RUTHFULLY YOURS

Legendary actor Denzel Washington says a recent movie role hasn’t changed his views on America’s criminal justice system and that black incarceration finds its roots in fatherless homes.

Washington, who plays a young, ambitious lawyer in the new movie “Roman J. Israel, Esq,” told reporters at the film’s premiere that his role didn’t make him more cynical about the criminal justice system but reinforced what he already believed.

“It starts at the home. It starts at home. It starts with how you raise your children. If a young man doesn’t have a father figure, he’ll go find a father figure,” Washington said, according to the New York Daily News.

“So you know, I can’t blame the system. It’s unfortunate that we make such easy work for them,” the Academy Award-winning actor added.

Washington explained that he has personal experience growing up around fatherless homes in the black community.

“I grew up with guys who did decades [in prison] and it had as much to do with their fathers not being in their lives as it did to do with any system,” he said in an earlier interview with Reuters.

“By the time we got to 13, 14, different things happened,” Washington explained. “Now I was doing just as much as they were, but they went further … I just didn’t get caught, but they kept going down that road and then they were in the hands of the system. But it’s about the formative years. You’re not born a criminal.”
Is Washington’s position widely accepted in the black community?

No. Just as the movie’s director, Dan Gilroy, told Reuters, many people in the black community believe there still exists a disparity in American society between black and white people.

“Our prison system needs reform at a fundamental level. We have the highest incarceration rate of any place in the Western world. … It’s not racially equal, it’s not socio-economically equal,” Gilroy said.

While there have been reforms in American history, some argue that Jim Crow still exists in the form of a mass incarceration prison system.

Suppose you never “insulted” Islam or Muslims? Or never gave Muslims the “stink eye” in a supermarket or the Mall of America? It wouldn’t matter. Especially if you’re a white infidel. If accused of Islamophobia or being “racist,” how would you reply? Logically, you couldn’t rebut the accusation. You would be trying to prove a negative. Hark that hoary old chestnut, asked by a trial lawyer of the defendant, “When did you stop beating your wife?” If it’s a Muslim defendant, the joke would be lost of him. Islam permits the beating of wives (and of dishonorable daughters) with a fist or a vehicle or a hammer or a machete.

I offer here a short list of my own thoughts on the terms gratuitously employed by the MSM and political establishment to sugar-coat the depredations of Islam and of the Left. As with Islam, because there is no moderate Islam, there is just Islam – Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey – there is no “alt-Left, or a “moderate Left; there is just the Left. “There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it.” Or, as the banner of FrontPage reads, “Inside every Progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.” The Progressive, writes N. A. Halkides, “believes in precisely two things: his own magnificence and the constructive power of brute force. In combination, they lead him naturally from the role of pestiferous busybody to brutal dictator.”

Islamophobia: Bare Naked Islam has I think the best motto in its site banner concerning Islam: “It’s not Islamophobia if they’re trying to kill you.” Which means that given the countless news stories about jihadist attacks and the number of people murdered in the name of Allah, most people, if they retain some sense and a desire for self-preservation, would naturally develop a phobia or fear of Islam. In 2016, over 11,000 Islamic terrorist attacks were made.

The war on the West is not limited to murdering Westerners. Just the other day Salafist “moderate” Muslims attacked a Sufi mosque in the northern Sinai killing over 300 worshippers. The Sufis are “heretics” according to Salafism’s strict and literal interpretation of the Koran, and deserve to die, as well as all non-Muslims who do not submit. Sufis hate America and the West, too, so no tears for the victims will be shed on my keyboard. Sufi, Salafist, Wahabbist, or Shi’ite, if your’re a member of one of those sects, and feel comfortable swathed, body and soul, in the suffocating “culture” of Islamic traditions and mores, then you’ve already wasted your life. A terrorist’s AK-47 or bomb won’t make a difference.

We are in the midst of an act of culturecide…..

We live in an age in which things are no longer what they are supposed to be. Words have come to denote the opposite of what they signify. Cultural institutions on which we rely to serve our personal and national interests have morphed into caricatures of their original intentions, working against their foundational purposes.

