Was I concerned with them lying? Heavens, no. They always lied. But they could not help their bureaucratic nature. The proof was always there in the documents, recorded somewhere. I spent many an all-nighter pouring over boxes of government documents until I stumbled on the smoking gun I could flash up on the monitor for the jurors to catch the bureaucrats in a lie and thereby win the case.
Rochester Tea Party v. Jemima Rudolph, et al., was the first of many cases. Rudolph was the head of the state agency going after my client. Soon, I started hiring associates, other young constitutional conservatives (because by then I had figured out what I really was politically) who were eager to fight.
There had always been a few conservative or liberty-based legal groups who would sue when the government overstepped, but we were part of a wave that took it to a whole new level. It really kicked in with the suits involving Obamacare and its effect on religious and personal liberty. The progressives had nothing but contempt for people who did not agree with them, particularly religious people. They tried to use Obamacare to figuratively shove their opponents’ faces in the dirt by, for example, forcing believers to subsidize abortion-related insurance. My whole goal was to survive in the case long enough to get in front of a jury, because then we would win even if we lost.
We started calling it “conservative lawfare,” and it drove the progressives nuts. What made them so vulnerable was not only the dubious legal grounds of their actions but their manifest pettiness and unfairness. You see, lawfare—as progressives themselves used to understand—was not just about winning on the merits of a particular lawsuit. It was theater—it highlighted and put in front of the public these government actions in a way that could not be swept under the rug. You go to court, and unless you dismiss the case following a settlement, the court has to rule one way or the other. Something has to happen.
Most Americans are generally fair-minded, and they saw how essentially unfair many of these government actions were. And when the progressives doubled down—which they always did—they looked awful. It was not always a matter of winning or losing the case itself. We lost a lot of cases because Obama and Clinton had years to pack the courts with progressive judges, and many are still on the bench making mischief today even though impeaching those three Supreme Court justices during the second Marlowe administration sent a pretty clear message.
But what really mattered, what really helped the movement, was showing the injustice of progressivism. Lawfare let us do that.
Colonel Jeremy Denton, US Army (Ret.) (Insurgency Expert)
The colonel is particularly animated, pausing only to sip his black coffee as he focuses on the subject he spent his life studying—how to defeat an enemy.
Fighting a war is actually pretty simple in concept. Execution—that’s where it gets complicated, but the concept itself is really, really simple. You never want to fight fair. You want to always—always—have the advantage. Most battles are won or lost long before someone fires the first shot. It’s all about setting the stage for the battle, maneuvering yourself and your forces into the most advantageous position while simultaneously maneuvering your enemy into the least advantageous position.
We call that “shaping the battlefield.” You look for where and when you have the edge, and then you make the enemy fight you there and then. That’s especially important for insurgents. Our conservative lawyers understood that instinctively.
Dan Stringer (Billionaire CEO/Activist)
The notorious tycoon has just finished a tennis match. He is a fierce competitor and is clearly pleased that he won the match. His Ukrainian tennis coach hands him a fruit drink and a towel. He stands while he talks, leaning on the net.
I threw money at lawyers because we could win in court. We wanted to get the government and the progressives in court because that took away all their advantages. I was a big proponent of lawfare right from the beginning because I saw that was where we could draw blood.
I funded a lot of lawyers. There was a glut of them, and I could get them cheap, so I found some talented ones and created a public interest law firm. I took the write-off—we were a nonpolitical civil rights organization under the law—and my lawyers raised unholy hell with the liberals, suing every government agency and liberal institution for everything they could think of. It was great. No case was too big or too small. The government was constantly having to get up and publicly defend its nonsense. Win or lose, we won. And what made them maddest was we stole that screenshot right out of their playbook.
I used to say that conservatives had to harness the power of lawyers for good instead of evil. The left had been using the courts for generations to chip away at our Constitution; we needed to use it to rebuild our rights and our freedoms. And, along the way, to give the progressives fits.
I learned that lawfare was not suited just to federal government issues; in fact, states often provided us an even more effective venue for litigation. I didn’t realize it before, but my lawyers showed me how the state constitutions are just packed full of civil rights that dwarf what’s in the United States Constitution. Moreover, with many states in conservative hands, we had the chance to do what the left was so good at and pass laws that empowered conservative activists to seek conservative change in the courts.
What were some good targets? Schools were great ones. There was nothing better than a lawsuit over the petty fascism of some principal who thought she was Stalin reborn. We had one who refused to have kids say the Pledge of Allegiance. Just flat-out refused. Well, many states have laws requiring the Pledge, but hers didn’t. No problem for my lawyers! We cobbled together some half-assed civil rights claim and filed. Discrimination laws are awesome!
Now, some of the lawyers didn’t get what we were doing. “Wait,” sputtered one of them, who soon found work in the workers compensation law field. “This sounds legally tenuous. What about standing? What about, well, evidence?”
Silly lawyer. This was lawfare.
We knew we weren’t necessarily trying to plead and prove a legally meritorious claim. This wasn’t about winning some money. It was about defeating our opponents in public, about humiliating and demoralizing them while getting our own side energized. We filed that lawsuit because Principal Pinko wouldn’t let Junior say the Pledge and that kid was on Hannity the very next day. The key element wasn’t the legal brief. It was the press release. This was guerrilla theater.
We exposed the principal as some sort of liberal wacko and the superintendent started getting calls from parents—which he knew as “voters”—about why one of his administrators was dissing Old Glory. He picked up the phone and pretty soon the principal was chastened and the school day began starting again with the kids with their hands on their hearts pledging allegiance. I had a camera crew go out there and film it.
By the way, we didn’t even bother to serve the lawsuit. We just cashed the settlement check and my legal team’s next case had some seed funding.
It was a virtuous circle.
Most fair-minded Americans were appalled when we showed them the kind of bigotry that, say, an evangelical Christian would have to endure at the hands of government bureaucrats or the big, liberal-leaning companies. Pretty soon, after burning their hands on the stove enough, the word got out—knock off the prejudice against these folks. We loved to get settlements that forced liberal government appointees or Democrat-funding CEOs to have to endure sensitivity training designed to cleanse them of their atheist-normative, urbano-centric biases. They became terrified of us.