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justice
Bearing Witness in the Age of Generative AI
Pushing back against the assault on verifiable reality is a crucial undertaking in the pursuit of justice.
May 31, 2026
The advent of generative AI has made it even harder to distinguish between what’s real and what isn’t, and also easy to claim what is real is fake. This threatens to undermine the very idea of "evidence," which traditionally has been used to enforce accountability, by fracturing shared, verifiable reality.
For example, in Iran authorities attempted to dismiss protest footage as edited or artificially manufactured after AI was used to enhance long-distance footage of someone confronting the military, effectively turning this doubt into a propaganda weapon. Doubt was also a feature in the aftermath of the recent bombing of a girls' school which killed 168 people—mostly children—in Minab, Iran. And in the midst of an already distorted information ecosystem, methods developed to detect AI fakes are now being weaponized to falsely discredit authentic evidence.
This affirms that the emergence of generative AI is not simply a technological issue, but is creating a visual evidence problem. The consequences are already being felt not only by those chronicling and exposing injustice.
Historically, visual media has been an important tool to document injustice. In South Africa, for instance, a generation of photographers used the camera to challenge the prevailing power structures of apartheid. By exposing the apartheid’s injustices and delegitimizing the system, as well as documenting resistance and everyday life, photographers had a huge impact on the liberation struggle in South Africa. So much so, that the camera would be “seen as an instrument of insurrection” by the apartheid regime, resulting in a ban on foreign journalists and documentary photography.
What would have happened if the apartheid regime had claimed that photographs like Nzima’s were faked or AI generated? Would this have created doubt for the audiences who saw it, impacting international support for South Africa’s liberation struggle?
Although they were not the sole targets of apartheid repression, those photographing or filming were often targeted by the regime. Security forces regularly exposed films, confiscated equipment, conducted raids, and banned publications, as well as people. For example, photographer Sam Nzima was harassed by police and placed under house arrest for months following the publication of his iconic photo of the dying 13-year-old Hector Pieterson who was shot by police during the youth uprising on June 16, 1976. The photo not only fueled the liberation movement within South Africa, but also galvanized stronger international condemnation of apartheid. Apartheid Minister Stoffel Botha even referred to those documenting what was unfolding in the country as "media terrorists."
While there have been attempts to deny or downplay apartheid, including from the now late last apartheid president F. W. de Klerk, systemic denial has not been possible owing to the evidence available. This underscores the role of documentation in defending truth, even if incomplete.
What would have happened if the apartheid regime had claimed that photographs like Nzima’s were faked or AI generated? Would this have created doubt for the audiences who saw it, impacting international support for South Africa’s liberation struggle? Today these questions are not rhetorical, owing to the emergence of generative AI.
To be sure for most of the world, the saying, “The camera never lies” has never been true. Visual media was vital to the Nazi regime's propaganda efforts. Before that, it played “a critical role in propagating colonialist myths about Africa,” with colonial states using photographic imagery to cement white supremacy. It would also become a tool for apartheid in South Africa, used to not only legitimize and validate itself, but to also attempt to shape global perceptions of what was happening in the country.
But the story did not end there. Visual media would also become a tool for liberation movements in South Africa and beyond, because documentation impacts how the world is perceived, meaning is made, and reality is verified.
For example, Human Rights Watch recently used geolocated images to verify the Israeli military’s unlawful use of white phosphorus, a highly reactive chemical which ignites when exposed to oxygen, in residential areas in Lebanon. This offers a pathway for accountability in the future. Similarly, the Syrian Archive, which tracks and preserves videos of war crimes in Syria, has used documentation to pursue accountability for the deadly use of chemical weapons in the country.
Documentation is critical in the pursuit of justice, as well as the need to preserve the past to confirm reality. Not only for these worthy ideals, but also so that those who are left to pick up the pieces know that their experiences of injustices are documented, even in the face of denial and propaganda aimed at persuading people otherwise.
Of course the risks and harms are heightened in conflict situations, which does not need to be inevitable. For example, Meta’s Oversight Board recently called for new rules on how deceptive AI content is managed by the platform to enable users to distinguish between what is real and fake. This follows Meta’s failure to appropriately designate an AI-generated video that purported to show significant damage caused by Iranian soldiers in Haifa, Israel. While the board’s recommendations are not binding, should Meta fail to urgently implement these, it will be yet another example of a platform knowing how to address harms but failing to do so. This must change.
To this end, pushing back against the assault on verifiable reality is a crucial undertaking. This includes protecting people's ability to safely document and preserve their documentation; accessible and effective detection tools, alongside transparency for AI-generated content; and democratic policies, laws, and regulations that center human rights considerations.
As history has repeatedly shown us, secrecy is a shield that protects injustice and emboldens bad actors. So, bearing witness, exposing truth, and insisting on justice remains as important now as it was for South Africa’s liberation movement and beyond— even in the age of generative AI.
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I Lost My Father to Violence—Executing the Wrong Man Won’t Bring Justice
My opposition to this execution is not a betrayal of my father. It is an affirmation of the values he lived by, and that I have tried to instill in my children.
Dec 30, 2025
At the tender age of 9, I lost my father, Doug Battle, when he was killed during a robbery. Like many children faced with sudden violence, I asked a simple question with no answer: Why did you have to kill him?
Today, I am asking a different question… one that should concern all of us.
Why is the state preparing to execute Charles Burton, a man who did not kill my father?
In 1991, six men robbed an AutoZone store in Alabama. Mr. Burton had already left the store with the money. Derrick DeBruce remained inside and made his own decision, in accordance with no one, to shoot my father as he lay face-down on the floor alongside employees and customers. There is no evidence that Mr. Burton knew, or had any intent, that a shooting would occur.
Executing a man who did not commit the killing does not heal wounds or strengthen public trust. It weakens it.
Both men were initially sentenced to death. Later, DeBruce, the shooter, had his sentence overturned and the state agreed to resentence him to life without parole. Mr. Burton, the non-shooter, remains on death row.
If this is allowed to stand, this would represent a fundamental flaw in how capital punishment is applied in America.
Mr. Burton is now 75 years old, wheelchair-bound, and suffering from severe rheumatoid arthritis. He is frail, in declining health, and poses no threat to public safety. Yet the state plans to execute him using nitrogen hypoxia, a method that raises serious ethical and constitutional concerns.
As a child, I believed justice meant punishment. I thought executions would bring closure. Over time, I learned that justice cannot be reduced to finality. A system that values procedural rigidity over truth demonstrates to me that it does not revere justice.
Mr. Burton’s continued presence on death row does not reflect a moral judgment. From what I understand, it has persisted in part because technical rules prevent courts from correcting past errors. When a legal system allows a man who did not commit the killing to die because the process itself blocks reconsideration, it reveals how fragile justice can be.
