Meet Fordham University Professor Saul Cornell, above.  Despite a proven track record of fabricating “facts” to promote gun control, the Illinois Attorney General has hired him to defend their position that the FOID Act is constitutional in the post-Bruen world.  If that’s the best they’ve got, they’ve got problems.

Guns Save Life filed suit in 2019 challenging the FOID Act’s constitutionality.   I’ll spare you the details of our court travels thus far (including delays sought by Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul after all of their server files got trashed by ransom-ware).   Suffice it to say that courts typically don’t move quickly.

As you might imagine, the decision in the US Supreme Court’s Bruen case has sparked a fresh round of filings on our side, seeking to have the FOID Act declared unconstitutional… under the Bruen precedent.

Well, the Illinois Attorney General has offered a peek as to their defense of the FOID Act.  They contracted with a well-known gun control advocate professor at Fordham University, paying him between $500 and $750 an hour as an “expert witness” to defend the FOID Act.  

This is the same professor who admitted that he willfully misrepresenting a study to promote gun control previously.  Really.

Read Kevin Williamson’s coverage of it over at the National Review.  Here’s the money quote(s):

Saul Cornell is a professor of history at Fordham, a gun-control advocate, and a contributor to Slate. I have concluded that he fabricated evidence for his most recent article…

I have a good deal of experience in writing about bias in gun-policy journalism. But this is not bias — it is fabrication. Here we have a professor at a major university writing an article in a major media outlet on the subject of a very contentious public-policy matter, and the first claim of fact in the piece is simply made up in order to bolster a weak argument made by a writer who believed — with good reason, apparently — that he could count on the bias and laziness of his editors and the stupidity of his readers to permit the fabrication to go undetected and unchallenged. This is precisely the sort of thing that undermines confidence in our journalistic institutions and fuels conspiracy-theory nonsense. If our institutions do not have enough self-respect to stand up for their own values, then who is going to do it for them?

We need honest journalists and honest academics. The Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History at Fordham University is not one of them.

Here’s the nitty gritty as I’m sure Kwame’s office will read this.  And then they’ll contact “Dr.” Cornell (cough) who will then read it.  His ears will burn, if he’s sober enough not to hallucinate through it.  And then he’ll be thinking about lawyers and all that…  and/or perhaps when he can make another trip to his closest dispensary.   Advice:  Take an Uber to the dispensary if you’re high as a kite, please.  

Again, from Kevin Williamson’s piece.  Emphasis added.

When I asked Professor Cornell about this, he responded that he had used World War II–era machine guns as a stand-in for modern AR-style rifles. Which is to say, Professor Cornell’s own explanation of this discrepancy is that he was willfully misrepresenting the data in the Dupuy study.

If gun control was righteous and noble, why the need to willfully fabricate “facts”?

World War II–era machine guns came in many different varieties, but all of them were, by definition, fully automatic weapons, and practically all of them fired cartridges that were far more powerful than the 5.56mm NATO round used in most AR-style rifles. For perspective, these weapons were used against light-armored vehicles and aircraft as well as against infantrymen — they were vastly more powerful than a modern sporting rifle.

When I called attention to this, Professor Cornell conceded that it had been a mistake to use World War II–era machine guns as a stand-in for AR-style rifles, and added that he should have instead used the 1903 Springfield rifle, which, by his estimate, would produce the much lower figure of 10x lethality for the AR-style rifle rather than 200x.

“You caught me, so I’ll pull another number out of the hat.”

This is, of course, absurd: Even if Professor Cornell had chosen a different weapon from the Dupuy study, it still would have been a willful misrepresentation of the contents of that study, which, again, makes no reference to modern AR-style rifles at all. Professor Cornell’s proffered alternative to misrepresenting the evidence in one way is, incredibly enough, to misrepresent the evidence in a different way. If that sounds difficult to believe, I don’t blame you for finding it so; I will happily provide the entire email conversation to the editors of Slate or to Fordham if either institution should ever stir itself to take an interest in this intellectual dishonesty.

But Professor Cornell’s explanation, self-indicting though it is, still doesn’t make sense: Substituting the World War II–era machine guns for the AR-style rifle, as he says he did, still would not produce that figure of 200x lethality. When I asked him about this, he replied that “this was all done quickly and I can’t reconstruct the process I used to come up with the figure based on my computer drafts.”

In other words, “Uh, uh.  The dog ate my research.  Yeah, that’s it.  The dog ate my homework.”

I skimmed Professor Cornell’s 87-page submission.  My first observation is that he thinks highly of himself.  While most career counselors will tell people to distill their resume to one page, Mr. Cornell’s is at 12 pages in this filing.  Can you spell narcissist?  Yes, the good professor thinks rather highly of himself.

The other thought that popped into my mind:  Just how much marijuana does Professor Cornell ingest?  Does he double down before writing?

Upon skimming it, our closing thought was a saying we learned in college:  “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullsh*t.”

Here it is.  Tell us if you think marijuana was involved in its creation.

Cornell Report Final 2022 Update Final

V. Summary of Opinion
It is my opinion that the FOID Act is consistent with the original understanding of Second
Amendment, and this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.

Well now.  Isn’t that special.  (Really now, just how many milligrams of THC/marijuana are in each of those gummy bears?)

As for the other 86 pages?  I’m not sure they’re worth the cost of 86 pages of Walmart copy paper or the toner to print them.  Once again, Illinois paid a small fortune to a guy who admits to playing fast and loose with the facts in an earlier effort to promote gun control junk science.  Now he’s trying to defend the FOID Act.

He’s sure seems to personify what’s wrong with American academia today. 

UPDATE:

Saul Cornell surely might have a habit of distorting the past for ideological reasons.  And it seems, in this new bit of “research” the Illinois Attorney General paid him to scribble down (presumably the original draft wasn’t done in Crayon), it surely looks as though that old dog isn’t learning new tricks.

Before we dip our toe into the fetid mess that Cornell sold to the Land of Lincoln’s brilliant legal mind of Attorney General (cough, right up there with Kamala Harris, cough) Kwame Raoul, let’s look at Cornell’s past.

He seems as though he’s hopped around from one university to another.  It’s almost as if he’s chasing gun control “research” monies and positions.  Almost.  

