George Soros' quiet overhaul of the U.S. justice system

Progressives have zeroed in on electing prosecutors as an avenue for criminal justice reform, and the billionaire financier is providing the cash to make it happen.

by Scott Bland at Politico

While America’s political kingmakers inject their millions into high-profile presidential and congressional contests, Democratic mega-donor George Soros has directed his wealth into an under-the-radar 2016 campaign to advance one of the progressive movement’s core goals — reshaping the American justice system.

The billionaire financier has channeled more than $3 million into seven local district-attorney campaigns in six states over the past year — a sum that exceeds the total spent on the 2016 presidential campaign by all but a handful of rival super-donors. 

His money has supported African-American and Hispanic candidates for these powerful local roles, all of whom ran on platforms sharing major goals of Soros’, like reducing racial disparities in sentencing and directing some drug offenders to diversion programs instead of to trial. It is by far the most tangible action in a progressive push to find, prepare and finance criminal justice reform-oriented candidates for jobs that have been held by longtime incumbents and serve as pipelines to the federal courts — and it has inspired fury among opponents angry about the outside influence in local elections.

“The prosecutor exercises the greatest discretion and power in the system. It is so important,” said Andrea Dew Steele, president of Emerge America, a candidate-training organization for Democratic women. “There’s been a confluence of events in the past couple years and all of the sudden, the progressive community is waking up to this.”

Soros has spent on district attorney campaigns in Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Texas through a network of state-level super PACs and a national “527” unlimited-money group, each named a variation on “Safety and Justice.” (Soros has also funded a federal super PAC with the same name.) Each organization received most of its money directly from Soros, according to public state and federal financial records, though some groups also got donations from nonprofits like the Civic Participation Action Fund, which gave to the Safety and Justice group in Illinois.

The Florida Safety and Justice group just poured nearly $1.4 million — all of which came from Soros and his 527 group — into a previously low-budget Democratic primary for state attorney in Central Florida before Tuesday’s vote. The group is backing Aramis Ayala, a former public defender and prosecutor, in her campaign against incumbent Jeff Ashton, whose jurisdiction covers over 1.6 million people across two counties in metro Orlando.

One TV ad from Florida Safety and Justice boosts Ayala, touting her “plan to remove bias so defendants charged with the same crime receive the same treatment, no matter their background or race.” The Soros-funded group is also attacking Ashton with ads saying he “got rid of protections that helped ensure equal treatment regardless of background or race. ... Take two similar traffic incidents that happened on the same night. A white man got off with a slap on the wrist, while the black man faces prison.” 

Opponents of Soros’ favored candidates have laced into the billionaire, saying that his influence has wildly tipped the scales of local elections and even charging that he made residents less safe.

“As a candidate and citizen of Caddo Parish, if an outsider was that interested in the race, I wanted to know exactly what he had in mind for the criminal justice system if he were to win,” said Dhu Thompson, a Louisiana attorney who lost a district attorney race to a Soros-backed candidate, James Stewart, in 2015. Soros gave over $930,000 — more than 22 times the local median household income — to the group boosting Stewart.

“I know some of his troubling opinions on social issues, especially the criminal justice system,” Thompson said. “I’ve never known him as an individual who was very strong on some of our crime and punishment issues. I felt it was very detrimental to the safety of Caddo Parish, and that’s why I took such a strong stand against him.”

A Soros representative declined to comment on his involvement in the DA races.

Progressive operatives and activists say that the recent uptick in news coverage of racial justice issues, especially police-involved deaths of African-Americans, helped sparked intense new interest in the powerful role of district attorneys, who did not indict officers in some high-profile cases. So has the longer-term reform push to shrink the U.S. prison population and promote treatment over punishment for drug users.

Reform groups have spent years advocating criminal justice policies and legislation that would reduce incarceration rates. Liberal donors have long given to policy-focused nonprofits; the Soros-chaired Open Societies Foundation, for example, works on drug policy and criminal justice reform and has supported other reform groups like the California-based Alliance for Safety and Justice — which, despite its similar name, has had no involvement in district attorney races, a spokeswoman said.

Prosecutorial discretion gives district attorneys a huge say in the charges and sentences that defendants face. But reform efforts have not traditionally focused on harnessing that power.

“They are often a very invisible part of the criminal justice system and the political system,” said Brenda Carter, director of the Reflective Democracy Campaign, an arm of the progressive Women Donors Network. “Many people can’t name their district attorney. It’s not an office people think about a lot.”