Earlier this year, I was informed that the state intended to move forward with Mr. Burton’s execution. When I was contacted by the Attorney General's Victims' Assistance Office and said I opposed the execution, I was told my opinion did not matter. As the victim’s child, I was not consulted about mercy, only about logistics.
My opposition to this execution is not a betrayal of my father. It is an affirmation of the values he lived by, and that I have tried to instill in my children. Justice can be measured by our commitment to truth and our willingness to show mercy.
Executing a man who did not commit the killing does not heal wounds or strengthen public trust. It weakens it.
I wrestle with my feelings on whether capital punishment should exist at all, but if it must be applied, it should be done so with restraint, proportionality, and humility. This case fails on all three counts.
I lost my father to violence. Another death will not bring him back. It will only deepen my trauma and the moral cost we all share.
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Why DEI Was Doomed to Fail
DEI’s fundamental contradiction was this: It argued that race is a social invention—a system created to control people by reducing complexity—yet it never suggested replacing it with a more holistic vision of justice.
Mar 09, 2025
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or DEI, is collapsing—not just as a corporate initiative, but as an ideological framework.
In what seemed like a flash, it became a dominant force in American institutional life, embedded in HR departments, university policies, and media discourse. And now, just as quickly, it finds itself in retreat, with entire DEI offices being gutted across corporate and academic America.
President Donald Trump’s administration has aggressively targeted DEI, issuing executive orders to dismantle these programs across federal agencies. This federal rollback has emboldened Republican-led states to eliminate DEI efforts within public institutions. Meanwhile, MSNBC’s recent firing of Joy Reid, a vocal defender of DEI who embodied many of its most aggressive tendencies, signals a broader cultural shift.
If we want to build a politics that actually addresses racial injustice, we need an approach that is dynamic rather than static—one that acknowledges history without being trapped by it.
The right celebrates this as a victory over “woke ideology.” The left frames it as yet another example of backlash and white fragility. But these explanations fail to account for why DEI has unraveled so quickly.
The reality is that DEI was doomed to fail—not because the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion are unworthy, but because the framework built around them was structurally flawed.
DEI’s fundamental contradiction was this: It argued that race is a social invention—a system created to control people by reducing complexity—yet it never suggested replacing it.
Instead, it doubled down on racial categorization, reinforcing the very thing it claimed to challenge. This reification of race, rather than dismantling structures of oppression, helped sustain them, making DEI brittle and politically untenable.
For the left, the lesson here is crucial. If we don’t break out of the rigid, black-and-white thinking that DEI promoted, we will continue ceding ground to the right. The need to discuss race and identity remains vital, but it must be done in a way that opens space for complexity rather than reinforcing the very constructs that uphold division.
DEI’s fatal flaw is that it traps itself in a closed loop. It rightly argues that race is a historical construct—a tool of power designed to enforce hierarchy. Yet instead of pushing beyond this construct, it reinforces race as fixed and immutable. The result is an ideological contradiction: Race is framed as an arbitrary invention, yet treated as an unchanging, permanent reality.
James Baldwin exposed the hollowness of racial constructs decades ago. In “On Being ‘White’… and Other Lies,” he wrote: “The crisis of leadership in the white community is remarkable—and terrifying—because there is, in fact, no white community.”
Baldwin understood that whiteness, like all racial identities, was not a biological or cultural fact but a political invention—a shifting construct designed to serve power. Yet DEI never seriously engaged with this idea. It simply replaced one rigid racial hierarchy with another, treating whiteness as an unchanging position of privilege while treating other racial identities as fixed sites of oppression.
This rigidity meant that DEI operated as a closed system, reasserting racial categories rather than interrogating them. It failed to engage with race as a lived, historically contingent process—one shaped by history, class, and material conditions.
By doing this, DEI alienated people across the political spectrum. Many white people, even those who consider themselves progressive, felt that DEI erased any meaningful discussion of economic struggle or historical complexity within whiteness.
Meanwhile, many people of color found DEI’s racial framework superficial—offering corporate-friendly language about inclusion while doing little to address material inequalities. The framework functioned as a kind of racial accounting system, but it lacked a clear political vision for building solidarity.
Sheena Mason, a scholar of racial theory, has articulated the deeper flaw in this approach: “To undo racism, we have to undo our belief in race.”
This insight is crucial. If race itself is a construct designed to justify social stratification, then maintaining race as a primary framework for addressing inequality only reinforces the divisions we claim to want to overcome. Yet DEI never suggested dismantling the concept of race—it only sought to redistribute power within its existing framework.
This was a fatal mistake. Modern genetic science has definitively debunked the biological basis of race. There is more genetic diversity within so-called racial groups than between them. The racial categories that shape our politics and institutions are historical inventions, not natural facts.
Yet DEI, instead of leveraging this knowledge to transcend racial essentialism, entrenches race as the defining lens for justice. This approach not only deepens social division but also makes the left vulnerable to the right’s attacks.
By insisting on the permanence of racial categories, DEI created an ideological framework that could be easily caricatured as divisive and exclusionary—giving conservatives an easy target while failing to deliver meaningful change.
Racial discourse often eclipses broader discussions of material conditions, making it harder to address economic inequality in a meaningful way.
Patricia Hill Collins, a foundational thinker in intersectional theory, has observed that, “Race operates as such an overriding feature of African-American experience in the United States that it not only overshadows economic class relations for Blacks but obscures the significance of economic class within the United States in general.”
DEI’s fixation on race, detached from material conditions, contributed to this very problem. By prioritizing racial categorization over economic struggle, it often obscured the broader systems of inequality that shape American life.
This not only made class politics more difficult to articulate but also allowed racial identity to become a stand-in for structural critique—reinforcing an identity-based framework that often benefited elites more than the working class.
With DEI collapsing, the question becomes: What comes next? The right hopes this marks the end of racial discourse altogether. That cannot happen. Structural racism, economic exclusion, and historical injustice are still deeply embedded in American life. Ignoring the function of racism and racial categories plays into the hands of those who want to maintain both racial and economic inequality.
But we cannot simply replace DEI with another rigid, prepackaged framework that reproduces the same mistakes. If we want to build a politics that actually addresses racial injustice, we need an approach that is dynamic rather than static—one that acknowledges history without being trapped by it.
This means recognizing that racial categories are not timeless truths but historical constructions that have been shaped by economic, political, and social forces. It means rejecting the idea that people are permanently locked into racial identities that define their entire experience. And it means moving beyond an approach that focuses primarily on representation and inclusion toward one that addresses material conditions to redistribute power.
DEI’s failure provides an opportunity for the left to rethink how it engages with race and identity. We need to stop seeing race as an unchanging structure and start understanding it as something that can be transformed. Morgan Freeman put it bluntly in an interview, stating, “I don’t want a Black History Month. Black history is American history.”
