Summary Justice Takes Over

Speaking of justice, we all know that our American concept of same involves granting the accused the due process of law. We have a visceral dislike of summary justice and of retaliatory justice-- to say nothing of lynchings. And we believe fervently in forgiveness-- we are strongly opposed to the concept of an unforgivable sin-- unless, to quote the New Testament-- it involves blaspheming the Holy Ghost. For those who are not very well versed in theology, Augustine interpreted it to mean that the only unforgivable sin was impenitence.

Anyway, we live in a time when all of that has been turned to rubble. Summary justice, destroying careers, lives and families, declaring the use of the wrong language to be an unforgivable sin-- these are the hallmarks of today’s Black Lives Matter protests. The radical left in this country has no use for due process of law-- certainly not when it comes to tearing down statues, fire bombing stores, assaulting police officers...regardless of the law. And those who are accused of thought crimes have no chance to defend themselves. 

Due process of law involves rational judgment and the rights to confront one’s accuser. It also involves being judged by a jury of one’s peers.

As noted, no one cares about that any more, a distinguished product of the Anglo-Saxon judicial system. Our radical left, lacking in the rational capacity or the temperament to engage in an unbiased determination of guilty or not guilty, has resorted to summary judgment.

They rationalize their position by saying that once upon a time blacks were subjected to summary judgment, even to the point of being lynched. They are simply returning the disfavor, by the law of the talion: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. They would have done better to go back to the Bible where it says not to get even, but to do unto others as one would have others do unto you. This is to be found in the book of Leviticus and in the Gospels.

Anyway, where did our social justice warriors get the idea that we should dispense with the due process of law and proceed to retaliatory justice. You guessed it: they got it from the Obama Department of Education. By the use of administrative edict colleges and universities were told by the Obama administration that they were no longer to grant due process of law to any man accused of sexual assault. Presumably it would empower women and allow them to destroy men's lives on their say-so. 

The New York Times reports on the Obama rule, recently overturned by the Trump Education department (via Maggie’s Farm):

The Obama administration directives created a system centered on the person making the complaint. They discouraged universities from giving the accused the right to question accusers or to learn the identity of witnesses. In some cases, the accused could not see the full evidence against them. The rules defined sexual harassment broadly as “any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature.”

Perhaps most controversially, Obama officials encouraged universities to appoint a single official who acted as detective, prosecutor, judge and jury. And they set a lower bar to determine guilt, changing from “clear and convincing” to “more likely than not,” known colloquially in legal circles as the “50 percent plus a feather” test.

Now, it has all been changed by Betsy DeVos. The Times continues:

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos fired a shot last month in the nation’s culture wars, overhauling how colleges handle investigations of sexual assault and ending what she called Obama-era “kangaroo courts” on campus.

The new Education Department rules give more protections to the accused, primarily young men who face discipline or expulsion as a result of allegations of sexual misconduct.

As you may know, leftist advocate groups were horrified to see malevolent creatures like toxic males granted the right to due process of law.

The move set off a liberal uproar, denounced by unions representing teachers and college professors, by the National Organization for Women and by an array of Democratic senators. The Trump rules, they said, constitute a radical rollback of protections for victims who seek justice after sexual assaults.

And yet, unsurprisingly, a band of intrepid feminist legal scholars applauded the DeVos initiative. I say, unsurprisingly, because legal scholars have long objected to the Obama administration rules and have long testified in favor of the men who were unjustly convicted by said rules.

… an influential group of feminist legal scholars … applauded the administration for repairing what they viewed as unconscionable breaches in the rights of the accused.

“The new system is vastly better and fairer,” said Prof. Janet Halley, who specializes in gender and sexuality at Harvard Law School. “The fact that we’re getting good things from the Trump administration is confusing, but isn’t it better than an unbroken avalanche of bad things?”

Coming from law professors, it’s good news indeed. Unfortunately, those who have no use for the rule of law or the due process of law are now marching through American cities and through the American media meting out retaliatory and summary justice.

Now we know that such people ever had any use for democratic institutions.

The French Revolution Redux

How’s your knowledge of history? Is it any better than that of New York Times editors?

OK, I realize that that is not a very high hurdle to clear, because Times staffers already mounted an insurrection over a Sen. Tom Cotton op-ed. They managed to make the company president eat his words. They got the editorial page editor fired.

