More about the Chauvin trial: Legal Insurrection; David Horowitz

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the link to last week’s post-verdict discussion of the Chauvin trial. William Jacobson and Andrew Branca of Legal Insurrection were the panelists.

Here’s a highlight video:

Here’s the complete talk:

If you prefer reading, you can find a transcript of the highlight video here at Legal Insurrection.

David Horowitz, a man I’ve written about many times before and who is a political left-to-right changer and prolific writer, also opines on the Chauvin verdict:

Headed by Antifa and Black Lives Matter and supported by every so-called “Civil Rights” organization, the Democrat Party and its malignant leadership – Biden, Harris, Pelosi and Schumer, this lynch mob has been on the attack against law enforcement a decade and more. Their threat, No “Justice” No Peace, is a threat that more cities will be attacked, more people will die – perhaps even Chauvin case jurors – if the verdicts they want aren’t delivered. This is a criminal movement with a criminal mission: to substitute its own vigilante justice for America’s justice…

The hope [many people have] expressed was that this corrupt verdict would bring social peace. Justice be damned.

It won’t. For the Black Lives Matter and Antifa fascists the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution. The lynch mob doesn’t give a damn about George Floyd or black lives. They haven’t got the slightest interest in the justice or injustice of any case, this one included. Their attitude is: How can we use this case to advance our real agenda which is overthrowing the American political and economic system and instituting a totalitarian state?

They’re doing a very good job of it so far, I’d say.

“I Could Not Love You More”…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is the title of a Bee Gees song that’s not one of my favorites. So, why am I talking about it? It’s because the official video for the song both amuses me and fascinates me.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s not a bad song. It’s a pretty good song. It’s one of their later efforts, created in 1997. “I Could Not Love You More” is a type of song I’ve never been all that keen on: the power ballad. This one’s about love – surprise, surprise – but about happy, fulfilled, reciprocated love. It’s probably the sort of thing people like to play at weddings.

The video’s a mixture of three themes. One is the ocean, with shots of turquoise blue water, children jumping into the water and swimming, and sea mammals cavorting, all very hypnotic and relaxing and emphasizing the hypnotic relaxing power of the Bee Gees’ music and voices.

Theme number two is a staple of music videos from that era – what I call the perfume-ad couple. A man and a women, both beautiful but obviously models, mime being in love. I don’t believe them for a minute. Are we supposed to envy them or identify with them, or both? Are they the prospective parents of the ocean-swimming children who will come along in a few years?

And then there are the Bee Gees themselves, doing what they seem to like to do in several videos I’ve seen: walk down a street. Slowly. Here, though, they’re not young any more – Barry is 50 and the twins are in their late forties. They’re dressed all in black, and the street looks like something out of an old Western. Is this the Frank Miller gang coming into town at High Noon to shoot Will Kane?

No, they’ve come to sing a love song instead. Their first entrance interrupts the perfume-ad couple, who are standing in the street of that old Western town for some odd reason.

But it’s the ocean scenes I especially like, with their mesmerizing effect that enhances the music and is enhanced by it as well. Even then, I wouldn’t be writing about this video if it weren’t for one particular moment that gets me every time. It occurs at around minute 2:44. Barry has just finished singing the phrase – while standing in that Western street – “I could not love you….more.” His voice has gotten softer and slower, and you might even think the song had reached its end although it’s a little early for that. Barry sings what seems like it might be the final word (“more”) – when suddenly kaboom! There’s a loud drum roll and simultaneously the scene changes to the ocean as a large sea creature (dolphin?) leaps out of the water.

It sounds corny, and it is. But I love it. No matter how many times I see it, it always surprises and delights me.

You may not experience anything at all like that. You may even think it odd (or worse) that I do. But here it is:

At what point will liberal Democrats become alarmed?

The New Neo Posted on by

That’s a question I’ve asked myself for quite some time.

I’m not talking about leftists; I’m talking about so many people I know who are not especially into politics; you might call them leftist-enablers. They tend to read the NY Times or the Boston Globe and listen to NPR, and vote Democratic Party almost reflexively. Their numbers are legion and they may even constitute the bulk of the Democratic Party, for all I know.

Years ago, I thought that they would become alarmed at some of the developments that alarmed me. The targeting of conservative groups by the IRS was one such thing. The promise Obama made – and broke – about “you can keep your doctor” under Obamacare was another. But there were so many more, each escalating bit by bit by bit.

