…and it will bleed into the non-academic world soon enough, and the Overton window will move to the point where the left will think it’s just a basic truth. And then half the country – the Democrat half – will agree, as well as the majority of the under-25 crowd.
Case in point: words are violence. That’s such an absurd equivalency that it contains its own obvious contradiction within it. Words are not violence. They are words. Words can incite and inspire violence if they meet a receptive mind. Expressing a difference of opinion is not violence. Words that make a person feel bad are not violence.
Remember the old children’s saying? Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me. I wonder whether kids say that anymore. Did they stop saying it decades ago, because it talked about violence? Did it allow bullies to keep on bullying, because of its nefarious suggestion that the bully could keep bloviating and it didn’t matter because it didn’t inflict actual violence?
Of course AOC is in the "words are violence" and "how dare you publish things that I personally disagree with" crowd. Do you have any idea how an op-ed page works? Do you know that the NYT has published op-eds from Putin, Erdogan, and the Taliban https://t.co/BoPGjcDj8L
One of the worst things about what’s been happening now, and actually for a long time, is the acceptance of lies as truth. It’s easy to spread a simple lie that grabs people and energizes them. Truth sometimes requires deeper thought, and maybe even a little math on occasion.
This is worth listening to on the subject:
And in the same vein – the lies constantly being told on the left – please read this, this, and this. I plan a longer post some day on that last article in particular, which is about the statistics on police violence against black people.
If they can’t debate on the facts, lies will do. In fact, maybe lies are better, because you can shape them as you wish. Coordinated lies are best of all, because if practically everyone is saying it, it must be true.
And the widespread acceptance of the lies encourages more lies, because they work.
The statement from the journal can be found here. Excerpt:
…[O]ur independent peer reviewers informed us that Surgisphere would not transfer the full dataset, client contracts, and the full ISO audit report to their servers for analysis as such transfer would violate client agreements and confidentiality requirements. As such, our reviewers were not able to conduct an independent and private peer review and therefore notified us of their withdrawal from the peer-review process.We always aspire to perform our research in accordance with the highest ethical and professional guidelines. We can never forget the responsibility we have as researchers to scrupulously ensure that we rely on data sources that adhere to our high standards. Based on this development, we can no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources. Due to this unfortunate development, the authors request that the paper be retracted.
They deeply apologize blahbity blah blah blah.
My hunch is that this is a case of garbage in garbage out, perhaps purposeful on the part of someone (although not necessarily the authors). I believe that it was one of those reports too good to fact check, since it disproved the narrative of the evil Trump. But the defects in the study were blatant enough that it didn’t take much time for online sleuths to come up with valid doubts based on anomalies in the data.
Grant Napear, longtime announcer for the Sacramento Kings, learned the hard way what is unacceptable speech in today’s America:
Grant Napear resigned as the Kings’ TV play-by-play announcer and was fired from KHTK radio in Sacramento on Tuesday.
Napear was previously placed on administrative leave after he tweeted “All Lives Matter… Every single one.” His tweet was in response to former Kings center DeMarcus Cousins, who asked Napear for his take on the Black Lives Matter movement amid worldwide protests stemming from the death of George Floyd.
KHTK’s parent company, Bonneville International Corporation, said in a statement that Napear’s comments “do not reflect the views or values” of the company, and the timing of his tweet was “particularly insensitive.”
So apparently Bonneville International Corporation does not subscribe to the idea that all lives matter. Some lives matter much more than others. Note duly taken.
And the people who espouse this sort of thing consider themselves righteous. I believe – although I have no way of knowing – that Martin Luther King would be extremely saddened.
A phrase – “Black Lives Matter” – that one would think might mean something like “we need to pay attention to black people’s lives every bit as much as anyone else’s, because all lives matter” – has morphed into a sacred slogan. Calling attention to the human worth of everyone – all created equal – is now a racist insult rather than a nearly universally agreed-on statement of the basis for American liberty.
As I said, duly noted.
