Why Change the Law When You Can Change How It’s Applied?

'Eroding the “fabric of civilization” by “differentially enforcing” the law is, indeed, a good summation of the modus operandi at play here.'

From The European Conservative

By Carlos Perona Calvete

The political class wants to demoralize opponents, disenfranchise citizens, and demonstrate power.

Elon Musk said the following on a recent episode of the Joe Rogan podcast:

[George Soros] had a very difficult upbringing, and, in my opinion, he fundamentally hates humanity … He’s doing things that erode the fabric of civilization … Soros realized that you don’t actually need to change the laws; you just need to change how they’re enforced. If nobody chooses to enforce the law or the laws are differentially enforced, it’s like changing the laws.

This is crucial and explains why much of what the political class does appears so gratuitously provocative.

In the case of recent developments in Spain, for example, what some analysts have missed is that Prime Minister Sánchez, however attached to power, may not be violating the constitution by giving amnesty to criminal politicians merely to get his investiture through, but to fundamentally degrade the country’s social fabric and trust in its institutions. (For his part, Sánchez apparently met with George Soros after coming to power, a meeting whose contents we have no record of.)

It is a symbolic act of domination to signal that the law is not above the establishment’s political will and that the enemies of this establishment are second-class citizens to whom legal prescriptions will be applied with vehemence, even as the government’s allies find themselves exempt from it.

It isn’t the pursuit of this or that policy, or the desire to stay in power while retaining the bulk of the system over which power is held, that motivates this strategy, but a more far-reaching attempt to demoralize opponents, disenfranchise citizens, and demonstrate power.

Whether goading people leads them to acts of civil disobedience that justify further effective repression or finally robs them of their will to fight, the end would be the same. And if the result is a chaotic, unstable society, this may also benefit foreign interests. In other eras, we would look at the instability of a country in terms of the interests of competing states, but today it makes sense to look at how non-state entities, including large funds and global platforms, may benefit from people becoming unable to effectively articulate their interests through trustworthy public institutions.

Eroding the “fabric of civilization” by “differentially enforcing” the law is, indeed, a good summation of the modus operandi at play here.

From the legal scrutiny to which a Trump is subjected, compared to a Clinton, or how ‘hate speech’ legislation is not invoked in cases of anti-white racism the way they are in other contexts, it is becoming clear that the laws on the books matter, but they matter less than who applies them.

The conclusion here is that institutions and officialdom cannot be upheld without changing the people inside them. Political change requires personnel change, and this means you have to have someone who is able to do the job and is committed to the right principles. Understanding this is already a shift from the more procedural sort of analysis that the Right has tended to engage in, with its quasi-metaphysical belief in neutral forces (from the market to the legal system) guaranteeing prosperity and stability without a greater emphasis on education, vigilance, and militancy (a mistake its political opponents have not made).