This is the kind of shift we need—one that integrates historical understanding rather than segregates it, one that moves past “race”—which we know doesn't exist—as a fixed identity category toward a broader, more holistic vision of justice.
The goal should not be to replace DEI with another top-down, bureaucratic approach, but to build a new paradigm that is open, flexible, and capable of fostering real solidarity.
If the left fails to do this, it will keep losing to the right. And if that happens, the backlash against DEI will not just be the end of a flawed initiative—it will be a major setback for the broader struggle for justice and equality.
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How Would Gandhi Have Faced Down Trump?
Whatever injustices, cruelties, and evils you seek to end, Gandhi’s life and message are worth studying and emulating.
Feb 22, 2025
On Inauguration Day, I was flying home from India, where I had attended Gandhi 3.0, a retreat that brought together 40 people from around the world to explore how Gandhian principles can be meaningful in today's world. I returned to the U.S. just as my country was erupting in turmoil.
My emotions were all over the place. Having just experienced the most heart-expanding nine days of my life, where I witnessed the most extraordinary acts of generosity and heard some of the wisest of voices, I felt strangely grounded with a deep sense of love for, well, everyone. But I was also aghast, frightened for so many, and startled by those who were delighted by the sledgehammer upheavals, the head-spinning international proclamations, and the unconstitutional decrees.
I certainly understand the desire to upend “the system”—something I’ve been trying to do with multiple unjust, unsustainable, and inhumane systems my entire adult life—but what was unfolding was inchoate, cruel, and chaotic destruction rather than carefully considered interventions that would reduce waste and corruption.
What could Gandhi teach me and us?
Like Gandhi, ask yourself how you can tend your time carefully knowing that ineffective—and potentially destructive—efforts will waste your precious energy and could also backfire.
Studying Gandhi helps me put my country into perspective. Gandhi spent decades endeavoring to free his country from British rule using only nonviolent methods. He worked to end the evil of untouchability embedded in India’s caste system. He led a movement toward Indian self-reliance. And all along the way he made inner work—the cultivation of love and wisdom; inquiry, introspection, and integrity; and meditation—foundational to everything he did.
Gandhi once said:
I hold myself incapable of hating any being on Earth. By a long course of prayerful discipline, I have ceased for over 40 years to hate anybody. I know this is a big claim. Nevertheless, I make it in all humility. But I can and do hate evil wherever it exists. I hate the systems of government that the British people have set up in India. I hate the ruthless exploitation of India even as I hate from the bottom of my heart the hideous system of untouchability for which millions of Hindus have made themselves responsible. But I do not hate the domineering Englishmen as I refuse to hate the domineering Hindus. I seek to reform them in all the loving ways that are open to me. My noncooperation has its roots not in hatred, but in love.
I posted this quote shortly after my return to the U.S., and a friend commented: “Waiting for your solution? Do we just be still without any action to what is happening in this country?”
Gandhi would hardly want us to keep still. After all, he worked tirelessly. He also worked strategically, wisely, and forcefully, with force embedded in his guiding principle of satyagraha, often translated as “nonviolent resistance.” But satyagraha means so much more than this. The word combines satya, meaning truth, and agraha, meaning insistence, firmness, and adherence. In other words, Gandhi’s force for change was an unshakeable commitment to opposing injustice with truth. And truth for Gandhi meant never doing evil to combat evil; never using violence to oppose violence; and never succumbing to hate to resist hate. It meant no less than living, acting, and teaching with an abiding core of love.
Gandhi is famous for responding to a reporter’s question about his message by jotting down, “My life is my message.” Those five words aren’t just one man’s story. They represent a universal truth. Each of our lives is our message. The question thus becomes: Am I modeling the message I most want to convey?
None of us is or will be Gandhi. Nor will we have the megaphone to the world that he came to have through the power of his character, his resolve, and his at the time unique nonviolent approach to resistance. If you or I declared, as Gandhi did on several occasions, that we were fasting until and unless violence among our citizenry ended, we would surely die of starvation, and that violence would persist after we were gone. But that doesn’t mean that Gandhian principles have nothing to teach us today. They absolutely do.
Here are Gandhian teachings I am taking to heart right now:
- Avoid rash acts and angry outbursts; these will not bring about any positive change.
- Learn from the changemakers who have brought about greater peace and justice and built more compassionate, sustainable systems against all odds.
- Embrace satyagraha, recognizing that this requires cultivating the inner resolve to continually pursue justice through nonviolent, loving means.
- Work toward systemic change, understanding that this takes profound dedication, deep thinking, careful strategizing, and patience.
- Do the inner work as tirelessly as the outer work to achieve all of the above.
If you were hoping for more specific strategies to address your current concerns, this may be a disappointing list, but let’s not forget that most people across the political spectrum care about others and want a future where their fellow citizens can thrive. Rather than consider those with different political views one’s enemies, we can perceive them as fellow participants and even potential friends with whom we can communicate, and maybe collaborate, as we identify better ways forward upon which we can agree.
Gandhi devoted years to readying himself and his followers for nonviolent resistance. He spent nearly two decades in preparation for the Salt March that led to India’s independence. Just ponder that as you consider the role you will play in achieving your vision for a sustainable, peaceful, just world.
Please don’t interpret this as meaning that we should only cultivate inner strength and love, or that we should do nothing now other than plan and strategize for an indefinite future. Rather, like Gandhi, ask yourself how you can tend your time carefully knowing that ineffective—and potentially destructive—efforts will waste your precious energy and could also backfire.
Whatever injustices, cruelties, and evils you seek to end, Gandhi’s life and message are worth studying and emulating. He demonstrated that satyagraha is not only a profound strategy; it is fueled by the most powerful of human capacities: love. Given that Gandhi was perhaps the greatest changemaker in history, it’s worth deeply considering his approach as a model for today’s world. And lest we think we somehow need to dispense with our anger to follow in Gandhi’s footsteps, he also said this:
“I have learnt through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world.”
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We the People Face the Abandonment of America's Foundational Principles
Are we ready to defend our ideals, or have we lost interest in distinguishing virtue from vice and public good from private greed?
Feb 05, 2025
Misattributed quotes and next-level gaslighting aside, we find ourselves yet again at a crossroads in time—a moment demanding serious reflection on the foundational principles that shaped our republic. This is not hyperbole.
For far too many years, most of what we have been willing to believe contradicts the ideals of the figures said to be revered by those we have entrusted with our government.
As to misattributed quotes, we could jump right in with Thomas Jefferson's actual words regarding our shared principles, but let's first reflect on the insights of his revolutionary compatriot turned bitter political rival, John Adams. In a letter dated April 16, 1776—less than three months before the signing of the Declaration of Independence—Adams shared this wisdom:
Public Virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics.