The issue arose when Sen. Lindsey Graham pointed out that today’s Democratic Party is in thrall to the radical left-- please do yourself a favor and stop calling it progressive.

When Rep. Eliot Engel a thirty year Congressman from Queens lost a primary to an anti-Semitic crackpot called Jamaal Bowman, Graham posited that the Jacobin left had taken over the Democratic Party. For the record, Bowman attacked Engel for being pro-Israeli. In today’s Democratic Party it’s the kiss of death. 

Jews who are supporting Black Lives Matter are in serious need of a brain transplant.

Anyway, Graham wrote this, via Tyler O'Neil:

It appears the French Revolution has now come to the Democratic Party based on initial primary results from New York and Kentucky. If you had any doubts about who is in charge of the Democratic Party ALL doubts should have been removed…

Every elected Democrat in office, and every Democrat running for office, lives in fear of the mob and The Squad. The idea of working with President [Trump] to accomplish objectives to help America is a one way ticket to political exile…. The Democrat Party will be held captive by the most radical political mob in modern American history. Their power and electoral success appears to be growing day by day.

For those who have forgotten their history the Jacobin Party was the most radical part of the political movement that followed the 1789 overthrow of the regime.

Anyway, Graham’s remarks were certainly colorful, but calling out America-hating radical leftists does not seem like an exaggeration.

Consider the New York Times. Tyler O’Neil reminds us that the Times’ revisionist history of the United States laid the groundwork for hating the country:

The lawlessness and mob rule across America arguably represents the victory of The New York Times‘s “1619 Project” and its attempt to convince Americans that the true founding of this nation did not come with the Declaration of Independence in 1776 but with the arrival of the first black slaves in 1619. The narrative of America as a racist, sexist, classist, heteronormative force of oppression helps propel AOC’s movement, the riots, and the iconoclasts.

For promoting this slander the Times won a Pulitzer Prize.

But then, a New York Times editor, by name of Don Saltzstein, took grievous offense at the Graham analogy:

The French Revolution, you say? In which rising social and economic inequality led to a democratic overthrow of a monarchy and the establishment of a republic? That French Revolution? 

Not to be outdone in stupid, a Vox writer offered her ill-informed views:

Vox writer Katelyn Burns suggested the French Revolution (1789-1815) was a “forebear” for the American Revolution (1776-1783). [She wrote] “Ah yes, the infamous French Revolution, which overthrew an out of touch royalty and aristocracy out of power to install an American style democracy."

It was slightly embarrassing to see that Burns did not know that the American Revolution predated its French counterpart, so the tweet was deleted.

And James Gleick, notable writer about science stood tall and proud for the madness called the French Revolution:

Is Lindsey aware that the French Revolution, inspired by the American Revolution a few years earlier, toppled an authoritarian regime in the name of equality and natural rights? Liberté, fraternité, égalité, Lindsey!

For the record, if you ask serious French intellectuals they will tell you, with a straight face, that the French rabble stormed the Bastille prison and released the inmates because the authoritarian monarchy had locked up a man by the name of the Marquis de Sade. Why did it imprison de Sade? Well, he had been drugging and raping women. 

No kidding. The same French intellectuals who were defending notable self-proclaimed pedophile, Gabriel Matzneff, more recently, had previously been defending a serial rapist. Why were they doing so? Because they thought that the French Revolution was about liberating libido-- consent be damned.

Among those of greater mental capacity psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan once opined that the only freedom granted by the French Revolution was the freedom to starve.

Anyway, the French Revolution quickly led to a Reign of Terror in 1793. After the economy collapsed, Napoleon took over and produced endless warfare across the European continent. Eventually, France brought back the monarchy.

O’Neil explains:

For those who might not be aware, the French Revolution devolved into a Reign of Terror (September 1973-July 1974) under the Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre. After the revolutionaries beheaded King Louis XVI in 1793, the squabbling factions began executing nobles, priests, and eventually revolutionaries who disagreed with them. Robespierre himself infamously found his own head chopped off after he led this terror in the name of republican “virtue.”

Under Robespierre during the Reign of Terror, France renamed the months of the year, swapped the 7-day week for a 10-day week, and murdered hundreds of priests in an attempt to wipe out Catholic Christianity in France and replace it with the Cult of the Supreme Being. Ironically, the revolutionaries cut off the heads of kings on the Notre Dame Cathedral, thinking they were the kings of France — when they were really the biblical kings of Judah.

