There’s too much at stake in today’s omni-powerful Supreme Court to let resumés be the gateway to a lifetime appointment. The narrow emphasis on “qualifications” has led to the domination of a cramped, elite clique from Harvard and Yale – eight of the nine went to the two Ivy Leaguers. This alone is immensely troubling. The Court has garnered unto itself too much power to allow only two insular academic monasteries to potentially take away our property and ruin our public spaces with needles, feces, and violence.
Today, Sen. Collins announced her support for Ketanji Brown Jackson (KBJ), the possible latest addition to the ever-growing Harvard faction on the Court. Here’s the mental trap of Sen. Collins and many others in the Senate who have embraced a rationale that results in the monopoly status of the two east coast campuses, in her own words:
“In my view, the role under the Constitution assigned to the Senate is to look at the credentials, experience and qualifications of the nominee. It is not to assess whether a nominee reflects the individual ideology of a senator or would vote exactly as an individual senator would want.”
Ever since the American Bar Association (ABA) was given a back channel in approving Court nominees (since the 1940s or 50s), a few ideological zealots of the kind that spill out onto our streets as raging mobs and into comfortable socio-political sinecures get the power to dictate to us who shares a locker room with our daughter, so long as they show the “prestige” of an Ivy League pedigree. Wallowing in the exclusive socio-political world of the Acela corridor is no longer considered a weakness but a strength for a majority in the Senate and the cadre running the ABA show.
Au contraire, Sen. Collins, ideology now matters a great deal. The battle lines are between originalists and the Living Constitution devotees. Making the Constitution a living thing means a form of interpretive evolution defined by the Left, the ethos of our campuses. A living Constitution is an anti-Constitution, no need for amendments, a legislature, or executive action – you know, the popular sovereignty arenas. KBJ is fully marinated in this anti-law version of law.
Don’t blame me for the oxymoron. Ideological acolytes like KBJ actively try to press it on us.
For the citizenry, we are reduced to quietly waiting for another ruling to stretch “equal protection” to cover who shares a school’s bathroom with our young daughters.
It’s gotten that bad. If the NCAA can betray our daughters, so can the courts. Both of them are a reflection of the college campus, and increasingly only two of them.
Please watch the CSPAN interview of Benjamin Barton, author of The Credentialed Court (click on the image). He adds the concern about an expertocratic groupthink on the most undemocratic, authoritarian branch in our government. In the program, watch for the near-uniform experience of having lived and worked as an adult almost exclusively in the geographic isolation of Washington, D.C., on today’s Court. For a lighter note of real diversity of experience on an earlier Court, listen for the description of Justice Byron White (JFK appointee). Fascinating, absolutely fascinating.
But let’s not forget, diversity of life experience as advocated by Professor Barton is secondary to ideology since one of the philosophical contenders, the living constitution, is such a grave threat to our way of life.
Porfessor Benjamin Barton, U. of Tennessee, and author of The Credentialed Court.
KBJ before the Senate Judiciary Committee considering her nomination for the Supreme Court.
We have reached the point of personal ideology being a disqualification for office. Progressivism has long been subversive of the rule of law. One commentator of recent memory called the progressive’s “living constitution” an ongoing, never-ending constitutional convention. Jurists under its sway can make and enforce law at will. No longer content with simply applying the law in court cases, they’ll force us back into the jungle of the rule of men (or women, or . . .), and away from the rule of law. We don’t need any more judges as potentates. That means a healthy “No” to KBJ.
KBJ is an embodiment of the threat to our civilizational order. It’s more than her refusal to define a woman when asked. Some of her rulings are just way out there, as in contortions to ignore the restraints in the job description in order to achieve long-sought lefty ends. She’s more of a revolutionary than a judge.
One example of the radical’s monstrous rationale came to the fore in committee hearings considering her nomination. Sen. Grassley (R, Iowa) brought to light her ruling as a DC District Court judge in Make the Road New York v. McAleenan, (2019). She, with a stroke of her pen, made a ruling in violation of the law. At issue is the power of the AG or Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS) to exercise “unreviewable” (by the courts) discretion to determine the classes of aliens eligible for expedited removal from the country (Immigration and Naturalization Act, section 1225). So, what did she do? She went ahead and “reviewed” the DHS decision.
