at the church, email messages surfaced where Ms. Willis wrote to counsel for the defendants asserting that “in the legal community (and the world at large), some people will never be able to respect African Americans and/or women as their equal and counterpart. That is a burden you do not experience.”  

Clues to Ms. Willis’s outspokenness — and possibly also to Judge McAfee’s decision, which, while critical of the prosecutor, allowed her to stay on if Mr. Wade left — could lie in electoral realities. She is a Democrat, while he is a Republican, but they both face challengers. President Biden claimed more than 72 percent of the vote in Fulton County in 2020.

While a pro-Trump Republican lawyer, Courtney Kramer, is running against Ms. Willis, the district attorney is likely more concerned about her left flank, in her primary in May. That is where a one-time Atlanta city solicitor and prosecutor, Christian Wise Smith, has positioned himself. He told his alma mater, Cooley Law School, that the justice system “is set up for people to fail. In Fulton County, the policies of systemic racism continue unabated.”

Judicial elections work differently. In Georgia, they are nonpartisan, and there is no primary. The vote will transpire on May 21, with a runoff, if necessary, to be held on June 18. Judge McAfee, just 34 years old, is running for a full four-year term after being appointed to the bench by Governor Kemp in 2022. He too faces a challenge from his left, in the person of an attorney and talk show host, Robert Patillo. 

Mr. Patillo is the erstwhile executive director of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the group founded by the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Mr. Patillo’s website describes him as an “Intellectual Militant.”

https://www.nysun.com/article/fani-willis-in-pursuit-of-a-trump-conviction-may-get-gagged-for-defying-judge-talking-about-race

A.R. HOFFMAN

Mr. Hoffman is an associate editor of the Sun, where he covers politics and culture. He holds a PhD from Harvard and a law degree from Stanford.

Neither of the Top Candidates for the White House This Year Is Living Up to Constitutional Norms

 The transfer of power to Jefferson from Adams in 1801 was grudging but peaceful — a defining moment not just in American history but in world history.

How are America’s leaders measuring up against the standards set by the Constitution and the examples of the Founding Fathers? It’s a question I’ve been asking as I seek refuge from contemporary politics in reading and occasionally writing, in my 2023 book “Mental Maps of the Founders,” about the early years of the republic.

One answer is that neither President Trump nor President Biden measures up well — but not necessarily in the ways their critics think.

For example, many people, including me, are dismayed by Mr. Trump’s trash-talking his opponents: his disparagement of recent Republican presidents and nominees, his insulting nicknames for opponents of both parties, his unfair but successful diminishment of Governor DeSantis.

Others, including me, are put off by Mr. Biden’s dismissal of “MAGA Republicans” and Secretary Clinton’s dismissal of “deplorables” as beyond the pale of decent citizens.

Such trash-talking is against the political norms of the middle and late 20th century. President Kennedy didn’t disparage fellow Democrats or President Eisenhower. Presidents who defeated incumbents — Carter, Reagan, Clinton — didn’t whine about the messes their predecessors left behind.

The Founders were not so prim. George Washington complained about Jeffersonian “self-created societies.”  Jefferson called Hamilton a “monarchist,” and Hamilton wrote of the “great and intrinsic” defects in the character of John Adams. Much of the name-calling came in pamphlets either anonymously or under pseudonyms that everyone saw through.

However, when it came to obeying the Constitution’s rules, the Founders did. The transfer of power to Jefferson from Adams in 1801 was grudging but peaceful — a defining moment not just in American history but in world history.

This was in obvious contrast to the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. This wasn’t an “insurrection” like the secession proclamations of 1860-61, and it could have been prevented if Capitol authorities had sufficient forces on hand.

As I wrote at the time, “While President Trump’s exact words to the crowd on the Ellipse didn’t constitute a criminal incitement, they were uttered with a reckless disregard for the possibility that they would provoke violence, which any reasonable person could find impeachable.”

In fact, many reasonable members of Congress, all Democrats and some Republicans, found Mr. Trump’s conduct contrary to the president’s constitutional duty to faithfully execute the laws, and they voted to impeach. A majority, 57 of 100, of senators voted for conviction, short of the two-thirds required by the framers of the Constitution for the dire penalties of removal and disqualification from office.

Similarly, Jeffersonians’ impeachment of a Supreme Court justice fell short of two-thirds for removal in the Senate. Absent the constitutionally required consensus, a drastic remedy is not in order.