At the Ohio State’s law school, he was the “director” of The Second Amendment Research Center.  Sounds impressive, except he wasn’t researching the truth, he instead promoted the anti-gun point of view.  In fact, the “individual rights” view of the Second Amendment wasn’t even welcome at the SARC.  Why?  Because one of its big contributors was the Joyce Foundation.  And in the words of Saul Cornell himself:  “Obviously Joyce does not want to put money into the hands of gun rights people (that does not seem unreasonable)…”

In fact, in a story in the Ohio State Sentinel, Antonio Ciaccia called out the one-sided nature of the Second Amendment Research Center.  Part of the story is reprinted over at Buckeye Firearms.

Op-Ed: Something’s Fishy at the John Glenn Institute

March 1, 2005
The (Ohio State University) Sentinel

by Antonio Ciaccia

Picture this: a public policy institute at Penn State University is awarded money to establish an abortion research center. The money to establish the center is donated by the Christian Coalition, and the appointed director of the center has written op-ed pieces in the past about how abortion is comparable to murder. Then the center releases documents authored by its director that discuss the interpretation of the Constitution that could forbid abortion all together.

Does this sound like a reliable source for fair research?

While the above scenario is fictitious, a very similar situation has arisen at Ohio State, thanks to our very own Second Amendment Research Center (SARC). In March 2003, the John Glenn Institute created SARC to “promote informed discussion of an important policy issue and stimulate interest in history as a dynamic field relevant to current policy issues.” The director of the center, Dr. Saul Cornell, a Constitutional historian, was chosen to shed light on the difficult topic of gun policy.

Cornell was no stranger to the issue of the Second Amendment. He had written on the topic many times before. In 2001, Cornell published a piece entitled “The Second Amendment Under Fire,” where he attempted to provide a fair analysis of the gun debate. In the piece, he invokes an idea that has been pushed by gun control advocates- the idea that the Second Amendment is a collective right. This interpretation of the amendment states that the right to bear arms is not a right for individuals to own firearms, but instead, a right for the military to bear arms.

In the piece, Cornell gives much credence to the collective rights argument and cites many examples to support the claim, but he offers little evidence from individual rights theorists, resorting to the hefty overstatement that “most historians, however, reject the individual rights interpretation.” This fringe interpretation was to be the basis of much work to come for Cornell. But his collective rights work was not to be his only hypothesis on the subject of gun control.

In 2000, Cornell and several other academics composed an open letter to Charlton Heston and the National Rifle Association, attacking the group’s policy preferences, calling those policies “a disservice to all Americans.” The letter aimed to “prevent the killings and violence that plague our country today.”

While the NRA wasn’t too popular in most circles at the time, this letter was written on an entirely separate premise from his collective rights work, which went into full swing only a year later. A simple timeline of the writings shows that Cornell’s opinion was dead set beforehand on worrying about gun control, rather than Constitutional wording.

Yet despite his past hostility towards the right to bear arms and his highly controversial collective rights view, the Glenn Institute named him director and wanted to set up this research center as an intellectual home for the new collective rights interpretation. In 2003, SARC was established with a $400,000 grant from an alarming source: the Joyce Foundation, one of the nation’s most prominent gun control advocacy groups.

The Joyce Foundation has long been involved in the issue of gun control. It makes yearly donations to anti-firearm groups like Handgun Free America, a group “dedicated to the ban of private handgun ownership in the U.S.” As you can see, the prerequisites for funding from Joyce are not exactly based on two-sided debate. Even more startling is that Handgun Free America received only $35,000, while Ohio State’s SARC was given over eleven times that amount!

Among the projects of SARC was a legal symposium they put on at Chicago-Kent, funded by the Joyce Foundation.  They invited speakers and paid them honoraria, but only for the anti-gun point of view advocated by Saul Cornell.   Sounds fair and objective, right?

Randy Barnett at the Volokh Conspiracy called out Cornell on this after Cornell objected to his blog post about the one-sided event…

Let me clarify this by posing the following question: Why did Joyce not organize its own conference, law review issue, or Second Amendment Research Center? The answer is plain: it wants its views to enjoy the academic respectability imparted upon it by the imprimatur of Chicago-Kent and Ohio State. It is that institutional imprimatur that enabled the Ninth Circuit to rely so heavily on articles published in the Chicago-Kent Law Review in his opinion in Silveira v. Lockyer. (BTW, the published opinion had to be modified later to remove its reliance on the discredited work of Michael Bellesiles.) This is what Joyce is buying from Chicago-Kent and Ohio State. This is what it is improper of these institutions to sell.

Back in the day, Cornell loved to cite the work of Michael Bellesiles.  And Cornell has submitted that material to the court as he’s done with this latest “research” about the FOID Act.   From the History News Network: 

If the Supreme Court hears US vs Emerson, the Justices will review
material submitted to the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals: law
journal articles, the prosecution’s brief, and Amicus Curiae filed by
gun-control advocates. The material in support of the gun-control
position has a number of citations to Bellesiles’s publications – such
as the 1996 article “The Origins of the Gun Culture in the United
States” which was the initial basis for Arming America. The Fifth
Circuit Court’s opinion cites several Chicago-Kent law journal
articles, including one by Michael Bellesiles, as defining the
“collective right” interpretation which supports gun control. The
Chicago-Kent articles in turn cite Bellesiles’s Arming America for
support.

In March 1999, Federal Judge Sam Cummings dismissed gun possession
charges against Timothy Emerson on the basis that the charges violated
Emerson’s Second Amendment right to own a firearm. Cummings’s ruling
was based on the Standard Model or “individual right” interpretation
of the Second Amendment. Gun control policies, however, are based on
an opposing or “collective right” interpretation — in which there is no
right to possess a firearm except during military service in the
National Guard.

Two organizations who have filed Amicus Curiae briefs in US vs Emerson,
the Second Amendment Foundation (pro-gun rights) and the Potomack
Institute (pro-gun control) have web sites with Emerson briefs and
supporting documents. A review of the documents at
those sites show that a group of historians reacted strongly to
Cummings’s ruling.

In 1999, Northwestern historian Garry Wills released the book A
Necessary Evil. Wills argued that Standard Model advocates project a
false view of Revolutionary militias – that the militias performed badly
in battle and that most people did not have guns. In support, Wills
stated, “In one of the most important (but neglected) studies of the colonial
frontier, Michael Bellesiles went through over a thousand probate
records…”

Not quite a virginal debutante’s introduction to society – but close.
Pulitzer winner Garry Wills is known for his strong attack on the
Standard Model, published in the 1995 New York Review of Books.