She tried to hang her hat on the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), as if it was the wormhole to make reviewable what was clearly not reviewable. So astounded was the normally liberal DC Circuit Court of Appeals that a panel of the Court reversed and admonished her by ruling that,
“There could hardly be a more definitive expression of congressional intent to leave the decision about the scope of expedited removal, within statutory bounds, to the Secretary’s independent judgment.”
She was so intent on bashing the Trump administration’s immigration policies that she violated the law when making a decision on the law. Try to make sense of that. Some could try, given that many are completely unaware that Article III of the Constitution gives to Congress the power to set the federal courts’ appellate jurisdiction. In other words, by statute, “unreviewable” means “unreviewable” by KBJ, et al.
The APA is not to be confused, as she apparently did, with the Constitution. This person is a radical, an unhinged progressive, or maybe even a revolutionary. As such, her nomination should be rejected, if not setting her to face impeachment.
2015 meeting of the American Historical Association.
Thomas Piketty, an academic apostle of the Left, once crowed in 2016 of the increasing correlation of higher educational attainment and the tendency to vote Democratic: high school graduates 44%, Bachelor degrees 51%, Masters 70%, and PhD degrees 76%. Does this mean that smarter people vote for the Democrats? Hogwash. The gap between smartness and possession of degrees has not been greater than in our time.
It’s fair to say that degrees and certificates in many cases just paper over human failings. We are still prone to unexamined and purely fashionable beliefs, an overwhelming desire to win at any cost, the penchant to make facts fit predetermined conclusions, and let hubris cloud our vision. Nothing much has changed for many of us after many years of schooling. Today, we have many such highly educated ideologues circulating amongst us.
It’s not necessarily a sign of brilliance to almost uniformly take crass positions on highly contentious issues. It heralds, if anything, a blind deference to peer group pressure. Not exactly evidence of high intellectual acumen. Abortion is one issue that brings to light a kind of organized intellectual debasement among the highly papered.
Justice Harry Blackmun (r), author of the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade.
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is before the Supreme Court. The case has attracted amicus briefs like flies to a feed lot. Stepping into the fracas is the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians in support of the Roe decision and abortion as a right. That wasn’t the first time. In 1989, 400 of them displayed their pro-abortion bona fides in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services.
Strange thing, though, these doyens of historical truth based their position on a falsehood in the original Roe v. Wade decision that was allowed to marinate and pass into their “consensus”. The fallacy stems from the uncritical adoption of the historical exegesis of a lawyer and abortion activist, Cyril Means, Jr., back in 1973. Means contended that abortion was a common-law liberty before the 19th century. He mangled primary sources, such as Samuel Farr’s 1787 medical treatise, to make it sound like abortion was an acceptable practice back then. Instead, his source, Farr, makes the opposite point if Means had only turned a few more pages: “. . . unborn embryos . . . may be supposed indeed from the time of conception, to be living animated beings, there is no doubt but the destruction of them ought to be considered a capital crime.” Historians, of all people, should know better but these didn’t. Apparently, professional integrity must not be allowed to get in the way of prejudices.*
The issue has always been fraught with an emotional tug-of-war between the unborn child and the mother in distress, but it’s very probable that the practice was nonetheless condemned going back centuries. Scholars have uncovered indictments in the 13th century for the killing of unborn children. In 1602, a woman in Surrey, England, was indicted for ingesting poison to kill the “child in her womb”. Many such examples exist in the historical record.
One cause for the confusion has much to do with state of knowledge, or lack thereof at the time, of the embryo (discovered in 1827 and the beginning of embryology) and pregnancy in general which led to the complicated picture in regards to early pregnancy abortions. There were muddled attempts in a few instances at determining when the baby was “alive”, using the arcane language of the “quickening”. Remember, this was a time when medicine was under the sway of Aristotle’s four humors (body fluids). Confederate general Stonewall Jackson was said to ride into battle during the Civil War with one arm raised to keep the fluids in balance. Still, it’s fair to say that abortion has always been considered at least an “inchoate felony” in the common law. The “inchoate” part is tied to the limited pre-natal understanding of the era.
The four humors in a medieval text.
It’s scandalous that professional historians have become so ahistorical. It’s equally scandalous that legal experts are willing to use deceit to establish far-reaching precedents. An example is the factual fraud in Mapp v. Ohio in 1961. The SCOTUS decision extended the exclusionary rule (Weeks v. US, 1914) to state court cases. After Mapp, the most violent perps – these are 90% plus tried in state courts – have a new legal weapon in their arsenal to take a walk.