Carter’s group commissioned research in 2015 that found that 95 percent of elected local prosecutors in the U.S. are white and three-quarters overall are white men. It also highlighted a Wake Forest University study that found that a vast majority of prosecutors — 85 percent — run for reelection unopposed.

“I found that to be shocking, and I think people are waking up to the untapped potential for intervention in these seats to really change the day-to-day realities of criminal justice,” Carter said. “It’s been really gratifying for us to see the research taken up and run with by different groups around the country.”

Armed with that knowledge, progressive groups including Color of Change began researching potentially interesting district attorney races around the country, multiple sources said. (The organization declined to comment.)

“It’s hard to find this information!” exclaimed Steele, the Emerge America president. “You can’t just Google ‘hot DA races.’ So part of the issue is identifying what potential races there are.”

Soros’ spending started on these races about a year ago, when he put over $1 million into “Safety and Justice” groups that helped elect two new district attorneys in Louisiana and Mississippi and reelect a third — Hinds County, Miss., DA Robert Shuler Smith — who has since been charged by the Mississippi attorney general with improperly providing information to defendants.

The other Mississippi district attorney Soros’ spending helped elect, Scott Colom, has now represented a four-county stretch of the eastern part of the state for eight months. Colom said in an interview that he has focused on prosecuting violent crime in his new position while trying not to burden local prisons with first-time, low-level drug offenders.

“I’ve expanded the charges eligible for pre-trial diversion,” Colom said, adding that the number of people in the program in his jurisdiction has doubled since he took office seven months ago. “It’s all focused on the individual person, on trying to find a plan with the best chance possible of avoiding criminal behavior.”

“I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who think prison is too nice and we need to spend more on it,” Colom continued. “But it seems like a large majority of people out there get it and realize there have to be priorities. Just because a fella commits a crime doesn’t mean the best outcome is sending them to jail. ... As much as possible, I want to take people from being tax burdens to taxpayers.”

After the Louisiana and Mississippi races, Soros next piled money into two of the biggest jurisdictions in the country: Houston’s Harris County (his lone losing effort so far) and Chicago’s Cook County, where he funded one of several groups that helped Kim Foxx defeat incumbent state’s attorney Anita Alvarez in a high-profile primary campaign dominated by the 13-month delay between the police shooting of Laquan McDonald and the indictment of the police officer involved.

In late spring, $107,000 from a Soros-funded New Mexico super PAC helped Raul Torrez win his Democratic district attorney primary by a 2-to-1 margin in Albuquerque’s Bernalillo County. Torrez’s Republican opponent dropped out of the general election soon after, citing the potentially exorbitant cost of opposing the Soros-backed candidate in the general election.

While Soros has spent heavily in 2015 and 2016, a broader national push into local prosecutor campaigns is expected to intensify in the next few years, thanks to longer-term planning and candidate recruitment. A Safety and Justice group has already organized in Ohio, according to campaign finance filings there. But it has not yet disclosed raising or spending any money.

“There’s been a realization that there’s not very much we can do this year, when you’re coming up to an election,” said Steele. “You have to have the right candidates. That’s a big piece of the puzzle and why I’m part of this conversation. ... A lot of the conversations I’m having are about 2017 and 2018, about looking forward to next year in Virginia and other places.”

That means more local candidates should prepare for the shock of one of the biggest donors in American politics flooding their neighborhoods with ads.

Colom, the Mississippi prosecutor, says he has never met Soros — like other district attorney candidates supported by the Democratic billionaire this year. He said there was no hint that hundreds of thousands of dollars were coming to aid his campaign until advertising started pushing the same criminal-justice reform message that Colom had been touting — albeit on a much cheaper scale.

“The first I heard of it, someone told me they liked my radio ad, and I was thinking, that doesn’t sound like one of mine,” Colom said.

X22, On the Fringe, and more-Dec 4

 

Hope you're all enjoying your Saturday! Here's tonight's news:

Heroic Disunionists: What the American Right Can Learn from the Abolitionists

The notion that support for disunion makes one a racist 

or neo-confederate is wholly untethered from history.

by Jeremy Carl for American Greatness

On May 31, 2015 the New York Times Times announced the end of its popular “Disunion” blog, dedicated to the Civil War, which had run for the previous four years. Two weeks later, Donald Trump descended the escalator at Trump Tower, setting in motion a series of events that would reveal a contemporary America arguably as prone to disunion as we have been at any time since the Civil War. 