Ultimately, the French Revolution failed. Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself emperor in 1804, conquered large swaths of Europe, and then lost the definitive Battle of Waterloo in 1815. The victorious allies installed a new king, Louis XVIII.

Anyway, Saltzstein, good Timesman that he is, declared that of course he understood perfectly what happened during the French Revolution. He just wanted to trash Lindsey Graham. And who cares about facts when you are trashing Lindsey Graham.

O’Neil concludes:

If Saltzstein knew about the trajectory of the French Revolution, as he now claims, why did he initially defend it? Could it be that some leftists are inspired by the French Revolution, Reign of Terror included? The proto-Communists in the Paris Commune were, and Karl Marx hailed the Paris Commune as a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” Rioters have burned churches and the City of Birmingham, Ala., canceled a church’s lease because the pastor had “liked” supposedly offensive tweets.

The mob rule spreading across America certainly does echo the Reign of Terror, and now is not the time to be defending the French Revolution. Let’s not forget: the American Revolution was far better, though it was hardly a “revolution” at all.

Joe Biden's Dementia

Here are a few words from the man who is currently leading in all of the presidential polls. Does this sound like a future president of the United States? How did the American people get conned by this?

Here Biden (via Stephen Green)is explaining to Barack Obama why he does not need to campaign.

In Biden's words:

Mass migration, disruptive impacts of technologies, strengthen the global health security, stop, stop the cold… war… future that we’re talking about. We’re talking about a [stumble], a peaceful cold war [stumble]. What are we talkin’ about?

What to Do about Noisy Neighbors

Where did people ever get the idea that they should suffer in silence? Where did the idiots who inhabit Powderhorn Park get the idea that they ought to tolerate criminal behavior, because calling the police makes them less woke?

Well, they might have gotten it from Carolyn Hax. I suspect that Hax is reading the mood of the country correctly, but she is also bowing to it. I suppose that weak-kneed columnists do not have the gumption to stand up against the mob, or against a home invasion. No, not a home invasion mounted by a criminal gang. A home invasion by neighbors who are incapable of turning the music down. 

As most of us know, noise is a pollutant. If you must play loud music, get yourself some headphones, but do not impose your bad taste and your bad hearing on other people, especially not on your neighbors. You might pretend to be courteous and offer your neighbors the right to tell you to tone it down, yet, if the music is too loud all the time, you are saying, by your actions, that you have no respect for them or their feelings.

So, what’s a woman to do? Here is the letter:

Six months ago, reduced circumstances led me to move to a neighborhood with very small yards. Each house is roughly 15 feet away from the next, and the backyards are tiny. For this reason, I'm very careful that my children and I are never loud enough to disturb our neighbors.

New people moved here a few months ago. They seem nice, but regularly play music loud enough to hear clearly through closed windows. They've mentioned having outdoor speakers for their music, and asked me to tell them if their noise was ever too much.

But it's always too loud — and I don't want to seem like the mean old lady who would never have them use their equipment. Yet, why would anyone install outdoor speakers in a setting like ours, as we all live so near to each other?

They also had an outdoor gathering until 1 a.m., with the conversation becoming increasingly vulgar as the evening wore on, presumably due to drink. I could clearly hear everything and felt embarrassed for them, and hoped my kids were asleep.

Should I remain patient or say something, as they requested? Their noise doesn't last all day and isn't every single day. But it's very grating when it happens. I'm nearly a senior citizen and don't want to seem like a spoilsport, unfriendly or intolerant.

Am I overreacting? Perhaps it's the norm in such neighborhoods to accept hearing others enjoying their lives.

When your enjoyment infringes on your neighbor’s privacy, to say nothing of her peace and quiet, you are not just enjoying your life. You are imposing yourself on others. And you are being grossly inconsiderate.

Hax thinks that it’s all about “joyous noise.” But, when this joyous noise is so loud you cannot hold a conversation in your living room, or when it keeps your children up at night, it is a violation of your home.

Hax is clearly wrong about this. She understands the points I am making, but opts for "joyous noise"-- and not confronting neighbors whose musical aggression counts as threatening:

Music is joyous noise. Even music you wouldn’t have chosen yourself, up too loud, coming from your neighbor’s yard.

