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.

An Ancient Story With New Costumes

Weaponized law is one of the oldest diseases of government, and the patient records are voluminous.

When King John’s barons forced Magna Carta upon him at Runnymede in 1215, they devoted two clauses—39 and 40—to countering this pathology: no free man is to be ruined save by lawful judgment of his peers, and justice is to be neither sold nor delayed. The barons knew that the King’s courts could be made engines of ruin as easily as instruments of right.

But by the 1630s, the Crown had perfected the art. The Court of Star Chamber—a body of the king’s privy counselors sitting without a jury—became the model for punishing political speech, and its sister tribunals did the rest. When John Hampden refused to pay the Ship Money tax, the Crown prosecuted him in order to teach every country squire a lesson: resist, and see what it costs you. Hampden lost the case narrowly—but eventually won the argument decisively. A few years later, the Long Parliament answered by abolishing the Star Chamber outright, and Edward Coke’s Institutes of the Lawes of England—the later volumes pried from the king’s grasp and ordered into print by that same Parliament—became the handbook of liberty (according to Jefferson, “Coke Littleton was the universal elementary book of Law Students”) for two centuries.

The 17th century also gave us the great martyr-defendants who helped forge a tradition of liberty. There was “Freeborn John” Lilburne, repeatedly fined, whipped, pilloried, and imprisoned for the crime of pamphleteering. He used his trials to establish—against ferocious opposition—the right against self-incrimination. There was William Penn (a distant relative of mine), prosecuted in 1670 for preaching to an unlawful assembly, whose jury was locked up without food for refusing to convict him; when juror Edward Bushel would not bend, the resulting Bushel’s Case helped establish that juries cannot be punished for their verdicts—a pillar of our Sixth Amendment. There was Algernon Sidney, executed in 1683 on the strength of a manuscript he had never published, deemed “treason” by a friendly court because the judges decided that ideas hostile to the King’s authority were themselves constructive treason.

The American Founders studied every one of these cases. They were not abstractions to them; they were current events and family lore. That is why the Declaration of Independence—drafted by Jefferson, revised by the Continental Congress—contains among its grievances that King George III had “made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices” and had sent “swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.” These are 18th-century words for 21st-century Lawfare, and I could not improve on them with a dozen law review articles.

Nor did the disease vanish with independence. The Sedition Act of 1798 criminalized criticism of the government—the one the founders had just built—and was wielded exclusively against the Adams Administration’s critics. Matthew Lyon, a congressman, was jailed and fined for accusing the administration of “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp.” James Otis, a generation earlier in Boston, had declared in opposition to the Crown’s writs of assistance that “a man’s house is his castle”—and the young lawyer scribbling notes in the courtroom was one John Adams. His administration stormed the castle anyway. The people responded, correctly, not by filing an amicus brief but by going to the ballot box in 1800—and Jefferson pardoned the sedition convicts (but even he privately encouraged the prosecution of some Federalist newspaper editors under state libel laws).

When power is abused, the remedy is never solely legal. It is political, and the law must be made to serve the politics of liberty again. This requires men of means and conviction to build counter-institutions. The lone martyr may be glorious, but he is usually killed, bankrupted, or disbarred. The counter-institution endures.

Failure Theater

Why hasn’t the conservative legal movement already done what the Oversight Project’s new law firm was founded to do?

Because for decades, our legal capacity has been rented, not owned. The Right’s answer to Lawfare has been the legal defense fund: raise money from patriotic donors, then pass it directly to private firms billing $1,000 an hour, or three or more times that amount. Under that model, a handful of senior figures get rescued. Everyone else—the county commissioner, the poll watcher, the young staffer, the alternate elector, the lawyer who dared to accept a client the regime disfavors—is left alone with a subpoena and a six-figure retainer estimate.

We have seen it firsthand. A friend of the Oversight Project’s President Mike Howell, then a young White House official, received a January 6th Committee subpoena and an unfriendly telephone call from the FBI. The fee quotes he received merely to respond to an investigation—not to litigate—were far beyond his means. Mike represented him pro bono. Most people in his position have no friend in the profession willing and able to do that. Multiply him by thousands.