Now, recognizing that those working to recreate our nation—in their own oh-so-very perfect image—may not favor the Federalist Adams, our indispensable second president, let us fast forward some 140 years to Theodore Roosevelt. "Teddy" Roosevelt, a man well-versed in the ideas of our Founding Fathers and our foundational principles, had this to say in a letter dated January 1917:
Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood—the virtues that made America. The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety first instead of duty first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.
The focus on virtue as the foundation of national character contrasts sharply with the narrative we have been fed by those who, in reality, promote "the things that will destroy America." God only knows why we, the people, have been so accepting of their manipulative tactics instead of insisting upon promoting "the virtues that made America." Regardless, we have once again set ourselves up to watch as policies that overwhelmingly benefit a growing cadre of super-rich are implemented.
Yes, they will fuel their economic fire sufficiently so that some of us will enjoy a few crumbs. But regardless of their justifications, the harsh realities facing the shrinking middle class and the most vulnerable will be disregarded. They'll tell us that our best way forward is to be dragged down some technological path by today's Monied Interests, feeding us an amped-up version of the same greed-driven trickle-down bullshit that we've willfully consumed for nearly half a century. And for good measure, they will, this time, destroy as many ballasts of good governance as they possibly can. Then, their blaze will exhaust itself—leaving behind a stunning path of destruction. Never mind the damage done.
We the People should by now recognize their ways.
Let's now acknowledge that many of our antagonists today would prefer that we conclude this essay with the Anti-Federalist Jefferson's 1801 Inaugural Address, wherein he listed his governing principles and said, "These principles form the bright constellation, which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages, and blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment..." However, it seems anything but likely that those currently at the helm of government are willing to acknowledge this in context.
For example, we are far removed from Jefferson's agrarian society, our need for a standing army is without question, and the Monied Interests have evolved beyond anything Jefferson could have imagined. So, we'll conclude, in a moment, with another example of Jeffersonian wisdom. Nonetheless, here's an abbreviated look at Thomas Jefferson's "bright constellation":
- "Equal and exact justice to all…
- Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations…
- The support of the state governments in all their rights…
- The preservation of the General government in its whole constitutional vigor…
- Absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority…
- A well-disciplined militia…
- The supremacy of the civil over the military authority…
- Economy in the public expence…
- The honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith…
- Encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid…
- The diffusion of information, and arraignment of all abuses…
- Freedom of religion; freedom of the press; and freedom of person…
- and trial by juries impartially selected."
To close, let's turn to the wisdom of an aging Jefferson, as he penned in an 1819 letter:
Of Liberty then I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will: but rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will, within the limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add "within the limits of the law"; because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.
We may not yet fully realize it, but we are literally in the process of deliberating (for lack of a better term) our foundational principles, and the chaos to come is going to test our commitment to Jefferson's Rightful Liberty—our foremost foundational principle of liberty and justice for all. We will soon know if we, as a nation, will continue our pursuit of a more perfect union.
The good news is that we, individually and collectively, get to decide which path we will pursue. The choice is ours.
Are we ready to defend our ideals, or have we lost interest in distinguishing virtue from vice and public good from private greed? Are we really to be remembered as the ones who abandoned America's Foundational Principles?
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Don’t Let the Supreme Court Get the Last Word on Housing Justice
New laws criminalizing the state of being homeless will not pass, and existing laws will not be retained, if we the people reject them.
Jun 29, 2024
Yesterday’s Supreme Court decision in City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson was an abomination. Justice Sonia Sotomayor had it right when she said that criminally punishing people for sleeping outside when there is no shelter available to them is “unconscionable and unconstitutional.”
Alas, six of her fellow justices disagreed, ruling that fining and imprisoning people just because they are homeless does not violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. So these vile, counterproductive responses to our housing crisis have been held to be constitutional.
But the second half of Justice Sotomayor’s verdict is alive and well: Punishing people because they are unhoused is unconscionable. The Supreme Court failed to stop this hateful practice, but we can.
Laws that imprison people for being unhoused are just as unconscionable today as they were before the Supreme Court ruling.
In my work teaching a law school clinic where we defend people facing eviction, and in research and writing as part of a book project, I have spent the last few years researching and writing about inspiring housing rights campaigns across the country.
Tenant unions, religious groups, civic organizations, labor unions, and others have come together to lobby local officials in Louisville, confront corporate landlords in North Carolina, run candidates for office in Kansas City, commit civil disobedience in Connecticut, convene phone banks in Tacoma, and fight like hell in dozens of other communities, too. They have won victories like bans on cold-weather and school-year evictions, referendums creating huge boosts in affordable housing funds, ceilings on rent increases, and protections against unlawful evictions.
This growing movement demands the fulfillment of the human right to housing. The people in this movement, not a half-dozen unelected, lifetime-appointed elites in black robes, will have the last word on how we treat our unhoused sisters and brothers.
That was always going to be the case, no matter how the court decided Grants Pass. As a practical matter, the Supreme Court majority only ruled that anti-homeless legislation is allowable—not that it is advisable, much less required. New laws criminalizing the state of being homeless will not pass, and existing laws will not be retained, if we the people reject them.
More broadly, transformative justice always comes from the bottom up, not from court decisions handed down from on high. Compare the anti-abolition movement to the Dred Scott decision sanctioning slavery, the civil rights movement to the Plessy v. Ferguson decision that enshrined “separate but equal,” the labor movement to multiple anti-worker decisions like the Hammer v. Dagenhart ruling that struck down laws prohibiting child labor.
During one of my visits to the amazing advocates of the Louisville Tenant Union, I heard one of the tenants tell her story. She and her children had not only been unlawfully evicted, she was wrongly arrested and imprisoned in the process. Judges did not save her, and law enforcement certainly didn’t. Instead, she found support and justice when she joined together with her fellow tenants.
“The powers that be told me I was crazy, but that’s harder to say when I am standing next to 100 other people who have gone through the same thing,” she said. “We are the ones to keep us safe.”
She is right. Laws that imprison people for being unhoused are just as unconscionable today as they were before the Supreme Court ruling. Together, we can stop them. Together, we can keep all of us safe.
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Waging Peace in an Uncertain World
Discovering solidarity and joint action on this International Day of Peace.
Sep 21, 2023
Every year, the International Day of Peace is observed around the world on September 21. Based on a declaration in 1981 by the United Nations General Assembly, this day is devoted to strengthening the ideals of peace and designated as a day of nonviolence and cease-fire. This notion is rooted and anchored in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, which clearly states, “Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person” (Article 3), and yet, we are left wondering how this will be actualized in our worldly affairs both individually and collectively.
