Biden's Two-Tiered Justice System
This administration really needs to settle down.
Biden’s increasingly operatic public denunciations against those dirty no-good savage MAGA folks who roam freely in the heartland (wide berth advised; feral MAGA types mean business) are meant to serve two purposes: It scares people into voting for Democrats by convincing them that Republicans really are fascists and Extremely Dangerous to Our Democracy™; and it reassures his base that they hate the right people for the right reasons and possess a stranglehold on the moral high ground.
This rhetoric and the effort to engineer a domestic threat have real-world consequences.
Last weekend, some spaz named Shannon Brandt, 41, intentionally hit and killed 18-year-old Cayler Ellingson with his truck. Why? Because Brandt thought the kid was “part of a Republican extremist group.” A breathalyzer test determined that Brandt’s blood-alcohol level was above the legal limit of 0.08.
According to court documents, Ellingson called his mother before he was hit, asking her if she knew who Brandt was. She said yes and told her son she was on the way to pick him up. A short time later, Ellingson called his mother again to say that “he” or “they” were chasing him. That was the last time she heard from the 18-year-old.
During a court hearing on Monday, Brandt said he didn’t understand the charges against him and objected to the bail amount, saying that he was not a flight risk.
“I have a job, a life and a house and things that I don’t exactly want to see go by the wayside — family that are very important to me,” he said, according to Fox News Digital.
Gee, maybe you should’ve thought about all that before you ran down that kid with your truck, you absolute moron. Clearly not the brightest bulb in the liberal light show.
Nevertheless, Brandt was released on $50,000 bond Tuesday after being charged with vehicular homicide and leaving the scene of an accident. Seems reasonable.
If this incident were reversed and an inebriated Ultra MAGA Trump supporter had used his truck to run down a trans activist walking home from a “family-friendly” drag show in Denver at which children were doling out greenbacks and it was revealed that the red cap-wearing savage behind the wheel explicitly told the cops that he ran over zir because of zir’s purported political views, the MAGA perp would’ve already been drawn and quartered in a one-hour special put on by the Jan. 6th committee and the media would be calling for the immediate internment of anyone who so much as looked like they voted for Trump. Doubtless, “white supremacy” and “domestic terrorism” would be worked into the coverage based on some dubious pretext. Russia and Putin, too.
Brace yourselves, here’s a shocker: None of the five major news networks — ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and MSNBC — have offered any on-air coverage to the attack. Neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post had their reporters cover the incident either, although the latter re-printed an Associated Press story on the subject that conveniently forgot to mention the key detail about Brandt accusing the teen of being a “Republican extremist,” which seems rather significant but that might just be me.
We call that bias by omission, folks.
This kind of stuff plays right into the hands of your QAnon types. It is pessimism, cynicism, and bitterness that are the lifeblood of political extremism, and I think we can all agree that the Biden administration has gone out of its way to promote all three. When you’re constantly trying to frame things as “our side is democracy, the other side is a grave threat to it,” you are in effect criminalizing your opponents and declaring that half the country is a danger to the other. This is a textbook way of radicalizing people—on both sides of the aisle.
Again and again, it’s our noble overlords and their media vassals who consistently ignore the standards of rational discourse, and who institutionalize hatred and incite division. The vast majority of Americans aren’t rabid partisans; they don’t care about all the crap that elites are always so consumed with. Indeed, most Americans aren’t even aware of the tempests in teapots that are drummed up on social media, which is the kind of stuff that the mainstream media dines out on—monetizing division and moral panics and feeding folks a round-the-clock diet of cultural flashpoints.
A recent poll found that more than 40% of Americans believe that a civil war is likely within the next decade. Which sounds overwrought, but I submit that it’s not something to be lightly dismissed. The human brain is wired in such a way that we’re more or less constantly wrapped up in the little things of day to day life, regardless of what long-term trends are playing out. But over time, tension builds. This is the frog-in-boiling-water problem: The courting of disaster is gradual but continuous; once we realize what’s happening, it’s already too late.
Perception is reality. If that many people genuinely think things are so bad between Left and Right that there’s a second civil war on the horizon, that should give one pause. It should also make you ask why. Why do people feel that way? To which I would respond by asking another question: Who, or what, shapes reality in this country?
I attempted to answer this in a three-part series a few months back. My thesis was that reality is shaped by whoever determines the narrative; and the narrative is determined by whoever controls discourse—specifically (in America, at least), the mainstream media, academia, Hollywood, Big Tech, and of course the White House. We all know that these institutions are dominated by folks of the liberal persuasion, and we have seen time and again how they work collegiately, in unison, to impress a specific worldview and a preferred morality upon the public.