The situation we are in today is becoming more and more like that of , Václav Havel’s greengrocer, a story I just learned about today (hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit). The parable can be found here:
The Power of the Powerless was originally written by Havel in October 1978…
Havel biographer, John Keane, describes Havel’s definition of a post-totalitarian world: “Within the system, every individual is trapped within a dense network of the state’s governing instruments…themselves legitimated by a flexible but comprehensive ideology, a ‘secularized religion’…a labyrinth of influence, repression, fear and self-censorship which swallows up everyone within it, at the very least by rendering them silent, stultified and marked by some undesirable prejudices of the powerful…”
Havel uses the example of a greengrocer who displays in his shop the sign Workers of the world, unite!. Since failure to display the sign could be seen as disloyalty, he displays it and the sign becomes not a symbol of his enthusiasm for the regime, but a symbol of both his submission to it and humiliation by it. Havel returns repeatedly to this motif to show the contradictions between the “intentions of life” and the “intentions of systems”, i.e. between the individual and the state, in a totalitarian society.
An individual living within such a system must live a lie, to hide that which he truly believes and desires, and to do that which he must do to be left in peace and to survive.This is comparable to the classical tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
…they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system…
Individuals at each level within the bureaucracy must display their own equivalent of the grocer’s Workers of the world, unite! sign, oppressing those below them and in turn oppressed by those above. Against this public lie is contrasted a life lived in truth, a title suggested by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his essay Live Not By Lies. Havel argued that the restoration of a free society could only be achieved through a paradigm based on the individual, “human existence,” and a fundamental reconstitution of one’s “respect for self, for others and for the universe”; to refuse to give power to empty slogans and meaningless rituals, to refuse to allow the lie to oppress oneself, and to refuse to be part of the lie that oppresses others. By doing so individuals illuminate their surroundings revealing to others that they have power.
At the moment in the US, strangely enough, it’s not the central government enforcing this – although that could certainly change soon enough with a change of administration. It’s the leftist mob that frightens people into submission, and the corporate entities and academic administrators who fire people for statements such as that of Napear.
Please read the whole thing; it has come to be more and more relevant in America today. And unfortunately, it may become even more so as time goes on.
[NOTE: Perhaps you have noticed, as I have, a host of emails from various companies you’ve dealt with (even tangentially) in the past, claiming their solidarity with the demonstrations and their renewed commitment to fight the rampant racism that infects our whole society. I cannot recall this sort of mass political mailing happening before. Perhaps it did on 9/11, but I don’t think email was quite as ubiquitous back then and I certainly don’t remember it happening. At any rate, it seems to me that most companies are very much feeling the need to put that greengrocer’s sign in their own windows.]
Most of the looters and rioters arrested by the NYPD over the past several days are immediately released as a direct result of New York’s new bail-reform law, New York City police chief Terrence Monahan told the New York Post on Tuesday.
While the city police made over 650 arrests on Monday night alone, Monahan said that “just about all of them” will be released without bail.
After the looting and arson, Cuomo did what he does best – blame others:
“The police in New York City were not effective at doing their job last night. Period,” Cuomo told reporters. He also floated the idea of “displacing” de Blasio, but immediately retracted the suggestion, saying it would create a “chaotic situation in the midst of an already chaotic situation, that doesn’t make sense.”
Chief Monahan told the Post that he was “extremely outraged” by Cuomo’s remarks.
“I’m watching my men and women out there dealing with stuff that no cop should ever have to deal with, bricks, bottles, rocks, hit in the face with bottles and continuing to go forward to make an arrest,” Monahan said. “For a governor to be sitting in his office saying that we’re not doing a good job — I’m outraged.”
I cannot even imagine what it is like to be a police officer today in New York or in any Democrat-dominated area. The police in general are being demonized, and the officials in charge do not have their backs and often tie their hands while those same officials posture and preen and virtue-signal and blame others.
Once hydroxychloroquine was touted by Trump as a possible tool against COVID, the drug’s days were numbered. Is it any wonder that a major study came out against it, and now there’s growing evidence that the study may have been fudged or at least very sloppy? Continue reading →
I have a better idea. Why not call them “undocumented shoppers”?
And isn’t that AP style guidance racist, anyway, assuming that black people are the ones looting?
But of course the changes in language are not limited to this moment, or to looters and looting. Get up-to-date on the newest Newspeak.