UNESCO cogently calls out the importance of peacebuilding in our time of unprecedented challenges:
New forces of division have emerged, spreading hatred and intolerance. Terrorism is fueling violence, while violent extremism seeks to poison the minds of the vulnerable and young. In the poorest and least-developed parts of the world, climate-related natural disasters are compounding existing fragility, increasing forced migration, and heightening the risk of violence.
Through social media, we have seen a cheapening and commodification of words, phrases, and concepts. Peace has become a marketing campaign for some, and for others, it is now conflated with ideological arguments that diminish meaning and capacity for change. The level of extremism we are witnessing today in many places of the world is reminiscent of a not so recent past, in which demagogues, fascists, extremists, identitarian youth movements, and eugenics all held hands together. The promise of their future was one of no diversity, no elderly or disabled, no poverty, no dissent. Instead, they offered up a sterile world, in which there would be total war to accomplish their aims.
Today, we are sadly at the same precipice. There is a war in Ukraine, despots and despotic regimes that use slave labor and traffic men, women, and children for exploitation. We have extremists who are committed to agitation and even violence, and our youth are influenced and emotionally agitated more and more through social media and substance abuse. In the midst of these human realities, there also exist the realities of nature, which include dramatic force-majeure events. Under this burdensome weight, one can easily be overwhelmed by the enormity of the challenges that each of us faces, and, as UNESCO clearly states, “The barriers to peace are complex and steep—no one country can solve them alone. Doing so requires new forms of solidarity and joint action, starting as early as possible.”
Each generation has a responsibility to the next in moving us toward non-violence, liberation, and justice.
What does solidarity and joint action look like? The pedagogical principle of empathy may best be captured by the African principle of “ubuntu” (Omeje, 2008). Ubuntu is a humanistic philosophy (which has no English synonym) and connotes “collective personhood” and is best captured by the Zulu maxims: “A person is a person through other persons” and “my humanity is inextricably tied to your humanity.” It is an overarching, multidimensional philosophy that invokes the idiom and images of group cooperation, generosity, tolerance, respect, sharing, solidarity, forgiveness, and conciliation (ibid., p. 89).
To engage an empathic pedagogy requires us to move beyond our binary thinking of us versus them and embrace the complexity of human thought and experience. We also need to actively look without bias through new perspectives and suspend personal judgment by approaching something with a willingness to understand (Millican et al, 2021).
As we move forward into the fourth industrial revolution with current and looming existential challenges, we cannot afford to barter away our ethics as a human community to the seductions of our own self-made technology. This is not to say that technology does not have a place, for it most certainly does and will continue to do so; however, the ethical considerations as it relates to our planetary survival and justice are even more critical. For this reason, we are now compelled to really question our reliance on instrumental logic and must begin to advance from the 20th century post-enlightenment turn in modernity into a post-human world that centers planetary interrelatedness. This will be part of our human journey together, perhaps even our errant into the wilderness. It is our destiny to take this journey and to take it together. How we do that will require great fortitude, a willingness to see ourselves as the extended kin that we are, and to wrestle with difficult questions, not one another. This is a spiritual reawakening more than anything else.
For those of us who work in and with community, this will be the work of our lifetime, and the International Day of Peace should be a time of reflection, repentance, and reconciliation. It should also be a time for action—we should not only have a “cease-fire” on all global violence, but also in our interpersonal relationships. We should take steps to reconcile where we may have fallen short, misjudged, or harmed in some way another individual and find a way for individual and community-wide reconciliation.
Perhaps it is auspicious that the 2023 International Day of Peace falls between Rosh Hashana (the Hebrew calendar new year) and Yom Kippur (the day of atonement)—a time to reconsider where one has missed the mark, fallen short, or done harm to another (knowingly or unknowingly). It is a time for reconciliation, where the powerful lessons of forgiveness and mercy become central. There are many interpretations and lessons to be learned from this, but peacebuilding is not a one-day affair, as it requires a lifetime commitment to human justice. It will take extreme perseverance as the fruits of peacebuilding may not happen in our lifetime. It will require us to always renew the covenant that says we stand committed to one another and to all creation. In the Jewish tradition, there is a wonderful passage from “The Ethics of the Fathers” that should give us strength and agency. The passage states that in our striving toward peace and justice “you are not required to finish this work, yet neither are you permitted to desist from it.”
In considering our work in social justice and peacebuilding, this statement is perhaps the most relevant and captures the long-enduring spirit that is required to heal a world out of balance. It is a beautiful concept in which you are not obligated to finish the work of perfecting the world today, but neither are you permitted to do nothing toward that goal. Each generation has a responsibility to the next in moving us toward non-violence, liberation, and justice—and to think with an Indigenous mindset of the seven generations to come. What a beautiful and powerful gift we have—to live life in the fullness of moving us toward perfection in the recognition of our shared humanity and the potential of our genius.
As educators, we understand that the world stands on justice, truth, and peace, and peace is where the true beauty of humanity rests in all its perfection. Perhaps this is the highest calling for all of us as educators. We have chosen a path that can and should open hearts and minds to bring healing into those dark spaces of the human experience. Erich Fromm calls the art of loving in which love is not a feeling, but rather love is a practice that is our only path forward to actualize peace. Let us consider this day of International Peace a day where we recommit ourselves anew to the values that higher education and other sectors offer up to the world, an opportunity to develop perspective taking. May we discover a way of seeing the world from a new and different aperture and exhibit the energy and zeal to actively seek justice and engage the intractable issues of our time.
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Trump Is Being Treated Unlike Other Criminal Defendants—Better
Those looking for fairness in the criminal justice system may wish to see Trump treated like an ordinary criminal defendant. But instead, what if everyone else accused of a crime were treated more like Trump?
Aug 09, 2023
Former President Donald Trump often complains that he is being treated unfairly by the prosecutors charging him with crimes.
Trump is now the subject of three federal and state criminal cases—and it is true that he is being treated unlike other criminal defendants.
The prosecutors are treating Trump a lot better than the average criminal defendant.
Most criminal defendants are just arrested and taken to jail, where they may sit for months or even years while they await trial, unless they plead guilty.
We are law scholars who have defended clients in criminal and civil cases, and we wish that our clients received the advantages that prosecutors are giving Trump.
Early Warnings
Trump’s unique treatment began before he was even charged with any crime. First, he had ample warning of the investigations because he got letters from the Justice Department saying he was a target of each investigation. These letters were sent to Trump a few weeks before his two federal indictments in June and July 2023.
Especially in white-collar cases, criminal defendants sometimes receive target letters that warn them of an impending indictment and sometimes give them the chance to testify.
But target letters generally lack detail and are far from the norm across all criminal cases. Target letters are not legally required. The Justice Department spells out various reasons why its prosecutors do not need to send them, including risks of a defendant destroying evidence or endangering witnesses.