But nothing seemed to upset them or act as a red flag. Either they didn’t read about the things that bothered me, or they didn’t believe it happened quite like I said it did, or they didn’t quite see what the big deal was.

So at what point will they become alarmed? Perhaps when they or someone they know and love is targeted by the left? Maybe not even then.

I am reminded of a post I wrote long ago about a writer who was originally from Iran. Although she was actually on the left, some of her story seems apropos. Here’s a portion of that post:

Nafisi married early, at eighteen, and attended college at the University of Oklahoma during the 1970s. Her plunge into political activism was as casual (and as literary) as it was leftist:

“I joined the Iranian student movement reluctantly. My father’s imprisonment and my family’s vague nationalist sympathies had sensitized me towards politics, but I was more of a rebel than a political activist–though in those days there was not much difference between them. One attraction was the fact that the men in the movement didn’t try to assault or seduce me. Instead, they held study groups in which we read and discussed Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State and Marx’s The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In the seventies, the mood—not just among Iranians, but among American and European students—was revolutionary. There was the Cuban example, and China of course. The revolutionary cant and romantic atmosphere were infectious, and the Iranian students were at the forefront of the struggle.”

So, revolution was a mood, an essence, something infectious in the air—rather like bacilli, as it turns out. Nafisi describes the group as markedly Marxist in philosophy and in style, sporting “Che Guevara sports jackets and boots…and Mao jackets and khakis.”

For Nafisi herself, romanticism and literature seem to have been the primary motives, passed somehow through the alchemy of her homesickness and transmuted into political activism:

“I insisted on wearing long dresses outside the meetings…I never gave up the habit of reading and loving ‘counterrevolutionary’ writers—T. S. Eliot, Austen, Plath, Nabokov, Fitzgrerald—but I spoke passionately at the rallies; inspired by phrases I had read in novels and poems, I would weave words together into sounds of revolution. My oppressive yearning for home was shaped into excited speeches against the tyrants back home and their American backers.”

Once in Tehran, Nafisi began to realize that the unsettling airport scene had been only the tip of the iceberg. She soon came to bitterly regret the mindless revolutionary zeal of her youth, and to realize that her revolutionary dream had turned into a nightmare, as they so often do:

“When in the States we had shouted Death to this or that, those deaths seemed to be more symbolic, more abstract, as if we were encouraged by the impossibility of our slogans to insist upon them even more. But in Tehran in 1979, these slogans were turning into reality with macabre precision. I felt helpless: all the dreams and slogans were coming true, and there was no escaping them.”

Although the revolutionaries back in Oklahoma and elsewhere had been decidedly leftist, the revolution they helped birth was a restrictive theocracy. One of the most interesting portions of the book describes how those leftists, at least in the early stages, managed to rationalize and excuse such clear signs that things had gone sharply awry as the imposition of the veil and the subjugation of women.

Nafisi was not one of those excusers, however; she describes her horror at the relentless approach of the suffocating clasp of the mullahs, a chill embrace undreamt of in her leftist days in Oklahoma.

And it got worse, much worse; there are many passages in the book that reminded me uncannily of what it must have been like for French revolutionaries to have watched the unfolding of the Reign of Terror (those who survived, that is), not to mention Stalin’s ex-comrades viewing the purges of their ranks:

“In later months and years, every once in a while Bijan [Nafisi’s husband] and I would be shocked to see the show trials of our old comrades in the U.S. on television. They eagerly denounced their past actions, their old comrades, their old selves, and confessed that they were indeed the enemies of Islam. We would watch these scenes in silence…I turned and ask Bijan, Did you ever dream that this could happen to us? He said, No, I didn’t, but I should have.”

“No, I didn’t, but I should have.” What quiet words of chilling despair! And indeed, one wonders how it was that smart people could have been so dumb; by the mid-to late-1970’s, when Nafisi and her friends were supporting a leftist revolution in Iran, surely the jury was no longer out on the fact that this was a road that would lead to the revolution swallowing its own as well as many others. But we see such a phenomenon again and again, as history repeats itself in its winding, twisting path.

In Nafisi’s case, she seems to have been mainly a romantic, interested in literature almost to the exclusion of other topics—such as history, apparently. Unfortunately for her, she had to learn the lessons of history the hard way, from personal experience. And so, too, did her revolutionary Iranian comrades-in-arms, unfortunately for them—and for us, and for the world as well. They could never have guessed at the trajectory their lives would follow from those long-ago days of sartorial playing at being revolutionaries, sporting Che and Mao jackets, to their final moments in the executioner’s chamber.

