The Department of Justice, and specifically its Office of Inspector General (OIG), loves to give the impression that its offices are staffed by independent, nonpartisan lawyers whose only goal is to investigate and root out corruption within the department. Records, however, show the watchdog is staffed by Democrat activists eager to use their power to crush their political enemies.

This partisanship has been on display in how the OIG, the DOJ’s internal watchdog office, has gone about investigating Trump’s Justice Department, particularly its scrutiny of two investigations by then-Attorney General William Barr. These IG “investigations,” reports on which are forthcoming, entail analyzing press releases and other communications to see if the DOJ broke the law or violated departmental guidance when it announced its own investigations.

While many Americans wish Trump’s Department of Justice had done far more to root out election problems in 2020, partisan Democrats in OIG say Barr and other Trump officials did too much by even acknowledging the existence of discarded Trump ballots that were found in Pennsylvania during the 2020 election. Despite a lengthy, expensive, and invasive investigation, Trump appointees will reportedly be found to have neither broken laws nor violated DOJ policies, once the report is issued.

According to multiple sources familiar with the matter, partisan Democrats in the watchdog office are also investigating Trump appointees for requesting data from the governors of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan after they required nursing homes to admit Covid-19 patients into their vulnerable populations,

There are two ways of legally winning elections. You can mobilize your current voting base and get them to the polls, or you can persuade voters who are not in your current voting base to go to the polls and vote for your candidate. It is no secret that Democrats have come to favor election strategies based on voter mobilization rather than persuasion over the last 10 years.

Democrats have enough trouble with Joe Biden’s dismal poll numbers and signs of a worsening economy. But being committed to a base mobilization strategy when the base is unstable or shrinking could spell serious trouble for Democrats in November. The factor that administers the coup de grace to their 2024 election plans could well be the fracturing of the college-age youth vote on the rocks of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

An increasingly restless college-age youth cohort exposes the Achilles heel of the Democrats’ mighty “nonpartisan” voter registration and mail-in ballot-harvesting cartels. These institutions are highly effective in mobilizing a fixed or growing voter base, but such practices become increasingly ineffective as the base becomes more unstable. In the meantime, Democrats have neglected the persuasion strategies needed to rebuild their base.

How Democrats Mobilize Their Base

The guiding lights of the Democrats’ voter mobilization strategies over the last decade have been scholars such as Cass Sunstein, Sasha Issenberg, and a growing army of young data scientists employed by think tanks and philanthropic institutions that provide intellectual and practical guidance to Democrats in managing elections.

When the Supreme Court announced its ruling last summer in Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (the decision that effectively ended affirmative action), it seemed like the country was finally ready to move on from this unfair policy and recommit to excellence and merit.

No longer would white and Asian applicants be passed over because they didn’t meet an organization’s arbitrary criteria for diversity, nor would unqualified applicants be admitted or employed and immediately fail afterward because they lacked the prerequisite skills and experience.

As a high school English teacher, I had special reason to celebrate the decision. For years I witnessed so many students of mine with near-perfect SAT scores, hundreds of volunteer hours, and limitless creative potential all being denied admission to supposedly elite universities because they happened to have the wrong skin color. Meanwhile, I saw their good-but-not-great peers make it into those same schools and even qualify for scholarships — again, because of their race. This was the very opposite of equal opportunity, and after so many decades of fuzzy reasoning and legal fumbling, the highest court of the land weighed in and condemned it.

Sadly, affirmative action wouldn’t go away that easily. As a recent report from Renu Mukherjee at the Manhattan Institute shows, the American Bar Association (ABA) and New York State Bar Association (NYSBA) have flouted the SFFA by encouraging “law schools and law firms to ignore the Court’s holding” and “continue granting admissions preferences to