The legal chicanery revolved around the belated claim of a lack of a valid search warrant. The case went all the way to the US Supreme Court under the false assertion that there was no search warrant. A simple examination of past issues of the Cleveland Plain Dealer establish beyond doubt that a valid search warrant was issued to enter the apartment of Dollree Mapp whose boyfriend was a bombing suspect (later convicted). She was charged with the possession of obscene materials as a consequence of the search. Authorities couldn’t locate the warrant during the legal proceedings in her case, but that wasn’t unusual in the era before photocopying. At most, there might be one or two extra carbonized paper copies in a dank basement file room where decay was rampant. Anyway, it wasn’t thought to be relevant since the operative legal principle was that evidence was considered valid no matter how it got to the court if it had a bearing on the case.
Formal portrait of members of the United States Supreme Court,Washington DC, 1962. Pictured are, front row, from left, Justice Tom C Clark, Justice Hugo L Black, Chief Justice Earl Warren, Justice William O Douglas, and Justice John M Harlan; back row, from left, Justice Byron R White, Justice William J Brennan Jr, Justice Potter Stewart, and Justice Arthur J Goldberg.
Ohio was blindsided late in the game by the defense assertion of no valid search warrant and a call for the Court to apply the exclusionary rule in state jurisprudence. If it was understood to be a point of contention earlier in the process, more stringent efforts at storing and retrieving these documents would have been made. The Court took the side of Mapp: no warrant, no allowable evidence, perp takes a walk. Now, with its application in state courts, where the overwhelming number of violent suspects are tried, the rule is extended to a suspected serial killer as much as a porn enthusiast. And to think that it all rests on an untruth. So much for the integrity of the titans of the law.
Even in cases when the Court reaches the right conclusion, oftentimes the reasoning is littered with drivel. More than that, these decisions sometimes show the degree to which our judicial aristocrats get sucked into vogueish patterns of thought. A classic in how to meander in junk thought but end in the right place is 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education. To bolster their argument that racial segregation was unconstitutional, they resorted to the bag of tricks of ideologically charged social science researchers.
The married research team of Mamie and Kenneth Clark, MA student in psychology and CCNY prof respectively, conducted experiments that allegedly proved that black children were mentally and emotionally scarred to a greater degree by segregation. As proof, they conducted studies such as the famous doll test. A small group of children were given dolls of different skin and hair colors. The doll of the lighter shade was preferred by all children, including the black children. Based on these preferences and answers to follow-up questions, the Clarks concluded that black children were traumatized with self-hatred. They further asserted that it was more acute among black children in segregated environments such as segregated schools. The test’s claims were cited in Earl Warren’s majority opinion.
The Clarks’ doll experiment.The Clarks’ doll test with Kenneth Clark in the background.
Since that time, the failings of the experiment were laid bare. Everything from the small sampling to the biases of the researchers to the conclusions drawn from the children’s responses has drawn fire. Yet, there it was; a highly questionable study lassoed into the judgment of the most eminent jurists. The simple thought that crusading academics might not be the most reliable wasn’t a serious enough matter to avoid using them. Right conclusion in the decision, but a perplexing path to get there.
Later, the dam broke on using social science studies as a substitute and supplement to the law in judges’ decisions. The Coleman Report of 1966 proved to be a rich source to order forced busing, a court takeover of the management of the school districts in a region (St. Louis), and all sorts of incessant court and federal meddling in local schools. Earl Warren’s majority opinion in Brown set the precedent for incorporating activism, disguised as chic research, rather than the law, its text and history, into a court’s rulings. What’s next, filling court vacancies from the ranks of Harvard’s African and African-American Studies Department?
We are not well-served by the upper crust in many of our professions, our so-called best and brightest. Historians are ahistorical. The crème de la crème of the legal profession doesn’t hesitate to practice deceit to achieve the desired end. Shoddy social science studies are ingested into rulings that impact everyone in ways large and small. Maybe a civilization’s state of health is reflected in the state of health of its elites. Now that’s serious food for thought.
RogerG
*Read here: “The Corruption of History”, Ramesh Ponnuru, National Review, Nov. 29, 2021.