The Difference Freedom Makes
After Trump was charged with crimes in each of his three pending cases, his lawyers negotiated dates when he could submit to authorities for processing.
And after Trump’s brief arraignments in court, judges found he was not a flight risk and released him.
Most criminal defendants are just arrested and taken to jail, where they may sit for months or even years while they await trial, unless they plead guilty. Three-quarters of federal criminal defendants are locked up to await trial.
Defendants in courts across the country plead guilty to crimes even if they are innocent, in part because pleading guilty gets them home sooner.
It is hard for detained defendants to recover lost wages and from the humiliation they experience while in jail, even if they defy the odds and later win their case.
Pretrial detention has also been shown to result in a higher chance of being convicted and receiving longer sentences.
Indeed, defendants in courts across the country plead guilty to crimes even if they are innocent, in part because pleading guilty gets them home sooner. For some defendants, the pretrial detention is longer than their actual punishment will be, so pleading guilty resolves the case with credit for time served. But the stain of a conviction stays on their record forever.
Benefits of Time and Freedom
Because Trump is not sitting in jail, he is well positioned to ask that his trials be postponed far longer than would an ordinary criminal case. Federal law generally requires “speedy” trials, which are considered a right to protect defendants.
Trump got a lengthy delay, though it’s not as long as his legal team requested. Trump asked that his classified documents trial be held after the November 2024 election, but his trial is scheduled to begin in May 2024. Federal prosecutors pushed for a December 2023 start date. These kinds of compromise decisions are common in legal decisions like deciding court dates.
This timing gives Trump’s lawyers nearly a year to prepare arguments in his favor. They can easily meet with their client to do so, something that would be difficult if Trump were incarcerated.
Most criminal defendants face a very different experience.
For example, after federal prosecutors charged Air Force reservist Jack Teixeira in June 2023 for revealing classified information, he asked for provisions similar to those that judges made for Trump.
He argued that he, too, should be released to await trial. Teixeira did not have Trump’s wealth and easy ability to flee.
Nonetheless, the court determined that Teixeira poses a national security threat and must remain in jail. The case is still pending.
Other criminal defendants spend years in jail before pleading guilty or perhaps going to trial.
A Treasure-Trove of Information
The differences do not stop there.
Prosecutors in all three of Trump’s cases have explained, in great detail, the allegations against him.
The classified documents indictment recounted several text message conversations between Trump aides and transcribed a conversation in which Trump disclosed the contents of classified documents and acknowledged their classified status.
Prosecutors often withhold documents until the eve of trial or wait until after key witnesses have testified, all of which is legal.
The indictment regarding Trump’s alleged plot to overturn the 2020 election results was 45 pages long and included a play-by-play description of his plan.
Early in the documents case, federal prosecutors publicly disclosed key information about their investigation that could have helped Trump’s legal defense.
In contrast, criminal defendants typically do not know the precise allegations facing them this early in a case.
Prosecutors often withhold documents until the eve of trial or wait until after key witnesses have testified, all of which is legal. In some cases, they fail to disclose the information.
The Other Side of the Coin
Prosecutors’ decision to treat Trump differently from other criminal defendants could serve a few purposes.
The Justice Department is prosecuting a former president. That puts the department in a delicate, high-profile position, where it has the “Herculean task of putting an ethical rope through a needle,” as one former federal prosecutor has said.
So, prosecutors’ detailed indictments help inform the public about the breadth and depth of the allegations made against Trump.
Their approach could add legitimacy to the prosecution’s and the Justice Department’s goal of maintaining accountability and independence while countering Trump’s perception that the cases are “a witch hunt” and rooted only in politics.
What Would Fairness Look Like?
Those looking for fairness in the criminal justice system may wish to see Trump treated like an ordinary criminal defendant. But instead, what if everyone else accused of a crime were treated more like Trump?
In that world, perhaps most importantly, pretrial detention would be used quite sparingly and would not provide leverage to coerce guilty pleas. People who are charged with a crime have not been proven guilty, and pretrial detention inflicts serious harm on defendants, their cases and their loved ones.
Prosecutors would tell defendants from the earliest stage of the case the detailed allegations against them so that defendants can prepare a meaningful defense.
The U.S. legal system aims at the truth, and robust procedures serve that goal.
In our view, the more thorough the judicial process is, the more confident people can be that it reaches the right outcome—whether the case regards Trump or not. Looking at Trump’s special treatment offers a good place to start in thinking about how the criminal legal system should treat all people accused of a crime.
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Compassionate Release for 3 of Newburgh 4 Highlights FBI Misdeeds
The agency may have earned praise in the Trump investigation, but it has a long, dark history of targeting political dissidents and other marginalized communities.
Aug 04, 2023
Former president Donald Trump has been criminally indicted for the third time in four months. Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment describes Trump’s attempt to overturn his loss in the 2020 election and cling to power. The four charges include the criminal violation of the rights of Americans to have their votes counted.
Republican loyalists are parroting Trump’s mantra that the investigations are all part of a witch hunt intended to keep him from regaining the White House in 2024. But many legal analysts have praised the strategy behind the historic indictment for targeting Trump without additional defendants or other complications that might prevent a speedy trial.
“I would like to thank the members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation who are working on this investigation with my office,” Smith said in his short public statement on August 1, after the indictment was unsealed. “These women and men are public servants at the very highest order, and it is a privilege to work alongside them.”
“The FBI invented the conspiracy, identified the targets; manufactured the ordnance; federalized what would otherwise have been a state crime.”
Smith’s praise may well be warranted in this case. But the FBI has a long, dark history of targeting political dissidents and other marginalized communities. Muslim Americans were especially hard hit in the wake of the attacks of September 11th, 2001.
Take the case of the Newburgh Four. Just days before this latest Trump indictment was unsealed, a federal judge in New York granted compassionate release to three inmates who had been convicted in 2010 of terrorism and given the mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years in prison. These prisoners, David Williams, Onta Williams, and Laguerre Payen are three members of a group known as the Newburgh Four. The fourth, James Cromitie, is expected to apply separately for compassionate release.
“A person… would be left with the impression that the offending defendants were sophisticated international terrorists committed to jihad against the United States,” U.S. District Court Judge Colleen McMahon wrote in her order. “However, they were, in actual reality, hapless, easily manipulated and penurious petty criminals… impoverished small-time grifters and drug users/street level dealers who could use some money.”
Judge McMahon ordered the three prisoners released within 90 days, having already served 14 years. The Newburgh Four were big news following their 2008 arrest, accused of plotting to blow up a synagogue in the Bronx and to shoot down U.S. military aircraft with surface-to-air missiles. The FBI used a shady paid informant, Shahed Hussain, a career criminal desperate to avoid deportation, to lure the four into the plot.