If you think I’m sounding conspiratorial or this is just meta nonsense, consider: The most elite institutions in America have made belief in an absurdity — that biological sex is not real — a litmus test and loyalty oath that millions of Americans are now pressed to accept, and for which failure to do so has implicit consequences. The pressure to conform, to go along to get along, is immense in a professional culture that has established dozens of new unwritten rules in the past couple years, along with penalties for breaking them. Are you going to be one of the only people at your company to not include your pronouns in your email signature? Are you going to tweet something like, “Biological sex is real,” and risk being called into HR the next day because of your “problematic” behavior?
Performative progressivism, this totalistic philosophy with religious undertones, is the modern day noblesse oblige. And silence, or even failing to show sufficient enthusiasm, marks you with suspicion. Your coworkers or peers will engage in “grievance archaeology,” going through your old social media posts and looking for cancellation fodder. Rest assured that you’ll be called to atone. Dare to decline, and your scalp will be added to the wall.
All of which is a long way of saying: Every public and private power center is falling over themselves to accommodate this ascendant Left/liberal cultural paradigm in which violence, when carried out by the right people in pursuit of a just cause, is not violence at all, and fidelity to the truth is seen as antiquated. The impact this ideology has had on contemporary affairs cannot be overstated. It is toxic.
The Biden DOJ Strikes Again
The Biden Department of Justice really is out of control. Friday morning, a well-known Catholic activist named Mark Houck was arrested in front of his kids after the DOJ ordered an FBI raid on his house for alleged violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE), which makes it a federal crime to “injure, intimidate, and interfere with anyone because that person is a provider of reproductive health care.”
Houck is the founder and president of The King’s Men, which “promotes healing for victims of pornography addiction and Christian virtues among men in the United States and Europe.” According to his wife, Ryan-Marie, he also drives two hours south to Philadelphia every Wednesday to sidewalk counsel for six to eight hours at two different abortion centers.
In October 2021, he was counseling when a pro-abortion protester purportedly threatened his son (12) and yelled obscenities at him, saying “crude … inappropriate and disgusting things,” like “your dad’s a fag.”
Houck then shoved the man away and he fell back. He was never charged for it, though the man tried unsuccessfully to sue him, per journalist Greg Price. The FACE violation charge was thrown out this summer, but was somehow picked up by the DOJ.
Ryan-Marie explained that the team of 25 to 30 FBI agents swarmed their property with around 15 vehicles at 7:05 AM, pounding on the door and demanding that it be opened. Her husband tried to calm them, saying, “Please, I’m going to open the door, but, please, my children are in the home. I have seven babies in the house.”
It didn’t work. Apparently, they stormed the house with rifles up and scared the hell out of the kids. When asked for a warrant, “they said that they were going to take him whether they had a warrant or not.” It was only after Ryan-Marie protested, saying “you can’t just come to a person’s house and kidnap them at gunpoint,” that they agreed to get the warrant for her from one of their vehicles.
Mark Houck is now facing a maximum sentence of 11 years in prison, three years of supervised release, and fines of up to $350,000, just because of an altercation with some abortion activist.
My point in relating this sordid little tale is not to bring up the abortion debate, but to underscore that when people say the Biden administration has weaponized the DOJ, it’s not just conjecture. How can anyone possibly think that the FBI is justified in raiding the home of some harmless father of 7 for a minor altercation that occurred while he was sidewalk counseling? You’d think this guy were a human trafficker or something, for God’s sake. The Biden administration actually assembled a grand jury, secured an indictment, and charged a man with a federal crime possibly carrying an 11-year sentence because he shoved another guy.
This only makes sense if you apply a political lens, and it sure looks as though the White House and the Democratic Party are waging a concerted campaign on “pro-lifers.” The FBI has yet to make a single arrest in its “investigation” of the attacks on pro-life centers and churches following the leaked Supreme Court opinion and the overturning of Roe v. Wade. There have been 97 such incidents.
“I met with many of you in my office at the White House,” Vice President Kamala Harris told Democratic state attorneys general at a conference on Thursday. “And we discussed the innovative strategies that you have used to defend women’s reproductive freedom.”
Innovative strategies. I’m assuming it was already tacitly understood that political persecution and intimidation were included. The very first example Harris gave was: “You are taking on, rightly, the crisis pregnancy centers.” Keep in mind that this is the same vice president who has said on more than one occasion that she approaches abortion policy with the mindset of “a prosecutor,” which is apparently why she’s been encouraging state attorneys general to go after nonprofits that exist to help mothers in crisis pregnancies. Her colleague, meanwhile, one Elizabeth Warren — she of the native American ancestry and knack for cringe-worthy social media clips — has said she wants crisis pregnancy centers “shut down.” As the Washington Times noted, Warren said this the same day that a crisis pregnancy center in Detroit was attacked for the second time, with death threats spray-painted across the facade.
But while the Biden administration sends a veritable FBI platoon to raid a guy’s home because of a sidewalk scuffle with an abortion protestor over a year ago, the arson/vandalism perpetrated on dozens of pro-life centers has gone completely unaddressed. Two-tiered justice system.
A man of peace is treated far more harshly than a murderer. Well, the man of peace probably deserved it, just like the dead kid.