by Daniel J. Flynn
Attorney General Merrick Garland gave his best Captain Renault impression on Capitol Hill in denying a double standard in how the Justice Department investigated (or didn’t) Hunter Biden (and his father) versus how they pursue his political rival. Shocked, shocked, indeed.
Those experiencing the less pleasant side of judicial double standards see rather clearly the woke hall pass.
“If he votes [R]epublican or questions any of the insanity it will take them less than 8 seconds to find women from his past to raise criminal charges on him,” Tristan Tate observed this week of self-proclaimed “woke” Howard Stern. “As long as he stays on that side of the line, he’s safe from being the next @rustyrockets and he knows it.”
Rusty Rockets is the nom de Twitter of comedian Russell Brand, who, after launching a rebellion against COVID hysteria and political correctness about two years ago, now finds himself an invisible person after equally invisible women accused him of everything from emotional abuse to rape a decade ago or longer.
Tate’s point — that Stern, whose show made a racist joke out of pop star Selena’s murder, routinely paraded mentally challenged people through his studio for public ridicule, and dressed up in blackface to abuse a leading African American legal figure, received immunity by shrewdly embracing progressivism once the witch hunt began while Brand, whatever the ultimate truth of the allegations, foolishly drifted right and became canceled via anonymous accusations untested in court — seems hard to gainsay.
Of course, the judicial system’s quite varied response to the Black Lives Matter riots of the summer of 2020 that cost billions of dollars and took two dozen lives to the I-learned-it-by-watching-you Capitol Hill riot of the winter of 2021 would seem to demonstrate this point to any moron. But the people baptized into the religion of politics are not just any kind of moron. Seeing their opponents as criminals — the mayor of Yakima calling 911 on conservative petitioners collecting signatures outside of Walmart the latest example — they find it natural that the loudest voices opposing their agenda face jail and career banishment.
People not marinating in politics quickly discover the hall pass of the in-crowd and the target affixed to the back of anyone who challenges them.
This represents not just politics by other means but a deliberate chilling whereby anyone with a megaphone daring to challenge progressive orthodoxy faces loss of liberty and lucre. Dinesh D’Souza? Roger Stone? Steve Bannon? Legal troubles inevitably followed the volume rising on their megaphones.
The College of Psychologists of Ontario, blessed by the government to award and revoke licenses to practice psychology, seeks to revoke the license of Jordan Peterson. His sins against the profession include criticizing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, mocking the idea of so-called gender-affirming surgery — particularly as it related to Elliott, née Ellen, Page — and his entire recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. The body orders him to take a remedial education program in issuing public statements or else lose his license to practice his profession of many decades.
The Department of Justice broadens an investigation into whether Elon Musk received any perks from his companies, a state of affairs that most people do not consider criminal but instead the reason as to why one launches a company in the first place. The investigation focuses on a purported glass house (insert metaphor here) that Musk says does not exist but that may, glass qua glass, just be invisible. “This would be next-level absurd,” Musk tweets. “I’m not building a house of any kind anywhere.” But even if he were not building it in Austin as alleged, why do federal prosecutors in Manhattan — Manhattan or Washington, D.C., often figure into hectoring of the anti-woke for some reason — investigate?
Donald Trump faces 718 years in prison from 91 charges in four separate jurisdictions, including, of course, Manhattan. Unlike, say, stealing or assault, the “crimes” involved actions not immediately recognized, and rarely prosecuted, as crimes. In the Manhattan case, he seemed like the victim of extortion attempts, but the local district attorney instead focuses on whether Trump recorded the payments to past paramours in Federal Election Commission filings as though campaign expenses. In several instances, progressives committed the offense Trump stands accused of but received not even a disapproving glance, and praise in some instances, from the Kewl Kids. Did not Stacey Abrams raise tens of millions of dollars on the fraud she won the highest office in Georgia when she really lost by five times as many votes there as Trump did? Did not Joe Biden store classified documents for longer and scattered in more locations?
How peculiar the fate of all of the Left’s boogeymen! Wherever the progressives control power, progressives unleash power upon their critics. That they refrain from wielding the power of the state against predators overrunning cities only highlights their corruption of purpose.
“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster,” Friedrich Nietzsche warned. “And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”
The people seeing boogeymen everywhere long ago became them.
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Daniel J. Flynn, a senior editor of The American Spectator, is the author of Cult City: Harvey Milk, Jim Jones, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco (ISI Books, 2018), The War on Football (Regnery, 2013), Blue Collar Intellectuals (ISI Books, 2011), A Conservative History of the American Left (Crown Forum, 2008), Intellectual Morons (Crown Forum, 2004), and Why the Left Hates America (Prima Forum, 2002). His articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, New York Post, City Journal, National Review, and his own website, www.flynnfiles.com.
Photo “Merrick Garland” by Department of Justice.