Facebook and pre-Elon Musk Twitter, cheered on by Democrats and law professors, almost immediately suspended Mr. Trump. That wasn’t unconstitutional, but it’s in tension with the animating spirit of the First Amendment. 

Even more so was the propagation by federal officials and Democratic officeholders, starting years before January 6, of the Russia collusion hoax.

In the first decades of the young republic, the Founders traded accusations of foreign allegiances. That’s because they faced a world war for all but a few months between 1793 and 1815 between revolutionary France and mercantile Britain, with many Americans favoring each side. Once that conflict was settled, charges of foreign allegiance disappeared.

Similarly, in the early years of the Cold War, accusations of allegiance to Stalinist Russia, some justified and many not, were common in American politics. The partisan and press propagators of the Russia collusion hoax had no such excuse: Russia is an unfriendly power, but the Cold War is over, and the evidence behind the charge was flimsy to the point of being laughable.

Just as flimsy have been the “lawfare” legal actions brought against Mr. Trump by Democratic local and special federal prosecutors. Most egregious is the lawsuit under a novel interpretation of a New York law in which Trump was fined $454 million, reduced to a picayune $175 million by an appeals court, for an inaccurate loan application that directly defrauded no one.

The obvious unfairness of the charges strengthened Mr. Trump’s candidacy. Days after the Manhattan district attorney brought the first case against Mr. Trump, his poll lead over Mr. DeSantis doubled from a close 15 points to an insuperable 32 points.

Voters seem to understand that using government to bankrupt a political opponent is contrary, certainly to the spirit, and arguably to the letter, of the Constitution. “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed,” reads the Eighth Amendment. That in turn was inspired by England’s 1689 Declaration of Right, which banned “excessive bail,” “excessive fines” and “unusual punishments.”

That was inspired by the ousted King James II’s lawfare against his political opponents, as I recounted in my 2007 book “Our First Revolution.” Coincidentally, it was James who, as Duke of York, ordered the capture of Nieuw Amsterdam, which has been named after him ever after.

This violation of constitutional norms evidently has Mr. Biden chortling and calling Mr. Trump “Broke Don,” much as he chortled over the Supreme Court’s rejection of his potentially $50 billion student loan forgiveness order as spending money without a constitutionally required appropriation by Congress.

America’s two presidents vying for a second term grew up in an America far closer in time to the Founding Fathers than any possible successor, but both have shown a reckless disregard for constitutional norms.

Creators.com

https://www.nysun.com/article/neither-of-the-top-candidates-for-the-white-house-this-year-is-living-up-to-constitutional-norms

MICHAEL BARONE

Mr. Barone is a senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Russia is not an Aggressor, and Ukraine is not a Victim

posted by Alexander G. Markovsky at American Thinker 

It is widely accepted that the Ukrainian crisis erupted into a military conflict on February 24, 2022, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the seeds of the hostilities were planted about thirty years earlier by President Clinton and, later, by George W. Bush, both of whom recklessly pushed for NATO’s eastward expansion.

Over the years, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin repeatedly warned that Moscow would not tolerate continuing NATO’s “Drang nach Osten” (“drive to the East”), particularly Ukraine’s membership and the subsequent establishment of NATO military bases along the Russian border.

On February 25, 2024, The New York Times published an article confirming Moscow’s fears. The article revealed that US intelligence not only played a crucial role in Ukraine’s wartime decision-making but also established and funded advanced command-and-control spy centers long before the Russian invasion on Feb. 24, 2022.

The newspaper exposed how, over the last decade, the CIA has operated a network of twelve bases in Ukraine. These bases, which enable the interception of Russian military communications and monitoring of spy satellites, are utilized to launch and monitor drone and missile attacks on Russian soil. With American biological weapon facilities scattered across Ukraine, it is understandable that Moscow perceived this as a significant threat to Russia’s national security.

Would the United States accept the presence of Russian military bases on its borders? As a matter of fact, it did not accept them even 1,500 miles from its borders. In 1983, President Reagan ordered the invasion of Grenada due to concerns that the construction of an airport by Cubans could potentially be utilized by Soviet forces.

It is essential to note that Putin’s case was much more compelling than Reagan’s. Unlike Ukraine, Grenada did not share a border with the United States, and there was no Russian military presence in Grenada, making Reagan’s concerns mostly hypothetical. It is worth mentioning that, despite dubious justification for the American invasion, the United States was not labeled as an aggressor, nor was Ronald Reagan referred to as a war criminal.