About a year ago this comment was made on the blog:
One fundamental principle – identified and exploited by both Goebbels’ Propagandaministerium and the KGB in Soviet Russia – is that endless repetition of a slogan infallibly modifies most people’s perception and reaction.
Pavlov – think about that – has been one of the few (the only one?) scientists whose research was constantly supported and financed in the USSR, even if he openly refused to accept the Marxist ideology.
…[E]verybody who comes from the left…knows that dissent means expulsion; so, any leftist develops a special ear capable of recognizing a new dogma: in articles and speeches given by the cool people in the cool places, a term begins to be used as if it were an indisputable evidence and those who “incredibly” refuse to accept it are gradually described as controversial, then conservative and eventually Fascist.
We constantly see this in action. “Moving the Overton Window” is another name for the goal of the process of language “reform,” which is to change public perceptions of what is acceptable and what is radical, and to make the once-radical now acceptable. There are many ways the left accomplishes this, but a major one is through language. The left recognized early on that changes in language are not superficial, and it became a big tool for them.
In the French Revolution, language was used for this purpose when people were instructed to call each other “citizen”, and in the USSR a similar phenomenon occurred:
Upon abolishing the titles of nobility in France, and the terms monsieur and madame (literally, “my lord” and “my lady”), the revolutionaries employed the term citoyen for men and citoyenne for women (both meaning “citizen”) to refer to each other…
When the socialist movement gained momentum in the mid-18th century, socialists elsewhere began to look for a similar egalitarian alternative to terms like “Mister”, “Miss”, or “Missus”. In German, the word Kamerad had long been used as an affectionate form of address among people linked by some strong common interest…In English, the first known use of the word “comrade” with this meaning was in 1884 in the socialist magazine Justice.
In the late 19th century Russian Marxists and other leftist revolutionaries adopted as a translation of the word “Kamerad” the Russian word tovarishch, whose original meaning was “business companion”…
That’s just about forms of address, but the thing about these words is that they are used constantly in everyday life and are habitual. To change them is to change a great deal.
Some language changes are natural and emerge spontaneously from the people themselves, but some are imposed from above either through suggestion, repetition, coercion, and/or threat of punishment. Think, for example, about Canadian professor Jordan Peterson’s battle over the use of pronouns for transgendered people—he has indicated he would certainly consider using a person’s preferred pronouns, but not under coercion or threat of punishment, either by government or by SJWs. As Peterson said in this video: the left is “trying to gain linguistic supremacy in the area of public discourse.”
To gain this linguistic and ultimately ideological supremacy, the left is constantly attempting to alter speech in ways both small and large. The small ways are sometimes even more effective, because they can evade whatever radar the right may possess, and the right often adopts these linguistic changes without even realizing what’s occurring.
Orwell devoted a great portion of his masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four to this very issue of politically purposeful language change, which he viewed as central to leftist thought. In fact, I believe that his coinage and discussion of Newspeak was the beating heart of his book and a huge, memorable, and especially meaningful reason why it became so widely read and influential.
Lara Logan is not one of the enablers. Please watch:
Perhaps Antifa’s most clever move is its name, which is explained as meaning “anti-fascist.” Orwell would be very very proud. A group or groups claimed to be Antifa’s antecedents may have started during the actual Fascist era in Germany and Italy, but the modern version surfs off the name to create an impression that is quite different from the truth.
“Fascist” had already become an all-purpose word to refer to whatever people don’t like, anyway. So these days the left and the MSM use it to refer to the right in the US. It’s absurd for many reasons, one of which is that the US right stands for small government rather than large. But the left and the MSM and the anti-Trumpers and the Democrats (have I left anyone out?) count on ignorance of history in its listeners, and so “fascist” and “nazis” it is.
Once Trump and the right have been falsely labeled as such – as well as “white supremacists” – the stage is set for lauding and/or excusing the excesses of Antifa as forgivable because, after all, they are just fighting fascism and white supremacy. Who wouldn’t want to do that?