Linguistic and institutional inversion is the time-dishonored strategy of totalitarian systems and is generally associated with the theory and practice of the Left, which has infiltrated the culture and polity of the free world, particularly in the areas of language use, the media, education, the arts and gender relations. The democratic West is now at the mercy of its own reverse polarity.

Language

One recalls the famous slogans of Orwell’s Ingsoc: War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. These contradictions are no longer as absurd as 1984 makes them out to be. What Orwell called Newspeak has entered the practice of the West at levels never before seen. A society in which language has been so denatured as to operate on the principle of inversion, beyond even the institutional euphemisms of political correctness, has no future. Samuel Butler saw this coming in his premonitory steampunk novel Erewhon, an anagram for Nowhere. We have got things backward.

Thus a blood-saturated religion is rinsed for public consumption as the “religion of peace.” An insurgent army of fascist brownshirts calls itself Antifa. “Inclusion” has come to mean the exclusion of those who do not conform to a prescribed ideology. “Diversity” is an antonymic synonym for monolithic groupthink. “Affirmative action” affirms racism in the guise of anti-racism. Sexual jokes, lewd comments and even innocent displays of affection or interest on the part of men are subsumed under the category of “sexual assault” and are said to constitute infallible signs of male depravity; similarly the term “rape culture,” prominent on campus, refers to a non-existent entity and has come to describe normal sexual and romantic behavior.

The mantra of “Social Justice” is the conceptual umbrella under which all such aberrations take shelter. It is nothing but a stand-in for flagrant injustice, exacting tribute from decent hardworking people and struggling entrepreneurs to benefit a largely parasitical class of those who claim to be oppressed or who affect to be offended. Indeed, what Michael Walsh calls the “decriminalization of crime in the name of ‘social justice,’ long a goal of the cultural-Marxist left, [leads to] social disruption, mistrust, resentment, lawlessness and, if left unchecked, anarchy and civil war.” What social justice has to do with a just society escapes us almost perfectly. In fact, the former is the diametric opposite of the latter. As philosopher Roger Scruton writes in The Meaning of Conservatism, “the greatest threat to just dealings between people is the attempt to remake society from above, in conformity with a conception of ‘social justice’.”

The Media

In her recent book The Smear, investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson, ostracized by the press elite for her unvarnished truth-telling, has analyzed the scandal of today’s “industry of smears and fake news,” which she calls “transactional journalism,” i.e., returning favors for privileged information, writing what you’re told to write. This has “opened the floodgate to clandestine collusion between reporters and special interests. As a result, it can be impossible to separate fact from fiction.” Moreover, the line between news reports and partisan editorializing has become blurred, so that opinions are routinely cast as fact. “The media had functioned as a powerful institution,” writes Daniel Greenfield, “because of its pretense of objectivity. When it tossed aside objectivity, all it had left was power”—that is, the power to obfuscate, deceive and drive the course of events toward its own political ends.

This violation of journalistic ethics is now pretty much universal. News is agitprop and editorials are political spin, almost always under the sign of left-wing advocacy masking as objective scrutiny and disclosure. Attkisson reminds us of Joseph Goebbels’ dictum in his Diaries, “those who control news policies [must] endeavor to make every item of news serve a certain purpose.” Just as today’s universities have taken a page from the Nazified German universities of the 1930s and the installation of the Nuremberg Laws, so contemporary journalism has learned from the dark master of deception and persuasion. A lie—the bigger the better—repeated with dinning regularity becomes, as Goebbels instructed us, the truth.

Just like aggressive nations, so too people who are not innately moral are deterred from committing crimes by fear of punishment.https://amgreatness.com/2017/11/27/the-case-for-sexual-deterrence/

The likelihood of arrest, the good chance of conviction, the probability of jail time or fines, or a permanent criminal record—or all that and more—do their parts to discourage criminality.

In that context, the sudden deluge of sexual harassment claims shares one common theme: lost deterrence.