Meanwhile, the Left runs the opposite model: institutionalized, salaried, in-house capacity. Their lawyers do not bill by the hour for the cause; they draw salaries for the cause. Ours must too. A salaried, mission-driven lawyer inside a nonprofit can defend dozens of clients for what a single Big Law engagement letter would devour in a month.

Tom Klingenstein says plainly in his essay what our establishment has refused to say: playing defense is honorable, but the best defense is a good offense, and we must now fight “by wartime rules.” He is funding accordingly. We are starting with five lawyers, spread thin, and we seek at least 15 more. “The good news is that they are there, waiting,” Klingenstein writes—“But no one has sounded the trumpet to call them up.”

Consider the trumpet sounded.

What the Firm Will Do

The Oversight Project’s law firm will do four things: defend patriots under attack, bring specialized legal expertise to the fight, take the offensive against those who abuse the law, and build a new generation of lawyers willing to fight for what is right. The goal is not merely to survive Lawfare, but to change the incentives that make it so effective—and to marshal the offensive legal capabilities the Right has too often lacked.

Rapid-response defense. When a subpoena, bar complaint, investigation, or politically motivated lawsuit lands, clients get experienced counsel immediately—without absorbing crippling bills. No more GoFundMe jurisprudence. No more watching good people choose between their family’s finances and their country’s future.

Specialized expertise. Our firm will feature experts in constitutional law, administrative law, ethics, bar defense, and First Amendment litigation—plus a nationwide network of aligned attorneys able to appear wherever the fight happens. Lawfare is distributed—it is leavened; our defense must be too.

Go on Offense. A movement that only absorbs punches is eventually ground down. Paired with the Oversight Project’s investigators, the firm will dig up the records behind the abuse—as we already have with Jack Smith’s dragnet—and pursue the damages, fees, sanctions, and professional consequences that make Lawfare expensive to practice. Here is the dirty secret of the whole business: the aggressors have never paid a price. Their calculation has never changed because nothing has ever made it change. When donors keep victims afloat forever, the aggressor’s incentives remain intact. That must end. It is imprudent to reveal the full playbook to the enemy (why forfeit surprise?), but understand the principle: the Star Chamber fell when its members feared the Long Parliament more than the King.

Building the bench. Young, hungry, ambitious attorneys will get real responsibility early, trained by lawyers who have been in the arena. The old conservative legal establishment has long reserved its appointments and laurels for those who never fundamentally challenge the regime. Lawyers who choose duty over careerism should be the movement’s heroes—and should be rewarded like heroes, not martyrs.

The Stakes

I know firsthand (from Arctic Frost’s targeting of me, especially) the Left’s use of Lawfare—I was arrested, indicted by Fani Willis, targeted by Jack Smith, subpoenaed by the January 6th Committee, pursued by the D.C. Bar, and much more. I’ve racked up millions in legal bills and more millions in opportunity costs, including the destruction of my BigLaw career and partnership. And yet I am still standing—and still fighting! I mention this not for sympathy—save it for the January 6 defendants, the overcharged and the smeared who received far worse treatment—but because I am the experiment, and the experiment proved the thesis: absent proper infrastructure, the most faithful are targeted, one by one, precisely because they are the most disruptive to the permanent bureaucracy and the Uniparty status quo.

Lilburne was whipped for a pamphlet. Sidney died for a manuscript. Penn’s jury starved rather than convict him. We dishonor their memory if we pretend the machinery aimed at us is novel—and we waste their example if we fail to build the institution that is necessary in the modern era of Lawfare and Barfare. Each of those fights ended not merely with brave individuals but with structures: Magna Carta, Bushel’s Case, the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, the Bill of Rights’ guarantees against excessive bail and cruel punishments—hard-won institutional scar tissue against the misuse of law.

The Left built a machine because it understands power. For too long the Right has rented its lawyers by the hour and hoped beyond hope. That era is over.

The next time the Left comes for one of ours—and they will; the machinery never idles for long—someone will be there to defend him. And that lawyer will be ready to fight—and win.