Justice Stephen Breyer is stepping down. Since the Supreme Court has insinuated itself in all matters of life, there’s much at stake when choosing a juridical potentate for a lifetime appointment. President Biden set down his criteria for filling the seat and, guess what, it has little to do with merit. It has everything to do with melanin count and genitalia. But does it, really?
In a pandering applause line to a radicalized party base in a debate, Biden boasted of a “black” and “women” choice. Do you think for a moment that’s what he’s really after? Do you think the “black” part is encapsulated in a Clarence Thomas? Do you think “black woman” means a Condoleezza Rice (NS advisor to Bush 43, former provost to Stanford University, Dir. of the Hoover Institution, and concert-quality pianist) or Winsome Sears (Lt. Gov. of Virginia)? No, the closest equivalent is Corey Bush, charter member of The Squad. Many of the women that he chooses are lefties, so much so that it’s hard to avoid the descriptor “socialist”.
Take for example his floundered choice for comptroller of the currency, Saul Omarova, a graduate of Moscow State University pre-Soviet collapse. This Cornell University prof favors a Fed takeover of banking, a proposal that would make Lenin’s corpse smile. Get the idea?
In a debate, Biden plaintively cried, “Do I look like a socialist?” I don’t know what a socialist “looks” like since many of them look like they stepped off the pages of style magazines. But I do expect a full-blown lefty of the kind that’ll produce the gibberish of a Sonia Sotomayor. Once installed, the appointee better have an army of clerks to clean up the mess in her opinions.
Get ready for a Supreme Court that looks like America: six sane ones, two Kool-Aid-drinking lefties, and one lefty trying to avoid the scat left by the other two.
Racialism can be easily overlooked if it is so commonplace. When it’s everywhere, it’s easy to become blasé about it. Yet, every now and then, we perk up when radicalism’s inanities poke through life’s hustle and bustle in the form of a Supreme Court justice like Sonia Sotomayor. Leaving aside the radicalism in her abortion views, her interrogations are absolutely nonsensical.
In her questioning of Scott Stewart, solicitor general of Mississippi defending the state’s law, she accused a possible majority of the justices of “politicizing” the Court if they should rule against her preferences. And I quote her highness:
“Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts? . . . . If people actually believe that it’s all political, how will we survive? How will the Court survive?”
It’s all political? Of course, it is. I reference Plato, Aristotle, Cicero. Before progressives expanded the government beyond its competence and forever tarred the word, “politics” was understood to be a community’s activity to decide what to do on matters before it. It’s about decision-making. In our constitutional system, the judiciary participates in quintessential decision-making. Have you noticed? Has she?
Was it only “politics” when the Court dealt a death blow to Jim Crow with Brown v. Board of Education? Was the Court only politicking when it invented a federal constitutional right to end the life of a fetus (abortion), the crux of the matter in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization before her Court? Take any case that would fit into her sacred canon of cases. Was the Court politicking in all of them? The Court is doing today what they did back then: make decisions.
Her apparent operating principle is that if the Court majority goes against her, it’s “politics”.
She has no observable ability to distinguish between proper and improper legal reasoning. Furthermore, she implicitly reserves for the Court the power to be a permanent constitutional convention, forever making up rules and rights as fits the fancies of bullying crowds from the campus and gaggle of Democratic Party allies.
Check out this gem of an excuse for the Court to do whatever it wants:
“. . . there’s so much that’s not in the Constitution, including the fact that we have the last word. Marbury versus Madison. There is not anything in the Constitution that says that the Court, the Supreme Court, is the last word on what the Constitution means. It was totally novel at that time. And yet, what the Court did was reason from the structure of the Constitution that that’s what was intended.
“They have all [newly minted rights such as abortion, gay marriage, contraception, etc.], like Marbury versus Madison, been discerned from the structure of the Constitution.”
Is there anything that can’t be drawn from “the structure of the Constitution” in the mind of Sotomayor? What’s her limiting principle? The Casey case of the 1990’s supplanted Roe regarding abortion and hung the right on “liberty”. “Liberty” becomes the license to do anything. All she would need is access “penumbras and emanations” (words from Casey) to invent a new constitution. This isn’t the rule of law; it’s the rule of men/women/whatever.
The “For the People Act” would make wide-open absentee voting the new norm.