In fact, Putin tried to avoid the current conflict. On September 7, 2023, as NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told a European Parliament joint committee meeting:

President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And [that] was a pre-condition for not invade [sic] Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.

Russia’s geographical vulnerability has been a concern for Russian leaders since the time of Peter the Great. Stoltenberg should have been mindful of Russia’s sensitivities if he wanted to avoid a conflict.

Stoltenberg did not elaborate on why he did not accept the treaty draft, why negotiations were not pursued, or why all the alternatives to conflict had not been explored. Ultimately, his unwillingness to engage in talks put the matter beyond the power of diplomacy.

Diplomacy was not given a chance because NATO needed to restore its image and validate its continued existence following a 30-year history of failure. The pursuit of “nation-building”—replacing authoritarian stability with democracy in countries that do not conform to the Bill of Rights—has accomplished neither. Instead, it has resulted in the loss of millions of lives and the devastation of many countries.

Furthermore, after a disastrous 2021 retreat from Afghanistan, the alliance lost the adversary that had long defined its purpose. Since a military alliance cannot exist without a rival, NATO's need for a credible enemy was an existential necessity. The Russian incursion into Ukraine could create the perception of a common threat and portray NATO as an indispensable pillar of global security, especially if NATO emerged victorious.

This being the case, the Europeans lacked the capability to seek revenge independently for centuries of military defeats and humiliations at the hands of the Russian Empire. After the empire’s fall, the Soviet Union discerned an opportunity for retaliation without direct military involvement.

Moreover, for President Biden, who was desperate to escape the Afghanistan disaster, a victorious conflict would be a pivotal moment in his presidency. Additionally, he never made a secret that he aspired to bring about a change in leadership in Moscow.

And, of course, there was Ukraine. Never in the realm of international relations was there a state that acted so consistently against its national interests. It put itself in grave danger when it announced its intention to join NATO in 2004, violating the 1997 Treaty on Friendship between Ukraine and the Russian Federation. This Treaty specifically addressed Ukrainian neutrality, stating at section 6, page 148:

Each High Contracting Party shall refrain from participating in, or supporting, any actions directed against the other High Contracting Party, and shall not conclude any treaties with third countries against the other Party. Neither Party shall allow its territory to be used to the detriment of the security of the other Party.

Ukraine’s leaders never grasped that Moscow saw this treaty as a key element of Russia’s security and would not allow Ukraine to violate its terms with impunity. Zelensky could have avoided the war by renouncing his NATO membership request and meeting Moscow’s demands, thus saving the country from destruction. However, the corrupt leaders in Kiev were driven by financial and military aid and were seeking conflict for personal gain.

Truth in politics involves various viewpoints and analyses, which are often influenced by one’s ideological background. However, facts matter.

The preceding facts illustrate a common overriding interest among NATO leadership, its member states, and Ukraine in instigating the invasion, albeit for varying reasons. Russia was the sole party that attempted to prevent the conflict.

Some Basic Law Stuff for Conservatives Watching This Legal Chaos

posted by Kurt Schlichter at Townhall 

For those of you who don’t live in the legal world every day like I do, being a simple Los Angeles trial lawyer, a lot of the legal stuff you see going on surrounding Trump and Trump-affiliated people might seem like chaos. Well, it is chaos. It’s complete chaos. There is almost no resemblance between what is happening with Trump and the law as normally practiced among normal people in normal times. Remember, there’s a Trump Exception to all the rules and all the norms that rejects any kind of precedent and procedure, as well as simple fairness, in its pursuit of the Bad Orange Man and his allies. When you understand that, you will understand why I shake my head when people ask me my legal opinion about what’s going on. My legal opinion about what’s going on is it has nothing to do with the law at all. 

Understand that what we’re seeing now are attempts to frame Donald Trump and people affiliated with him to abuse and misuse the legal system to gain a political advantage. This is nothing new. It is something scumbags have been doing for thousands of years. Remember, Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his legion because if he had left his troops behind, they were going to prosecute him into oblivion. Lawfare is nothing new – its modern practitioners just better hope they don’t end up provoking warfare, too.

But legal concepts do come up, and there is a lot of confusion out there about how the legal system works. I could write a book on it – and might – but here, I want to share a few general legal concepts with you so that some of the stuff going on becomes a little clearer. The law can be opaque, so it is often hard to understand what’s going on because the liars and scammers occasionally run head-on into people practicing law as it is normally practiced. We saw that with the idiotic idea that some clerk in Maine or the Colorado Supreme Court could decide who can be on the presidential ballot. You saw a bunch of people with fancy degrees and prestigious sinecures explaining to you how this was a brilliant legal maneuver and how this One Neat Trick under the 14th Amendment was going to keep Trump off the ballot, and BOOM! The Supreme Court, nine-zip, punted that idiocy through the goalpost of humiliation.