Disunion may seem like a curious name for a blog about the war, but it was actually the name used by an entire movement of Northern abolitionists in the decades leading up to the Civil War. This group was the most prominent of those seeking to split up America over the question of slavery. Abolitionist “disunionists” were, after the founders themselves who separated from Britain, America’s original secessionists. 

The fact that the leading historic advocates of high-stakes political strategies such as disunion were not, in fact, Confederate secessionists but abolitionistshas been quite intentionally obscured by the left-wing academic and cultural establishment. They seek to associate ideas that enhance local autonomy and popular sovereignty, especially on the Right, with unpopular causes. This is why, when discussing the possibilities, the term disunion is preferable to “secession” or “national divorce,” both of which are laden with negative moral or historical associations—something that distinguished historian Victor Davis Hanson understood well, when he recently labeled the totalitarian-Left regime as “The New Blue Confederacy.” 

But political tools such as nullification, rejection of judicial supremacy, or disunion are neither good nor evil in and of themselves. They are simply tools, each with its own particular history within American statecraft. Their moral salience depends entirely on the ends for which they were and are used. While tools such as nullification or disunion must be approached with caution, they should not be discarded a priori either on historical or moral grounds. 

What follows is an examination of the real history of these tools, and how the Right might use them effectively. 

Nullification

Nullification is a broad concept, but one that generally refers to a state’s ability to invalidate a federal law within its borders if the state believes a law is unconstitutional. It has a long history in the United States, having been first proposed by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the 1798 Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. 

Likewise, nullification has been rejected by the Supreme Court with as much energy as it was proposed—a rejection that is itself contested, and even more problematically, selectively applied. 

In the early 19th century, the most prominent advocate of nullification was John C. Calhoun, who advanced arguments that benefitted slaveholding states—a fact always stressed by nullification’s opponents. But the key cases of nullification in the mid-19th century involved northern states attempting to thwart the Fugitive Slave Act, a federal law that required states to return escaped slaves to the South. 

While Calhoun’s nullification crisis with the Jackson Administration would ultimately be settled in Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court in Ableman v. Booth(1859) for the first time explicitly rejected the principle of nullification. Ablemanoverturned a Wisconsin Supreme Court decision, which declared the federal government had no authority to overrule that state’s determination that the Fugitive Slave Act was invalid in Wisconsin. Ableman is considered perhaps the most important judicial repudiation of nullification, and it was done in the name of slave power. 

Yet despite the court’s ruling on nullification, the truth is that federal blocking of nullification has been sporadic and haphazard—with marijuana legalization, healthcare exchanges, and gun rights among the policies states have most recently attempted to nullify federal law. Between 2010 and 2016 there were over 1,500 nullification procedures endorsed in various state legislative proposals, 11 percent of which were enacted into law. Four-fifths of states have enacted policies that have nullified federal law in recent years. 

Opposing Judicial Supremacy 

Ableman v. Booth was notable not simply as touchtone for the repudiation of nullification but for its implicit declaration of judicial supremacy. It proclaimed not only that the Constitution was supreme over state law but that the Supreme Court was the sole, final arbiter of what the Constitution said. But this assertion of judicial supremacy was only made explicit under the liberal Warren court in the 1958 case of Cooper v. Aaron. It is notable the Supreme Court picked the morally sympathetic issue of civil rights and desegregation to justify its own power grab. 

But the court’s power play was hardly uncontested. Edwin Meese, while serving as Ronald Reagan’s attorney general, criticized Cooper v. Aaron in a high-profile speech, claiming that court decisions should only bind the applicants in a particular case, not create a general presumption about the supreme law of the land. 

Meese drew a distinction between constitutional supremacy and judicial supremacy, and it is notable that he drew substantial support in this position from scholars on both sides of the aisle. Cooper v. Aaron, he insisted, “was, and is, at war with the Constitution, at war with the basic principles of democratic government, and at war with the very meaning of the rule of law.”Meanwhile, Lloyd Cutler, who served as White House counsel to President Jimmy Carter and again to President Bill Clinton, noted that “FDR’s attorney general in 1936 would have agreed with every word” of Meese’s speech.