Those who use their positions of ideological correctness, perceived power, authority, influence, or money to leverage some sort of unwanted sex (from a fleeting grope to coerced intercourse) do so because, in their jaded cost-benefit calibrations, they can.

In our postmodern age, we can no longer rely on now ancient notions of self-restraint. Too many celebrities and power-mongers deprecate the old idea of acting like a gentleman as corny or passé. Many of today’s feminists may find men who open doors, pick up the dinner tab, or postpone sexual intercourse until there is a clear relationship as either condescending chauvinists or utter nerds. Hollywood seems to have idealized the moment when a man rough-handles a woman until his violence leads to eroticism and a willing surrender in his arms—in clinical terms perhaps possible, in real life clearly quite rare.

The majority of high-profile men do not ascribe anymore to religious principles that restrain the libido. Mike Pence was laughed at for his wise counsel of avoiding ubiquitous temptations—as if he were a 60-something innocent babe in the woods of slithering vamps.

In our therapeutic culture born in the 1960s, sex was recalibrated as liberating, free, and without consequences—not as the Greeks once warned of Eros as dangerous and destructive in its power to cloud reason and make even the sober and judicious mere slaves to their appetites.

A sex-sick Phaedra was not a pretty sight.

The Right Politics
Sometimes sexual deterrence is lost through loud liberal politics. Al Franken assumed that as a progressive “giant of the Senate” his professed progressive feminism exempted him from any consequences for his snickering gropes and creepy cheap feels. In Franken’s twisted mind, how many free prods and pokes does voting against confirming conservative federal judges earn?

Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) seems to have made a career of exempted perversions, predicated on the fact he was a founding member of the Black Caucus.

Correct politics deterred aggrieved women from coming forward—on the understandable expectation that, even if believed, their elders would insist that their own harassment was not so important as to endanger the cosmic political good.

So abstract morality can offset concrete immorality in a variety of ways: Bill Clinton’s stance on abortion may have earned him a sort of coerced or cheap insurance from “knee-pad” sex. Denigrating a Paula Jones as trailer trash was a small price to pay for having an empowered Hillary as first lady.

According to prominent members of the progressive elite — and a few members of the conservative elite — the election of Donald Trump signaled the rise in the United States of fascism or racism or both. These sweeping smears of Trump and his supporters, which began during the primaries, backfired in 2016: They helped fuel the discontent among ordinary voters that provided the real-estate mogul’s slender margin of victory in key Rust Belt states. The elites’ intemperate condemnation of the people’s judgment bolstered the people’s dim view of the elites.

The elites’ fear, both before and after the election, that Trump was leading a fascist takeover of America has been fueled by his shoot-from-the-hip tweets and off-the-cuff public pronouncements, many of which evinced an ignorance of the rule of law and an enthusiasm for strong rulers. But hyperbole and bombast do not a fascist takeover make. Moreover, elites would be well advised to recall — or learn — that America’s sturdy constitutional constraints, starting with the separation of powers, anticipate the ascendancy of unenlightened statesmen and are designed to keep dark impulses in check. In addition, fascism rests on the acquiescence to a powerful leader of the military, business community, media, entertainment industry, and academy. Trump cannot even unify his own party around his leadership.

The accusation that Trump’s victory represented the recrudescence of a deep-seated American racism was equally scurrilous and equally implausible. Racists still exist in America and some felt emboldened by Trump to purvey their hatred. But there is no reason to suppose that if a white, male, progressive Democrat had governed in the manner of Trump’s predecessor that popular frustration would have been less robust. President Obama rammed through Congress a fundamental transformation of health care in defiance of popular will. He usurped Congress’s lawmaking powers by issuing executive orders that appropriated funds to sustain the Affordable Care Act, that imposed extensive environmental regulations, and that altered the legal status of illegal aliens. He presided over an Internal Revenue Service that methodically impeded his political opponents’ participation in the democratic process. He downplayed or dismissed voters’ anxieties about jobs, trade, and immigration while adopting measures that exacerbated them. Abroad, he coddled adversaries and alienated allies. The notion that ordinary Americans are inveterate racists because they rejected the third term for Obama governance that Hillary Clinton represented exhibits the elites’ own bigotry.