The law still sort of works. It doesn’t always work, but it should always work because, properly applied, the law is the thing that puts the Constitution into action. If you haven’t seen it, go watch “A Man For All Seasons” about Sir Thomas More and his struggle to uphold the law in Henry VIII’s England. More gives a famous speech where someone tells him that to get to the Devil, he would ignore all the laws, and Thomas More tells him that that’s crazy, that when he cuts down all the laws and the Devil turns around on him, where will he hide then? It’s a great question, and one our ruling class should ask itself – because the Devil will demand his due.

But it’s hard to see what’s going on here in 2024 without a program, so let me explain a few things about how the law generally works as practiced in America when Donald Trump or one of his allies isn’t involved. Now, I want to be clear about a couple of things. First, I’m not your lawyer. This is not legal advice. Don’t take it as such. I am probably not licensed in your venue, and I’m not advising you on what to do or how to do it. I’m simply explaining some basic concepts. If you have a question about the law in your jurisdiction, go find a licensed lawyer and consult him, her, or whatever other gender they identify as. What you’re getting for me here are general concepts. Nothing more.

Let me reiterate. I’m not your lawyer.

First, legal professionals talk procedure while amateurs talk facts. When somebody comes to me with a case, they want to tell me all the facts about who said what and who did what and what happened and how, and I don’t care about any of that. Well, not yet. The first thing I want to do is understand the procedural status. Procedure is essential. Where is the case being brought? We call that venue. I want to know if it’s Washington, DC, where everybody is a Democrat, or Texas, where everybody’s a patriot, except in Austin. I want to know the court. State? Federal? Who are the judges – that shouldn’t matter, but the first thing every lawyer checks is what judge the case has been assigned to. In normal cases, it is often significant. In political ones, it is often dispositive.

And I want to know about when the stuff happened. There’s a thing called the statute of limitations, and that is a hard deadline to file a lawsuit or lose your potential rights. Now, there’s a reason for a statute of limitations. Memories fade, evidence disappears, and it’s almost impossible to defend yourself against something that happened 30 years ago. You see that in the E. Jean Carroll case, where she can’t even tell you when this alleged sexual assault happened nearly three decades ago. How the hell are you supposed to defend against that? In order to get Trump, the New York legislature lifted the statute of limitations to allow her to sue. The Trump Exception strikes again! And, of course, venue matters too in that case – in New York, everybody’s a damn communist. If you had a feeling that this was scummy, you were absolutely right. This is a travesty.

We’ve seen a lot of procedural machinations in the criminal cases. We haven’t even gotten to proving anything. All this stuff about dates and hearings and motions and disqualifications is procedural. The actual fact stuff isn’t even in the picture yet. Why don’t the facts matter yet? Because you can’t have legal proceedings unless you have a rigorous set of rules for how you govern them. That includes ways to challenge faulty cases – those are what the motions to dismiss are. How you do it is as important as what you do.

Here’s how you initiate a case. Someone files a case. In civil cases, it doesn’t even have to be a good case. A wise old lawyer told me all you need to file a case is a typewriter and a filing fee, which tells you how long I’ve been practicing. But that’s true. When you see a lawsuit filed, all it means is someone’s made claims. They have not proven anything. They have just made accusations, and those are worth the paper they printed on, and sometimes not even that. In criminal cases, the standard is supposed to be a little higher because you must at least get it past a grand jury, but of course, you know the cliché – a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. And if you did that, Chris Christie would probably defend the sandwich pro bono.

All this procedural jousting we are seeing is important because Trump is fighting several different battles. First of all, Trump id fighting the election battle. Trump doesn’t want to have these trials before the election because they are all in blue cities, and even though they have zero legal merit, he is likely to be convicted. The convictions will probably get thrown out on appeal – an appeal is what happens after a trial court decision – but that’s not going to matter for the 2024 election, where Trump will be a “convicted felon.” So, Trump wants to delay these trials until after the election. And if he’s reelected, which is looking pretty good for him right now, he can direct his Justice Department to drop the federal cases. Which he should absolutely do, and it will make the liberals wail and gnash their teeth and be generally hilarious.