The ideology behind Meese’s rejection of judicial supremacy goes back further than FDR. In the famous Dred Scott case, Abraham Lincoln made an almost identical argument to Meese’s while it was his opponent Stephen Douglas who stood for unfettered judicial supremacy. As noted constitutional scholar Michael Paulsen observed, “Lincoln stood for constitutional supremacy, and against the prospective binding authority of the Supreme Court’s betrayal of the Constitution in Dred Scott v. Sandford.” 

Lincoln would do the same in defying Ex Parte Merryman, which attempted to limit the president’s authority to hold enemy prisoners during the Civil War. 

In the view of Harvard Law School’s Noah Feldman, the Emancipation Proclamation itself was a constitutional violation. But it was certainly not a moral one.

As Paulsen wrote, “it seems fair to say that one cannot embrace the modern view of reflexive judicial supremacy without simultaneously opposing nearly everything Lincoln said and did as President.”

Disunion 

If nullification and judicial supremacy have been treated dishonestly by the Left, then the concept of disunion has been even more abused. While clearly a policy of last resort and not one endorsed by this author in our current situation, much of the refusal of some on the Right to even consider disunion is not the result of a serious and sober study of our current political situation, but instead a sort of political wishcasting. 

As leading disunion advocate Dave Reaboi wrote, responding to National Review’s Rich Lowry’s harsh criticism of his argument: 

Can we all admit that nothing human lasts forever, including the United States? If we can (and we should), we must slowly grope at a point at which the country is truly changed fundamentally, and a return to constitutional government . . . is impossible. What then? Does Lowry admit this is a possibility? No, because that’s what ‘giving up on our birthright’ means to him; it means being stuck on the sinking ship, forever, impotently yelling stop—and believing so furiously that you sink along with it.

More importantly, Reaboi and others note, disunion (which he calls national divorce) is more a concept at this point than a political program. 

“National divorce isn’t an immediate action plan,” he writes. “Rather it is a rhetorical strategy to prepare the ground for crucial discussions about what comes next in America, as the country grows ever more divided, bitter, and angry. More than anything else it is a reminder for Red America to think about economic and cultural autonomy for itself and what it would take to get there.” 

Nor is disunion morally dubious: In fact, its earliest proponents were some of the most heroic Americans of their era, including America’s most important abolitionists, most notably William Lloyd Garrison, founder of The Liberator, America’s most important anti-slavery publication, whose masthead read “No Union with Slaveholders.” 

So outraged was Garrison by slavery that his critiques of the pre-Cvil War Constitution as written go far beyond all but the most extreme modern critics on the Left or Right. Garrison referred to the Constitution’s implicit sanction of slavery as a “Covenant with Death” and an “Agreement with Hell.”  

Garrison’s views weren’t idiosyncratic. The American Antislavery Society, the most important anti-slavery group in the United States, voted overwhelmingly for disunion in the 1840s. Horace Greeley, the famous anti-slavery editor of the New York Tribune who would be the Democratic nominee for pPresident in 1872, also supported the right of dDisunion, which he explicitly compared to the process of American Independence. Wendell Phillips, perhaps the preeminent figure in the abolitionist movement, argued, “it is impossible for free and slave states to unite on any terms, without all becoming partners in the guilt and responsible for the sin of slavery.” 

Phillips further argued in support of disunion: “The abolitionists of this country should make it one of the primary objects of their agitation, to dissolve the American Union . . . [S]ecession from the present United States Government is the duty of every abolitionist.” 

That it was abolitionists who led the charge for disunion was acknowledged by a pro-Union and pro-slavery newspaper in Kentucky in 1861. 

“For years, the abolitionists have hated and cursed the Constitution of the United States, because that alone stood in the way of their fiendish purposes. They were the first and the most venomous disunionists,” the paper editorialized.

Clearly, the notion that support for disunion makes one a racist or neo-confederate is wholly untethered from history.

There are, of course, entirely reasonable and practical objections to disunion: Red and blue states and communities are intermingled, we have an interdependent financial system, etc. Garrison outlined his own response to the practical considerations of disunion in his own day in a speech on disunion in June 1855:

We are asked, ‘How is the dissolution of the Union to be effected? Give us your plan!’ My answer is, whenever THE PEOPLE are ready for Disunion, they will easily find out a way to effect it. . . . Our preliminary work is, not to construct a new government, but first of all to make every Northern man see and confess, that our boasted Union is a snare, a curse, and a degrading vassalage;–in strict verity, that there is no Union for freedom to be dissolved, but ONE TO BE CREATED. . . (all emphases in the original)

And indeed, the Right should emulate Garrison’s reply as it seeks greater autonomy from the increasingly oppressive and maniacal blue state regime. We do not need to formulate a specific policy strategy today. But we should not apologize for representing the interests of ourselves and our voters. Nullification, rejection of judicial supremacy, and even ultimately disunion are simply tools, nothing less, nothing more. If they are used to preserve our freedoms and our independence, they are entirely worthy.