A considerably more illuminating explanation of Trump’s victory comes from understanding the power of populism. The 2016 election returns reflected a revolt of the less well-off and less influential against political elites whom they regard as arrogant and self-serving.

Can government bureaucrats vitiate private property rights without a jury trial and fair compensation? That’s the question the Supreme Court will consider on Monday in what could become a landmark patent case, Oil States Energy v. Greene’s Energy.

At issue is the inter partes review that Congress established with the 2011 America Invents Act to curb abusive patent litigation. Owners of low-quality patents—e.g., abstract ideas or processes with broad applicability—extort businesses with infringement lawsuits that are often cheaper to settle than fight. This can deter innovation. Inter partes review allows anyone to challenge a patent at any time. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board, composed of administrative judges appointed by the Commerce Secretary, then decides whether to grant a review and perhaps revoke a patent.

Oil States lost an inter partes review challenge after suing Greene Energy for infringement. The company then claimed that inter partes review violates the Constitution’s Article III and the Seventh Amendment because it allows an administrative agency to revoke patents without a jury trial. Article III sets the qualifications for the federal judiciary—that is, judges are appointed by the President with the consent of the Senate. They also have lifetime tenure. The Seventh Amendment guarantees a jury trial in suits involving common law such as private property, contracts and trademarks.

Congress has increasingly ceded authority to administrative bodies over disputes involving public rights—those between the government and individuals that don’t have a basis in common law. But private rights are strictly the domain of the federal judiciary. This distinction is crucial since Article III judges are intentionally insulated from politics and the two political branches.

American politics has been largely free of military influence since George Washington defused an incipient army mutiny at Newburgh, New York, in 1783. There have been relapses, including George McClellan’s presidential maneuverings before the 1864 election, and the insubordination of the politically ambitious Douglas MacArthur in 1951. But military deference to America’s elected civilian leadership has been so consistent for so long that even faint political activism by high-ranking officers stands out. Recently, a three-star Air Force general nudged up to, if not across, that thin line—taking to YouTube to accuse the institution, its cadets, and its staff of racism.

Academy Superintendent Lieutenant General Jay Silveria stirred the Internet in September when—not to mix military metaphors—he ordered the institution’s 4,900 cadets and staff to shape up or ship out following the discovery on campus of racist graffiti. “If you demean someone in any way, you need to get out,” Silveria said in a speech that quickly scored more than 1 million YouTube hits. “If you can’t treat someone from another race, or different color skin, with dignity and respect, then you need to get out.”

It was a textbook social-justice-movement moment—judgment first, facts afterward—insofar as Silveria had no clue who had scrawled the slur, no apparent interest in finding out, and no hesitation in spreading responsibility for it as widely as possible. And when the “hate crime” turned out to have been a hoax—the perp was a black student enrolled in an academy-preparatory program and one of five alleged “targets” of the slur—that didn’t slow down the academy’s virtue-signaling. “By embracing our differences, we help create a culture of respect and dignity,” said the academy’s director of culture, climate and diversity, Yvonne Roland. “As an institution of higher education and a military installation, we prepare our cadets to meet the challenges of an ever-changing global environment and to value ethics and human dignity.” Whatever that means.

“From the Berlin Wall, to Vietnamese and Cuban boat people, to the DMZ, the prisoners of communism run in only one direction: toward liberty and self-government, toward the bounty of the marketplace and the possibilities of representative democracy.”

On November 13, a 24-year-old North Korean soldier, known only by his surname Oh, commandeered a jeep and sped toward the De-Militarized Zone that for 64 years has separated his communist homeland from the democratic capitalist south.

As he approached the border, the young man abandoned the vehicle and scrambled on foot toward the line of control. North Korean soldiers began firing on him. He was hit five or six times before collapsing onto South Korean ground. Transported to a hospital in Suwon, near Seoul, doctors performed emergency surgery. They discovered and extracted parasitic worms from his small intestine. Diagnosed with tuberculosis and hepatitis B, he is nonetheless expected to recover.