In October 1999, three historians–Michael Bellesiles, Saul Cornell,
and Don Higginbotham–challenged the Standard Model in articles
published in the Constitutional Commentary law review. The
Cornell and Higginbotham articles cite Bellesiles. Bellesiles, of
course, cites himself. Around that time, the prosecution appealed
Cummings’s ruling to the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The
prosecution’s brief states: “The case law and history ignored by Emerson
are more than adequately set forth in the Government’s opening brief and
the amicus briefs of the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence et al. and the
Ad Hoc Group of Law Professors and Historians, as well as by countless
legal and historical researchers. See, e.g., Michael A. Bellesiles, Suicide Pact: New
Readings of the Second Amendment….” The prosecution then goes on to
cite the articles by Cornell and Higginbotham, Will’s A Necessary Evil, and an article
by historian Carl T. Bogus, which also cites Bellesiles.

You remember Michael Bellesiles, the Emory University history professor who claimed that his research showed Americans had few guns prior to the civil war and many of those were in poor condition.  Oh, how the gun-hating Left in America loved that book.  They were giddy about it.  Anti-gun politicians, the mainstream media, academia, and gun control groups virtually deified Bellesiles.  He even won the prestigious Bancroft Prize for history research from Columbia University.

Except Bellesiles made the whole thing up.  He ultimately resigned from the University and his “prestigious” Bancroft Prize was revoked.  And he’s now a bartender who writes on the side.  Maybe he’s bartended with AOC?

Here’s a few snippets piece from Current about Bellesiles and his scandal:

Twenty years ago an Emory University history professor named Michael Bellesiles published a book arguing that early Americans were not all that interested in guns until after the Civil War.  The book, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, won the prestigious Bancroft Prize, but the prize was revoked when gun rights advocates and others challenged Bellesiles’s scholarship.  Bellesiles eventually resigned his post at Emory.  Today he works as a bartender and writes history.  His most recent work is A People’s History of the U.S. Military.

Over at The Week, Bill Black reflects on the Arming America controversy.  Here is a taste:

Arming America was published in 2000 to much acclaim. Historian Peter Onuf (later a founding co-host of the BackStorypodcast) called it a “myth-busting tour de force,” while a former president of the Organization of American Historians said it was “a classic work of significant scholarship with inescapable policy implications.”

The “policy implications” of Arming America were with respect to the Second Amendment. If, as Bellesiles claimed, individual gun ownership was not a significant part of American life when the Constitution was written, then it becomes harder to argue that the Constitution’s drafters were especially interested in protecting gun ownership as an individual civil right. The “right of the people to keep and bear Arms” looks more like a restatement of their right to “a well regulated Militia,” not a separate individualist claim.

This was a potent talking point in 2000. The Columbine High School massacre had occurred the year before and spurred a fierce national debate over gun rights; Arming America was quickly swallowed up in that debate. NRA president Charlton Heston lambasted the book’s argument as “ludicrous.” Bellesiles began receiving death threats and anonymous phone calls. Gun enthusiast message boards scrutinized every footnote in the book and began finding discrepancies.

More worryingly (from academia’s point of view), serious scholars began finding discrepancies too… 

In the face of these criticisms, especially a William and Mary Quarterly forum in which other historians called Bellesiles’s work “biased,” “careless,” and “misleading,” Emory University appointed a special committee in 2002 to investigate the charges against Bellesiles. They found it hard to check a lot of his research, because rather than building a proper database for the 11,000 probates, he had instead taken handwritten notes on legal pads — which were almost entirely destroyed when a pipe burst in Emory’s Bowden Hall, flooding his office. As for the mysterious San Francisco records, Bellesiles explained he had actually used records from nearby Contra Costa County; the committee, however, had reason to doubt he had visited the Contra Costa archive when he said he did…

Read the rest here.

Gee, Bellesiles lost his “notes” when a pipe burst, flooding his office.  That’s the professor version of “my dog ate my homework.” 

Or in the case of Saul Cornell, “this was all done quickly and I can’t reconstruct the process I used to come up with the figure based on my computer drafts.”

But let’s do some fisking of Cornell’s submission supporting the FOID Act, shall we?

I. Assignment
I have been asked to provide an expert opinion on the history of firearms regulation in the
Anglo-American legal tradition, with an emphasis on the connection between the current state of
Illinois’ license and permitting scheme—i.e., the Firearm Owners Identification Card Act, also
known as the “FOID” Act1—and the history of firearms regulation over the long arc of Anglo-
American legal history. I have further been asked to opine on how the Founding-era generation
understood the right to bear arms, as well as the understanding of the right to bear arms held at the
time of the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Finally, I
was also asked to assess the extent to which analogies between the Second Amendment and the
First Amendment illuminate issues relating to legal challenges to the FOID Act.

Fair enough.

II. Qualifications and Background
I am the Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History at Fordham University. The
Guenther chair is one of three endowed chairs in the history department at Fordham and the only
one in American history. In addition to teaching constitutional history at Fordham University to
undergraduates and graduate students, I teach constitutional law at Fordham Law School. I have
been a Senior Visiting research scholar on the faculty of Yale Law School, the University of Connecticut
Law School, and Benjamin Cardozo Law School. I have given invited lectures, presented
papers at faculty workshops, and participated in conferences on the topic of the Second Amendment
and the history of gun regulation at Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, Stanford Law…

Blah blah blah snipped.  I hear the haughtiness in his voice as I read that.  Imagine how erect he must have sat in his chair as he pounded that out at $500 an hour.  As an Illinois taxpayer, I hope he’s not a hunt-and-peck typist.    

Serious question:  Do THC-infused gummy bears leave your fingers smelling skunky?