We should unreservedly reject the Left’s attempt to morally blackmail us by pretending that these tools are illegitimate. Certainly, neither the abolitionists nor President Lincoln himself allowed their political enemies to set the terms of the debate. Whatever fate awaits the American Right, we will decide it ourselves. Regardless of our choices, in 2021 there is no longer a union for those who love freedom to be dissolved. There is one to be created.

WATCH: A Brief History of Identity Marxism

The ideology that is most conveniently identified as “Wokeness” is much more accurately described by the phrase Identity Marxism. That is, Wokeness is a Marxian approach to identity politics for similar aims to those Marxism has always touted. In this regard, Critical Race Theory is Race Marxism; Critical Gender Theory is Gender Marxism; Queer Theory is Gender, Sex, and Sexuality Marxism; Fat Studies is Fat 

Marxism; Postcolonial Theory is Postcolonial Marxism; and Disability Studies is Disability Marxism. All together, working intersectionally, they are one new species of Marxism: Identity Marxism. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay walks the listener through a history of the various strains of Marxist thought to make the case that Wokeness is best thought of this way. Indeed, it must be understood this way. In so doing, he elucidates what Marxism really represents as a broad, overarching philosophy (or, religion) and indicates that the various species of Marxism, including vulgar, Cultural, neo-, and now Identity Marxism, are all essentially the same project in different guises. Join him for a penetrating discussion that frames Wokeness as it really is. 

Grassley Warns Durham: ‘Don’t Take Your Eye Off Government Misconduct’

Jordan Boyd reporting for The Federalist

Sen. Chuck Grassley urged Special Counsel John Durham to pursue accountability for the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice for “spreading misinformation” that perpetuated the Russia collusion hoax.

“As Durham proceeds, I’d say this: Don’t take your eye off government misconduct. The Justice Department and FBI hid critical information from the FISA court that would’ve cut against their case. They failed to correct the court record when they should’ve,” Grassley said. “Simply put, the Justice Department and FBI misrepresented information to the court. That conduct can’t be allowed to pass.”

In a speech delivered on the Senate floor on Tuesday, Grassley reviewed how Durham indicted Igor Danchenko, one of Christopher Steele’s primary sub-sources, for lying directly to the FBI, which the agency used to target Carter Page.

“This is yet another stunning fatal defect against the Obama-Biden administration’s fake predicate to investigate Trump. Specifically, yet another illustration of Justice Department and FBI failure. As a result of these failures, this country has been dragged through the mud for years,” the Iowa Republican said.

Grassley went on to document not only how “fabricated” information make its way to the top without proper scrutiny but that the basis for Steele’s dossier came from sources who were deeply embedded in Democratic politics and Hillary Clinton.

“While the Democrats were smearing Trump with false Russia allegations, they were the ones rubbing elbows with Russians and spreading false information in the media. Of course, the media gladly ran with it,” Grassley noted.

Among those who promoted the fake story was now-National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan.

Grassley said he tried to sound the alarm, along with Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., about how the “Steele dossier was most likely tainted with Russian disinformation” by getting information declassified.

“One document indicates that the FBI received a U.S. intelligence report on Jan. 12, 2017, warning of an inaccuracy in the dossier related to Michael Cohen,” Grassley explained. “The report assessed that the material was ‘part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations.’”

But that didn’t stop federal agents and corrupt judges from renewing the FISA warrant targeting Page.

“A similar U.S. intelligence report arrived on Feb. 27, 2017, undercutting a key allegation against Trump. The report noted claims about Trump’s travel to Moscow in 2013 ‘were false, and that they were the product of Russian Intelligence Services infiltrat[ing] a source into the network’ of sources that contributed to the dossier,” Grassley said.

Once again, however, “just over a month later, the FISA warrant against Page was renewed a second time.”

“I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that the FBI also opened a counterintelligence case on Danchenko but failed to tell the FISA court. If this fact pattern was a movie script, nobody would believe it,” Grassley said. “With Durham’s recent indictments, we now have even more proof that the Trump-Russia collusion investigation had the wrong name; it should’ve been the Clinton-DNC-Russia collusion investigation.”