This isn’t everyone’s view, obviously, and it’s a nearly impossible one to hold if the music is offensive, bad, constant, distracting or in open defiance of a polite request to turn it down.

But by your description that’s not what you have here — so maybe use their courtesies as opportunities to think less music stoppage and more affirmation of life.

So, Hax does admit that she can ask the neighbors to turn down the volume. But how long will that last. The letter writer understands, better than Hax, that it is not a very viable solution. At 1:00 a.m. you can call the police on a bunch of rowdy and obnoxious drunks in the neighbor’s backyard, but don’t you think that a woman alone with children might fear for their safety. What will prevent the drunks or the neighbors from trying to make her life miserable.

You have children, a new neighborhood and friendly but noisy new neighbors. Maybe the only sensible answer for this combination and your temperament is to trust they were sincere and ask them to turn down the volume. You have every right to do that.

But I hope you will at least try on the idea first of freer-spirited living. Can their joy be even a wee bit contagious?

It is not joy when someone is invading your home and making your life unbearable. When someone is invading your home you do not say to yourself that it’s time to enjoy some more free spirited living. What a pathetic failure to see what is happening.

One understands that moving away might be difficult, but it seems to be the only viable solution. Or, at the least, for the woman to tell her neighbor that she does not want to be a scold and does not want to interfere with their joyous noise, but it feels like a violation of her space and is damaging her children's health.  

Terminal Stupidity in Powderhorn Park

Credit to Caitlin Dickinson of the New York Times for reporting this story, which feels like it came from The Onion or the Babylon Bee. What will satirical websites do when white Americans  sound like pathetic imbeciles, suffused in white guilt, mouthing idiocies? If you thought that there was any real hope for a renaissance of the American, you can erase that thought from your mind.

So, here we are in Powderhorn Park, a Minneapolis neighborhood inhabited by an assortment of woke leftists. These people were woke before anyone even dreamed up the notion.

We begin with Shari Albers:

When Shari Albers moved three decades ago into Powderhorn Park, a tree-lined Minneapolis neighborhood known as a haven to leftist activists and bohemian artists like herself, she went to work sprucing it up.

She became a block club leader, organizing her mostly white neighbors to bring in playgrounds and help tackle longstanding issues with crime.

So, to show how guilty they feel for the death of George Floyd, the inhabitants of this leftist dystopia have decided never to call the police:

After the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police, Ms. Albers, who is white, and many of her progressive neighbors have vowed to avoid calling law enforcement into their community. Doing so, they believed, would add to the pain that black residents of Minneapolis were feeling and could put them in danger.

Word got around, and, lo and behold, homeless encampments started sprouting in the local park. At least the group was diverse:

Two weeks ago, dozens of multicolored tents appeared in the neighborhood park. They were brought by homeless people who were displaced during the unrest that gripped the city. The multiracial group of roughly 300 new residents seems to grow larger and more entrenched every day. They do laundry, listen to music and strategize about how to find permanent housing. Some are hampered by mental illness, addiction or both.

Guess what, the drug dealers saw a market for their wares and moved into the encampment:

Their presence has drawn heavy car traffic into the neighborhood, some from drug dealers. At least two residents have overdosed in the encampment and had to be taken away in ambulances.

The fine upstanding citizens inhabiting the encampment are a threat to law and order, even to Albers:

The influx of outsiders has kept Ms. Albers awake at night. Though it is unlikely to happen, she has had visions of people from the tent camp forcing their way into her home. She imagines using a baseball bat to defend herself.

Not being able to call the police, as she has done for decades, has shaken her.

“I am afraid,” she said. “I know my neighbors are around, but I’m not feeling grounded in my city at all. Anything could happen.”

She invited a bunch of criminals into the neighborhood. She told them that she would never call the police. And guess what-- she is afraid.

She is not alone:

But many in the neighborhood, who were already beleaguered from the financial stresses of the coronavirus, now say they are eager for the campers to move on to stable housing away from the park.

“I’m not being judgmental,” said Carrie Nightshade, 44, who explained that she no longer felt comfortable letting her children, 12 and 9, play in the park by themselves. “It’s not personal. It’s just not safe.”

Would you believe that the encampment inhabitants have not yet caught on to the #MeToo movement. 

