THE RULES OF THE GAME HAVE CHANGED; ATTORNEY RON COLEMAN

Attorney Ron Coleman speaks with the precision of a man who has spent decades sharpening words into weapons. In an age of double standards and decaying institutions, he stands for a simple premise: accountability. “People who are not accountable are the ones who want to promote all these high-sounding ideals,” he said. “But all they do is destroy responsibility.”

The spark for the hour was the U.S. military’s destruction of a Nicaraguan fentanyl boat. Critics called it an “execution.” Coleman called it policy. “They were terrorists,” he said. “They don’t get due process in international waters.” He saw the outcry not as moral outrage but as a symptom of a deeper rot—the belief that anything America does must be wrong. “If you don’t even accept the premise that Americans benefit from America being the strongest country in the world,” he said, “then we’re not having the same conversation.”

Coleman had just returned from the National Conservatism Conference in Washington. The theme there was power—who has it, who should, and who wants to give it away. “Some of these people,” he said, “want America to be enfeebled. They don’t want American interests asserted. That is the agenda.”

He talked about judges defying the Supreme Court, the Justice Department acting as a partisan arm, and the corrosion of shame. “There was a sense of self-respect that’s gone,” he said. “Now you have courts giving the finger to the Supreme Court. There’s no accountability, no competence, no one watching.”

Coleman does not spare the press. “The press has abandoned any pretense of objectivity,” he said. “No one’s saying, ‘this is a systemic problem.’” The old Chicago-style graft has metastasized, he said, into something ideological—an Alinskyite campaign to hollow out American institutions from within. “Obama brought Chicago politics into the federal government,” Coleman said, “squeezing every institution for self-interest.”

He contrasted the sloppy activism of the left with what he sees as deliberate counter-strategy. “The Trump administration won eighteen cases in the Supreme Court and lost none,” he said. “Slow and steady wins the race. You want to be the one with the last word.”

Abroad, the same principle applies. When Israel struck Hamas commanders in Qatar, the world cried foul. Coleman laughed. “It’s like the German High Command vacationing in Toronto during World War II,” he said. “You don’t let the enemy sit out the war in a hotel suite.” Israel, he argued, faces scrutiny no other nation endures. “You can kill a million people in Syria or Sudan and no one blinks,” he said. “But if Israel defends itself, it’s a war crime.”

His refrain returned to fairness. “We have the same reaction as those little toads,” he joked, recalling a video of frogs fighting over a worm. “When we don’t see fairness, we attack.” The left, he said, twists that instinct into grievance—“Look, someone’s getting more than you”—and builds a politics of resentment.

Asked about letters of marque, Coleman smiled at the antiquarian term. “It’s an old tool,” he said. “A government could authorize private parties to go after pirates. A way of outsourcing law enforcement on the sea.” The analogy was clear: when the state abdicates, others must act.

In closing, Coleman was cautiously optimistic. “We’re in a transitional period,” he said. “Many of the abuses of the last twelve years are being undone. We have no guarantee of permanence, but the rules of the game have changed.” The left, he said, cannot stop revealing itself. “Being a Democrat only involves strategies to attain and retain power. Anything goes. That’s going to turn off more and more of the electorate.”

Coleman believes the future belongs to those who still believe in restraint, law, and accountability. “It’s about who’s answerable,” he said. “National conservatism is about making accountability the cornerstone of policy.” The rest, he added, “is noise.”