Watermark for absentee ballots?

The New Neo Posted on by

Recently I read that the Tennessee legislature is considering requiring watermarks for absentee ballots:

Big Tech and Corporate America may face more difficulty funding the elections process under the “Tennessee Election Integrity Act.” In part, the act would require funding from nongovernmental entities to be approved by the Tennessee General Assembly if in session, or the Governor, House and Senate Speaker, Secretary of State, Comptroller of Treasury, and the General Assembly Treasurer. Additionally, an amendment to the act announced on Tuesday would make it more difficult to produce fraudulent absentee ballots.

In short, the amendment to the bill would require non-electronic absentee ballots to be watermarked by local election commissions. That way, county election officials could verify the validity of the ballots upon receipt. Ballots without the watermark would be discarded.

I can’t find much information on whether other US states use this method, but it seems like a good idea. When I read it, I was reminded that several months ago I read what Great Britain does to ensure the integrity of its mail-in ballots. Their system seems considerably more secure than ours:

Each postal ballot pack contains inside the cover envelope a ballot paper, two envelopes (“A” and “B”) and a postal voting statement. Postal ballot papers contain the following design, security and identification features on the reverse:

–an official mark (e.g. a watermark or an official stamp)
–a unique identifying mark (e.g. a barcode which is different for each individual ballot paper)
–a unique identification number

When issuing each postal ballot paper, the officer marks on a list (called the corresponding number list) next to the postal ballot’s unique identification number the elector number of the voter to whom the postal ballot is sent, and then makes a mark next to the voter’s name in a separate list of postal voters. The unique identification number of the postal ballot paper is also marked on the postal voting statement sent within the postal ballot pack. The local authority name and address and the name of the constituency/ward are printed on both envelopes “A” and “B”. Once all ballot papers for an election have been issued by the returning officer, the corresponding number list is sealed in a packet which can only be opened upon the order of a court when an election result is challenged.

So ballots there have a watermark, barcode, and an ID number.

And if I understood that passage correctly, it seems as though there is also a way, if an election is challenged, to go back and match ballots to envelopes again. There’s a great deal more at the link if you care to read it.

You might want to send friends a link to this article on CRT

The New Neo Posted on by

We’ve discussed Critical Race Theory many times on this blog. But it’s easy to forget that it’s still not exactly a household word, even though it’s been dominating so much of the current turmoil, and has found its way into schools both private and public. It’s one of the most dangerous and divisive philosophies that has ever hit this country, and people need to learn what it is and why it needs to be fought.

Here’s the article. It’s long, but that’s true of just about any treatment of CRT, and this one is shorter than many. There’s really no time to spare in getting the word out.

And here’s something that is another example of the increasingly strong federal hand in education as well as the far-leftist race-based commitment of the Biden administration:

The Biden Department of Education has quietly proposed a new rule prioritizing the use of federal tax dollars for K-12 schools that replace traditional education with “culturally responsive teaching and learning” – more commonly referred to as critical race theory. This is the most significant move by the federal government to redefine the nature of state-funded public schools in U.S. history.

Although the current effort to push public schools receiving federal funding to adopt a detailed indoctrination agenda may feel new and overwhelming for parents, the truth is that the Biden attempt is simply the last phase in a decades-long effort to control local schools and press the progressive agenda on our children. With the power of taxpayer-funded purse strings, the federal government sends a message to public schools that if they want financial aid they must “teach” critical race theory and prioritize its ideologically anti-American, anti-traditional agenda over traditional education.

There have been recent voices in the realm of private schools to push back against this trend. At least parents there have the power of the purse. Public schools are more vulnerable to federal pressure. And although parents can theoretically pull their children out of public schools, that requires money or time – money for a decent private school (if one is even available) or time to homeschool. The feds are counting on the idea that most people either have neither or are unwilling to follow through on this – or will even remain ignorant about what their children are being taught.

Fundamental transformation of America – and something that most people who voted for Biden probably did not anticipate. But they should have.

[NOTE: And while we’re at it, please read this article on an EO recently signed by Biden. It could be one of the most dangerous and far-reaching tools the left has designed recently, giving it tremendous power. It all depends on how it’s used, and whether a successful challenge can be mounted against it.]

A new video in the Columbus, Ohio case…

The New Neo Posted on by

…makes it even more clear that the police officer who shot the knife-wielding 16-year-old Bryant was doing what was unfortunately necessary to prevent a potentially fatal stabbing.

