Progressive Prosecutors Build a New Kind of Police State

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

Before New York Attorney General Letitia James launched her selective prosecution of former President Trump, the former public defender was advocating for the “criminal justice reforms” that empowered criminals and terrorized a state.

AG James had run for office promising to “reform NY’s criminal justice system and to investigate and prosecute Trump’s family businesses” and she kept her word. Criminals now roam free in the state while prosecutorial resources were dedicated to targeting political opponents.

In New York, criminals have nothing to worry about from the Attorney General’s office, only Republicans do. And this is becoming the norm among “progressive prosecutors”.

The crime waves sweeping the country and the serial prosecutions of former President Trump and other conservatives are not separate events, but the common outcome of a fundamental transformation of the justice system from punishing crime to punishing political opposition.

Within prosecutorial circles, the same debate has been taking place between maintaining even handed professional standards or using the profession to advocate for social justice as in other fields. In the media, it’s been between objective reporting and biased activism, and within medicine, between treating those who are sickest or prioritizing disadvantaged groups.

Among prosecutors, the debate has taken the form of the familiar social justice formula of “punching up” or “punching down”. Progressive prosecutors argue that prosecuting violent junkies or serial thieves is “punching down” and that they should advocate for change by dropping those cases, which make up much of their workload, and attacking the ‘root causes’.

The first part of this argument has gotten plenty of attention as cities and communities fight to oust radical prosecutors (dubbed by some the Soros DAs because of that billionaire’s backing for such figures) because even in an era of soaring crime rates, they refuse to bring criminals to justice. But it’s the latter part of that argument which may be even more dangerous.

What are the ‘root causes’ of social problems and how should they be fixed? If sending muggers to prison is ‘punching down’, whom are the prosecutors going to be ‘punching up’ against?

Too few have connected the vigorous prosecutions of Trump, his supporters and former administration officials to the same movement that gives violent criminals a pass, but they are two sides of the same coin. Progressive prosecutors have been attacked as promoting lawlessness, but more accurately they are promoting a new concept of what the law is.

Prosecutorial discretion means choosing which criminals to prosecute based on a set of values. The same philosophy which allows a DA to refuse to bring charges against a repeat sex offender because he is a member of an oppressed minority group allows him or her to bring charges against a driver for smearing his tires over a BLM street graphic, or for a federal prosecutor to choose which president to prosecute for taking home classified documents.

Prosecutors are not supposed to be judges or legislators, but social justice activism demands that everyone use their profession to be an advocate for social change, And that social change, under the revolutionary agenda of leftist movements, demands “punching up” against political power rather than “punching down” against those helpless victims who are merely mugging people because of the economic policies of Trump and other Republicans.

That is what progressive prosecutors believe and act upon. By engaging in sustained lawfare against conservatives, they believe that they are fighting against the ”root causes” of crime.

And all other social problems.

Police defunding was misunderstood from the beginning. Despite the impression created by CHAZ or the BLM riots, the end goal is not lawless anarchy, but a new kind of police state which merges generous welfare and street lawlessness with relentless prosecution of speech and other political offenses. Such systems already exist to varying degrees in Europe where ordinary citizens often have more cause to fear, for example, London’s Met police than criminals do. This new era of law enforcement officers has already begun in this country at the very top, but will take some time to make its way to street level.

The same phenomenon is moving more rapidly through the ranks of prosecutors, many of whom come through a limited set of law schools and are highly attuned to their careers and the political trends that can assure them a lucrative income or strand them in a backwater.

Federal prosecutors, the most savvy of careerists, understood that early on and the aggressive prosecutions of conservative figures, along with the failed prosecution of leftists for some of those same offenses, is the result. Local DA’s like Fulton County’s Fani Willis, got the memo, and so did state officials aspiring to higher office, like Attorney General James.

This isn’t “lawlessness”: it’s a new sort of law based on a different set of values. And those values are fundamentally hostile to the traditional notions of law, fairness and freedom.

Law enforcement and the justice system in its various forms were brought into being to protect the ruling class and then to protect individuals from harm by criminals. The American experiment significantly watered down the elements of the legal system that treated the persons and the agendas of the ruling class as uniquely worthy of protection and democratized law enforcement so that it protected the persons and property of each individual citizen instead.

Progressive prosecutors, for all that they claim to be making the system fairer, are actually reverting to that earlier two tier system in which the justice system is a means of enacting the agendas of the ruling class rather than protecting the lives and property of individuals. Like those government bureaucrats who choose which regulations they adhere to, some prosecutors have usurped the powers of the people.

‘Punching up’ is really ‘punching down’.

The philosophy of the progressive prosecutors, much like DEI medicine, places more value on some lives than others based on their race, gender or other protected characteristic, almost entirely devalues personal property while valuing government property quite highly, and seeks to punish political dissent against the ruling class while rejecting the notion that its members have any obligation to protect the ordinary citizenry.

This progressive police state, like the rest of the social justice system, values generalities over specifics. It addresses “root causes” rather than protecting Mrs. Rosen or Mrs. Johnson from having their purses stolen, it drives “systemic change” rather than ensuring that a repeat sex offender stays away from the Greenview playground, and pursues other ruling class ideological agendas rather than providing defined services to a defined person.

The classical American view set out the duties of civil servants and elected officials in terms of the needs of the people while the progressive approach is to define the ideology of this governmental ruling class as the answer to all the needs of the people whether they know it or not. The shift in definition is also a shift in power that allows the ruling class to define its agenda as the embodiment of the national welfare and any opposition to it as a threat to the people.

This is why they often describe Republicans and conservatives as “threats to democracy” whose political views must be prosecuted and who need to be locked up to save the agenda.

Enacting the progressive agenda through every institution also involves protecting it through those same institutions. And within the ambit of prosecutors, that can mean dragging opponents of that agenda into court. Prosecutors who believe in social change are dropping the prosecution of criminals whom they consider victims of society while prosecuting opponents of social change for having caused all the social problems with their conservative politics.

Criminalizing dissent is not overreach: it is a necessity for those who believe that criminality stems from the political views of society and not the individual life choices of criminals.

Criminal justice reform legalized everything from drugs to shoplifting, sprang violent felons from prisons and eliminated bail, but it also worked to outlaw defensive measures from legal gun ownership to barring businesses from asking applicants about their criminal past. A raft of new laws targeting single family homes, theft prevention programs, surveillance equipment and a multitude of other conditions and tools that they blamed for criminality went up even as stealing was treated as a victimless crime and junkies carrying out violent assaults were set loose.

The criminal justice reform movement is as concerned with policing businesses and ordinary people as it is unconcerned with policing criminals. And a particular priority of the new progressive policing is punishing speech and ideas that are deemed hateful and sustain an oppressive capitalistic system of “whiteness” that they claim is the root cause of crime.

The more organized the ideas and the system, the more they need to be rooted out.

And that is what the lawfare aimed at conservatives, especially conservative elected officials, is about. Progressive prosecutors are implementing their agenda one freed criminal and one imprisoned conservative at a time. 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.  Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.