China’s Fifth Column Doesn’t Require Troops Or Missiles

A jury is a modest institution. Twelve citizens sit in a box. They listen. They deliberate. They apply the law as instructed. Then they render a verdict. The jury is not a legislature. It is not an executive. It is not a protest movement. It is a fact-finding body embedded in a constitutional structure that presupposes something simple and fragile: that law governs us all.

That modest picture is now under strain. In recent months, a small but organized network of progressive NGOs has begun to train potential jurors to view their service not as a duty of fidelity to enacted law but as an opportunity for resistance. The pitch is explicit. Jury duty is described as a political tool. Jurors are encouraged to “influence outcomes” in order to protect targeted communities from the agenda of a democratically elected President. Trainings and teach-ins are advertised in Washington, D.C. Toolkits circulate nationally. Immigration enforcement is a focal point. The idea is clear enough. If you disapprove of the law, you may block its application by refusing to convict.

To understand why this development is alarming, one must begin with a neutral point. Jury nullification is not new. Anglo-American legal history contains episodes in which juries refused to convict under laws they regarded as unjust. English juries declined to punish seditious libel in the 18th century. American juries sometimes resisted enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. During Prohibition, acquittals were common in certain jurisdictions. Advocates cite these episodes as evidence that nullification is a democratic safety valve. They describe it as the conscience of the community made visible.

That is the romantic picture. It imagines isolated acts of moral courage, rare, and spontaneous. A jury confronts an egregious prosecution and quietly refuses to cooperate. The act is bounded, contextual, and exceptional. The system absorbs the anomaly and moves on.

The present movement is different. It is organized. It is replicable. It is taught. It is explicitly partisan. That difference matters.

Consider the structure. Democrat NGOs in D.C. host recurring “juror information” sessions. They frame jury service as a means to judge the administration’s agenda. A separate project publishes a reusable jury nullification module, complete with presentations and handouts, and invites activists to run their own workshops. In Minneapolis, an anti-ICE organization schedules a nullification training and directs participants to those materials. Professional defense networks host webinars on “the power of jury nullification.” The infrastructure resembles a franchise model. A core toolkit is produced. Local chapters adapt it. The message is consistent. Jury service is leverage.

If this were merely theoretical, it would be troubling enough. But there are signs that the strategy is bearing fruit in particular jurisdictions. Nationally, between 90% and 95%+ of federal defendants are convicted, whether by plea or trial. The system, whatever its flaws, overwhelmingly produces guilty verdicts when charges are brought. Yet in Los Angeles, in cases involving anti-ICE protesters accused of attacking federal officers, the pattern diverges sharply.

In the Central District of California, U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli charged 18 anti-ICE protesters with offenses arising from confrontations with federal agents. None of those cases has led to a conviction. In every case that proceeded to trial, Los Angeles juries refused to convict. If even a fraction of those acquittals reflects jurors who entered the box primed to treat enforcement itself as illegitimate, then the shift from abstract training to concrete outcome is complete. The jury ceases to be a neutral arbiter of fact and becomes a localized veto point against federal law.

One might object. Is this not merely civic education? Citizens have a right to learn about the history and power of juries. That is true. The First Amendment protects general discussion. But the line between abstract civics and strategic influence is thin. When trainings are timed and located to coincide with high-profile prosecutions, when organizers speak of protecting communities from political persecution, when jury duty is described as a way to stop federal enforcement, the message is not neutral. It is tactical. The funding streams behind these efforts underscore the point. These NGOs are not merely sustained by small donor enthusiasm or even by Soros-linked funding networks that have long backed progressive legal activism. They are also connected to transnational financial networks associated with Neville Roy Singham, who is based in Shanghai, China, and who is married to Jodie Evans, the founder of Code Pink. When organizations training jurors to obstruct federal enforcement are supported by money flowing through networks tied to a Chinese Communist Party-aligned ecosystem, the issue ceases to be parochial. It becomes a question of whether domestic adjudication is being strategically sabotaged by actors whose interests are openly hostile to the current administration and, in some cases, aligned with foreign power structures.

The rule of law depends on a simple principle, that legal outcomes track legal standards rather than factional identity. A criminal statute is enacted by representatives elected by the people. It is interpreted by courts. It is applied to facts found by juries. Each institution has a role. When jurors are urged to substitute their partisan commitments for the law as instructed, they cease to function as fact finders. They become ad hoc legislators.

Imagine a sculptor holding a finished statue. If we reject the possibility that both the statue and the lump of clay exist, we must choose one description. Likewise, if we reject the idea that juries both find facts and make policy, we must choose which function defines them. The constitutional design chooses the former. It assigns policymaking to Congress and the president. It assigns fact-finding to juries. To collapse those roles is to blur the structure.