I predict that this story will be one that fades relatively quickly. Various people have tried to save it – “he should have shot the knife out of her hand”; “knife fights are just commonplace teenage hijinks” – but their efforts are so ridiculous that even some on the left are having more than the usual trouble fully embracing them. Instead, I believe that the BLM crowd will go on to the next incident to hype, and attorney Crump will find another ambulance to chase.

There are real issues here to explore, such as why the dead girl was in foster care, what lead to the situation escalating, what might have been done to prevent it. But they are questions that have nothing to do with the police. The police are a convenient scapegoat for the left, because the reality of the situation would require more self-searching and more actual thought.

What chance does Chauvin have to win his appeal?

The New Neo Posted on by

Alan Dershowitz thinks the case might be reversed on appeal:

The conviction of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on all counts in the death of George Floyd “might be reversed on appeal” — likely by the U.S. Supreme Court — and it “should be,” Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz told Newsmax TV after Tuesday’s ruling.

“The judge himself said this case may be reversed on appeal, and I think it might be reversed on appeal,” Dershowitz said on Newsmax TV’s “Spicer & Co.” Tuesday, shortly after a jury in Minneapolis returned guilty verdicts against Chauvin on counts of second- and third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter…

“A new appeal will be filed immediately, because he’s in jail now, pending appeal,” said Dershowitz, explaining that there are “two levels of appeal” in Minnesota but most likely, the case will go to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The nation’s top court, he added, “holds the best possibility for the defense of getting this conviction reversed, on the grounds that the judge himself suggested the statements made by people outside the courtroom essentially intimidating jurors and telling them that if they don’t come to the ‘right verdict,’ there will be violence and consequences and their own lives may be affected.”

Meanwhile, Judge Peter Cahill, who presided over the case, will likely sentence Chauvin to a “very substantial sentence,” said Dershowitz, and that “might be the equivalent of life imprisonment” for the former police officer, who is now 45 years old.

Well, Dershowitz knows a lot more about criminal law than I do. But I don’t think there’s any chance of reversal by SCOTUS, although I think there should be.

The sad and horrible truth – at least, as I perceive it – is that the Supreme Court justices are subject to the same fear and pressures (and politics) as the jury, Judge Cahill, and the Minnesota higher court. In fact, SCOTUS is subject to even more pressure than they are, because of the overt Democrat threat of court-packing.

In addition, I don’t see Justice Roberts ever voting for anything so controversial, whatever the merits might be. Among other things, he simply doesn’t have the courage and tends to take the path of least resistance. And although some of the other justices do have the courage, I don’t think it’s enough to make a majority. I think they may even refuse to hear the case, actually.

As far as Chauvin’s sentence goes, I’m a little surprised that Dershowitz thinks it will be that long. Other attorneys who have written on the subject think it will be less than that, because the sentences would ordinarily run concurrently. Then again, the prosecution is alleging aggravated conditions for the crime, Cahill is running scared, and the mob has made it clear they will only be appeased by the most severe sentence – and even then they won’t really be satisfied.

[NOTE: Also see this article on Judge Cahill’s errors during the trial. I doubt any of them will matter on appeal, either.]

Today’s roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) The Biden administration is offering to lift oil and financial sanctions on Iran if Iran agrees to what is essentially Obama’s Iran deal. Sounds like win-win for Iran to me.

(2) The stock market isn’t happy, because of this:

…[The Biden administration] confessed that they were considering a whopping capital gains tax rate increase, nearly doubling it, to 39.6%, according to Market Watch. With the existing surtax on investment income, that could make the rate as high as 43.4% for the “wealthy.” Biden is expected to drop this plan next week to help pay, a little bit, for all the social spending that Joe has been piling up.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell nearly 350 points or 1%, while the Nasdaq Composite and S&P 500 fell 0.38% and 0.46%, respectively, in reaction to this news.

What else did they expect? Or was it worth it to get rid of President Mean Tweets?

(3) No surprise here, either:

Travis Campbell, an economics PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts, published his findings in a recent pre-print study examining the impact of BLM protests on police use-of-force incidents.

His analysis, which is still undergoing peer-review, found that cities with BLM protests had 15 to 20 percent fewer police homicides than expected if the protests had not taken place, equating to 300 fewer police killings nationwide over five years.

But, in a revised unpublished version shared with DailyMail.com, Campbell finds that cities with BLM protests also saw a 10 percent increase in murders overall, equaling 1,000 to 6,000 additional murders nationwide.

