RUTHFULLY YOURS

Well, that was nuts, even for Hollywood.

Let’s be clear: the Oscars were already a fairly ridiculous exercise. A cathedral of glamour and ego, the movie industry’s annual awards conclave is a bloated exercise of hype and self-satisfaction that takes as long to complete as the second year of medical school. This is, of course, why we watch it. An Oscars ceremony that isn’t too long, inane and occasionally infuriating—that’s not a proper Oscars, buddy!

And yet, what happened late Sunday in Los Angeles redefined the already high standard for absurdity at the Academy Awards. An event that once gave us a Rob Lowe duet with Snow White, as well as Telly Savalas,Pat Morita and Dom DeLuise singing “Fugue For Tinhorns” from “Guys & Dolls,” now has its signature moment of insanity: “Bonnie & Clyde” compatriots Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway erroneously awarding Best Picture to “La La Land”— rather than the actual winner, “Moonlight.”

I’ve watched the sequence on replay several times now and, to be honest, it’s way too bizarre to be infuriating. It appeared that Mr. Beatty and Ms. Dunaway were somehow in possession of an incorrect envelope, containing not the Best Picture winner, but the Best Actress, which had just been awarded to Emma Stone of “La La Land.” Opening the crimson envelope, 79-year-old Mr. Beatty seemed baffled, pausing briefly before handing it off to Ms. Dunaway, who announced “La La Land” as the winner.

The most painful thing, really, is that mistake wasn’t recognized immediately. Where was the production team? Already tucking into steaks at Musso & Frank? Even Steve Harvey botching the prize for Miss Universe 2015—the previous gold standard for bungled awards show finales—was faster to repair the damage of a winner incorrectly named.

Instead, the poor “La La Land” producers, cast and crew are allowed to ascend the stage, deliver speeches and experience the weightless feeling of capturing moviemaking’s greatest honor. Think about this for a second: They really thought they had won. Everyone had thought they had won. With 14 nominations, the film was a heavy favorite; a Best Picture win was utterly plausible.

They’re close to wrapping up their acceptance speeches before an anxious-looking production person in headgear starts barreling around the stage, looking like a guy who forgot his iPad on an airplane.

Except he’s Lucy, about to rip the football away from Charlie Brown. CONTINUE AT SITE

Last Sunday Chelsea Clinton, usually such a reticent public figure, took to Times Square with her 2-year-old daughter, Charlotte, to march in the Muslim solidarity rally.

“Thank you to all who organized #IAmAMuslimToo today — Charlotte’s 1st protest rally. #NoBanNoWallNoRaids,” she tweeted.

Chelsea’s also promoting her new, co-authored book “Governing Global Health,” with a soft-focus Q&A in the Sunday New York Times and an eight-city tour in April. It’s a more high-profile push than the one for her last, a 2015 YA book called “It’s Your World,” which focused on low-key school visits — exercising, perhaps, an abundance of caution during her mother’s presidential campaign.

This was, for decades, the Clinton strategy: Say as little as possible, avoid unforced errors. While stumping for her mother in 2008, Chelsea took it to new levels, refusing to answer this question: “Do you think your dad would be a good ‘first man’ in the White House?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t talk to the press and that applies to you, unfortunately,” Chelsea said. “Even though I think you’re cute.”

The interrogator? A 9-year-old “kid reporter” from Scholastic News.

If Chelsea’s new online persona seems surprising — she’s come alive on Twitter, prolific and politicized — party observers say it shouldn’t be. In the wake of Hillary Clinton’s devastating electoral loss, it seems Chelsea Clinton, historically boring and opinion-free, is mulling a run for high office.

Though her spokesperson denies it, signs point elsewhere.

“The super-aggressive tweets are a way to create a constituency around her,” says veteran political consultant Hank Sheinkopf. “Particularly in New York, where people don’t like Donald Trump.”

‘It bothers the s—t out of me that everyone thinks she’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.’

Last November, Page Six reported that Chelsea was being groomed for a Congressional run. The Clintons “will not give up,” a source said. “Chelsea would be the next extension of the Clinton brand.”

That’s the problem. Putting aside America’s exhaustion with dynastic politics, Chelsea herself, as a potential candidate, comes loaded with Clintonian baggage: the greed, the entitlement, and her mother’s greatest flaw — an inability to connect with common people.

