WHEN THE STATE BECOMES THE WEAPON
The Weaponisation of Power Against Milo Yiannopoulos
By John Mappin | IF Magazine
There is an old and extremely important distinction between the rule of law and rule by law.
The first protects civilisation.
The second can destroy it.
Under the rule of law, the law stands above politics. It applies equally to the fashionable and unfashionable, the powerful and powerless, the popular and unpopular.
Under rule by law, something rather different happens.
The institutions remain. There are still judges, courts, officials, hearings, warrants, agencies and statutes. Everything retains the appearance of constitutional order.
But somewhere along the way the question changes.
Instead of asking, What does justice require?, people begin asking:
What can we use against him?
That distinction is worth considering in the extraordinary case of Milo Yiannopoulos.
Milo is not an easy man to defend.
That is precisely the point.
Free societies are not tested by how they treat people everybody likes. They are tested by what happens to the awkward man, the offensive man, the dissident, the troublemaker and, above all, the man who has accumulated powerful enemies.
Milo has spent much of his adult life collecting them.
For more than a decade he has made a profession of saying things other people considered unsayable. He has offended the Left and the Right, liberals and conservatives, journalists and politicians, activists and institutions.
At various moments he has even managed to offend many of his own friends.
One need not approve of everything Milo has ever said — I certainly do not — to recognise something infinitely more important.
He has a right to be treated justly.
And justice ceases to be justice the moment it depends upon whether we approve of the defendant.
THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE HAS TEETH
In late August Milo Yiannopoulos was detained by United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The government's stated position was straightforward: Milo had remained in the United States beyond the period authorised by his visa, had failed to appear at an immigration hearing and had consequently become subject to a final order of removal. He was subsequently detained and deported to Britain.
Those facts matter.
If somebody breaches immigration law, holding controversial political opinions does not magically exempt him from it.
But neither does that dispose of the wider question.
It raises it.
Why does the machinery of government descend upon some people with extraordinary efficiency while apparently passing others by?
That question becomes especially important whenever private political disputes and personal vendettas begin intersecting with the coercive machinery of the state.
There is an enormous difference between enforcing the law and encouraging the state to investigate one's political or personal opponents in the hope that something can be found against them.
The first is government.
The second is potentially something much darker.
And anyone who believes in constitutional government ought to recognise the difference.
FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE SPEECH
Milo's story did not begin with immigration.
Years before his deportation, his appearances on American university campuses had become battlegrounds over whether controversial political speech should be permitted at all.
At Berkeley in 2017, protests surrounding one of his scheduled appearances descended into violence and the event was cancelled.
Consider the extraordinary inversion.
A speaker is controversial.
Opponents threaten disorder.
The authorities fear disorder.
And therefore the speaker disappears.
It is the ancient mechanism known as the heckler's veto.
You do not actually have to censor somebody if you can make the consequences of allowing him to speak sufficiently unpleasant.
And the modern mechanism extends far beyond universities.
Publishers, payment processors, social-media platforms, banks, employers, professional organisations and government agencies collectively possess an astonishing capacity to make somebody disappear from respectable public life.
Each institution may insist that it acted independently.
Perhaps it did.
But the cumulative result can nevertheless resemble something very different from ordinary disagreement.
It can resemble civic erasure.
THEN COME THE COURTS
There is another characteristic of modern political warfare that deserves considerably more attention.
The legal process itself can become punishment.
A person does not necessarily need to be convicted of anything to have his life profoundly damaged by law.
Lawyers must be hired.
Documents produced.
Hearings attended.
Depositions endured.
Deadlines observed.
Money spent.
Years disappear.
Reputations become permanently associated with litigation merely because litigation exists.
None of this means courts should not function. Of course they should.
Nor does it mean that every case involving a political figure constitutes persecution. Plainly it does not.
The danger arises when citizens begin to regard the legal system not principally as a means of obtaining justice, but as another battlefield upon which political enemies can be exhausted.
That is the phenomenon sometimes called lawfare.
And it is corrosive because it retains all the outward appearances of legality.
No dictator is required.
No secret police are necessary.
The paperwork is perfectly in order.
“BUT HE BROKE THE LAW”
There is a sentence increasingly heard in modern politics:
“But he broke the law.”
Sometimes that settles the matter.
But sometimes it does not.
Modern states have accumulated enormous forests of statutes, regulations, administrative requirements, tax provisions, immigration rules and reporting obligations.
Consequently, the mere existence of a technical violation cannot always answer the question of selective enforcement.
The deeper question is whether the same machinery would have moved with the same determination against somebody politically useful, fashionable or protected.
That is where equality before the law becomes meaningful.
It does not merely mean that the same statute exists on paper for everybody.
It means that the coercive attention of the state must not be allocated according to friendship, faction, influence or ideology.
If my friend commits an offence, the law should apply.
If my enemy commits precisely the same offence, the law should apply precisely the same way.
Anything else is not justice.
It is politics wearing a judge's wig.
THE RIGHT SHOULD KNOW BETTER
There is an especially uncomfortable aspect to Milo's case for conservatives.
Milo himself has advocated tough immigration enforcement.
His opponents can therefore laugh and say that he has merely received the policies he wanted imposed upon others.
Perhaps there is an irony there.
But schadenfreude is not a constitutional principle.
If conservatives genuinely believe in borders, courts, police and strong institutions, then they carry a greater responsibility — not a lesser one — to ensure those powers are exercised impersonally.
Otherwise the conservative argument for strong institutions quietly becomes an argument for strong institutions provided our people control them.
That is not conservatism.
It is factionalism.
And eventually the faction changes.
This is the lesson political movements repeatedly refuse to learn.
Every weapon constructed for your enemy will eventually be inherited by somebody who considers you the enemy.
THE PERFECT TEST
Milo is therefore almost the perfect test of whether we actually believe the principles we claim to believe.
Not because he is always right.
Not because he is always wise.
Certainly not because he is always polite.
He matters precisely because he is difficult.
It requires virtually no courage to defend the liberties of somebody whose opinions are approved by every respectable newspaper.
The real test comes when the individual is outrageous, embarrassing, unpredictable and capable of saying things one desperately wishes he had not said.
Civilisation means that even that man receives justice.
Especially that man.
The political weaponisation of institutions rarely announces itself with trumpets.
Nobody hangs a brass plaque outside a government department reading:
OFFICE OF POLITICAL PERSECUTION.
It arrives bureaucratically.
A complaint.
A referral.
A subpoena.
An investigation.
A hearing.
A regulation.
A missed deadline.
A removal order.
Every individual step may be lawful.
Every official involved may believe he is simply doing his job.
And yet citizens must retain the courage to ask whether the immense coercive power of government is being applied consistently — or whether political and personal warfare has somehow found its way inside the machinery.
That question is not an attack upon the rule of law.
It is essential to preserving it.
Because the law must punish conduct, not opinions.
Government must administer justice, not revenge.
Courts must resolve disputes, not become weapons through which the wealthy, powerful or politically connected can exhaust their enemies.
And political factions must resist the intoxicating temptation to summon the power of the state against people they dislike.
The moment we abandon those principles because the person concerned is Milo Yiannopoulos, we have established something considerably more important than what happens to Milo.
We have established that the principle itself is negotiable.
And once equality before the law becomes negotiable, the only remaining question is who controls the machinery.
Today it may be Milo.
Tomorrow it may be someone you despise.
And the day after that—
it may be you.
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