Judge McMahon wrote, “The FBI invented the conspiracy, identified the targets; manufactured the ordnance; federalized what would otherwise have been a state crime… by driving three of the four men into Connecticut to view the ‘bombs’ and ‘stinger missile launchers’… Hussain drove the four men to Riverdale (they had no way to drive themselves); ‘armed’ the ‘bomb’ (because the hapless Cromitie, despite his ‘training,’ could not figure out how to do it); and told Cromitie how to place the device.”
McMahon has long criticized the government’s conduct in this elaborate entrapment operation, and the fact that she was forced to sentence the defendants to the mandatory minimum. “The fact that what the government did was legal does not make it just,” McMahon wrote, when ordering the compassionate release of the three.
The Newburgh Four were one in a string of informant-driven prosecutions that entrapped members of the Muslim community. “We have a lot of cases out there. The Fort Dix Five is one. The Holy Land Five is another case. Aafia Siddiqui is another case. You can go down a whole long list,” Stephen Downs said on the Democracy Now! news hour. He is the board chair of the Coalition for Civil Freedoms and represents David Williams of the Newburgh Four. Downs is also the former chief attorney of New York State’s Commission on Judicial Conduct.
“They were out there going to create as many terrorists as they could, to show the public… that they were keeping America safe.”
“This was the government’s standard operating procedure right after 9/11,” Downs explained. “They were out there going to create as many terrorists as they could, to show the public… that they were keeping America safe. If they couldn’t find any real terrorists—and they couldn’t; there really weren’t any real terrorists around—they had to create them. And that’s what they did: They created these terrorists.”
The prosecution of the Newburgh Four was a political prosecution. They cannot recover the 14 years they’ve lost, they will still be on probation, subject to reimprisonment, and they will still be considered “felons” with all the burdens that designation carries.
Meanwhile, last October, a lead federal prosecutor of the Newburgh Four, David Raskin, joined the prosecutorial team investigating the Trump/Mar-a-Lago classified documents case. Jack Smith has an enormous challenge before him, prosecuting Trump’s attempted coup d’état, while rising above the FBI’s well-documented legacy of political persecution.
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Rightwing Dark Money Bomb Coming for State Courts
Fair courts in the states are being targeted by some of the same right-wing dark money forces that have captured the U.S. Supreme Court.
Nov 01, 2022
State supreme courts can be vital to protecting Americans' freedoms, though the U.S. Supreme Court gets most of the attention, especially lately with its rulings limiting federal protection for reproductive rights, voting rights, gun safety, and our environment. State courts are where the vast majority-90%-of civil and criminal cases of the country are decided.
These kinds of dark money operations engulfing our state judicial systems are already having an effect on who sits on our state courts and how they operate.
With the nation's highest court dominated by right-wing appointees reversing legal precedents protecting people's rights and kicking issues to states, having fair state supreme courts is more important than ever.
But fair courts in the states are being targeted by some of the same right-wing dark money forces that have captured the U.S. Supreme Court.
A June report by the Brennan Center for Justice found that in 2022 so far legislators in at least 25 states had introduced more than 70 bills that would politicize or undermine the independence of state courts-a growing assault on fair courts.
Take Kansas, for example. This summer, Kansas voters resoundingly rejected a ballot measure, pushed by the Catholic right-wing and other groups closely affiliated with Leonard Leo, trying to overturn the Kansas Supreme Court's 2019 ruling affirming state legal precedents that the state Constitution protects the right to access abortion. But that referendum was not the only attack on that court's independence by right-wing operatives waging a war of attrition against the state's fair courts. The state legislature nearly passed a measure that sought to eliminate merit selection, long a target of the far-right, because having an independent body assess the qualifications of potential judges can help ensure that appointees have reputations for fairness rather than a track record of partisanship or bias.
That's not all. Right now, in Kansas, the religious right which bankrolled the failed amendment coalition called "Value Them Both" to the tune of $6.7 million (much of which has come from the Catholic Church), are opposing retention of five of the six state supreme Court justices sitting for re-election. (They support anti-abortion judge Caleb Stegall, a former attorney for Charles Koch's Americans for Prosperity, and counsel to far-right governor Sam Brownback who installed Stegall as a judge.) Allied groups, like "Kansas For Life," have long sought to oust members of the court for its rulings following legal precedents on education and abortion. Those efforts include a large-scale $2 million push by a dark money group calling itself "Kansans for Justice" in 2016 that ultimately failed, but moved the needle on the percentage of voters opposing retention.
Another major threat looms in Alaska, where voters will decide whether or not to hold a state constitutional convention, which would open the door to eliminating merit selection in the state widely seen as a leader in judicial independence. Nationally, Charles Koch funded groups like ALEC and right-wing special interests have ramped up their campaigns for a federal constitutional convention to give a majority of Republican-led states the power to radically rewrite our founding document to conform to their extreme agenda.
This public attention on state courts and the appointment process may be new, but the dark money effort to control them is not. Leonard Leo-through the Judicial Crisis Network/Concord Fund (JCN/Concord) and the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC), which orchestrated the REDMAP operation in 2010-has been targeting state courts through judicial elections and attempts to eliminate merit selection for decades.
This is no accident and is the result of seeds planted years ago. In 1971, shortly before he was named to the U.S. Supreme Court, tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell put a marker down in the blueprint he penned for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on the importance of the courts to right-wing big money. In the Powell Memo he emphasized that "the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change."
RSLC has been the biggest spender in judicial elections in recent years. In 2014, the group created a subsidiary, dubbed the "Judicial Fairness Initiative" (JFI), to influence judicial elections because independent state courts devoted to following precedent had become a barrier to the GOP's political and policy agenda. Since then, it has spent more than $21 million to influence judicial elections in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and others, often more than an individual judicial candidate has raised and spent. In February, RSLC announced its plans to shatter previous spending on state court races this year.
As a "527 group" under the IRS code, JFI is required to disclose its donors but what that really means is the JFI is a vehicle for obscuring which RSLC donors are really funding its campaigns to install right-wing activists on state courts. JFI's only disclosed donor, ever, is... surprise: RSLC. We know, however, that groups tied to the court-obsessed Leo have made donations right before similar amounts were transferred to JFI.
Meanwhile, JCN/Concord is just another shell for passing money from other Leo-tied groups, designed to keep the true donor secret-although as of August we know Leo's agenda has been bankrolled in the form of a $1.6 billion dollar transfer to a trust controlled by Leo through a 90-year old Chicago billionaire named Barre Seid.
True North Research has documented how Seid secretly (to the public) underwrote legal briefs for Republican State Attorneys General to the U.S. Supreme Court. Seid has been tied to funding climate change denial, anti-abortion candidates, and anti-Muslim propaganda, as well as securing Leo's berth as a key decisionmaker at the public-funded George Mason University's Scalia School of Law, the DC-area law school that secures posh summer gigs abroad and away from the DC heat for Trump Supreme Court appointees, namely Brett Kavanaugh (England) and Neil Gorsuch (Italy).