No sooner had Robert M. Gill received his get-out-of-jail-free card than he was back at it again. One of a record 1,715 felons to have their lengthy jail sentences commuted by President Barack Obama, Gill celebrated his dumb luck — sudden release from his life-imprisonment term for a major narcotics-trafficking conviction — by attempting to sell two pounds of cocaine. He was captured by Texas police after a violent collision at the end of a high-speed chase.

Having inevitably done the crime, he’ll now probably do the time that should never have been interrupted. Obama justified the release of Gill and hundreds of hardened criminals on the laughable fiction that the federal penitentiaries overflow with “non-violent drug offenders.” You’re supposed to imagine jails teeming with sad-sack Millennials nabbed while toking on a joint behind the local Starbucks. Actually, it is settled law that guns are “tools of the trade” of drug dealing (which is why the cases typically feature evidence of weaponry — and often separate charges for deploying weapons in protection of the lucrative cash business). A quick perusal down the long list of Obama commutations, which includes several gun crimes along with drug offenses, puts the lie to the convict-as-victim storyline. Heather Mac Donald is right: “Prison remains a lifetime achievement award for persistence in criminal offending.”

In Obama world, there was an exception to this wisdom. The just-departed administration was just as anxious to send innocent business executives to jail as it was to spring actual criminals back onto our streets.

The vehicle for this perversion of justice is known as the “responsible corporate officer” doctrine. The Supreme Court, which created it, may soon have the chance to revisit and bury it. The Justice Department, now under the direction of Attorney General Jeff Sessions rather than Obama’s anti-corporate zealots, should provide the shovel.

It is a bedrock principle of the criminal law that there may not be liability for a bad act in the absence of bad intent — mens rea. In fact, this is the principle that FBI director James Comey was purporting to defend — not very convincingly — when the Obama Justice Department strained to avoid indicting Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information. The requirement of mens rea for criminal liability does not mean absent-minded wrongdoers are off the hook for the damage they cause, not by a long shot. We have a very elaborate civil-justice system to address just such harms. It is not unusual for civil judgments to run into the tens of millions of dollars. If the suffering caused by a corporation is significant, civil lawsuits, including lawsuits brought by the Justice Department and government regulatory agencies, can put the company out of business.

But this is not enough for the anti-capitalist Left, for whom there is no justice but “social justice” — a morality play in which minority men are imprisoned owing solely to systemic racism while greedy executives go unscathed despite exploiting the masses for profit. For every violent crime, there is an excuse; for every business-related accident, there must be a scalp.

Last year we experienced a rather spirited presidential election season. It was probably the fiercest of my lifetime. But we should not be troubled by heated political campaigns. They are the occasional episodes that mark a healthy democracy.

In one respect, however, the 2016 election campaign was quite troubling. We saw two of our most important legal institutions—the Supreme Court and the Justice Department—bend in the political winds.

Years ago, I gave a speech in which I tried to explain why some justices moved, over time, to a more activist posture, less restrained or principled—in other words, result-oriented. A major factor was the influence of the press. Hence the “Greenhouse effect,” referring to Linda Greenhouse, who covered the justices for the New York Times. The Supreme Court press is increasingly dominated by lawyer-journalists who reflect the change in the composition of law-school faculties, which are now almost uniformly left-activist. That political flavor was recently demonstrated by the stunningly uniform opposition at law schools to the nomination of Jeff Sessions as attorney general.

Since the press’s orientation is sympathetic to activist results, which I think it is safe to say are largely on the left, it is not surprising that the Greenhouse effect is more demonstrable vis-à-vis Republican appointees. And the effect has been particularly strong on Washington neophytes—judicial appointees who had not served in prior Republican administrations and therefore had not yet experienced the attacks of the mainstream press. The neophytes had not yet grown the thicker skin that Republican officials in the executive branch necessarily develop. Compare, for instance, Justices John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O’Connor,Anthony Kennedy and David Souter with William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia,Clarence Thomas,John Roberts and Samuel Alito. The latter five had served in Republican administrations, but none of the former had.

A few minutes past noon, on February 26, 1993, as a senior editor in a major centrist publishing house was berating me for proposing a book on the Islamic Proselytization of America, the deafening noise of screaming ambulances, firetrucks and police cars rushing downtown and news of a large explosion at the World Trade Center, cut short our lunch. As he departed, the editor forcefully stated: “I will never publish anything as preposterous and far-fetched as this! How dare you even suggest such a topic? Muslims, like all other immigrants, come to America to enjoy the American dream, not to terrorize it.” This was early in the political correctness trend.