My writings on the Second Amendment and gun regulation have been widely cited by state
and federal courts, including the majority opinion and dissenting opinion in NYSRPA v. Bruen.3
My scholarship on this topic has appeared in leading law reviews and top peer reviewed legal
history journals. I authored the chapter on the right to bear arms in The Oxford Handbook of the
U.S. Constitution and co-authored the chapter in The Cambridge History of Law in America on the
Founding era and the Marshall Court, the period that includes the adoption of the Constitution and
the Second Amendment.4 Thus, my expertise not only includes the history of gun regulation and
the right to keep and bear arms, but also extends to American legal and constitutional history
broadly defined. I have provided expert witness testimony in Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, Nonprofit
Corp. v. Hickenlooper, 14-cv-02850 (D. Colo.); Chambers, et al., v. City of Boulder, 2018
CV 30581 (Colo. D. Ct. City of Boulder, filed June 14, 2018), Zeleny v. Newsom, 14-cv-02850
(N.D. Cal.), and Miller, et al v. Smith, et al., 2018 cv 3085 (C.D. Ill.); Jones v. Bonta United States
Court of Appeals, — F.4th —- , 2022 WL 1485187 (9th Cir., May 11, 2022); Baird v. Bonta, No.
2:19-cv-00617 (E.D. Cal.); Worth v. Harrington, 21-cv-1348 (D. Minn.).

Oh, we know.  You sure seem to be the go-to guy for distorted history (for ideological reasons) when it comes to gun rights.  There’s junk science and then there’s junk history.

III. Retention and Compensation
I am being compensated for services performed in the above-entitled case at an hourly rate
of $500 for reviewing materials, participating in meetings, and preparing reports, $750 for depositions
and court appearances, and an additional $100 per hour for travel time.

There you go.  

My compensation is not contingent on the results of my analysis or the substance of any testimony.

Oh, of course.  You’ll be COMPLETELY objective.  Getting paid $500 an hour by the Illinois Attorney General has a way of influencing beliefs, opinions and discussions. 

When interested parties pay politicians for their services and opinions, it’s called bribery.

Remember these guys?  From wiki.

• Dan Rostenkowski (D) was a U.S. congressman from Chicago for 36 years, from 1959 to 1995. He was chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee from 1981 to 1994. After a federal investigation he was accused of various acts of corruption, such as accepting kickbacks, using official funds for personal expenses, and participating in what became known as the Congressional Post Office scandal. In 1996 he pleaded guilty to two counts of mail fraud and was sentenced to 17 months in prison.^[7][8]

• Dennis Hastert (R) was a congressman from 1987 to 2007. He was the longest-serving Republican Speaker of the House, from 1999 to 2007. In 2006, Hastert became embroiled in controversy over his championing of a $207-million federal earmark (inserted in the 2005 omnibus highway bill) for the Prairie Parkway, a proposed expressway running through his district.^[9][10] The Sunlight Foundation accused Hastert of failing to disclose that the construction of the highway would benefit a land investment that Hastert and his wife made in nearby land in 2004 and 2005. Hastert received five-eighths of the proceeds of the sale of the land, turning a $1.8 million profit in under two years.^[9][10][11] Hastert’s ownership interest in the tract was not a public record because the land was held by a blind land trust, Little Rock Trust No. 225.^[12] There were three partners in the trust: Hastert, Thomas Klatt, and Dallas Ingemunson. However, public documents only named Ingemunson, who was the Kendall County Republican Party chairman and Hastert’s personal attorney and longtime friend.^[11][12] Hastert denied any wrongdoing.^[9] In October 2006, Norman Ornstein and Scott Lilly wrote that the Prairie Parkway affair was “worse than FoleyGate” and called for the Speaker’s resignation.^[13] In 2015, Hastert pleaded guilty to structuring bank withdrawals to evade bank reporting requirements, a felony. In 2016 he was sentenced to 15 months in prison. At his sentencing hearing, he admitted that he had molested several boys when he was a high school wrestling coach in the 1960s and 1970s, and that he had used the improperly withdrawn funds to buy the silence of one of the victims.^[14][15]

• Mel Reynolds (D) was a U.S. representative from 1993 to 1995. He resigned from Congress after being convicted of having sex with an underage campaign worker.^[16] While serving a five-year prison sentence, Reynolds was convicted in 1997 of unrelated charges of bank fraud and using campaign finances for personal expenses.^[17] He received a 6+1⁄2-year sentence but was released in 2001 when his sentence was commuted by President Clinton.^[18] In 2017 Reynolds was found guilty of failing to file federal income tax returns.^[19] He received a six-month sentence for this third conviction.^[20]

• Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D) succeeded Mel Reynolds as congressman from Illinois’s 2nd congressional district, serving from 1995 until his resignation in 2012. On February 8, 2013, Jackson admitted to violating federal campaign law by using campaign funds to make personal purchases.^[21] Jackson pleaded guilty on February 20, 2013, to one count of wire and mail fraud.^[22] On August 14, 2013, he was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison.^[23]

• Aaron Schock (R) represented Illinois’s 18th congressional district, serving from 2009 until 2015. In March 2015, after controversy about his use of federal funds, Schock resigned from Congress. In November 2016, a federal grand jury indicted Schock on 24 criminal counts including theft of government funds, fraud, making false statements, and filing false tax returns.^[24] Schock pleaded “not guilty” to all charges when arraigned on Monday, December 12, 2016.^{[25][needs update]}

 

Governors[edit]

• Dan Walker (D) was the 36th Governor of Illinois, serving from 1973 to 1977. After leaving office he pursued various business interests, and acquired the First American Savings and Loan Association, which was later declared insolvent as part of the savings and loan crisis. In 1987 Walker pleaded guilty to bank fraud and perjury for receiving improper loans from First American. He was sentenced to seven years in prison,^[28] and was released after serving a year and a half.^[29]
• George Ryan (R) was the 39th governor of Illinois, serving from 1999 to 2003. Before that he was secretary of state from 1991 to 1999. In 2006 he was found guilty of fraud and racketeering charges for various acts that he committed in these two offices. He was sentenced to six and a half years in prison.^[30]
• Rod Blagojevich (D) was the 40th Governor of Illinois, serving from 2003 to 2009. He was the only Illinois governor to be impeached by the state House of Representatives and removed from office by the state Senate. In 2011 Blagojevich was found guilty of 18 counts of corruption, including attempting to sell or trade an appointment to fill Barack Obama’s vacant seat in the U.S. Senate. He was sentenced to 14 years in prison.^[31] In February 2020, after he had served about eight years of his term, his sentence was commuted by then-President Trump.^[32]

 