The researcher adds that the figures don’t “fully account for the positive impact of BLM protests” – he must be afraid of the woke mob coming for him. But then he adds that,”his data suggested that BLM protests result in ‘less police effort and less proactive policing,’ which could explain both the decrease in police killings and the overall increase in murders.”

Police homicides are not usually of people who aren’t engaged in crime or at the very least actively resisting arrest. They are often shot in the course of a murder in the making. So it’s hardly some stretch of logic to imagine that keeping police from doing that will cause murders to rise.

LeBron James tries to backtrack on his tweet about the officer who shot Ma’Kiya Bryant in Columbus

The New Neo Posted on by

{NOTE: I already wrote about some of the facts of the Bryant case yesterday in this post.]

Let’s see: cops are called to the scene of a fight and are told by the callers that knives are involved. When they arrive, they see some girls (who turn out to be in their mid-teens, although I don’t know whether the cops knew at the time that they were that young) in the middle of a fight. One raises her hand that holds a large knife, and it very strongly appears that she is a split-second from plunging it into the other girl.

What should the cop do? This one shot the knife-wielding girl, and she died. All the subjects were black except the police officer. It is crystal clear why he shot, and it’s clear he probably saved the life of the other girl. Knives are extremely lethal weapons at close range, and this was close range. There was no chance of the officer getting close to the girls in time, and no way I can think of to have defused the situation, which had obviously been building for some time and which the spectators (including relatives of the girls) had been unable to de-escalate.

However, some people are not okay with a white cop defending anyone – even a black person – if it results in the death of another black person. And so we have reactions such as this tweet from LeBron James (now deleted), which appeared along with a big photo of the police officer who shot Bryant: “YOU’RE NEXT”:

James clearly got told, presumably by his lawyers (or Jack Dorsey or quite frankly, any sane rational human being) to take that down and just 20 minutes later, the basketball star deleted this disgusting tweet.

LeBron James has approximately 50 million followers. And yet apparently:

Here’s how James tried to excuse himself. It’s quite an exercise in Orwellian thought:

Got that? His tweet – which featured a frontal photo of the police officer, and the words “YOU’RE NEXT” all in caps – is now being used (by the right, no doubt – Republicans pounce!) to “create more hate,” as though his words themselves didn’t create plenty of hate. And then he follows that up with something even worse: “this isn’t about one officer.” No, LeBron, the problems are most definitely not about one officer. But your tweet was just as definitely about one officer – the one you were specifically targeting.

I’m going to assume that James thinks that most of his followers will never know the content of his original tweet and will accept his explanation. And who knows, he may be correct on that.

And as for the race-baiting ambulance-chasing lawyer Ben Crump, who’s gotten rich and famous off of the killing of black people by white cops, he’s up to his usual tactics. His modus operandi is always to get in early and loudly with a lie, plant the narrative, and then ignore the correction and hope everyone else does, too. It’s worked very well for him in the past. Here is a tweet of his from April 20th on the Bryant case:

I don’t see Twitter putting a note on that and calling it “misinformation.” Or “debunked.” And yet it is definitely both. The very unfortunate death of Ma’Kiya Bryant occurred because she was not only armed but about to stab another black girl.

And I bet Crump doesn’t tweet “another child lost!” whenever a child is killed in the inner city by a knife or gun wielded by another black person.

[NOTE: On the other hand, there’s this surprising reaction from someone on the left who gets it:

Progressive writer Zaid Jilani, who is no stranger to annoying the left (including media leftists) although he happens to be one of them, took to the Twitter machine yesterday to write a blisteringly spot-on critique of the absolutely shameless, incendiary tactics the left/mainstream media were utilizing in spinning the tall tales they were about the Bryant case.

In his rant, Jilani said that the “news media can’t report honestly about violent crime because it doesn’t recognize it as a thing that exists and impacts the lives of ordinary people.” In other words, if it’s not a violent situation they can use to advance “woke” narratives, they aren’t interested.

Jilani also noted that a very similar case involving two African-American teenage girls in Ohio from just the day before the Bryant shooting got little to no national media attention because police weren’t involved. It was a case involving a 13-year-old girl who stabbed another 13-year-old girl to death.

He concluded by stating that in cases like Bryant’s, the media were not simply reporting on them because they involved a loss of life. They were exploiting the tragedies to advance a narrative and to “promote division.” That is, he correctly pointed out, not journalism and is certainly not good at all for this country.

No, it’s not. There’s not all that much “journalism” in the MSM; it’s woke activism, and it’s meant to stir up trouble.]