H1/S1, the “For the People Act”, is actually the “For the Democrats Act”. It would codify the Democrats’ enthusiasm for mass producing votes, real or imagined. But regardless, the thing is unconstitutional. It would make a shambles of the US Constitution’s Article 1, Sec. 4, Cl. 1. The Clause reads:
“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but Congress may at any time make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Place of chusing [sic] Senators.”
According to the Democrats’ wild reading of the Constitution, the clause behind the semi-colon eliminates the one in front. But why would Madison and company bother writing “shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature” if Pelosi and Schumer could erase it with the “make or alter” in the secondary part of the sentence? That’s certainly what H1/S1 does. It’s a federal takeover of all elections in the country. Here’s how:
It effectually repeals a state’s voter ID laws.
It lacerates a state’s registration requirements. It commands same-day registration for all states which would make it impossible to validate a voter before they vote as the thing is then allowed to untraceably flow into the river of votes to the counting center. It decrees automatic registration from government databases (DMV) which ropes in the eligible with the ineligible. States would be required to allow the registration of 16 and 17-year-olds. What would stop them from voting since the ID laws were emasculated? If that isn’t enough, a state’s laws to clean up the registration lists would be repealed through a variety of petty and self-serving legalisms.
The act of voting according to a state’s laws would be altered beyond recognition. Mail-in voting with ballots shot-gunned to the wind would be the new norm coast to coast, all of it with no validation of a signature or anything else for that matter. Ballots can be dropped off anywhere, any precinct, and by anyone. Combined with the rest of the loosey-goosey provisions, who know who’s voting and from where? To boot, party activists are empowered to sweep the area to collect the things (ballot harvesting). No potential for fraud there?
Election Day becomes a minimum of Election Two Weeks+1 by federal edict. People get a chance to vote before they know all the issues, like a presidential candidate’s son engaging in influence-peddling that also implicates the presidential candidate. The idea is to get votes in the bank before the digging can expose the candidate as a scoundrel.
The First Amendment would be under permanent siege with provisions criminalizing political speech. George Soros’s and Biden’s lefty DA’s would have a field day going after anyone who dared to stand athwart their vision of the “right side of history” – reminiscent of Lenin’s “ground down by the wheels of history”.
Congressional redistricting, a clear power of the states (Art. 1, Sec.2), would be rendered moot by the bill’s order for every state to have unelected redistricting commissions. Once again, another slice of the Constitution is made silent by narrowly partisan congressional gamesmanship.
Now this is real chutzpah: the bill would restrict the power of the Court to hear suits against the bill. They aren’t happy with silencing opposition. They desire to muzzle the Court.
Simply put, this rotten fish wouldn’t pass legal muster. In today’s Court, judicial review can’t be repealed when fundamental federalism and personal rights are being flattened. Here’s a list of Court precedents that are steamrolled by the monstrosity:
NAACP v. Alabama: The concomitant intimidation against opposition political groups in the bill’s disclosure requirements violates NAACP’s key finding that a group’s associational rights are protected by the 14th Amendment.
Citizens United v. FEC: Political groups have First Amendment protections to shield them harassment.
Allen v. Cooper, Board of Trustees of the University of Alabama v. Garrett, City of Boerne v. Flores, Cutter v. Wilkinson: All concern the “congruence and proportionality” standard. The rule sates that a federal statute can’t be overly broad when it crosses into the states’ constitutional powers and must be tailored to specific ends that are validated by heavy evidentiary findings. By any stretch of the imagination, H1/S1 doesn’t cut it. Pelosi rushed this thing through without much of a hearing back in 2019, only to bring the thing back again in 2021 now that Schumer, at least nominally, is calling the shots in the Senate. The atrocity is ripe for the Court’s guillotine in spite of their best efforts at garroting the Court.
Senate Republicans stepped into the breach. They aborted the thing before the Court would have to do a later-term version of the act, to borrow the lingo from the long-simmering abortion debate.
RogerG *Source: https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/report/the-facts-about-hr-1-the-the-people-act-2021 *Source: https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/07/even-if-congress-pretends-h-r-1-is-constitutional-the-supreme-court-cant/ *Also on my Facebook page.
Remember the Supreme Court’s decision in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo in November of last year. It slapped down Cuomo’s near lockdown of church in his state. The Court ruled that he couldn’t have more severe restrictions on places of worship than for other organizations. Soon after, Harvest Rock Church and Ministry in California filed suit to challenge Newsom’s assault on faith. Their case reached the Court and it referred the matter back to the 9th Circuit with the stipulation to follow the decision in Brooklyn. Meaning, California was slapped down again.