The editor and all witnessed that day that not all Muslim immigrants come here with peaceful intentions. Americans have also found out that some Muslim communities sheltered, supported and condoned vocal proponents of jihad against the U.S. and its infidels. Expressing concern about it even then was at best frowned upon, and more often loudly condemned.

Omar Abdel-Rahman, aka the “Blind Sheik” who died in an American prison last week, was a Muslim who hated America and everything it stands for, for a long time and made no secret of it. The spiritual leader of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood’s spin-off Jama’a Islamiya, he adhered to the radical interpretation of Islam as was preached in the 13th Century by the Syrian Sufi Ibn Taymiyah, and more recently by Egyptian Muslim Brother, Sayyid Qutb. Rahman praised Muslim terrorists, preached for terror and issued fatwas, calling on “Muslims everywhere [in the West] to dismember their nation, tear them apart, ruin their economy, provoke their corporations, destroy their embassies, attack their interests, sink their ships…. Shoot down their planes, [and] kill them on land, at sea, and in the air. Kill them wherever you find them. He incited to attack Americans and Jews everywhere, and instigated the murder of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981, Rabbi Meir Kahane in New York, in 1990, and influenced many other Islamic terrorist attacks here and abroad. Nonetheless, he was allowed to enter the U.S., and in 1991 his “religious work” awarded him a permanent residency in the U.S.

The Blind Sheik enjoyed the unique American right to free expression to advance his call for jihad against the country that sheltered him and called on his flowers to take up “urban terrorism” everywhere, especially in the U.S., Egypt, and Israel. He influenced the radical Islamic network that was responsible for the 1,200 pounds of homemade car-bomb that exploded in the garage under the World Trade Center, killing six, wounding 1,024 others and causing billions of dollars in damages. A few months later he was arrested and three years later was charged and convicted of plotting “a day of terror for the United States – assassinations and synchronized bombings of the U.N. headquarters, a major federal government facility in Manhattan and tunnels and a bridge linking New York City and New Jersey.”

It was a beautiful day in the neighborhood. That’s unusual for Presidents’ Day in Chicago, where the weather is typically a mournful dirge for Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, with blowing snow and biting wind. But in 2017, it was a gentle, sunny day that felt like mid-May.

A good day for a protest, and one had gathered on the riverbank opposite Trump Tower. There were lots of police nearby, but they were relaxed, without much to do. The demonstration was clearly peaceful, so I decided to walk over and see what it was about.

It was about President Donald Trump, and the demonstrators did not care for him one bit. What was interesting, though, was the cheerful, benign feel of the crowd, juxtaposed to signs saying they were victims of fascist oppression and to speakers egging them on. No one seemed to notice the inconsistency or care about it.

There were about 1,000 people, standing on the sidewalk, courteously making way for pedestrians, chatting with friends, and occasionally repeating slogans tossed out by various speakers. One was talking about transgender people, another about home foreclosures, and concluded with an attack on the new Treasury secretary and a brief chant, “Lock him up.” No one seemed to know who he was, and none had signs about housing, but everyone enjoyed a chance to repeat the line once directed at Hillary Clinton.

Another speaker tried a different tack, “The people, united, will never be divided.” Hearing that old protest bromide, I mumbled to myself, “I think that’s true by definition.” A woman standing nearby started laughing and her boyfriend said, “That’s just what I was saying.”
I asked some police, leaning against their cars or traffic barricades, if everything had been this calm before I arrived. “Oh, yes,” was the common reply, leading some older ones to tell their younger colleagues about less happy occasions. I asked the same question to several people in yellow T-shirts, representing the National Lawyers Guild. They gave the same answer. When I asked them why they were there, they said they were “looking for misconduct by state agents.” The phrased sounded like Sgt. Joe Friday, funneled through Inspector Clouseau. No matter. The yellow T-shirts hadn’t found any bad “state actors” and seemed content to enjoy the sunshine.

No one was looking for a fight. No militant communists or anarchists in the crowd, no Trump supporters there to taunt them. They just wanted to share their view that the president was a fascist, a tyrant, a dictator, and a hater of immigrants, gays, or transgender people, depending on who was speaking.

The crowd was mostly white, some who had been doing this since the 1960s, some of more recent vintages. There were singles in their 20s on lunch break, and moms and dads in their 30s, with kids tagging along for the holiday. There were surprisingly few Hispanics and even fewer African-Americans. It looked like the crowd at a Bernie Sanders rally.