• Orville Hodge (R) was the Auditor of Public Accounts (predecessor office to the Illinois Comptroller) from 1952 to 1956.^[33] During his term in office, he embezzled $6.15 million of^{[citation needed]} state funds, mainly by altering and forging checks that were paid on the state’s account.^[34] Upon indictment, Hodge pleaded guilty to 54 bank fraud, embezzlement and forgery charges^{[citation needed]} and was sentenced to a 12- to 15-year prison term,^[33] of which he served 61⁄2 years.^[34]

• Paul Powell (D) was the Secretary of State. Though his salary was never more than $30,000 per year, after he died in 1970, his hotel room was found to contain $750,000 in cash kept in shoe boxes, briefcases and strong boxes, while his office had $50,000 in cash as well as 19 cases of whiskey and $1 million in racing stocks. Powell left an estate of $4.6 million, which a federal investigation determined Powell had mostly acquired through bribes he received for giving noncompetitive state contracts to political associates.^[35][36]
• William J. Scott (R) Attorney General convicted of tax fraud and sentenced to a year in prison (1982).^[37]
• Jerome Cosentino (D) served two nonconsecutive terms as Illinois Treasurer, from 1979 to 1983, and from 1987 to 1991. In 1992 he pleaded guilty to defrauding two banks of several million dollars in a check kiting scheme.^[38] He was sentenced to nine months of home confinement.^[39]
• Frank Mautino (D) is, as of 2022, the Auditor General, the state’s chief financial watchdog. In May 2017 his former legislative campaign was fined $5,000 for willfully failing to provide information to an investigation of the campaign’s spending.^[40]
• Martin Sandoval (D) was a state senator and chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee. In 2020 he pleaded guilty to bribery and tax evasion, admitting that he had taken more than $250,000 in bribes in exchange for actions favorable to SafeSpeed, a red light camera company.^[41][42]
• Luis Arroyo (D) was a state representative. He resigned in 2019 after being charged with bribery for accepting payments to promote legislation favorable to the proliferation of sweepstakes machines. In 2021 he pleaded guilty.^[43] In 2022 he was sentenced to four years and nine months in prison.^[44]
• In the 1980s, a federal task force known as Operation Greylord investigated corruption and malfeasance in the Cook County court system. Dozens of people, including judges, attorneys, police officers, and court officials, were eventually convicted of various crimes.^[45]
• In the 1990s, Operation Silver Shovel was an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation into political corruption in Chicago. Eighteen individuals, including six aldermen, were convicted of crimes. “At its conclusion, Silver Shovel had uncovered everything from labor union corruption to drug trafficking and organized crime activity,” according to the FBI.^[46][47]
• Fred Roti (D) served as an Illinois state senator (1951–1957).^[48] When his seat was lost to redistricting, he returned to precinct work, and took a patronage job as a drain inspector with the City Department of Water and Sewers.^[49] In 1990 Roti was indicted for racketeering and extortion. On January 15, 1993, after deliberating 2+1⁄2 days, a federal jury convicted Roti of taking thousands of dollars in bribes. The jury convicted him on all 11 counts of racketeering, racketeering conspiracy, bribery and extortion. The jury found him guilty of two out of three “fixing” charges, convicting him of taking $10,000 for influencing a civil court case and $7,500 to support a routine zoning change, both in 1989. But the jury cleared him of the most serious allegation, sharing $72,500 for fixing a Chinatown murder trial in 1981.^[50][51]
• Betty Loren-Maltese (R)^[52] was the town president of Cicero from 1993 to 2002. She was convicted of helping to steal $12 million from a municipal insurance fund, and in 2003 was sentenced to eight years in prison. Cicero police chief Emil Schullo was among several others who served time for participating in the same scheme.^[53]
• Nicholas Blase served as mayor of Niles for 47 years, from 1961 to 2008. He resigned amid federal charges that he participated in an insurance kickback scheme.^[54] Several months later he pleaded guilty to mail fraud and tax evasion, and admitted that he had pressured local businesses to buy insurance from a friend’s agency in return for a share of the commissions, receiving more than $420,000 over a period of more than 30 years.^[55] In 2010 Blase, then 81 years old, was sentenced to a year and a day in prison.^[56]
• Rita Crundwell (R) comptroller and treasurer for Dixon was arrested for fraud in 2012 after embezzling about $54 million over many years. The money was used to support a lavish lifestyle and her horse ranch, the Meri-J.^[57] She pleaded guilty to wire fraud and was sentenced to 19 years and 7 months in prison.^[58]
• William Beavers (D) was a Cook County commissioner from 2006 to 2013. Before that he was a Chicago alderman from 1983 to 2006. In 2013 he was convicted of failing to pay taxes on hundreds of thousands of dollars he took out of his campaign fund and used for gambling and other personal expenses. He served a six-month sentence.^[59]
• Barbara Byrd-Bennett (D) was the head of Chicago’s cash-strapped public school system. In 2015, she resigned over a $20,500,000 no-bid contract to her former employer SUPES Academy.^[1] She subsequently pled guilty to multiple charges^[60] and was sentenced to four and a half years in prison.^[61]
• In 2016, the state of Illinois filed a lawsuit against mayor Eric Kellogg and other officials of the city of Harvey, calling for an investigation into allegations of corruption and financial issues. The lawsuit also asked the court to invalidate the mayor’s unilateral removal of several aldermen who opposed him.^{[62][needs update]}
• In 2018, David Webb, the former mayor of Markham, pleaded guilty to charges of wire fraud and income tax evasion, in connection with a $300,000 bribery scheme.^[63] In 2021 he was sentenced to two years in prison.^[64]
• In 2019 Donald Schupek pleaded guilty to embezzling $27,000 from the village of Posen when he was the mayor there.^[65]
• In 2021 Louis Presta, the mayor of Crestwood, resigned and pleaded guilty to taking a $5,000 cash bribe for favorable treatment of SafeSpeed, a red light camera company that did business with the town.^[66] In 2022 he was sentenced to a year in prison.^[67]
• Tony Ragucci was mayor of Oakbrook Terrace from 2009 to 2020. In 2022 he pleaded guilty to taking $88,000 in a red light camera kickback scheme.^[68]

According to The Economist‘s profile of Edward Burke, “Criminality among the city’s 50 aldermen is also astonishingly common.”^[69] Dozens of Chicago aldermen (city council members) have been convicted of corruption-related crimes.^{[2][70][71][72]}

