Jeff Clark’s booking photograph (Credit: Fulton County Sheriff’s Office)
I have spent the last several years learning—the (very) hard way—a lesson that most Americans still have not learned: the courtroom has become the principal battlefield of American politics. And on that battlefield, the Left arrived with an army. The Right brought a checkbook and a prayer. That ends now.
Last week, the Oversight Project announced the launch of a new law firm—a salaried, in-house, battle-ready legal outfit whose mission can be stated in just ten words: defend our friends, and go on offense against our enemies. Backed by a generous philanthropic seed investment from Tom Klingenstein, the chairman of the Claremont Institute, the firm is designed to do what the conservative legal ecosystem has refused to build for 50 years: an institution that treats the legal defense of patriots as a standing obligation rather than a series of one-off charity bake sales.
The Problem Goes Deep
Politics in a constitutional republic does not require every citizen to be a professional political operator. A country made entirely of aspiring senators would be unbearable—and ungovernable. The genius of the American design is that ordinary people can tend to their faith, their families, their trades, and their towns, precisely because a thin line of citizens—candidates, lawyers, organizers, whistleblowers, election officials—is willing to stand in the public fray on their behalf.
If you want to destroy a republic, you do not need to repeal its constitution. You merely need to make participation in public life ruinous financially, professionally, and reputationally. Make every act of public-spirited citizenship carry the threat of personal bankruptcy, and watch the thin line slip into the invisible, based on self-selection and attrition.
The Left long ago figured this out. It moved disputes that belong at the ballot box—case by case, indictment by indictment, bar complaint by bar complaint—into venues where it holds the advantage of purse, personnel, and patience. As Tom Klingenstein pointed out in his essay, “It’s Time for the Right to Return Fire,” the Left raised at least $183 million last year for precisely this sort of activity. It amassed these funds through a sprawling network of nonprofits—including the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center—whose assets vastly outstrip the Right’s legal capacity, supplemented by a Big Law industry that does its pro bono bidding as a kind of liturgical obligation.
Everyone on the Left gets defended, while everything on our side gets challenged and our best people are persecuted and prosecuted.
Klingenstein makes the crucial category correction: we have treated Lawfare as a “series of discrete legal disputes.” It is not. It is “a system of political power”—what the old Whigs would have called an instrument of prerogative. And systems of power are defeated only by counter-institutions, not by sporadic acts of individual heroism. (Read more: AmericanMind.org, 10/8/2026) (Archive)