Oh risked everything to live in freedom. He has joined the ranks of other defectors, refugees, and exiles that fled oppression for the chance of a life free of tyrannical control. From the Berlin Wall, to Vietnamese and Cuban boat people, to the DMZ, the prisoners of communism run in only one direction: toward liberty and self-government, toward the bounty of the marketplace and the possibilities of representative democracy.

Many did not—many do not—make it. They die imprisoned, like the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, or do not survive the crossing, like Peter Fletcher, murdered by the Border Troops of the German Democratic Republic at the age of 18.

And there are millions more still who, having been born and raised in democratic capitalist societies, do not fully recognize or appreciate the novelty and blessing of their lives. The story of Oh is not only a reminder that the call of freedom persists. It is a rebuke to those who ignore freedom’s song.

For it has become fashionable, on both left and right, to downplay or ignore or deprecate the idea of freedom, to blame individualism, self-determination, and choice for inequality, pollution, corruption, immorality, decline, and other tragic aspects of the human condition. The fact that all of these pathologies flourish in autocratic, socialist, and communist societies as well as in our own seemingly escapes the notice of the intellectual critics of freedom.

Even so, we are told that free will is a delusion, that we are better off being “nudged” by our cognitive and moral superiors, that freedom and democracy are like rubber bands that snap back when stretched to the limit. “We are drowning in freedom,” says one editor. Tell that to Oh.

Left-wing currency manipulator George Soros’s push to radically reshape the judiciary and elect extremist district attorneys across the country to weaken law enforcement and protect lawless sanctuary cities is bearing fruit.

Soros has been pouring money into local elections because he supports local efforts to resist U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and wants to cripple police in order to advance the neo-Marxist abstraction known as social justice that simplistically breaks the world down into race, class, and sex or gender. Radicals claim that American laws and institutions are inherently corrupt and that these systems protect, for example, wealthy, white, native-born, non-disabled males at the expense of everyone else.

Soros wants prosecutors to empty prisons and coddle the prisoners who remain, scale back drug prosecutions, lower bail, and eliminate alleged racial disparities in sentencing, among other things.

Getting people who share Soros’s worldview into public office at every level is key to promoting his ugly vision of how America, which he calls “the main obstacle to a stable and just world order,” should look.

Soros’s backing helped elect radical leftist Lawrence (Larry) Krasner (D) as Philadelphia DA this month. Krasner, who quipped that his track record as a civil rights lawyer made him “completely unelectable,” somehow managed to best seven other candidates in the primary election.

“Krasner, who has represented Occupy Philadelphia and Black Lives Matter, and has sued the police department more than 75 times, had a major fundraising advantage that was provided almost exclusively by Soros,” the indispensable Joe Schoffstall reported at the Washington Free Beacon.

On the campaign trail, Krasner promised never to seek the death penalty in any criminal case and to keep Philadelphia a lawless sanctuary city. A segment of his platform titled “Resist the Trump Administration” spelled out his plan to “protect immigrants,” “reject the drug war,” and “stand up to police misconduct.”

“As District Attorney, he will work to maintain Philadelphia as a ‘sanctuary city’ and protect the Fourth Amendment rights of all residents, cooperating with federal authorities only to the degree required by law,” according to his campaign website.

“Because legal proceedings can affect the status of immigrants and therefore relations between communities and law enforcement, Larry will take those effects into account when making prosecutorial decisions and setting prosecutorial policy. He will oppose renewal of ICE’s access to the PARS database, a city police database used by ICE to identify ‘deportable’ immigrants.”

In April, Soros gave $1.45 million to the Philadelphia Justice and Public Safety PAC, which was created to support Krasner and listed its address as the Democrat law firm Perkins Coie in the nation’s capital. Soros threw another $214,000 the super PAC’s way in May, bringing his pro-Krasner donations to $1.7 million, “an unusual[ly] high [amount] for the average district attorney race.” It was also the first time a PAC had ever backed a candidate for Philly DA.