And so we get a bunch of puff pieces such as, just to take one that came up when I Googled, this from the BBC:
Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, says the modern American Antifa movement began in the 1980s with a group called Anti-Racist Action. Its members confronted neo-Nazi skinheads at punk gigs in the American Midwest and elsewhere. By the early 2000s the Antifa movement was mostly dormant – until the rise of Donald Trump and the alt-right…
What are they opposed to?
Neo-Nazis, Neo-fascism, white supremacists and racism, and these days the movement that encapsulates some of those ideas: the alt-right.
We spoke to secret Antifa groups in Oregon. They said they come from a variety of political backgrounds but they were united in their opposition to fascism, and they have an anti-government streak. They said they see creeping authoritarianism in the current American administration that they are looking to build “a movement that really insulates us from the policies of Donald Trump”.
So they’re just a bunch of good people fighting Trump and his merry band of white supremacists. It goes unmentioned how small that latter group is, and how Trump and the rest have condemned it, because the MSM doesn’t want to give that impression.
The piece goes on:
Their willingness to use violence marks out Antifa from many other left-wing activists, although the Antifa members we spoke to said they denounce the use of weapons and violent direct action. They said if violence does occur, it’s as a form of self-defence. They also make historical arguments to justify their position. For instance, they ask, what if opponents of the German Nazi Party had been more forceful in their opposition in the 1930s, could World War Two and the Holocaust have been averted?
Antifa have been directly and sometimes physically confronting the far right on the streets…
That’s about as negative as it gets.
In all that propaganda from Antifa there is one very telling phrase of truth: “they have an anti-government streak.” Boy, do they ever. In fact, they are anarchists, a word that is descriptive of the group but only comes up once in that entire article, in this context: “Like other protest movements dating back to Cold War era West German anarchists, Antifa supporters will often dress all in black…” The casual reader could be forgiven for assuming that only in Germany during the Cold War were the current Antifa’s predecessors anarchists (if the reader even knows what the word means). But anarchists are exactly what the group is today.
What are anarchists? Well, since they’re anarchists, they have a lot of different beliefs, and there are anarchists of the left and of the right but the divisions are hard to fathom because the entire thing is hard to fathom. But roughly, Antifa are anarchists of the left (see this). What unites anarchists in general is a desire to destroy central governments, but that’s only the beginning. As such, Antifa in the US is very interested in stirring up trouble and doing anything they think will weaken the Trump administration, but their goals are much larger than that.
See this, for example; Antifa has had a large presence in the liberal/left Northwest for several years:
Antifa has never had to hide in Seattle, Portland or the rest of the West Coast. When the news media is forced to mention them at all, they obligingly call them “anti-fascists”, which, this week, useful idiots have been touting on Twitter as proof that being against Antifa means one is for fascism, to which I have replied, “why are you against ‘Making America Great Again?”
In notoriously anti-Second Amendment Seattle, Antifa open-carried. They commandeered a couple of blocks, as their “security arm”, the John Brown Gun Glub, prevented citizen journalist, and expert on Antifa and its funders, Andy Ngo, from filming the goings on. The Seattle media was incurious…
Portland, Oregon, has at times been owned by Antifa. They controlled the comings and goings of cars an people, which the Mayor of Portland, Ted Wheeler, allowed. A decision upon which he doubled-down.
At various times on my radio program, I read from Facebook pages of Antifa groups about their paramilitary trainings to be held in Seattle parks: how to make IEDs; how to hide spears in the handles of protest signs; the use of marbles to trip (and probably fatally injure) police horses and their riders. The rest of the Seattle media was not drawn to the stories.
On July 13, 2019 at 4:30 AM, I thought Antifa had erred by outing themselves as dangerous Marxists bent on attacking our Country. One of their soldiers, from the related “security” arm, the John Brown Gun Club, attempted to murder federal agents at an ICE Detention facility in Tacoma, South of Seattle in Washington State. An ICE Spokesman noted, had the terror attack been successful at blowing up the building, 1,400 people would have been murdered.
One would imagine this would alarm the media and the government–not so. In Seattle, and much of the West Coast, this attack is still viewed as a righteous act of self-defense against an agency politicians vilify.
See also this:
This is dangerous.
