As American Democracy Dies, Can We Bankrupt the Bastards?

   

“The world is becoming more authoritarian as non-democratic regimes become even more brazen in their repression and many  democratic governments suffer from backsliding by adopting their tactics of restricting free speech and weakening the rule of law, exacerbated by what threatens to become a ‘new normal’ of Covid-19 restrictions. For the fifth consecutive year, the number of countries moving in an authoritarian direction exceeds the number of countries moving in a democratic direction. In fact, the number moving in the direction of authoritarianism is three times the number moving towards democracy.”  

Introductory Paragraph of the International IDEA Global State of Democracy Report 2021, November 22nd.

The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA), headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, is an intergovernmental organization that supports sustainable democracy worldwide. Its member states include much of Europe, Latin America, parts of Asia, Canada and Africa, but notably missing are the United States, the People’s Republic of China and Russia. So, let’s start with a little observation about Sweden itself, often lambasted by vocabulary manipulating right-wing American zealots as “socialist.” 

While its citizens face higher taxes and there is a vastly lower income inequality gap between rich and everyone else than in the United States, they have universal healthcare, childcare, employee protection and powerful social safety nets that are weak or non-existent here (as the above picture of homeless Americans attests)… but they actually lack those necessary characteristics that define a socialist state: government ownership of land, factories (the means of production) and wealth in general. Hmmm? No, Sweden is not a socialist country.

Every year, International IDEA releases a report on the state of global democracy, focusing on those nations where freedom has indeed suffered. The report identifies the United States as one of the democracies that is “backsliding,” meaning that it has “experienced gradual but significant weakening of Checks on Government and Civil Liberties, such as Freedom of Expression and Freedom of Association and Assembly, over time.”

​​“The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale,” the report continues. We can see the evidence, which ranges from the explosive rise of right-wing militia (far in excess of their left-wing counterparts), voter suppression, the politization of the pandemic to the legitimization of vigilantism and political violence (pictured above)… supported by the angry, inciting and blame-filled, false narrative rhetoric of a former president, who now totally controls one of the two major American political parties and has been imbued by that party to exclude anyone who disagrees with him.

Aside from the Congressional hearings on the causes and consequences of the January 6th attack on the Capitol (also pictured above), the varying criminal prosecutions and investigations associated with those who promulgated that attack as well as state and federal civil and criminal investigations of Donald Trump and his associates, there just may be a new tool to crush the rise of right-wing militia’s and those who incite them with conspiracy theories and direct suggestion. Bankrupt them with civil litigation for their wrongful actions. Technically, those unlawful efforts might not even be dischargeable in bankruptcy; they just might be debts that follow the perpetrators for the rest of their lives. Lawsuits for money damages are an additional remedy, not a replacement, to criminal prosecution.

These lawsuits are beginning to generate huge-dollar verdicts against right-wing militants and those who, in support, maliciously incite violence and/or spread lies setting the stage for very toxic events. These decisions augur badly for Trump and his coterie of “do anything I say” supporters, especially in the lawsuits filed by Dominion Voting Systems against various right-wing television networks and Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and former NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who falsely claimed Dominion’s voting machines were manipulated via the Internet to hand Biden the election. Unfortunately for the defendants, the machines were not even hooked up to the Internet. 

Looking at those lawyer-enablers of fake narratives: Make them pay for their misuse of the courts. “Attorneys Gary D. Fielder and Ernest John Walker filed suit in Denver in December 2020, supposedly on behalf of 160 million American voters, alleging a vast conspiracy to steal the 2020 election. They accused, among others, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and the company Dominion Voting Systems, a manufacturer of voting equipment and a favorite target of the tin-foil hat crowd. The attorneys asked for $160 billion in damages… The case was — surprise! — dismissed in April, but [the judge] wasn’t finished with the litigious duo. He hauled the attorneys up for a hearing last summer to consider possible sanctions. He asked whether it occurred to the co-counsel — Walker, a former government lawyer; Fielder, a onetime local prosecutor — that they were being used by Trump to spread his self-serving propaganda?” Mark Barabak for the Los Angeles Times, November 26th. But just before Thanksgiving, that Colorado magistrate judge, N. Reid Neureiter, ordered those two attorneys “to pay nearly $190,000 to the defendants they targeted in a meritless and irresponsible lawsuit claiming fraud in the November 2020 election — a wholly aboveboard exercise that resulted in the clear-cut and irrefutable defeat of the nation’s 45th president.” Barabak. And mass media liars?