I asked a couple of blacks why they thought so few were involved. “We got enough going on in our own community,” one told me. I asked if that meant there were anti-Trump demonstrations in other Chicago neighborhoods. “No,” she said, “It just means we have different problems.” Hardly a random sample but surely accurate.

On February 1, rioting broke out in Berkeley to prevent a flamboyantly provocative Donald Trump supporter from speaking on the University of California campus. Black-masked anarchists beat and pepper-sprayed supposed attendees of the event and hurled explosive devices at police officers; the vandals ransacked and torched banks, retail businesses, and campus facilities. University and city police did nothing to quell the mayhem.

The Berkeley riot is a wakeup call, representing several converging trends in American culture: the virulent anti-cop hatred spread by the Black Lives Matter movement; police departments’ withdrawal from proactive policing in response to that hatred; academic victim culture; and anti-Trump hysteria. Such political violence is likely to spread if law enforcement does not resolve to suppress it at its first outbreak.

The roots of the police inaction during the recent anarchy can be traced back to a vicious, four-day anti-police riot in Berkeley in December 2014, in which Black Lives Matter and other radical groups participated. City police had used tear gas on the first night of violence to stop rioters from throwing bricks, rocks, metal pipes, glass bottles, and other dangerous objects at them. Nearly a dozen officers were injured; one officer, hit with a bag of gravel, sustained a dislocated shoulder. The next day, local leaders sharply criticized the police for what activists termed a “police riot.” So on the second night of anarchy, the department refrained from any crowd-control tactics, such as skirmish lines, that allegedly rile up protesters. The violence against civilians worsened, including multiple assaults, a robbery at gunpoint in the name of “No Justice, No Peace,” and shots fired at a homeowner trying to prevent damage to his backyard. Nevertheless, the second night of riots was deemed a relative success from the police perspective because officers had not had to use force to protect themselves. The official takeaway from the four-day breakdown of law and order was that it is better to allow widespread property damage than to use preventive tactics that risk confrontations with rioters and that might require officers to forcefully (and untelegenically) defend themselves. The department would only intervene in group lawlessness to protect life.

This distinction between preventing property damage and preventing personal assaults is of course specious. Rioters do not compartmentalize their behavior; allowing attacks on property will regularly lead to attacks on persons, in a literal demonstration of Broken Windows theory.

Fast forward to 2017 and the planned speech at Berkeley of Milo Yiannapoulos, an in-your-face provocateur who revels in violating politically correct taboos. (Scandal engulfed the Yiannapoulos brand this week, with the revelation of an interview in which he coyly jokes about adult sex with minors, including his own underage experience with a priest. The Conservative Political Action Conference disinvited Yiannapoulos from its annual event—he had been slated to speak—and he resigned his position at Breitbart News.) On February 1, both campus and city police were woefully understaffed in preparation for Milo’s speech, undoubtedly due to the prevailing law enforcement philosophy of not looking “confrontational.” Bay Area activists had complained during the 2014 “F—k the Police protests,” as such anti-cop riots are locally known, that seeing police in riot gear made them feel anxious. But serious conflict at the Milo event was a certainty, and the appearance of dozens of so-called “black bloc” anarchists should not have been a surprise; these lawless assailants have been a regular feature of Bay Area protests since the early 2000s.

When flaming rockets started flying at the student union where Yiannapoulos was scheduled to speak, the University of California campus police retreated to the inside of the building and never reemerged. When the rioters fanned out to city streets (even though Milo’s speech had already been cancelled), police commanders had neither the tactical tools nor the manpower to crack down on the chaos. Only one arrest was made the entire night, by school police, for failing to disperse. The rioters most certainly took notice of their unimpeded reign. The violence continued the next day, with physical assaults against Berkeley student Republicans, both on and off campus.

The next week, the Berkeley student newspaper invited several current and former columnists to justify the anti-Milo violence. It was an easy assignment. The writers needed merely to recycle the maudlin victimology rhetoric that university administrators and faculty had fed them for years. It is a given on college campuses that an ever-expanding congeries of victim groups is under virtually lethal assault from all-encompassing racism. Allegedly “marginalized” students need “allies” in order to survive their college experience, as if they are attending classes in a war zone. Berkeley’s Division of Equity and Inclusion has erected banners on campus that urge students to “create an environment where people other than yourself can exist,” as if anyone is at risk of not being allowed to “exist” on Berkeley’s welcoming campus.