• Thomas E. Keane (D), chairman of the Chicago City Council Finance Committee, was convicted in 1974 of mail fraud and conspiracy charges associated with questionable real estate deals. He was sentenced to five years in prison, and served a 22-month term.^[73]

• William Carothers was convicted in 1983 of extorting as much as $32,500 in remodeling work for his ward office from the builders of Bethany Hospital. He was sentenced to three years in prison.^[74]

• Edward Vrdolyak (D, then R) was an alderman from 1971 to 1987. In 2008 he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud for accepting a 1.5 million dollar kickback in a real estate scheme. He was sentenced to ten months in prison.^[75] In 2019 Vrdolyak pleaded guilty to charges of income tax evasion connected to the state of Illinois’s tobacco lawsuit settlement in the 1990s.^[76] He was sentenced to another 18 months in prison.^[77]

• Isaac “Ike” Carothers (D) was an alderman from 1999 to 2010. He resigned after pleading guilty to accepting $40,000 in home improvements for backing a controversial project in his ward. He was sentenced to 28 months in prison. Isaac Carothers is the son of William Carothers, an alderman who was convicted of a similar crime in 1983.^[78][79]

• Willie Cochran (D), a former police officer, was elected alderman in 2007. In 2016 he was charged in a 15-count indictment with stealing funds “meant for poor children and seniors”, taking bribes, and other crimes.^[80] In 2019 he pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud.^[81] He was sentenced to one year in prison.^[82]

• Ricardo Muñoz (D) was an alderman from 1993 to 2019. In 2021 he pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering, admitting that he had spent cash from a political fund on personal items such as sports tickets, meals and travel.^[83] In 2022 he was sentenced to 13 months in prison.^[84]

• Patrick Daley Thompson (D) is the grandson of Richard J. Daley and the nephew of Richard M. Daley, both of whom served as mayor of Chicago. Thompson was the alderman of the 11th Ward from 2015 to 2022. He resigned after being convicted in federal court of income tax evasion and of lying to regulators about a bank line of credit that he received.^[85] He was sentenced to four months in prison.^[86]

Let’s continue with Mr. Cornell…

V. Summary of Opinion
It is my opinion that the FOID Act is consistent with the original understanding of Second
Amendment, and this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. The original understanding
of the Second Amendment and its state constitutional analogs, and our nation’s historical
tradition of firearm regulation, are and were inextricably linked to the goal of promoting a free
state and preserving “the peace.”

Mr. Cornell would be a good writer of fiction.  Write a storyline, drop in a few cherry picked historical bits, and off he goes to the next Tom Clancy novel.  Oh wait, Clancy died.

It is impossible to make sense of the numerous laws enacted by
the Founding generation and later generations without recognizing that the right to keep and bear
arms was understood to further the goals of ordered liberty, not undermine them.

Notice how Cornell doesn’t write “numerous gun control laws.”  Is that a lie by omission?  Or subtle distraction?

Then he throws in a nugget of truth.  “understood to further the goals of ordered liberty, not undermine them.”  Yes, gun ownership guarantees liberty.

The amended complaint in this lawsuit alleges several claims that rest on demonstrably
false historical premises. The complaint alleges the FOID Act is an unconstitutional infringement
of the right to keep and bear arms because it “places an unconstitutional tax on the exercise” of a
fundamental right.

It’s more than an allegation.  It’s a fact.  F.A.C.T.  It does.  Just like a tax on the right to vote or a tax on the right to buy a book or go to church.  

Furthermore, the amended complaint alleges that “licenses with attendant fees
have no basis in the history and tradition of firearms regulation in this Nation, and, accordingly,
there are no ‘historical justifications’ that support their validity.”5

Really.  Tell us all about the FOID Act of 1791, would you kind sir? 

Listening…

These claims are historically
false: neither are supported by the evidence of the history of firearms regulation or the well established
facts developed in the existing historical scholarship on arms regulation.6 The foundation
for these assertions is ideological, not historical. Indeed, if the complaint’s views of the right to
keep and bear arms were in place during the American Revolution it would have undermined the
ability of the states and the new nation to achieve independence and we would have no Second
Amendment.

Emphasis added…  Sound familiar?  It surely looks like one of Cornell’s favorite go-to expressions.

It’s actually masterful.

Masterful projection.

And you have to hand it to him, he’s also a master gaslighter too.

Gun rights and gun regulation were not antithetical concepts in the Founding era: the two
were seen as two sides of the same coin. Without robust regulation of arms, it would have been
impossible to implement the Second Amendment and its state analogues.7  The complaint’s vision
of the Second Amendment rests on a series of post-Founding era myths that have little connection
to the historical realities and legal framework that effectuated the original understanding of the
right to keep and bear arms.8 Rather, the ability to regulate firearms and gunpowder is of ancient
vintage and was central to the conception of ordered liberty that defined American law from its
earliest days.9 At the very core of the early American understanding of the scope of liberty was the
right of self-government and the right of the people themselves to regulate their internal police.10
Regulations of gunpowder and firearms were at the very core of state police power.11

As such, the modern FOID Act, which requires qualified individuals to obtain a permit and
undergo a background check prior to possessing a firearm can be properly characterized as both a
direct lineal descendent of early American gun laws and a clear constitutional analogue of several
different types of longstanding and historically recognized forms of firearms regulation. Moreover,
the FOID Act is completely consistent with the Founding generation’s understanding (and that of
the generation that ratified the Fourteenth Amendment) of the lawful use of the police power to
regulate for the health, safety, and welfare of the people. Consequently, based on a comprehensive
review of the historical evidence and scholarship, it is my opinion that the Illinois FOID Act is
well within the category of presumptively lawful firearms regulations discussed in District of Columbia
v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008) and fits within the text, history, and tradition framework
developed in N.Y. State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, 597 U.S. __, 2022 U.S. Lexis 3055 (2022).12

Use of the police power?  I missed the section on police power in the US Constitution.  Could someone help me out?

VI. The Historical Inquiry Required by Bruen and Heller
The United States Supreme Court’s decisions in Heller, and most recently Bruen, directed
courts to look to history for guideposts in evaluating the scope of permissible firearms regulation
under the Second Amendment. At the time Heller was decided there was relatively little scholarship
on the history of gun regulation.13

That’s because there was next-to-zero gun regulation in the 1790s.