Defenders of organized nullification will reply that juries have always possessed the power to acquit against the evidence. That is correct. Power is not the same as right. The system cannot easily punish acquittals. Double jeopardy prevents retrial. Deliberations are secret. Appellate review is limited. This opacity is part of the jury’s independence. It is also its vulnerability. Because partisan nullification is structurally unreviewable, even a small number of motivated activists can produce effects that are difficult to detect and impossible to correct.

Suppose a single activist juror, trained to see her role as resistance, enters deliberations in an immigration related prosecution. The evidence is clear. The law is clear. She refuses to convict, not because the facts are in doubt but because she opposes the statute. A mistrial results. The government must decide whether to retry the case. Resources are limited. Witnesses are fatigued. Over time, prosecutors may decline to bring similar cases in that jurisdiction. The statute remains on the books. Its practical force evaporates. This is not legislative repeal. It is functional nullification.

Scale that dynamic. If trainings proliferate, if sympathetic jurors are seeded across multiple venues, if acquittals cluster in ideologically aligned jurisdictions, the result is nonuniform enforcement. The same federal law yields convictions in one district and routine acquittals in another. Citizens are no longer equal before the law in practice. They are subject to a patchwork shaped by local activism.

This is the anti democratic core. Democracy is not mere headcount. It is a system in which laws are made through elections and legislative deliberation. If 12 randomly selected citizens can override a duly enacted statute in application, without changing it and without accountability to voters, they exercise a veto outside the constitutional channels. That veto is not reviewable. It is not transparent. It is not deliberated in public. It is exercised in a closed room.

Some will object that juries themselves are democratic because they are composed of citizens. But the analogy is misleading. Jurors are not elected to represent constituencies. They are selected to apply law impartially. Their legitimacy depends on neutrality. When they are trained to act as partisans, that neutrality erodes. The institution ceases to function as designed.

There is a further risk. The movement does not arise in isolation. In recent years, well-funded activists have supported prosecutors who decline to enforce certain categories of crime. In some jurisdictions, district attorneys announced policies of categorical non-prosecution for offenses they regarded as unjust. Critics warned that this amounted to executive nullification. Judges in certain venues adopted lenient practices that, in the eyes of opponents, failed to hold defendants accountable. Now the focus shifts to juries. If prosecutors can refuse to prosecute and juries can be trained to refuse to convict, the cumulative effect is a multi-layered strategy of non-enforcement.

One may dismiss such concerns as exaggerated. Sympathetic journalists often downplay the scale. They describe the trainings as small gatherings of a few dozen activists. They emphasize the lack of direct evidence linking workshops to specific verdicts. They stress the historical pedigree of nullification. But absence of public data is not proof of absence of impact. The mechanism is inherently hidden. If even 5% of jurors in a contested category of cases are influenced by partisan training, the effect on close cases could be substantial. The problem is not that every jury will nullify. It is that some will, unpredictably and selectively.

The rule of law is often described in abstract terms. But its core is simple. It means that we resolve disputes and enforce norms through general rules applied consistently, rather than through ad hoc exercises of power. It means that if you dislike a statute, you seek to change it through elections, legislation, and litigation, not by quietly refusing to apply it when summoned to a jury box. It means that even when your preferred candidate loses, you respect the legal framework that governs the polity.

The jury is a noble institution when it does its proper work. It protects defendants from overreach. It demands proof beyond a reasonable doubt. It brings community judgment into the administration of justice. But like any institution, it can be repurposed. When NGOs teach citizens to view jury service as a partisan weapon, they do not merely expand civic knowledge. They reengineer the function of the jury.

Will the republic collapse tomorrow because of a handful of teach-ins? Probably not. Institutions are resilient. But resilience is not invulnerability. The move from spontaneous conscience acquittal to organized partisan strategy marks a threshold. Once crossed, it is difficult to retreat. The choice before us is stark. Either juries remain bodies that apply law, or they become venues for factional veto. We cannot have both.

There is an additional danger that few are willing to articulate plainly. Political communities do not tolerate vacuums for long. If confidence in the western system of laws and courts erodes, if citizens come to believe that verdicts reflect faction rather than principle, alternative sources of authority will present themselves. Our enemies in China know that when secular legal orders weaken, religious legal systems often expand to fill the space. It is not far-fetched to imagine pressures for adjudication rooted not in constitutional text and representative enactment, but in religious codes such as Sharia, which derive their authority from theological command rather than democratic consent. Whatever one’s view of comparative legal traditions, the American constitutional order rests on law made by elected representatives and applied by neutral courts. If that structure fails, it will not be replaced by nothing. It will be replaced by something. And that something may be far less accountable to the people than the system we now risk destabilizing.

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