How about Infowars’ host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones? He was found liable in early November for damages in Connecticut lawsuits brought by parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting over Jones' claims that the massacre was a hoax. Connecticut Judge Barbara Bellis took the rare step of defaulting Jones in the defamation lawsuits for his and his companies' “failure to produce critical material information that the plaintiffs needed to prove their claims.” The default means the judge found in favor of the parents. Bellis said Jones and his attorneys showed a “callous disregard of their obligations to fully and clearly comply with discovery and court orders.”

The ruling in the Connecticut lawsuits essentially mirrors a Texas judge’s September 27th order to default Jones in three similar defamation lawsuits filed by victims’ families there with similar accusations that Jones repeatedly ignored orders to turn over records to the families’ lawyers. Now the lawsuits in both states will be turned over to juries, likely sometime next year, to hear the extent to which Jones’ conspiracy theories harmed the families. Expect large damage awards, which may result in debts that may not be dischargeable in bankruptcy and which are likewise unlikely to be reversed on appeal.

November produced another key verdict against right-wing militants in a judicial ruling in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a “jury awarded more than $25 million in damages Tuesday [11/23] against white nationalist leaders for violence that erupted during the 2017 Unite the Right rally… After a nearly month-long civil trial, a jury in U.S. District Court in Charlottesville deadlocked on two key claims but found the white nationalists liable on four other counts in the lawsuit filed by nine people who suffered physical or emotional injuries during two days of demonstrations.

“The verdict is a rebuke to the white nationalist movement, particularly for the two dozen individuals and organizations who were accused in a federal lawsuit of orchestrating violence against African Americans, Jews and others in a meticulously planned conspiracy… Lawyers for the plaintiffs invoked a 150-year-old law passed after the Civil War to shield freed slaves from violence and protect their civil rights. Commonly known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, the law contains a rarely used provision that allows private citizens to sue other citizens for civil rights violations…

“Hundreds of white nationalists descended on Charlottesville for the Unite the Right rally on Aug. 11 and 12, 2017 [pictured above], ostensibly to protest city plans to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. During a march on the University of Virginia campus, white nationalists chanted, ‘Jews will not replace us,’ surrounded counter-protesters and threw tiki torches at them. The following day, an avowed admirer of Adolf Hitler rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one woman and injuring dozens of other people… Then-President Trump touched off a political firestorm when he failed to immediately denounce the white nationalists, saying there were ‘very fine people on both sides.’

“The driver of the car, James Alex Fields Jr., is serving life in prison for murder and hate crimes. Fields is one of 24 defendants named in the lawsuit funded by Integrity First for America, a nonprofit civil rights organization formed in response to the violence in Charlottesville.” Associated Press, November 24th. Another case unlikely to be reversed on appeal, and one that very likely will not be discharged in bankruptcy. 

How about all those lawyers representing these obviously false narratives?

Where red state prosecutors are loath to charge and try these villainous perpetrators of violence and damaging conspiracy theories, where biased juries and Trump-leaning judges find ways to distort otherwise solid prosecutions, even where the federal Department of Justice is overwhelmed, perhaps a tsunami of private plaintiff civil litigation against them will exert the chilling effect necessary to shelter our democracy from overthrow. Even as the GOP attempts to strangle fair and free elections, thus working in the opposite direction. Step hard over those lines protecting democracy and prepare to be personally sued for more money than you are likely to earn in a lifetime. Stand back and standby! 

I’m Peter Dekom, and there are many ways to skin this villainous cat; private civil litigation is a legitimate and effective way for true believers in America to preserve our democracy.