A burgeoning body of scholarship has revealed the wide
scope of arms regulation in the Anglo-American legal tradition and the Founding era.14 The creation
of powerful searchable digital “archives” has transformed this sub-field and facilitated a more
sophisticated understanding of the scope of gun regulation under Anglo-American law, and during
the Founding era.15 My report draws on this new body of digital sources and the scholarship that
it has generated.

“Sophisticated” understanding?  LOL.  Sure thing, Mr. Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History at Fordham University.

Looking to history for guidance when evaluating modern gun laws requires a deeply contextualized
understanding of the fundamental legal and philosophical principles underpinning the
Second Amendment, including the common law understanding of the limits on the uses of dangerous
or unusual weapons.

In other words, rubes like us in flyover country don’t understand.

Two types of inquiry are therefore necessary?

No, sir.  they are not.

First, one must gain some
familiarity with Founding era rights theory, particularly as it related to the scope of state legislative
authority under the police power.17 Second, one must canvass the history of state and local regulations
to establish the scope and types of laws that have been viewed as within the bounds of the
lawful exercise of government power at different moments in American history. A properly contextualized
historical inquiry must also recognize, as Heller and Bruen did, that the specific
protections associated with the right to keep and bear arms lawfully evolved as firearms technology
developed. In short, history illuminates the scope of the right and contours of regulation, but it

BZZT!

does not create “a straight jacket” limiting the states to only those practices appropriate to a preindustrial
agrarian society with low population density.18
VII. Methodology
The analysis that I used in reaching my opinion draws on recent scholarship and employs
the accepted historical and legal methodologies for interpreting such sources, including an analysis
of the public meaning of the Second Amendment, various individual state constitutional provisions
on the right to keep and bear arms, state statutes, local ordinances, court decisions, and popular
and learned legal commentaries. The methods of legal history require a deep immersion in the
primary source materials, conscious attention to the limits and strengths of various types of legal
sources, and a broad knowledge of related historical fields outside of Anglo-American legal history.
19

More “you’re too stupid to understand your betters…”  Saul Cornell must have been the life of the party in high school, right?  

Unless he brought the weed.

To avoid approaching history, text, and tradition with an “ahistorical literalism” it is vital
to survey historical scholarship across a broad range of subfields.20 Social history, cultural history,
economic history, military history all shed important light on the original meaning of the Second
Amendment. One must avoid the common tendency to treat sources in isolation, decontextualized,
floating freely, detached from the web of historical meaning that made them comprehensible to
Americans in 1791 and other relevant moments in American history that illuminate history and
tradition as described in Bruen. The alternative, a decontextualized approach, embodies the worst

Before you barf, I’m snipping.  I need a drink.

Following Heller and Bruen, courts look to history for guideposts in evaluating the scope
of permissible regulation under the Second Amendment.25 Recent scholarship has uncovered a
previously unexamined history of arms regulation in the Anglo-American legal tradition, at the
Founding, and in the era in which the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified.26 My report draws on
this large body of new scholarship and the breadth of digital sources now available to scholars, in
order to understand and contextualize the rights implicated in this case.

Is this a body of new scholarship like your old one that you couldn’t produce when asked?  Or like that of Michael Bellesiles, then prestigious history professor now bartender?  Hmm?

VIII. Summary of Historical Evidence
The historical evidence supporting my opinion includes the following categories of gun
regulations beginning from the Revolutionary era and extending forward in time. As Bruen notes
regarding the general contour of modern shall issue permit schemes, the aim of these regulations
is to protect individual rights and public safety. Thus, laws that screen applicants so that only law
abiding and responsible citizens are issued permits are constitutional. There is ample evidence
from the Founding era that the right to self defense did not limit state’s legitimate exercise of their
police power to promote public safety, including laws aimed at preventing those who were not law
abiding or responsible from obtaining and using firearms.

Cornell’s pretty attentive to “police power,” isn’t he?  Is the Illinois Attorney General worried that part of the Illinois Constitution will be struck down as unconstitutional?

Several different categories of early American gun regulations are relevant to this inquiry,
including:
Disarmament Statutes and Loyalty Oaths: Founding-era governments required loyalty
oaths as pre-condition for owning firearms. Individuals refusing to sign these oaths were disarmed.
These oaths were different than the oaths imposed on individuals who took up arms against the
government in rebellions or insurrections. For example, the disarmament of Pennsylvania Quakers
resulted from their refusal to pay fees and assessments to support public defense and safety. Refusal
to comply with these laws was itself a justification for disarmament. It was widely recognized
in the Founding era that disarmament of those refusing to comply with these sorts of regulatory
statutes was constitutional, and consistent with the requirements of the Second Amendment or the
relevant state analogues.

So, following Cornell’s “constitutional and consistent with the requirements of the Second Amendment, the Illinois General Assembly could pass a law that would disarm everyone who didn’t vote Democrat in the last Primary Election in our state?  That would somehow be constitutional based upon historical law according to Bellesiles, er, I mean Cornell?

What’s next, professor?  Are blacks going to be singled out as they were with the rich and vibrant history of Jim Crow gun laws that disarmed cash-poor, recently freed slaves following the Civil War?  Is that okay too?

Tracking Of Potential Members Of State Militias (1776-1861): Early American militia
statutes required a substantial subset of the adult white male population to acquire certain arms,

Oh, so gun registration is okay?  Along with other legal requirements for “American militia”?  I’m telling you, I think he sampled some of the brownies too before he started writing this.  Maybe a whole platter of the double-stuffed variety.

maintain them, and demonstrate competence with their use. To effectuate this goal, states enacted
a broad range of laws to identify who was eligible for militia service, keep track of their level of
armament, and punish those who failed to adhere to these requirements.

In other words:  No guns for Negroes.  Really, professor?  Do you really want to hang your hat on racist gun control laws?

In fact, states were free to
gather any pertinent information they believed necessary to create a well regulated militia. Thus,
to ascertain if groups were eligible for a religious exemption, states were recognized as having the
power to collect information about religious beliefs and practices. Governments conducted periodic
guns censuses to determine if the population had purchased the necessary firearms to comply
with militia laws. The very idea of a presumption of privacy regarding arms would have defeated
the goal of creating a well regulated militia.