Socialist Seattle Councilmember Tammy Morales defending the weekend violence, telling her comrades on the Council:
"I don't want to hear is for our constituents to be told to be civil, not to be reactionary, to be told looting doesn't solve anything." pic.twitter.com/NVUBfYVrwS
— (((Jason Rantz))) on KTTH Radio (@jasonrantz) June 2, 2020
The people of Antifa could be shut down fairly easily if they weren’t idealized, covered up, and romanticized, by other people playing a stupid, ignorant, dangerous, dreamy game – or who are in league with them. And such people are legion in blue strongholds these days.
More:
As NBC News in New York noted, the attacks being carried out on American cities are sophisticated; they have logistics, supply chain, intelligence operations and medical supply and aid groups. They learned their techniques on our streets, tested them on our citizens and now, they are employing them against the United States of America, along with drug addiction, sex trafficking, illegal immigration and pornography: another gift to the Country from the one-party West Coast. How can you protect you and your communities?
These groups are not going to stop, they will have to be stopped. Make sure office holders and politicians you support will work to end Antifa and the militant arm of Black Lives Matter as terrorist groups.
A Project Veritas video released Tuesday showed a man identified as a campaign organizer for Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Bernard Sanders saying “cities burn” if President Trump wins reelection and predicting violence against police at the 2020 Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee.
Asked what would happen if Mr. Trump is reelected, the man described as Sanders campaign field organizer Kyle Jurek said, “F–ing cities burn,” adding, “I mean, we don’t have a lot of time left, we have to save
f–ing human civilization.”…
[H]e also expressed support for ideological reeducation Trump voters; compared such Americans to Nazis; praised Soviet-style gulags; and predicted police would be “beaten” in riots at the party convention.
They found an opportunity prior to the convention, in the Floyd death at the hands of police in Minneapolis. But they were already prepared with the playbook, the supplies, and the organization.
But the left doesn’t care. Why should they? Lies are their daily bread. And they work. I wager that a few months from now, most Democrats will still think the photo’s real, and even if they don’t they still will be making excuses for why it expresses A Higher Truth.
If a person hates Trump already, as so many do – and thinks he’s either Hitler or the devil incarnate or both – the photoshop makes perfect sense. Even without the photoshop, his actions were outrageous because he’s evil and he’s pretending to hold a Bible, when his real aim is Fascist tyranny.
Just the other day I had a brief discussion with a friend about the riots – something several people have brought up with me, by the way, even though we rarely if ever discuss politics – and she asked me, “Doesn’t Antifa just mean anti-Fascist?” Clever folks, to call themselves that.
I explained the name was Orwellian, and went into it a little bit. This particular friend, who is almost always very reasonable, took it in. But whatever her news sources are, they hadn’t given her much of the picture at all. And this is by design, too.
[NOTE: It’s also interesting to me how few people know that for the most part the Nazis despised Christianity, and that many of the people who tried to stop Hitler and plotted to assassinate him were devout Christians.]
I have a special interest in the brief Judge Sullivan and his lawyers filed yesterday with the DC District Court. I was curious to see how it jibes with my 3-part analysis of what has been going on with Sullivan regarding Flynn.
The legal issues interest me too, of course. I refer you especially to this article as well as this one. The latter is not primarily about Sullivan’s brief, it’s about a different brief submitted by the DOJ to the same court in order to counter whatever argument Sullivan might make:
In a sign of how important DOJ views the underlying constitutional issues in the case, the formal brief to the appellate court [from the DOJ] wasn’t just signed by the line attorney managing the government’s case. Instead, it was signed by Noel J. Francisco, the Solicitor General of the United States who is tasked with representing the U.S. government in the most important appellate cases across the country; Brian A. Benczkowski, the Assistant Attorney General and head of DOJ’s entire criminal division; Deputy Solicitors General Jeffrey B. Wall and Eric J. Feigin; assistants to the Solicitor General Frederick Liu and Vivek Suri; Michael R. Sherwin, the acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia; Kenneth C. Kohl, the acting Principal Assistant United States Attorney for D.C.; and Jocelyn S. Ballantine, the line prosecutor handling the Flynn case at trial.
