After the 2020 Presidential election, the judiciary did more than any other branch of the government to defend American democracy. In a remarkable display of legal consensus, according to the Washington Post, at least eighty-six federal and state judges dismissed Donald Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud. They included judges appointed by Republicans and Democrats, and others who were elected. All told, at least thirty-eight judges appointed by Republicans rejected in some form Trump’s attempts to throw out the results in states won by Joe Biden.
Many of those judges were Trump appointees. Steven D. Grimberg, a federal judge in Georgia nominated by Trump in 2019, flatly rejected a request to block the certification of Biden’s win in that state, ruling that it “has no basis in fact or in law.” (The Supreme Court, which includes three Trump appointees, also rejected the former President’s claims.) One of the most trenchant legal repudiations came from Wisconsin State Supreme Court Justice Brian Hagedorn, a Republican who had previously served as the chief legal counsel to Governor Scott Walker, when Walker was in office. In a three-page ruling, issued in December, 2020, Hagedorn called the petition to throw out every vote cast in that state “unprecedented in American history,” “woefully deficient,” and based on “flimsy” evidence that came “nowhere close” to making its case. The longtime conservative’s ruling included a warning: “At stake, in some measure, is faith in...
The author and behavioural scientist, Gad Saad, has just published a book on what he calls “suicidal empathy”. He says that “a society dies when it cares more about exhibiting infinite tolerance a...