But the procedural fighting is also setting up the parameters of the trial. In the procedural phase, you try to pick apart the complaint by getting some or all of it dismissed. You’re also trying to gather evidence—in civil cases, that’s called discovery, and in criminal cases, there are different proceedings. You're generally getting ready for the trial.

What’s the trial? I mean you’ve all seen them on TV, and I’ve got to tell you, they’re about 1/1000th as interesting. “You can’t handle the truth!” moments are very rare. More common are hours of drab people looking at documents and saying, “Yes, I wrote that. Yes, it says what it says.” Now, understand that the judge doesn’t generally decide who wins a trial. They can, as in the ridiculous New York AG’s baloney civil suit against Trump, but usually you have a jury. Judges generally rule on matters of law, that is, what the law is and how it applies to a certain set of facts. The jury generally decides what facts have been proven. That’s also important on appeal. Appeals usually do not challenge the findings of fact. That is, if a jury says you ran a red light, a court of appeal will probably not disturb that finding of fact. What an appeal addresses are usually questions of law. That is, did the judge apply the right legal standard? 

Using the right legal standard is very important. In the Florida case, we’ve been hearing about jury instructions. Bizarrely, the leftist Twitter lawyers are in a frenzy because the judge is asking the government and the defense to both submit jury instructions on the Presidential Records Act and some other issues. You might be shocked to hear that this happens all the time. Juries have to be instructed on what the law is so they can make their factual findings. There are a lot of standard jury instructions out there that are usually used. Judges don’t reinvent the negligence or breach of contract instructions for every new civil case. But there aren’t a lot of cases going to juries on the Presidential Records Act, and the jury has to be instructed somehow. The way judges do it when there is no standard jury instruction is the court orders the parties to propose their own instructions and then uses them as the basis to craft instructions. That’s perfectly normal, despite the howling from the half-wit lawyers. I’ve warned you already in previous columns that you should never trust a social media or TV lawyer, other than me or someone I approve!

The results of trials are another issue. We’ve seen the results in the recent civil cases with these massive monetary awards against Donald Trump. This is all crazy stuff. Those numbers are insane. It’s not even close to being normal. Yeah, there are some wild jury verdicts out there, but nothing like this. These jury verdicts are obviously part of the special Trump Exception. Man, the leftists aren’t going to like it when the Trump Exception becomes the rule, and it gets applied to them in red venues. In any case, expect the appellate courts to deal with that nonsense decisively.

In criminal cases, you have sentencing. In the federal courts, there are sentencing guidelines, and it’s a whole different procedure to come up with an appropriate sentence. Right now, we’re seeing some J6 defendants actually being threatened with increased sentences because they successfully challenged their previous sentences on appeal as not being in accordance with the law. You are not supposed to be punished for successfully pointing out errors. Again, the Trump Exception is in effect. It’s really disgraceful.

Now, most cases don’t go to trial. Going to trial is unbelievably exceptional. About 97% of cases settle. We saw the recent settlement in the Matt Schlapp case, where someone accused him of harassment. Disclosure: Matt is a friend, and I have given him legal advice in the past, but I am not counsel of record on this case, and I’m only talking about what I know from open sources. Apparently, there was a settlement. People who hate Matt because he’s a conservative who likes Trump take this as some sort of admission of guilt. It’s not. Every settlement agreement I have ever written or reviewed says something to the effect of “This is a settlement of a disputed claim and not an admission of liability.” The press reports say his insurance company is paying the accuser. Insurance companies are key in civil cases. There’s usually one lurking in the background, and they have a right to settle a case against you whether you want them to or not in almost all situations. In other words, you can tell your insurance company you don’t want to settle, but the insurance company can do it anyway. After all, it is paying a ton of money for your defense (your insurance policy typically pays for your lawyer as well as any judgment against you).

In this case, the accuser issued a statement essentially retracting the entire accusation, stating that his claims were “the result of a complete misunderstanding, and I regret that the lawsuit caused pain to the Schlapp family.” So, basically, Matt Schlapp didn’t pay this guy anything from his own pocket and received what looks to me like an apology and a total vindication, something Schlapp would not have gotten even if he had won a jury trial in a blue venue. I call that a total victory, just like Ron DeSantis won over the Mouse and Trump won over the insurrectionist ballot idiocy. Never, ever, trust the regime media to tell you the truth about a conservative’s legal victory.

When you’re looking at news reports of legal matters involving Trump or Trump-friendly people, understand that you are probably not going to get an accurate story. To do that, you have to come here. You have to come to me.

Court adjourned.