Grassley also strongly chastised the corrupt corporate media and Democrats for spreading “falsehoods” that have “damaged our political discourse for decades to come.”

Jussie Smollett's Request for a Mistrial Will Have You Literally Laughing out Loud

Bonchie reporting for RedState

The trial of Jussie Smollett continues apace. Smollett is accused of making false claims to police after asserting that two racist men attacked him during sub-zero temperatures in Chicago, IL while shouting “This is MAGA country!” That led to days of breathless media coverage elevating Smollett as the victim of a hate crime and blaming Donald Trump for creating an environment where such could happen.

Of course, all evidence points to the fact that it didn’t happen. Yesterday, the two brothers, who Smollett allegedly hired to fake the incident, took the stand and things didn’t go well for the defense. Not only is there a check Smollett wrote to them for their services, but there’s a video of Smollett and the two men doing a dry run the day before, choosing the spot where the “attack” would take place.

I won’t rehash everything as RedState has covered the case extensively since its inception, including the ongoing trial so be sure to check that coverage out.

What do you do when you are losing as a defendant? You start doing desperate things, and Smollett’s lawyers did just that yesterday, requesting a mistrial and personally attacking the judge. So what was the request for? Originally, a sidebar was called so Tamara Walker, a lawyer for Smollett, could request a mistrial based on the judge shutting down a line of questioning which he found irrelevant (it was). Things went downhill from there.

Apparently, she is now accusing the judge of physically “lunging” at her during the sidebar in his chamber. Smollett’s lawyers also accused the judge of visibly “snarling” when he sustained objections.

Yes, Smollett’s legal team is making up wild stories about the judge in a trial that is only happening because Smollett made up a wild story. It’s absolute art, and I promise you this isn’t satire. Here are the details per The New York Post.

While the attorneys were conferring with Linn, Walker claimed he “physically lunged” at her when she presented the motion for a mistrial, a claim the justice vigorously denied and was not witnessed by The Post.

“When you said the word mistrial on these grounds frankly I was stunned you’d even consider a mistrial based on this,” Linn said.

“I marched right back behind my bench,” he continued, adding he didn’t lunge at Walker.

The questioning that got all this started was Walker asking Olabinjo Osundairo, one of the brothers who orchestrated the fake hate crime with Smollett, if he had called someone a “fruity ***” at some point in the past. He had, but the judge ruled the line of questioning wasn’t relevant. Obviously, Osundairo having made offensive remarks in the past does nothing to change the fact he was contracted by Smollett.

That’s when Walker went to the judge to make the request for a mistrial, after which she claimed the judge physically lunged at her. She then started to cry and left the courtroom with her mother (who was there for some reason). Admittedly, I wasn’t aware this was a high-school mock trial. The rest of Smollett’s legal team then made other claims that the judge was snarling at them, again trying to paint him as biased. Walker eventually returned and continued her questioning.

It’s all so absurd. Smollett’s legal team clearly wants to throw as much mud as possible into the gears hoping it gets their client off somehow, but I can’t imagine this stuff working in their favor. Judges, and the system in general, don’t usually reward such game playing.

I just love the Jussie Smollett Story

Are you ready for “This is MAGA Country: The Sequel?”

posted by Dianny at Patriot Retort

Okay, I admit it. It’s so much fun having Jussie Smollett back in the news.

The Jussie Smollett Hate Crime Hoax is hands down my favorite story from 2019, and not just because I got a hell of a lot of mileage out of it.

I don’t know what tickled me more, really. That I knew the instant it happened Jussie Smollett was lying through his teeth, or that the media and Democrat politicians made utter clowns of themselves falling for it.

Remember his interview on Good Morning America? Oh, man, was that great!

Every time I thought the story couldn’t get any funnier, it just kept getting funnier.

Like when we finally got a look at the two Trump-supporting white supremacists who “attacked” Jussie.

Then we found out Jussie paid them using a check. I howled laughing when I learned that.

Then I made a check:

I wrote at the time, “Jussie Smollett’s Great MAGA Hate Crime caper makes Jerry Lundergaard and his idiot kidnappers from ‘Fargo’ look like criminal masterminds.”

How anyone fell for this ridiculous story is a mystery to me.

And when it all came apart at the seams, nobody was more disillusioned than Alyssa Milano.

Ah, God love her; she’s so dumb.

Anyroad.

