Leftist Lynch Mobs from Ferguson to Rolling Stone
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
Did you bury a teenage girl alive after shooting
her? Are you on death row after a string of crimes
too gruesome to describe? Or you just a member of Al
Qaeda dedicated to destroying America?
If
so progressives will fight for you. Just dial
1-800-IAM-VICTIM and the left waiting to take your
call will insist on your presumption of innocence.
Its activists, reporters and lawyers will exploit
every pretext to get you off the hook and they will
call that justice.
The judicial process, they will say, matters more
than public safety, public outrage or the victims.
When the crime wave set loose by their own activism
flooded the country they clung to Blackstone’s
formulation of “It is better that ten guilty persons
escape than that one innocent suffer.” As murders,
rapes and robberies rose, the value of that
formulation went up from ten to ten thousand.
But it had to be the right ten thousand.
Leftist lynch mobs rioting in Ferguson, marching
through Manhattan and screaming in Oakland assert
that the presumption of innocence doesn’t apply to
police officers or white Hispanics. Their poses of
victimization with their cries of “Black lives
matter” and “I can’t breathe” disguise what they
really are.
They were protesting before the case moved forward.
They have continued protesting after the verdict was
in. That’s not a call for justice. It’s a lynch mob
that knows what the verdict should be and seeks to
intimidate the authorities into giving it to them by
taking the law into their own hands.
Rolling Stone’s rape story was cooked out of the
same ingredients; a presumption of guilt and a lynch
mob demanding its own brand of justice. The facts
never mattered.
The assistant managing editor at the University of
Virginia’s student paper admitted that when she
argued, "To let fact checking define the narrative
would be a huge mistake."
It was never about the facts. It was about the
narrative. And the narrative was not only the guilt
of a few men, but the way that their guilt stood in
for the guilt of all men or all white people. The
factual question of whether Officer Darren Wilson or
a few UVA students committed a crime was a
technicality.
Since the racist and sexist narrative states that
all white people or all men are inherently guilty,
the factual question of whether a few men actually
raped someone doesn’t matter. The factual question
of whether a police officer is actually guilty under
the law is so obscure that it isn’t worth
discussing.
Fact checking just obstructs the narrative that all
white people or all men are guilty.
The old lynch mobs presumed that a black man was
guilty on account of his race. So do the new lynch
mobs.
Wilson’s crime wasn’t shooting Michael Brown. It
was shooting him while being white. If he had been
black, we wouldn’t be talking about it now. If the
black sergeant supervising the takedown of Eric
Garner had been the one to restrain him, there would
be no protesters shouting “I can’t breathe”.
Subtract the race of the perpetrator and the case
wouldn’t exist. That’s what makes the case racist.
A lynch mob brought into existence by the race of
the man they want lynched is a racist lynch mob.
At Ferguson and the University of Virginia not only
was the crime assumed into existence before the
verdict was in, but the action of one police officer
in Ferguson was used to indict all police officers
and then all white people. The actions of a few men
at the University of Virginia were used to indict
the entire fraternity and then all fraternities and
then all men.
Classic lynch mobs treated the actions of one black
rapist as a justification for repressing all black
people. The leftist lynch mobs at Ferguson and the
University of Virginia used the accusation of an
individual crime to call for the repression of
entire groups, to attack all white people and all
men.
Even if these crimes had turned out to be
substantiated, indicting hundreds of millions of
people for the actions of a few is the narrative of
a hate group. And that’s what progressives have
shown that they are; a respectable establishment
hate group that demonizes millions of people and
leads lynch mobs.
One of the greatest lies of the left is that it
believes in civil liberties. The ACLU’s civil
libertarian colors were a convenient costume. It
never existed to protect the rights of the people
against leftist governments. It existed to protect
the privileges of leftists.
That’s a direct quote from its co-founder.
Roger Nash Baldwin wrote, “If I aid the
reactionaries to get free speech now and then, if I
go outside the class struggle to fight against
censorship, it is only because those liberties help
to create a more hospitable atmosphere for working
class liberties... When that power of the working
class is once achieved, as it has been only in the
Soviet Union, I am for maintaining it by any means
whatever.”
When Baldwin wrote these words, he was speaking of a
Soviet Union led by Stalin which was maintaining its
dictatorship of the proletariat through a secret
police, torture and mass murder.
The co-founder of the ACLU was not only endorsing
Stalin’s crimes, but he was also looking forward to
an American Stalin rounding up enemies of the state
and shooting them with the support of the ACLU.
The presumption of innocence is an idea that
leftists only believe in when they aren’t in power.
When the left isn’t in power, then it may protect
civil liberties to protect itself. When one of its
own radicals is sitting in the White House, then it
leads lynch mobs through the streets. The protests
aren’t acts of weakness by victims, but signs of
strength by oppressors.
The left is rejecting the democratic results of the
midterm elections and turning to street violence.
Their confidence is derived from the support of the
establishment from the White House to the media.
Never have lynch mobs received such universal
acclaim from all the powers of the United States of
America.
The progressive lynch mobs in Ferguson and at the
University of Virginia contend that some crimes are
too hurtful to a particular population to be
protected by the presumption of innocence. Some
suspects should be presumed guilty because of the
combination of their race and gender with a national
crisis.
After
fighting for Al Qaeda terrorists at Gitmo, the left
hypocritically decided that the presumption of
innocence should apply to Muslim terrorists but not
to police officers. The civil libertarians of the
left went from championing the rights of criminals
over those of victims to embracing the conservative
position of victim rights… as long these rights are
reserved for only the right sorts of victims.
The activists of the left must be forced to admit
whether they are for or against the presumption of
innocence. If they want to dispense with the
presumption of innocence when it comes to enemies of
the people like police officers and fraternity
members, it will also go away for Islamic terrorists
and violent thugs. Not to mention Weather
Underground terrorists teaching at prestigious
progressive colleges.
We cannot have a presumption of innocence for some
people and not others. The left is not entitled to
create two justice systems for two types of people.
One group will be lynched with a formality of a
trial manipulated to produce a verdict that not only
damns one defendant, but also his entire race or
gender. The other will receive every possible
defense no matter how obvious his guilt may be.
America is a nation of laws, not of racist lynch
mobs. Its trials are based on facts, not on
narratives. The presumption of innocence matters
more than the narrative and the social justice
hashtag. Without it all we have left are racist
lynch mobs with smartphones marching through
Manhattan.