Harvest Rock Church in Pasadena, Ca.
But wait, there’s more. The governor will be forced to pay the $1.35 million legal tab in a settlement on file with the 9th Circuit. But wait, there’s more. Newsom will be the first governor in history to be under a federal injunction to protect houses of worship. According to one source, “the state of California is now under a permanent injunction from imposing restrictions on churches and houses of worship that are not equally applied to other critical infrastructure or essential services.”
The Court has had enough of California’s extremist state government. But what of the state’s electorate who keeps sending these Maduro-loving clowns to Sacramento in super majorities? Recent opinion polls indicate that Newsom is set to survive the recall. Maybe it’s not surprising. The guy is buying votes by flooding the state with millions of checks. Apparently, that’s all it takes to keep the state in its current morass of blackouts, punishing taxes, rampaging wildfires, bad roads, cities that look like homeless Woodstocks, water shortages, empty prisons/rising crime, and a permanent condition of lockdown.
California voters, after all, it was always up to you.
Florida authorities serving a search warrant on her apartment for her theft of confidential data and equipment.Rebekah Jones booking photo, January 2021. She was booked for hacking the state’s computer system and stealing the confidential files of thousands of Floridians.
If our debate over criminal justice reform centers on a cessation of prisons being prep schools for more violent hoodlums and the reintegration of convicts back into society, I am in whole-hearted agreement. However, the argument frequently strays into the dark territory of repealing three strikes or decriminalization. The Rebekah Jones story illustrates the problem in taking this path.
To put it succinctly, the overwhelming mass of suspects had many run-ins with the criminal justice system before they actually landed their first felony conviction on the scoreboard. Take for instance the aforementioned Rebekah Jones, the person at the center of efforts to defame Florida Governor DeSantis’s COVID-response record. She’s a real piece of work.
Let’s start with a couple of things that she kept out of her application for employment with the Florida Department of Health. In Louisiana in 2018, she agreed to a pre-trial intervention program to avoid conviction for “battery of a police officer”. Prior to that, she evaded a 2017 conviction in Florida for “criminal mischief” by entering into a deferred-prosecution agreement. And that’s not all.
The public record on Rebekah Jones is chock-full of other nefarious stunts. An ex-boyfriend acquired a restraining order on her for damaging his car and the harassment of his mother. She was fired from a position with Florida State University for having sex with a student and lying about her criminal record. A stalking case against her in Florida is currently under investigation. She couldn’t restrain herself from texting pics of her ex-boyfriend’s genitals. This girl has a track record of little self-restraint, and it shows. Boy does it show.
Right now, Rebekah Jones is the darling of the left. They see her as their avatar to bring down their Dark Lord, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. This episode only proves the degree that politics poisons the well. She’s given a free pass for a long trail of abusive behavior right up to her being canned on May 12, 2020. How many others on the dock are actually facing DA’s and judges who are fed up with having the same person appear before them over and over again, like Rebekah Jones?
The Left ought to choose their friends more wisely. And reform activists should be careful before they succeed in unleashing troubled people back into our neighborhoods before we know the whole story. We, and they, will get more than what we bargained for.
You can read about Rebekah Jones in Charles C. W. Cooke’s excellent piece in National Review.
Defense attorney Eric Nelson, left, and defendant former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin listen as Assistant Minnesota Attorney General Matthew Frank, questions witness Christopher Martin during the Chauvin trial.
If you think that the conviction of Derek Chauvin is the end of it, you’re a fool. Winston Churchill said it best in 1942: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” There was a ring of hope in Churchill’s words for Brits after the Battle of Britain; not so for us. Now, America, we are really going to be in for it.
This is more than about Chauvin. The Chauvin trial should have been about a police officer’s abuse of his power. Instead, it was taken along in a flood of revolutionary fervor to change America beyond recognition. The verdict only fed the beast, the beast being the organized hustle of “systemic racism”; and the beast needs more feeding. Like everything else, the Chauvin/Floyd incident was thrown into this mythical-racism maelstrom. These radicals won’t be satisfied with a single conviction. Their goal is to make America unrecognizable and, hence, unlivable for the rest of us.