Jussie Smollett is back in the news because his trial began this week. And on Wednesday, one of the Nigerian brothers Jussie paid to beat him up testified that the dopey actor thought staging a hate crime would help boost his career.

Abimbola Osundairo told the jurors that Jussie asked him and his brother to “fake beat him up,” and Osundairo agreed to go along with the clownish plan because he felt like he owed it to good old Jussie. After all, Osundairo felt indebted to Smollett because “he also got me a stand-in role on ‘Empire.’” Abimbola thought Jussie may further help his acting career if he agreed to accept the role of White Supremacist MAGA Guy #1 in Jussie’s silly production.

Can you believe Jussie found someone dumber than he is?

Jussie even wrote the script for this theater of the absurd, instructing Abimbola and his brother to shout “Empire, faggot, nigger, MAGA.”

Actually, Jussie was both script-writer and director for the production. According to Osundairo’s testimony, Jussie blocked out every detail of his sub-zero street theater.

“He wanted me to punch him but he wanted me to pull the punch so I didn’t hurt him and then he wanted me to tussle him and throw him to the ground and give him a bruise. Then he wanted it to look like he was fighting back, so I was supposed to give him a chance to fight back and then eventually throw him to the ground and my brother would tie the noose around his neck and pour bleach on him.”

For crying out loud, they even ran a dress rehearsal!

Yup, it is still getting funnier.

But wait! There’s more!

It looks like Jussie Smollett hired a lawyer who is just as eager to play the victim as he was.

On Thursday, his defense lawyer Tamara Walker claimed the judge in the case “physically lunged” at her when she offered a motion for a mistrial during a meeting in the judge’s chambers.

Don’t tell me. He also shouted “This is MAGA Country” when he did it.

According to the New York Post, during cross-examination of Osundairo, Walker “appeared close to tears as she argued with the judge.” But she kept hold of her Subway sandwich the whole time. Okay, I made that part up.

How much you wanna bet Robin Roberts will be interviewing Tamara Walker on “Good Morning America” next Monday?

Last night, Tucker Carlson invited my favorite Twitter follow Jesse Kelly on his show to talk about the media’s reaction to the whole Jussie Smollett fake hate crime. It’s always a treat watching Jesse Kelly, so enjoy:

Listen, I have my doubts that Jussie Smollett will face any legal consequences for wasting police time and resources on his vanity project.

He should, and maybe the jury will surprise us and convict him.

I’ve just learned not to expect much in situations like this.

But at least we get the opportunity to enjoy this idiot’s fall from grace all over again.

To Prevent Unnecessary Deaths, Nation Demands Common-Sense Alec Baldwin Control

Babylon Bee🐝

U.S.—The nation has begun clamoring for common-sense Alec Baldwin control to curb unnecessary deaths from careless actors gunning down their coworkers on set.

"How many more have to die before we as a nation will implement common-sense, reasonable controls on Alec Baldwin?" asked one protestor outside the Capitol building. "Blood is on our hands every day we allow Alec Baldwin to remain on the streets and not be locked up in a safe, away from guns and ammo, when he's not being used."

Legislators have proposed many common-sense Alec Baldwin control laws, from a background check on any movie studio that wants to bring Baldwin onto a movie set, to a 14-day waiting period before Alec Baldwin can be allowed anywhere near a gun.

"The Second Amendment was designed to allow for slow, muzzle-loading Alec Baldwins," said one activist. "The Founders had no idea there would one day be fully automatic, high-capacity, assault Alec Baldwins walking the streets. The Constitution never intended for just any American to be able to deploy Alec Baldwin to shoot down people willy-nilly."

Congress doesn't seem likely to pass Alec Baldwin control anytime soon, though, as they are currently preoccupied with passing common-sense Hillary Clinton control.

 

Article by Sheldon Bart in The American Thinker

How America Survived Biden

(To prevent confusion, this essay imagines how we might change America’s current trajectory.)

Some said it started with the circulation online of quotations from the 46th installment of the Federalist Papers. In Federalist 46, James Madison declared that the “ultimate authority” under the proposed Constitution of the United States “resides in the people alone.”

“Let us not,” he wrote, “insult the free and gallant citizens of America with the suspicion, that they would be less able to defend the rights of which they are in actual possession, than the debased subjects of arbitrary power would be to rescue theirs from the hands of their oppressors.”

Nor should we, he continued, “insult them with the supposition” that they could “ever reduce themselves…by a blind and lame submission” to a “long train of insidious measures.”

