Tag: justice

Cosmic or Merely Comic?

Jussie Smollett, woke, victim, progressivism

A number of important criminal trials are bunching up together at the moment. The Rittenhouse acquittal came first, but the Coffee and Arbery verdicts, along with it, also qualified as major milestones. Looming over our heads is perhaps the headiest of all, the Ghislaine Maxwell honey pot case. But for the wildest comedy, there’s Jussie Smollett’s.

The story is such a travesty it is hard not to laugh — especially if you have heard comedian Dave Chappelle’s bit about “the French actor, Juicy Smolliet.”

Eddie Scarry, writing in The Federalist, provides a less humorous take: “Smollett wasn’t engaging in a hoax. He was perpetuating a scam and that scam has a name. It’s called ‘social justice.’”

Scarry makes a case for Smollett’s rationality: “It’s not like Smollett is a demonstrable sociopath who told an aimless lie about being attacked by Trump supporters in 2019 for the sake of it.” When he hired two Nigerians to fake a racist, homophobic attack on him, he did so with a purpose: to parlay rampant “woke” sentiment to gain fame and fortune. “This is what our entire culture is teaching now — that the quickest way to advance is to claim victimhood on account of race, sex, or sexual identity — ideally, some combination of all three.”

While the scam element is obvious in Smollett’s greed, social justice itself is not a scam. It is an ideology of constant revolution, always to re-make the world over to correct for cosmic injustices.

And it’s more: Social justice is open-source psychological warfare. It doesn’t need centralized control — though it has some, in the form of the insider elitists — because its strength comes from the distributed acceptance and performances of its hapless criminal pushers.

Thankfully, comic criminality may undermine its allure.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags fake news, Jussie Smollett, justice, media, PSYOP, social justice, woke culture

free trade & free markets

Meritocracy a Myth?

COVID and the pandemic panic have not been kind to small businesses, but some entrepreneurs have skyrocketed their wealth. Months ago, CNBC’s Gary Cohn waxed enthusiastic for “the banner year for newly minted American billionaires,” citing among reasons to celebrate “the possibility that it can happen to other people. . . .”

Reporting on three new billionaires from Doordash and “the winner of the week, Brian Chesky, AirBNB CEO,” CNBC’s Robert Frank said the recent uptick was “really inspirational no matter what your point of view.”

Wrong, says Kyle Kulinksi, a thoroughly unimpressed progressive podcaster, dissing the segment as “everything that’s terrible about CNBC in one clip.”

Now, I can imagine worrying about the context of celebrating a few folks’ success while so many others have been hit hard by bad policy and a virus, all the while big business (especially banks) have been subsidized with “stimulus.” But, Mr. Kulinski explains, “the main problem” is that CNBC’s encomiasts “clearly believe in the myth of meritocracy.”

Kulinski then yammers on about hard-working folks who got nowhere in life working three jobs. “The idea that the reason why these people are getting wealthy is because they’ve just worked harder than anybody else — that’s provably not true.”

And then proceeds not to prove it.

Kulinski errs in focusing on “working hard” in sheer physical and time-suck terms. But to the extent we have a meritorious meritocracy, the merit rests on what CNBC’s Cohn called “work hard and have a great idea.” Emphasize the “and” — remembering that “great ideas” are those that extend value to others via trade.

Value isn’t measured in BTU’s and time-clock ticks.

Kulinski should have noticed the big truth about these gig economy billionaires: they have allowed normal people to take their investments in household production — their homes and their cars — and turn them into capital goods for services on the open market.

They created new markets . . . wherein all participants gain.

That is progress.

But not, apparently, “progressive.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags envy, justice, work

crime and punishment ideological culture

The Portland Chaos

“As a lifelong Portlander,” Alan Grinnell writes to the editor of The Oregonian, “I am shocked at what our city has become.”

Responding to a Steve Duin column about Portland, the “broken city,” Grinnell asks, rhetorically, “Who would have thought that our downtown would become a wasteland, that there would be homeless camps everywhere in the city, and that gangs of armed thugs on all sides of the political spectrum would run out our police?”

Duin defined the problem as one of “mob rule,” lamenting that “just about everyone I spoke to was terrified they might be the next random target of the mob.”

After months of riots and property destruction following the killing of George Floyd by police in distant Minneapolis, Minnesota, the focus of recent police and community attention turned to a house on Mississippi Street from which so-called “sovereign citizens” — the Kinney family (who are black and indigenous) — were evicted for not paying their mortgage (since 2017). Now the house is being occupied by “activists,” who have turned the area into a sort of autonomous zone — as was done for weeks this summer, dangerously, in the Capitol Hill area of Seattle.