You can find Judge Sullivan’s (actually, his lawyers’) response here. Note the beginning of the tome:
The unique facts of this case warrant evaluation by the trial judge before any review by this Court.
It is unusual for a criminal defendant to claim innocence and move to withdraw his guilty plea after repeatedly swearing under oath that he committed the crime.
There it is – again with the guilty plea! Which isn’t especially relevant to the issue at hand that he was asked to address, which is whether Sullivan had the authority to buck the dictates of the DOJ to dismiss the case. That opener does seem to be in line with what I wrote earlier, which is that for some reason Sullivan has not absorbed (or will not accept, or pretends to not absorb or accept) something that has become glaringly obvious about the Flynn case, which is that Flynn’s confession was coerced.
The brief seems to basically lead up to the idea that wouldn’t it be great if Sullivan appointed himself as a sort of Special Prosecutor in order to investigate and ferret out the truth of everything that’s gone on here? The answer should be “no, that’s not your role.”
The bulk of the brief is a lengthy discussion of what happened in the case, with emphasis on that repeated guilty plea and even the inclusion of quite a few of the quotes I used in my posts on the subject. The brief reminds me of a term paper in which the writer has little to say of substance, and instead just shoots the old bull – as Holden Caulfield would say – until he/she reaches the requisite number of pages and turns the paper in with a relieved sigh that at least that’s over.
The following just might be my favorite part:
Mr. Flynn likewise errs in seeking mandamus on the basis that further proceedings in the district court “will subject [DOJ] to sustained assaults on its integrity.” Pet. 28. Judge Sullivan has not disparaged DOJ’s integrity in any way.
Tell me another one, Judge Sullivan. Do you recall, “Arguably, this undermines everything this flag over here stands for. Arguably, you sold your country out”? How about Sullivan’s totally uncalled-for remark, “is there an opinion about the conduct of the defendant the following days that rises to the level of treasonous activity on [Flynn’s] part?” Or Sullivan’s later threat to get Flynn for criminal contempt for perjury for entering a false guilty plea, a judicial action previously unheard of?
Towards the end of the brief you can find this:
For several years, the government represented to the district court, across multiple court filings and appearances, that Mr. Flynn was guilty of making materially false statements. As recently as January of this year, the government maintained those representations. And Mr. Flynn repeatedly affirmed his guilt, under oath and penalty of perjury, despite being given multiple opportunities to disclaim it. It was not until this year that Mr. Flynn, and then the government, told the district court that its finding of guilt should be reversed and that the government’s prior solemn representations were legally and factually untrue.
It didn’t just tell the court. It described an egregious pattern of repetitive investigatory and prosecutorial malfeasance. But apparently, Sullivan suspects the guilty party is the Barr DOJ:
…the unusual developments in this case provide at least a plausible “reason to question” the “bona fides” of the government’s motion…
Not reason to question the original actions of the government and the resultant coerced guilty plea, but reason to question the government’s recent motion to dismiss. You cannot make this stuff up, although apparently Sullivan (or his lawyers) can.
But it’s the last few pages that are the craziest. That’s where Sullivan basically says he should become the equivalent of a special prosecutor and ferret out the truth, while Flynn waits patiently:
The process Judge Sullivan has established, including the appointment of an amicus, will permit him to fully consider the issues, and will aid this Court as well if further review becomes necessary. The government and Mr. Flynn currently are aligned in support of dismissal, with nobody presenting the other side of the complex and important Rule 48 questions raised by that request.
So: continued anger at, and real or feigned inability to understand, what Flynn’s guilty plea was about and what engendered it; plus remarkable arrogance/hubris. Throw in some ignorance of the law and some tactics that advance anti-Trump politics, and there you have it: Judge Sullivan’s brief.
I’m not going into detail on the brief by the DOJ, but I suggest once again that you read this article by Sean Davis about it. From the article:
“The Constitution vests in the Executive Branch the power to decide when—and when not—to prosecute potential crimes,” DOJ argued in its brief. Rules of federal criminal procedure, cited by Sullivan in support of his gambit to appoint himself both judge and prosecutor in the inquisition against Flynn, “do[] not authorize a court to stand in the way of a dismissal the defendant does not oppose, and any other reading of [those rules] would violate both Article II and Article III” of the constitution, DOJ wrote.