Others pointed to more contemporary promptings, such as the mandated vaccination of children against COVID-19. Parents recoiled as the experimental mRNA substances being utilized were suspected not only of virulent side effects but of having produced an “antibody-dependent enhancement” reaction. The reference was to a worse-case immunological scenario in which those receiving a vaccine become more rather than less vulnerable to viral infection.

At the same time, due to the hostility of the Biden administration to fossil fuel, the price of gas had risen to $6.50 a gallon in some parts of the U.S. The tragedy of an elderly Michigan couple who died during the winter of 2021-22 because they could no longer afford to heat their home had been eulogized in a hit song, “Blizzard,” by the popular balladeer, Bob Dylan.

Similarly, runaway deficit spending precipitated inflationary pressure on the price of food and consumer goods. Historians have also cited as a triggering factor the murder of a California congressman by two members of a Mexican drug cartel. The pair had taken advantage of a de facto open border to enter the country illegally two months earlier. Then again, the sinking of a Taiwan fishing fleet by a combined naval and air operation of the People’s Republic of China, just days after a skirmish between the Ukrainian army and Russian “observers,” spread shock waves throughout the U.S.

In truth, all of the foregoing elements contributed to the remarkable occurrences of the spring of 2022. The poll numbers of the 79-year-old President Biden continued to decline in proportion to the perceived deterioration of his mental faculties. As foreign aggressions mounted and domestic crises deepened, the feeling became ever more palpable that an administration widely considered inept, radical, incompetent, and out-of-control could no longer be tolerated.

With three more years remaining for Biden to serve, it seemed as if an increasingly restive public was stuck with a diminished chief executive who didn’t appear to be calling the shots of his own insufferable administration. Impeachment was not in the cards, as Biden’s Democratic Party controlled both houses of Congress, albeit by the slimmest of margins. Indeed, Vice President Kamala Harris was an even less palatable figure than the president, and the third-in-succession, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, was largely unspeakable.

Fortuitously then, an editorial appeared in an obscure heartland weekly that offered a way forward. Entitled “The Marionette Is Controlled from Above,” the column suggested that it was not necessary to cut Biden’s “strings.” A compromise could be reached if the strings were pulled by someone more in sync with the electorate.

The editorial reverberated far and wide through social media, igniting a grass-roots movement calling for the immediate replacement of White House chief of staff Ron Klain. The public demanded in his place a competent administrator with a mainstream sensibility, unquestioned rectitude, and bipartisan appeal.

As the White House was rocked with letters, phone calls, and emails calling for Klain’s ouster, a march on Washington was quickly organized for April 19, 2022. The date marked the 247th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the first engagements of the American Revolutionary War.

More than a quarter of a million people peacefully assembled on the National Mall that morning, some marching to the fife and drums of Revolutionary War reenactors. Participants carried American flags, and placards, and banners reading: “Federalist 46,” “Klain Must Go,” “Of the People, By the People, For the People,” “Ultimate Authority,” and “We the People.”

Simultaneous demonstrations were mounted in towns and cities across the country, as millions of sympathizers stayed home from work or gathered in city parks and squares, and houses of worship in defiance of pandemic restrictions. Horns honked, headlights flashed, boat whistles blew, flags waved from the windows of apartment buildings, banners were towed by low-flying aircraft.

Klain resigned on the morning of April 19th, shortly before a bipartisan congressional delegation called upon President Biden at the White House. For three hours, the parties haggled over Klain’s successor. When finally the name of former Secretary of Defense, General James Mattis, USMC (Ret.) was announced, the crowd cheered and afterward dispersed without incident.

Fifteen senior White House staffers submitted their resignations before General Mattis moved into the West Wing. Within a month after the new chief of staff assumed his duties, the White House announced a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on vaccinations. Border security was abruptly tightened and social welfare spending restrained. Chinese incursions into Taiwanese airspace markedly diminished, and the Russian “observers” on the Ukrainian border were content to merely observe.

When, after a prolonged absence, President Biden again appeared in public on ceremonial occasions, he seemed to enjoy his figurehead status and was often greeted with cheers.

April 19th became the only national holiday that was never officially decreed but customarily celebrated, nonetheless. For years afterward, Americans by the millions paused that day to remember how they rose as one to fulfill the faith and vision of James Madison and Federalist 46.

 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/12/how_america_survived_biden.html 

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