Notably, the transfers from RSLC to JFI often occur right after the deadline for disclosing primary donations, but then due to the timing of filing deadlines don't get reported federally until after the general election for those judges. This has allowed JFI to stealthily scope out scorched earth-ad buys in the week before the general election-spending more in a few days than the candidates themselves raised and spent all year.
There is no way any candidate could counter those last-minute attacks without reserving almost their entire campaign's fundraising for spending in the last week and no way with campaign finance limits to raise that much on the spot, cut the ads, and place them in time.
RSLC--JFI's playbook, or should we say Leo and his billionaire benefactor(s)--reflects a real gaming of the virtually broken "campaign finance"/anti-corruption system. But the good news is that these tactics do not always prevail.
The lack of real-time transparency and real transparency about the true original funders makes it impossible for voters to know for sure who is funding the judicial spending, but the need-to-be-reformed IRS filing requirements shed some light. For example, we know that JCN/Concord has given RSLC nearly $2 million so far this year, most of that coming in late September. That does not include any money transferred in the fourth quarter of 2022, which will not be revealed until after the upcoming election.
We've seen this playbook before. In Wisconsin, for example, filings showed that in March 2019, RSLC received $1 million from JCN. The network was conceived by Leonard Leo, the co-chair of the Federalist Society, who oversees a sprawling dark money operation that raked in hundreds of millions of dollars before the 2020 election. Since 2012, JCN has been a top funder of RSLC (contributing at least $8 million) and spent directly to shape state courts where relatively small sums have an outsized influence. At the same time, JCN has been the leading source of dark money supporting the Trump nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In the week following that March 2019 transaction, RSLC sent $1.1 million to JFI, which then spent over a million on TV ads that ran the week before Wisconsin's April supreme court election. The ads said they were paid for by RSLC but made no mention of where its parent group got its money. RSLC later crowed that its spending swept its preferred candidate onto the Wisconsin Supreme Court, winning by .5%
In Pennsylvania's 2021 Supreme Court race, RSLC used a similar strategy where it ultimately spent over $1.6 million backing Kevin Brobson who won a seat on the court last November.
This year, another group-which is tied to the Restoration PAC and GOP mega-donor Richard Uihlein-is playing a major role. It calls itself "Fair Courts America" (FCA/Uihlein) co-opting the language of fairness.
FCA/Uihlein even spent money in a lower court race for the Wisconsin Court of Appeals in 2021 alongside RSLC/JFI. FCA/Uihlein has spent on ads in the Kentucky (along with RSLC) and Illinois Supreme Court elections-as well as in the primary for the Texas Supreme Court and even a prosecutor's race in Arkansas, where the group took in an additional $100,000 from local chicken magnate Ronald Cameron. It is apparently very chummy among these groups with different public facing names but a common agenda: Arkansas filings for FCA/Uihlein list RSLC-JFI vice-president Andrew Wynne as the executive director of the group.
Another document outlines FCA/Uihlein's ambition to spend over $20 million on races this cycle in several states, cumulatively. While most of that spending has not yet materialized, we are now one week before election day, so FCA/Uihlein's cash bomb may be in the works. Since RSLC-JFI was launched in 2014, it has spent $21 million total, so if FCA/Uihlein spends $20 million this cycle that would blow previous records out of the water.
In North Carolina, another dark money group that is calling itself "Tough and Fair Judges" (TFJ) has already weighed in during the Supreme Court primary and now is hitting Justice Sam Ervin IV as a supposed "liberal Democrat insider," even though he has served as a well-regarded appellate judge for the past 14 years. TFJ's sole known funder calls itself the "Good Government Coalition" (GGC), but GGC is heavily bankrolled by RSLC and the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce. It too is run by longtime RSLC operatives. Another group spending on the court race there is calling itself "Stop Liberal Judges" (SLJ) also appears to be a shell for RSLC funds through a group that itself is funded by GGC. This dizzying alphabet soup of front groups seems almost designed to confuse or mislead voters.
Also notable is Ohio, where the state's independent supreme court has followed legal precedents on redistricting that the state's runaway right-wing legislature is openly ignoring by drawing extreme partisan maps in defiance of the law. A myriad of very special dark money interests-including the Susan B. Anthony List, Ohio Right to Life, and the business lobby-are preparing to wage an expensive campaign to keep the court in GOP hands. But they are not alone, RSLC-JFIhas spent $2 million on TV ads backing the three Republicans running for the bench.
And in Montana RSLC-JFI recently spent $500,000 tarring Justice Ingrid Gustafson. Gustafson's opponent is James Brown, who was backed in the primary by $150,000 in outside spending by... RSLC-JFI, of course. Brown notoriously represented a right-wing dark money called Western Tradition Partnership a decade ago when it violated multiple state disclosure/anti-corruption laws.
Also coming to Brown's aid is right-wing operative Jake Eaton who filed baseless ethics complaints on behalf of his group, which has received funding from RSLC, against Gustafson. Eaton reportedly worked closely with GOP Rep. Barry Usher (himself the listed treasurer of RSLC-JFI Montana PAC in older filings) on drafting a bill which would have amounted to a judicial gerrymander in the state by eliminating statewide election of Supreme Court justices to give more sparsely populated parts of the state even more disproportionate say on the state's highest court. Or, as Usher described it, "I think it would help get our Supreme Court a little more aligned with our electorate," not all of the electorate. RSLC is not a new connection for Eaton. In 2016, he was treasurer of a group attacking justice Dirk Sandefur that was almost entirely funded by RSLC, which broke public disclosure laws by failing to report its funding.
Notably, Brown is backed by Gov. Greg Gianforte, a former House rep who may be most famous for body-slamming a reporter in 2018. Brown is also backed by Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, who has assailed the state judiciary in recent years for following precedent and standing up to his party's extreme agenda. Guess who has been the biggest funder of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), which funnels money into races for state AGs like Knudsen? JCN/Concord, that is Leonard Leo's web. RAGA itself is a spin-off of... RSLC, of course.
As the Brennan Center has documented, these kinds of dark money operations engulfing our state judicial systems are already having an effect on who sits on our state courts and how they operate. This includes both the quality of justice, meaning the politicization of the courts in their rulings, as with the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and the diversity of the bench. The scorched earth attack ads designed by such groups also likely deter fair-minded people from seeking those offices and having their reputations smeared by unaccountable dark money.
All of this harms the quality of justice and the legitimacy of courts in the eyes of the public. In our view, dramatic changes in disclosure laws and other anti-corruption measures are long overdue.
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