By Tom Fowdy
The Tate brothers and free.
Controversial online influencers Andrew and Tristian Tate left Romania, where they were subject to a travel ban, and have arrived in the United States. The move to release them was directly engineered by the Trump administration, who clearly placed diplomatic pressure on Romania. Before this, they were beset by accusations of human trafficking and rape, and continue to be denounced in the United Kingdom for these alleged crimes.
We live now in a hyper-partisan age that has been exacerbated by social media confrontation. Each side works to morally smear, discredit and undermine their opponents, and worse it has become conventional (particularly in the United States) to use the power of the law and criminal investigations to attack the other side, or likewise to pardon who have met legal consequences. This is not something exclusive to Donald Trump in any way as the Biden administration did exactly the same. Amidst it all, there is one clear trend emerging, that the United States Justice Department is ultimately politically motivated whether we like or not.
While Trump pardoned those involved in the January 6 riot, Biden pardoned his own son and Dr. Anthony Fauci, Trump himself was also subject to a wave of criminal investigations and charges. Now that he is back in office, Trump is thus actively using his power to protect those who are loyal to him or suit his agenda, whether it be domestic through the justice department and power of pardon, or via the State Department overseas. Hence, even the Tate brothers are being given political amnesty, as overseas American nationals.
If America was built upon the rule of law, we are thus seeing it decline considerably due to this "politicisation". It seems that if you are too politically active and prominent, there is a possibility that the law itself will be waged against you. Of course, we should not forget America has a zeal for "judicial activism" which is unparalleled in the rest of the world. Wealthy people and organisations actively fund lawsuits which are designed to push various agendas. This has always been the case but it has got considerably nastier. This is because law is fused as part of the American ideology and psyche in a way that it is not in Britain. It is seen as the means to defending ones rights and obligations.
It is because of this mindset that I approach many of the legal problems Trump has got into with considerable scepticism. It is all politically motivated and with that comes the tedious American political "drama" which tends to deliberately exaggerate and overstate anything. Hence Democrats enjoy superfluously depicting the President as a "Kremlin asset" or whatever. Thus, if Trump and his supporters say the system is biased against them, it's because it genuinely is. While that does not mean Trump is an innocent man or done nothing wrong, what it does allude to is that facts and objective balance are being lost in this polarised climate, and the law itself is being sucked into it, and thus people's confidence in the system to do the right thing is being eroded.
That of course, works both ways. Why should the January 6 instigators escape justice, or going back to the topic, the Tates? We aren't just seeing judicial activism here as per, we are seeing the emerge of a mindset that because the political stakes are so intense, each side increasingly thinks their own is above the law, and thus the law itself is replaced with cynicism due to abuse of the process. Political loyalties are subverting justice itself on both sides of the spectrum, and of course the longstanding consequences of that are people lose faith in the system and constitutional order as a whole. This lead us to question where exactly is American politics going to go over the coming years? And can its institutions survive the growing abuses of power by both political parties whom with a fathoming hatred of one other, see fit to throw everything possible at their opponents? Only time will tell, but I believe the Tates escaping prosecution is an ominous sign, and that America's deterioration of law and order will have negative ripples on the rest of the world.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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