Really?  If EVERY ADULT MALE was a part of the militia, one wouldn’t need gun registration.

Varied Legal Frameworks for Different Types of Arms: All guns were not created equal
under the law. Most states treated militia guns differently than ordinary arms. Guns required for
militia service were recognized to have greater need for legal protection than ordinary civilian
arms. Militia arms were not subject to seizure in debt proceedings and could not be sold for tax
arrears. States also exempted public carry of militia related weapons from the broad prohibitions
that applied to concealed weapons and other restrictions on public carry.

Somehow I don’t think the good professor is supporting the legalization of machineguns, suppressors and all those good things.  Where are all these laws against carrying concealed weapons he speaks of?

Guns and Taxation: Militiamen in the Founding era were required to purchase their own
weapons and ammunition without any compensation. Thus, the laws imposing these expenses were
a form of taxation, transferring the cost of public defense to individual households. Firearms have
also been taxed by states and localities outside of the context of the militia. It was widely accepted
in the Founding era that states could impose these taxes without violating the Second Amendment
or similar state constitutional provisions.

Regulation and the Police Power: Heller’s category of presumptively lawful regulations
acknowledged that as gun technology and use changes, so too would the nature of regulation.
Bruen’s elaboration of text, history, and tradition lends additional support to Heller’s conclusion.
The best illustration of this part of Bruen and Heller’s core holdings is their extensive discussion
of antebellum concealed carry laws. Easily concealed firearms were not common in the era of the
Second Amendment and did not become readily available until the Market Revolution of the early
nineteenth century made them cheaper, more reliable, and more common. The same forces that
made wooden clocks, Currier and Ives prints fixtures in American homes also made it possible to
manufacture and market easily concealable pistols. States responded to this change with a spate of
10
laws regulating these weapons.27 Most courts recognized that the authority to enact such laws was
an appropriate exercise of the police power. This regulation too was recognized as consistent with
the Second Amendment and relevant state arms bearing provisions.

Laws like these, Saul?

“Most courts recognized that the authority to enact such laws was an appropriate exercise of the police power.”  Courts also were slow to remedy historical wrongs like counting slaves as 3/5ths of a person.  Or that “Separate but equal” was okay.  Or, under Dred Scott, that slaves were property, not people.

The Web of Early American Gun Regulation: When viewed together, these laws demonstrate
that the individual states took a vigorous approach to firearms regulation to meet the needs
of public safety and defense. Regulation of firearms and gun powder were rooted in state and local
police power authority. The application of the police power to firearms and ammunition was singled
out as the locus classicus of state police power by Chief Justice John Marshall in his
discussion of laws regulating gunpowder in Brown v. Maryland. 28

A discussion is not lawmaking.

Indeed, a state’s ample police
powers are at their apex in matters relating to firearms.
The nineteenth century witnessed an intensification of regulation in response to new and
unprecedented problems created by firearms in an increasingly urban society, a factor generally
recognized by the generation that ratified the Fourteenth Amendment. The decline of communitybased
forms of peacekeeping and law enforcement typical of pre-industrial and pre-modern societies
was replaced by modern-style police forces. Another response to these changes was the use
of permit and license schemes to limit access to firearms to those persons who did not pose a threat
to public peace and safety. For example, the traditional tool of sureties, an effort to offer financial
incentives to keep the peace, evolved into permit schemes during the era in which the 14th Amendment
was adopted, after the Civil War. As the nation grew further away from the rural nation of
yeoman farmers idealized by Jefferson and others the nature of law changed, with new approaches
analogous to those used during the Founding era evolving in order accommodate these developments.
29 These administrative mechanisms and professional police forces that developed to
address these changes in the second half of the nineteenth century, during the period of the adoption
and ratification of the 14th Amendment, remain a central feature of American life.30

Snip….  I’m just about ready to throw in the towel on this guy’s $500 an hour screed.  After all, I am not making that sort of money to fisk this turd.  And it’s too early to drink.

Then I found this…

a. Disarmament Statutes: Disarming Dangerous Persons and Loyalty Oaths in Historical
Context
The notion that all individuals in the Founding era had an absolute right to keep and bear
arms is contradicted by the historical record from the era of the Second Amendment. Although all
individuals did have a right to assemble, speak, and practice their religion, members of groups
outside of the polity, such as slaves, Indians and mixed-race persons were typically prohibited from
owning firearms in most cases. Even among those of white European extraction only a subset of
the free white population fully enjoyed a right to keep and bear arms. For example, individuals
who were unwilling to swear loyalty to their state and the new government of the United States,

So laws that banned gun ownership for disfavored groups (be they blacks, Irish, Italian, Chinese or whomever) are somehow acceptable under Cornell’s analysis of “historical traditions”?  And they are justification for today’s gun bans?  That’s what Kwame Raoul is hanging his hat on to save the FOID Act?  We all know the FOID Act was passed to keep blacks disarmed as much as possible (and to throw black gun owners who didn’t get the FOID Card into prison and turn them into prohibited persons…)

persons who engaged in political violence and certain forms of protest, and individuals who refused
to contribute to the cost of public defense and safety were among those disarmed. One of the
most important examples of state regulation of the possession of firearms occurred when the State
of Pennsylvania disarmed Quakers who were peaceful, but objected to taxes and fees imposed by
the government to pay for the costs of a well regulated militia.
The use of loyalty oaths with provisions that disarmed significant portions of the population
were common in the era of the Second Amendment.46 Loyalists, those who refused to forswear
allegiance to the British crown, were disarmed in most states.

And we’re back to gun bans are okay, according to Saul Cornell’s flawed analysis, for those with political wrongthink, including an opposition to excessive taxes and fees imposed by the government.  Along with loyalty oaths.  Read Breitbart?  No guns for you.  

Don’t vote Democrat?  No guns for you.

Again, both would be acceptable under Saul Cornell’s analysis of “historical tradition” of gun control.

He goes on to claim that gun registration is okay.  And on and on.  

He’s a better writer of fiction than history.

But then again, he has experience writing fiction masquerading as history.  And citing the works of others who do the same.   In Saul’s mind, extremism in pursuit of tyranny is no vice.  And neither is making things up to support gun control.

But if gun control is such a righteous and noble cause, why does he have to play fast and loose with history and facts to promote his point of view?