I love that photo of Lessig! As a director, if I wanted to stage a pose that screamed “pompous jerk,” that’s exactly what I would tell an actor to do.

But I digress…Prof. Lessig is an unusually unethical faculty presence even for Harvard, as Ethics Alarms has documented since 2015 . That is when he ran for the Democratic nomination for President promising to be a “referendum President” who would serve only as long as it took to pass the Citizens Equality Act of 2017, a potpouri of progressive agenda items of varying wackiness. Once he had persuaded Congress to pass that dog’s breakfast, Lessig would step down, and his Vice President would become President. And who did the esteemed government prof regard as qualified for that position? Oh, just Elizabeth Warren, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Robert Reich, Van Jones, Jon Stewart, Sheryl Sandberg, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Martin O’Malley, and Joe Biden, among others.

What a great plan!

Incredibly, sufficient numbers of students, media types and members of the public still take Lessig seriously enough after that bit of signature significance (no respectable person would propose such nonsense even once, on the dumbest day of their lives) for Lessig to get his books published. For his latest, Lessig has teamed up with Prof. Matthew Seligman of Stanford (whose trustworthiness and integrity is instantly dubious because he has written a book with Lessig), titled “How to Steal a Presidential Election.” Naturally, it is concerned only with how Donald Trump might exploit “loopholes” in the Constitution to steal the 2024 election. After all, everyone knows that Democrats never, ever would try to do such a thing, because Trump and Republicans are the existential threats to democracy. Joe said so!

You can read a summary of Larry’s theories on election-stealing here, if your sock drawer is ready for inspection. Lessig and Seligman feel they are experts at this: well before the 2020 election, they developed a course at Harvard law school called “Wargaming 2020.” Later, analyzing the 2020 mess, Lessig wrote that “Trump didn’t really understand what he could have done. There were obvious moves he and his team could have made, but they didn’t take them.” The professor declared that “The insurrection on 6 January 2021 was tragic in its loss of life, but as a method of overturning the election it was the dumbest thing they could have possibly done. No court would ever allow the election to be decided by force of bayonets.”

Note that Lessig instantly blows up his credibility twice in that exposition, calling the Capitol riot an “insurrection,” one of the Left’s Big Lies, and bemoaning the “loss of life,” deceitfully channeling the relatedAxis Big Lie that the riot was responsible for multiple fatalities when the single life lost was an unarmed female rioter shot dead by a discredited member of the Capitol Police without outcry or consequences.

I have to hand it to Ann Althouse, who gets the pointer for this topic. She quickly pounced on the inherent hypocrisy in Lessig’s throbbingly partisan analysis. “If physically taking over the building is an incredibly dumb way to try to steal the election, that’s a reason to infer that there was no intent to steal. It would make more sense to say that Trump thought that a big demonstration would motivate Congress to undertake some additional process that would determine whether the votes had been accurately counted and that might legitimately change the outcome,” she writes. Bingo! That is exactly what Trump intended, and what Ann describes is not an insurrection.

Here is her best point: “If it’s obvious that different moves can be made to steal the election, why is it supposed to be so outlandish for Trump to have questioned whether the Democrats stole the election? Maybe they made some of those ‘obvious moves.'” Silly Althouse! It’s outlandish because Trump is always lying and evil, and Democrats never have anything but the nation’s best interests at heart!

Ann finally concludes, and she’s spot on:

“It’s not anti-democratic to be suspicious that what purports to be the result of a democratic process could be wrong. Lessig himself is expressing that suspicion.”

We have learned, however, not to expect consistency, objectivity or even common sense from Prof. Lessig.