“Nor, under the circumstances of this case, may the district court assume the role of prosecutor and initiate criminal charges of its own,” the brief continued. “Instead of inviting further proceedings the court should have granted the government’s motion to dismiss.”…
“The failure to dismiss the indictment was error,” DOJ wrote in its brief. “And the court’s efforts to pursue additional charges of contempt compounded its error.”
“When, like many other defendants, petitioner pleaded guilty but later asserted his innocence, he did not expose himself to prosecution for criminal contempt of court,” Francisco and the other DOJ attorneys noted. “The court lacks authority to bring its own prosecution of petitioner, for two independent reasons.”
“First, any false statements in this context are not contempt under 18 U.S.C. § 401,” the continued. “Second, even if petitioner’s conduct were punishable as contempt, the authority to prosecute him would lie with the Executive, not the court.”
The DOJ attorneys cited precedent after precedent, including Supreme Court decisions, that require Sullivan to dismiss Flynn’s case rather than mounting his own personal prosecution against Flynn.
“The district court plans to subject the Executive’s prosecutorial decision to extensive judicial inquiry, scrutiny, oversight, and involvement,” DOJ wrote. “Under the Supreme Court’s and this Court’s precedents, it is clear and indisputable that the district court has no authority to embark on that course.”
Lawyers can argue almost anything, as Sullivan’s brief demonstrates. But some arguments are extraordinarily weak, as is Sullivan’s. That doesn’t mean that some judge can’t find for them, if the end justifies the means.
[ADDENDUM: Here’s another good article to read about Sullivan’s brief.]
Some time during the Obama administration it occurred to the left that its time had finally come and its patience was about to be fully rewarded. Between the Gramscian march, the “fundamental transformation” Obama was working on, the coming-of-age of generations steeped in leftist education (including legal education), the mainstreaming of identity and grievance politics – and, most importantly of all, the full cooperation of the MSM and its heartfelt embrace of ends-justify-means lies – the left felt itself to be on the threshold of total dominance of American politics for the foreseeable future. In fact, it knew itself to be there.
It was in the bag.
The results of the 2016 election were a seismic shock of large magnitude. But recovery involved a complete dedication to the undoing of that event. I don’t need to go into all the ways in which the left tried to accomplish this, but they were many and they were vicious. They came one after the other with no respite, and still Trump and the right seemed to bounce back, although much of the country seems oblivious to the outrage of something such as Russiagate/Obamagate, for example, with many people persisting in the idea that Trump is Putin’s puppet and Michael Flynn a traitor.
Propaganda works. But it hasn’t yet clinched the deal.
So more recently, the left has changed gear somewhat. The country is no longer allowed to be prosperous if it would help Trump. COVID was turned into an excuse to gravely wound the economy. And now that the COVID episode was beginning to calm down, and there might not even be a lethal enough second wave to deal a fatal blow to Trump, we have the revival of the 60s civil unrest and racial riots, one of the most terrible aspects of that decade.
But there’s a difference, and it’s the leftism of a much larger segment of the American public, the willingness of virtually the entire MSM to voluntarily become Pravda, the courts’ desire to play along as well, the amount of money supporting the movement, and what I see as the increasing sophistication of the violent forces such as Antifa who are ready to exploit any and every incident that lends itself to it.
The 60s radicals were relative amateurs. These people, less so, at least in terms of organization. And we have not yet seen the worst of it, of that I am convinced.
I hope I’m wrong. But it’s something like a fireworks display. At first, there are pauses between the explosions, and some are smaller and some larger. But towards the finale, they come fast and furious and the reverberations are huge.
And we’re still more than five months from that finale. Did I say “finale”? If somehow Trump manages to get elected, I believe that the left’s resultant fury will be even greater and the fireworks will be greater, as well.
[NOTE: Sorry to be so pessimistic. I don’t mind if you try to talk me out of it. I think the left counts on this feeling of weariness.]
[NOTE II: Please read this. And also this from Lileks, who lives in Minneapolis.]