“[I]f you live or tend shop on North Mississippi, and fear for your own safety around the local ‘security’ forces,” inquired the columnist, “what do you make of the cops’ retreat from the neighborhood?”

While many appear sympathetic with the Kinneys’ plight, the takeover by the terrorists, er, activists, is another matter entirely. One black man on reddit calls it “one big scam,” suggesting folks “ignore these loons.”

But ignoring willful lawbreakers appears to be the problem, not the solution.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags crime, justice, police, Portland

Accountability crime and punishment

Not Above the Law

Should government officials be free to violate the rights of others so long as they are doing their job at the time?

With impunity?

That’s the question that the Institute for Justice is arguing before the Supreme Court in Brownback v. King.

The case concerns James King, whom officers of the law mistook for a fugitive. When they grabbed his wallet and demanded to know his name, King ran, thinking he was being mugged. The officers pursued him and and then viciously assaulted him — nearly killing him.

Later, the government concocted bogus charges to try to force King to accept a plea bargain. The idea was to prevent him from suing the government for the way he had been treated.

King did not cooperate.

The problem? Many government officials in many circumstances have a get-out-of-prosecution-free card. The doctrine that confers this card is called “qualified immunity.”

In the 1982 case Harlow v. Fitzgerald, the Supreme Court opined that this immunity is warranted by “the need to protect officials who are required to exercise discretion” and “can be penetrated only when they have violated clearly established statutory or constitutional rights.”

In practice, however, the immunity being granted often seems more unqualified than qualified.

IJ’s premise is simple. “Government officials are not above the law,” says IJ President Scott Bullock. “Those who are charged with enforcing our nation’s laws should be more — not less — accountable for their unconstitutional acts.”

In a free society, police cannot brutally beat innocent people and get away with it. Can they?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags justice, police brutality, qualified immunity

judiciary partisanship U.S. Constitution

Heal or Heel?

Supreme Court, packing, packed, red, blue, Republican,Democrat, right, left, partisan,

Call it High Court chutzpah?

In a Second Amendment case seeking U.S. Supreme Court review, five U.S. Senators have filed an amicus curie or “friend of the court” brief . . . that wasn’t very friendly.

“The Supreme Court is not well,” argue Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) in their brief against the Court accepting the case. “Perhaps the Court can heal itself before the public demands it be ‘restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics.’”

A not-very-veiled threat.

Is their goal really to ‘reduce political influence’? Or to leverage influence against the Court should it not “heal itself” — or come to heel — by authoring judicial decisions more to Democrats’ liking?

Seven Democratic presidential contenders, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Kristen Gillibrand, support court packing — having the next Democrat-controlled Congress increase the size of the SCOTUS beyond nine justices, to 12 or 15.

“[M]ost Americans recognize this tactic for what it is, which is a direct attack on the independence of the Supreme Court,” Sarah Turberville and Anthony Marcum write in The Hill. “It is no coincidence that court packing is employed by would be autocrats all over the world rather than by leaders of liberal democracies.”

To supposedly “depoliticize” the “partisan” Supreme Court, Mayor Pete Buttigieg wants to pick five justices to represent Democrats and five to represent Republicans, and then those ten would together choose five additional justices.

Nothing like being overtly partisan to vanquish partisanship, eh?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags blind justice, court packing, Democrat, judicial, justice, law, left, partisan, partisanship, Republican, right, Supreme Court

crime and punishment

Guilty. Guilty! Guilty?

“No responsible prosecutor,” Alan Dershowitz writes in The Hill, “should ever suggest that the subject of his investigation might indeed be guilty even if there was insufficient evidence or other reasons not to indict.”

Don’t I know it.

The world-famous lawyer takes issue with the “statement by special counsel Robert Mueller in a Wednesday press conference that ‘if we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that.’”* Dershowitz makes a good case that the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ principle requires the government not merely to refrain from imposing punishment before obtaining a lawful conviction, but also to hold back from punishing people by making loud public claims about their supposed guilt.

Which brings to mind my own experience at U.S. Term Limits. In 1994, we ran radio ads and sent mail to citizens in two Oklahoma congressional districts and one in Kentucky. We did not urge a vote for or against anyone, but merely provided information on where the candidates stood.

Yet, prompted by a complaint from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which prefers ignorant to knowledgeable voters, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) investigated.

As if to foreshadow current prosecutorial proclivities, the FEC abandoned its witch hunt after two long years. Relieved the agency’s harassment was finally over, I remember opening an Oklahoma newspaper and discovering a story headlined, “Term Limits Group Violated Law in State, U.S. Agency Charges.”

This problem goes well beyond Mr. Mueller and President Trump. Government agencies that cannot prosecute, should not persecute.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Dershowitz calls Mueller’s comments “worse than the statement made by then-FBI Director James Comey regarding Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign.”

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