BLM protesters in Minneapolis.
After reading the press reports this morning, a common reaction to the verdict is a collective “sigh of relief” with calls to “reimagine” policing and continue the fight against the spectral “systemic racism”. In both cases, we’re going to be screwed with more violent streets, an epidemic of resisting arrest, riots, and a bloated federal monster rooting around in nearly all aspects of our lives. Yes, we’re going to be in for it.
The oft-quoted “sigh” concerns the relief that the mob got what it wanted and we’re safe from them torching our cities . . . for now. That’s the ticket: public tranquility guaranteed by indulging the mob. You don’t have to look very far to see what we’re in store for. Kids will tell you what it’s like in a playground with a few bullies and no adults. Make no mistake about it, we are entering a time of public policy and justice under the gun of mob intimidation. The collective “sigh” is worrisome in the extreme.
The trial was organized at the outset to be exposed to the mob. The judge amazingly refused to grant a change of venue or even sequester the jury. The jury during the trial could have been pummeled by media stories of the mayhem 10 miles up the interstate from the courtroom (and home to one of the jurors), the Maxine Waters flame-thrower inciting more violence, the intimidation of a defense witness, the general turmoil outside the courtroom, and the year-long mayhem across blue-America. We won’t know if they were affected by the intense rancor till many moons later, but nonetheless the judge’s decisions will forever taint the trial.
The tactic of intimidation to further the ends of the revolution isn’t limited to the miscreants of Black Lives Matter on the streets of Minneapolis. The tactic of court-packing by the Jacobins of the donkey party isn’t solely meant to land four new lefties on the Supreme Court. It serves the function of intimidating the court. Justice, the cement of a civilized society, could be compromised by justices, like the institutionalist John Roberts, constantly looking over their shoulders at the threats coming from the mob soldiers running the show in Congress and the senescent Biden administration. They will have won without seating more radicals if the Court caves. Remember, in the end, back in the thirties, FDR won without successfully packing it.
Evil winds are blowing. Given all that has happened, and likely to happen, this is not a time to go into law enforcement. It’s a perilous profession that will be “reimagined” into more peril for those in its ranks. If you’re already in it, and of a ripe age, fill out the retirement papers. If you’re younger than that, you have a big decision to make: stay or leave. If you’re a young whippersnapper looking to join, consider becoming an astronaut. I hear that a mission to Mars is in the offing.
For the regular Joe and Judy six-pack, don’t expect 911 to matter anymore. We’re on our own.
In case you haven’t heard, Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski was just decided at the Supreme Court. Wow, in a 8-1 decision, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing for the majority, the college woke universe was dealt a blow! In a nutshell, as a result of this decision, these bastions of the left’s ministry of truth are skating on thin ice when they attempt to muzzle free speech. It’s about time!
It all started at Georgia Gwinnett College. The College, a new addition (2006) to the Georgia public university system, is modern in more than its buildings. It’s thoroughly modern in its wokeness.
An evangelical student, Chike Uzuegbunam, tried to disseminate literature and engage with fellow students but was smacked down by the school’s Politburo. Check this out: He was told that he must submit an application for a permit three days in advance and then he is to be penned in one of two “free-speech zones”. These so-called zones have a calendar and geographic dimension. The pens are only open 18 hours a week. On a Friday, the clock starts ticking at 11 a.m. and stops at 1 p.m.
Chike Uzuegbunam before the US Supreme Court
That’s not all. After he got his permit and went to the appointed spot at the appointed time, he was stopped by campus cops. They were enforcing the school’s ban on “disturb[ing] the peace and/or comfort of person(s)”. It seems that hearing about the resurrected Christ is harmful to the school’s Wicca followers and anyone else in full rebellion mode against the most prevalent faith in the country, like the majority in the faculty lounge.
He sued, and the Alliance Defending Freedom took up his cause. Here’s an organization worth contributing to. You can donate here.
My only question at this point concerns the campus cops. How can they in good conscience enforce these obviously horrendous administrative decrees? I’m reminded of the defense at the Nuremberg Tribunals in 1946: We were following orders. Are these uniformed personnel willing to commit disgusting acts for a secure job with good pay and benefits? At least for some, it must have dawned on them that this is wrong, clearly, unmistakably wrong. Yet they still carried it out. Shame on them. Shame on them.