Angelina Roslik burst into tears, explaining that she had spent the past four years fleeing unstable housing conditions and was struggling more than she cared to admit with the chaos the camp had brought into the neighborhood. Linnea Borden said she had stopped walking her dog through the park because she was tired of being catcalled. “My emotions change every 30 seconds,” said Tria Houser, who is part Native American.

Since they could not call the police and since they did not believe that an army of whiny social workers was going to restore law and order, they found a group of American Indian vigilantes:

Rather than turn to law enforcement if they saw anyone in physical danger, they resolved to call the American Indian Movement — a national organization created in 1968 to address Native American grievances such as police brutality — which had been policing its own community locally for years.

So, welcome to life without the police:

The impulse many white Powderhorn Park residents have to seek help from community groups rather than from the police is being felt in neighborhoods across the country. But some are finding the commitment hard to stand by when faced with the complex realities of life. While friends, neighbors and even family members in Powderhorn Park agree to avoid calling the police at all costs, it has been harder to establish where to draw the line.

So, when one man got robbed at gunpoint, he called the police. The boys who robbed him of his house keys ended up stealing someone’s car. But, the man felt guilty about what he did and has come to realize that he should not do it again:

Mitchell Erickson’s fingers began dialing 911 last week before he had a chance to even consider alternatives, when two black teenagers who looked to be 15, at most, cornered him outside his home a block away from the park.

One of the boys pointed a gun at Mr. Erickson’s chest, demanding his car keys.

Flustered, Mr. Erickson handed over a set, but it turned out to be house keys. The teenagers got frustrated and ran off, then stole a different car down the street.

Two days after an initial conversation, his position had evolved. “Been thinking more about it,” he wrote in a text message. “I regret calling the police. It was my instinct but I wish it hadn’t been. I put those boys in danger of death by calling the cops.”

Frankly, these people are so pathetic they deserve what they get. It may not be true justice, but it is poetic justice. Anyone who is dumb enough to believe the propaganda should pay for it… with their property and their peace of mind.

How to Save the Statues and Monuments

The Babylon Bee has found the solution. It has figured out how to save our statues and historical monuments. 

The solution: disguise them all to look like Karl Marx:

City councils all over are ordering Karl Marx wigs and putting them on Teddy Roosevelt, George Washington, Christopher Columbus, and other statues. The move has proven extremely effective at deterring Antifa and other extremist groups, who are only looking for statues of old hateful white guys to destroy and not statues of communists.

"As soon as enraged rioters see the statue isn't of a dangerous, murderous madman whose ideas killed hundreds of millions but is just of Karl Marx, they move on," said one city council member in Illinois as he put a Karl Marx wig and beard on a statue of Abraham Lincoln. "Well, first, they bow respectfully to their hero and then move on."

Silicon Valley Punts on Diversity

Here is a story to brighten your day. I am sure you suspected as much, but apparently our thought police-- the tech oligarchs who run Silicon Valley-- talk the talk more than they walk the walk.

They are all-in for diversity. They are all in for equality. If you say the least discouraging or presumably racist word, they will cancel you. They might just cancel you for being a conservative Republican. They do it to show how much they love diversity.

So, some researchers in San Jose set out to see how well their companies practice what they preach. The answer, as you might have guessed, is that they do not. They have always been and continue to be run by white and Asian males. For all intents and purposes, diversity does not exist in these companies. In the surrounding areas, black and Hispanic citizens live in near poverty. 

The Daily Mail reports:

A new study has revealed staggering income inequality in Silicon Valley and an astonishing lack of diversity within its top technology companies. 

Researchers at San Jose State University' Human Rights Institute unveiled the results of the study, dubbed the Silicon Valley Pain Index, on Tuesday. 

Among the most dramatic findings were that 10 'large tech companies' - which were not named specifically - employ zero black women, and the net worth of the top 10 richest people in Silicon Valley - all of whom are white men - is an eye-watering $248billion. 

'These statistics show that white supremacy is operating in most all of the institutions and systems in Silicon Valley,' lead researcher Dr Scott Myers-Lipton told SFGate.

What is the deeper meaning of this? Aside from the fact that these people are sanctimonious hypocrites, they are simply paying protection money to the mob. Have you noticed that the mob, such as it is, has not said a word about Silicon Valley. They are not going to bite the hand that is feeding them.